The New York (24 page)

Estavar said, “You work for Señor Castro, the pig. You work for the CIA.”

“Hold on, I work for George Bremenhaven, which is even worse.”

“The pig who raped Cuba.”

“George gave these kids a chance to play in the Bigs.”

“Bigs?” said Riccardo.

“The major leagues,” I said.

Raul held up his hand.

— Let's speak Spanish. Riccardo said:

— Is this a good man, Raul?

— He is doing what he has to do.

There was a shrug in that answer as well. I saw the way this was going. It wasn't Raul's fault but it was like the time that Pedro Quininos and I went down into this Billy Bob bar on the road to Galveston with me.forgetting he was a Mexican wearing a sombrero and the next thing you knew, we were playing Zorro with pool cues with half the cowboys in the place. Sometimes you forget where you are when you come out of the workplace and go down home.

— Raul, I've got to call it an early night. I appreciate the beer.

— No, no, Señor Shawn. I buy you a beer. I must, before you leave.

— And have this. It is octopus (said Riccardo).

I thought it was. But I took it anyway. It was chewy and I chewed. Sort of like Doublemint gum with all the sugar gone out of it.

More beer came. The juke played this woman singing in a falsetto and there were feet dancing on the record as well as that throbbing flamenco guitar.

“Whaddaya you do, Mr. Riccardo?”

“I am a courtroom interpreter,” he said.

“Like criminal court?”

“Yes. I am on call in the branches in Manhattan to interpret for the clients who do not speak English.”

“Lots of them, I guess.”

“Lot of them. We also have a Korean interpreter, Mr. Kimm Soo Long, and there is the Polish lady, Mrs. Gzenewski.”

“Polish? I didn't figure on Polish.”

“You only think the lawbreakers are Spanish, is that it?” asked Estavar.

“No, I figured the Spanish speakers played ball for the Yankees,” I said. Little shit was getting me hot.

Raul leaned forward then. He fixed his eye on Estavar. He held it a moment, just like an actor. I swear his eye was going to do an Eastwood twitch, but he just held it there on Estavar, his strong wrists gripping the edge of the table.

“Mr. Shawn gave us his free day. To show us this city. He took us to many places. He didn't take us to the courts.” He said this in careful and totally unaccented English. “We saw the Statue of Liberty.”

“Ah, the statue.
Muy
buena,”
said Riccardo.

Estavar said, “He wants you to defect. Why don't you defect and get it over with?”

Raul blinked. The language was too fast for him.

— Defect (repeated Estavar in Spanish). He is trying to lure you to defect. To show you how much there is in America and how little you have in Cuba.

— I will never defect. My fiancee. She is in Havana.

Riccardo appeared uncomfortable. He tapped the tips of his fingers together. He said:

— Please, please. This is a place for pleasant thoughts and pleasant words. Señor Shawn is not an agent provocateur. I have seen him play many times.

Now what the hell did that mean? Did he mean there was something about the way I pitched that said I couldn't be whatever he said I wasn't?

—
Look. I don't want anybody to do anything except play ball. We're going to Texas next week and swing through the West Coast and all I want to do is play ball and get through this season.

— And win the pennant (Raul said). I looked at him.

He stared at me.

— Well, yeah. Everyone's got a chance.

— We have more than a chance.

— You got a chance, Raul We ain't anywhere near winning the pennant.

— Look at what we have done.

— Look at Suarez. He don't pace himself as a pitcher. He's throwing his arm out. He'll be a cripple by July. Look at Tomas at short. He keeps getting surprised by the ball.

— The grounds are very alive, Señor. He is used to dead grounds. Dead. The infield, I mean.

So that was it. Raul had just solved a mystery for me there. Sure, the kids were playing on semi-manicured grass with a few crab weeds in it. The ball didn't have the bounce in Havana it had in the Bigs.

— Raul is hitting well (Riccardo said).

— He might be a spring phenom.

— No, he's the real thing. I can see Reggie Jackson when I see him swing.

— The second go-round, the pitchers will be seeing him again, figuring out how to pitch to him.

— They can't pitch to me (Raul said). —- That's what they all say.

— Another round.

The last came from Riccardo who sprinkled the infield with his index finger and made a circular motion. More beers and I sat still and took it like a man. Raul was waiting for the waitress to leave to have another fight with me. I was ready.

— Raul, I don't want you to get your hopes up. The season is a hundred and sixty-two games long. You got to pace yourself. Baseball is funny, it's like life, you got your ups and downs. The best team ever is gonna lose a third of its games, that's a given. So we still have a lot of losing to do. It's how you come back from the losing that determines the winning.

— True words, Señor. Very true words (Riccardo said and he burped. His eyes were getting glassy but it was the only sign of intoxication, not counting the burp). I had a case today in which this poor
hombre
robbed a woman at an ATM machine. He has had bad luck ever since he came to New York two years ago. His wife left him with their baby and she is on welfare in Brooklyn and he has not had a job except in the Roy Rogers on Broadway washing dishes. He has no money and he could not stand any more losing. So he robbed a woman at an ATM on West 88th Street.

I stared at Riccardo. He waved his hand in dismissal and sighed.

—- He was given two years at Attica. This is the end of the season for him. I sat there and didn't say anything. Raul said:

— It is unjust, all the poverty that drives men to these crimes. “Hey,” I said, getting the words in my personal fog machine, “Poverty

is poverty. Only thing is here that not everyone is poor so it stands oet. I didn't see a lot of rich people in Havana.”

“You saw people sharing their fate,” Estavar said,

“I don't have to be poor again to know I was,” I said.

“You're making a million dollars this year, it says so in the 
Daily News”
Riccardo said. He said it softly.

“Damn right,” I said.

“The American way, reward the Anglo and keep down the Hispanic who does the work,” Estavar said.

“You're a fucking Communist,” I said.

“No, I am,” Raul said.

We all looked at him.

Riccardo tapped him on the back of his hand. “Raul, little one, you are just a ball player.”

“No, they say I am a Communist”

“That's just a way of talking,” I explained.

“It is true. We do the bidding of El Supremo. And we do this for Cuba.”

“Where'd you pick up your English?”

“My fiancée is fluent in English,” he said. “She helps me.”

“Then you could talk regular all along?”

“I am not happy with English,” Raul said.

“That's what the Irish say,” I said. Trying to keep it light and falling on my own joke again. If jokes were sharp, I'd be in bandages.

“You were not born when I volunteered for the Bay of Pigs,” said Riccardo. “They said I was just a boy and they would not let me go. My uncle was killed there and my father was put into prison. He died.”

Raul closed his eyes a moment, as though to absorb the tragedy of what Riccardo said. Then he said to me:

—- You should go home now, Senor. I'm sorry.

I did it with some dignity, I thought. I got up slow and extended my hand to Riccardo and shook it and then to the other Jose who had the limo and then did a wave to Estavar because I wasn't going to let the snot reject my handshake. Then I rested my hand on Raul's shoulder.

— I don't want nothing from you except to make it more comfortable for you. For Tío, Suarez, the others. I know this is just like one long road trip to you, but autumn will come before you know it.

— And we will not win the pennant.

— I didn't say that. I just said, you got to expect losses along the way. — If you expect to lose, you will lose.

— I didn't say that. I didn't say you should expect …

— I know what you said. This is not baseball, Señor. This is a show, some kind of a circus show. This is not baseball. The others on the other teams, they know. They feel they are shamed because we are on the field against them. What are we? Boys from Cuba no one ever heard of.

“Shit and double shit, Raul,” I said. Then, in Spanish:

— I don't want you to get down.

— I am down. All the time. All I want is to be with my beloved one.

— Maybe that's all I want, too.

He looked at me. The others looked at me. Damn. I didn't figure on giving anything away. I took my hand off his shoulder.

— You got a girl, I got a girl. You handle it. You make your living. You're on the road, you have to do what you have to do.

— You love someone?

— I love someone (I said, thinking to make him feel better). —- And you … “handle” it? How do you handle it?

— You watch westerns on TV and drink beer when you can and when there's a game, you play the game. That's what you do.

— And it is not more important than that?

— It's more important, Raul. You just “handle it.”

Estavar guffawed. He brought up his hand half-clenched and made a frigging movement with it.

“He means like this, Raul.”

But Raul was staring at me.

“You can do that, Señor? Handle it when she is someplace far away, waiting for you?”

“It's what you have to do.”

Raul shook his head and looked away.

— If you can do that, then I feel sorry for you, Señor.

— Why?

He looked back up at me.

— Because, Señor, then you are not in love at all.

And I had to get out of there, right then, back into the glitter of the shabby street with the shabby cabs humping over the patched up pavement, letting the cool night air slap me around a little.

Lovesick little puppy.

Shit.

I lurched down the sidewalk toward the parking lot.

Handle it! I wanted to scream at him.

But I didn't make a sound.

So where did a twenty-three-year-old punk from Cuba get off taking pity on me, a grown man with years of experience who has won a hundred and sixty games lifetime and spent sixteen seasons in the Bigs?

Charlene Cleaver did not even enter into this equation and there I was, trying to make him feel better, trying to make all of them feel better by getting them out of their rooms and their fucking Spanish language TV shows and their pizzas and showing them the Umpire State Building and all. Where did they get off?

I went across town to the West Side Highway and up to the George Washington Bridge. The Hudson River was the color of ink and there was a light enough rain to make the wipers go thunk-thunk every ten seconds or so. I turned on the radio and listened to some fucking jazz interpretation of country and turned it off and just tapped the wheel with my fingertips, trying to remember when I was young enough not to be able to handle things.

Left El Paso when I was eighteen and went up to Arizona on a baseball scholarship and I just knew I was going to the Bigs someday. I knew everything when I was eighteen. I remembered Daddy driving me to the bus station for the long haul north. I didn't even have a car at Arizona the first two years. I was poor. Daddy saw me the first year in the Bigs and I cherish that, only wish Mama had.

I handled everything.

New Jersey slouched glittering and dark across the oil on the waters of the Hudson. New Jersey is like a midget hitching up its pants to face off the big bully on Manhattan Island,

Part of growing up is handling things, That's what I was trying to get across to Raul, lovesick pup.

Handled Sue Joan Moffett at Arizona. She wanted to keep house and teach kindergarten and make babies. She was God's gift to cloudy days, sunny and golden all over with breath like a pine forest. Didn't have to figure her in my plans, though. I guess I made it plain enough that she and I were just for fucking and not for keeps. She made her babies with someone else. She was a phase of my life.

Of course, you might say my life was becoming just a series of phases. And now Charlene, with Raul putting it in perspective. If I wasn't a love-starved calf like him, then it wasn't the real thing, is that it?

I hung a right at Route 4 once over the bridge and then went up the Palisades Parkway to the Clyde exit and back over the Palisades to the other side of Fort Lee. Fort Lee takes getting used to, which is why cab drivers don't like to drop you off there.

I parked in the Holiday Inn lot and thought about having a nightcap in the bar there but then thought better of it. Just my luck some asshole would want to bend my ear about the team. I lurched on down the walk, which was all coated with rain, and into my apartment building. I had the key out on the way up in the elevator.

Same old home sweet home. I threw the keys on the table and turned on the kitchen light. I punched up the answering machine and rolled back the tape because the red light was blinking.

“Where are you, Ryan Patrick? This is ten o'clock at night and you're not even home yet and I know you don't play today, so I've had to go take a room at the stupid old Holiday Inn down the street from you. I don't even know where I am, but I do know it's costing me $109 a night because you weren't home. I hope you're satisfied.” And the receiver slammed.