We got into El Paso in good time. I’m sure Harv credited his hustling and his fussing for that. You ask me, we would’ve done it without all that mother-hen business. Even I’d traveled enough playing ball to hit my marks without thinking about it much. The rest of those fellas could go around the world twice with what they could cram in a duffel bag, and not miss a bus or a boat or a train even once.
We each got two keys for our roominghouse doors. Well, each door had two locks on it. That right there told me everything I needed to know about what part of town we were in. I didn’t have much worth stealing, but I got the feeling some of our neighbors wouldn’t be choosy.
At least we could change at the ballpark. The Texans played in Dudley Field till the Arizona–Texas League folded. Before they joined that league, El Paso had good semipro ball and played in an outlaw league or two—pro, but not hooked in with the bigs and the regular minors.
Now they were back to semipro, but they still had that nice park to play in. It was in the south part of town, not far from the Rio Grande. A lot of buildings there were Mexican style, and Dudley Field fit right in, as much as a ballyard could. The entranceway was built from the mud brick they use in those parts. You got your tickets there—well, unless you were playing you did—and then you went past the people selling hot dogs and beer and what they called tacos and other Mexican stuff on the way to your seat.
The grandstand was shaded partway to first and third, like it is most places. Bleachers out past the grandstand on both sides. More bleachers back of right field. Nothing behind the fence in left but a street.
It was long down the lines—340 each way—but only 390 to dead center. The alleys were short, too. It wasn’t quite the bandbox we’d seen in Big Spring, but there are plenty of bigger parks. The left-field wall was pretty high, the one in front of the bleachers not so much.
The Texans’ home whites had the team name across the chest in blue letters, with red numbers on the back. Their caps were blue, with a red EP on them. They wore red socks with blue and white rings on the calves. Texas colors are the same as the country’s, so naturally a team named for the state wore them.
Most of their team was white—a bigger share than the town had. But there were some Mexicans on it, too, not just one star (or pet, depending on how you looked at it) the way there was in Marfa. Guy playing third couldn’t have been anything but a Jew. El Paso was about the last place I would’ve expected to find one playing ball, but I guess they’re all over.
We got a run in the top of the first. Fidgety Frank took the hill for us. If he was tired after going nineteen in Alpine, he didn’t show it—and Wes had pitched the day before. You do what you’ve gotta do, that’s all.
Their leadoff man singled. The next fellow hit a perfect double-play ball to short. We turned it, but the lead runner bowled over Eddie at second even after he’d got off his throw. A calling card, you might say. Fidgety Frank called back. He stuck a fastball right in their third hitter’s ribs. The Texan let out a yell, but he went on down to first. Their cleanup guy made an out, so we came up again.
We all watched to see how things would shake out. Sometimes one apiece is enough, and the game goes on. Sometimes you need more. Every once in a while, things get out of hand. When their pitcher threw at our first two guys that inning, I had the bad feeling this’d be one of those afternoons.
And it was. What made it even worse for the Texans was, we jumped all over them. By the end of three and a half, we were up 8-0. They could see they weren’t gonna win. The crowd was on them in English and in Spanish. I was in the middle of things when they blew. I slid into second kind of hard to break up a double play—not a patch on what their guy did earlier, honest. I did break it up, too. Their second baseman couldn’t get off his throw.
We both wound up sprawled in the dirt by the bag. “You hairy Yankee asshole!” he said, and hauled off and punched me in the ear. Hurt like anything.
I believe I said something about his mother. I know I punched him back. Then we were rolling and wrestling and thrashing. Their shortstop jumped on top of both of us. The dugouts emptied, and we had ourselves a rhubarb.
“Break it up!” the umpires bleated. But there were two of them and maybe thirty of us, so we didn’t have to break it up if we didn’t feel like it. And we didn’t, not for a bit. The crowd screamed while both sides banged away. A few bottles came flying out of the stands. Only a few, though. This wasn’t baseball, but they liked watching it just the same.
When it wound down, the umps threw me out of the game. They tossed the Texans’ second baseman, too, so that was fair. Harv thumped me on the shoulder. “Attaboy,” he said. My ear still hurt. But you’ve got to stand up for yourself on the road. Nobody’ll do it for you if you don’t.
We ended up beating them 12-2. Might’ve been different some other day, but that was how it wound up then. Their manager didn’t look happy when he and Harv talked after the game. He was also their left fielder. He’d been in the brawl; he had a mouse under one eye.
About the most he could say was, “What the hell—you got us.”
“We don’t usually play it that way,” Harv said, which was true. He added, “If you want to, though, we can.” And that was also true.
Their manager looked up at the stands, which had been packed and still had a lot of people in them. “Ah, screw it. You guys put fannies in the seats. If you come back next year, we’ll be glad to take you on again.” He knew he liked money, whether he liked us or not.
“Glad enough so you don’t have to show you got Louisville Sluggers in your jocks?” Harv didn’t cuss much, but he got his point across.
He got it across so well, the Texans’ manager turned red under his tan. But he grudged a nod. “Yeah, yeah. You can take care of yourselves.” He rubbed his cheek. Somebody’d tagged him a good one.
And that was the story there. We showered under Dudley Field, changed into our street clothes, and rode back to the roominghouse. Harv hung on to the proceeds. By the look of things, they were safer with him than they would have been anywhere he stashed them.
We ate at a Mexican place. Wasn’t any other kind near where we were staying. We had those tacos and enchiladas and tamales and beans and spicy rice and all kinds of funny stuff like that. I washed it down with a Mexican beer. That was good—it had more taste than the American stuff. Can’t get it anywhere but right by the border, though.
Then we trooped down the street to a movie house. It was one of those Fred-and-Ginger singing-and-dancing shows. They could cut a rug, all right. Some of the things they did had to be harder than turning two with an El Paso Texan trying to knock you into next week.
Laying a quarter down for a ticket without worrying about it felt funny. I couldn’t remember the last time I was able to do that. I liked it.
I liked it till just before the end, anyway. Then there was a horrible scream right outside the theater—a man. A couple of seconds later, a girl screamed, too. The house lights came up. The movie stopped. A little man—the manager, I guess—came out and said, “Please exit the building in an orderly manner.” Then he said what had to be the same thing in Spanish. Peculiar to think Mexican farm workers and factory girls’d want to watch Fred and Ginger, but plenty of ’em did.
We hustled out. A man lay in the middle of the street. You could see right away he was dead. The streetlight showed blood in three spots on his white shirt. “Aii!” Kind of a cute Mexican girl beside me crossed herself. “Chupacabras!”
I didn’t know what that was. Before I could even think about asking, three paddy wagons and an ambulance pulled up, all of ’em with lights flashing and sirens wailing like banshees. The cops bailed out of their cars with pistols in their hands. One of ’em carried what they call a riot gun instead: a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. You didn’t want to get on his bad side, no, sir.
“That way!” A young gal—maybe the one who’d screamed out there—pointed down a dark alley. “It went that way!” Sh
e had to choke out the words.
“You can smell the stink of the thing,” a cop said. I’d thought that was only the Rio Grande wafting over the city. Maybe I was wrong.
Two cops had flashlights on their belts. They shone them down the alleyway. Something in there let out a hissing screech. All the cops started shooting at once. The riot gun boomed twice, the shots close together. One of the cops yelled. More pistol shots then, and another one from the riot gun after the guy with it reloaded.
A cop came back to the street. He didn’t seem to notice he had blood on his face and more on his hand. “We got the damn goat-sucker!” he said.
Several Mexicans crossed themselves then, and a gray-haired white woman. The fellas from the House of Daniel wanted to see what this thing was. One cop started to wave us back. Another one had been at the game that afternoon and knew who we were. He let us go on.
I wasn’t sure I felt like thanking him. The thing was as big as a cougar, maybe bigger. It had a hide like a lizard or a gator. Spines ran down its backbone, all the way to the end of the tail. It had big, pointy teeth and big claws. Close up, the reek made my stomach want to turn over.
“There’s a dead wetback,” a cop said, and he laughed.
Listening to them talk, I worked out that these things killed livestock—and sometimes herders—down in Mexico. They sucked out the blood in nothing flat. Chupacabras and goat-sucker meant the same thing.
Mexicans sneaked over the border when they got hungry, whether they had papers or not. This chupacabras thing had, too. But it didn’t work for its supper. It killed. It was big and tough and hard to dispose of. It took I don’t know how many revolver rounds and three barrels’ worth of double-aught buck before it died. It did die, though.
So did that fellow on the street. The ambulance men had covered him over so we didn’t have to see his blind, dull stare at the sky. They’d have to find out who he was and who loved him. Some lives were about to have a tornado tear through them. I remembered when my mother died. The dead man was of an age to have little kids. The goat-sucker didn’t care. It was just hungry. But they’d be as ruined as if it had hunted down their daddy on purpose.
(VIII)
We weren’t even a little bit sorry to say good-bye to El Paso, let me tell you. That chupacabras thing left me thoughtful. Well, what it left me was scared, if you want to know the truth. We’ve had werewolves as long as we’ve had full moons. It’s in the blood, they say, and for once I expect they’re right.
We’ve had zombies a long time, too. Ever since we brought over colored folks to slave for us, it would be. We make more of ’em now and we use ’em for more and different things, but they’ve been around.
Even vampires … They crossed the ocean some time not too long before I was born. They’ve spread through the whole country by now. They’re a nuisance. Some places, the ones where there are a lot of ’em, they’re worse than a nuisance. But you can keep from getting bit if you’re careful. Eddie Lelivelt and I sure did. Wasn’t the first time for me, or for him, either.
But that goat-sucker thing, that threw me for a loop when I saw it. Threw me for a worse loop when I smelled it. I guess those critters have been running around loose in Mexico for as long as there’ve been people there, however long that is. Maybe longer—I dunno. To run into one on our side of the Rio Grande, though, that rocked me back a little. More than a little.
So we were glad to head up US 80 out of El Paso, out of Texas, and into New Mexico. Our next stop was La Mesa. Then we’d go on to Las Cruces. Eddie told me Las Cruces means The Crosses in Spanish. I liked that. Oh, you bet I did. I liked it fine. If ever a name would keep those vampires away, that was the one.
La Mesa first, though. It was a tiny little town, but what they called the La Mesa Town Team did its own barnstorming. It didn’t go all over the place like the House of Daniel, but it traveled in Arizona and New Mexico and Texas and down across the border into Mexico. The Town Team and the Las Cruces Blue Sox and the Tortugas Red Caps and some other clubs down there had what they called the Old Pro League. They’d play ball and they’d play brawl with one another and with anybody else who came along. Us, for instance.
Some of the guys on the Town Team were Mexican. Some weren’t. Some could’ve gone either way. One thing I saw straight off was that whites and Mexicans were a lot easier with each other in New Mexico than they were in Texas. Farm workers who followed the crops played alongside grease monkeys from the garage and college kids out for extra dough.
We had a good game in La Mesa. It was another place where we played in the city park, but it was also another place where Harv didn’t care. The stands were full, and there was standing room around the outfield.
The Town Team played hard, but not dirty. It didn’t turn into a beanball war or anything. Maybe some folks from La Mesa went down to watch the game in El Paso the day before and told their ballplayers we knew how to do whatever needed doing. That kind of word does get around.
We won it, 9-7. I got a couple of hits and threw out one of their guys trying to stretch a double into a triple. The next batter doubled, but Wes wiggled out of the inning. He swatted me on the rear when we came into the dugout—actually, it was just a bench behind a chain-link fence, with some more chain-link in back of it to keep the fans from throwing too much at us.
“Way to go,” he said. “That would’ve been a bigger inning if you didn’t shoot him down. Dunno whether Rabbit could’ve made the throw.”
“I’m glad I did.” I left it there. I knew I couldn’t hit with Rabbit—they weren’t about to bat me third. I also knew I could get the job done in the outfield. The House of Daniel would’ve latched on to someone else in a hurry if I couldn’t. This was the first time, though, that anybody’d said I might be better out there than their man who’d got hurt.
After the game, the La Mesa manager told Harv, “Now you gotta go up and whip the Blue Sox right outta their shoes.”
“Well, we’ll sure give it a try,” Harv said.
“You gotta do it,” the La Mesa manager said. “Otherwise, the Blue Sox, they ain’t gonna let us forget it. We always play ’em home-and-home Fourth of July weekend. Those games, man, they’re wars.” He grinned. He liked it.
To show us they had no hard feelings about the game, the Town Team went out to supper with us. Not a lot of places to eat in La Mesa, but if all you were after was chili and beer you could do fine. And we did. We filled up the place, all of us still in our sweaty uniforms, and told stories about ballgames and road trips.
Some of the House of Daniel players were temperance. From what they said, their church didn’t hold with drinking. But not all of them followed all the church rules, any more than folks who listened to any other preacher did. And not all the ballplayers belonged to the church. Everybody on the team had to look as though he did, to draw notice to the House of Daniel. But I wasn’t the only one there because he could run and throw, not because he believed in the sermons coming out of Cornucopia.
The boarding house had crickets. Crickets aren’t as disgusting as cockroaches or bedbugs, but they’re about as annoying. For one thing, the little bastards kept chirping all night long. I’ve heard they do it ’cause they want to meet lady crickets. I wish they went to dances or promenaded in the town square instead.
And for another thing, crickets hop. They end up in bed with you instead of with a lady cricket. You yank a cricket off your eyebrow in the middle of the night, you won’t go back to sleep right away. Believe me, you won’t. And if you fling it against the wall hard enough to splatter it, the spot it leaves there will make the landlady screech at you while you’re leaving.
She was screeching at a bunch of us when we left the next morning. We were mostly yawning. I wasn’t the only one who’d had a crummy night. We went back to the chili joint for breakfast. They scrambled eggs and peppers and spicy sausage all together and wrapped ’em in those flat corn things they call tortillas. And they made coffee strong enough to
pry our eyes open before we went on to Las Cruces.
Las Cruces is a real town, almost a city. Six thousand, maybe eight thousand people—bigger than a place like Pampa or Big Spring, though not a patch on somewhere like Ponca City. It sits alongside the Rio Grande. Wherever they can make the water from the river stretch, everything’s all green and growing. Cotton, corn, beets, asparagus, sweet potatoes, pecans … I don’t know what all else. Go six inches past where the Rio Grande reaches and you’re out in the desert again.
They said the La Mesa Town Team was older, but the Blue Sox had their own ballyard. They didn’t have to play in the city park. They may have had it, but I didn’t much like it. Lions Park was, well, a sight to behold. It was only about 290 feet down the right-field line, and the fence was low.
Center was something else. That was why I didn’t like it. There was no fence at all out there. If somebody hit one over your head, it would roll as far as it rolled, and all you could do was chase it.
“Snake, you better play deep,” Harv told me.
“Thanks, boss. I never would have worked that out on my own,” I said. He kinda laughed. I went on, “How come you didn’t warn me it was like this?”
“I’ve seen too doggone many ballparks, that’s how come,” he answered. “I remember every one of ’em real good, but I don’t always recollect which one’s where, if you know what I mean.”
I hadn’t thought about it, but it made sense once I did. He’d taken that team over most of the country and down south of the border. He’d been doing it for years and years. How could you blame him if he misremembered whether a park was in this town or that other one fifty miles farther down the highway?
Then I stopped caring about small stuff like that. When the Blue Sox went out to catch flies, the fellow who patrolled that fenceless center field for ’em was black as moonless midnight. He looked like a center fielder, tall and skinny. He ran like a center fielder, too, and threw like one. But he was black.
The House of Daniel Page 13
