Dirty Rice

by Gerald Duff

  “The change-up mystifies and it steals. It wobbles at times, it floats, it sinks, it drops where it ought not be, and if met by the bat of right- or left-hander, it deadens the drive intended. It maketh the line drive a grounder, it robs the fly of loft and carry, it comes like a thief in the night. It stealeth points from the batting average, it insureth failure, and assureth outs. It sendeth the baseball warrior back unto the dugout, bat dragging in the dirt like an old man’s pizzle. It availeth none who is righteous. It accrueth to the earned run average of the enemy. It doeth naught to no good man.”

  “What must I do to be safe?” G.D. Squires called out in a loud and breaking voice, sounding like he was about to cry like a child lost in the Big Thicket of Texas.

  “Well you may ask, my son,” Frank Millspaugh said. “Put your trust not in the things of this gymnasium where great round balls pumped full of air float toward baskets with no bottom. Believe you in the Louisville Slugger, put your trust in your own reflexes, keepeth thy head down and thy eye on the hard little ball that hurteth sorely whatever part of thy body it may meet. Smite gently, but well. Look up to the mountains of the left field stand or the opposite field, if it so profit thee, to see from whence cometh thy help. Take, drink from this bottle. Wormwood, wormwood, and thou shalt be safe at first and lo at all the bases.

  “Selah, Rogers Hornsby, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and in the name of the Rayne Rice Birds, look to the shining example of Gemar Batiste, our red skinned brother. For surely, he hath shown our hitters the way, the truth, and the light. Bless thee, Rice Birds, and harken to my words. Take up thy beds and walk. Anybody got any more absinthe?”

  Everybody hollered at that, and Frank Millspaugh got offered several different bottles of whiskey, but he wouldn’t take a drink from a one of them. Instead, Dynamite Dunn pointed to six or seven players, then to me, and announced that the disciples were departing to take the word of Father Frank into all the world, and he knew just where the world was to be found in Alexandria, Louisiana. It had a special name, Lou Anne’s, and we would begin our ministry there.

  “I ain’t going with y’all,” Mike Gonzales said, shaking his head and backing away. “God don’t like blasphemy. He will not stand for that kind of shit. He won’t put up with it.”

  “You stay here and watch the bats and balls then, and don’t let the thief come in the night,” Dynamite said. “We got to go see if Lou Anne’s is still fertile soil for good seed.”

  I was still a little bit wound up from the game, and I had some money in my pocket. I’d made two or three paydays by then, and I figured I could afford to spend a little bit of what I’d earned. I’d paid Miz Velma Doucette a full month’s amount for staying in her house and eating two meals a day, using the twenty dollars the Rice Birds gave me for room and board, and I had wrapped up ten dollars in a sheet of paper so nobody could see there was money in the envelope I addressed to my folks back in the Nation. I sent that to Mr. Ford Mathis at the agent’s office, and I knew that my brother Polk would be checking the mail every day in the village to see if I’d wrote a letter.

  Both me and Mike Gonzales had noticed that when Miz Doucette had got paid that forty dollars from the two of us the kind of grub she was feeding us picked up. Up until she got that full month’s pay from us, we’d been seeing mainly beans and rice and a little cornbread on our plates, and not much of that sometimes.

  Don’t get me wrong about how I look at eating. I will face up to anything that’s put on a plate in front of me. I liked that dish she called dirty rice, and I would eat all of it that was allowed me. There was something about the spice in it, the way it would burn your mouth but make you want more of it. Sometimes it didn’t even look worth eating, but it always was. But after our landlady had got the full forty dollars, I got to say I perked up when a chunk of meat big enough to see would now and again hit my plate.

  I was even able to eat me some dinner at noon on most days, and that was a welcome change. I was getting to eat three meals a day that deep into that season in the Evangeline League. I figured I was doing better than most folks I saw around me there in Louisiana and a whole lot better than the People back in the Alabama-Coushatta Nation.

  So if I watched myself and didn’t get too far into a whiskey bottle at this Lou Anne’s place that Dynamite Dunn was talking about, I’d be able to pay my own way and even buy a drink or two for him and G.D. Squires for a change.

  So when the seven or eight of us that Dynamite had pointed out as disciples bound for Lou Anne’s started out of the high-school gym that night, I took the opportunity to speak to Dynamite about my plans for the expedition.

  “I ain’t going to drink much whiskey at this place,” I told him. “I got to pitch tomorrow. Dutch has done told me that.”

  “Don’t be complaining to me, Gemar, and making declarations about what you might not do,” Dynamite said. “I promise I will not force you to drink a drop, and besides, that’s your predicament.”

  “You mean about me not drinking too much?”

  “That, yeah, but the main thing is I don’t have to worry about getting the ball not exactly over the plate but close enough to it to fool at least twenty-seven men with bats in their hands, probably a lot more than that before it’s over with.”

  “That’s what I mean,” I said. “I got to do all that with a baseball tomorrow.”

  “It ain’t everybody can be what the Reverend Millspaugh called you, Gemar.”

  “What you mean?”

  “The messiah,” Dynamite Dunn said and started. “You know, like the preacher said, the one who’s going to have to save the Rice Birds from their sinful ways. All I got to do is catch what you throw at me, hit at the ball when it’s my time up, and put on and take off them tools of ignorance.”

  “What sinful ways?” I said. “I don’t care what y’all do.”

  “I’m not talking about drinking whiskey and chasing women and taking things that don’t belong to you. Naw, that stuff’s easy. I’m talking about the worst sin a baseball club can commit. That’s what you got to worry about.”

  “You mean losing a game,” I said. “Letting more of the other ones get home than you do.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean, Chosen One,” Dynamite said. “The worst sin of all. Losing a game and losing enough games to lose a season. That’s why the reverend called that the mission you got to deal with.”

  “I didn’t hear him say mission. The word he said was just example.”

  “What’re you crazy bastards talking about?” Phil Pellicore said. “I swear to God every time a catcher and a pitcher get together they got to start orating about winning and losing baseball games. Don’t you get enough of that shit on the field?”

  “Naw, Phil,” Lee Turk said. “You don’t understand. Your brain is too limited from standing out in that hot sun at second base all the time. The pitcher and the catcher are in this business just for the love of the game. They ain’t worried about winning and losing. Didn’t you just hear Dynamite say mission? If that ain’t a man worried about the purity of the game, I’ll kiss your ass.”

  “Well, not here in public,” Phil Pellicore said. “Talk to me more private, and we’ll see if we can’t work something out along them lines.”

  “Let’s quit this jabbering and go to Lou Anne’s,” somebody else said. “The preacher’s done sent us out into the world, and we got work to do.”

  Lou Anne’s was like most all of them clubs in Louisiana. The building could have been a cotton gin, if the signs and lights in front of it hadn’t been there, and if wagons and mules instead of old cars and trucks had been scattered all over the front and side yards of the place. The main difference between this place and the Bon Soir Club in Lafayette had to do with something else, I learned quick.

  “Where’s the cribs?” Phil Pellicore said. “They ain’t got everything all stuck inside
the one building, do they?”

  “Why not?” Dynamite said. “This ain’t New Orleans, boys. It’s a lot more space to work with around here. Everything ain’t just cheek by jowl up against everything else, one wall running into the next all the way down the street.”

  “A man’s got more room to work here, I reckon,” Phil said. “You can spread out and take your full swing at what they’re pitching.”

  “I hope it ain’t ball four,” Dynamite said. “Pray as much as I do in a game to get that free trot down to first base, I sure as hell don’t want to get walked here at Lou Anne’s.”

  “I guess it’s women, huh?” I said. “That y’all are talking about.”

  “Listen at the red man learning the white man’s ways,” Phil Pellicore said. “This might be your night to bust your cherry, Gemar Batiste, if you play your hand right.”

  “Change his luck, more likely,” Tubby Dean said. “That’s what they call it when a white man gets his first colored piece, ain’t it? Same thing for a Indian, I imagine.”

  I didn’t say anything back to that, but I could tell that most of that bunch would’ve liked for me to talk about Indian women. I could’ve worked myself up into getting mad about the thing that Tubby Dean had just said, but I didn’t want to spend the effort. White folks will say anything that comes into their head to see how somebody from the Nation will take it, and the best way I’d learned to keep things moving was to act like I didn’t understand what was going on.

  I did, though, every word that was said.

  Men playing baseball for a living have got a different way of doing their job. Some of what they got to tend to is so quick nobody can even see it happen. Hitting a fastball coming at you and making it change directions like a bolt of lightning has just struck. That’s one. Or throwing up your glove when a batted ball comes at you so fast you ain’t got the time to even register it’s happening. You feel a sting and there it is in your glove, the thing you didn’t even see coming.

  We went on in Lou Anne’s place there in Alexandria, in convenient walking range of the high-school gym, and did it because we could. We followed the road open to us that night, and we was all glad to be walking it.

  It was a bigger place than any honky-tonk I’d been in before, and it had tables for gambling set up all around one end of the first room we came to. Folks were clustered tight around them, mostly men but some women, too, and they were hollering when something good happened, groaning and cussing when the opposite thing took place.

  “Craps,” Lee Turk said. “Lord, don’t let me go up to that table. And if you can’t stop me from doing that, let me not bet much. And if I lay down more money than I can afford to lose, strike me down, Lord. Put that hammer to my head. I’m leaving it up to you.”

  “He ain’t listening to you, Johnny,” Dynamite Dunn said. “The Lord done threw in his hand about you a long time ago. You on your own now, son.”

  “Craps,” I said to Dynamite Dunn. “That’s a dice game, right?”

  “Why, yes, I do believe it is,” Dynamite said, acting surprised so he could get everybody to laugh at what I’d said. I moved up close enough to one of the tables to see what was going on.

  A good-looking drunk woman was standing at one end, rolling the dice around in a cup. People were yelling at her, and she was yelling back as she worked the cup full of dice around and around. All them faces were sweating and shining in the lights from the big bulbs over the table, their eyes were popped and glowing, and everybody’s mouth was open.

  “New girl up,” the man holding a kind of stick at the other end of the table said, his voice loud enough to be heard over all the noise, “new girl up. First time to roll them.”

  When they heard him say that, the people at the table starting putting dollar bills and silver on different places on the table, hollering louder than before, and people from other tables began running toward where the new girl was fixing to let loose the dice in the cup in her hand. “New girl, new girl,” some of them was saying. “Get that lucky money down.”

  When she let loose and the dice scattered down the table, everybody hollered at how the count of dots added up and the man with the stick began pushing money toward some people and away from some back toward him. As soon as the drunk woman got the dice back and shook up to her satisfaction, she threw them another time and people hollered louder and more of them from the other tables came running our direction.

  “She’s hot,” Lee Turk, pushing in beside me, said. “She’s new, Lord, and I got to lay my money down, if it be thy will. You better get some of yours laid down too, pitcher. It ain’t that many virgins left in Louisiana.”

  “You going to take a chance, Gemar?” Dynamite Dunn said in my other ear. “Or you going to pass?”

  “Naw,” I said, stepping by to let him get past me. “You and Lee go on ahead.”

  In the dice game, there was no way to use your mind to tell how the pieces would land and show their numbers, whether you were holding the dice or watching them tumble. Somebody just threw them out there where it was all true dark, no matter how bright the light might be shining on the table, and the way you won depended on nothing you could figure out.

  Here’s what it’s like. It’s like a pitcher standing on the mound with that ball hid in his glove where you can’t see how he’s gripping it, and he’s looking in at the catcher like he doesn’t even see you up there with a bat in your hand ready to swing it if he shows you where he’s going with what he’s holding. He will not holler, and he won’t laugh, and he won’t show you by the way he’s standing how he’s going to throw that next pitch to you. If your eyes are good enough to see out there to the mound and study some part of his face that will let you know what you need to about his plan, you might hit what he throws you. That can happen. But what will not happen is what happens in the white man’s dice game like the one I first saw in Lou Anne’s in Alexandria, Louisiana. That pitcher will not throw the ball into the dark like it’s a roll of the dice. He will hide the pebble under a piece of hide, and you generally cannot guess which one it is. You got to figure it out all by yourself.

  I walked off from where the dice game was going on with the new girl throwing, and I decided to go up to the bar and buy me just one drink of whiskey while my teammates from the Rice Birds lost all their money. When that was finished up, we could all go back to our cots in the high-school gym, and I could get me some rest before I had to climb up on that mound the next day. One drink wouldn’t hurt me, no matter how it tasted going down. I would sip at that single one, take it slow and make the whiskey last, and I’d look around at the white people having a good time screaming and cussing and laughing and staggering around.

  “What can I get you, hoss?” the bartender asked me. I didn’t much like him calling me that, but I’d learned by then that a white man probably didn’t mean anything by calling me by the name of an animal. They will put a name on a perfect stranger, and expect him to answer to it, no matter how much of an insult that would be to an Indian back in the Nation. What was the right way to take that kind of misnaming, I didn’t know. It depended where you found yourself in the world. So I let what he called me stand, and I said back, “Give me a glass of whiskey, River Otter.”

  He looked funny at me for saying that, but he brought me the drink and I laid a dollar bill on the counter to pay for it. I figured to get some change back, but I didn’t want to look nervous about wanting it right that minute. I was taking that first sip and watching the bartender mess with the cash register he’d walked over to, being sure to let him know I was paying attention, when it felt like somebody ran into me from behind.

  It was a light touch, like the one doing it had just stumbled a little, and as soon as I felt it, a woman said she was sorry. “The heels on these shoes will wobble back and forth,” she said, “particularly when I’m trying to order me a drink. I won
der why that is?”

  I could see she was some years older than I was and that she wasn’t drunk like most of the women I’d noticed up to then. She had her hair stuck up high on her head with pins, and that made her throat look naked to me. She didn’t seem bothered by that, and I thought I would keep on looking at her until she let me know she’d had enough of that kind of inspection. It’s been my experience, going back to even then, that women can let you know quick when they’ve had all they want of you looking at them, and they can do that without saying a word.

  “Maybe the floor’s slick in here,” I said, thinking back to the Bon Soir Club in Lafayette. “They put a kind of soap or something on it to make it easy for folks to move their feet back and forth when they’re proposing to dance. That might’ve made your foot slip.”

  “Not much dancing goes on here in Lou Anne’s,” the woman said. “Is that what you looking to do? You want to dance?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “I don’t reckon I do. I just want to drink my glass of whiskey and watch these fellows I come here with have a good time losing all their money.”

  “Don’t call me ma’am, Sugar,” the woman said. “That’s what folks call my granny.”

  I didn’t know what to say back to that, so I took me a big drink from my glass, thinking as I did it that I was not going to be able to make just the one last me if I kept on sucking it down at that rate.

  “What you want, Edith?” the bartender said behind me, slapping my four-bits down on the counter. “Same as always?”

  “Yeah, but not so strong,” she said, and both of them laughed.

  “You going to buy the lady a drink?” the man said to me, pointing at the four-bit piece he’d laid on the bar. I nodded yes, and he brought her a glass with a red-colored drink in it. He picked up my change from the dollar bill and went off with it. I kept my face turned toward the woman. No reason to make her feel bad about my money leaving for good.