The House of Daniel (47 page)

More of the crowd was white folks than Japs, but not a whole bunch more. The Japs all yelled for the Pickers, in English and in Japanese. The whites seemed split. Some rooted for the Pickers 'cause they were the town team. The rest cheered for us because we looked like them.

The Pickers weren't as good as the oil-company clubs or the Columbias. It wasn't because they were Japs. It was because they
were
a town team. They were guys who liked to play and got together. None of them had ever pitched at the Cricket Grounds or caught in Weeghman Park.

We beat 'em 6-2. They seemed happy they'd had a game against us, and happier that we hadn't clobbered them. They had fun. So did I—I picked up a single and a triple and grabbed everything they hit my way.

Just down Redondo from the ballyard was the Tijuana Inn. Wherever you've got Mexicans, you'll have Mexican food. It wasn't quite the same as what they dished out in New Mexico, but it tasted good and it doesn't cost much. Can't knock that for a combo.

We were gonna play at Todd Field again the next day, against the Redondo Beach Sand Dabs. Since all we had to do to get to the ballpark was cross the street, we had the morning to ourselves. The Tijuana Inn wasn't open for breakfast. A diner a few doors down was, so I had ham and eggs there with Eddie (well, he had bacon and eggs, if you're feeling exact). Then he went back to the motor lodge.

I started to do the same thing, but I stopped before I got there. “Go ahead,” I told him. “I'm gonna look in the feed store.” They sold pets, too—I noticed that painted on their side window.

Eddie gave me a sly smile. “Feeling homesick?”

“Something like that,” I said. I'd missed Enid and Oklahoma now and then. I'd sure never missed my old shack. I don't reckon a mouse or a cockroach could've missed that miserable place.

“Have fun,” he said, and kept walking. He didn't care about cows or chickens, at least before they got cooked. He didn't have a dog or a cat or a goldfish. J. N. Hill's wasn't his kind of place.

I also had no pets. You can't, not on the road. I'd done some hired-man work on farms outside of Enid, but I was never a farmer. So what drew me into Hill's? I had to be thinking about Charlie Carstairs and his business again.

A bell over the door rang when I walked in. It smelled like … a shop that dealt in animals and their food. The green notes of alfalfa, whatever goes into chicken feed, cat box, bird cage—all that kind of stuff. And there were spades and rakes and hatchets on the walls. Half a dozen dowsing rods pointed at a glass of water on a counter. I smiled to myself. No, I wouldn't have been surprised to see Charlie Carstairs talking with a farmer in overalls, explaining which rod would suit him best and why.

A couple of farmers in overalls were in J. N. Hill's. One of them was smoking a cigarette. They were talking to each other … in Japanese. I guess it was Japanese, anyway. They looked just like the Pickers we'd played the afternoon before. But they could've been speaking Yakima and I wouldn't have known the difference.

One of them looked my way and said something that had
House of Daniel
in the middle of it. Maybe he'd been in the stands at Todd Field yesterday. Anyone who wears a beard that isn't white is liable to get asked if he belongs to the House of Daniel, of course. If you don't think of cough drops when you think of beards, you'll think of the traveling baseball team.

I looked at the burlap sacks of feed piled almost man-high. No, I didn't get homesick much, but that whole place stabbed at me. Not much around Los Angeles is like things in Enid, but that store could've belonged to Charlie Carstairs as easy as not. It caught me by surprise, so I felt the stab worse.

Going over to the pets didn't make things any easier. Canaries and parrots, those didn't do anything for me. Neither did the little green turtles swimming in a galvanized washtub. But puppies and kittens are like babies. They can't help being cute.

I bent down and stuck my finger out at a red tabby kitten. Then I jerked it back in a hurry—the kitty took a swipe at it with a paw full of little needles. I'm sure it didn't mean to hurt me, which didn't mean I wouldn't've got hurt. Some ways, cats are more like people than you'd think.

“Would you like to hold him?” a girl asked. She smiled at the kitten and at me. She was tall and slim, with wavy hair a little darker than honey blond. Her crisp white blouse had J. N. HILL'S embroidered over her heart, the way a ballplayer might wear his team's emblem there on his shirt. She filled the blouse better than any ballplayer would have, though.

I straightened up in a hurry—so fast that I had to work my arms to keep from falling down again. I'd been thinking about Charlie Carstairs and his place back in Enid. If I hadn't been thinking about it and him, I wouldn't have gone into J. N. Hill's to begin with.

But thinking about Charlie wasn't enough for … this. I'm about as sorcerous as your average two-by-four, but … this had me wondering if maybe I wasn't a wizard after all.

“Are you all right?” she asked. Some of what was going through my head must've shown on my face. She sounded honest to Pete worried about me. Well, I was probably either white as gypsum sand or else green like a lime.

I tried to talk, but all I managed the first time was a cough. I tried again, and this time I was able to come out with it: “You're Mich Carstairs.” I've seen guys who just got beaned steadier on their pins than I was then.

An up-and-down frown line came and went between her eyebrows. “That's right. I am. But I don't reckon I know you.”

She'd seen me once, for a couple of minutes, months earlier. I hadn't had a beard then. Now … Now I hadn't shaved since a few days after that. No wonder she didn't recognize me.

“I'm Jack Spivey,” I said. I almost said
Snake Spivey
, which wouldn't have helped. But, naturally, she didn't recognize my name, either. So I went on, “I'm the fella in Ponca City who told you to come to California. I'm mighty glad you did, too.”

Her eyes went wide. They were even greener than I remembered. “You
are
that fellow,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Nobody else would know about it.” She took a different kind of look at me. “But what are you doing with that hair and those silly whiskers?”

The Jap farmers might know why I looked the way I did. Mich hadn't the faintest idea. “I play ball for the House of Daniel,” I explained. “That's why I'm in Los Angeles myself—the team'll be around for a while.”

“How crazy!” she said. “I knew there was a game across the street yesterday, but I never imagined anybody I'd, uh, met was in it.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I mean, here at J. N. Hill's, not here in Los Angeles. I know about that.”

“You know some of it,” Mich said. “After you went away, I found a telephone booth and telephoned Charlie. He said getting away might be a good notion—he was having trouble with that fat thug in Enid, so staying in Ponca City wasn't safe for me.” That fat thug! Nobody in Enid would've dared call Big Stu any such thing. Plenty of folks might've thought it, but they didn't say it. Well, we were a long way from Enid now.

“But…” I looked back at the dogs and cats. That marmalade kitten seemed ready for another crack at my finger. “You still haven't said why you're
here
.”

“I needed a job when I got out to Los Angeles,” she said. “I saw this place, and I came in looking for one. They asked me if I'd worked in a feed store before. I told 'em I'd spent years helping my brother in Enid. They sent him a CC message and found out I wasn't making it up. I think that startled Mr. Hill enough to get him to hire me.”

Now I wished I'd spent more time, or any time, in Charlie Carstairs's store. I would've met Mich sooner. Of course, she would've met me as the town drunk's kid. That would've put two strikes against me in a hurry. Oh, wouldn't it just!

“You like it in Los Angeles?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I'm still getting used to it. It's not like Oklahoma, is it? Los Angeles isn't like anything else that I know of. So many people here, but it doesn't seem like a big city. Big pieces of it hardly seem like a city at all.”

“This Gardena place doesn't, or not very much,” I said. “I was down in Long Beach for a couple of days. That had more of a city feel to it.”

“If you say so. I haven't been there yet.” Mich studied me. “Can I ask you something now?”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“When you knocked on my door in Ponca City and told me to get out of town, did Big Stu send you there to do something else?”

“I don't want to have to lie to you, Miss Carstairs,” I said after I thought for a few seconds. “So if it's all the same to you, I'm gonna pretend I didn't hear a word you said.”

She clicked her tongue between her teeth. Then she asked, “Why didn't you do whatever he wanted you to do?”

So much for me not hearing a word she said. But that one I could answer: “Because he thought you were Charlie's brother, not his sister, that's why. I couldn't do anything like that to a lady.”

“Oh.” She looked down at her shoes. Then she managed sort of a smile. “I didn't know Big Stu hired gentlemen.”

“Heh,” I said—sort of a chuckle, to match her smile. “Till you opened the door, neither did I. And neither did Big Stu. You'd better believe that.”

Mich said “Oh” one more time. She seemed to think of something else. “Did you, uh, get into trouble with him because you didn't do whatever that was?”

“Nothing I couldn't handle,” I answered, which was close enough to true. His strongarm boys hadn't broken my ribs, and they hadn't punted my balls, either. Not from lack of effort, but they hadn't.

“Mich!” a man called from the front of the store. “We need you at the other register!”

“Coming, Mr. Hill!” She hurried away. Her skirt swirled around her legs. She had nice ones. I hadn't noticed that in Ponca City, which only goes to show how shook up I was when she opened that door and turned out not to be Charlie Carstairs's kid brother.

She took care of whoever was buying something up there. Me, I let the little orange kitty try to murder my finger some more. If she wanted to come back and talk a while longer, she could do that. If she didn't … then she didn't, that was all. I couldn't blame her. The only way we knew each other was that I hadn't slugged her with brass knucks or blackjacked her. It wasn't exactly what the women's magazines called a formal introduction.

She did come back. Something warm happened inside my chest when she did. It told me she didn't think of me as one of Big Stu's slimy guys who wasn't quite slimy enough for that particular job. You don't want a pretty girl thinking about you that way, even when she isn't your pretty girl.

“I guess I'm glad you made me pull up stakes and come out here,” she said. “I do think there are more chances in Los Angeles than in Oklahoma.”

“You've been here longer than I have, but I wouldn't try to tell you you're wrong,” I said. The kitten meowed at me—I wasn't paying attention to him. I stuck my finger down there again. He almost got me that time.

“Careful!” Mich said.

If I was careful, would I have gone gallivanting all over everywhere with the House of Daniel? Oh, who knows? All my other choices looked worse. I said, “The team will be in Southern California through most of the winter, looks like. Lots of teams and players come here then, 'cause the weather stays nice. If I'm, um, close to Gardena, could I maybe take you to dinner and a movie?” If I was careful, would my mouth have gone gallivanting all over everywhere?

Well, what was the worst thing she could do? She could tell me to get lost and walk away. If she did, I'd go back to the motor lodge and not talk about how I struck out when I wasn't even up.

But she said, “Wait a second.” She came back with a pen and a sheet torn from a scratch pad that had J. N. Hill's name and address and telephone number printed at the top. She wrote another address under it. “This is where I'm renting a room,” she said. “You can write me there. They don't have a telephone, but you can call me here during the day if you want.”

“Thanks! I'll do that, promise.” I folded the sheet and stuck it in an inside pocket. “Thanks very much, uh, Mich.” I think that was the first time I ever used her name.

“Jack, I ought to be thanking you.” She used mine, too.

I shook my head, because I knew what she meant. “Not for that,” I said quickly. “Only a skunk woulda gone through with that.”

“Big Stu could have found one,” she answered. She didn't say
He thought he had found one
. We both knew that. One of the reasons she'd left Ponca City in such a tearing hurry was that, even though Big Stu was wrong the first time he thought he'd found one, he would've made sure he was right the next time.

“This isn't how I ever figured I'd meet somebody,” I said.

“Well, neither did I,” she said. “We'll see what happens, that's all. We'll see if anything happens.”

“Sure.” I nodded. You never can tell how you'll get along with somebody before you try and do it. Sometimes you can't tell how you'll get along with somebody even after you've been doing it for a while. If it were simple, everybody'd get along with everybody else, right? You know as well as I do how that works out. So it ain't simple, and a lot of the time I think that's the only thing anybody knows about the whole business.

Mr. Hill called Mich up to the front again. I figured it was time for me to get out of there before she wound up in trouble for wasting time with a customer. Except I wasn't even a customer, because I didn't buy anything.