Double Wide

by Leo W. Banks

  I could relate to that.

  Closing the folder, I returned it to the ghostly librarian. “I think Gila monsters are underappreciated.”

  She raised a feeble fist. “Hear, hear!”

  I still had time before meeting Opal and decided to take a stab at finding Charlie O’Shea. He bounced between two or three of the same bars, and one of them was fifteen minutes from the Historical Society.

  Hoping to get lucky, I drove east on Speedway to midtown and found him at a joint called the Bunker.

  Seven regulars sat at the bar. I knew they were regulars because when I pushed open the door, they cussed and shielded their eyes against the assault of sunlight and good breathing air.

  I had to tap Charlie’s shoulder three times to get his attention. He shot off the seat like he was on fire, and tried to stand perfectly still.

  The more he tried, the faster he wiggled.

  “Oh, good evening, Mr. Mayor.”

  “It’s afternoon.”

  “To what do I owe this…” He stopped to let his brain buffer. Then, squeezing his chin in thought: “Lordy, where was I?”

  Charlie had a pleasant face, crinkly blue eyes, and a neck that widened under his ears. He had skinny arms and girlish legs that weren’t exactly white, more a curdled cream. He wore a short-sleeved pool-party shirt with palm trees on it. His hanging belly beneath the untucked shirt made it look like he was hauling overseas cargo.

  In the summer he wore Bermuda shorts, a different color each day. Red, yellow, money green. Today was heavenly purple.

  I asked him about the knife attack.

  “Saw the whole thing. A bloody mess for a Tuesday.” He chuckled, dimpling his cheeks.

  “A cop named Diaz wants to talk to you about it.”

  “In that case, I didn’t see a thing.”

  “No, you’re going to talk to him. I don’t want him poking around Double Wide any more than necessary.”

  He ignored me and climbed back onto his barstool. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and, after a couple of tries, wrestled him out the door and into the Bronco’s passenger seat. When he couldn’t get comfortable, I took him around to the back, and dropped the tailgate, and he crawled in like he wanted to go to sleep.

  Seconds later, he shot up and swung his legs over the bumper to climb out. I leaned down and grabbed his feet and spun him back inside. I’d planned on living the remainder of my life without ever getting up close with Charlie O’Shea’s knees.

  But there they were. They looked like the elbow joints on a plumber’s pipe.

  I spread a blanket over him and talked to him for a minute. The only thing I didn’t do was read him a story. With his head against the spare tire, he chewed his cheeks and passed out.

  TEN

  I drove downtown. Opal wasn’t where she was supposed to be outside the community center. I double parked at her sketch spot and waited.

  Without a top on the Bronco, I had nothing to keep the sun off me. In Tucson in the summer, if you stand still, you get baked alive. Keep moving and there’s at least the illusion of a breeze, even if it comes out of a pizza oven.

  I looped around the block, past Tucson Police headquarters, Saint Augustine’s Cathedral, and some of the side streets and couldn’t find her. I went back to the same spot and double parked and waited some more.

  As I sat there, Fausto Molina called from Monterrey. My ringtone was George Jones singing “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” the greatest country song ever recorded.

  “Prop, it’s me.” For some reason, he dropped the “s” in Prospero. “I don’t know what’s going on. Rolando wouldn’t just disappear like this.” Fausto had a polite manner and a voice nearly identical to his older brother’s.

  He last saw Rolando two weeks ago, which was the same time frame Alice had given. “He left the ballpark here saying he had to make a quick business trip and would be back in a couple of days. That was it.”

  I knew his destination was Arizona. But if I said that, Fausto would ask how I knew, and I’d have to tell him about the hand. “Did he say anything about gold? Trying to get rich mining for gold?”

  “Gold? You mean like Papa? No, I never heard that.”

  “What about cocaine? Alice said she thought he was doing okay on that.”

  “I don’t know, Prop. Man, really, I don’t know about that.” He didn’t want to talk about cocaine. “He said I was going to be in the big leagues soon.”

  That left a sour taste. The worst approach for a kid with talent was to tell him about all the great things in his future. Expectation is a beast with no conscience. Given what happened to me, I was surprised Rolando talked that way.

  “It’s going to happen, Prop. Nobody can hit my pitch.”

  “Your pitch? What pitch is that?”

  “El Bailador. I’ve won thirteen games with it so far.”

  In Spanish, El Bailador means “the dancer.”

  “You gave this pitch a name? I don’t like the advice you’re getting, Fausto. That’s either confident or really dumb. Did Rolando come up with that?”

  “We wanted to give reporters something catchy for their stories. It’s a great pitch, Prop. It dives out of the zone.”

  “Sounds like a split-fingered fastball.”

  “It’s better than a split, much better. The drop is harder and faster.” His voice sank. “But Rolando’s gone, and pretty soon I won’t be able to throw it.”

  The five o’clock bell had sounded and downtown workers were hustling along the sidewalk to their cars. A TPD squad car pulled alongside the Bronco and the cop waved me out of my spot. I went around the block again, holding the cell to my ear as I drove.

  “How old are you, Fausto?”

  “I turn eighteen in five months.”

  “Hey, congratulations.”

  “I always wanted to be older.” He laughed softly. “I guess I’m getting my wish.”

  “There’s a lot out there other than baseball.” I talked over the rumble of the Bronco’s engine.

  “No, no, I can be the best.”

  “Don’t make the world too small, Fausto.”

  He was young and too wound up to listen. “Prop, I can do this! I can make it to the big leagues! But I need to find Rolando!”

  He let out a soft moan. He sounded heartbroken. I had to tell him about his brother. But I needed a place to park. I couldn’t spring that news while weaving through traffic, holding the cell with one hand, working the stick shift with the other and steering with my thighs.

  Fausto piped up before I could find a spot. He sounded cautious, as though he wasn’t sure whether to speak. “You should go see Mr. Danny Wilson.”

  Wilson was GM of the Tucson Thunder. I knew him from my playing days. He was a bullpen coach in Tacoma when I pitched there. “Why would Wilson know about Rolando?”

  “Rolando talked to Mr. Wilson about me.” Fausto pushed those words out slowly and said nothing for a long time, as if to gauge my reaction.

  I let the silence linger.

  “About signing me, Prop. Wilson came to Monterrey to watch me pitch. He was going to give me a big contract with the Thunder.”

  Fausto had started out saying he had no idea where Rolando might be, but he had a clue after all. Why hold back Rolando’s connection to Tucson? He certainly hadn’t forgotten. No Mexican seventeen-year-old forgets the interest of an American GM with a checkbook.

  Something didn’t add up, and I decided to keep my mouth shut. I told Fausto I’d talk to Wilson and get back to him.

  ELEVEN

  I checked the Thunder’s schedule on my phone. They were home against the Sacramento River Cats. I looked up Fausto’s record. He was 13–1 with an ERA just below 2.00. A pitcher with those numbers was dealing some pain, no question.

  But I wanted to talk to Wilson.

  And what happened to Opal?

  I had leftover cardboard scraps in the back of the Bronco. When I lifted Charlie’s leg to get at one of them, he m
umbled the Gettysburg Address but didn’t wake up. With a black Sharpie from the glove, I wrote, “Gone to Hi Corbett Field. Meet me there.” I leaned it against a tree at Opal’s sketch spot and got on Broadway Boulevard heading east.

  What could be better than spending a summer night at the ballpark? For me, lots of things. The closer I got to Hi Corbett, the more my stomach knotted up from the memories.

  The first time I drove that stretch of Broadway, my sneakers were up on the dash and the radio was blaring some crazy song. The fellow who picked me up at the airport, some front-office box mover, kept eyeing at me as if to say, “This kid’s a project. Bitty’s gonna have his hands full.”

  Wilbit Bastion was the Thunder’s manager, and if you know baseball, you know Bitty. He was thickly set and mostly bald, and he had a jowly face and a voice full of gravy. His chin dripped spit and he was incapable of speaking an English sentence without cuss words.

  Bitty set down lots of rules for players and proceeded to ignore them if your fastball had late movement and hit the catcher’s mitt with that sound that caused everyone to turn around and say, “Who is that kid?”

  We went along Broadway that day, music blaring, my hair going wild from the wind through the window. I was eighteen and sure of everything. Just give me a ball and point out the plate and I’ll strike out everybody you send up there. I almost did, too.

  And when Bitty told me to get a haircut, I told him I liked my hair just fine. It was so thick my cap flew off every time I lunged into my delivery. That became my trademark. The fans waited for it, cheered at the sight of it. Everyone loved it and loved me.

  The Phenom.

  The Arizona Diamondbacks called me up to the big club midsummer, and for the remainder of the season, I was the talk of the National League.

  Then everything fell apart. My velocity dropped, and the medical people called it a tired arm. They put me on rest, and the rest got longer, and the tired arm became a torn labrum. The surgery went well, and after a long rehab, I came back and tore the labrum again.

  Another surgery, more rehab. When I finally got healthy, I still threw a hard fastball. But the physical trouble had migrated into my head, and for a pitcher that’s the twilight zone.

  Commanding the strike zone starts and ends with a first-pitch fastball. But when I lost that command, I had to pitch from behind in the count, and everything spiraled down.

  I kept coming back because the only place I excelled was between the chalk lines. Life baffled me everywhere else. I bounced from club to club, and signed again and again based on what GMs remembered of me, rather than what I could still do.

  In my big league career, four seasons, I won a total of twenty-one games, and to the end, my twice-repaired shoulder was more or less fine, my arm fine, my legs fine. But I’d lost the stupid confidence I had as a kid that let me rear back and fire the ball with everything I had, without worry, doubt, or fear.

  When you lose that, you can’t go to the store and buy more. You can’t find it on a headshrinker’s couch or on your knees in church. When you lose that, toss your spikes in the closet, because you’re done.

  TWELVE

  Hi Corbett Field is in midtown across from the El Con Mall, part of a multiblock complex with a zoo, a golf course, and multiple ballfields. It’s an oasis of green in a city of sand. The road to the park turns south off Broadway and rolls along a pleasant, palm tree–lined lane to the parking lot.

  I left Charlie to his gin dreams and jumped a turnstile onto the concourse. The concession people were moving supplies around on dollies as team staffers hustled here and there to get set up in advance of the first pitch.

  As soon as I started toward the team offices, I saw Danny Wilson walking toward me. He was a former catcher, an advance scout and bullpen coach for the Diamondbacks. The GM position was his third job with the club, and he was said to be on the way up.

  Wilson still looked like an athlete. The walk is a giveaway no matter how old you get. Arms held away from the body, head erect, legs churning forward with that good balance that comes from years of physical confidence.

  He was about fifty. His eyes were blue, deep set, and tired looking, but there was still a good bit of the young man in them. He had a mess of sandy hair framing a round face that had spent a lot of time on sunny ballfields.

  Spotting me, Wilson clapped his hands. “For a minute there I thought I was seeing a ghost. Whip Stark! Are you kidding me?”

  We man-hugged. High hand grip, shoulder bump, back slap. Wilson had on a blue shirt with the Thunder logo on the chest. He wore beige Dockers. If it weren’t for Dockers, minor league executives would never wear pants.

  “You look fantastic for a retiree. Like you could still heave it.”

  “I’m only thirty-one, Danny. You bet I can still heave it.”

  “Where you keeping yourself, Whip? Looking for a job?”

  “I’m working on being invisible.”

  “Well, this isn’t the place for you. Have you seen our Heroes’ Wall?”

  I hadn’t seen the Heroes’ Wall.

  “Right down the concourse, we got us a plaque with your face on it. We tried reaching you for the ceremony. Most strike-outs in nine innings in the ballpark’s history.” Wilson snapped his fingers. “How about we introduce you to the fans tonight? I’m sure there are lots of people that remember old Whip Stark.”

  If you run a minor league baseball team, you’re thinking about promotion twenty-four hours a day. Wilson would introduce Daffy Duck’s long-lost brother, Murray Duck, if it gave the impression the ballpark was the place to be.

  Wilson said, “A round of applause, some autographs. We’ll have fun with it. Cindy, Cindy?” Wilson flagged a redheaded girl in khaki shorts, white ankle socks, and the same blue Thunder shirt. “Print out some career stats on Prospero Stark. He’s in the database. We’ll make an on-field introduction tonight.”

  “Yes, Mr. Wilson,” she said and was off.

  He turned back to me. “The local ABC affiliate has a crew here somewhere and they’re looking for a story. Roxy’s the reporter’s name. Roxanne Santa Cruz. I’ll point you out to her.”

  “Let’s talk about Fausto Molina.”

  The good-fellow bluster left him entirely. He made a confused face that wanted me to believe he had no idea what I was talking about. He spread his hands to emphasize the point.

  “Come on, Danny. You went to Mexico to scout him.”

  The crowd on the concourse was still thin. He looked past my shoulder, eyes darting. “What else do you know?”

  “I talked to Fausto.”

  His mouth tightened into a scowl. “The kid’s not supposed to talk about this.”

  “Tell me about El Bailador. It’s a good ball, I hear.”

  He lowered his voice. “It’s filthy, filthy. It’s a big league pitch right now.”

  “Rolando was helping Fausto and now Rolando’s missing.”

  “Missing? I don’t know anything about that.”

  I told him what I knew, leaving out any mention of the hand.

  “I know you two were close, Whip. But this is a real tricky topic.” Wilson looked around the concourse like a burglar after coming through the window. He was stalling and didn’t want to give in, but he was trapped. “Come on.” He tilted his head up the tunnel leading to the seats.

  We walked to the first row behind the batting cage and sat among a scattering of season-ticket holders. A handful of kids had gathered at the netting to watch batting practice. The ball-park echoed with voices, balls cracking against bats, and the PA system blaring pregame music.

  Wilson let out a deep breath and began. “This is tricky, Whip. Honestly, I have no idea what happened to Rolando. But if you want my guess, cocaine. He was all over that stuff.”

  “When you were there in Monterrey, you met with him, right? Talked to him?”

  “Absolutely. We sat together and watched Fausto pitch. Everything seemed fine.”

  “Fausto thinks
he might’ve come up here to see you.”

  Wilson looked surprised. “I haven’t seen him since Monterrey.”

  “Okay, what’s the tricky part?”

  Wilson dropped his head and spat between his legs. He squinted out at the field. “Look, I don’t like this secrecy stuff more than you do. But I gave this guy my word that I’d keep his name in my pocket. Fausto’s name, too.” He jabbed his chest with his thumb. “I keep my word.”

  That was as indignant as Wilson got. He wasn’t the type. On the field he was as tough as they come. But off it, he was a shot-and-beer man who liked to get along.

  Wilson watched players running wind sprints in the outfield. The PA system was playing Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days.”

  I said, “Nobody will hear anything from me.”

  “Okay, but I ain’t giving up the name.” He watched the players for a moment, spat, watched some more, and spat again. “My phone rings out of the blue and it’s this guy telling me there’s a kid down in Mexico who’s a lock to lead a big league rotation, and soon. He wants me to fly down there and see for myself.”

  “A voice on the phone tells you to scout a seventeen-year-old, and just like, that you go?” The Mexican League is a designated AAA league, but it’s actually more of a high double. The competition isn’t as good as AAA in the States. Even with Fausto dealing the way he was, it was still Mexican League competition.

  “This fellow isn’t just anybody,” Wilson said. “He’s starting to make noise for himself in the game. He’s betting big on this kid, and let me tell you, he’s crazy, okay? Shit-bottom nuts.”

  “This is baseball. Could you narrow it down?”

  “No, listen to this,” Wilson said, warming to the subject. “He has this plan he’s trying to orchestrate where I sign Fausto, bring him up, and let him do his thing, build interest, court the media, all that. He wants to market the kid like a rock star. He’s got this social media strategy where he puts Fausto in front of teenage girls, does an Instagram campaign, photos, all kinds of shit.”