The New York

by Bill Branger

  “Oh, I can do that.”

  “And Charlene. We are interrupting our vacation for you, so the least you can do is fly Charlene to Havana with me.”

  “Does she have a passport?”

  “You got a passport, honey?”

  “No,” Charlene said.

  “She don’t have one, George. Get her one, willya?”

  “Ryan! I —”

  But I was in the process of hanging up again and Charlene was in the process of settling herself on her side in that big king-size bed under the sheets and, hell, as long as we were awake, why waste it?

  29

  Señor Martinez, who had been my guide before when I first went to Cuba, was at the Havana airport when we landed. And so was Catfish Williams.

  “Hey,” Deke said to me as I came down the steps to the tarmac. Charlene was behind me because I think she was a little intimidated by everything. The only foreign country she had ever been in was Tijuana, once, and that isn’t really foreign when you can practically take a streetcar there from San Diego. In less than twenty-four hours, she had been passported by Mr. Baxter of the State Department and certified for travel to a foreign country with which we had no relationship. It would take that much to intimidate Charlene about anything.

  “Hey,” I said to Deke. And “hey” to Señor Martinez, who was looking less than comfortable.

  “Señor Shawn, who is this lady?”

  “This is Charlene Cleaver. She and I had our vacation interrupted to come down here, so I thought it was best to bring her along. Besides, she’s never seen Cuba before.”

  “Charmed, Señora Cleaver,” Martinez said. The “señora” was out of respect because she was not a young girl anymore. I don’t know if that would have pleased Charlene or not so I didn’t bring it up.

  “But what’s he doing here?”

  “Señor Williams is an American businessman,” Señor Martinez said.

  “We used to play baseball together,” I said.

  “I know this,” Señor Martinez said. The knowledge did not seem to make him any happier.

  There were the usual security people hanging around, but things had changed some. First, this was high summer in Cuba and it was hotter than a two-dollar pistol. It had been warm and humid in February, but this was a joke. I was soaking wet and only thirty seconds off the plane. Charlene wore slacks and a blouse and that blouse was into serious clinging already and her hair was wet. Texas is hot in summer, but Texas is also air conditioned from one end to the other.

  “Saw your star outfielder came home and I thought you’d be chasing after him,” Deke said, slapping my arm and smiling. He was also keeping his eye on Charlene even while he was greeting me.

  “It’s common knowledge, is it?”

  “Everyone knows everything in Cuba, just one big happy family down here —”

  “What are you doing here, Deke?”

  “Like the señor says, I’m an American businessman,”

  “I thought we didn’t have business in Cuba.”

  “Hell, it’s opening up right and left. Opportunities are knocking and Deke is opening the doors. After I saw you in Chicago I figured that if this thing was good enough for the New York Yankees, it was good enough for Catfish Williams.”

  “What was good enough?”

  “Whole country is gonna open up sooner rather than later and I want to put in my bid.”

  “On what?”

  “Fish, man. I sell fish, you remember. Lots of fish. I could become my own supplier of fresh fish, not just for myself but for other franchises. These people been living in a vacuum the last thirty years.”

  “Is any of this legal?”

  “Hell, yes. Got my certifieds from the State Department even. Even met with the Minister of Fisheries last night, we had a good old chat.”

  “Charlene, this is Catfish Williams. I told you about. From Chicago.”

  “I was wondering if you were going to introduce me.”

  “I’ll introduce you but that’s as far as it goes,” I said.

  “Shit, man, you got me wrong.”

  “I seen you on the road for too many seasons,” I said.

  “Well, there’s that.”

  We were such a jolly party, standing there in customs while the guys in sunglasses and long white shirts hanging out of their pants went through our bags. They spent their time on Charlene’s bag and they were pawing through her clothes like they were pawing her. I don’t like customs people even when they don’t do anything offensive because they treat everyone like a crook. The U.S. customs are the worst, I think, but I haven’t been that many places. The Canadians are polite but cold, exactly the way Canadians are themselves, so I don’t attribute it much to customs. The Mexicans don’t give a shit. But those U.S. customs people are convinced you’re smuggling dope into the country, even if you’re coming in from a three-game series in Toronto on your way to Cleveland. What the hell would you smuggle from Toronto to Cleveland?

  These Cuban guys were getting a kick out of their job and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it. Mr. Martinez just stood there, looking nervous, and Catfish just stood there, looking horny. Charlene, however, had had enough.

  “Put them clothes back the way you found them, I didn’t pack them careful just to have some dumb cop get ‘em wrinkled.”

  One of the guys in sunglasses stopped. Looked up at Charlene. Looked at me. Looked at Catfish. Then closed the bag and made a big chalk mark on the leather.

  The other sunglasses did the same with my bag and then we moved along to Passport Control. This was a counter with two more sunglasses behind it and they studied our passports for a long time, as well as the attached visas. Then they did that passport thing with a stamp pad and a pound-pound-pound all over a blank page. When it was done, they had bent my passport and I unbent it a little and slipped it into my shirt pocket.

  Mr. Martinez was still driving a Trabant, but Deke had hired himself a 1958 Buick Roadmaster with the long snout and the buildup of chrome on the front end that made it look like a Patton tank, if a tank had chrome.

  “Y’all can’t fit in that sardine can there, I can take Miss Cleaver with me back to the hotel,” Deke said in his honey-colored voice.

  “On the other hand, you can take both of us to the Comrade Hilton,” I said.

  “What do I look like, your driver?”

  “You driving Miss Daisy, you’re driving me,” I said. “I owe you a lot baseball-wise, Deke, but I don’t owe you as much as you think.”

  “You’re very short on trust,” Deke said.

  “I trust you plenty about a lot of things but not about that,” I said.

  So Señor Martinez followed us to the Comrade Hilton in the heart of Havana. The Roadmaster had air conditioning, but it didn’t work. Deke rolled down all the windows. Somehow, the wet hot breeze was less than refreshing, like being slapped with wet towels in a steam bath.

  Summer didn’t bring out the best in Havana. There were a lot of smells in the air that were not pleasant and the sewers reeked. The bougainvillea were all blooming and there was a sense of jungle creeping over everything. Even the little yards seemed like jungle, as though no one had the energy to cut back the grass. The buildings gleamed in the wicked afternoon sun. The people on the crowded streets were dressed in the minimum and their faces were weathered by sun and heat. It was all very depressing to me and I wondered if Raul was finding it the same way,

  “Where is Raul?” I asked Deke.

  “Why ask me?”

  “Because you’d know,” I said.

  “Well, I understand he’s being interviewed by the security police.”

  “How’d he get back here?”

  “No one knows. He was picked up on a beach on the north coast yesterday morning. He said someone brought him in from Miami by cigarette boat and this got him in trouble right away because the crack Cuban navy doesn’t like to admit it has any cracks in it,” Deke said, and laughed. He drove with
one hand on the steering wheel. He wore one of those African shirts with a lot of colors in it and no collar. He also wore a big Panama hat that made him look like a character out of Casablanca.

  “So he hasn’t seen his girlfriend yet?”

  “Maybe he has. The rumor is she was picked up herself by the security police. This is one helluva city for rumors, sport. The thing is you can’t hardly believe anything you read in the papers, but you can go with the rumors, they’re almost always right on the button.”

  “How long you been here?”

  “Couple of weeks.”

  “You met Castro?”

  “El Supremo? No, he ain’t had the time to parlez with this nigger yet. But I’m edging closer all the time. The Minister of Fisheries was a big deal. I told him about catfish farming and he was very, very interested. These waters are loaded with fish, sport. The fishermen are all about a hundred years behind the times. The Russians used to trawl around here, but the Russians are persons non grata. You know what it is to get in on the ground floor of something? When you told me about George Bremenhaven making cozy with the administration and Congress in Washington, I started pulling my own contacts.”

  “So that was all bullshit about the government being on my case and you not wanting to be in contact with me no more,” I said.

  “Hell, sport, I saw you plenty when you played the White Sox on that last trip, introduced you to some fine ladies,” he said.

  He did that for Charlene’s benefit, I knew. Why does everyone want to get me in trouble with Charlene?

  Charlene spoke up for the first time. “Is he playing around, Deke?”

  He just smiled at me and I gave him a look. I wasn’t amused,-no matter how funny he thought he was being.

  “Naw, naw, Charlene. Boy’s in love, I can tell when he just sits there and this fine fox is coming on to him, all shivery and satiny, you know, in a red dress that starts where most legs leave off and he just drinks his white boy’s beer and starts talking about you “

  “He talks about me?”

  “Can’t shut him up on the subject,” Deke said.

  Well, that was all right. Charlene purred her pleasure and seemed to unwilt in the heat right before my eyes.

  We met Martinez back at the hotel and the woman behind the counter signaled for a bellman to take our bags up. Separate rooms. Hers was 501 and mine was 560. At least it was the same floor.

  My theory is that power makes you into a puritan. That’s why Communists talk a good game, but when it comes down to it, they’re as straitlaced as any hard-shell Baptist. There was no reason for me and Charlene to have different rooms except that was the way to make it more difficult for us.

  Her room was even bigger than mine.

  We decided to meet in the lobby after taking a shower. It was easier said than done because the water in my shower wasn’t working. I turned on the tap on the sink and a little brownish water came out and I scooped it and slapped it on my face and toweled down my wet hair. I looked like hell. I changed my shirt and slapped English Leather all over me, even under my armpits.

  Charlene said her shower hadn’t worked either and Señor Martínez explained it was because of the heat and the need to conserve water. Here we were on an island surrounded by nothing but water and they didn’t have enough.

  Martinez said he would take me to the government house in his Trabant. He also said that Miss Cleaver could not go along because he had no instructions concerning her.

  Unfortunately, Deke Williams said he would escort Miss Cleaver around Havana to look at the sights and there was nothing I could do about it except trust them both.

  The afternoon sun lingered. It was after seven, but the sun didn’t show any sign of setting. The street life was, if anything, even more intense now with little open air markets here and there where farmers were selling their products. A little bit of capitalism had been creeping into the country for years, and now it was more or less sanctioned as not being a threat to communism, which shows you can rationalize about anything.

  We went back to the same grim building I had been taken to the previous winter for my big audience with Castro. I was hoping the pleasure would not be repeated.

  We went down a hall and another hall and then through a double door and into a large room hung with paintings and dominated by a long, old-fashioned wooden table. Red velvet chairs were pulled up around the table. Señor Martinez and I sat down in two of them and we waited.

  We waited about a half-hour. Time is not of the essence in Cuba, I figured. One day is much like another, so why hurry them along?

  The room was cool but not air conditioned. The windows were open on one side to catch the early evening breeze. There were beautiful lowers growing outside the windows and they smelled sweet almost to the point of intoxication.

  About eight, the doors opened and a man in army fatigues came in. He was alone and he carried a clipboard. He stared at me and then at Martinez and sat down.

  “How can we help you, Señor Shawn?” he said in English.

  “I kind of would like to see Raul Guevara and have a chat with him,” I said.

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Why? We were on speaking terms just the other day in New York City. We play on the same team.”

  “The Yankee Imperialists,” he said.

  “No, just the New York Yankees. We haven’t invaded any country that I know of, although the team used to barnstorm in the off season. But they don’t do that anymore.”

  “The person you spoke of does not wish to speak to you.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then why can’t I see him?”

  “It’s impossible.”

  “Who are you anyway?”

  “Colonel Colon,” he said.

  “Well, Colonel, I came all the way down here and interrupted my vacation just to see Raul and I don’t see the point of you stalling around. He’s got a contract to play baseball for New York and he’s only halfway through the year. So he can’t just tear up his contract like that.”

  “A contract to be a slave? To work as a slave?”

  “Playing baseball is not working as a slave. The hours are short and we stay in first-class hotels. At least, on the road,” I said, thinking of the roaches in the East Side Hotel. “He’s got all the pizza he can eat and Miller beer he can drink. I don’t know of any slave that would have it that good.”

  “There’s no point in discussing this,” Colonel Colon said.

  I leaned forward the way my agent, Sid Cohen, does when he’s face-to-facing and I folded my hands together just the way Sid does. I even borrowed Sid’s tone of voice. “Sure there is, or you wouldn’t be here,” I said. It was a quiet voice, very reasonable. “Raul is a homesick boy and that’s something no one counted on, that he’d just go home. It’s an embarrassment to everyone, including the Yankees.”

  “Poof. I don’t care what embarrasses you Yankees.”

  “You ought to. Señor Castro let himself be engineered into making this deal in the first place and now it looks like he wants to go back on his word. Besides, here you’ve got the greatest hitter maybe in the history of the game, the most famous thing to come out of Cuba since the cigar, and you want to let it go? That doesn’t make sense to me.”

  Colonel Colon just sat there for a long moment and then got up with his clipboard and marched out of the room. I looked across at Martinez, but he was just looking miserable in general and didn’t want to make eye contact with me.

  So we sat in the room for another while. Evening arrived suddenly, the way it does the closer you get to the equator, and it was still warm and humid. I got up from my velvet perch and walked around the table a couple of times, just to do something. I also hummed a little of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” one of the few songs I know all the way through.

  At 9:40, the double doors opened again and this time it was the big man himself surrounded by his toadies. He came righ
t up to me and stood there, staring at me with those cold brown eyes. Then he said, “Have you learned to speak Spanish yet?” I said in Spanish:

  — I practiced a lot.

  — It doesn’t show. Your accent is appalling.

  — I came to talk to Raul.

  — I know.

  — And the girl.

  — That is not the business of the manager of the Yankees.

  — It is when it affects the play of my best player. Maybe the best player in all of baseball.

  — The best player to ever play the game.

  — All right. Have it your way.

  — A Cubano, the greatest ball player in the world, the greatest who ever existed!

  — I agree a hundred percent.

  — Hah! He would not have thrived except under our system, under our nurturing guidance.

  — Well, I don’t know about that. Ball players are just natural sometimes.

  — He is the triumph of Cuban manhood, its finest flowering.

  It was obvious to me that Castro was winding the stem on one of his speeches and I wanted to slow him down. So I said:

  — You gonna let them get married?

  That stopped him.

  He stared at me and I thought he was going to order someone to shoot me. I thought it was that close.

  Instead, he said, in English, “Why shouldn’t they?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Maria can join Raul in New York for his triumphant first season. She’ll become America’s sweetheart. Maybe she already is. And it will be because of you, because of Fidel Castro’s big and generous heart that the two newlyweds will set up house together.”

  “And will come back to Cuba to live at the end of the season.”

  “Of course, of course,” I said.

  “And show the North Americanos that Cuba has heart, Cuba is more than strong, it has …”

  Words were failing him. I helped him out.

  “It has romance. Cuba is for lovers.”

  “Exactly,” he said and he had to hug me, he was so overcome by emotion. The English Leather on me clashed with the Old Spice on him, I guess, because he pulled back almost immediately and sniffed at me.