The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (31 page)

But he can see the portrait of Lucy—that famous painting by that famous American painter—on the wall above them, in the light.
In color
her hair is indeed remarkable. “I have heard many great things about you,
Señor
Castro,” Arnaz says suddenly. He is wearing gabardine slacks, is thinner than Fidel imagined. “I was the only boy in Cuba never to play baseball, I am certain, but I follow the sport avidly—especially when one of its players is a son of Cuba and boasts your gifts.” 

“Muchas gracias,”
Fidel says. He is uncomfortable, sitting with the man he has seen so many times on television, and knows he should not be. They are both Cubans. They are both important men. “If I may say so,
Señor
Arnaz, you are the most famous Cuban in America and my girlfriend and I are but two of the many, many fans you and your wife have in both countries. . . .” 

It is not what he wanted to say. Arnaz smiles, saying nothing. He is waiting. He is waiting to hear the reason Fidel has come. 

He has rehearsed this many times and yet the rehearsals mean nothing. It is like his fastball. All the practice in the world means nothing. He must simply find the courage to say what he has come to say: 

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,
Señor
. I have asked for this meeting because I am concerned about our country. . . .” 

He waits. The face of Arnaz does not change. The smile is there. The eyes look at him respectfully, just as the eyes of the Cuban in the coffee shop looked at him. 

And then Arnaz says, “I see,” and the smile changes. 

Fidel is unable to breathe. All he can see is the frown, faint but there. All he can do, holding his breath, is wonder what it means:
Disappointment,
because Arnaz imagined something different—a Hollywood project, a
baseball
Hollywood project, an event for charity with baseball players and Hollywood people . . . for the poor of Cuba perhaps? 

Or is it
anger?
 

“To what do you refer?” Arnaz asks, his voice different now.
I do not imagine this,
Fidel tells himself.
It is real. The warmth is gone
. . . . 

Even the room looks darker now, Lucy’s portrait on the wall, dimmer. Fidel takes a breath, exhales, and begins again: “I cannot be sure of the details myself,
Señor
. That is why I wished to see you. Perhaps you know more than I.” He takes another breath, exhales it, too, and smells suddenly the cane fields of Oriente, their sweetness, and sweet rain. “We are both celebrities,
Señor
Arnaz—myself to a much lesser degree, to be sure—and I believe that celebrities like you and I hold unusual positions in our two countries. We are Cubans, yes, but we are not
ordinary
Cubans. We are famous in two countries and have the power, I believe, and even—if I may be so bold—the responsibility as well, to know what is happening in Cuba, to speak publicly, even to influence matters between those two countries . . . for the sake of the sons and daughters of Martí. . . .” 

Arnaz waits. 

“Have you,” Fidel goes on quickly, “heard of a movement in Oriente Province, in the Sierra Maestro, or of any general unrest in our country,
Señor?
Word of such matters has reached me recently through a fellow Cuban whose credentials I have no reason to question and who I do
not
believe is a communist.” 

Arnaz looks at him and the silence goes on and on. When the little Cuban finally speaks, it is like wind through pine trees near a sea, like years of walls there. “Forgive me for what I am about to say,
Señor
Castro, but like many men in your profession, you are very naïve. You hear a rumor and from it imagine a
revolution
. You hear the name of José Martí invoked by those who would invoke any name to suit their purposes and from this suddenly imagine that it is your duty to become
involved
. 

“It would hurt you seriously,
Señor
Castro,” Arnaz continues, “were word of this concern of yours—of our meeting and your very words to me today—to become public. Were that to happen, I assure you, you would find yourself in an unfavorable public light, one that would have consequences for you professionally for many, many years, for your family in Cuba, for your girlfriend here. I will not mention your visit to anyone. I trust you will do the same.” 

Arnaz is getting up. “I would also suggest,
Señor
Castro, that you leave matters of the kind you have been so concerned with to the politicians, to our presidents in Washington and Havana, who have wisdom in such things.” 

Fidel is nodding, rising, too. He can feel the heat of the shame on his face. They are at the door. The chauffeur is standing by the limousine. Arnaz is telling him goodbye, wishing him good luck and a fine baseball season. The gracious smile is there, the manly handshake somehow, and now the limousine is carrying him back down the driveway toward the gate. 

The despair that fills him is vast, as vast as the uncleared forests beyond the sugarcane and tobacco fields of Oriente Province, lifting only when the limousine is free of the gate and he can think of Nancy again—her face, her hair—and can realize that,
yes,
she would look good with red hair, that indeed he would like her hair to be such an amazing red. 

Southpaw 

Story Notes 

It turns out that the seductively ironic and charming story about Fidel Castro—the one “Southpaw” uses as its premise—the one about Castro, the good baseball player even though his fast ball sucked, being scouted by the New York Giants—is probably apocryphal one way or another. But it was such a good story (as apocryphal stories usually are) that when I asked my uncle, the late, great sportswriter and organized-crime investigator Jack Tobin, about it, he simply nodded—which I, of course, and with less than journalistic rigor, took to be validation of the story’s veracity, and which nod I am using, as you can see, to defend this story to this day. Uncle Jack, who wore a hat until the day he died and was as generous as he was Joe-Friday-tough, was one of my idols growing up. Who else could possibly be the West Coast editor of
Sports Illustrated,
covering all the Olympics, and also the man who helped put Jimmy Hoffa in prison—all in the same lifetime? If he wasn’t investigating the Santa Monica Mountains and the Teamster’s Fund for the
Los Angeles Times,
he was gum-shoeing the early use of steroids in big-league sports, looking into corporations that wanted to go to bed with other corporations, using his own sixth sense to find people who’d been lost for thirty years, and meeting with secret informants—sometimes under death threats—in the dark of night. Though Uncle Jack was a practical, down-to-earth, get-things-done guy, I learned early from him what I’d also learn years later from “remote viewers” in the U.S. government’s only truly successful experiments with ESP: that past a certain point it doesn’t matter why scientifically something like ESP or the paranormal of Jung’s “synchronicity” or miracles or a sixth sense works. What matters is that it does work. (See the new field of “placebo studies”—a field that accepts the “placebo effect” as an actual effect, just as powerful as medication, worthy of study. See the medical profession’s increasing acceptance of the power of “prayer” to heal, and its increasing acceptance of meridians and acupuncture. If it works, use it, guys.)
 

A quick story to illustrate. I’d see Uncle Jack regularly while I was researching and writing
Dream Baby,
and I’d always assumed he didn’t believe in such stuff—ESP, psychic things. He never commented on my research, the interviews, the wild things I was reporting to him occasionally. Then one day as I started work on the novel itself I said, “By the way, Jack, what do you think about ESP?” The universe stopped (it didn’t turn blue, no, but it did stop). He answered (with words to the effect): “You mean a sixth sense? Sure. How do you think I discovered the Teamster’s Fund story. I use it all the time. When going to sleep or waking up I’ll hear a name—just a name—and later I pursue it. I don’t care whether people say that’s just intuition, the unconscious working with it, or something else—something fancier. I have my own reasons to think it’s fancier, but that doesn’t matter, does it. It works and I use it to do what I do in this life, out of the values I hold, out of doing what I believe is right.”
 

Without Uncle Jack I wouldn’t have seen ESP-ish things—what human beings do with them when they’re real enough in their lives to serve them—so clearly. Without Jack, too—without his living example of how one might fuse improbable worlds—“Southpaw,” which appeared originally in
Asimov’s
and later in the Dozois/Schmidt anthology
Roads Not Taken,
would never have been written. After all, in what other world would Castro the baseball player choose Lucille Ball over a revolution?
 

Benji’s Pencil 

George Maxwell suddenly felt a web of warmth on his skin, then the burn of his heart’s fresh beating, then the first flutterings of sound in his ears. He awoke to focus his eyes weakly on a bare ceiling. His eyes rolled once like oiled agates, then clung securely to the clarity of the white surface above him. 

He was beginning to feel the warm crescendoing tones of his muscles when a voice near him said, “George Maxwell, welcome to life.” 

The muscles sputtered hotly in his neck, but Maxwell turned his head and found the face that belonged to the voice. A pale man smiled back at him, his shiny shaven head contrasted like a wrinkled egg on the thick weave of his white robe. 

Maxwell tried his lips, but they sputtered as all of his muscles seemed to be doing. 

“George Maxwell, please try to say something.” 

“Fihnlegh,” Maxwell tried. “Finlehrg . . . Finahlrg . . . Finalih . . . Finally.” 

The other man laughed kindly. “A most appropriate choice for your first word. It makes me want to start off my talk with an apology for the institute’s tardiness in reviving you. Do you mind if I talk while you regain your lips?” 

Maxwell shook his head. 

“The Institute for Revivication wants to apologize for taking so long in unfreezing you. Your records were misplaced for five years and—” 

“Ahm,” Maxwell interrupted. 

“Yes?” 

“Ahm ah curd?” 

“Pardon me? Please try again.” 

“Am ah cured?” 

“Oh. Of course you’re cured.” The man smiled, almost laughing. “All you needed was a new heart. I hope this won’t bother you, considering what you were accustomed to in your time as far as heart transplants go, but we put a synthetic heart in your chest.” 

Maxwell jerked and emitted a feeble “Argh.” 

“I am sorry. In your time that would have seemed terrible, I’m sure. Something inorganic within you. But let me assure you, you’ll be fine. We’ve been giving people synthetic hearts for a long time, and the psychs always report that there is negligible personality change as a result. Okay?” 

Maxwell nodded, a little relieved. His mind was shouting, “Now I’ll be able to see the green!” 

“Let me finish your formal introduction first. By law I must give you this intro speech, then we’ll have some minutes to talk about anything you’d like. Your grandson—rather one of your multi-great-grandsons—will be here soon to pick you up.” 

Maxwell jerked again, but tried a smile with his limp lips. Relaxing, he waited for the soothing voice of the first man he’d heard in a terribly cold long time. 

“Fine? As I was saying, your records were misplaced, so we had no way of finding any relative of yours. By law a relative must be willing to house and feed you for the remainder of your life. You were lucky. One of your multi-great-grandsons is an assistant food-distributor and can afford to support you. But I won’t say more—you’ll be talking to him soon enough and that’s another problem. The language. The written language of this time is not very different from yours. Inflections and sectional dialects often make it hard for a ‘new’ person to understand. I happen to be an Introducer, so I’ve had to study tapes of past spoken language in order to communicate with people like yourself.” 

“Lingige hand?” Maxwell asked. “Linguage hahd?” 

“No, it’s not hard at all. You’ll be able to pick it up in a week or so. I just wanted to prepare you for it. Now, there’s one other matter for intro—” 

“Ah git wrkuh? Kin ah get wrkh?” 

“Get work? No, I’m sorry. That’s one of our problems. Not many jobs, so that’s why we had to find a relative to support you. I know you’ll feel bad about that, being a burden and all, but that’s
modus vitae
these days.” 

“How longh will ah liv?” 

“Ah, yes. Technically we could keep you alive and in very good health for over a hundred years. But mandatory death, I’m afraid, is at seventy years of age. Population control, you understand. Family planning and euthanasia. According to our records, you have ten years left. That’s quite a while, you must realize. And it will be ten years of life in a time that’s new to you.” The man smiled again.