Dirty Rice (28 page)

Nobody in the clubhouse afterwards made much of what had happened with Chief Rice Bird, but Dutch Bernson did get me off to one side to talk.

“Now, Gemar,” he said. “What did you think about that? Did it make you get pissed off?”

“You mean about that white man wearing his costume?”

“Yeah.”

“No, manager,” I said. “I don't care how white folks might dress up and skip around and holler in public and all. I'm used to seeing that kind of behavior. It ain't none of my business.”

“Well, that's a load off my mind then,” Dutch said, smiling like he'd just found a ten dollar bill loose on the ground. “So all that's just jake with you. That's what you're saying?”

“Anything a man dressed up like that might do don't mean nothing to me, as long as he don't step across the line,” I said. “Or come up to me when I'm working.”

“What line you talking about? Some way of acting you don't like?”

“I mean the line that marks the diamond off from what's outside it,” I said. “I ain't going to put up with foolishness inside the diamond where everything's been marked right and laid out the way Abba Mikko fixed it to be. That's all I worry about.”

“Inside the diamond?”

“Where baseball is,” I said. “It's easy to tell where it starts and where it stops. All you got to do is look where you're going and watch how you step.”

From then on, the fellow dressed up to be Chief Rice Bird did show up at all the home games in Rayne. He'd add things to his show now and then, sometimes carrying a little stuffed cloth woman doll with long black braids, calling her his squaw and shaking her above his head to let folks see her better. After a while, people in the stands got used to seeing him and stopped paying as much attention as they did at the first, and that made Mr. LeBlanc and Mr. Guidry try to come up with new ways to make Chief Rice Bird interesting enough to get more folks to buy tickets and popcorn and peanuts and beer and soda pop.

One of the new ideas was to have Chief Rice Bird bring big paper dolls out on the field with him fixed up to look like the mascots of the other teams we played. Some of them was easy to do, like the Opelousas Indians one, and the Jeanerette Blues, and when Chief Rice Bird would chop his tomahawk into the paper Indian and the fake colored man that was supposed to be the Blues mascot, the crowd would holler and laugh and carry on and say kill him, chief, take his scalp.

When Rayne was playing teams like the Alexandria Aces or the Lafayette White Sox, it wasn't near as easy to show what their mascots looked like, and just hitting a tomahawk into a big piece of paper with a name of the mascot wrote on it didn't seem to stir up the fans much. What happened for the rest of the season is that folks just got used to seeing Chief Rice Bird dance around and make like he was scalping the teams we played, and the Chief Rice Bird show started petering out when the grown folks stopped paying close attention.

So after Chief Rice Bird kept dwindling down in getting attention and making more people want to buy tickets, the owners of the Rayne team started trying some other things they thought might help out what Dutch Bernson kept calling the bottom line. Whatever new wrinkles the owners thought up to get more tickets sold always came down to one thing, money, and the fact there wasn't enough of it. That wasn't no surprise to anybody. A shortage in the money department was everywhere in the country.

We got used to seeing more and more things happening outside the diamond to juice up the prospects. Boxing matches before and after home games where two men would take off their shirts, put on gloves, and try to knock each other around some. Raffles for hams, and sometimes buckets full of shrimp or crabs. One time an old wreck of a car that would still start up and run was give away during the seventh inning to a fan lucky enough to have the right ticket.

There wasn't nothing wrong with most of that, as far as I was concerned. It was happening outside the diamond, and I didn't have to pay it any attention. The only one of these special contests they called promotions that did bother me was a boxing match that turned out to be the last one they put on. All the first ones had been fought by real boxers, young fellows in the Golden Gloves program, and they had referees to make them do right and not go too far in busting each other up. People got tired of that, though, watching them jab at each other and score points on style, and so Mr. LeBlanc and Mr. Guidry, one or both of them, come up with the idea of first time boxers going at each other.

They put up a purse of a twenty dollar bill, and the man who won got all of it. So when these two fellows started fighting each other, there would be not one cent for the loser. That made them two fight until they couldn't. They fought until the blood run down and had to be covered over later with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. The man still standing won the twenty dollar bill all right, but his front teeth was gone, and the one he'd beat got carried out on a stretcher.

All these new ways to get more money into the till came and went, and the Rice Bird players watched it all and we kept on playing ball games, most of which we come out on top. We was all still getting our money every Friday afternoon from the lady in the office, and we hadn't missed a payday yet, though a couple of times we had to wait until the next Monday or Tuesday to get this week's cash. I was paying Miz Velma Doucette what I owed her every week, I had enough left over to buy me the extra meals she wasn't obliged to feed me and a beer or two, and I sent home ten or so dollars every now and then. I told my little brother Polk in one of the letters I sent along with the money that I'd got to ride in a Packard sedan down to the Gulf Coast. I expect Polk liked hearing that better than getting the money.

My roommate at Miz Doucette's house was suffering shortages of cash all the time.

“Gemar,” Mike Gonzales said to me one Friday night after the Eagle had screamed and we'd got paid our money that afternoon, “how are you able to make it on what the Rice Birds are paying us to play baseball on this team? I guess you are, but let me tell you I'm about to starve to death.”

“You still hungry?” I said. “After all that gumbo soup and crackers I watched you eat at supper? It filled me up all right.”

“When I say hungry, I don't just mean for just what I put in my belly,” Mike said. “I'm hungry for lots of things. I'm doing without, pitcher, and I'm the best shortstop in the whole league.”

Mike Gonzales wasn't the best shortstop in the Evangeline League, and both of us knew that. But it made him feel better and helped his argument to claim that, so I wasn't about to remind him about the man who played that position for Lake Charles, Bill Ray Summers. What Mike could've said that would've been true was that he was the best fielding shortstop in the league, maybe, but his hitting wasn't nothing like what Summers could do. Summers was not the acrobat on the field that Mike was, but he did catch the ball and throw people out. And he hit the long ball on a regular basis like Mike could never do.

“What're you hungry for then, that you can't buy it with what they paying us to play for Rayne?”

“Everything. I want me a car, some nice duds, more than one hat, some new shoes with white inlays on the sides of them, folding money to carry in my pocket when I go to a honky-tonk and find me a woman I want to spend it on. I want me a better grade of whiskey, a little reefer now and then to smooth things down. I want to live like Cab Calloway. Hell, I could talk to you for an hour about what I'm hungry for, Gemar. And just look at you now.”

“What you mean by saying look at me?”

“That's what I mean. You don't even know what you ain't got enough of or at least some of. Look at them shoes you're wearing. Have you bought you a single new shirt since you been in Louisiana?”

“I got me a shirt. I got two of them to wear whenever I want to. And when I'm on the field playing they give me clothes to wear so I don't have to use my own. I ain't studying clothes.”

“What are you studying, then?” Mike Gonzales said. “What do you want, Gemar? Why're you playing like you do for these white folks?”

“I don't think about what I don't have and what I ought to want. If I did that, I wouldn't have time to think about nothing else. I got enough money to let me think about what I want to think about.”

“You ain't answered my question, though. Why do you play so hard for these white folks that own the Rice Birds and the ones of them that come to see you do it? That's what you ought to be worried about. That's where you're falling down and your mind is wrong.”

“I don't play for the white eyes. I don't play for nobody.”

“Don't you play then for yourself? Don't you play because you can do it better than most folks? Don't you do it to beat them other ones? Show them you're better than they are?”

“Some of that's in it,” I said. “But I ain't proud of that, beating somebody else just to show him I can. It's the baseball, playing that better than him, being better at the game. That's what I want to do.”

“Ain't that what I just said? Showing him you're better than he is.”

“You don't listen any better than Jay Bird does, Mike,” I told him. “He wants to hear himself holler. He likes that more than any other sound in the world.”

“Oh, hell,” Mike said. “Some more of that Indian shit again. I'm hungry. I don't mind telling anybody that, and you won't never own up to wanting something you ain't got.”

“I got a chocolate candy bar you can have,” I said. “There in that dresser drawer, if you want to eat it.”

“I'll eat it right up now,” Mike Gonzales said. “I'm ready to eat anything.”

• • •

There are ways to cheat in baseball, and I've seen a lot of them tried and some of them work. Sometimes it's real easy to cheat, and sometimes it's harder to make cheating pay off than it is to just play it straight. When you're playing baseball, it's a simple game, and all it calls for is for you to do one of two things. If you're at bat, you try to hit the ball and stay safe. If you're in the field, you try to stop the other ones from doing that.

At bat, how can you cheat a pitcher who's got good stuff? You can't. All that matters when you're at bat is being able to hit that ball so it falls safe. You can't do no tricks, and you can't fool nobody into thinking you hit the ball. The truth is always before you, and a lie can't get no purchase when a man is trying to hit a baseball.

No, cheating mainly comes when you're trying to lose. And it comes the easiest when your team is in the field, not up at bat.

Up at bat, if you're trying to lose, you can swing and miss a ball on purpose, you can stand there and take a called strike you should've tried to hit, and you can miss a sign from your third base coach and say you're sorry about that. But I ain't ever seen a game won or lost yet because of one missed sign, no matter how much hell a manager will raise with you about it.

If you're trying to lose a game, the ways you can do it belong mainly to the time your team is in the field. A man who wants to cheat is good at making things up. He gets practice thinking, so he gets good at that, like anything else you do over and over.

In the field, to find ways to lose, you can always start with the most simple thing. Baseball is about hitting, throwing, and catching a hard little ball. It's easy to throw it so the man who's supposed to catch it can't. It's easy to drop the ball another man throws to you. It's easy to miss catching a ball hit so hard it gets to you like a bolt of lightning. It's easy to look in the wrong direction and miss a runner taking off to steal a base.

That's fielding hit balls I just talked about. What about the pitcher, the man with the job of getting that ball by another one with a bat in his hand? It's easier for him than it is for any player in all the other positions on the diamond. All a pitcher has to do is throw balls and not strikes. A pitcher can put a man on base that don't belong there anytime he wants to.

Any pitcher at any point in a game can lose his mind and his stuff, and there ain't no predicting when it will happen and no way to cure it. A pitcher who wants to cheat so his team will lose can do that whenever he wants to. Groove a fastball with nothing on it to a strong batter, and you'll see what he does with that pitch most times. Hit a batter and put him on base if it comes to needing that. Things will go bad for a pitcher's who's gone crazy, and they will do that fast.

When you come to believe somebody on your team is considering ways to lose and that gets mixed into the game, the stuff you're called upon to notice and take account of will multiply.

So it came to me late in the season in a game the Rice Birds were playing against New Iberia that I was about to have a lot more to think about when I pitched than I did ordinarily. That was enough for me to handle whenever I was on the mound, just trying to get the other ones out, even with a weak bunch like New Iberia was that year.

In the third inning, we'd already got ahead by three runs, and I could tell I had my good stuff that day. It was going to be a quick one to play, it'd put us even with Opelousas in standings if we won it. It would mean money in the pocket. The Alexandria Aces wouldn't be able to catch us. You could tell all the Rice Birds was happy, joking in the dugout, hoorawing each other and feeling loose. Nobody was saying much to me, but now and then G.D. Squires and Tubby Dean would look over at me to let me know they saw how good the pitching was going.

I don't remember much else about that game with New Iberia. Like I said, they was a weak bunch of hitters, and the Rice Birds was playing like baseball is supposed to be played, so it went by quick and we were all back in the clubhouse taking off our uniforms pretty soon after then. Mike Gonzales was dancing around the room, talking loud and making jokes with whoever would listen to him, Cajun music was coming out of somebody's radio, and four or five folks was milling around among us. One of them was Tommy Grenier talking to players about what was going on and what we expected to happen in the last few stands of the season, writing in his little notebook so he could fix up his story for the newspaper, and two others of the ones visiting was Sal Florio and Soapy Tonton.