The House of Daniel (27 page)

It was 6-2 when Luke came up again, this time with the bases empty. They didn't stay empty long. Wes drilled him right in his big behind. Luke flipped away the bat and looked out to the hill. I think that, if he'd decided Wes hit him because he was colored, he would've tried to tear his head off. But to get hit because he'd slugged two three-run homers? That was part of the game. Luke went on down to first.

Next inning, their pitcher plunked Wes. That was part of the game, too. Even Luke chuckled, and swatted Wes on the butt when he took his base.

They ended up beating us 7-4. The crowd cheered their heads off. That colored gal jumped out of the stands and gave Luke a big kiss. She was pretty and then some.
I am black, but comely
, the Good Book said. It knew what it was talking about, all right.

When Luke detached himself from her, Harv went over to him and said, “You big galoot, you ruined us.”

“Sometimes you have good days, sometimes not so good.” Yeah, Luke was a ballplayer. He pointed over to Wes. “Did you have to hit me so damn hard, man?” Now, for a joke, he could rub at his posterior.

“Not as hard as you hit me,” Wes said. “I don't think that first one's come down yet.” I looked out toward center. I wasn't sure it had come down, either.

 

(XII)

“Colorado!” Harv said when the bus crossed the state line. You know what, though? Except for the sign that told us we were out of New Mexico, not one thing changed. The landscape didn't—still mountains and rocks and pines. The people didn't, either. The next town up, not far over the border, was Trinidad. It was bigger than Raton, but just about as Mexican. You don't think about Colorado belonging to Mexico back in the day, but some of it did.

Only about twenty miles from Raton to Trinidad, so we could sleep in that morning. After the long haul from Clovis to Raton, we needed it. Nobody blamed the long drive for our loss, even if it could've had something to do with it. We were supposed to travel and play and win. That was what the House of Daniel was all about.

They mined coal in Trinidad. The streets crossed at funny angles; the place was built on a chain of foothills. The center of town had some regular brick buildings. More of the ones on the outskirts were made from adobe. Yes, they did things here the same way as they did farther south.

They called their ballyard Round-up Park. The city ran it, but semipro teams could use it. The folks in Trinidad knew the Raton Mice had beaten us. They were wild for their club to do the same. Trinidad and Raton didn't like each other any better than most towns twenty miles apart. That they were in separate states only made things worse.

Remember what I'd been talking about with Eddie a few days earlier? That was before I found out the Trinidad team really did call itself the Vampires. “Good thing it ain't a night game!” Wes said when he saw that across their shirts.

Me, I made sure none of their players was wearing great big sunglasses and that none of 'em had slathered every inch of skin that showed with ointments and lotions. They looked like a bunch of ballplayers, was what they looked like. As long as they didn't start licking my ankle if I got spiked, I was ready to go.

We all were. Trouble was, so were they. The game could have gone either way, but it wound up going theirs, 3-2. Now both those towns that couldn't stand each other had bragging rights over the House of Daniel.

That was the first time since I joined the team that we'd lost two in a row. Harv was not happy, which is putting it mildly. He read us the riot act when we got back on the bus after the game. “‘They shall drive thee from men,'” he said, madder'n I'd ever heard him, “‘and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field, and they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and they shall wet thee with the dew of heaven, and seven times shall pass over thee, till thou know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will.'”

No, Harv didn't read the riot act like anybody else. I've heard some lulus in my time, but up till then I never had a manager ream me out Book of Daniel style. I'm not saying it didn't work. The guys on the team who belonged to the House of Daniel hung their heads. The rest of us, I guess, wanted to laugh, only we didn't dare. Harv might not have been cussing the way a lot of managers would have, but he was hot enough to melt lead.

He glared at us from the driver's seat. “We'll be in Denver pretty soon,” he said. “We'll be playing in the
Post
tournament. We want to be playing our best ball then, don't we? Are we playing our best ball right now?”

Nobody said anything. If anybody had said anything, Harv would've kicked him off the bus and around Round-up Park, I mean kicked him so he had spike scars on his behind the rest of his life.

“We lost two straight games!” Harv roared, as though he were one of those lions in the den. “We lost to the Mice, and we lost to the Vampires! Those teams ain't fit to shine our shoes. Am I right or am I wrong?”

“You're right, Harv,” I said, along with two or three other fellas. That seemed safe enough, on account of he
was
right. You didn't need field glasses to see it. They weren't as good as we were. They beat us anyhow.

Harv breathed out through his nose, hard. Now he sounded like a bull about to charge. “All right, then. You listen to me, you lunkheads. You listen good, you hear?
You hear?
”

We nodded—all of us, I think. We couldn't help it. I don't know if Harv ever was a drill sergeant. If he wasn't, the Army let a good one get away.

“When we go up to Pueblo tomorrow, I expect to see some players who care about what they're doing, then,” Harv said in a voice that warned he was ready to bite nails in half. “If I don't, I expect I can pull in some off the street who do. We got Snake that way. We can get more. You wear the lion on your chest, you better not have a pussy cat's heart.”

“Teacher's pet,” Fidgety Frank whispered to me.

“Oh, shut up,” I whispered back. I wished Harv hadn't singled me out like that. I wanted to be like the rest of the guys. That's how you fit in on a team.

“Did I hear something?” Harv shouted.

“No, Harv,” Fidgety Frank and I said together. Along with everything else, Harv had rabbit ears. He would.

“Mm, okey-doke,” he said, as if he knew we were lying but didn't want to call us on it. He went on, “I want you to whip the tail feathers off the Pueblo Chieftains tomorrow. Not just beat 'em—whip 'em. Whip 'em good! And if you don't, I'll know the reason why.”

He turned around and started up to the bus. We went back to the roominghouse. Nobody said a word all the way there.

*   *   *

Whip the tail feathers off the Pueblo Chieftains? I hoped we could. But it wasn't one of those things that came with a guarantee, if you know what I mean. Up till year before last, Pueblo was in the Western League. That's Class A ball, the higher minors. But the league threw them out, and Denver, too, on account of most of the teams were farther east even though they called it the Western League, and taking the train out to Colorado cost too blasted much. That's the kind of thing the Big Bubble busting made leagues worry about.

Some of the guys who'd played for Pueblo in the Western League hooked on with other teams in the regular minors. Some of 'em like it there, though, and stuck around after the league pulled out. You can't blame 'em. It's pretty country. If you'd found a girl there, you could look for a job, too. And you could still play ball and put some extra cash money in your wallet.

So the Pueblo Chieftains were a hot team. They had some players who'd been maybe
that
far from the bigs once upon a time. They even had themselves a new ballpark. Runyon Field opened up not long before we got there. None of the players from the House of Daniel had ever seen it before.

“When we came through here last year, the Chieftains played at Merchants Field, where the Western League used to be,” Eddie told me while we were going to the new place. “Oh, my, people were ticked off about getting dumped! It was even worse in Denver. The Denver folks tried to sue the league, but it got tossed out of court.”

Runyon Field looked as though a team from the higher minors could play there. It held, I dunno, four or five thousand people. The grandstand ran a long way down the foul lines. Then bleachers took over. When Eddie got a look at them, he started to laugh. “What's so funny?” I asked—they didn't look like anything but bleachers to me.

“They took those out of Merchants Field and brought 'em over here,” he said. “Waste not, want not.”

“How do you know?”

“I remember that blue-green paint they've got on the benches. I thought it looked queer a year ago, and I still think it does.”

“Oh,” I said.
Waste not, want not
was about the size of it. If you were going to put bleachers in a new ballpark, why pay for new ones when you could move the old ones for a lot less? Of course, that was the same kind of thinking that made the Western League pull out of Colorado, but try telling the folks in Pueblo anything along those lines.

We got a run in the top of the first. Wes set the Chieftains down in order in the bottom of the frame. In the top of the second I came up with one out and Eddie on third. The Chieftains' pitcher threw me a changeup. I was out in front of it. I hit it hard, but way foul. It pinballed off one of the columns holding up the grandstand roof and smacked a fan in the back of the head. Poor guy never saw it coming. Just
wham!
, out of the blue.

“Way to go, Snake!” Harv yelled from the dugout. “You put a new crease in his fedora!”

I felt bad about it. I'd never done anything like that before. But after a minute or so the fellow waved to show he was all right. The crowd gave him a hand. He was tough. He stayed in the game—well, in the stands.

“Play ball!” the plate umpire said, and we got back to it.

The Chieftain threw me another offspeed pitch. I hit this one hard, too, but I waited on it and kept it fair. It dropped in front of the left fielder. Eddie could have walked home. The pitcher slammed his fist into his glove. He tried to fool me, doubling up on the slow stuff, but it didn't work.

Things kept going right for us and wrong for the Chieftains. They had a runner picked off second. They lined into a double play. They couldn't turn one when they needed it most. I don't think we exactly whipped the tail feathers off them, but we won it 6-3.

“Better. A
little
better,” Harv said after the game. “But you've got to get better yet. Colorado Springs tomorrow. And we're still on our way to Denver.”

He didn't say we'd go straight to Denver from Colorado Springs. I didn't know what he had planned. Probably we'd go some other places before we got there. It still wasn't tournament time. But we
were
on our way, even if it was a twisty way to be on.

*   *   *

Colorado Springs was another medium-sized town at the edge of the Rockies. The mountains marched across the western skyline as we rolled north up US 85. They were something to see, all right.

Colorado Springs was different from Pueblo and Denver—it hadn't had a real pro team for years and years. The old club was called the Millionaires. Anybody who's ever played minor-league ball will tell you what a silly nickname for a team
that
is.

But one of the guys who'd played for them stayed in Colorado Springs when the team folded. He ran a city league of semipro teams. A lot of people want to stay in the game somehow after they get too old to play. He'd found a way to do it.

We were going to play an all-star team from this league. We'd done that before. I figured we'd do it again after this, too. Towns didn't always think any one club of theirs was good enough to face us—and the other teams didn't always want one getting the glory if they won (and the big gate even if they didn't). So they'd split up the players and they'd share the money. It worked out.

Harv said, “All-star teams have better players on 'em, yeah. But they aren't teams the way we're a team. Their guys haven't played together for years. The shortstop doesn't know what the second baseman'll do on a grounder up the middle. If you push 'em, they'll make mistakes.”

They did have a nice place to play the game. Spurgeon Field looked so new, they might've just taken it out of its box. If they wanted to get back into minor-league ball, they could do it as far as the park was concerned.

The Colorado Springs All Stars wore shirts and caps with stars on 'em. They really did. I don't know where they got 'em, but they had 'em. The old Millionaires player in charge of the city league managed them. He had an All Stars uniform, too, and a pretty good stretch of belly to pull it tight. He kept a big chaw in his mouth, and shifted it from one cheek to the other every so often.

All the people in the stands cheered when they took the field. Then … Well, by the time the game was over, they must've wished they'd picked a different batch of all-stars. They were pretty sorry. They threw to the wrong base not once but twice. Their first baseman dropped a perfect throw from short. Plop—it fell out of his mitt. He looked at the ball on the ground as if he couldn't believe his eyes. They had a runner get picked off first. One of their batters doubled but got thrown out trying to stretch it into a triple: this when he led off the inning. The play wasn't close, either.

We ended up winning 9-4. The game was easier than that. They hit a two-run homer with two out in the bottom of the ninth. It changed the final score, but both sides knew who'd played well and who hadn't.

Their manager came up to Harv after the game and said, “I didn't think I was sending out a high-school nine this afternoon.”