Chasing out to the airport was a hoot, me and the three TV vans, but I got there a good ten minutes before them and took the first plane to anywhere. First fun I’d had in days, punching along at 90 and 100, watching them old vans in my rearviews fall behind.
Anywhere turned out to be Kansas City, which figures. I thought of looking up that wise-ass reporter who showed off his fancy knowledge of different kinds of Spanish, but I didn’t. In fact, it amused me more now. I bet George didn’t know when he hired me that I only spoke Spanish with Mexicans and that Mexican Spanish wasn’t like Cuban Spanish.
While I waited around in the K.C. airport for the next plane to Chicago, I tried to think of everything I knew about Cubans.
I knew about Castro. Everyone knew about him. Wore a beard, smoked cigars, wore an army uniform to bed at night, and gave long speeches. He played baseball once. Pitcher. But I didn’t know anything else.
Ricky Ricardo. Lucy’s husband. Now I was getting someplace. Come to think of it, he spoke lousy English all his life. Part of the fun of watching the “I Love Lucy” reruns was trying to figure out what Ricky was saying, How could someone spend all those years in America and not speak better English?
Take Mexicans. They pick up English fast and good, and you give a Mexican enough rope and he’ll talk better English than they do in Detroit.
So maybe the smart-ass from the Kansas City Star who once wanted to hang me for accidentally beaning one of their players was right. Maybe George had hired me on to do something I couldn’t do — speak Spanish with Cubans the same way they can’t speak English to us, even if they’ve been here a million years.
That thought kept me tickled all the way to Chicago. I took a cab downtown to the Drake Hotel and checked in without even looking at the room rate. I looked up Sid, but he wasn’t in yet so I left a message for him.
Next, I called Charlene at work to ask her to forgive me. But she was taking the day off. I called her at her apartment, but she was taking the day off from there, too.
Then I had a sudden and brilliant and sickening inspiration.
I called her at Ernie’s Cafe.
She came to the phone. She sounded fuzzy around the edges, which I know is the way she sounds when she’s been crawling around inside a bottle of Smirnoff long enough. She is not a drunk, but she can drink when she wants to.
“Where are you?” she said.
“Chicago.”
“Why?”
“I’m gonna meet with Sid here.”
“And do what?”
“I dunno. Sid hasn’t figured it out yet.”
“Fuck Sid,” she said. I could hear the weave in her voice.
“Charlene. You drinking alone?”
“I drink with whoever I want.”
“Who you drinking with?”
“Jack Wade, if you want to know.”
That’s what I mean about having an inspiration that was both intelligent and sickening.
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Ryan Patrick, I am free, white, and over twenty-one, and I drink with whoever I want and wherever I want.”
“Just don’t go to bed with him,” I said. This was the wrong thing to say. I knew it when I said it. There was a long silence.
And then: “We were talking about you, you shit.”
“Charlene, I called to tell you I was sorry.”
“That ain’t saying ‘I’m sorry,’ saying don’t sleep with the first man buys you a drink in Ernie’s Cafe, man you knew since college, man with a wife and two little children.”
“It’s just that he’s a car salesman,” I said.
“And it’s just that you’re a broken-down ball player who everyone in the country right now thinks is a Communist and a scab. If I didn’t know better and know you’re just dumb, I’d think it, too.”
“So what does Jack think?”
“Jack thinks you need a lawyer,”
“Sid is a lawyer.”
“He’s an agent more than a lawyer.”
“Well, I don’t need two lawyers.”
“I didn’t say you needed one lawyer. I said Jack said you need a lawyer. I told Jack he was Ml of shit,” Charlene said. “I said what you need to do is cut your losses and go out and resign and maybe punch George in the nose for the hell of it to do what you should’ve done last Thanksgiving if you remember I told you.”
She was stringing her words together as carefully as a drunk putting popcorn kernel by kernel on a needle and thread to form a decoration for the Christmas tree.
“Charlene, I feel terrible about everything, just everything. But mostly, I feel terrible about walking out on you that way.”
This produced more silence. Was she figuring I hadn’t said enough? Or too much? it is hard to tell with a woman’s silence which is intended.
I said, “Can you just let me apologize?”
“I thought you just did that.”
“Well, I didn’t hear nothing from your end.”
“Like what?”
“Like, you accept my apology.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Does that mean you didn’t?”
“It don’t mean anything.”
“I wish you would go home, Charlene, and get a good night’s sleep and I’ll call you in the morning.”
“You do? I figure to go on drinking until I can’t stand up and depend on Jack to take me home.”
“That would be a mistake. I wouldn’t trust Jack to take Mother Teresa home.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say, Ryan. You judge everyone by your own standards, which are none too high. Or so it seems from everything I been reading about you in the papers and on the TV. They say you beaned a ball player once and got suspended. You never told me that.”
“Charlene, you know me more than a year. You know —”
“I know that you told me some things and I know that you convinced me there is no Miss Roxanne Devon of Brunswick, New Jersey. I don’t know any more than that.”
“You know I love you.”
Now, I am not a glib talker and I do not go out of my way to say “I love you” to ladies I meet and even might go to bed with. The ladies and I have an understanding that if we meet up after a game someplace — say like Toronto, after a game — we have a couple of hours to decide to do it or not. Mostly the ladies decide by the look of me and whether there’s kink in me and whether I hold my liquor, and I decide if the girl is honestly sincere about having fun or one of those naggy kinds of groupies who’ll end up selling her story to the National Enquirer I haven’t done that for a while — like I told Charlene, it was the truth — but I used to. I am thirty-eight years old, after all. I ain’t a stud, but I ain’t a virgin. And I never told Charlene I loved her before — well, maybe once — so I guess I meant it.
“I don’t know that, Ryan,” she said after a moment. Her voice was soft then, and sober-sounding, though that was impossible if she had been drinking with Jack Wade a whole boozy afternoon.
“Well, I mean it.”
“You never said it before.”
“Which proves I mean it.”
“Like the telephone operator proves there’s no Miss Roxanne Devon of Brunswick, New Jersey.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I said.
“It’s all right. Don’t say anything. I’m going home now. Call me in the morning,” she said.
It was good enough. Not great. But good enough.
“Safe home,” I said.
"I'll be fine.”
“If you can’t drive, let Jack drive you.”
“You think I’m crazy?”
“Is he that drunk?” I said.
“Ryan. He’s a car salesman,” she said, and hung up.