The House of Daniel (26 page)

I thought about that gal in Las Vegas. She was a pro, a pro at something she couldn't want to do. Thinking about her made me feel rotten, so I got to the bottom of my beer bottle in a hurry.

Then I thought about Mich Carstairs. I hoped she made it to California. I hoped she found a job there, too, a for-true job. If she didn't, I hoped Charlie Carstairs could help her out. She looked good enough, she could have made a go of it as a pro if she had to. But you don't care to imagine that for somebody you like, so I hoped for the for-true job instead.

“You feeling good, Snake?” Eddie asked. “You look kinda unhappy, like.”

“Must've eaten too much.” I put my hand on my belly. I
had
eaten too much—we all had—but that wasn't what griped me. Well, when somebody asks
How ya doin'?
, you don't tell him everything that's gone wrong with you for the past month. Or if you do, you got to reckon he won't ask you again.

Harv patted his belly, too. “You can roll us back to the motor lodge tonight, we're so stuffed,” he told the Pioneer who ran the barbecue place.

“That's the idea.” The shortstop sounded proud of himself. “Have some more if you want. There's plenty.” If you can brag on how much food you've got now that the Big Bubble's busted, you're doing all right for yourself. You want folks to know you are, too. I mean, unless you just want them to think you are.

When we staggered out of the restaurant, a garbage truck was coming up the street. The fellow driving it was a man. The two picking up trash cans and dumping them in the scoop were zombies, though. You could tell by how slow they moved—and, when they got in the glare of the truck's headlamps, by how gray they were.

“I hate those things,” the Pioneers' shortstop said. “I don't believe they're as dead as everybody thinks. Doesn't stand to reason anything'll slave all the time and not want anything for itself. Doesn't stand to reason it won't want to get even with the folks who make it slave all the time, either.”

Eddie'd said the same kind of thing. But I wasn't thinking about Eddie right then. I'd already noticed that shortstop was one of the fellas who sounded all Texan. He'd've had grandfathers or great-granddads who'd worn gray during the States War. How many of them had owned colored folks? I'd had kin in the States War my own self, but no slaveholders. Us Spiveys, we were never rich enough for that.

“Hasn't happened yet,” Azariah said.

“I know,” the Clovis man answered. “I hope it doesn't, too. We won't have ourselves a good time if it does.”

He had that straight. We all found out how straight he had it. But I don't care to miss a bag in the story. They call you out for that.

*   *   *

When we got back to the motor lodge, the old coot who ran it came out of his office and asked, “One of you beards called Harvey Watrous?”

“That's me.” Harv ran his fingers through his whiskers. He was proud of 'em. He should've been, too—he had some humdingers.

The coot gave him an envelope. “Consolidated Crystal guy brung a message for you.”

“Thanks.” Harv opened it. He read the green paper inside, smiled, and stuck it in his hip pocket. “Well, ain't that nice?”

“Ain't what nice?” Fidgety Frank and I asked at the same time.

Harv smiled again. This time, he looked like a dad smiling at a three-year-old who keeps asking
Why?
all the time. “When everything's ripe, you'll know. I promise,” he said, and ambled off to his cabin. This side of clouting him with a bat or a tire iron or a jack handle, we had to go off to ours, too.

And we had to get up too blasted early the next morning. We were going all the way up to Raton, near the Colorado line. It would be a long trip—250 miles, something like that. “Tell me again why I'm doing this,” Wes said around a great big yawn when he got on the bus.

“Because if you don't, we'll leave your sorry behind right here in Clovis.” Harv sounded as cheerful about it as if he'd already had three cups of coffee.

“That's a good reason,” Wes allowed, and he sat down.

I thought it was a terrific reason after we had breakfast at an all-night greasy spoon. They vulcanized the eggs. The coffee tasted as though they brewed it from adobe. I've had plenty of better food. I'd need to think for a while to decide whether I've had worse.

Out of Clovis, we headed north and north and north some more over roads almost as bad as that greasy-spoon breakfast. You go and you go and you go. Every fifteen or twenty or twenty-five miles there's a tiny little town in the middle of the desert for no reason anybody can see. Harv stopped for gas in a little place called Nara Visa. If he'd turned right from there, he would've been in Texas in ten minutes.

But he didn't. He went straight ahead. We chugged past red sandstone bluffs—mesas, they call 'em out there—that either the wind or some crazy god with too much time on his hands spent eons carving into shapes nobody who hadn't seen 'em would believe.

I didn't see all of 'em myself. I was on-and-off dozing in the bus, coffee or no coffee, jounces or no jounces. By then, I was getting the knack. It wasn't as good as a bed, but it was a lot better than nothing.

I was awake again when we went through Clayton and swung from north to northwest. That was a sign we were only an hour and a half away.

If the bus didn't break down, I mean. That was always the dread. Not just a blowout. We could deal with those. Harv built in time to fix one in every long haul. But if we threw a rod or something …

It was one of those places where every so often you'd see buzzards circling overhead. A lot of the time, they'd be the only moving things you'd see. Cars and carpets were few and far between.

Yeah, we had some guys who knew their way around an engine. Yeah, we had an iron box full of tools and another one with spare parts for some of the things likeliest to fail. But that didn't kill all our worries. Some breakdowns you just can't fix without a shop.

Past Clayton was Rabbit Ear Mountain. Don't ask me why they call it that. It looks like a mountain, but not much like a rabbit ear. Ten miles farther on, Mt. Dora was a village at the foot of the mountain called Mt. Dora. Half of it was boarded up. Looked like the Big Bubble got it but good.

After another ten miles, we went through Grenville. It was about the same size as Mt. Dora, and looked just as broke. From what Fidgety Frank said, though, Grenville busted even before the Big Bubble popped. They struck oil near there right after the War to End War. Then, a few years later, the well dried up. So did Grenville, and it didn't seem anyone had watered it since.

Here and there in the desert, you'd see one or two of those made-of-anything shacks like the ones that farm workers and foreclosed folks lived in. I don't know what the people who ran 'em up lived off of. They hunted some, I suppose. If they had a little water close by, they might scratch out a vegetable plot.

All I can tell you is, I wouldn't want to try it. Pretty soon, you'd be down to roasting lizards and grasshoppers and crickets. Even a soup kitchen and a flophouse are better than that, aren't they? It was plain enough that the folks in those shacks didn't think so.

“Why would you want to live out here?” I asked after we went by another shanty like that.

“Because the whole goddamn world leaves you alone, that's why,” Wes answered right away. “When the world's knocked you down and kicked you, just getting it to leave you alone is more precious than rubies.”

Behind the wheel, Harv clucked. “Wes, do you have to take the Lord's name in vain and quote from the Good Book in back-to-back sentences?”

“Sorry, Harv,” Wes said. Harv sat up a little straighter, so you could tell he was pleased. As soon as he did, Wes went on, “If I'd known you were minding me so close, I would've done 'em both in the same one.”

Not many of us needled Harv. Wes would do it, and Fidgety Frank. Well, they were the pitchers. Harv had to give them more leeway than the rest of us, on account of he needed them more. But Wes would have needled Harv if he'd played the outfield all the time, not just when he wasn't out there flinging. He was a natural-born troublemaker, Wes was.

Next place after Grenville was Des Moines. “Harv, you took a wrong turn somewhere!” Fidgety Frank said. “How in blazes did you land us in the middle of Iowa?” We all laughed.

“That'd be funnier if you hadn't said the same blamed thing on this road last year,” Harv shot back. We all laughed louder—well, all of us but Frank. Harv didn't cuss, but he had a good needle just the same.

In more time than it takes to tell you, we made it to Raton. We got there fine for the game, because we'd left so early. Raton, the guys told me, is a Spanish name that means exactly what you'd think. Great name for a town. Unless you're a cat, why would you want to move there?

To raise cattle, maybe. Or to work on the railroad. Or to mine coal. Those are the things folks around there do to make a living. We heard as much Spanish as English. There were some colored folks in Raton, too. You don't see that many in New Mexico. Eddie told me they sprang from the Buffalo Soldiers who fought Indians around there in the old days.

The boarding house where we put on our uniforms was … a boarding house. You could have put it in Enid or Amarillo and nobody would have looked at it twice. We played the Raton Mice in a ballyard called Elks Park. It was old and made of wood and looked as though a fire was the best it had to hope for.

Nobody'd painted the little grandstand behind the plate or the seats or the outfield fences for a long time. The fences had advertisements on them, so badly faded you could hardly make out what they said. The one right behind me, I figured out at last, was for a funeral parlor. That did everything you'd think it would to cheer me up.

Distance markers? If there'd ever been any, they were long gone. The field was short in left and long in right. The left-field fence must've been twenty feet high. That would keep some balls in play, but not all.

As for the Mice, they looked like the town. Quite a few of 'em were on the swarthy side. A couple wore bushy black mustaches. Another guy had a thin one, so he looked as much like a lounge lizard as somebody with MICE across his chest in big letters could. The shortstop and first baseman weren't swarthy—they were colored. The first baseman stood six-four, easy, and he was almost as wide as he was tall. Not fat. Muscle. He batted left. Right field was a fifty-cent cab ride from home plate, but he launched half a dozen balls over the fence limbering up.

“Oh,
yeah
!” he'd yell every time he got hold of one good. Kids on the far side of the wall chased down the baseballs and brought 'em back for a dime. Well, one kid chased down a baseball and ran off with it. He decided he'd sooner have the ball than the money. I hope he had fun with it.

The Mice didn't look like anything special before the game. Not bad, you understand, but nothing to scare you, either. The crowd was big enough to keep Harv from putting on his my-hound-dog-just-died face, but no bigger'n that.

This sure wasn't the Texan part of New Mexico any more. The colored fans who'd come out to watch their guys and the rest of the Mice sat scattered amongst the others. Nobody fussed about it. It was how they did things, that's all. They took it so much for granted, you wondered why people all over didn't do it the same way.

I knew we were in trouble as soon as we got two batters into the game. They had a tall, lanky sidearmer, a white guy, on the hill. He leaned to the right, too, so he looked as though he was coming straight from third base. He'd bust you inside twice and then put the next one just off the outside corner. You'd swing and you'd miss by so much, you'd look like you were trying to hit a golf ball with a broomstick. He set us down in order, and our guys came back shaking their heads.

“Keep us in it, Wes!” Harv chirped. Sounded like good advice to me. We might get something, but I didn't think we'd score much. If the Mice jumped out ahead, coming back wouldn't be easy.

But a walk and a Texas League single put Raton men on first and second with one out and that great big black first baseman coming up. His name was Luke. Wes tried to jam him, the way their pitcher had with our first three hitters. He got it inside, all right, but not far enough inside.

“Oh,
yeah
!” Luke yelled. The ball headed my way. I ran back a few steps, in case I was wrong. Then I stopped, because I wasn't. It went over my head and way over the fence right where the old funeral-parlor sign was. That seemed fair—Luke killed it.

He took his time rounding the bases. He wasn't trying to show Wes up. It was just that somebody that big couldn't move too fast.

“Oh, Luke! Yeah, Luke!” a colored gal behind the Mice's dugout hollered, over and over. She blew him kisses. If she wasn't Mrs. Luke, she sure wanted to be.

We got one back in the third. Their sidearmer walked me and then left one over the middle of the plate for Azariah, who was hitting last. Azariah split the gap between Raton's guys in center and right, and the ball rolled to the fence. It's a long way out there; I scored standing up.

But in the bottom of the third Luke came up with two on again. This time, nobody was out. Wes didn't try to come in on him again. That hadn't worked so well the last time. Instead, he pitched on, or off, the outside corner. Luke worked the count to two balls and a strike. Wes went outside again, but he left it up a little higher than he wanted.

Luke didn't try to pull it. No—he went with the pitch, and hit a high fly to left. And the big fellow was so strong, he sailed it over the high fence out there. “Oh,
yeah
!” he shouted, and went into his home-run trot. Go down 6-1 to a team with a sharp pitcher and you're in deep water. And we were.