Dirty Rice (16 page)

When I pitched a game, it would make my mind tired by the time a game was over, more tired than the catcher's though he will claim he's the one doing the heavy brain work. If you're pitching, you got to think before, during, and after every pitch you make, and if there happens to be somebody from the other team already on base, you got to think about that, too. It's a lot to carry around in your head, and the whole game you're toting that load. That's why you will see a pitcher when his team's at bat sitting with a towel or a rag wrapped around his head looking down at the floor of the dugout. He's just trying to get some relief from having to think while he's out there on the mound.

The days I wasn't pitching in the Evangeline League, I played in the outfield mostly, and sometimes I would be at first base. Let me tell you it was a mental rest not to be up there on the pitcher's mound where everything starts every time the ball is in play. All I had to do in the outfield was look in to see how the batter was standing at the plate, remember how he'd hit before if I'd ever seen him do that, check where the runners were on base, and wait for the pitcher to try to throw the ball. Not till then did I have to do anything else. I had plenty of time to think about all kinds of stuff that wasn't baseball, and still do my job of fielding if the ball came my way.

I never told Sal Florio that, naturally, when he'd ask why I'd done something in particular in some game. I'd let him believe what he wanted about what really goes on in a player's head. It didn't hurt anything to let him think so much mentality was at work in a baseball game, and besides none of that was his business, anyway. What you know as a player belongs to you. You can't explain a house to a man who ain't never lived in one. It's a waste of time. A pitcher on the mound hasn't got a choice about what to study, but you do in the outfield.

“Well,” Sal Florio would always get around to saying after a game. “How're you making out financially? I don't mean how much are you paid. I think I know that already. Not enough, right?”

I never said much back to him when he'd ask that, but Mike was willing to say how hard it was to make do with what he had to work with. “It gets tight sometimes, Mr. Florio,” he'd say. “We get our breakfast and our supper where we live in Miz Doucette's, and that's pretty good most of the time. But it's short rations every now and then, ain't it, Gemar?”

I'd nod, and Mike would go on to complain about having to skip eating dinner at noon time, since that wasn't part of the deal with Miz Doucette.

“I hate to hear things like that,” Sal Florio would say. “People are hungry all over this country now, and that's a crying shame. It's too bad you boys are in the same fix now and then. What y'all are doing by playing baseball in the Evangeline League is helping people get their minds off their troubles for a while, and it's too bad you're not recognized for what y'all do for folks. You provide a service to every town and parish you play in, and for you to have to go hungry at dinner is a damn shame.”

“Yes sir,” Mike would say. “And I send a little money home to my mama when I got it to spare. I don't begrudge it, and I'm glad to have a job this day and age, but it do make it hard now and then.”

“What about you, Gemar?” Sal Florio would ask me. “You got folks back home on the reservation you got to worry about?”

“I guess everybody's got people they'd like to help out,” I said. “You just do what you can.”

Then Sal Florio would reach in his pocket for some of them coupons he carried around with him. “Here you go, Gentlemen,” Sal Florio would say. “It's not much, but it'll help you Rice Birds a little, and I want you to know I'm trying to come up with some way to let my friends make a little extra money. I can't sleep some nights thinking about what's happening in Louisiana and the whole damn country. I'm working on it, boys. Y'all just keep playing that good baseball for these folks in Rayne. I hope I can come up with something to help y'all make ends meet.”

“Looky here, Gemar,” Mike Gonzales would say after Sal Florio had walked off to talk to some other Rice Bird players, Soapy Tonton right behind him like a watchdog on a rope, “What he give me. I got two coupons to Danny's Fried Chicken. It's gonna be a full belly tomorrow at dinner time.”

“Belly will be waiting,” I'd say. “Laying low and not saying a thing.”

One night in the middle of that first home stand in the season for the Rice Birds, Sal Florio had given out a bunch of passes to the Blue Moon Dance Hall in Rayne. I decided I wouldn't go with the bunch headed that direction. I was going to pitch the next game and still feeling a little sick in my mind when I would think about drinking any more whiskey after the Bon Soir Club. I told Dynamite Dunn that I wouldn't be going with them, and I had to take some hoorawing from them for that.

It was worth listening to all of them call me a singles hitter and a softball pitcher and other names, though, to be able to walk up Serenity Street in the direction of Velma Doucette's house all by myself in the night time. It was close to midnight, and Moon was high up in the sky, not yet chased down by the stars and made to hide himself before Sun came up. I started thinking about the Alabama-Coushatta story about the stars being jealous of how big and bright Moon could get every month and how they ganged up to make Moon keep moving. Sun was too big and bright to be afraid of the stars, no matter how many of them there was in the sky, so Sun took his time moving from one edge of the earth to the other. He didn't have to get in a hurry or hide himself ever, like Moon had to do most nights of every month. Sun moved at his own pace.

As I walked up the steps to Miz Doucette's house, I turned back to see how far Moon still had to go to get away from the stars that were chasing him, and as I did, I heard somebody say my name. It was Teeny Doucette. She was sitting in the swing at the far end of the porch where the Morning Glory vines grew up on a trellis thick enough to shade that whole part of the house, even in the daytime.

“Gemar,” she said again. “Hello. Where's Mike?”

“I'm by myself tonight,” I said. “Mike's gone with a bunch of folks to the Blue Moon Dance Hall.”

“The Blue Moon, huh? The real moon is pretty this time of night, isn't it? I believe it's almost full.”

“Moon will be as round as a mush melon tomorrow night,” I said. “Then he'll start to wither away again.”

“That's a funny way to put it,” Teeny laughed. “Why will the moon do that?”

“The real reason for that you have to learn in school,” I said. “But the old folks back where I live have got other ways to talk about it. Just stories, you know, not like the way the science teacher tells it in the schoolhouse.”

“Which way you like best?”

“Depends on who I'm talking to,” I said. “I learned a long time ago you got to figure out what people can stand to listen to. You got to be careful what you say or they'll take it wrong.”

“What about what you do? Not just what you say. Will they take that wrong, too?”

“I had too much whiskey to drink the other night in the Bon Soir Club,” I said. “If that's what you're meaning.” I knew Teeny wasn't interested in ways of talking about the way the moon changes its location and how a bunch of old men on a Indian reservation might try to explain all that. “I ain't saying I didn't do what I did, though. I did it, all right.”

“Clayton LeBlanc's not really mad at you, Gemar,” Teeny said. “He's not the kind of man to hold a grudge.”

“I got to say I am just that kind of man myself,” I said. “No matter how I try not to be, I will hold a grudge. Clayton must be a real different kind of fellow.”

“Don't get me wrong. He didn't like it when you made him look bad. But he understood you didn't know what you was doing when you shoved him down, after I explained it to him later why you did it.”

“I didn't shove him down,” I said, and leaned up against the porch banister. By leaning back against that porch rail, I could see better how the moonlight was falling on Teeny Doucette's face. Her nose and cheekbones stood out real good, and the shadows they was throwing made them look even better to me. Her eyes I found hard to see, but I knew how they looked already.

“I hit him three times. This Clayton LeBlanc. I didn't shove him.”

“Clayton would a lot rather believe you shoved him,” Teeny said. “It would let him rest easier in his mind. See, what I told him was that my Mama had asked you to keep an eye out for me, since you roomed here in the house, and that you took that wrong, being an Indian and all, and didn't know what she meant by it. I told him you didn't understand what dancing is and mistook what he was doing.”

“I know just exactly what dancing is. And your mother let me know I wasn't supposed to have anything to do with you,” I said. “Not ever, since you're in that program to learn how to get a job and you ought not to be bothered.”

“I know that,” Teeny said and started pushing against the floor of the porch to make the swing go back and forth a little. “She tells every man and boy that comes around here the same thing, and especially baseball players. But Clayton LeBlanc doesn't know that. He's never been inside this house.”

“Dynamite Dunn has, though,” I said. “He said he used to room here, and he can't no more because of something or the other that happened.”

“I don't know what he told you, but Dynamite always adds more to a story than is the truth.”

As soon as I said his name, Teeny had stopped making the swing go back and forth, and I was afraid she might get up and go in the house. “The moon's down some more,” I said. “See yonder where the stars has chased him.”

“You say funny things, Gemar,” Teeny said and started pushing the swing back and forth again.

“Yeah,” I said. “That biggest star there has got it in for Moon and won't never stop trying to catch up to him. I hope he never does.”

“That's a planet,” Teeny said. “That's Venus, but why would you care if Venus ever catches up to the moon?”

“It would make the night time stop coming,” I told her. “Sun would hang in the sky all the time, and it wouldn't ever be any relief for us again. Sun would kill all the corn, dry up Long King Creek and Lost Man Marsh, and that last day would never end and it'd finally burn the world up.”

“I like it when you tell those Indian stories,” Teeny said. “Do you know some more?”

“Lots of them,” I said. “But let me ask you something.”

“What? Is it about Dynamite Dunn and that business with him?”

“No,” I said. “I ain't studying my catcher. He works for me. I'm talking about Clayton LeBlanc. They tell me his Daddy is one of the folks that owns the Rice Birds, and that's the ones I work for.”

“I just go dancing with Clayton now and then,” Teeny said. “We don't make up an item.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing,” she said and laughed. Then she stopped the swing from moving. “I just saw the light go on in the kitchen. I better go in the house, and you can wait a while and then come on in to your room if you want to. Mama won't think anything about it, probably. She won't think we've been talking out here.”

“I can't talk to you even?”

“As far as Mama's concerned, can't nobody have anything to do with me.”

“Oh,” I said and straightened up from where I'd been leaning against the porch rail, watching Moon light up Teeny's nose and cheekbones. He wouldn't keep doing it, though, I knew. Moon will not do anything for long.

“Don't worry about that, though,” Teeny said. “I don't let her stop me.”

She went on in the house, and shut the screen door behind her. I waited until I couldn't hear anything but the tree frogs singing there on Serenity Street and then walked off the porch and into the yard where I could get a better look at the stars chasing Moon across the sky. I knew the main one was a planet called Venus, just like Teeny Doucette had said. I had gone to the white folks school in Annette, after all, but I didn't have to believe the big light hanging in the sky wasn't just one of the stars if I didn't want to.

“Chase him, Hunter,” I said out loud in the language of the Nation, the words sounding strange to me there in Rayne, Louisiana. “Don't ever give it up. One of these nights Moon might get tired and slow down and you'll catch him.”

The next stand of games we had was against the Alexandria Aces. Alexandria was far enough away from Rayne that we couldn't ride back and forth on the toad mobile every day and stay in our own beds at night. There was about twenty of us that traveled to games out of town, so putting us all up in a hotel cost a lot more money than the owners of the Rice Birds would spend. They got that town's high school to let us stay in a gym on cots set up on the court where kids played basketball.

The reason why they kept so many cots in the Alexandria High School was in case of tornadoes coming through in the springtime, according to what Lee Turk told me. “It's that far north of Rayne,” he said. “They don't have to worry so much about hurricanes like folks do in South Louisiana, but that don't mean there ain't bad shit can come down on you from out of the sky in Alexandria. Tornadoes is just as bad.”

“That's wrong,” Phil Pellicore had said back to Lee Turk. “Hurricanes is a lot worse than a damned old twister. I been through both, and I can testify to the truth of what I'm saying.”

The two of them argued about what was worse for a good while. That kind of quarreling went on all the time traveling with a baseball team. It was something to do and it helped pass the time. I never got caught up much with taking one side or the other of an argument, since I didn't care which side arguing won. What difference did it make to me whether Bull of the Woods Chewing Tobacco was better to suck on than Brown Mule? Or whether President Roosevelt was doing the right thing to get the country out of the Depression everybody was always talking about? Or whether Huey P. Long was going to make the big money boys start sharing the wealth with everybody?

It was always depression times on the Alabama-Coushatta reservation. Now that the white folks was having to tighten their belts, though, you would have thought that things could change and get better if the true opinion was proved by the right people. I knew better than that. Things was bad and would stay that way.

But it was better to listen to ballplayers argue about one thing and another, sometimes getting so mad they'd come close to hitting the other fellow, than just to stare out of the bus window going along the roads or up at the basketball goals in some high-school gym where you had to spend the night on a tornado cot.

After that first game against the Aces, we all loaded into the bus to ride to the high school, not feeling much like talking or looking out the windows at the houses on the streets we was taking to get there. We'd lost that first game, and Hookey Irwin had pitched it. A bad sign, most of us figured, when one of our best ones had got his stuff knocked all over. We'd scored enough runs to win an ordinary game, but the Aces batters had wore Hookey out. So we sat quiet and looked out the bus windows.

Alexandria was a good bit bigger town than Rayne back then, and it looked numerous to me. I was watching a bunch of kids playing under a street light at about midnight, pushing at each other like they was about to fight but not really meaning it, when somebody behind me said that Frank Millspaugh would be preaching once we got to the gym.

“How did he get a hold of it?” Clarence Meche hollered out. “You'd think it'd be hard to find here in among all these Alexandria Baptists.”

“That's exactly where you liable to find it,” Dynamite Dunn said. “This kind of burg is where it's most needed. There ain't nothing hungrier for it than a good Baptist outside the church house.”

What they meant was whiskey, I guessed, so I said that word out loud to Dynamite, like a question, and Dynamite answered it the same way.

“No, not whiskey,” he said. “Frank Millspaugh will not take a drink of whiskey, nor beer, neither. Only thing he'll drink other than ice water or a cold soda pop is absinthe.”

“What's that?” I said. “Some kind of a medicine?”

“It's a medicine all right. It will fix you up so fast you're likely to fall over before you get the first full swallow down.”

“I want me some then,” Mike Gonzales said. “Has he got any extra?”

“Don't be asking Frank to give you a taste of it,” Dynamite said. “He will not share it, once he gets his hands on a bottle. And he will take it personal if he thinks you're trying to get him to give up some of it.”

You could hear people passing the word around the bus as we rode along toward the high-school gym, not talking loud because they didn't want Dutch Bernson to take an interest in what they were saying, but sounding a lot happier than they'd been before. Thinking about just being whipped on a baseball diamond by the other bunch will not lead to friendly feelings. Being a part of a team is not a comfort.

“I don't know about the rest of you boys,” Tubby Dean said, “but I feel in real need of hearing a good sermon about now. I hope the Reverend Millspaugh will put one on us.” I could hear several amens said.

Once we got there, Dutch talked to us a little like he would always do after we'd lost a game. After a while, he ran out of things to say, and he left to go stay in a hotel or a tourist court somewhere. He was the manager, after all, he told us, and damned if he'd spend the night on an army cot on a basketball court in the middle of a crowd of fellows who was satisfied to get beat by a bunch of banjo hitters.

As soon as Dutch Bernson got out of the door, G.D. Squires asked for all of us to stop milling around and listen to what he had to say. “Would the congregation please come to order,” he said, standing under one of the basketball goals with his hands folded in front of him. “There are troubling signs among us. I don't have to tell you that. You that have eyes to see can tell that. You that don't, just listen for the news you never want to hear. I myself can't tell you, but there's a man among us, the Reverend Frank Millspaugh, who can bring the message we all are in need of.”

Frank Millspaugh played mainly in the outfield, and he generally took a deep position. He had given up trusting himself to be able to go back on flies or come in on line drives. Anything hit in his direction, unless it was a high fly, would be at least a single. At the plate, he could still get around quick enough on a fastball, though, and that was keeping him employed.

Frank stood up from his cot, put a little bottle up to his mouth and drank what was left in it, threw it down, and walked to where G.D. Squires was standing. He raked his eyes over the crowd of players standing by, shaking his head from side to side, and raised his hands up with the right one curled like the bottle was still in it.

“I want every head bowed and every eye closed in this great gymnastic cathedral,” he said. “Signs and wonders, sinners, signs and wonders.”

Lots of players dropped their heads like the People would do back in the Nation at Thomas Two Tongues' church, but I kept watching to see what he would do next. Mike Gonzales pulled at the sleeve of my shirt.

“You have seen the absence of Herbert the toad this evening,” Frank said. “You have noted the empty and bare skull of the man who calls himself a manager. Is that not true?”

“Yes,” somebody said in a low voice, others joining in pretty quick after that. “Yes, oh Lord.”

“Herbert is no longer with the Rice Birds. I tell you that without fear of successful contradiction of the truth I bring. Our toad has gone on before us, but he leaves us with a sign and a promise. And that sign is this, and that message is this. Keep your eye not on the sparrow, but on the change-up that comes in the night. That pitch thrown by the deceiver is not a fastball, and it comes not with the energy in it that will allow the well swung bat of truth to send the ball, lo, to the outermost reaches of left field if you're a righty, or right field if you're a southpaw.

“The change-up mystifies and it steals. It wobbles at times, it floats, it sinks, it drops where it ought not be, and if met by the bat of right- or left-hander, it deadens the drive intended. It maketh the line drive a grounder, it robs the fly of loft and carry, it comes like a thief in the night. It stealeth points from the batting average, it insureth failure, and assureth outs. It sendeth the baseball warrior back unto the dugout, bat dragging in the dirt like an old man's pizzle. It availeth none who is righteous. It accrueth to the earned run average of the enemy. It doeth naught to no good man.”

“What must I do to be safe?” G.D. Squires called out in a loud and breaking voice, sounding like he was about to cry like a child lost in the Big Thicket of Texas.

“Well you may ask, my son,” Frank Millspaugh said. “Put your trust not in the things of this gymnasium where great round balls pumped full of air float toward baskets with no bottom. Believe you in the Louisville Slugger, put your trust in your own reflexes, keepeth thy head down and thy eye on the hard little ball that hurteth sorely whatever part of thy body it may meet. Smite gently, but well. Look up to the mountains of the left field stand or the opposite field, if it so profit thee, to see from whence cometh thy help. Take, drink from this bottle. Wormwood, wormwood, and thou shalt be safe at first and lo at all the bases.

“Selah, Rogers Hornsby, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and in the name of the Rayne Rice Birds, look to the shining example of Gemar Batiste, our red skinned brother. For surely, he hath shown our hitters the way, the truth, and the light. Bless thee, Rice Birds, and harken to my words. Take up thy beds and walk. Anybody got any more absinthe?”

Everybody hollered at that, and Frank Millspaugh got offered several different bottles of whiskey, but he wouldn't take a drink from a one of them. Instead, Dynamite Dunn pointed to six or seven players, then to me, and announced that the disciples were departing to take the word of Father Frank into all the world, and he knew just where the world was to be found in Alexandria, Louisiana. It had a special name, Lou Anne's, and we would begin our ministry there.

“I ain't going with y'all,” Mike Gonzales said, shaking his head and backing away. “God don't like blasphemy. He will not stand for that kind of shit. He won't put up with it.”

“You stay here and watch the bats and balls then, and don't let the thief come in the night,” Dynamite said. “We got to go see if Lou Anne's is still fertile soil for good seed.”

I was still a little bit wound up from the game, and I had some money in my pocket. I'd made two or three paydays by then, and I figured I could afford to spend a little bit of what I'd earned. I'd paid Miz Velma Doucette a full month's amount for staying in her house and eating two meals a day, using the twenty dollars the Rice Birds gave me for room and board, and I had wrapped up ten dollars in a sheet of paper so nobody could see there was money in the envelope I addressed to my folks back in the Nation. I sent that to Mr. Ford Mathis at the agent's office, and I knew that my brother Polk would be checking the mail every day in the village to see if I'd wrote a letter.

Both me and Mike Gonzales had noticed that when Miz Doucette had got paid that forty dollars from the two of us the kind of grub she was feeding us picked up. Up until she got that full month's pay from us, we'd been seeing mainly beans and rice and a little cornbread on our plates, and not much of that sometimes.

Don't get me wrong about how I look at eating. I will face up to anything that's put on a plate in front of me. I liked that dish she called dirty rice, and I would eat all of it that was allowed me. There was something about the spice in it, the way it would burn your mouth but make you want more of it. Sometimes it didn't even look worth eating, but it always was. But after our landlady had got the full forty dollars, I got to say I perked up when a chunk of meat big enough to see would now and again hit my plate.

I was even able to eat me some dinner at noon on most days, and that was a welcome change. I was getting to eat three meals a day that deep into that season in the Evangeline League. I figured I was doing better than most folks I saw around me there in Louisiana and a whole lot better than the People back in the Alabama-Coushatta Nation.

So if I watched myself and didn't get too far into a whiskey bottle at this Lou Anne's place that Dynamite Dunn was talking about, I'd be able to pay my own way and even buy a drink or two for him and G.D. Squires for a change.

So when the seven or eight of us that Dynamite had pointed out as disciples bound for Lou Anne's started out of the high-school gym that night, I took the opportunity to speak to Dynamite about my plans for the expedition.

“I ain't going to drink much whiskey at this place,” I told him. “I got to pitch tomorrow. Dutch has done told me that.”

“Don't be complaining to me, Gemar, and making declarations about what you might not do,” Dynamite said. “I promise I will not force you to drink a drop, and besides, that's your predicament.”

“You mean about me not drinking too much?”

“That, yeah, but the main thing is I don't have to worry about getting the ball not exactly over the plate but close enough to it to fool at least twenty-seven men with bats in their hands, probably a lot more than that before it's over with.”