When We Were Wolves (2 page)

We had all grown up together in Porcupine, playing prairie ball on a sand-and-rock field in the cool of early evening. As kids, when the Cubs and White Sox games were on and the weather allowed for good reception, we would sit cross-legged in the mercantile owned by Asa’s mother and listen through the static on a storage-battery neutrodyne set to the Chicago teams on WLS. The nine of us, shiny black hair, no shirts, dirty bare feet, stared at the radio among the canned goods. The radio put the idea of professional baseball into our heads. We would play ball, passing around our one and only glove, taking turns spitting Red Man chaw into the sweet spot and working it in with our fists. We learned to field bad hops bare-handed, bad hops being the rule.

Job stayed out past dark every night, throwing at a red strike zone painted on an outhouse behind the store. Throw, walk, pick up the ball, back to the makeshift mound, throw again at the target he could no longer see. Job’s pitching made a slow, metered thump against the weathered wood, like the beating of a drum at sunset.

I began to stay behind with him to catch, where the whistling sound of his pitches became so familiar that soon I could catch Job in the dark. Though I was small and skinny, I grew to realize that my purpose in life would be to wear the secondhand tools of ignorance in the dirt behind home plate.

“How’s the arm tonight?” I’d yell to Job as I squatted to catch a fastball, knowing he wouldn’t answer. His mind was too busy listening to the electric hum of his pitches.

We got the red-and-gray wool-flannel uniforms, patched and stained, but free, from a women’s relief circle over in Mud Butte. The uniforms were at least ten years old, having belonged to a team of white ranch hands. The team name came easy—the felt letters across the chest already scripted:
MUD BUTTE INDIANS.

The Indians’ play had much in common with the colored teams of the time. We were hustlers. We liked to bunt. We loved to steal third and home. We utilized the squeeze play and the hit-and-run. We knew about sacrificing.

Sometimes our aggressiveness cost us runs. But often, against the better teams—colored teams and semi-pro squads out of Aberdeen or Jamestown or Dickinson or Mobridge or Chadron or Stillwater—we made up the difference between losing and winning through hustle alone. This with only an hour or two of bad sleep in the car and just nine players—no one on the pine. Job Looks Twice had to pitch the entire game, and even doubleheaders some Sundays. The winning was so easy we sometimes put one of the Elk brothers on the mound and rested Job’s arm. Some days we played our hearts out and won. Other days a different luck would pick up a bat and knock us into the next county.

Close calls always went to the other team. Called strikes were unheard-of. Job never argued with umpires, because he knew it was fruitless. The umps had the support of the fans, who sometimes resembled angry mobs. The other teams had to either go down swinging or hit the ball into play so we could glove it.

Our vested interest in winning games went well beyond pride. When we didn’t win we didn’t get paid. We were in high demand.
Our name was hoodoo. Many people believed that beating the Indians would bring a break from the dust. As well as being the catcher, I also arranged the Indians’ schedule, which usually meant wiping the layers of dust from my face, tucking my braid down the back of my collar and hustling into town while the rest of the Indians scrounged up supper by the river. Except for Job. We’d find the local watering hole and speak with the mayor, the sheriff, barkeeps, the undertaker, the men who planned the games. They ran ads in the local newspapers, cartoons of feathered savages with big teeth and tomahawks running bases. Word of our winning preceded us, and opposing teams shot beanballs at our heads in the early innings. Sometimes it was a hard sell to get the men interested in playing us at all. “Beat us and maybe it will rain,” I told them, their eyes on Job and the arm that wasn’t there.
Hell
, their faces would say,
if we can’t beat a one-armed Indian baseball team, we don’t deserve rain.

“You shouldn’t sell us on rain,” Job said to me once on the way back to the river camp. “It will come back to hurt us.”

“Sometimes it’s the only way I can sell us,” I said. The more I sold the Indians as rainmakers, the less Job accompanied me to town, until finally he stopped altogether.

Just before the Indians lost Job to the weather for good, we’d played an honest-to-God rainmaking in Custer and won under a hot, cloudless sky. The pinewoods around Custer were terribly dry and infected with beetles, and fire threatened to flatten the entire town. Heavy woodsmoke from the lumber kilns hung in the brown trees like a premonition. The mill boss let his employees off on a Wednesday afternoon for the game and townsfolk took a desperation holiday. Custer also had gotten word that beating the Indians would bring rain. The Indians beat the Colonels 7 to 0. We were
glad for the victory and downright thankful to make it out of town with our hides. They were too mad that we took away their rain to bother paying us. These white towns took their water rights seriously. It was a long time thereafter before Custer got rain.

We kept winning games and it kept not raining. Sometimes we got paid, but most often not. Job began believing in the pattern of winning and no rain, no matter how hard we tried to talk him out of it.

“Maybe it is true,” Job said to me after the Custer win. “You say it when you go to town.”

“I only say it so they’ll want to play us. Its business,” I tried to reason.

“We won the game and I know the weather,” he said, gripping his empty sleeve. “There is no rain.”

“Times are hard,” Otis Downwind said. “Back in Winner I saw a porcupine behind the madhouse eating on a onion.”

“So what?”

Otis looked at Job and paused. “Times are hard when a porcupine’s gotta eat a onion.”

After a few more nonpaying, no-rain wins, when things were looking especially hungry for the Indians, I managed to set up a rainmaking game in Faith, with a couple of other games along the way. We spent the next few days in the car, heading into the setting sun, to Faith, at a bone-jarring thirty miles per hour.

The car wasn’t a thing to rely on. The best Model Ts lasted about thirty-five thousand miles. Ours had over fifty thousand miles when Asa bought it from an old man in Mitchell. The car handled the rutted dirt roads like a cattle car. The wind and dirt had sandblasted the paint off and the body was rusted nearly through. Now and then it would backfire—Kaboom!—loud as a field gun. For relief from the heat we hung canvas water bags from the door hinges.
Condensation formed and made the air blowing over the bags less hot. When the radiator boiled over—which happened every fifty or so miles with the load of us—the bags came in handy. Some days the T started. Other days it didn’t.

Tumbleweeds collected along the fencerows and dirt drifted against the tumbleweeds until it almost covered the fences. What grass was left burned. Smoke filled the sky and we never truly did see it blue. Some days, through the haze, a dirt roller would birth out of the horizon. It looked like a thunderstorm, but blacker, angrier. Sometimes it would strike while the Indians would be on a ball field, sometimes we’d be in the middle of nowhere in the Ford. The sun would disappear altogether and there’d be midnight at noon.

On the way to Faith we stopped to wash our uniforms and feet with rocks and powdered soap in a shallow, muddy slew of the Bad River. Job loved to fish for catfish. He would bait his hook with a grasshopper at the end of a braided line on an old cane pole he carried strapped to the car like an antenna. Some folks who had already lost everything lived along the rivers in Hoover camps. They fished for food and when the carp and catfish weren’t biting there was no dinner. Out of canned hams and beets, our guys hadn’t eaten since early the day before, when we caught a few bluegills and Job beaned a rain crow with a fastball. We roasted the pigeon-tasting bird over the campfire and ate it with coffee.

The next day Job landed a channel cat that must have gone fifteen pounds. He picked up the fish by the lip and walked to a little camp of tents that met with the river and the highway. He gave the cat to a family of sharecroppers with eight or ten young kids.

“What in hell,” said Carp Whitehorse. “You gave them our dinner for nothing?”

“Not for nothing,” Job said, shaking his stump at the third baseman. “Nothing is for nothing.”

Our uniforms dried flapping in the wind on the long drive to Faith.

The Indians blew into town from the east. I slowed the car and idled down Main Street to the ball field at the west end of town, near the sun-bleached Lutheran church. Folks on the square pointed and stared. A brass band warmed up with scales in a weathered gazebo.

The outfield in Faith was dirt, cracked and hard, just like the infield. Barbed wire separated center from the scrabbled wheat field, where brown-and-yellow shoots of Russian wheat gasped for water and fought to stay upright. This wheat held hope. As Job threw me some lifeless pitches and the rest of the Indians played pepper and stretched, the bleachers slowly filled with baseball fans, the convicted, and the simply curious.