The House of Daniel (7 page)

So I was up like a shot. I took my spikes out of the sack and waved 'em around. “Hey, I'm a player!” I shouted. “I'm a center fielder, even!”

The guy with the megaphone looked me over. I wasn't seventy-five years old. I didn't stand four feet ten. Didn't weigh three hundred fifty pounds, either. He couldn't tell me to get lost just by eyeballing me, anyway. “Well, c'mon down and we'll talk,” he said.

Down I went. The fellow with the megaphone brought over a couple-three Greasemen, I guess to ask if they knew what I could do. One of them was Mort Milligan. I pointed his way. “
He
knows I can play center some,” I said.

Big lug might not have recognized me in my everyday clothes. He did then, though. “Oh. It's you,” he growled, like he wanted to clean me off the sole of his shoe. He nodded to the man from the House of Daniel. “Yeah, so-and-so can run 'em down, all right. Robbed me like a bank yesterday playing for Enid.” He told him how I'd caught his long drive.

“Huh,” said the House of Daniel man. His eyes were sharp in the middle of all that face fuzz. “How come you didn't go on back to Enid, then?” he asked.

Well, it wasn't as if I hadn't figured he'd want to know—him or somebody for the House of Daniel, anyway. Didn't look for it quite so quick, though. I said, “Somebody down there I'm on the wrong side of. Better if I go somewhere else for a while. This here's a way to do it.”

“Huh,” he said again. “Cops on your tail? They come after you with bloodhounds or wizards or whatever the demon?”

“No cops,” I said, which was the Lord's truth … unless they were enough in Big Stu's pocket to chase me, too. I added, “I'd be in more hot water with them if I had done what this guy wanted.” That was also true, which was good. You want to be straight when you're starting out with somebody. Tell lies at the beginning and they'll always come back to bite you. Later on, when the other folks've shown they don't fly with angels' wings, either, you can do the same. But a bad start makes for a bad finish.

“He can play?” the guy with the megaphone asked Mort Milligan.

“He can play,” Mort said, bless his heart. “He's damn good in center—better with the glove than our guy, I'll tell you that. He won't hit third for you like your fella who got racked up, but he's pesky up there.”

Pesky
is what they call you when you look like you ought to make outs all the time but you don't. I thought I was better than that, but the House of Daniel guy didn't ask me.

He scratched at something under his beard. Then he said, “Tell you what. You've got baseball togs in that bag? Put 'em on. We'll run you around some, see what you look like out there. Oh, and tell me your name, too.”

Conoco Ball Park didn't have dressing rooms. Mostly, you put on your uniform somewhere else and then went there. I did kind of a fan dance in the tunnel going out of the dugout. A few people walked by while I was doing it. If anybody looked in, he might've seen something, but he wouldn't've seen much.

A few folks had stayed in the stands. They booed my ENID EAGLES shirt. One of 'em hissed like a rattlesnake. I touched the brim of my cap and waved. They booed louder, of course.

The House of Daniel guy who'd had the megaphone came to the plate with a bat and a few balls. He hit fungoes my way for ten, fifteen minutes. He ran me all over center, and you can do a lot of running there at the Conoco Ball Park. I caught what I could, chased the rest, and threw the balls back to him as hard and straight as I could.

I'd worked up a sweat by the time he waved me in. “You're Jack?” he said, and I nodded. So did he. “Yeah, you're a decent ballhawk, all right. Better than decent.” He tossed me the bat, easy and gentle so I could grab it one-handed. “What do you do this way?”

He was bigger and heftier than I was, and the bat was heavier than what I favor. I didn't ask for a different one; I just choked up an extra inch so I could get around faster. Out to the mound came the fellow who'd finished the game in center.

“Wes here will see what you've got,” said the guy who'd run me around.

Wes's first one came straight at my nose. I hit the dirt, got up, and planted myself again. “You were watching Close Shave out there,” I said.

“Nah.” Wes Petersen shook his head. He had a deep, gravelly voice. “I'm a mean son of a gun any which way.” To show he meant it, he knocked me down again.

I nodded back to him, as though we were in a saloon drinking beer together. “You can hit me, all right. Let's see if I can hit you.”

Next pitch started for my head, too. This one broke so hard, I could hear it spinning through the air. Hell of a curve. It dropped over the plate for what would've been a strike.

I didn't bail out on it, anyway. I did wave out to the mound. “
Nobody
could hit that one,” I said. Wes looked pleased.

Then he threw me another one. Maybe it didn't break so sharply. Maybe I was set up and looking for it. Whatever you want to say, I went with it and smacked it into right. It would've been a hit. Wes didn't look so happy about that.

He threw to me for about as long as I'd shagged flies. I did what I could do. I'll never bust fences. When you can't, you're better off knowing you can't. You'll concentrate on the things you can do and get so you do them as well as you're able to.

Wes looked over to the guy who'd hit fungoes. “What d'you think, Harv?” he asked.

“Yeah, he'll work,” Harv said. Not a whole bunch of praise, but plenty to make me feel eight feet tall. Harv turned back to me. “So you want to ride with us, huh?”

“You bet I do!” I had all kinds of reasons for saying that. Big Stu was the one furthest up front, maybe, but not the biggest. When the Archdeacons or the Hilltoppers buy some busher's contract after he's knocked around in Rochester or Omaha or Denver or Portland, that's what I was feeling, or some of it. I'd never make the big time. I wasn't good enough. But the House of Daniel reckoned I was good enough for them—good enough to be a blowout patch, anyhow. Long step up from the Enid Eagles. Hell of a long step.

“All right, then. We'll take you along for a while,” Harv said. “You can start letting your hair and your whiskers grow.”

“I'll do it.” I wondered how funny I'd look and how long I'd take to look that way. Because I thought I ought to, I asked, “How bad off are your guys who slammed together?”

“Double-Double busted his ankle,” Harv said. His last name was Watrous, I remembered from the game. “Out anywhere from three months to six, the doc said. Have to hope he keeps his speed when he gets back. Rabbit … I dunno about Rabbit. His collarbone, that's not as bad a break as an ankle, and it heals cleaner.” His face clouded. “But his noggin, his dumb noggin don't seem so good. They're taking him to the hospital for a similarity scan.”

“Good they can do that kind of thing these days, anyhow,” I said, and Harv and Wes both nodded.

Like everything else, medicine keeps moving forward. A wizard with the right training can cast a spell on a hurt man's skull, say. Then he'll cast the same spell on a regular skull, one with nothing wrong with it. The law of similarity will show him all the places where the two of 'em don't match up exactly. If the hurt guy's got a break in there, the magic'll tell the wizard right where it's at so he and the rest of the docs can decide what to do about it.

Works for other bones, too—not just skulls. And they're starting to use it for the squishier parts, too, though that's not so easy. They can find things and fix things that killed people back in Great-Granddad's time. Quite a world we live in, isn't it?

“First month, we'll pay you ten bucks a game—and we play a lot of games,” Harv said. “Hang on after that—we call it sticking around after your beard grows in—and you go on shares like the rest of us.”

If they found somebody they liked better, they'd dump me. Well, every baseball team ever hatched is always looking for better players. I'd just have to be good, so they'd want to keep me.

What I said was, “It's a deal, and I thank you kindly.”

“You're helping us out of a jam, too,” Harv said. “Get back into your everyday clothes. You can hang on to those pants—they're close enough to our road grays. But you won't need that Eagles shirt any more. We'll put a lion on your chest instead. You belong to the House of Daniel now!”

*   *   *

Most semipro teams travel like the Enid Eagles. Guys fill up cars and somebody drives to wherever the next game is. You hope the clown behind the wheel isn't drunk or sleepy or coming off a brawl with his boss or his girlfriend. Players mostly show up where they're supposed to when they're supposed to. When they don't, teams drag somebody out of the stands and hope for the best. Hey, look at me. Even the House of Daniel did that.

But they traveled in style. Waiting outside Conoco Ball Park sat a streamlined bus, modern as week after next. It had enough seats for everybody on the team and enough room so everybody could stretch his legs some and not show up for the next game all tied up in knots. Each side had that open-mouthed lion's head painted on it in gaudy colors. THE LIONS' DEN was stenciled alongside it. HOUSE OF DANIEL—FAMOUS TRAVELING BASEBALL CLUB.

Most of the seats already had ballplayers in 'em by the time I climbed aboard. I nodded to a fellow with nobody next to him and said, “Mind if I sit here?” It was like your first day at a new job. Well, it
was
my first day at a new job. I'd walk soft till I scouted out how things work.

The guy nodded back, friendly enough. “Go ahead. You gotta park yourself somewhere. I'm Eddie Lelivelt.” He stuck out his hand.

I shook it. “Jack Spivey.” I stuck my bag on the luggage rack and sat down. The seat was a lot comfier than anything on the Red Ball Line, I'll tell you that.

“Good to meet you,” Eddie said. He was three, maybe four years older'n me, his hair past his ears but not to his shoulders, his beard mostly brown but with red streaks on the chin and in his mustache. He went on, “I watched 'em working you out. You can go get 'em—no two ways about that.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You were playing second, weren't you?” I wanted to make sure so I didn't say anything dumb. Guys don't always look the same once they take their caps off, and all those beards made it tougher.

Eddie Lelivelt nodded, though. “Yeah, that's me.”

“You're smooth out there,” I said. He wasn't a player who ran all over everywhere snagging things. He tried to put himself in the right place to begin with, so he could make his plays without looking like a showoff.

“Much obliged.” He grinned. When he did that, he looked about fifteen.

“I do hate to come on board like this,” I told him. “I've never seen two guys run into each other so hard before.”

“Me, neither. That was terrible.” His grin went away. “I hope Rabbit'll be all right. For a minute or so there, I was scared he'd gone and killed himself.”

“People always tell you, ‘Keep your eye on the ball,'” I said. “Him and your other fella, they did it too well.”

“Boy, you got that right,” Eddie said.

While we were talking, Harv and Wes and one or two other House of Daniel men got on the bus. The doors hissed shut. The engine started up. It sounded a lot newer, or maybe just better taken care of, than the one on the Red Ball bus. We rolled away from Conoco Ball Park, heading west.

I had a bad few seconds when I realized we were heading west. Had I joined up with the House of Daniel so I could stick my head in the lion's mouth for real? I turned back to Eddie Lelivelt. “Um, you don't have a game in Enid tomorrow, do you?”

“Nope. We're going way farther than that. Town called…” He laughed at himself. “I don't remember what it's called. Somewhere in Texas. Harv will know. Wherever we play next—that's all I can tell you. I don't care where. I'm a baseball bum. What difference does
where
make?”

“Long as it's not Enid, I don't care, either,” I said.

“I saw on your shirtfront that's where you played before,” he said. “Don't mean to stick my nose in where it doesn't belong or anything, but it sounds like you aren't sorry to give it a miss.”

“I was supposed to take care of something for one of the guys who runs things there, but it turned out to be something I couldn't stand to do,” I answered. “You can't explain to people like that. They don't want explaining. They just want you to do what they tell you. He'll take it out of my hide if he gets the chance.”

“Yeah, I've known a few like that. Everybody has, chances are,” Eddie said. “Well, traveling with the House of Daniel's a good way not to give him the chance. We go all over the map, and sometimes we don't know where we're heading till we turn left instead of right. Somebody sets up a game against a strong team in a good ballpark, we'll go. You'd best believe we will.”

“How often do y'all win, anyway?” I asked.

That
y'all
made Eddie smile. The House of Daniel fellas, they talked like they came from the North. They did, most of 'em, so I guess they were entitled. He thought for a couple of seconds, working it out. “Two out of three, three out of four, something like that,” he said. “It's baseball. You don't win all the time. Their pitcher throws a great game or one of your guys kicks one or the umps are even worse than usual or … oh, a million things. But we do all right. Plenty good enough to keep going.”

“You sure do,” I said. “Only reason Ponca City caught you there was the collision, but you won just the same. And the Greasemen, they're pretty good.”

“They weren't bad.” Eddie Lelivelt sounded like he was giving them the waddayacallit—the benefit of the doubt. He looked over at me out of the corner of his eye. “How about the Enid team you're off of? How do they stack up against Ponca City?”