The House of Daniel (12 page)

If I hadn't started working for him, and then stopped the way I stopped, I wouldn't've been there in Lubbock right then, part of a better ballclub than the one I'd jumped. You try to track all those things and how they fit, life starts looking like a plate of spaghetti with the strands squiggled together.

After we got to our room, Eddie poured a glass full of water from the pitcher on the dresser. He didn't drink it or anything. He just set it on the window sill. “What's that all about?” I asked him.

“Supposed to keep twisters away,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?” I didn't see how it could. But I didn't see how leaving it there would hurt things, either. So I kept my mouth shut.

No tornado picked up Lubbock and carried it away, not during that storm. If Eddie wanted to credit his glass of water, he could. But the town's been hit before. I expect it'll get hit again. Same as Enid, it's in the right part of the country for twisters. Maybe nobody there knows Eddie's trick. Or maybe the trick doesn't work. But don't tell that to Eddie.

It was still raining next morning, maybe not so bad as in the night but too hard to give us any chance to play a game that day. Harv said to our landlady, “Ma'am, may I use your telephone to call Sweetwater and see how we can rearrange our schedule? Of course I'll pay you back for the call.”

“You talk so purty, I'd be right glad to let you use it if only I had one,” the widow woman answered, “but I ain't.”

“That's … too bad.” The way Harv skipped a beat there said he was thinking harder things than what he came out with. He did tack on, “I'd guess it might come in handy for a business like this.”

“No, sir.” The gray-haired gal shook her head. “People calling me up all the time to pester me when I don't care to talk to them? Slick-talking fly-by-nights trying to sell me things I don't want and I don't need and I can't afford? I've got enough of them scoundrels knocking on my front door. I send 'em off with a flea in their ear, let me tell you. You can go to the drugstore or the post office to palaver on the telephone if you feel like it, but I don't want one. So there you are.”

“Here I am, all right.” It was raining plenty hard enough to soak Harv, even if he went out with an umbrella and a slicker.

But he was less put out than he might've been. Not everybody's got a telephone—nowhere near. Only people I knew in Enid who did were Big Stu and Rod Graver. Well, I guess Charlie Carstairs, too, but I knew him just well enough to nod to him when I walked by his store or we passed each other on the street. And not to beat up his kid sister when neither one of 'em had done anything to me.

Come to think of it, I read in some newspaper or other that there's one telephone for every seven or eight people in the country. Newspaper wasn't sad about that—it was crowing. We've got more per head than anywhere else in the whole wide world. If you believe that paper we do, anyhow.

None of which did Harv a red cent's worth of good. It might explain why the widow had no telephone—though she'd done a pretty fair job of that all by herself—but it didn't make one pop onto the table in her parlor. Harv splashed out to do what needed doing. We were only a couple of blocks from a Rexall, so he didn't have to go too far. And the lightning and thunder had eased off with the rain. You could still hear thunder growling to itself, but it was off to the south now. It put me in mind of a mean dog chained up to guard a still out in the woods, and you hear him when you're walking down the road at the edge of the trees.

After they finished their oatmeal and toast, some of the House of Daniel players went back to their rooms for more sleep. Why not? We weren't going anywhere any time soon. Some of them played cards. The widow woman eyed them as if they were sacrificing babies to Moloch, but she didn't say anything.

I stayed out of the poker game. If you know beforehand you'll lose money, why give yourself the chance? Eddie Lelivelt had a little traveling checker set. He beat me two out of three, but it didn't cost me anything. Our landlady didn't look at the two of us like she expected devil's horns to pop out of our foreheads. I kind of wished she would have.

Harv finally came back. Maybe to get even with the widow woman, he dripped all over the rug and the wood floor in her front hall. “What's the news?” Eddie called.

“If the rain stops, we'll play in Sweetwater tomorrow morning and Big Spring tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “We won't draw much for a morning game, but what can you do? If the rain doesn't stop…” He shook his head. More water flew from his hair and his beard. “Even if the rain doesn't stop, Daniel and his brothers had it worse. I always got to remember that.”

“It's a fact,” Eddie said.

“I got to remember it anyway,” Harv said. “Just 'cause something's true, that doesn't mean so much. You got to know it's true. You got to know what its being true means.” That was too deep for me. But then, I never ran a ball team, or wanted to. Harv could do it. He could play, too, which was even better.

*   *   *

The rain did stop, so we took off for Sweetwater at sunup the next day. It was still hot. Still muggy, too. When the sun hit the ponds and puddles and ditches, you thought you were in a steam bath. When you were in our bus, you for sure thought you were in a steam bath. We opened up the windows. Then we might as well have been in a windy steam bath.

We went southeast down US 84 till we came to US 80, and then east a few miles into Sweetwater. There were a couple of refineries along the way—nothing like what they've got around Pampa, but a couple. Sheep grazed by the highway. We saw buzzards feeding here and there on the shoulder, so some of those sheep must've tried to cross when they shouldn't have. Sheep don't have the brains to look both ways before they start. Well, neither do some people I know.

Game was due to start at half past nine. We got to Swatter Field with, oh, forty-five minutes to spare. That's the town team: the Sweetwater Swatters. They're another one that had played pro ball when times were good. Now that times aren't so good, most of the Swatters work in the gypsum mines outside of town or in the factories that process the gypsum once it comes out of the ground.

They wouldn't have to work today, of course—at least not the morning shift. They were loosening up, throwing the ball around, when we came in. Infield still looked muddy, but they'd put down enough sand so there weren't any puddles on the dirt. There sure were in the outfield, in the left- and right-field corners and one maybe twenty feet back of where the center fielder would stand.

“Gonna be one of those exciting days.” Wes spat a stream of tobacco juice into a little puddle by our dugout. We were all trying to get limber after the bus ride. Easy to hurt yourself when you didn't have enough time to stretch. Pull a hamstring on that muddy infield and Harv would start yelling
Is there a shortstop in the house?

Wes was going to pitch this game. I knew he had good stuff. He'd worked me out with it. How long he could keep it on a day and a half's rest … Well, we'd all find out.

“The Swatters'll eat you lion guys up!” yelled a fan a few rows back of our dugout. “Eat you up, you hear?” We heard. They could probably hear him inside the gypsum works across town. Every little place has one of those fans. Sometimes he's a drunk, sometimes just a loudmouth. He shouts for the town team and cusses out whoever they're playing. He never shuts up, no matter how much everybody else wants him to.

You pretend not to hear. If you answer back, you're playing his game and letting him get your goat. If you go into the stands and knock his front teeth down his throat after he talks about your mother, three to two you'll find out the sheriff is his brother-in-law. In that case, you'll be a while getting out of town.

Grandstand wasn't packed, the way it was a lot of the time when the House of Daniel came calling. Half past nine was too early to start a game. The Swatters didn't have much of a chance to spread the word about the new time, either. We drew some people, though: I'd bet at least as many as they got for a game with some other North Texas team.

We didn't score in the top of the first. I felt better than I expected going out to center. I wasn't used to playing day after day, or to riding the bus the same way. Two nights on the same saggy mattress in Lubbock had put some gas back in my tank.

When the first ball the Swatters hit was a grounder, I took a closer look at the little lake behind me. Not deep enough for gators, but a snapper or water moccasin wouldn't've surprised me. Even that early, mosquitoes buzzed around. Swallows swooped down to catch some, but plenty were left. I knew I'd have welts before the game ended. Mosquitoes are nothing but little vampires with six legs.

Of course the Swatters' second guy up hit a long fly to center. Would have been an easy catch but for the puddle. I splashed on into it—what are you gonna do? Water soaked my shoes and socks, but I made the play. Wes waved out at me when I threw the ball in to Eddie. Getting drenched like that on a cold day would've been worse. Well, a cold day in Sweetwater was something we wouldn't see this year.

My first at-bat, I paid the Swatters back. I hit my own fly ball out toward the center-field fence. Their outfielder ran it down. Splashed it down, if you really want to know, same as I had. I hoped he enjoyed squelching around out there just as much as I had.

Next inning, I was on my wet feet yelling. With two men on, Wes hit one that skipped into the pond before their center fielder could run it down. We plated both of 'em, and Wes wound up on third because the Swatter threw what was worse than a spitter back to the infield, and the relay man couldn't handle it.

We scored two more that inning, and ended up coasting to an 8-3 win. That was good. The thing Harv dreaded most of all was extra innings in Sweetwater. Play fourteen or fifteen there and we might not have made the game in Big Spring. We climbed back on the bus in our dirty, sweaty, smelly uniforms and tooled west on US 80. Fifty miles? Seventy-five? Something like that. More than an hour. Less than two.

You want to play baseball every day? You want to try to make a living at it? People who do—well, people who say they do—think about the big leagues and nice hotels and fancy steaks and showgirls and bottom berths in Pullman cars. You aren't in the bigs (maybe even if you aren't a star up there), chances are you've got to do something else besides to make ends meet. And playing baseball every day means bus rides through hot country in stinking wool flannels and a boardinghouse that waters the oatmeal when you get to the next little town.

I took off my shoes. Then I peeled off my socks, too, and wrung 'em out on the floor of the bus. I'm not sure I was ever wet enough before to need to wring out my socks. I left my dogs bare after that. I'd put the socks and spikes back on when we parked next to the Big Spring ballpark.

Countryside changed about halfway there. It went from ranching country with sheep and a few cows to cotton fields as far as the eye could reach. Workers changed, too. Lot more colored fellas—gals out there with 'em—than we'd seen farther east. Most of 'em kept the sun off their noggins with straw hats. The brims on those were as wide as something a Mexican'd wear, but not shaped the same way.

Then we drove past a couple of work gangs in rags with no hats at all. They didn't move real fast, either. They were zombies, and already dead, so of course they didn't care about the sun. Their bosses weren't paying 'em anything, so they didn't care—too much—if things went a little slow. Even coons and greasers cost a little something to hire. Not zombies.

Eddie Lelivelt saw 'em, too. “I don't like those shuffling stiffs,” he said. “They ain't natural.”

“That's kind of the idea,” I said.

“No, not like that,” he said. “I mean, nobody likes 'em when they put real people, live people, out of work. Nobody but the people who use 'em, anyhow. But I mean,
really
not natural. They're dead, right? But they're still movin'. So some kind of something's gotta be going on inside their heads. Only stands to reason. But what else is going on along with it? Somebody did that to me, I wouldn't be mighty happy about it. Would you?”

“I could've been one of those—things,” I answered, shuddering when I remembered. “I ran away from a conjure man's tout not long before the House of Daniel took me in.”

“Hey, you make a better center fielder than you would a zombie.”

“Thanks a lot,” I told him. Better he should've said it like that than the other way, but even so.…

Harv kept looking at his watch. He pushed the bus as hard as he could. Not a lot of traffic on the road, so that was pretty hard. Only thing that slowed him down even a little bit was worrying a Texas Ranger on a motorcycle would pull him over and give him a speeding ticket. He wouldn't have cared about the ticket, mind, but the time he wasted jawing with the lawman would have eaten up every minute he saved by stomping on the gas and more besides.

Big Spring is a new enough town, most of the trees are still little. It's a big enough town to own a few traffic lights. Harv had to stop for those, even if he didn't like it. But hey, we got to Hutch Field half an hour before game time. What more do you want?

 

(VI)

Two bus rides, a ballgame in the morning … Was I tired? Oh, just a little. Only people who wonder how you get tired playing a game haven't tried it. Stand and run around in the hot sun for a couple of hours so your uniform sticks to you like glue and see how you like it. Then turn around and do it again that afternoon. Think that won't wear you out some? Good luck, buddy!

“Oh, my,” I said when we got inside Hutch Field. Grandstand was nice enough, and we would have a bigger house than we did at Sweetwater. I didn't see any standing water anywhere—the colored groundskeeper knew his business. But I did see right away it was gonna be one of those games.