by Gerald Duff
Abba Mikko gave me the opportunity to show what a Coushatta could do when his mind was right and his red oak bat still had some hits left in it, and I ended up with three extra-base hits and making just one out. That was my last time up at the plate in the game, so I couldn’t tell if the red oak bat was finally out of the hits that was put into it to begin with. I did say something to it, though, when I turned around to walk back to the dugout, just saying under my breath, “Poppoyom, Little Friend, I should’ve took a little off that one. You did what you supposed to, but I got hungry and took a bigger bite than I could hold.”
The South team didn’t have to come to bat in the bottom of the ninth inning. I did get to put out the last man for the North, and that was a good way to leave that diamond.
Here’s the way I put that last one out. A man was on first, with a good lead on our pitcher, and the base coach for the North team took a chance and sent that runner one base further than he ought to have when the batter hit a sharp single that landed in front of me. I got to it quick. I put my throw right on the third base bag on a line, and when the runner coming all the way from first got there, the third baseman was waiting with the ball to tag him out. You could tell the runner didn’t even want to slide. He did, though.
That was the game, and we felt good when we ran off the field, just like the people in the stands backing the winning team showed it felt to them. I was glad we’d got to more bases safe than they had. More of us had stayed alive, and more of them had died. But I was thinking about the way I always felt when I left that place inside the diamond. When you stepped outside the diamond, a kind of fog would set in. It was hard to tell where to set your feet.
When I got back to the dugout, all the players on the South All-Star Team was jumping around and hollering, the people in the stands still yelling, and I picked up my red oak bat and put it back in the tow sack. I looked around for Mike Gonzales and Hookey Irwin, but before I could see where either one of them was located, the manager for the South team came up to me.
“Wait just a minute, Gemar Batiste,” Hank Rimmer said. “You can’t slip out of here yet. Didn’t you hear what the man just said on the loudspeaker?”
“I wasn’t noticing,” I said. “I was getting my stuff together. Was he talking in French? Because I don’t know what they’re saying when they do that.”
“Naw, he wasn’t talking in French,” the manager said. “Chip Mouton just does that Cajun stuff now and then to be funny. He was speaking pure dee English just then, though. He was calling your name and telling you to step outside this dugout.”
“Why?” I said. “The game’s done over, as far as I know.”
“Not quite just yet,” Hank Rimmer said. “Step on out there.”
“Do what he tells you, Gemar,” Hookey Irwin said. He had come up while I was talking to Rimmer. “The manager’s word is law. You can’t break it. Ain’t that right, Hank?”
“I wish it was,” Rimmer said and grabbed me by the arm and led me toward the step-up of the dugout onto the field.
“Here he is, folks,” the voice on the loudspeaker said. “Gemar Batiste of the Rayne Rice Birds. Just named by the managers as the Most Valuable Player in this year’s contest. Chief Batiste. All the way from his tribe in Texas.”
A couple of men dressed in suits and ties and wearing baseball caps like the ones they’d give us to put on in the All-Star Game were waiting at home plate, and they started clapping their hands together and waving at me to come over to them.
“Here to present the medal for the Most Valuable Player of the game is the commissioner of the league, Mr. Horace Comeau. With him is the co-owner of the Rayne Rice Birds, Mr. Legon LeBlanc. And folks, ain’t he the lucky one?”
When I got up to them, Hank Rimmer was still holding onto my arm. I took off my South All-Star cap and tipped it out toward the two of them. Lots of people in the stand hollered and clapped, and the players from both dugouts made a lot more noise. I knew they were gigging me by doing that, but I was glad they were. It made me feel a lot easier in my mind. It generally is not a good sign when ballplayers act serious. When they’re hoorawing each other, things are what they ought to be.
“I believe Chief Batiste would be more comfortable and feel more at home if he was wearing his Indian war bonnet,” one of them said into a microphone set up on the plate. “Let me speak on behalf of the Evangeline League and all its teams and their loyal fans to congratulate you, Gemar Batiste of the Rayne Rice Birds, on the exhibition of baseball playing you put on today.”
Everybody carried on some more, and Legon LeBlanc put his hand on my shoulder and started talking. “We’d like to have Miss Peggy Judice come forward for the presentation of the Most Valuable Player medal to Gemar Batiste. At the end of last season, Peggy Judice was named Miss Evangeline League of 1934, and her last official act will be to place the medal on this year’s Most Valuable Player.”
A good looking white girl came out from over by the stands, wearing a crown on her head and a long blue dress with a white piece of cloth across her body.
“Let me get behind you, Mr. Chief,” she said, holding a medal with a ribbon on it. “So I can put it around your neck.” She turned toward my right side, and I turned in the wrong direction and she turned again and so did I, staying in her way again. People started laughing and clapping at that, and Mr. Horace Comeau talked into the microphone.
“I believe you have scared the Chief, Peggy,” he said. “I think he’s afraid you might be about to take his scalp.”
There was a real big laugh from the crowd at that, and the Miss Evangeline League girl fastened the medal around my neck so it hung down on my chest. They all clapped again, and the two dugouts of players hooted and hollered, and Mr. Comeau pointed toward the microphone. “Say a couple of words to them, Chief,” he said to me away from the microphone so nobody but me could hear it.
“What do I say?” I said.
“Just say thank you and say how hard fought the game was. That’s all they want to hear you tell them.”
I got up to the microphone, and folks quieted down some. “Thank you for this pretty decoration around my neck,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t think to take a little off that line drive, the one that Harry Branch Junior caught so easy. If I’d done that, the ball would’ve fell fair. I done told my bat it wasn’t his fault. It was all mine. Thank you.”
“That’s the time, that’s the time,” Mr. Comeau after everybody stopped hollering and laughing so loud. “Like we say in Louisiana, it’s a poor workman who blames his tools. But I never heard a man apologize to one before.” He held up his hand again when some more hooting and yelling started up. “One other thing I want to present to Chief Batiste now, and it’s something that won’t last like that Most Valuable Player medal will, but I do believe it’s one the Chief won’t turn down. It is a cash award from the Evangeline League in recognition of his outstanding play in this year’s All-Star Game.”
He held out an envelope to me, and I reached out and took it. I figured I’d open it up later to take a long look at that fifty dollars.
“Wave it over your head, Chief,” Mr. Comeau said low so the microphone wouldn’t be able to broadcast his words. “Let these people see how tickled you are.” I did, and people hollered like they was looking at a big hunk of beef steak ready to be cut into for the first bite and they were starving to death.
• • •
Back in the clubhouse of the Baton Rouge Red Sticks, they had tubs of ice full of bottles of beer waiting for us. By the time I got there, players had already got into that, swigging down beer like men needing water in a bad drought. Hookey Irwin was just sipping at his, but Mike Gonzales had one bottle up to his mouth and another in his hand ready.
“Grab you a beer, Chief,” somebody hollered and I said I would in a minute. I took my envelope with the money in it over t
o where my regular clothes and bat was, pulled the medal off my neck, and put all that in my tow sack. What I was really looking to do was to get me a pinch of mikko root to put into my cheek, and once I did that, I did take a bottle of Jax beer out of one of the tubs of ice and started sipping at it. Everybody drank and carried on, ate all that Cajun food, and all the players for both teams showed how good they were feeling. The mikko root I had put in my mouth lasted me all the way back to Rayne, and I didn’t have to worry about remembering that trip. All I could see was trees everywhere I looked.
21
That night when I got back to Miz Velma Doucette’s house on Serenity Street, I was by myself. Mike Gonzales must have gone with Hookey Irwin somewhere to keep on drinking until they got their fill. I wasn’t thinking about much of anything when I walked up on that dark porch. Not having to think about stuff is what a man is after when he puts a chunk of mikko root in his mouth. You will have dreams, now, if you take on too much mikko, so you have to watch what amount you pinch off.
“I listened to the whole thing on the radio,” somebody sitting in the dark in the swing on Miz Doucette’s porch said. “I was real proud of the way you played in that All-Star game.”
“Who is that?” I said in the language of the People. “Is it a witch? Have you covered your head with your blanket?”
“I don’t know what you’re saying when you don’t talk English, Chief Batiste,” she said. “Don’t you know that?”
“Teeny Doucette,” I said, this time in English. “I didn’t know it was you. I thought you might’ve been one of them women who hides her eyes with a blanket.”
“Why would a woman do that?” she said, leaning forward. A shaft of light from the street lamp in front of the house on Serenity Street fell on her face. I still couldn’t see her eyes, but the shadows of her cheekbones and the outline of her hair told me who she had to be. I said that to her.
“I can’t be who I’m not, of course, Gemar,” Teeny Doucette said. “Nobody can do that. You’re always going to be who you are, no matter how you try to hide it.”
“A witch is different,” I said. “A witch can make herself look like somebody else. She will want you to think that she ain’t who she is. See, she can throw up a fog to hide her eyes, or she can look almost like somebody you already know. Then you’ll be fooled.”
“All the time?” Teeny said. “This witch can always look like somebody she’s not, and you’ll never be able to tell her for who she really is?”
“She can do that if you can’t see her eyes,” I said. “That’s why she’ll keep them hid long enough so you’ll forget to look for them anymore. When you start making that mistake, forgetting to look, a witch won’t have to worry then about you finding out.”
“Why’s that?”
“You stop wanting to know who she really is. You stop caring. She can let you see her eyes like they really are then, and it won’t make any difference to you.”
“Why would you stop caring if she’s really a witch or not, or what her eyes tell you?”
“You give up,” I said to Teeny Doucette sitting there in the dark of the moon. “You give up because you ain’t yourself like you used to be. You don’t belong to who you are or who you used to be.”
“Who do you belong to then?”
“Her,” I said. “You belong to her. You belong to the witch.”
“Are you glad you do?”
“You ain’t got any say so in the matter. So yes, you’re glad. You quit being the one who didn’t want to be the witch’s. Now you want to be.”
“Can you see my eyes?” Teeny said.
“I can always see your eyes. As soon as I first saw your eyes, I didn’t care any more who you really might be.”
“Am I a witch to you, Gemar Batiste? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I don’t care if you are or not,” I said, stepping out of the street light and moving into the dark place where she was sitting in the porch swing. “It don’t make no difference to me. Not ever again.”
“Look at my eyes then,” she said.
“I don’t have to,” I said. “I can’t see them no more. But that don’t matter. I got them in my head now, and I always will.”
• • •
I don’t know what time it was when Mike Gonzales came drunk into the room, but I was by myself asleep in bed. I was somewhere in that dream I had after Teeny had left and gone back to her room, next to where her mother slept. Teeny was quiet when she was with me, and nobody who wasn’t right there in the room with us could’ve known we were together. Like some women in them stories McKinley Short Eyes would tell us, Teeny was there with me, but there was no sign after she left she’d ever been there.
I’d put my face deep into the black hair that floated up from her head onto the pillow, and I kept my eyes closed so as not to see her look into them. During that time together, I didn’t think I was ever touching her. She was there in my bed, but she was somewhere else, too, and I couldn’t get to that place or know where it was. While I kissed her and heard her make those songs in my ear, songs sung so low nobody could hear the music but me, I knew that when I saw her in the morning daylight, she would not be who she had been with me the night before. There together with her was a sad time, and I had tears to shed. But I would not let her see me cry, and I thought ahead to the next day when I saw her, I would not be seeing the woman who’d been with me in the dark the night before.
When she left me in the room by myself, some of the dream that took me belonged to the mikko root. I could bear to live through the mikko dream, and I could run from the Big Man Eater with my feet feeling like stones stuck in sand. I could survive that dream and wake from it. But I knew I’d never get away from the part of that dream that belonged to Louisiana in the swamp country where the land is flat all the way to the end of the world.
22
The Rice Birds had a home stand with two teams starting up the week after the Evangeline League took off work for the All-Star game, and we had the last half of the season to get through before the playoff games would come. That would match up the top two teams in the standings, and our bunch was now only two games out of first place. Dutch Bernson took it into his head to remind us of what all that meant right before we started that first game of the series with the Lake Charles Explorers.
“He’s got him a new toad under his hat this morning,” Dynamite Dunn said as we all stood around in a circle to listen to Dutch explain things to us. “He found him one yesterday in a mud puddle somewhere.”
“Gents,” Dutch Bernson said, patting a couple of times on the top of his cap. That made the toad move around a little, and you could see a bulge start sticking up in the hat’s material. “We’re sitting pretty close to where we want to be. And that’s fine and dandy for right now. But I expect it’s some of you that ain’t got your priorities understood or straight yet. Some of you might still think the main question here has to do with playing baseball. Let me tell you. It ain’t.”
Nobody said anything out loud at that, and I fastened my eyes on a couple of gulls circling in the air above Addison Stadium. The two white colored birds had their heads cocked to one side as they glided above us, and hoping probably that somebody standing on the ground would throw something up at them they could catch and eat.
“Oh, we got to win enough games to get us where we want to go,” Dutch was saying. “That goes without saying. But winning baseball games ain’t the point of why you’re playing in the Evangeline League. Now is it, Phil?” He meant Phil Pellicore, who’d been with the Rice Birds since the Evangeline League started up.
“Hell, no,” Phil said. “I’m playing so I can beat this panic we’re in.”
“I want y’all to hear what Phil just said back to me. What he means is the reason to bear down and win enough games to get into the playoff ain’t g
ot a damn thing to do with the games themselves. They are a means to an end, boys, and you got to keep that in mind. The more games we win, the more we can play. If we get in the playoff against Opelousas or whatever bunch it ends up being, the Rice Birds make more money. And you’ll get paid more for a longer time. Ain’t that what it’s about? Baseball games is a means to an end, and that’s all they are. Them other teams want to beat you for one reason only, and it ain’t got nothing to do with proving which team is the best. No sir. They want to beat you so they can take the food out of your mouth and the clothes off your back.”
“They trying to rob us then. Take our stuff,” Tubby Dean said. “That what you saying, Dutch?”
“I wish he wouldn’t talk back to him like that,” Dynamite Dunn said to me out of the side of his mouth. “Tubby’s just giving the Old Man more to work with and more reason to talk.”
“Do you believe what Dutch is saying?” I said.
“I don’t believe nothing anybody says,” Dynamite said. “I used to believe my mama, but I kept catching the bitch in lies.”
“In the meantime,” Dutch said, cutting his eyes over at me and Dynamite, “before we get to the end of the regular season and praise God, maybe get to play more games in the playoff, we got to find better ways to make money right now. Mr. LeBlanc and Mr. Guidry have let me know that, and they got some ideas about how to increase profits. I’m going to be talking to some of you about that. And you better listen to what I say, if you want to keep eating regular.”
Dutch talked on a little more, but I stopped listening to him.
It was the next day right after warm-up before the first game was set to begin that Dutch Bernson said something that let me know I should’ve spent less time watching sea gulls sail around and more of it trying to figure out how what he’d said to us applied to me. I was going to pitch the next night, so he had me scheduled to play in the outfield, and when Dutch asked me to come into his office, I figured he was going to talk about the pitcher I’d be batting against. Or maybe look ahead a little and get a head start on going over the Lake Charles hitters so I could be thinking about how I’d pitch to them the next day.
