“Some of ’em will.” Carpetbag knew how good he was. He didn’t brag or boast nearly so much as he might have. He must’ve known that, if he’d been born white, he would’ve been even more famous than he was, to say nothing of a lot richer. Knowing that kind of thing would have soured a lot of men. It rolled off his back, the same way the nasty names did.
Nothing stuck to him. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. He was what he was, he knew what he was, and he was happy with what he was. You know what? You could do worse. Plenty of folks have, whatever their color.
When we went back to the boardinghouse in Canon City, the woman who ran it held a sealed CC envelope out to Harv and said, “This came while you were playing the game.”
“Did it?” Harv answered with no expression in his voice. I mean, none. He looked a trifle worried while he opened the envelope. Carpetbag Booker seemed less cheerful than usual, too. What kind of finagling did he do to get out of his contract with the Crawdads and sign one with the House of Daniel? Had the Crawdads sicced lawyers on him to make him go back where they said he belonged?
“What’s it about?” he asked Harv.
A big, slow smile spread over Harv’s face once he read the message. “It’s from the guy in Colorado Springs who runs their semipro league,” he answered, nothing but relief in his voice. “Wants to know if we can play his All Stars again tomorrow. Says he promises a full house if Carpetbag pitches.” He turned to the colored fella. “Don’t want to wear you out ahead of the tournament.”
“Reckon I can go a few, anyways,” Carpetbag said. “Didn’t have to work too hard today—no, suh. An’ I done a lot o’ ballplayin’, Mistuh Harv. Soupbone ain’t fallen off my shoulder yet.”
“You know best,” Harv said. “But sing out if you feel tired or sore, you hear? The tournament’s more important than a warmup game.”
“I will let you know,” Harv said solemnly.
“Okey-doke.” Harv turned back to the landlady. “Where’s the CC office at here? I’ve got to answer this.”
* * *
When we got back to Colorado Springs, we found a different roominghouse to lodge at. The old couple who ran this one didn’t get shirty about having Carpetbag Booker staying at their place. He did wind up with a room of his own again, though. He seemed happier that way, and Harv wanted to keep him happy.
That old minor leaguer didn’t miss a trick. He advertised the game in the town paper. Flyers all over said BALLGAME TODAY! COLORADO SPRINGS ALL STARS VS. HOUSE OF DANIEL AND CARPETBAG BOOKER! SPURGEON FIELD, 2:30 PM! In smaller letters underneath, it said Admission only one dollar!
Tickets two days earlier had been fifty cents, what the House of Daniel usually charged. If he could fill the ballpark at twice as much a head …
He could, and he did. People cheered when they saw Carpetbag getting loose. He tipped his cap to them, and they cheered louder. “I barnstormed through here—ain’t been back for a few years, but I did,” he said. Then he paused and thought about it and looked surprised and a little sheepish. “Reckon I barnstormed through just about everywhere. Everywhere they plays baseball, anyways.”
The All Stars did better than they had the last time we faced ’em. You could see why the old ex-Millionaire thought they were all-stars. But they’d never faced Carpetbag Booker before. From center, I could see he wasn’t throwing as hard as he had against the Fylfots the day before. But he didn’t need to. When the All Stars weren’t out in front on him, they swung late. He had ’em—what’s the word?—mesmerized, that’s it, like a bird in front of a snake.
Oh, not all of ’em, and not every pitch. One guy singled off him, then hit a two-run homer. Carpetbag tipped his cap to him, too, as the fellow rounded the bases. Baseball’s a fair game. Even Carpetbag Booker made mistakes. If you could jump on one, more power to you.
Carpetbag might not have been so polite if we weren’t still ahead, 5-2. After six innings, Harv batted for him and brought in Fidgety Frank to finish the game. Frank gave up a run, but we still beat the All Stars again.
Their manager took it like the pro he’d been. “Well, at least we looked like we belonged on the same field with you today,” he told Harv.
“Your guys played a fine game.” Harv was always willing to be generous, especially after we won.
Players from the All Stars did the same thing the Canon City Fylfots had. They crowded around Carpetbag to get him to sign things. Some people from the crowd came out on the ratty grass to get his autograph and shake his hand, too. They didn’t care whether he was black or white or purple with orange stripes. With Carpetbag, what color he was hardly seemed to matter. What mattered was, he was a pitcher. And he was a showman.
Harv glanced over at him and smiled. Then he looked back to the All Stars’ manager and smiled another kind of smile. “I really liked the way you plugged the game,” he told him. “Admission only a dollar, you said, like they were getting a bargain instead of paying through the nose. Wish I would’ve thought of that, I do.”
“Thanks. Much obliged. You’re welcome to steal the stunt.” The old minor leaguer shifted his cud of tobacco, spat a brown stream, and chuckled. “Like I could stop you from stealing it even if I wanted to.”
“I may. I expect I will—long as Carpetbag sticks with us, anyhow,” Harv said. “He’s signed through the tournament. Afterwards … Afterwards’ll just have to take care of itself.”
“That’s how you do it. Worry about one thing at a time.” The ex-Millionaire looked toward the All Stars and Carpetbag Booker. “He’s a piece of work, ain’t he? I saw him up in Denver once. He was playing against a team of mostly big-leaguers, so he couldn’t show off so much then. When he knows he’s got the edge on you, like he did today—oh, my! He oughta be against the rules.”
“I’ve gone against him a few times,” Harv said. “Sure is more fun with him on my side.”
“I bet it is!” the Colorado Springs manager said. “Play like you did today and you’ll go a long way in the tournament.”
“Here’s hoping,” Harv said. They shook hands. The All Stars’ manager went to round up his team. Carpetbag had ’em just as much under his spell now as he had when he was pitching against them. He’d forgotten more baseball than almost anybody else ever learned.
After we showered and changed, we went back to the spaghetti joint where we’d had supper when we were in Colorado Springs two days earlier. The guinea who ran the place, he gave Carpetbag a funny look when he walked in with the rest of us. If he’d gone in there by his lonesome, I bet that guinea would’ve told him to get lost. But he must’ve seen we would’ve walked out with Carpetbag. He didn’t feel like losing a whole team’s worth of orders, so he kept his mouth shut. It’s like that a lot, I reckon. One kind of people may not fancy another kind, but hardly anybody doesn’t fancy money.
We filled ourselves up with noodles and meat balls and tomato sauce and flat cheese pies with sausage on ’em and what the guinea called vino. I don’t drink a lot of wine—I like beer better. But it went with spaghetti and meat balls just fine.
While we ate, we hashed over the games we’d played and the games we’d be playing once we got to Denver. There’d be sixteen teams in all, and they’d draw who played who out of a hat once everybody got there. Win and you went on; lose and you were done. Win three in a row and you made the finals. That’d be a series, best two out of three. Win it and you were the champions. That’s what we were aiming for.
I was sitting near the middle of the table, gabbing with Eddie and Azariah. Harv was at one end, Carpetbag at the other. Carpetbag had Fidgety Frank on his right, Wes on his left. He was going on about the Pittsburgh Crawdads and the Kansas City Regents, the two colored teams that were coming to Denver. He knew the Crawdads like his own team, of course, on account of they had been. But he knew plenty about the Regents, too. He’d played with them and against them, and he knew how to get them out. He knew how to get them out if you could pitch the way he did, anyhow.
Wes sat beside me on the bus ride back to the new boarding house. He kept shaking his head as though somebody’d clouted him and he was trying to clear it. “The things that son of a gun knows!” he said, more to himself than to me. “Not just how to pitch to those colored teams, but how to pitch. I learned more at that restaurant than I did the past ten years.”
“He looked like he knew what he was doing out there, all right,” I offered.
Wes kinda glared at me. “You … outfielder,” he said. “All you know about pitching is that you can’t do it.” That you’re too dumb to do it was what it sounded as if he meant. “Pitching’s about messing up a hitter’s timing. Carpetbag, he’s got more ways to do that than Jimmy’s got little liver pills.”
“Can he teach ’em to you, or can you work out some of your own when you know the kinds of things he does?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe not. I’m a pretty fair pitcher, but that’s all I am—a pretty fair pitcher. Take a pretty fair singer. Let Joel Alson give him lessons. He’ll get better, yeah. But he ain’t gonna turn into Joel Alson himself. I ain’t gonna turn into Carpetbag Booker, neither, not even if they go and paint me black.”
That made sense. If you could do it—and if you were white, so you got to do it—you did it and you made your living at it. If you were pretty fair, you played for a team like the House of Daniel. And if you were no darn good, you sat in the stands and second-guessed, the way most folks did.
Carpetbag plainly liked teaching. But Wes was right—all the teaching in the world only helped so much. You had to be able to do things, or the lessons were just talk. That gave me something to think on when we got back to the boarding house. It sure did, all right.
Next morning, we set out for Denver.
(XIII)
Denver was the biggest town I’d ever seen in person up till then. It had upwards of a quarter-million people, which put it ahead of Oklahoma City and Tulsa. You think stockyards, you think of Chicago or maybe Kansas City. Denver had ’em, too—big ones. Animals came in. Meat and hides and smells came out.
Till you’ve gone right by a stockyard, you don’t think about the stinks. Those animals stay in the pens for at least a little while, and they do what animals do while they’re there. They do what animals do in the stock cars that bring ’em there, too. Those have to get cleaned out before anybody can use ’em again.
Most of the cleaning crews were zombies. If you’re already dead, how much do you care about shoveling manure all day? Not much. That was what the hiring bosses figured, anyway. They weren’t as right as they thought they were. I was there to find out about that, and I wish I hadn’t been.
But I won’t get ahead of myself. When we drove past the stockyard, Carpetbag wrinkled up his nose and said, “Per-fume!” Something about the way he said it set us all laughing. He could take an ordinary word and put a little spin on it you’d never notice if you weren’t listening. If you were, he’d have you holding your sides. He talked like a colored fella who’d grown up down where colored fellas couldn’t get much school, but he was nobody’s fool. Not even a little bit.
We didn’t have a game that day. It was the first day we hadn’t played since that big old rainstorm in Texas. That afternoon, we were supposed to go to the Denver Post offices for the draw and then to Merchants Park, where we’d play the games, for photos.
We pulled up in front of the boarding house where we’d be staying for the tournament. While we were getting off the bus, Carpetbag said, “Mistuh Harv, you don’t mind, I’d like to go on up Larimer Street to the colored part o’ town an’ stay there. I gits everywhere I needs to be on time, I promise.”
Harv frowned. “You got to understand, Carpetbag, we don’t mind you stayin’ with us. We truly don’t.”
“You can say that again,” Fidgety Frank put in. “I ain’t hardly started picking your brains yet.”
“I hears you, an’ I believes you, an’ I thanks you,” Carpetbag said. “But you gots to understand, friends. If I stays here, I’ll be livin’ in a boarding house. Well, I can do that. But if I goes an’ stays amongst my own folks, I be livin’ like a king.”
We all looked at one another. Carpetbag Booker was such a great pitcher, even white people knew his name and some of his reputation. But I don’t reckon we ever stopped to wonder just how famous he was with his own kind. As famous as the Bambino? Maybe. Or maybe a little more famous than that. He sure made it sound as if he was.
Harv coughed once or twice and peered down at his shoes. “You do whatever you think is best, Carpetbag,” he said at last. “We’ve got to be at the Post at two o’clock. Then I’ll drive us to the ballpark for photos.”
“At the Post at two o’clock. I be there,” Carpetbag said. Then he waved for a taxi. He was the kind of fella who always had one drive by when he needed it. Me, I would’ve waited a week before one came down that no-account street. Not Carpetbag Booker. He tossed in his luggage and rolled away.
“I hope he shows up,” Wes muttered.
“I expect he will,” Harv said. “He’s here to do a job with us. Till he does it—till we do it—he doesn’t get paid. I’ve never heard that he’s got anything against money.”
“Me, neither,” Wes replied. “But hey, who does?”
* * *
Same way as Denver was a bigger city than I was used to, the Post was a bigger newspaper. It lived in a big, square building—a fancy one, I’d call it—with a big baseball diamond over the entranceway. You could follow a game from back East on one like that, with the plays coming in by Crystal message or then by radio. Or they could show what was going on in games from their own tournament.
Men in baseball uniforms filled the front hall. We were supposed to wear them because we’d be taking the pictures at the ballpark afterwards. I saw Carpetbag as soon as I walked in. He’d beat us there. He was joshing with the other colored players, especially the ones whose shirts had Crawdads across the chest in script and who wore caps with little red crawdad patches sewn on ’em.
One of the colored guys was short and stocky—built like a catcher, in other words. After a second, I realized he only looked short ’cause he stood next to the tall, tall Carpetbag. His shoulders were wide enough for any two men, maybe two and a half. That had to be Job Gregson.
The Kansas City Regents had crowns on their chests the way we had lions. I’d seen the Las Cruces Blue Sox before. A couple of teams were from Colorado. One had a brewery backing them; the guys on the other worked for—or made like they worked for—a company that made rubber half-soles.
If you put two half-soles in a zombie’s head, would he turn back into a human being? Yeah, my mind started wandering. Too many strangers all at once.
There was a team from Wichita. There were the Rapid City Runners, from South Dakota. The Olympia Timbermen came out of Washington State. The Cheyenne Buffaloes were from Wyoming. The San Diego Sailors had gold embroidery on the bills of their caps—scrambled eggs, I heard one of ’em call it. Didn’t look like scrambled eggs to me.
The Salt Lake City Industries wore a beehive patch on their sleeves. I didn’t know why then. The Reno Gamblers had a big ace of spades there. I got that. There was a team from Phoenix, and one from Billings, Montana. They were Buffaloes, too, and kinda looked sidewise at the Buffaloes from Cheyenne.
And there were the Waco Wildcats. What those Texans looked sidewise at were the Crawdads and the Regents. I knew what they’d be feeling. I’d felt some of it myself. They were going to have to play against colored teams? They must’ve known before they set out for Denver. The rules and who all was coming weren’t any secret. Only now they were face-to-face with it, you might say.
A plump fellow in a suit
and tie whacked a lectern with a pointer to get us to pay attention. When we finally did, he said, “Hello, everybody. I’m Zeb Huckaby, sports editor of the Post. I want the manager for each team to come forward, if you please. We’ve got sixteen teams. There will be eight games in the first round. You’ll draw to see which game you play in and whether you’re home or visiting.”
Harv and the rest of the managers pushed up toward him. He had a big board behind him on an easel. Now he whacked the board with the pointer.
“Winner of game one will play the winner of game three. Winner of game two will play the winner of game four. Five will play seven, and six will play eight,” he said. “Then the winner of one and three will play the winner of two and four. The winner of five and seven will play the winner of six and eight. And the winners of those games will play best of three for the championship.”
His board had eight games on the bottom row, four on the next, two on the next, and then the last series. Lines made it look like a pyramid.
“If the managers will line up so you can choose your envelopes…” Zeb Huckaby said. They did. The envelopes were in a fish bowl. The managers came up one at a time.
The Crawdads’ boss went first. He was a wiry little gray-mustached fella. He looked as though he’d been a shortstop till he got past forty and still knew how even if his body didn’t let him. “Game six, visitin’,” he said.
“Game six, visiting—the Pittsburgh Crawdads.” Huckaby slid their name into the top slot for game six.
“Game one, visiting,” the Las Cruces Blue Sox’s manager said.
Harv went up two guys later. “Game one, home,” he read. He and the fella who ran the Blue Sox nodded to each other. We’d get a rematch right away, and somebody would go home unhappy. I also figured out we wouldn’t have to play the Crawdads till the finals, if we got that far.
But the Regents turned up in our half. And the Waco Wildcats’ manager drew … “Game six, home.” He looked ticked off for all kinds of reasons. He wasn’t just playing a tough team to start with, he was playing a tough colored team. If he didn’t like it … all he had to do was beat the Pittsburgh Crawdads.
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