Dirty Rice

by Gerald Duff

  “I’m going to get you, Red Man,” he said. “I’m going to get you this time, Flathead.”

  I know who he was. His name was Load Van Zant, and he had the highest batting average in the league the year before and was proud of that. He wasn’t leading the league this year. Me and a player from the Opelousas team was ahead of him and had been most of the season.

  Load Van Zant was a big fellow, but had a quick bat, and he was mainly interested in just putting the ball in play. You keep getting singles and walks and getting on base, and most of the time that’ll pay off for the team. It’ll sure pay off for your batting average, if you’re all that partial to numbers. I figured that’s the kind of batter Load Van Zant was.

  I looked at him, leaning on his bat, and I said something back at him, not out loud since he couldn’t have heard me in all that rumbling and squalling from the crowd.

  “Banjo hitter,” I said, slow so he could read my lips. I knew he had a good eye, what with all them singles he hit. “Banjo hitter,” I said it again.

  By then, Dynamite Dunn was set up behind the plate, and I threw him a couple of warm-up pitches while Load Van Zant watched me, pounding his bat on the ground a little harder than he had been. The umpire waved him to the plate, and I looked in at Dynamite’s sign. He wanted a low outside pitch to Load, a right-hander, to start him off, and I shook him off a couple of times until he called what I wanted. High inside tight fastball, and I went into my windup and gave Load Van Zant that pitch right where I wanted the ball to go.

  When he climbed up off the dirt where he’d had to dive to keep from getting hit in the head, I’d managed to get Load even madder than he’d been when he whispered he was going to get me. He knocked some of the dirt off his uniform, stepped back in, tapped his bat on the plate twice, and squared up into his stance. His stance this time was a lot more closed than it’d been before. Banjo hitters will generally take an open stance, not interested in getting much on the balls they hit since they’re doing more slapping at the ball than trying to drive it. They ain’t trying to coil up into a closed stance, like a timber rattler in the Big Thicket will do when he’s hoping to get as much spring and reach into his strike as his muscles will let him. Unlike a rattle snake, a banjo hitter is not interested in killing you. He just wants a nibble.

  This time, though, Load Van Zant was ready to try to put more on the ball, and what he wanted to do more than anything else was to bust a line drive back at the pitcher’s mound. So what I did with the second pitch was to start with the show of a big windup and a high leg kick, and then to send him an off-speed breaking ball a little inside. He like to have torn his britches swinging at that one, so far in front of it he spun around enough to throw up a shower of dirt and leave cleat marks in the design of a circle to mark where he’d been.

  “Banjo,” I whispered toward him, saying it twice to make sure he read my lips, and threw another high inside fastball that came an inch from his nose as he bailed out. That’s when he threw his bat down and came running at me, Dynamite behind him but a little slow in getting started.

  It felt good to me to see Load Van Zant coming, and I slung my glove off and was waiting when he made his first step on the dirt of the mound. “Not your left hand,” Dynamite was yelling, over and over again. I remember thinking I was much obliged to Dynamite for saying that, so I spun around to swing from the right side just as Load ran into me. He did want to land a blow himself, and that put him at a disadvantage. By the time Load Van Zant had swung and missed, and I’d thrown a right jab that took him on the left point of the jaw, all the real fist fighting was over, and the wrestling had started up. That didn’t last long either, though, but I did get the chance to say into Load Van Zant’s ear as he held onto me how did he like getting his ass whipped by a flathead Indian.

  Both benches did clear, and everybody got to stumble around and push on each other until they were satisfied, and the folks in the stands got their money’s worth. Dutch Bernson slipped down on the mound as he came running up to pull at Load Van Zant’s collar.

  The umpires got everybody separated and sent back to the dugouts, and not a real lick was hit. Nobody got throwed out of the game, because the umpires knew it was to the benefit of Evangeline League baseball for the game to get finished with me on the mound and Load Van Zant at bat.

  He stepped back in finally, and I threw him a couple more fastball strikes, and he was back in his open stance by then and never caught one of them. The next two batters went down easy. Dynamite came running toward me and jumped up for me to catch him, and I did that.

  All of us started working our way through the folks who’d run onto the field to get to be part of the carrying on, drunk and falling down and all of them hollering. They was trying to slap me on the back and shake my hand and one of them, a big old boy with no teeth in his head and wearing blue overalls and a fedora, tried to pull the hat off my head. A couple of sheriff’s deputies that got to come to the games free if they wore their uniforms pushed a way through the crowd for the players to get to the clubhouse. I mean the ones that wanted to, since two or three hung back trying to talk to some of the women who’d run out there on the field. Mike Gonzales was one of that bunch.

  The man on the loudspeaker was still carrying on about the first no-hitter ever pitched in Addison Stadium, calling me Chief Batiste and saying stuff about the pitches I’d been throwing, naming them. The last thing I heard him say through the loudspeaker as I went through the door of the clubhouse where everybody was hooting and hollering like ballplayers will do was the words “scalped by the Thunder Bolt.”

  “Well, Gemar,” Harry Nolan said to me. “How do you feel now?”

  “I feel all right,” I said, unbuttoning my shirt to let some air get to me and sitting down.

  “Let me give you a tip that will serve you in years to come,” Harry said. “Memorize the way you’re feeling right now, because you going to want to think back to it later on. You’re going to find a need to do that. Get that feeling by heart.”

  “Leave him alone, Harry,” Dynamite said. “The misery ain’t set in yet, like it done has for you and me. Let it get here at its own speed.”

  Tommy Grenier had showed up in the clubhouse by then, notebook in hand, and he was right ahead of Tony Guidry and Legon LeBlanc, all coming in my direction. Over in one corner talking to Mike Gonzales and a couple of other players was Sal Florio, dressed in a real nice black suit with lines running up and down it. He was tapping a finger into the palm of his other hand.

  “I’ll keep all that in mind, Harry,” I said back to him.

  Everybody talked at me at the same time, and I said things back to different ones as I picked out what they were saying. All that loud talking was happening at the same time, like a thunder shower with a big wind pushing it hard enough to make trees bend over and leaves blow off, so there wasn’t much chance to make sense of anything anybody was saying. The next day if you’d have read what Tommy Grenier wrote in his story in the Rayne Tribune, you’d have thought that time in the Rayne Rice Birds clubhouse when they were talking to me about the no-hitter was real organized and thoughtful. Whenever you read what somebody has wrote about things, you are reading a lie. Anything that happens, whether it’s a man pitching a no-hitter in a ball game or two people sitting down quiet to eat a meal together, has got too much going on at the same time.

  If you make allowance for the lying that’s got to take place, sometimes you can pick out a little bit of truth from all the made-up parts. So all that talking and questions being asked and me trying to answer them and Dutch Bernson chiming in to show how good he managed the game, and Dynamite telling folks about how him and me had planned every pitch I throwed, and Mr. LeBlanc and Mr. Guidry trying to squeeze the last drop of juice out of me being an Alabama-Coushatta from Texas, all them words being put out into the air of the Rice Bird clubhouse was just like a big cloud gr
owing denser and hiding more of what was behind it the more that got said.

  It got real dark real quick.

  After a while, though, folks had got all they wanted to, and the room started clearing out. I had got into my regular clothes, and had took a sip of whiskey from the bottle that somebody had stuck in my face, and Dynamite Dunn grabbed me by the arm and spun me around to face him.

  “All right, Gemar,” he said, his eyes dancing in his head, “you ain’t going directly back tonight to Velma Doucette’s house to lie down on your bed and think nice thoughts before you doze off. Not this time, hoss.”

  “Why not?” Phil Pellicore said. “The Chief is liable to pitch another no-hitter the next time he gets up on the mound. This ain’t likely to be no big thing to him.”

  “He might just do that, scarce as hen’s teeth are,” Dynamite said. “And if he does, I’ll say the same thing to him then that I’m saying now. But he can’t miss a chance to howl the first time he does it.”

  “I ain’t getting drunk,” I said. “Let me get that said first thing. Keep that in mind.”

  “I ain’t talking about getting drunk,” Dynamite said. “Why’s that worry you so much you got to make claims about it? Hell, a man can always get drunk. But you can’t always go to the Atchafalaya cockfights. That don’t happen every time it gets dark in Acadia Parish.”

  “It’s tonight?” Phil Pellicore said. “Why didn’t I know that?”

  “It’s lots of things other folks know and you don’t, Phil,” G.D. Squires said. “So let me tell you. The rooster wars are tonight, way out yonder on Thibodaux Road toward Church Point, and we’re fixing to load up and go see them.”

  “Rooster fights,” I said. “I never been to one, but I have seen birds fight.”

  “You can tell us that story on the way, Mr. Pitcher,” Dynamite said. “Let’s go, y’all.”

  “I ain’t getting drunk,” I said again. “But I got to go get something out of my locker.”

  “I want some of that, too,” Dynamite said. “If it’ll make you feel good.”

  “I wouldn’t call it good,” I said. “It just makes you a different man.”

  “Well, hell. All of us could stand some of that,” G.D. Squires said. “Let’s load up the car and get on the road.”

  We did that, and as we headed to the Atchafalaya cockfight, I sucked on a pinch of mikko root and told myself it was good that I wasn’t having to think every minute about Teeny Doucette and the way her black hair looked rising up on a pillow. And I wasn’t, right up to that time I told myself I wasn’t. Think about that last pitch I threw, instead, I told myself, the one that batter hadn’t even swung at, and the way his knees buckled when it went by him. I put that in my head and remembered not to look out the car windows at the dark rice fields rolling by us in the moonlight. I might see a berdache, I reminded myself, a half-man with no legs but just smoke to stand on, looking back at me, and I couldn’t afford to do that just now.

  • • •

  Well before we got to the dirt road that turned off the blacktop we were riding on, we could see parked on the sides of the road and in the bar ditches a bunch of cars and trucks and even a wagon or two with the mules unhitched. The closer we got, the more automobiles showed up in our car beams. They were bigger and newer ones than the old Fords and Chevrolets and Starrs we’d seen, and there weren’t any mules and wagons mixed in among them now. Men were standing and milling around by some of the biggest cars, smoking cigarettes, and turning their backs toward our car as we passed by them.

  “Why ain’t they at the cockpit?” Tubby Dean said. “Them guys standing there playing pocket pool. Has it started yet?”

  “Fool,” Dynamite Dunn said. “That bunch ain’t going to the cockfights. They drive them Packards and Lincolns and Cadillacs for the ones inside laying their money down. You see what color most of them happen to be, don’t you?”

  “You ain’t talking about the cars now.” Tubby said. “When you say color.”

  “I’m talking about chauffeurs, and I’m talking about bodyguards,” Dynamite said. “Where was you raised, Tub, and where’ve you been?”

  “Illinois, that’s where I was raised. You don’t see chicken fights in the Prairie State.”

  “You do in the Pelican State, let me tell you.”

  “It ain’t against the law?”

  “No, it’s not, but if it was, it wouldn’t be,” Dynamite said. “See, down here in the marsh country, if it’s against the law, it’s all right to do it. You just got to pay the right man to get permission. But chicken fighting, now that there’s a noble sport. That goes back to Napoleon. Everybody thinks that’s jake.”

  “So you don’t have to pay nobody to be able to do it.”

  “I didn’t say that. I just said it’s legal. You got to pay somebody for everything you do in Louisiana that’s worth doing,” Dynamite said. “Look up yonder, G.D. I believe you can squeeze this old wreck of a car right in that hole.”

  We unloaded and made our way toward the building where the rooster fights was going on. “You said bodyguards while ago,” I heard Tubby say to Dynamite. “Why they need bodyguards, people in them Packard and Cadillac cars?”

  “It’s big wads of money being put up for grabs, Tub, that’s why. And whenever money’s changing hands, it’s a good chance an accident or two might happen. Them bodyguards been hired to make sure the right hands get to hold on to that cash. Lord, how did you get to be so old and fat and learn so little?”

  A couple of fellows with shotguns in their hands was standing by the door into the barn where all the noise and light was coming from, looking hard at us. One of them seemed to know Dynamite, and he said something and then moved away from the door to let us in. The building looked like a regular barn, but it was oversized and made out of galvanized tin. It was the only building around, and that wasn’t usual on the rice farms.

  “You that big Indian pitcher for Rayne?” one of the men holding the twelve-gauge said to me as I passed by him.

  “Yeah, I reckon,” I said. “I ain’t all that big, though.”

  “How?” he said and looked at the other man to see if he’d laugh. He did, and I said back to him what Alabamas and Coushattas back in the Nation always said when some white man made that joke. We’d learned it from Frank Had Two Mothers, a Coushatta from the Snake Clan, a fellow who’d left the reservation and gone to California to pick tomatoes for a while and then come back.

  “How, hell, who?” I said, and both of the shotgun holders laughed the way whites always did when they heard that.

  The building was full of folks, and it was lit up mainly by some spotlights aimed at a big pen made of planks in the middle of benches rowed up. The seats were lined up full of people, most of them standing to see down into the pen, with only a few too drunk to stay upright and having to wallow around on the benches.

  Everybody had been smoking a lot of cigars and cigarettes, and they were going to smoke a whole bunch more, judging by the way the cloud from burning tobacco was hanging all over the building. Just as we all got in and started trying to work our way up to where we could see what was happening in the pen, something happened in it that made the crowd holler together at full volume.

  A high-pitched scream lifted above all the deeper sounding yells, and it hung in the smoke so long you could almost see it right there above the heart of the wooden pen.

  “Some gamecock has done hung a gaff in another one’s head,” Dynamite hollered, “and broke it off in him, the way that sounds.”

  “Was that a woman just screamed?” I said back to him.

  In a minute or two, the noise let up enough for people to talk to each other, and they were waving paper money in each other’s faces and cussing and saying numbers and the names of roosters. One name I kept hearing was Louisiana Black Top.

&
nbsp; From what I could tell from hearing the labels the white eyes in Louisiana were slapping on fighting chickens, the ones in the cockfighting business had something in common with the People of the Nation back in Texas. Both the ones watching chickens fight in a place special built for them and betting on which one would kill the other one, and the Alabamas and Coushattas trying to find the right names to call everything around them where they lived, showed they believed it matters what name belongs to each particular thing.

  The difference I could see was that the chickens with the special names promising what they would do to another chicken didn’t have no choice in the matter of finding out what name fit them and was theirs alone. A white man had decided what the chickens would be called and what fit them. The chicken didn’t earn his name and wouldn’t know it.

  The naming of a fighting chicken wasn’t meant to satisfy the chicken but the man who’d slapped it on him. So there wasn’t no real power in it, like there is in the name a young man of the People comes to know is his when he dreams it during his spirit quest in the Big Thicket. He earns that name, and he tells it to only one person other than himself. It ain’t cheap is what I’m saying about that name a young man of the Nation works to get.

  After a while, we got close enough and at the right angle to see what was going on in the pit. It was dug down into the ground so folks in the stands could get a clear view. The losers got throwed into a wooden box over in one corner of the pit, and that box was full enough I couldn’t count the ones dead there. A lot of blood was on most of them, so you couldn’t tell the colors right off. The eyes of the cocks were open, but glazed over, and there wasn’t any doubt most of them was dead. A couple was still quivering, but that didn’t mean they were yet alive.

  “Chief,” somebody said to me as I was leaning over to see into the pit. “Glad to see you here. You ever been to a cockpit before?”