Summerland (47 page)

"A bushbaby," Ethan said, and suddenly the memory of his lost father, steering their car along the Clam Island Highway, was like a cold, heavy stone in the pit of his stomach. What was going on, there in the world that Padfoot's dark glasses could no longer show him? What if something terrible had happened? What if his father was dead?

Buendía snuffled, and coughed, and then sprang up to a sitting position. He stared at them, eyes wide and uncomprehending, then at the digital clock on his nightstand—it was 3:12 in the afternoon—then back at the children. Recollection flooded his expression, and he fell backward on the bed, and groaned.

"I should know this will be happen," he said. And then he let off a string of Spanish curses, which I could transcribe but had better simply characterize as foul and imaginative. They ended, unmistakably, with the words "Chiron Brown," which Buendía pronounced "
keeROAN BRON
."

"You
do
know him," Jennifer T. said.

"Yes, I know that man. Since I was smaller than you." He sounded disgusted, Ethan thought, as if he wanted them to know that he was fed up, for some reason, with Ringfinger Brown. But looking around at the smelly, empty house, at the squalor in which he lived, it was hard for Ethan not to think that maybe Buendía was just disgusted with himself. He was having, Ethan knew, a terrible year. This was his second season with the Angels. He had played almost all of his career since his defection to the United States in the National League, first for the Phillies, and then for the Mets. He had played center field, and then as his legs gave out and the surgeries mounted he switched to right; but since coming to the American League he had played nothing but designated hitter, never taking the field, spending the whole game on the bench until his turn to bat came around. Sometimes an aging player can flourish as the DH, smacking home runs at a decent clip and stretching his career by a couple of years. But hitting, though he did it magnificently, had always been only one part of Rodrigo Buendía's game. As a younger player he had been one of the top outfielders in the game, covering vast distances, making legendary catches, throwing out runners at home plate from deep in the outfield grass. He had not been moved to the DH position, so much as
reduced
to it.

Ethan knew a lot about Rodrigo Buendía, who was one of Mr. Feld's favorite players. He knew that Buendía had escaped from Cuba on a small boat, and that during the journey to Florida he had supposedly saved the lives of three people. He knew that Buendía was the first player to win the Triple Crown in batting—highest average, most home runs, and most runs batted in—since Mr. Feld himself had been a boy. He knew, from having watched a Barbara Walters TV special about Buendía, that Rodrigo Buendía had a pretty blond wife, and a daughter, a girl whose name, he suddenly recalled, was Jennifer. And he knew that at some point in the past couple of years it had been in the newspapers and on TV that Buendía had, as it turned out, not saved anybody during the crossing from Cuba. Not that he'd let them drown. Just that there weren't any such people at all.

"Where is everyone?" Ethan said. "Where's Jennifer?"

Buendía had thrown an arm over his face.

"Gone. Gone, gone, they all gone. Lawyers. Psychologists. Judges." One of his big hands strayed down to his knee. It was notched and seamed with an impressively hideous array of scars. "Now that damn scout Bron. I told him already two time. Buendía's already enough a hero. So I din't save no two womens and a baby from the Gulf of the Mexico. I got the Triple Crown. I got lifetime three hundred ninety-six home runs. Career average three-fifteen. That pretty good, I think. Ought to get that damn BRON off my ass. Because, I tell you what, Buendía goes out someplace, the peoples coming up to him, everybody say, Rodrigo, you my
hero
"

He sat up now, and with a glance at Jennifer T. tugged the bed-clothes up over himself. He looked at the cigar butt in his hand and brought it to his lips, drawing on it as if some spark remained. Then he set it down on the corner of his night table.

"Now, Buendía, he
done
being a hero. Buendía came to this country with something
big
inside him, something Mr. Keeroan BRON maybe was the only person to notice it, back in the day, give him credit for that. But now, look at Buendía.
Look at him, dude
. In this all-white house. With all these white people all around him. In this white country." He pointed toward the long blue ribbon of bedroom windows. From atop the pile of white houses that had once been a desert hill, alive with lizards, there was a view of all Rancho Encantado, and below it, separated by electric fence and by powerful grammers of wealth and privilege invisible to the human eye, the endless grayish-white grid of Greater Anaheim. You could see the false mountains of Disneyland, and beyond them another mountain of glass, and beyond all that still, the shining white band of the sea. And you could see the stadium where the Angels played, with its scaffolding of lights. "Buendía is
tired
, dude. That something big inside is all little now. My wife, my daughter, they knew it. They saw it. They saw it because—" Here his voice cracked, and his big, sweet-natured face crumpled. "Because, I showed them."

And he covered his face with his big brown hands.

"Mr. Buendía," Ethan said. "If you come with us, I promise you, you won't be so tired anymore. I think it would be really good for you, don't you guys?"

"Definitely," Jennifer T. said. "Rejuvenating."

Buendía peered out from behind his hands. "Where is it?" he said, and his voice sounded pitifully small.

"I think you may have been there before," Thor said. "A long, long time ago."

Buendía stared at him. His expression was pretty close to the usual expression that Thor Wignutt's behavior elicited from adults.

"I been there," he said. "A long—" He closed his mouth, and afterward they agreed they had all seen the memory seep into his face. "Huh," he said, and for another moment his thoughts wandered again into the light and shade of the Summerlands. Then he picked up his cigar butt again. He studied it for a moment, then looked up, sharply, at Jennifer T. "What's your name, girl?"

Jennifer T. hesitated a moment, glancing at Ethan. Then she answered. Ethan could see how much it cost her to say the word.

"Jennifer," she said, snipping it off before the T. with a visible wince. Then, to make sure the point was not lost, she added, "Just like your daughter."

"Yeah? That true?" He nodded, and rubbed at the back of his head. "Okay, Jennifer,
hija
, run get me one of those cigars from the dresser there."

"No way," she said. "First of all, they give you oral cancer. Second of all, they give you lung cancer. Third of all, they
stink
. Maybe if you didn't smoke so many cigars, you wouldn't be all old and sad and broken down."

Ethan thought she had pushed it a little bit too far with that last remark, but to his surprise, Buendía smiled.

"Maybe not," he said. "But I can tell you right now, no way is Buendía going into that crazy place with you without no damn
cigar
."

RINGFINGER BROWN WAS WAITING FOR THEM, ON THE BALL FIELD
on the bluffs above Old Cat Landing, when Rodrigo Buendía returned to the Summerlands for the first time since he was seven years old. As so many children who carry a deep grief into a lonely place seem to stray into the galls and magic places of the Worlds, on that day thirty years before he had left the little house in the Zapata Marshes outside the town of Trinidad, running from the news that his
abuela
, who had raised him, was dead. That was the day, perhaps, that he had first come to the attention of Chiron Brown, who haunted the places where the branches of the Tree were pleached together, looking for hot prospects in the joyous and heartbreaking Game of Worlds. On this day of his return, at the age of thirty-seven, divorced, alone, broke-kneed and stuck playing DH in the bottom of the American League West, only Rodrigo Buendía knew all the things that he was running from. Or perhaps it was only one big thing: the burden and pain of being Buendía, the Great Bear, El Gran Oso. He stepped into the green field on the bluff, carrying a bag with a change of clothes, two bats, a mitt, and a box of El Rey del Mundo cigars. When he saw Chiron Brown, in a plain white suit, with a white Panama hat, standing on the edge of the grass along the third-base line, he stopped, and dropped his duffel. He walked, half stumbling, over to the ancient man. They shook hands. Then Buendía sank to his broken old knees in the grass.

"
Lo siento
," he said.

"What you sorry for, bear cub?"

"I'm sorry I didn't turn out the way you wanted. I know you had more in mind for me than just being a ballplayer. I'm sorry I didn't save nobody's life."

"Shoot, Rodrigo," Ringfinger said, and with one hand, without seeming to strain at all, he dragged the big man to his feet. "It don't matter. Some peoples, they just gets off to a late start."

CHAPTER 21

Jennifer T. and the Wormhole

SO FAR ALL THE GAMES PLAYED
by the Shadowtails had been more or less private affairs. Though accounts and box scores were duly filed, in time, with Professor Alkabetz and his crack team of baseball gnomes at the Society for Universal Baseball Research, they were played under no official auspices or sponsorship. They were wildcat games, unscheduled and largely unwitnessed.

But the night before the game between the Big Liars of Old Cat Landing and Big Chief Cinquefoil's Traveling Shadowtails All-Star Baseball Club, they came down from the hills. They came from all over the Far Territories of the Summerlands, inuquillits from the snow country, ferishers from the riverbottom mud hills. There were waterknockers, whole families of them, poling into town on their waterlily rafts. Wereotters lolled about the riverdocks, drinking shocking quantities of beer and then getting into quarrels with the stolid werebeavers. The beavermen were teetotalers, for the most part, and between the two families of riverine werebeasts there was certainly no love lost.

Miss Annie Christmas repainted her tin-roofed house, sewed herself a new uniform, and then, as she later reported it, went up into the hills and shot seventeen giant razorback hogs. After she came home, she made breakfast for all of the Shadowtails, went up to the ball field and shot a mosquito (the size of an eagle, according to Annie) as a warning to the other mosquitos to clear out of town. Then she returned home again and started barbecuing hogs. The Tall Man with the Harpoon broke out his last five-dozen casks of good Jamaican rum. The Tall Man with a Knife in His Boot began to drink it. It was a great big party, up and down the main street. There were fireworks, and then firecrackers, and then, when they ran out of firecrackers, the men from the Lost Camps got out sticks of dynamite and blasting caps. People in the Summerlands have old-fashioned ideas of fun. They tied firecrackers to the tails of cats and sent them shrieking and yowling down the streets. All the Summerlands folk found this extremely amusing, even Spider-Rose and Grim the Giant. There were appalling fights fought with shivs and straight razors. Gouged eyeballs were squirting and bouncing all over the place, rolling under beds and into the corners of Jersey Lily. Late that night there were whispered rumors of hoodoos and bone-faced baykoks straying in nearer to the campfires than they ordinarily cared to do, news of the contest have reached even to their lonely and forsaken haunts.