by Gerald Duff
“Tump it on out here on the ground in front of us, Dutch,” Clarence Meche said. “It’s feeding time.”
In a little while, the waitress came out with the first load of plates. It looked like pinto beans and squash and something green and a chunk of cornbread and a piece of gray-looking meat covered with gravy, and wasn’t much different from what I’d been eating all my life. The waitress stopped laying the plates down and went back to the kitchen with two of them still in her hand.
“She couldn’t bear to inflict them two on us,” Dynamite Dunn said. “She’s got a kind heart, that girl does.”
The man Dutch had called Mr. Arlis Pritchard was out from behind the counter, looking over at the table where I was sitting and walking over to the Rice Bird manager. He leaned over, said something in Dutch’s ear, and both men started talking at the same time, shaking their heads back and forth.
“Shit,” Mike Gonzales said. “I know what’s going on.”
Pritchard said out loud, “You didn’t tell me it was going to be coloreds in the bunch. I done told you. We don’t let them in the house, and we sure don’t serve them nothing to eat.”
“Where is a colored man?” Dutch said. “Show me where he is.”
“Right over yonder,” Pritchard said, pointing with a long-handled fork he’d carried with him from the kitchen toward the table where we were sitting.
“Him sitting next to that Mexican. That’s the nigger I’m talking about, and we don’t serve niggers in my café.”
“I ain’t a nigger,” Mike Gonzales said. “I’m a redbone, and that ain’t a nigger.”
“Arlis Pritchard ain’t talking about you, Mike,” I said. “I believe you’re the Mexican he’s pointing his fork at, so I must be the nigger.”
“Bullshit,” Dynamite Dunn said, jumping up from his seat. “You ain’t the nigger, Chief. I got to confess it, boys. I’m the nigger.”
“You lying son-of-a-bitch,” G.D. Squires yelled and stood up so fast his chair fell over behind him. “Goddamn it, I’m the nigger, and I’ll whip your ass if you say I ain’t.”
Everybody got into it then. By the time Arlis Pritchard had run back into the kitchen, everybody on the Rice Bird team was claiming to be the nigger, and not a one backed off all the way back onto the toad mobile.
After a while, things calmed down enough for folks to start complaining about being hungry, Dutch promising we’d stop at a hamburger place up the road a piece where we could eat outside. “I’m still pissed off,” Mike said to me. “I ain’t no nigger. I’m a redbone.”
“Well, I ain’t a Mexican,” I told him. “Let’s get that straight. I’m a Coushatta.”
“Dutch,” G.D. Squires hollered out about then. “I didn’t hear you while ago admit that you’re the nigger. Are you trying to hide that from the team?”
“Oh, shit,” Dutch said. “All right, goddamn it. I’m the nigger.”
“Not only that, boys,” Dynamite Dunn said. “Our manager is the nigger with a toad under his hat.”
“Is the toad the nigger?” somebody hollered out.
“Leave Herbert out of this,” Dutch said. “He ain’t nothing but pure dee toad.”
• • •
I wasn’t scheduled to pitch that first game with Monroe. It was Hookey Irwin’s turn to start, and I would be up on the mound in the second one. Dutch had put me out in center field for the first one. When you play center field, the way you see the field is some different from the view you get in either one of the other outfield positions.
Dutch Bernson was not a manager who tried to get scientific when he was telling players where to stand. But in that first game against the Monroes, I was playing pretty much on a line straight out from second base and standing about halfway to the wall when a batter would come to the plate. I could see everything taking place on the diamond, positioned like that, and nothing was on a slant. What that meant was I could see how the second baseman and the shortstop played every ball hit in their direction, and I could judge how good their throws would be to all the bases.
Hookey was rocking along just fine, getting people out when he had to, making Monroe leave men on base without scoring, and not giving up any well-hit pokes. By the end of the seventh or eighth inning, the Rice Birds was ahead by a couple of runs, and everything was settled in and working like it ought to. It was then that Val Scoggins batting for the Zephyrs caught one of Hookey’s fastballs where he wanted it, and by the time I’d gone to the wall in center field and throwed the ball back in to the second baseman, Scoggins was standing on second base.
The next man up worked the pitcher for a walk, since Hookey was throwing a little too careful to him, and that put men on first and second, and I relaxed a little bit. The next batter was an old fellow who’d been rattling around for years playing wherever he could. His name was Ernest Bell, and players called him Ding Dong sometimes. He handled that all right, as far as anybody could tell. There was one out already, and I figured Bell for nothing more than a ground ball to short, and then Mike Gonzales would force the man at second and maybe start a double play if things went right.
They did, at first. The second pitch Hookey made was just where he wanted to put it, and Ernest Bell swung too high, got a piece of it, and the ball went on two hops to Mike Gonzales. He stepped up, fielded the ball clean, and then spun to flip it to the Rice Bird second baseman who’d tag second and burn it down to first to put out Bell for the double play. When Mike turned to throw the ball to Phil Pellicore, he didn’t flip it, though. He threw it hard and he threw it high, and the ball ended up halfway to the right center field wall before it stopped rolling. Two runs came in by the time I’d got to the ball, grabbed it and threw it toward home plate to Dynamite Dunn, and Ernest Bell ended up on third for the first time in a long time.
Mike Gonzales was looking deep into his glove like there was something hiding inside the pocket, and the hometown fans of the Monroe Zephyrs were hollering like they’d all just been handed ten dollar bills.
So the score was tied, there wasn’t but one out still, and the next man up, a lefty named Cletis Morris, got around on Hookey’s first pitch and knocked it to the right field wall, where G.D. Squires caught it and tried to throw out Ernest Bell at home. He had tagged up, and the third base coach’d sent him, and G.D.’s throw was way up the third base line. Bell didn’t even have to slide to score, but he did anyway.
That one run stood up for the Monroe Zephyrs during the rest of the game, and when we made our last out and drug on back toward the high-school gym, we’d lost a game in the standings and the Alexandria Aces had picked up one more on us. Tommy Grenier was waiting in the Monroe High School gym to tell me and anybody who’d listen.
“Chief,” he said, “let me know what you’re thinking after the Rice Birds losing that close one. I bet you’re really blue about now, right?”
“Gemar Batiste ain’t never been called blue before,” Dynamite Dunn said. “I guarantee you. Red, now, he’s been called red a lot.”
“He is the original red man,” G.D. Squires said, listening in.
“You’re wrong there, G.D.,” I told him. “The original red man was that color because he was made out of mud, and all Abba Mikko had to work with was that old Alabama clay which is red as fire.”
“It’s really gratifying to hear you Rice Birds be able to joke at a time like this,” Tommy Grenier said. “That way of looking at hard times will stand you in good stead for the rest of the season.”
“I don’t know about G.D.,” I said. “I ain’t joking about how the original man got to be red colored.”
“G.D. can’t talk for himself,” Dynamite said. “It’s always somebody needful to talk for him.”
“This banter among you fellows really cheers me up,” Tommy Grenier said, not looking up from scribbling in his notebook. “But let me ask
you one more thing, Chief.”
I didn’t say anything, since I’d just caught sight of Mike Gonzales coming into the gym from the room where the showers were, and I wanted to see how he’d look at me when he came over.
“Here it is,” he said. “You’re listed by your manager as the starting pitcher against the Monroe Zephyrs tomorrow. It’s got to be on your mind that it’s up to you to seal the deal if the Rice Birds are going to be in the playoffs against Opelousas at the end of the season. Your team just got beat by Monroe, and you’ve got to try to stop them from throwing your team into a sudden-death game against Alexandria to see which one of you gets to play for the championship of the Evangeline League. How much weight are you feeling right now? It’s your responsibility to put out the fire. Hookey Irwin’s loss has put you in a hole. Do you think you’re up to the job of digging out of it?”
“Monroe didn’t beat us today,” I said. “We gave them the game. Hookey Irwin didn’t lose it for us. We give them runs they didn’t make.”
“You’re talking about the throwing error by Gonzales in the eighth inning,” Tommy Grenier said.
Everybody stopped talking when Tommy Grenier said that. Baseball players always know what makes a game get away from them, but they don’t never want to say it was because somebody did wrong or didn’t do right. We all knew that. But if you start going over how a thing was done wrong or how it wasn’t done right, all you are asking is for it to happen again.
When Mike Gonzales came across that gym finally and walked up to us, nobody said nothing to him at first. “We going to be on our own tonight to get supper?” G.D. Squires asked. “Or has Dutch found us somewhere to go on the cheap?”
“I ain’t going where he might direct us,” Dynamite Dunn said. “I know a chili parlor close to the Smooth Sailing Tourist Court, where we ate a couple of times last year. It ain’t that bad, and I’ll pay for my own grub before I’ll put anything in my belly that Dutch Bernson’s turned up for us tonight.”
“I don’t know why I threw that damn ball over Phil’s head,” Mike Gonzales said, “and let in them runs. I must’ve caught my cleats on a little rock or something. I felt my foot slip right before I turned the ball loose. It just sailed on me.”
“You know, the dirt in an infield is funny,” G.D. Squires said. “It will look smooth as a tabletop, and that will fool you. You will trust it to be what it looks like, and lots of times that dirt will be just eat up with them little pebbles that’ll slide under you.”
“I believe the closer a ball field is to the Gulf of Mexico the better the infield surface is going to be,” Dynamite Dunn said. G.D. wanted to argue about that, and the conversation got into that in a lot more detail than anybody normal would want to listen to. It was in safe water now, I could tell, what folks in the hearing range of Mike Gonzales was wanting to talk about. G.D. and Dynamite wasn’t about to back off on any position on any subject they’d decided to argue about, and even Mike Gonzales could tell that nobody wanted to hear him try to justify that throw he’d made.
I knew what I didn’t want to know. I knew what’d happened when Mike Gonzales threw that ball halfway to the wall, that one I had to chase down, but when later on that night him and me had got back to our room in the Smooth Sailing Tourist Court in Monroe and he wanted to explain some more to me, I told him I didn’t want to hear any more about it.
“Gemar,” Mike said, “you done made throwing errors before. I know you have. I remember a couple of times you did. You ought to understand what I’m saying.”
“I ain’t contending about that,” I said. “I know I’ve made errors. But I ain’t going to talk about a single one of them bad actions.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t have to. I made them, and I made them fair and square. So they’re gone now.”
“You ain’t listening to me.”
“You’re right. I ain’t listening, and I’m easy in my mind. I ain’t got a thing to explain about why I struck out with a man on base today, neither. You know why I did that?”
“Tell me why.”
“I struck out,” I said, “because that pitcher for the Zephyrs fooled my ignorant head. And that was my fault. And that was the one and only reason I struck out.”
“See,” Mike said, “I believe I figured it out, what happened. I was cheating a little toward second, thinking Bell wouldn’t be able to pull the ball none, so I was overbalanced when I threw the ball. That’s the way I see it.”
“I ain’t going to say what I’m thinking, Mike, because I might be thinking wrong. I hope I am. It’s like being fooled by that curve today I struck out on. I ain’t going to be fooled by it again. I’ll be watching for it the next time when it comes.”
“You ain’t making any sense,” Mike said.
“Sometimes the best thing to do is not to make sense. When you make sense, you can be wrong. It’s timing that’ll tell, not sense. I’m going to sleep now. I got to pitch tomorrow.”
“I wish I could go to sleep, with all that’s on my mind,” Mike said. The last thing I remember hearing before I drifted off was Mike saying the name of some woman and talking to himself about money and how much of it he owed somebody.
30
Later that night lying in a strange bed, I woke up from a dream I’d been having. I couldn’t remember a lot of it, but what did stay in my mind I wished hadn’t.
Mike Gonzales was asleep in his bed across from mine, groaning every breath he took, and I felt like I had to get out of that dark tight place and step outside where there’d be some light and open air to take into my lungs. I got up, and I walked out of the room and away from that bed where the dream had been closing down on me.
I didn’t know what time it was by the clock, but it smelled late outside, the air not stirring but cooler, no cars moving on the street, and all the houses and buildings dark. I took off walking back in the direction the Rice Bird bus had come from, and by the time I’d got a block or two down the street, I was breathing better, and I could see the moon was about three-quarters full. It was hanging like a stone high in the sky, and I set my eyes on it as I walked on.
A good ways up ahead, one house had a light burning in a window, so I knew somebody besides me was awake. In a few minutes of steady walking on that street in North Louisiana, I could recognize that I was coming up on the ball field where the Monroe Zephyrs played.
The thing that would let me turn around and go back to the room where I was supposed to be able to rest was waiting in that ballpark, I thought, and if I looked at what was there in the right way, I’d be able to go back to the tourist court and crawl back into bed.
Coming up that street, I reached first the corner of the ballpark where the left field line runs into the wall. I stopped at that corner and climbed up on the two-by-four boards that supported that part of the wall. Other folks before me had done that, I could tell, even in the light of a moon less than full. The place on the wooden support where I put my feet to stand and look over the left field wall felt smooth and slick from people doing that before me.
Once up there, I could see what I needed to, and it was well lit up by a big bulb hanging on a pole behind it. I’d figured they wouldn’t leave all the lights turned out at night in the ballpark where the Zephyrs played. I didn’t think the light they left burning would be where it was, though, just in the position and at the angle to show clear what it did.
Home plate had light falling on it, shining from that bulb above it, and as far away as I was then, standing on a two-by-four plank outside, I could see the white shape of the diamond.
I watched it for a good long time. The longer I watched, the brighter home plate at the point of the diamond got, and by the time I’d seen enough to satisfy me, it was giving out more light on its own than the moon above the ballpark. Home plate was there, it wasn’t moving, and it was se
ttled in where Abba Mikko had put it.
After I hopped down off that two-by-four and started back up the street toward the tourist court, I could see my shadow from the light of the moon moving ahead of me. Now and then I swung my arms out to the side, and I shook my head to watch the shadow man do the same thing. He didn’t miss a single motion I made, and home plate behind the two of us stayed right where it was supposed to be.
• • •
The next day when it was time for me to step up on the mound, I knew in my bones it was going to happen somewhere along the way. What inning it would be in, I couldn’t have told, but it would come at a time when it made a difference, and that difference would be all that was needed to make the wrong thing happen. Depending on any particular game, the wrong thing can be so little and so hard to see that most folks will never know it was even there. A player can look off at a time when he ought never to have done that, because looking off just then will let something get by him. It can be as simple as that and as hard to notice.
Baseball can’t talk to you when you’re a man trying to play the game the way it’s supposed to be done, but it can let you know when you fall short of what it expects of you. It does that not in your head where words come from, but in the part of your body that can’t think and can’t imagine what might be contrary to what the truth is. When you fail at some part of what you got to do when you’re playing baseball, you don’t have to ask your mind what just took place. Your body tells you.
