Butterfly Winter (21 page)

“
I DO NOT TRUST HIM
,” General Bravura said to his followers in the jungle. “I only wish I could be in touch with El Presidente in his retirement, but his country home is surrounded by soldiers who state El Presidente is resting and no longer wishes to be involved in state matters.”

“I think we should attempt an assassination,” said his second in command. “He has only been in power a few days and cannot possibly know what dangers lie ahead. He will be more vulnerable now than in the future.”

“We should at least talk with him,” said General Bravura.

On his second week in power Dr. Noir stood on the steps of the Presidential Palace and watched as three dilapidated Jeeps approached the gates. General Bravura and eleven of his lieutenants and advisors accompanied him. Dr. Noir welcomed them, said that a banquet had been prepared, and led General Bravura and his entourage into the palace.

Once they were in the semicircular foyer of the palace, an armed soldier appeared from behind every marble pillar, rifle at the ready.

“Surrender your weapons, please,” said Dr. Noir.

One of General Bravura’s lieutenants attempted to draw his side arm and was shot dead. General Bravura was taken through a side door to the sun-bright garden full of blazing bougainvillea growing against the white coral of the walls. General Bravura was handcuffed and forced to stand between two swaths of bougainvillea. A few seconds later he was shot. The remainder of General Bravura’s associates were marched to the basement of the palace to a section Dr. Noir liked to refer to as the wound factory.

BECAUSE OF DR. NOIR
the baseball fields of Courteguay lay abandoned. In smaller towns or in small parks in the cities, the infield was sodded, home plate and the pitcher’s rubber uprooted like large vegetables. All across the nation backstops were scrapped. On the outskirts of San Barnabas was a dump full of a tangle of mesh backstops, deposited at odd angles, rusting, grating eerily in the night wind, sections rubbing together squeaking and creaking as if among them metal rodents clacked and scuttled.

The larger baseball parks, the St. Ann Mother of Mary Stadium and the Jesus, Joseph, and Mary Celestial Baseball Palace, the Stations of the Cross Ballpark at the north end of the country, and two other major parks were totally off limits, left to decay in silence. Armed guards were placed at each entrance with instructions to shoot intruders first and ask questions later; it became an imprisonable felony to photograph either the stadium or the guards.

The grasses grew tall and wild, cowlicked, seeming to sense their new freedom. Berry vines appeared, delicate and green at first, but soon grew bolder, their spines fiercer, their stocks big and round as fingers. Weeds fought their way up through the shale of the bullpen. Small flowers peered jauntily through cracks in the asphalt in front of the concessions. Birds found sanctuary in the uppermost corners of the grandstand, their nighttime flutter and daytime squawking and squalling became the ballpark’s only sounds. Wind pried at the heavy shingles on the roof, and with no one to listen the shingles seemed to give up their grip easily, making flapping sounds in the night like travelers demanding entrance, then spinning crazily downward to lie in among the tangled grasses, or land like kites in the parking lot already inundated with weeds, vines, and flowers, sprinkled like croutons in a salad.

Dr. Noir imported fifty thousand soccer balls from Haiti.

A
group of boys on a spring day after school headed to a vacant lot where a ball appeared, not a baseball at all, but a tennis ball, worn, hairless and weathered to the color of a mouse. A fence picket became a bat, dandelions were pulled and stacked to use as bases.

The voices of the boys rose on the scented spring breeze, shrill as starlings.

“Stee-rike,” a sweet voice shrilled.

“Burn it in there, Ernesto,” cried another.

The ball rose in a long arc to the outfield, a dark-skinned boy glided under it, pounded an imaginary glove, caught the ball on the move and fired to home, though there was no runner.

Again the bat met the ball with a resonant thump and the forbidden sounds of baseball echoed over a little corner of Courteguay, until a Jeep growled down the street and stopped outside the school fence. Two soldiers leapt from the rear of the Jeep, each brandishing a submachine gun.

“Ho!” the leader called. “The ball. Give us the ball.”

The boys bolted and ran, scurrying across the vacant lot and the school yard and disappearing into the cherry-colored bougainvillea. The soldiers loped slowly across the yard, joking easily, for they had both played baseball when they were children.

At the edge of the lot, the tallest soldier, not with rancor, but because of boredom, sprayed the bougainvillea with machine gun bullets. The soldiers walked back across the lot. One of them kicked the pile of dandelions that was second base. They climbed in their Jeep and drove away, the odor of green grass clinging to their uniforms.

The children crept slowly back to the lot, emerging from the bougainvillea like rabbits, nose first, testing the air. At first they thought that one of their friends was playing a trick on them, that he was lying face down on the edge of the bougainvillea feigning sleep, that bougainvillea blossoms had dropped onto the back of his grey T-shirt.

The boys became serious and silent, exchanging frightened glances. One of them nudged their friend with a toe. One of the death flowers on his back burbled audibly. The boys ran to find some adults. Their dead friend, nine-year-old Trinidad Munoz, became the first baseball martyr.

“T
he deeds of a leader are relatively unimportant. What is important is that he look the part of a leader. Unless he is a thoroughly despicable tyrant or a mewling coward his actual performance matters little so long as he looks the part, appears often enough in public, dresses in a manner appropriate for a person in a position of power, and displays the proper amount of eccentricity, enough to make him remarkable and audacious, without being a zealot or a fanatic,” said the Wizard.

“It is quite the opposite in baseball,” said Julio. “A Greek god in a diamond-studded uniform who cannot hit or field or pitch is gone in a day. Audacity must be accompanied by talent. Everything must be accompanied by talent. Talent is everything.”

“True,” said the Wizard. “A sports hero is paid to perform. If he can perform with panache, if he can elicit sympathy, he will become an idol. The same is true for a politician.”

“Not true,” said Julio. “It is that a politician has more tricks available to him. If he is in a slump he gives the people the spectacle that they crave: a parade, a show of strength, bribing the Olympics to come to his country, something, anything to make the rabble feel good about
themselves, though billions of public money are wasted, and the country becomes hugely poorer.”

“Being a Wizard is the perfect preparation for leadership. A perfect leader must continually pull coins out of noses and make flowers rain from the sky,” said the Wizard.

“A plodding leader may be more capable than a wizard, for a wizard has no illusions. A wizard knows that there are no wizards, that coins come not from amazed noses but from between the Wizard’s fingers, and that the flowers that rain from the sky were in his pockets first. I agree with you that talent is essential, but … look at Roger Maris, a great baseball player but a plodder. He lacked panache, and unfair as it was, he has never been given his due, probably never will. The fans and the press long for the perfect combination, genius and eccentricity. Look at The Bird … Detroit’s Mark Fidrych.”

“But The Bird is the perfect example,” cried Julio. “It doesn’t matter how much you talk to the ball, tend the grass, or stalk about the mound, when your fastball is gone so are you.”

“Oh, but The Bird, if only I could have worked with him. He was born to be a leader. He should have become a politician for he was already a wizard,” the Wizard continued.

“Politicians suffer similar fates. Those who do not provide bread and circuses do not fare well. President of the United States Carter was probably the most compassionate, honest, genuinely decent man to be President in a century. But he did not look the part. He did not act aggressive when aggression was called for, he did not supply spectacle when the nation cried out for spectacle.

“Now, Dr. Noir. I must give the Devil his due. On the day Dr. Lucius Noir seized power in Courteguay he decreed that as long as he was dictator all the mirrors in all of Courteguay would reflect only his image.

“Children screamed. Women fainted. Mirrors were a scarce commodity in San Barnabas. A hubcap or a piece of chrome from a wrecking yard often served the purpose. People who had mirrors or make-do mirrors gasped in horror the first full day of Dr. Noir’s regime for
when they went to brush their teeth, there staring back at them was the dictator of Courteguay. Even the rivers, lakes, and ponds carried his reflection, so that even the peasants of the fields when they went for a cool drink or to wash the sweat from their brows in a stream or rain puddle were confronted by a strange man, one many peasants did not know.
Haitian voodoo!
people screamed. The military along the border to Haiti were increased tenfold.”

T
he Gringo Journalist, who would one day win the Pulitzer Prize for his collected writings about Dr. Lucius Noir’s time as Dictator of Courteguay, was born in Onamata, Iowa, a somnolent farm town of forty frame buildings located on the banks of the Iowa River, in Johnson County, just south and west of Iowa City. He graduated from journalism school at the University of Iowa, qualified for a four-month internship program sponsored by some of the nation’s major newspapers, and was assigned to the
Washington Post
, as the most junior of junior reporters.

The Gringo Journalist had no interest in Courteguay. He had never taken a geography course in university, and, until he was assigned to visit there as part of a tourism promotion sponsored by the new Courteguayan government, he had always thought Courteguay, if he had given it any thought at all, was in Central America.

At the University of Iowa, he had been entertainment editor of
The Daily Iowan
, the university’s student newspaper, and during his four years with the paper had written several hundred theater, movie, and book reviews. His fondest hope was to review theater productions in Washington, D.C.

The tourism assignment was refused by several senior reporters because they felt Courteguay was so small and so close to Haiti, at that time controlled by the ruthless Papa Doc Duvalier, that it might be overrun at any moment. There is nothing reporters like better than free trips to exotic foreign lands, but they prefer free trips that don’t involve danger or inconvenience, unlike congressmen who are not smart enough to sense danger, hence, years later, the fools who visited the Jim Jones compound in Guyana.

“I don’t think they have indoor plumbing in Courteguay,” said one reporter who declined the assignment. “In order to eat, you probably have to pick mangos off the ground and wash them yourself, besides haven’t they just changed governments again? There are likely to be mortar shells exploding in the streets, and excitable snipers in the palms. Send someone who’s feeling suicidal.”

Though the Gringo Journalist was not feeling suicidal, he was the lowest of the low; he didn’t have the luxury of refusal. He took whatever assignment was thrown his way.

The actual trip to Courteguay turned out to be a disappointment. The Gringo Journalist, and the dozen or so press people on the tour, saw virtually nothing of interest. They were housed at an adequate beachfront hotel, the beach being on Lake Verde, a man-made lake that was filled with trash and smelled putrid. They were taken on tours of downtown San Barnabas, shown the Presidential Palace, from the outside only, taken for a drive through sugarcane fields, shown through an evil-smelling sugar processing plant, given a souvenir bottle of El Presidente Pure Cane Syrup, and taken to a night club featuring a marimba band, limbo dancers, and a fire-baton twirler. They were not allowed to go anywhere unescorted.

While the other reporters enjoyed the holiday and the free liquor, the Gringo Journalist was observing everything carefully. He concluded that things were not as tranquil as the ever-smiling Director of Tourism would like them to believe.

The only interesting information he had learned before the excursion came from a senior sports reporter at the
Post
.

“For the size of the place,” he said, “they produce a hell of a lot of good baseball players.”

The Gringo Journalist asked the Director of Tourism if he might take in a baseball game. He had seen a baseball stadium in downtown San Barnabas, although the tour had passed by it without a word from the tour guide; he had been able to translate the sign in front of it as St. Ann Mother of Mary Stadium.

“I’m afraid that will not be possible,” the white-suited Director of Tourism told him, “the baseball season is not in operation at the moment.”

The Gringo Journalist noticed too that the Courteguayan coat of arms, which featured crossed baseball bats, one filed to the thinness and sharpness of a sword, had been removed from the crown of the pith helmets of the stoic, white-uniformed palace guards. His questions about the fatigue-clad, submachine-gun-toting soldiers who seemed to always lurk on the edges of the tourist areas went unanswered.

“Leave well enough alone,” a colleague told him. “We’re on a freebee. Drink the liquor, enjoy the women. Keep your nose clean.”

HE HEARD A PERSISTENT RUMOR
that a wizard with many names had written a novel in which a certain Dr. Lucius Noir was a character, the incarnation of evil, and that eventually the character had come to life and was now wreaking havoc in Courteguay. When the junket returned to America, while his colleagues wrote puff pieces for the travel page on Courteguay the Beautiful, the Gringo Journalist begged a senior editor for travel money to investigate Dr. Noir’s American school days.