City Beasts

by Mark Kurlansky

  * * *

  Bolling, Homeland Security.”

  Asshole, thought Captain Frank Flicker. He called me. Why does he always have to make me feel like I called him? “So what did you find, Carter?” Frank was not sure how this sounded, because he could never remember if Carter was Bolling’s first or last name.

  “Will figure it out,” said Bolling. He was just a voice on the phone, but Frank knew what to expect: a hard man with a clean-shaven square jaw and a bald head—the type any bird would have recognized as without feathers.

  “I think it’s figured out.”

  “There’s cults and schisms of cults. And they all need watching.”

  “But the zoo vouched for this guy.”

  “How’d he spell that? Was it N-I-T-H, -nithologist? Or N-A-T-H, -nathologist?”

  “I don’t know the spelling, Carter. But I talked to the zoo. They said they did have someone by that name. They said they did. I asked if he called himself a -nithologist or -nathologist and they said he was. They said they had eight of them. I asked if there were more operating in the Bronx and they said ‘Maybe.’ That’s all I got.”

  “Interesting.”

  Carter claimed that everything was interesting. It made it appear as though he knew something others couldn’t see. Frank thought he had learned this trick from watching Basil Rathbone in old Sherlock Holmes movies. But this was only a guess. “You know what I think, Boll—er—Carter?” There was a pause because, of course, Carter or whatever his name was didn’t want to know what Frank thought. But he would tell him anyway. “I think our guy Sanchez is just an odd bird. I’ve been ten years in this precinct. Once the weather warms up for spring, every odd bird in the city turns up here. You should have seen who we just busted for assault and battery. Assault and battery! This hundred-pound woman who pounded this big guy over the head with a wine bottle. She said his tennis racket was hurting the birdies.”

  “Just hold him. I want to question him.”

  “Don’t have anything to hold him on.”

  “So you refuse to cooperate?”

  “Just hurry up.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “I’m telling you, Carter. Just one of these odd birds.”

  “We’ll see.”

  * * *

  Night came to Central Park. New warblers would be coming like a fresh crop of tourists checking in. The small and misnamed screech owl—no bird would call him that—cooed a soft and breathy vibrato before silently flapping his white wings in a stealth hunting mission. Night heron with their white shirts and black suits, like potbellied attorneys, flew to the boat basin in search of fish. It was past time for the ibis to find his tree for the night. But he had no one to nest with. He leapt into the air, stretched his broad wings, and headed north. Freedom felt good, but not if it meant feeling hungry, afraid, or alone. To escape all that would also be freedom, and he was soon back in the Bronx. It was dark now, but he could still see from the air that the aviary had been fixed.

  And the quetzal? He flew to the safety of the highest treetop, but then a little lower he saw a laurel, his favorite tree. He was learning how to find food here and which fruits to avoid because they made him feel funny, and how to stay away from the monkeys. Everyone wants freedom, but every bird has its own idea of what it is.

  Dr. Ifigenio Sanchez was relieved when he returned and discovered that the ibis had returned. The quetzal was going to be more difficult. Quetzals knew how to hide.

  Lolly Messerheim could see that she had chosen the wrong wine and the wrong person to hit over the head. But she was home now and she took out her notebook and triumphantly placed a check mark next to the words “resplendent quetzal” and then noted the date and “boat basin, Central Park.”

  DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

  Twice Bitten in San Pedro

  The tarantula is named after the province of Taranto in the southern Italian region of Apulia. There it is believed that a bite from this spider leads to a seizure of hysterical dancing known as tarantism. Early references to the condition go back to 1100 BCE. The tarantella was banned by the Roman senate in 186 BCE, but people secretly continued tarantism because it not only saved people from the poisonous spider bite, it seemed to cure depression. It is still danced today in Taranto. No one dies of the bites and dancers seem to feel happier after performing the tarantella. Scientists have conducted studies on a theory that the dance somehow stimulates the endocrine system.

  The first time Baldito Gil got bitten he was riding in a black Mitsubishi Montero. But he would get bitten again and the second bite would be very different.

  Change does not come often, but when it does it is an unstoppable force. In San Pedro a few old things might stay, mostly mosquitoes, the old joke went. But the old ways were dying and they were being replaced by baseball.

  No one minded. Who wouldn’t rather work in baseball than sugar? Sugar was fit only for Haitians. So when the Dos Hermanos refinery sold off a large plot of land to the ex-shortstop Dante Galvinez, no one minded. Most of that land had not been under cultivation for years. It was just rotting like fruit on the ground. It was thought to be dead land. Even the braver birds, the big black cao-cao and the leggy white galsas, stayed off of that land. If you passed along the dirt roads near it, there was a weird hissing sound that hurt your ears and sounded like it was from another world. Frants Belsaint, who claimed to have “special knowledge” because his father was a Haitian, warned Dante about the land. Of course, Frants had warned about most things. He was usually proven right, but no one was impressed. Predicting disaster in San Pedro was a safe bet.

  “The galsas don’t land there. That is a very big fukú.”

  Dante thought that this was probably true, but at the price the refinery was asking for their dead land it was more of a gift than a fukú. Besides, he didn’t believe in curses in baseball, only poor training and bad strategies.

  At any time, Dante tried to have twenty boys to develop. They paid him nothing because they had nothing, and then he got a third of their signing bonus, sometimes more, depending on how poor and desperate the family was. He had bought the land and built dugouts and two diamonds and high fences so kids in the neighborhood wouldn’t steal his balls every time there was a home run or a meaty foul. Originally he was going to rent it to a Major League team for a camp. The Minnesota Twins, where he had played shortstop for three years—what a cold, white place that was—were looking for a place to rent. But then he decided that there was more money in being a buscón. A lot of people looked down on them because they took money from kids, but buscones saved those kids and some became Major Leaguers.

  * * *

  Dante had been a good shortstop and he thought he had the makings of a good businessman, but what he really took pride in was that he was a great scout. He signed eight players to the Mets and later signed twelve to the Blue Jays. In all, he brought three all-stars and a Gold Glove to the majors. But he collected his salary and watched the buscones make the real money, a piece of the signing bonuses. He could be a great buscón because he was a great scout. He could just look at a fourteen-year-old. The way he was built, the way he bent over, the way he ran or threw something, and he could see what kind of ballplayer he would be. He saw a boy running and knew if he was going to be able to steal bases. He taught him how to hit and he grew into the American League top base stealer for three years. He saw a thirteen-year-old dancing in the street. His big feet and hands told him he would be tall. His dancing was rhythmic and graceful and he was left-handed. He became a star relief pitcher for the Boston Red Sox.

  Everyone could look at the kids in Consuelo or Quisqueya out in sugar country where baseball began and find some ballplayers. But Dante could find them anywhere. One day he was walking into town on the bridge over the Higuamo, with Elvio, his young assistant, who was convinced of Dante’s dazzling abilities the way a good assistant should be. As D
ante looked toward the mouth of the river at the small rowboats fishing in the mangrove swamp, a kid on one boat caught his attention. Like all the kids—like Dante himself before baseball saved him—he was only bones, a brown-skinned skeleton. But this kid had shoulders like the crossbeam on a ship. Dante watched him throw out nets. He had power in those shoulders and Dante saw the kid haul in the nets with a rhythmic steadiness.

  “Look at that,” Dante said to Elvio. “What do you see?”

  Elvio stared at the boats and the mangrove. “Fishermen?”

  “Anyone special?”

  Elvio picked out one who he deemed about thirteen or fourteen because he knew that was the age that they needed to find.

  “And what do you see when you look at him?” asked Dante. Elvio looked and looked, but he had no answer.

  “You know what I see?” asked Dante. “I see a center fielder.”

  Elvio looked at Dante with appropriate awe. A center fielder. Not right or left, not infield. A center fielder.

  “I wonder how he’ll hit,” said Dante to himself. And then added, for Elvio, “We’re going to Punto de Pescadores. Do you realize this is about the only neighborhood in San Pedro that hasn’t produced a Major Leaguer? All they do down there is fish. We’ll see.”

  * * *

  Bueno,” Omero said repeatedly, with no discernible emotion.

  “Claro,” was Josias’s equally flat response.

  They sat on a long bench, just a plank and a few sawed-down thick poles in front of their small pink house that for all its bright paint looked completely dark inside. So did the bright blue house next to them. All the brightly painted houses along the water looked dark. Their long, slim boats that had been dragged up just high enough to be out of high tide rested in a line in the dirt in front of the houses.

  They all sat shoulder to shoulder, staring at the murky lagoon—Baldito’s father, Omero, and his grandfather, Josias, sat at one end with netting in their laps flowing down their legs and piled on the ground. They had fast-moving tools in their hands that looked like extra fingers. Their hands looked like wood that had dried in a field in the sun. But the fingers moved with the speed of insect legs.

  Their faces were like masks that revealed nothing. Their skin was weathered leather. Omero’s leather was broiled a dark brown, making his almost hazel eyes shockingly light so that he seemed to see more than other people. Josias’s skin was the red chalky color of dried clay. The fishermen said he was Taíno and descended from the first fishermen in San Pedro and that was why he knew everything—where the fish were going, when they were coming back, what the weather would be.

  “So he is already fourteen?” asked Dante.

  “Bueno.”

  “Claro.”

  These men looked tough—tough as cane cutters or anyone else in this tough town. Dante thought the conversation was going surprisingly well. He understood that fishermen did not say a lot of words. It was the magic of baseball. It seduced everyone. He continued growing bolder. “Fourteen is late.”

  “Bueno.”

  “Claro.”

  Rosalia was stewing fish in the kitchen, releasing an aroma that reminded Omero and Josias that they had dinner to look forward to as soon as they were through with these smiling men.

  “But we will train hard every day. I will provide the equipment. Everything. Then when he is sixteen and a half. The exact day. When is his birthday?”

  “August twenty-first,” said Omero.

  “Apogee tide,” added Josias. The implication, lost on Dante and Elvio, was that February 29 was a day to be fishing.

  “So Septem . . . Octo . . . Nov . . . Dec . . . Jan . . . Feb. The last of February.”

  “That will be a leap year,” Josias pointed out. “You can use the extra day. That’s a very good day.” Of course, he meant an extra day for fishing.

  “Yes!” said Dante, trying to sound enthusiastic so that his growing frustration didn’t show. “On that day I will show him to scouts. I will have showed him before, but that day they can bid. I will bring over everyone interested and it will be like an auction.”

  “Bueno,” said Omero.

  “Slavery,” said Josias.

  “What? No, just trying to get the best price.”

  “Claro,” said Josias, as though correcting his own mistake. Dante stared into Josias’s eyes that did not move. It was impossible to see what he was thinking.

  “Then I take a thirty percent commission.” He usually tried for a third but he wanted this to go smoothly and he had other ways of making money on this.

  “Bueno.”

  “So we have a deal?”

  “No,” he heard one of them say softly, and the two started carefully folding their net on the ground. All the while they were both saying in a soft, inoffensive voice, “No. No. No.” Dante had the feeling that when they were through with the net they would both leave. He had to remind himself that they lived there.

  Finally Elvio, who couldn’t keep his silence anymore, said, “Why not?”

  Omero turned and fixed his pale eyes on Elvio, which scared him because this was the first time in this limited conversation in which Omero had looked at anyone. “Baldito is the anchor. Do you know what that means?”

  “No,” said Elvio nervously. Omero explained that the Gil family fished well because he had three sons with whom to fish. The three boys would let out a net holding the ends while Omero operated the oars, slapping the water and making a commotion to frighten the fish and drive them into the net. After a few hours Omero would haul it in with the help of his sons. Even when he was still small, Omero’s youngest son, Baldito, was “the anchor,” the one who played the central role in pulling on board the heavy net full of fish. His arms, too long for his small body, held surprising strength, and that was needed because the net was filled out like a balloon with fifty or sixty pounds of silver, white, and colored little fish writhing, squirming, breathing their last.

  “Take one of the other boys,” said Omero. “I need Baldito.”

  “The others are already too old,” Dante explained, not bothering to add that he saw nothing to develop in them.

  Omero shrugged, and he and Josias started to vanish into the darkness of the pink house.

  “You don’t want your son to be a Major League Baseball star?” Dante called out in desperation.

  Omero’s light eyes shined out from the darkness of the doorway. “How much money will there be if you get him signed?”

  Finally, Dante thought, he is going to talk business. “The signing bonus could be anything from fifty thousand dollars to maybe over a hundred thousand.” Dante was already thinking he would be worth three hundred thousand but he would let the scout keep some of it and he would keep $100,000 for himself, and then take thirty percent of what was left and the family would never know. It was easy. Done all the time.

  “We want fifty thousand dollars,” said Omero.

  “Sure, maybe more.”

  “If I am going to lose my anchor for two years I want fifty thousand dollars guaranteed. You can take thirty percent of everything over that.”

  Why argue? thought Dante. He was going to get a lot on this. Let the fucking fishermen have their $50,000.

  * * *

  When Baldito’s father told him that he had to train to be a baseball player, Baldito was confused. He had never thought of being a baseball player. People in sugar mills became baseball players. He was a fisherman. Adding to his confusion, Josias said to him, “Just watch out for that field they’ve got.”

  “What do you mean? Watch out for what?”

  “Ask Frants,” Josias whispered. At just that moment Omero came up and hugged him. “This is from God, absolutely from God.”

  Josias nodded in agreement.

  “Why?” asked Baldito.

  “We were finished,” sa
id Omero.

  “Finished?” said Baldito. “The catches are down, but the fish will come back. They always do.”

  “No, they won’t,” said Josias. No one argued with Josias about fish.

  “It’s the cement,” said Omero. A Mexican cement factory had been built on the river. The town was very happy about this because it created hundreds of jobs and they were much better jobs than those at the sugar mills, which operated only part of the year. But the cement factory dumped something in the river that was killing the fish. “If we can get fifty thousand dollars,” said Omero, “we can buy a big boat that can go to sea with a big engine and enough money for gasoline and we can catch the big fish at sea. So you have just saved us.”

  “If I can get signed,” said Baldito.

  “You can get signed,” said Josias, and so it was true because he was Taíno and knew things even though he knew nothing about baseball.

  * * *

  Baldito did talk to Frants.

  “The field is cursed, boy. That’s all there is to it. Dante Galvinez is a fine, honest man. But he was swindled. He bought cursed land. I know. It was my father who put the curse on the Dos Hermanos. He got his right arm caught in a crusher. They didn’t do anything for him. He lied in a cot in the batey for ten days, crying in agony. Finally someone came and cut his arm off. Dos Hermanos told him that there was no work for a one-armed man. When he asked for his back pay they said that it was spent on his operation. Operation? There wasn’t any operation. They just chopped off his dead arm. Dos Hermanos didn’t understand this, but my father was from the Artibonite and he knew a lot of things. He had a lot of power and he told Dos Hermanos that he was cursing them. He said, ‘Your sugar will become worthless and your land will be haunted with the screams of the sugar workers you have mistreated.’