Dirty Rice

by Gerald Duff

  After the cars all got parked, a bunch of men dressed in dark pants and coats and ties and white shirts came at a fast pace out of the clubhouse onto the field and right behind them trotted a fellow in a white suit, waving his hands in every direction and jerking around like he was one of them dolls you see hanging from strings that somebody is working from above. The way he was moving made it look like his feet was barely touching the ground and that his arms didn’t belong to him but to somebody else. His eyes was flashing, and he was grinning and laughing so big that you could see all the way into his mouth, which was opened so wide I expected him to spit something out.

  He grabbed ahold of the microphone behind home plate, mouth still popped open, and then he delivered what he’d been dying to get out of the inside of his head. That was words, and he poured them out like they was scorching his mouth.

  He said he was so glad he was here at the Evangeline League championship playoff he could hardly stand it, and that he’d turned his back on important business pertaining to the welfare of the United States of America to be able to be where he was. He declared he’d been keeping up with the progress of the Evangeline League standings all season long, and he couldn’t think of a better pair of teams to be playing for the championship than the Opelousas Indians and the Rayne Rice Birds. They may play baseball in other parts of the country, he said, but they don’t and can’t play the game the way it’s done in Louisiana in the Hot Sauce League.

  When he said that part, everybody in the stadium stood up and hollered and clapped louder than I’d ever seen a crowd do before, even counting the All-Star game in Baton Rouge back in July when I hit that home run to win it for the South team. “You tell ‘em, Huey,” yelled somebody with a voice like a bull bellowing. “Tell it.”

  “I’ll tell ‘em all right, folks,” the senator said. “When the Kingfish starts preaching about Louisiana, everybody’s bound to listen. I don’t give them no choice. It’s high poppalorum and low poppahirum once I get to going.”

  That made them holler even louder, and Huey P. Long stood there in the middle of all that noise with his arms spread out and his hands turned up, grinning like a cotton farmer in a steady rain that had come just in time to save the crop. There couldn’t be no weather he’d rather face.

  “Now, folks,” he said. “I got one more thing to say before we get to the real business of why we’re all here, the ball game that’s fixing to get played and that y’all are itching to see. It’s special, and here it is. Everybody knows I was born and raised in North Louisiana, and I’ve told the story of my dear grandmama, bless her heart, how she was a full-blooded Cajun lady raised on a bayou out near Lafayette. She’s gone on to be with the Lord, but her blood is my blood and that’s pure Cajun. I’m a Duke’s mixture, north and south Louisiana.”

  People started hollering some French words when the Kingfish said that, and he hollered some back at them, making them laugh and whistle and stomp. “Here’s something you might not know, though, about what all I’m proud to reveal about my Louisiana heritage. There happens to be a young man who’s pitching today for the Rayne Rice Birds, and he’s a full-blooded Indian from Texas. He is a dandy ballplayer, and no matter how much the Lone Star State might want to claim him, his tribe is originally from the Pelican State. He is a Coushatta Indian, and that tribe’s home is in North Louisiana, and my great-grandmother was a full-blooded Coushatta lady who got married to my Scotch-Irish great-grandfather way back yonder. Folks, you see standing before you a man whose bloodline goes back to the Coushatta people, and I’m proud to call Gemar Batiste a blood brother this afternoon.”

  The folks from Rayne that’d come for the game all whooped and hollered the loudest then, and I leaned over to speak in Dynamite Dunn’s ear in the middle of all that racket. “Is he telling the truth?”

  “In what part?” Dynamite said. “The Kingfish ain’t never telling the full story in anything he says. But he’s telling them what they’re dying to hear, always all the time. He’s telling more than the full truth.”

  “He don’t look like he’s got a speck of Indian in him,” I said.

  “How much Cajun does he have, you reckon? He’s got as much blood from one as from the other,” Dynamite said. “When the Kingfish is talking and claiming kin, the best way to listen is to lie back and enjoy it. The plain truth don’t matter.”

  “Pitcher,” Huey P. Long said into the microphone, pointing a finger at the Rayne dugout, “Gemar Batiste, I’m talking to you. Would you just climb out of where you’re sitting and let these folks take a look at you? All of us want to say Bon Jour to a Louisiana boy who’s been wandering in the wilderness and now has come home.”

  “Get your ass up, pitcher, and wave your hand in the air,” Dynamite said. “You heard what the Kingfish said.”

  “I ain’t going to say anything,” I said.

  “He don’t want you to say a word. He is the man who does all the talking, and all you got to do is be quiet and do what he says. Do it, damn it.”

  So I did that, not liking to have to, but knowing it wasn’t a thing else I could do at the time. I didn’t stay out in the open more than a couple of heartbeats, but it was enough to give the crowd something to yell at. When the noise died down a little, Huey P. Long said he was going to say a thing he’d always wanted to but never had the chance to utter before. “Play ball,” he said real loud, and spun around to get off the field, still looking as though the one above him you couldn’t see, the one who worked the strings that made him walk and open his mouth and wave his arms and draw breath and holler at folks, was hard at the job again of getting the Kingfish moved to a new location.

  “Oo wee,” G.D. Squires said as he moved past me grinning, bat in hand, on his way to lead off as the first man up for Rayne. “I didn’t know you was a cousin to the Kingfish. That explains everything to me.”

  I didn’t say anything back, and I was glad the baseball game was starting up where you could tell what mattered. I could step inside that diamond where what somebody is called don’t make a particle of difference. Doing it would feel like taking in a drink of cool water when you’re dead thirsty. You don’t taste it. You just take it down, and it becomes part of your blood because it’s going back to where it started out.

  The Rice Birds didn’t score in the first two innings of that second game, and neither did the Indians. We did pick up two runs in the third, but they didn’t get nothing but a single and left the man that hit it standing on base when the third out came, a fellow I struck out with his bat on his shoulder hoping for a walk. By that time, Senator Long had left the game to go do some business for the United States of America, according to what the announcer said over the loudspeaker, and we had to stop all the action on the field so the crowd could wave back at him as he took off with that ring of heavy-set men all around him, moving in that jerky gait as he walked out of the stadium, his feet barely touching the ground.

  Once he got gone and the noise from the car horns and sirens had died down, we got back to business on the field and worked our way through the rest of the innings left to us without the benefit of the Kingfish in the stands. This time, though, the Opelousas Indians was the ones having to bat in the bottom of the ninth because they were down three runs to one, and when I got the last man to bounce a soft grounder to short stop, Mike Gonzales picked it right up and fired to second for the force and Phil Pellicore turned the double play and threw to first as perfect as you will see it done in practice. Mike didn’t make any fielding or throwing errors the whole game, and I tried to get myself to feel encouraged by that. I couldn’t get no lift in spirit, though, and the reason was that I had lost faith in Mike.

  What it meant when we won that second game so handy was that we ought to have done the same thing in the first one. Now we’d be playing the third one back in Rayne, and Hookey Irwin would pitch it and I’d be in either center or right. The bett
ing odds would be a lot different for that game than they’d been for the one I’d just pitched.

  The one thing that didn’t satisfy me in the game I’d just pitched was that I’d give up a homer, the only run the Indians scored, and I’d done it because I wasn’t looking close at what I was doing. The batter was Bill Zontoni, a man I’d never let hit a good lick off anything I’d throwed him any time I faced him before, and I let down against him this time. What made me let up with him at bat was that I’d took off my cap to wipe the sweat off my forehead, hot that late in the game—I believe it was the seventh—and as I did it, I’d looked up at the crowd of people sitting behind home plate. I caught sight of the sun hitting on a woman’s hair where she was sitting just to the third base side of home plate, and the way it shone made me think for a minute it might be Teeny Doucette up there next to the Big Man Eater she told me she was going to marry. I looked away as quick as I caught myself thinking that might be her, but it was too late to shake her out of my head. What if it is her, I said to myself. You ain’t going to look back to see if it is, are you? If you do and it is her, what difference is it going to make to you? And if it ain’t her, is that going to relax your mind? No, because she’s already moved there into your head now, and you ain’t going to be able to work her out of it in between pitches.

  Remember where you are, I told myself. There ain’t nothing outside the lines of the diamond that means a thing right now. Tell the truth, is there? No, I said to that part of my head arguing with another part of it. All that stuff outside the lines can change even while you’re looking at it. It will do that. And it will finally die. Nothing dies in here where it’s marked off to be the place it is. So throw that weak hitter a fastball and get him out. Set him down. Let him be the one worried about himself and what he didn’t do when he had the chance. Empty out your mind.

  You can see why I threw that fastball the way I did, right over the heart of the plate with nothing on it but a little speed, and that’s why Bill Zontoni couldn’t believe what he saw coming toward him, a chance to unload on a bad pitch by Gemar Batiste and get his name wrote down for hitting a home run in a playoff game in the 1935 Evangeline League championship series. He hit it square, and it landed just over the right center field wall, and he got to trot around the bases at a slow pace. He didn’t have to hurry. He would be alive from the time he swung that bat until the last game of baseball would be played in this world. He would live from now on. It was like he’d been issued what white people call a paid-up insurance policy and he was collecting on it.

  Back in the clubhouse after the game was won, the Rayne Rice Birds was the ones not in a hurry to leave this time. There was beer to drink and shrimp and all kinds of spicy hot Cajun food to eat and a lot of hollering and hoorawing to get through before we’d have to finally all straggle out and get on the toad mobile to go back to Rayne and think about the next game. The strangers in the bunch was even more numerous than they’d been after the All-Star game in Baton Rouge, and all the usual ones that showed up was there in full force. I mean Mr. Tony Guidry and Mr. Legon LeBlanc, looking as satisfied as if it was them that had won the game themselves and not the players on the team they owned. Tommy Grenier from the Rayne Tribune was there to ask question that didn’t need no answer but had to be answered anyhow, and working through the crowd and talking to every player he could find was Sal Florio with Soapy Tonton right behind him, moving like there was a string you couldn’t see tied from his belt to the one his boss was wearing. Soapy had that fedora on, like always, nailed down perfect to his head as if it had been measured several times before they put the screws in it to hold it to his skull.

  People were slapping me on the back and shaking my hand, starting in to poke at me about the home run I’d give up to Bill Zontini, since it was all right to talk about that now because it hadn’t hurt us none. At least it hadn’t changed what the game ended up being, a win for the Rice Birds to tie up the series now and let us have a chance to come out on top in the third one with Hookey Irwin on the mound. Dynamite Dunn was relieved the game was over with and the way it had come out, believing like all catchers do that he’d been the one who carried the team through to that good ending.

  “Chief Batiste,” Dynamite said to me, his eyes dancing in his head like dice that’s just been throwed, “didn’t we do it? Didn’t we show them bastards how the cow ate the cabbage?”

  I nodded at him and slapped him on the shoulder and took the hand he stuck out for me to shake, and about then Mike Gonzales moved up close enough to talk. “You pitched a hell of a game, Gemar,” he said. “It was fun watching you.”

  “You and Phil turned some good plays, Mike,” I said, “especially that last one that got two of them Indians. Real pretty work on that double play.”

  “Well,” Mike said, “I appreciate that, Gemar.” He didn’t say anything else right then, but I could tell he wanted to, but not with Dynamite there to hear him. So I messed with my shoes a little bit, looking down to do it, and by the time I straightened up again, Dynamite had walked off. It was catcher’s payday, and he wanted to cash that check.

  “I see you’ve moved out of our room in Miz Doucette’s house,” I said to Mike. “It feels real spacious in there now. These days there ain’t a bit of noise but what I make rattling around in that place on Serenity Street.”

  “Yeah, it was getting real tight in there for both of us,” he said. “So I figured I’d do us both a favor by getting a new place to stay. I guess I ought to’ve told you I was going to do that.” Mike got quiet then and looked around the room full of people hollering, talking loud, drinking beer and eating and carrying on, and then he leaned in toward me. “Look, Gemar. I need to talk to you about something. Can we go outside for a minute before everybody’s got to load up to ride back to Rayne?”

  We did that, stepping out into the late afternoon there in Opelousas, the sun going down and most of the street emptied out of cars and the people who’d come to the game by then. It had cooled down a good bit, and a little breeze had started up from the west, coming in fits and starts and moving around some of the paper and trash on the paved street outside the Indians’ stadium. It was real quiet all of a sudden.

  “Let’s get up underneath that tree over yonder where it’s some shade,” Mike Gonzales said, pointing to a big live oak with its limbs pretty much covered up with Spanish moss, some of it drooping almost all the way to the ground, making the live oak look more gray than green.

  “All right,” I said. “I don’t mind standing under that witch tree for a little while, but I wouldn’t want to stay there long.”

  “Indian stuff?” Mike said.

  “Most things is Indian stuff to me,” I said. “I can’t help it. I got that disease and there ain’t no cure for it.”

  “Can’t you get well? Take you some medicine for it?”

  “The white eyes medicine don’t seem to work for me in the long run, Mike,” I said. “As much of it as I try to worry down and as hard as I want it to prosper, now and then. The disease I got won’t yield to that, no matter how big a dose of it I take.”

  “You talking about whiskey, I reckon.”

  “That sometimes, yeah. Mostly other stuff that don’t come in a bottle, too, though. It’s white folks medicine floating all around us, Mike. It’s in the air, it gets into what we eat, it’s in what we hear people say, the things we pick up in our hands, and in what we do each and every day that rolls.”

  “Is it in baseball?”

  “Not usual,” I said. “Them white eyes germs have got a hard time living inside that diamond. But you got to give them credit. They will not give up trying. There ain’t no quit to them.”

  “All that you’re saying is getting by me. Can I talk to you about something else?”

  “That’s why we come out here, isn’t it? Otherwise we could be inside the clubhouse having a good old time along w
ith the rest of them.”

  “Shit,” Mike said. “I can’t tell when you’re serious, Gemar, half the time. More than that. All the time.” He coughed a little, looked off toward the sun setting in the west, lighting up the big puffy clouds that float all over that flat country in South Louisiana and changing colors steady as you watch them, and then he started talking.

  “I’m in trouble, Gemar, and I don’t know what to do about it. Naw, take that back. I know what to do, but I’m scared to do it. I ain’t like you. It ain’t the same situation for me. I never will be able to go any higher than this. The Evangeline League is it for me. It is the final stop for the train I’m on. And don’t start telling me I’m good enough to play shortstop on lots of other teams in better leagues and get paid a lot more money to do it. Hell, I know that, but that ain’t the point, and you know it.

  “This place here is Louisiana, and it’s a lot looser than anywhere else in this country. Lots of people got colored blood in them in this state, up and down the line. I bet you don’t know a thing about New Orleans and the Creoles. Them Creoles can move around from one place to another, do all kinds of stuff, own their own house and business, and the white folks let them and don’t care. Everything in Louisiana is meant to work just the way it does. They got that system figured out a long time ago, and they don’t see no reason to change it. Take me. I can say I’m redbone, and everybody here says fine, that’s jake, go on and play shortstop in the Evangeline League. We’ll let you, and we’ll pay you a little bit to do it. We’ll whoop and holler and clap our hands together when you do something good on the field, and we’ll mean it. We don’t care if you ain’t really what you say. Just don’t tell the truth, and you can get along fine in Louisiana.”