Dirty Rice

by Gerald Duff

  “Gemar,” Dutch Bernson said, “this man that’s about to throw to you is Hookey Irwin, and he had the best won-lost record in the Evangeline League last year. He was twenty-one and nine, and he did that on a team that finished fourth in the standings. Ain’t that right, Hookey?”

  The pitcher didn’t say anything, still trying to fix whatever it was that was wrong with his glove, and then he finally looked up toward Dutch and nodded. “You’re the one that keeps count of all that kind of thing, Dutch,” he said. “I just try to get the ball over the plate, best I can.”

  “Bullshit,” Dynamite Dunn said to me in a low voice. “That little sucker studies and squeezes every number he can out of every game he pitches.”

  “Hookey Irwin,” Dutch was saying. “This young fellow here is Gemar Batiste, and he’s a full-blooded Indian from Texas. He claims he’s a ballplayer, and he wants to see can he hit you.”

  Hookey Irwin finally looked at me then. We both nodded, but didn’t have anything to say to each other yet, and Dynamite Dunn started getting set up behind the plate. In a minute or two, Hookey Irwin started throwing to the catcher, with Dutch standing way off to one side, and I began fiddling with the bat I’d picked out in the locker room. It was a little heavier than I would have liked, but it felt all right in general. I swung it a few times to get the feel of it, not putting much into it since I was still cold.

  Hookey Irwin was a right-hander, so I would be batting left-handed and that was a good thing since I was a natural lefty. I had taught myself playing on them sawmill teams to switch hit.

  Hookey was shorter than I was by about half a head, compact in his body and in his motion, and I figured him to be more of a control pitcher than one who would try to overpower a batter with fastballs. He wasn’t throwing hard as he warmed up, keeping every pitch about the same tempo, and I knew that he wasn’t really worried about me. He wasn’t pitching in a game and didn’t think he’d have to strain to show me up.

  Hookey Irwin wouldn’t be about to let up on me. His first pitch wouldn’t be one of the control pitches he was using to warm up as he threw to the catcher. No. When I came up to the plate, it would be his best fastball. He would hope I’d let it go by, surprised by the difference between it and what I’d been seeing him do so far, and then he’d spring on me them curves and drops and what folks call a slider now. I’d be so confused I wouldn’t get my timing right, and I would be puzzled as to what he’d throw next and that would keep him one pitch ahead of me, and Hookey Irwin would show his manager what he still had, no matter how weak the batter was he was facing.

  Hookey threw another curve, nodded twice at Dynamite Dunn, and caught the return throw. He then looked up at the sky, back down at the ground and stood there, waiting for me to come up to the plate.

  “Batter up,” Dutch Bernson said, as I began to walk toward home. The cleats on my borrowed shoes felt good to me digging into the ground, and I looked around me. There wasn’t any crowd there, but Addison Stadium was fixed convenient so people could have a good place to sit and watch from when the time came.

  I walked to the first base side of the batter’s box and tapped my bat on home plate like I always did. Then I settled into my stance, a closed one so as not to let an inside pitch be out of my range, and I looked at the pitcher on the mound, staring down at me while he held the ball hid in his glove.

  The pitcher looked toward the mitt the catcher was holding up just behind and to the side of my left knee, rocked back in his motion, came forward in his stride and about three-quarters’ overhand in his pitch, and released all that movement bringing that fastball toward me. The white circle the ball made was growing fast like the full moon over Lost Man Marsh in the Nation of the Alabama-Coushattas, and I could tell that circle needed to be stopped before it got by me and vanished into the darkness waiting behind. I started my swing and my bat, met the ball just as it crossed the plate where everything was still safe, and the crack it made rang in the empty stadium.

  My swing hadn’t gotten under the ball enough to get it over the right field fence, so it carried like a line drive, hitting the top edge of a Jax Beer sign about twenty feet fair inside the foul line and bouncing back and rolling toward us, coming to a stop in the high grass just short of the base path.

  “I believe if you’d hit that ball a little harder, Gemar, we wouldn’t have to walk so far to pick it back up,” Dutch Bernson said. I could feel Dynamite Dunn starting to stand up behind me, his catcher’s gear creaking. I leaned forward and knocked the bat on the side of my right shoe, but that was just a way I could keep from looking up at Hookey Irwin out on the mound. I didn’t need to let him see me sneaking a peek to see how he was taking things right then.

  “Want a new ball?” Dynamite Dunn said to his pitcher and whipped a throw by my ear to get another one to him. The air it raised coming that close to my head lifted a little bit of my hair.

  Now instead of being one pitch behind Hookey Irwin, I was one pitch ahead of him, a situation that gets on a pitcher’s nerves. He had figured I wouldn’t be expecting him to put his best fastball right over the plate the first time he pitched to me, and I had let him know with what I did with that fastball that I was on to what he was up to. I had read him the first time I faced him. Now he had to try to get out of that hole.

  What he would do now is to get the ball up a little bit, high and inside to me, take some steam off of it, but let me know he was still ready to throw that fastball. You just got lucky, he’d be saying, and you’d have swung at the first pitch I threw anyway, whether it was a fastball or a knuckler. You ain’t figured me out, no matter it might look to you. You can’t out think me.

  He’d throw that, I’d take the pitch, and the next one would be his best curve, broke off just above my knees and hooking inside to a left-handed batter. It took a minute or two for all that to happen, since Hookey had to rub up the ball, adjust that glove again, look in at me with the same stare he’d used before the first pitch, and finally deliver the ball. He wasn’t going to let anything put him in a hurry.

  After he let them two next ones go, I was two pitches ahead of him, since I let the high inside zip by my head, and when the curve came—a damn good one, too—I caught it square in the sweet spot and it went to dead center field, where it would’ve been a double if I’d been running the bases. Maybe a triple.

  I forget how many more pitches Hookey Irwin made to me that morning in Addison Stadium, but it couldn’t have been more than six or eight. I got wood on all of them that was in the strike zone, fouling off a couple, finally catching another of his fastballs square and getting under it enough to put it over the opposite field fence, and then reaching too far and swinging too hard for another one outside, hitting nothing but air. It was a good pitch for him, and I got too hungry and shouldn’t have bit at it. A good pitcher will make you do that.

  As soon as I was fooled into making that swinging strike, Dutch Bernson told us that he’d seen all he needed to of me at bat. Hookey Irwin walked off the mound, started messing with his glove again, and went through the door to the hall leading to the clubhouse without looking back. Dynamite Dunn pulled off the catcher’s gear he’d been wearing, and reminded Dutch he was supposed to tell him where he could find a place to room for the season.

  “I’ll show you what I got available on that business in a little while,” Dutch said. “You don’t have to know right this minute where you’re going to lay your head tonight, do you? It’ll keep.” Then he turned to me.

  “Gemar,” he said. “You say you’re a pitcher, and we can see if that’s true sometime later on this week. But you have showed me you can hit the ball, at least off a right-hander real early in the season before he’s hit his stride. Why don’t you get them cleats off and come to my office once you do?”

  When I got to that little room a few minutes later, Dutch was sitting behind his desk fiddling with so
me papers. He had a big chew of tobacco in his mouth and he leaned forward to spit into a Seaport coffee can before he said anything to me.

  “You chew?” he said and pointed toward a plug of Brown Mule on his desk that was about half gone. I said I didn’t.

  “Let me start by saying that Hookey Irwin is a damn good pitcher,” Dutch said. “I’d say he’s the best one the Rice Birds got, though Cliff Labbé is right up there, too. What’d you think about the stuff he showed you today?”

  “I was lucky,” I said. “I got ahead of him, and he didn’t catch up until right there at the end.”

  “Was he doing something to tip his pitches? Especially that fastball?” Dutch looked at me hard when he said that, to see if I understood what he was talking about.

  “I just guessed he’d start me off with a fastball,” I said, “and once I’d got that right, it closed down what he could do. Ain’t no pitcher got more than a few pitches, I always been told. It’s just how good he can throw what he’s got that counts, I reckon.”

  That was the right thing to say to Dutch. “I can see you’ve had some teaching,” he said. “And it sounds like you listened to it. But there wasn’t no tell you could read off of Hookey. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Every time he let loose a pitch, he looked the same to me from one to the other. I couldn’t see how he was gripping the ball, now. He hid that real good.”

  “His stuff’s pretty good, you thought, though?”

  “I wouldn’t of wanted it to be no better if I was batting against him,” I said. “If he was on my side now, I’d be satisfied to see him on the mound as many times as he could start.”

  “Let me tell you what I’m ready to do, Gemar,” Dutch said. “You got a lot to learn, I believe, to be able to play baseball in the Evangeline League, but I’m willing to let you try. What I’m talking about now is not pitching, but hitting, you understand. You say you’re a left-handed pitcher, and if you prove out to be right on that, we can all be happy. We’ll see. But talking now about your hitting is what I’m doing. I believe I can get the owner of the Rayne Rice Birds to pay you a salary of sixty dollars a month during the season. On top of that, we’ll give you an allowance of twenty dollars a month toward your room and board.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “I take that to mean you’re saying yes to that?” Dutch said.

  “Yes, that deal sounds good.”

  “You understand there ain’t no guarantees, now. Anytime things go wrong, any of us might have to hit the road. It’s day to day, just like baseball always is. And I’m the one who’ll tell you if things are going wrong. And there ain’t no arguments possible.”

  “I don’t know what that word guarantee means,” I said.

  Dutch said, “That word is wrote down and it’s said out loud, but it does not pertain to nothing. Never. As long as we agree on that, every little thing is jake.”

  “It’s like baseball, the way I figure it,” I said. “The best pitch ever throwed can be hit, and the best hitter that ever lived is going to strike out just when he ought not to. You can’t predict it.”

  “I hope maybe you can pitch just like you hit Hookey Irwin today,” Dutch Bernson said. “We’ll find that out, and I’ll give you written down on a contract what we just been talking about. Have you got any money on you?”

  “No. I used the last of what I had to buy some doughnuts this morning.”

  “I’ll get Dynamite to take you over to Miz Velma Doucette this afternoon. She’s got a room with two beds in it that she lets out to players during the season, and you can set up there. She’ll want five dollars for the rest of the month for room and board, and I’ll advance you that. I don’t know right now who else I’ll put over there to sleep in that other bed, but you don’t have to worry about that. You don’t mind Cubans, do you?”

  “I don’t know any Cubans, so I don’t know to mind them one way or the other.”

  “That’s good to know,” Dutch Bernson said, getting up from his chair and reaching into the back pocket of his pants. “I’ll advance you that five dollars for Miz Doucette. I sure hope you can hit in a real game the way you wore Hookey out today. Oh, don’t ever tell him I said that, by the way. You know how pitchers get.”

  “I won’t, manager,” I said and stuck out my hand for the five.

  4

  After the manager had told Dynamite Dunn to show me where the house was I’d be rooming in, I got my tow sack and bat. It had gotten a lot hotter since morning, and the air felt heavier to move in than it generally did back in the Nation. It seemed like it wanted to rain, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I felt like I needed to take a deep breath, but it was harder to draw in air than I was used to it being. It took more effort in South Louisiana.

  “Looks like you’re liable to be around here for a while,” Dynamite said, “after what you showed Dutch back yonder.”

  “Maybe. If I can do what I got to do to make it. There ain’t no guarantees.”

  “He gave you his opinion on guarantees, did he?” Dunn said and began to laugh.

  “He seemed down on the very notion of guarantees, all right,” I said. “But I wasn’t bothered by him saying it. I imagine he’s right.”

  The street we were walking on had hardwood trees growing on both sides of it, most of them hanging with what white folks call Spanish moss and the People of the Nation see to be signs of where a witch has walked and brushed up against the tree limbs.

  “Lots of Spanish moss around here,” I said to Dynamite Dunn, “everywhere you look.”

  “It’s some kind of stuff growing everywhere in Louisiana,” he said. “Wet as it is and hot around here most of the time, I’m afraid to set a bat down on the ground for very long. Might take root overnight.”

  “I hope you like to run,” he went on. “Dutch is death on making us run all the time, speaking about hot and wet. You watch. Tomorrow when everybody shows up for the first day of practice, first thing he’s going to do is tell us to start running laps around the field. I predict Hookey is going to be sick and not able to run them first few days.”

  “He don’t talk much, does he, Hookey?”

  “He’s a pitcher, and he don’t talk much to anybody that might hit a throwed ball. All of them’s like that. You say you’re a pitcher yourself, ain’t you? You ought to know that about that breed of ballplayer.”

  “I try not to take it personal when somebody hits what I’m trying to throw by them,” I said. “Most of the time.”

  “It’s personal to me every time I hit that field. I don’t like nobody that’s trying to beat me. Trying to take the bread out of my mouth, that’s what he’s doing, is the way I figure it. Like today, out there. You think Hookey Irwin’s going to be your partner now after the way you hit his stuff in front of me and Dutch?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to show him or nobody up, but I wasn’t looking for friends, neither.”

  “That’s the way to see it. Don’t expect no friends and maybe you’ll find one or two,” Dynamite said. “There, that corner house with the porch across the front and the swing hanging on it, that’s Miz Velma Doucette. You just go up there and knock on the door and tell her Dutch Bernson sent you.”

  “All right,” I said. “You ain’t coming with me?”

  “No, Gemar, I’m not. I roomed in Miz Doucette’s house season before last, and she would not like to see me walk up on her porch again.”

  “You going to tell me why?”

  “Not right now. It is a long story, and it ain’t a happy one for some people in it. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  • • •

  The woman who came to the door of that house on Felicity Street gave me a long look up and down through the screen without saying anything. The screen door was still latched, a
nd I moved back from it to show her I wasn’t up to any funny business. She had a head scarf tied around her hair the way women used to do back in those days when they were doing housework.

  “I was sent by Dutch Bernson to talk to you about getting a room here, if you’re Miz Doucette,” I said. “I’m trying to get on with the Rice Birds baseball team, and he said you let out rooms sometimes during the season.” I tried to put a smile on my face like white folks need to see when you happen to walk up on one of them and act like you want something.

  My try at smiling at Miz Velma Doucette the first time I saw her seemed to work all right, though. She unlocked the latch on the screen door, which wouldn’t have stopped a child from busting in the house if he really wanted to, and smiled back at me herself.

  “Why, yes, I do let out rooms to some of the baseball players, when I got one available,” the lady said. She pushed her scarf back further on her head.

  “What’s your name?” she asked me, “and where do you call home?”

  I told her, and she acted both satisfied and curious at the same time, hoping I’d tell her more without her having to ask me to. So I did the best I could, and in a few minutes she had let me in the house and pointed me in the direction of the room where I might be staying. It was dark in her house after standing outside in the sun, but I could see that along with the davenport and the chairs in the front room there was a lot of sayings in frames up on all the walls. I didn’t try to read them as we went down the hall off the front room, but I did see that the letters of the sayings had patterns of flowers and birds flying and little animals bending their heads to eat grass and blossoms off the ground.

  “Here’s the room, Mr. Batiste,” Velma Doucette said, “just off the hall here to the right. It’s a two-man room with two beds in it and two chairs and a table to sit at and write letters on. The baseball boys that’ve lived here always say it’s real convenient the way it’s laid out. It’s even got a closet to put your stuff in. You can write home to your mama and daddy real easy in this room.”