by Bill Branger
— I don’t want to get drunk.
—- Fine, then don’t.
— You get drunk sometimes so that you will feel nothing. But I want to feel the pain of love.
—- You talk like an asshole, sometimes.
— I talk to you of the pain you understand. You are not so wise or clever as to hide this from me.
— Sonny, you’re twenty-three years old going on twelve. I am a grown, mature man. How did I get mature? Aging had a lot to do with it. When I was younger than you, I had a little girl named Sue at Arizona State who was just about the lovingest thing you ever saw. All golden and sweet and pleasing in her nature. I mean, she could cook and sew and keep house and wear sexy underwear and there wasn’t a bed made that could stand up to her. This was the Olympics, you understand? And she just thought I was the greatest thing invented since flour tortillas.
— And?
— Well, I was going to school on baseball scholarship and the scouts were giving me the eye and I was going to the Bigs. I just knew I was if I gave it a chance. So that’s what I did.
— What did you do? About Sue?
— I dropped her.
— You dropped her?
The way he said it, I just looked away. Through the window of the saloon. Up the street. Cab making a left turn. Bus stopping. Guy selling shit on the street. Homeless guy in a doorway, drinking something. Fascinating things. I just kept looking away, trying not to see Sue, as she was a long time ago.
— She didn’t it in with my plans. First thing you know, I would have had kids and a house to worry about. I wanted to be free to play baseball and play it as best as I could.
— Oh, that is the saddest story I have heard in a year. That is just so sad.
— Why is it sad? She married someone else and probably has achieved every goal she ever set for herself.
— Except to marry you.
— Well, you got to make sacrifices. That’s what I been trying to tell you about growing up. Every day isn’t going to be Christmas, Raul. Everything is a trade-off. You get this, but you give up that. You want that, you have to give up this.
— But love is not a commodity.
— Tell that to the hookers on Eighth Avenue.
— This is not prostitution. Love is not sex, it is not debased.
— You sure you’re not a secret Jesuit infiltrated into Cuba by the Church? You talk like a priest.
— Ah, I can’t talk to you. I can’t talk to you anymore. You have told me a sad story of your own life and you do not even see the sadness in it.
— I didn’t say I didn’t see the sadness in it. I said being sad is part of the price.
He stared at me then as though he was seeing my skull under the cover of skin and it horrified him.
Then, very slowly, he shook his head and there were tears in those doe eyes. He stood up and put out his hand and rested it on my shoulder.
—- You don’t even understand, Señor Shawn. But you have made me understand for the first time. Made me understand for myself and for my beloved Maria.
— Understand what?
But he just shook his head and took his hand off my shoulder and turned. He went to the door. He stopped and looked back at me. Then he went through the doorway into the steam of a New York summer night,
I just sat there a moment and thought about Sue as she was, nubile little thing. She was making someone happy somewhere.
And Charlene.
I wanted to call her just then, but I was in a saloon on Broadway in the middle of Manhattan and what could I say to her anyway?
And there was a worse thought.
What if she was out when I called?
28
The All-Star break in the season came the second week of July and none too soon for me. When you’re thirty-eight, going on thirty-nine, 162 games is just too many. I looked forward to the break. I planned on lying down to Houston and picking up Charlene for a short trip to Vegas. I don’t gamble to make it count, but this guy on the White Sox can get you five nights in a nice hotel on the Strip and comps to the Siegfried and Roy show, the one with the white tigers, and some funny money to play with for less than three hundred dollars. Besides, I needed to recharge my batteries and I was missing Charlene very much.
The team was a semi-solid second, three behind the Red Sox in the American League East. Raul had been second in the voting for the American League All-Star team and the team manager had picked him as a sub, so Raul was scheduled to be at the big game in Cleveland while me and Charlene would be at the gaming tables on the Strip.
That was the way it was supposed to be. I admit I was feeling lax. I hadn’t seen Baxter since that afternoon in my room in Fort Lee. I wondered whether he was fretting about how well we were doing. There had been six more certified brawls. The New York papers had turned around and were starting to love us. We were the Scrappy Yanks, the Go-to-Hell Gang, the best thing in baseball brawling since the Gas House Gang operated in St. Louis in Dizzy Dean’s day. I was balancing everything, the players who were not pussy (Tomas had picked up his fielding percentage after someone explained to him what a croquet wicket was), George, who still called me at one in the morning, and Charlene in Texas, who didn’t know what to think about it all.
I just wanted her to think about me in Vegas. Our little hideaway.
It was nice, the first day, with us gambling a little on the video poker machine and taking a swim in the outdoor pool. It felt good to relax and Charlene was just this side of legal in her bathing suit, which made me very proud of her. Everything was going to be nice. So I thought at the time. It lasted most of the day and the night.
Then it happened. I got this frantic phone call at four in the morning in our room at the Mirage Hotel. It was George. Who else would call me at four in the morning? I said something to him that wasn’t polite and slammed down the receiver.
“Who was it?” Charlene said. She was naked and mussed. We had had a wonderful evening and a half crammed into one.
“Who do you think would call me at four in the morning?” I said. “Your friend George.”
“You keep saying that. I met the man once in my life and he was thoroughly charming.”
“And Hitler had cute bangs,” I said.
“Really, Ryan —”
The phone was ringing again. I turned on the light this time and picked up the receiver.
“Ryan, how dare you hang up on me?”
“George, I’m taking a few days off.”
“I’m in fucking Cleveland,” George said.
“Was it a good game?”
“It was a good game, who gives a shit if it was a good game or not? The important thing is he’s not here. He’s gone. Vanished. Vamenos.”
“Who’s vanished?” I said.
“Raul Guevara, you son of a bitch. This is some trick of yours, some sneaky little way to get back at me for sending those Roxanne Devon letters to your broad.”
“I knew you did it —”
“That was part of the fun, you knowing. But now this isn’t funny, this is serious, and I want you to stop playing games and produce that Cuban cocksucker before I get the FBI to tear you a new asshole, asshole.”
“You’re stuttering, George.”
“Is he there? Is he there with you right now? You gone queer for him, is that it? I don’t care if you two want to play daisy chain, just tell me he’s there in bed with you right now and I won’t say a word. You know what Castro does to queers? He cuts off their gonads and fries them up for breakfast, you cocksucker! Give me that shit about poor little Raul sitting all alone in his room pouring out his heart to his alleged girlfriend in Havana when all along you been taking him out to your queer spots in the Village and hanging around with your sissy friends and —”
“George, no one is here.”
“You lying son of a bitch! Put him on!”
“It’s for you,” I said to Charlene. I gave her the phone.
“Hello,” she said,
“Who the fuck is this!” George screamed.
“Don’t you shout at me, ain’t no man ever going to shout at me and get away with it!” she shouted.
“I mean, is this you, Charlene?” I was standing next to Charlene and heard him yelling.
“Yes, it’s me, who’d you think it was?”
“He told me he sent the Roxanne Devon letters to you just to stir up trouble,” I said from my side of the bed.
“Is that right, George? Did you send those letters to me?”
“Who gives a shit about letters, you bitch! Put loverboy back on the phone,” George said.
She blanched and put her hand over the receiver. “He called me a name I can’t repeat.”
“George is like that,” I said, I was glad she was seeing the snake for what he really was.
“Aren’t you going to do something?”
I took back the phone. “George, did you call Charlene a bad name?”
“Fuck you, fuck both of you. Ryan, Raul has disappeared off the face of the earth. He was supposed to be in Cleveland for the All-Star game. No show. I call the East Side Hotel. Nobody’s seen him. I send over my friends from the Twenty-third Precinct and they roust the place. They find two wanted armed robbers and a welfare queen the state has a warrant for, but they don’t find Raul Guevara. Fucking cops are worthless. I send them to that Tapas place and the bag who runs it said she hasn’t seen him for days. She’s lying, that fucking whore! I’m going crazy, Ryan.”
“I know, it sounds like it,” I said. I couldn’t keep the pleased tone out of my voice.
“Ryan! You gotta find him, you’re his best buddy!”
“You just said I was queer for him.”
“A figure of speech, Ryan. Ryan … Ryan, you gotta find him “
“I don’t know where to look for him. You hit the only two places I know he ever went, the hotel room and the Tapas.”
“What do you mean, he ever went? It’s a big city, the greatest city on Earth, he must have had dozens of places — Girls, where did he go for girls, Ryan?”
“He didn’t go for girls,” I said.
“Boys, then. Where’d he hang out to pick up boys? You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone. Down on Christopher Street —”
“George, you’d inform on your mother if there was any woman willing to admit she was your mother, which I doubt.”
“Tell me he’s with you.”
“He’s with me and Charlene right now. We’re doing a double reverse in a few minutes, also called a Charlene Sandwich.”
“A fucking orgy! I knew it!” George shouted. “You really are best buddies, but you aren’t fags! Great! Just put him on the line a sec. I want to hear that spic’s beautiful Spanish voice one time.”
“I’m sorry, George. We’ve got him bound and gagged. That was from our last assignment together.”
“Ball players are sick, sick people. But hey, live and let live is all right by me. Ryan, tell me that he’s all right.”
“He’s all right”
“Are you telling me that because it’s true or because you’re just telling me that?”
“Guess.”
“You son of a bitch, you’re fired! Fired! Get your shit out of the locker room by this afternoon.”
“I don’t keep no shit in the locker room. Baseball players are thieves.”
“Then don’t let me see you again, you cocksucker! I am going to file suit against you and don’t think I’m going to pay you, not for what you’ve done to me. The FBI is going to be on this case. On your case. Kidnapping is a federal crime.”
“You’re a walking federal crime, George,” I said. I said it very calmly because that upsets George even more.
“Where the fuck is he, Ryan?”
“You fired me. So I won’t tell you. Good night, George.”
I replaced the receiver and just sat there. Charlene was leaning on one naked elbow close enough to let me smell her. She smelled sweet, which is her natural odor.
“What happened?”
“Raul took a walk.”
“George doesn’t know where.”
“No.”
“You know.”
“Yep.”
“He told you.”
“Not in so many words.”
She worried her lower lip with her upper teeth a moment and just looked at me before she said anything.
“He went home.”
That’s what I like about Charlene. Under her mere beauty, she is smart. I’m about the only mistake in judgment in her life and that can be explained.
“Yep.”
“Back to Cuba.”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“Boy’s in love. Wants it to stay that way. So he figures that he’d better hitch up with his girlfriend while the hitching is good. Hitting way over .400, he can go home even if Castro don’t want him to go home and he can be a national hero and get married. The boy thinks. He doesn’t have this love stuff down, but he works at thinking.”
“What love stuff?”
“Maria Velasquez is a beauty and he thinks she won’t wait for him.”
“He got any reason to think that?”
“Not that I know of. Just insecure. I tried to talk to him but it wasn’t any good.”
“Tell him what?”
“That shell wait for him.”
“Why would she?”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“You think all a woman’s got to do is sit around and wait?”
“No. But waiting is a sign of maturity.”
“I’m mature enough, thank you. I got mature in crow’s feet on my eyes. I don’t enjoy waiting. Certainly don’t enjoy waiting on a man who keeps you waiting just because he thinks he can get away with it. Ever notice that a man won’t wait on a woman, but lots of women wait on a man? Says he’ll meet you at one and he comes in late and you’re supposed to la-de-da all that, but you keep a man waiting, they practically accuse you of something.”
“I don’t recall keeping you waiting, Charlene.”
“You really don’t, do you?”
See, this was turning ugly the way it can and I knew it, but it was like putting the brakes on a ship just about to plow into the dock in the Houston Ship Canal.
I was saved by the phone.
I picked it up again and said, “Hello.”
“Ryan, I unfire you.” The calm George. “I want you to find Raul.”
“I think he went home, George,”
“Why would he do that?”
“He’s in love, I told you all that.”
“He went home because he’s in love?”
“Home is where his girlfriend lives.”
“Then he’s coming back here?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Get him, Ryan. Get him for the love of God and baseball. We are talking about maybe the greatest hitter in the history of baseball and he’s going back to Cuba? How did he get out of this country in the first place?”
“I don’t know. He’s got relatives in Miami.”
“I want their names. I’m turning them over to the FBI This is subverting the foreign policy of the United States government.”
“Aw, George. Don’t do everything ass backward. Tell the people you know in the government what’s going on and what happened and let them sort it out. If Raul don’t wanna play baseball in the U.S., we can’t make him.”
“Why wouldn’t he want to? This is the greatest country in the world, isn’t it?”
“In parts,” I said.
“Castro wouldn’t go back on his contract, would he?”
“In a New York minute.”
“He can’t do that to me.”
“I don’t think this involved Fidel Castro, I think this was a Raul Guevara production. He’s hitting .452 and he can go back to Cuba as a national hero, and what’s Fidel gonna do about it? Put him in jail for not wanting to play ball in New York?”
“But
we’re the New York Yankees.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes people don’t get choked up the way you do about it.”
“You gotta go to Havana, Ryan. You gotta go get my boy back.”
“He ain’t your boy, George —”
“I paid for the son of a bitch, he belongs to me!”
I held the phone a little away from my ear because George was starting to give me a headache.
“You gotta do it, Ry. We start up again in two days, we need that boy in the lineup. He’s gonna be the batting champ, the man who hit over .400 first time since Ted Williams. He is a New York Yankee.”
I liked George’s appeals to patriotism because it meant I had him over a barrel. I was learning Sid Cohen’s lesson.
“George, if I go down to Havana and talk to him, you gotta do something for me.”
“I do everything for you now.”
“No, no, George. You know what you gotta do.”
“What do I have to do?”
“You have to tell Charlene.”
“Tell her what?”
“Tell her what you just told me.”
“Why?”
“It would make me happy,” I said.
“You mean about Roxanne Devon?”
“Yep.”
“All right.” Just like that. George doesn’t even have loyalty to himself.
“And one other thing.”
“What, for Christ’s sake?”
“About that steak “
“What steak?”
“The steak in the Century Plaza Hotel.”
“For Christ’s sake, Ryan, this is childish.”
“You’re the childish one, George. You keep giving people a hot foot because you never grew up.”
“All right, all right. I’ll tell her”
“Tell her everything,” I said.
“All right already.”
I handed the phone to Charlene.
She was the ice princess in tone as she said, “Yes?” Like Catherine of Russia, except in English.
Charlene listened. And listened.
“That was a rotten thing to do to me. And to Ryan. You ought to be horse-whipped,” Charlene said. “And you even lied to me about eating meat? Well, you’re going to be the one that ends up with prostate problems, not me.” She handed the phone back to me.
“Okay, George. You got to clear me through so I can fly legal to Havana.”