“What you want, Snake?”
“Did you have anything to do with that?”
“Who, me? I’m just a dumb ballplayer.” Dumb like snow is black, I thought. That old pawnshop man’s crack came in handy all kinds of ways. Harv went on, “Anyways, whatever happens, I’d sooner chalk it up to the Lord. He gets the credit. I get the blame for not being good enough.”
All at once, without the conjure man there, the Metros’ pitcher wasn’t good enough. Oh, he still had smarts. But now his curve was just a wrinkle, not an old-time drop. He lost some giddy-up off his heater, too. You could hit him. We scored two runs, and then two more. I bunted those last two along. I thought I was safe at first, but they called me out. I jawed a little. You won’t win—you never win—but you feel a little better afterwards. And maybe they’ll get the next one right.
Then the conjure man came back. He looked drug through a knot-hole, but he was still game. And I’ll be blamed if he wasn’t carrying a live chicken. I thought about the Amarillo Greys and their notion of after-the-game fun.
Whatever the conjure man did with the chicken, he held it down so we couldn’t see. I don’t know that he killed it, but the Metros’ moundsman started throwing bullets again, and the ball took some more funny bounces off their bats. They closed to 4-3 on us.
“‘That we would desire mercies of the God of heaven concerning this secret,’” Harv muttered in the dugout. Book of Daniel says they, but he was talking about us. “‘He revealeth the deep and secret things; He knoweth what is in the darkness, and the light dwelleth with Him.’”
I watched the conjure man. I hoped he’d get the trots again, but he didn’t. I don’t believe he did any more conjuring after that, though. His head kind of lolled back and to the side, the way your head will when you take one on the button and you’re trying to recollect who you are. He was a good conjure man, mind, same as the Metros were a good ballclub.
But the House of Daniel was better that day. And Harv might not’ve done anything to a chicken, but he was better that day, too. He didn’t do anything to the Metros, or I don’t think he did. Without their fellow in the lime and the pumpkin and the skull with the fedora, we ended up whupping ’em good. Final was 9-4. I got one hit—not the homer I wanted, but a single. It would do. It would have to.
“Good game,” the Metros’ manager said when he came over to shake hands after the last out. It didn’t quite sound like Now go swallow rat poison, but it was on the way there.
“Why, thanks,” Harv said. “Nice to see you let one of your colored brethren out of their section so he could sit with the white people.”
The Amarillo man’s face congealed like fat in an icebox. “Cornelius, he sits where he wants to,” he said.
“Shits where he wants to? Well, ain’t that nice?” Harv went right on smiling. I would’ve punched the Amarillo guy, swear I would. Now I look back on it, though, Harv’s way was better. It hurt worse, and it would sting for longer. He hardly ever cussed, but he couldn’t resist that one. We gave old Cornelius something fresh to think on, too. Well, ain’t that nice?
(V)
Tulia’s fifty miles south of Amarillo. Only a couple of thousand people there, but Eddie Lelivelt told me they had themselves a pretty fair town team. It was one of the outfits the Amarillo Greys used to tangle with, and you can take that however you want—I guess they did.
But the House of Daniel felt right at home when the bus chugged in there. Quite a few of the Tulia men were raising whiskers along with their wheat and cows. “Good thing you fellers won’t be here for Old Settlers’ Day month after next,” one of them said. “They give a prize for the best whiskers, and y’all’ve got yourselves a running start.”
“How big a prize?” Wes asked. “If it’s big enough, maybe we’ll come back.” He smiled so the local could think he was joshing if he wanted to.
The bristly man from Tulia said, “It’s only twenty-five smackers. Wish it was more, but times is tough all over.”
We’d seen that on the way down from Amarillo. Plenty of what had been farms weren’t any more, on account of nobody lived on ’em. Tulia wasn’t like Pampa; it didn’t have the oil fields to keep it going. It was hurting so bad, it could’ve been in Oklahoma.
Maybe there were folks with nothing to fear but fear itself. I’ll tell you, though, plenty more with getting thrown out of work to fear, or getting foreclosed on and tossed out on the street, or not finding a new job if you’d already lost the one you used to have, or not being able to feed your kids and put clothes on their backs, or not being able to feed yourself and put clothes on your own back.
Shack I’d lived in, getting foreclosed on would’ve just been a laugh. I’d been all those other places, though, and more besides. Would I have taken up with Big Stu if I hadn’t? Well, I like to think I wouldn’t have, any road.
Tulia team called themselves the Ravens. No, I don’t know why. Because they did, that’s why. Socks and caps and uniform letters and piping, those were all green. Ever seen a green raven? Me, neither.
But they beat us. They had a spotty-faced kid throwing for ’em, and he just rared back and flung, and we never could catch up to him. We managed one run, but they got three.
I almost made the last out. I purely hate doing that. It’s like everything’s my fault then. I was proud of myself when I worked the kid for a walk. A round-tripper would tie it. A groundout to second wouldn’t, and that was what we got.
After the last out, the Ravens started yelling and pounding on each other like they’d just licked the Wolves and they were all gonna get fat Series checks. Folks in the grandstand weren’t what you’d call sedate, either. Looked like the whole little town was there, or pretty close.
Well, what else did they have to do? Whole flock of ’em had no work to go to. They’d sit wherever they’d sit, and they’d stew. Or they’d cough up a quarter and go to the pictures. They could do that all day, every day. House of Daniel came through once every couple of years. The hope of beating us ought to be worth half a buck, hey?
And then the Ravens went and did it. Happy days for Tulia. One happy day, at least. If that kid kept pitching and his arm didn’t blow up, he’d go places for sure.
This was the third game I’d played for the House of Daniel, the fourth I’d seen. I felt mad about losing, and I felt bad about losing. We were the House of Daniel! We were supposed to charge on into these no-account hick towns and win.
It’s funny. I didn’t feel the same way when I played for the Enid Eagles. I wanted to win then. I tried to win. But I knew sometimes we wouldn’t. We were good. We weren’t that good, though.
When I looked at the other fellas with the lions on their shirts, I needed a few seconds to cipher out how they felt. Then it hit me: they were embarrassed to lose a game to the Tulia for heaven’s sake Ravens. You play baseball, you’ll get embarrassed every once in a while. The game does that to you. Doesn’t make it any more fun when it happens.
Harv walked over to the Tulia dugout. He was a better sport than that so-and-so in Amarillo. When he said, “Well, you got us this time,” he didn’t sound like he wanted a tornado to blow the Ravens and the ballpark and the whole town straight to nevermore. He may have felt that way, but he didn’t sound like it.
“I’m much obliged,” the Tulia manager said. “Sidd pitched his arm off out there today, didn’t he?”
“Hope not, for his sake. I don’t know how long you’ll be able to keep him,” Harv said. “A year from now, he could be in the Texas League. Three years? Maybe the bigs, if he stays sound. He’s trouble, all right.”
“That’d be something, wouldn’t it?” The guy from Tulia turned his head and hollered, “Hey, Sidd! The House of Daniels reckon you got the stuff to pitch in the big leagues!”
“I’d sure like to.” Sidd’s uniform was all soaked and soggy with sweat. Well, so was everybody’s, but the pitchers and catchers had it worse. He went on, “You pitch up there, your name goes into the recor
d book all official, like, and you’re in there forever so they can remember you.”
“The Lord always remembers you forever,” Harv said, but even he sounded kinda halfhearted about it. What we did would go in the local paper—a guy from the Tulia Herald was talking with some of the Ravens and scribbling down what they said—but who except the ballplayers and their kin would recollect the game and what all went on longer than Tuesday after next?
Baseball. It’s the same game, semipros or the bigs. Oh, they play it better—they play it real well a lot more often—up there. But it’s the same game. Only in the bigs everything everybody does between the white lines gets written down for all time, almost as if they carve it in stone. Sidd said it: play the game there and you’re part of history.
Play in Enid or Amarillo or Tulia and everything you do is written on the wind. The dust devils will grab hold of it and rub it out or blow it away, so it might as well’ve never happened. Same thing for the House of Daniel, or near enough. Being the best semipro team around—what’s that? It’s like being the best cook in Enid. Even if you are, who’s gonna remember you fifteen minutes after you’re gone unless he knew you beforehand?
I wondered why the demon I bothered. Come to that, I wondered why anybody bothered working hard to be the best cook in Enid, or anything else where they forgot about you as soon as you weren’t there doing it any more. What’s the point?
Harv went under the stands with the manager from Tulia to split the take. When he came back, he handed me two five-dollar bills.
If you could get ’em to pay you for whatever you did, that made a pretty fair start on things. Remembered? You could fret about remembered later on. You’d have some grub in your belly while you were fretting, too.
* * *
If you played in Pampa one day, in Amarillo the next, and in Tulia day after that, how could you not go on to Lubbock for a game on the heels of the one in Tulia? The House of Daniel couldn’t. That’s how we wound up squaring off against the Hubbers. It was an afternoon that made me think, Well, hey, I guess maybe Texas is hotter’n Oklahoma after all.
“You got to watch out for these fellas,” Harv told us before we went from our boarding house up to Hubber Park in the north end of town. “This is a town like Amarillo, and it’s a team like Amarillo. They been in real pro ball before. Chances are they will be again one of these days. Some of the guys who played for ’em in the West Texas League before the Bubble popped, they’re still here. Maybe not as quick as they were then, but they’ll be sneakier for sure. So play smart, you hear?”
I stuck up my hand. When he nodded at me, I asked, “Reckon we have to worry about a conjure man here, if they’re just like Amarillo?”
“Hope not,” he answered. “Even for a ball team like the Metros, that was a lowdown thing to pull. But if they try it, well, I do hope we’ll come out of the Hubbers’ den without getting eaten up, same as we did farther north.” He grinned.
Some of the ballplayers grinned back at him. Some groaned at the bad joke—and it wouldn’t be the first time he’d told it, or the dozenth. It might’ve been a joke, but it made sense to me just the same. What could you do but go on and try to take care of whatever came your way?
Hot? Oh, I mean to tell you it was hot. Outfield fences had signs for a butcher and a baker and a tailor—no candlestick maker, can’t say why. When I took my cuts at the plate, those signs shimmered as though I was looking at ’em in a ripply little creek.
I didn’t see anybody in the stands who put me in mind of Cornelius. There were a fair number of colored folks in their section down the line. Four men sitting together there had on ball caps like the ones the Hubbers were wearing. They looked as if they could play for ’em, too, if they weren’t too dark to get away with it.
After I finished swinging, I asked one of the Lubbock fellas, “Who are those smokes in your hats?”
He looked down the line. “Them’s Oree and Jake and Wilson and Big Mike.”
I hadn’t guessed he’d know ’em by name. “They ballplayers, too?”
“Every one of ’em,” he said. “They’re on the Black Hubbers—they play colored teams from around these parts. We give ’em our hand-me-downs. We ain’t got a lot of money, but they got even less.”
“That’s how it works, all right,” I said, and trotted out to broil in the outfield before the game started.
Then we came in and the Hubbers hit and took infield and outfield. Their pitcher warmed up in front of their dugout. I had all I could do not to start laughing when I saw him. “He looks like he ate up half the gate receipts,” I said.
“More than half,” Eddie Lelivelt agreed. You can be pretty porky and still play ball. Plenty do, especially the pitchers and catchers, who don’t have to run so much. But this guy was fatter than Big Stu, and that’s not easy.
He didn’t look like he had much, either. Oh, he put the ball where the guy catching him put his glove, but he didn’t throw hard enough for it to matter. “This may be easier than you thought,” I said to Harv.
“Or he’s got somethin’ up his sleeve,” he answered. You run a team, you never think anything’ll be easy. Most of the time, you’re right.
The fat guy waddled out to the mound. He threw some more warm-ups. Still nothing. “Play ball!” yelled the ump behind the plate. Our leadoff hitter dug in.
Fatso wound up. He let fly—slower than ever. His wrist kind of snapped when he turned the ball loose. Ball staggered to the plate like the drunkest drunk in town (only Lubbock’s dry, dry, dry, and always has been). Azariah Summers, who was playing left that day, took a swing that missed by a foot.
“Stee-rike!” the umpire said.
Second pitch was just as staggery. Azariah let it go by. Last second, it hopped back over the outside corner. The catcher dropped it, but the ump called it a strike anyway. The third one was a ball—it stayed outside. Then Azariah swung and missed, even wider than the first time. He might have got it with a butterfly net … or he might not. He came back to the dugout with his head down.
“Oh, that’s a nasty knuckler,” Harv said. “He went and sandbagged us, too—didn’t show it till it counted.”
You don’t throw a knuckleball with your knuckles. Well, you can. A few people do. But most of ’em dig in with their fingernails instead, and push the ball out of their hand with no spin at all. It does whatever it wants after that. Flutters, wiggles, or herky-jerks—that kind of thing. Catchers hate it. Batters hate it worse. Even the pitcher doesn’t know where it’s going or how it’ll get there. But if he’s got a good one that day, he’ll drive the other side wild.
If he doesn’t, if he throws ’em so they tumble instead of knuckling, they’re long balls waiting to happen. But Fatso set us down in order—two whiffs and a little dribbler straight back to him. I wondered if he’d throw the first baseman a knuckleball to keep him on his toes. He didn’t, though.
If we didn’t let them score, they couldn’t beat us. That’s what I was thinking when I walked out to center. It was too hot for me to run if I didn’t have to. I hoped the spirit gum holding my whiskers on wouldn’t catch fire. Almost muggy enough to swim in, too.
Out on the hill, Wes had to be feeling the same way. They didn’t score in the bottom of the first, anyway. We got another shot at their guy. He walked a couple of people. No, he couldn’t tell where it was going, either. A double play bailed him out of the jam. When he took off his cap to wipe his forehead on his sleeve while he went back to the dugout, I saw he was almost bald. Well, so what? If you can throw a knuckler at all, odds are you can keep throwing it till you’re fifty.
Wes held ’em in the second, too. Fatso walked our leadoff man in the third. That put me up there with a man on first. Maybe the pitcher’d make a mistake. And he did. It came in as juicy as a roast on a platter. I creamed a bullet of a liner—straight into their shortstop’s glove. Only good news was, he couldn’t double off our runner.
I went back to the dugout cussing. Not all t
he House of Daniel men went in for that. Harv mostly didn’t, like I’ve said, but he didn’t get mad to hear other people do it. He found ways to let folks know how he felt any which way. He got more mileage out of Shucks! than I did with a whole raft of blanks and blankety-blanks.
“Do it again same way next time, Snake,” was all he said when I slammed my bat into the trash can that held ’em. “You hit it good. It just didn’t drop in.”
I fanned the next time, fooled as bad as Azariah had been to start off the game. But in the bottom of that inning I threw a Hubber out at the plate to make the third out. Throw beat him by five feet. He saw it coming in and tried to knock our catcher back to Tulia. Amos held on to the ball even so. When he took it out of his mitt to show it to the ump, even the Lubbock crowd clapped for him. You’ve got to be brave to want to catch. You’ve got to have a screw loose, too. They don’t call the mask and chest protector and shin guards the tools of ignorance for nothing.
Scoreless through seven. We really didn’t fancy losing two games in a row. Losing wasn’t what the House of Daniel was all about. Fatso looked ready to keep serving ’em up till it got dark. Why not? He wasn’t working hard. Smart, yeah, but not hard.
Nobody on, one out in the eighth when I came up again. You’re gonna beat smart, you better play smart yourself. I figured I’d bunt, the way I had against Ponca City. The Hubbers’ third baseman was back and tight to the line, guarding against doubles into the corner. Bunting also gave me more time to wait for that damn flutterball. If I could get it down, I’d beat it out.
I could. I did. And I took off on the first pitch to the next hitter. A knuckler’s easy to steal on. It goes in slow, and the catcher has trouble corraling it a lot of the time. That’s what I was thinking, anyhow. But the throw came in to second like something shot out of a gun. The second baseman slapped the tag on me right as my spikes hit the bag.
We both waited. “Safe!” the base umpire said, and held his palms flat to the ground. The crowd booed. The second baseman cussed hard. He thought he’d got me. A pop bottle flew out of the stands. It missed the ump by three feet, no more.
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