Love and Hydrogen (25 page)

And finally there was what Ericksson called a Real Lack of Perspective. He was talking, of course, about that famous South of the Border hotheadedness we'd all seen even in the bigs. In our first series against Marianao after Charley and I joined the team (the two of us went two for twenty-six, and we got swept; so much for gringos to the rescue), an argument at home plate—not about whether the guy was out, but about whether the tag had been too hard—brought out both managers, both benches, a blind batboy who felt around everyone's legs for the discarded lumber, a drunk who'd been sleeping under the stands, reporters, a photographer, a would-be beauty queen, the radio announcers, and a large number of interested spectators. I forget how it came out.

After we dropped a doubleheader in Havana our manager had a pot broken over his head. The pot held a plant, which he kept and replanted. After a win at home our starting third baseman was shot in the foot. We asked our manager, mostly through sign language, why. He said he didn't know why they picked the foot.

But it was more than that, too: On days off we'd sit in our hammocks and look out our floor-to-ceiling windows and screened patios and smell our garden with its flowers with the colors from Mars and the breeze with the sea in it. We'd feel like DiMaggio in his penthouse, as big league as big league could get. We'd fish on the coral reefs for yellowtail and mackerel, for shrimp and rock lobster. We'd cook it ourselves. Ericksson started eating over, and he did great things with coconut and lime and beer.

And our hitting began to improve.

One for five, one for four, two for five, two for five with two doubles: the box scores were looking up and up, Spanish or not. One night we went to an American restaurant in Havana, and on the place on the check for comments I wrote,
I went 3 for 5 today.

Cienfuegos went on a little streak: nine wins in a row, fourteen out of fifteen. We caught and passed Marianao. Even Ericksson was slimming down. He pounced on bunts and stomped around home plate like a man killing bees before gunning runners out. We were on a winner.

Which is why politics, like it always does, had to stick its nose in. The president of our tropical paradise, who reminded Charley more of Akim Tamiroff than Harry Truman, was a guy named Batista who was not well liked. This we could tell because when we said his name our teammates would repeat it and then spit on the ground or our feet. We decided to go easy on the political side of things and keep mum on the subject of our opinions, which we mostly didn't have. Ericksson threatened periodically to get us all into trouble or, worse, a discussion, except his Spanish didn't always hold up, and the first time he tried to talk politics everyone agreed with what he was saying and then brought him a bedpan.

Neither of us, as I said before, was much for the front of the newspaper, but you didn't have to be Mr. News to see that Cuba was about as bad as it got in terms of who was running what: The pay-offs got to the point where we figured that guys getting sworn in for public office put their hands out instead of up. We paid off local mailmen to get our mail. We paid off traffic cops to get through intersections. It didn't seem like the kind of thing that could go on forever, especially since most Cubans didn't get expense money.

So this Batista wasn't doing a good job, and it looked like your run-of-the-mill Cuban was hot about that. He kept most of the money for himself and his pals. If you were on the outs and needed food or medicine, it was your hard luck. And according to some of our teammates, when you went to jail—for whatever, for spitting on the sidewalk—bad things happened to you. Relatives wrote you off.

So there were a lot of
demonstraciones
that winter, and driving around town in cabs we always seemed to run into them, which meant trips out to eat or to pick up the paper might run half the day. It was the only nonfinable excuse for showing up late to the ballpark.

But then the demonstrations started at the games, in the stands. And guess who'd usually be leading them, in his little pleated shirt and orange-and-black Marianao cap? We'd be two or three innings in, and the crowd out along the third-base line would get up like the chorus in a Busby Berkeley musical and start singing and swaying back and forth, their arms in the air. They were not singing the team slogan. The first time it happened Batista himself was in the stands, surrounded by like forty bodyguards. He had his arms crossed and was staring over at Castro, who had
his
arms crossed and was staring back. Charley was at the plate, and I was on deck.

Charley walked over to me, bat still on his shoulder. I'm not sure anybody had called time. The pitcher was watching the crowd, too. “Now what is this?” Charley wanted to know.

I told him it could have been a religious thing, or somebody's birthday. He looked at me. “I mean like a national hero's, or something,” I said.

He was still peering over at Castro's side of the crowd, swinging his bat to keep limber, experimenting with that chipped-tooth whistle. “What're they saying?” he asked.

“It's in Spanish,” I said.

Charley shook his head and then shot a look over to Batista on the first-base side. “Akim's gonna love this,” he said. But Batista sat there like this happened all the time. The umpire straightened every inch of clothing behind his chest protector and then had enough and signaled play to resume, so Charley got back into the batter's box, dug in, set himself, and unloaded big-time on the next pitch and put it on a line without meaning to into the crowd on the third-base side. A whole side of the stands ducked, and a couple of people flailed and went down like they were shot. You could see people standing over them.

Castro, in the meantime, stood in the middle of this with his arms still folded, like Peary at the Pole, or Admiral Whoever taking grapeshot across the bow. You had to give him credit.

Charley stepped out of the box and surveyed the damage, cringing a little. Behind him I could see Batista, his hands together over his head, shaking them in congratulation.

“Wouldn't you know it,” Charley said, a little rueful. “I finally get a hold of one and zing it foul.”

“I hope nobody's dead over there,” I said. I could see somebody holding up a hat and looking down, like that was all that was left. Castro was still staring out over the field.

“Wouldn't that be our luck,” Charley said, but he did look worried.

Charley ended up doubling, which the third-base side booed, and then stealing third, which they booed more. While he stood on the bag brushing himself off and feeling quite the pepperpot, Castro stood up and caught him flush on the back of the head with what looked like a burrito of some sort. Mashed beans flew.

The crowd loved it. Castro sat back down, accepting congratulations all around. Charley, when he recovered, made a move like he was going into the stands, but no one in the stadium went for the bluff. So he just stood there with his hands on his hips, the splattered third baseman pointing him out to the crowd and laughing. He stood there on third and waited for me to bring him home so he could spike the catcher to death. He had onions and ground meat on his cap.

That particular Cold War crisis ended with my lining out, a rocket, to short.

In the dugout afterward I told Charley it had been that same guy, Castro, from our first day on the dock. He said that that figured and that he wanted to work on his bat control so he could kill the guy with a line drive if he ever saw him in the stands again.

This Castro came up a lot. There was a guy on the team, a light-hitting left fielder named Rafa, who used to lecture us in Spanish, very worked up. Big supporter of Castro. You could see he was upset about something. Ericksson and I would nod, like we'd given what he was on about some serious thought, and were just about to weigh in on that very subject. I'd usually end the meetings by giving him a thumbs-up and heading out onto the field. Ericksson knew it was about politics, so he was interested. Charley had no patience for it on good days and hearing this guy bring up Castro didn't help. Every so often he'd call across our lockers, “He wants to know if you want to meet his sister.”

Finally Rafa took to bringing an interpreter, and he'd find us at dinners, waiting for buses, taking warm-ups, and up would come the two of them, Rafa and his interpreter, like this was sports day at the UN. Rafa would rattle on while we went about our business, and then his interpreter would take over. His interpreter said things like, “This is not your tropical playground.” He said things like, “The government of the United States will come to understand the Cuban people's right to self-determination.” He said things like, “The people will rise up and crush the octopus of the north.”

“He means the Yankees, Ericksson,” Charley said.

Ericksson meanwhile had that big Nordic brow all furrowed, ready to talk politics.

You could see Rafa thought he was getting through. He went off on a real rip, and when he finished the interpreter said only, “The poverty of the people in our Cuba is very bad.”

Ericksson hunkered down and said, “And the people think Batista's the problem?”

“Lack of money's the problem,” Charley said. The interpreter gave him the kind of look the hotel porter gives you when you show up with seventeen bags. Charley made a face back at him as if to say, Am I right or wrong?

“The poverty is very bad,” the interpreter said again. He was stubborn. He didn't have to tell us: On one road trip we saw a town, like a used-car lot, of whole families, big families, living in abandoned cars. Somebody had a cradle thing worked out for a baby in an overturned fender.

“What do you want from us?” Charley asked.

“You are supporting the corrupt system,” the interpreter said. Rafa hadn't spoken and started talking excitedly, probably asking what'd just been said.

Charley took some cuts and snorted. “Guy's probably been changing everything Rafa wanted to say,” he said.

We started joking that poor Rafa'd only been trying to talk about how to hit a curve. They both gave up on us, and walked off. Ericksson followed them.

“Dag Hammarskjöld,” Charley said, watching him go. When he saw my face he said, “I read the papers.”

But this Castro guy set the tone for the other ballparks. The demonstrations continued more or less the same way (without the burrito) for the last two weeks of the season, and with three games left we found ourselves with a two-game lead on Marianao, and we finished the season guess where against guess who.

This was a big deal to the fans because Marianao had no imports, no Americans, on their team. Even though they had about seven guys with big-league talent, to the Cubans this was David and Goliath stuff. Big America vs. Little Cuba, and our poor Rafa found himself playing for Big America.

So we lost the first two games, by ridiculous scores, scores like 18–5 and 16–1. The kind of scores where you're playing out the string after the third inning. Marianao was charged up and we weren't. Most of the Cuban guys on our team, as you'd figure, were a little confused. They were all trying—money was involved here— but the focus wasn't exactly there. In the first game we came unraveled after Rafa dropped a pop-up and in the second we were just wiped out by a fat forty-five-year-old pitcher that people said, when he had his control and some sleep the night before, was unbeatable.

Castro and Batista were at both games. During the seventh-inning stretch of the second game, with Marianao now tied for first place, Castro led the third-base side in a Spanish version of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

They jeered us—Ericksson, Charley, and me—every time we came up. And the more we let it get to us, the worse we did. Ericksson was pressing, I was pressing, Charley was pressing. So we let each other down. But what made it worse was with every roar after one of our strikeouts, with every stadium-shaking celebration after a ball went through our legs, we felt like we were letting America down, like the poor guy on the infantry charge who can't even hold up the flag, dragging it along the ground. It got to us.

When Charley was up, I could hear him talking to himself: “The kid can still hit. Ball was in on him, but he got that bat head out in front.”

When I was up, I could hear the chatter from Charley: “Gotta have this one. This is where we need you, big guy.”

On Friday Charley made the last out. On Saturday I did. On Saturday night we went to the local bar that seemed the safest and got paralyzed. Ericksson stayed home, resting up for the rubber match.

Our Cuban skipper had a clubhouse meeting before the last game. It was hard to have a clear-the-air meeting when some of the teammates didn't understand the language and were half paralyzed with hangovers besides, but they went on with it anyway, pointing at us every so often. I got the feeling the suggestion was that the Americans be benched for the sake of morale.

To our Cuban skipper's credit, and because he was more contrary than anything else, he penciled us in.

Just to stick it in Marianao's ear, he penciled us into the 1-2-3 spots in the order.

The game started around three in the afternoon. It was one of the worst hangovers I'd ever had. I walked out into the Cuban sun, the first to carry the hopes of Cienfuegos and America to the plate, and decided that as a punishment I'd been struck blind. The crowd chanted, “The Elephant passes slowly, but it squashes.” I struck out, though I have only the umpire's say-so on that.

Charley struck out too. Back on the bench he squinted like someone looking into car headlights. “It was a good pitch,” he said. “I mean it sounded like a good pitch. I didn't see it.”

But Ericksson, champion of clean living, stroked one out. It put the lid on some of the celebrating in the stands. We were a little too hungover to go real crazy when he got back to the dugout, but I think he understood.

Everybody, in fact, was hitting but us. A couple guys behind Ericksson, including Rafa, put together some doubles, and we had a 3–0 lead which stood up all the way to the bottom of the inning, when Marianao batted around and through its lineup and our starter and went into the top of the second leading 6–3.