Butterfly Winter

by W. P. Kinsella

  “The virginal wood awaits your paints,” said Julio.

  The portrait was not of herons. It was of the side of a mountain with small evergreens covered with millions of monarch butterflies, on the earth were the outlines of Quita and Julio buried beneath an avalanche of butterflies.

  When it came time to pay, Julio deposited twice the agreed fee in Umberto’s hand.

  “No,” said Umberto, “the painting cannot leave the village.”

  But Julio had already hired three husky boys to share the burden.

  “It is mine. I will do with it as I please,” said Julio forcefully. It took them two days to transport the wall to San Cristobel.

  When Julio unwrapped the canvas that protected it, the wall, which smelled of freshly sawed lumber, was blank and virginal. Though Julio imagined he could see Umberto’s laughing face lurking in the shadows of the pale wood.

  SEVENTY

  THE WIZARD

  After Quita’s death, Julio drifted through two mediocre seasons. The political situation kept him from returning to Courteguay. His promise to Quita kept him from moving on with his life. He alternately pined for Quita, while cursing himself for being so weak as to desire other women. Without earthly love Julio became depressed, pitched lackadaisically, even so his record was 16-8. He made all sorts of fundamental errors, like forgetting when there were runners on base. Once with the bases loaded a sharp grounder was hit on one bounce into his waiting glove, but Julio was thinking about a girl in a red sweater sitting directly behind first. He began to make a play to first, then heard Esteban’s anguished cry from where he stood one size twelve planted firmly on the plate waiting for the force out. For some reason he looked to second before throwing to Esteban just as the sliding runner touched the plate.

  It was in Boston that Julio, sick with guilt, decided he could no longer stand being without a woman. His promise to Quita was always with him, as night after night he fought back his desire but with diminishing success. He remembered Quita’s dying words, “You will never make love with anyone but me,” and vowed that he would remain true to her, at least in spirit.

  The physical is on one level, the spiritual another, he rationalized; it is merely lust which demands to be satisfied. I will not make love; I will satisfy only my physical passions.

  The season was half over. After every game Julio waited in the clubhouse until the other players had left. He listened to their joking, their chattering, as they speculated on what adventures awaited outside the player’s gate. He pretended interest in his clothes and equipment as they wondered aloud which of the bizarre, wild, sensually violent women would be their lot.

  Julio would sit in the damp, silent clubhouse, amid the odors of sweat, chlorine, and urine, dreaming of Courteguay, of Quita, of the winter of the butterflies, until he felt safe from temptation, until the streets around the ballpark would be deserted. Dressed so casually he could be mistaken for one of the park cleaners, who by then would be arriving for work, Julio would slip out of the park and walk, hands deep in pockets, the few blocks to his hotel, where he would sneak in a side entrance and up to his room.

  He had awakened that morning in Boston full of an unquenchable desire, the kind he knew could be satisfied only by a woman. He relieved himself, while calling up his memories of Quita, breathing her name. But the relief was pale and useless; desire continued to smolder within him like ground fire.

  That night he pitched indifferently, thinking more about what he would do after the game than the game itself. He tried to blot out the batter from his mind, tried to concentrate only on making the ball reach Esteban’s mitt. But his success was marginal. His team won 7-6, though Esteban reprimanded him for his carelessness on more than one occasion for throwing pitches to the wrong location, and twice for throwing the completely wrong pitch.

  After the game he dressed carefully, splashing lime-scented aftershave lotion on his smooth cheeks. He wore tight, fawn-colored slacks, a black silk shirt with buttons in the shape of silver nuggets. He combed his hair and donned his team jacket. By now the first rush of players would be on the street, signing autographs, eying the more aggressive groupies, who would be flaunting themselves, making their availability plain.

  I will choose one from the background, Julio decided, one who might not be attracted solely by my uniform, one who, as my third baseman might say, won’t spread her legs until she reaches the hotel room.

  He emerged from the player’s gate smiling, tossing a baseball in the air. If I could only be like Esteban, he thought almost hourly. Esteban was mainly indifferent to sex and the pleasures of the flesh. But I cannot, Julio concluded. As he signed autographs he studied the women who waited; he dismissed the predatory ones, the grasping ones, the lewd-mouthed ones, who demanded that he sign their clothing or parts of their bodies. At the rear of the semicircle he spotted a dark-complexioned girl in a blouse the color of outfield grass; her hair reached below her shoulders. She might be of Latin origin, he decided. Staring above the crowd he caught her eye, and aiming carefully tossed the baseball to her. She caught it awkwardly, cupping both hands as she did so.

  He deliberately made her wait until last; he finished signing autographs for all the little boys in baseball uniforms; he fended off the more aggressive women, especially a persistent one in a thousand-dollar dress and floppy black hat who he had heard the other players speak of with a mixture of admiration and contempt.

  Finally, the dark-haired girl was alone in front of him. He seized the baseball.

  “Should I write, From the greatest pitcher in all baseball?” Julio asked, smiling to show off his even white teeth.

  “Whatever you wish,” the girl replied. She was not beautiful, Julio noticed. Her face was too long, her chin pointed.

  “Do you by chance speak any language other than English?” Julio asked.

  “Espanol,” the girl whispered.

  “Would you go for a walk with me?” Julio asked in his best Spanish, which while not perfect was far better than his English, adding before she could reply, “It is sometimes very lonely being a traveling baseball player.”

  The girl nodded, and as they set out Julio took her hand; the very touch of warm flesh made him draw in his breath. He had intended to be brash and brazen with this woman, the way he promised himself he would be with all women for the rest of his life. He had planned to make it clear that she meant nothing to him but a means of sexual release, a toy to be used and then held in mild contempt. He planned on behaving like Navarro the third baseman, who would fling a heavy arm around a woman’s shoulders, grin jovially, and say something like, “Hey, honey, you like to get sucked off before you get fucked?”

  Instead, Julio and the girl walked in silence for a block.

  “I am Carmen,” the girl said.

  “Do you know who I am?” Julio asked.

  “Of course, you are the handsome half of the Pimental twins,” she replied.

  “Of course,” said Julio.

  He bought some roasted nuts from a street vendor and they ate them as they walked. The girl’s hand was warm in his; when his cheek brushed against her hair he could smell rose-scented soap, and the hair tickling his nose, the way Quita’s had, excited him. He was tempted to ask the girl why she was doing this, inquire as to why she was attracted to him, find out if it was the uniform, the fact that he was famous, find out if it was the money, his own good looks. At length he decided he really didn’t want to know. He supposed there wasn’t a logical answer anyway.

  At the hotel he was solicitous as a bridegroom, ordering drinks and ice from room service, inquiring as to the girl’s comfort an endless number of times, until she finally stepped into his arms and raised her mouth to his, beginning the kiss in the same aggressive way that Quita always had. Julio found himself trembling as Carmen’s delicious tongue touched his.

  Forgive me, Quita, he thought. This will be for physical satisfaction only. But when he mounted the girl, Carmen; when she seized his penis a
nd guided it into her the way his beloved Quita had done, Julio felt his senses dissolve in an all-encompassing passion. He felt as if he were being slowly immersed in sweet, heated water. Carmen’s tongue rattled in his mouth; her odors were of sun-sweet earth, leather, Quita’s odors. As he abandoned himself totally to sexual pleasure, the woman in his arms seemed to become Quita. As he changed positions, tasted her body, felt her convulse against his tongue, her red nails scraped his shoulders in loving passion in the exact way Quita’s used to do. Julio called her name into the sweet sexual warmth of the room.

  As he lay gasping, his head on the pillow next to her, she licked her own taste off his lips, exactly as Quita used to do. And when she slid down and took him in her mouth it was like the slim fire-colored skaters he had seen on TV racing through his veins.

  “Quita! Quita, my love.…”

  And she answered him in voice, and breath, and passion.

  Hours later as they cuddled softly in the large bed, their aura seemed suddenly to lift like a cotton candy cloud. When he looked down Quita was no more. The girl Carmen was there, plain, unremarkable, breathing softly into his shoulder.

  After Carmen left Julio felt guilty for experiencing such unrestrained pleasure. But, he thought, it is the first happiness I have known in two years. Can it be wrong?

  He could hardly wait for the game to end the next day. He picked a woman who, while not unattractive, was of a type not desirable to him. She was a black girl with a wild tumbleweed of hair. She wore a red skirt slit to the waist, and a turquoise blouse that showed off her sloping breasts. She was brazen, not very intelligent, and almost impossible to understand when she spoke. He hustled her back to the hotel and into bed. In the throes of sexual activity Julio, to his delight, experienced all the exotic passions he had enjoyed every time he made love with Quita.

  Every night that week he took a different woman back to his hotel. In his bed, for a few blissful hours each one turned into the essence of Quita Garza. Slowly, that magical week, Julio came to understand the true meaning of Quita’s dying words.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  THE GRINGO JOURNALIST

  The player who rusted in the rain. Did this actually happen? The Wizard says it did. I am always noncommittal for I hate to spoil a good story. His name was Pasqual Ruiz, says the Wizard. An average outfielder, an average hitter, destined never to rise above Triple A baseball, his one uniqueness was his abiding fear of rain. At the first sign of rolling black clouds he would become uneasy. He would spend more time watching the sky than watching the hitter. At the first spit of rain he would walk off the field and conceal himself in the dugout. The manager tolerated this eccentricity. If he was called upon to come to bat while it was raining, no matter how lightly, he refused to leave the dugout. The times this happened were few and the manager replaced him in the lineup when it was necessary.

  However, in the middle of his second season in America, management changed. The new field manager was a man with a reputation of never quitting, and of expecting his players to follow instructions with no questions asked. When he was told of the peculiarities of Pasqual Ruiz, he spit contemptuously on the field and said, “My players play when and where I tell them to. There are no exceptions.”

  A few days later a fine drizzle began while the team was batting. When Pasqual’s turn came to bat he remained seated. The manager strode to a spot in front of him and demanded to know why he wasn’t batting. Pasqual Ruiz instantly forgot whatever English he had learned. He signaled frantically for a fellow Courteguayan to come and explain the situation. The manager listened, then said, “Tell Pasquali here if he wants to continue playing baseball in America he’ll go to bat, otherwise he’ll be on the first plane back to whatever heathen hinterland he came from, a place where he’ll have to spend a whole year burning off rain forest in order to earn half as much as he gets for one day’s meal money.”

  Pasqual Ruiz listened. He picked up a bat and walked out into the drizzle, where he swung at the first three pitches, none of which were near the strike zone, and trotted back to the dugout.

  When the inning ended he was the last player to leave the dugout, in fact he waited until the manager had stared at him for several seconds and was about to make his way down the bench to confront him again, when he reluctantly ventured into the outfield. He stood the whole half inning in the ever-increasing drizzle, and when the inning ended he walked stiffly back to the bench. The next inning it was raining harder, so hard that about twenty minutes into a four-run inning the umpires called the game. The players ran toward the dugout, all but Pasqual Ruiz.

  “What’s the matter with Pasqual? I thought he hated the rain?” said the manager.

  “He is rusted,” said a utility infielder.

  “People don’t rust,” said the manager.

  “Unless they are from Courteguay,” said the infielder who, it was rumored, had been conceived from a union between a glove and a bat, and had been discovered, when he was a few hours old, in an equipment bag.

  Ruiz never played again. He remained in right field for two seasons while the fielders played around him. Gradually it became known that there was a statue in the right field of the baseball park. Pigeons sat on Ruiz’s head. Young thugs painted graffiti on his body.

  “What became of him?”

  “The team, somewhere in the Midwest, lost its Major League affiliation, the ballpark was closed, eventually torn down. Ruiz stands now in a cornfield, I am told, no longer visible from any road, longing to again someday hear the crack of the bat.”

  “Is that how it happened?” I ask the Wizard.

  “If it isn’t, it’s the way it should have happened,” replied the Wizard.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  THE GRINGO JOURNALIST

  Dr. Noir, his instinct for survival more delicate than most, became suspicious of herons. Though Courteguay was landlocked and there was no lake close to the Presidential Palace, Dr. Noir noticed that there were an inordinate number of herons on the palace grounds. The tall, blue birds stood like statues on the manicured lawns, walked slowly and softly in the gardens, stared with squinted eyes at anyone who approached them, displayed a certain arrogance as they let guards or visitors get almost close enough to touch before slicing the air with their dark wings.

  “Where have they come from?” Dr. Noir demanded of his chief of security.

  “They are only harmless birds,” came the reply. “A change in migration patterns, who knows? They are nondestructive, virtually silent, nothing to worry about.”

  “But I do worry,” said Dr. Noir.

  “I assure you, sir.…”

  “Kill them!” said Dr. Noir. “Not now …” He grabbed the sleeve of the security chief to keep him from drawing his weapon. “Instruct the guards. I want an attack. I want them all killed at once.”

  As if they had heard, the herons suddenly took flight, their giant shadows darkening the sun for a few seconds. The security chief barked into his radio. A gunshot shattered the quiet of the palace grounds, a heron landed with a thud near the Japanese garden thirty yards from the palace.

  Like feathered spears the herons attacked. There was a crackling of rifle fire, more herons dropped on the lawns. Two hurtled toward the presidential balcony. The security chief bellowed into a radio held in his left hand, in his right he waved his handgun. But before he could get off a shot a heron arrived from above and to his right; he screamed as his right arm was pinned to his body, the gun fired wildly. Dr. Noir held a wooden deck chair in front of him, and just in time, for a heron impaled the seat of the chair, its beak driving all the way through. Dr. Noir, holding the chair as a shield hurried into his apartment, quickly closing the door and drawing the curtains.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  THE GRINGO JOURNALIST

  During their twentieth season in the Major Leagues, when everyone but the Wizard and their parents thought they were thirty-six years old, Esteban decided he had had enough. He had been studying for the priestho
od for several years and was nearly ready for ordination in the outside world, but not the world of Courteguay where he was already a bishop, with a good opportunity of becoming a cardinal.

  Julio, while moderate in most of his habits, was gregarious and outgoing, even more so after he learned to speak English, if not well, still well enough to understand the offers that were being made to him by the Baseball Sadies. He was delighted by media attention and the attention of women, many of whom were not Baseball Sadies at all, but professional models, and actresses. Julio’s reputation was that he never turned a Baseball Sadie away unsatisfied. His reputation of course was inflated by the tabloid press; colorful people in sports are at a minimum, and their color can and will be enhanced by the tabloids. On the other hand Esteban became accustomed to being ignored. When they were younger Esteban wished that he and Julio might have been identical twins so he could have impersonated Julio on occasion. Esteban found himself uncomfortable with even the most aggressive groupies, and, after his experience with the mysterious Gypsy girl, had been very selective when it came to female company for nearly five years.

  Julio won over 300 games during his career, and would certainly have won more if he had not played for a perennially second division team. Julio and Esteban never got to play in a World Series.

  Even in the most humid days of July, the President of the United States attended many games when Julio started. A Secret Service man would emerge from the shadows of the locker room, his shoulders bulging with hidden weaponry, and state that the President would appreciate it if Julio would stop by his box and say hello.

  “We would like to help Courteguay achieve freedom for itself and its people,” the President of the United States said to Julio.

  Julio noticed that when the President smiled the left corner of his mouth turned up and a dimple like a small pentastar appeared at the left corner of his mouth.