The New York

by Bill Branger

5

  George dumped a bunch of players in the next ten days while the World Series was engrossing the rest of the country. Not a trade. A dump. Con-tracts were up and he just dumped them. The New York newspapers were hounding him, but George mostly let Miss Foster take care of the reporters. He was spotted in Chicago with his pal from the White Sox, but before anyone could get to him, he was down in Kansas City with another owner and pal, and so it went, day after day, with George slicing skin off his payroll with the subtlety of a hunter gutting deer.

  I did not get a warm welcome in Houston from anybody. Got in about eight P.M. after a grueling drive on a bad, rainy day. I rented a studio at the Longhorn Arms and sent out my laundry and called Charlene. She didn’t answer, I put on my cowboy boots and went down to Mickey’s Place and drank some beer and tried to get in the mood of being back in Texas. Texas, if I had to explain it, is sly and full of itself. Sort of like China used to be, the center of the world. It can get on your nerves, but Texans don’t mean nothing by it, it just goes with the spaces they live in. Being in Texas is wearing boots without feeling like you’re wearing a costume on Halloween. The country music was about Budweiser and losing a good woman and Budweiser again. It made me sad for myself. I went to the pay phone and called Charlene. Still no answer. It was about midnight then and I decided I could either sleep in my car or try out my bed at the Long horn Arms. I opted for the bed and slept till morning.

  It was raining and dreary and it made my pitching arm ache. I drank some coffee and ate a bowl of chili at Ernie’s Cafe, then I went by Jack Wade’s store. “Store” is what the auto dealers call their showrooms when they’re talking to each other. I tried to pick up those terms.

  Jack was in because it was only eleven and Jack never went out to lunch before 11:20 A.M. He also never came back once he was gone to lunch un- less he ran into someone at a bar who wanted desperately to buy a Honda right then and there.

  Jack was about thirty-five, which was Charlene’s age, and he was hefty and soft-looking, except for the eyes. Every owner in the world has the same eyes. Jack and George were born to be owners of men.

  “Nice of you to come by,” Jack said in his drawl, the one that is heard on commercials on cable all night long. He didn’t hold out his hand while I settled my bones on a straight chair in his office. He just sat there, belly sprawled out in that squeaky swivel chair, going back and forth. On the walls, he had a picture of himself with former governor Anne Richards and another with present governor Jeb Bush. I wonder if he switched them around depending on whether he was selling a Republican or a yellow dog Democrat.

  “I had me some bidness to clean up in New York,” I said I said “bid-ness” because Jack likes to think talking funny is a sign of sincerity. If he was from Georgia, you wouldn’t have been able to understand a word he said because Georgia people are hanging in there with their accents, no matter how much television they watch. Texas does yawls and all, but every passing year, another kid loses his critters and druthers. We all are going to end up talking like they do in Omaha on the 800 telephone line.

  “You all ready to start, Ry?”

  “Well, Jack, that’s it. I got me a contract for another year.”

  “Is that a fact? Seen in the Chronicle it was, that your crazy Jew boss in New York is gonna dismantle the team. How come is it he isn’t dismantling you ‘long with those others?”

  “Not a Jew, Bremenhaven,” I said. “German.”

  “Same difference,” said Jack Wade. “Why is that? I mean, you getting a new contract? I thought you thought you was at the end of the trail, pard-ner.”

  “Turns out I wasn’t,” I said. I might owe explanations to Charlene, but I’d be goddamned if I would owe one to Jack Wade.

  “Well.” He cleared his throat. “Just as well, pardner. Just as well. I don’t think I could’ve used you now,”

  That went through me like a butcher knife in a watermelon. I said, “Why’s that?”

  “I didn’t know about your tax problem,” Jack said, leaning back in his swivel chair.

  “I got no tax problem “

  “Is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You got no tax problem.”

  “Why you think I got a tax problem?”

  “Why I think that is that when the tax man come by a day ago and sat down with me and we close the door, the Yankee son of a bitch I thought was looking me over was looking you over. He wanted to know what I paid you last winter both over and under the counter and that the gummint appreciated my cooperation. Then he toF me not to tell no one, just keep it under my hat.”

  “Like you’re doing,” I said.

  “Well, shit, it’s a free country. Besides, he shook me up so much I was over at Ernie’s before noon and Ernie says that when the gummint comes lookin’ for someone, you best not have nothin’ to do with that someone. And besides, you never did call me from New York City, I don’t know what you been doin’ up there. And then I seen Charlene on Post Street and tol’ her about the gummint and you and your tax trouble and she just buttoned up like she was frozen and walked away. I offered to buy her a drink for old times.”

  “And she didn’t take it.”

  “Not that I recall,” Jack said. It was as certain as Jack ever is about what happens in late afternoon, let alone at night.

  “Well, Jack, I’ll tell you one thing. I ain’t got no tax problem with the gummint,”

  “Let me give you a word of advice, Ryan. If the gummint says you got a tax problem with them, you got a problem.”

  “I ain’t.”

  “I don’t care,” Jack said. “I just don’t want to get involved in it. I got a bidness to run and I can’t have a baseball player as my P.R. man who is wanted for fraud or something by the U.S. gummint. It might attract a certain clientele but it would drive just as many away.”

  When I left Jack, I didn’t even say good-bye. I was plain mad — angry — and confused, and jest a little bit thinking about Deke Williams telling me that the government got me by the balls now with that confidential thing I signed for George and how he wasn’t going to call me on the telephone anymore for fear it might be tapped.

  I drove out to Rice University Hospital, which is a big complex where they do routine miracles of healing and research. I admire it greatly and more so since Charlene showed me around one day to the good things being done there Charlene was due to be working. I parked in the visitors’ lot and walked three or four miles through the complex to the building where Charlene hung out.

  I saw her when I stepped off the elevator.

  It’s a special, even warm kind of thing to spy on someone you are crazy for when they don’t know you’re there. She was writing something down and biting her lip the way she does sometimes and I just wanted to give her a kiss long enough to last till morning.

  “Charlene,” I said instead.

  She looked up at me and said nothing for a moment. Then she put down her pen and got up. She was wearing brown slacks and a brown sort of blouse with pleats and her black hair was tied back with a red piece of rope or yarn. She has incredible skin, which I won’t go into describing because I can’t. I can say her eyes are gray and they go from the edge of blue to the edge of an Arctic kind of ocean, depending on what she’s thinking about. Her eyes were about medium at this moment.

  She stepped from behind her desk and came around to me, but she didn’t give me a hug, which I expected her to do. “Come on, Ryan,” she said.

  She led me to a cafeteria at the end of the hall where we got coffee and carried it to an empty table. We sat down at almost the same time. I told her she looked beautiful. It had been five weeks since I last saw her.

  “When did you get in?”

  I told her, and told her about going to see Jack Wade, but I didn’t tell her about Jack Wade and the tax man. And I didn’t tell her about Deke Williams and his conspiracy theory of government.

  “What are you going to do?”

 
; “I guess get a job for the winter,” I said.

  “But not with Jack.”

  “He rethought the whole thing and figured he couldn’t use me right now,” I said, making it light and easy. Telling the truth is just frying eggs in bacon grease. Lying is making an omelette. “No hard feelings. I figure maybe I can get back on with Bruce Construction, if they’re doing anything.”

  “Back to the hammer and saw.”

  “Honest work,” I said.

  “It’s that,” she said. There was trouble in her gray eyes still. She wasn’t exactly here at the table with me, she was somewhere out of the hospital, I figured.

  “Charlene, I been honest with you,” I lied. “I really miss you and I’m glad to be back in Houston but I got to know if you got someone else on the line now and if I’m a thing of your past.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Because I been trying to reach you and you’re always out.”

  “You think I should hang around a telephone on the chance you might take time out from your busy social life and call?”

  “What has gotten into you, Charlene? Five weeks ago, we was lovey and dovey. A week ago when I called telling you I was staying in New York a couple of days, we were still cooing and doing each other. Now, the last couple of nights, I been on the road coming home, it’s all changed.”

  “Maybe it all changed a while ago,” Charlene said. “Maybe you were just stringing me along. And then you tell me you’re rehired by the team just when everyone else is getting fired.”

  “What’s got into your head?”

  “Miss Roxanne Devon,” she said. Just like that. As if it meant anything to me.

  “Who?”

  “Come off it,” Charlene said.

  “I never heard of such a person in my life,” I said.

  “Roxanne Devon is not a common name.”

  “Not to me. It would of stood out if I had met anyone with a name like that.”

  “She lives in New Jersey and she wrote me. I got the letter Tuesday and she was telling me about you and her and how she was now shocked to find out that you had a woman on the side in Houston. It was some letter,” Charlene said. She said it in an even voice with only a little sarcasm thrown in.

  “You believe that?”

  “What should I believe? What’s convenient for you, Ryan?”

  “Charlene, I have had girlfriends and girlfriends, which is only natural because I am thirty-eight years old and of the heterosexual persuasion but you are it and you have been it for the year we’ve known each other. There ain’t no Roxanne or Tanya or Mary or Janie or anyone else and I resent your thinking there would be,” I said.

  “Then why would this person out of the blue send me a letter?”

  All I could think of was Deke and George and the tax man and that terrible moment when I groveled for George in his office and agreed to stay on the Yankees one more year as his official Spanish interpreter.

  I knew this was all tied in somehow, but I couldn’t explain it. Not now, not to Charlene. She’d just get caught up in the same mess, wouldn’t she?

  “Charlene, you try to call this Roxanne woman up?”

  Charlene stared at me for a moment and then shook her head. “What could I say to her?”

  “There ain’t no Roxanne,” I said.

  “What if there is?”

  That was a thought. What if there was? I mean, how clever was whoever was doing this for whatever reason?

  Then I thought of George. And the people in the White House, including the ghost of Abe Lincoln. No. They weren’t that smart, this was just preliminary bullying, like Booker did on that playground when I was in fifth grade. On the other hand, Booker did end up beating the shit out of me.

  I took her to the pay telephone in one of the lounges and we placed a long distance call to the information operator in Brunswick, New Jersey, which is where Miss Roxanne Devon was supposed to live. We tried an “R. Devon” and then any kind of Devon with initials. The operator said there was no such listing and Charlene replaced the phone and looked at me.

  I grinned at her. “Thank God we can still believe in the phone company.”

  6

  Now we’re going to have to switch around in this story for it to make any sense about the way it turned out in the end. Raul Guevara told me all this much later, but at the time I was in Houston, trying to fix things up with Charlene, and George was running a fire sale on the team, Raul was having his own adventures.

  I can tell you for a fact that Havana is not the way I expected it to be, not when I finally saw it. It had the old American cars and it had a lot of crummy-looking buildings, but it had something else, something about the people. They still have style, Raul explained. Even if they wear rags, they wear them with style. He was right there.

  Raul said about this time — we are talking about at the end of the World Series in late October —- he was playing ball.

  The way Raul explained it later, I got the picture. Playing ball in Cuba is like waltzing on a battlefield with the orchestra going on despite all the gunfire. Not that there’s gunfire in Havana. It’s just so fucking poor is all, yet the Cubans got this thing about baseball — it just goes on and on and it’s glamour, it’s probably like the way it was in the 1930s here when Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were doing their dances at Yankee Stadium and the country was outside the walls, selling apples on street corners to itself.

  Raul. I can see him on that hot, humid Cuban night with the sweat soaking his uniform and that limber-easy swing of his. Not a big dude, don’t have muscles on muscles. Just all the muscles he needs. And the eye. He sees a thing on the ball and he don’t have to wait to communicate it to his arms or wrists or his back, with the way his back rears back and slouches into a reaching swing.

  On this night, he hit two home runs and drove in four runs. I could even hear the bat, the way he described it to me. Ever notice how some ball players start out trotting toward first base even before the ball is halfway out of the park because they know it’s gone? It’s because of the sound and the feel of the bat on the ball. You hit the ball square and it just implodes on you, on the bat, just takes the wind out of itself and goes thump or something. I don’t have that swing — thank God I’m a pitcher — but I seen it in plenty of others. Raul said he was hitting that way that night and his team won and they were all falling over each other on the way out of the dugout to the lockers. He was feeling good when he got back to the clubhouse to strip off his uniform and take a shower.

  The good feeling did not last as long as it should have. Raoul said there were two men waiting in the clubhouse and they said he was going to go with them after his shower.

  They had cards that said it didn’t matter what their names were, they were from government house.

  What a miserable shower that must have been, with two goons waiting for you, both of them still wearing sunglasses even though it was nearly midnight.

  After his shower, he shaved slowly and then put on his clean clothes. He wore his clothes with style, even though he was a poor kid from the outback, Havana had taught him style in the two years he was playing there. Raul has big square shoulders and a slight build and sort of olive drab eyes. He told the men he was ready, and he wondered what he was ready for.

  They all crammed into an East German Trabant, which is a two-cycle car like a motorcycle and is mostly glued together with plastic panels. It makes a VW Beetle look like a Cadillac. Old Fidel, he sure got shit for his bargain with the devil — you’d think for a smart guy he would’ve at least looked at the kind of cars they would end up sending him for being a Communist. Well, they rattled through Havana that night, over to one of the few buildings with lights on.

  Let me tell you, it is scary in a city at night with no lights on in the buildings. You wonder where the bad people are. And for all I know, the bad people wonder where you are.

  All the while, Raul kept asking the goons what was going on and they kept saying not
hing. Nada.

  When they got to the government house, the men untangled themselves from the Trabant like three clowns getting out of the car in the center ring and went up the steps. Raul said he had a charley horse from the way he had to sit in back and I believed it, having ridden in a Trabant since then and being two inches shorter than Raul.

  When they got inside, they went up another set of marble steps to a landing and down a hall to a big wooden door, the kind of door that is built that big just to intimidate the shit out of you. I mean, nobody needs a door that big for anything. Raul said he was intimidated, but he carries himself with such natural dignity for someone only twenty-three years old that I doubt it showed at the time.

  They made him wait alone in an office for a long time. He studied the office while he waited. There was a photo of Fidel on one wall and another of Che and one of Fidel cutting sugar cane with the peasantry.

  Then they came for him around one in the morning and took him down another hall to a bigger room.

  He sat down in a bigger chair with ornate arms and red cushions. He asked for a glass of water and the goons ignored him.

  About two in the morning, Raul looked up and there was Fidel himself sweeping into the room with a small entourage of toadies.

  Raul had never seen him up close, just at the May Day rally and once when he came out to the park to throw out the first ball, but Fidel had been in and out so fast that it didn’t count. Now he was in the same room with Raul, and Raul said Fidel lit it up until it hurt his eyes, like all the lights going on in a dark bar at last call. (Raul didn’t say nothing about last call or a dark bar, but I imagined it my own way.) Raul stood up by instinct and the president came around a desk and gave him a big bear hug, chattering away as he did it.

  Castro has a tenor voice sort of roughened by the cigars he smoked for a long time. Raul recalled that Castro said:

  —- Hey, big man, what a game tonight, I saw your first homer before I had to leave, big man. You are sweet, Raul, you swing like Ted Williams could swing in his prime. What do you think of that?