The House of Daniel Read online

  We nodded—all of us, I think. We couldn’t help it. I don’t know if Harv ever was a drill sergeant. If he wasn’t, the Army let a good one get away.

  “When we go up to Pueblo tomorrow, I expect to see some players who care about what they’re doing, then,” Harv said in a voice that warned he was ready to bite nails in half. “If I don’t, I expect I can pull in some off the street who do. We got Snake that way. We can get more. You wear the lion on your chest, you better not have a pussy cat’s heart.”

  “Teacher’s pet,” Fidgety Frank whispered to me.

  “Oh, shut up,” I whispered back. I wished Harv hadn’t singled me out like that. I wanted to be like the rest of the guys. That’s how you fit in on a team.

  “Did I hear something?” Harv shouted.

  “No, Harv,” Fidgety Frank and I said together. Along with everything else, Harv had rabbit ears. He would.

  “Mm, okey-doke,” he said, as if he knew we were lying but didn’t want to call us on it. He went on, “I want you to whip the tail feathers off the Pueblo Chieftains tomorrow. Not just beat ’em—whip ’em. Whip ’em good! And if you don’t, I’ll know the reason why.”

  He turned around and started up to the bus. We went back to the roominghouse. Nobody said a word all the way there.

  * * *

  Whip the tail feathers off the Pueblo Chieftains? I hoped we could. But it wasn’t one of those things that came with a guarantee, if you know what I mean. Up till year before last, Pueblo was in the Western League. That’s Class A ball, the higher minors. But the league threw them out, and Denver, too, on account of most of the teams were farther east even though they called it the Western League, and taking the train out to Colorado cost too blasted much. That’s the kind of thing the Big Bubble busting made leagues worry about.

  Some of the guys who’d played for Pueblo in the Western League hooked on with other teams in the regular minors. Some of ’em like it there, though, and stuck around after the league pulled out. You can’t blame ’em. It’s pretty country. If you’d found a girl there, you could look for a job, too. And you could still play ball and put some extra cash money in your wallet.

  So the Pueblo Chieftains were a hot team. They had some players who’d been maybe that far from the bigs once upon a time. They even had themselves a new ballpark. Runyon Field opened up not long before we got there. None of the players from the House of Daniel had ever seen it before.

  “When we came through here last year, the Chieftains played at Merchants Field, where the Western League used to be,” Eddie told me while we were going to the new place. “Oh, my, people were ticked off about getting dumped! It was even worse in Denver. The Denver folks tried to sue the league, but it got tossed out of court.”

  Runyon Field looked as though a team from the higher minors could play there. It held, I dunno, four or five thousand people. The grandstand ran a long way down the foul lines. Then bleachers took over. When Eddie got a look at them, he started to laugh. “What’s so funny?” I asked—they didn’t look like anything but bleachers to me.

  “They took those out of Merchants Field and brought ’em over here,” he said. “Waste not, want not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I remember that blue-green paint they’ve got on the benches. I thought it looked queer a year ago, and I still think it does.”

  “Oh,” I said. Waste not, want not was about the size of it. If you were going to put bleachers in a new ballpark, why pay for new ones when you could move the old ones for a lot less? Of course, that was the same kind of thinking that made the Western League pull out of Colorado, but try telling the folks in Pueblo anything along those lines.

  We got a run in the top of the first. Wes set the Chieftains down in order in the bottom of the frame. In the top of the second I came up with one out and Eddie on third. The Chieftains’ pitcher threw me a changeup. I was out in front of it. I hit it hard, but way foul. It pinballed off one of the columns holding up the grandstand roof and smacked a fan in the back of the head. Poor guy never saw it coming. Just wham!, out of the blue.

  “Way to go, Snake!” Harv yelled from the dugout. “You put a new crease in his fedora!”

  I felt bad about it. I’d never done anything like that before. But after a minute or so the fellow waved to show he was all right. The crowd gave him a hand. He was tough. He stayed in the game—well, in the stands.

  “Play ball!” the plate umpire said, and we got back to it.

  The Chieftain threw me another offspeed pitch. I hit this one hard, too, but I waited on it and kept it fair. It dropped in front of the left fielder. Eddie could have walked home. The pitcher slammed his fist into his glove. He tried to fool me, doubling up on the slow stuff, but it didn’t work.

  Things kept going right for us and wrong for the Chieftains. They had a runner picked off second. They lined into a double play. They couldn’t turn one when they needed it most. I don’t think we exactly whipped the tail feathers off them, but we won it 6-3.

  “Better. A little better,” Harv said after the game. “But you’ve got to get better yet. Colorado Springs tomorrow. And we’re still on our way to Denver.”

  He didn’t say we’d go straight to Denver from Colorado Springs. I didn’t know what he had planned. Probably we’d go some other places before we got there. It still wasn’t tournament time. But we were on our way, even if it was a twisty way to be on.

  * * *

  Colorado Springs was another medium-sized town at the edge of the Rockies. The mountains marched across the western skyline as we rolled north up US 85. They were something to see, all right.

  Colorado Springs was different from Pueblo and Denver—it hadn’t had a real pro team for years and years. The old club was called the Millionaires. Anybody who’s ever played minor-league ball will tell you what a silly nickname for a team that is.

  But one of the guys who’d played for them stayed in Colorado Springs when the team folded. He ran a city league of semipro teams. A lot of people want to stay in the game somehow after they get too old to play. He’d found a way to do it.

  We were going to play an all-star team from this league. We’d done that before. I figured we’d do it again after this, too. Towns didn’t always think any one club of theirs was good enough to face us—and the other teams didn’t always want one getting the glory if they won (and the big gate even if they didn’t). So they’d split up the players and they’d share the money. It worked out.

  Harv said, “All-star teams have better players on ’em, yeah. But they aren’t teams the way we’re a team. Their guys haven’t played together for years. The shortstop doesn’t know what the second baseman’ll do on a grounder up the middle. If you push ’em, they’ll make mistakes.”

  They did have a nice place to play the game. Spurgeon Field looked so new, they might’ve just taken it out of its box. If they wanted to get back into minor-league ball, they could do it as far as the park was concerned.

  The Colorado Springs All Stars wore shirts and caps with stars on ’em. They really did. I don’t know where they got ’em, but they had ’em. The old Millionaires player in charge of the city league managed them. He had an All Stars uniform, too, and a pretty good stretch of belly to pull it tight. He kept a big chaw in his mouth, and shifted it from one cheek to the other every so often.

  All the people in the stands cheered when they took the field. Then … Well, by the time the game was over, they must’ve wished they’d picked a different batch of all-stars. They were pretty sorry. They threw to the wrong base not once but twice. Their first baseman dropped a perfect throw from short. Plop—it fell out of his mitt. He looked at the ball on the ground as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. They had a runner get picked off first. One of their batters doubled but got thrown out trying to stretch it into a triple: this when he led off the inning. The play wasn’t close, either.

  We ended up winning 9-4. The game was easier than that. They hit a two-run homer wi
th two out in the bottom of the ninth. It changed the final score, but both sides knew who’d played well and who hadn’t.

  Their manager came up to Harv after the game and said, “I didn’t think I was sending out a high-school nine this afternoon.”

  Harv set a hand on his shoulder. “Happens to everybody once in a while,” he said, and anyone who’s played a little baseball knows about that. “Sometimes you’re the windshield. Sometimes you’re the bug.”

  “Splat!” the fat, old, ex-Colorado Springs Millionaire said. They both laughed. I’m sure it felt funnier to Harv, though. You lose a game like that, you want to go somewhere quiet and have a couple-three cold ones so you don’t need to brood about it as much.

  Afterwards, we celebrated at a spaghetti joint. Spaghetti and meat balls and that kind of stuff is cheap, but it fills you up. “I think we did play better today. I’m not what you’d call sure, though,” Harv said. “When the other side turns in a game like that, you’ve got a tough time gauging how good you are.”

  Wes kinda coughed, but he didn’t say anything. Harv had had kittens when we played two games like that. Of course, Harv was looking ahead to the tournament. We couldn’t play like that in Denver, not if we wanted to go very far.

  We got back on the bus. Harv drove us to the roominghouse where we were staying in Colorado Springs. The gal who ran it came out just about spitting rivets. “Mister Watrous,” she snapped, “Mister Watrous, there’s someone in the parlor who says he needs to see you.”

  “Well, all right. I’ll see him. What’s the matter?” Harv said. Pretty plainly, something was.

  The woman made a horrible face. “I am not in the habit of letting persons of that sort enter my establishment. I don’t know how he sweet-talked me into allowing it. Do your business with him and send him on his way, if you would be so kind.”

  “What’s she going on about?” Eddie whispered. Eddie was a Northern fella through and through. He had no hint. I thought I did, but I could’ve been wrong, so I shrugged back at him. We all trooped in together. As soon as we got to the parlor, we’d know.

  In there sat a colored fella. I nodded to myself; that was what I’d figured. He stood up when he saw us. He was tall—six-three, maybe six-four—and skinny. He wore a sharp suit. He might have been my age or he might have been twenty years older. You couldn’t tell at first glance. He would’ve been handsome and to spare if he hadn’t quit shaving a few days earlier.

  He touched the brim of his Panama hat. He had long, thin fingers. A pitcher’s fingers, I thought, not knowing yet how right I was. “”Which one of y’all is Mistuh Watrous?” he asked, his voice smooth as creamed coffee and full of the Deep South.

  “That’s me.” Harv stuck out his hand. “And you would be—?” He sounded as though he knew, but he wanted to hear it with his own ears to make it official.

  The colored fellow shook with him. His hand almost swallowed Harv’s, which wasn’t little itself. “I’m Carpetbag Booker,” he said. “Mighty pleased to meet you, suh. I’ve come to pitch fo’ your team through the tournament, like you asked me to.”

  * * *

  Harv beamed just like Christmas. Everybody except Harv gaped at Carpetbag Booker. Fidgety Frank, Wes, Eddie, and I were maybe a little less amazed than the rest of the guys, but only a little. Yes, the four of us knew Harv had got a CC message connected to somebody from the Pittsburgh Crawdads, but we’d never dreamt he could’ve talked Carpetbag Booker into signing up with the House of Daniel, even for a little while.

  Wes looked less happy about it than some of the others. He was our number two pitcher. Now he’d be number three, which meant he wouldn’t pitch much. He played the outfield, too, but even so.… This bit a big chunk out of his pride.

  But the first thing Harv had to do was get the lady who ran the roominghouse down off her high horse. The idea of a colored man staying in her place gave her conniptions. It did till Harv slipped her an extra ten clams, anyway. That and hearing how Carpetbag was a famous colored man sweetened her up. Mostly, though, it was the money.

  Nobody asked me how I felt about things. I’d played against colored fellas a few times now. Play on the same team with one? He’d give us a way better chance to win the tournament. Any fool could see that. I’d been raised to think whites and coloreds playing together was wrong, though. No, it was worse than wrong—it was a sin.

  Maybe it was … in Oklahoma. And in Texas. And in Alabama or Mississippi or wherever Carpetbag Booker came from. Not in New Mexico or Colorado. If these places could cope with it, maybe I could, too. Besides, Carpetbag had already put some extra money in the roominghouse lady’s pocket. If we went deep into the tournament, he’d put more in mine.

  And the way he acted, you didn’t think of him so much as a colored fella. You thought of him as a ballplayer. He’d barnstormed with big-leaguers in the offseason. If they could play alongside him, I reckoned I could, too. Playing alongside him sure got them some extra cash.

  So we all talked for a spell. Then he picked up the carpetbag he was nicknamed for and went to his room. He had one all to himself. The gal who ran the roominghouse insisted on it. Carpetbag, he didn’t say boo. If he slept better than the rest of us on account of not having any roommates, he didn’t say anything about that the next morning, either.

  For that day’s game, we went toward Denver by going away from it. Canon City is about forty miles southwest of Colorado Springs, most of it along a winding mountain road. They spell it the way they spell it, but they say it as though it were Canyon. It’s at the start of the Grand Canyon of the Arkansas, which isn’t in Arkansas and isn’t as grand as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, which isn’t in Colorado. Names get confusing sometimes, don’t they?

  My guess is, Canon City used to have one of those Spanishy thingumabobs over the first n so you could tell how you were supposed to say it. It doesn’t any more, though, and it hasn’t for a long time. They still say it as if it did. Spelling gets confusing sometimes, too.

  The Grand Canyon of the Arkansas is a thousand feet of red granite carved by the river over Lord only knows how many years. A bunch of ’em—that’s all I can tell you. The other thing you could see in Canon City was the Colorado State Pen. The walls there were all made out of gray stone, so I don’t think they got carved out of the Grand Canyon.

  Across from the prison was State Park. When we got there, trusties in striped jail suits were mowing the grass and trimming weeds and the like. In the middle of the park stood the field where we’d play.

  Well, the ballpark stood and leaned and tilted. It was another old wooden place falling to pieces a bit at a time. For a little while, not long after I was born, Canon City had a team in the Rocky Mountain League. A very little while—it moved down to Raton partway through the season, and the league gave up the ghost before the season ended. So that’s been a semipro park and a for-fun park ever since.

  We were playing the Canon City Fylfots. That was the name of the pro team back when, and the semipro team hung on to it. You do see that here and there. And they had a hooked cross on each sleeve and FYLFOTS across the chest in black letters with red edging. They had got hold of the thing before that noisy fella on the far side of the ocean, and they were not about to let go of it for him or anybody else.

  The stands were not great big. They were pretty full, though. The House of Daniel does pack ’em in. And everybody in them buzzed when Harv bawled out the last name in our lineup: “And pitching today for the House of Daniel, for the first time ever, is the one, the only, the great … Carpetbag Booker!”

  Carpetbag tipped his cap to the crowd. They must have seen him there warming up, but not all of ’em would have known who he was. They’d heard of him—that was for sure. Most of ’em cheered. Some booed. A few yelled the kind of things colored fellas hear a lot.

  Growing up where he grew up, Carpetbag must’ve heard ’em all a million times. If they bothered him—and how couldn’t they?—he didn’t show it. As far as any
body could tell by looking, they rolled off him like water off an oilcloth.

  We staked him to a couple of runs in the top of the first. That’s always good. He went out and put on a show. He kicked his leg way high in the air when he wound up, so the batter would see the sole of his shoe. He had a fastball that sank. He had a fastball that hopped. He had a changeup. He had a nickel curve. And he had the knack that good pitchers have, the knack for ruining a batter’s timing. He had way more of that than anybody else I’ve ever seen.

  When no one was on, he’d throw a hesitation pitch. Guys will do that now and then. But he was even better at it than Fidgety Frank. He could stop his motion at a different place each pitch, yet still throw hard and still throw strikes. You wouldn’t believe it, but Carpetbag did it. He made it look easy, too.

  It didn’t seem fair. He was tougher than big-league hitters. The Canon City Fylfots couldn’t touch him. Oh, it wasn’t a perfect game or anything—they scratched out a few hits and even a run. That was something for the guy who did it to tell his grandchildren about when he had them. I knocked in a run against Carpetbag Booker!

  But it wasn’t any kind of contest. By then we’d got seven or eight, I forget which, and the poor Fylfots hadn’t a prayer of catching up. Carpetbag toyed with them. He started clowning. They still couldn’t hit him.

  The crowd ate it up. “Do the windmill!” some leather-lungs shouted from the seats. And Carpetbag would. He’d send his arm around three or four times before he turned the ball loose. And the hitter would swing and miss. Or else he’d stand there with his eyes wide and take it. The ump would call it a strike, because it was.

  When the game was over, half the Fylfots crowded round to get his autograph. He signed and signed, a big old grin on his face. “Mistuh Harv, I had to get stretched out after the train ride west, but I reckon I’m ready,” he said.

  “I reckon you are,” Harv said. “The teams in Denver, though, they’ll be tougher than you had it here.”