Dirty Rice

by Gerald Duff

  “I don’t like nothing crawling in my hair,” Mike Gonzales said. “Anything I feel on my head I got to get off of it as quick as I can.”

  “How old is his toad?” I asked Zeb. “How long’s Dutch had him up there?”

  “It ain’t the same toad all the time, Gemar. Hell, toads die off. Sometimes they’ll run off, too, when they get the chance. I know Dutch has lost a bunch of them for as long as I been with the Rice Birds. He had the same habit back when he was in the Sally League, too, I heard people say. So, no, it’s different toads that Dutch has crawl around on his head underneath his cap. He’ll get a new one when he needs a replacement. It’s like when you bring in somebody off the bench when something goes wrong with a player.”

  “When he gets sick or something,” Mike said. “Maybe messes up at bat or makes too many errors.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Zeb said. “But I will tell you one thing. No matter what particular toad Dutch is got up underneath that cap crawling around on his head and soothing his nerves, one thing stays the same. The name of the toad is always Herbert.”

  “Herbert,” I said, and Zeb Munger nodded and said the same name back to me.

  “Maybe that’s Dutch’s daddy’s name,” Mike said. “Maybe a toad on the head runs in the family.”

  Zeb Munger laughed at that until he started coughing so hard he had to turn around in his seat to do it. No matter what Zeb had said about the toad not meaning anything to Dutch but giving him a nice feeling as it moved around on his bald head, I knew better than that. Toad meant something to Dutch Bernson, and he was carrying around what Toad signified to him in every movement Toad made on the manager’s head. I hadn’t figured out what that was yet, but I was glad to know it. Hearing that about Dutch and Herbert made me feel a lot better about the manager of the Rice Birds as I rode back to Rayne after playing my first game in the Evangeline League, and it still does.

  • • •

  In less than ten or twelve hours later, we was loading up in the toad mobile for the trip back to Crowley for the second game in that stand. When we’d got back to Miz Doucette’s on Serenity Street late that night before, me and Mike didn’t make much racket going to our room and crawling into our beds, and we didn’t hear any sound from anybody else in the house. The next morning when I was going into the room where we ate our meals, though, I did catch sight of Miz Doucette’s daughter going down the hall and out the front door, wearing a dress with polka dots on it and carrying a satchel in her hand. She heard me, looked back over her shoulder and smiled that way that made me not be able to smile back, much less think of anything to say.

  “Y’all won yesterday,” she said. “I heard some of the game on the radio. That’s real good.”

  I nodded, standing in the door to the room where my breakfast was waiting, and wondered if Teeny Doucette would be interested in hearing the facts about Dutch Bernson and the toad named Herbert crawling around on his head under his baseball cap. That was the thing that came into my head at the time, and I tell it now to show how seeing that woman would mess up my way of thinking. Every time she showed up, it made me feel like I’d been stung by enough wasps to paralyze me.

  “The Rice Birds are playing the Millers again today and tomorrow, right?”

  “Yes,” I managed to say back to Teeny Doucette. “Two more games in Crowley.”

  “I hope you hit another triple, then,” she said and went out the door headed for wherever she was going that morning.

  Mike Gonzales was already sitting at the table with a cup of coffee in front of him when I walked into the room. He looked up at me and grinned. “I hope you hit another triple, then,” he said in a high voice nothing like Teeny Doucette’s, and I sat down to my plate and refused to pay him any mind.

  11

  We lost that second game against Crowley. Dutch started Cliff Labbé, the second best pitcher he had, but Cliff didn’t have his good stuff that day. It will happen like that in baseball, and it will do it with no reason you can tell or predict. Cliff looked good warming up before the game, he was hitting the spots where he wanted to put the ball, and Dynamite Dunn, catching him, was shaking his mitt up and down after one of Cliff Labbé’s fastballs like it was coming hard enough to sting him.

  That didn’t make no difference when the game started, though. Things will change, and you can’t tell why. The first man up hit the first pitch hard right by Mike Gonzales at shortstop, and things went on from there like that for the next two hours. The way the time went by was nothing like the way time had acted the day before. That first game, the one we knew we was going to win as soon as the second inning got under way, seemed to me to move by like a hummingbird flying from one flower blossom to another one. I was in one place, say at bat, one minute, and I was in right field the next, and I was watching Hookey Irwin strike out a man on three pitches right after that, and all that movement of the ball and the bat and people running between bases was taking place almost at the same time. By the time one part of the game had ended, another one was on its way to reaching where it was supposed to be going, and then it was there. Time was on the move.

  In the games you’re losing, though, you can feel the time go by like it was an old man leaning on a stick to help him stand up, and it’s winter and the ice is on the ground, and he can’t move quick or he’ll slip and fall. The road he travels will not end before dark comes, and the sun is high in the sky with a long day to go, but the clouds are on the face of it, and there’s no way to tell when the struggle will be over.

  But the second game with the Crowley Millers did finally come to an end, and it was our turn to be quiet in the clubhouse while we pulled off our uniforms and got dressed in street clothes as quick as we could for the ride back to Rayne on the old white bus.

  Mike and I sat together over the wheel well this trip, in the seat they’d called the one for penitence, but this time nobody told us we could move to another one. We’d both had a good game, but I don’t remember the hits I had or the catches I’d made in right field in that game. The ones you don’t win take away your memory of how it happened, sometimes, and that’s a relief.

  When we got back to Rayne after that one, Dutch said he wanted to talk to me, so I followed him into his office. He didn’t have his cap on, I noticed, and I could see how little hair he had left on his head as I walked behind him, just a little around the edge and only one or two long strays left on top. I wondered where Herbert was. Maybe he’d got hurt or killed when Dutch kept hitting himself on top of the head during the game in Crowley when all them things went wrong. It’d been a bad day for toads.

  “Some of these games you win, and some you don’t,” Dutch said to me, after he sat down and reared back in the chair behind that desk full of papers. “But you know the worst thing, Gemar?”

  I didn’t say anything back, but just looked at the manager of the Rice Birds, figuring he didn’t need to hear anything said by me to keep him talking. He didn’t. “Here’s the worst part. The hits and runs you see in a game like this’un just going to no use at all. Just wasted. And there ain’t no way you can get them back and use them later on when you need them. It’s just water poured out on the ground to make it muddy. No use to nobody. You see what I mean?”

  “The way I look at it sometime is this way,” I said, nodding at what Dutch had just told me. “It’s only so many hits in any bat, and it’s only so many good swings in any man playing the game of baseball. When they’re gone, they’re gone, no matter whether they did you any good or not.”

  “That’s a good way to put it,” Dutch said, putting up his hand to touch the cap he wasn’t wearing. I could tell he’d forgot that he didn’t have it on, even though he changed how he was fiddling with his head to make it look like he was just trying to rub at what little of his hair was still left on top. He wasn’t feeling for Herbert, he was letting anybody watching
know. He was just scratching, like he’d intended to. I looked off like I wasn’t noticing a thing.

  “But we did win one of them,” he went on, “and we got another one tomorrow in Crowley before we get to come home and play Opelousas here. Gemar, I’m thinking I’ll put you on the mound tomorrow. What you think about that? You ready?”

  “I’m ready to pitch,” I said. “Sure. I can’t guarantee how I’ll do, though. It depends.”

  “It depends on what? You ain’t feeling sick or nothing, are you?”

  “I’m feeling good,” I said. “I need to sleep a little bit, but that ain’t unusual at the end of a day. I’ll be fine in the morning.”

  “Depends on what?” Dutch said again, scratching the top of his head with both hands now. “You ain’t overly spooked, are you?”

  “I’m not scared no more than usual. But how I’ll do depends on how good he’ll let me pitch.”

  “Who? Is it somebody I know? You ain’t talking about your catcher, are you? Dynamite ain’t been discouraging you, has he? You ain’t bothered by folks hoorawing you none, are you?”

  “It ain’t Dynamite Dunn, no,” I said, trying to think how to put it to Dutch so he wouldn’t take it wrong, and then deciding just to go on and say it and let him think what he wanted to. “I mean Abba Mikko.”

  “I don’t know nobody named that. Is it somebody you met in town here in Rayne?”

  “No. It’s just what you’d call a superstition, manager,” I told Dutch Bernson. “Just some Indian stuff that don’t make no sense to white folks.”

  “Oh,” he said and looked off like he’d heard a noise that made him think something was in the room he hadn’t noticed and was giving itself away by moving. “Hell. We’re all subject to leaning on things that nobody but us recognizes. Is that all this Abba guy is? Kind of like Santa Claus is to you when you’re a kid? You wonder what present he’s going to bring you, if he shows up. Whether it’s going to be what you want.”

  “Yeah, something like that. But he will show up. I ain’t worried about that part.”

  “Put your mind on whatever you need to, then,” Dutch said. “Just get up there tomorrow and see what you can do. Think what you need to. It’s always a crap shoot anyway.”

  “Some of the time it is,” I said. “But one thing you can always count on.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “You’ll be able to tell what he decides he wants to do.”

  “This Abba guy?” Dutch said.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “He’s the one making the dice roll. All you got to do is count up the pips after he’s done that. You’ll know then.”

  • • •

  When I got back to my room that night in Miz Doucette’s house, Mike Gonzales wanted to talk about the game the Rice Birds had lost, but I didn’t want to do that. So I rolled over in my bed and went to sleep right off, not dreaming much of anything that I remembered and waking up the next morning feeling rested and hungry. I didn’t see anybody in the house but Miz Doucette, and I made myself not look around to try to spot Teeny. I was able to get out of the house and down the street to where the bus would be waiting to take us to Crowley without having to see her, and that was a thing good for me. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see the woman, but I knew if I did it might weaken my mind.

  I’d learned while playing on the sawmill teams in East Texas that on the days I pitched I needed to get my mind as empty as I could. It’s only so much room in your head for things to wander around in, and a pitcher’s mind’s probably got a lot less space to spare than any other player that steps inside a baseball diamond. When you’re pitching, you throw the ball with your legs first, then your back, then your arm, and then the way your fingers grip that round thing you’re holding in your hand.

  That’s what you use to throw the ball up toward that man who’s trying to hit it so he can get to the next safe place for him, that collection of parts you call your body. Throwing the ball is not pitching, though. Pitching takes place only in your head. That’s where it’s located, inside where the body ain’t got no say. Pitching a baseball is an inside thing that nobody outside can see. What happens outside is open to see, naturally. Somebody who’s watching a pitcher pitch can see what happens after he does it. But he can’t see it happening while it’s taking place. Only what happens afterwards is what the onlookers can see, just that. What makes the pitching take place is not open to inspection.

  Let me put it like this. There ain’t no time busier, there ain’t no more ever going on in a baseball game than the time when the pitcher is standing dead still on the mound looking in at the catcher’s mitt. That’s when the real action is taking place, before the body parts, the legs and backs and arms and hands, do anything. The time when everything is still, not moving, fixed in one spot, that’s when the pitching is underway. The rest is just delivering the ball to the plate. The pitching’s been done as soon as the man doing it goes into his stretch. The rest is just carrying out orders.

  All that is why a pitcher is the one of the nine men on the field the least interested in hearing people talk to him and give him advice and ask him how he’s feeling or what he’s thinking. He’s in the middle of his job, right in the heart of it, when the people watching him think he ain’t doing a thing. That makes him moody. People will consider him crazy, but he’s got every right to be.

  So before that third game of the season for the Rice Birds, the first one I pitched in the Evangeline League, I was working on keeping my mind empty of anything that wasn’t pitching and clear of thoughts that would take up space I needed in my head to be able to pitch and not just throw the ball toward home plate. I didn’t know what my body might do when I told it what was needful at the time, but I had to make certain I was pitching, not throwing. My back and legs and arm and hand and fingers would be given jobs to do, and damn them, they might not carry them out. But I had to be able to rest easy in my mind that I’d told them the right things to do.

  In the warm-up before the game started, I was off a little bit on my curve ball and my drop and the slow stuff, and I wasn’t hitting the spots exactly where I wanted to as I was throwing to my catcher. That made me feel better, though, than if I’d been right on the money with every warm-up pitch I threw. What that told me was that my mind was getting ready to do some pitching, to consider what it had to tell my body to do, and that it wasn’t worrying about making things look good in warm-up when it didn’t make no difference what happened.

  I could see from where I was throwing to Dynamite Dunn outside the diamond alongside the third base line that the Crowley Millers, whatever they were doing in the field to get ready for the Rayne Rice Birds to come to bat in the first inning, was all taking looks at me. They will always do that when a pitcher is warming up, particularly when they’ve never seen him before and when he’s a left-hander. Lefties have always had a reputation for being on a slant, and that works to their advantage. It still does and always will, even though everything tends to move in their direction, like McKinley Short Eyes had told me back in the Nation, how all moving water goes from right to left, like Abba Mikko planned it. Every time I saw somebody who I was fixing to pitch to watching me close because I throw from the left side, I’ve been glad for being thought of that way, unpredictable and liable to be wild.

  Missing my spots and now and then throwing a warm-up pitch to my catcher that made him have to stretch to get it was satisfying me fine. Let them wonder about my control, I was thinking to myself. It might make one or two of the Crowley players step a little light in the batter’s box, not want to dig in too deep when they got ready to take pitches from a left-hander who’s been making his catcher scamper to get a mitt on some of his stuff. Let me look like I’m not being too fine with my throwing now while it don’t mean a thing. Let me do the real pitching when the umpire hollers play ball and a batter’s got to step in a
gainst me.

  Like all games that go the way a pitcher wants them to, the first game I pitched in the Evangeline League is not one I remember that well. When all that’s going on inside your head as a pitcher is working the way you want it to, there ain’t much room to store up memories of what you’ve done right. Your body does what your head tells it to do after you’ve decided how and what you need to get the man out you’re facing, and you ain’t got the time nor the inclination to think back over what you did when it worked. There’s another man coming up, and everything’s brand-new again, and what happened before does not matter one whit now. The trouble you got to deal with is right now, and there’s no room left in your head to savor what you did back yonder.

  I had a teacher in the Annette school back in Texas whose favorite thing to say to us kids was something about history repeating itself. She might have been right about that in some cases, maybe wars and what she called current events and that kind of thing, but that saying does not apply to pitching a baseball to a man holding a bat in his hand. It’s a new day each at-bat, and you can’t show a batter the record of what you did before and expect it to impress him enough to cause him to walk off and sit down. He can hurt you, no matter what you did before, and he knows he can, whether he’s ever hit you before or not. That was yesterday. Now is now. If you don’t know that like the batter does, you ain’t a pitcher.

  The game went all right for me and the Rice Birds. That’s what I’m trying to say, but I don’t recall it pitch-by-pitch, and if I could, that would mean that I’d lost it. The Crowley Millers would have made it around the bases safe more times than we had, and I would’ve been able to tell exactly what I did wrong to let that happen to the Rice Birds and to me. When you ain’t pitching, but just throwing, and they’re up there knocking the ball back at your bunch so you can’t catch it, you can see every one of the mistakes you made come flying back. The reason why is that your mind is not right, and the room in it is being took up by seeing things go wrong rather than telling your body what it’s got to do.