Dirty Rice Read online

  Mr. Leonard Piquet talked a little bit more that morning, but I didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying, just nodding at him when he gave a sign he wanted something back from me. After a while he ran out of things to say, gave me a piece of paper he wrote that manager’s name on, and the name of the town where the Rice Birds baseball team played its home games, and ended up by saying he hoped he’d be seeing my name in the box scores of the Louisiana newspapers not too long from now.

  “What will you go by?” he asked me, right before he had to get Polk to climb out from behind the wheel of that car.

  “Go by?” I said to Mr. Piquet. “What you mean go by?”

  “What name are you going to use, if you get to play in the Evangeline League? That’s what I mean. Lots of players, old and young, have a good reason or two to rename themselves before they get put up on a roster.”

  “I’ll use Gemar Batiste,” I said. “That’s the only name I got.”

  I was lying. I had another name, one that I got when I went through what it takes to become a man in the Alabama-Coushatta Nation, back when I came to be twelve years old. That name came to me in a dream, like it’s supposed to when you take that journey at that age into the Big Thicket and spend them days not eating and not closing your eyes to sleep and keeping that chunk of root under your tongue. You don’t come back from where you are in the Big Thicket to the circle of old men waiting at the center of the Nation until you dream your name with your eyes wide open. You have your real name, then, and nobody knows it but you. If you ever give it away, you never will be who you are and who you’re supposed to be.

  “I expect that’ll be just fine, using Gemar Batiste as your name,” Mr. Piquet said as he got into his car to leave. “You probably hadn’t got a reason yet to use an assumed one. And if you make it to the Rayne Rice Birds and do all right, people will call you what they want to, anyway.”

  “They’ll call me by my name,” I said. “That’s the one I answer to.”

  “Yeah, OK, Gemar,” he said and laughed a little bit. “Remember, you got two weeks to get there for the try-outs.”

  Polk and I watched until Leonard Piquet got that big black car turned around and pointed in the direction he had come from.

  “I tell you one thing,” Polk said. “That is a fine automobile. And you know what I did when I walked around it?”

  “No, what?”

  “I spit in my hand and rubbed it on that statue of Diana while y’all were talking and not looking at me. That’s what.”

  “Why did you do something nasty like that?” I said and picked up a rock to get ready to tend to the rest of the inning I’d been working on. “What good did that do you?”

  “Everywhere that car goes now, I’m right along with it. Part of me’s going to always be traveling with that machine no matter where it goes. I can think about that and know it’s true.”

  “You’re crazy,” I told my little brother. “None of that means anything. None of it makes any sense.”

  He went back in the house then.

  • • •

  I thought long and hard about whether to take with me that new bat I had made when I got my stuff together to take to Louisiana. It wasn’t that dented up, and it felt good and right in my hands, but it would be hard to carry on the roads I’d have to travel, so I decided to leave it. They’ll have a bat for me to use there, I told myself, a brand new one. I don’t need an old homemade bat, so I’ll stick it up under the house where my brothers can’t find it.

  All I’d be carrying was the tow sack and a paper bag that my mother had put some biscuits in, along with a couple of pieces of salt pork she had fried up for me. In my pocket, I had two dollars in change that Polk had made me take, money he had saved up from selling blackberries he’d picked. I didn’t want to take it, since I had a little bit of money of my own. I forget how much, but it couldn’t have been over three or four dollars, but if I didn’t let Polk give me his money, he’d be hurt. So I took it.

  McKinley Short Eyes lived at a little place by himself between my father’s house and the big highway. All of the family of Bronson Batiste of the River Otter Clan were outside the house when I got ready to take off walking toward wherever I was going, all of them but the littlest one, my baby sister, Bluebonnet, who was inside taking a nap.

  “My family,” I said, saying the proper words that we used back in those days to say good-bye. “I will leave now, but I will hold you inside, and take you with me.”

  “You are not leaving us,” my old man said. “We go with you wherever your journey might end.”

  That was the prescribed way to say it. Now my father could say a few practical things to the son about to leave home. He figured I’d be back soon, anyway. Where could you go that would let you feel like you could stay there? The reservation was always behind you, pulling at you and hanging on.

  “Now, Gemar,” my father began, “when you go to this baseball place where they’ll call you a rice bird, you have to understand a couple of things.”

  “What, my father?” I said.

  “These white eyes in Louisiana can’t be much different from the ones here in Texas outside the Nation. They’ll talk a lot, and they’ll expect you to look like you’re listening to what they’re saying. But they don’t care if you do or not. They’re just filling the air up with sound. You understand that?”

  I nodded, and he went on. “Let them tell you how to do the baseball. Don’t argue with them with words from your mouth. If you need to disagree because what they tell you is wrong, do it with your tools. They’ll understand that.”

  “I will depend on what I can do with my hands.”

  “One last thing, then,” my father said. “They say they will give you money to work at what you think is play, what you like to do anyhow. I cannot believe they will do that, but you do. If they do give you money, don’t spend none of it on whiskey. You know what I’m talking about.”

  I told him I’d stay away from that, and in a little time I was walking away, down the dirt road that ran in front of the house of Bronson Batiste of the River Otter Clan toward McKinley Short Eyes’ place. I let Polk carry my tow sack as I had crawled up under the house and pulled out my good bat to bring along to Rayne, Louisiana.

  I wasn’t surprised to see that McKinley Short Eyes was out in front of his house, sitting on the sawed-off stump of a live oak tree. He had his pipe stuck in his mouth, and a big cloud of smoke he had just blown out was hanging in front of his face. I couldn’t see the old man’s eyes for the smoke.

  “Gemar Batiste,” he said, “I knew you’d be coming by to see me today before the sun got up high. Who’s that with you?”

  “That’s my brother, the son of my father Bronson Batiste of the River Otter Clan, and his name is Polk.” I went on to ask him, “How did you know I would be coming to talk to you today, Old Father?”

  “I dreamed it two sleeps ago and then again last night,” He took a long draw on his pipe. “You were way off somewhere from the Nation, and you were wearing funny shoes. They had blades coming out of the bottoms of them, like knives, and everywhere you walked you left a mark cut in the earth of where you’d been. Anybody could track right where you’d walked. They were doing that and writing it down on paper where you’d been and how many steps you took along the way. You had that stick in your hands, that one you’re carrying right there, and you were having to swing at what they were throwing at you. Do you understand what I’m saying, Gemar Batiste?”

  “Yes, Old Father,” I said. “I think you had a dream about me playing the baseball.”

  “No,” McKinley Short Eyes said, “what you just said would be the easy way to talk about my dream. But it would not be right. It’s not just the baseball. That wouldn’t surprise me enough for me to dream about it.”

  I nodded.

 
“No, it ain’t that easy, Gemar,” the old man said. “The baseball in my dream is the baseball you play, the way you can throw the ball by the other ones and hit it hard back at them when they try to throw it by you, but that’s not how the way I saw you dressed and carrying that stick works in my dream. I’ll explain it so even this boy beside you will be able to follow what I’m saying. Are you listening, boy?”

  “Yes, Old Father,” Polk said.

  “You know, Gemar Batiste,” said McKinley Short Eyes, “where this baseball, the playing of it now I’m talking about, came from, don’t you?”

  I nodded, and he launched into the story of how baseball had first come to the People.

  “From that Indian from some other nation, the one that showed up where the Alabamas lived before they came to Texas. That place, our first home, was where the state of Alabama is now. The white eyes took the name, and then told us that was all they wanted. We had to leave now, since they had done got the good out of us. But that’s another story. Before we left what they call Alabama now, this stranger showed up one year at the Corn Dance. Dressed funny. A strange headpiece on. Had a design worked into it with beads. Had rings punched into his ears. Wearing silver all over him, carrying a stick like what you got there, and a ball along with it. It wasn’t like any other ball we ever saw before. It bounced real high when you threw it against the hard ground, and when he hit it with that stick, it took off like a bird. Like a hawk, it would fly. We didn’t know what it was made of then, but now we do. You know what it was?”

  “Yes, Old Father,” I said, shifting my weight a little to let Polk know to keep his mouth shut. “It was rubber.”

  “It was rubber,” McKinley Short Eyes said. “He was from Mexico, see, called himself an Aztec, and they had rubber down there, come out of a particular tree, but we didn’t know it, that material. We didn’t have nothing that would give to the touch and then come back at you. Or bounce worth a damn. Now the whole world knows rubber. And he taught the young men how to hit the ball when it was throwed to them and run toward a safe place. If somebody out there waiting caught the ball that man with the stick hit up in the air before it landed, he was dead. If it was a grounder, they had to field the ball and try to hit him with it before he got to the safe place. You know all this. It’s what the white eyes picked up and changed it a little and named it baseball. They made the ball real hard, for one thing. You get hit with that, you know it. It’ll do a lot more than just sting, like that first rubber ball did. That’s baseball, where it came from.”

  “They call it that,” I said. “Where I’m going to go play it.”

  “What I’m worried about is what the baseball means in the dream. I mean when it ain’t just the thing it is, but it’s something that’s behind it, too. You know how the Nation’s old stories work. They’re good for something else, what they tell us about how to do and how to act and how to come out better than we were before we heard them. Ain’t that right?”

  “Yes sir,” Polk said, and I touched him on the head with my free hand.

  “You got to figure out my dream, then,” the old man said. “I didn’t tell you all of it, and I don’t want to. You don’t need to be no more scared than you are right now. But look out for these things. Listen, now. An animal whose ears you pull to try to get him to give you money. A man who doesn’t see you when he’s looking right at you. A woman that talks a language I ain’t never heard before. All that is hooked up some way with the baseball you play, the throwing and the hitting and the catching. I don’t know how. That’s your job to figure out. Nobody can do that for you.”

  McKinley Short Eyes stopped talking. His pipe had gone out. He had stopped looking in my direction, aiming his gaze instead on the tree line across the road from his house. He looked like he was all by himself.

  “Old Father,” I said. “Thank you. I will remember what you’ve said and I will work on figuring out how it will help me. I know it can.”

  I looked down at Polk, and we turned to walk toward the road leading to the way out of the reservation. As we reached the road and began to move away, McKinley Short Eyes called my name.

  “One more thing from my dream I ought to tell you,” he said. “You had a real nice picture of a bird on your baseball shirt, one like I’d never seen before. That was a good part of my dream. Think about that bird on your shirt as you travel.”

  I waved and walked on. After a few hundred yards, Polk asked me if there was something wrong with McKinley Short Eyes.

  “Other than being old and full of stories and not many people for him to tell them to any more, no,” I said.

  “I’m going to start going to see him every day or so,” Polk said. “Listen to him talk some.”

  “You do that, and write to let me know if he’s had any more dreams with me in them. But be sure to figure them out before you send me any letters.”

  “You’re not worried about what he told you about his dream?”

  “Naw,” I said. “Why should I be? It doesn’t mean anything. You go back to the house now.”

  “I will,” Polk said, giving me the tow sack.

  “I’ll send you a picture of a rice bird,” I said, turning my back on my little brother and breaking into a trot. I knew if I could make it to the Carter Lumber Company railroad by nine o’clock I could climb on one of the log cars and ride the east bound to where the track ended in Woodville.

  2

  For the next few days or so, I spent the daylight hours sleeping in the woods and fields close enough to the L and N railroad to be able to get to it quick when the sun went down. I fed myself on cheese and crackers and sardines out of cans, goods I bought at stores in the towns where I’d stop in the daylight hours to rest up from the night rides I took on top of railcars. Those places had names like Crossroads and Coushatta and Natchitoches and Tioga and Alexandria and LeCompte and Opelousas and Church Point and Mire. Coushatta was a puzzle to me because of what it was named. It was in the wrong place and didn’t fit. And finally one town was named Lafayette. That was the place where I got off the train in the dead middle of the night, crawling down the side of a moving car filled with a load of something that smelled sweet like sugar burning.

  That night it was time for me to get off the train for good because I had got to where I had to leave off riding and end up getting by foot to Rayne, Louisiana. There was a sign lit up with red and white lights, on a building with lots of automobiles parked in front of it and music coming from it loud enough to hear over the sound of the freight cars.

  The instruments making the music didn’t sound like any I had heard before. Guitars, yeah, but something else, too. It put me in mind of the way the old men in the Alabama-Coushatta Nation would pound on the drums and the old women would chant the same words over and over during the Corn Dance, but it wasn’t made by drums or the voices of people saying the same thing again and again. It told anybody listening that the music would know when it had got to the place where it intended to be. It made you want to wait to hear it get there.

  As the freight I was riding passed the building, I read the sign. The Heart of Evangeline Country, it said, Bon Soir Club d’Lafayette. I put my hand on my tow sack and touched the knob of my red oak bat. I was ready to crawl off from where I was and get to where I was headed.

  Rayne was not on a main railroad line. I had asked an old man who sold me some sardines and crackers and a bottle of soda water in a little store back up in a place called Grand Coteau where Rayne was situated once you got to Lafayette. He told me it was a few miles west, so I crawled down off that freight car as it slowed to pull into Lafayette.

  I knocked some of the dust and dirt off the front of my shirt and pants, and by the time I got that done and my tow sack slung over my shoulder, I could feel the sky getting lighter.

  I took off across the open field next to the train tracks. By the time I h
ad got my feet good and wet from the dew I could see the lights of a stray automobile or two way off up front of me. In a little while, I got to the road and set myself a good pace as I walked along the shoulder of the road next to ditches full of water.

  I didn’t get a ride from there to Rayne, Louisiana. I wanted to walk into that town, and I didn’t want to have to deal with somebody doing me the favor of a ride in his automobile. I wanted to be by myself when I got to Rayne, and I was, the full sun hitting everything before me.

  I could tell where downtown Rayne was by the church steeples and the buildings sticking up. By the time I reached the main crossing, people were in the streets going in and out of the stores, stopping to talk to one another. It was about eight o’clock, I figured.

  I went into a drugstore on the corner of the main street crossing. Behind the counter at the front of the store was a yearling boy dressed in a white shirt and wearing eye glasses, fixing to light up a cigarette.

  “You like to scared me to death,” he said. “Don’t nobody but Mr. Mouton come in here before eight in the morning, and I thought you was him.”

  “I thought it was past that time,” I said. “I just wanted to ask something.”

  “You can’t buy nothing yet,” the boy said. “We ain’t open, even with that door unlocked. We still ferme.”

  “What?”

  “I thought maybe you was French,” the boy said. “The way you look. That means closed, see.” He looked around him. “I ain’t supposed to smoke in here, see. Mr. Mouton won’t allow it, and that’s why you scared me. I thought it was the old man.”