by Rick Wilber
The rage came to his defense. He picked a decision out of the air, arbitrary as the breeze: fastball, outside.
Jones went into his windup. He threw his body forward, whipped his arm high over his shoulder. Fastball, outside. George swiveled his hips through the box, kept his head down, extended his arms. The contact of the bat with the ball was so slight he wasn’t sure he’d hit it at all. A line drive down the right-field line, hooking as it rose, hooking, hooking... curling just inside the foul pole into the stands 320 feet away.
The fans exploded. George, feeling rubbery, jogged around first, toward second. Sievers pumped his fist as he rounded third; the Senators were up
on their feet in the dugout shouting and slapping each other. Jones had his hands on his hips, head down and back to the plate. George rounded third and jogged across home, where he was met by Sievers, who slugged him in the shoulder, and the rest of his teammates in the dugout, who laughed and slapped his butt.
The crowd began to chant, “SEN-a-TOR, SEN-a-TOR.” After a moment George realized they were chanting for him. He climbed out of the dugout again and tipped his hat, scanning the stands for Barbara and the boys. As he did he saw his father in the presidential box, leaning over to speak into the ear of the cheering President Nixon. He felt a rush of hope, ducked his head, and got back into the dugout.
Kaat held the Giants in the ninth, and the Senators won, 2—1.
In the locker room after the game, George’s teammates whooped and slapped him on the back. Chuck Stobbs, the clubhouse comic, called him “the Bambino.” For a while George hoped that his father might come down to congratulate him. Instead, for the first time in his career, reporters swarmed around him. They fired flashbulbs in salvoes. They pushed back their hats, flipped open their notebooks, and asked him questions.
“What’s it feel like to win a big game like this?”
“I’m just glad to be here. I’m not one of these winning-is-everything guys.”
“They’re calling you the senator. Your father is a senator. How' do you feel about that?”
“I guess we’re both senators,” George said. “He just got to Washington a little sooner than I did.”
They liked that a lot. George felt the smile on his face like a frozen mask. For the first time in his life he was aware of the muscles it took to smile, as tense as if they were lifting a weight.
After the reporters left he showered. George wondered what his father had been whispering into the president’s ear, while everyone around him cheered. Some sarcastic comment? Some irrelevant political advice?
When he got back to his locker, toweling himself dry, he found a note lying on the bench. He opened it eagerly. It read:
To the Effeminate Rabbit:
Even the rodent has his day. But not when the eagle pitches.
Sincerely,
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
5
That Fidel Castro would go so far out of his way to insult George Herbert Walker Bush would come as no surprise to anyone who knew him. Early in Castro’s first season in the majors, a veteran Phillies reliever, after watching Fidel warm up, approached the young Cuban. “Where did you get that curve?” he asked incredulously.
“From you,” said Fidel. “That’s why you don’t have one.”
But sparking his reaction to Bush was more than simple egotism. Fidel’s antipathy grew from circumstances of background and character that made such animosity as inevitable as the rising of the sun in the east of Oriente province where he had been bom thirty-two years before.
Like George Herbert Walker Bush, Fidel was the son of privilege, but a peculiarly Cuban form of privilege, as different from the blue-blooded Bush variety as the hot and breathless climate of Oriente was from chilly New England. Like Bush, Fidel endured a father as parsimonious with his warmth as those New England winters. Young Fidelito grew up well acquainted with the back of Angel Castro’s hand, the jeers of classmates who tormented him and his brother Raul for their illegitimacy. Though Angel Castro owned two thousand acres and had risen from common sugarcane laborer to local caudillo, he did not possess the easy assurance of the rich of Havana, for whom Oriente was the Cuban equivalent of Alabama. The Castros were peasants. Fidel’s father was illiterate, his mother a maid. No amount of money could erase Fidel’s bastardy.
This history raged in Fidelito. Always in a fight, alternating boasts with moody silences, he longed for accomplishment in a fiery way that cast the longing of Bush to impress his own father into a sickly shadow. At boarding school in Santiago, he sought the praise of his teachers and admiration of his schoolmates. At Belen, Havana’s exclusive Jesuit preparatory school, he became the champion athlete of all of Cuba. “El Loco Fidel” his classmates called him as, late into the night, at an outdoor court under a light swarming with insects, he would practice basketball shots until his feet were torn bloody and his head swam with forlorn images of the ball glancing off the iron rim.
At the University of Havana, between the scorching expanses of the baseball and basketball seasons, Fidel toiled over the scorching expanse of the law books. He sought triumph in student politics as he did in sports. In the evenings he met in tiny rooms with his comrades and talked about junk pitches and electoral strategy, about the reforms that were only a matter of time because the people’s will could not be forever thwarted. They were on the side of history. Larger than even the largest: of men, history would overpower anyone unless, like Fidel, he aligned himself with it so as not to be swept under by the tidal force of its inescapable currents.
In the spring of 1948, at the same time George Herbert Walker Bush was shaking the hand of Babe Ruth, these currents transformed Fidel’s life. He was being scouted by several major league teams. In the university, he had gained control of his fastball and given birth to a curve of so monstrous an arc that Alex Pompez, the Giants’ scout, reported that the well-spoken law student owned “a hook like Bo-Peep.” More significantly, Pirates scout Howie Haak observed that Fidel “could throw and think at the same time.”
Indeed Fidel could think, though no one could come close to guessing the content of his furious thought. A war between glory and doom raged within him. Fidel’s fury to accomplish things threatened to keep him from accomplishing anything at all. He had made enemies. In the late forties, student groups punctuated elections for head of the law-school class with assassinations. Rival political gangs fought in the streets. Events conspired to drive Fidel toward a crisis. And so, on a single day in 1948, he abandoned his political aspirations, quit school, married his lover, the fair Mirta Diaz Balart, and signed a contract with the New York Giants.
It seemed a fortunate choice. In his rookie year he won fifteen games. After he took the Cy Young Award and was named MVP of the 1951 Series, the sportswriters dubbed him “the Franchise.” This past season he had won twenty-nine. He earned, and squandered, a fortune. Controversy dogged him, politics would not let him go, the uniform of a baseball player at times felt much too small. His brother Raul was imprisoned when Batista overthrew the government to avoid defeat in the election of 1952. Fidel made friends among the expatriates in Miami. He protested U.S. policies. His alternative nickname became “the Mouth.”
But all along Fidel knew his politics was mere pose. His spouting off to sports reporters did nothing compared to what money might do to help the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra. Yet he had no money.
After the second game of the Series, instead of returning to the hotel Fidel took a cab down to the Mall. He needed to be alone. It was early evening when he got out at the Washington Monument. The sky beyond the Lincoln Memorial shone orange and purple. The air still held some of the sultry heat of summer, like an evening in Havana. But this was a different sort of capital. These North Americans liked to think of themselves as clean, rational men of law instead of passion, a land of Washingtons and Lincolns, but away from the public buildings it was still a southern city full of ex-slaves. Fidel looked down the Mall toward the bright Capitol, white
and towering as a wedding cake, wondered what he might have become had he continued law school. At one time he had imagined himself the Washington of his own country, a liberating warrior. The true heir of Jose Marti, scholar poet, and revolutionary. Like Marti, he admired the idealism of the United States, but like him he saw its dark side. Here at the Mall, however, you could almost forget about that in an atmosphere of bogus Greek democracy, of liberty and justice for all. You might even forget that this liberty could be bought and sold, a franchise purchasable for cold cash.
Fidel walked along the pool toward the Lincoln Memorial. The floodlights lit up the white columns, and inside shone upon the brooding figure of Lincoln. Despite his cynicism, Fidel was caught by the sight of it. He had been to Washington only once before, for the All Star Game in 1956. He remembered walking through Georgetown with Mirta on his arm, feeling tall and handsome, ignoring the scowl of the maître d’ in the restaurant who clearly disapproved of two such dark ones in his establishment.
He’d triumphed but was not satisfied. He had forced others to admit his primacy through the power of his will. He had shown them, with his strong arm, the difference between right and wrong. He was the Franchise. He climbed up the steps into the Memorial, read the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address engraved on the wall. THE PROGRESS OF OUR ARMS UPON WHICH ALL ELSE CHIEFLY DEPENDS IS AS WELL KNOWN TO THE PUBLIC AS TO MYSELF .. . But he was still the crazy Cuban, taken little more seriously than Desi Arnaz, and the minute that arm that made him a useful commodity should begin to show signs of weakening—in that same minute he would be undone. IT MAY SEEM STRANGE THAT ANY MEN SHOULD DARE TO ASK A JUST GOD’S ASSISTANCE IN WRINGING THEIR BREAD FROM THE SIN OF OTHER MEN’S FACES BUT LET US JUDGE NOT THAT WE BE JUDGED.
Judge not? Perhaps Lincoln could manage it, but Fidel was a different sort of man.
In the secrecy of his mind Fidel could picture another world than the one he lived in. The marriage of love to Mirta had long since gone sour, torn apart by Fidel’s lust for renown on the ball field and his lust for the astonishing women who fell like fruit from the trees into the laps of players such as he. More than once he felt grief over his faithlessness. He knew his solitude to be just punishment. That was the price of greatness, for, after all, greatness was a crime and deserved punishment.
Mirta was gone now, and their son with her. She worked for the hated Batista. He thought of Raul languishing in Batista’s prison on the Isle of Pines. Batista, embraced by this United States that ran Latin America like a company store. Raul suffered for the people, while Fidel ate in four-star restaurants and slept with a different woman in every city, throwing away his youth, and the money he earned with it, on excrement.
He looked up into the great sad face of Lincoln. He turned from the monument to stare out across the Mall toward the gleaming white shaft of the Washington obelisk. It was full night now. Time to amend his life.
6
The headline in the Post the next morning read, SENATOR BUSH EVENS SERIES. The story mentioned that Prescott Bush had shown up in the sixth inning and sat beside Nixon in the presidential box. But nothing more.
Bar decided not to go up to New York for the middle games of the Series. George traveled with the team to the Roosevelt Hotel. The home run had done something for him. He felt a new confidence.
The game-three starters were the veteran southpaw Johnny Antonelli for the Giants and Pedro Ramos for the Senators. The echoes of the national anthem had hardly faded when Allison led off for the Senators with a home run into the short porch in left field. The Polo Grounds fell dead silent. The Senators scored three runs in the first; George did his part, hitting a change-up to right center for a double, scoring the third run of the inning.
In the bottom half of the first the Giants came right back, tying it up on Mays' three-run homer.
After that the Giants gradually wore Ramos down, scoring a single run in the third and two in the fifth. Lavagetto pulled him for a pinch hitter in the sixth with George on third and Consolo at first, two outs. But Aspromonte struck out, ending the inning.
Though Castro heckled George mercilessly throughout the game and the brash New York fans joined in, he played above himself. The Giants eventually won, 8—3, but George went three for five. Despite his miserable first game he was batting .307 for the Series. Down two games to one, the Washington players felt the loss, but had stopped calling him “George Herbert Walker Bush” and started calling him “the Senator.”
7
Lavagetto had set an eleven o’clock curfew, but Billy Consolo persuaded George to go out on the town. The Hot Comer was a dive on Seventh Avenue with decent Italian food and cheap drinks. George ordered a club soda and tried to get into the mood. Ramos moaned about the plate umpire’s strike zone, and Consolo changed the subject.
Consolo had been a bonus boy; in 1953 the Red Sox had signed him right out of high school for $50,000. He had never panned out. George wondered if Consolo’s career had been any easier to take than his own. At least nobody had hung enough expectations on George for him to be called a flop.
Stobbs was telling a story. “So the Baseball Annie says to him, But will you respect me in the morning?’ and the shortstop says, ‘Oh baby, I’ll respect you like crazy!”’
While the others were laughing, George headed for the men’s room. Passing the bar, he saw, a corner booth, Fidel Castro talking to a couple of men in slick suits. Castro’s eyes flicked over him but registered no recognition.
When George came out, the men in suits were in heated conversation with Castro. In the back of the room someone dropped a quarter into the jukebox, and Elvis Presley’s silky “Money Honey” blared out. Bush had no use for rock and roll. He sat at the table, ignored his teammates’ conversation and kept an eye on Castro. The Cuban was strenuously making some point, stabbing the tabletop with his index finger. After a minute George noticed that someone at the bar was watching them, too. It was the pale old man he had seen at Griffith Stadium.
On impulse, George went up to him. “Hello, old-timer. You really must be a fan, if you followed the Series up here. Can I buy you a drink?”
The man turned decisively from watching Castro, as if deliberately putting aside some thought. He seemed about to smile but did not. Small red splotches colored his face. “Buy me a ginger ale.”
George ordered a ginger ale and another club soda and sat on the next stool. “Money honey, if you want to get along with me,” Elvis sang.
The old man sipped his drink. “You had yourself a couple of good games,” he said. ‘You’re in the groove.”
“I just got some lucky breaks.”
“Don’t kid me. I know how it feels when it’s going right. You know just where the next pitch is going to be, and there it is. Somebody hits a line drive right at you, you throw out your glove and snag it without even thinking. You’re in the groove.”
“It comes from playing the game a long time.”
The old man snorted. “Do you really believe this guff you spout? Or are you just trying to hide something?”
“What do you mean? I’ve spent ten years playing baseball.”
“And you expect me to believe you still don’t know anything about it? Experience doesn’t explain the groove.” The man looked as if he were watching something far away “When you’re in that groove you’re not playing the game, the game is playing you.”
“But you have to plan your moves.”
The old man looked at him as if he were from Mars. “Do you plan your moves when you’re making love to your wife?” He finished his ginger ale, took another look back at Castro, then left. Everyone, it seemed, knew what was wrong with him. George felt steamed. As if that wasn’t enough, as soon as he returned to the table, Castro’s pals left and the Cuban swaggered over to George, leaned into him, and blew cigar smoke into his face. “I know you, George Herbert Walker Bush,” he said, “Sen-a-tor Rabbit. The rich man’s son.”
George pushed him away. “You know
, I’m beginning to find your behavior darned unconscionable, compadre.”
“I stand here quaking with fear,” Castro said. He poked George in the chest. “Back home in Brian we had a pen for the pigs. The gate of this pen was in disrepair. But it is still a fact. Senator Rabbit, that the splintered wooden gate of that pigpen, squealing on its rusted hinges, swung better than you.”
Consolo started to get up, but George put a hand on his arm. “Say, Billy, our Cuban friend here didn’t by any chance help you pick out this restaurant tonight, did he?”
“What, are you crazy? Of course not.”
“Too bad. I thought if he did, we could get some good Communist food here.”
The guys laughed. Castro leaned over.
“Very funny, Machismo Zero.” His breath reeked of cigar smoke, rum, and garlic. “I guarantee that after tomorrow’s game you will be even funnier.”
8
Fidel had never felt sharper than he did during his warmups the afternoon of the fourth game. It was a cool fall day, partial overcast with a threat of rain, a breeze blowing out to right. The chill air only invigorated him. Never had his curve had more bite, his screwball more movement. His arm felt supple, his legs strong. As he strode in from the bullpen to the dugout, squinting out at the apartment buildings on Coogan’s Bluff towering over the stands, a great cheer rose from the crowd.
Before the echoes of the national anthem had died he walked the first two batters, on eight pitches. The fans murmured. Schmidt came out to talk with him. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong,” Fidel said, sending him back.
He retired Lemon on a pop fly and Killebrewon a fielder’s choice. Bush came to the plate with two outs and men on first and second. The few Washington fans who had braved the Polo Grounds set up a chant: “SEN-a-TOR, SEN-a-TOR!”
Fidel studied Bush. Beneath Bush’s bravado he could see panic in every motion of the body he wore like an ill-fitting suit. Fidel struck him out on three pitches.
Kralick held the Giants scoreless through three innings.