The House of Daniel (39 page)

Harv set a hand on his shoulder. “Hey, it happens to everybody once in a while. It happened to us yesterday down the road from here.”

“I saw that,” the Broncos' manager said. “If you really want to know, I thought the paper had the score backwards.”

“Nope,” Harv said. “We got waxed. I wasn't jumping up and down about it, but what can you do? The Cowboys didn't try and rub it in, either. We just played a lousy game, that's all.”

“They wouldn't rub it in against you. Oh, no. They'll wait till the next time we play 'em, then rub it in on us.” The Broncos' skipper sounded like the managers from La Mesa and Las Cruces, down in New Mexico. But we'd beaten both of them, so neither could boast. Wasn't like that here.

“Hey, tell 'em you've got a ballpark where the grass'll grow. That'll shut 'em up,” Harv said.

A blue jay landed on the dugout roof and pecked at the peanut shells to see if there were any peanuts in 'em. Only it wasn't a blue jay like the ones in Oklahoma. Oh, it was a jay, a lot of it was blue, and it had a crest. It skrawked like a jay, too. But it was bigger than a regular blue jay, and its head was black. Isn't that funny?

Now that I think back on it, the jays in New Mexico didn't have crests at all. I'd done so much traveling, even the birds were getting peculiar. If I'd paid more attention, I'm sure I would've noticed more things like that.

While I was watching the blue jay that wasn't quite a blue jay like I was used to, the Broncos' manager chuckled. From a guy whose team made all those errors and who lost by twelve runs, that was something. “There you go,” he said. “But they like that horrible place, you know?”

“They've probably got other things wrong with 'em, too,” Harv said. The Broncos' boss man laughed out loud. If you've got to get KO'd, there are worse ways to climb off the canvas.

*   *   *

We hopped out of the sack early the next morning. We had a game in Lewiston against the Indians that day. I had no idea where Lewiston was. But Harv did, so we got up with the sun. We ate breakfast at an all-night diner, and poured down the coffee as if Prohibition on it started two days later. Then we got into the bus. North up US 95 we went.

The mountains in Colorado are higher than the ones in Idaho. The ones in Idaho have sharper edges, though. I noticed that especially because we were leaving the valley of the Snake River, where we'd spent most of our time in Idaho. Not many sharp edges there. It's as though some enormous fire elemental way under the ground melted everything in the valley till it got soft enough to lose those edges.

Going up through the mountains to Lewiston, we got them back. Boy, did we ever! Sometimes US 95 was narrower than you wished it would be. You paid attention to that most of all when the drop was on your side. There were guardrails a lot of the time, but you didn't want to think about what would happen if the bus chose just the wrong minute to blow a tire or lose its brakes. Guardrails would never hold it, and some of those drops went a long way down.

Right outside of Lewiston was the Nez Perce reservation. That made me wonder if the Lewiston Indians really were Indians. Plenty of Indians in Oklahoma, of course. Most lived farther east than Enid, but some of the guys on the Eagles had a little Cherokee blood. They were proud of it—it wasn't the tarbrush or anything.

We drove past some Nez Perce kids playing ball on a schoolyard. They looked like Indians, all right, but they didn't look much like Cherokees. Well, you wouldn't expect a squarehead to look like a dago, either.

Lewiston's a nice little town. Idaho is a lot like New Mexico that way—it hasn't got any big cities. We were back in the Snake River valley again, but now we'd got north of the melty part.

The gal who ran our roominghouse looked to be part Indian herself. Most, I'd say, but she wasn't a fullblood, on account of she had blue eyes. Well, back in Oklahoma I knew some blue-eyed people who called themselves Cherokees, too.

We could relax at the roominghouse for a while before we went to play. The Indians had scheduled a night game to draw better. Their home field was the normal school's ballpark, and it had lights.

“Even if they don't have their own ballyard, they're one of the top clubs around here, so be sharp out there,” Harv warned us. “I hear they're going into the Idaho–Washington League next year, and that's a real good semipro circuit. Wait till we get to Spokane. Some of the teams there already belong to it, and they play exhibitions against us and against the Seattle Indians from the Coast League and against the Tokyo Titans. Sometimes they even win.”

Wes knew that stuff, but he started laughing anyway. “Wait a second,” he said. “The Lewiston Indians play the Seattle Indians?”

“I'm not sure about that, but the Spokane clubs do.” Harv took longer to see the joke than he might have. “Oh,” he said when he did. “Yeah. The Indians always win.”

“But they always lose, too,” Wes said.

I had my own
Wait a second
. “Tokyo's in Japan, right?” I said. “Across the ocean and everything?”

“That's right.” Harv nodded.

“They play baseball there?” I was a kid from Oklahoma. I didn't know anything. Till I joined up with the House of Daniel, I'd hardly even known they played baseball in Mexico.

“Yup.” He nodded. “Sometimes the Titans come to America in the wintertime when their regular season's over. They barnstorm like us when they do. We played 'em a couple of years ago, down in California. We beat 'em, but it might've gone either way. They could play some.”

“Baseball. In Japan! How about that?” I couldn't have been much more surprised if he'd told me the House of Daniel played a team from Mars. Green men with four arms didn't seem much stranger to me than Japs. I knew Japs looked pretty much like Chinamen, but I wasn't sure I'd ever seen one.

Some of the Lewiston Indians
were
Indians, all right. No matter what they were, they looked sharp loosening up. Salamanders blazed on top of poles outside the fences. I don't think the light they gave was as even as what we got from the electrics in Denver, but we could play by it. Now I had a few night games under my belt. I didn't feel as funny about the idea as I had in Madrid, New Mexico.

What I really wanted was to see whether Fidgety Frank could bounce back from the pounding he took in Twin Falls. If he was just worn out there and had a bad game, that was one thing. If something in his flipper had gone sour, though, we had worries. Wes couldn't go every day. If we had to run Azariah or Eddie or somebody else who wasn't a proper pitcher out there in games we wanted to win … No, that wouldn't be so hot.

Some of the crowd were really Indians, too. Not everything they called to their team was in English, or in any language I'd ever heard before. I guess it was whatever the Nez Perces used amongst themselves. Frank got the Indians on the field out in the bottom of the first. One guy hit the ball hard, but it was right at me.

“How you doin'?” Harv asked from the dugout—in fact, it was just a bench inside a chain-link cage with no ceiling and a couple of openings in the sides.

“Not too bad,” Fidgety Frank answered.

We got him a couple of runs in the second. I singled in one myself. It was only a bloop in back of their second baseman and in front of the right fielder, but it did the trick.

Frank made the most of the lead. He kicked his right leg high in the air and waggled his foot. He hesitated here, there, any old where, in his motion. He threw slow, slower, slowest—except once in a while he'd sneak in a fastball when they weren't looking for it. He was
pitching
, was what he was doing. It may have looked funny, or even ridiculous, but it got the job done.

Their cleanup hitter was the kind of guy who looked like he had muscles in his sweat. Fidgety Frank made him break not one but two bats, curving him inside and getting him to hit it off his fists. The guy's fourth time up, in the bottom of the eighth, he hit one over the fence, but by then we were up 6-0. So 6-1 was how it ended.

After the game, that cleanup hitter aimed a finger at Fidgety Frank as though he wished he had a pistol. “Hope I never see you again,” he said.

Frank blew him a kiss. “Thank you kindly. I love you, too.”

“You made me guess wrong all night long, except when it didn't matter any more,” the guy said. He had blond hair and pink skin, but something in the angles of his cheekbones and his chin told you he wasn't all one thing or the other.

Harv put his arm around Fidgety Frank. “Name of the game,” he said.

“Yeah, it is.” The big man nodded. “I saw Carpetbag Booker put on a show like that in Spokane one time, but nobody else till now.”

That made Fidgety Frank touch the bill of his cap. “Obliged, friend,” he said. “Carpetbag's the best there is. I ain't, but I do try.”

The salamanders dimmed just then, to save the Indians the cost of feeding 'em so much. All the faces, even the white men's, went dusky orange. Shadows seemed thick enough not to need people to cast 'em. It was getting chilly; the heat of the day didn't last once the sun went down. Wish I could say that about summertime in Oklahoma.

The Indians' manager came up beside their cleanup hitter. He looked more like a real Indian than the other fella did. “You learned us a lesson today,” he told Fidgety Frank. He turned his head toward Harv. “Your whole team did. You play as tight a game as the Seattle Indians.”

“I don't know if that's true, but thanks for saying so.” Harv touched his cap, too. “And now we're gonna scurry. We're going into Spokane tomorrow, and we'll play in those parts for a bit.”

“I may come up there myself and catch a game or two,” the Indians' manager said. “Like to see you play, and like to keep an eye on the teams there, too. We'll be in the league with 'em next year. The more you know, the better you do.”

“There you go,” Harv said. My head bobbed up and down with his. If I were a slugger like the Indians' cleanup man, I wouldn't have needed to worry about things like bunting and hitting the cutoff man and playing in the right place for the guy who was up. But I did need to worry about those things, so I noticed when other people paid attention to them.

*   *   *

Another hundred miles on the bus. What was that? Not a long ride, not a short one, not when the bus belonged to the House of Daniel. The trip up US 195 was mighty pretty, though. Eastern Washington—they called it the Inland Empire—had some of the finest farming country I'd ever seen anywhere. The wheatfields were green, green, green, just starting to go golden. The country gently rolled. It wasn't flat like the prairie. Here and there, brown squares of fallow land gave the picture a touch of variety.

Everything was just so. That impressed me, too. But for a few patches of mustard with those little yellow flowers, I hardly saw any weeds. All the houses were neat and looked freshly spruced up. Same with the barns and other outbuildings. I don't recall spotting a barbed-wire fence with a missing strand, or even one that sagged very far.

Spokane was the city where people from that whole Inland Empire came to do business. It was bigger than Enid, smaller than Tulsa. Seattle's bigger, of course, but Seattle's on the other side of the mountains, on the other side of the state. Spokane was just as happy
not
thinking about Seattle, thankyouverymuch.

We got to unpack in our roominghouse. We were going to stay in town for a while. We had games against three of the teams from the Idaho–Washington League. We were going to take on the Silver Loaf Bakers on Monday, the Bohemian Brewers on Tuesday, and Inland Motor Freight on Wednesday. They banged heads with one another on the weekends, and with the out-of-town teams in their league. In between times, they stayed sharp and made money with exhibitions against smaller clubs or against barnstormers like us.

All the games were at Natatorium Park—Nat Park, they called it. They used to have a swimming place there before they built the ballpark. That's what a natatorium is: a fancy name for a swimming hole. And if you think I knew that before I got to Spokane, kindly think again.

Nat Park was in a bigger park. Big pines grew all around it. It was another one of those all-wood ballparks that don't last, and it was falling to pieces right before our eyes. They'd run it up before I was born. Now it was running down. The stands held four or five thousand, though—not comfortably, but they did—so Harv stayed happy.

Wes took one look at the sagging, shabby grandstand roof before we even went inside and said, “Let's hope we can get these games in before the termites finish eating the joint.” That was about the size of it.

The playing field had its quirks, too. The infield was all dirt, like the one at Merchants Park in Denver. It was only about 250 down the right-field line, but a lot longer out to center and left. I figured I'd shift a little into left-center to cover as much ground as I could.

Watching the Bakers take their warmup cuts, I wasn't amazed to see that they had four or five lefty hitters who looked strong. They were another team that had looked for players who could use what their park gave them.

The crowd cheered them when they took the field. The stands weren't full, but I'm sure we drew better than three thousand. The House of Daniel came through there every year, near enough. The fans liked to watch their home-town heroes square off against the traveling team, and Harv liked the money he made.

By the time the game was over, as many folks were cheering us as the Bakers. We beat 'em 5-2. Wes could've taught a class on how to pitch, the way he handled them. He worked those big lefty bats away again and again, so they couldn't pull the ball down the short right-field line. When he came in, it was in off the plate to jam them. He treated the right-handed hitters just the other way. He wanted them to hit to left. That was the big part of the ballpark. And he made it work all game long.