Dirty Rice

by Gerald Duff

  I didn’t have to look to know what was coming. Mike Gonzales took a little hop to one side, fielded the ball clean, and reared back to throw it to Tubby Dean at first base, the easy out to take. When he let it go, I didn’t watch the ball. I knew where it was going, and I didn’t have to follow that. Instead, I kept my eyes on Tubby Dean who made the highest jump I ever saw him accomplish the whole time I played on the Rice Bird team alongside him. Tubby was a big man, and he looked a little soft and awkward, but he wasn’t that. Like some big men can do, he moved his feet good, and he could stretch out a long way at first, and he could get off the ground higher than anyone would’ve believed he could. All that didn’t let him catch the ball the shortstop threw over his head by four feet, though, and by the time he’d run it down and throwed to Dynamite Dunn at home, both runners for Opelousas had come in safe.

  We made up one run in the bottom of the ninth, but that’s all the Rice Birds could come up with. Opelousas beat us by one, and Cliff Labbé lost one of the best games I saw him pitch that year I spent in the Evangeline League. There ain’t no guaranteed payoff for pitching well, and everybody who’s ever stepped up on a mound at the center of a diamond knows that. You can make bad pitches that the other team hits all over the park, and you can still win. You can pitch a close hard game and show good stuff the whole way through it, like Cliff Labbé did in that series with the Indians, and you can still come up whipped. It’s times when baseball don’t care a bit about how good you are and how hard you work to win. The game likes to mock you now and then, just to show you how little you can count on effort paying off and how hard work and good intentions can’t be trusted. That’s what ballplayers are talking about when they claim their nerves is shot. They get afraid to depend on anything happening good any more. They’ve lost their faith, and that’s a hurtful and nervous state to be in.

  It was quiet in the clubhouse after that first game in the championship series with the Opelousas bunch. Players got dressed quick, not looking around at each other, and we all left as soon as Dutch Bernson said we could. Mike Gonzales spent as much time as folks would let him, going around from one man to the other, explaining how his foot had slipped and he’d hurried his throw to make up for that. “It just took off on me, Gemar,” he told me. “Like it had wings sewed to it. I never had that happen to me before. You’ve seen me make that play a thousand times. Now, hadn’t you? Tell me the truth.”

  “If you don’t treat a baseball right, it won’t pay no attention to what you tell it to do,” I said. “It knows what’s going on, and it’ll take it out on you.”

  “What you mean by saying that? Are you saying I wasn’t trying?”

  “Naw, I wasn’t saying that. You were trying all right, Mike. And you did just what you wanted to.”

  “I don’t like what you saying, Gemar. It sounds wrong to me. I believe you’re throwing off on me.”

  “I imagine you know a whole lot about what’s wrong, all right. Now don’t talk to me no more. I got to pitch the next game and keep them other ones from putting us in the shade. I said all I want to, cut-off man.”

  “You better listen to what Gemar’s saying,” Dynamite Dunn said. “Don’t you want a good payday?”

  “He ain’t worried about a payday, I don’t believe,” I said, feeling the blood starting to pound in my head and a tingling feeling working its way down my arms toward my fingers. “That’s the last thing Mike’s going to let bother him.” The sounds were starting up, too, deep in my head, that of a drum tapping and of a stream of water flowing over rocks and getting stronger as it moved toward a long fall into a deep black pool.

  “You,” Dynamite Dunn said to me, “Gemar, I’m talking to you. Come with me to the diner. Don’t worry, we ain’t going to drink nothing that’ll hurt us. We’re going to eat and drink coffee, and we’re going to figure out what we need to do in Opelousas when you pitch day after tomorrow. We got to nail that one down, hoss, and I got things to say to you that I hope’ll help us do it.”

  I looked at Dynamite and he stared hard at me, like he was trying to see inside my head. “All right,” I said. “Chica mau.” The sound was fading now.

  “Mike,” Dynamite said. “Go over yonder and talk to Tubby Dean about that ball he almost caught. Did you ever see a fat man get that high off the ground before?”

  Some of the Rice Bird players still in the clubhouse laughed a little at that, but Mike wasn’t one of them. “I done talked to Tubby,” he said. “He can’t tell me nothing. That throw was an accident. I put too much on the ball. That’s what happened.”

  “Whatever it was don’t make no difference now,” Dynamite said. “Go off and think about it for just two more minutes and then forget it. We got to win the next two. Hell, we’re used to winning two games in a row. We’ll do it again.”

  Me and Dynamite had that coffee and ate the supper special at the diner. By the time I’d got most of it down, I was able to listen pretty close to what he was saying to me. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard him tell me before when we’d talked about a game I was fixing to pitch, but it seemed good to me to pay attention to the words coming out of the catcher’s mouth, familiar as they was. He named the players in the Opelousas lineup one by one that I’d be facing, how they’d hit before when Dynamite had caught games against them with me and with other folks pitching, the kind of pitches each one liked to swing at, what they might be able to do with a given one, and what they didn’t like to see coming at them.

  Like most catchers, Dynamite kept a lot of what he knew about batters in his head, but he did write down things in a little notebook or on scraps of paper some times when he thought it’d help him and the pitcher he was handling. Sitting across from me in the booth in the diner, he would close his eyes when he talked about one or the other of the good hitters he was going over, like he was seeing them at bat taking a swing. How did Toot Arceneaux handle a fastball on the inside part of the plate? What would get him to swing when he ought not to? What would make him think a particular pitch was coming that he knew to wait on? What could confuse his thinking, get him leaning in when that was the wrong thing to do and he ought to’ve been leaning back, tempt him to go all out in his swing at what he figured was going to be a fastball and have it be a curve instead and him throwed off in his timing and just chop at it?

  Sitting there in the diner with it getting darker outside and the few other people that had come there to eat now all leaving to go home, I didn’t want Dynamite to stop talking. I knew what he was going to say but it was something that was a comfort to put into my mind right then.

  “What does Remy LeGrande like to hit?” I said to Dynamite, knowing full well that Opelousas player liked a high fastball, like most weak hitters hope and believe they can drive, but not wanting to let Dynamite change the subject yet. “That second baseman for Opelousas is who I’m talking about.”

  “You ought to remember that,” Dynamite said. “As many times you set him down this season. But I guess it’s been so easy to get him to bite that you done forgot.”

  “A man will remember what he didn’t do right more than what worked for him before,” I said. “That’s a thing I got by heart.”

  “Yeah, but a man won’t dwell on it,” Dynamite said. “If he wants to sleep good at night. Or get that bastard out next time. Now, listen, I think the one man you got to worry about if he comes up with men on base is Ellis Credeau. He is patient, and he don’t get flustered and he will not load up and try to knock the ball out of the park. He will not scare easy. He will choke up on the bat and chip away at you. He knows how to wait.”

  By the time Dynamite had worked his way through all the Opelousas batters I’d be facing in the second game of the series, I was feeling settled down enough in my mind so that all I was hearing was the words my catcher was saying. I was seeing men come up to bat, one after the other, scratching the dirt around home plate t
o convince themselves that was their personal territory and then lifting their eyes finally to look at me, the man fixing to cause them all that trouble and grief. I knew they were mistaken in the notion that home plate might belong to them this time, and I watched myself put pitch after pitch by every one of them, the ball popping in Dynamite Dunn’s mitt loud enough to scare roosted birds into flying up.

  35

  By the time I left the diner and walked up the street to go home and get some sleep, I felt settled down enough to do that. When I got to Miz Velma Doucette’s house on Serenity Street, though, I could see she was up waiting for me in the living room. I hesitated to turn the knob, wondering what the reason might be for her to be up that time of night. It wouldn’t be about what had been happening between me and Teeny, I figured. How could Miz Doucette know anything about that? Teeny was getting married, and she was getting married good, to a man whose daddy owned half of a baseball team and rice farms and buildings and boats and big cars that were brand new or close to it. She was a woman fixing to be set up with the best chance she’d ever have, she’d told me. Teeny wouldn’t say a word to anybody to put any part of a shadow on that bright spot in the sunshine she was stepping into.

  “Howdy, Miz Doucette,” I said as I walked into the living room. “I’m sorry I’m getting to your house late, but we played that first game with Opelousas, and we’re getting ready to take off in the morning to play the next one over yonder.”

  “I know that, Gemar, and I know y’all lost that first one. I listened to it on the radio, and I’m real sorry it ended the way it did. Teeny went to it with Clayton LeBlanc, but she ain’t back yet.”

  “She did?” I said. “I didn’t know she was at the game.”

  “There was so many people to watch the Rice Birds play the Indians I don’t expect you would’ve been able to see her even if you’d been looking, would you?”

  “No, ma’am. I don’t ever look for anybody in the stands anyway,” I said, not mentioning anything about an exception for the one that might be wearing that yellow dress. “Well, I guess I’ll go on to mine and Mike’s room and get me some rest.”

  “That’s what I wanted to tell you about, so you wouldn’t be worried when you didn’t see Mike in your room no more. He asked me to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “He’s decided to move out to a different place, Gemar,” Miz Doucette said. “He took all his stuff and left out of here tonight. He said he wanted to get him a place of his own so he won’t have to share space no more. So he’s moving into a garage apartment of his own behind Mr. Addison’s house on Mouton Street. Do you know where that is?”

  “No, I don’t. I saw the street sign before, though.”

  “I thought it was funny he hadn’t told you he was moving, and I told him that. But you know what he said?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “He said when a chance at something good pops up, he figures you got to take it while you can.”

  “Mike said that, huh? Who is Mr. Addison? That’s the same name as the Rice Bird ballpark.”

  “That tells you who he is, Gemar. The Addisons is a fine old family here in Rayne. They own the Tribune and the bank and I don’t know what all in Acadia Parish. They been here a long time.”

  “Good for Mike, then. He’s where he wants to be.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. I hope he gets the kind of cooking he wants over there. He never liked mine much, like you do. It’s too spicy for him, I do believe, but you don’t mind that, do you?”

  “I eat whatever I can,” I said. “Whatever’s in front of me. I ain’t that particular.”

  “I hope you do like Cajun country cooking, though,” Miz Doucette said. “It’s all I know how to do.”

  “I like everything in your house, Miz Doucette.”

  “I’m glad about that. I notice you got a good appetite always. And I want you to know I ain’t going to ask you to pay a cent more for your room and board than you’re doing now, even though it’s just going to be you in that room by yourself from now on.”

  “I appreciate that. Thank you.”

  “And one reason why I don’t have to ask for more money from you is that Mike Gonzales paid me a whole extra month’s rent just because he’s moved out early. Wasn’t that nice of him?”

  “Real nice,” I said. “Real nice. Mike’s a generous man. I do believe he likes giving things away.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?” Miz Velma Doucette said, and I went on back to my room in the back part of the house, the one with all the nice sayings framed up on the walls, especially the one saying which I had got by heart. . . .

  • • •

  The Opelousas ballpark where we played that second game of the Evangeline League playoff series burned down a long time ago. I read about it in the Beaumont Enterprise a little while after that destruction took place in the 1960s, round about the time they killed the white folks’ president in Dallas riding in his big open car by that building full of school books. Back in the ‘30s, though, that ballpark was located right downtown in Opelousas, and it was a whole lot bigger than the one in Rayne, with new bright paint on the beer and insurance and automobile signs on the outfield walls and inside the clubhouse, too, and with a whole lot more seats in the stands and in the bleachers that run down the first and third base lines than there was in the Rice Birds ballpark. The reason it burned after the Evangeline League shut down sometime in the 1950s was not because of a fire that was set on purpose or an accident with electric hook-ups like the way most old ballparks end up, though. That fire was started by a bolt of lightning striking in the middle of the night long after the last ball was pitched and the last bat swung on that diamond.

  Nobody missed the field after it was gone, I imagine, since baseball was long dead by then in all them Evangeline League towns. Abba Mikko will take pity on a spot of ground that used to be a place where real things once happened, and he will get rid of it once it’s lost itself. Put it out of its misery, I mean, and save it from having to be always a reminder that it was a true place at one time and now ain’t nothing.

  But that lightning bolt that set fire to the Opelousas Indians ballpark was still a long way off the day I was set to pitch in that second game, and none of the players and people who’d bought tickets to see the teams play and nobody else there had any thought about what might or might not happen past the time it would take for nine innings to be worked through.

  The Evangeline League folks running the playoff games had a lot of talking and presenting to do before they’d get off the field and let the game come alive, so the players on both teams had a long spell to sit in the dugouts waiting for all that business to get took care of. Opelousas was the home team, and I figured that’d let me have a few more minutes to warm up, the Rice Birds being the first to bat. I motioned to Dynamite Dunn sitting beside me to get out on the field outside the first base line so I could throw a few more pitches while the talking was still going on.

  “I don’t think they’d like it for us to do that, Gemar,” Dynamite said, “while they’re still jabbering away. We better wait.”

  “All right,” I said. “Excuse me. I forgot for a minute this ain’t really about the subject of baseball.”

  “You not about to get wrong-headed on me, now, are you?” he said, giving me that look he would turn on me when I said or did something to make him nervous. “You not going to sull up and go Indian on me, I hope.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’m going to be as much of a white man as I can be today.”

  “Don’t say shit like that, Gemar. It spooks me. Just pitch, all right?”

  Dynamite looked at me like I was a firecracker he’d just lit and it hadn’t gone off yet, though it was way past time for it. He didn’t know whether to come up closer to light another match to stick to the fuse or to get a
way from the blow-up which might come any time now. Do you get near enough to poke at it or do you run? Looking at Dynamite’s eyes all popped open, I felt glad again I wasn’t a catcher.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the man talking through the loudspeaker said in English and then again in French, “I’ve been saving the best for last. Our most distinguished guest has not yet arrived, but his schedule will allow him to be here in a few minutes. So I beg your indulgence until that time. I know you’ll be glad to wait a little while longer for this second playoff game between the Opelousas Indians and the Rayne Rice Birds to begin when I tell you the good news. In less than ten minutes, our beloved and distinguished United States Senator Huey P. Long will be joining us for the first few innings of the game.”

  The man kept on talking, but you couldn’t hear much of what else he was saying after that, just a word or two now and again out of the loudspeakers as the crowd of folks in the stands and bleachers screamed and hollered. It reminded me of the noise a big flock of geese makes when they’re landing in the Big Thicket on Bear Lake.

  “The Kingfish is going to be here,” Dynamite hollered in my ear, close up so I could hear him. “I never thought I’d get a chance to play in front of him.”

  “But he ain’t going to stay the whole game, that man said. He didn’t show up at the All-Star game when they said he might. I reckon he can’t be counted on to stay long in a place.”

  “Hell, no,” Dynamite said. “He’s got to be everywhere in Louisiana all the time. He’s just showing up here for a minute or two. I wish my old man was here to see Huey Long watching me play. What you think about that, Gemar?”

  “Well, I just hope he gets to stay long enough to watch me strike out a man or two,” I said. “It’s his lucky day I’m pitching.”

  The noise of the crowd died down some enough to where you could hear the loudspeaker good, but that didn’t last long, because the whooping and hollering cranked up again in a few minutes right about the time a lot of car honking and siren blowing could be heard getting louder outside on the street leading to the ballpark. When that noise stopped, one of the bands cranked up, playing the American national anthem and then another song I didn’t know. Later on, somebody told me it was the state song of Louisiana, but I’d never heard it before.