The House of Daniel (15 page)

We had to work to beat the Panthers. They didn't roll over and play dead, the way the Peccaries had in Pecos. One of their greasers couldn't have been more than five-six, but he was built like a brick: he was almost as wide as he was tall, and it was all muscle. He hit one so far over the left-field wall, it just disappeared. Maybe it broke a window in Pecos when it finally came down.

But we were knocking the horsehide around, too. It wasn't a little tiny ballpark, but it played like one that day. We came out on top, 8-6, but they had men on second and third in the bottom of the ninth with that short, strong Mexican at the plate. Wes threw him a pretty changeup, and everybody on our side let out a sigh of relief when he got out in front and Eddie Lelivelt caught the popup. The guy slammed down the bat and cussed in English and Spanish.

“Thought José would nail you there. He's mighty tough in the pinch,” the Panthers' manager said. “That would've been a feather in our caps.”

“You guys played a good game,” Harv told him, and he wasn't saying it for politeness' sake. “You would've made us sweat in an icebox.”

“No icebox here,” the Texan said, which was plenty true. “Besides, making you sweat isn't the window they pay off at. We came out here to win.”

“Well, so did we. Take any one day and only one team can,” Harv said. “But you fellows can play with anybody around here.”

“Kind of you to say so,” the man from Fort Stockton answered. “Pecos, Midland, Odessa … yeah, we can hang with any of the teams from those towns. But have you been down to Alpine yet?”

“Not this year,” Harv said. “We're heading there next. I remember right, they were tough the last time we came this way. What's their name?”

“They're the Cats,” the Panthers' manager said. “If you beat 'em this year, I'll tip my cap to you. Rancher down there, fella by the name of Kokernot, he's put some money into their teams, paid for good ballplayers. They're a handful and a half.”

“Fellow by the name of Coconut, you say?” Harv kinda chuckled.

So did the Fort Stockton manager. “Yeah, we call him that sometimes. Call him worse things, too. You've been around the block, I know—seen more'n I have, for sure.”

“Around the block? Me? Oh, maybe a time or twelve.”

“Well, then, you've got to know how it goes. A team in one town starts spending on players. Pretty soon, the other teams for miles around, they get sick of losing all the time. They get sick of hearing about how they lose all the time, too. So then they start throwing their own money around. It's like one country builds battleships, and then their next-door neighbor does, and then everybody's doing it.”

“Uh-huh.” Harv nodded. “And then they all sail out and blow each other to smithereens.”

“That's about the size of it,” the Panthers' manager agreed. “They spend and spend till they go broke. Then the leagues they built up fall apart, and then they pick themselves up and start over without the expensive fellas from out of town. Right now, Alpine's the one laying out the cash. Way it looks, though, everybody else will be playing catch-up pretty darn quick.”

Enid and Ponca City and some of the other Oklahoma towns had played that boom-and-bust game not long before I joined the Eagles. Got so people said they were better than some real pro ballclubs. Then, just like the Big Bubble, that little bubble busted. They went back to being pretty much town teams.

Town pride's a scary thing. If one team starts whaling the stuffing out of its neighbors, everybody in those places wants to do something about it. People get sick and tired of losing, and sick and tired of getting the horselaugh from the town with the hot team. No matter what it takes, they've got to get even.

Good thing they play baseball instead of war. Otherwise, they'd be shooting at each other somewhere all the time. Oh, wait. They do that, too, you say? Well, there you are. And there they are.

 

(VII)

South and west to Alpine out of Fort Stockton. The land climbs as you go down US 67. I wasn't sorry to get away from Fort Stockton, not even a little bit. I saw more ditchside shanties while we were on the irrigated land around the town. Had any of the peons who lived in them scraped together fifty cents to watch the Panthers play us? Had they yelled their heads off when fireplug José hit that one out of sight? I sure would have, in their shoes … if they had shoes.

We got back into ranching country pretty quick. Signs along the side of the road said
WATCH OUT FOR CATTLE
. Every few miles, though, you'd see a dead cow on the shoulders. Sometimes buzzards flapped up from one when the bus roared by. Sometimes they'd be too busy chowing down, and didn't bother.

I saw a truck and a car that had taken a beating, too. Cows always lose when they get hit on the highway. But they can let your old DeSoto know it's been in a brawl.

Green mountains rose, off in the distance. We got closer and closer to them. Then we got in amongst 'em. Alpine's almost a mile up, but it sits in a valley between a couple of those peaks. Because Alpine is higher than Fort Stockton or Pecos or Odessa, the weather there wasn't quite so hot and sticky.

We passed a road sign pointing the way to Kokernot State Park. I had no idea if it was named for the fella pumping money into the Alpine Cats, but it had to be named after somebody in his family. I mean, how many Kokernots are there on the tree?

Roominghouse where we stayed was nicer than most. Ballpark was … well, a ballpark. It wasn't much different from most of the other parks in Texas where we played. The grandstand had a roof on pillars that shaded the section behind the plate and partway down the lines. The rest baked in the sun. Alpine might have been cooler than some of the other towns where I'd played lately, but if you stayed under that sun too long the buzzards would be flapping up from whatever was left of you.

We warmed up. Then we watched the Cats go through their paces. They looked good, all right. They looked good in a way that worried me. Baseball is like a lot of other things. When you do it very well, it looks as though you aren't working hard at all. If it seems to take a lot of effort, you ain't that good, even if you think you are.

The Cats scooped and caught and threw as if it were all as simple as you please. The House of Daniel plays like that. Good pro teams play like that. Teams that aren't so hot make it look harder.

Their pitcher was around the plate except when he felt like knocking us down. We put a man on in the top of the first, but they turned an around-the-horn double play that was slick as motor oil.

Fidgety Frank threw the first pitch in the bottom of the first behind their leadoff man's noggin. You throw behind somebody when you want to hit him, because the natural thing for a batter to do when he sees a ball coming his way is to lean back. Frank didn't quite bean the Cat. He picked himself up and dug in again. Next pitch was right at his head. It ticked off his bat when he bailed out, so he got a strike to go with his scare.

That sent a message loud and clear. If they wanted a beanball war, they could have a beanball war. The next two pitches sent a different message. They were both on the outside corner at the knees. The Cat took the first one for a called strike two. He swung at the next pitch, but he couldn't've hit it with an oar.

He walked back to the dugout shaking his head. If I were him, I would've been glad it was still attached to the rest of me. The Cats batting second and third were, well, call it loose up there. They didn't get buzzed, but they were leaning away from the plate anyhow. Neither one of them hit the ball hard.

We went down in order in the top of the second. Their guy had a nasty curve and a fastball that hopped when it got to the plate. He was tough. He didn't try low-bridging anybody, so I figured we could settle down and play ball.

And we did. They got a run in the bottom of the second on a double and a couple of ground balls. We tied it in the fourth when Wes hit a homer down the left-field line. It barely got over the fence, but nothing in the rules says you've got to hit 'em as far as that Mexican in Fort Stockton did.

It was 3-3 after nine. We got a run in the top of the eleventh. They tied it again in the bottom of the frame. We got another one in the twelfth. So did they.

It went nineteen innings. We were ready to take the field for the twentieth, but the plate umpire held up both hands. “Game called on account of darkness!” he shouted.

Sure enough, the sun was going down behind what they call Twin Mountains. I thought we could've played one more inning, but I wasn't ready to argue about it. In the gloaming, their pitcher might hit me when he didn't mean to.

Both sides kind of milled around. So did the crowd. Nobody knew what to do. You don't have a lot of draws in baseball. Rain or darkness will make 'em once in a while, but not very often. We couldn't be happy, the way we would have if we'd won. But we couldn't be too unhappy, either, because we hadn't lost. What do the Catholics call it? We were in Limbo, that's where we were.

I nodded at one of the Cats. “Good game,” I said. And it had been. A game that's played well brings its own kind of enjoyment even if you don't win.

“Yeah.” He nodded back. “Y'all can play, even if you're funny-looking.” He looked like a cowboy himself, face lined and tanned brick-red, big hands, long chin, a chaw in his cheek.

By then, I was starting to get used to my own itchy cheeks. Part of that itch was from sweat and spirit gum, part from my own whiskers coming in. I hadn't shaved since I joined the House of Daniel. Even after I got the false beard off, I was starting to look like I lived in a shantytown. Pretty soon, I'd have a real beard, but I didn't yet. I looked like somebody who couldn't afford a new blade for his razor, is what I looked like.

“It's a free country,” I said, and glanced over toward their pitcher. He had his uniform sleeve pulled all the way up so he could rub liniment on his tired soupbone. “We showed you headhunting wasn't such a good notion, anyways.”

He coughed a couple of times. “That wasn't my idea.”

“Didn't say it was.”

He coughed again, spat out a ribbon of tobacco juice, and chuckled deep in his throat. “After that second fastball from your guy came in high and tight, I bet Zeke wanted to stick his head down in his neck like a turtle.”

“He figured we only got one to a customer?” I asked.

That pulled a real laugh out of the cowboy Cat. “Somethin' like that, I expect.”

I turned away then. I wanted to get back to the roominghouse and clean up. Play nineteen innings anywhere in Texas, even in Alpine, and you'll need cleaning up afterwards. I wondered if I'd have to wring out my socks again, even with no puddles in the outfield. That's still the longest game I ever played in, and not by a little bit. I wanted supper, too. Play nineteen innings anywhere and you'll be hungry.

There was a diner down the street from the roominghouse. Kind of a pretty place—different-colored bricks in patterns. Beef stew wasn't bad, either. Not as good as Big Stu's stew, but not bad. Along with bread that tasted fresh-baked, it filled up the empty fine.

We were just getting back to the roominghouse when a Consolidated Crystal delivery man—well, a kid in a uniform on a bike—came up and stopped. “Any one of you-all named Harvey, uh, Watrous?”

“That's me,” Harv said.

“Got a message for you.”

Harv signed for it and tipped him a dime. The kid in the gray-blue jacket with the brass buttons pedaled off. We all went into the roominghouse. The rest of us drew back a little to let Harv read the telegram by himself. You get a crystal message when you're in some strange little town, it's liable not to be good news. In case it wasn't, we gave Harv room to pull himself together some before he passed it on to the rest of us.

But he was smiling when he folded up the sheet of flimsy green paper and stuck it in his inside jacket pocket. “Message from Ponca City,” he said. “Rabbit and Double-Double both got on the train this afternoon, bound for Cornucopia.”

“Good!” Azariah said. “That's good news!”

Cornucopia's the little town in Wisconsin where the House of Daniel has its main church and its lands and its I-don't-know-what-all. It's on the shore of whichever Great Lake it's on the shore of. They told me which one I can't tell you how many times, but I don't remember.
Cornucopia
means
horn of plenty
. I remember that. The town was built and named before the House of Daniel settled there. They took it for a lucky sign. Reckon I would have, too.

And Azariah was right. It
was
good news. I'd seen those two outfielders smash together. When Rabbit went down, I figured he'd be lucky to get out of the hospital at all, much less in only a bit more than a week.

I said so. Wes answered, “Rabbit always did have a hard head.”

“Not too hard to crack,” I said, at the same time as Harv went, “Like you don't.”

“You bet I've got a hard head,” Wes said proudly. “Would I still be playing a kids' game at my age if I didn't?”

“You could go out and get a regular job instead. That's easy as pie, right?” Harv said. Everybody laughed then. We all knew how easy it was … n't.

Wes scratched his chin. His beard had a couple of gray streaks there. He'd been at it for a while, all right. “I'm eating doing this,” he said. “I'm sleeping in a bed, and under a roof—even if they're different ones almost every night. What more do I want?”

A wife? A family? A house? A car, even?
I wondered. I sure wanted all of those things. I would've thought Wes wanted them more, since he was older. But he didn't seem to care.

All I'd wanted in Ponca City was the chance to go somewhere, anywhere, that wasn't back to Enid. I'd got that. I'd already traveled farther than the Enid Eagles ever got. Big Stu wouldn't have any notion of where I was, where I'd been, or where I was going. I'd jumped into a hole and I was growing a beard over it.