Dirty Rice Read online

  I asked him where the Rayne Rice Birds baseball field was located, and he took a deep drag off his cigarette. “They ain’t start playing no games yet,” he said. “Season don’t begin until next week. So there’s no game tonight, and you can’t buy tickets yet.”

  “I know the season’s not going yet, but they’re getting ready for it,” I said. “Where is the field?”

  “Addison Stadium is where they play, and it ain’t just a field,” the clerk said. “It’s as good a stadium as Miller Stadium that Crowley’s got, and it’s a lot better than Jeanerette. That ain’t nothing up against Addison Stadium. Say, you want to buy you some cigarettes? I’ll sell you a pack even though we’re closed, if you’ll let me have a couple of them. How about a pack of Picayunes?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t smoke cigarettes. Where is this Addison Stadium where the Rice Birds play? Can you point me toward it?”

  “Go back outside, cross Main Street, and keep walking down Hebert for a ways, past the ice house and the feed stores and the grain silos. You can’t miss it.”

  “All right,” I said. “Much obliged.”

  The light was green for me to walk across that main street, and in just a little while I could see up ahead the ice house with a truck backed up to the loading dock and a man with a white apron over his overalls wrestling big chunks of clear ice with a pair of tongs down a ramp onto the truck bed. The ice looked brand new. By the time I got to where the silos were lined up, I could see part of a big structure painted dark green up ahead on the right side of the street.

  It was where the baseball field was, I figured, Addison Stadium the kid had called it. It was backed up to the street, and it wasn’t until you got up close to it that you could begin to see what was on the other side of that building. That was the field itself, behind a wooden fence that started at each end of the green wooden building and ran a long ways at an angle, like it would have to do to follow the diamond shape where you play baseball.

  The walls of the stadium went up a good ways from the ground, a foot or two over head high to an average sized man, and though I couldn’t see from where I was standing the back wall, I knew it would have to be even higher.

  That higher wall that closed off the field was to stop anybody from hitting a cheap home run. Something too easy to do ain’t worth doing, especially when you’re playing baseball, standing at home plate where that man is trying to get that ball by you and you’re trying to keep alive, to be safe, and to be able to start where you are and come back to that same spot and have it mean something.

  If it ain’t no trouble to do that, why would you want to do it? That’s another thing McKinley Short Eyes would tell us. Lots of what he would tell us young ones I didn’t pay much attention to or care about whether it made sense or not. That made good sense to me.

  Back in Leggett and Kountze and them other places in East Texas where I’d played baseball on the sawmill teams, the playing wasn’t never done with a building put around where we all stood at the points of all them diamonds. We didn’t have walls to keep people from being able to see what was going on, and there wasn’t anybody putting up barriers and selling tickets, and players ran from one safe place to another one, or not, and where you left home plate and came back to it to finish.

  We played baseball in fields open to the eyes of anybody that wanted to look, and we hit balls over the outfielders’ heads that could’ve rolled to the end of the world if we’d have hit them hard enough.

  That fielder that didn’t catch your ball could’ve chased that hit ball to the end of the world and thrown you out at home, if he had the arm for it.

  I was standing in front of that green building with the big doors closed and locked, studying below that sign that said Addison Stadium a good-sized picture of a black bird holding something white in his mouth, when I heard somebody say something to me.

  He was a white man who looked to have been out in the sun a lot. He was blue-eyed, but tanned almost like the leather of a glove and wrinkled at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth like the hide you’d see on an old man’s neck.

  “What kind of a bat is that?” he said, nodding toward my tow sack.

  “It’s a baseball bat,” I said.

  “I had done figured that part out on my own,” he said. “That was easy. But it don’t seem like that bat got its start in Louisville, Kentucky. Did it?”

  “No. It come from Texas. From the Big Thicket. I made it.”

  “No kidding? Is it a model or something? I see it’s not ash or maple. Are you making them to sell?”

  “I’ve made a good many of them, but I don’t make bats to sell. No.”

  “Mind if I look at it?” the man said, shifting his weight a little the way you will when you want something to happen and are getting ready for it to take place.

  “Sure,” I said, handing it to him. “Just as long as you don’t hit a ball with it.”

  He took the bat, backed away from where I was standing, and settled into a right-handed batting stance. He took a cut with my bat, easy at first, then another, and finally a full swing.

  “It’s got a nice balance,” he said, turning the bat up to look at the barrel, the end, and then the knob. “It’s got a few nicks down here past the sweet spot, but it’s got a real good feel to it. It ain’t beat up.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s been took care of.”

  “You said something a while ago I want to ask you about. You said I could look at it long as I don’t hit a ball with it. Why’d you say that?”

  “What I’m afraid of, if you’d hit a ball with it, is that I don’t know for sure if there’s any hits left in this bat. And if some is left, I don’t want to waste a one of them,” I said.

  “Oh, hell,” the man started to laugh. “You’re a baseball player.”

  “That told you that, what I just said?”

  “Yep, it sure did. You’re as crazy as a shithouse rat, just like the rest of us.”

  And that’s how I first met Dynamite Dunn, though when he introduced himself to me, he didn’t call himself that. That name was one somebody had come up with to put on the score cards and the rosters and for writers in the sport pages of the newspapers to use when they did their stories about the Rice Birds. He told me his real one, Herman Allan Dunn.

  I never met but one or two players in my time in the Evangeline League who would call themselves by their nicknames. Both of them had something wrong with their thinking, too, the ones who would announce themselves with a name like “Legs LeBlanc” or “Streak Magill.”

  I’m not saying players wouldn’t answer to the nickname put on them. Once your teammates started calling you by some tag they come up with, you had to go along with it and act like it didn’t bother you to have to answer to it, because if they found out you didn’t like being called something in particular, that would be all the name you’d ever hear again from them.

  Now in the Evangeline League, that name you made for yourself was put on you by other people, maybe because of the way you looked or some way you acted or something you had done once that was good. Or was bad. That could be a good thing for you if your luck held. Or it could make folks laugh when they said or heard that nickname, because of the way it’d come to you.

  Let me tell how Herman Allen Dunn got to be called Dynamite Dunn, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. It was his first year with the Rice Birds. He come to bat with the bases loaded for the Rice Birds, bottom of the ninth, up against the the Jeanerette Blues. And he didn’t hit a home run and he didn’t hit a single and he didn’t get hit by a pitch, but he still drove in the man on third, so that man could win the game. How Herman Allen Dunn did it was to flap his arm up, flinch back, and done it so good wearing that loose fitting uniform that he made a called third strike look like ball four, and the umpire gave him a walk.

>   So he was named Dynamite Dunn for that. He was like Dirty Boy in one of them stories McKinley Short Eyes used to tell us about the young man who was underestimated and laughed at until he saved the day somehow. He had something to prove, and it was about changing what his name meant when people said it.

  “Does anybody here know you already, Gemar?” Dunn asked. “I ain’t heard your name that I can recall.”

  “A man showed up on the reservation and told me I could come try out to play baseball for the Rice Birds,” I said. “He said he’d send a telegram to the manager and let him know I was coming.”

  “Who said that to you? What did he look like?”

  “Name of Leonard Piquet.”

  “I don’t know that fellow,” Dunn said.

  “I’m supposed to see the manager. You reckon he’s here?”

  “Dutch is here this morning, all right,” Dunn said. “He’s in there sweating blood and writing names on little bitty pieces of paper like it was going out of style, I imagine. He loves to play with the lineup. He figures he’ll get it set just right one of these days. He told me to come in here early before the workout started, and he’d be able to let me know where I’d be staying in Rayne this season.”

  The last time I’d had something to eat was when I finished up a can of sardines just before getting off the L and N freight in Lafayette, so I was feeling a little weak. I figured I’d better see the manager pretty quick and get him to let me do my tryout to get on with the Rice Bird baseball team before it got too much later in the morning, or else I might not show what all I could do. Maybe I could hurry things along a little.

  “I need to talk to this manager myself,” I said to Dunn. “I’m feeling like I need to eat something, too. You think we can go see him right now?”

  “We can go eat breakfast before we knock on Dutch’s door, if you want to,” Dunn said, and pointed at a building across the street. “There’s a diner over yonder that ain’t worth a damn. You got any money?”

  “I got two bits,” I said and fingered the last coin left in my pocket.

  “That’ll get you three doughnuts and a cup of coffee,” Dunn said. “You want to let me carry that bat for you?”

  3

  Both folks working in the diner knew Dunn, and that’s when I first heard him called by his nickname Dynamite. I could tell he didn’t particularly care to have me hear him called that. It didn’t take us long to eat them doughnuts that woman brought us, and in a little while we were back across the street.

  “Dutch is in there in what he calls his office,” Dunn said, nodding at the door marked PRIVATE.

  Dunn had to knock for a good while before somebody hollered to wait a minute and then the door opened up and we could see who it was talking, a man that was probably only about forty something. He was wearing a baseball cap, even though he was inside the building. He had on a regular shirt and pants, though, and a pair of cowboy boots that looked run down.

  “What you want, Dynamite?” he said. “Shouldn’t you be in bed this time of morning, or is it just the shank end of night to you?”

  “No, I got me a good rest last night, in the back seat of somebody’s car behind the icehouse. That’s why I’m here to see you. Remember you told me to come by early so you could let me know where you’d located for me to room this season?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Dutch said. “I do have a list of old ladies in Rayne dying to rent you boys rooms this year, like always. Who’s this with you? The man that owns the car?”

  Dutch was a little stooped in the shoulders, and like Dynamite Dunn, his eyes were a pale shade of blue like they’d been bleached out by looking into the sun too much. Too long in the infield.

  “No, I don’t expect he even owns a car,” Dunn said. “Do you, Gemar?”

  I shook my head no, and he went on. “He does own a bat like you’ve never seen before, though, Dutch. Keeps it in a big old cloth sack and won’t let me use it.”

  “That ain’t nothing new, Dynamite,” Dutch said. “I’ve seen you not use a lot of bats a lot of times.”

  “Tell Dutch what you told me, Gemar,” Dunn said. “See can you get Mr. Bernson’s attention.”

  “My name is Gemar Batiste,” I said to Dutch. “From the Alabama-Coushatta Nation in Texas. A man called Leonard Piquet saw me play baseball and said he would send you a telegram about me. He claimed you would let me try out to play for the Rayne Rice Birds.”

  “I don’t get many telegrams from Piquet,” Dutch Bernson said, “but I did get that one all right. Damn if you didn’t show up like he said you would.”

  Dutch was looking at me, starting down at my feet and then moving his gaze up my body to my neck. “You ain’t near as big a fellow as I would expect from reading that telegram from Piquet,” he said. “He said you could pitch. He said you could hit the ball a ways, too. Can you do that, Gemar?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “If I get enough of it. Sometimes I die.”

  “You die?” Dutch said, looking me in the face now.

  “Shit,” Dynamite Dunn said. “I never heard it said like that before.”

  “So you want to try out for us, huh? How do you propose you do that? No offense intended, but I ain’t never seen you play no baseball. All I got is a telegram from Leonard Piquet, a man that’s always hoping to cash in some way somehow if something pans out right for him. I ain’t saying Leonard lies on purpose, now. Don’t get me wrong. But he does live in hope, and living like that will cause a man to believe in what he’s had no opportunity to see yet. You follow what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, manager,” I said.

  “Listen, Gemar,” Dutch said. “Come on in here and we’ll see if we can find you a set of cleats back in the locker room that’ll fit you. Bring your bat and your stuff.”

  “He ain’t going to use his own bat yet, I don’t imagine,” Dynamite Dunn said. “Are you, Gemar?”

  “Not if y’all got some other bats I could use. I don’t want to use my red oak bat right now, unless I just have to.”

  “Ask him why not,” Dunn said to Dutch Bernson as I followed him inside into the little room that was his office. “Ask him why he won’t use his own bat now.”

  “I’ll do that later, Dynamite,” Dutch said. “You show Gemar where the locker room is and find him some cleats. I’m fixing to warm Hookey Irwin up a little bit so he can make a few pitches to Gemar.”

  “Is Hookey here already?” Dynamite Dunn said. “I ain’t seen him yet.”

  “He slept on a cot in the locker room last night. He didn’t know nobody with an empty back seat in his automobile behind the icehouse, I reckon. He ain’t that lucky.”

  “I’d a lot rather been on a cot in the stadium,” Dynamite said. “I didn’t know I had that option.”

  “You don’t have that option,” Dutch said. “You ain’t a pitcher. Go put on a catcher’s mitt.”

  “I got to have a mask and a chest protector if I got to catch Hookey this morning,” Dynamite Dunn said. “He’s liable to be as wild as a cyclone this time of year.”

  “Put on all you want to,” Dutch said. “But first get them cleats for Gemar. Find him a cap, too.”

  We found several pairs of baseball shoes that fit me good enough to wear. I picked out some that looked pretty well broke in.

  I put them on and walked around a little on the cement floor of the locker room, feeling the cleats slide some on the hard surface and decided they’d do me all right for this try out business.

  “What size is your head?” Dynamite Dunn asked. He was rummaging through a wooden box of clothes, pulling out jerseys and uniform knickers, and now and then a cap. “Some of these been washed and some has been put up dirty,” he said, “and that was last year. I believe they strong enough by now to walk off by themselves if they took a mind to.”
/>
  “I don’t know what size hat I wear,” I said, reaching for the one Dynamite was holding. “Let me see that one.”

  He handed it to me, I put it on, and it fit well enough. “That’s one of them old caps,” he said. “Back before the name was changed to the Rice Birds. That one there has got a Rayne Red Sox sign on it. Don’t you want to wear one that’s up to date while you’re trying out for the job?”

  “This one feels all right,” I said. “I don’t care if it’s old.”

  “Maybe that means it’s lucky. You can’t tell for sure, though, what’s going to work for or against you. Lucky pieces will fool you. If you could tell that difference, everybody’d be batting three hundred.”

  I pulled out the first bat I touched in a rack pushed up in the corner of the locker room, and I followed him out into the corridor leading toward daylight. So my first time to step onto the playing field of the Rayne Rice Birds I was carrying a bat and wearing cleats that made that clinking sound of metal rubbing against the cement of the hall.

  My feet felt different when the cleats sank into what they were touching as I walked on the dirt and then the grass it led up to. It stopped feeling like I was sliding along on something too hard to get a purchase on.

  Dutch Bernson was behind home plate, bent over a little at the waist with a catcher’s mitt held up for a target. I understood why he was standing like that. You don’t get down in that crouch that binds and stretches every muscle and sinew of your legs unless you have to. You don’t do it for fun.

  The pitcher was on the mound, throwing easy and slow, not taking much of a windup, and he acted like he didn’t see me and Dunn come onto the field. I would’ve acted the same way, if I’d had the job of testing somebody who is claiming to be able to do what you do.

  “Gemar Batiste,” Dutch Bernson said, slinging the catcher’s mitt off his hand and stepping out from behind the plate, “I see Dunn found you some shoes and a cap.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the pitcher was fooling with his glove, acting like something on it needed to be adjusted. I kept my head pointed straight ahead.