Well, you had to know Fidgety Frank was gonna get his own back. He plunked Mort Milligan on the right arm. Mort eyed Carlisle as he took his base, but he didn’t say anything. The next batter hit into a force play to end the inning.
There were a couple of more brushbacks after that, but things kinda settled down. It was 5-2, House of Daniel, in the bottom of the sixth. The Greasemen were a good nine—I ought to know—but the traveling team didn’t seem to be having much trouble with ’em.
Then Ponca City’s cleanup guy doubled to start the inning. The fellow behind him worked a walk Fidgety Frank really didn’t want to give away. And up came muscly Mort Milligan, who was the tying run.
Carlisle came up and in, not to knock him down but to push him back from the plate an inch or two. Sure enough, the next one was low and away. Milligan swung and missed to even the count. Fidgety Frank thought he’d go low and away again. That was where the House of Daniel catcher set up, anyhow. Only Frank made a mistake.
Whack! I knew that sound. I’d heard it just the day before. Mort Milligan clobbered this long, low liner to almost the same place he’d hit the one then. Just like me, Rabbit O’Leary was off at the crack of the bat, trying to run the line drive down.
But I’d known I was the only one who had the ghost of a chance of catching the one yesterday. Enid’s right fielder could throw fine, but he was slower than some dead people—and I don’t mean zombies. I mean dead dead. Unlike the Eagles, the House of Daniel was a high-class outfit. Their right fielder didn’t just throw. He could run, too.
It cost ’em plenty.
Rabbit O’Leary streaked after that scalded baseball. So did the right fielder. He was a big, lanky Dutchman called Aaron Aardsma or Double-Double-A or mostly just Double-Double. He was sure he could catch it. So was O’Leary. They both kept their eye on the ball. Neither one thought about anything else.
Till they slammed into each other.
That’s the worst collision I ever saw. None of the others comes close. It’s the worst collision I ever heard, too. You wouldn’t think flesh and blood could make a noise like that smashing into more flesh and blood.
O’Leary went down flat and didn’t move. Aardsma rolled over three or four times. When he stopped, he was bent like a bow, both hands clutched to one ankle. The ball shot past them and rolled all the way to that far-off fence in right-center. By the time the left fielder finally picked it up and threw it in, even Mort Milligan had himself the easiest inside-the-park homer anybody could want. House of Daniel 5, Greasemen 5.
A few people in Conoco Ball Park cheered the home-town hero. But those cheers were like ripples on a great big old pool of quiet. Most of the crowd was staring out at the train wreck in the outfield. I can’t have been the only one wondering whether Rabbit O’Leary was even alive. He not only didn’t move, he didn’t twitch.
After getting the ball back to the infield, the House of Daniel’s left fielder ran in to see what he could do for his buddies. The bearded second baseman was running out at the same time. They both took one look, cupped their hands in front of their mouths, and yelled the same thing: “Is there a doctor in the house?”
Two men in business suits, one young, the other bald with a gray fringe, came out of the stands. The bald guy had his black bag; the other fellow didn’t. The young man went to work on Double-Double. He shouted in to the House of Daniel’s dugout. Somebody brought him some boards. After a while, stretcher-bearers came out and lugged Double-Double off, the way they would have during the Big War. That ankle he’d grabbed had a splint on it.
The Ponca City folks gave him a nice hand. He’d earned it. He’d been going all-out when he got hurt. He never would’ve got hurt so bad, or maybe at all, if he hadn’t been. He managed to wave back before they carried him down into the dugout and away.
Which left O’Leary still down on the grass. The bald doc had him rolled over onto his belly. He was pushing down on his ribs and lifting his arms. “Artificial respiration,” somebody behind me said, like we couldn’t see that for ourselves.
Only purpose for artificial respiration is when the fella getting it can’t breathe on his own. Some of the reasons for that are bad. The rest are worse. It got pin-drop quiet in the ballpark while the old guy worked on Rabbit. The other doctor came over to help him out. I wondered if the next fellow we saw helping out there would be the undertaker.
But that didn’t happen, thank heaven. After a long, scary while, Rabbit’s motor caught and turned over and he started breathing on his own. Everybody clapped when the bald doc stopped breathing for him and got to work on the other bad stuff that had happened to him.
The guys with the stretcher came back. They carried Rabbit away. His left arm was in a sling. What looked like a whole roll of bandage was wrapped around his head. The crowd cheered him, too—quietly, but they did. Just before he disappeared, his right arm came maybe two inches off his chest in a try at a wave. That took him more hard work than running after Mort Milligan’s liner must have. People cheered again, louder this time.
* * *
And then? Then the game went on.
Yeah, that smashup gave folks most of their money’s worth. Most, but not all. They wanted to see who won and who lost. Plenty of ’em had bets down on who won and who lost. In those parts, ballgames are right up there with cockfights and dogfights for making money change hands.
So the House of Daniel’s left fielder moved over to right. A fellow who’d taken grounders at third went into left. And one of the pitchers who’d warmed up back of Fidgety Frank took over for Rabbit in center. Even the fanciest semipro team carries only fourteen, fifteen guys, sixteen tops. The fewer who split the take, the bigger the take is for everybody who does.
They got out of the sixth. The new left fielder made a nice catch—not a great catch, but nice—for the last out. The seventh was scoreless. In the top of the eighth, the House of Daniel scored three runs. They set up the inning with the prettiest hit-and-run you’d ever want to see. Guy on first broke for second. When the second baseman went to cover the bag, the batter slapped the ball through where he’d been. The runner kept on to third, and they were percolating.
Ponca City scored one in the last of the ninth, but only one. The House of Daniel took the game, 8-6. The two teams shook hands. Nobody on the House of Daniel tried to deck Close Shave Simpkins. It wasn’t like they’d never got thrown at before. In the stands and under them, cash went back and forth.
Then the fellow with the megaphone stood up in front of the visitors’ dugout and blared, “Is there an outfielder in the house?” People laughed, ’cause he sounded just like the guys who’d yelled for a doctor after the collision.
Me, I wasn’t laughing. As soon as Rabbit and Double-Double trainwrecked like that, I started hoping the House of Daniel would put out a call like that. I could play the field with them—I knew I could. Hitting? Well, I wasn’t terrible, or the Eagles would’ve turned me down. Maybe I’d get on a hot streak or something.
You hate to wiggle on to a team because somebody else gets hurt. You wouldn’t want anybody else wiggling on ’cause you got hurt. But guys do get hurt all the time. Teams need players all the time. And, by now, Big Stu would know I didn’t do what he told me to do. Big Stu, he got mad and he got even.
So I was up like a shot. I took my spikes out of the sack and waved ’em around. “Hey, I’m a player!” I shouted. “I’m a center fielder, even!”
The guy with the megaphone looked me over. I wasn’t seventy-five years old. I didn’t stand four feet ten. Didn’t weigh three hundred fifty pounds, either. He couldn’t tell me to get lost just by eyeballing me, anyway. “Well, c’mon down and we’ll talk,” he said.
Down I went. The fellow with the megaphone brought over a couple-three Greasemen, I guess to ask if they knew what I could do. One of them was Mort Milligan. I pointed his way. “He knows I can play center some,” I said.
Big lug might not have recognized me in my everyday clothes. He d
id then, though. “Oh. It’s you,” he growled, like he wanted to clean me off the sole of his shoe. He nodded to the man from the House of Daniel. “Yeah, so-and-so can run ’em down, all right. Robbed me like a bank yesterday playing for Enid.” He told him how I’d caught his long drive.
“Huh,” said the House of Daniel man. His eyes were sharp in the middle of all that face fuzz. “How come you didn’t go on back to Enid, then?” he asked.
Well, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t figured he’d want to know—him or somebody for the House of Daniel, anyway. Didn’t look for it quite so quick, though. I said, “Somebody down there I’m on the wrong side of. Better if I go somewhere else for a while. This here’s a way to do it.”
“Huh,” he said again. “Cops on your tail? They come after you with bloodhounds or wizards or whatever the demon?”
“No cops,” I said, which was the Lord’s truth … unless they were enough in Big Stu’s pocket to chase me, too. I added, “I’d be in more hot water with them if I had done what this guy wanted.” That was also true, which was good. You want to be straight when you’re starting out with somebody. Tell lies at the beginning and they’ll always come back to bite you. Later on, when the other folks’ve shown they don’t fly with angels’ wings, either, you can do the same. But a bad start makes for a bad finish.
“He can play?” the guy with the megaphone asked Mort Milligan.
“He can play,” Mort said, bless his heart. “He’s damn good in center—better with the glove than our guy, I’ll tell you that. He won’t hit third for you like your fella who got racked up, but he’s pesky up there.”
Pesky is what they call you when you look like you ought to make outs all the time but you don’t. I thought I was better than that, but the House of Daniel guy didn’t ask me.
He scratched at something under his beard. Then he said, “Tell you what. You’ve got baseball togs in that bag? Put ’em on. We’ll run you around some, see what you look like out there. Oh, and tell me your name, too.”
Conoco Ball Park didn’t have dressing rooms. Mostly, you put on your uniform somewhere else and then went there. I did kind of a fan dance in the tunnel going out of the dugout. A few people walked by while I was doing it. If anybody looked in, he might’ve seen something, but he wouldn’t’ve seen much.
A few folks had stayed in the stands. They booed my ENID EAGLES shirt. One of ’em hissed like a rattlesnake. I touched the brim of my cap and waved. They booed louder, of course.
The House of Daniel guy who’d had the megaphone came to the plate with a bat and a few balls. He hit fungoes my way for ten, fifteen minutes. He ran me all over center, and you can do a lot of running there at the Conoco Ball Park. I caught what I could, chased the rest, and threw the balls back to him as hard and straight as I could.
I’d worked up a sweat by the time he waved me in. “You’re Jack?” he said, and I nodded. So did he. “Yeah, you’re a decent ballhawk, all right. Better than decent.” He tossed me the bat, easy and gentle so I could grab it one-handed. “What do you do this way?”
He was bigger and heftier than I was, and the bat was heavier than what I favor. I didn’t ask for a different one; I just choked up an extra inch so I could get around faster. Out to the mound came the fellow who’d finished the game in center.
“Wes here will see what you’ve got,” said the guy who’d run me around.
Wes’s first one came straight at my nose. I hit the dirt, got up, and planted myself again. “You were watching Close Shave out there,” I said.
“Nah.” Wes Petersen shook his head. He had a deep, gravelly voice. “I’m a mean son of a gun any which way.” To show he meant it, he knocked me down again.
I nodded back to him, as though we were in a saloon drinking beer together. “You can hit me, all right. Let’s see if I can hit you.”
Next pitch started for my head, too. This one broke so hard, I could hear it spinning through the air. Hell of a curve. It dropped over the plate for what would’ve been a strike.
I didn’t bail out on it, anyway. I did wave out to the mound. “Nobody could hit that one,” I said. Wes looked pleased.
Then he threw me another one. Maybe it didn’t break so sharply. Maybe I was set up and looking for it. Whatever you want to say, I went with it and smacked it into right. It would’ve been a hit. Wes didn’t look so happy about that.
He threw to me for about as long as I’d shagged flies. I did what I could do. I’ll never bust fences. When you can’t, you’re better off knowing you can’t. You’ll concentrate on the things you can do and get so you do them as well as you’re able to.
Wes looked over to the guy who’d hit fungoes. “What d’you think, Harv?” he asked.
“Yeah, he’ll work,” Harv said. Not a whole bunch of praise, but plenty to make me feel eight feet tall. Harv turned back to me. “So you want to ride with us, huh?”
“You bet I do!” I had all kinds of reasons for saying that. Big Stu was the one furthest up front, maybe, but not the biggest. When the Archdeacons or the Hilltoppers buy some busher’s contract after he’s knocked around in Rochester or Omaha or Denver or Portland, that’s what I was feeling, or some of it. I’d never make the big time. I wasn’t good enough. But the House of Daniel reckoned I was good enough for them—good enough to be a blowout patch, anyhow. Long step up from the Enid Eagles. Hell of a long step.
“All right, then. We’ll take you along for a while,” Harv said. “You can start letting your hair and your whiskers grow.”
“I’ll do it.” I wondered how funny I’d look and how long I’d take to look that way. Because I thought I ought to, I asked, “How bad off are your guys who slammed together?”
“Double-Double busted his ankle,” Harv said. His last name was Watrous, I remembered from the game. “Out anywhere from three months to six, the doc said. Have to hope he keeps his speed when he gets back. Rabbit … I dunno about Rabbit. His collarbone, that’s not as bad a break as an ankle, and it heals cleaner.” His face clouded. “But his noggin, his dumb noggin don’t seem so good. They’re taking him to the hospital for a similarity scan.”
“Good they can do that kind of thing these days, anyhow,” I said, and Harv and Wes both nodded.
Like everything else, medicine keeps moving forward. A wizard with the right training can cast a spell on a hurt man’s skull, say. Then he’ll cast the same spell on a regular skull, one with nothing wrong with it. The law of similarity will show him all the places where the two of ’em don’t match up exactly. If the hurt guy’s got a break in there, the magic’ll tell the wizard right where it’s at so he and the rest of the docs can decide what to do about it.
Works for other bones, too—not just skulls. And they’re starting to use it for the squishier parts, too, though that’s not so easy. They can find things and fix things that killed people back in Great-Granddad’s time. Quite a world we live in, isn’t it?
“First month, we’ll pay you ten bucks a game—and we play a lot of games,” Harv said. “Hang on after that—we call it sticking around after your beard grows in—and you go on shares like the rest of us.”
If they found somebody they liked better, they’d dump me. Well, every baseball team ever hatched is always looking for better players. I’d just have to be good, so they’d want to keep me.
What I said was, “It’s a deal, and I thank you kindly.”
“You’re helping us out of a jam, too,” Harv said. “Get back into your everyday clothes. You can hang on to those pants—they’re close enough to our road grays. But you won’t need that Eagles shirt any more. We’ll put a lion on your chest instead. You belong to the House of Daniel now!”
* * *
Most semipro teams travel like the Enid Eagles. Guys fill up cars and somebody drives to wherever the next game is. You hope the clown behind the wheel isn’t drunk or sleepy or coming off a brawl with his boss or his girlfriend. Players mostly show up where they’re supposed to when they’re supposed
to. When they don’t, teams drag somebody out of the stands and hope for the best. Hey, look at me. Even the House of Daniel did that.
But they traveled in style. Waiting outside Conoco Ball Park sat a streamlined bus, modern as week after next. It had enough seats for everybody on the team and enough room so everybody could stretch his legs some and not show up for the next game all tied up in knots. Each side had that open-mouthed lion’s head painted on it in gaudy colors. THE LIONS’ DEN was stenciled alongside it. HOUSE OF DANIEL—FAMOUS TRAVELING BASEBALL CLUB.
Most of the seats already had ballplayers in ’em by the time I climbed aboard. I nodded to a fellow with nobody next to him and said, “Mind if I sit here?” It was like your first day at a new job. Well, it was my first day at a new job. I’d walk soft till I scouted out how things work.
The guy nodded back, friendly enough. “Go ahead. You gotta park yourself somewhere. I’m Eddie Lelivelt.” He stuck out his hand.
I shook it. “Jack Spivey.” I stuck my bag on the luggage rack and sat down. The seat was a lot comfier than anything on the Red Ball Line, I’ll tell you that.
“Good to meet you,” Eddie said. He was three, maybe four years older’n me, his hair past his ears but not to his shoulders, his beard mostly brown but with red streaks on the chin and in his mustache. He went on, “I watched ’em working you out. You can go get ’em—no two ways about that.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You were playing second, weren’t you?” I wanted to make sure so I didn’t say anything dumb. Guys don’t always look the same once they take their caps off, and all those beards made it tougher.
Eddie Lelivelt nodded, though. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“You’re smooth out there,” I said. He wasn’t a player who ran all over everywhere snagging things. He tried to put himself in the right place to begin with, so he could make his plays without looking like a showoff.
The House of Daniel Page 5