Dirty Rice (2 page)

“What name are you going to use, if you get to play in the Evangeline League? That's what I mean. Lots of players, old and young, have a good reason or two to rename themselves before they get put up on a roster.”

“I'll use Gemar Batiste,” I said. “That's the only name I got.”

I was lying. I had another name, one that I got when I went through what it takes to become a man in the Alabama-Coushatta Nation, back when I came to be twelve years old. That name came to me in a dream, like it's supposed to when you take that journey at that age into the Big Thicket and spend them days not eating and not closing your eyes to sleep and keeping that chunk of root under your tongue. You don't come back from where you are in the Big Thicket to the circle of old men waiting at the center of the Nation until you dream your name with your eyes wide open. You have your real name, then, and nobody knows it but you. If you ever give it away, you never will be who you are and who you're supposed to be.

“I expect that'll be just fine, using Gemar Batiste as your name,” Mr. Piquet said as he got into his car to leave. “You probably hadn't got a reason yet to use an assumed one. And if you make it to the Rayne Rice Birds and do all right, people will call you what they want to, anyway.”

“They'll call me by my name,” I said. “That's the one I answer to.”

“Yeah, OK, Gemar,” he said and laughed a little bit. “Remember, you got two weeks to get there for the try-outs.”

Polk and I watched until Leonard Piquet got that big black car turned around and pointed in the direction he had come from.

“I tell you one thing,” Polk said. “That is a fine automobile. And you know what I did when I walked around it?”

“No, what?”

“I spit in my hand and rubbed it on that statue of Diana while y'all were talking and not looking at me. That's what.”

“Why did you do something nasty like that?” I said and picked up a rock to get ready to tend to the rest of the inning I'd been working on. “What good did that do you?”

“Everywhere that car goes now, I'm right along with it. Part of me's going to always be traveling with that machine no matter where it goes. I can think about that and know it's true.”

“You're crazy,” I told my little brother. “None of that means anything. None of it makes any sense.”

He went back in the house then.

• • •

I thought long and hard about whether to take with me that new bat I had made when I got my stuff together to take to Louisiana. It wasn't that dented up, and it felt good and right in my hands, but it would be hard to carry on the roads I'd have to travel, so I decided to leave it. They'll have a bat for me to use there, I told myself, a brand new one. I don't need an old homemade bat, so I'll stick it up under the house where my brothers can't find it.

All I'd be carrying was the tow sack and a paper bag that my mother had put some biscuits in, along with a couple of pieces of salt pork she had fried up for me. In my pocket, I had two dollars in change that Polk had made me take, money he had saved up from selling blackberries he'd picked. I didn't want to take it, since I had a little bit of money of my own. I forget how much, but it couldn't have been over three or four dollars, but if I didn't let Polk give me his money, he'd be hurt. So I took it.

McKinley Short Eyes lived at a little place by himself between my father's house and the big highway. All of the family of Bronson Batiste of the River Otter Clan were outside the house when I got ready to take off walking toward wherever I was going, all of them but the littlest one, my baby sister, Bluebonnet, who was inside taking a nap.

“My family,” I said, saying the proper words that we used back in those days to say good-bye. “I will leave now, but I will hold you inside, and take you with me.”

“You are not leaving us,” my old man said. “We go with you wherever your journey might end.”

That was the prescribed way to say it. Now my father could say a few practical things to the son about to leave home. He figured I'd be back soon, anyway. Where could you go that would let you feel like you could stay there? The reservation was always behind you, pulling at you and hanging on.

“Now, Gemar,” my father began, “when you go to this baseball place where they'll call you a rice bird, you have to understand a couple of things.”

“What, my father?” I said.

“These white eyes in Louisiana can't be much different from the ones here in Texas outside the Nation. They'll talk a lot, and they'll expect you to look like you're listening to what they're saying. But they don't care if you do or not. They're just filling the air up with sound. You understand that?”

I nodded, and he went on. “Let them tell you how to do the baseball. Don't argue with them with words from your mouth. If you need to disagree because what they tell you is wrong, do it with your tools. They'll understand that.”

“I will depend on what I can do with my hands.”

“One last thing, then,” my father said. “They say they will give you money to work at what you think is play, what you like to do anyhow. I cannot believe they will do that, but you do. If they do give you money, don't spend none of it on whiskey. You know what I'm talking about.”

I told him I'd stay away from that, and in a little time I was walking away, down the dirt road that ran in front of the house of Bronson Batiste of the River Otter Clan toward McKinley Short Eyes' place. I let Polk carry my tow sack as I had crawled up under the house and pulled out my good bat to bring along to Rayne, Louisiana.

I wasn't surprised to see that McKinley Short Eyes was out in front of his house, sitting on the sawed-off stump of a live oak tree. He had his pipe stuck in his mouth, and a big cloud of smoke he had just blown out was hanging in front of his face. I couldn't see the old man's eyes for the smoke.

“Gemar Batiste,” he said, “I knew you'd be coming by to see me today before the sun got up high. Who's that with you?”

“That's my brother, the son of my father Bronson Batiste of the River Otter Clan, and his name is Polk.” I went on to ask him, “How did you know I would be coming to talk to you today, Old Father?”

“I dreamed it two sleeps ago and then again last night,” He took a long draw on his pipe. “You were way off somewhere from the Nation, and you were wearing funny shoes. They had blades coming out of the bottoms of them, like knives, and everywhere you walked you left a mark cut in the earth of where you'd been. Anybody could track right where you'd walked. They were doing that and writing it down on paper where you'd been and how many steps you took along the way. You had that stick in your hands, that one you're carrying right there, and you were having to swing at what they were throwing at you. Do you understand what I'm saying, Gemar Batiste?”

“Yes, Old Father,” I said. “I think you had a dream about me playing the baseball.”

“No,” McKinley Short Eyes said, “what you just said would be the easy way to talk about my dream. But it would not be right. It's not just the baseball. That wouldn't surprise me enough for me to dream about it.”

I nodded.

“No, it ain't that easy, Gemar,” the old man said. “The baseball in my dream is the baseball you play, the way you can throw the ball by the other ones and hit it hard back at them when they try to throw it by you, but that's not how the way I saw you dressed and carrying that stick works in my dream. I'll explain it so even this boy beside you will be able to follow what I'm saying. Are you listening, boy?”

“Yes, Old Father,” Polk said.

“You know, Gemar Batiste,” said McKinley Short Eyes, “where this baseball, the playing of it now I'm talking about, came from, don't you?”

I nodded, and he launched into the story of how baseball had first come to the People.

“From that Indian from some other nation, the one that showed up where the Alabamas lived before they came to Texas. That place, our first home, was where the state of Alabama is now. The white eyes took the name, and then told us that was all they wanted. We had to leave now, since they had done got the good out of us. But that's another story. Before we left what they call Alabama now, this stranger showed up one year at the Corn Dance. Dressed funny. A strange headpiece on. Had a design worked into it with beads. Had rings punched into his ears. Wearing silver all over him, carrying a stick like what you got there, and a ball along with it. It wasn't like any other ball we ever saw before. It bounced real high when you threw it against the hard ground, and when he hit it with that stick, it took off like a bird. Like a hawk, it would fly. We didn't know what it was made of then, but now we do. You know what it was?”

“Yes, Old Father,” I said, shifting my weight a little to let Polk know to keep his mouth shut. “It was rubber.”

“It was rubber,” McKinley Short Eyes said. “He was from Mexico, see, called himself an Aztec, and they had rubber down there, come out of a particular tree, but we didn't know it, that material. We didn't have nothing that would give to the touch and then come back at you. Or bounce worth a damn. Now the whole world knows rubber. And he taught the young men how to hit the ball when it was throwed to them and run toward a safe place. If somebody out there waiting caught the ball that man with the stick hit up in the air before it landed, he was dead. If it was a grounder, they had to field the ball and try to hit him with it before he got to the safe place. You know all this. It's what the white eyes picked up and changed it a little and named it baseball. They made the ball real hard, for one thing. You get hit with that, you know it. It'll do a lot more than just sting, like that first rubber ball did. That's baseball, where it came from.”

“They call it that,” I said. “Where I'm going to go play it.”

“What I'm worried about is what the baseball means in the dream. I mean when it ain't just the thing it is, but it's something that's behind it, too. You know how the Nation's old stories work. They're good for something else, what they tell us about how to do and how to act and how to come out better than we were before we heard them. Ain't that right?”

“Yes sir,” Polk said, and I touched him on the head with my free hand.

“You got to figure out my dream, then,” the old man said. “I didn't tell you all of it, and I don't want to. You don't need to be no more scared than you are right now. But look out for these things. Listen, now. An animal whose ears you pull to try to get him to give you money. A man who doesn't see you when he's looking right at you. A woman that talks a language I ain't never heard before. All that is hooked up some way with the baseball you play, the throwing and the hitting and the catching. I don't know how. That's your job to figure out. Nobody can do that for you.”

McKinley Short Eyes stopped talking. His pipe had gone out. He had stopped looking in my direction, aiming his gaze instead on the tree line across the road from his house. He looked like he was all by himself.

“Old Father,” I said. “Thank you. I will remember what you've said and I will work on figuring out how it will help me. I know it can.”

I looked down at Polk, and we turned to walk toward the road leading to the way out of the reservation. As we reached the road and began to move away, McKinley Short Eyes called my name.

“One more thing from my dream I ought to tell you,” he said. “You had a real nice picture of a bird on your baseball shirt, one like I'd never seen before. That was a good part of my dream. Think about that bird on your shirt as you travel.”

I waved and walked on. After a few hundred yards, Polk asked me if there was something wrong with McKinley Short Eyes.

“Other than being old and full of stories and not many people for him to tell them to any more, no,” I said.

“I'm going to start going to see him every day or so,” Polk said. “Listen to him talk some.”

“You do that, and write to let me know if he's had any more dreams with me in them. But be sure to figure them out before you send me any letters.”

“You're not worried about what he told you about his dream?”

“Naw,” I said. “Why should I be? It doesn't mean anything. You go back to the house now.”

“I will,” Polk said, giving me the tow sack.

“I'll send you a picture of a rice bird,” I said, turning my back on my little brother and breaking into a trot. I knew if I could make it to the Carter Lumber Company railroad by nine o'clock I could climb on one of the log cars and ride the east bound to where the track ended in Woodville.

For the next few days or so, I spent the daylight hours sleeping in the woods and fields close enough to the L and N railroad to be able to get to it quick when the sun went down. I fed myself on cheese and crackers and sardines out of cans, goods I bought at stores in the towns where I'd stop in the daylight hours to rest up from the night rides I took on top of railcars. Those places had names like Crossroads and Coushatta and Natchitoches and Tioga and Alexandria and LeCompte and Opelousas and Church Point and Mire. Coushatta was a puzzle to me because of what it was named. It was in the wrong place and didn't fit. And finally one town was named Lafayette. That was the place where I got off the train in the dead middle of the night, crawling down the side of a moving car filled with a load of something that smelled sweet like sugar burning.

That night it was time for me to get off the train for good because I had got to where I had to leave off riding and end up getting by foot to Rayne, Louisiana. There was a sign lit up with red and white lights, on a building with lots of automobiles parked in front of it and music coming from it loud enough to hear over the sound of the freight cars.

The instruments making the music didn't sound like any I had heard before. Guitars, yeah, but something else, too. It put me in mind of the way the old men in the Alabama-Coushatta Nation would pound on the drums and the old women would chant the same words over and over during the Corn Dance, but it wasn't made by drums or the voices of people saying the same thing again and again. It told anybody listening that the music would know when it had got to the place where it intended to be. It made you want to wait to hear it get there.

As the freight I was riding passed the building, I read the sign.
The Heart of Evangeline Country
, it said,
Bon Soir Club d'Lafayette
. I put my hand on my tow sack and touched the knob of my red oak bat. I was ready to crawl off from where I was and get to where I was headed.

Rayne was not on a main railroad line. I had asked an old man who sold me some sardines and crackers and a bottle of soda water in a little store back up in a place called Grand Coteau where Rayne was situated once you got to Lafayette. He told me it was a few miles west, so I crawled down off that freight car as it slowed to pull into Lafayette.

I knocked some of the dust and dirt off the front of my shirt and pants, and by the time I got that done and my tow sack slung over my shoulder, I could feel the sky getting lighter.

I took off across the open field next to the train tracks. By the time I had got my feet good and wet from the dew I could see the lights of a stray automobile or two way off up front of me. In a little while, I got to the road and set myself a good pace as I walked along the shoulder of the road next to ditches full of water.

I didn't get a ride from there to Rayne, Louisiana. I wanted to walk into that town, and I didn't want to have to deal with somebody doing me the favor of a ride in his automobile. I wanted to be by myself when I got to Rayne, and I was, the full sun hitting everything before me.

I could tell where downtown Rayne was by the church steeples and the buildings sticking up. By the time I reached the main crossing, people were in the streets going in and out of the stores, stopping to talk to one another. It was about eight o'clock, I figured.

I went into a drugstore on the corner of the main street crossing. Behind the counter at the front of the store was a yearling boy dressed in a white shirt and wearing eye glasses, fixing to light up a cigarette.

“You like to scared me to death,” he said. “Don't nobody but Mr. Mouton come in here before eight in the morning, and I thought you was him.”

“I thought it was past that time,” I said. “I just wanted to ask something.”

“You can't buy nothing yet,” the boy said. “We ain't open, even with that door unlocked. We still
ferme
.”

“What?”

“I thought maybe you was French,” the boy said. “The way you look. That means closed, see.” He looked around him. “I ain't supposed to smoke in here, see. Mr. Mouton won't allow it, and that's why you scared me. I thought it was the old man.”

I asked him where the Rayne Rice Birds baseball field was located, and he took a deep drag off his cigarette. “They ain't start playing no games yet,” he said. “Season don't begin until next week. So there's no game tonight, and you can't buy tickets yet.”

“I know the season's not going yet, but they're getting ready for it,” I said. “Where is the field?”

“Addison Stadium is where they play, and it ain't just a field,” the clerk said. “It's as good a stadium as Miller Stadium that Crowley's got, and it's a lot better than Jeanerette. That ain't nothing up against Addison Stadium. Say, you want to buy you some cigarettes? I'll sell you a pack even though we're closed, if you'll let me have a couple of them. How about a pack of Picayunes?”

“No,” I said. “I don't smoke cigarettes. Where is this Addison Stadium where the Rice Birds play? Can you point me toward it?”

“Go back outside, cross Main Street, and keep walking down Hebert for a ways, past the ice house and the feed stores and the grain silos. You can't miss it.”

“All right,” I said. “Much obliged.”

The light was green for me to walk across that main street, and in just a little while I could see up ahead the ice house with a truck backed up to the loading dock and a man with a white apron over his overalls wrestling big chunks of clear ice with a pair of tongs down a ramp onto the truck bed. The ice looked brand new. By the time I got to where the silos were lined up, I could see part of a big structure painted dark green up ahead on the right side of the street.

It was where the baseball field was, I figured, Addison Stadium the kid had called it. It was backed up to the street, and it wasn't until you got up close to it that you could begin to see what was on the other side of that building. That was the field itself, behind a wooden fence that started at each end of the green wooden building and ran a long ways at an angle, like it would have to do to follow the diamond shape where you play baseball.

The walls of the stadium went up a good ways from the ground, a foot or two over head high to an average sized man, and though I couldn't see from where I was standing the back wall, I knew it would have to be even higher.

That higher wall that closed off the field was to stop anybody from hitting a cheap home run. Something too easy to do ain't worth doing, especially when you're playing baseball, standing at home plate where that man is trying to get that ball by you and you're trying to keep alive, to be safe, and to be able to start where you are and come back to that same spot and have it mean something.

If it ain't no trouble to do that, why would you want to do it? That's another thing McKinley Short Eyes would tell us. Lots of what he would tell us young ones I didn't pay much attention to or care about whether it made sense or not. That made good sense to me.

Back in Leggett and Kountze and them other places in East Texas where I'd played baseball on the sawmill teams, the playing wasn't never done with a building put around where we all stood at the points of all them diamonds. We didn't have walls to keep people from being able to see what was going on, and there wasn't anybody putting up barriers and selling tickets, and players ran from one safe place to another one, or not, and where you left home plate and came back to it to finish.

We played baseball in fields open to the eyes of anybody that wanted to look, and we hit balls over the outfielders' heads that could've rolled to the end of the world if we'd have hit them hard enough.

That fielder that didn't catch your ball could've chased that hit ball to the end of the world and thrown you out at home, if he had the arm for it.

I was standing in front of that green building with the big doors closed and locked, studying below that sign that said Addison Stadium a good-sized picture of a black bird holding something white in his mouth, when I heard somebody say something to me.

He was a white man who looked to have been out in the sun a lot. He was blue-eyed, but tanned almost like the leather of a glove and wrinkled at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth like the hide you'd see on an old man's neck.

“What kind of a bat is that?” he said, nodding toward my tow sack.

“It's a baseball bat,” I said.

“I had done figured that part out on my own,” he said. “That was easy. But it don't seem like that bat got its start in Louisville, Kentucky. Did it?”

“No. It come from Texas. From the Big Thicket. I made it.”

“No kidding? Is it a model or something? I see it's not ash or maple. Are you making them to sell?”

“I've made a good many of them, but I don't make bats to sell. No.”

“Mind if I look at it?” the man said, shifting his weight a little the way you will when you want something to happen and are getting ready for it to take place.

“Sure,” I said, handing it to him. “Just as long as you don't hit a ball with it.”

He took the bat, backed away from where I was standing, and settled into a right-handed batting stance. He took a cut with my bat, easy at first, then another, and finally a full swing.

“It's got a nice balance,” he said, turning the bat up to look at the barrel, the end, and then the knob. “It's got a few nicks down here past the sweet spot, but it's got a real good feel to it. It ain't beat up.”

“No,” I said. “It's been took care of.”

“You said something a while ago I want to ask you about. You said I could look at it long as I don't hit a ball with it. Why'd you say that?”

“What I'm afraid of, if you'd hit a ball with it, is that I don't know for sure if there's any hits left in this bat. And if some is left, I don't want to waste a one of them,” I said.

“Oh, hell,” the man started to laugh. “You're a baseball player.”

“That told you that, what I just said?”

“Yep, it sure did. You're as crazy as a shithouse rat, just like the rest of us.”

And that's how I first met Dynamite Dunn, though when he introduced himself to me, he didn't call himself that. That name was one somebody had come up with to put on the score cards and the rosters and for writers in the sport pages of the newspapers to use when they did their stories about the Rice Birds. He told me his real one, Herman Allan Dunn.

I never met but one or two players in my time in the Evangeline League who would call themselves by their nicknames. Both of them had something wrong with their thinking, too, the ones who would announce themselves with a name like “Legs LeBlanc” or “Streak Magill.”

I'm not saying players wouldn't answer to the nickname put on them. Once your teammates started calling you by some tag they come up with, you had to go along with it and act like it didn't bother you to have to answer to it, because if they found out you didn't like being called something in particular, that would be all the name you'd ever hear again from them.

Now in the Evangeline League, that name you made for yourself was put on you by other people, maybe because of the way you looked or some way you acted or something you had done once that was good. Or was bad. That could be a good thing for you if your luck held. Or it could make folks laugh when they said or heard that nickname, because of the way it'd come to you.

Let me tell how Herman Allen Dunn got to be called Dynamite Dunn, and you'll see what I'm talking about. It was his first year with the Rice Birds. He come to bat with the bases loaded for the Rice Birds, bottom of the ninth, up against the the Jeanerette Blues. And he didn't hit a home run and he didn't hit a single and he didn't get hit by a pitch, but he still drove in the man on third, so that man could win the game. How Herman Allen Dunn did it was to flap his arm up, flinch back, and done it so good wearing that loose fitting uniform that he made a called third strike look like ball four, and the umpire gave him a walk.

So he was named Dynamite Dunn for that. He was like Dirty Boy in one of them stories McKinley Short Eyes used to tell us about the young man who was underestimated and laughed at until he saved the day somehow. He had something to prove, and it was about changing what his name meant when people said it.

“Does anybody here know you already, Gemar?” Dunn asked. “I ain't heard your name that I can recall.”

“A man showed up on the reservation and told me I could come try out to play baseball for the Rice Birds,” I said. “He said he'd send a telegram to the manager and let him know I was coming.”

“Who said that to you? What did he look like?”

“Name of Leonard Piquet.”

“I don't know that fellow,” Dunn said.

“I'm supposed to see the manager. You reckon he's here?”

“Dutch is here this morning, all right,” Dunn said. “He's in there sweating blood and writing names on little bitty pieces of paper like it was going out of style, I imagine. He loves to play with the lineup. He figures he'll get it set just right one of these days. He told me to come in here early before the workout started, and he'd be able to let me know where I'd be staying in Rayne this season.”