“Aw, manure!” the Medford manager said. Something like that, anyhow. Harv smiled back at him. You win the game, you can afford to smile. You win the game because you worked the hidden-ball trick, you can really afford to smile.
* * *
We drove east to Klamath Falls through the forested mountains. They’ve done a lot of logging in Oregon, but they’ve still got a demon of a lot of trees left. The ones covering those mountainsides were firs and spruces and pines and hemlocks and oaks and others I couldn’t name. The shrubs underneath the trees were wild lilac and manzanita and something that grew lots of little red berries.
There wasn’t much traffic. Deer kept bounding across the road. Once Harv screeched the brakes so hard, he spilled half of us out of our seats. If he hadn’t, we could’ve brought some more venison into Klamath Falls tied to our fender. Deer are stupid. They don’t look both ways, or even one way, before they jump out. They just do it, and sometimes they pay the price.
I saw a black bear in a roadside clearing, making a pig of itself on a carcass. Maybe it had killed that deer a little while before, or maybe it was filling up on carrion. Bears are fussier than buzzards, but not always a lot fussier.
And I saw … Well, I saw two or three of ’em before I decided my imagination wasn’t playing tricks on me. Even after I decided it wasn’t, I had no idea what in blazes to call ’em. So I asked: “What’s eight or nine feet tall, all covered over in shaggy brown hair, and walks on its hind legs?”
“That would be Harv’s uncle,” Wes answered. “Didn’t you hear? He’s playing left for us when we get to Klamath Falls.”
“Looked more like your grandpa to me,” Harv said, and turned some of the laughs back on Wes.
Laughs were fine, but I still wanted to know. “C’mon, you guys,” I said. “What’s the right name for those—things? Whatsits?”
“You said your grandpa was called Elmer, didn’t you, Wes?” Harv said. Once those two started going at each other, they didn’t want to stop.
Eddie actually answered my question: “Around here, they call ’em bigfoots, or sometimes bigfeet or bigfeets. The Indian name for ’em—or an Indian name for ’em, anyhow—is sasquatch.”
“Are they people or animals or devils?” I asked.
“Somewhere in there,” Wes said, which didn’t help at all. He went on, “Probably closest to people. But what are people except animals with some devil in ’em?”
Harv breathed out, hard. “You need to read the Good Book more, Wes.”
“‘What is man, that thou art mindful of him?’” Wes quoted, to show Harv that he did—and to annoy him. Then he said, “That always seemed like a real good question to me.” It must have seemed like a good question to Harv, too, because he didn’t try to answer it.
Klamath Falls sits by the southern tip of Upper Klamath Lake (Lower Klamath Lake is on the far side of the California line). Swarms of white pelicans floated in the lake and flew above it—when they did, they seemed nearly as big as a small aeroplane. They raised their chicks there. As soon as I saw ’em, I understood why the team we’d be playing was the Klamath Falls Pelicans.
Out in back of the motor lodge where we were staying, a bigfoot or sasquatch or whatever you wanted to call it was chopping a big oak log into firewood. The axe it swung could’ve cut off an elephant’s head. No, not it. In spite of the long hair all over, that bigfoot was definitely he. His feet weren’t the only big thing about him.
He stopped and stared at us when we got out of the bus. “Boy,” he said in a high, thin, piping voice that didn’t go with his bulk, “you guys are almost as furry as I am! How’d that happen?”
“We’re the House of Daniel.” Harv sounded calmer than I could have. “How’d it happen that you’re here in town and not up in the mountains somewhere?”
“I love waffles,” the bigfoot said. “Pancakes, too, but waffles even more. You have no idea what a nuisance it is to make waffles in the woods. And whipped cream! Whipped cream is impossible! So I work in Klamath Falls and I get waffles at the diner.”
“You don’t, uh, play baseball, do you?” Harv asked. Yeah, the sasquatch had a big strike zone. But if he ever got good wood on one, no ballpark would hold it. Lordy! No county would.
“Not me. I’m kinda slow,” he answered. “But Klamath Falls has a basketball team that hasn’t lost for years.” He mimed dropping the ball in the basket. With hands that size, he could treat a basketball the way Carpetbag treated a baseball.
After we put on our uniforms and headed over to the ballpark, we saw a few more bigfoots going on about their business in Klamath Falls. I don’t know whether they loved waffles, too, or if they had different reasons for coming to town. But they made themselves at home, and the ordinary people there took ’em in stride.
Pelicans Field was wooden, but pretty new and well kept up. It held maybe 2,500. The team played in a semipro league with the Medford Nuggets and other outfits from towns in southern Oregon and the northern chunk of California. A game with us was an extra payday for them, and a bigger one than they got most of the time.
While we were coming in from our warmups and they were going out, one of them said to me, “Hear you had some fun in Medford yesterday.”
“Fun?” I gave him a crooked grin. “Yeah, you could call it that.”
“What touched it off?” he asked.
“We pulled the hidden-ball trick in the bottom of the ninth, and the fella who got caught didn’t much like it.”
His mouth fell open. “I bet he didn’t! I’ve never seen anybody try that, let alone work it.”
I wondered if I should’ve kept quiet. Now we wouldn’t be able to spring it here. But if he knew there’d been a dustup in Medford, somebody on the Pelicans probably already knew why. That was how it looked to me, anyway. And with a little luck, we wouldn’t need it.
As the park filled up, I noticed it had a few extra-big boxes by the dugouts. The seats in ’em were extra big, too. And sure enough, three sasquatches sat down behind the Pelicans’ dugout. Klamath Falls worked to help ’em fit in if they wanted to. Plenty of worse ways to go about things. In a bit, one of them went up to the concession stand and came back with three of the biggest mugs of beer you ever saw. I wouldn’t have wanted to mess with a drunk bigfoot, but they didn’t get drunk. They behaved better than most ordinary people. You could hear ’em, though. They all had those squeaky voices.
The Pelicans beat us, 4-3. They got a well-pitched game, and they made some good plays when their guy got in trouble. Wes pitched fine for us, too. It was one of those games where somebody had to lose, and that afternoon it was us. Not even Harv could get too upset about it. We didn’t do anything wrong. We just didn’t win.
When we went to a diner for supper, I almost ordered some gooey waffles. But I didn’t. I had fried fish and French fries instead. I was cleaning my plate when Eddie said, “I wonder if the bigfoots who live in town have to pay taxes like everybody else.”
“If they do, it’s the best reason I can think of for moving back to the woods.” Wes didn’t like taxes. He liked the people who collected them even less.
“But then what would they do for waffles?” Fidgety Frank asked.
“And beer,” I said. “Don’t forget beer.”
“I never forget beer,” Frank said seriously. “They sure could put it down, couldn’t they?”
“They’ve got bigger boilers to fill up,” Wes said. “They didn’t get out of line or anything.”
“Good thing they didn’t,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to try and make anything that size shut up, not unless I had some bigfoot cops with me. Even then, I’d like it more if they got out in front.”
“Me, too,” Eddie said. He was about as big as I was: not very, in other words. Most of the other guys on the team were taller or wider than the two of us, or taller and wider. Of course, put anybody from the House of Daniel alongside a sasquatch and he’d look nine years old, tops.
“We want to g
et an early start tomorrow,” Harv said. “Next game is down in Redding, against the Tigers, and it’s a longish way. California, here we come, with our spikes and chewing gum!” Have I said before that Harv couldn’t carry a tune if he had a pail to put it in? In case I haven’t, he couldn’t. That didn’t stop him from trying, however much the rest of us wished it would have.
* * *
California! For a long time, I’d thought my pa settled there after he got out of Enid. I might think so to this day if he hadn’t gone to that game up in Bellingham—about as far from California as you can get and still stay on the West Coast.
Maybe Mich Carstairs still was somewhere in the Golden State. I hoped she was, for her sake. She’d got out of Ponca City, anyhow, even faster than I had. For all I could prove, she’d headed for New Hampshire. But I liked thinking she might be in the same state I was in. I liked thinking we might bump together some way, too. I didn’t figure the odds were good, but I didn’t do a lot of calculating about odds. Did she ever go see a ballgame? I had no idea, which didn’t keep me from thinking about it.
Crossing from Oregon into California wasn’t anything special. It wasn’t like taking the ferry across the Columbia to get from Washington into Oregon. It was more like going from Colorado into Utah. The only difference between the start of the one state and the end of the other was the line on the map. If I hadn’t seen the sign next to US 97, I never would’ve known where that was.
Even after we crossed the border, we had more than 120 miles to go before we got to Redding. California’s a big state. All the states out West are big, but California’s big even compared to the rest of them. After Texas, it’s the biggest in the forty-eight. And it’s about as tall as Texas. It’s just skinnier.
Weed was the town where US 97 ran into US 99. Dunno how come they called it that—it was a harmless enough little place. We went on down US 99. Off to the east and south, Mount Shasta got bigger and bigger. It’s not as tall as Mount Rainier, up by Seattle and Tacoma. But you can see it better because the air is dry, not hazy and misty and foggy.
Redding sat at the upper end of the Sacramento Valley, with mountains to the east and west. It wasn’t much bigger than Weed, but they knew about the Tigers all the way up in Oregon. Tigers Park had gone up ten or twelve years earlier. The team or whoever backed them had money. Everything was clean and freshly painted. The plumbing worked. The showers had hot water. A team from the regular minors would’ve been happy to play there.
The Tigers handled themselves like a team from the regular minors. They wore pinstriped uniforms with a tiger’s head on the left breast. I’d wondered if that would ever happen. Now here it was. Their tigers against our lions. The two biggest cats facing off.
It was a hot day—up in the nineties, maybe over a hundred. The heat felt more like New Mexico than Texas or Oklahoma, though. The air stayed dry, so your flannels didn’t stick to you and get all soaked with sweat. That made the weather easier to take. Not easy, but easier.
At least half the Tigers could’ve played pro ball, or had a few years earlier. They weren’t a young, quick team. They knew what they were doing, though, and they hadn’t got too creaky to do it. Their second baseman had one of the sweetest pivots I’d ever seen. The crowd cheered ’em on. The park wasn’t great big—like the one in Klamath Falls, it held 2,500 or so (no bigfoots, or none I saw). Against us, they filled it up. It was another one of those ballyards with spaces between the planks on the outfield fence. Kids—grown-ups, too—peeked through them.
Fidgety Frank kept the Tigers guessing. They threw a lefty at us, too, only one who didn’t fidget so much. Their guy tried to fool us with his pitches, not with his motion.
That works the first time through the lineup, especially if you’ve never seen a pitcher before. The fellow on the mound has to be better to make it go the second time around, and the third pass is harder yet. Besides, he’s starting to tire out himself by then.
So they went up on us, 2-0, after four. But we tied it in the fifth and got a run in the sixth. Then they tied it. Yeah, they could play. We got four in the eight, though, to grab some breathing room. I knocked in two of those myself with a single to left. They plated one in the eighth and one in the ninth, but we won it, 7-5.
They were good sports. They all shook hands with us. They didn’t like losing any more than anybody else would have, but they didn’t waste time moaning about it. “You got us,” their manager said. “We like to take on the best teams that’ll play us. We sent letters to the Seals and the Oaks in the Bay Area, and to the Sacramento Senators, but we couldn’t get a game with any of ’em.”
“We’ve had the same trouble with Coast League teams,” Harv said. “Seems to me like they think they’re supposed to beat us. So if they do, it’s nothing special. But if we beat them, they look like chumps. The only thing that might bring ’em is if you can promise a big house. They like money as much as anybody else.”
He didn’t tell the Tigers’ manager to go on the road against the PCL clubs. That was a bad bet. Fans in Frisco and Oakland and Sacramento are spoiled. They wouldn’t want to watch their darlings take on a no-account team from a whistle-stop town. The people in charge of the big-city teams knew what was what. If they didn’t care to play against the House of Daniel, they weren’t likely to take a chance on the Redding Tigers.
“Where do you guys go next?” the Tigers’ manager asked.
“Red Bluff,” Harv answered.
By the face the guy from Redding made, I guessed that was the next town down the road. They must have loved each other like Pampa and Borger in Texas. As soon as the fella opened his mouth, I knew what he’d say. And he did: “You beat those damn Stags, you hear?”
“We’ll give it our best shot,” Harv said. “We always do.”
* * *
Red Bluff. Chico. Yuba City. I don’t know how many other Sacramento Valley towns we played in. Lots of them. We kept working our way south. Redding was hot. Red Bluff was hotter. Chico was hotter yet. If you felt like baking yourself, central California was the place to do it.
We stayed away from the coast. It was kind of a shame. On that side of the mountains, the weather wasn’t much different from what they got in Seattle. It was cool and damp and foggy. On the side of the mountains where we were at, the weather wasn’t much different from what they got in hell.
And we kept working our way down into it, too. Stockton. Modesto. Those were towns that had had pro teams years earlier but lost them again: towns like a lot of the ones in Texas and Utah and Idaho. Even now, when one of the semipro clubs in those places found somebody good, the Coast League teams would hear about it quick. The semipros made money selling contracts to the PCL teams. The big leagues had chains of farm teams in the regular minors. The Coast League used some of those semipro teams in the medium-sized towns in California the same way.
The baseball there was tough even before the barnstorming teams got going. We lost more often than Harv liked. The trouble was simple: they had lots of good players. If a guy lost a step or two and couldn’t stick with the Seals or the Beavers or the Hollywood Stars, he wouldn’t drop down to a lower minor league. There were no lower minor leagues on the West Coast then.
No—he’d get on some hot semipro outfit and make it hotter, the way that Vic guy had with McNulty Transfer in Tacoma. He might not be a topflight pro any more, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t play. I was glad to be a center fielder. You really needed to cover ground out there. Some old pro who’d got slow couldn’t steal my job. A good thing, too, ’cause plenty of those fellas hit harder than I did.
Oakland, now, did its spring training in Fresno. And the semipro team we played there, which was probably the best one in town, was called the Fresno Acorns. The Oaks played them every spring, getting ready for the Coast League season. And the Oaks’ young players, the ones who weren’t ready for the PCL, played for the Acorns and learned whatever they needed to know.
One thing I don’t reck
on they ever did learn was how to stay cool in Fresno. I don’t believe there is any way to do it. Fresno isn’t just hotter than Texas. Fresno’s much hotter than Texas. If that doesn’t scare you, you must never have been to Texas. Or to Fresno.
Fresno is also the raisin capital of the world. You put grapes out under that sun and they shrivel to raisins in nothing flat. If you put me out under that sun with no clothes on, I’d shrivel to a raisin in nothing flat, too.
You’d think—you’d hope—a team in a place like that would play in a ballpark with lights and schedule as many night games as it could. You’d be disappointed. I sure was. We beat the Acorns 4-3. It was another one of those games where at the end you aren’t sure of anything except that you won. You don’t go away thinking We were better than the team we beat. I’d got used to that feeling playing for the House of Daniel. The longer we played in California, the more air leaked out of it.
One of the things you’ll see in Fresno is wreaths of garlic bulbs around doors and windows. A lot of the people there are Armenians. The men are hairy and dark and they’ve got big hooked noses, so they look like Jews. But they aren’t. Armenians are like Greeks—they use garlic to keep vampires away. You smell it all over the place.
They cook with it, too. They put it in lamb and in chicken and in salads—in everything but ice cream and soda pop. They put tarragon in soda pop instead. After a while, garlic grows on you. I don’t know but what I’d sooner flavor lamb with it than with mint jelly.
Visalia is another one of those towns where they play good ball. Porterville is, too. We won a game in Visalia and lost one in Porterville—or it might’ve been the other way around. Neither one of those ballparks had lights, either, and oh, they were hot. We kept pouring down water and gulping salt pills.
From Porterville, we went down to Bakersfield. That’s an oil town, the last town of any size before you go over the high pass there and come down the other side into Los Angeles. I hadn’t done that yet. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.
The House of Daniel Page 34
