Watching us, some of the Peccaries seemed ready to ooh and ahh, too. I heard one of their men going off say, “I’ve got trouble believing I’m on the same field with the House of Daniel.”
I hoped more of them felt that way. I hoped they’d go right on doing it. If they figured we were bound to beat ’em, it would mean as much as if they started every at-bat with a strike already on ’em.
We batted around in the top of the first and scored four times. I doubled in the last one myself. If they hadn’t thought we were world-beaters before then, we did our best to convince ’em.
Fidgety Frank took the hill. He’d pitched afternoon before last, but he didn’t care. He was like Walt Edwards back in Ponca City. Not being able to throw real hard didn’t bother him one bit. He couldn’t throw all that hard even with plenty of rest. Hey, raw speed counts, but only so much. Put a little on, take a little off, vary when you do it, and you’ll have the other side swinging at shadows and talking to themselves when they go back to the dugout after a popup or a roller back to the box.
Fidgety Frank was puffing and blowing out there. He was working hard even if he wasn’t throwing hard. He got a hit of his own in the third, a booming, run-scoring double into the gap in right-center. He might have been happier to sit on the bench with the rest of us while the inning played out.
But another double cashed him in. That made it 6-0. You could watch the air go out of the Peccaries as though they were so many leaky inner tubes. If any of them had thought they were going to whip us, they started to see that it wouldn’t go their way today.
Sure enough, we breezed home, 11-3. Fidgety Frank got tired in the late innings and served up a few fat ones. Or maybe he did it on purpose, the way a card sharp’ll let a sucker win a hand once in a while to keep him in the game. I don’t know. Didn’t matter one way or the other.
After the game was over, the Peccary who couldn’t believe he was playing against us brought around one of our advertising posters and had us all sign it.
“I’m gonna get it framed. I’ll hang it on my wall when I do,” he said.
“Most of the time, our flyers get hung right on top of a POST NO BILLS sign,” Harv said. We laughed about that, for all the world as if it weren’t true. When you win a game by eight runs, laughing comes easy.
A kid came up to me with a sheet of paper and a pencil. “Will you sign this?” he said. He couldn’t have been more than nine.
“Here you go.” I did it. I’d never signed an autograph in my life, and now I’d done two in five minutes. I thought that was pretty funny, too, in a different kind of way.
“I want to play for the House of Daniel myself, when I can grow me a beard,” the kid piped.
“Maybe you will,” I told him. He had a while to wait.
The Peccaries’ manager came over to make nice with Harv. Since they hadn’t thrown at us or tried to rack up our infielders after we got the big lead, Harv made nice with him, too. “Maybe you’ll get us next time,” he said.
“Mebbe.” The other guy sounded as though he wished he could believe it. “You Pecosed us but good today, though.”
Harv stuck a finger in his ear, the way you will when you aren’t sure you heard right. “We did what?”
“You Pecosed us,” their manager repeated. “In the old days, when there really wasn’t any law in these parts, you’d shoot somebody, then you’d fill his carcass with rocks before you chucked it in the river so it wouldn’t come up again. That was Pecosin’.”
“How about that?” Harv said. “Nice little town you had here, huh? They don’t do that any more, do they?”
“Not over a ballgame, anyways,” the local answered. “Not with you fellas—y’all are famous. If we were playin’ a team from Fort Stockton, though, say, and it was one of those games where the benches cleared two or three times, well, some folks might get a tad upset over somethin’ like that.”
“Do tell?” Harv said tonelessly. “Do they, um, Pecos people in Fort Stockton, too? We’ve got a game there tomorrow.”
“Nah.” The Peccaries’ manager shook his head. “Oh, they might shoot you. Fort Stockton’s about half greaser, and they got themselves some excitable boys. But they wouldn’t chuck you in the river afterwards. They ain’t got no river. They draw their water from Comanche Springs instead.”
“Thanks. That takes a load off my mind.” Harv sounded as mild as milk. The Peccaries’ boss man kind of scratched his head, wondering whether Harv had just needled him and this whole part of Texas on the sly.
* * *
Fort Stockton is about fifty miles southeast of Pecos down US 285. If that’s not the lonesomest stretch of highway the good Lord ever made, I don’t know what would be. Empty in Texas seems emptier than anywhere else, on account of there’s so much of it and it stretches so far. Desert and sun and every once in a while a dust devil swirling and grinning.
We could tell when we got to the ground Comanche Springs watered—ten square miles of it, maybe more. Wherever the ditches reached, the gray and the yellow and the faded tan turned green. It’s good enough land if only you can irrigate it. Most places, they couldn’t. Without the friendly water elementals and the free-flowing spring, Fort Stockton’d be one more dance floor for the dust devils.
Wherever the ditches reached, shacks popped up beside ’em like toadstools. Packing crates, scrap lumber, tar paper, rocks, corrugated sheet iron for a roof if they were lucky, all kinds of junk slapped together any old way … You wouldn’t believe how many Mexicans lived in each one. I sure didn’t.
Power? Running water? They didn’t imagine that stuff, much less have it. They didn’t even have outhouses. I watched a kid squatting over the edge of one of those ditches, doing his business happy as you please. His mama would draw water out of that ditch to wash with, and to cook with, and to drink.
When I lived in Enid, I was poor. I knew it. Everybody else did, too. In case I hadn’t, plenty of other folks would’ve been glad to point it out to me. But you know what? Till I saw those shacks, and that kid crapping in the irrigation channel, I didn’t have any idea what poor meant.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not just greasers living that way these days. If anything, the Mexicans may cope with it easier, on account of they didn’t have it any better south of the border. But you can find shantytowns outside of a lot of cities, and hungry, miserable people living in ’em, too.
No wonder folks want conjure men to take away whatever it is that makes ’em people. Zombies don’t care about being poor—or anything else. No wonder vampires recruit more vampires, and no wonder so many are willing to kiss sunshine good-bye. Every vampire’s as good—or as bad—as every other one. The thing outside the window in Odessa had that much straight.
No wonder even the people who stay human, which is most of ’em, can’t figure out what to do next. Nothing seems to help much. No wonder politics are so fouled up. The questions look bigger than the answers. Since the Big Bubble popped, it’s like we’ve fallen and we can’t get up.
But you know what else? Some of those skinny, dirty, raggedy Mexican kids were playing ball. Oh, not with a real baseball, not unless they stole one. Not a real bat, either, or I don’t think so—whatever they or their fathers could fix up from more scrap lumber. Gloves? Gloves were for people who could buy them.
They made do without ’em. They played. They had fun. You watch something like that, you remember baseball’s a game. Play it for money and it’s a different game. They played it ’cause they liked playing it. That was reason enough for them. More than reason enough.
Harv was eyeballing those shacks, too, while he drove past them. What he said about it was, “I wonder if anybody in this whole place will be able to shell out four bits for a ticket.”
If the crowd didn’t come, he wouldn’t pay us after the game. Well, he would, but not much. The team would lose money on the stop. If you went on losing money, you couldn’t keep going. Yeah, baseball for the House of Daniel wasn’t the sa
me game as it was for those shantytown boys.
Things looked better when we got into the real town of Fort Stockton. They still looked kind of Mexican, because some of the buildings on the town square were made out of mud brick. Adobe, they called it. Put an overhanging roof on it so the rain can’t melt it down and it’ll last about as long as the other kind of brick.
There was the Hotel Fort Stockton, too. No mud brick there—all columns and fancywork. It would have been something to see twenty years earlier, I guess, when the gilding hadn’t peeled away from the plaster yet and the sun hadn’t bleached the paint. Now it just looked as though they ought to run up something new to take its place.
The train station looked the same way. So did the ballpark, which sat right behind it. I don’t think it was as old as the Hotel Fort Stockton, but it wasn’t much newer. Crows sat on the edge of the roof that kept the sun off some of the grandstand. They weren’t buzzards waiting for something to die, but they might as well have been.
You always wonder what the team you’re gonna play against calls itself. The Fort Stockton nine were the Panthers. A panther is a painter is a cougar is a catamount is a puma is a mountain lion. It would’ve been fun if they had a cat’s head on their shirts like us. But they just spelled out PANTHERS across their chests in blue block letters. Hard to get less exciting than that.
Three or four of their players had dark skins and black, black hair and funny angles in their faces. Mexican Panthers, that’s what they were. The white men on the team didn’t seem to mind. Texans will let Mexicans get by with things they wouldn’t take for a second from colored folks. Sometimes they will. When they feel like it. They didn’t make the Mexicans in the crowd sit down the line by themselves in the hot sun—I will say that for them.
We had to work to beat the Panthers. They didn’t roll over and play dead, the way the Peccaries had in Pecos. One of their greasers couldn’t have been more than five-six, but he was built like a brick: he was almost as wide as he was tall, and it was all muscle. He hit one so far over the left-field wall, it just disappeared. Maybe it broke a window in Pecos when it finally came down.
But we were knocking the horsehide around, too. It wasn’t a little tiny ballpark, but it played like one that day. We came out on top, 8-6, but they had men on second and third in the bottom of the ninth with that short, strong Mexican at the plate. Wes threw him a pretty changeup, and everybody on our side let out a sigh of relief when he got out in front and Eddie Lelivelt caught the popup. The guy slammed down the bat and cussed in English and Spanish.
“Thought José would nail you there. He’s mighty tough in the pinch,” the Panthers’ manager said. “That would’ve been a feather in our caps.”
“You guys played a good game,” Harv told him, and he wasn’t saying it for politeness’ sake. “You would’ve made us sweat in an icebox.”
“No icebox here,” the Texan said, which was plenty true. “Besides, making you sweat isn’t the window they pay off at. We came out here to win.”
“Well, so did we. Take any one day and only one team can,” Harv said. “But you fellows can play with anybody around here.”
“Kind of you to say so,” the man from Fort Stockton answered. “Pecos, Midland, Odessa … yeah, we can hang with any of the teams from those towns. But have you been down to Alpine yet?”
“Not this year,” Harv said. “We’re heading there next. I remember right, they were tough the last time we came this way. What’s their name?”
“They’re the Cats,” the Panthers’ manager said. “If you beat ’em this year, I’ll tip my cap to you. Rancher down there, fella by the name of Kokernot, he’s put some money into their teams, paid for good ballplayers. They’re a handful and a half.”
“Fellow by the name of Coconut, you say?” Harv kinda chuckled.
So did the Fort Stockton manager. “Yeah, we call him that sometimes. Call him worse things, too. You’ve been around the block, I know—seen more’n I have, for sure.”
“Around the block? Me? Oh, maybe a time or twelve.”
“Well, then, you’ve got to know how it goes. A team in one town starts spending on players. Pretty soon, the other teams for miles around, they get sick of losing all the time. They get sick of hearing about how they lose all the time, too. So then they start throwing their own money around. It’s like one country builds battleships, and then their next-door neighbor does, and then everybody’s doing it.”
“Uh-huh.” Harv nodded. “And then they all sail out and blow each other to smithereens.”
“That’s about the size of it,” the Panthers’ manager agreed. “They spend and spend till they go broke. Then the leagues they built up fall apart, and then they pick themselves up and start over without the expensive fellas from out of town. Right now, Alpine’s the one laying out the cash. Way it looks, though, everybody else will be playing catch-up pretty darn quick.”
Enid and Ponca City and some of the other Oklahoma towns had played that boom-and-bust game not long before I joined the Eagles. Got so people said they were better than some real pro ballclubs. Then, just like the Big Bubble, that little bubble busted. They went back to being pretty much town teams.
Town pride’s a scary thing. If one team starts whaling the stuffing out of its neighbors, everybody in those places wants to do something about it. People get sick and tired of losing, and sick and tired of getting the horselaugh from the town with the hot team. No matter what it takes, they’ve got to get even.
Good thing they play baseball instead of war. Otherwise, they’d be shooting at each other somewhere all the time. Oh, wait. They do that, too, you say? Well, there you are. And there they are.
(VII)
South and west to Alpine out of Fort Stockton. The land climbs as you go down US 67. I wasn’t sorry to get away from Fort Stockton, not even a little bit. I saw more ditchside shanties while we were on the irrigated land around the town. Had any of the peons who lived in them scraped together fifty cents to watch the Panthers play us? Had they yelled their heads off when fireplug José hit that one out of sight? I sure would have, in their shoes … if they had shoes.
We got back into ranching country pretty quick. Signs along the side of the road said WATCH OUT FOR CATTLE. Every few miles, though, you’d see a dead cow on the shoulders. Sometimes buzzards flapped up from one when the bus roared by. Sometimes they’d be too busy chowing down, and didn’t bother.
I saw a truck and a car that had taken a beating, too. Cows always lose when they get hit on the highway. But they can let your old DeSoto know it’s been in a brawl.
Green mountains rose, off in the distance. We got closer and closer to them. Then we got in amongst ’em. Alpine’s almost a mile up, but it sits in a valley between a couple of those peaks. Because Alpine is higher than Fort Stockton or Pecos or Odessa, the weather there wasn’t quite so hot and sticky.
We passed a road sign pointing the way to Kokernot State Park. I had no idea if it was named for the fella pumping money into the Alpine Cats, but it had to be named after somebody in his family. I mean, how many Kokernots are there on the tree?
Roominghouse where we stayed was nicer than most. Ballpark was … well, a ballpark. It wasn’t much different from most of the other parks in Texas where we played. The grandstand had a roof on pillars that shaded the section behind the plate and partway down the lines. The rest baked in the sun. Alpine might have been cooler than some of the other towns where I’d played lately, but if you stayed under that sun too long the buzzards would be flapping up from whatever was left of you.
We warmed up. Then we watched the Cats go through their paces. They looked good, all right. They looked good in a way that worried me. Baseball is like a lot of other things. When you do it very well, it looks as though you aren’t working hard at all. If it seems to take a lot of effort, you ain’t that good, even if you think you are.
The Cats scooped and caught and threw as if it were all as simple as you please. The Hou
se of Daniel plays like that. Good pro teams play like that. Teams that aren’t so hot make it look harder.
Their pitcher was around the plate except when he felt like knocking us down. We put a man on in the top of the first, but they turned an around-the-horn double play that was slick as motor oil.
Fidgety Frank threw the first pitch in the bottom of the first behind their leadoff man’s noggin. You throw behind somebody when you want to hit him, because the natural thing for a batter to do when he sees a ball coming his way is to lean back. Frank didn’t quite bean the Cat. He picked himself up and dug in again. Next pitch was right at his head. It ticked off his bat when he bailed out, so he got a strike to go with his scare.
That sent a message loud and clear. If they wanted a beanball war, they could have a beanball war. The next two pitches sent a different message. They were both on the outside corner at the knees. The Cat took the first one for a called strike two. He swung at the next pitch, but he couldn’t’ve hit it with an oar.
He walked back to the dugout shaking his head. If I were him, I would’ve been glad it was still attached to the rest of me. The Cats batting second and third were, well, call it loose up there. They didn’t get buzzed, but they were leaning away from the plate anyhow. Neither one of them hit the ball hard.
We went down in order in the top of the second. Their guy had a nasty curve and a fastball that hopped when it got to the plate. He was tough. He didn’t try low-bridging anybody, so I figured we could settle down and play ball.
And we did. They got a run in the bottom of the second on a double and a couple of ground balls. We tied it in the fourth when Wes hit a homer down the left-field line. It barely got over the fence, but nothing in the rules says you’ve got to hit ’em as far as that Mexican in Fort Stockton did.
It was 3-3 after nine. We got a run in the top of the eleventh. They tied it again in the bottom of the frame. We got another one in the twelfth. So did they.
It went nineteen innings. We were ready to take the field for the twentieth, but the plate umpire held up both hands. “Game called on account of darkness!” he shouted.
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