The House of Daniel (38 page)

All of those men, anywhere from sixteen to fifty years old, most of them bare-chested in the bright sunshine, working away with shovels and picks and mattocks and sledgehammers … It was impressive to watch, at least till you remembered that all the men in that gang, and in I don't know how many others like it, were doing that work in exchange for a full belly and a place to flop because they couldn't find anything better on their own.

Back in Enid, I thought about joining the CCCP. I thought about it, but I didn't do it. That outfit is like the Army: when you're in, you're in. And you're in all the time. They wouldn't have given me time off to play for the Eagles. Some CCCP gangs had teams of their own, but the Eagles played better ball—and they paid a little something.

So instead of talking with my CCCP recruiter, I talked with Big Stu. Yeah, and look how that turned out.

The Idaho Falls Spuds—well, what were they gonna call themselves, the Pineapples?—had also played in the Utah–Idaho League. One more outfit that went semipro after it couldn't make a go of things in the regular minors.

Highland Park was a good enough place for a game. From what one of the Spuds said, folks in Idaho Falls had been playing there since they dug up a beet field somewhere around the turn of the century and turned it into a ball field. It was another one of those wooden ballparks, the kind that last till they have a fire—and then you find out if whoever's running the place has the cash to rebuild.

Good-sized park, too. It was 350 down each line and 408 to center. The fancy grandstand roof covered most of the stands. Only the folks in the box seats down close to the field got wet when it rained.

And it was on-and-off drizzling, maybe more than drizzling, when we started to play. A big-league club or one in the Coast League, say, might've called the game and scheduled a doubleheader the next day. But the House of Daniel wouldn't be in Idaho Falls the next day. We had a game somewhere else.

What the Spuds had were 3,500 people in the stands—that was Harv's guess. They weren't about to give all that nice money back, not unless Noah's Ark floated by looking for Mount Ararat to anchor on. The crowd was all for going ahead, too. Some of the people in the boxes moved back under the roof. Some opened umbrellas. They'd come prepared. And some just didn't care if they got wet.

It wouldn't be a neat, tidy game. When the ball was wet and the dirt was muddy and the grass was slick, funny things were bound to happen.

And they did.

Harv biffed one up the gap in right-center. On that wet grass, it squirted through to the wall like a watermelon seed you shoot between your thumb and first finger. Harv's not swift on his feet, but he would've had a triple even if the Spuds' center fielder didn't fall on his can chasing the ball.

Their pitcher stood on the rubber cussing his luck and scowling at Harv. He squeezed the wet ball getting ready to pitch—and it wiggled out of his hand and fell on the ground, plop. “Balk!” the umpire on the bases shouted, throwing up his hands. “That's a balk! Runner advances one base!”

Head down so the Spuds wouldn't see him snickering, Harv trotted home and stepped on the plate. The pitcher yelled at the umpire. So did the catcher. So did the Spuds' manager, who was also their first baseman. So did the crowd.

But the ump was like the folks with the umbrellas. He came prepared. He pulled a rule book out of his hip pocket, opened it, and gave a shout: “Rule thirty-one, section eleven, says it's a balk ‘If a pitcher, in the act of delivering the ball to the batsman or in throwing to first base, drop the ball, either intentionally or accidentally.'”

They shut up. They couldn't very well say he didn't drop it. He did. Their manager did say, “That's a new one on me. I've never seen it before, and I've seen a little.” His belly hung over his belt. A lot of the time, first base is an old guy's position.

“Doesn't happen often,” the ump agreed, “but it's in the book.” He got points in my book for knowing the rule. He got more for explaining it instead of getting up on his high horse when they hollered at him. And he got some for carrying the book so he could cite chapter and verse.

That game had bad hops. It had bad throws. It had passed balls. One of the Spuds pulled a hamstring trying to score on a short fly ball. He went down in a heap halfway between third and the plate. He tried to crawl home, but Amos tagged him out. His buddies had to almost carry him back to the bench, poor guy. He got a hand, but he would rather have had the run. He wouldn't play again for a while, either.

We came out on top, 6-5. The only thing that proved was that we came out on top that afternoon. “Wonder how we'd match up in a real ballgame,” their manager said when it was over.

“Oh, it was real,” Harv answered. “Not to write home about, maybe, but real.”

“Still a shame it was raining,” the Spuds' manager said.

“Always a shame when it rains,” Harv agreed. “But we got the game in, and we had a decent crowd.” That made the Spuds' manager quit grousing. Money took some of the sting out of losing. Did Harv know that? He just might have.

*   *   *

I've talked before about how Harv had a good dose of mother hen in him. He got his chicks on the road way too early the next morning. We had a game in Twin Falls, and we had to go back down through Pocatello to get there.

“Lord only knows how long that CCCP work will hold us up today,” he said when he fired up the bus's engine. “Lord only knows if they're messing with the road somewhere west of Pocatello, too.”

“It may not matter. We may not be able to play, anyhow,” Wes said. The bus's windshield wipers were already flicking back and forth.

“You bite your tongue, you hear me?” Harv was mad as could be. “We won't draw real good this afternoon—Twin Falls ain't the big city. If we have to play tomorrow morning instead, before we go on to Boise…” He shook his head and looked up at or past the ceiling of the bus. If God listened to him—and who didn't?—that kind of disaster wouldn't happen.

Turned out to be just as well we started early. We had to hold up while the CCCP dynamited a boulder that was in their way. We were so far off, all we saw was a big cloud of smoke and rocks flying out of it. We were so far off, in fact, that we saw it before we heard the boom. Then we had to wait some more while the men without shirts cleared away those smaller rocks. They didn't clear them all; we bounced over some.

They stared in through the bus windows when we finally went by. Most of 'em looked green-jealous. We weren't working as hard as they were—nowhere near. But we were doing better on account of it. You could see them thinking
If only I was able to hit a decent curve, or throw one
.

There
was
more CCCP work west of Pocatello. Harv didn't say a word, but his back might as well have had an electric sign on it flashing
I TOLD YOU SO!
on and off in big red letters. Wes didn't say anything, either, which was bound to be just as well.

It was still drizzling when we got to Twin Falls, but that was all it was doing, drizzling. We wouldn't have any worries about getting the game in. Or I thought we wouldn't, till I got a look at where the Twin Falls Cowboys played. It was in a park by a canal that brought wastewater down from a mine in the hills outside of town. I don't know what was in that wastewater, but I know it smelled like a conjure man's kettle over a fire when he didn't like you one bit. And I know grass wouldn't come up anywhere near it.

So their field didn't just have a skin infield. It had a skin outfield, too. Except the skin was all over mud. If I was gonna play on that, I wanted a spoon or something in my hip pocket to clean my spikes with. And I was gonna play, because the stands were full even if they didn't boast a roof.

Harv pulled a rabbit out of his hat. Instead of spoons, he handed us all those flat wooden things docs use to hold your tongue down. I didn't know he had them till he pulled them out of a duffel. I mean, I had no idea. Even Mother Nature needed to work hard to get one past Harv.

The Cowboys didn't have any of those wooden doodads. But they did carry spoons or butter knives or shoehorns or anything else that could get the dirt out of their cleats. They knew what kind of ballpark they had, and they knew what it was like on a wet day.

And Fidgety Frank was just flat. His hesitation moves didn't fool the Cowboys. Neither did his curveballs. When we got down 8-3 after five, Harv took him out and let Azariah finish the game. He threw knuckleballs, only some of 'em didn't knuckle. So he got knocked around pretty good. He had a big old grin out there on the hill, though. He was just mopping up, but he was having a good time. The Twin Falls fans were, too.

Not Fidgety Frank. When the rest of the House of Daniel came back to the dugout after Azariah got the Cowboys out at last, he sat there with his head down and said, “What do you think, boys? Shall I catch a train back to Cornucopia and go into the secondhand inner-tube business?”

“Nope,” Harv said. “Remember, you got the Pittsburgh Crawdads out in Denver. They're a lot tougher'n these guys'll ever be. Anybody can have a bad day once in a while. Everybody does.”

“Those Crawdads feel like a million years ago,” Frank said. “And my arm oughta be in a museum, 'cause it feels a million years old.”

“That's why Azariah's finishing up for you,” Harv said. “You've put a stack of miles on it. Give it some rest, and you'll be better next time out. Besides, next time you'll pitch in a park where the grass grows.”

“I hope so.” Fidgety Frank made as if to hold his nose. “That dang canal stinks, too—unless I'm just smelling my dead arm.”

“It's the canal,” Wes said. “I don't care how dead your arm is—it wouldn't stink like that.”

We made the third out, and Azariah went back to the mound and took some more punishment. Our bats woke up a little, but not enough to make a real game of it. It wound up 13-7. The Cowboys were happy. So were the Twin Falls fans. They'd knocked off the mighty House of Daniel! It was as close to winning the Series as a place like Twin Falls could come.

In spite of the rain, in spite of the roofless grandstand, we had a better than decent crowd. We made enough to get through to Boise, no worries. We all had a little more cash in our pockets and grouch bags. You don't get rich playing in places like Twin Falls. You show the flag. You try to win. If you don't, you fool around so the fans enjoy it. We managed that.

Then you clean up and you get out of town. We managed that, too. There'd be a story in the paper about how the Cowboys pounded the stuffing out of us, but who twenty miles away read the Twin Falls paper? As far as the world knew, we were still the champion semipros. Next time we won, we'd believe it again ourselves.

 

(XVII)

Boise was another one of those towns that had been in the Utah–Idaho League till there was no Utah–Idaho League to be in any more. That team was called the Senators—Boise, I found out, was the capital of Idaho. When I went through there, two or three semipro teams played one another and the teams farther east. We were scheduled against the Boise Broncos.

We played at a field in the Boise Municipal Park, not far from the statehouse. I don't think that's where the Senators used to perform. It wasn't half bad, though. If they ever got a minor-league team back, they could spruce up the place, maybe put in some lights for night ball and make the grandstand bigger, and it would do fine.

I liked their uniforms—they had brown bucking broncs on their chests and on their caps, too. When I got close to one of the players, I saw it said
Bronco Bootery
under the horse in small letters. After that, I knew who was putting the money into their team.

Their pitcher looked as though he'd taken the mound for the Senators, and for all the pro teams Boise'd had before them. If he wasn't forty, he was forty-five. As soon as you saw him, you knew he'd throw junk and have good control. Against a team full of eager, free-swinging kids, he'd keep 'em off balance.

But we'd seen guys like that before. We hit him harder than the Twin Falls Cowboys had hit Fidgety Frank and Azariah the day before. He lasted three innings before the Broncos' skipper decided he needed to try someone else. It was 9-2 by then, and the new pitcher didn't help.

Their glovework didn't help, either. I don't recall whether they made five or six errors that day. I'm sure it was one or the other. You haven't got a chance when you do something like that. Somebody in the stands who know who their sponsor was shouted, “No wonder you play for the bootery! You boot it often enough!”

This was in the bottom of the eighth, mind. The crowd had been sitting on its hands since the fifth or sixth. The score, if I remember straight, was 16-4. It was one of those awful days any team can have. We'd had one ourselves against Twin Falls. So everybody who hadn't gone home by then heard this yell. And of course everybody who heard it laughed. Getting laughed at by your own fans is the one thing I can think of that's worse than having them boo you.

They booed plenty when we got the last out an inning later. Don't get me wrong—that's no fun, either. These are people who live with you. Their kids go to school with yours. You gas up your Plymouth at the service station one of them runs. Your wife buys pickles and flour at the grocery where another one stands in back of the cash register.

You think you won't hear about the kind of game your team played? You think your wife won't? And your son? You're dreaming if you do. Junior will come home from first grade and ask you
Daddy, why are you a bum?
You sure you want to play this game again?

Their manager came over to Harv and shook his hand. You could see he was a gentleman, but you could also see he was a gentleman who'd got thrashed. “You didn't try to run it up, and I thank you for that,” he said. Then his mouth twisted. “You didn't need to. We did it for you.”