by Dick Cluster
Over the next few minutes four or five more men came in. From the greetings they offered I could see they were customers who lived nearby, not intruders from other neighborhoods like myself. Some of them greeted the old man warmly, and they seemed to be asking the brunette something about the solitary man. This made me feel a little better. Finally, I managed to stop worrying about the individual who kept putting his hand under the cuff of his pants. “What are you anyway, a policeman?” I asked myself, adjusting my chair more comfortably so as to enjoy the baseball game. “Did you come here to carry out a criminal investigation, or to try your luck in The Sporting Life?”
I ordered a second drink. A stranger in the place, with no one to talk to, I let myself eavesdrop on the conversation of the old man and the younger one accompanying him while on the center screen I watched my beloved Cardinals taking on the Braves. My team was winning, but the one I bet on was losing. Because how could I bet on St. Louis when Pujols was out of the lineup? But do you think that was easy for me?
While the commercials were on, the old man raised his voice so it carried over the chorus of other voices singing, “If you love me, why don’t you call?”
“I wanted my boy to be like El Mamaguaia,” he said, his gaze lost in the night invisible through the windows. I wanted to know what might lie behind that phrase pronounced in such a hopeless tone. I moved my chair closer to the old man and the young one in the checkered shirt, who was listening quietly while nodding slowly as if in agreement. “Not like Sammy Sosa or Manny Ramírez, you know?” the old man continued with his glass not quite grazing his lips. “I wanted my boy to be like the Mamaguaia of ’98, that powerful, natural slugger that nobody would mess with. Ah, and as smart as the Alou brothers, you know?”
The solitary man in the corner signaled to the blonde, who attended to him immediately. He looked uncomfortable, as if annoyed that the old man had been raising his voice. He handed the girl a slip of paper, which she folded in two and secreted inside her top.
On the center screen, the game was half over, the Braves now leading two to one in the bottom of the fifth. Without Pujols in the lineup, the Cardinals had no way to come back, I assured myself. Finally I’d make some money. Finally I wouldn’t have to start the week borrowing money from the Brits in my middle-class neighborhood. I crossed my fingers and prayed for God to support the Braves.
Buoyed by my second vodka and the promising shorts of the waitresses, I came to the conclusion that luck would indeed be with me, that I’d be receiving money any minute. Whenever I drink, I feel happiness is just around the corner, and I let my imagination run away with me. My mind was wandering, and so were my eyes. I checked out all the screens while waiting for the old man to pick up the thread of what he’d been saying. On one of them, Andy Roddick had Roger Federer on the run in center court at Wimbledon; on the screen to its left, Holyfield was unloading hooks and jabs on Mike Tyson’s face in the rerun of an old boxing match; next to that, a group of cyclists began a new stage of the Tour de France; then there was a local horse race: Psychotic the winner again, by half a length. The farthest screen reported on the historic Dominican baseball rivalry between the Licey Tigres and the Águilas of Cibao.
At about 9:15 the door to the bar opened again, and someone came in, studied the room, and finally headed for the corner by the slot machine. He told some secret to the solitary man in black, and the scarce light revealed an angry scowl. Again the one in black rubbed his leg underneath the pants, as if assuring himself that all remained in readiness.
Hanging as I’d been on the old man’s story and the tense game on TV (La Russa now kicked the dirt to protest a call on a close play at second base), I had almost forgotten the lone man. He looked toward our side of the room while saying something to his visitor. Maybe it was “Wait for me outside.” I needed to hide my interest, as the detectives of my weekly shows advise in the case of a whiff of danger. But again I wondered why I always had to act as if I were Columbo. Very simple, a resigned voice inside me answered: Those of us who bet can’t lose ourselves in the game, because we need to calculate the final result.
I managed to direct my eyes back to the middle screen, but I couldn’t order my ears to ignore the old man’s words, which were getting more and more interesting. I owe the monologue that came next (a monologue because the younger man only nodded as the older one talked) to a Yadier Molina triple. That hit by the St. Louis catcher scored Matt Holliday from first, tying the game at two runs apiece, and that’s how it stayed until the ninth inning. My hopes were falling fast. God did not appear to be taking signs from me.
The old man, on the other hand, seemed cheered by this new turn of the game. He looked over the paper on which he’d written down his bets and went on with his story, to which I was all ears.
“When I was young, I managed the amateur team in our town in the south. One of the star prospects was my son. A big, strong boy who had the scouts talking about a new Rico Carty. The comparison to Rico really didn’t do justice to my boy, because power wasn’t his only tool. He was a terrific fielder and on top of that he had speed. He was no truck, he was a gazelle. There wasn’t any doubt he’d be better than the slugger from San Pedro de Macorís—with all due respect to Carty, you know? And he had brains, smart like the Alous, like Juan Marichal. I could imagine him managing in the big leagues when he got old.
“The scouts kept after me, wearing me out, and the press was after me, too. The day of his signing approached, and we’d prepared everything for the family celebration we were going to have. . . . Then, the hurricane came.”
After this sentence, he seemed to clear a lump from his throat. In the mirror I could see that the memory was getting him down, and the effects of the whiskey were hitting him, too. His face relived the time he was talking about. He signaled to the blonde, who came over, reached into her blouse, and handed him the paper that had been warming against her breast. The old man whispered something to her while glancing at the solitary man out of the corner of his eye. She nodded, yes.
“Are you sure?” the man with the battered briefcase asked. “The same team?”
“Yes, definitely. St. Louis,” she answered. She turned away to attend to other customers.
His eye on the man in black in the darkened corner, the old man raised his glass in a toast. “To the Cardinals!” he announced dramatically, “though I’ve never thought much of that team. To St. Louis, because today I want to forget what that fucking hurricane did, twisting fate and drowning the future of a great prospect!”
Clearly the hurricane he was talking about was Georges, that freak of nature with torrential rains and winds over one hundred twenty miles an hour that scourged the island in 1998, provoking death and desolation through most of the country and the Republic of Haiti next door.
“The river rose,” the old man continued, and now he too rose, coming to his feet, turning away from the screen but still following the game through the mirrors. Ninth inning, tied, Cardinals at bat with two outs and men on first and third. La Russa, in a duel of strategies, called on Pujols to pinch-hit. “That river ruined our life, my family’s and mine. It took my son. He was found two days later up in a tree. With one leg smashed and his face frozen in fear.”
Atlanta made a pitching change. I took advantage of the break to go to the john. When I got back, the old man had fallen into a deep silence. The young one in the checkered shirt was no longer nodding but was trying to cheer him up. At the same time, the lone man in black with the nervous tic had stood up again. As I passed him I realized how big he was, enormous. He wouldn’t need a pistol if he wanted to kill someone. I remembered Inspector Morse and deduced that the old man’s briefcase could be a ruse to distract visitors from the real danger. My deduction took on force when, unexpectedly, the lone man staggered toward the slot machine. “He’s pretending to be drunk,” I thought. “He’s got an accomplice waiting outside, and now he’s playing drunk.” Using the mirrors, I kept my eye on the other
two. “Nobody’s catching me off guard,” I swore.
The old man sat down and sighed deeply. In silence his eyes went from screen to screen as mine had done before. Armstrong took off, closely pursued by Alberto Contador. Surprisingly, Roddick lost the second set to a revived Federer, conscious of playing for history. Holyfield bounced like an angry cat because Tyson had bitten him on the ear. There was no more horse race, but a documentary about the death of the King of Pop. On the last screen Polonia (always him!) crashed into the wall in a Tigres vs. Águilas game.
Glass in hand, the old man shifted his eyes back to the center screen and began to offer his analysis of the game. The lone man in black in the corner watched him with a condemnatory look half shrouded in shadow. Surely these two were in cahoots. Again I felt I ought to get out of there. What was really in the briefcase? I hadn’t learned much from either my analyses modeled on Kojak and Columbo or the psychological insights of Inspector Morse.
I prepared for the worst. There was someone waiting outside. I was going to be attacked on the street, not inside the bar. But not till after the game.
Top of the ninth. Men at the corners, two outs, Boone Logan on the mound facing the pinch-hitting Pujols at the plate, play resumed. Curve ball. Grounder to third, picked up by Chipper Jones, throw to first. End of half inning, game still tied.
I breathed again. La Russa’s strategy had failed, and things soon got worse for St. Louis. In the bottom of the ninth, Atlanta put a man on second after two outs. Garrett Anderson at bat, breaking ball, slow roller to first—and through Pujols’s legs! Victory to the Atlanta Braves.
My team had lost, but I was happy because Atlanta’s win brought me several thousand pesos.
In the bathroom, where no one could see, I slid an empty bottle into my pocket, just in case. I was getting ready to collect on my bet and leave when the old man suddenly picked up the piece of cardboard from the floor, grabbed the briefcase, and stood. I thought he was after me, but no. He sat back down, then signaled to the solitary man. I thought of sprinting out the door and leaving my winnings behind, but the two girls were watching me and I felt ashamed. Better for those guys to kill me than for the women to think I was a coward. I was moving toward the cash register when the old man opened the case and said to the younger one in the checkered shirt, “Look, here are all the clippings. Here’s the whole story, so all the snoopers, all the busybodies can see I’m not lying.” He sought out my face with a cynical look. “You, don’t you see now?”
They were a mix of sports articles and news pieces covering the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Georges long ago. There were a lot of stories about the home run battle between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire in that same September of 1998. There was a half-page photo below a headline that proclaimed, “Emeterio Ramírez Cadet, top prospect.” On the cardboard, alongside that article that also showed a small, poor house and the parents and siblings of the young player posing for the camera, the old man had glued a feature that said, “Fate Catches Up With the Future Pro.” The old man read solemnly (no more music to compete with his voice) how the Nizao River had buried houses, people, and animals after the hurricane came through.
Tears fell from his bitter eyes. Shaking, he threw the paper the blonde had given him to the floor while he cursed the local authorities who had left him defenseless. The lone man from the darkened table approached with difficulty. He had waited until almost all the customers were gone, I saw. The girls inched off to the side as if in fear. He said to the old man, “Let’s go. The taxi’s been waiting for a while. Did I hear that you bet on St. Louis? Me too. Bad luck.”
Then they left, each supporting the other as they walked. The door closed, erasing them.
I signaled to the blonde, who was gathering empty glasses and bottles. “Who’s that guy staggering from his jumo?” I used the local term to make myself clear.
“He’s not drunk, he doesn’t touch a drop. I’m surprised you don’t know about him. They call him The Prospect, his name is Emeterio. He comes every night to look after Don Enemencio, his father, who owns this place. Emeterio lost his leg during Georges, and his father feels guilty about it.”
I leaned down to pick up the note the old man had dropped. I opened it and read, “Let’s go, papa. I can’t get used to this metal leg.”
THE STRANGE GAME OF THE MEN IN BLUE
José Bobadilla
(Dominican Republic)
José Bobadilla (Santo Domingo, 1955) traces his formation as a writer to mentors ranging from Aurora Tavárez Belliard, who taught him to read, to Juan Bosch, his most important influence. He spent 1980 to 1986 in Nicaragua, first as a literacy volunteer, then as a professor. After his return home, he served as an assistant to Bosch and a member of the Presidential Council on Culture. He was awarded the national literary prize for the novel Memoria del horror hermoso in 2007 and the following year for the story collection La insaciable aguja del deseo. He is currently a special assistant to the president of the Dominican Republic.
Though set in an unnamed country in the nineteenth century, this story borrows the surname of the military governor of the Dominican Republic during the US occupation of 1916–24, Rear Admiral Harry Shepard Knapp.
For weeks the city had known that this would not be any ordinary day. Admiral Knapp, scrupulous in all things from brushing his teeth to the extraordinary challenge of a difficult battle, wrote in his diary in his customary cramped script:
The festivities will take place on the fourth of the coming month. The players will make their entrance right behind the marine band that will follow the flagbearers with marches and patriotic songs. In the meantime, three nights earlier, we shall carry out the sentence that puts an end, once and for all, to the bandits who so embarrassed us in the recent skirmishes.
So wrote that officer, a man who instructed his bootblack to work as if polishing the most fragile of mirrors while, to himself, he silently intoned old songs of the South, that evermore-elusive ancestral paradise where solicitous black women served him breakfast while his lover of the previous night stirred in voluptuous slumber between the sheets. Spencer Walker O’Sullivan Knapp—of the O’Sullivans of Memphis, Clayton River, and St. Louis—was forty-nine years old, appropriately tall if a bit ungainly, with a somber, penetrating voice and gestures more deliberate than spontaneous. His blond hair had a reddish tint that made it look dyed, while the twinkle in his eyes called to mind the flashing silhouette of a tiny fishhook in a cup of some disturbing azure brew. There were some who enthusiastically averred that he was a veteran of European wars, those clashes of kings and generals on horseback, stranded here to expiate a secret guilt. Indeed, in furtive written notes or over elegant strokes of the billiard cue, it was said that none less than the president of his native land had summoned him and declared, in a fit of uncharacteristic frankness, “You’ll be an admiral at last, but you’ll have no fleet to command.”
Thus was he condemned to dress in full formal regalia in a place located, so to speak, on the outskirts of a courtyard where beggars from the poorest neighborhoods gathered to pick over the leavings of disdainful gentlemen attending the ball. But the admiral gave little or no thought to such matters. The Fourth arrived with a jumble of flags, pennants, and bunting hung like sacred altar cloths from every available perch. At dawn, a bugle call summoned the troops to formation, and a cannon shot thundered from the ramparts for all to set their clocks and pocket watches by, so that at nine sharp, without a second’s delay, the celebration could begin. The first to arrive were the honorable judges of the Supreme Court in their long ritual robes. Then, just as the chords of the country’s most august patriotic hymn reached a crescendo, the Most Reverend Monsignor made his appearance out of the shade of a long line of ancient trees, like a spectral apparition wrapped in frozen flames of taffeta, solemn under a three-peaked biretta, and took his seat upon his ceremonial throne.
The ill feeling that festered between the two principal figures now appeared irresolvable, since
neither flattery nor threats had served the haughty officer to lessen the archbishop’s longstanding sense of injury. Indeed, His Reverence made a point of attending every public ceremony and state function, never missing a chance to display his disdain. It must be admitted that Spencer Knapp’s punctilious courtesy had become proverbial. Yet, surrounded by his no-less-correct general staff, he observed the natives of the country as if from a distant street or, worse still, a balcony high above.
A junior officer on horseback approached the reviewing stand at a ceremonial trot. Coming to an abrupt halt, he uttered something that did not require any translation. The admiral responded with a gesture that was in turn answered with an energetic salute. At this signal, as if activated by a perfect train of gears, gun batteries fired to signal the corps of marines to parade in formation before the multitude. However, this was not what anyone had come to see. Behind the marines, a double file of athletes descended from the gun batteries like the spreading tail of a peacock, the column on the right in shirts of a celestial blue, and that on the left in scarlet. Upon the parade ground, a mysterious square shape had been drawn with limestone dust. The protagonists immediately occupied this playing field, each in his designated place. The strange sport they were about to demonstrate was said to be an invention of prehistoric Indians bored to distraction during the long winters, and later perfected with martial discipline and artistic flourishes by fortune-hunters and ruffians. Following long-standing rules and regulations that made some sense out of nonsense, these sportsmen banged away at a small ball while dashing like lunatics between pillows spread about the field. The cognoscenti of this pursuit referred to the square space as a diamond and the objective of their activity as a run.