by Gerald Duff
“That sounds real nice, manager,” I said. “But I’ll tell you right now, to save us a bunch of time and argument, I ain’t going to put nothing on my head but a Rayne Rice Birds baseball cap. I’ll wear that and my regular uniform when I get on that diamond to pitch, and I ain’t adding nothing more to my wardrobe.”
“Legon and Tony told me you understood this thing and was ready to go along with it. They said you didn’t ask a single question. I’m surprised to hear you talk like that.”
“I understood it just fine,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t have to ask no questions. I knew everything I needed to know.”
“You’re saying you’re going to disobey the direct order of your manager. That’s what you’re telling me.”
“Anything you tell me to do, manager, that’s about me playing baseball for you, I will go along with, like always. You tell me to throw at a batter’s head when I’m so far out in front of him I can smell him sweating like a hog and just dying to make his out so he won’t have to suffer no more, I’ll do that. But there’s one thing I ain’t going to do, no matter how much direct ordering you give me.”
“What thing is that? Just not dress up some?”
“No, that ain’t the thing. That’s just a sign of the thing. The thing I won’t do is play Indian for you. And I won’t play Indian so the Rice Birds can sell more tickets, and I won’t play Indian for Mr. Legon LeBlanc and Mr. Tony Guidry just because they own the Rayne team.”
“Gemar, we’re talking about money. Listen to me now. That’s the only thing that’s real and the only thing that matters these days. Hell, any days.”
“No, Dutch. We’re talking about me and we’re talking about baseball. That’s the only things that’s real. I don’t know nothing about money.”
“What am I going to tell the men that own this team, the ones that pay your sixty dollars a month? You don’t want that money?”
“Yeah, I want that money. But I want it for playing ball. Not for putting on a headdress and hollering hi yi yi yi.”
“What the hell am I going to tell them?”
“Dutch, tell them they got what they wanted. Tell them I just turned real Indian on y’all.”
I walked on out of Dutch’s office then, but I knew it wasn’t over.
We played that first game with Monroe, and I spent my time in it out in left field and at bat. I was thinking the whole game about what might happen the next day when I was scheduled to pitch. It didn’t end up bothering my play too bad, though. I got two hits, both of them just singles, and I drove in a couple of runs. It wasn’t the kind of game that will make you remember it later. You always forget the good. Bad stays with you.
Taking my last warm-up pitches before the game the next day with Dynamite Dunn, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary going on. Dutch Bernson hadn’t said anything else to me about what we’d talked about in his office, and it looked like the second game in the series with Monroe wouldn’t be a bit different from any other one. Nobody had tried to talk to me about putting on a special Indian show before the umpire called play ball, and I was beginning to believe the owners of the Rayne team had decided to give up the idea.
“Ain’t you throwed enough fastballs yet to get you loose?” Dutch hollered out to me on the mound, and I was about to tell him I’d do one or two more, when the loudspeaker started making that crackling noise it always did before somebody would begin talking on it. It wasn’t Doug Givens’ voice that came over it welcoming folks to Addison Stadium, when the sound cranked up and started coming out of the loudspeaker. It was the steady beat of a drum.
As soon as that happened, Dutch stood straight up and showed me the ball in his hand and said something I couldn’t hear because of the noise, and then the folks in the stands stopped making their usual racket. Instead, they sounded like people will who’ve just seen something out of the ordinary, something that was making them turn to each other to ask what was going on. Then they started hollering together.
Now the sound out of the loudspeakers was not just the drum tapping but a bunch of high-pitched notes coming from a flute or a whistle. Then was when I saw him coming up the steps out of the dugout, somebody wearing a big feather headdress that ran all the way from the crown of his head down his back halfway to the ground. His shirt and pants was made out of cloth fixed up to look like fringed deer hide, his shoes were covered with bead work, and he was chopping up and down with a big tomahawk that had a handle that looked to be at least three feet long.
Doug Givens started talking fast and hard over the loudspeaker as the man dressed up like a picture show Indian got into the full movements of a dance that made him lean over so far backwards that his headdress touched the ground and when he came back up, leaning forward, to make his nose just about touch his knees pumping as high as they did with his dance steps.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Doug Givens said over the speaker in a voice loud enough to drown out the drums and flute music, “let’s welcome Chief Rice Bird in his tribute to today’s pitcher for your Rayne team, the most valuable All-Star of the Evangeline League, Chief Gemar Batiste.”
The crowd hollered at that, but in a few seconds started to clap along with the man dressed up like an Indian who’d turned to face the stands, not losing a step, and giving voice to what I was used to hearing from white eyes trying to sound the way Indians are supposed to when they’re doing a war dance.
“Chief Rice Bird has come from the bayous of South Louisiana to welcome his brother from the Alabama Tribe in Texas,” the loudspeaker announced, “and he will now perform the native dance of Chief Gemar Batiste’s people when they are fixing to go on the warpath.”
The man called Chief Rice Bird put on extra motion and speed and danced all around home plate. That part of the dance didn’t last long, though, and in less than a minute Chief Rice Bird stepped over the white line of the diamond, and started moving in my direction, coming halfway up the mound toward me, carrying his tomahawk in his left hand and holding his right out for me to give him a white eyes handshake. I looked hard at him and didn’t move. His eyes were light blue, I could see, and he had red paint all over him from his neck up to his forehead where the war bonnet started.
“Chief,” he said, bowing his head toward me and looking up into my face, “it’s just a show they paying me to do. Won’t you shake my hand for me? They want you to do that for the crowd. Please.”
“I will do that, this once,” I said. “But you got to walk off this pitcher’s mound as soon as I do. Don’t dance away from here. Just walk off and get off the diamond. Don’t step on that white line again when you do it, neither.”
“No offense,” he said. “It’s just show business. It don’t mean nothing.”
“That is the pure truth,” I told him.
“Chief Rice Bird,” Doug Givens was saying as I let the man dressed as an Indian touch my hand, “has promised to show up at every home game Chief Gemar Batiste pitches for the rest of the season. Chief Rice Bird will do that as a tribute to the fighting spirit of the Alabama Tribe. Let’s go get them, Chief Rice Bird and Chief Batiste. Beat the Zephyrs.”
The crowd hollered at that, and Chief Rice Bird didn’t start dancing again until he’d stepped off the diamond, and then going back down into the dugout. I could see him take off his headdress as soon as he got out of sight of the folks in the stands.
Dynamite Dunn trotted out to the mound, moving slow to give himself time to think up something that he hoped would be funny, and held out the baseball for me. “Kiss my ass if that ain’t a show,” he said. “That sucker can out dance Fred Astaire.”
“Give me the damn ball, catcher,” I said. “Did you know this stunt was going to happen?”
“What if I say I did?” Dynamite said, popping his eyes wide open and smirking at me. “And I didn’t tell you?”
“
You’d get your ass whipped right here on the pitcher’s mound and then have to catch a game,” I said. “That’s what.”
“Before the first pitch?” he said. “That don’t seem right. But no, I didn’t know about it. Some other folks did, though, I guess. I knew something was up, the way they were acting, but nobody told me nothing.”
“That’s because you’re a catcher and not able to figure things out, I reckon.”
“How long do y’all plan to converse out here?” Stumpy Sonnier, the umpire, said. I hadn’t even seen him walk up to the mound. “People got things to do and places to go. Is it too much to ask you to throw the damn ball?”
“I’ll do that, Mr. Sonnier,” I said. “As soon as the two of y’all get back behind the plate. I swear.”
I pitched the full game, giving up a few more hits than I liked to do, but I don’t remember much more about that win, except that Chief Rice Bird came out again to dance a little bit during the seventh inning stretch. He made sure that time to stay clear of the white lines marking off where the diamond was located, and when the last man for the Zephyrs made his out, Chief Rice Bird came out and waved to the crowd. Most of the kids at the game, some grown folks among them, leaned over the fence to shake hands with him and touch his tomahawk. The last I saw of him he was pushing back at a big overweight woman trying to pull his war bonnet off.
Nobody in the clubhouse afterwards made much of what had happened with Chief Rice Bird, but Dutch Bernson did get me off to one side to talk.
“Now, Gemar,” he said. “What did you think about that? Did it make you get pissed off?”
“You mean about that white man wearing his costume?”
“Yeah.”
“No, manager,” I said. “I don’t care how white folks might dress up and skip around and holler in public and all. I’m used to seeing that kind of behavior. It ain’t none of my business.”
“Well, that’s a load off my mind then,” Dutch said, smiling like he’d just found a ten dollar bill loose on the ground. “So all that’s just jake with you. That’s what you’re saying?”
“Anything a man dressed up like that might do don’t mean nothing to me, as long as he don’t step across the line,” I said. “Or come up to me when I’m working.”
“What line you talking about? Some way of acting you don’t like?”
“I mean the line that marks the diamond off from what’s outside it,” I said. “I ain’t going to put up with foolishness inside the diamond where everything’s been marked right and laid out the way Abba Mikko fixed it to be. That’s all I worry about.”
“Inside the diamond?”
“Where baseball is,” I said. “It’s easy to tell where it starts and where it stops. All you got to do is look where you’re going and watch how you step.”
28
From then on, the fellow dressed up to be Chief Rice Bird did show up at all the home games in Rayne. He’d add things to his show now and then, sometimes carrying a little stuffed cloth woman doll with long black braids, calling her his squaw and shaking her above his head to let folks see her better. After a while, people in the stands got used to seeing him and stopped paying as much attention as they did at the first, and that made Mr. LeBlanc and Mr. Guidry try to come up with new ways to make Chief Rice Bird interesting enough to get more folks to buy tickets and popcorn and peanuts and beer and soda pop.
One of the new ideas was to have Chief Rice Bird bring big paper dolls out on the field with him fixed up to look like the mascots of the other teams we played. Some of them was easy to do, like the Opelousas Indians one, and the Jeanerette Blues, and when Chief Rice Bird would chop his tomahawk into the paper Indian and the fake colored man that was supposed to be the Blues mascot, the crowd would holler and laugh and carry on and say kill him, chief, take his scalp.
When Rayne was playing teams like the Alexandria Aces or the Lafayette White Sox, it wasn’t near as easy to show what their mascots looked like, and just hitting a tomahawk into a big piece of paper with a name of the mascot wrote on it didn’t seem to stir up the fans much. What happened for the rest of the season is that folks just got used to seeing Chief Rice Bird dance around and make like he was scalping the teams we played, and the Chief Rice Bird show started petering out when the grown folks stopped paying close attention.
So after Chief Rice Bird kept dwindling down in getting attention and making more people want to buy tickets, the owners of the Rayne team started trying some other things they thought might help out what Dutch Bernson kept calling the bottom line. Whatever new wrinkles the owners thought up to get more tickets sold always came down to one thing, money, and the fact there wasn’t enough of it. That wasn’t no surprise to anybody. A shortage in the money department was everywhere in the country.
We got used to seeing more and more things happening outside the diamond to juice up the prospects. Boxing matches before and after home games where two men would take off their shirts, put on gloves, and try to knock each other around some. Raffles for hams, and sometimes buckets full of shrimp or crabs. One time an old wreck of a car that would still start up and run was give away during the seventh inning to a fan lucky enough to have the right ticket.
There wasn’t nothing wrong with most of that, as far as I was concerned. It was happening outside the diamond, and I didn’t have to pay it any attention. The only one of these special contests they called promotions that did bother me was a boxing match that turned out to be the last one they put on. All the first ones had been fought by real boxers, young fellows in the Golden Gloves program, and they had referees to make them do right and not go too far in busting each other up. People got tired of that, though, watching them jab at each other and score points on style, and so Mr. LeBlanc and Mr. Guidry, one or both of them, come up with the idea of first time boxers going at each other.
They put up a purse of a twenty dollar bill, and the man who won got all of it. So when these two fellows started fighting each other, there would be not one cent for the loser. That made them two fight until they couldn’t. They fought until the blood run down and had to be covered over later with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. The man still standing won the twenty dollar bill all right, but his front teeth was gone, and the one he’d beat got carried out on a stretcher.
All these new ways to get more money into the till came and went, and the Rice Bird players watched it all and we kept on playing ball games, most of which we come out on top. We was all still getting our money every Friday afternoon from the lady in the office, and we hadn’t missed a payday yet, though a couple of times we had to wait until the next Monday or Tuesday to get this week’s cash. I was paying Miz Velma Doucette what I owed her every week, I had enough left over to buy me the extra meals she wasn’t obliged to feed me and a beer or two, and I sent home ten or so dollars every now and then. I told my little brother Polk in one of the letters I sent along with the money that I’d got to ride in a Packard sedan down to the Gulf Coast. I expect Polk liked hearing that better than getting the money.
My roommate at Miz Doucette’s house was suffering shortages of cash all the time.
“Gemar,” Mike Gonzales said to me one Friday night after the Eagle had screamed and we’d got paid our money that afternoon, “how are you able to make it on what the Rice Birds are paying us to play baseball on this team? I guess you are, but let me tell you I’m about to starve to death.”
“You still hungry?” I said. “After all that gumbo soup and crackers I watched you eat at supper? It filled me up all right.”
“When I say hungry, I don’t just mean for just what I put in my belly,” Mike said. “I’m hungry for lots of things. I’m doing without, pitcher, and I’m the best shortstop in the whole league.”
Mike Gonzales wasn’t the best shortstop in the Evangeline League, and both of us knew that. But it made him feel better and helped his
argument to claim that, so I wasn’t about to remind him about the man who played that position for Lake Charles, Bill Ray Summers. What Mike could’ve said that would’ve been true was that he was the best fielding shortstop in the league, maybe, but his hitting wasn’t nothing like what Summers could do. Summers was not the acrobat on the field that Mike was, but he did catch the ball and throw people out. And he hit the long ball on a regular basis like Mike could never do.
“What’re you hungry for then, that you can’t buy it with what they paying us to play for Rayne?”
“Everything. I want me a car, some nice duds, more than one hat, some new shoes with white inlays on the sides of them, folding money to carry in my pocket when I go to a honky-tonk and find me a woman I want to spend it on. I want me a better grade of whiskey, a little reefer now and then to smooth things down. I want to live like Cab Calloway. Hell, I could talk to you for an hour about what I’m hungry for, Gemar. And just look at you now.”
“What you mean by saying look at me?”
“That’s what I mean. You don’t even know what you ain’t got enough of or at least some of. Look at them shoes you’re wearing. Have you bought you a single new shirt since you been in Louisiana?”
“I got me a shirt. I got two of them to wear whenever I want to. And when I’m on the field playing they give me clothes to wear so I don’t have to use my own. I ain’t studying clothes.”
“What are you studying, then?” Mike Gonzales said. “What do you want, Gemar? Why’re you playing like you do for these white folks?”
“I don’t think about what I don’t have and what I ought to want. If I did that, I wouldn’t have time to think about nothing else. I got enough money to let me think about what I want to think about.”
“You ain’t answered my question, though. Why do you play so hard for these white folks that own the Rice Birds and the ones of them that come to see you do it? That’s what you ought to be worried about. That’s where you’re falling down and your mind is wrong.”
