Dirty Rice (19 page)

“The Snake Crawler, you mean? What do you think I'm going to call it? We're going to call whatever you do that makes us money whatever we need to call it.”

“All right,” I said. “As long as I don't have to call a pitch that.”

“You probably won't never have to say much about it. Indians is supposed to be real close-mouthed, ain't they?”

“Whatever you say, boss,” I told him and went out to pitch to the first batter of the inning. He was the shortstop, a little quick guy, and the way he came up to the plate, he didn't look like much of a hitter. He wasn't glad to be there, and he was ready to go sit back down on the bench as soon as he could. He might complain about the umpire's call on a ball or two he hadn't swung at once he got back in the dugout, but he wasn't the kind of batter that somebody like G.D. Squires was. He wasn't hungry to tear into a pitch coming at him to see how it tasted.

After he got his feet arranged just the way he wanted them, the Aces' shortstop hammered his bat on the plate a couple of times to let me know I was going to be dealing with a dangerous man. I didn't look at him, but I held the ball in my glove a little longer than I ordinarily would do, letting the batter know I had something special picked out for him. When I went into my windup and then uncoiled to release the ball at the top of my motion, I aimed it just at the spot where the bill of the batter's cap cast a shadow over his eyes. I didn't put all I had into that fastball, but it got there quick enough to make that little shortstop fall backwards and land on his ass with his bat sticking up like a toy a baby would be holding.

The umpire came running out and pointed his finger at me and began shaking it. “One more pitch like that and you're out of the game,” he hollered at me. I didn't make any sign I'd heard him, looking down at my glove instead like something had come loose inside it. Maybe that's what accounted for the way that fastball took off on me, I was saying by doing that. It beats me how the ball got away from me like that.

I naturally came inside with the next one, too, but not close enough to make the batter jump backwards and fall this time. He was standing extra light on his feet, though, ready to jump back like a frog scared by a snake hissing, so I got tired of seeing him up there and put the next three pitches quick in a row across the plate and let the little fellow go sit down.

We won the game without nobody else getting hit by a pitcher, and nobody come out of the stands again onto the field looking to whip our asses. Dutch Bernson was satisfied that I'd let folks know I could and would throw at a man's head, and G.D. Squires thanked me for taking up for him with a purpose pitch.

“You know what?” he said to me in the clubhouse later. “There ain't nothing like a little scuffle on the field to make a man feel better when he's down. You don't even have to land a punch to make it happen. It clears your head right up and settles your belly down, a little scrap like that.”

“If you'd been hit by that first pitch Gemar made to that little bastard instead of the one Irion plunked you with, you wouldn't be standing around here bragging about how good you feel,” Phil Pellicore said. “You'd be holding a chunk of ice to your head.”

“If the Chief hits you with his Thunder Bolt, that calls for big medicine,” Dutch Bernson said and clapped me on the shoulder.

I'd been called Chief on every sawmill team I'd ever played for, and I was used to hearing that. White Eyes seemed to think that was a new way to name an Indian every time they used it, and when they'd call you that, they would always stop and look at you to see if you appreciated what a good label they'd come up with. I'd come to understand they meant it for a compliment, so I'd stopped giving any sign I was impressed one way or the other with being tagged like that. So I'd just stand there and take the name, the same way Jay Bird or Possum or Polecat would. Animals don't speak a human language, and if you don't let yourself understand what a man is saying to you, you can be as peaceful as any creature in the Big Thicket or Lost Man Marsh no matter what you're called.

So when Dutch put that name on me and that label on my fastball in front of all the Rice Bird players, I just kept doing what I was doing and didn't say a word back. I couldn't do anything about what names Dutch wanted to use, but I could get my clothes changed and my regular shoes put on there in the Aces clubhouse in Alexandria and get ready to go out into the street.

Dutch was right about what a name for a thing might mean to a newspaper reporter, though. When we got back to Rayne after that stand of games in Alexandria, Tommy Grenier had already wrote up the story about the Rice Birds fighting with the Aces fans on the field. He didn't lie too much, but he did say things he couldn't have known, and he did make stuff up to make the story read better.

I was willing to let Tommy Grenier have space to work in and room to draw things out and put new stuff into what he was telling. What I didn't like, though, was him reporting things I was supposed to have said to Dutch Bernson and the Rice Bird players. It wasn't just that I didn't say them things. But the way he said I said them made me sound loco. Here's what I'm talking about.

Chief Gemar Batiste is ordinarily mild-mannered and quiet spoken. In the hurly burly of the clubhouse or the feverish excitement of a game in progress, he is the soul of calm. In critical times in a game, he will lift his eyes to the sky and ask direction from the Great Spirit he believes in and prays to. He will not join in the joking and hilarity of the clubhouse, but sit quietly as he thanks the Great Spirit for favors granted. Chief Gemar Batiste, or simply Chief as his teammates call him, is the very picture of the solemn Red Man.

But in the unfortunate event that took place on the baseball diamond in Alexandria last Thursday, Chief Gemar Batiste felt it necessary to plead with his manager to be allowed to defend center fielder G.D. Squires, grievously injured by a cowardly attack by the Aces pitcher, one Joe Irion. His teammates, after being viciously attacked by a mob from the grandstand, looked to the Chief for vengeance.

“My heap big friend hurt, Manager,” the Chief said to Dutch Bernson. “Me go on warpath. Me hurl Thunder Bolt. Me scalp'um Aces.”

Tommy Grenier wrote more about that little tussle than that, but that part there is all I can stand to say out loud. It got the job done, though, that story in the
Rayne Tribune
did, according to what Dutch Bernson told me. The newspaper in New Orleans, the
Picayune
, put what Tommy Grenier wrote in the Rayne paper onto its sports section, and I know that because one of the owners of the Rice Birds came into the clubhouse right after the story come out in New Orleans to show it to Dutch.

I'd never seen him before, but I could tell by the way the veterans players acted when he come in the clubhouse that he weighed a lot more than it looked like he did. Somebody saw him and said his name the way you do when the boss on a job comes up on you when you're not noticing, and it got quiet real fast. Not everybody stopped what they were doing and saying, but the ones closest to the door hushed up pretty solid. In the clubhouse that day, it sounded like it does when Hawk flies over a bunch of robins squawking and carrying on.

After they finished laughed and strutting around the clubhouse and showing the piece in the New Orleans paper to every Rice Bird player they come to, then tearing out the story and sticking it up on the bulletin board where Dutch would post lineups and reminders to us about what was working on his mind, the two of them came over toward me where I was standing with Mike Gonzales.

“Chief Batiste,” Tony Guidry said, “I have been hearing a lot about you from your manager and now I'm reading about you in the
New Orleans Picayune
. I believe it's about time I met you face to face.” He stuck out his hand, and I took it to shake, and he held on longer than was comfortable, looking me in the eye like there was something he'd been told was inside my head and if he looked hard enough, he'd be able to spot it.

“Chief,” he said. “You are tearing up the Evangeline League. What you got to say for yourself?” The way he was looking out of his eyes at me didn't match up right with the words he was saying. What he'd said was just on the edge of hoorawing, and I was used to hearing that from the Rice Birds. I'd noticed that when folks talked like that to me, you could see in their eyes they were looking to see how you were taking what they said. A lot was going on at the same time, but there usually wasn't no harm intended

I could tell from the way Tony Guidry was talking to me that he wanted to sound like he wasn't acting no different from anybody in the clubhouse, but I knew I couldn't say things back to him the way I'd be able to with the Rice Bird players. I'll just Indian up, then, I told myself, the way Dutch has told me to do. I'll act like I'm back in the reservation and the Agent has asked me to do something I don't want to. Move to a different house, maybe, or help him get some other Alabama or Coushatta to change the way they're doing to the way the Agent would like to see. Help him look good to some other white man. Help him get an advantage.

“I just try to do what my manager tells me to, Mr. Guidry,” I said back at him, making my eyes as empty as I could get them to be. Keep them as black and flat as the surface of Lost Man Marsh, I told myself, in the winter when even the weeds has shriveled up, turned brown, and died. “He knows what I ought to do and how he wants me to do it.”

“Damn, that's a fine attitude, Chief,” Tony Guidry said. “I purely love to see that in a rookie ballplayer. I love to see that in anybody that works for me, to tell the truth. I'd love to see it in my wife, too, but that ain't likely to happen.”

Everybody laughed when he said that, particularly the players who were married up or had been at one time. Not many of them had a wife that I knew of, and the ones that did never showed much sign of wanting to talk about her. Only the ones without regular women around them had things to say about that subject. The less you know about women, the more you got to talk about them. That's the way it seemed with that bunch of men on the Rice Bird team. I guess with any bunch of men, come to think of it.

“Tell me where you learned to throw that Thunder Bolt, Chief Batiste,” Tony Guidry said after everybody had calmed down from laughing at how funny what he'd just said was. “That's a fine name for that fastball you been throwing past everybody in the Evangeline League. It's a thing to admire.”

“Back on the reservation in Texas,” I said, gearing up to tell the kind of lie that white people never could get enough of. “Out hunting for bobcats and rabbits and squirrels and the odd deer or two. When I didn't have shells for my Daddy's old shotgun, I'd carry a pocketful of rocks with me out in the woods. I'd chunk them rocks at whatever I was trying to bring back home to eat or sell the hides off of. I guess the Thunder Bolt come from me doing that.”

“You had to make every rock count, huh?” Guidry said. “Your aim had to be true and on the money. That's what you're telling me.”

“Hunting bobcats and deer with rocks,” I said, “you hardly ever get a chance to throw more than once. You got to bear down and make it count.”

“Well, you've been doing that, all right, and the kind of stuff about you and the Rice Birds we're seeing in the papers and hearing on the radio is doing us all good. Keep up that good work, Chief. Keep that Thunder Bolt coming at them batters.”

“I'll try, Mr. Guidry,” I said. “I'll sure keep my eye on the ball.”

“What's that other one you throw? What is it you call your curve? The Snake?”

“I believe you must be talking about the Snake Crawler,” I said, thinking I'd go all out and say something else to make him and Dutch happy. “That's my curve that I don't want nobody to know which way it's fixing to twist.”

“Say, listen,” Guidry said, laughing and slapping me on the shoulder before he walked off to go with Dutch Bernson into his office. “Chief, I know you're a hunter. Did you ever do any fishing?”

“In Long King Creek, yes, sir,” I said. “For perch and blue gill and sometimes gar.”

“How about you and a couple of your teammates coming out with me and some folks on my fishing boat into the Gulf some day soon here? See if we can't catch something a little bit bigger than you'd find in freshwater.”

“If my manager says it's all right, I would,” I said.

“Oh, I expect he will. Y'all don't play everyday. Next time the Rice Birds got some games in Morgan City, let's do it then. That's where I keep my boat down close to the Gulf.”

I told him all right, and Tony Guidry walked off, slapping people on their shoulders and backs as he left the clubhouse, swaying from side to side the same way Bear does when his belly is full. Not hungry just now, but satisfied to know he can find something to eat when next he wants it. Everybody he touched, Guidry called by name. “Dynamite,” he said. “Tee Joe, Phil, Hal, Tubby, Cy, Juan.”

“Mr. Guidry knows everybody's name,” I said to Zeb Munger. “Nicknames, too.”

“Tony Guidry will call everybody he sees by name,” Zeb said, sitting on a bench and holding one of his feet up to look at a blistered spot on it. “Lots of times he won't put the right name to the right man, but you know what, Gemar?”

“No. What?”

“Every man in here answers to the name Tony Guidry calls him and just grins real big when he's doing it.”

“One of the men that owns the team,” I said. “I reckon that's why he gives out names like he's Abba Mikko and walks around like he might be Bear.”

“I don't know who them people is you're talking about,” Zeb Munger said. “But I do know your name is Chief Batiste and that you'll be going fishing in the Gulf of Mexico pretty soon here.”