by Gerald Duff
“All right,” I said. “I don’t mind saying all that, but it ain’t the truth.”
“To hell with the truth,” Dynamite said. “Truth don’t matter. Hadn’t you learned that yet?”
“I’m learning all kinds of thing, I reckon,” I said. “What’s the other thing you want to tell me?”
“Here it is. Teeny Doucette was right where she wanted to be last night, dancing there in the Bon Soir Club with Clayton LeBlanc. You didn’t save her from nothing. She didn’t need no protection. You got to understand that.”
“Not the way he was seized up to her,” I said. “With his mouth all up against her neck like a cannibal will do to somebody he’s got a hold of.”
“A cannibal? Jesus Christ, Gemar. Where do you get that kind of notion?”
“It don’t matter where I got knowing what I know,” I said. “I saw what was happening, and I did what I was supposed to do.”
“You know what money is? Do you know what people have to do to get hold of some of it and make a living these days? Don’t you know you got to put on sale what people will buy and you better hope that what you got to trade is what they want?”
“I didn’t see no trading taking place last night in that honky-tonk,” I said, wanting to throw the ball in my hand as hard as I could into a catcher’s mitt or up against the outfield wall if there didn’t happen to be a catcher around to show me a target. I needed something to aim a hard throw at. “I know what I saw.”
“Trading’s taking place every day all day long,” Dynamite Dunn said. “All night, too, let me tell you. You got to learn to live with that. Teeny Doucette’s done learned that already.”
“I ain’t going to do that, Dynamite,” I said. “I’m not trading nothing with nobody, and I don’t want to know about trading one thing for another. I’m just going to play baseball in the Evangeline League as long as I want to for as long as they’ll let me.”
“That’s trading, Gemar,” Dynamite said. “That’s pure and simple trading.”
“Not when I’m throwing the ball by somebody that’s trying to hit it,” I said. “Nor when I’m up at the plate with a piece of wood in my hands to keep that other one from throwing that ball by me. Not then. That ain’t trading. That’s baseball.”
“I see it ain’t no use talking to you,” Dynamite said, smiling big.
“I want to throw some fastballs,” I told him. “I’m tired of talking. Set up.”
“All right, Gemar,” Dynamite said, pulling his mask down over his face, “let me get my poor old legs bent down in that squat again. Show me what you going to get them boys out with in the next game you pitch.”
14
We had our first home stand of the season then, with two teams coming in back to back, three games each, with one off day in the middle, and the first stand was with the Jeanerette Blues and the next was the New Iberia Cardinals. That was six games in all we played that week, and I was in every one of them. I pitched two, the second game in each series, and Hookey Irwin opened both of them. Cliff Labbé started the third games against Jeanerette and New Iberia, and he lost both of them, not lasting past the fourth inning against Jeanerette and getting pulled out of the New Iberia game in the eighth. Hookey won both of his, and so did I.
I was in right field in two games against the Blues and one against the Cardinals, and Dutch Bernson put me in center the other one when Phil Pellicore got his ankle sprained stepping in a hole and had to sit out for a while. I pitched better than I hit in that first homestand with the Rice Birds, but not much. I got on most times I was up, and I hit one out against the Blues and went four for five in one of the games against the Cardinals. I felt all right, for the most part, but I did strike out against one of the Blues pitchers and had to walk back to the dugout like a dead man. It was all I could do to keep my bat from dragging in the dirt on the way back from home plate where I’d let myself be fooled by a curve ball out of the strike zone. I could hear that pitcher pawing at the mound with his cleats my whole way back to the dugout. Nobody looked at me when I sat down, but Harry Nolan slapped me on the shoulder when I walked by him. I saw him do that, but I couldn’t feel his hand hit me.
A man who’s dead can’t feel nothing from the outside.
After I’d pitched that second game, the middle one against the New Iberia Cardinals, somebody came to the clubhouse wanting to talk to me. I was sitting by Dynamite Dunn taking off my cleats when Dutch Bernson come up to say something to me.
“Gemar Batiste,” he said. “It’s a man from the Rayne Tribune here wants to ask you some questions. I told him he could talk to you for a little while. Name’s Tommy Grenier.”
“Grenier’s Grumblings,” somebody yelled out, Tubby Dean I believe. “Why things ain’t going right.”
“Now, Tubby,” the man from the Rayne Tribune said, “you’re giving me a bad reputation here. I just came here to praise and admire the Rice Birds, like I always do when you win a game.”
“And shit on us when we don’t,” Tubby said, causing the ones who heard him to yell things back. We had just won one, and most everybody in the clubhouse was ready to whoop and holler if they got the chance. All in all, the clubhouse was lively.
Tommy Grenier looked to me like a man whose name didn’t fit him too well. I would’ve thought the name Tommy was something you’d call a young white kid, but the man who wanted to talk to me was way yonder past being a kid. He was wearing suit clothes and a necktie and a white shirt with stripes in it, and was fat enough that he’d sweated through most of his clothes.
“Gemar Batiste,” he said, shifting a little notebook from one hand to the other and sticking out his fingers for me to take hold of. I didn’t hold on to his hand long, wet as it felt to me. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Tommy Grenier sat down on the bench beside me, and I shifted down it a little to put a little more space between us, but that didn’t stop him from scooting down to follow me. “They tell me you’re an Indian from a tribe in Texas.”
I nodded to allow that I was, and Tommy Grenier started asking me some questions. I still got that first piece that got wrote about me playing in the Evangeline League because I’d cut it out of the Rayne Tribune and sent it to Polk, my little brother. I’d promised him I’d write once I got to the Rayne Rice Birds, and I did, and he saved that first letter with that newspaper clipping in it.
Here’s some of what it said. I’ll tell you where the lies and the parts Tommy just made up are located when I come to them. A man telling a story, whether he’s writing it down or just saying it out loud, will not be satisfied with the plain truth. That’s true of people writing in newspapers and I imagine it’s true of anybody anywhere claiming to be recounting what has took place and needs telling about. They ain’t lying, exactly, but twisting the truth to fit what they want to get across. Generally they got something in mind they’re trying to prove, and the real truth ain’t a consequence.
Me now, I consider an exception to the rule. I’m telling what really happened, and I haven’t got a reason to lie. Why should I? Everybody’s dead now from that long-ago time, anyway, and the Evangeline League is deader than the ballplayers in it and the Louisiana towns that had teams playing. I’m just telling this story to set things right. I ain’t trying to prove nothing. And I can hear how Dynamite Dunn would be laughing out loud to hear me talk about that time. He’d find things to differ with me on.
Here’s some of that story Tommy Grenier put in the Rayne Tribune. The top of the page had a headline that was a bigger size than what came next, and it told the first lie. “Alabama Indian Tomahawks Cardinals,” it said. That was wrong, and it wasn’t what I told him I was. Tommy told me later when I told him what he’d called me was wrong that he had to tell it that way. “People will not read all those details,” he said. “They don’t have time for it. They don’t want to know i
t, and that’s the first thing a reporter’s got to understand. Do not tell them what they don’t want to hear.”
The littler print went on like this. “He’s named Gemar Batiste, and he’s from a reservation in Texas. He’s called Chief by his teammates on the Rice Birds roster, and he set down the New Iberia Cardinals with a shutout two-hitter last night in Addison Stadium. He depends on a fastball he calls his Thunder Bolt, mixed in with a curve named Snake Crawler. He was big poison to the Cardinal hitters, and he lets out with an authentic Indian war whoop every time he sets a batter down.
“Watch out, Evangeline League. Big Chief Gemar Batiste is on the warpath, and he’s hungry for strike-outs and scalps.”
When I first saw this kind of stuff that Tommy Grenier had made up from what I’d told him in the clubhouse, I was lying on my bed in Miz Doucette’s house on Serenity Street listening to Mike Gonzales read it out loud out to me. The Rayne Tribune newspaper was the one that Velma Doucette got on her porch every day, and she’d caught Mike in the hall and asked him to show this one to me.
“That fat man didn’t get it right,” I said to Mike Gonzales who was reading louder than he had to and waving one hand up and down as he did it. “I never said nothing about calling no fastball a thunderbolt or a curve a snake.”
“Not a snake,” Mike said. “You didn’t call your curve ball a snake. See here. What you called it is Snake Crawler. That’s a lot different from just snake. What it means, you understand, is your curve is a crawler, like a snake. It ain’t the snake itself. Your curve ain’t just all coiled up like a snake will do. It’s got a motion to it, like a snake on the move. Let’s get it right, Chief. Watch what you’re saying now.”
I listened to Mike Gonzales laugh and carry on and stride around the room, knowing he’d simmer down directly.
After that story by Tommy Grenier came out in the Rayne Tribune newspaper, some people read it, I guess. The ones that made their way through all of it seemed to believe what it said. They did that because they wanted to think an Indian will act the way Tommy Grenier said I did. It satisfied the way they wanted to see things. It’s a lot more interesting to believe a red man will let out a war whoop when he gets somebody out in a baseball game than it is to see the truth. And the name Gemar ain’t familiar to most people not living in the Alabama-Coushatta Nation, so they would rather hear his name is Chief and believe he calls a pitch a Thunder Bolt or a Snake Crawler than a fastball or a curve.
I learned early on in life to take advantage of the way the white folks liked to think about Indians. You can use that to an advantage if you’re willing to play along a little. You do it too much, and it will make you sick, though. But if you don’t let yourself start believing you truly are the creature the white man wants to think you are, you can get something out of acting the way they expect you to.
So people had read in the newspaper what they wanted to hear about an Indian playing for the Rice Birds, and every time we won or lost another game I played in, it entertained folks to read about what I’d done. Mike Gonzales started getting some notice, too, and it came from the same place as the interest in me. I was an Indian, and Mike called himself a Cuban and was a good enough shortstop for everybody to go along with that. If taking his word about being a Cuban would keep him playing for the Rayne team, that was just fine with everybody. The two of us together was different enough from the rest of the Rice Bird players to get extra attention.
Mr. Tony Guidry liked that, and I guess Mr. Legon LeBlanc liked it, too, and I know that Sal Florio liked it, because he started coming to the clubhouse every other home game or so. He even came in some times after road games. He wanted to let everybody know how happy he was with the way the Rice Birds was doing in the Evangeline League and what a good time the folks coming to the games was all having when they watched us play. Whenever he’d show up, he’d always ask Dutch Bernson if he could have his permission to come in the clubhouse. We was winning about two out of three games we played then.
What Sal Florio would do was knock on the open door to the clubhouse, making it clear he wasn’t just going to walk in the room uninvited, and he’d ask the man nearest to him if the manager was available. Dutch Bernson generally was, and when he wasn’t in the room he’d come soon enough when somebody would holler out that Mr. Sal Florio was looking for him.
“Where is the mastermind of this fine baseball team?” Sal Florio would say, Soapy Tonton standing close behind him in the hall with his fedora hat looking like it was welded to his head. “I’d like to offer him my congratulations on another good win by the Rice Birds.”
At that, a few of the players would holler and make a whoop or two, and Dutch would come over to talk to Sal Florio, him and his pet toad Herbert riding under his hat, and Sal Florio would ask if he could come in the room. I never saw Dutch Bernson say no to him, and once I asked G.D. Squires what would happen if Dutch didn’t put out the welcome mat for Sal.
“That’s like asking what would happen if the sun don’t come up in the morning, Gemar,” G.D. said. “The only answer to that is that the question won’t matter if the sun don’t come up. And it won’t matter if Dutch Bernson tells Sal Florio he can’t come in the clubhouse because it won’t be no such of a thing as a clubhouse any more.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I said. “Exactly.”
“Exactly don’t enter the picture. When you’re a gambler and you’re gambling, you supposed to either win or lose, right?”
“I reckon so.”
“That’s what you’re supposed to say, all right,” G.D. said. “Heads or tails, twenty one or not, ace or deuce. One or the other. There is one problem with that way of looking at it, though, Gemar. You know what that is?”
“No, what?”
“It’s way yonder too chancy. A gambler can’t make no money when things is chancy. Before he lays down his bet, he’s got to be able to know what’s going to happen.”
“That doesn’t make much sense.”
“Keep on thinking that, son,” G.D. said. “It’ll keep you out of trouble.”
After Sal Florio would get the go ahead to come in the clubhouse, he’d tell Soapy Tonton to take a seat somewhere, and he’d talk to Dutch a while, slapping him on the back and laughing big. Then Sal would walk around the clubhouse, stopping to pass the time of day or tell a joke to one or the other of the Rice Bird players. He’d hand out cigars to a few people, and he’d hand out some of them little pieces of paper that they could turn in at Danny’s Fried Chicken or the Home Café or the Blue Goose Dance Hall and get meals and drinks free. After the first time or two I’d seen Sal Florio come into the clubhouse after a game, he would make sure before he left to come by and talk either to me or to Mike Gonzales.
“Good game tonight, Gentlemen,” he’d say to us. “You’ve brought new life to the Rice Birds this season.” Then he’d go on to talk about some fielding play or hit one of us had made or some pitch I’d throwed somewhere along the way, and we’d nod and agree with the way Sal Florio described it. You could tell he believed the players on the field was thinking every minute about what was taking place and what might take place later. He give all us players a lot more credit than we deserved for being thoughtful about everything we did on the diamond.
The truth of the matter was a lot different from what Sal Florio believed, though, and it’s always a lot different from what these commentators on the TV and the radio are always saying about what’s going in any game they’re calling.
When I pitched a game, it would make my mind tired by the time a game was over, more tired than the catcher’s though he will claim he’s the one doing the heavy brain work. If you’re pitching, you got to think before, during, and after every pitch you make, and if there happens to be somebody from the other team already on base, you got to think about that, too. It’s a lot to carry around in your head, and the whole
game you’re toting that load. That’s why you will see a pitcher when his team’s at bat sitting with a towel or a rag wrapped around his head looking down at the floor of the dugout. He’s just trying to get some relief from having to think while he’s out there on the mound.
The days I wasn’t pitching in the Evangeline League, I played in the outfield mostly, and sometimes I would be at first base. Let me tell you it was a mental rest not to be up there on the pitcher’s mound where everything starts every time the ball is in play. All I had to do in the outfield was look in to see how the batter was standing at the plate, remember how he’d hit before if I’d ever seen him do that, check where the runners were on base, and wait for the pitcher to try to throw the ball. Not till then did I have to do anything else. I had plenty of time to think about all kinds of stuff that wasn’t baseball, and still do my job of fielding if the ball came my way.
I never told Sal Florio that, naturally, when he’d ask why I’d done something in particular in some game. I’d let him believe what he wanted about what really goes on in a player’s head. It didn’t hurt anything to let him think so much mentality was at work in a baseball game, and besides none of that was his business, anyway. What you know as a player belongs to you. You can’t explain a house to a man who ain’t never lived in one. It’s a waste of time. A pitcher on the mound hasn’t got a choice about what to study, but you do in the outfield.
“Well,” Sal Florio would always get around to saying after a game. “How’re you making out financially? I don’t mean how much are you paid. I think I know that already. Not enough, right?”
I never said much back to him when he’d ask that, but Mike was willing to say how hard it was to make do with what he had to work with. “It gets tight sometimes, Mr. Florio,” he’d say. “We get our breakfast and our supper where we live in Miz Doucette’s, and that’s pretty good most of the time. But it’s short rations every now and then, ain’t it, Gemar?”
