We ended up losing 5-1. It was about as dismal as it sounds. After our last out, the Crawdads shook hands with one another and patted one another on the back as they walked off the field. They figured they had the prize and the trophy and the glory. In their cleats, I would have, too.
“I’m sorry, Mistuh Harv,” Carpetbag said softly. “I done let you down.”
“There’ll be another game tomorrow—and one more the day after that.” Harv wasn’t happy, but he hadn’t given up. He went on, “‘And these three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, fell down bound into the midst of the burning fiery furnace.’ But after a bit, Nebuchadnezzar said, ‘Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt, and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.’ If God’s with us, we can’t lose.”
“You is a believin’ man, Mistuh Harv.” Respect filled Carpetbag’s voice. “God weren’t with me today—God and that umpire, neither.”
“We’ll get ’em tomorrow, then,” Harv said.
But when tomorrow came, he put the ball in Fidgety Frank’s hand. “I can go, suh,” Carpetbag said.
“I know you can. If I need you, I’ll bring you in,” Harv answered, salving his pride. “Let’s see what they do against somebody they haven’t met so often, though.”
Carpetbag nodded, but you could tell how much he wanted to be out there. “You the manager,” he said. No, he didn’t think Harv was doing the right thing.
Harv saw it, too. “Look, if this doesn’t work out, you can say, ‘I told you so, you stupid jerk.’ I’ll sit still for it. I’ll have earned it.”
“Well, that’s fair,” Carpetbag allowed. “We win today, you run me out there tomorrow?”
“You bet I will!”
“Let’s win, then.”
* * *
Something funny happened when we headed for the bus for the second game. A tall guy was walking down the street—almost dancing down the street—juggling three oranges and whistling. He was having himself a great time. If he wasn’t a pro dancer, he should’ve been. He was good.
Just for the heck of it, I tossed him a baseball. He didn’t miss a beat. It went right into the stream. Three or four steps later, it came back out—straight to me. We all clapped for him. He grinned and tipped his hat, also without dropping an orange, and kept on going.
“Maybe he’ll bring us luck,” Harv said.
I hoped he would. We needed it. And I hoped Fidgety Frank wouldn’t be off because he hadn’t pitched for so long. I really hoped he wouldn’t worry that he—a semipro pitcher—was out there in place of somebody who’d be pulling down a fat salary in the big leagues if only he were pinker.
Fidgety Frank got through the first mostly with fastballs. The Crawdads started a left-hander who went by Two Lemons Ellis. When I asked Carpetbag how come, he started giggling and wouldn’t tell me. Two Lemons threw slow, slower, and slowest. He couldn’t blow it by you, but he could drive you nuts.
It was one of those games where you knew somebody would catch a break sooner or later, but you didn’t know who. I stopped the Crawdads from getting theirs by running down a long drive in center with two out and two on. It would’ve gone out of some parks. In Denver, as long as I could get to it, it wasn’t a tough catch.
“Yeah, Snake!” Fidgety Frank said when I came in.
Two innings later, we loaded the bases with two out. Harv hit one right up the middle: between Two Lemons’s legs, past the Crawdads’ diving shortstop, past their diving second baseman, and into center. A seeing-eye single, good for two runs. Wes singled in another one, and we had ourselves a lead. Out on the mound, Two Lemons cussed like a muleskinner.
All that rest must’ve helped Fidgety Frank, not hurt him. He threw a four-hit shutout, and we won by those three runs. Everything was on the line the next day.
Carpetbag was gracious. He mostly was. “Well, Mistuh Harv, you tol’ me so,” he said. Then he turned to Fidgety Frank. “You kin do that to my ol’ team, why ain’t you a fo’-true pro?”
“I like what I’m doing here.” Fidgety Frank must’ve known he couldn’t pitch like that all the time. But he’d done it once, when it counted most. If he was proud of himself, he’d earned the right.
Carpetbag nodded seriously. “That’s impo’tant,” he said. “Now I got to pitch me a better game yet. Can’t let the Crawdads say some white boy showed me up.”
“I’m no boy.” Fidgety Frank had a few gray hairs in his whiskers. Carpetbag just grinned a sly grin. I still had no idea how old he was. I wondered if anyone but his mother did.
I had a thought before the last game. Remembering Amarillo, I asked Carpetbag, “Reckon the Crawdads have a conjure man helping ’em along?”
“They don’t do that much,” he said. “An’ no conjure ain’t never caught up with me yet. I ain’t lookin’ back to see if one’s gainin’, but I ain’t hidin’ under the bed, neither.” I had to be satisfied with that. I guess I was.
The Crawdads ran Lightning Washington out there again. So it was a rematch of the first game. Only it wasn’t. This time, Carpetbag Booker had his good stuff and Lightning didn’t. We had a different plate umpire, too, and Carpetbag got the calls on the corners. Give him good stuff and that ump, and all we had to do was get some runs and try not to throw the game away.
We scored two in the third. One was mine. I’d bunted my way aboard—the Crawdads weren’t the only ones who could use the speed game. Carpetbag got into hot water in the top of the fourth. One guy singled, and another walked. With two out, Job Gregson hit a screaming liner, but right at me. I didn’t have to move more than a step and a half. You could hear the thock! when the ball smacked my glove all over Merchants Park.
That was the only hot water Carpetbag saw. He was as good as he’d promised he would be. We took this game 3-0, too, and he gave up that hit in the fourth and only one more. Eddie caught a popup for the last out, and we’d won ourselves the Denver Post Tournament.
The roar there was 11,000 people cheering their heads off. We all doffed our caps to them, and they cheered louder. I’d never played in front of such big crowds till Denver. Plenty of big-league games don’t have nearly so many people in the stands. When you stop and think about it, that’s pretty amazing.
Zeb Huckaby came out and made a speech about how wonderful the tournament was. Well, what would you expect him to say? Then he gave the Pittsburgh Crawdads the runner-up trophy and a check. The crowd applauded them no matter what color they were. That was good. They played some fine ball. They were better than we were, I guess, but they couldn’t solve Carpetbag Booker when it mattered most.
Then it was our turn. We got photographed. We got a bigger trophy. I don’t know how much the Crawdads made, but I expect we got a bigger check, too. It came to about $150 a man. Not a lot for so many games, but some glory came along with the money. Now if only you could buy stuff with glory.
Almost everybody stayed in the stands to give us one more hand. I felt eight feet tall and solid as Job Gregson. He did shake Carpetbag’s hand after the game. That was good, too.
As the clapping died down, we heard a different kind of noise from the direction of the stockyards. It was coming our way, and getting louder. I didn’t know what it was, but it sounded scary. And that’s how we—and Denver—got caught up in the Great Zombie Riots of 1934.
(XIV)
There in Merchants Park, you understand, we had no idea it was the zombie riots yet. We just knew we were hearing a whole bunch of people who sounded scared and angry at the same time. Then, through the middle of all that, a bunch of sharp pops came through loud and clear.
“Those are guns going off,” I said to Eddie.
“You sure?” he asked.
“I’m positive,” I answered. Once you know what gunfire sounds like, you won’t mistake it for anything else. Not even fireworks come close.
“You’re right,” Carpetbag Booker said. I wasn’t surprised he’d heard gunshots, too. “What’s goin’ on?”
A cop with his cap all askew on his head ran into the ballpark and handed Zeb Huckaby a sheet of paper. Then he ran right back out. He pulled his pistol from his holster as he hustled away.
“May I have your attention, please? Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?” Huckaby said into his microphone. “The police have asked me to request that you leave Merchants Park quickly and in an orderly way. Be careful when you get outside. They have warned me that there are, ah, disturbances out there.”
Naturally, that set off more hubbub than it stopped. But it might’ve been all right if the lights hadn’t picked that exact minute to go out. I don’t just mean the lights in the ballpark. I mean the lights all over town. All at once, without the slightest warning, Denver went black as the inside of a crocodile. The screams we were hearing got louder and shriller. The gunfire didn’t let up, even a little.
Some of the ushers, bless ’em, had wills-o’-the-wisp they used to guide people to their seats. In a night game, it got dark under the grandstand roof—the lights were for the field. But it didn’t get so dark then as it had now. Those little flickering lights were godsends.
“Will an usher please come to the field to guide the players away?” the Post’s sports editor shouted. The microphone was dead, of course. But either an usher heard him anyway or the fella had the notion on his own. In that sudden midnight, even a will-o’-the-wisp seemed wonderful.
“Come on, you guys,” the usher said. “This way—and hustle, if you want to get away with a whole skin.”
“What’s going on, anyway?” Half a dozen people must have asked him the same thing at the same time. I oughta know—I was one of ’em. We didn’t all use the same words, but it was the same question no matter who asked it, or how.
As we went down into a dugout, he said, “Maybe you should grab bats. I don’t know if it’ll help, but it won’t hurt. What I hear is, all the zombies in town, and especially the ones from the stockyards, they’ve gone squirrelly. Wild. Outta control. Whatever you wanna call it. They’re killing anybody alive they can get their mitts on.”
I happened to be right by the bat rack. I grabbed me a Louisville Slugger. You bet I did. It was heavier than the one I hit with—probably belonged to Harv or Wes. Even while I grabbed it, I wondered how much good it could do. Zombies are already dead. If you hit one with a baseball bat … Well, so what?
I grabbed it, anyhow. Like the usher said, it couldn’t hurt. So did the other players, from the House of Daniel and from the Pittsburgh Crawdads. You felt better with something like that in your hand. It was made for hitting things. And it sounded as though things were running loose. No—running wild.
Somewhere not far enough away, a machine gun started banging away. I’d never heard one before, but I knew what it was. It couldn’t very well’ve been anything else.
“Do Jesus!” one of the Crawdads said. “That ain’t gonna settle no zombies. They’s already too dead to care if they gits shot.” It was the same thought I’d had when I was taking hold of the baseball bat. If machine guns wouldn’t stop zombies … In that case, we were all in a lot of trouble.
They wouldn’t. And we were.
The will-o’-the-wisp gave us just enough light to see by as the usher led us down the tunnel and through our dressing room. Somebody—I think it was Carpetbag Booker, but it could have been one of the other colored fellas—said, “How’d them zombies go wild like that? They ain’t supposed to be able to do nothin’ but what their massas tells ’em, and not all that much even then.”
“What somebody told me was, vampires been whispering poison in their ears,” the usher said. “They want to see that red flag flyin’ here like it does in Russia.”
It made some kind of sense, anyhow. Vampires weren’t dead like zombies, or weren’t as dead as zombies, but they weren’t exactly alive, either. If anybody or anything could get through to a zombie, a vampire could, or might be able to. That was how it looked to me, anyway.
Most of the time, zombies didn’t want anything. Not to want anything any more was the whole point to becoming a zombie in the first place. Vampires, though … Vampires wanted blood. Everybody knew that. And if they could somehow get zombies to spill blood in rivers, we might have a mess something like the kind of mess Denver had right now.
When we got out of the clubhouse and out of the ballpark, the noise was a lot louder, a lot scareder, and a lot scarier. And it wasn’t pitch-dark out there now. Here and there in the distance, fires were burning—I mean burning out of control. It wasn’t enough light to navigate by, but it was there, and it kept on getting brighter. I smelled smoke, too.
Our bus sat only a few steps from the door we’d come out of. Harv said, “You Crawdads, you can pile in there along with us. It’ll be jammed, yeah, but you’ll have some iron between you and whtever’s going on out here.”
“Thank you, suh. We is much obliged to you,” Quail Jennings said. And both teams got on. We had three on a seat, not two. We had guys standing in the aisle. We didn’t have any oil on us, the way sardines do in their tin. But we all made it aboard.
Harv started up the engine and turned on the headlamps. By then, my eyes had got used to the dark. The beams stabbed out like spears. The bus grunted and groaned more than usual because it was carrying so much extra weight, but it went when Harv put it in gear. Slow and careful, he pulled out onto Broadway.
He needed to be slow and careful, on account of people leaving Merchants Park were going across the big wide street as quick as they could. Other cars coming by almost knocked them over. Everybody in the cars was honking his horn as hard as he could.
Harv drove north past a big Montgomery Ward’s store next to the ballpark. That was the direction of our boarding house, and of the fleabag hotel in the colored part of town where the Crawdads were staying. We were trying to make headway against the tide, though. That was also the direction the riots were spreading from.
People came driving down Broadway like maniacs. They were coming south on both sides of the street. It made going north, well, interesting. Exciting, too. Harv learned on his horn. My thought was that, if folks coming the other way couldn’t see our big old bus, they weren’t likely to hear it, either. I just thought it, though. I didn’t say anything. I might’ve been wrong. Even if I was right, honking wouldn’t hurt anything.
People came running down Broadway, too, on the sidewalk and in the middle of the street. Some of them were bleeding. Some had their clothes torn off. We saw all this in bits and pieces, as they got in the way of somebody’s headlamps or as they ran past some house or shop that was on fire.
“I hope the ballpark doesn’t burn down,” Eddie said. “It’s all wood—the stands, the fences, everything.”
He was jammed onto the seat behind the one where I was practically sitting on a Crawdad’s lap—or maybe the colored guy was practically sitting on mine. “Thanks a lot,” I told him. “Now I’ve got something else to worry about.”
Up ahead of us, a fire engine raced around a corner. It had its headlights on and its red light going, and its siren wailed like a lost soul. The guy in the Model A trying to get away from the zombies broadsided it even so. He was going way too fast to stop. I don’t think he even had a chance to hit the brakes.
It was an awful crash. Pieces of metal and glass flew off the Ford and the fire engine and smashed and cut people on the street. Another car ran over one of the Model A’s wheels. It went out of control, bounced up onto the sidewalk, and slammed into a telephone pole. Three or four people flew out of the car. They lay there thrashing. They might even have been lucky, because the car started burning like nobody’s business.
Some of the firemen got knocked off their engine, too, when the Model A hit it. Harv pulled the bus over to the curb and stopped. “Come on,” he said. “We have to help those people. It’s the only Christian thing
to do.”
Right then, I wouldn’t have been too disappointed if he hadn’t been such a good Christian. But when the bus’s door wheezed open, I jumped out with everybody else. I wasn’t brave enough to stay behind when other people didn’t. The bat in my hand felt as though it would do as much good as a fly swatter against a boa constrictor.
We were trotting toward the wrecks—and trying not to get run over ourselves—when I saw my first for-sure rioting zombie. He—no, she—wore shapeless, colorless coveralls, the cheapest kind of stuff you could still call clothes. She wasn’t moving slow and stupid, the way zombies are supposed to do. Oh, no. Oh, Lord, no! She sprang on one of the people thrown from that car that hit the pole and started tearing and biting at him. He’d been groaning. Now he shrieked.
“C’mon!” Harv yelled, and ran toward her, waving his baseball bat. “Like I said before, remember the fourth man in the fiery furnace.”
He had faith. Me, all I had was not wanting to look yellow to the guys on my team and to the Crawdads. That was enough to make me follow him. Go ahead, call me a fool. I sure was calling myself one.
The zombie looked up from what she was doing. Her face was all bloody from the nose down, but I knew that wasn’t her blood. I don’t think zombies have any or use any or however you want to put it. The fire from the burning car blazed out of her eyes. I know people’s eyes don’t shine like that. She wasn’t a person. She was a zombie.
She yowled. I’d never heard a zombie make a noise before. I hoped I never would again, but I wasn’t so lucky as that. Then she charged us.
Harv swung on her first. If he’d hit a baseball with that swing, he would’ve bombed it out of the park. He rearranged her face pretty good and knocked her back on her heels. But that’s all he did. How could he kill her? She was already dead. She didn’t care if she got uglier than she was before. She just cared about ripping him—ripping all of us—to pieces.
We all waded in. Some of us got scratched and cut a bit, but she couldn’t bite the way she had before thanks to Harv’s home-run swing. We kept at it, swinging from the heels. A zombie with face and arms and legs all broken up may still want to kill you, but it can’t move any more to do what it wants.
The House of Daniel Page 24