by Gerald Duff
I did get to come to bat in the second inning, though, after we got a man on base with two outs. The one on base was Mike Gonzales, batting seventh right before me. I wasn’t going to let that bother me yet, though, Dutch putting him up in that spot before me. I figured it was my job to correct his mistake, and if I couldn’t do that in the first game, it wasn’t nobody to blame but myself.
Mike had hit a good line drive just inside the right field line, and he didn’t even slow down when he tagged first, figuring he could beat the right fielder’s throw to second. That he did, popping up from his slide like he was on a spring.
I understood why Mike Gonzales was grinning, getting that double the first time he’d come to bat for the Rice Birds in a real game, but I wasn’t about to let the expression on my face give away how I felt no matter whether I got a hit or died at the plate.
I remember as I stepped up to the plate I was thinking that I would not hold it against Mike Gonzales that he was standing on second base grinning like a jackass eating briars, so anybody looking on could tell how he was feeling from just seeing his face. That wasn’t Mike’s fault. He hadn’t had the advantages of the raising in the Nation I’d had. I forgive him for that, I said to myself.
I looked down at the plate and saw it had a little dirt on it that had got kicked up when Mike Gonzales had took off for first, so I reached down with my bat and touched the tip of it to the sign Mike left there. It couldn’t hurt to have a little bit of that evidence introduced to the piece of wood I was holding in my hand.
I took a long look at the pitcher then, Winston LeBreaux. Like Dutch had said, he was a man who looked like he’d been around for a good while, and that meant something. He might not have the stuff he’d started out with all them years before, but the fact the Crowley team was still paying him to try to get balls by people with bats in their hands meant he’d learned how to use what he had left. Mainly, that would be what was in his head now, not in his arm and back and legs.
Looking down from that little hill of dirt he was standing on, the pitcher wasn’t paying any attention to me that you could tell. He was just looking in at the catcher, down in his crouch making signs just behind my left leg, and the pitcher was letting me know he didn’t see no reason to be bothered with studying me. I didn’t present any problem for him, he was saying. I don’t even see you. You’re just something to look past.
I was new to him. So what he’d do as a right-hander who’d been around for a long time with his first pitch was put it outside to the left-handed batter in front of him, and he’d want to make it look like he’d just missed with a curve ball. He figured I’d be eager and hot to swing the bat, not wanting to be caught looking afraid to take my chances, so he’d use that first one to set me up for the next one to come. If I swung at the first pitch, that’d tell him where to put the second one, but if I didn’t, that’d tell him something different. He’d prefer I didn’t swing at that first pitch, though. If I didn’t I’d be all tensed up and ready to take a full hack at the second one, and he’d put that one inside. If he could get enough on the ball for that second pitch, he’d want that to be a tailing fastball tight up against me about mid-thigh level.
We both got set, and he reared back and here came the first pitch throwed to me in a real game in the Evangeline League, but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. It came in like I figured it would, and I leaned forward and shifted my upper body like I was trying to be able to reach the ball where it was going to fade outside. It did that, but I didn’t swing. The umpire called it a ball, and it was, and Mr. Winston LeBlanc now figured he had me a little bit on edge. I was ahead in the count, and he figured that I wouldn’t lay off anything now. He thought he knew now I’d chase an outside pitch, like a rookie will lots of times do, and all he had to do to get me leaning and he’d put that inside pitch right by me. And all that would be the worst that could happen for him, if I misjudged the pitch, would be a strike at least, and if I got the bat on it, it’d likely be a weak grounder hit to the left side of the infield, a bouncer a shortstop would eat up like breakfast.
Winston LeBreaux pulled at the bill of his Millers cap, ready for business. He hid the ball inside his glove, looked at the catcher, nodded his head, and went into his windup. I got ready, on my toes but laid back, tight and loose at the same time, my eyes on that spot in the empty air where his right hand would be when he let go of that pitch headed inside to me, and I took a breath and let it go. There wasn’t anybody in the world now but Winston LeBreaux and me, and the only sound was the green color of the grass and the white lines of the diamond speaking to me in a low and steady tone.
It was a good pitch for him, coming to me where he wanted it to go, and if I’d been thinking the way the pitcher wanted me to be, I’d have hit the ball on the handle of the bat I was holding, and it would have squirted back fair, headed straight for where the shortstop was lined up, leaning forward with his hands raised and his eyes fastened on my bat like a tick seized up in an armpit. I was thinking only the way I wanted to, though, not the way Winston LeBreaux was figuring, and I put the sweet part of that piece of ash on the ball just as it reached the spot where it needed to be for me to drive it. I didn’t really hit it that hard, but I hit it true, and the line drive went over the second baseman’s head and touched the ground just in time to bounce twice before it hit the right field wall a few inches above ground level.
Hitting the wall like that made it take a nice crooked path off to one side, not tracking true, and by the time I’d rounded first base and was halfway to second, the center fielder was just picking it up and deciding to try to get it all the way home before Mike Gonzales would reach that final safe place. He ought not to’ve tried that. I figured he didn’t have the arm for that kind of throw, since if he did, he would’ve been playing his baseball in a higher level league than the Evangeline. I’d put on more speed as soon as I saw him rear back, and by the time his throw had bounced just behind the pitcher’s mound and ended up eight or ten feet up the third base line and the catcher’d grabbed the ball and fired it to third, I was standing there with my triple, watching what was going on. I wasn’t concerned no more, since nobody could bother me now.
Winston LeBreaux looked at me for the first time then, holding the resin bag in his pitching hand, but he didn’t have any expression on his face other than that of a man who was interested in not dropping what he was throwing up and down without looking at it. I could hear sounds other than just the colors now, standing there with one foot on base, while the third baseman waited with the ball in hand to see if I’d step off and let him tag me. I didn’t want to do that, so I stuck where I was, breathing the air and watching the colors of everything around me in Crowley Stadium, the grass and the dirt of the base paths and the clothes and faces of the people in the stands, and listening to all of those different shades humming together. I looked away from the pitcher on the mound, not studying me now, and in at Mike Gonzales trotting back toward the dugout, getting slapped once on the back by Hookey Irwin waiting on deck to bat, now a pitcher with a one-run lead. My triple. My RBI.
That lead held up the rest of the game, and the Rice Birds got three more men safe home, and after Hookey left in the eighth inning with two men on, the Millers got a run across before a man hit into a double play off a knuckler throwed by Harry Nolan. I got on base twice more, once on a single through the left side and once on a walk, and I got drove in for a run by G.D. Squires. I was killed just the one time, a long fly to the opposite field that the man in left made a good catch on at the wall, but that didn’t hurt me much. The Rice Birds was up by three runs at the time, and nobody had to act like I was a dead man sitting on the bench when I’d had to carry my bat back to the dugout. That bat did pick up a lot more weight when that fielder caught my fly, though, and I felt every ounce of it. A bat that lost a hit will take it hard and sink into itself. I knew I couldn’t use that particular one again
, so I dug my thumbnail into the end of the knob to mark it. We was through with each other.
I didn’t have but two chances in right field, a couple of easy flies, and a bouncer off Hookey Irwin that got past the first baseman. I handled it all right, Hookey pitched a strong game, and the Rice Birds got to go into the clubhouse in another team’s home, us the ones still alive and joking and hollering and not wanting to take off the uniforms and leave. We wanted to stay together in the same place a little while longer. The Crowley Millers had to be the quiet ones, trying to get out quick from that place that didn’t smell right now, and where the light was dim and the loudest sounds you could hear was somebody’s cleats hitting the floor when they took their shoes off and the water dripping from the shower heads in the other room.
Like I said, it ain’t that far from Rayne to Crowley, so we all loaded into the bus to ride back home and spend the night. The ones who ran the Rice Birds was always looking for a way to save a dollar or two, and they figured it cost less to haul us back and forth to home from road games whenever it was close enough rather than have to pay for us to spend the night before we played another game in that stand.
“They squeeze the nickel until the buffalo craps,” Dynamite Dunn would always say those nights when we bumped along them highways coming back from places like Opelousas and New Iberia and sometimes even as far as Alexandria. You can sleep on a bus like that one when you’re tired enough. But it ain’t easy, and you’ll wake up pulling into Rayne, Louisiana, more wore out than when you got on the bus back yonder where you’d just played nine innings or sometimes eighteen when it’d been a doubleheader.
Worse thing, though, about them trips wasn’t getting off that bus in front of Addison Stadium. No, the worst thing about coming back to Rayne in the middle of a road series was thinking that you had to get back up in a few hours and load up for that ride back again to where you’d been to play another one to finish up the schedule. That made you tired just thinking about it as you fell into bed.
Most of us was young enough to stand it, though, and not be so whipped down we couldn’t do it again, over and over, whenever Poke Bateau fired up the engine and put the bus in gear to haul us all to the next place to play. The older Rice Bird players suffered the most from that movement from one place to another and back to where we’d started, but they complained about it a lot less than the younger ones did. The young ones could afford to moan and whine and threaten to play sick so they wouldn’t have to take that long bus ride wherever it was headed this trip. They was still in the middle of being alive, and couldn’t feel that time coming on them yet when nobody would want to haul them anywhere to let them play baseball and get paid for it. They could still brag and get away with making threats they wouldn’t carry out.
The old ones felt that time poking up its head in the aches in their muscles and their ligaments and bones and bellies and feet. They knew that time was coming when they’d be dead men as far as the Rice Birds and the Evangeline League was concerned or cared, and it was on its way like a freight train.
We wasn’t thinking about things like that when we loaded up outside the Crowley Millers’ for our trip back to Rayne after coming out on top in the first game of the season for the Rayne Rice Birds, though. We wasn’t studying the end of nothing, and we wasn’t looking back any further than what’d happened in the last three hours or so. Everything was going on right then for all of us, and time had stopped reminding us of what might’ve happened bad before and what might happen tomorrow.
When me and Mike Gonzales got on the bus, waiting like rookies was supposed to do until everybody else had already climbed aboard, we headed for the seat we’d sat in coming from Rayne to Crowley, the one over the wheel well with no room for your legs, the one that carried every bump the wheels made straight up into your backbone. Nobody was sitting in it, and Mike got there first. As he started to swing around to get into the seat, somebody hollered out. “Naw, y’all can’t ride in that one. It’s took.”
It was Dynamite Dunn talking, but some other ones started chiming in, too. “Wait till you strike out with the bases loaded, Gemar,” G.D. Squires said. “And you will, hoss, trust me on this. Then you can take your rightful seat right yonder.”
“Cuba,” Tubby Dean said, and everybody started laughing as soon as he said that word, some of them saying si senor over and over, “you can’t sit down there again in that seat until you get picked off first base or throwed out sliding. And that will come, too. That seat there is the seat of penitence, and you going to find plenty of opportunity to spend time in it.”
“Not tonight,” G.D.Squires said. “No, sir, you damn rookies got half of our hits and scored two of our runs, so you can’t have that seat of honor this trip. Get your asses to the back of the toad mobile.”
People hooted and hollered at us all the way down the aisle of the bus, and me and Mike ended up on the wide seat at the rear, able that night to let our legs stretch out as far as they’d go.
“What you got to say for yourself, Gemar Batiste?” Zeb Munger said, leaning over the back of the seat in front of me. “Any advice you got to give to a man that struck out three times in that damn game?”
“All I can say is try to avoid that situation,” I said, judging Zeb was joking and not trying to pick an argument. “That’s what I tell myself, but most of the time I don’t listen to what I’m saying.”
He laughed at that, so I felt easier in my mind about why he’d asked me that question.
“Can I ask you something?” I said, feeling Mike Gonzales give a little flinch beside me on that back seat. Mike was always on the lookout about what people said to him and he said to them. Conversations made him nervous. Unlike me, Mike did like to talk a lot to anybody that’d listen to him and even to ones who didn’t want to or wouldn’t. So he’d learned to be anxious about what words might mean to people, though he couldn’t stop himself from pouring them out into the air.
He knew he was likely to get into trouble by saying some of the things he said, but he loved to hear himself talk, I believe, and he did do a good job of making himself understood. Too damn good, sometimes, like I said. Anyway, Zeb Munger said sure he’d try to answer what I wanted to ask him, so I asked it.
“I hear lots of folks calling this bus by a name,” I said. “G.D. said it just now. He said what we’re riding in here is the toad mobile. Why do y’all call this vehicle that?”
My experience with toads back in the Nation wasn’t near as frequent or as interesting as my encounters with frogs, though both creatures looked a lot alike. Thinking back to the stories I’d heard the old men tell us young ones as long as we’d listen to them, I can remember three or four tales about Frog, but not a single one about Toad. He lived in the Big Thicket, and you’d see evidence of him and his kinfolks crawling around on the ground lots of times, but he never figured enough in anything that mattered to the People to make his way into a story. That wasn’t true of Frog. He was one of the original animals that swam down into the deep water and brought up the mud that Abba Mikko used for material to make the first people with, and Frog was the first creature to warn folks that the big flood was coming, the one that killed almost everything alive then but the People. Without Frog, nobody would be still here. Toad, though, never did much and never got no notice for the little he did do. Why name a bus for him?
“That’s right,” Zeb Munger said and started laughing, “you new ones hadn’t figured that out yet. You hadn’t been looking close enough to find it out for yourself.”
“Well,” I said, “what I’ve been thinking is maybe this bus is called the toad mobile because it’s so slow and ugly looking.”
“A good guess, but that ain’t it, rookie,” Zeb said. “Let me put it this way to you. You ever noticed Dutch not wearing his cap on his head, inside or outside of the house?”
I had to admit I hadn’t, but if you’d pres
sed me to say why the manager of the Rice Birds always wore his hat, I’d have said maybe his hair was falling out of his head like it will do with most white men the older they get. You’ll never see an Indian, no matter what nation he comes from, with his head all slicked off because his hair won’t grow there no more. It will turn the color of opossum’s hair when the Indian gets old, some shade of gray and maybe even dead white, but it’ll still be hair on his head left until he leaves this world. McKinley Short Eyes always told us that the hair on a white man’s head died and never came back because the white man was always figuring ways to take away land from Indians and use it all up. That kind of constant figuring will wear out the roots of a white man’s hair from the inside out, McKinley Short Eyes said. It ain’t natural to spend all your time trying to get together land that don’t rightfully belong to you. Do that night and day, and your hair will quit on you.
“I’ve seen that,” I told Zeb Munger, “but I never studied on why it is.”
“The reason why Dutch keeps his head covered up with a cap most of the time, and you can watch and check me on this, is that he keeps a toad in that cap on top of his head.”
“A toad?” Mike Gonzales said. “Alive?”
“Of course alive,” Zeb said. “Would you want to have a dead toad riding around on your head?”
“Naw,” Mike said. “Not dead nor alive. But I was thinking maybe it was a dried up toad. You know, something Dutch would be keeping in his cap for a mojo. Something to bring him luck.”
“I one time asked Dutch that very thing about why he did it,” Zeb said. “Is it for a good luck charm like a rabbit’s foot or a special penny or something? But he said no. Then you know what he told me?”
“No, what?” Mike and me said at the same time.
“He said,” Zeb said, talking louder than he’d have to for me and Mike to hear him, so I could tell he wanted to broadcast what he was saying to whoever else in that part of the bus might be listening. “Dutch said it was simple. He’s bald as a coot on top of his head, and he says that live toad crawling around on that bare skin up there feels good to him.”