The House of Daniel (42 page)

Trouble is—at least if you're Tacoma—that Seattle does all the same things, and more besides. Other trouble is, when the Big Bubble popped, it put the screws to the port and to the logging business. Swarms of people went on the dole. Others turned parks into gardens. They had teams of beggars who shared what they got. They did whatever they could, in other words, same as everywhere else.

If you're gonna be broke, you could pick plenty of worse places to do it than Tacoma. It's not too hot; it's not too cold. It's as green as any place could want to be. You've got the bay on one side and the mountains on the other. Mount Rainier is as big and beautiful a mountain as anybody would ever care to see. When you could see it through the haze, I mean. Even when it's not raining around there, the air's damp. No wonder it's all so green.

Tacoma was Seattle's kid brother when it came to baseball, too. Seattle had the Coast League Indians. The PCL is Class AA, like I said before. Out on the West Coast, the PCL might as well be the bigs. The closest big-league teams are in St. Louis, more than half the country away. Only one team in the whole PCL has any kind of arrangement with the bigs. The rest go their own way, as much as they can.

Tacoma … isn't like that. The Tacoma Tigers were in the Western International League once upon a time. That was just B ball, a long way down from AA. And the team and the league hit a mine and sank halfway through the season a dozen years earlier.

So semipro teams had played in Athletic Park ever since. Tacoma was like Spokane—it was big enough for a local league. The first team we played down there was an outfit called McNulty Transfer.

They had a script
McNulty
across their chests in red, and a red McN on white caps with blue visors. One guy looked scary taking batting practice. He wasn't especially big, but he hit the ball hard. It jumped off his bat with the kind of
crack!
you don't hear very often. He'd been around; you could see it in his face. He looked head and shoulders more dangerous than anybody else on the team.

“Who is that fella?” I asked a fan sitting in back of our dugout.

“The one who's up there? That's Vic. I forget his last name—something Eye-talian,” the fan answered. “He played a couple years for the Indians. He wasn't a regular or nothin', but he did. Then he messed up his knee, and they didn't want him back after that. He's falling to pieces, just like the stands here.”

Sure as the demon, Athletic Park had seen better years. Nobody'd bothered painting advertisements or slapping posters on the outfield fences for a long time. Nobody'd bothered painting them at all, to tell you the truth. The planks were faded and warped. You got the feeling you might be able to charge right through them.

I also got the feeling I might have to try it. Down the left-field line it was 312, and 324 to right: a trifle short. But center was more than a trifle short—it was only 374 out there. That isn't far enough, not if you're a center fielder and especially not if you're a pitcher.

And the grandstand roof was even older and more decrepit than the fences. Moss grew on the shadowed parts. I hoped the logs in the columns holding it up hadn't started rotting. All in all, that roof looked more as though they meant it to keep off the rain than the sun.

They had a decent crowd under it, though, and out in the bleachers in the watery sunshine. The McNulty Transfer team trotted out. They had Vic playing first, a sure sign of somebody who could hit but couldn't run any more. Their pitcher was a freckly, redheaded southpaw.

“Boy, he's got the map of Ireland on his mug,” Wes said as the guy warmed up.

Harv hit a pretty good drive off him, but the ball didn't carry for beans. Their center fielder had to go back to the track to haul it in. He didn't have any trouble, though. We weren't playing somewhere with thin, dry air any more.

They scored a run off Wes in the first. We came back with three in the third and one more in the fourth. That redhead was wild as a bobcat. He kept walking guys, and we kept making him sorry.

They got one back in the bottom of the sixth. Vic came up with two on and two out. Wes didn't put a curve where he wanted it, and Vic hit a long, high one to center. I had time to get back to that fence, and then up against it. It must've been about eight feet high. I jumped and got my glove above the top of it. The ball hit and stuck. A split second later, I had my meat hand on it, too.

Vic had already gone into his home-run trot. The ump on the bases didn't know I had it, either, not till I threw it back in. That's when he brought up his right fist.

Vic stopped dead, about fifteen feet past first base. Nothing makes an outfielder happier than seeing how disgusted a batter can get. “Oh, for Christ's sake!” Vic hollered. But when I came by him, he swatted me on the butt and said, “Hell of a catch, ya bastard.”

“Thanks.” I went on into our dugout.

When I got there, Wes squealed, “Oh, Snake! My hero!” like a girl in a dumb movie. He made as if to kiss me like one of those girls, too.

I pushed him away. “If I'd known you were gonna do that, I woulda let him have his homer,” I said. We both laughed. Laughing's easy when three runs for the other side don't go up on the board.

We ended up winning the game 6-3. McNulty Transfer got their last run when Vic hit another curve way over the fence in left-center. “Bring that one back, you something-or-other!” he shouted at me as he rounded second. I would've needed a long-handled net, or maybe wings, to do it.

“Well, Snake, you do keep finding ways to earn your keep,” Harv said when he paid me.

“Good,” I answered. I was extra happy about the catch because I didn't get any hits. I was glad for anything I could do to show him I belonged on the House of Daniel. If I'd had to, I would have run through that fence, or more likely mashed my nose trying.

*   *   *

We stayed in Tacoma two more days. We beat Superior Dairy—trounced 'em, in fact. And then, just to remind us not to get cocky, the team from Kimball Gun Store beat us. Harv hated that. Harv hated to lose any old time, of course. But he hated losing to a team he didn't think was good enough even more.

“They aren't fit to carry our jocks!” he shouted after the game. “Heavens to Betsy, they aren't fit to carry guts to a bear! We've got no business losing to a club like that! We've—” He broke off and glared at us in a different way. “What's so funny, you goose twits?”

That only set us off some more. The guys who didn't start giggling about
Heavens to Betsy
did over
aren't fit to carry guts to a bear
. Sometimes you truly do need to cuss to get across what you're driving at. This seemed like one of those times. He sounded mad, yeah, but he sounded silly, too, and you can't sound silly when you're trying to scorch the paint off somebody.
Goose twits
made things worse, not better.

“Harv, honest to God we know they ain't supposed to beat us,” Fidgety Frank said. “Things just didn't go right, that's all.”

“I hope to kiss a catfish, they didn't!” Harv yelled. By then, everybody who wasn't already laughing his head off was stuffing a towel in his mouth so he wouldn't. Harv threw his hands in the air. “All right, you pack of mangy clowns—I give up. But you better look like you don't have your heads in your backsides when we go to Yakima tomorrow.”

I'd guessed we would go to Olympia and play the Timbermen, the Washington team that went to Denver. Olympia's just the other side of Tacoma, after all. But it turned out the Timbermen were on the road themselves, so we headed for Yakima instead.

Yakima was southeast of Tacoma. They grow fruit around there—apples more than anything else—and hops and wheat. Toward the end of summer, it's like cotton-picking time in Georgia or somewhere like that. The town fills up with farm workers—there are more of them than the folks who live in the valley year-round. The House of Daniel got there before the big inflood started. Even so, there were guys in straw hats and denim shirts and dungarees wandering in and out of the movie houses and saloons, and gals wearing overalls and bandannas looking for packing-plant work moseying down the street peering into shop windows.

At the motor lodge where we stayed, the geezer who ran it said, “I wouldn't have room for you in another six weeks. Everything goes crazy at harvest time. The lodges all fill up. We got shacks, we got tent villages, we got people in bedrolls sleeping out in the open. When they do sleep, I mean. Whole place works its head off.”

“Work is a Christian virtue,” Harv said.

“Don't reckon slaving is, and what we got then ain't far from it,” the old man answered. Harv didn't have a good comeback for that one.

We took on the Yakima Indians at Athletic Field. Not Athletic Park—that was back in Tacoma. Athletic Field. The pro Yakima Indians had played there till they folded about the same time as the pro Tacoma Tigers. One more semipro team carrying a dead pro team's name. One more ballpark falling to pieces a bit at a time on account of the semipros didn't have the money to keep it up—and on account of wooden ballparks just do start falling to pieces even if you are able to take care of 'em.

Athletic Park had been on the small side. Athletic Field was big: 345 to left, 420 to center, and 353 to right. The fences were high, too. I couldn't hope to stick my glove over the top and swipe a home run. That kind of park meant lots of doubles and triples—plenty of room for the ball to rattle around and to bounce off the fences and away from the outfielders.

Fidgety Frank looked out to the far-off right-field fence and said, “Glad I'm on the hill today. Wes can go chase my mistake, and I don't got to run after his.” For some reason or other, Wes didn't jump up and down and dance about that.

By the way the Indians loosened up, they seemed better than any of the teams we'd played in Tacoma. They had a kid shortstop who vacuumed up anything anywhere close to him. But I figured it would come down to pitching in the end. Most of the time, it does.

Most of the time, but not always. A fellow was dancing in the stands. He was red-brown, with black, black hair under his wide-brimmed Stetson. He wore a collarless work shirt and blue jeans and boots like everybody else's, but not everybody wore a coyote's tail sticking out from between the shirt and the dungarees. It wasn't just an ornament, either, or it didn't seem to be. It had as much wiggly life as if it were really attached to him.

No one in the stands got in his way as he capered up and down the aisles. The more he danced, the more he sang—the words weren't English, or anything like English—the better their guy pitched and the more funny hops the ball took.

I wasn't the only one who'd noticed. “What's going on with that fella?” Eddie said to Harv after we went down a run on a ball he should have fielded with his eyes closed.

“Well, I don't know for sure, but it kinda looks like a Yakima Indian giving the Yakima Indians a helping hand, don't it?” Harv said.

“Do something about it,” Fidgety Frank growled. “If they beat us, he won't get the credit—I'll get the blame.”

“I'll do what I can,” Harv answered, “but it's his home park more ways than one.”

I needed a second to see what he meant. How long had the Yakima Indians lived right around there? How in tune were they with every little Power that had lived there just as long? Those were more questions where the exact answer didn't matter much.
A long, long time
seemed close enough. So did
mighty in tune
.

But there are little Powers, and then there are big Powers. The little Powers draw their strength from where they're at. The big Powers have strength enough to use it wherever they go. That's what makes them big Powers. And there isn't any Power much bigger than the one they talk about in the Good Book.

Harv looked toward the Yakima with the coyote tail, and he said, “‘How I am come to make thee understand what shall befall thy people in the latter days: for yet the vision
is
for
many
days.'”

He didn't talk loud. The Yakima couldn't have heard him, not with ordinary ears. But he all of a sudden stopped dancing. His tail twitched up, the way a dog's or a coyote's will when it takes a new scent.

“‘And a mighty king shall stand up, that shall rule with great dominion, and do according to his will. And when he shall stand up, his kingdom shall be broken, and shall be divided toward the four winds of heaven; and not to his posterity, nor according to his dominion which he ruled,'” Harv went on. “‘And when he had spoken such words unto me, I set my face toward the ground, and I became dumb.'”

The Yakima with the coyote tail didn't set his face toward the ground. He didn't become dumb, either. He let out a startled yip, the way a dog will if it's running and it slams into your foot when you've got it up to take a step. And his tail went down, down, down like an unhappy dog's. He took off as though he had ants in his britches.

“That Book of Daniel, that's strong stuff.” By the way Fidgety Frank said it, he might have been talking about 120-proof rotgut. His voice had the same mix of admiration, respect, and fear.

“You bet it is. Nothin' stronger,” Harv answered. Believing it was was what brought you into the churchy part of the House of Daniel and kept you there. By the way Harv handled conjure men, the Book of Daniel had something going for it, all right. He nodded to himself and added, “Let's go play ball.”

So we did. Maybe 'cause we were ticked off, maybe just 'cause we were the better ballclub, we won the game 7-5. We should've won by more than that, but the quick kid they had at short made a couple of plays that might've been magic all on their own. I didn't know if he could make it as a pro—one game isn't usually enough to judge how somebody swings the bat. But he could field with anybody. I knew that.