Butterfly Winter (17 page)

The first pitch was aimed for Julio’s crotch; by springing backward with a panther-like quickness he avoided it. His manager stormed from the dugout and jawed with the umpire for several minutes, all the time pointing accusingly at Hasslewaite, while the Mets fans booed and brayed, and Hasslewaite stood insolently on the mound exuding innocence.

Hasslewaite pitched two strikes, then zipped a fastball toward Julio’s head. Julio moved back only an inch or two; the ball passed under his chin.

“The Chief has great control, greaser. He’s gonna stick the next one in your ear,” and he laughed again, tobacco juice gurgling in his throat. “They’ll be refried beans all over home plate.…”

Instead of going for the head, Hasslewaite used a curve ball that sliced in and hit Julio on the pitching arm, just above the wrist. By the time the manager and trainer reached him the wrist was swollen and greenish.

“Tough luck, fella,” said the catcher, mask in hand, grinning from yellowed eyes.

“Very unwise,” was all Julio said to the catcher, as he was escorted from the game. In spite of the burrito poultices his mother sent from Courteguay and the ministerings of the Wizard, Julio was out of action for six weeks. But Hasslewaite never pitched again. His rotator cuff mysteriously ground to a halt. He was unable to raise his pitching arm above shoulder height.

Ten years later, at a small, seedy carnival in Baltimore, Julio saw Hasslewaite for the last time. Among a crooked ring-toss game, weighted milk bottles, and a sinister puppet show, was a grimy freak show featuring a gorilla-baby, a bearded lady, and a ruptured strong man. Also on the program was Hasslewaite; Julio recognized him from his portrait on the garish canvas banner in front of the freak tent. A beady-eyed man in a pinstriped baseball uniform, with yellow daffodils growing from his right wrist where his pitching hand should have been.

M
agic is only something you haven’t seen before, the Wizard told Julio. Some things that happen to us every day, people on the other side of the earth might call magic. While we might be equally impressed by what they consider ordinary. For instance, I have heard that there are places where the wizards can make it so cold men turn to marble before your eyes.

Julio recalled the Wizard’s words the first time he saw the butterflies darken the sun.

High in the sand hills above San Barnabas, where the cane fields petered out to rock as the elevation increased, where stubborn evergreens stood hunched over like seraped old men, was the place where the monarch butterflies spent the winter in hibernation. It would be many years before the outside world would discover the wondrous event, though it was known and ignored by the Courteguayan hill people since the beginning of time.

The monarchs, large black-and-orange butterflies, with wing-spreads of up to four inches, migrated each fall from as far away as Canada. Some years a hundred million of them made the dramatic
journey across the
USA
, lines of them intersecting, the main stream becoming larger and larger, vibrating like Halloween streamers. Pulled by some invisible magnet, they crossed the continent, eventually forming a Mississippi of butterflies that flowed like an endless pipeline over the ocean to Courteguay and to the evergreens high in the sand hills.

Once they arrived, the black-bordered monarchs folded their wings, attached themselves to a needle of evergreen, and rested until spring when they awakened and again formed a fluttering, thousand-mile conduit back to North America, an undulating, whirling sky-ride of color.

From the base of the hills, the butterfly-saturated trees looked dead, as orange as if they had been singed. Travelers from San Barnabas stared up at the pale orange trees and remarked that they must suffer from dry rot or blight. Then the trees passed from their minds. The hill people knew the truth of the butterflies but considered the phenomenon unremarkable.

The residents of San Barnabas were used to the whirling tunnel of butterflies passing over the city each October and April, but only the Wizard had ever had the curiosity to follow the golden horde to its resting place.

The first year the Wizard was rich enough to own a hot air balloon, he hovered high above the endless orange tube of life, which from above appeared to be full of jittering orange smoke. The Wizard knew that butterflies were so named because early peoples thought that witches took on the colorful, mysterious form in order to steal milk and butter.

The Wizard, ever avaricious, fantasized that these butterflies took their color from gold, and that wherever they came to rest he would find a mine stuffed with indescribable wealth. The butterflies, he decided, restored themselves by bathing in gold dust. What he did not expect to find was the most tranquil spot on earth, a fairyland of sleeping orange evergreens.

The few peasants in the area respected the butterflies, did not even cut firewood in “the season of the sleeping sunshine,” which was how they described each butterfly winter.

Local farmers stock their wood in the early fall, the Wizard reported back, for they’ve found even the sound of an ax will cause some butterflies to fall to the ground. And those that fall from the evergreen needles die. If a tree is actually cut, the ground around it is papered with the silken wings of monarchs.

When Julio Pimental returned to Courteguay, after another season of baseball in America, he was heavy-hearted and arm-weary. He sat for days next to Fernandella’s cool stream, the only movement about him his eyes, which twitched involuntarily when the brilliant blue fish tossed themselves in the air like coins.

Fernandella tempted him with pheasant pie, pickled pheasant, pheasant burritos, as well as something indescribable, a dish she had seen illustrated in an American magazine Julio had sent to her. She carried the recipe down to the fenced compound, where the eldest priest translated for her, his face pressed against the chain-link fence that confined him. The translated ingredients included lampblack, and a small electrical appliance. The dish, which was supposed to be Chicken Alejandro, though Fernandella used pheasant instead of chicken, turned out less than satisfactory.

“I am not going back,” Julio sighed. “Baseball players in America may be well paid, but they are not idols; they are traded like goats from one farmer to another.”

But by now even Fernandella was used to luxury. And Hector Alvarez Pimental, with the Wizard acting as a commissioned broker, had just ordered a chartreuse
BMW
with white leather upholstery.

“With home cooking and a few days rest you will soon be good as new,” said Fernandella.

“Have you considered playing winter baseball in Mexico?” his father asked, feeling the biceps of Julio’s pitching arm.

Julio mooned by the crystal stream for another week, while his twin, Esteban, studied Latin texts at the San Barnabas Library, conferring frequently with the moth-eaten priests in their chain-link enclosure.

Early one morning Julio heard children screeching in the hills high above the house; he looked up to see several silhouetted against
the sky like stick drawings. Each child’s arm was extended upwards. They ran along the crest of the hill, pointing, as if flying invisible kites.

Curiosity overshadowed his torpor, and he languidly climbed the hill.

“The butterflies are coming,” the children chanted.

Julio scanned the sky; it was pale as ice. The short grass on the hill was scorched yellow; the day would be white hot in an hour or so. The sky was blank as water.

“How do you know?” Julio asked the children, who stared back at him with the contempt the very young have for adults who do not share their intuition. Though Julio was scarcely a year older than the oldest, his clothes and manner tagged him as an adult, and they automatically mistrusted him.

“Everyone knows,” a sullen-eyed girl in a sugar-sack dress finally replied.

“I can’t see a thing,” Julio replied.

“It is sad to be blind,” said the girl. “My grandfather is blind.”

“I mean in the sky,” said Julio.

“The sky. The land. Blind is blind.”

“I can see,” said Julio, raising his eyes to meet the girl’s dark stare. She was perhaps a year younger than he, with a colt-legged vitality. Julio could see her tiny breasts pushing like shadows against the white sackcloth.

“Really?” said the girl, Quita, a mocking smile on her lips.

“I see a terrible beauty in front of me,” said Julio. As he said it he felt his chest tighten; he was unable to take a full breath; it was as if his ribs were taped. His statement had not emerged in the bantering tone he intended. The girl, her lips slightly parted, continued to stare at him with sad, dark eyes.

Julio, who had learned to joke in blighted English, outside baseball stadiums, with fans, groupies, Baseball Sadies, could think of nothing to say to this girl in his native language. He felt as he did when the bases were loaded, the winning run dancing yo-yo-like off third base. Reacting accordingly, he breathed deeply, clearing his mind of
everything. He pretended he was on the mound, the translucent batter glowing dimly to one side of the plate, his only thought to hurl the ball to his brother, Esteban. Hurl it without interruption.

Moments passed. The other children raced on across the spine of the hill, arms still spearing skyward, while Julio stood as if in a trance. The girl sat down in front of him, pulled up her knees, locking her long fingers in front of her ankles. Julio blinked, stared up at the sky that was still blank.

“You look as if you’re in prayer. Are you one of the religious ones?” asked the girl.

Julio gazed down at her as man must first have gazed at fire.

“No,” he said. “But I am rich enough to buy you your heart’s desire.”

“No one is rich enough to buy anyone’s heart’s desire,” said Quita, “especially mine. I want to fly in the body of a white heron, sleek and smooth as soap, piercing the sky; I want to see my moon shadow dark on the water below me. Are you rich enough to buy me that?”

“No,” sighed Julio, his own lips parting as he watched Quita’s face. He would have traded his career for one kiss; he was terrified he would frighten her away.

“The religious ones talk of going to meet their leader in the sky. He walks on water and converses with oxen, at least so they say.”

“I am not one of them,” said Julio. “The priests are kept in corrals like cattle; the militia has orders to shoot the missionaries you speak of.”

“I’m glad on all counts,” said Quita. “The religious ones are not interested in now. They claim to wait for their pleasure in another world. I seek pleasure now, and in the next world, if one exists. Are you really rich?”

Julio breathed deeply, exhaled, letting the air and tension float from him. He noticed that Quita’s eyes were set wide apart. She would make a great pitcher, Julio thought. She could watch base runners while facing the plate.

“Yes. I am rich. I have just returned from playing baseball in America. I am a pitcher.”

“If you are rich why are you unhappy?”

“Because I am lonely. My life in America is like being locked in an empty room for months at a time. And, as a baseball player, I am expected to perform miracles.”

“With loaves and fishes like the leader of the religious ones?” asked Quita. And though Julio met her straight, innocent gaze, he could not tell if she was making fun of him or sympathizing.

“With my right arm and a baseball.”

“I know about baseball,” said Quita. “My father was Milan Garza. He has been honored by El Presidente as a Courteguayan Baseball Immortal. He died when I was very young. El Presidente would not allow my mother to bury him: his body was taken away and is preserved in a glass case in the Hall of Baseball Immortals in the Capitol building. I have never been there, though I am told my father stands as he did in the outfield, in his Cardinal of St. Louis red-and-white uniform, his glove on his hand, a holy aura about his head. I am told, too, that his eyes glow in the dark.”

“I have never been to the Hall of Baseball Immortals either,” said Julio, “though I am rich enough to go any time I wish. Rich enough to take you with me. But Milan Garza is a national hero. In America I am often asked by reporters if I knew him. He played for years in America. As his daughter you should be rich beyond your dreams.”

Quita stood up and moved closer to Julio. As she did so he caught the first odors of her: sun-sweet earth, but behind that something darker, muskier, like the scent of the deep-colored nasturtiums that bloomed on the shady side of Fernandella’s new home.

“You have been away for years. Have you not heard of Dr. Noir? My father decided to run for the Presidency of Courteguay. It was the one thing he wanted that he could not have.”

“But what of the honors your father received? El Presidente named Milan Garza a Knight Commander of the Blue Camellia. I read about it.”

“One cannot eat titles, or praise, or adulation, as you must well know. For I recognize you now, one half of the The Battery,
Courteguay’s most famous export. El Presidente used to say you and your brother were worth more to Courteguay’s economy than one million pounds of mangos. Is that true?”

Julio smiled, trying to imagine one million pounds of mangos.

“My father was murdered,” Quita continued. “Poisoned so he could be displayed forever in a crystal coffin at the Hall of Baseball Immortals. ‘A dead idol is much safer than a living one,’ Dr. Noir told my mother in a supposed note of condolence. ‘A dead hero can never disgrace himself in his old age, can never support unpopular political causes, disclose unacceptable sexual preferences, become falling-down drunk in public, or display an aging and ill-conditioned body.’ You should become familiar with such quotes. You should also know that if you become rich and famous through baseball Dr. Noir will see to it that you have a short life span. Has no one told you that?”

But Julio was barely listening. He breathed in the sweetness of Quita Garza, though far in the back of his mind he recalled the fortune-teller who predicted his brother’s early death. No, no one had told him anything. But Julio was not very interested in death, or warnings of death. He was in love. The white sky made him dizzy.