Fidgety Frank had just lit another coffin nail when a carpet came up the road toward the motor lodge. We all watched it, all of us trying to make as though we were doing no such thing. The carpet stopped in front of the cabin where Harv was staying. By the light over the cabin door, we could see that the fellow riding it wore a gray-blue jacket of a cut everybody knows. We couldn’t see that the brass buttons on the jacket were stamped CC for Consolidated Crystal, but we didn’t really need to.
The deliveryman gave Harv the message. Harv closed the door. The CC man got back on the carpet. Casual as could be, Wes asked him, “Where’d that message come from? Do you know who sent it?”
“I can’t tell you anything like that,” the deliveryman answered. Wes handed him a folded-up bill. When he unfolded it, he coughed. No, I don’t know how big it was. Big enough to make him cough, that’s how big. Real fast, he said, “It’s from Pittsburgh, from some guy on the Crawdads, whatever the Crawdads are. But you never heard that from me.” He sailed out of there faster than he had any business going.
“Huh,” Fidgety Frank said when the Consolidated Crystal deliveryman was gone. The CC fella might not have known about the Pittsburgh Crawdads, but we sure did. They were only one of the two or three best colored teams in the country. They traveled in a couple of big old limousines. People had been telling stories about Carpetbag Booker, who pitched for them, as long as I could remember. Job Gregson, their catcher, hit balls farther than anybody, and I mean anybody.
“Are they coming out for the Post tournament?” I asked.
“Don’t know,” Fidgety Frank said. Wes and Eddie both shrugged. If they did come out, they’d have a good chance of winning. We all knew that.
“What’s Harv cooking up?” Wes answered his own question: “Whatever it is, it’s gotta be something juicy. But what?”
“Can’t ask him,” Eddie said. “If he knows we know, boy, will we catch it.” So would the CC deliveryman, but we didn’t waste any time caring about him.
“I almost wish we didn’t find out,” I said. “Now we’ve got more questions about this than we do about the flying hubcaps.”
“We won’t ever get answers about those, though,” Wes said. “This stuff with the Crawdads, we’ll find out pretty quick, whatever’s going on.”
“But I want to know now,” Eddie said. I was thinking the same thing.
Wes let out a smart-aleck chuckle. “Gives you something to look forward to, don’t it? Me, I’m going to bed. We’ve got another game tomorrow. We’ve always got another game tomorrow.”
He had that right. I thought curiosity would keep me up. It did, too, for a good three minutes, maybe even five. Another game tomorrow. Always another game tomorrow. Well, I knew what I’d be doing, anyway.
* * *
What I’d be doing was getting on the bus and going up to Santa Fe for a game there the next afternoon. Nobody said a word about the Pittsburgh Crawdads. Harv didn’t think anyone else knew. Oh, wouldn’t he have reamed us out if one of us asked him something like Hey, Harv, gonna get Job Gregson to catch for us?
When you go up from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, you go up every which way you can. You go north—you go east, too, but you do go north. And you go up, as in up. Albuquerque’s just under a mile high—I think I said that before. Santa Fe’s at 7,000 feet.
And you notice the difference. At a mile up, you feel pretty much the way you always do, especially if you’ve been in high country for a bit, the way we had. Climb another couple of thousand feet on a two-hour bus ride and all of a sudden every staircase feels as though it’s got three or four extra steps in it. You stop to catch your breath when you shouldn’t need to. If you do something where you really need to, you mostly can’t.
It’s so high up, it’s not even hot. But you can sunburn lickety-split, on account of there’s less air between you and the sun. Hit a baseball and it goes and goes. Pitch one … Well, you can try. Curveballs don’t want to curve. Fastballs won’t hop the way they do down closer to sea level.
It was a pretty place. It was old, too—settled from Mexico more than three hundred years ago. On this side of the ocean, that made it ancient. I don’t reckon anything in Oklahoma is even one hundred years old, let alone three. And it looked old. It was like Albuquerque, only more so. Everything either was made of adobe or else wasn’t but looked as though it were. That kinda grows on you after a while. It makes a town look like it belongs where it is, not like it just got plopped down there by happenstance. Santa Fe’s the state capital, too.
Some of the mountains around the town still had snow on them. If Santa Fe was high, they were higher. Every so often, you’d see an eagle circling maybe even higher yet.
Santa Fe’d had semipro teams for as long as anybody. It’s never been in a pro league. The Santa Fe Saints played at Fort Marcy Park. No adobe there. Chain-link fences and wooden bleachers. If the bleachers were smaller, it would look like a high-school field.
It was too small to be as high up as it was. Only went 302 in left and 318 in right. Center was 395. That wouldn’t be a big ballyard at sea level. Up 7,000 feet, and even I started looking like Job Gregson. Well, hitting like him, anyhow. From what I heard, he was twice as wide as me and more than twice as black. But I had no trouble clouting ’em over the fence in batting practice.
Wes said, “Why don’t you let Frank pitch today, Harv? I don’t want to get blamed for a mess of a game.” I don’t know whether he was grousing about my batting-practice homers or his own curves that wouldn’t.
“I’m still pooped from yesterday,” Fidgety Frank said. “Give the ball to Eddie. He can throw a few innings.”
“I’ll do it. If you aren’t scared of what’ll happen, I’m not, either,” Eddie said. Some position players are convinced they can pitch. Once in a while, they’re right. More often, what happens is something to be scared of.
“Wes, you’ll run your fat behind up on the mound, and that’s all there is to it,” Harv said. “If you get knocked around, I expect we can jump on whatever they’ve got chucking, too.” He rolled his eyes. No, I’d never want to manage a baseball team.
More than half of the folks in the crowd looked Mexican. When they chattered or yelled, you heard Spanish with the English. But New Mexico isn’t like Texas. You saw that even more in Santa Fe than you did anywhere else. In Santa Fe, the Mexicans looked down their noses at the Yankees for being Johnny-come-latelies. They were the old families, and some of ’em were rich old families, too. Gringos? They didn’t need any miserable gringos, or they didn’t reckon they did.
The Saints were split the same way as the crowd. I heard some of the Yankees on the team calling each other gringo when they practiced: “Don’t boot that one, gringo, or you’ll warm the bench!” Stuff like that. They laughed. They thought it was funny, the same way colored folks will call each other names where they’d pull out a knife if they heard ’em from a white guy.
Harv turned out to know what he was talking about. He usually did, which was one reason he did a good job of riding herd on the House of Daniel. We landed on the Santa Fe pitcher with both feet. We batted around in the first inning, and scored five runs. Nothing makes a pitcher happier than taking the hill with a big lead. Wes gave one back in his half of the first, but you think you ought to get a medal if you only give up one in Fort Marcy Park at 7,000 feet.
We got three more in the second. Their manager—he was a fat little Mexican guy who I found out later was the assistant attorney general for the state of New Mexico—made a slow, sad walk out to the mound from the dugout. Their pitcher made a slow, sad walk into the dugout from the mound. A new guy came in. He got the last out.
The Saints answered back with a run again. Then we beat up their new pitcher. When you’re leading 12-2 after two and a half, the rest of the game doesn’t seem so important. You know what’s going to happen, and so do the players on the other side. All you want to do is collect your share of the gate and leave town without anybody getting hur
t.
When it got to be 15-4, the Saints’ third pitcher threw one at Harv’s ear. That kind of thing can happen in that kind of game. Harv got out of the way. Next inning, that pitcher came up. Wes hit him right on the ankle bone, the one that sticks out. I could hear the clunk all the way out in center. The Saint went down in a heap. After a bit, he stood up and hobbled to first.
Nobody threw at anybody else the rest of the game. One more time: message sent, message answered, answer received. The end.
“You were too much for us today,” the Saints’ manager told Harv after it was officially over. “You had your hitting shoes on.”
“Play in this place all the time and you probably gotta talk your pitchers down offa tall buildings like they was stockbrokers or something,” Harv said—as much sympathy as he’d show after he got decked like that.
The fat little Mexican heard what he didn’t say. “Just so you know, I didn’t tell Ike to spin your cap.”
“Okey-doke. We took care of it any which way.”
“I guess you did!” the Saints’ manager said. “He’ll limp for two weeks. That one caught him solid. He’s got luck with him if he didn’t break something in there.”
Good luck or bad? I could see the question on Harv’s face. He might have been as good a Christian as he could be, but he believed in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Not many ballplayers are ready to turn the other cheek. If they do, somebody may fire a fastball at that one, too.
Harv knew what kind of a big shot their manager was. He told us over supper, which is how I found out. “You better believe I went over everything three times and made sure I saw a cash box from every concession stand in the place,” he said. “With a lawyer for a manager, you bet the Saints’ll never be short for money.”
“Are you sure you got it all?” Wes asked.
“I’m sure I gave it my best shot,” Harv answered. “If he was out to diddle me, he had to work hard.”
“Sounds all right by me,” Wes said after a bit of thought. “Going against lawyers is like playing the Hilltoppers. Chances are you won’t beat ’em, but you hope you can give ’em a good game.”
When we came out, we all stared up at the stars. We couldn’t help it. We saw a lot of ’em in Roswell, and even more in Albuquerque. But you never dreamt you could see as many stars as you could in Santa Fe. The Milky Way looked like milk, honest. It wasn’t just a smudge in the sky, the way it is most places. I never saw it like that before, and I never did again, either, not even in Denver later that year.
“‘But there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets,’” Harv murmured, gaping up like the rest of us. Book of Daniel language? Sure it was. I’ve read the passage since—I hadn’t then. Daniel was talking about dreams, not stars, but so what? Seeing the stars that night was like revealing one page from a big book of wonders you don’t usually get to open.
Then something flitted across those stars. You could follow it by how it blocked them. I pulled the cross out from under my shirt. It was glowing a little, so that was a vampire, the way I thought. A couple of other guys were doing the same thing at the same time.
“I think maybe we’d better head on back to the boarding house,” Fidgety Frank said.
“Pronto,” Wes added. They say that in New Mexico—some in Texas, too. Means something like and step on it.
That seemed like a good idea, so we all prontoed. And none of us got bit that night, or crumbled to dust or caught fire when the sun hit him the next morning. Back on the bus we went. Another ballgame, coming up.
* * *
From Santa Fe, we went down to Madrid. When I saw the place, I wondered whether Harv had lost his marbles stopping there. It couldn’t have held much more than a thousand people. And it wasn’t a town, or not exactly a town. It was a company town. If not for the coal mines, there wouldn’t have been any Madrid.
They put us up in company housing. We had time to kill before the game. For one thing, Madrid isn’t far from Santa Fe. For another … Well, I’ll get to that in a little bit. The company housing was about like you’d think. It had everything a person needed, and none of what he might want.
We got some extra sleep. That was all right. They fed us lunch. Company lunch was like company housing. I didn’t have to pay for it. Just as well, ’cause I wouldn’t’ve wanted to. They showed us around. I know more about coal mining than I did before, I will say.
Then we changed into our uniforms and went to the ballpark. And as soon as we got there, I understood why Harv brought us to Madrid. The Oscar Huber Ballpark was fancier than the one they had in Albuquerque. Bigger, too—they said it would hold 6,000. The grandstand had a tin roof.
And the ballpark had lights.
It had had them for almost fifteen years when I was there. They’d replaced some of the first salamanders atop their towers with bigger, brighter ones that didn’t eat so much. The kind of people who run coal mines will save money any way they can. If that happens to make the baseball better, too, well, they don’t mind.
So the Madrid Miners were the same kind of ballclub as the Ponca City Greasemen or the Carlsbad Potashers. The coal company paid for their travel on the road. Watching them work out, I would have bet that the coal company paid for some ringers, too. They were an outfit that knew its business.
I wanted to get out there and catch some flies by salamanderlight myself. I could tell right away it was different. The ball looked like a white pill against the sky that got darker and darker. No, not like a flying hubcap, if that’s what you were thinking. Those flattened out when you saw ’em edge-on. The ball stayed round.
Under that hot white glare, the grass and the infield dirt seemed greener and redder than they would have in the daytime. The stands almost disappeared into the deepening night. You could still hear the people in ’em, but you couldn’t see them any more. It felt peculiar.
When I came in for our first at-bats, Eddie said, “If they start playing lots of games at night, teams will hire vampire outfielders to fly up and grab home runs before they go over the fence.”
“What’ll they pay ’em in—necks?” I asked. “I don’t want to go on the road with a bunch of coffins stacked up in the back of the bus. Do you?”
“Well, no,” he allowed.
“What’s the world coming to?” I went on. “Zombies stealing jobs that just take a strong back, and now you’re talking about vampires in the outfield? Isn’t there anything left for a poor, ordinary human being?”
“Doesn’t look that way,” Eddie answered. “If a zombie or a vampire can’t do your work, chances are some kind of a machine can. People are obsolete.”
“About the only thing machines can’t do is make more people,” I said, “and they’ll probably figure that one out Wednesday after next.”
“Even if they do, I bet it doesn’t catch on.” Eddie tipped me a wink. “The old-fashioned way’s too much fun.”
The Madrid Miners took the field. People in those invisible stands cheered them. They had their team name on their chests: MADRID in an arc that went up and then down, MINERS under it in an arc that went down and then up, so it almost looked as though they made a baseball. The letters and their caps and socks were black. It was all about as plain as plain could be, but it made sense for a bunch of guys who grubbed coal out of the ground.
By the way they played, some of ’em didn’t work too hard when they went underground. They were good. They were the kind of semipros who were ballplayers first and had their job jobs, if you know what I mean, to make it look as if they weren’t for-true pros.
Fidgety Frank was on his game, though. The way he’d lost in Albuquerque, I’d worried about it. You couldn’t curve people to death here. Madrid was up almost as high as Santa Fe. But Frank never threw two pitches in a row the same speed. Take a little off, put a little on, keep the hitters looking for what you aren’t throwing … He made it work.
Their pitcher was a skinny Mexican kid who threw hard. Their team and
their crowd were split like the ones in Santa Fe. More of the rich people in Madrid, the mine owners and such, were gringos, though.
It was a tight game all the way. We hit into three double plays. Their infield was as good as you ever saw. The shortstop and second baseman played as though they’d been married for years. They knew each other’s moves in their sleep. After eight innings, it was knotted up, 3-3.
Their guy started to wear down as the game went on, but their defense kept saving him. In the top of the ninth, we had men on second and third with two out and Eddie up. I knew what I would’ve done then—I’d done it before. But if I yelled it out to him, the Miners would know it, too.
Turned out I didn’t need to. He saw their third sacker playing back and laid down a sweet little bunt. The third baseman rushed in, grabbed it, and tried to make an impossible play at the plate. The run would’ve scored any which way, but he hurried the throw, and it went wild. That let our guy on second come in, too.
Sometimes you’ve just gotta know when to stick the ball in your pocket. If you try to do what nobody can, you only make things worse.
And was I glad we had the two-run cushion, because one of their guys homered with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. Nobody on, so we kept the lead. Their last batter hit the ball pretty good, but not good enough—and right at me. I caught it with both hands, trotted in, and set the ball on top of the mound.
“Final score—House of Daniel 5, the Miners 4,” their announcer said sadly, and stepped away from his microphone. Yes, they had a microphone. Along with the lights, that made the Oscar Huber Ballpark as modern as they came.
We did trade handshakes and Attaboy!s and Good game!s with the Miners. Nothing wrong with their team at all. We won the game, but it could have gone their way just as easy. They knew it. So did we. Play baseball and somebody’s got to come out on top. That’s how the game’s set up.
Eddie was so happy with himself, his spikes hardly dug into the dirt. He walloped me on the back. “I saw you do it, Snake, so I figured I’d give it a try,” he said. “If I got it down, it was a hit for sure, and I got it down. The second run seemed like icing on the cake, but we ended up needing it.”
The House of Daniel Page 18
