Dirty Rice (21 page)

“I done asked you not to talk about that shit,” Mike Gonzales said. “It's bad luck. It's just asking for trouble.”

“You don't need to ask for trouble when the Big Man Eater shows up,” I told him. “He brings all you can stand with him.”

“Don't,” Mike said. “Gemar, don't get to talking about his feet none. I don't want to hear that.”

“If you're not going to finish that whiskey,” Hookey Irwin said to me. “Push that glass on over here to me.”

“All right,” I said and did that. “The Big Man Eater's feet, under them nice leather shoes, look like a big old pair of talons, like I told you before. But they're all twisted and put on funny, and they're kind of yellow-green looking. Not like that light green you see on leaves in the spring, now, but the kind of yellow-green color you see on top of marsh water when it's been a heavy drought for a long time.”

“Kind of dried up, huh?” Hookey Irwin said, sipping at the whiskey I'd give him.

“So dry the water's turned thick and it stinks,” I said. “I wish I had me my whiskey back.”

“You ain't getting it,” Hookey said and put both hands on the glass like he was keeping it away from me.

“I'm glad of that,” I said.

Baton Rouge was the biggest town I'd ever been to. In every direction I looked from the window of the room at the Red Lion Hotel, I could see buildings sticking up higher than the tallest pines on the reservation. When I stood to the left side of the window and craned my neck, I could see the tallest one of them all, and that was the capitol of Louisiana.

“What you looking at, Gemar?” Mike Gonzales said. “What can you see out that window? Women walking by on the street?”

Mike was fiddling with the radio, trying to get some music to come on that he could stand to listen to, but he was having a hard time doing it. What you would get on the air in the daytime in Louisiana back then was either radio plays with women talking to each other about troubles with their husband or boyfriends, or bands playing slow music that sounded the same on every station, or Cajun music with a lot of fiddles and people singing in French. It'd be news sometimes that some announcer was describing, about how bad things were going in the country and what President Roosevelt had to say about that. None of what he said about bad times was ever new or a surprise to me, though.

“No, I ain't looking at folks walking on the street,” I said to Mike. “I'm not studying women. I'm noticing the capitol building over yonder. I never have been in a town where a state capitol is before.”

“Not even in Texas?”

“No, I ain't even been to Houston yet, much less out to Austin.”

“I've been to Montgomery,” Mike said. “I seen the state capitol of Alabama. Stood on the steps of that building where the Silver War started.”

“What war was that?”

“You must've heard about that war in school, ain't you? It's the one that turned the slaves loose.”

“You mean the colored people, I reckon,” I said. “The colored folks in Texas I seen ain't heard about being turned loose yet, I don't believe.”

“What time they supposed to pick us and take us to the Red Sticks baseball diamond?” I asked Mike. He told me the answer, which I knew already. I acted like I didn't know that part of the schedule they had us fixed on for the All-Star game, and him telling me when things was going to happen did get his mind off the Silver War.

“We got some time to kill before then,” I said. “Before they come around with the bus to haul us out there to the stadium. Let's go take a look at that Louisiana capitol building close up.”

We did that. We got to ride down to the ground floor in the elevator. It didn't take us but a few minutes to walk from the Red Lion Hotel to where that big white building sticking up in the sun like a stone knife was located. You couldn't help but see it from almost anywhere in Baton Rouge. The closer I got to it, the faster I wanted to move toward it.

“Looky yonder,” Mike said when we got to where all them white steps going up to the front doors started. “Yonder on each side of where you go inside. Ain't that a big old statue of an Indian man standing there with a bow and arrow in his hands? What's he doing in Louisiana at the capitol?”

“He's doing the same thing that statue of that colored man is doing, Mike,” I said, pointing toward the other side of the big gold colored doors. “That Indian was put there by the white people to show what troubles they had to go through to take over this Louisiana country.”

“That makes sense, all right,” he said and chuckled a little bit, “but why is that Indian standing up and looking around like he sees something coming, and the slave yonder is all bent over pulling at some weeds and grass and shit?”

“That's not what that colored man is doing, Mike,” I said. “That statue is supposed to let you know how the white men started planting rice and sugarcane and beans and stuff as soon as they could get the Indians herded up and out of the way. See, then that's when they had to bring in the colored folks to tend to the farming. Keep the weeds out so the good crops could grow. Pick that cotton, chop that cane, harvest that rice.”

“See to it that everything is jake,” Mike laughed a little more. “I believe you on to something, Gemar. A colored man can take care of that business. That picking and weeding and chopping.”

“You want to go on inside the building now?” I said. “Or have you seen enough to satisfy you?”

“Naw,” Mike said. “I'm going to pass on walking through that door. What I feel like I need to do is get out on a baseball field and see can I catch ever damn ball hit at me. Whatever comes off the bat, ever how hard and fast it gets there.”

“Me,” I said. “I want to let that pitcher just try to get that ball past me at the plate. I want to slap it right past everybody trying to stop me, and I want to knock one or two line drives up against the outfield wall so hard it makes the paint flake off where it says Drink Jax Beer.”

When we got back to the Red Lion Hotel, it was time to get ready for the bus to pick us up. Me and Mike got our stuff together, he rubbed on that little blue rock he carried around in his pocket for luck, and I got my red oak bat out of the closet in the hotel room. I hadn't used that bat I'd made back in the Nation a single time, because I hadn't wanted to waste any of the hits it might have left in it. Now I figured I was ready to spend two or three of them in this All-Star game.

I used the tow sack to wipe the handle and the barrel down, and I could feel something move underneath my fingers. I knew it was most likely me causing that, but I didn't want to take the chance of insulting the bat if I was wrong.

“Poppoyom,” I said in the language of the Alabama-Coushatta Nation. “Little friend. Stand with me this day. Let me help you do what you will.”

“What you saying?” Mike Gonzales asked. “Who you talking to?”

“I'm talking to my bat,” I said. “Just like you're talking to your blue rock. And I imagine I'm saying the same thing you're saying.”

“I can't tell you what I'm telling Rufus,” Mike said. “I do that, and it won't work.”

“You mean your mojo?”

“How you know about mojo? That ain't Indian. That's African.”

“A colored man told me, and then he turned into a tree,” I said. “It was at a courthouse back in Texas, and he was eating peanuts while he talked. I looked off for a minute, and when I looked back to say something, he'd went inside the tree. The peanut hulls stayed, so I know he was there before he became a tree.”

“Gemar Batiste,” Mike Gonzales said. “I told you not to talk about stuff like that. It makes me feel like I'm walking in some dark place I ain't never been before. And want to or not, I'm closing in on it.”

“Let Rufus know what's worrying you,” I told him. “He'll take care of it for you.”

• • •

The bus they carried us all in from the hotel to the ball field was bigger than any I'd ever been in before. When they let all of us off at the Red Stick stadium where the All-Star Game was going to be played, lots of people were milling around in front of the ticket place, and when they saw all of us getting off the bus, most of them started taking good long looks at us. Both teams of us were all together on that big bus, so you couldn't tell who'd be playing against who if you wasn't one of the ones riding the bus. All of us knew who belonged to the other team, though, and we'd played against each other on our regular teams for the whole first half of the season enough to recognize each other. That didn't make us old friends, and the closer we got to the stadium where the game would be played, the less we talked to the ones we'd be playing against. Who can feel easy with a man who will try to put you out of commission the first chance he gets?

“Which one of y'all is from Monroe?” somebody in that crowd waiting to buy tickets hollered. “That's my team. The Zephyrs.”

“Is it that coon-ass yonder?” another fellow said. “That Mexican looking fellow carrying that bat sticking out of his bag?”

“I believe he's talking about you,” Mike Gonzales said.

“Could be me,” I said. “Or you. You're dark enough. One thing I know. It ain't Hookey Irwin.”

“Hookey is a white man,” Mike said. “You got to give him that.”

Inside the clubhouse, we all started getting into our uniforms. We had to wear our usual ones from our own teams. They didn't give us any special all-star outfits like you will see teams wear now on TV. They did give us special caps to wear. It said North on one team's and South on the other, and it had a drawing of a baseball diamond right above the bill.

When both teams got ready to go out on the field to warm up, three or four people talked to us about different things before they let us go outside. I did want to know about any special rules about foul lines and balls knocked into the stands on one bounce and such like, but I didn't need to hear about what an honor it was to be chose to play in that game and what all the game meant to the fans. I noticed when they talked about a bonus to be paid to the best player on each team, and decided I might like to try to win the money. It was fifty dollars, and the two managers would decide who was supposed to get it.

“After the game's over,” another fellow said. “You got to be willing to talk to the newspaper reporters, if you happen to be one of the players they want to interview. Remember you're at work today, boys, and you got to earn your pay. It's like everything else, gentlemen. It's a business we're running here.”

The two managers broke us up into the teams, and did what they always do before a game starts up. I heard what the manager of the South team said to my bunch, and I knew the one for the North would be saying the same things. Our manager, the one for the South All-Stars team, was the regular manager for the Opelousas Indians. He told us his name, but said he expected we knew it already from his record in the Evangeline League. I didn't know him or his name. Without direction, a baseball team will not be a team, he said. What you want to make is a big one, he told us, not a little one. And that big one is the team the manager makes out of all the little ones.

“How do you draw a little one?” Mike Gonzales said to me, “Instead of a big one?”

After the manager for the South All-Stars finished talking, he asked if we had any questions and nobody said nothing, so he told us to look at the lineup card by the door as we went out to warm up. Everybody wanted to get up there quick to see if their name was on the starting lineup. So as a man would leave the clubhouse on his way out to the field, he would act like he'd almost forgot to look and then take a gander at the card.

I didn't want to be the last one to look at the starting lineup, but I didn't want to run up there to look for my name. I turned toward Mike Gonzales, but he wouldn't look up at me.

“You going up there to see?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Directly.”

“Let me know if my name's on the starting lineup, when you do.” Mike looked off to one side like he hadn't heard me.

“All right,” I said then. “I'll look for myself.”

I did that, saw my name listed as left field batting fourth, Mike's at shortstop batting sixth, and Hookey Irwin's name with P beside it. Right before I stepped out of the clubhouse, I looked back at Mike, and shook my head. “I'm sorry, Mike,” I said. “If it was up to me, I wouldn't do you that way.”

I stepped outside, and I could hear the cleats on his shoes scraping on the cement floor as he ran up to look at the lineup card.

They had flipped a silver dollar to see who got to be the home team, and the South All-Stars won that. When we trotted out to our positions, we could see how big the crowd was there in the stands, enough to fill the whole place up and have people standing down both baselines. Me and Mike was side by side as we went out across the diamond, and Mike told me he was feeling good and ready to play a game of ball.

“Rufus is right here with me,” he said.

“That rock in your pocket is going to bruise you up if you have to slide on it,” I said.

“Rufus is slick,” Mike said. “He won't hold me back none.”

Hookey Irwin set the North All-Stars down three in a row in the first inning, a strike out and a pop up and a one-hopper to Mike that he picked up easy and threw down to first. I didn't get to come to bat until I was the first batter for the South team in the bottom of the second.

The pitcher for the North All-Stars was Bobby Babineaux, a man I'd batted against before when we played his team, the Alexandria Aces, and he was a right-hander with a heavy beard. It made him look like he was mad at something all the time. I'd had good luck against Babineaux before.

Considering it was my first time up in the Evangeline League All-Star game and I'd never had any trouble hitting Bobby Babineaux before, I figured I would let him know I wasn't worried about anything he might try to throw by me. I wasn't feeling mean, but I believed it might help me a little to remind Babineaux that he'd met up with me before and it hadn't worked out good for him then. Why should it be any different this time?

Right before I stepped into the batter's box and got set to take the first pitch from him, I pulled off my new cap with South wrote on it, and I tipped it real big toward Bobby Babineaux. I stuck it back on my head, went into my stance and drawed my red oak bat back, and got ready to jump when he would throw that fastball high and inside to me. It came like I knew it would, and I felt the breeze from it fly by my left ear as I twisted my head out of the way.

I heard the catcher in his crouch down by my knee say something I couldn't understand, but the umpire must've. “Don't start that up,” he said. “Play ball.”

Babineaux rubbed up the ball and looked in at the catcher, shook him off, and went into his windup for the second pitch. It was going to be another fastball, a little outside to me, I knew, and that meant it would go to the opposite field when I hit it. Poppoyom, I said inside my head to my red oak bat, and when the ball got there another one of the hits left in that bat got used up. As soon as the bat met the ball and I went through with my swing, I knew I wouldn't have to run hard from home to get safe to a base. By the time I got halfway down the line to first, the ball had carried over the left field fence and was gone from that Red Sticks diamond for good.

I didn't look to see where it was and how it was carrying, and I didn't look up a time as I was circling the bases. Back then ballplayers didn't do stuff like that. They ran not at full speed, but at a decent pace. They didn't pull off their hats and wave them at the stands when they crossed the plate, and they sure didn't jump on that safe place like it was about to crawl away from them.

I could hear the crowd hollering, of course, and I got slapped on the back by the third base coach and the next batter up for the South All-Stars waiting for me to go by him to the dugout. He was a third baseman for the Jeanerette Blues, and he said “good lick” when I passed him.

I never looked at Bobby Babineaux the whole time I was running out my home run and going back into the dugout. It wasn't personal for me. I was the batter, and I had stuck up that arrow in the ground where he could see it. By the time I came to bat again a couple of innings later, he wasn't on the mound no more, took out in favor of a left-hander from Monroe named Dennis Daigle.

By the time that Evangeline League All-Star Game ended up, Hookey Irwin had pitched four innings where the North team hadn't scored a run, and was took out to give some other pitchers on the South team a chance to show their stuff. It was good enough to let us come out on top. Mike Gonzales had made a couple of stops of hard hit balls at shortstop, and he had started two double plays, and got a couple of singles when he come to bat.

Abba Mikko gave me the opportunity to show what a Coushatta could do when his mind was right and his red oak bat still had some hits left in it, and I ended up with three extra-base hits and making just one out. That was my last time up at the plate in the game, so I couldn't tell if the red oak bat was finally out of the hits that was put into it to begin with. I did say something to it, though, when I turned around to walk back to the dugout, just saying under my breath, “Poppoyom, Little Friend, I should've took a little off that one. You did what you supposed to, but I got hungry and took a bigger bite than I could hold.”

The South team didn't have to come to bat in the bottom of the ninth inning. I did get to put out the last man for the North, and that was a good way to leave that diamond.

Here's the way I put that last one out. A man was on first, with a good lead on our pitcher, and the base coach for the North team took a chance and sent that runner one base further than he ought to have when the batter hit a sharp single that landed in front of me. I got to it quick. I put my throw right on the third base bag on a line, and when the runner coming all the way from first got there, the third baseman was waiting with the ball to tag him out. You could tell the runner didn't even want to slide. He did, though.

That was the game, and we felt good when we ran off the field, just like the people in the stands backing the winning team showed it felt to them. I was glad we'd got to more bases safe than they had. More of us had stayed alive, and more of them had died. But I was thinking about the way I always felt when I left that place inside the diamond. When you stepped outside the diamond, a kind of fog would set in. It was hard to tell where to set your feet.

When I got back to the dugout, all the players on the South All-Star Team was jumping around and hollering, the people in the stands still yelling, and I picked up my red oak bat and put it back in the tow sack. I looked around for Mike Gonzales and Hookey Irwin, but before I could see where either one of them was located, the manager for the South team came up to me.

“Wait just a minute, Gemar Batiste,” Hank Rimmer said. “You can't slip out of here yet. Didn't you hear what the man just said on the loudspeaker?”

“I wasn't noticing,” I said. “I was getting my stuff together. Was he talking in French? Because I don't know what they're saying when they do that.”

“Naw, he wasn't talking in French,” the manager said. “Chip Mouton just does that Cajun stuff now and then to be funny. He was speaking pure dee English just then, though. He was calling your name and telling you to step outside this dugout.”

“Why?” I said. “The game's done over, as far as I know.”

“Not quite just yet,” Hank Rimmer said. “Step on out there.”

“Do what he tells you, Gemar,” Hookey Irwin said. He had come up while I was talking to Rimmer. “The manager's word is law. You can't break it. Ain't that right, Hank?”

“I wish it was,” Rimmer said and grabbed me by the arm and led me toward the step-up of the dugout onto the field.

“Here he is, folks,” the voice on the loudspeaker said. “Gemar Batiste of the Rayne Rice Birds. Just named by the managers as the Most Valuable Player in this year's contest. Chief Batiste. All the way from his tribe in Texas.”

A couple of men dressed in suits and ties and wearing baseball caps like the ones they'd give us to put on in the All-Star Game were waiting at home plate, and they started clapping their hands together and waving at me to come over to them.

“Here to present the medal for the Most Valuable Player of the game is the commissioner of the league, Mr. Horace Comeau. With him is the co-owner of the Rayne Rice Birds, Mr. Legon LeBlanc. And folks, ain't he the lucky one?”

When I got up to them, Hank Rimmer was still holding onto my arm. I took off my South All-Star cap and tipped it out toward the two of them. Lots of people in the stand hollered and clapped, and the players from both dugouts made a lot more noise. I knew they were gigging me by doing that, but I was glad they were. It made me feel a lot easier in my mind. It generally is not a good sign when ballplayers act serious. When they're hoorawing each other, things are what they ought to be.

“I believe Chief Batiste would be more comfortable and feel more at home if he was wearing his Indian war bonnet,” one of them said into a microphone set up on the plate. “Let me speak on behalf of the Evangeline League and all its teams and their loyal fans to congratulate you, Gemar Batiste of the Rayne Rice Birds, on the exhibition of baseball playing you put on today.”

Everybody carried on some more, and Legon LeBlanc put his hand on my shoulder and started talking. “We'd like to have Miss Peggy Judice come forward for the presentation of the Most Valuable Player medal to Gemar Batiste. At the end of last season, Peggy Judice was named Miss Evangeline League of 1934, and her last official act will be to place the medal on this year's Most Valuable Player.”

A good looking white girl came out from over by the stands, wearing a crown on her head and a long blue dress with a white piece of cloth across her body.

“Let me get behind you, Mr. Chief,” she said, holding a medal with a ribbon on it. “So I can put it around your neck.” She turned toward my right side, and I turned in the wrong direction and she turned again and so did I, staying in her way again. People started laughing and clapping at that, and Mr. Horace Comeau talked into the microphone.

“I believe you have scared the Chief, Peggy,” he said. “I think he's afraid you might be about to take his scalp.”

There was a real big laugh from the crowd at that, and the Miss Evangeline League girl fastened the medal around my neck so it hung down on my chest. They all clapped again, and the two dugouts of players hooted and hollered, and Mr. Comeau pointed toward the microphone. “Say a couple of words to them, Chief,” he said to me away from the microphone so nobody but me could hear it.

“What do I say?” I said.

“Just say thank you and say how hard fought the game was. That's all they want to hear you tell them.”

I got up to the microphone, and folks quieted down some. “Thank you for this pretty decoration around my neck,” I said. “I'm sorry I didn't think to take a little off that line drive, the one that Harry Branch Junior caught so easy. If I'd done that, the ball would've fell fair. I done told my bat it wasn't his fault. It was all mine. Thank you.”

“That's the time, that's the time,” Mr. Comeau after everybody stopped hollering and laughing so loud. “Like we say in Louisiana, it's a poor workman who blames his tools. But I never heard a man apologize to one before.” He held up his hand again when some more hooting and yelling started up. “One other thing I want to present to Chief Batiste now, and it's something that won't last like that Most Valuable Player medal will, but I do believe it's one the Chief won't turn down. It is a cash award from the Evangeline League in recognition of his outstanding play in this year's All-Star Game.”

He held out an envelope to me, and I reached out and took it. I figured I'd open it up later to take a long look at that fifty dollars.

“Wave it over your head, Chief,” Mr. Comeau said low so the microphone wouldn't be able to broadcast his words. “Let these people see how tickled you are.” I did, and people hollered like they was looking at a big hunk of beef steak ready to be cut into for the first bite and they were starving to death.

• • •

Back in the clubhouse of the Baton Rouge Red Sticks, they had tubs of ice full of bottles of beer waiting for us. By the time I got there, players had already got into that, swigging down beer like men needing water in a bad drought. Hookey Irwin was just sipping at his, but Mike Gonzales had one bottle up to his mouth and another in his hand ready.

“Grab you a beer, Chief,” somebody hollered and I said I would in a minute. I took my envelope with the money in it over to where my regular clothes and bat was, pulled the medal off my neck, and put all that in my tow sack. What I was really looking to do was to get me a pinch of mikko root to put into my cheek, and once I did that, I did take a bottle of Jax beer out of one of the tubs of ice and started sipping at it. Everybody drank and carried on, ate all that Cajun food, and all the players for both teams showed how good they were feeling. The mikko root I had put in my mouth lasted me all the way back to Rayne, and I didn't have to worry about remembering that trip. All I could see was trees everywhere I looked.