Kill the Ámpaya!

by Dick Cluster

  When they called us with the news that Eleazar had been run over by a truck, I felt this was already old news, as if we were being brought up to date on something that had happened quite a long time before. I think Eleazar was dead from the moment the White Sox put him on that plane for home.

  My son’s signing was neither good nor bad in itself. It all depends how you look at it. Eight hundred thousand dollars was nothing to sneeze at in the era when he was signed. But I don’t think it was fair price, either, for a left-handed pitcher with the control Keny displayed at the age of sixteen.

  That sum, now that I think about it, didn’t do much honor to the innumerable Sunday afternoons I spent sitting on grimy benches with the nails sticking out, pretending I was in a VIP box in Yankee Stadium. Nobody said so out loud, but all of us there on those benches knew this was the price we had to pay, and we all knew it was just a question of time. We knew our buds were going to bloom. We knew they wouldn’t get stunted at a height of five foot seven, damned forevermore. We knew they wouldn’t get some girl pregnant. We knew.

  After the Astros signed Keny, my old coworkers at the ministry—the few I was still in touch with—started greeting me with expressions suspended between amazement and envy. Ah, the envy! Who was it that said envy is skinny because it never eats, only bites? That is sure the truth. And so Venezuelan, too, my God. When news of the signing came out in the papers, one of the first to call to offer his support was a former boss of mine, a tyrant who had made life impossible. Since I don’t hold grudges, I accepted his invitation to have lunch. I knew that his son had turned out to be a slacker and a pothead—everybody in the ministry knew that. I’m nobody to be making judgments about others, but after this guy offered me his pained congratulations and then began slinging barbed comments like “what matters isn’t getting there but staying there” and “this kid inherited everything from his uncle,” I couldn’t take any more. With this Salieri I decided to call a spade a spade.

  “Look,” I said, “Maybe my boy will only last two days in the major leagues. Maybe he’s inherited a lot from his uncle. Anything is possible. But tell me something. I know where your son got his laziness—from you. But his taste for weed, which side of the family did that come from?

  Keny whizzed through the minors as fast as you could take a breath. Within a year he’d jumped from an instructional rookie league to the Triple-A farm team in Norfolk. His record of 7–3 with an ERA of 1.59 showed that he was going to break the curse that hovered over our family, for good and all. Halfway through the year, the general manager was ready to call him up to the big-league club, but the manager at Norfolk was more judicious. The rookie still needed to polish a few things about his pitching mechanics, he said.

  When Keny came home for the winter break, I was struck by the equanimity with which he took everything. This didn’t reassure me, but the opposite. He was neither happy nor sad, neither enthusiastic nor apathetic. In words that were more or less devoid of emotion, he told us that, assuming things went on as they’d been going, he’d be on the Astros’ forty-man roster the next year. I could never understand that boy. Just a step away from glory, an inch from emerging from the herd into the spotlight, and he sounded like he was being sent to harvest crops on a plantation. But before he left for Virginia, Keny told me the problem. It was as obvious as it was simple.

  “I’ve never liked baseball, Papa. I’m doing all this for you.”

  Right then I didn’t know how to fully appreciate those words, though now I do. Now I understand why my son agreed to go along with the plan of “less school, more stadium” that I had laid out for him since he was little. I never demanded good grades in chemistry or physics, only on the field. He always knew that what would make me happy would be seeing our name in letters across his back, not on an academic diploma.

  Halfway through the season, Keny hurt his pitching arm.

  When that happened, my boy was rated as the organization’s A-1 prospect. He was undefeated after eight starts and was the talk of the league. No other pitcher in Norfolk’s history, whether righty or lefty, had achieved such a record in his second year. Two days before the injury, the call-up order from the big club was sitting on the manager’s desk.

  Keny never knew.

  The injury itself was not all that serious. A bone spur on the elbow is as common among pitchers as the habit of putting saliva on the ball. The operation and the rehab were routine; the club had a doctor who specialized in that kind of surgery.

  Still, Keny’s return to the Norfolk rotation was not completely satisfactory. His performance had deteriorated slightly. He’d lost a little off his fastball, not much, but enough to worry the general manager.

  When my son called to say his contract had been sold to a team in Taiwan, what he really wanted was permission to come home to Caracas. I think I heard him crying on the other end of the line, or maybe the connection was bad. I adlibbed a speech about perseverance and other such nonsense. At some point I cried, too. Both of us knew he was never going to wear a big-league uniform again.

  What happened after that I’ve had to piece together out of loose ends, half-truths, and my own imagination.

  The team that bought Keny’s contract was called the Bears, or maybe Elephants, or maybe even Coyotes, if they have coyotes in that part of the world. Whatever, it was one of the strongest teams in the league—and the main target of the Taiwanese gambling mafia.

  In Taiwan, Keny recovered his form. Though I think he’d never really lost it, I think what he lost was his confidence, and for a pitcher that’s a serious thing. In his first two starts in Taiwan, he was simply unhittable. He demonstrated his old control and velocity, with the radar gun clocking him at up to 98 miles per hour. His pitches came in sharp and on the corners, intimidating for batters who aren’t so tall. And Taiwan, of course, is no land of giants.

  One night when the summer monsoon was drenching the streets of Taipei, Keny received a proposition. The proposition was backed up by two irrefutable arguments: a bag stuffed with Taiwan dollars and a threat.

  It didn’t take Keny long to get the picture. He tried to reason with them, but in vain. The mafia—Taiwanese, Italian, or Venezuelan—always tries the carrot first. The emissaries, as if they knew past, present, and future by heart, dropped the bag on his bed. Each put a hand on his shoulder and told him, “You losing tomorrow.”

  That ungrammatical sentence plunged him into uncertainty and panic. His first impulse was to go find the manager of the team and announce that he was quitting. He didn’t do it. Instead, I got a harrowing call at two a.m.

  That was the last time I talked with my son.

  I spent the insurance money on a mausoleum in the Cementerio del Este. It’s made of white marble, in the best part of the cemetery. It’s beautiful, it really is. An homage to my boy that I wanted to make. I go every Sunday and, though I don’t pray, I spend hours in front of a picture that I had them seal onto the tombstone. He’s twelve years old, in a baseball uniform, and his eyes are translucent and stern.

  Sometimes I think (and other times I’m sure) that instead of sitting on marble tiles I’m back on the benches full of nails and grime, where I used to sit and wait and dream.

  HOW TOMBOY MARÍA LEARNED SHE COULD FLY

  Daniel Ernesto Reyes Germán

  (Dominican Republic)

  Daniel Reyes Germán (Santo Domingo, 1988) writes under his own name and under the pseudonym Daniel Kinger. He studied filmmaking at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo and has won several Dominican literary prizes, including the second prize in the Primer Concurso de Cuentos sobre Beisbol (2008) and second, third, and fourth prizes in the Fundación Juan Bosch’s 100 Años en 100 Palabras (2010). He also writes and illustrates stories for children and young adults.

  The ant that grows wings is the one that goes astray.

  — POPULAR SAYING

  I’ve got rhythm, I’ve got swing, I play ball like anything.

  — MERENGUE L
YRIC

  On its way from the capital to Los Llanos, the Mella Highway passes through a series of cane fields. When you reach signpost number who-knows-what, you can catch a glimpse of the town of San Luis. You can see the sugarcane railway, the oxen pulling their heavy loads, and the cane cutters with dark skin and brown-sugar souls, machetes in hand, sharp blades in constant twisting motion, right to left, right to left, chopping at the green foliage that seems to glow and pant in the heat. You may feel you’re breathing through a vat full of sugar, the best definition of a sweet smell. There, to the east of steamy Santo Domingo, is Josefina’s house.

  She’s having labor pains.

  “Where’s my pregnant lady?” asks a woman with a hint of smile. She is directed to a bedroom. She’s the midwife, everyone calls her La Matrona. As fate will have it, the señora Josefina Pierre gives birth to a girl.

  Josefina had her daughter the regular way, in her own home and without complications. Though she was Catholic more by upbringing than by belief, that was enough to provide the child a name: María del Carmen. María del Carmen Paúl Pierre. Both parents were of Haitian descent.

  Every day, María del Carmen walked to the country schoolhouse carrying a cane-leaf chair over her head. The chair was both her seat in the classroom and the weapon she wielded in the fights she got into, even at that age. She loved busting heads. Of course she was sent home in the company of a teacher, but that did not get her punished. The neighbors said her parents spoiled her, overly supportive as they were. María del Carmen Paúl Pierre was lively and smart. Her body was striking and exotic for her years: black, tall, and thin with a long, willowy spine, her kinky hair braided and tied with red ribbons. Her parents tried to hide her signs of masculinity, which disappeared anyway as she turned adolescent and adult. She exuded natural leadership; if you were a child her age, you both feared her and wanted to follow her. But in the environment in which she lived, her only outlet was to prance, tease, fight, and get into trouble, provoking complaints from teachers, relatives, friends, classmates, and neighbors.

  One fine day, the school sent a counselor to give María del Carmen’s parents some advice. In the cramped parlor of their house, they waited expectantly for what he had to say.

  “The girl has a lot of energy, she’s hyperactive,” he said. “The best thing would be for her to take on some kind of activity or project. Maybe some kind of sport—something to get all the bad stuff out of her head. You know what they say,” the counselor added with the dispassionate calm of a psychologist, “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.”

  “She washes dishes and sometimes she goes with me to the river to do the clothes,” her mother offered without much hope.

  “That’s not enough. She needs an activity that requires more energy, time, and effort. If I may say so, your daughter is very jumpy. It’s almost as if she were trying to fly, that’s the feeling I get, and nothing good can come of that.” The teacher stood up, his lips seeming to offer a silent prayer that came from deep inside. “As my folks used to put it,” he added, “‘The ant that grows wings is the one that goes astray.’ Those old sayings don’t lie.”

  What he recommended was a little league that held its games on the ball field at the edge of the village. He pointed that way with his chin, as if he were trying to plant a kiss on the wind. Unable to come up with any reasons for delay, Josefina took María del Carmen by the arm and led her to the site that everyone called the play, which was baking under the unforgiving sun of a cloudless day.

  The arrival of the unlikely visitors awakened universal curiosity on the play. Throwing arms stopped in midair, bats did not swing, gloves did not reach out to catch balls in flight. One such ball raised a cloud of dust as it collided with the ground. Craning their necks to the point of injury, everyone stared at the pair of females who shyly stepped onto the green grass in search of the coach.

  “How do I sign her up?” Josefina blurted out, taking the bull by the horns.

  “First of all, ma’am, we take only boys. There isn’t any girls’ league.”

  A few boys laughed, though if María del Carmen were to find them outside the ball field she would surely make them pay, one by one. The coach shushed them. He was a tall, ordinary man, dressed no better than a scarecrow, with a dried-out face like a cashew nut.

  “It’s doctor’s orders,” Josefina lied, irreverent and confident. “She needs to be here.”

  The manager hesitated a moment and noted that María looked to be the right size to play third base, where he needed someone to round out his team. He picked up a notebook, gave the strange pair another once-over, and asked, “Does this little piece of work have a name?”

  “She’s María del Carmen Paúl Pierre.”

  The coach wrote this down and told her to run a few laps to warm up. He told her mother, “We’ll give her a tryout to see if she’s got what it takes.” His tone was not lacking in innuendo. “When practice is over we’ll send her home to you.”

  María del Carmen heard him and thought, “I’m no message to send and no soldier to give orders to.”

  The manager handed her a bat and watched as she assumed her stance. “She’s got something,” he thought. He told his best pitcher to throw a fastball by her.

  Some more boys laughed, and she glanced at them just long enough to memorize their faces. Then she swung and made contact with the ball. It was a rolling, but well hit, so the manager said, “Okay Tomboy María. Let’s see how you field.” And he spit, grinding the toe of his shoe over the saliva that turned the dirt to mud.

  From then on she was not María del Carmen Paúl Pierre. Everyone called her Tomboy María.

  When she got home that afternoon, all the neighborhood kids wanted to hear how she had done. Everyone knew about the morning’s visit from the school and her being sent to join the league. She ducked inside just long enough to grab the necessities for stickball. The usual odds and ends of players took turns at bat and in the field. It wasn’t long before the game expanded to include whole teams, and variations were added: bases made of old license plates, home run derbies, and more. United by their fever for baseball, the children would play until the sun sank below the horizon.

  “Everything had better go right, or I’m going to kick your asses. You’re a bunch of lazy clowns, and if I have to tell anybody anything twice, he better be ready for what I do next. I’m not going all the way there to get shown up or to lose, especially on somebody else’s turf. And another thing: get the money together. You know the price of the round trip, so don’t play dumb like you never heard about it. We’re leaving at four a.m., on the dot, American time. That’s it. Now get going,” he ordered. “I want to see you sweat. Except you, Tomboy María. I have something to discuss with you.”

  María’s heart skipped a beat, her pulse stopped, she didn’t breathe. For a few seconds she froze in fright.

  “Coach, I’ll bring the cash tomorrow, when my father gets paid,” she stammered, dropping her eyes and wringing her hands together, awakening the man’s compassion.

  “No, that’s not it.” He hesitated for a moment like a bearer of bad news. “The thing is, you can’t go. The league is for boys. You’re not allowed.”

  He spoke to her more courteously than usual, as if it really did hurt him to say this. Still he did not stray far from his usual brusqueness. “I’m sorry, I really am. Tell that to Doña Josefina, so she’ll know.”

  Tomboy María nodded reluctantly. She climbed up on the bleachers and squatted there. All the anger she had bottled up to avoid causing problems in the league threatened to come pouring out. She remembered the moments when she was the idol of everyone watching in the play. Her eyes reddened and tears welled up in her chest, like when she got in fights at school. Although she felt humiliated, degraded, she couldn’t show weakness. She thought she was the best player on the team, and she wasn’t wrong. She remembered her recurrent dream of flying alongside a column of ants after a fierce downpour. The day she woke
up in terror from the first of those dreams, her mother took her small head between her breasts and said, “Joseph in the Bible dreamed of flying, and he ended up the leader of his people. The next time you dream this, concentrate on your goals.” That’s what she said, more or less, though not in those exact words. Tomboy María decided that playing baseball was her greatest and most longed-for desire.

  When practice was over, all the boys headed for home. Tomboy María looked at the ones who had laughed at her when she first appeared. Now she had nothing to lose. The news that she couldn’t go on the trip and show off all she had accomplished wounded the innermost corners of her soul.

  “So what is it?” she shouted. “Do I have shit on my face? Do I look like some kind of clown?” She was going to give each of them what they deserved. But she controlled herself, again thinking about the consequences of her actions. It was more important to stay in the league than to break a few heads and give the boys the thrashing they deserved. She held onto the vague hope of coming back from a championship series, someday, with the gold medals she had imagined during stifling sleepless nights. She turned around and headed home, leaving the boys shocked at the gestures she made for them to remember her by. She loved baseball more than she loved busting heads. Though it was hard for her to believe sometimes, she felt so good simply because she could run faster, swing harder, steal more bases, and catch with more precision than the rest. A sense of superiority was what her soul needed most.