The House of Daniel (45 page)

*   *   *

California! For a long time, I'd thought my pa settled there after he got out of Enid. I might think so to this day if he hadn't gone to that game up in Bellingham—about as far from California as you can get and still stay on the West Coast.

Maybe Mich Carstairs still was somewhere in the Golden State. I hoped she was, for her sake. She'd got out of Ponca City, anyhow, even faster than I had. For all I could prove, she'd headed for New Hampshire. But I liked thinking she might be in the same state I was in. I liked thinking we might bump together some way, too. I didn't figure the odds were good, but I didn't do a lot of calculating about odds. Did she ever go see a ballgame? I had no idea, which didn't keep me from thinking about it.

Crossing from Oregon into California wasn't anything special. It wasn't like taking the ferry across the Columbia to get from Washington into Oregon. It was more like going from Colorado into Utah. The only difference between the start of the one state and the end of the other was the line on the map. If I hadn't seen the sign next to US 97, I never would've known where that was.

Even after we crossed the border, we had more than 120 miles to go before we got to Redding. California's a big state. All the states out West are big, but California's big even compared to the rest of them. After Texas, it's the biggest in the forty-eight. And it's about as tall as Texas. It's just skinnier.

Weed was the town where US 97 ran into US 99. Dunno how come they called it that—it was a harmless enough little place. We went on down US 99. Off to the east and south, Mount Shasta got bigger and bigger. It's not as tall as Mount Rainier, up by Seattle and Tacoma. But you can see it better because the air is dry, not hazy and misty and foggy.

Redding sat at the upper end of the Sacramento Valley, with mountains to the east and west. It wasn't much bigger than Weed, but they knew about the Tigers all the way up in Oregon. Tigers Park had gone up ten or twelve years earlier. The team or whoever backed them had money. Everything was clean and freshly painted. The plumbing worked. The showers had hot water. A team from the regular minors would've been happy to play there.

The Tigers handled themselves like a team from the regular minors. They wore pinstriped uniforms with a tiger's head on the left breast. I'd wondered if that would ever happen. Now here it was. Their tigers against our lions. The two biggest cats facing off.

It was a hot day—up in the nineties, maybe over a hundred. The heat felt more like New Mexico than Texas or Oklahoma, though. The air stayed dry, so your flannels didn't stick to you and get all soaked with sweat. That made the weather easier to take. Not easy, but easier.

At least half the Tigers could've played pro ball, or had a few years earlier. They weren't a young, quick team. They knew what they were doing, though, and they hadn't got too creaky to do it. Their second baseman had one of the sweetest pivots I'd ever seen. The crowd cheered 'em on. The park wasn't great big—like the one in Klamath Falls, it held 2,500 or so (no bigfoots, or none I saw). Against us, they filled it up. It was another one of those ballyards with spaces between the planks on the outfield fence. Kids—grown-ups, too—peeked through them.

Fidgety Frank kept the Tigers guessing. They threw a lefty at us, too, only one who didn't fidget so much. Their guy tried to fool us with his pitches, not with his motion.

That works the first time through the lineup, especially if you've never seen a pitcher before. The fellow on the mound has to be better to make it go the second time around, and the third pass is harder yet. Besides, he's starting to tire out himself by then.

So they went up on us, 2-0, after four. But we tied it in the fifth and got a run in the sixth. Then
they
tied it. Yeah, they could play. We got four in the eight, though, to grab some breathing room. I knocked in two of those myself with a single to left. They plated one in the eighth and one in the ninth, but we won it, 7-5.

They were good sports. They all shook hands with us. They didn't like losing any more than anybody else would have, but they didn't waste time moaning about it. “You got us,” their manager said. “We like to take on the best teams that'll play us. We sent letters to the Seals and the Oaks in the Bay Area, and to the Sacramento Senators, but we couldn't get a game with any of 'em.”

“We've had the same trouble with Coast League teams,” Harv said. “Seems to me like they think they're supposed to beat us. So if they do, it's nothing special. But if we beat them, they look like chumps. The only thing that might bring 'em is if you can promise a big house. They like money as much as anybody else.”

He didn't tell the Tigers' manager to go on the road against the PCL clubs. That was a bad bet. Fans in Frisco and Oakland and Sacramento are spoiled. They wouldn't want to watch their darlings take on a no-account team from a whistle-stop town. The people in charge of the big-city teams knew what was what. If they didn't care to play against the House of Daniel, they weren't likely to take a chance on the Redding Tigers.

“Where do you guys go next?” the Tigers' manager asked.

“Red Bluff,” Harv answered.

By the face the guy from Redding made, I guessed that was the next town down the road. They must have loved each other like Pampa and Borger in Texas. As soon as the fella opened his mouth, I knew what he'd say. And he did: “You beat those damn Stags, you hear?”

“We'll give it our best shot,” Harv said. “We always do.”

*   *   *

Red Bluff. Chico. Yuba City. I don't know how many other Sacramento Valley towns we played in. Lots of them. We kept working our way south. Redding was hot. Red Bluff was hotter. Chico was hotter yet. If you felt like baking yourself, central California was the place to do it.

We stayed away from the coast. It was kind of a shame. On that side of the mountains, the weather wasn't much different from what they got in Seattle. It was cool and damp and foggy. On the side of the mountains where we were at, the weather wasn't much different from what they got in hell.

And we kept working our way down into it, too. Stockton. Modesto. Those were towns that had had pro teams years earlier but lost them again: towns like a lot of the ones in Texas and Utah and Idaho. Even now, when one of the semipro clubs in those places found somebody good, the Coast League teams would hear about it quick. The semipros made money selling contracts to the PCL teams. The big leagues had chains of farm teams in the regular minors. The Coast League used some of those semipro teams in the medium-sized towns in California the same way.

The baseball there was tough even before the barnstorming teams got going. We lost more often than Harv liked. The trouble was simple: they had lots of good players. If a guy lost a step or two and couldn't stick with the Seals or the Beavers or the Hollywood Stars, he wouldn't drop down to a lower minor league. There were no lower minor leagues on the West Coast then.

No—he'd get on some hot semipro outfit and make it hotter, the way that Vic guy had with McNulty Transfer in Tacoma. He might not be a topflight pro any more, but that didn't mean he couldn't play. I was glad to be a center fielder. You really needed to cover ground out there. Some old pro who'd got slow couldn't steal my job. A good thing, too, 'cause plenty of those fellas hit harder than I did.

Oakland, now, did its spring training in Fresno. And the semipro team we played there, which was probably the best one in town, was called the Fresno Acorns. The Oaks played them every spring, getting ready for the Coast League season. And the Oaks' young players, the ones who weren't ready for the PCL, played for the Acorns and learned whatever they needed to know.

One thing I don't reckon they ever did learn was how to stay cool in Fresno. I don't believe there is any way to do it. Fresno isn't just hotter than Texas. Fresno's much hotter than Texas. If that doesn't scare you, you must never have been to Texas. Or to Fresno.

Fresno is also the raisin capital of the world. You put grapes out under that sun and they shrivel to raisins in nothing flat. If you put me out under that sun with no clothes on, I'd shrivel to a raisin in nothing flat, too.

You'd think—you'd hope—a team in a place like that would play in a ballpark with lights and schedule as many night games as it could. You'd be disappointed. I sure was. We beat the Acorns 4-3. It was another one of those games where at the end you aren't sure of anything except that you won. You don't go away thinking
We were better than the team we beat
. I'd got used to that feeling playing for the House of Daniel. The longer we played in California, the more air leaked out of it.

One of the things you'll see in Fresno is wreaths of garlic bulbs around doors and windows. A lot of the people there are Armenians. The men are hairy and dark and they've got big hooked noses, so they look like Jews. But they aren't. Armenians are like Greeks—they use garlic to keep vampires away. You smell it all over the place.

They cook with it, too. They put it in lamb and in chicken and in salads—in everything but ice cream and soda pop. They put tarragon in soda pop instead. After a while, garlic grows on you. I don't know but what I'd sooner flavor lamb with it than with mint jelly.

Visalia is another one of those towns where they play good ball. Porterville is, too. We won a game in Visalia and lost one in Porterville—or it might've been the other way around. Neither one of those ballparks had lights, either, and oh, they were hot. We kept pouring down water and gulping salt pills.

From Porterville, we went down to Bakersfield. That's an oil town, the last town of any size before you go over the high pass there and come down the other side into Los Angeles. I hadn't done that yet. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

Game first, though. We were playing against the Coca-Colas—the company had a big bottling operation in town. The ballpark was horrible. I don't know who laid it out, but the sun shone straight into the batters' eyes. It was another one that ran only 354 to center, too. It was so short there,
I
hit a home run, and I don't hit many.

We beat the Coca-Colas something like 11-2. I had spare ribs for supper (dunno why they call 'em that—I bet the pig they come from doesn't think they are). Then, instead of letting us overnight in Bakersfield, Harv put us on the road after dark and started for Los Angeles. He wouldn't say why. He just did it. We grumbled all the way. We wanted to
sleep
, dammit!

 

(XX)

We rode and we rode, still grumbling. Then after a while, when we were on one of the last downhills before the city, Harv pointed out the windshield and said, “Take a gander at that, boys.”

All those lights spread out for miles and miles, every color you could imagine, some steady, some blinking … Los Angeles has way more than a million people, and it's almost the size of a small state. The city lights looked like stars, but there were more of them and they were brighter and closer together than the ones up in the sky.

It was just about worth seeing by night. In the daytime, the magic would go out of it. We'd see buildings, not lights. We didn't let on we were impressed, though. Oh, no. We went right on complaining. If ballplayers aren't playing, they're grousing about something.

Then we got in amongst the buildings. They looked like buildings with lights on them, all right, except for the ones that looked like buildings without lights on them. They were lower than you'd expect for such a big city. When I said so, Wes told me it was against the law for any building except the city hall to go up more than twelve stories.

“How come?” I asked him.

“They've got quarrelsome earth elementals, that's why,” he said. “They had a big old earthquake last year, and they expect more. None of the elementals will admit the quakes are their fault—they all say they're the other guys' fault. So nobody human here wants a big old skyscraper to fall over in the next one and kill a bunch of people.”

“Ah,” I said. “Thanks. That makes sense.”

“I know.” Wes sounded even gloomier than usual. “But they do it anyway.”

I take back what I said a minute ago. Not all the Los Angeles buildings looked like buildings. We went past a hat store that looked like a fedora and a fried-chicken place that looked like a drumstick and a place that sold boats that looked like a cabin cruiser and a doughnut house with a giant doughnut on top of it. I don't even want to guess what the building that looked like the Sphinx sold. Mummies? Pyramids? Cripes, maybe it was another fried-chicken place.

So we got into Los Angeles, and we drove and we drove, and we didn't drive out of it again. Sometimes it was more built up, sometimes less. There were small farms and orange orchards among the houses and shops, but not too many.

We didn't go past the city hall. I think I got a glimpse of it, way off to the east of the street we were driving on. If I did, it was miles away. We just kept chugging along.

After a while, Harv said, “This isn't Los Angeles any more. We're in the suburbs now, heading down to Long Beach.”

“What's Long Beach?” I asked. “Is that where Los Angeles goes for a swim?”

“It's a city all by itself—an oil town and a port. It's got something like 150,000 people in it,” Harv said. “And you know what? Hardly anybody who doesn't live in this part of California even knows it's a town.”

“I sure didn't,” I said.

Wes chipped in again: “Other thing you need to know, Snake, is that you can't just charge into the Pacific and go for a swim. Well, you can, but I promise you won't do it more than once.”

“Why? They have sharks that eat you or something?”

“No, or no worse'n anywhere else. But the water's
cold
. All up and down the West Coast, you'll freeze your pecker off except for maybe two weeks a year. Maybe.”