The House of Daniel

by Harry Turtledove

  They named Artesia for the first well they dug there. They made a bargain with the water elementals deep underground. That well’s been going for years and years, and it’s never run dry. They cooked up a sweet deal with the earth elementals, too, because Artesia’s as big an oil town as Midland or Odessa. Sheep graze on alfalfa near town, and Angora goats gnaw anything that grows on the hillsides farther away.

  Brainard Park in Artesia is a peculiar place to play a ballgame. It’s a real baseball park, with a partly roofed grandstand and all. But they plopped it down on a funny-shaped piece of ground and did the best they could. It’s 360 down the right-field line, but only 350 to dead center. I don’t know how far it is out to left. The distance sign’s fallen off the tin wall; a rectangle of darker green paint shows where it used to hang. Farther to left than it is to center—I’m sure of that.

  The tin wall is higher in center than it is down either line. They tried to keep balls from flying out of there, yeah. But that wall would need to be as tall as the Pierce-Arrow Building in New York City to stop all those Chinese home runs.

  When I said so, Harv came back with, “Yeah, I bet that Mike Lee on the Rebels has hit one or two out of here.”

  Did I wince? Did I groan? I know darn well I did. Sometimes you get topped, that’s all. Harv topped me there.

  And then the Artesia Drillers topped us. Fidgety Frank was on the mound for the House of Daniel, and he didn’t have anything. His fastballs ran straight—no dip, no dive. His curves hung up there in the strike zone, just asking to get creamed. When he tried to change speeds, the Drillers waited on him and hit the slow stuff as though they knew it was coming.

  For all I knew, they did. They got plenty of runners on second base to peer in and steal signs. Those tin fences already had lots of dents. The way the ball kept clanking off them, they got some more. And two or three sailed over that joke of a wall behind me. You say I hit the ball out to dead center, it’s usually quite a poke. Not at Brainard Park.

  We were hitting some, too, enough to keep the Drillers interested but not enough to catch up. The guy running the scoreboard had plenty of zeroes and ones painted on flat sheets of tin. He wasn’t using those much, though. I wondered if he’d run low on fours and fives. It wasn’t a tidy game. It wasn’t anything like a tidy game. I will say the fans got their four bits’ worth. By the time the dust settled, the Drillers beat us, 17-13.

  Looking out at the final, Harv shook his head. “By the score, anybody’d think we were playing football out here.”

  “Did we make a couple of field goals or miss an extra point?” Eddie asked.

  “Way we were kicking the ball today, I’d bet on the field goals,” Harv said. Our glovework had been about as bad as the rest of it. A pitcher doesn’t give up seventeen runs all by himself, not even in a joke of a ballpark like that. The whole team has to help out, and we did. Booted grounders, throws to the wrong base, bad throws to the right base … I made one of those. That day, it wasn’t as if I stood out from the crowd.

  The Drillers’ manager was so tickled, he slapped Harv on the back almost hard enough to knock him down. “I don’t expect we’d get you every time, but we got you today,” he said.

  “Yeah, you did.” Harv kept it short. I could see why. The Drillers weren’t a bad team, but they didn’t come close to the Las Cruces Blue Sox. That was a solid outfit. They played the game the way it ought to be played, even if they did have a colored guy in center.

  Even if Fidgety Frank were sharp, this would’ve been a high-scoring game. In a place like Brainard Park, you won’t get pitchers’ duels. Well, you will, but you’ll never know it by the scoreboard. Since Frank was about as flat as a mouse under a steamroller, we didn’t get it done.

  “We had a good gate, too,” the Drillers’ manager went on.

  “Yeah, we did.” Harv still wasn’t talking much. No, he didn’t like to lose, not for beans. But he sounded a little less end-of-the-world gloomy. Brainard Park had the ridiculous little playing field, but the stands held 4,500 people. They hadn’t been full, but they hadn’t been far from it.

  Artesia’s never yet had a minor-league team. Semipro ball was as good as those folks knew. And when it comes to semipro ball, the House of Daniel tops the heap. And here they’d gone and trounced us.

  Over in the dugout, Fidgety Frank had his sleeve rolled all the way up to his shoulder. Wes was slathering liniment on his arm. It smelled something like mint and something like moonshine and something like hot peppers. If you put it on spare ribs, it would probably cook ’em without any fire.

  Fidgety Frank looked up into the burning blue sky. “Don’t see any buzzards circling,” he said. “Danged if I know why. That thing is dead. Somebody oughta cut it off and bury it.” He sounded embarrassed. Get clobbered the way he did and you would, too.

  “I got me some plumbing work that needs doing,” the Drillers’ boss said. “With what we brought in, I can just about afford it.”

  “Good for you, then,” Harv said. “We’re on the road so much, the only plumbing I worry about is what’s hooked up to the radiator on the bus.”

  “Must be nice, playing so often.” The man from Artesia sounded as if he wished he were riding with us.

  “Well, it’s a living,” Harv told him. “Not an easy one all the time. Sometimes we have days like today. Sometimes the bus breaks down or the road washes out. Sometimes we get a rotten crowd, and we lose money for the stop. Can’t take too many of those. Sometimes we get the other kind of rotten crowd, the kind that throws stuff at us. And all the greasy spoons we eat at, I guzzle more bicarb and Bromo-Seltzer than you ever seen.”

  “Hey, I can do that when my wife makes pot roast and onions.” The Drillers’ manager chuckled, but then he frowned. “Been a while since she’s done that. These days, it’s oxtail stew and boiled tripe when it isn’t noodles and cottage cheese.”

  “Times are tough all over,” Harv said. “I’ve seen more of it than you—oh, you bet I have. Oil wells, they kinda keep you from knowing just how rugged it can get.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” the Artesia man answered. “My brother-in-law, he headed out to California. Now he’s scuffling there instead of here. Where do you fellows go next?”

  “Hobbs,” Harv said. “Do I remember straight? Isn’t the ballpark there even smaller’n this one?” He waited for the Drillers’ manager to nod, then cut loose with a sigh. “We’ll have to see what we can do about that, I guess.”

  We cleaned up and found one more greasy spoon for dinner. I’ve had worse, but I’ve sure had better. When we came out, the full moon blazed low in the eastern sky like a twenty-dollar goldpiece. It was gorgeous, but you don’t always want to be out on full-moon nights.

  The howl came from right around the corner. A second later, so did the werewolf. It charged right at us. No matter we were a whole team—nothing much can hurt a werewolf. But it can sure hurt you, and it wants to when the fit is on it.

  Nothing much can hurt it. Not nothing, it turns out. Fidgety Frank reached into his pocket and flung something at the critter. Caught it right in the nose. And the beast let out another howl, a horrible one, and turned around and ran like the dickens.

  Fidgety Frank walked over to where it had been and picked up whatever he’d thrown. “What did you do?” I asked him. I wasn’t the only one, either.

  He opened his hand. A half-dollar sat on his palm. “Werewolves hate silver,” he said, “so I gave him some.”

  “Sweet Jesus!” Wes said. “Where’d you get an idea like that?”

  Frank looked faintly embarrassed, as though he’d got caught looking at dirty pictures or something. “Read a story in a rag called Amazing by a hack named Iverson, I think it was. Some guy drove off a werewolf that way in it. I thought it was a good idea, and I guess I was right.”

  “I guess you were!” Wes said. “I gotta remember that.”

  “Yeah.” Fidgety Frank stuck the coin back in his pocket. He sighed. “Best fas
tball I threw all day, too, dammit.”

  (IX)

  Go to Hobbs and you’re almost back in Texas. I didn’t even think about that when the bus chugged out of Artesia early in the morning. It’s, oh, seventy miles from one place to the other. A couple of hours on the highway. Only you don’t stay on the highway. If you do, you end up in Lovington instead.

  Nope. A few miles after you go through the tiny little town of Loco Hills, you swing onto the right fork of the road instead of the left. The left is the one that keeps on being US 82. The right … You go on for a ways, and then the paving stops. It’s not dirt all the way from there to Hobbs, but it is for something close to twenty miles.

  We had to stop once, to jack up the bus and fix a blowout. It was hot. The sun sledgehammered down. It was dryer than dry. I was helping to work the jack. I’ve done things I enjoyed more.

  We were about through when the car under an oncoming cloud of dust turned out to have cops in it. I was glad to see ’em, which’ll tell you something about how frazzled I was. “Sorry we didn’t get here sooner,” one of them said.

  Harv wiped his sweaty forehead with his sleeve. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I bet you are.”

  “We would’ve lent a hand.” The cop turned to his partner. “Wouldn’t we, Winslow?”

  “Sure. You bet.” By the way Winslow said it, he was lying and didn’t care if we believed him or not. The other cop gave him a look. Winslow sounded a little friendlier when he went on, “Wouldn’t want the buzzards and the coyotes squabbling over your bones.” He mostly didn’t talk like a Texan, but he said kye-oats the way they did.

  Buzzards were circling up above us now. They weren’t after Frank’s arm. They were hoping for the whole team. They’d flown over this road often enough to know that, when cars and things had to stop along it, they got a decent chance for the blue-plate special.

  The cop who wasn’t Winslow said, “I’ve seen the House of Daniel play before. You’re good. You heading for Hobbs?”

  “Sure are,” Harv said. Where else would we be going on that horrible road?

  “I’m from Artesia myself,” the cop said. “I hope you knock the stuffing out of the Boosters. Now, as long as you’re all okey-dokey, Winslow and me are gonna mosey along.”

  “You do that,” Harv said, along with something less charitable under his breath.

  Off drove the cops. They left their own trail of dust behind. It wasn’t a dust devil, but it made you think of one.

  We piled back into the bus. One thing playing ball every afternoon will do is give you a suntan. I knew a fellow back in Enid who was so blond and so pink, he couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t tan at all. He’d burn and peel and burn and peel till finally he had to hang up his glove—he couldn’t stand it any more. These days, a lot of towns have lights for their ballparks and play under ’em as often as not. Wasn’t like that even those few years ago, though.

  Our adventure with the tire cost us half an hour. Harv couldn’t step on the gas, the way I know he wanted to. On that rutted dirt track, he would’ve had another flat in jig time, or else pieces would’ve started falling off the undercarriage. So he just drove along, taking things easy even if he didn’t like it. When somebody going the other way came by, he slowed down even more till he got past the dust the truck or the Model T kicked up.

  I know those twenty miles on dirt only seemed like forever. If they really were, I’d still be on ’em, I guess, like the Flying Dutchman only in a bus instead of a boat. I also know we all cheered when we got on US 62—which is the same as US 180 on that stretch—to finish the run to Hobbs. Could be asphalt’s never got itself a bigger hand.

  Hobbs isn’t even five miles from the Texas line. We were closer to Midland and Odessa again than we were to Las Cruces and La Mesa. When I wondered out loud about that, Eddie said, “Don’t try to keep a map of where all we’re going in your head, Snake. It’ll drive you screwy—well, screwier. It looks like the belly marks a real snake leaves in the dirt. It does if he’s drunk before he starts going, I mean.”

  “When I want to know what you think, Eddie, I’ll kick it out of you,” Harv called from the driver’s seat, so he’d overheard us. “Long as we’re in Denver for the start of the Post tournament, everything’s fine.”

  We stayed at a motor lodge in Hobbs. US 62 (or 180, if you’d rather) runs west and a little south toward Carlsbad, so there is a paved road there. It just wasn’t the one we’d been on. The old man running the motor lodge was glad to see us. Most of his cabins stood empty, so I expect he would’ve been glad to see anybody.

  “People been askin’ about y’all, askin’ when the House of Daniel was comin’ to town,” he told Harv. “They want to know what y’all are up to.” Yeah, we were by the Texas line, all right. By the way he talked, he’d grown up on the other side of it.

  Harv puffed out his chest. Any farther and he would’ve busted off some buttons. “Everybody wants to know when the House of Daniel is coming to town,” he said grandly. “It’s true in plenty of places bigger than this.”

  I was proud of myself, to be part—even a little part—of such a famous team. I was when I heard the old man go on like that, anyhow. Later, I had me a different notion about why those people were asking about the House of Daniel. But that was later. I didn’t have it then, when it might’ve done me some good. You never have those notions quick enough to help you. It’s always later, when you can see why you should’ve had ’em sooner.

  We got into our uniforms and went aboard the bus one more time. You spend more time riding here and there and back and forth than you do playing ball, let me tell you.

  Well, it wasn’t a long trip from the motor lodge to League Park. Hobbs is growing like a weed—that was what the guys who’d been there before said—but it’s not big enough for anything in town to be too far from anything else. Don’t ask me why they call their ballyard League Park. They’ve never been in a pro league. New Mexico semipro ball is hot stuff, though. We’d already seen that.

  When we got inside, everybody groaned. Yeah, it was another one of those ballparks. Honest to Pete, I don’t know why they built so many of ’em that way out in West Texas and New Mexico. They’re high up out there. The air’s already thin and dry. The ball flies like nobody’s business. So how come they play in so many stupid little bandboxes? I guess they just like to watch balls sailing over the fence.

  “Hope you got your hitting shoes on, boys,” Wes said when he saw the numbers painted on the outfield wall. It was 340 down the left-field line in League Park. Okey-doke, that’s an honest poke. Not long, but honest. But it was only 345 to center and 290 to the right-field line. They plopped another field on a lot too small to hold it.

  “Just play your regular game, guys,” Harv told us. “Don’t air it out swinging for the fences. You don’t got to. Plenty of balls’ll leave this yard any which way, and you won’t mess up your swing trying to do too much.”

  Harv was full of good advice. He usually was. Here, though, how could you talk somebody into not whaling away with all his might? It was like putting a turkey dinner in front of a starving man and telling him to take little bites and chew his food real good.

  I watched the Boosters taking their hacks before the game. They all swung with an uppercut. They were sure going for the downs with every cut. Well, this was their home grounds. They played half their games here. The House of Daniel couldn’t afford to try and smash everything. That style just doesn’t work when you use it in a bigger place.

  “Maybe even we’ll pick up some homers here,” I said to Eddie. Along with Azariah, we were the smallest, slimmest guys on the team.

  “Maybe we will. I don’t know if I want to or not, though,” he said. “I start trying to hit ’em out, most of ’em won’t make it.” Anybody’d think he’d been listening to Harv or something.

  Harv wasn’t watching the Boosters, not right then. He was looking into the stands. He didn’t fancy what he saw, either. “We’ve got a full house, a
nd that’s good,” he muttered. “But I don’t think this place’ll hold more than thirteen hundred, fourteen tops, even if they stuff ’em in sideways. Miserable park’s too small all the way around.” I would’ve guessed the crowd for bigger—it was plenty loud—but you couldn’t beat Harv at counting the house.

  A few of the faces in the crowd were swarthy and Mexican. There weren’t any faces like that on the town team. No black faces, either. Well, even the one on a mostly white team had surprised me plenty. But I remembered again that Texas started just the other side of Hobbs.

  We got three in the top of the first. One ball went over the fence and one banged off it. In the bottom of that frame, Wes served up his own gopher ball. But it was a solo shot, and the Boosters didn’t get anything more then. Still, you could tell what kind of game we’d have.

  I led off our half of the second. I hit a fly to center. I hit it pretty hard—didn’t crush it or anything. Most ballparks, it would’ve been a medium-deep out. There, it ticked off the top of the fence and went over. The Boosters’ pitcher flipped his glove in the air—that’s how disgusted he was. I hustled around the bases. Not like I had much practice at a home-run trot.

  Nobody talked to me when I got back to the dugout. Nobody even looked at me. Then all the guys pounded on me and made a racket. It was my first long ball on the team, and they made sure I’d remember it.

  A couple of innings later, I went hard into that center-field fence, trying to catch a liner that should’ve been an easy out. It banged into the wood a couple of feet over my glove. Fidgety Frank was playing right. He got the ball and held their runner to a single. Center and right were so short, if any outfielder had the ball you couldn’t go for second ’cause you’d get nailed.

  “You all right?” he asked me after he threw it in.

  “I’ll live.” I’d have a new bruise to go with the one from where the Las Cruces pitcher hit me, but what can you do? Was I thinking Wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful, too? Oh, you bet I was.