Butterfly Winter (16 page)

“Not flat,” said the Gringo Journalist. “The question is why do I, and I assume everyone else, see him as he sees the world?”

“Handicapped people often develop their other senses to extremes. It is very easy for him to make his way through crowds.”

The Gringo Journalist turned and stared at the spot behind them where the cut-out man leaned indolently against a lamppost.

“Have you forgotten you are in Courteguay, where magic does not need an explanation?” says the Wizard. “Besides, it is the least we could do.”

E
steban’s hitting was always a problem. He was an adequate if uninspired catcher. But he could not hit, or run the bases. “Tell you how slow he is,” said Al Tiller, addressing a gaggle of sportswriters in the dressing room after a particularly humiliating loss, where Julio had pitched a two hitter, but one of the hits was a home run, and where the team had been unable to get a runner beyond first base. Esteban’s batting average was a puny .130.

“I seen trees grow faster than he runs. He once started out for second base in the fifth inning and got there in the ninth. He is slower than shit movin’ through a long dog.”

Eventually, the sportswriters got around to Esteban’s hitting. “He’s the only player I ever managed with a negative batting average. When he comes up in a situation I’ve got a special sign telling him to get hit by a pitch.”

But humor could only go so far. The owner and general manager could not believe that Julio would not pitch to another catcher. They threatened to send both boys back to Courteguay, if Julio continued to insist that Esteban be his catcher. They agreed. Management withdrew
the offer for they couldn’t release their star pitcher. They forced Julio to pitch to another catcher. He smiled sullenly, went to the mound and lobbed batting practice pitches to the opposing batters. After seven consecutive hits, rather than take Julio out of the game, word came down to Al Tiller to put Esteban in. Julio pitched a shutout for the remaining innings.

At the All-Star break Esteban consulted a moth-eaten priest behind the chain-link fence. As a side bar, Julio Pimental never played in an All-Star game though he would have been a choice of the National League manager for probably eighteen of his twenty professional seasons. But, since Julio would pitch to no one but Esteban, and Esteban was never a factor in All-Star voting, Julio had to be dropped from the team every year.

“Do you think a holy relic might do the job?” the old priest asked.

“I believe in holy relics,” said Esteban.

“Then it is as good as done.” The priest retreated to the huts where he and his compatriots existed. Minutes later he returned with an inch-long sliver of bone, which he handed to Esteban. “This is from the arm of Saint Cayetano of San Barnabas, a simple fisherman who, though he had to fish from the Dominican coast, then smuggle his catch back to Courteguay, became lost at sea, landed in Florida, and returned to Courteguay in possession of a cathedral-shaped radio which, when properly motivated, spoke in many voices and of many things.”

“I will insert this shard of bone into my bat and Saint Cayetano will take pity on my inability to match the round bat with the round ball.”

Esteban carried the shard back to America, inserted it into the hitting end of his bat, and his batting average for the remainder of the season was .312, while the only Major League Baseball Club in the True South put on a late-season rally that allowed them to finish in second place in their division.

Esteban’s emergence as a hitter was not without trauma. After a month of hitting over .300 he shattered his bat one night in San Francisco. Pieces of the bat scattered in all directions as if it had exploded from inside. Esteban, neglecting to run out the pop fly he
hit, dropped to his knees and began gathering bits and pieces of the destroyed bat. At his urging the bat boy returned splinters of bat and the other players picked up what bits they could find. Esteban struck out in his three remaining at-bats, and on the team bus and later in their hotel room the twins frantically searched for the bone chip from the arm of St. Cayetano of San Barnabas.

Unable to find it they slipped out of the hotel and made their way back to Candlestick Park. They talked a caretaker who recognized them into letting them in and, in the predawn fog and drizzle, crawled about the infield noses to the ground desperately searching for the bone shard.

The search was unsuccessful. Esteban eventually fell into a fitful sleep while Julio slipped out of the hotel and after asking directions several times found a butcher’s shop where he explained, with great difficulty, what he was looking for (though Esteban learned to speak grammatically correct and almost unaccented English, Julio liked to give the impression he had a limited knowledge of the language. In interviews he frequently lapsed into Spanish and ‘How you say?’ were three of his favorite words, though the non sequiturs and malapropisms he came up with were too clever not to have been intentional). Julio held the shard over a gas flame until it dried, then polished it with cloth. On the way back to the hotel he stopped at a hardware store and bought a small drill and a hammer and chisel.

Julio spread the broken pieces of bat on his bed and began dismembering them with the hammer and chisel.

“I’ve found it! I’ve found it!” he yelled into Esteban’s sleeping ear.

Julio held the shard before Esteban’s bleary eyes.

“I will hit again,” said Esteban, grasping the bone chip.

Taking a new bat, Julio drilled a hole in the business end and inserted the shard, then he closed the entrance with plastic filler. Esteban, now wide awake, took a few mighty practice strokes.

S
he was one of the refugees from Courteguay; eighty of them crammed together, scrunched like broccoli, the girl recounted, her eyes wide with the remembered discomfort of it, in an open boat, dilapidated, unseaworthy, the bottom spurting water as a wounded general spurts blood.

Several people were lost when the boat was swamped repeatedly. She told of sharks turning like saws in the bice-colored waters, waiting, told of the agonized screams of those who were swept away, told of the ugly stains on the waves, how blood, like rust, colored the waters.

The boat limped into Miami harbor and promptly sank, losing a few more of the refugees. The remainder were arrested and preparations were made to ship them home to Courteguay.

“We are political refugees,” they cried.

“Courteguay is not considered an unpleasant place to live,” countered the US Immigration Service.

“But Haitians arrive in America daily, by the boatload.”

“If Courteguay was to become part of Haiti we might consider you.”

“We are poor.”

“So is most of the world.”

“The priests live behind chain-link fences.”

“By their own choice. We are sorry, but unless your life is in danger in Courteguay, or unless you have relatives in the
USA.
”

“I am not from Courteguay,” said the girl.

“Where are you from?” asked the immigration official.

“I am from the sky,” she replied.

“Mentally unstable,” the official scribbled on a note pad.

“I have relatives,” the girl said cunningly. “The Pimental brothers, who pitch in the President of the United States Baseball League are my cousins.”

She looked deep into the eyes of the immigration officer. He stamped each application “refused” and the would-be immigrant was led away. He used the same stamp on her application but what appeared on her application was “
APPROVED.
”

She was waiting outside the ballpark when Esteban and Julio emerged.

“She is the girl from the sky,” said Esteban, not at all surprised by her appearance.

“She is the Gypsy fortune-teller,” said Julio, also unsurprised.

Esteban took her to dinner where she ate nothing but stared at him with large starving eyes. Back at his hotel room her lovemaking made Esteban forget, possibly for the first time in his life, the mysteries of philosophy and religion.

“I was very lonely,” Esteban said, her head on his shoulder, her perfumed hair spread across his chest. She accompanied him on the remainder of the road trip. Back home she moved into Esteban’s room in the apartment he shared with Julio.

“Nothing good can come from this,” Julio prophesied ominously.

“You have more than your share of women. Allow me a little pleasure,” said Esteban.

“There is a difference between pleasure and enchantment. She has attached herself to you. It spells trouble.”

“Nonsense,” said Esteban, who, even after he had showered, carried the odors of the strange girl on him.

THE WIZARD ARRIVED UNEXPECTEDLY
, his balloon landing roughly on the roof of the hotel, jarring the plaster off the roof in the penthouse. The Wizard was not in top condition, his balloon having been caught in Tropical Storm Carlotta, one of the first hurricanes of the season.

Looking like a drowned rat the Wizard knocked on Julio’s door. He clutched a very wet sack of pheasant burritos sent by Fernandella.

“I need some sleep,” he said. “I’ve been drifting in this hellacious storm for several days.” Esteban peered at him from behind Julio.

“You may share my bed,” said Esteban. “Later, Julio will go down to the lobby and take his choice of the slim, beautiful young women who scatter themselves about like flower petals. My girlfriend, who interestingly enough tells me her name is Carlotta, will not be joining me tonight.”

The Wizard, taking only enough time to toss his wet caftan into the bathroom and cover himself in a white terrycloth robe supplied by the hotel, collapsed into Esteban’s bed.

Esteban read for a while in the sitting room between the two bedrooms, finally retiring when he tired of hearing the amorous moans coming from Julio’s room.

He was soon sound asleep.

Deep in the night the woman, Carlotta, appeared in the hallway as if somewhere a magician had gestured hypnotically and sent her there. Though Esteban had given her a key, she opened the door without using it, and crept into the foyer, hearing the lustful sounds emanating from Julio’s room. She smiled and entered Esteban’s room. She sensed something wrong, but waited until her eyes adjusted somewhat so she could see the slumbering lump that was Esteban, and beside him a petite form in a hotel housecoat with a pillow strategically over her head. Carlotta drew a thin stiletto from her purse and pierced Esteban’s heart with one flick of her wrist. As she moved a step closer in order to lean across Esteban’s body and dispatch the woman, the
stiletto in her hand turned to a delicate orchid, and the wild-eyed Wizard sat up and stared at her.

“What have you done?” he croaked. “I smell blood.”

UPON THE ANNOUNCEMENT
of Esteban’s death there followed national mourning in Courteguay. Only President Kennedy’s assassination had triggered greater consternation.

Within hours of the announcement, the Wizard, like the angel of death himself, hissed airward in a black balloon with a black gondola. He was dressed in a black-satin-cowled cape with a single silver star over the heart.

“I knew it,” wailed Fernandella, throwing a plate at her husband, Hector Alvarez Pimental, “your evil ways have come home to roost. I predict that the stream will dry up, the fish will rot in the sun, the stench will cause the cockatoos to fly away. Everything will return to the way it was before the twins became famous.”

Hector Alvarez Pimental calculated that with one son dead his allowance would be cut in half, might disappear altogether, for it was Esteban who suggested the allowance, cajoled Julio into going along. Now, if Julio refused to hurl the ball to another catcher.…

He wondered if he would be able to sell seating at Esteban’s funeral. As he ate a breakfast of pheasant burritos and a large glass of passion fruit juice, Hector Alvarez Pimental pictured tens of thousands of plaster of Paris catchers each in the image of Esteban Pimental, each scrunched in a crouch, each with red cheeks, blue eyes, chest protectors and shin guards. After breakfast he phoned a wholesaler in San Barnabas and ordered a hundred thousand to be ready the day of the funeral, or before if possible.

The funeral, of course, would be held at the former Jesus, Joseph, and Mary Celestial Baseball Palace in San Barnabas, renamed Dr. Lucius Noir Soccer Pitch when Dr. Noir came into power, renamed Juarez Blanco Baseball Megatropolis the last time Dr. Noir was deposed, renamed Esteban Pimental Memorial Stadium, less than eight hours after Esteban’s death was announced.

Photographs, Hector Alvarez Pimental thought, were another matter entirely. He found a signed 5×7 of Esteban in full baseball regalia, and ordered half a million copies. He would wholesale them for twenty centavos each, let the vendors sell them for whatever the traffic would bear.

P
ete Hasslewaite, the Mets twenty game winner, was beaten the first two times he faced Julio, 1-0 and 2-1. The third time they faced each other, every time Julio came to bat Hasslewaite threw at him. The first pitch merely brushed him back, the second made him step out of the batter’s box, the third missed the bill of his cap by half an inch and sent him sprawling in the dirt. Hasslewaite then struck Julio out on three pitches.

“Live in fear, greaser,” the catcher rasped, “you ever seen a baseball hit a melon?” He laughed, tobacco juice spraying through the bars of his mask.

Though tempted, Julio did not retaliate. Instead the next time he came to bat, he stepped back and hit a brush-back fastball cleanly up the middle for a single, batting in a run to give his team the lead.

The third time he came to the plate, the catcher spat contemptuously an inch from Julio’s shoes.

“You ever played in pain, greaser?” the catcher, who would one day be elected to the Hall of Fame, growled. “The Chief,” for Hasslewaite, a swarthy, raw-boned Oklahoman, claimed to be one-quarter Cherokee,
“is gonna give you a horsehide lobotomy, greaser.” The catcher grinned evilly and spat again.