Dirty Rice (27 page)

“Chief, if that doesn't make people come flocking to every game you pitch for the Rice Birds from then on,” Legon LeBlanc said, “I don't know Cajuns, and I don't know the state of Louisiana.”

“What you think, Gemar?” Tony Guidry said. “How's that sit with you?”

“Right now,” I said, feeling everything around me lift up and fall and lift again, the boat, the big water it was on, the men looking at me, the Mexican deckhands doing something with pieces of rope, the fish dying in the hold of the
Gulf Dream
, “I believe I might've drank too much beer this morning. Everything feels like it's moving up and down.”

“You just not used to being on the big water,” Legon LeBlanc said. “That's all it is. You're just feeling a little seasick. We'll get you some saltine crackers to eat, and that'll help.”

“I don't feel like there's anything underneath my feet,” I said. “It's all moving, but I can't tell in what direction.”

“What you do is look at the horizon, see,” LeBlanc said, “where it's not moving. Fix your eyes on that, and you'll be able to feel like you got hold of something you can hang onto that's staying in one place. What your mind wants is something solid. That's why your belly feels funny. It's used to being on solid ground, not where things move underneath you.”

“You know a lot about being seasick, Mr. LeBlanc,” I said.

“I used to be bothered by that, too, when I would leave solid ground,” he said and handed me some crackers that one of the deckhands had fetched. “But I got used to it. I don't need to feel like I'm fixed solid any more. Up or down or being set in one place makes no difference to me. Wobbling around doesn't bother me a bit now.”

“We're about to head the
Gulf Dream
on in, Chief,” Tony Guidry said. “Just look away off toward the horizon. You'll be fine. We'll talk later about the Indian show you're going to put on for the Rice Birds. Just rest easy now.”

“The horizon,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed above the greenish waves topped with a pale-colored foam. “That line way off yonder you can barely see. That's where it starts. That's where you come to the end of the world.”

I'd figured when I got off the
Gulf Dream
, moving up and down with every shift of the water underneath it, and stepped onto solid ground that I'd feel again like I was supposed to. Set solid on the earth, knowing where I was and that the next step I took would be just like the ones before it. My belly would sink back where it belonged, the funny slipping and sliding in my head would stop happening, and I'd be where I'd been before and able to predict what was coming next. I could lay out the thing to come, and it would come.

That wasn't the way it was, though, when I reached out and took the hand of the Mexican who'd tied the boat to the dock and offered me a little help climbing up and off the sinking and rising boat. Instead, when my feet hit the dock and I walked down that to where the ground began, the surface underneath me felt then like it was rising up and falling with waves I couldn't even see. It was like I was still on the boat named
Gulf Dream
, subject to what was happening to it from being on the big water, and not walking on the flat solid earth where I'd spent all my time before up until then. Mike Gonzales saw how I was weaving back and forth, my eyes set on my feet like I had to watch them to be sure they were coming down and rising up as I walked, and he put out his arm for me to steady myself on.

“Are you drunk, Gemar?” he said. “I thought I'd got down a lot more beer than you did, but here I am doing fine, and there you are trembling along like an old lady.”

“I ain't drunk,” I said. “But I ain't right in my head and my belly. It don't seem to know where I am and how to deal with that.”

“What's it you talking about? Your belly?”

“Not just my belly, no. It's every bit of me. Whoever, whatever I am.”

“Shit, you are drunk,” Mike said, offering me more support with his arm as I walked along beside him. “You talking a little crazy, too. You need to take you a nap when we get back to the tourist court.”

I didn't argue with that, and I fell across my bed as soon as I could get to it. I couldn't go to sleep right off, though, and I laid there listening to Mike snort and snore as he slept off all that Jax beer he'd drunk out on the big water.

I tried not to think about that, and to keep the big water out of my head, I fastened my mind on remembering how the red oaks and sycamores and longleaf pines on the reservation stayed always in the same place every day and every time you might think to look for them. They'd all fall, one by one when their times came, but where they'd land to rot away back into the floor of the earth beneath them was set. That patch of ground was there and would stay. It would not shift on them or on anybody wanting to see where the big trees had ended up. It was something you could count on. Thinking that, about being able to look at the leaves come to the limbs and grow full and green and then wither and turn brown and fall as every year moved toward its end, let me doze off, and I didn't wake up until Mike made enough noise moving around that room in the tourist court to rouse me.

“How you feel now?” he said. “I know you're awake, no matter if you are keeping your eyes closed.”

“How can you tell I ain't still asleep? You just guessing.”

“Naw,” he said. “I know when somebody's possuming. The way he's breathing will tell you that.”

I sat up and put my feet on the floor, and it didn't move under them, so I knew I was finally off the water and back on dry land. “I feel all right now,” I told Mike Gonzales. “But I'm glad we ain't playing a game tonight.”

“Let me ask you something then,” he said. “What you think about them plans old LeBlanc and Guidry done laid out for you? You ready to do what they say?”

“What you talking about?” I said, to give myself a little time to think about how to answer. I wanted to make sure I got across to him what I would and would not do.

“I mean about putting on that feather bonnet and doing that war dance when you pitch,” he said. “You know what I'm talking about. Making more folks show up and lay their money down to watch the Rice Birds play baseball. Letting them see how a real Indian warrior does it.”

“No, I don't think much of what they want me to do at all,” I said. “And I will tell you why just this one time, and I ain't going to talk about it again.”

“Why's that?”

“If you talk about a thing more than once, it means it's still alive in your head. That's why. I'm going to kill it just this once, and it's going to stay dead. When I kill it, it is going to stay killed.”

“Not like Jesus, huh?” Mike said. “No resurrection on the third day. Ain't going to be no stone rolled away.”

“No resurrection then,” I said. “None ever.”

“All right, now we got that straight, tell me this one time why you not going to play along with what them owners want so we can make us some money. I want to hear what's wrong with that notion. I don't know about you, but I need all the money I can get my hands on.”

“Get what I'm fixing to say by heart then,” I said. “Remember that picture show we went to in Rayne at the Joy Theatre a couple of weeks ago?”

“The gangster one, yeah. That was a good show.”

“I ain't talking about the feature now. I mean the short that come along with it, the one that had Step ‘n Fetch It and Lightning in it. Where they was supposed to be working for that white man in the hardware store and the ghost showed up.”

Mike nodded and wanted to talk some about that, but I didn't let him. Just listen until I'm finished, I told him, and then you can say all you want to.

“Keep that in your head, then,” I went on, “while I'm talking about what Legon LeBlanc and Tony Guidry want me to do the time before I pitch a game in the Evangeline League. See, what they want is for me to act like Lightning and Step ‘n Fetch It did in that short. Why was it so funny to all them white people in the Joy Theatre when Lightning's eyes got real big that time the ghost tapped him on the shoulder?

“Because it was funny, I reckon. It made me laugh.”

“Why was it funny? Does a colored man's eyes get that big in real life? Naw, they don't. But white folks in the Joy Theatre like to think they do. That's why it's funny. Here's the way a colored man really acts, they're thinking, and that's funny as hell.

“Now, why do them men who own the Rice Birds think more white folks will come to the games if I act the way they talked about wanting me to do. Put on a eagle feather bonnet and do a war dance and wave a tomahawk around?”

“Because that's the way an Indian chief acts,” Mike said. “I mean, I guess they think that's the way one will act.”

“Yeah, but I ain't an Indian,” I said.

“Bullshit, you sure are one, all them stories you tell and the way you look. How ain't you an Indian?”

“I belong to the River Otter Clan of the Coushatta People, allied with the Alabamas and belonging to the Creek Confederation before we arrived in Texas. I didn't say the Choctaw Nation now,” I said. “So I ain't an Indian. There's no such thing as just an Indian. That's how. Look at you. You're a colored man just like Step ‘n Fetch It, right? Just like Lightning, and the way he moves and thinks so slow they got to call him something he ain't just to make a joke for white folks to laugh at in the Joy Theatre in Rayne, Louisiana, and everywhere else.”

“Hell, no. I ain't no nappy headed dumb nigger,” Mike Gonzales said. “Like them white folks see them to be. I'm a redbone, and that's a special kind of man. I ain't got nothing to do with Lightning. I don't know nobody like him.”

“I ain't got nothing to do with a big war bonnet full of feathers and buttons and rawhide strings, neither. I never saw a tomahawk in my life, and when the People of the Alabama and Coushatta Nation dance every year at the Green Corn Festival, they don't jump up and down and holler hi yi yi yi. And I am not going to.”

“I get it,” Mike said. “I see what you're saying. You ain't going to have to tell me any of this ever again. But you sure been given your orders by LeBlanc and Guidry. How you going to handle that?”

“When I step over that white line onto the diamond, I'm going to act like I always act. I'm going to try to put the other sons-of-bitches in them different uniforms out and stay alive myself so I can come back to home plate safe. That's all I'm going to do. That's what baseball is about.”

“What if you don't act like an Indian the way they want you to? They might not let you keep on playing for the Rice Birds. This here is about money, Gemar. There ain't enough of that around, if you ain't noticed. A man's got to find a way to get some of it. It's serious business.”

“I've thought about that, Mike,” I said. “It was cannibals all over that boat we rode out there so deep in, and I admit they are a consideration. They must have got on board before we left the shore. So I'll have to see how Rabbit would handle it. I might even need to get Dirty Boy to help me out.”

“You can talk shit like that, and still say you ain't a Indian.”

“I'm a Coushatta of the River Otter Clan,” I said. “I'm not a damn Indian.”

“I know, I know. You done told me that until I can't stand it. Let's go get something to eat.”

“As long as it's not fish,” I said. “As long as it don't have a thing to do with floating up and down in big deep water.”

I figured Dutch Bernson would start in talking about what Legon LeBlanc and Tony Guidry had told me about their plans for me to play Indian as soon as he saw me, but he didn't. We finished up that series with the Morgan City Oilers and one with the Hammond Berries and had got back to Rayne before my manager showed a special interest in meeting me in his office with the door closed.

I put on my Red Man face, and I followed him into his tight little room after he said to me we had something to talk about. Nobody took notice of me and Dutch leaving the room but for one. That was Mike Gonzales, who kept cutting his eyes at me. I made like I didn't see him. I'd been noticing him huddled up with Sal Florio for a good while before I left with Dutch, with Soapy Tonton leaning against the wall over in a corner. I figured Mike Gonzales had all the company and close notice he could use.

“Well, Gemar,” Dutch Bernson said once he got settled behind his desk and his cap with Herbert underneath it squared up on his head, “you know it's your time in the rotation to pitch that second game tomorrow with Monroe. I believe Hum is going to start Miller Overstreet against us. You remember him, don't you?”

I nodded. Dutch was looking up at me like he wanted me to say something to him about Miller Overstreet, so I did. “Tall fellow. Probably used to have a pretty good fastball. I hit him hard the last time I saw him,” I said. “I believe it was him on the mound up there in Monroe a month or so back.”

“It was,” Dutch said, “and I expect you'll hit him again, but I don't want to dwell on how you might treat that poor old man's fastball. I want to talk about what we going to do before you climb up on the mound to get the game kicked off tomorrow. We need to get that all straight.”

“Me and Dynamite's done gone over the Monroe batters,” I said. “I believe we got it in hand.”

“Yeah, I know y'all do. You and him work real good together on getting ready for a game you're pitching. I ain't worried about that. What I'm talking about is the plans you and Mr. LeBlanc and Mr. Guidry come up with on your fishing trip. How that's going to go and all.”

“We caught a bunch of fish,” I said. “Didn't they give you some of them?”

“Yeah, and I cooked them at the house. Wasn't bad, they was real good, in fact. I ain't talking about grouper, though, Gemar. We got to get this new thing with you started up right.”

I knew Dutch didn't want to be the first one to open up the thing about the Indian warrior business. When a man is trying to bring up a sore subject with another man and there ain't no way to put it off no more, he wants the man who's going to suffer the consequences to be the one to start whining about it. The first man to complain and try to get out of a thing is the weak one. You get a man to jabbering and trying to explain why something ain't his fault, and you got a much better chance to come out on top in the ongoing negotiation.

So I didn't say a thing back to Dutch. I just looked at the backs of his hands where he'd been clawing them raw.

“I hear you got a little seasick out on the water,” Dutch said, backing off a little and resting before he'd come back to the job of talking he had to do. “Mr. LeBlanc said you turned plumb pale. Said he thought you was going to puke your lunch over the side any minute there.”

“I got sick out there all right,” I said. “Real sick to my stomach and all over. I don't know if I turned pale or not, though. That ain't usual for a man with my complexion, you understand.”

“I wondered about that,” Dutch said, trying to laugh a little. He picked up a lead pencil and started using that to poke at the back of one of his hands. He knows I ain't going to be the first one to whine, I could tell.

“We done got the Indian war bonnet for you to wear, Gemar,” he started off, “a real pretty one. Looks like it might have come off a chief in a picture show. Brand new one, just full of feathers and shiny colored buttons big as silver dollars. It's a doozy.”

“That sounds real nice, manager,” I said. “But I'll tell you right now, to save us a bunch of time and argument, I ain't going to put nothing on my head but a Rayne Rice Birds baseball cap. I'll wear that and my regular uniform when I get on that diamond to pitch, and I ain't adding nothing more to my wardrobe.”

“Legon and Tony told me you understood this thing and was ready to go along with it. They said you didn't ask a single question. I'm surprised to hear you talk like that.”

“I understood it just fine,” I said. “That's why I didn't have to ask no questions. I knew everything I needed to know.”

“You're saying you're going to disobey the direct order of your manager. That's what you're telling me.”

“Anything you tell me to do, manager, that's about me playing baseball for you, I will go along with, like always. You tell me to throw at a batter's head when I'm so far out in front of him I can smell him sweating like a hog and just dying to make his out so he won't have to suffer no more, I'll do that. But there's one thing I ain't going to do, no matter how much direct ordering you give me.”

“What thing is that? Just not dress up some?”

“No, that ain't the thing. That's just a sign of the thing. The thing I won't do is play Indian for you. And I won't play Indian so the Rice Birds can sell more tickets, and I won't play Indian for Mr. Legon LeBlanc and Mr. Tony Guidry just because they own the Rayne team.”

“Gemar, we're talking about money. Listen to me now. That's the only thing that's real and the only thing that matters these days. Hell, any days.”

“No, Dutch. We're talking about me and we're talking about baseball. That's the only things that's real. I don't know nothing about money.”

“What am I going to tell the men that own this team, the ones that pay your sixty dollars a month? You don't want that money?”

“Yeah, I want that money. But I want it for playing ball. Not for putting on a headdress and hollering hi yi yi yi.”

“What the hell am I going to tell them?”

“Dutch, tell them they got what they wanted. Tell them I just turned real Indian on y'all.”

I walked on out of Dutch's office then, but I knew it wasn't over.

We played that first game with Monroe, and I spent my time in it out in left field and at bat. I was thinking the whole game about what might happen the next day when I was scheduled to pitch. It didn't end up bothering my play too bad, though. I got two hits, both of them just singles, and I drove in a couple of runs. It wasn't the kind of game that will make you remember it later. You always forget the good. Bad stays with you.

Taking my last warm-up pitches before the game the next day with Dynamite Dunn, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary going on. Dutch Bernson hadn't said anything else to me about what we'd talked about in his office, and it looked like the second game in the series with Monroe wouldn't be a bit different from any other one. Nobody had tried to talk to me about putting on a special Indian show before the umpire called play ball, and I was beginning to believe the owners of the Rayne team had decided to give up the idea.

“Ain't you throwed enough fastballs yet to get you loose?” Dutch hollered out to me on the mound, and I was about to tell him I'd do one or two more, when the loudspeaker started making that crackling noise it always did before somebody would begin talking on it. It wasn't Doug Givens' voice that came over it welcoming folks to Addison Stadium, when the sound cranked up and started coming out of the loudspeaker. It was the steady beat of a drum.

As soon as that happened, Dutch stood straight up and showed me the ball in his hand and said something I couldn't hear because of the noise, and then the folks in the stands stopped making their usual racket. Instead, they sounded like people will who've just seen something out of the ordinary, something that was making them turn to each other to ask what was going on. Then they started hollering together.

Now the sound out of the loudspeakers was not just the drum tapping but a bunch of high-pitched notes coming from a flute or a whistle. Then was when I saw him coming up the steps out of the dugout, somebody wearing a big feather headdress that ran all the way from the crown of his head down his back halfway to the ground. His shirt and pants was made out of cloth fixed up to look like fringed deer hide, his shoes were covered with bead work, and he was chopping up and down with a big tomahawk that had a handle that looked to be at least three feet long.

Doug Givens started talking fast and hard over the loudspeaker as the man dressed up like a picture show Indian got into the full movements of a dance that made him lean over so far backwards that his headdress touched the ground and when he came back up, leaning forward, to make his nose just about touch his knees pumping as high as they did with his dance steps.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Doug Givens said over the speaker in a voice loud enough to drown out the drums and flute music, “let's welcome Chief Rice Bird in his tribute to today's pitcher for your Rayne team, the most valuable All-Star of the Evangeline League, Chief Gemar Batiste.”

The crowd hollered at that, but in a few seconds started to clap along with the man dressed up like an Indian who'd turned to face the stands, not losing a step, and giving voice to what I was used to hearing from white eyes trying to sound the way Indians are supposed to when they're doing a war dance.

“Chief Rice Bird has come from the bayous of South Louisiana to welcome his brother from the Alabama Tribe in Texas,” the loudspeaker announced, “and he will now perform the native dance of Chief Gemar Batiste's people when they are fixing to go on the warpath.”

The man called Chief Rice Bird put on extra motion and speed and danced all around home plate. That part of the dance didn't last long, though, and in less than a minute Chief Rice Bird stepped over the white line of the diamond, and started moving in my direction, coming halfway up the mound toward me, carrying his tomahawk in his left hand and holding his right out for me to give him a white eyes handshake. I looked hard at him and didn't move. His eyes were light blue, I could see, and he had red paint all over him from his neck up to his forehead where the war bonnet started.

“Chief,” he said, bowing his head toward me and looking up into my face, “it's just a show they paying me to do. Won't you shake my hand for me? They want you to do that for the crowd. Please.”

“I will do that, this once,” I said. “But you got to walk off this pitcher's mound as soon as I do. Don't dance away from here. Just walk off and get off the diamond. Don't step on that white line again when you do it, neither.”

“No offense,” he said. “It's just show business. It don't mean nothing.”

“That is the pure truth,” I told him.

“Chief Rice Bird,” Doug Givens was saying as I let the man dressed as an Indian touch my hand, “has promised to show up at every home game Chief Gemar Batiste pitches for the rest of the season. Chief Rice Bird will do that as a tribute to the fighting spirit of the Alabama Tribe. Let's go get them, Chief Rice Bird and Chief Batiste. Beat the Zephyrs.”

The crowd hollered at that, and Chief Rice Bird didn't start dancing again until he'd stepped off the diamond, and then going back down into the dugout. I could see him take off his headdress as soon as he got out of sight of the folks in the stands.

Dynamite Dunn trotted out to the mound, moving slow to give himself time to think up something that he hoped would be funny, and held out the baseball for me. “Kiss my ass if that ain't a show,” he said. “That sucker can out dance Fred Astaire.”

“Give me the damn ball, catcher,” I said. “Did you know this stunt was going to happen?”

“What if I say I did?” Dynamite said, popping his eyes wide open and smirking at me. “And I didn't tell you?”

“You'd get your ass whipped right here on the pitcher's mound and then have to catch a game,” I said. “That's what.”

“Before the first pitch?” he said. “That don't seem right. But no, I didn't know about it. Some other folks did, though, I guess. I knew something was up, the way they were acting, but nobody told me nothing.”

“That's because you're a catcher and not able to figure things out, I reckon.”

“How long do y'all plan to converse out here?” Stumpy Sonnier, the umpire, said. I hadn't even seen him walk up to the mound. “People got things to do and places to go. Is it too much to ask you to throw the damn ball?”

“I'll do that, Mr. Sonnier,” I said. “As soon as the two of y'all get back behind the plate. I swear.”

I pitched the full game, giving up a few more hits than I liked to do, but I don't remember much more about that win, except that Chief Rice Bird came out again to dance a little bit during the seventh inning stretch. He made sure that time to stay clear of the white lines marking off where the diamond was located, and when the last man for the Zephyrs made his out, Chief Rice Bird came out and waved to the crowd. Most of the kids at the game, some grown folks among them, leaned over the fence to shake hands with him and touch his tomahawk. The last I saw of him he was pushing back at a big overweight woman trying to pull his war bonnet off.