by Gerald Duff
One time when the Rice Birds was playing the Lake Charles Explorers in their ballpark, a field that backed up directly onto a marsh just the other side of the fence, I noticed something big lying up on a hummock that stuck up out of the water. It was an alligator, quiet there in the sun like they will get when their bellies is full and they don’t have to worry about finding something to eat just then. He was resting so still he didn’t look like he was alive, but I knew he was. He had one eye open like he was watching a little bit of the game going on just the other side of where he lived in the marsh, and I called out to him to say howdy. He didn’t make no sign he’d heard me, but it felt good to me to have some company out there in right field where I was up close to the wall playing the man at bat deep, since he’d been known to hit some long balls that direction. “Ho, Alligator,” I said. “I believe we got the Explorers where we want them.” Alligator didn’t answer me, but I figured he was thinking the same way I was, out there with me in the outfield in that hot Louisiana sun.
So early on in that game with the Alexandria Aces, the one they were calling sudden death in the newspapers and on the radio, the one Dutch Bernson had put me in to pitch with just two days rest, I thought I knew why Dynamite Dunn had decided to trot out to the mound to hand me the ball instead of tossing it back. The muscles in the back of his thighs hurt a little, I figured, and he wanted some relief, or he’d got lonesome up there behind the plate, the only man on the field having to squat down like that and look at the back of the man holding a bat and facing away from him, and Dynamite wanted to tell me something I didn’t need to hear. He couldn’t say a word I wouldn’t be able to predict.
I knew we had to win this one before we’d be the team to face Opelousas in the three-game playoff that would end up the season in the Evangeline League. I didn’t need to be told no encouraging words, and I knew just how I wanted to pitch to the batter at the plate.
“How you feel?” Dynamite said, holding out the ball toward me, but not letting go of it yet. I looked him in the eye, but I didn’t say anything back to him.
“You’re doing fine, Gemar,” Dynamite said. “Keep it humming, and I’ll do my best to catch every damn one of them.” That was the encouraging word he felt obliged to give me, and I nodded and reached for the ball, which he wasn’t ready to turn loose yet.
“You seen her yet?”
“Who?” I said.
“She’s wearing a yellow dress, sitting right behind the home plate screen. I thought she’d have caught your eye by now.”
“Teeny?” I said.
“Teeny Doucette. Yessir. Pretty as you please, right up there between Clayton LeBlanc and his old daddy, Legon.”
“I never look up in the stands when I’m pitching,” I said.
“I know that, pitcher. That’s why I’m telling you. To save you the trouble of having to crane your neck.”
“Go to hell, Dynamite,” I said. “I don’t know her.”
“I bet you wish you didn’t, all right,” Dynamite said, letting me take the ball out of his hand. “She knows you, though. Didn’t you hear her holler your name when you struck out Moon Trahan?”
“I just hear noise when I’m pitching. Here he comes. Get on back behind the plate.”
Dynamite turned around to wave at the umpire, Dewey Potts, and he said one more thing. “It’s a scout from the White Sox up yonder, too, in case you’re interested. Right behind that good-looking girl in the yellow dress, the one you claim you don’t know.”
I wasn’t worried about a baseball scout from the Chicago White Sox, nor from anywhere else right then, since I’d never had trouble keeping my mind on what might hurt me when I was pitching a game. It was that man up there with a club in his hand looking to do me wrong that I studied.
Teeny Doucette popping up in my head was something that I hadn’t been faced with before, though, and I was both pissed off at Dynamite Dunn and obliged to him for letting me know she was there watching me pitch. Maybe if Dynamite hadn’t told me she was there and how to spot her, I never would have known it at all or at least until the game with the Aces was over with. But what if some sweat had got in my eyes while I was up on the mound, hot as it was that day, and I had took off my cap with the picture of the Rice Bird on it, and wiped the sleeve of my uniform shirt across my face? Maybe I’d have looked up and saw that flash of yellow behind the wire screen and recognized the woman wearing that dress by knowing it could be only her black hair shining in the sun the way it would do.
It ain’t a good thing for a man to try to pitch a game of baseball with his mind divided into more than one part. You have got to see just one thing at a time when you’re throwing a ball toward a man who wants to hit it back and whose aim is to ruin what you’re working on. And that one thing you’re seeing is a little spot. And that spot is located on a bigger spot, the place where the catcher is going to hold his mitt for you to see it if he’s doing the job he’s hired out for, and that’s all you see. Your mind is on that until the ball is safe where you want it to be. You see like you’re looking down a gun sight.
Usually, I’d never had no real trouble collecting my mind together before I would throw one pitch and another up there. But now that I knew Teeny Doucette was up there in the stands along with the fellow I’d had to knock down three times in the Bon Soir Club in Lafayette, and her looking down at what I was doing in that game against Alexandria, I felt afraid I might lose that good tight hold on my mind I needed to do my job right.
I took some time rubbing the ball up, hoping the batter would get sore at me for taking so long and that he’d back out of the box to make me wait a little. He did that in a little while, lifting a hand to the umpire and stepping back to pull at his uniform and take a half swing in the empty air, and then finally start to step back in. Him doing all that bought me a little time to think of what I might put in my head to keep my mind settled, and by the time he was looking out at me again, I’d found something to think about other than not trying to see Teeny Doucette in her yellow dress.
I went into my windup to pitch the ball so the batter could reach it if he was good enough, but with enough on it that he couldn’t do anything with it. I put it right by him and into the spot on Dynamite Dunn’s catcher’s mitt where it was supposed to go.
I kept my mind in one piece, even when some of the Alexandria batters would hit one of my pitches.
When it was over, we didn’t have to come to bat in the last half of the ninth inning, since we were ahead already, and the sudden death was suffered by the Aces. The last man I faced I struck out on four pitches, and the final one he swung at late and missed by a foot. The ball popped into Dynamite Dunn’s mitt like the sound of a drum hit hard one time. Dynamite ran out to grab me, and I let him do that, though I usually wouldn’t allow him to hug me up like a catcher will.
When we all got back in the clubhouse, everybody was yelling and carrying on and throwing stuff up in the air. Rice Bird caps, gloves, shirts and socks, anything portable. The room had more people in it than I’d ever seen after a game before. Lots of them I recognized, like Tommy Grenier from the Rayne Tribune newspaper, and Sal Florio and Soapy Tonton, and Tony Guidry and Legon LeBlanc, and folks who ran the stores and businesses in town, the ones I’d seen across counters in cafés and the drugstore and the Joy Theater and places like that. And then some other folks brand new to me, mainly men wearing new-looking suits and hats, and some women, too. I figured they must have been wives of the men I hadn’t seen before, from the way they was dressed and how old they were. But a few of the women was young ones, wearing lighter colored dresses and lots of lipstick and rouge and powder on their faces. The women stood mainly just outside the door, not coming far inside the room, I noticed, keeping a little distance from all them loud ballplayers with their shirts unbuttoned and pulled out of their pants and their shoes off and their mouths open to whoop and holler a
nd carry on.
There was tubs of bottles of beer on ice waiting for us, and everybody was sucking down Jax and some other brands I hadn’t seen before, here and there bottles of whiskey passing around from one man to the other. G.D. Squires hadn’t been off the field more than two minutes, but he looked like he’d already managed to get drunk. “Damn, Chief Batiste,” he said. “We done got ourselves into the Evangeline League playoffs. Kiss my ass, if that ain’t going to be a show.”
“Gemar,” Dynamite said. “Look here at my catching hand, you crazy Texas Indian. It’s red as fire from them damn fastballs you been burning in there.”
I thought to remind him I was from the Nation and not from Texas, but I let it go. Somebody stuck a Jax beer in my hand, and I tilted back my head and took a big sip from it. That allowed me to look toward the door to the outside where the women were edging away, and I wondered if Teeny Doucette would have come down to the clubhouse with Legon LeBlanc and his son. I caught a glimpse of something yellow just outside the door, and I wished I hadn’t. If I wandered over there and found out that yellow dress was the one Dynamite had told me Teeny was wearing and she was in it and saw me, what would I say to her? What if the man she’d come to the game with was standing there talking to her? Would I just have to slink off like I was scared, or would I lose my head and say something that’d made me look like I was addled? Would Clayton LeBlanc say something to me that I couldn’t abide? Would I have to act crazy like an Indian in a picture show would do? Would he need knocking down again? Why would he? Would I do it? What would come of it if I did?
It was a hell of a lot easier to pitch nine innings than to think about all that, I figured, so I turned my back to the door and looked around for somebody to talk to that wouldn’t call up so many questions for me. That turned out to be Harry Nolan, sitting on a bench with two beer bottles empty beside him and one still half-full in his hand. I wanted me a good sized pinch of mikko root, and I promised myself I’d take care of that before the day was over.
“Well, pitcher,” Harry said, looking up at me and tipping his bottle in my direction like he was saluting. “I didn’t witness a single Rice Bird miss a sign from me today. But I see you did what you supposed to do one more time again. Here’s to you.”
“Thanks, Harry,” I said. “But there ain’t that many real hitters on the Alexandria team. It wasn’t that hard a job out there.”
“You can still stand up like a man and say stuff like that, and I expect you’ll be able to do it for a while longer.”
I didn’t ask him what that meant. It never took long for Harry to start explaining, and it didn’t then.
“When you’re young and in your prime and still strong as a bull, you can act like you ain’t impressed with yourself. Yessir, you can pitch a game like you just did, with a scout from Chicago come down here to take a look at you, and people hollering your name and slapping you on the back and wanting to touch you for luck, and you don’t have to brag. People’ll do that for you, and all you got to do is stand there and say shucks it wasn’t nothing.”
“Some of that might be right, but I don’t think about things like that. I just throw the ball up there and try to stay out of the way if they hit it back at me.”
“You don’t have to think about stuff like that, pitcher,” Harry Nolan said and took a drink of beer. “No you don’t. Not yet. The time when you got to think about what you’ve done and what you can do, that ain’t got here yet. You still working at the mindless stage. I don’t mean mindless, like dumb, now. I mean not mindful. That don’t require no reflection. You don’t have to tell your arm and your legs and your back what they ought to do. They just do it on their own, and all you got to do is stand back and watch them work. You ain’t required yet to give orders and hope they’re carried out like you want.”
“That’s the way to celebrate a win, Harry,” Dynamite Dunn said from where he was standing looking at us, with a bottle of beer in one hand and a lit cigar in the other one. “Telling Gemar cheerful shit like that. I believe you missed your calling. You are misplaced professionally. You ought to be running a funeral home.”
“I ain’t bothering Gemar,” Harry said. “Nothing anybody can say to him now is going to make him feel bad. Ain’t that right, pitcher?”
“I can feel bad on my own without no help from a soul,” I said. “I don’t need nobody to tell me how to feel about a thing. I will listen to preachers and teachers and folks like that talking about how a man ought to feel, though, sometimes, just to see what they’re saying.”
“That’s the point, pitcher, that I’m trying to make,” Harry said. “But what can a broke-down reliever say to you? Don’t listen to me. Hell, no. I advise against it. So take my advice and don’t listen. I can’t tell you nothing.”
“Nobody can tell anybody how to feel,” I said. “You got to handle that all by yourself on your own.”
I walked off then and left Dynamite and Harry Nolan still trying to get each other’s goat, and I headed for where my regular clothes was located. If the women that’d been standing just outside the door had cleared out, I figured I could get out of my uniform and slide on outside the Addison Stadium clubhouse. I felt like I needed to catch a little breeze in my face if one was blowing outside in the street, but I wasn’t counting on that. Down in South Louisiana, you hardly ever got a chance to have a medium-sized movement of air come over you. It was either blowing like a hurricane or dead still in all them towns where the Evangeline League teams played. It was not a place to catch a moderate breeze.
I had to get by Dutch Bernson before I could slip out of the clubhouse, though. I knew he’d want to remind me about what I already knew about the playoff games coming up with Opelousas. He was a manager, and he believed he had to be reminding players what to do and what to think about all the time. A manager will look for ways to see things going wrong. It’s his nature and he’s got to follow it, the same way Crow has got to holler full-time at any other bird he runs across.
I spotted Dutch across the room with his back turned to me, talking hard and fast to one of the men I’d never seen before, a fellow wearing a suit and tie and a Panama hat, and I figured that gave me a good chance to get out of there without having to deal with anybody else. Dynamite Dunn did call my name as he saw me leaving, wanting to get me to go with a bunch of the ballplayers to a honky-tonk in Rayne, I expected, but I made like I didn’t hear him and made it outside without having to stop again. I didn’t want my head tore up with whiskey that night.
I was outside the ballpark just in time to catch sight of Teeny Doucette about a block down the street climbing in the backseat of a big black sedan, the door of it being held open by Clayton LeBlanc. She was wearing that yellow dress, all right. I was glad I hadn’t seen her in it when I was pitching, and it didn’t go me any good to see her getting in the car with the Big Man Eater then, neither. When Clayton got inside, the Buick took off and passed by where I was waiting to cross the street. I could have beat them across, if I’d wanted to. I just stood there when they drove by, and all of the folks in the car waved at me and the man in the passenger’s seat in the front hollered through the window at me.
“Good game, Chief,” he said. “Real good game. Hot damn.”
I kept my eyes off the backseat where Teeny was sitting, and I lifted my hand up in the air as they drove off.
33
It was later on way after midnight while I was lying in my bed that she came into my room. I thought at first it might be Mike Gonzales looking for home, but the soft way the door opened told me it couldn’t be him. It came open gradual and quiet, and it didn’t bang into the wall the way it would have if Mike had been finding his way to bed, his belly full of whiskey and his head roaring like an empty gourd with wind blowing through it.
“Gemar,” she said. “Are you asleep?” She spoke in a voice so low that I couldn’t have heard her
if I had been dozing or if it had been somebody other than her.
“No,” I said to Teeny Doucette. “I can’t go to sleep. I’m just resting my eyes here in the dark.” There wasn’t much light so I couldn’t see her face, just the shadow she made as she closed the door behind her.
“You didn’t want to see me today,” Teeny said, “in the stadium after the game and then when you were outside standing by yourself when we went by you in the car. Why was that? I waved at you. I know you saw me.”
“How could you know that? I didn’t lean down to see who was in that big car going by me.”
“That’s how I knew. I could tell you didn’t want to see me because you were looking off so you couldn’t.”
“All right. I’ll tell you the truth. I didn’t want to see you. I couldn’t stand to see you.”
“Don’t you like me, Gemar?”
“You were wearing that yellow dress,” I said. “That’s one reason I didn’t want to see you. I was not going to look for you, no matter if I did know you were there.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way about me. Not even wanting to let me know you saw I was there.”
I didn’t say anything to that, and I kept my eyes fixed on the place on the wall behind her. I told myself that if I kept looking at that spot I wouldn’t run the chance of catching a glimpse of Teeny’s face when she moved into the light coming through the window behind me. I figured that might help me get through what was happening in that little room.
