by Bill Branger
“Tickets say I leave day after tomorrow.”
“That’s it,” George said.
I knew there was something wrong with all this. George practically gave me that extra twenty-five. But money has always blinded me to my own best self-interest.
That night I took Charlene out to a Mexican restaurant that was full of hot food and thirsty drinkers. Charlene can eat. I admire that in a woman. She doesn’t pick around or say she doesn’t do onions or something, the way some women do. She tucks in and even gets salsa on her chin in the process.
I told her about going to Cuba and she didn’t seem real enthused. For that matter, neither was I. The reason I don’t go to foreign countries and never got a passport is that 1 don’t want to be in a place where no one speaks English. Told that to a team buddy once and he asked me why the hell had I stayed with a New York team, then? He said he’d only found three or four people in the whole city who spoke English, or pretended to. But he was from Omaha originally and they think everyone doesn’t speak English who ain’t from Omaha.
“You ought to talk to Sid before you go,” Charlene said, wiping some food from her upper lip where it was stuck. “You think by now you’d of realized that George is not your friend.”
“I didn’t think he was my friend ever,” I said. I get riled when Charlene questions my intelligence. Any man would. “I just made me another twenty-five thousand dollars. And it’s just baseball work anyway, what I’m paid to do.”
“Go to Communist Cuba and pick out his team, right? Jest baseball work?”
“Charlene, I’m a pitcher. I know a hitter when I see one. I know a pitcher when I see one. If I was an outfielder, it’d be different. Pitchers and catchers are the smartest players on the team. They make the best coaches and managers.”
“You think you’re going to be a coach when this is over?”
“Maybe. Maybe a scout. I’d like scouting, go out and watch some games and make notes and file my expenses every month.”
“What if you scout wrong?”
“Well, I won’t. If I see someone can’t play in the Bigs, I’ll tell George and we won’t take him.”
Charlene sneered and put down her tortilla to make a point. “You’re gonna go to Castro and say, ‘This boy ain’t got it, Fidel.’ And Castro’s been standing there backing down America for more than thirty years and he’s gonna doff his hat and say, ‘Sorry, Mr. Shawn, sir, is there someone else I can get for you?’ Shit. In your dreams.”
I hadn’t exactly thought of that. Maybe I should call Sid on this thing. But it was a done deal.
“And suddenly, in the middle of January, George and this Mr. Baxter, whoever he is, fly down here and knock on your door and give you a bonus and a brand-new passport to fly down to Cuba for you to evaluate? Why didn’t he call you up to New York? Why didn’t he call Sid? Ryan Patrick Shawn, I am beginning to have grave doubts about your genetic code.”
“What does that mean?”
“You said you loved me once,” Charlene said.
“I do. You never heard me take it back.”
“I never heard you say it again, either.”
“All right, I love you, Charlene.”
“Sometime you could say it without me dragging it out of you.”
“All right.”
We sat there a moment and I saw Charlene had a head of steam and I was letting it settle down a little. She picked up her glass of beer and drank some, to cool the palate.
“Charlene?”
She just glared at me.
“I love you.”
She kept glaring, but it got less intense.
“I love you,” I said, holding her eyes in mine.
“What if we had kids? 1 want kids, but 1 don’t want dumb kids. I ain’t dumb and I never thought you were before. But what if there’s a streak of dumbness runs through you, through your genes? Then we have a kid and he’s gurgling and cute and crawling around the crib and 1 keep wondering, is this the dumb one or is he going to be like me?”
“I ain’t dumb, Charlene. I went to college.”
“You could prove it once in a while. George has got so many tricks he needs more than two sleeves. You keep falling for the same gags over and over again. This team is going to have your fingerprints all over it and George will say, when it goes wrong, that he was misled by you.”
“He can say what he wants, but I got the extra money.”
“And then, when the year is over, the Colorado Rockies or the Marlins or the Rangers or someone is gonna say, ‘Hey, you know that real dumb player on the Yankees what sold George a load of Cuban horsemeat? Let’s see if we can get him to do the same for us. Be a scout. Be a coach. Hell, we’ll make him manager.’ You think they’re gonna say that?”
“You ever think 1 might know what I’m doing around an infield? You ever think that, Charlene? I played this game man and boy for thirty years and I know a little bit about it. Just a little. It don’t matter if they lisp or wear dresses or carry those little red books the Chinese always had, they still gotta play baseball the same as anyone else. Same bat, same glove, same pill. I got eyes, I can see if someone is no good. I’ll call George and tell him —”
“What if George disappears on you again like he’s done times before?”
Damn. Another thing I hadn’t thought of.
“See what I mean, Ryan? You don’t think to the next jump. You gotta do better’n that with someone like George Bremenhaven.”
“I’ll call Sid.”
“And lock the barn door,”
“Charlene, you never told me you wanted to have kids.”
“I’m thirty-five years old and I want to be a mama. I been thinking for a while that you were the one, because 1 liked you. But these last few months, you are either acting squirrelly or you are acting dumb. I’m beginning to believe this is not acting.”
“I want to play baseball,” I explained.
She stared at me then like she’d seen me for the first time. And then she did a surprising thing. She patted my hand on the table.
“Poor baby. That’s what it is, isn’t it? You just want to play baseball,” she said.
“Yep,” 1 said.
“Ryan, Ryan.” She said my name twice in that tone women use when they’re trying to convince you that men are children. It’s the Big Mama voice, and I resent it.
“About having kids, I wouldn’t worry there. Uncle Dave, up in the Panhandle, I think he was adopted by my grandfather so he’s not natural kin to us.”
“I wasn’t thinking about anyone else except you.”
“So would you throw a kid out of your house because he wanted to be a player in the Bigs?”
“I would consider it carefully,” she said.
“If we were going to have kids, it would involve getting married. I don’t believe in that Hollywood stuff where you get married as the last thing.”
“Neither do I.”
It was my turn to stare.
She stared back and I flinched first. When you’re thirty-eight years old and been playing a boy’s game for a living all these years, you kind of think young. I never thought about marriage. I mean, for me personally.
“You’ll want to give that some thought,” Charlene said, letting me off the hook. “So will I. Did you ever have an IQ test?”
“I suppose, I don’t know. They give you one to go to college, don’t they?”
“We might need an IQ test. I just don’t want to make a mistake because I’d be stuck with it,” she said.
“Why don’t you make it an HIV test while you’re at it, Charlene?”
“Why, are you gay? You do like wearing that pink bathrobe of mine.”
“I wear your robe because it’s the only warm thing you got and when we’re lounging around your drafty old apartment in our altogether, I get cold. I don’t wanna be cold so I put on your robe, I’ll go out and buy myself a regular robe and hang it in your closet except that I ain’t seen your closet or the inside o
f your apartment for more than a month “
“Are you shouting at me, Ryan Patrick? I won’t stand to be shouted at by any man,” Charlene shouted.
People in the restaurant started to look ‘round at us and then turn away, sly-like, the way people do when they’re catching a show.
“I’m just saying there’s no reason to worry about me wearing your clothes because you don’t let me come to see you anymore,” I said.
It’s amazing how your voice carries in a place with tile on the floor and walls. Like singing in a shower, makes you sound good or, at least, loud.
“Is there something wrong, Señor?”
The waiter was large and wore a Pancho Villa mustache. At that point, I realized we might possibly be making a spectacle of ourselves. I looked at Charlene and saw she realized the same thing.
“No, no, por favor the bill,” I said and he went away.
Charlene stared at me a moment and then laughed. She laughed and laughed and I didn’t get it.
“Do you speak Spanish, isn’t that what George asked you?”
“Yeah. That’s what started it,” I said, still not getting it, Charlene just had a fit of the giggles and couldn’t stop it.
“‘Por favor, the bill?’“
“Well, we’re in Texas, honey —”
“Por favor, the bill. Where’d you get your command of language? Reading Doritos bags?”
So, naturally, I had to start laughing, too. It was a good thing because we might have stayed mad — angry — at each other if I hadn’t said it that way and Charlene hadn’t been smart enough to pick up on it. I’m not too worried about dumb being in my genes, it’s just that I don’t always see the worst in other folks the way I should.
And there was another bonus that night.
Í got to wear Charlene’s bathrobe again. And a couple of other things happened before.
14
They took me out to the ball game the night I arrived in Havana. The park was not big league bet they came out to see a ball game. The way things go in the States, a lot of the people who show up at the games are there because they can afford to be. They’re the skybox crowd, and when the skyboxes overflow, you find them down the first and third base lines in what used to be boxes and are still called that, although the real boxes are skyboxes.
They were hooting and hollering and carrying on and this was before the game even started.
My escort was a smiley little fellow with a mustache who spoke English just like Ricky Ricardo. He pointed out the players on the roster sheet who were going to be going to New York.
We ate something like beans and rice on a tortilla and it tasted good, but it was a little too hot for me. I started sweating and asked Mr. Martinez for a beer, por favor. He was my guide. My rusty Spanish was coming back bit by bit and Martinez understood me enough to send someone to fetch an ice-cold. On the other hand, it’s hard to screw up cerveza fría.
Quite a trip down: Houston to Mexico City and then a short hop to Havana International, as they call it.
It wasn’t a real warm night, not at all, but the humidity was just lying there like a bump on a log, building up to something that was going to be rain.
First guy up was not on my roster, but I watched him anyway. He walked on four pitches, which told me nothing. The next guy was on the roster, listed as infield material. He stroked a clean single to right even though he batted right-handed and the first guy, Munoz, legged it to third on the throw. The next guy up was Raul.
George told me to keep an especial eye on this kid.
The pitcher was a blazer. Threw it high and inside, just to get respect, and Raul sort of decked out of the way without acknowledging that the pitcher might want to take his head clean off. He did a couple of swings outside the box and got back into his stance way too fast. A major leaguer takes his time, Dusts his hands on the resin, looks at his bat as though he’s never seen one before — you know, all the tricks. Makes the pitcher think too much about the next pitch. But Raul was back in the box like greased lightning.
The next was high and outside and Raul shouldn’t have done it. It was a ball, but Raul couldn’t wait, maybe he had a train to catch.
He stroked the ball like Willie Mosconi shooting pool. Just that clean and certain, like it was no trouble at all. The pitch was high and outside, but Raul just reached over and plucked it out of the catcher’s mitt and batted it down the first base line, fair by two feet, all the way to the outfield walk Two runs scored and Raul stood on second not even breathing hard. The crowd started throwing things up in the air.
Damn. I was feeling like throwing things myself and I didn’t have anything but a bottle of beer and it was still half-full. The kid shouldn’t have done what he did, he should’ve waited on the next pitch, but it was like he had his own timetable and it had nothing to do with anyone else.
Raul hit three for four that night, which is a .750 clip. Mr. Martinez said Raul was the best player in Cuba, and he beamed when he said it.
The kid looked light to me, but his wrists must have been made of steel cables. He slugged the way Ted Williams slugged, rearing back to let the power of the swing flow through the wrists and sort of letting the bat dictate the power of the drive. It’s like one of those rides in the carnival where the faster the center pole turns, the higher and faster the cars on the periphery ride. Raul swung that bat and I was seeing a medieval knight swinging a mace at the end of a chain.
I was semi-impressed by it. And very tired when Mr. Martinez took me to my room at the Hilton, which is no longer a part of the Hilton chain, of course. Sort of a Comrade Hilton now.
I loved those old cars on the street. City was full of them. The air was bad from auto pollution and the streets tended to be narrow, but the cars were as wide as Wilshire Boulevard. Damn, I love old cars, I don’t know why they don’t make them anymore.
I figured when we started trading with Cuba in a big way, those old cars would be part of it. There are car collectors in this country who would pony up to get some of those rust-free specimens that were a dime a dozen on Havana streets.
The streets were mostly dark, by the way, which Mr. Martinez explained was part of the ongoing shortages, but he wasn’t complaining, I could understand why.
The room was a hotel room, all right, and the air conditioner, which was in the window, worked. It kept me awake half the night, but I didn’t dare turn it off. The rain started around one in the morning and the rain danced on the metal box hanging outside the window. I like the sound of rain on metal, I think everyone does. Rain in Texas is manna mostly, unless we get too much of it, and that seldom happened when I was a kid down in El Paso. Rain made you wanna run out in the red dirt road and dance in your clothes until you were soaked. Rain was warm when I was a kid. I bet myself, before I fell asleep, that rain in Havana was warm, too.
I spent three days watching them all on the practice field, but I didn’t show my stuff until the last day. It’s tricky evaluating minor league talent when you don’t know the starting point of what you’re looking for, but I was learning the ropes. I watched the players when they were involved in the action and that tells you a lot. Some players, especially outfielders, even in the Bigs, stand around during a game like they just happened to be there waiting for a bus. They don’t go on their toes, they barely follow the play, they want to be so cool that they outcool themselves. In other words, they don’t come to concentrate on the game.
That was not the problem in Havana. These boys played like boys. They talked all the time, the infield chattered like the inside of a Texas jail at lights out. Yak, yak, yak Spanish, mile a minute.
About this lisping thing. It is annoying at first; you miss certain words even if you speak Spanish as well as I do. Still, we had players up from Panama and Venezuela who didn’t lisp, so I could parlez in the locker room if I felt like it, but I seldom did. The other thing is slang. Cubans use slang all the time and it was hard to pick up.
The last afte
rnoon, I took the mound because I wanted to see what these boys would do when they tried a rough sample of major league pitching. Not that I am a Nolan Ryan or even a Deke Williams, but I earned my pay over the past sixteen years.
Raul.
He didn’t look like much to me from 60 feet 6 inches away, but looks can be deceiving. Ask anyone ever had to pitch to Molitor.
I remembered the way Raul had stroked that pitcher my first night in Havana. I wasn’t fastball, wasn’t even a fastballer when I was young. I could do a decent 85 miles an hour, but you only earn a ticket to Des Moiees with that kind of pitch. I was a thinker and I was thinking, standing on the mound. The ball felt wet in my hand because of sweating. Must have been the humidity. Might have had something to do with facing Raul, mano y mano, 60 feet 6 inches away.
I decided to try some chin music, just to tune him up.
I threw it inside, letter high, and he hit the deck in a cloud of dust. When you throw inside on purpose, don’t fake it. Dumb shit wants to stand there, let him get plunked in the ribs. That’s the way I throw. Deke taught me.
I heard a lot of yakking behind me, but I just took the ball back from the catcher and paid it no mind.
The catcher was a kid named Orestes Manguez and he had an arm. But there was no reason for him to burn it back to me, just because he and Raul were roommates. So I called him out to the mound.
— Orestes (I said in Spanish), batter’s gotta learn to deal with the brushback in the Bigs.
— Yes.
— You can throw the ball hard as you want to me, but I don’t want no hard feelings. This is just business.
— What?
— Baseball. This is just business. I’m making a judgment here on what your buddy can do.
— He can stick the ball right up your fat Yanqui ass, sir.
—- We’re all Yankees now (I said, making a nice pun).
But Orestes wasn’t smiling. He grumped his way back across the plate, assumed the squat, and Raul aimed his bat at me and then regripped it with both hands.
High and away.
My intention was to get him to reach for it, tap it into the infield.