The House of Daniel

by Harry Turtledove

  I had my head in the stands more than I usually do. I hoped I’d spot Mich coming out to watch me play. Nope. Maybe she couldn’t get the afternoon off. Maybe she didn’t care about baseball. Or maybe she didn’t care that much about me but was just being polite at J. N. Hill’s.

  I can’t tell you how good having a real outfielder in right felt. Fidgety Frank and Wes could throw, of course, and a right fielder needs to be able to do that. But they were both slow out there, and Frank didn’t hit much. Rabbit made the team better with the glove. His first time up, he ripped a double into the right-field corner. He didn’t have much rust to knock off.

  We beat the Sand Dabs 11-3, I think it was. Their manager shook his head when he came up to Harv. “They said you were good,” he said as they shook hands. “They knew what they were talking about, I guess. You could’ve made it look even worse than it does.”

  “Can’t tell much from any one game.” Harv stayed polite. They hadn’t done anything to tick him off.

  “Nice of you to say so,” the Sand Dabs’ boss said. He had sun-furrows on his forehead and cheeks. His eyebrows were paler than his leathery skin. “No matter what you say, though, we were welterweights up against a top big man.”

  I’m sure Harv answered him, but I have no idea what he said. I did spot Mich then, still in the white blouse that said J. N. HILL’S. She was heading for the way out, but looking back at the field. I waved to her. She waved, too, but she kept going.

  “Got a girl here, do you?” Rabbit said.

  “I’d met her before, back in Oklahoma. We happened to bump into each other again this morning.” That was all true, even if it left out most of what livened up the story. I could say more later if I felt like it, but I didn’t have to.

  “Lucky you. She’s pretty.” He couldn’t have got more than a glimpse of her. Well, so what? Ballplayers notice good-looking women. Good-looking women notice ballplayers, too, but not so often. Still and all, we do all right for ourselves.

  * * *

  There are so many places to play ball in Southern California, I started losing track of them. We went up the coast to Santa Barbara and Ventura and Oxnard. We played in Pasadena, which was about as snooty as a town could get when it hadn’t been there all that long. We went inland to San Bernardino and Riverside. I don’t think they were as hot as Fresno, but they came close.

  We went one county south to towns like Santa Ana and Fullerton and Anaheim. On the way there and back, I saw more orange and lemon trees than I ever had before. They call it Orange County, and it’s got a little city named Orange in it, too.

  And we went farther south, all the way to San Diego by the Mexican border. San Diego was a good-sized town: bigger than Spokane or Tacoma, for instance. But it didn’t have a pro team then. Semipros and barnstormers played at Navy Field—San Diego’s a big Navy town—or at Balboa Stadium in Balboa Park.

  We took on a team of San Diego all-stars at Balboa Stadium. It was right next to their zoo. That was top-drawer: the snake house even had a baby dragon in it. He was something to see, all right. They made sure you stayed back far enough so he couldn’t singe you when he spat fire. He wasn’t much bigger than my arm. I don’t know what they’ll do when he grows up. His range will get longer. They can take their time figuring it out, though. The sign by the enclosure said dragons live hundreds of years.

  That all-star team had its own baby dragon. The guy playing right for them was so young, it was ridiculous. Sixteen, tops—I’d be amazed if a razor ever touched those cheeks. He was skinny as a splinter. You could drop him down a soda straw and he’d never touch the sides.

  “Hey, kid!” Wes called, watching him shag flies. “Does your mommy know you’re here?”

  He said something about Wes’s mother that would’ve made one of those Navy men in San Diego turn puce. “Punk’s not real smart, is he?” Rabbit said. “Five gets you ten Wes plunks him his first time up.”

  “I won’t touch that,” I said. I knew Wes, too.

  The kid was hitting third for the All Stars. That should’ve told us something right there. He batted left. He came up with one out and a man on first base in the bottom of the first. Sure as the demon, Wes’s first fastball spun his cap. He got up, dusted himself off, and climbed in again. “Is that all ya got, you old fart?” he yelled.

  The next one would’ve played xylophone music on his ribs, but he twisted out of its way, too. Dunno how—Wes meant for it to get him. He sent some more compliments out to the mound.

  Wes threw him a nasty curve on the inside corner. Crack! As soon as the kid swung the bat, he didn’t look sixteen any more. He uncoiled faster than one of the snakes in the zoo. The line drive split the gap between Rabbit and me. By the time we ran it down, the kid loped into third. He was laughing his behind off.

  He singled his next time up. Time after that, Wes did hit him. He went down to first cussing a blue streak. When he came up again, there were All Stars on first and second, so Wes had to pitch to him. The kid worked the count to two balls and a strike. Then he hit another one. I went back a few steps, but it was over my head and over the fence. Wes threw his glove ten feet in the air.

  The kid came up one more time, in the bottom of the eighth. Wes gave him nothing good, and he tossed away his bat and took his walk. Thanks mostly to him, the All Stars beat us, 5-3. A kid, yeah. A splinter, yeah, but a splendid one.

  He turned pro before his eighteenth birthday. By then, San Diego’d joined the PCL. A season and a half for the Friars, and the Boston Golden Cods bought his contract. They shipped him to Minneapolis. He tore up the American Association for the Mooses, too. Now he’s smacking line drives all over the Fens. The way he swings the bat, he may keep doing it for the next twenty years.

  You know what, though? From everything I hear, he’s still a first-class son of a bitch. Not that his billfold cares.

  Back then, what Wes said was, “That guy’ll go far—if somebody doesn’t kill him first.” That was about the size of it. No one has yet, and the kid’s still going.

  But we kept coming back to Los Angeles. The Seraphs won the PCL pennant that year by thirty-five and a half games. I know the Coast League plays a long season. That’s still preposterous. They split the season, winner of the first half playing against the winner of the second for the league title. Since the Seraphs walked away with both halves, they had a best-of-seven series against the top players from the rest of the league. They took that in six.

  After the playoffs finished, the barnstorming teams from back East and up the coast started coming to town. We played a few games in Weeghman Park ourselves then. No, we didn’t go back to Chicago. Los Angeles has a Weeghman Park, too. The Seraphs are a farm team for the Square Bears (sometimes people call ’em the Cubes for short), which is how that happened.

  Weeghman Park—Los Angeles’s, I mean—though, now that’s a ballyard! They say it’s the best minor-league park in the country. For once, I think they’re right. It holds twenty thousand, and it’s double-decked.

  It did have its quirks. It went 340 down the left-field line, 339 down the line in right, and 412 to center. That sounds like a fair-sized field, doesn’t it? Well, it was only 345 to right-center and left-center. They put bleachers back of the right-field fence, which cut the place down there. The fence in left ran along the street. So what would’ve been ordinary fly balls in most places went out of that one.

  Still, if you spent most of your time going from a beat-up wooden park with benches that put slivers in your butt to a high-school field fenced off with chain-link, the way the House of Daniel did, that two-decked grandstand with the tall white clock tower sticking up behind it was something to see.

  “Guys in the bigs can’t have it much better’n this,” Eddie said. I figured he was right. The clubhouses had lockers in ’em, not just nails, and they had room to turn around. If you’d seen some of the places that called themselves clubhouses that I had, you’d know how great that seemed.

  And I’ll
tell you what else seemed great. The House of Daniel couldn’t play at Weeghman every day. Too many other hot teams were in town. A lot of the time, we’d stay at that motor lodge by Todd Field in Gardena. When we did play at the fancy park, we’d ride the trolley up. Transfer to the S line, and it dropped you right by that clock tower (which was also a memorial to the men who died in the War to End War).

  When we didn’t play at Weeghman Park, we’d have a game in Gardena or Torrance or at Shell Field or Recreation Park in Long Beach or up in Pasadena or wherever Harv could promote one. And because we stayed right there so much of the time, I had a fine chance to spark Mich Carstairs.

  * * *

  Back in Enid, Mich wouldn’t have looked at me twice. Hey, let’s not kid ourselves. Back in Enid, she wouldn’t have looked at me once. Her brother ran one of the biggest businesses in town, a business that kept going strong even after the Big Bubble popped. Me? I was a drunkard’s boy, the kind of guy no respectable girl wanted anything to do with.

  But you know what? Everything’s different in California. Pa was wrong about an awful lot of things, starting with the bottle, but he got that one right. Go out to California and it’s like starting over. Everybody comes to the plate with no out, no balls, no strikes. What you were, who your people were, back wherever you came from, that doesn’t matter. Almost everybody in California comes from somewhere else, and most folks go out there to get away from whatever was wrong with where they came from.

  So it wasn’t the drunk’s son and the businessman’s kid sister. It was a guy who played ball for a pretty fair traveling team and a gal from his home town who’d found work at the feed store across the street from the ballpark. If we messed it up, it wouldn’t be because of who our kin were. It would be because we didn’t get along, just the two of us.

  Only we did get along. First time we went out, we had a Saturday-morning picnic at Meade Park, up the street from the motor lodge. Had to be a morning picnic, ’cause I was playing that afternoon. A loaf of bread, cold cuts, soda—she could’ve drunk beer, but I didn’t want to before a game.

  We ate. We talked—more about California and where we wanted to go than about Enid and where we’d been. We found out we laughed at some of the same silly things. I held her hand a little. Nothing fancy, but we enjoyed it.

  We went dancing. I’ll never put Fred out of business, but I don’t glump around out there like a zombie, either. Mich seemed happy I made the effort. Seeing her happy made me happy. So did any excuse to get her in my arms.

  Gardena had a movie house on Renshaw Boulevard. You could go there on a bus from the corner with the motor lodge and the ballpark and the feed store. That was good, since Mich didn’t have a car and I didn’t have anything I couldn’t carry with me. She was saving money to buy a secondhand machine. Los Angeles is so spread out, a car really helps you get around.

  We would sit in the parlor at the house where she rented her room. The lady whose house it was would sit across from us. She didn’t like my beard one bit, not even after I explained how I needed to wear it to fit in on my team. I never found out what Mich’s room looked like. That gal would’ve thrown me out, and Mich, too, if she’d caught me in there. That was another reason to wish one of us had a car. You can find all kinds of quiet, private places if you do.

  Just after the turn of the new year, Carpetbag Booker came through Los Angeles with a barnstorming team split about fifty-fifty between colored guys and whites. Los Angeles was tougher on colored folks than a lot of places I’d seen on my travels. It surprised me some, but that’s how it worked.

  The night before Carpetbag’s team played us, the House of Daniel took him out to dinner. We’d found what we thought was a pretty good rib joint. Carpetbag didn’t seem so impressed. His standards might’ve been higher than ours.

  He didn’t fuss about it, understand. He was always polite. And he ate his fill—it wasn’t that bad a place, just maybe not quite so good as we thought. Afterwards, he waggled a finger at us. “Y’all can butter me up all you pleases, but I’m still gonna whup you tomorrow afternoon. That there’s my job.”

  “Wouldn’t think of buttering you up,” Harv said. Carpetbag laughed—he knew better. Harv went on, “And it’s our job to try and beat you, too.”

  “Sure enough. You kin try,” Carpetbag agreed. “But I’m gonna whup you anyways.”

  And he did. We had a good crowd at Weeghman Park—seven or eight thousand. The payday made losing hurt less, but it still did. The other guys had faced him before. It was my first try. Oh, he was nasty! I figured I’d drop down a bunt, but he remembered I did that, doggone him. He threw me nothing but rising fastballs my first at-bat. When I squared, I popped one up. From then on, I took my regular hacks. That didn’t help, either. Well, misery loves company, and I had plenty.

  In games like those, where nobody was the proper home team, winners got sixty percent of the gate, losers forty percent—that was after the Seraphs took a cut for letting us use their ballpark. “Sorry I cost you money, Mistuh Harv,” Carpetbag said, “but I ain’t real sorry, ’cause I made it myself.”

  “If you stick around here, maybe we’ll get some revenge,” Harv told him.

  “We is in Bakersfield tomorrow, Sacramento the day after, an’ Oakland the day after that,” Carpetbag answered. “I’m a travelin’ man, Mistuh Harv. Don’t stick around nowhere fo’ long.”

  Not many could say they traveled more than Harv. Carpetbag Booker was one of them, though. Back when I first met Eddie, he called himself a baseball bum. Next to Carpetbag, though, he was only a beginner.

  Somewhere around that time, I realized I was serious about Mich. I can tell you just what made me see it. I started reading the want ads in the papers, looking for work in that part of town. Nothing paid as much as I was making for the House of Daniel. But before too long the team would travel on. If I had to choose between going with them and sticking around with Mich … If I was reading those want ads, that pretty much answered that question.

  If we wound up together, she’d be bringing in some money from J. N. Hill’s, too. And I figured I could catch on with one semipro team or another around there. That would add some. Not a lot: we’d play once or twice a week, not every day. And a town team wouldn’t draw the kind of crowds the House of Daniel did. Still—some.

  I had some other things to worry about, too. I knew what topped the list. Because I was serious about Mich, that didn’t have to mean she was serious about me. If she wasn’t, then sticking around in Los Angeles and finding myself an ordinary job weren’t things I wanted to do any more. I’d go out on the road again with the House of Daniel, and I’d stick with them as long as Harv wanted me around. If anybody asked me, I’d say the same thing Eddie had. I’d tell him I was a baseball bum.

  So I needed to see where I stood. Before I asked, I paid a call on a jeweler I’d found on Gardena Avenue. It wasn’t a great big diamond. To tell you the truth, it was a little tiny diamond, on account of that was what I could afford. It did have a nice sparkle to it, though. Or I thought so. I hoped Mich would, too.

  We went to the Tijuana Inn for supper. It was close to J. N. Hill’s and to the motor lodge. They could do regular steaks, even if they spiced ’em Mexican style. We had a table in the back, where it was quiet. Well, it was pretty quiet all over. The waiters were always glad to see us. They liked regulars. They would’ve liked it better if they’d had more of ’em.

  After we ate, I took the little velvet box out of my pocket and set it on the table. Mich stared at it and stared at me. She knew what it was likely to be. “Go ahead,” I said, my heart pounding about a thousand a minute. “Open it.”

  She did. Then she stared some more. “Oh, Jack,” she whispered. “It’s gorgeous.”

  “You’re gorgeous, honey,” I said. “Try it on.” I’d just been guessing about the size of her finger, but the jeweler promised he’d fix it for free if she couldn’t wear it.

  Either I was a good guesser or I got lucky. I
t slid onto her ring finger and didn’t fall off again. She moved her hand this way and that so the stone caught the light from different angles. “It is gorgeous,” she said.

  I thought her eyes shone more than the diamond did. My heart kept thudding away, though, ’cause I still hadn’t found out what I needed to know. I took a deep breath to steady myself, the way I would have stepping up to the plate with the game on the line in the late innings.

  “Do you want to marry me, then?” There. I’d said it. Scarier than that fastball behind my bean? Now that you mention it, hell yes. All that fastball could’ve done was knock me sideways. It wouldn’t have left me eating crow, the way she would if she said no.

  But she nodded. “Sure,” she said, which wasn’t yes but was close enough. Then she came around the table, plopped herself down on my lap, and kissed me. I hadn’t expected that, not even slightly, which isn’t the same as saying I didn’t like it.

  The other folks in the restaurant shouted congratulations. All the waiters clapped their hands. The headwaiter went to the bar and brought us two rum-and-Cokes that could have brought a zombie to life and then put him back to sleep.

  “On the house,” he said gravely.

  “Thank you!” Mich and I both said.

  Those were mighty fine drinks. Oh, yes. When we left, I walked as though it was blowing a gale out there, even though it wasn’t. Mich could’ve been steadier, too. But all I had to do was make it to the motor lodge up the street. Her bus stop was right at the corner there. The bus would drop her off less than a block from the place where she rented her room.

  I stood with her at the stop till the bus pulled up. Nobody else was waiting there, so we found something to do with the time. We might’ve found something more if the bus had run late. But it came right when it was supposed to. Stupid thing.