The House of Daniel (8 page)

“Well, we licked 'em yesterday. That's how come I was in town.” That was one of the reasons, anyhow. “But they beat us about as often as we beat them.”

He kind of grunted, as if to say,
Yeah, the likes of you could start for a team that good.
He wasn't dogging me or anything, just letting me know what he thought. I couldn't very well tell him he was wrong, either. Rabbit O'Leary looked like a better ballplayer than I am to me, too.

Except Rabbit was back there in Ponca City with maybe a cracked noggin and with a busted collarbone for sure, and I was on the bus. I was on for as long as I could stay there, anyway. That's how baseball works before you ever step out between the white lines.

The bus took us past three or four farms in a row with no crops in the ground, no animals in the fields, empty farmhouses with busted windows, barns and outbuildings fading in the harsh sunlight and starting to fall to pieces. Eddie stared out the window at them, and at the roof-high dust devil dancing in front of one.

He turned back to me. “What went wrong here?”

I kind of shrugged. “Farmers in these parts had trouble making ends meet even before the Big Bubble popped. When it did, the bankers foreclosed on some. A couple of bankers got shot trying.”

“Doesn't break my heart,” Eddie said.

“Mine, neither. Other folks just upped and left—reckoned they had no hope where they were at. My pa, he was like that. Others yet … That dust devil you saw, that's just a baby next to a lot of 'em. You can't grow anything when all your dirt's blowing away and somebody else's dirt is coming down on top of you. So that's prying people off the land, too.”

Eddie clicked his tongue between his teeth. “It shouldn't be like this. It isn't right.”

I shrugged again. “You know that. I know that. Everybody says the same thing. But it doesn't change. It doesn't get better. You don't need me to tell you so. Playing with this team, you've done more traveling than I have. You can see for yourself.”

“I've seen plenty,” he answered, his voice quiet. “This is as bad as anything, though.”

“How about that?” I said, and whistled a few notes between my teeth. I knew we had it bad—you couldn't very well not know that. But I knew other places had it bad, too. I hadn't known we had it especially bad. Now I did. No wonder Pa headed out West.

Now I was heading out, too. I wondered when I'd come back. I wondered if I would, too.

Before I went out, though, I had to go back through. The sun was sinking when we passed through Enid one last time. Not that many people on the streets. A lot of the ones who were gawped at the House of Daniel bus. Well, that paint job is there to be gawped at. The House of Daniel wants people to know it's coming to town.

The House of Daniel does. I didn't, not for beans, not in Enid. If Big Stu was walking out of his diner and saw me roll by … That would've been great, wouldn't it? But he wasn't, and he couldn't have spotted me even if he was. I was sitting by the aisle, since the window seats were taken by the time I got in. No lights working inside the bus. I wouldn't have been more than one dim shape amongst all the others.

I can see that now. I could see it five minutes after we got out of Enid. Did I have palpitations while we were in town? Listen, I had palpitations and a half. And when I saw Ace McGinty staggering down the street like he was already toasted, I had palpitations and three-quarters.

Ace didn't see me, though. I don't think Ace even saw the bus. And he was the last of the Enid Eagles I ever set eyes on. The bus kept on toward the western fringes of town.

Eddie Lelivelt kept looking out the window. I don't know if he would have unless he was sitting next to somebody from Enid. But he was, so he did. Sadly, he pointed and said, “Another one of those lost and damned places.”

He was pointing right at my house, the house I'd left a few days before, the house I'd never go back to again. I looked at it, too, but not for long. “Well, you're right,” I said as it disappeared behind us.

 

(IV)

We rolled on through the night. Harv drove and drove and drove. He liked it. We didn't always roll any too fast. Not all the roads in western Oklahoma are paved. Sometimes we kicked up dust. Sometimes gravel rattled off the undercarriage. Sometimes the bus bounced and bucked like a bronco. We rolled on regardless.

Beside me, Eddie closed his eyes and curled up against the iron wall and the window. I thought he was kidding, but pretty soon he started to snore. He wasn't the only one, either. A lot of the time, if guys who played for the House of Daniel didn't sleep on the bus, they went short.

I still didn't know where we were going. Truth to tell, I didn't much care. We were heading away from Enid—now!—which was all that mattered. Almost all that mattered. Other thing was, Big Stu didn't know where I was going, either, and he wouldn't have an easy time finding out.

If I leaned the way Eddie was leaning, I'd end up lying in the aisle. Or I'd snuggle against his shoulder and he'd think I was peculiar. So I tried to stretch out straight in the seat and doze off. I might have got a little shuteye that way, but I didn't get a lot.

We stopped at some little town or other to gas up. When the engine stopped, I heard coyotes howling in the distance. The moon was out, but it wasn't full, so I knew they weren't werewolves. They sure sounded like werewolves, though. Coyotes have some of Old Scratch in them regardless of the moon's phase.

Then we got going again. Hardly any cars came our way. Once we saw a carpet's lanterns up above us. He didn't drop anything on us, so that was fine.

Little by little, light started spreading over the prairie from behind us. We were heading south and west, toward Texas. Hardly any place in Oklahoma west of Enid had a team good enough to give the House of Daniel a game or a ballpark that was worth their while to play a game in. So we were bound for the Lone Star State.

I'd made trips there before. Enid went there every so often. But it's not like I'd been there a lot. The town's closer to Kansas. The people are closer to Texas, though: the way they talk and the way they think. Kansas is the start of Yankee country.

Of course, here I was in the bus with a bunch of guys from Yankee country. Well, they were taking me out of trouble and paying me, too. So I figured I'd worry later about how much I'd let that worry me—if, when later came, I decided it still needed worrying about.

We crossed into Texas just about when the sun came up. The road swung from west to southwest at the same time we did. The bus's long, long, long shadow stretched out ahead of us. We chased after it, but we never caught up to it. When you're chasing shadows, you never do.

Not long after sunrise, Eddie Lelivelt opened his eyes. He yawned and stretched. Something in his back and something in his neck cracked like oversized knuckles. Aside from that, though, he could've been sleeping in a feather bed at the Ritz. He glanced over at me and asked, “You doze any?”

“Maybe a little,” I said.

“You'll learn how,” he said. “You've got to. We don't get enough time at the roominghouses and motor lodges where we stay for a fellow to catch up there.”

“You're used to it. I'm not, not yet.” We both talked in low voices, to keep from bothering the other guys who went on sawing wood. I looked out the window. It was all prairie, some farms, some cattle ranches—about like what was in the part of Oklahoma we'd just left. “Know where we're going?”

“Pissant town called Pampa,” Eddie answered. I must have stirred or opened my eyes wider or something, on account of he asked me, “You know the place?” He didn't miss much, Eddie Lelivelt.

“I've played there once or twice. You're right—it's a pissant town, kind of like Ponca City boiled down to a pint.”

He nodded. “I thought that was how I remembered it, but I wasn't sure. I've been through too many other places since the last time we stopped there, a couple of years ago. We drew pretty good, though, even if it isn't a big place, so here we are again.”

You could tell when you were getting close to Pampa. Instead of crops, oil wells and derricks and tank farms started sprouting on the prairie. Once upon a time, Pampa was a no-account cattle town. They struck oil before the Big Bubble busted, so the smashup hurt them less than a lot of other places. Their downtown is tiny, but the shops in it are new and mostly open.

They pay the price other ways. The air smells like everybody's been eating beans for years. There's soot on the walls. There's soot on the ground. I laughed when the bus pulled up in front of a roominghouse and stopped. Eddie, he raised an eyebrow at me. “This is where the Enid team stays when we—I mean, they—come here,” I explained.

“Oh.” The way he weighed it, he put me in mind of Rod Graver. Well, there was another fella who didn't miss much. When Eddie chuckled, you knew you'd earned it. “Got you. Yeah, that's funny.”

The players woke up as soon as the bus stopped. Rattling and banging didn't faze 'em. Quiet? That was a different story. They grabbed their stuff—most of 'em had a sight more'n I did—and got down onto the sidewalk. One of 'em looked up at the sun trying to poke through all the stinking crap in the air and said, “Just as pretty as I remembered it.” He held his nose. Yeah, that about summed up Pampa.

As we started filing into the roominghouse, Harv said, “Eddie, you and Jack'll get a room by yourselves. You'll need to climb out of the sack earlier'n the rest of us so you can pretty him up.”

“No worries,” Eddie said.

“Pretty me up?” I asked him.

“Get some sleep first,” he answered. “Plenty of time to take care of it then.”

I shrugged. “Okey-doke.” In we went, all those shaggy guys with their manes and their face fur and me feeling like a kid—a kid who could use a shave, but a kid just the same—beside 'em. The landlady didn't even blink at the way they looked. Their money spent as good as anybody else's.

She did blink when Harv asked for one more room than she'd expected. Cash money kept her from getting too fussy, though. It has a way of doing that.

Our room was about like the one I'd had with the Eagles in Ponca City. With only two guys in it, it felt, well, roomy. Eddie took an alarm clock out of his bag, wound it up, and set it on the nightstand. Then he went next door and came back with another one.

“You'll buy yourself one of these, first chance you get,” he told me. “We all have 'em. We all set 'em, too. Can't afford to miss wakeup, so we don't take any chances.”

I was too busy yawning to worry about alarm clocks. I lay down on one of the beds and sacked out without even shedding my shoes. Tired? Me? Oh, just a little.

Next thing I knew, it was like a bomb went off next to my head. A few seconds later, another one started bang-clanging away, too. No, not bombs. Those blamed alarm clocks. Eddie killed 'em before I could fling 'em against a wall.

“Rise and shine, sweetheart,” he said. “Time to pretty you up.” Way he talking, we could've been canoodling in there, not flopped out like a couple of stiffs.

I told him where he could stick his rise and shine. I told him how many corners he could fold it into before he stuck it there, too. He just laughed. Then he pulled a bottle and a little painter's brush and what looked like the hair that goes into furniture cushions out of his bag. “What's all that?” I asked.

“Spirit gum and fake whiskers,” he said. “You play for the House of Daniel, you got to look like you belong.”

“How about my hair?” I ran my hand over it. It wasn't what you'd call long. Not too many fellas wore theirs shorter, matter of fact.

“We'll slap a wig on you, too, but that can wait.” He didn't get excited, any more than a grocer would if you asked him how much his soap flakes cost. “C'mere and sit on my bed. The light's better over here.”

So I went. He started painting spirit gum on my cheeks and my chin and my top lip. Smelling it made me half drunk, or maybe just woozy. The stink was something like moonshine and something like ether. I went under ether one time, when the dentist yanked my wisdom teeth. I was there, and then I was gone, till I woke up sore, with holes in my head. I wondered if the spirit gum would knock me out, too.

Soon as Eddie painted the gum on, he started bearding me up. “Tickles,” I told him.

“Don't talk,” he said. “I'll do a better job if your face doesn't fidget.”

When the gum dried, it started to itch. Or maybe it was that upholstery all over my face. I started to scratch. He slapped my hand down. “This'll drive me crazy,” I said.

He kinda looked at me. “Look where you're at. Look what you're doing. You've got to be crazy already.” He made me sit there till everything was ready. Then he let me get up and take a peek into the mirror over the beat-up chest of drawers.

Don't know who that was on the other side of the glass. A stranger. A mighty strange stranger, too, let me tell you. “Looks like somebody slapped shredded wheat all over my face,” I said. The fake beard was darker'n what I grow on top of my head, but I didn't grumble about that. Plenty of real ones are the same way.

They handed me Double-Double's uniform. It fit tolerably well. Then Harv did stick a wig on me. That was about the same color as the whiskers. It was even hotter than they were. I started sweating like a fool. I hoped the spirit gum was waterproof. If it wasn't, my beard would start falling out in clumps. That'd give the folks in Pampa something to talk about!

“We playing at Gulf Field south of town or Road Runner Park?” I asked Harv. He seemed to know such things.

“Road Runner, against the All Stars. It holds more people, so the gate will be better,” he said. I nodded. The Eagles had gone down to Gulf Field against the Oilers, who got their name the same way the Ponca City Greasemen did. There was another team in town, too, the Plainsmen. All those guys who pulled oil out of the ground needed something to do when they weren't working. They drank or they played ball, same as in most places.