The House of Daniel (16 page)

I thought so, then. What did I know? Not much about how sharp Big Stu could be, or how far his arm could reach. Well, I'd find out.

*   *   *

From Alpine west to Marfa, US 90 and US 67 are the same road, the way US 81 and US 60 are heading north out of Enid. It's a short haul, hardly more than twenty-five miles, and it goes through mountain country all the way. Even the pass through the mountains is a mile high, or close enough so it doesn't matter. The mountains tower over the valleys. But the valleys are pretty high up themselves, or the mountains would seem to loom even higher.

Marfa's another cow town, about the same size as Alpine. It's the last place of any size along the highway till you get to El Paso. That's a couple of hundred miles of not very much. El Paso is a real city, bigger than Enid and Ponca City put together. We were hoping for a big crowd there. They'd had a team in the Arizona–Texas League till a couple of years earlier, when the league went belly-up. The hope was that they'd be hungry to see some good ball. The hope was that we could give it to 'em, too.

But Marfa first. It's a cow town, like I said. There are ranches in the valleys the mountains shelter. Cowboys came out of those ranches to watch a ballgame. Some of 'em were suntanned and wore Stetsons. Some were darker to begin with and wore sombreros. Mexico does a lot of slopping over the Rio Grande in that part of the country.

The team was called the Marfa Indians. As a matter of fact, most of 'em looked more like cowboys, the Stetson-wearing kind. They were lean and tan, some with their hair bleached almost white by the sun. But the pitcher loosening up in front of their dugout was shorter and stockier and browner. He wore a big, bushy mustache, black as shoe polish.

We all watched him to see what he had. He didn't cut loose with anything real hard, but his curves broke quick and sharp. He was hitting the catcher's glove with every pitch, too, so the guy hardly had to move it.

Eddie Lelivelt clucked like a worried chicken. “We better watch out for that guy,” he said. “The rest of the Indians wouldn't let him play with them unless he was way better than anybody else they could find.”

That made more sense than I wished it did. When you're the wrong color or you talk the wrong way, you've got to work twice as hard to get half as far. It isn't fair, but who told you life was fair?

Finally, the Marfa pitcher broke off a curve so nasty, the catcher couldn't handle it. He kinda laughed and trotted after the baseball. The other Indians laughed. They clapped their hands. “Way to go, Pablo!” one of them called.

“Long as I don't do it with a man on third,” Pablo answered, and they laughed some more. He sounded like a Mexican with a drawl. Maybe he hadn't grown up speaking English, but the kind he'd learned came from around there.

The crowd cheered when the Indians took the field. It was another city park, but Harv couldn't beef about the gate today. The grandstand was packed, and they'd roped off space behind the chain-link outfield fences for standing room. The crowd was about fifty-fifty, whites and greasers. The cheers for Pablo when he warmed up on the mound sounded different from the ones for the rest of the team.

Everybody whooped it up when he got us out in order to start the game. He could throw harder than he'd shown warming up. Well, no surprise there. And his control on the hill was as good as it had been on the sidelines.

“Another day where we've gotta bust our tails,” Harv said sadly when the House of Daniel took the field. Marfa was another town that never had a pro team. They didn't have a rich man spending money on 'em, the way the Alpine Cats did. They had players who liked to play, that was all. And they had Pablo.

A good pitcher will give you fits no matter who you are. Good pitchers are harder on a traveling team than in a league. In a league, you see them over and over and get to know what they do. Not when you come through once a year at most. Of course, they don't know your guy, either, so that evens out … unless their guy is good that day and yours isn't.

It was scoreless in the third, one out, when I came up. Neither side had got anybody on yet, as a matter of fact. Pablo dropped a hook on me that could have caught Jonah's whale. “Strike one!” the umpire said. I stepped out of the box to think it over. When I got back in, he threw me a fastball near the outside corner. “Ball one!” the ump said. The crowd hooted. He could have called it a strike. I gave him credit for going against the home team.

Another curve, another strike. Another fastball. This one ran inside. Pablo didn't like to throw it for strikes. Okey-doke, even count. I stepped out again. He'd feed me another curve. Where, though? Start it over the heart of the plate and bust me inside? Or make it look wide and come back over the outside corner?

He hung it. First mistake he'd made all day. Instead of diving down around my ankles, it came in belt high. And I belted it. When you hit it square on the sweet spot, it doesn't feel like anything coming off the bat. But it scooted between the left and center fielders and out to the fence before they could cut it off.

I took a big turn around second, then hustled back. Their center fielder could throw. An infield out got me to third. And a fly ball to right meant I stayed there.

Next time I saw Pablo, in the fifth, the first one came in under my chin. Not trying to hit me, but to let me know he remembered me. Fine, Pablo. I remembered you, too. He got me to swing too soon at a changeup, and I rolled out to third.

Scoreless through six and a half. Some games are like blowing up a balloon. Pressure inside builds and builds. Then, like the Big Bubble, it pops, and leaves one side or the other unhappy. The Indians got two guys on in their half of the seventh. Up came their cleanup hitter.

The count went to two and one. Wes let fly again. As soon as the pitch left his hand, even before it got to the plate, he yelled, “Shit!” Thigh-high would-be fastball with nothing on it, right down the middle.

Crack!
You know that sound when you hear it. All you can do is turn your head and see how far it goes. It went quite a ways. Somebody at the back of the standing-room folks in left field made a sign-him-up catch. Three-nothing, Indians. A couple of dozen people must've scaled hats onto the field. A sombrero flew almost all the way to the mound. Wes stomped it. Was he ticked off? He might've been.

We got one back in the eighth on a walk and a two-out double, but that was all we could do. Pablo stayed strong the whole game, and we lost, 3-1.

“I should've shut 'em out,” Wes snapped. Yes, he was steamed. “One lousy pitch! One, goddammit, the whole game!”

Pablo made one, too. He made it to me. I hit it good, but I didn't hit it out. I do think straightening my left arm helped my swing, but it sure didn't help enough to make me a number-four hitter. I haven't got the power, and that's all there is to it. Their guy did. He got his chance, and he took it.

The Indians were proud of themselves. Some people in the crowd here had watched the game in Alpine the day before. The Indians knew the Cats hadn't beaten us. Now
they
had. They got bragging rights next time they faced Alpine.

I tipped my cap to Pablo. I took care, so my wig didn't come up with the hat. “How come you aren't pitching in the Texas League?” I asked him.

“What you talking about? You clobbered me,” he said.

“Once,” I said. “Anybody'll mess 'em up once in a while. You sure didn't mess up many. I bet you could pitch pro if you wanted to.”

He shrugged. “I don't want to. I got a ranch job I ain't gonna lose. Got a wife and two little kids, too. Pro ball's a crapshoot. With the Indians, I pick up some extra money and I don't go far from home.”

I've heard plenty of other good semipros say the same things. I mean, guys who could play in the top minors if they had the itch bad enough. Maybe even in the bigs—I dunno. But they're happy where they're at, doing jobs they like, so they don't care if they go up higher. I'd do it in a red-hot second, only I'm not good enough myself. In Enid, I thought I might be. That tryout in Dallas taught me I was wrong.

I wouldn't've been good enough for the House of Daniel if they hadn't needed somebody bad in Ponca City. They got somebody bad, but I was doing my doggonedest not to let 'em figure it out. I didn't hurt 'em in the outfield, and nobody expects much from an eighth hitter, anyhow.

They might cut me loose when my cheap month was up. They might find somebody with more pop in his bat. They might drop me when Rabbit healed enough to play again. I'd be somewhere new if they did. I'd have myself a stake. I could start over. No—I could start. Except for the baseball, I hadn't done anything in Enid I wanted to bring along with me.

*   *   *

We set out early the next morning. The sun wasn't up yet. It's two hundred and some miles from Marfa to El Paso, like I said before. US 90 curls north and west up from Marfa to Van Horn, where it runs into US 80 again and goes on to El Paso. We could gas up in Van Horn and put some water in the radiator. From what Harv said, that was about what it was good for. But it was the only place worth calling a town till we got where we were going.

On the way to Van Horn, we drove through some of the most terrible country I'd ever seen. What looked like snow was the sun shining off salt in a dry lakebed. By the way the landscape seemed, that lake'd been dry for a million years. I bet the buzzards circling in the sky had to go in to Van Horn to buy gas and water.

Dust and I don't know what all else had scoured the mountainsides into weird, peculiar shapes. The desert lower down had greasewood and prickly pear popping up every so often. The rest of it … well, it tried to pretend nobody ever ran a road through there.

When we made it to Van Horn, we got out to stretch our legs and put nickels in the Coca-Cola machine and line up to use the toilet back of the filling station. “Hurry up, you lugs!” Harv yelled when the attendant finished pumping gas. “We're late to El Paso, I'll know why!”

The rest of the players had known him longer than I had. When they didn't hustle up, I decided he was just venting steam, so I didn't, either. The stop wasn't what anybody would've called long.

It was mountains and desert again, except in a few places where they could get water. Everything by the roadside greened up then. And, along with the crops, more of those shacks made of junk and scraps sprouted from the ground. Animals in a zoo live better than the people in those places—and animals don't know others have it better. It shouldn't be allowed.

Getting close to El Paso, we went past what was left of some old Spanish missions. You had to be mighty sure of your God to want to bring Him to a place like that. I guess they were back then. Maybe they were even right. The longer I go on, the less I know I know about anything like that.

Every now and then, I could see across the Rio Grande into Mexico. Another country! You don't think about other countries in Enid, Oklahoma. You're too close to the middle of your own.

Irrigation channels brought water from a dam upstream on the Rio Grande and from deep wells in town out to what would've been desert without 'em. The peons' shacks in the fields blended in with the shanties on the edge of El Paso. And the shanties and shacks blended in with the poorer neighborhoods till you couldn't tell where one left off and the other started.

Part of the trouble is, everybody's hurting since the Big Bubble busted. And part of it is, El Paso was somewhere between half and two-thirds Mexican. The folks who ran the big farms kept the people who worked on 'em as poor as they could so they'd make more money themselves. Texans don't keep Mexicans separate, the way they do with colored folks, but they keep 'em down.

Right across the Rio Grande from El Paso is Juarez, in Mexico. Juarez was hurting, too. Since Repeal, not so many Americans came over the border to drink. Most of the guys on the House of Daniel team had gone down into Mexico to play against greaser teams in the wintertime. From what they said, the poor parts of Juarez made El Paso look like heaven—and the poor backwater farming towns down there made Juarez look like heaven.

I waved out the window at the crummy shacks we were passing. “How could anything be that much worse than this?”

“Snake, till you've seen it, you just can't imagine it,” Fidgety Frank said. “Thank your lucky stars that you can't, that's all I got to tell you.”

Everybody knew I didn't fancy the nickname Harv hung on me. Maybe I shouldn't have let people know quite so much. They all called me Snake every chance they got. Ballplayers are like that. And if you show they've hit a nerve, they'll only do it more. So I just nodded and made like I was easy with it. If I kept doing that long enough, they might give it up.

We got into El Paso in good time. I'm sure Harv credited his hustling and his fussing for that. You ask me, we would've done it without all that mother-hen business. Even I'd traveled enough playing ball to hit my marks without thinking about it much. The rest of those fellas could go around the world twice with what they could cram in a duffel bag, and not miss a bus or a boat or a train even once.

We each got two keys for our roominghouse doors. Well, each door had two locks on it. That right there told me everything I needed to know about what part of town we were in. I didn't have much worth stealing, but I got the feeling some of our neighbors wouldn't be choosy.

At least we could change at the ballpark. The Texans played in Dudley Field till the Arizona–Texas League folded. Before they joined that league, El Paso had good semipro ball and played in an outlaw league or two—pro, but not hooked in with the bigs and the regular minors.

Now they were back to semipro, but they still had that nice park to play in. It was in the south part of town, not far from the Rio Grande. A lot of buildings there were Mexican style, and Dudley Field fit right in, as much as a ballyard could. The entranceway was built from the mud brick they use in those parts. You got your tickets there—well, unless you were playing you did—and then you went past the people selling hot dogs and beer and what they called tacos and other Mexican stuff on the way to your seat.