by Gerald Duff
“I swear to God I didn’t,” Mike said, and then he touched his right hand to his head and belly and both sides of his chest. You saw a lot of people doing that in them days in Louisiana, and not just ballplayers warding off a jinx.
9
We rode a lot of buses in the Evangeline League, different ones at times going to the towns where we’d play. But generally we’d be in the one particular bus, that one we rode that afternoon when I took my first trip as a player for the Rayne Rice Birds. It was parked on the street in front of Addison Stadium waiting for us after Dutch Bernson had give us a little talking to before we got all our stuff together and went outside. I’d listened to most of what he said, but he didn’t say nothing surprising nor new.
“I don’t see why rookies don’t have to carry all this junk,” one of the veteran players said, letting the bag he was carrying drop to the floor when he saw me coming up behind him.
“Pick them bats back up, Rodney,” Dutch’s assistant coach said, a tall skinny fellow named Poke Bateau. “That’s probably the closest you going to come to touching one today.”
Folks laughed at that, but when we all got outside, some of the ones doing most of the laughing was looking at the bus and cussing. “It’s the toad mobile again,” a couple of them were saying. “How’d they get it back here? Did they push it by hand?”
“Naw, it set there all winter,” another one said. “Didn’t you see it out here all hunkered down in the mud?”
“Get on the damn bus, gentlemen,” Poke Bateau said. “That machine has been subject to a complete overhaul while y’all have been lying up and resting. Engine’s been rebuilt, and it’s a new paint job been put on it, and she’s ready to roll.”
“Poke’s right,” Dutch Bernson said. “It’ll be like traveling in a brand new vehicle this season. Everything’s up to snuff. Get on board. Next stop’s Crowley, Louisiana.”
“Does it still smell inside like a family of polecats has just moved out?” Rodney Baronet said. “Or did y’all finally get around to fumigating the toad mobile?”
“She smells like the inside of the best whorehouse in New Orleans, Rodney,” Dutch said. “Not that you ever been inside anywhere that smells sweet. And don’t be saying nothing against toads.”
Everybody laughed big at that, at least the ones who’d been around for a while did, and we started loading up. The bus did smell like new paint inside, all right, and the outside of it had signs of a new coat, too. Each side of the bus had a big picture of a black bird painted on it like the one on the stadium. The vehicle didn’t look like a bus you’d see driving on the highway for hire to haul people places, but it wasn’t exactly like a bus for school kids to ride, neither.
Me and Mike Gonzales and three or four others new to the Rice Birds wasn’t allowed to get on until all the veterans had crawled aboard, and in the meantime we were set to loading the bags of gear into a compartment behind a door cut into one side of the bus. I was the last player to get on, and behind me was Dutch Bernson.
“Gemar,” he told me as we stood there together, “if you’ve looked at the lineup card, you seen I left right field blank. I won’t fill that in until the umpire asks to see it. That way I’m going to save Tubby Dean’s hurt feelings to the last minute.”
“All right,” I said. “That’s fine with me.”
“Did you bring that red oak bat with you?”
“No,” I said. “I plan to save that for when I particularly might need it.”
“That’s your business,” Dutch said. “I hope you’re carrying some kind of a good luck charm with you today, though.”
“I ain’t forgot that, manager,” I said, and I climbed on the bus to Crowley.
• • •
It wasn’t going to take long to get to where we was headed. It’s not many miles from Rayne to Crowley, and the bus hummed along the highway fine. I’d been told to sit beside Mike Gonzales in the seat right over the wheel well, a seat the veterans hollered out was especially set aside for rookies. The padding on it was busted and flattened out, but so were most of the rest of the seats on that bus. The closer we got to where we were going, the quieter it got on the bus, and the joking calmed down to nothing. After a while, all you could hear was the wheels on the road and the jouncing up and down of the springs when we’d hit a bump or a chughole. I looked out of the window beside me most of the way, and as flat as that country is I could see a good distance off the road.
It was rice fields mostly, now and then a little house or two with cars that wouldn’t run anymore sitting in front of some of them, kids playing outside on rope swings tied to tree limbs, a few mules and a horse or two behind fences, lots of water in the bar ditches from the rain showers that would come almost every afternoon for about thirty minutes in that country, and far off on the horizon in some places a line of trees with Spanish moss hanging from them.
I let my eyes close, and I could feel myself dozing off, a few words between people coming into my ears like I was listening to them talk far off and pictures of things popping up before me as if I had my eyes open, though I didn’t. I found myself with two other people about my same age, it seemed to me, and they was from the Nation back in Texas, but I didn’t know who they were. That didn’t bother me, though, because we were on our way on a trip, a journey headed someplace we had heard about and wanted to see.
The clothes we were wearing were like the ones the People dressed in back in the old days, the kinds you’d see in the pictures up on the walls of the agent’s office in the center of the Nation where all the trails and roads and paths of the reservation came together and stopped. Those old photographs showed the men of the Alabamas and Coushattas wearing shirts and pants made from animal hides, and their hair was long and twisted into braids with pieces of wood and feathers and shells worked into them. Some had marks made with paint on their eyes and hands, though you couldn’t tell the colors in the old pictures. The women wore long dresses down to the ground, and the young ones, both boys and girls, didn’t have much of anything on them. I had always figured them old photographs was took by some white man in a summer a long time ago, a season when it was so hot the People didn’t need much protection, young or old. Nobody was trying to keep bad weather off.
In my dream, which couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes, a lot happened to me and the other two boys from the Nation. We were headed somewhere we’d been told about, and we were carrying bows and arrows and chunk sticks with darts to throw with them, and all three of us had our medicine bags with us. We felt like we were fixed and ready for anything that might come up. So when we come to a big body of water so wide we couldn’t see the other side, we knew something would help us cross all that water if we waited long enough.
What come up out of the water with a big splash in front of us was a Horned Snake, big around as the trunk of a longleaf pine, colored every shade of the rainbow, and he let us know he’d carry us where we wanted to go if we’d climb on him and feed him corn. We did that, straddling his back and each one of us reaching into our bag and throwing ears of corn ahead of him to make him swim forward to eat it. By the time our bags was all empty, we could see the other shore we wanted to get to, and just as the Horned Snake ate the last ear of corn, we all three hopped off his back and waded the rest of the way to land, just in time so he didn’t get hungry again and want to eat one of us up.
He sank back into the water, and we started walking into a stand of hardwoods, so tall I got dizzy looking up at the tops of them. Something was hiding up there that I had to locate and see what it was, and just about when I got to that place in my dream on the Rice Bird bus to Crowley, I felt something pushing hard against my side. No matter how much I tried to get away from it, it followed me.
“What you groaning about?” Mike Gonzales was saying. “Damn if you don’t go to sleep quick, Gemar. I looked off for a minute and wh
en I looked back to say something to you, you was sawing wood, man. You having a nightmare in the middle of the day?”
“Just a dream,” I said, rubbing my face and wondering what would’ve happened next in my trip with the two others from the Nation. “I must have nodded off.”
“I wish I could get to sleep that easy,” Mike said. “It’d save me having to wait all this time to get to Crowley.”
I saw that the bus was moving down a road with houses and buildings on both sides of it, a place that looked a lot bigger than Rayne, and I figured we was about there.
“You sure was acting like it was bothering you,” Mike Gonzales said. “Just carrying on and saying some of them Indian words, I guess they was.”
“It was just my dream,” I told him. “That’s all it was. Wasn’t nothing real to it.”
“I’m glad it was yours and not mine, then,” Mike said. “I tell you that much. What does that one Indian word you kept saying again and again mean? Popo or something like that.”
Before I had time to think of whether to tell Mike anything about the Poppoyom, he pointed out the window on the far side of the bus, spinning around in the busted-out seat of the Rice Bird bus and stretching his arm across the aisle. “Looky there, looky there, Gemar. This is got to be the Crowley Millers’ baseball field. This here’s the place where I’m going to get my first hit in the Evangeline League.”
“Hey, rookie,” somebody sitting in the seat behind us called out for everybody to hear. It was an outfielder named Milton Spears, I remember. “Don’t be saying shit like that. Are you just trying to throw a jinx on yourself?”
“I’m carrying a jinx buster,” Mike Gonzales said. “I ain’t worried about no spells against me. Ain’t that right, Gemar?”
I didn’t say anything back to that.
“Woo, listen to this brand-new shortstop,” Milton Spears said. “I sure hope I get to see that check get cashed.”
“What check is that, Milt?” somebody hollered.
“That check this Cuban’s writing with his mouth,” Milton Spears said. “The one he’s going to have to cash with his ass.”
The bus stopped about then, and Dutch Bernson stood up from his seat and started telling us how to act as we unloaded and went on into the clubhouse of the Crowley Millers. Their stadium was bigger than Addison Stadium, and there was already a gang of people lined up in front of it buying tickets. Most of them turned to watch us Rice Birds as we climbed off the bus and headed for the door leading inside. I grabbed one of the bags of gear from the storage compartment, and Mike Gonzales did the same, both of us following in the direction of the veterans ahead of us. I could tell lots of people in that ticket line was giving us the once over.
“What kind of a Rice Bird’s them two?” one of those people called out.
“Don’t look like no rice bird I ever seen before,” another said. “Look like a couple of black birds to me.” People liked that, and several of them said the same thing again.
One of the things Dutch had said to all of us before we got off the bus was not to get in discussions with folks that tried to get our goats. I figured Mike Gonzales already knew that lesson by heart, and sure enough he kept his head down and his attention on carrying the bag of gear he’d picked up.
Once we got inside with the rest of the Rayne team, though, he turned to look at me. “How’d you like what them Crowley people said about you?” he said.
“I didn’t hear anybody say nothing,” I said.
“Are you hard of hearing, Gemar?”
“No, I just don’t know what grackles mean when they start talking to each other.”
“Grackles? What’s that?”
“It’s a kind of a bird,” I said. “You see them in the Big Thicket all over the place. A ugly speckled bird, likes to walk around on the ground instead of flying. Craps all the time a whole bunch. The other birds won’t say a word to them. That’s why grackles make so much racket.”
“Shit,” Mike Gonzales said and started taking off his road clothes.
“That’s right, shortstop,” I said. “That’s the very word that fits the grackle.”
10
After we’d got suited up and Dutch had time to talk to the bunch of us again, all of us went out onto the diamond where the Crowley Millers played. I waited so I could be the last one out of the door, most of the rest of them pushing to get outside to start warming. The only one left besides me, Punk Kinkaid, would never leave the clubhouse on the road or at home, since his job during a game was to be sure nobody would come in and steal stuff the players might have left lying around. Punk had never played baseball that I knew of, but he’d worked with Dutch Bernson lots of other places before coming to the Rayne Rice Birds.
“Something wrong with your gear?” Punk said. “You missing something, rookie? Need some help?”
“No,” I said. “I just like to be quiet and by myself when I’m fixing to leave the world and about to step inside a baseball diamond.”
“Oh, hell,” Punk said. “Another one of them damn ballplayer superstitions. It’s like assholes. Everybody’s got one. It wears me out to keep up with what all you crazy bastards believe you have to do right before you can play a game of hard ball. How long do you have to wait before you can go out there?”
“Right now,” I said. “It’s time.”
What caught my attention first was the colors inside the walls and fences of Millers’ stadium. The grass in almost all them playing fields in the Evangeline League back then was green and plentiful. It rained so much in that country pretty much year round that there was no shortage of strength in the grass covering the fields. I expected that would be true in the Crowley stadium, about like what it was in the Rayne Rice Birds’ field. But the grass in the Millers’ field was so green it looked almost bluish to me, the shade you’d see in the sky in East Texas early in the spring after a good shower had stopped and the sun had come out strong.
That wasn’t all. The lines marking the difference between the diamond and all that was outside was whiter than I’d ever seen, and the few people coming early into the stands to watch the game was wearing clothes that looked like they’d been special dyed for what was about to happen. That depth of color wasn’t there for anybody to notice but me. I knew that. That said things to me, and I touched my hands together real quick so anybody watching me wouldn’t have noticed what I’d just done and if they did see it, wouldn’t have given it no weight.
“Abba Mikko,” I said in the language of the Nation. “Old Father. Today let me be what I’m supposed to be.”
I stepped over the diamond’s white line, my left foot first, and I didn’t let the right foot know I was going to make it do that until I was all the way on the field. I’d learned a long time ago, playing on the sawmill teams and even just knocking rocks off into the woods behind my father’s house, that the less I asked the parts of my body to think about what they were being called on to do, the better they’d do the job I set before them.
So my left foot stepped over the white line, my right one went along without thinking about it, and I was standing inside the diamond of the Crowley Millers where I’d try to stay alive and make the other ones up against me fade away into nothing.
Nowadays when teams warm up before the game starts, they take a good long time doing it. The players lie down on the ground and stretch their muscles, the pitchers throw more times than they will in the game itself, everybody takes batting practice, the infielders catch grounders and throw to first base so many times they have to spell the man catching the throws, and the catcher behind the plate throws down to second base always right on the bag. It ain’t never like that once the game starts, though, no matter how warmed up they get.
It wasn’t that way in the Evangeline League back during what the white people call the Great Depression. I reckon if w
e spent more than twenty minutes before a game getting loose and ready, the people in the stands waiting for the game to start would have throwed bottles at us.
So that first-day first-game of the Rice Birds’ season, after a few minutes of soft throwing and easy swinging of the bats, all of us players went to the dugout and sat down to listen to Dutch Bernson give us whatever directions he wanted to. They didn’t amount to much.
“A lot of y’all have done batted against this Winston LeBreaux,” Dutch said, tapping on the top of his cap with one hand and holding its bill with the other one. “He’s getting a little slower every year, but he can still sneak a fastball by you when you ain’t looking out good. Lot of breaking stuff, though, like always. If we get on him early, he’s apt to get discouraged. Keep that in mind.”
“All right,” Dutch went on. “All right, the plate umpire’s fixing to get it cranked up, just as soon as that damn accordion finishes playing. First game, boys. Let’s see what y’all can do.”
I was listed on Dutch’s lineup to bat eighth, so I didn’t expect to be able to get up until maybe the second inning, unless something bad happened to that Millers pitcher, Winston LeBreaux. Nothing bad did happen to him in the first inning, but he lost his chance at a no-hitter when Phil Pellicore hit a sharp single through the hole between second and first. That didn’t do Phil no good, though, since a couple of weak fly balls ended up getting hit and caught.
Out in right field, I didn’t get any chances when the Millers came to bat in the bottom of the first. Hookey Irwin was sharp, and he wasn’t having to bother with throwing many balls to the first three batters, just putting strikes over in the places he was aiming at, getting two men to ground out and one man to sit down after swinging three times at balls that’d moved away from where he figured they was headed in the first place.