The House of Daniel (11 page)

Play in Enid or Amarillo or Tulia and everything you do is written on the wind. The dust devils will grab hold of it and rub it out or blow it away, so it might as well've never happened. Same thing for the House of Daniel, or near enough. Being the best semipro team around—what's that? It's like being the best cook in Enid. Even if you are, who's gonna remember you fifteen minutes after you're gone unless he knew you beforehand?

I wondered why the demon I bothered. Come to that, I wondered why anybody bothered working hard to be the best cook in Enid, or anything else where they forgot about you as soon as you weren't there doing it any more. What's the point?

Harv went under the stands with the manager from Tulia to split the take. When he came back, he handed me two five-dollar bills.

If you could get 'em to pay you for whatever you did, that made a pretty fair start on things. Remembered? You could fret about remembered later on. You'd have some grub in your belly while you were fretting, too.

*   *   *

If you played in Pampa one day, in Amarillo the next, and in Tulia day after that, how could you
not
go on to Lubbock for a game on the heels of the one in Tulia? The House of Daniel couldn't. That's how we wound up squaring off against the Hubbers. It was an afternoon that made me think,
Well, hey, I guess maybe Texas is hotter'n Oklahoma after all
.

“You got to watch out for these fellas,” Harv told us before we went from our boarding house up to Hubber Park in the north end of town. “This is a town like Amarillo, and it's a team like Amarillo. They been in real pro ball before. Chances are they will be again one of these days. Some of the guys who played for 'em in the West Texas League before the Bubble popped, they're still here. Maybe not as quick as they were then, but they'll be sneakier for sure. So play smart, you hear?”

I stuck up my hand. When he nodded at me, I asked, “Reckon we have to worry about a conjure man here, if they're just like Amarillo?”

“Hope not,” he answered. “Even for a ball team like the Metros, that was a lowdown thing to pull. But if they try it, well, I do hope we'll come out of the Hubbers' den without getting eaten up, same as we did farther north.” He grinned.

Some of the ballplayers grinned back at him. Some groaned at the bad joke—and it wouldn't be the first time he'd told it, or the dozenth. It might've been a joke, but it made sense to me just the same. What could you do but go on and try to take care of whatever came your way?

Hot? Oh, I mean to tell you it was hot. Outfield fences had signs for a butcher and a baker and a tailor—no candlestick maker, can't say why. When I took my cuts at the plate, those signs shimmered as though I was looking at 'em in a ripply little creek.

I didn't see anybody in the stands who put me in mind of Cornelius. There were a fair number of colored folks in their section down the line. Four men sitting together there had on ball caps like the ones the Hubbers were wearing. They looked as if they could play for 'em, too, if they weren't too dark to get away with it.

After I finished swinging, I asked one of the Lubbock fellas, “Who are those smokes in your hats?”

He looked down the line. “Them's Oree and Jake and Wilson and Big Mike.”

I hadn't guessed he'd know 'em by name. “They ballplayers, too?”

“Every one of 'em,” he said. “They're on the Black Hubbers—they play colored teams from around these parts. We give 'em our hand-me-downs. We ain't got a lot of money, but they got even less.”

“That's how it works, all right,” I said, and trotted out to broil in the outfield before the game started.

Then we came in and the Hubbers hit and took infield and outfield. Their pitcher warmed up in front of their dugout. I had all I could do not to start laughing when I saw him. “He looks like he ate up half the gate receipts,” I said.

“More than half,” Eddie Lelivelt agreed. You can be pretty porky and still play ball. Plenty do, especially the pitchers and catchers, who don't have to run so much. But this guy was fatter than Big Stu, and that's not easy.

He didn't look like he had much, either. Oh, he put the ball where the guy catching him put his glove, but he didn't throw hard enough for it to matter. “This may be easier than you thought,” I said to Harv.

“Or he's got somethin' up his sleeve,” he answered. You run a team, you never think anything'll be easy. Most of the time, you're right.

The fat guy waddled out to the mound. He threw some more warm-ups. Still nothing. “Play ball!” yelled the ump behind the plate. Our leadoff hitter dug in.

Fatso wound up. He let fly—slower than ever. His wrist kind of snapped when he turned the ball loose. Ball staggered to the plate like the drunkest drunk in town (only Lubbock's dry, dry, dry, and always has been). Azariah Summers, who was playing left that day, took a swing that missed by a foot.

“Stee-rike!” the umpire said.

Second pitch was just as staggery. Azariah let it go by. Last second, it hopped back over the outside corner. The catcher dropped it, but the ump called it a strike anyway. The third one was a ball—it stayed outside. Then Azariah swung and missed, even wider than the first time. He might have got it with a butterfly net … or he might not. He came back to the dugout with his head down.

“Oh, that's a nasty knuckler,” Harv said. “He went and sandbagged us, too—didn't show it till it counted.”

You don't throw a knuckleball with your knuckles. Well, you can. A few people do. But most of 'em dig in with their fingernails instead, and push the ball out of their hand with no spin at all. It does whatever it wants after that. Flutters, wiggles, or herky-jerks—that kind of thing. Catchers hate it. Batters hate it worse. Even the pitcher doesn't know where it's going or how it'll get there. But if he's got a good one that day, he'll drive the other side wild.

If he doesn't, if he throws 'em so they tumble instead of knuckling, they're long balls waiting to happen. But Fatso set us down in order—two whiffs and a little dribbler straight back to him. I wondered if he'd throw the first baseman a knuckleball to keep him on his toes. He didn't, though.

If we didn't let them score, they couldn't beat us. That's what I was thinking when I walked out to center. It was too hot for me to run if I didn't have to. I hoped the spirit gum holding my whiskers on wouldn't catch fire. Almost muggy enough to swim in, too.

Out on the hill, Wes had to be feeling the same way. They didn't score in the bottom of the first, anyway. We got another shot at their guy. He walked a couple of people. No, he couldn't tell where it was going, either. A double play bailed him out of the jam. When he took off his cap to wipe his forehead on his sleeve while he went back to the dugout, I saw he was almost bald. Well, so what? If you can throw a knuckler at all, odds are you can keep throwing it till you're fifty.

Wes held 'em in the second, too. Fatso walked our leadoff man in the third. That put me up there with a man on first. Maybe the pitcher'd make a mistake. And he did. It came in as juicy as a roast on a platter. I creamed a bullet of a liner—straight into their shortstop's glove. Only good news was, he couldn't double off our runner.

I went back to the dugout cussing. Not all the House of Daniel men went in for that. Harv mostly didn't, like I've said, but he didn't get mad to hear other people do it. He found ways to let folks know how he felt any which way. He got more mileage out of
Shucks!
than I did with a whole raft of blanks and blankety-blanks.

“Do it again same way next time, Snake,” was all he said when I slammed my bat into the trash can that held 'em. “You hit it good. It just didn't drop in.”

I fanned the next time, fooled as bad as Azariah had been to start off the game. But in the bottom of that inning I threw a Hubber out at the plate to make the third out. Throw beat him by five feet. He saw it coming in and tried to knock our catcher back to Tulia. Amos held on to the ball even so. When he took it out of his mitt to show it to the ump, even the Lubbock crowd clapped for him. You've got to be brave to want to catch. You've got to have a screw loose, too. They don't call the mask and chest protector and shin guards the tools of ignorance for nothing.

Scoreless through seven. We really didn't fancy losing two games in a row. Losing wasn't what the House of Daniel was all about. Fatso looked ready to keep serving 'em up till it got dark. Why not? He wasn't working hard. Smart, yeah, but not hard.

Nobody on, one out in the eighth when I came up again. You're gonna beat smart, you better play smart yourself. I figured I'd bunt, the way I had against Ponca City. The Hubbers' third baseman was back and tight to the line, guarding against doubles into the corner. Bunting also gave me more time to wait for that damn flutterball. If I could get it down, I'd beat it out.

I could. I did. And I took off on the first pitch to the next hitter. A knuckler's easy to steal on. It goes in slow, and the catcher has trouble corraling it a lot of the time. That's what I was thinking, anyhow. But the throw came in to second like something shot out of a gun. The second baseman slapped the tag on me right as my spikes hit the bag.

We both waited. “Safe!” the base umpire said, and held his palms flat to the ground. The crowd booed. The second baseman cussed hard. He thought he'd got me. A pop bottle flew out of the stands. It missed the ump by three feet, no more.

He just stood there, a skinny little guy sweating like the rest of us. His black suit didn't show it as much as our flannels, but black held the heat worse. Pop bottles and bad language were all part of the day's work for him. Hard way to make five or ten bucks, let me tell you.

I had planned on lighting out for third as soon as Fatso went to the plate again. Now I wondered if that was a good scheme. Their backstop threw
hard
, even if Fatso didn't. Harv would stretch
Shucks!
some more if I got hung out to dry. Would he ever!

But we had to grab a run some kind of way. We couldn't win if we didn't score. So I lit out.

Another strong throw. Strong and about three feet over the third baseman's glove. It sailed into left. I scrambled up and dashed home.

Everybody punched my arm and pounded my back and patted my behind when I went into the dugout. “A home-run bunt!” Eddie said.

“Good work,” Harv said. “You pushed 'em, and you rattled 'em, and they broke.” He would've said a few other things if they'd thrown me out. But I had plenty of bigger might-have-beens than that to fret about if I was so inclined.

We beat 'em 1-0. Their second baseman gave the base umpire another piece of his mind after the last out. That did him as much good as you'd expect. I might have told the ump a thing or three if he'd called me out. Or I might not have. We still could've won some other way if I were out. My being safe was pretty much why the Hubbers lost.

In their dugout, the catcher and the fat pitcher were talking. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but I didn't need to be Sam Spade to work it out. The catcher was telling the pitcher he was sorry he'd heaved one into left there. When Fatso put a hand on his shoulder, you knew they'd be playing together again any day now.

After Harv handed me my money after the game, he said, “Looks like you're earning your keep, kiddo.”

“Don't jinx it!” I said. He laughed, but I was only a quarter joking, tops.

*   *   *

Where do you go from Lubbock? If you weren't born there,
anywhere—and quick!
seems like the right answer. Oh, that's not quite fair. Lubbock brags about being the cleanest town in Texas, and it didn't look too dirty to me. They farm outside of town. They raise cows and chickens. Cotton, too. Reason enough to stay if you already live there, I guess. Not reason enough to settle there if you don't.

Only we couldn't get away as fast as we wanted to. I told you how hot it was during the game, and how sticky. It got stickier and stickier, too, and clouds started filling the sky so it looked black as night an hour before sundown. I knew what was coming. So did everybody else. “Gonna pour,” Eddie Lelivelt said.

It didn't just pour. It came down in buckets, hogsheads, barrels. We listened to it drumming against the boarding house's dining-room windows. We might've gone out to celebrate the win—Wes was talking about a steakhouse he'd been to before. But when you might have to swim back, the widow woman's supper looked like a better idea, even if it was longer on dumplings and sauerkraut than it was on beef.

Rain didn't let up, either. Thunder boomed like big guns. Devils' pitchforks of lightning played flashbulb tricks outside the windows. The wind screamed. There'd be tornadoes spawning somewhere—I hoped nowhere close.

When we were going upstairs to our rooms, Wes said, “Forty days and forty nights.” That wasn't Book of Daniel, but it didn't seem so far wrong, either.

Harv kind of sighed. “I don't think we're gonna play in Sweetwater tomorrow.” He sighed again. “Dunno about Big Spring the day after, either. Parks'll dry out pretty fast once the rain blows away, but it don't look like it's blowing away. Looks like it's blowing in, doggone it.”

I heard what he wasn't saying. If we didn't play, no money came in. But money still went out. We had to pay for the rooms, and for whatever food didn't come with 'em, and for everything that went with the bus, and probably for a bunch of other stuff I didn't even know about. I'd lived on a frayed shoestring myself, same as half the country, and got used to knotting it back together when it broke.

When something I'd counted on fell through … well, that was when the shoestring got some new knots in it. That was when I started taking care of this and that for Big Stu, too.