The House of Daniel (24 page)

The Saints answered back with a run again. Then we beat up their new pitcher. When you're leading 12-2 after two and a half, the rest of the game doesn't seem so important. You know what's going to happen, and so do the players on the other side. All you want to do is collect your share of the gate and leave town without anybody getting hurt.

When it got to be 15-4, the Saints' third pitcher threw one at Harv's ear. That kind of thing can happen in that kind of game. Harv got out of the way. Next inning, that pitcher came up. Wes hit him right on the ankle bone, the one that sticks out. I could hear the clunk all the way out in center. The Saint went down in a heap. After a bit, he stood up and hobbled to first.

Nobody threw at anybody else the rest of the game. One more time: message sent, message answered, answer received. The end.

“You were too much for us today,” the Saints' manager told Harv after it was officially over. “You had your hitting shoes on.”

“Play in this place all the time and you probably gotta talk your pitchers down offa tall buildings like they was stockbrokers or something,” Harv said—as much sympathy as he'd show after he got decked like that.

The fat little Mexican heard what he didn't say. “Just so you know, I didn't tell Ike to spin your cap.”

“Okey-doke. We took care of it any which way.”

“I guess you did!” the Saints' manager said. “He'll limp for two weeks. That one caught him solid. He's got luck with him if he didn't break something in there.”

Good luck or bad?
I could see the question on Harv's face. He might have been as good a Christian as he could be, but he believed in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Not many ballplayers are ready to turn the other cheek. If they do, somebody may fire a fastball at that one, too.

Harv knew what kind of a big shot their manager was. He told us over supper, which is how I found out. “You better believe I went over everything three times and made sure I saw a cash box from every concession stand in the place,” he said. “With a lawyer for a manager, you bet the Saints'll never be short for money.”

“Are you sure you got it all?” Wes asked.

“I'm sure I gave it my best shot,” Harv answered. “If he was out to diddle me, he had to work hard.”

“Sounds all right by me,” Wes said after a bit of thought. “Going against lawyers is like playing the Hilltoppers. Chances are you won't beat 'em, but you hope you can give 'em a good game.”

When we came out, we all stared up at the stars. We couldn't help it. We saw a lot of 'em in Roswell, and even more in Albuquerque. But you never dreamt you could see as many stars as you could in Santa Fe. The Milky Way looked like milk, honest. It wasn't just a smudge in the sky, the way it is most places. I never saw it like that before, and I never did again, either, not even in Denver later that year.

“‘But there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets,'” Harv murmured, gaping up like the rest of us. Book of Daniel language? Sure it was. I've read the passage since—I hadn't then. Daniel was talking about dreams, not stars, but so what? Seeing the stars that night was like revealing one page from a big book of wonders you don't usually get to open.

Then something flitted across those stars. You could follow it by how it blocked them. I pulled the cross out from under my shirt. It was glowing a little, so that was a vampire, the way I thought. A couple of other guys were doing the same thing at the same time.

“I think maybe we'd better head on back to the boarding house,” Fidgety Frank said.

“Pronto,” Wes added. They say that in New Mexico—some in Texas, too. Means something like
and step on it
.

That seemed like a good idea, so we all
pronto
ed. And none of us got bit that night, or crumbled to dust or caught fire when the sun hit him the next morning. Back on the bus we went. Another ballgame, coming up.

*   *   *

From Santa Fe, we went down to Madrid. When I saw the place, I wondered whether Harv had lost his marbles stopping there. It couldn't have held much more than a thousand people. And it wasn't a town, or not exactly a town. It was a company town. If not for the coal mines, there wouldn't have been any Madrid.

They put us up in company housing. We had time to kill before the game. For one thing, Madrid isn't far from Santa Fe. For another … Well, I'll get to that in a little bit. The company housing was about like you'd think. It had everything a person needed, and none of what he might want.

We got some extra sleep. That was all right. They fed us lunch. Company lunch was like company housing. I didn't have to pay for it. Just as well, 'cause I wouldn't've wanted to. They showed us around. I know more about coal mining than I did before, I will say.

Then we changed into our uniforms and went to the ballpark. And as soon as we got there, I understood why Harv brought us to Madrid. The Oscar Huber Ballpark was fancier than the one they had in Albuquerque. Bigger, too—they said it would hold 6,000. The grandstand had a tin roof.

And the ballpark had lights.

It had had them for almost fifteen years when I was there. They'd replaced some of the first salamanders atop their towers with bigger, brighter ones that didn't eat so much. The kind of people who run coal mines will save money any way they can. If that happens to make the baseball better, too, well, they don't mind.

So the Madrid Miners were the same kind of ballclub as the Ponca City Greasemen or the Carlsbad Potashers. The coal company paid for their travel on the road. Watching them work out, I would have bet that the coal company paid for some ringers, too. They were an outfit that knew its business.

I wanted to get out there and catch some flies by salamanderlight myself. I could tell right away it was different. The ball looked like a white pill against the sky that got darker and darker. No, not like a flying hubcap, if that's what you were thinking. Those flattened out when you saw 'em edge-on. The ball stayed round.

Under that hot white glare, the grass and the infield dirt seemed greener and redder than they would have in the daytime. The stands almost disappeared into the deepening night. You could still hear the people in 'em, but you couldn't see them any more. It felt peculiar.

When I came in for our first at-bats, Eddie said, “If they start playing lots of games at night, teams will hire vampire outfielders to fly up and grab home runs before they go over the fence.”

“What'll they pay 'em in—necks?” I asked. “I don't want to go on the road with a bunch of coffins stacked up in the back of the bus. Do you?”

“Well, no,” he allowed.

“What's the world coming to?” I went on. “Zombies stealing jobs that just take a strong back, and now you're talking about vampires in the outfield? Isn't there anything left for a poor, ordinary human being?”

“Doesn't look that way,” Eddie answered. “If a zombie or a vampire can't do your work, chances are some kind of a machine can. People are obsolete.”

“About the only thing machines can't do is make more people,” I said, “and they'll probably figure that one out Wednesday after next.”

“Even if they do, I bet it doesn't catch on.” Eddie tipped me a wink. “The old-fashioned way's too much fun.”

The Madrid Miners took the field. People in those invisible stands cheered them. They had their team name on their chests: MADRID in an arc that went up and then down, MINERS under it in an arc that went down and then up, so it almost looked as though they made a baseball. The letters and their caps and socks were black. It was all about as plain as plain could be, but it made sense for a bunch of guys who grubbed coal out of the ground.

By the way they played, some of 'em didn't work too hard when they went underground. They were good. They were the kind of semipros who were ballplayers first and had their job jobs, if you know what I mean, to make it look as if they weren't for-true pros.

Fidgety Frank was on his game, though. The way he'd lost in Albuquerque, I'd worried about it. You couldn't curve people to death here. Madrid was up almost as high as Santa Fe. But Frank never threw two pitches in a row the same speed. Take a little off, put a little on, keep the hitters looking for what you aren't throwing … He made it work.

Their pitcher was a skinny Mexican kid who threw hard. Their team and their crowd were split like the ones in Santa Fe. More of the rich people in Madrid, the mine owners and such, were gringos, though.

It was a tight game all the way. We hit into three double plays. Their infield was as good as you ever saw. The shortstop and second baseman played as though they'd been married for years. They knew each other's moves in their sleep. After eight innings, it was knotted up, 3-3.

Their guy started to wear down as the game went on, but their defense kept saving him. In the top of the ninth, we had men on second and third with two out and Eddie up. I knew what I would've done then—I'd done it before. But if I yelled it out to him, the Miners would know it, too.

Turned out I didn't need to. He saw their third sacker playing back and laid down a sweet little bunt. The third baseman rushed in, grabbed it, and tried to make an impossible play at the plate. The run would've scored any which way, but he hurried the throw, and it went wild. That let our guy on second come in, too.

Sometimes you've just gotta know when to stick the ball in your pocket. If you try to do what nobody can, you only make things worse.

And was I glad we had the two-run cushion, because one of their guys homered with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. Nobody on, so we kept the lead. Their last batter hit the ball pretty good, but not good enough—and right at me. I caught it with both hands, trotted in, and set the ball on top of the mound.

“Final score—House of Daniel 5, the Miners 4,” their announcer said sadly, and stepped away from his microphone. Yes, they had a microphone. Along with the lights, that made the Oscar Huber Ballpark as modern as they came.

We did trade handshakes and
Attaboy!
s and
Good game!
s with the Miners. Nothing wrong with their team at all. We won the game, but it could have gone their way just as easy. They knew it. So did we. Play baseball and somebody's got to come out on top. That's how the game's set up.

Eddie was so happy with himself, his spikes hardly dug into the dirt. He walloped me on the back. “I saw you do it, Snake, so I figured I'd give it a try,” he said. “If I got it down, it was a hit for sure, and I got it down. The second run seemed like icing on the cake, but we ended up needing it.”

“You did great, man!” I walloped him back. I'd rubbed off on somebody! On a team as good as the House of Daniel, who would've figured that?

 

(XI)

We'd gone through Artesia twice, once on the way to Hobbs and once on the way to Roswell. Now we went through Santa Fe twice, too. Las Vegas was on the far side of the capital from Madrid, east through the Santa Fe National Forest and some no-account little towns.

Yeah, I know there's another Las Vegas in Nevada. That's the one where you can gamble and carry on if you're so inclined. Reno's better set up for such things, but you can do them in the Nevada Las Vegas, too. The one in New Mexico is a farming town and a railroad town. People may think of the one in Nevada first, but the one in New Mexico's bigger.

It used to be a rip-snorting place. Billy the Kid spent a little while in jail there. They had outlaws with nicknames like Caribou and Dirty-face and Hoodoo and Flapjack Bill and Jimmie the Duck. The only people who get to wear handles like that nowadays are ballplayers. Fair enough. We're on the road even more than Billy and the rest of the gunslingers were.

The Las Vegas Maroons have been around for about as long as I've been alive. They and the Miners and the Saints and the Dons play each other a lot every year. They call it the Central New Mexico League, but it isn't hooked in with real leagues and real pro ball any way I know of.

When we got to Maroons Field, the Las Vegas players shook our hands and gave us cigarettes and chocolates because we'd whipped the Miners. “Those guys got more money than they know what to do with,” one of the Maroons grumbled. “Well, no—they pay players with it. About time somebody took 'em down a peg.”

“You won't like us so much if we beat you the same way,” Harv said.

“Nope, sure won't,” the Las Vegas fella said. “But we'll like the payday all right.”

Sure enough, the stands were filling up. Only a thousand people in Madrid, but their ballpark held three times as many as the one in Las Vegas even if Las Vegas had a dozen times more people. I guess the answer to that is, there's nothing else to do in Madrid. Las Vegas is a real little city. You can see a film or go shopping or go to a restaurant the mining company doesn't run or do anything else you feel like.

Still, this wouldn't be a bad crowd. Harv wasn't looking as though he wanted to cuss in spite of belonging to the House of Daniel.

Like the Miners and the Saints and the Dons, the Maroons looked as if they knew what they were doing out there. They were kitted out in the color that gave 'em their name. It made 'em seem less somber than the Miners did.

We won the game, 6-2. No thanks to me, doggone it. I didn't get a hit. I struck out once. And I dropped a fly ball. I didn't do anything stupid. I tried to catch it two-handed. But it popped out of my glove before I could get my meat hand on it. Next thing I knew, it was on the ground. The guy who hit it wound up on second, and the crowd laughed and laughed.

He didn't score. I still felt like a jerk. When I got back to the dugout, Harv said, “Hang in there. Nobody's perfect.”

“I should've had it,” I muttered.

“Yeah, you should have,” Harv agreed. “Just catch the next one, and the one after that, and.…”