Night of the Avenging Blowfish

by John Welter

  “This is stupid,” someone in the outfield said.

  “Well, then, why’re you here?”

  “Because he’s stupid.”

  “Okay. Everyone turn on their flashlights,” Widdiker said, and we did, shining them on each other so that here and there in the dark were long, yellow beams of light crisscrossing each other for no reason except screwing around. Someone started singing, “Yooouuu light up my life.”

  “Okay,” Widdiker said. I waited for him to do something.

  “Okay,” he said again.

  “Okay what?” I said.

  “Okay,” he repeated, as if all he was going to do was stand at the pitcher’s mound and keep saying “Okay.”

  “Okay. Let me get the ball ready,” Widdiker said. He turned on his flashlight and shined it on the ball for a few seconds, then turned off the flashlight and held a faintly glowing, orange baseball. It looked like glowing debris from a volcano.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Where are you?” he said.

  “Here,” I said.

  “Well, should I pitch toward the sound of your voice, thus striking you in the head?”

  “Should I throw a phosphorous grenade?” DeMarco said. “You could see him then.”

  “Yeah. If my clothes were on fire, you could see me,” I said.

  “Just use your flashlight,” Widdiker said.

  “You mean you want me to throw my flashlight at him?” DeMarco said.

  “Turn on your flashlight,” Widdiker said.

  “How can I hold a flashlight and a bat at the same time?” I said.

  “I could turn mine on,” Oxler said from behind home plate. It was so dark, I’d forgotten we had a catcher. Oxler turned his flashlight on and put it on the ground behind home plate.

  “Don’t throw very hard,” I said. “If you hit me with the ball, I’m throwing this bat at you.”

  “Whiner,” Widdiker said.

  Widdiker shined some more light on the ball to make it glow again.

  “Are you ready?” he said.

  “No.”

  I saw the ball rise up in the dark over Widdiker’s head and I clenched the bat tightly. The orange ball whizzed toward me, right at me, and I jumped back and heard the ball bounce off the wire backstop.

  “Strike one,” Widdiker said happily.

  “That wasn’t a strike. You almost hit me,” I said as Oxler picked up the ball and tossed it back to where he imagined Widdiker was.

  “Okay. We’ll say it was a ball,” Widdiker said, turning his flashlight on to shine it on the ball. “Are you ready?”

  “No.”

  This time, the glowing ball came relatively close to the strike zone, and I swung at it and missed. But no one could have seen me swing.

  “Ball two,” I said.

  “You swung at it. I heard you,” Widdiker said.

  “Did you see me swing at it?”

  “He swung,” Oxler said.

  “You didn’t have to tell him,” I said.

  “Okay, strike two,” Widdiker said, shining his light on the ball. “This is going to be a split-fingered fastball.”

  “You don’t even know what a split-fingered fastball is,” Deek called out.

  Okay,” Widdiker said. “This is going to be a spitball.”

  “Don’t spit on the ball,” I said. I could hear Widdiker clearing his throat, as if trying to accumulate all of the saliva and phlegm he had.

  “He’s going to throw a phlegm-ball,” Yamato said.

  “Don’t put phlegm on the ball,” I said.

  Widdiker kept clearing his throat as loudly as possible, then started making spitting noises.

  “Everyone back up,” Deek said. “If Coldiron hits that ball, there’ll be phlegm all over everyone.”

  Widdiker shined some more light on the ball and said, “Wow. This is really sticky.”

  “And it’s going right back in your groin, too,” I said. “I’m aiming a line drive at your balls.”

  “Ready?” Widdiker said.

  “Unfortunately for you, I am.”

  The glowing ball came toward me in a blurred, orange arc, and when I realized that this one was going to be well within the strike zone, a little burst of exuberance and adrenalin raced through me as I swung as smoothly and violently as I could. It was a solid smash, and everyone yelled and screamed in glee or awe as the glowing ball rose far, far up into the immense night, still going upward and away, this faint blur of orange looking like a comet leaving the Earth while I ran slowly to first base; slowly, because I wanted to watch the ball; slowly, because in the dark I didn’t know where first base was.

  Several people were yelling, “Home run! Home run!” and right when the ball had passed its highest stage in the dark, and began its descent that would give us a one-to-nothing lead over ourselves, there was a gunshot and a flash in the outfield, where Deek was, and then two more shots from the same gun.

  Boom! B-Boom! And the ball actually went backward, my God—at least one of the bullets hit the ball pretty squarely—and the ball rose up a few feet and went backward and then down into the infield, its pale, orange glow beginning to diminish, like it was dying.

  Everyone was completely silent, as if realizing that when you shoot a gun in the city, police might come. Squinting in the dark, I walked over to the barely glowing ball and picked it up and felt a bullet hole in it. Everyone from the infield and the outfield ran silently up to me and stood around me in a circle, and I could smell the gunpowder from Deek’s gun.

  “Deek?” Widdiker said. “Why’d you shoot the fucking ball?”

  “Well, I just felt it was my responsibility as an outfielder,” Deek said.

  I walked up to Deek with the ball and said, “You shot my home run.”

  “I think we should go,” Yamato said. “Someone might call the police.”

  Oxler shined his flashlight on the ball and we all looked at the bullet hole.

  “It was going to be a home run,” I said wistfully. “I never hit a home run before. Do you understand that?”

  “I’m sorry,” Deek said.

  “We better go,” Pascal said impatiently.

  “I think I hear a siren,” Horner said, and it sounded like there was a siren somewhere.

  “I mean, damn it,” I said, looking at the wounded ball. “I’ll never be anybody’s hero, like Roger Maris or Reggie Jackson. I’ll never be famous, or particularly well-liked, and maybe no one even misses me, you know? Maybe right now in the world there’s not a single person who wonders where I am or when they’ll see me. And maybe everything I do is so ordinary it’ll be forgotten almost the instant after I do it. And when I die, they’ll misspell my name on the tombstone, and the inscription will say ‘Like Everyone Else, He Died.’ And I’ll be completely forgotten, like a withered old artifact that isn’t even as valuable as a petrified dinosaur bone. But I at least thought, for a few seconds tonight, that if I’m going to be denied everything else, I could at least have a home run. That’s all. No wealth. No fame. No wife. No lover. But as a trivial consolation, an accomplishment of no real meaning, I thought I could at least have the harmless glee of hitting a baseball so far that no one could catch it. But you shot it. You shot my home run.”

  “I’m sorry,” Deek said gloomily.

  “The siren’s getting louder,” Widdiker said. “We better evacuate.”

  Everyone started running off the field except me. I shined a flashlight on the ball and made it glow again, except for the bullet hole. I looked out into the dark where my home run had been going when it was shot and I ran a few steps forward and then threwwwwwww the ball as high and hard as I could, and watched the little orange streak go forward with my life. It went into the trees and I heard it hit something, and it was gone.

  “Home run,” I said, and I imagined Natelle smiling at me. Then a police car drove up to the edge of the baseball field with its flashing lights on, and I used my
Secret Service training to run off into the dark, welcoming trees.

  35

  There was a thunderhead off the coast of Indizal as our jet approached the island, and Widdiker looked out the window in front of Yamato and me and said, “Look. That cloud is bigger than Indizal.”

  It almost was. From the air, Indizal looked like an inflatable island, like one of those random geographical features produced by a volcano, that stuck pathetically out of the ocean for no clear reason. The island was surrounded by a dozen or more smaller islands that looked as if they were dropped out of the sky and just hadn’t floated away yet. When we landed on what appeared to be a dangerously short runway, I couldn’t tell if the pilot had the front of the jet tilted upward or if the weight of the jet made the island tilt. The worst thing was when one of the crew members opened the door and a wave of heat and humidity raced in with the overpowering odor of unknown plants and flowers, as if the island were attacking us. Just a few seconds after I’d stepped onto the runway and started sweating, a giant flying bug landed on my forehead. Despite the fact that several government and military officials were standing there to greet us, I yelled, “Goddamn it!” and slapped the bug off my forehead.

  All of the government and military officials looked at me and laughed. One of them, an officer in a gray uniform, walked up to me with a cheerful smile and said, “Goddamn it!” then lightly slapped himself on the forehead. I think the only English he knew was what I had just taught him. He bent over and picked up the giant flying bug, which was slightly twisted and mutilated now, and held the bug in front of me and said something in Spanish, which of course I didn’t understand. Another officer walked over to us and said, “I am speak English. He is say this is a gravedigger beetle. Has poison bite, but usually only bite bugs. Maybe he mistake you for bug.”

  “Goddamn it!” the first officer said, laughing again as he slapped himself on the forehead.

  “It’s good that you’re teaching him English,” Deek said as he walked by.

  For two days we simply attended security meetings, studied the official schedules of the president and other politicians, studied maps of the city and the surrounding countryside—as little of it as there was—and staked out our spots in the Hotel Grenadier, where the president and everyone else would be staying. A grenadier, I found out in a dictionary, was a soldier in a special regiment, or a soldier equipped with grenades. This meant that Indizal’s most elegant hotel was named after grenades. Widdiker said that after the maids made your bed each day they put fresh shrapnel under your pillow. That’s when I started calling it the Hotel Shrapnel.

  It wasn’t a good sign. Nothing was. Natelle was on her retreat, trying to reassemble her ruined life, possibly deciding whether I should be a part of it and unable to tell me so because I was gone, against my will. My home run, the only home run in my life, was shot down during our victory over ourselves, and the police came. Then we flew to an island that was essentially a volcano that hadn’t recently blown up and didn’t need to, because politics were so volatile on the island that there were plenty of mortars and rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles for everyone. Even though the PDF had ostensibly been defeated in the recent civil war, there were dozens or even hundreds of PDF fighters and mercenaries on Indizal and its nearby islands, hiding out in the jungles that no one cared to search because of such things as gravedigger bugs, vipers, mosquitos with lethal bacteria, and a virtual absence of roads to go on to look for them. Plus the hotel was named after grenades. Everything was a bad sign. I didn’t really believe in omens, but I believed in reality, and this was bad reality, crawling all over us like the first tingling sensations of a panic. And I was lonely. I didn’t want any of this. I just wanted to love Natelle and be loved back. But the world didn’t work that way. As far as I could tell, the world didn’t work at all. That was why we had hundreds of armed men on a volcano with trees. That was why Natelle had a ruined life with no instructions on how to fix it. That was why I was always on the verge of giving myself to her, with no obvious proof that she wanted me.

  On the evening of the second day there, when Natelle would come home and I couldn’t see her, and we had the night off before the president arrived in the morning, I snuck down the street from the Hotel Shrapnel to a little bar to get pleasantly drunk. I ordered a gin and tonic without any tonic, just the way Aramilo drank them, and I held the gin up to my nose and breathed it in, and it made me tingle with the promise of peace; I needed peace and there wasn’t any in me, and I knew I wasn’t just about to drink. It was worse than that. I was about to annihilate myself. This wasn’t gin. It was anesthesia. I drank to feel human. Or probably to stop feeling human. And I wanted that gin badly, wanted it to come into me and race through me like the peace I didn’t have. And it would do that. It would cover me like a layer of blessed numbness, through which no sadness could enter and none could leave. And when the layer wore off, all I’d have to do would be drink again and drink again and again, until I wasn’t anybody anymore, until I was a blob of pain fighting itself.

  My face and my hands were sweating, either from having no gin or from wanting it, and I realized, or it seemed like I did, that even if Natelle might never want me, at least I better want me. Maybe I’d be alone all my life, but I’d be alone with me, and I’d better be nicer to me.

  I picked up the glass and tossed the gin behind me, listening to it splash on the floor.

  “Goddamn it!” a man yelled. I looked behind me and it was the same officer I’d seen at the airport, sitting now at a table with a dark trail of gin across his pant leg. The officer slapped his forehead and smiled at me, as if even though I’d just thrown gin on him, he was willing to think it was some bizarre American bar ritual and there was no reason to be mad at me. Still smiling, he picked up his glass of beer and tossed the beer behind him onto another officer, who began laughing and slapped his forehead and said, “Goddamn it!” and then threw his beer on the first officer. It worried me that I was teaching them how to be Americans.

  WITHIN MINUTES after Air Force One landed at the airport and the president and his gang of middle-aged white men in expensive suits stepped off the jet and into the vast crowd of Secret Service agents, reporters, camera crews, and Indizalian politicians and military officers wearing elegant white suits, I recognized on the tarmac an inconceivably frail and tiny figure: Ambassador Hobar Aramilo, who waved a conductor’s baton as he directed an orchestra playing “Begin the Beguine.”

  Over my earphone I heard someone say, “Isn’t that a dance song? Do they expect the president to dance?”

  I was supposed to be looking for shooters, snipers, and madmen, and I was, but the music made me think of Natelle, an urgently loved woman as distant as a faintly twinkling star. I didn’t feel well. I couldn’t imagine that I ever had. I kept looking for madmen and wondering where Natelle was, but I was distracted when the orchestra stopped playing its instruments and everyone began whistling the theme song from “The Andy Griffith Show.” Evidently, Aramilo had found out that it was one of the president’s favorite shows.

  A voice in my earphone said, “What’re they going to play next—the theme song from ‘Petticoat Junction’?”

  The president held both of his hands above his head and waved to the orchestra as agents herded him and part of his gang into some old 1960s black Cadillacs to take them to the Hotel Shrapnel for the first meetings of the Economic Summit of Small and Inconsequential Nations. The summit had a real name, but I never used it.

  The bad thing about this trip, aside from the fact that I was about four thousand miles from Natelle, was that Indizal still had armed insurgents, some of whom might want to shoot at us. Presumably, they were in hiding and were either so fearful or demoralized from their drubbing in their little civil war that they weren’t a danger to anyone. This was bullshit. Anyone with a gun was a danger, including us. As we were taught in our earliest days of training, anyone could be a threat to the president: Busboys, bellmen, barb
ers. Dishwashers, dancers, doormen. Waiters, wine stewards, winos. Reporters, receptionists, ranchers. Generals, gardeners, gumbo. Well, maybe not gumbo.

  “Everybody is a suspect,” Doltmeer liked to say. “The only way to make the world completely safe for the president is to kill everyone else on the planet. Clearly we don’t have the budget for that.”

  In Indizal, though, the most ominous people weren’t the hidden members of the PDF, but some of the very politicians the president was to talk with at the summit; the ill-tempered and envious leaders of struggling little nations who were understandably indignant about the dominance of the Western World, meaning, in my opinion, Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty. And in a way, the city of Rio D’Iguana did resemble Dodge City, Kansas, in the sense that, back in the late 1800s, Dodge City was swarming with armed civilians who freely roamed the streets and hotels. And so it was here, with each leader from each country bringing with him or her a dozen or more bodyguards carrying machine pistols and machine guns and automatic pistols—everyone protecting their leaders as though they were queen bees. Including ourselves, there were at least two hundred armed men at the summit, ready to shoot anyone who looked suspicious, and of course everyone looked suspicious. If, as we were told, one of the goals of the summit was to help disintegrate the cultural and economic barriers that sustained nationalism and war, then it was pretty obvious that we were the most heavily armed pacifists in the world.

  Before the state dinner at the Hotel Shrapnel that evening, I was one of the agents assigned to hang out in the hotel kitchen and make sure none of the kitchen staff put bombs or poison in the food.

  “Why would they want you in the kitchen?” Yamato wondered as we walked to the kitchen.

  “It must be my extensive experience with Spam,” I said.

  “Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

  “You know, usually you don’t know what you’ll regret until you’ve already done it.”

  “Just don’t do anything stupid,” Yamato said.

  “Fine. We’ll assign that to someone else.”