Dirty Rice

by Gerald Duff

  It took us a while to work our way through a bunch of other boats heading out between the shores of a bay on each side of us, but when we got to the open water, the man on top at the controls of the Gulf Dream gave it the gas, and we started moving at a good clip. From where I was sitting, I could look back at the trail the boat left in the water, and it reminded me of the crest of feathers on top of Red Bird’s head, but a whole lot bigger. The faster we went, the higher the plume of water stood up, shining in the sun as it rose and fell back. That looked good to me, how regular it was, and I eased back in my seat and let the air get a good chance to push against my back and make the sleeves of my shirt flap as I watched where we’d been pull steady away from us.

  Mr. Guidry asked me and Mike if we was ready for our first beer of the day on the water, and I told him not yet. Mike said he believed he was ready for one, and him and the two co-owners of the Rayne Rice Birds started sipping at bottles of Jax.

  “Chief,” Mr. Guidry said to me, stepping out of the wind into the space where the high part of the boat gave some protection from the noise. “I understand you never been saltwater fishing before.”

  I told him I hadn’t, and he started talking a lot about what kind of fish we’d be going after and how we’d rig our gear to do it, and what they’d been catching lately in the spots we were going to be trying, and a lot more stuff that I heard some of and some not. I kept nodding, though, like I was following everything he was saying, Mike kept drinking every bottle of Jax they brought to him, and the Mexicans stayed busy getting lines fixed on the reels and hooks put on them, and we pushed along through the water with Red Bird’s crest of feathers rising up strong and steady behind us.

  When Tony Guidry ran out of things to tell me, he moved over to where Legon LeBlanc was sitting, and they started talking for a good while to each other, what they were saying was lost in the wind between me and Mike and them, and I was glad of that. I was tired of acting like I was listening to Mr. Guidry’s directions, and I figured once we got to where the fishing took place I could figure out enough how to do to satisfy the people watching me.

  That gave me a chance to look at what was outside the boat, and it came to me that for the first time in my life all I could see in every direction was nothing but water. I was in the middle of where there was not a thing but that, and the circle my eyes made as I moved them from one place to the other didn’t contain a single living thing I could see. Not a hardwood, not a pine, not a blade of grass, not a hill, not a speck of dirt, not another person but the ones with me in the boat.

  My belly did a little shift somewhere deep inside me when I thought about that, and I knew then how Lodge Boy must’ve felt when him and the other two young Alabamas left the shore and headed across the big water to find the edge of the world. What they did was told in the story McKinley Short Eyes would tell us children about the time the three boys went too far south out of the Nation and ended up in the land where the Karankawas lived. That tribe of Indians was cannibals, and they stayed hungry all the time because they couldn’t find enough meat to eat down there where they lived on the shore of the big water. They had fish, sure, and sea birds if they could catch them, but their weapons was weak, and their arrows wouldn’t hold a good point.

  See, McKinley Short Eyes would say when he got to that place in the story, them Karankawas didn’t have the advantages the People got here in the Big Thicket. Last thing we’re worried about is finding good wood for our bows and arrows. What can we use for that? When he asked that question, some kid would answer, one of the young ones generally, since the rest of us had heard the story enough times not to get excited again about the strength of beaux d’arc limbs and how the ash is so straight its arrows fly true, and then the old man would go on with the story.

  “All them cannibals had to work with was cane and crooked live oak and no real flint to make arrowheads, and when they did get those sorry tools put together, what could they use them on? Seagulls and turtles and fish so deep in the water you can’t even see them. Trying to kill that trash using them weak weapons, you can understand why they decided they’d rather eat a human being, so long as he wasn’t one of them. The Karankawas was real skinny and hungry all the time, that whole bunch, and didn’t have enough sense to plant corn and squash and beans, and if they did, would it grow in that old sand?”

  “No, Old Father,” some kid would holler.

  “No,” McKinley Short Eyes would say. “Too stupid, them Karankawas. They’d rather eat a fat Alabama or a husky Coushatta anytime, instead of a seagull or some seaweed or grasshoppers.”

  Thinking of that story of the three boys leaving shore to get out of range of the cannibal Indians and finding they had to paddle their little boat all the way to the end of the world to find land again, I lifted my eyes from the surface of all that water the Gulf Dream was moving through, and I caught sight of the clouds, white thunderheads puffed up bigger than any I’d seen before on land. That was a good change for me from the way the water was the same any direction I looked, and I couldn’t help from laughing at the relief those clouds brought me.

  “What’s so funny?” Mike Gonzales said to me, bumping his shoulder into me where we sat.

  “Nothing much,” I said. “I was just thinking about cannibals.”

  “Cannibals? Why? We got all this free Jax beer to drink and you sitting there thinking about cannibals?”

  “Yeah, that and whether they slipped onto the boat with us, and why they’re so hungry and how to get away from them and how far is it to the edge of the world.”

  “Crazy shit, again, Gemar,” Mike said. “You sure can come up with it. You better start sucking on a bottle of beer here to clear your mind. There ain’t no cannibals but in Africa, last I heard, right?”

  “Depends on the living conditions, Mike. If the soil ain’t good enough to grow a good crop and your arrows can’t hit nothing worth eating, you will get bad hungry. Once that happens, you stop thinking about whether what you eat can talk or not. If it moves around and has got flesh on its bones, it could be your next meal, if you’re lucky.”

  “Talking about next meal, did you take a look yet at what they got on that table in that little room yonder? Everything you can think of to eat, Gemar. I ain’t even talking about what else it is to drink in there.”

  “Any long pig on that table, you reckon, Mike?” I said. “Anything that don’t need skinning to eat?”

  “You ain’t about to turn my stomach today, no matter what you say,” Mike said. “I’m not going to be suspicious about what I’m eating. It’s all good, and I’m just going to eat the living hell out of it. I’m fixing to get real full for a change.”

  After a long time of running full tilt, the boat began to slow, the Red Bird’s crest of water sank down and died away, and we came to a stop in the middle of that part of the Gulf. “Gentlemen,” Tony Guidry called out. “Here’s our first hole to start fishing in. I expect they’re waiting for us.”

  “How can you tell where to stop?” Mike said. “It looks all the same to me out here.”

  Legon LeBlanc and Tony Guidry got a good chuckle out of that, and both of them pointed to the man at the wheel of the boat. “He knows where they hang out,” Guidry said. “That’s why he’s called a guide. He’s been here before, and he remembers.”

  “How does he know that?” I said, figuring I’d give the co-owners a chance to laugh at me, too. It was my turn. “I guess I missed the road sign.”

  That was a chance for a real belly laugh for them, and they took full advantage of it. Wiping his eyes, Legon LeBlanc turned to Tony Guidry, as though he was the only one in hearing distance. “Tony,” he said, getting ready to do some hoorawing, “you’ve been telling me that Gemar Batiste is too serious a man to crack a joke, and here he is got us laughing like he’s Bob Hope.”

  “He fooled me,” Guidry said. “Let’s s
ee if him and Mike are fisherman now.”

  It turned out everybody was a fisherman that day. As soon as the Mexican deckhands would get a chunk of bait put on our hooks and we’d let them down, we’d feel the fish hit. All we had to do was crank them up then, let the deckhands take them off, throw them into a compartment full of blocks of ice in the floor of the boat, put more bait on the hooks, and let the lines down and do it again.

  After a while, all of us but Mike got tired of doing that, and me and Legon LeBlanc and Tony Guidry watched him haul out the fish by himself until he quit too and asked for another beer. The deckhands washed down the blood in the bottom of the boat, stowed the bait, and put the rods back into their holders as the Gulf Dream rocked back and forth in the troughs of the waves.

  “Catching this bunch of grouper and amber jack is a hell of a lot of fun,” Tony Guidry said. “But just taking a break and being on the water is good by itself, don’t y’all think?”

  Everybody agreed with that and took another sip of beer, me along with them now, thirsty after all that lifting of fish out of the sea. “You know something, though,” Legon LeBlanc said. “Not many folks can afford to do something like this. Take a break from work. Go fishing and drink beer. Get a little entertainment in their daily life.”

  “Not the average man,” Tony Guidry said. “Not these days. Hell, all that poor bastard can hope to do, if he has a job to take a break from, is to go watch a baseball game, maybe. See his hometown team play somebody else’s hometown team. Forget his troubles for part of the day.”

  “It’s a shame what this country’s come to,” Legon LeBlanc said. “It used to be a poor man’s dream. If he worked hard, tended to business, he could raise a family, put a roof over them, keep them fed, take them to a damn ballgame now and then, and look forward to a long and happy life.”

  “That’s one of the things I’m proudest about,” Tony Guidry said. “Being able to provide the means for the everyday man to get a little fun in his life for him and his wife and little ones.”

  “You’re talking about exactly what I’m thinking about, I do believe,” Legon LeBlanc said, lifting his bottle of Jax toward his partner. “I mean the Rayne Rice Birds, the team these boys here are doing such a fine job for.”

  “You got it,” Guidry said. “I mean that down to the ground. It’s taking its toll on us, but so far we been able to keep going. Meet the payroll, pay the light bill, keep the doors open and the team playing so folks can watch them.”

  “Let’s be honest with these boys, Tony,” LeBlanc said. “They’re full grown men and they’re providing interest and spark to the team, and they deserve to hear directly from you and me just what the situation is. These boys are winners.”

  “Hell, yeah, let’s do it. We depend on them and what they’re doing. And you know what? They’re depending on us, too. Am I telling the truth or not? Tell me now.”

  We all said he was, and Tony Guidry kept talking. “The way things are going for the Rice Birds, people are sure wanting to come see them play. At least more than they did last year. And that’s good, but I hate to say it ain’t good enough.”

  “Real baseball fans are showing up more than usual all right,” Legon LeBlanc said. “But you need a lot more people in the park than just these old boys that love to see a game of ball played. I wished that wasn’t true. But you need the ones that don’t know a damn thing about good baseball. They are the majority.”

  “They are, for sure, and that’s a true fact,” Tony Guidry said. Him claiming a thing was a true fact put me on edge as soon as I heard the words come out of his mouth. It didn’t take me long growing up in the Nation to know that when the whites start testifying to the truth of something you better start looking around for the rest of what they’re fixing to say. If you have to swear a thing is true, it’s likely something else coming that’ll turn you around and get you headed in another direction. If a thing is true, you don’t need to claim that it is to get people to believe. They ought to be able to look at it and tell. The truth don’t need to be worrying about how to convince you.

  “I don’t want to get too deep into matters of finance with our crackerjack shortstop and with Gemar Batiste, the Most Valuable All-Star Player in the Evangeline League. That ain’t their territory, just like baseball ain’t mine,” Tony Guidry said. “If they wanted to, these two fellows could start talking about the inner workings of the game, and I’d just be sitting here listening and sucking on my thumb like a child.”

  “I know what you mean,” Legon LeBlanc said. “Let’s just break it down simple for Gemar and Mike. See if I’m getting the message across right, partner, and if I’m not, just jump on in and help me out.”

  “Fair enough,” Tony Guidry said, looking at me and then at Mike with an expression on his face that told me to get ready to listen close. It was about to be something said that would need a careful figuring out.

  “It’s a question of intake and output,” LeBlanc said. “What the Rayne Rice Bird enterprise is pulling in is not taking care of what we’re putting out. We’re spending more than we’re making. Now, that sounds like we’re up Shit Creek without a paddle, but that ain’t the way it has to be.” Tony Guidry nodded hard at that, but didn’t say anything. Instead he lifted his beer bottle toward both me and Mike to ask if we wanted another one. Mike did.

  “We do have some real advantages, though,” Legon LeBlanc said. “If we got the sense to use them right. Just winning games comes first and gets the horse started, but that won’t draw enough people in to make things work in the long run. We have got to find more ways to get attention and to make folks want to come see the show at Addison Stadium and on the road in every town we play in.”

  “Tell it on out,” Tony Guidry said. “You are hitting the ball right on the nose, Legon.”

  “We got our best asset for providing that extra special thing sitting right here on this boat with us,” LeBlanc said. “And you know who I’m talking about. It’s Chief Batiste of the Alabama Indian Tribe, that’s who it is.”

  “Let me get this straight for Gemar’s benefit,” the other co-owner said. “You are not saying that the Chief has got to pitch or hit any better than he’s been doing. Or Mike Gonzales neither. That is not your point.”

  “It couldn’t be that,” LeBlanc said. “What else could a reasonable man ask the Chief to do on the baseball field? We are talking about the most talented ballplayer the Rice Birds have seen in a long time. Hell, let’s not limit it to our team. The whole Evangeline League hasn’t seen a rookie have this kind of year before. No, I don’t mean he’s got to play better ball. Do you understand that, Gemar?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “But every ballplayer could do better than he does. It ain’t a game where anything’s ever perfect. Most of the time you don’t do right.”

  “I wish you would listen to the wisdom of this young man, Tony,” Legon LeBlanc said, spinning around to stare directly at his partner. “That’s what I mean when I talk about his intelligence.”

  Here it comes, I told myself, the rest of what was left out when they started swearing something was a true fact. What’s going to be said now is the part that makes that true fact a lie. It’s going to be like that bar of chocolate candy I bought as a kid in the Carter Lumber Company Commissary in Camp Ruby, Texas, when I laid my nickel in trade on the counter and walked outside to stand on the gallery and eat it. It wasn’t until I got the wrapper off and took my first bite off the end of the bar, making it a little one so the chocolate would last me as long as I could stand to hold back, that I saw the white worms working in a cluster just under the surface of what I had taken into my mouth to eat.

  I took it back inside the commissary, but Mr. Milton Redd wouldn’t give me my nickel back, since he said he wasn’t the one that made the candy in the first place. He told me I could just pick the worms out and eat what was still good, but
instead I gave it to a fice dog sitting outside the store under the edge of the porch. He wasn’t particular and ate it right up, worms and all.

  “Here’s what we think the Rice Birds can do to take advantage of not what you do on the baseball diamond, but what you are when you’re doing it,” Legon LeBlanc said. “Are you following me, Gemar?”

  I figured I was, but I shook my head no and looked puzzled as best I could make myself do that. “You mean what I’m doing when I pitch or when I bat?” I said.

  “No, I mean as an Indian. Why do you think all these newspapers in the Evangeline League towns and even in New Orleans and the radio stations all over Louisiana are giving you and the Rice Birds so much show?” he said.

  “Because I’ve been helping Rayne beat the other ones?”

  “That is a necessary condition, I got to admit,” Legon LeBlanc said. “But it’s not the main reason for all that attention we’re talking about. Didn’t Dutch Bernson speak to you about playing up the Indian connection and what that might do for us?”

  “He did say something about that, but I guess I didn’t know what he meant exactly.”

  “Let me spell it out for the Chief,” Tony Guidry said. “This is the part that gets me fired up and ready to go. I purely love to talk about it.”

  “Go ahead,” LeBlanc said and lifted his bottle of Jax toward me. I nodded yes, and one of the Mexican deckhands reached into the tub of ice and beer, opened one, and handed it to me. “Get him one of those napkins to wrap around it,” LeBlanc told the Mexican.