The House of Daniel (25 page)

“Gotcha,” I said, or he would have gone on for a while.

We were still in our baseball togs when we left the ballpark. It didn't have showers; we'd have to clean up when we got back to the roominghouse where we were staying. The take was enough to keep Harv happy, even if it wasn't enough to make him jump up and down.

But we had to run a gauntlet of beggars to get to the bus. I handed out a couple of quarters. So did most of the guys. You knew they wouldn't help with anybody's real troubles. If you don't have a job, if you don't live in anything better than a packing crate, a quarter will get you a supper, but then you'll be hungry again tomorrow and you still won't have work or anywhere decent to stay.

Decent … I ask you, friend, what are you supposed to say when kind of a pretty girl sidles up to you and goes, “For five dollars, Mister, I'll do anything you want all night long”?

Women can always do that, because some man or other will want what they're peddling. But can they do it without wanting to bust every mirror where they're staying? It's a rotten old world sometimes, it truly is.

I didn't much want to, but I coughed up another quarter. “Go on—get out of here,” I told her. “You don't know what you're talking about.” Maybe this was her first time trying it. Maybe she'd decide it wasn't such a hot idea and wouldn't try it any more.

Yeah, and maybe the stork finds babies under cabbage leaves and takes 'em to the hospital. Her mouth twisted. “Devil I don't,” she said. “I ought to, by now. But I got to feed my little girl some way or other.”

She hadn't found her kid under a cabbage leaf. I wondered what it would think of her when it found out how she'd fed it. Or maybe it never would. Maybe, when she saw a better chance, she'd move away from that town and hope she never ran into anybody from Las Vegas, New Mexico, again.

“Here. Now scram.” I coughed up one more quarter. She was plenty pretty for that, even if she wasn't enough of a beauty to make me such a fool that I'd give her all she wanted.

She didn't scram, of course. But she did leave me alone—she went off and rubbed up against some of the other House of Daniel guys. Nobody walked away from her. I bet she collected five bucks easy from the ballplayers, and she didn't even have to give back what she'd said she would.

When we finally made it onto the bus, I sat down by Wes. He chuckled, not in a nice way. “How much did you give her?” he asked.

“Half a buck,” I said. “How about you?”

“Six bits,” he answered. “Go ahead, call me stupid.”

I didn't. I said, “She was like a vampire, sucking money out of us.”

“I'd sooner have her suck me than a vampire any day,” Wes said. My ears got hot. Back in Oklahoma, you could go to jail for something like that. A crime against nature, they called it. People did it just the same—I'm not saying they didn't—but they hardly ever talked about it. When Wes saw it made me nervous, he laughed and laughed. He had maybe eight years on me. That's not so much, honest. But he was way older.

Times were hard for everybody. That was the thought in my mind as we pulled away from Maroons Field and the beggars and the girl who wanted money and didn't care how she got it. That was the thought in my mind, yeah, but I didn't come out with it. Wes would have had some more ear-burning things to say if I did.

*   *   *

Another early start the next morning: we were heading east again, bound for Clovis. The road had been paved, but not any time lately. We couldn't have gone as fast as we did if there'd been more traffic. I didn't care to think about breaking down, especially right after we passed a bleached-out cow skull near some rocks. A roadrunner was sitting on it.

When we got about halfway to Tucumcari (Tucumcari is about halfway to Clovis from Las Vegas), the road improved. Pretty soon, I saw why: they were damming the Mora River. A big billboard said the Conchas Dam would make the desert bloom and stop the Mora from flooding whenever it got the urge. It also said the dam was putting I don't know how many people back to work. Pick your own big number.

They were driving trucks and tractors and backhoes and bulldozers and steamrollers. Way more of 'em, though, were using picks and shovels and sledgehammers to dig and to break rock. A private company building a dam these days'd likely use zombies for the pick-and-shovel work. It'd go slower, but it'd come out cheaper in the end. Companies care about stuff like that. The government cared about votes, so all the workers out there in the desert were real, live human beings.

They had their own little town of shacks and tents by where the dam was going up. Chances were they had their own town team, too. No sooner had the thought crossed my mind than Fidgety Frank yelled out, “We gonna play them on the way back, Harv?”

Harv laughed along with everybody else. “Nah,” he said. “They ain't got enough of a ballpark to make it worth our while.” Nothing fazed him—nothing the guys on the team could do, anyhow.

Past the regular workers' town was a smaller one for the engineers and wizards. I watched one wizard in a wide-brimmed straw hat smoking a pipe while he palavered with a water elemental. He'd built a canvas shade to protect it from maybe boiling away while it came forth in the burning sun. You change how the water's going to go around and what it's going to do, you've got to make it right with the Ones tied to the water. I'm sure some of the other wizards were dealing with the earth elementals. Put all the weight of a dam on top of them, plus all the water backed up behind it, and you'd better keep them happy. If you don't, pretty soon you've got a big earthquake and no dam.

Tucumcari turned out to be a bigger town than I'd guessed. “How come we don't stop here?” I asked Harv when we went through. I tried to pitch my voice so he could tell I wasn't razzing him the way Fidgety Frank had—I really wanted to know.

“We ain't stoppin' in Tucumcari on account of Tucumcari don't care enough about baseball to have a team worth playin'.” Harv bit the words out between his teeth. He might have sounded more disgusted if he'd talked about blasphemy and abominations against the Lord in Tucumcari. Then again, he might not. To Harv, not caring about baseball
was
blasphemy and an abomination against the Lord.

We went south out of Tucumcari. Soon as we left it behind, Harv sat up straighter in the driver's seat. It was as though he was glad to shake the dust of the place off his tires—well, off the bus's tires. So, south for a while, and then east, and then south again. And I will be fried for eggs and bacon if we didn't find ourselves in Clovis, and in plenty of time for the game.

When we pulled up in front of the motor lodge to change into our uniforms, Harv hopped out from behind the wheel. He wasn't just ready to go—he was raring to go. He'd herded that bus, and us yahoos, across 170, 180 miles of rugged road. I would have been all crippled up after that. I creaked like an old man even though I hadn't been driving. I'd be fine once I got loose, but I wasn't loose yet.

In our motor-lodge cabin, Eddie looked me over. “Y'know, I think we can skip the false whiskers,” he said. “Your real beard's long enough so people can see it from the stands.”

“Sounds good to me!” I said. “That spirit gum still makes me woozy. I won't miss it, not even a little bit.”

“Okey-doke. You still better put on the wig, though.”

“I'll do that. The wig's just hot. I'd be hot without it, too.”

Eddie nodded. “Can't be much else down here this time of year.”

Harv looked at me twice when I went back to the bus without the shredded wheat glued to my cheeks and chin. Then he nodded, too, I don't know whether to me or to himself. “Yeah, you'll do,” he said. “Sorry to put you through that. We don't always. When Benjamin Harrison Caesar pitched for us a couple of years ago, we let him stay clean-shaven.” He kinda frowned. “Didn't help. He drank his way off the team.”

I wished he hadn't told me that. Benjamin Harrison Caesar was as good a pitcher as ever lived (except maybe Carpetbag Booker, I supposed). He played for the Philadelphia Quakers and the St. Louis Archdeacons for years and years. So he ended up pitching for the House of Daniel after he couldn't get 'em out in the bigs any more, did he? I wondered if he'd left the bigs on account of the bottle. If he had, he took his time about it. He stayed up there for twenty years.

“Don't worry about it,” I said. “I know I'm not Benjamin Harrison Caesar. Nobody's gonna come to the park because he hears Jack Spivey will be playing.”

“How about Snake Spivey, the world's slickest center fielder?” Harv didn't just play for the House of Daniel and manage 'em and drive the darn bus. He promoted the team, too.

“If that's what I am, you aren't paying me enough.” I said it with an egg-sucking grin, so he'd know I was joshing.

“Get on the bus, you no-good, worthless bum,” he growled. I hoped like anything he was joshing. And he was, because he went on, “Pretty soon you'll go on shares like the rest of the guys, you know. That's better money.”

“I'm not losing sleep about it, Harv,” I said. And I wasn't.

Bell Park was a nice place to play a ballgame. It was newer than most, and held about 2,500. That's what Harv said, anyway, and what Harv doesn't know about seats at a baseball park isn't worth knowing. And it was different from a lot of those parks in Texas and New Mexico. It wasn't too big or too small. Nope—it was just right. Goldilocks would've glommed on to it for sure. It ran 330 down each line and 410 to straightaway center.

The Clovis Pioneers were just right, too. We knocked them around the same way we did with the Santa Fe Saints. The scoreboard didn't show it, because their yard was bigger and they were only—only!—at 4,200 feet. It wasn't a pinball score, but we won going away, 8-2.

Guys who'd been there before expected a tougher game. Clovis had fielded a pro team for a couple of years in the Twenties. They'd played in a ramshackle field on the north side of town then; Bell Park wasn't there yet. But the Pioneers didn't have it when they took us on that afternoon.

Their fans let 'em hear about it, too. Anybody called me some of those names when I wasn't between the white lines, smiling when he said it wouldn't help. But when you buy a ticket, you buy the chance to tell the ballplayers what you think of 'em. And that crowd did. Some of the ladies in the stands didn't talk as though they were.

Still, I have to give Clovis points. They had better manners than the Saints or their own fans. Even after the game got out of hand, they didn't start aiming beanballs at the team from out of town.

“They're good sports,” Harv said when I remarked on that sitting in the dugout in the bottom of the eighth.

“Huh,” Wes said. “They want us to come back next year so they draw another big crowd. This'd be an easy enough town to skip, and they know it. We'd get thrown at a lot worse'n we do if the town teams didn't like the money we bring in so much.”

“Sometimes we get thrown at, anyway,” Azariah said.

“Sometimes we do,” Wes agreed. “But it would be worse if we were a lousy draw. It would be worse if we didn't give as good as we got, too.” Wes was almost as much of a hardnose as he thought he was.

After the game was over, the Pioneers took us to a barbecue. They were no-kidding semipros; their shortstop ran the joint where they fed us. He wouldn't take our money, either. “That's not fair,” Harv said. “We beat you. Least we can do is pay for our supper.”

“Unless you're stickin' a rib bone in there, you shut your yap, you hear?” the Pioneer said. Clovis is like Hobbs. It's another one of those towns by the state line. In that part of New Mexico, you might as well be in Texas. A lot of the settlers came from Texas to begin with. They still talked like it, and they still acted like it. Weren't any Mexicans on the baseball team. I didn't see many in town.

Nothing wrong with the barbecue, not even a little bit. I was glad I only had my own whiskers to get all gooey. That fake stuff would have been a horrible mess. When everybody who drank had had a beer or three, the Pioneers' catcher got a guitar out of a back room and started singing.

He was good. He was plenty good enough to make some money on the side with his singing and playing. A semipro ballplayer and a semipro music fella. I never did find out what his regular job was, or if he had one.

You'll never see me playing center field for the Titans in the Cricket Grounds. I'm a pretty decent outfielder, but I'm not good enough to do that. You won't hear the fellow from Clovis—they called him Rocky—on the radio any time soon, either. He was fine at a barbecue place after a few beers. But he wasn't good enough for the big time, either.

One of the things I remember my pa saying was that folks used to make music by themselves and for themselves more often before the radio came along. They knew how they sounded and how their friends and neighbors sounded, but they only heard top people when they went to the theater for a show, and they didn't do that very often.

When most houses got radio sets, all that changed. You just had to twist a knob and there they were: the best singers, the finest bands, right in your parlor playing for you. And you listened to them for a while, and then you thought about how you sounded singing with your sister at the piano and the fat guy from across the street sawing away on the fiddle. If you weren't embarrassed to open your mouth after that, you were either mighty good or you had a lot of brass.

The Pioneers' shortstop may have been too proud to feed us for money, but their catcher pocketed what we gave him between songs. Maybe he figured he'd earned it. Or maybe he was looking for whatever he could get his hands on because semipro ball and semipro music left him stretched to make ends meet.