I was right about one or two things that would happen next, but so was George.
Sid Cohen issued a statement Wednesday that made me a victim of management greed and a good guy promoting international healing. It was good enough for a lot of papers that weren’t necessarily mad at me — or angry, as Charlene would say — but were distracted at first by George.
I was right about the editorials. The liberal papers weighed in with editorials endorsing the combination of baseball and the State Department to end squabbling in the Caribbean, and even the New York Times picked up George’s line about baseball ending the cold war. I was also right that it wouldn’t matter on the sports pages of the selfsame newspapers, where everyone was still upset. A columnist in the New York Times sports section practically had a stroke in print about a field full of Castro Cubans, as if politics had anything to do with baseball. Only everything.
Next day, Fidel Castro made a six-hour speech in Havana and introduced every ball player who would be going to New York. It was covered by CNN and C^Span.
I thought the New York Post and the Daily News got it right, though. On the same day, both papers had as their headlines the same words: NEW YORK YANQUIS!
You couldn’t get those papers in Chicago, but Sid sent them to me by Federal Express. George was up to his ass in alligators for a few weeks while the season ticket cancellations came in. One lawyer filed a class action suit on behalf of season ticket holders who felt cheated by the shoddiness of the product George was going to be putting on the field next season. What clients want to go out and see the Havana Nine on the field in the House That Ruth Built?
It was a mistake on their part. George went on public television and denounced the unconscious racism of the fans who wouldn’t turn out to see Latino ball players. He denounced the union for the same reason. This put both groups in a box, even though everyone knew that George was about as unconsciously racist as they came. In a way, I admired his using political correctness to lie his way out of something that was so obvious, though I didn’t let it blind me into admiring the son of a bitch in general, just in particular.
New York Yanquis. Damn. The people I admire in the print media are the guys who write the headlines.
I could even see George restitching the uniforms with that name, Yanquis, He’s a bastard, but he’s got a stubborn streak in him. This was about money to him, at least it was at first. But maybe after he saw Lincoln’s ghost that night in the White House and Lincoln gave him the thumbs up on the way to the bathroom for a midnight tinkle, maybe he — George, not Abe — started believing his own lies.
I couldn’t blow the whistle on George without blowing the whistle on myself, and getting fired in the process. So 1 said nothing.
After a week of hiding out in Chicago — I spent a couple of hilarious nights on the dark side of town with Deke and company — I went back down to Houston. It was all right. Everyone had lost interest in me for the time being. It was January, and Charlene and I had missed Christmas. Texas A&M missed another bowl bid. San Francisco was set to go to the Super Bowl in New Orleans at the end of the month, so you might say football was over.
Missing Christmas. At least /had. She’d spent Christmas at her mama’s and baked cookies. I believed it, but I couldn’t see it, exactly. Besides, the cookies were all eaten up. I took her to Tony’s again, but she wouldn’t let me come up to her apartment. We were strained, you might say.
And then, January 14th it was, this guy shows up on my doorstep at the Longhorn Arms with George.
This guy was a bean pole on which was hanging a gray suit. George was a fatty in a blue suit. They were a pair, though, and I counted my fingers after we shook hands.
There are two places to sit down in my room. On the bed or on the single chair by the credenza where I eat breakfast. The gray suit didn’t sit down, but George flopped on the bed like he lived there.
George looked around the room and then fingered the material of the bedspread. He looked at me. “This is a dump, Ryan.”
“Just a room,” I said.
“Barely,” George replied. “Where do you keep all your money? In shoeboxes?”
I didn’t say a thing.
George said, “1 got something for you to do.”
“What’s that, George? Last time you had something for me to do,1 was tied to a can.”
“You know you don’t even have a passport?”
Another strange thing to say. I replied by saying nothing. I sat on the straight chair backward, legs spraddled and resting my arms on the back.
“Grown man, thirty-eight years old, doesn’t have a passport?”
“I never had need for one,” I said.
“All the money you’ve made, you never wanted to see another country?”
“Been in Toronto. Ciudad Juarez, As far as I wanted to go,” I said.
“Well, Ryan. Well.” He seemed to be searching for words, but this was a feint.
“That was a dirty trick you pulled with your slime-bucket agent Sid Cohen, saying I fooled you. I never fooled you.”
“Is that right?”
“I could let hard times be hard times, but I’m not a hard guy. I’m a guy trying to do what my country needs me to do. Trying to do the right thing for a lot of poor spies who just want a chance to play the American game.”
“George, you just want to cut the payroll and cheap your way to a pennant.”
“That’s American, isn’t it?”
He had me there.
“Ryan, Mr. Baxter here is with the State Department. He arranged a passport for you.” He pointed at the bean pole.
“Why?”
“For Cuba, of course.”
“I’m not going to Cuba.”
“Ryan, someone has to evaluate the team that Señor Fidel picked out for me.”
“This wasn’t no part of the deal,” I said.
“The deal is you’re my employee,” he said.
“I ain’t never been to Cuba.”
“No. They require a passport. You never had one before. Mr. Baxter got you one.”
I admit 1 have a reverence for government objects. Saw the Constitution once under glass. That was one. Went down to D.C. for a day trip when we were playing the Orioles up the road. Saw the Lincoln Memorial, that was something. Couldn’t make sense of the Washington Monument, though. Got there too late for the White House tour. But I saw the Constitution.
The dollar bill. That’s another thing that looks government to me. And important. And this passport, with its blue cover and seal and all, and inside, a picture of me that had a seal across it to make me official — it was like a deputy sheriff’s badge. I just looked at it and all the blank pages that followed it. It was a beautiful thing and made me proud of myself. Then I realized something: I still didn’t want to go to Cuba.
“I don’t wanna go.”
“I don’t want a pig in the poke. Neither does the government,” George said. “We want you to evaluate the players and if you turn thumbs down on someone, he doesn’t get to go to New York.”
“I'm no scout.”
“Not yet,” George said.
That was a teaser. Charlene said I had no future left in baseball. But what if it was known that I scouted this team and it turned out well?
Well?
I started to calculate. If it turned out well, I could parlay this into something the year after next, maybe shop around to a decent club that would forget I betrayed the whole baseball world by carting in a bunch of wetbacks from Cuba. I realized I was even starting to think the way Charlene and George talked, but as I say, when in Rome. It made you wonder if there was ever a time when you weren’t in one Rome or another, wearing that toga and pretending you’d go back home and put on regular cowboy boots someday when the toga days were over.
“This is over and above what we were talking about, when I signed the contract,” I said.
“No it isn’t,” George said,
I just sat there, staring at him. Mr. Baxter looked uncomfortable in the room.
“You want a can of beer?” I said in general.
Baxter shook his head. George said, “You have any vodka?”
“No, George. Just beer.”
“I haven’t had a beer in twenty-five years,” he said.
“You want one?”
“No. It bloats me.”
I just looked at him. Then I got up and went to the icebox and pulled out a can of Miller’s and popped the tab. It tasted cold and I made a slurping-burping sound with the swallow. I went back to the straight chair and sat on it the wrong way again.
“You always drink in the morning?” George said.
“You were the one wanted vodka,” I said.
“You got to take care of yourself.”
“George, how much you want to give me to be your scout?”
“I don’t have to give you anything, you’re already on the payroll.”
“To play baseball.”
“Five thousand dollars. And your expenses,”
“Twenty-five thousand. Brings me back to par.”
“You greedy cocksucker, I can get someone else to look at the team in Cuba.”
“You oughta, then.”
“Look, I thought we were in this together.”
“You keep reminding me that I’m the Indian and you’re the chief. I like to keep it that way.”
“Are you and that son of a bitch Sid Cohen cooking up something else?”
“George, you wanted me to go to L.A. for the winter meetings and I did and you sandbagged me right in front of the nation’s medías. I’m already thinking that twenty-five thousand more is too little for whatever is going to happen. If I go down there and bring the team back and they stink up the Stadium, you’ll put the blame on me.”
“Would I do that?”
Silence. We both knew the answer.
“Ten thousand,” he said.
I shook my head.
“I thought you told me once you’re no good dealing for yourself.”
“I’m getting better. The more time I spend with you, the better I get.”
“You are screwing up a beautiful deal. We’re two weeks from spring training and I got to get moving,” George said.
“Thirty-five thousand. Now that I think about it, this is going to be a lot of trouble for very little money for me.”
“No, no, no. You said twenty-five thousand.”
And that was that. We made the deal right there and George signed an agreement and Mr. Baxter put down his signature as a witness, though I could see he didn’t want to. The contract was written on the stationery of the Longhorn Arms, by hand, but my writing is very neat and legible because I went to the Catholic school in El Paso and the nuns were insane on the subject of handwriting.
“Now give me some expenses,” I said.
George peeled ten hundred-dollar bills off his roll. His roll is big enough to have a custom clip holding it together. In the middle of the clip is a diamond, I guess in case George gets down to his last few hundred and he needs to pawn it,
“A thousand dollars?”
“And your airline tickets. Mr. Baxter?”
Here was an employee of the State Department and he was doing major lackey work already for George. They had probably only been together for a couple of hours. George certainly has his way with retainers. Baxter gave me the tickets and George said, “You only need a couple of days in Havana. Put them through a camp, see how. they handle things. Then call me in New York and bring ‘em down to Sarasota through Mexico City and get this show on the road.“
“Tickets say I leave day after tomorrow.”
“That’s it,” George said.
I knew there was something wrong with all this. George practically gave me that extra twenty-five. But money has always blinded me to my own best self-interest.
That night I took Charlene out to a Mexican restaurant that was full of hot food and thirsty drinkers. Charlene can eat. I admire that in a woman. She doesn’t pick around or say she doesn’t do onions or something, the way some women do. She tucks in and even gets salsa on her chin in the process.
I told her about going to Cuba and she didn’t seem real enthused. For that matter, neither was I. The reason I don’t go to foreign countries and never got a passport is that 1 don’t want to be in a place where no one speaks English. Told that to a team buddy once and he asked me why the hell had I stayed with a New York team, then? He said he’d only found three or four people in the whole city who spoke English, or pretended to. But he was from Omaha originally and they think everyone doesn’t speak English who ain’t from Omaha.
“You ought to talk to Sid before you go,” Charlene said, wiping some food from her upper lip where it was stuck. “You think by now you’d of realized that George is not your friend.”
“I didn’t think he was my friend ever,” I said. I get riled when Charlene questions my intelligence. Any man would. “I just made me another twenty-five thousand dollars. And it’s just baseball work anyway, what I’m paid to do.”
“Go to Communist Cuba and pick out his team, right? Jest baseball work?”
“Charlene, I’m a pitcher. I know a hitter when I see one. I know a pitcher when I see one. If I was an outfielder, it’d be different. Pitchers and catchers are the smartest players on the team. They make the best coaches and managers.”
“You think you’re going to be a coach when this is over?”
“Maybe. Maybe a scout. I’d like scouting, go out and watch some games and make notes and file my expenses every month.”
“What if you scout wrong?”
“Well, I won’t. If I see someone can’t play in the Bigs, I’ll tell George and we won’t take him.”
Charlene sneered and put down her tortilla to make a point. “You’re gonna go to Castro and say, ‘This boy ain’t got it, Fidel.’ And Castro’s been standing there backing down America for more than thirty years and he’s gonna doff his hat and say, ‘Sorry, Mr. Shawn, sir, is there someone else I can get for you?’ Shit. In your dreams.”
I hadn’t exactly thought of that. Maybe I should call Sid on this thing. But it was a done deal.
“And suddenly, in the middle of January, George and this Mr. Baxter, whoever he is, fly down here and knock on your door and give you a bonus and a brand-new passport to fly down to Cuba for you to evaluate? Why didn’t he call you up to New York? Why didn’t he call Sid? Ryan Patrick Shawn, I am beginning to have grave doubts about your genetic code.”
“What does that mean?”
“You said you loved me once,” Charlene said.
“I do. You never heard me take it back.”
“I never heard you say it again, either.”
“All right, I love you, Charlene.”
“Sometime you could say it without me dragging it out of you.”
“All right.”
We sat there a moment and I saw Charlene had a head of steam and I was letting it settle down a little. She picked up her glass of beer and drank some, to cool the palate.
“Charlene?”
She just glared at me.
“I love you.”
She kept glaring, but it got less intense.
“I love you,” I said, holding her eyes in mine.
“What if we had kids? 1 want kids, but 1 don’t want dumb kids. I ain’t dumb and I never thought you were before. But what if there’s a streak of dumbness runs through you, through your genes? Then we have a kid and he’s gurgling and cute and crawling around the crib and 1 keep wondering, is this the dumb one or is he going to be like me?”
“I ain’t dumb, Charlene. I went to college.”
“You could prove it once in a while. George has got so many tricks he needs more than two sleeves. You keep falling for the same gags over and over again. This team is going to have your fingerprints all over it and George will say, when it goes wrong, that he was misled by you.”
“He can say what he wants, but I got the extra money.”
“And then, when the year is over, the Colorado Rockies or the Marlins or the Rangers or someone is gonna say, ‘Hey, you know that real dumb player on the Yankees what sold George a load of Cuban horsemeat? Let’s see if we can get him to do the same for us. Be a scout. Be a coach. Hell, we’ll make him manager.’ You think they’re gonna say that?”
“You ever think 1 might know what I’m doing around an infield? You ever think that, Charlene? I played this game man and boy for thirty years and I know a little bit about it. Just a little. It don’t matter if they lisp or wear dresses or carry those little red books the Chinese always had, they still gotta play baseball the same as anyone else. Same bat, same glove, same pill. I got eyes, I can see if someone is no good. I’ll call George and tell him —”
“What if George disappears on you again like he’s done times before?”
Damn. Another thing I hadn’t thought of.
“See what I mean, Ryan? You don’t think to the next jump. You gotta do better’n that with someone like George Bremenhaven.”
“I’ll call Sid.”
“And lock the barn door,”
“Charlene, you never told me you wanted to have kids.”
“I’m thirty-five years old and I want to be a mama. I been thinking for a while that you were the one, because 1 liked you. But these last few months, you are either acting squirrelly or you are acting dumb. I’m beginning to believe this is not acting.”
“I want to play baseball,” I explained.
She stared at me then like she’d seen me for the first time. And then she did a surprising thing. She patted my hand on the table.
“Poor baby. That’s what it is, isn’t it? You just want to play baseball,” she said.
“Yep,” 1 said.
“Ryan, Ryan.” She said my name twice in that tone women use when they’re trying to convince you that men are children. It’s the Big Mama voice, and I resent it.
“About having kids, I wouldn’t worry there. Uncle Dave, up in the Panhandle, I think he was adopted by my grandfather so he’s not natural kin to us.”
“I wasn’t thinking about anyone else except you.”
“So would you throw a kid out of your house because he wanted to be a player in the Bigs?”
“I would consider it carefully,” she said.
“If we were going to have kids, it would involve getting married. I don’t believe in that Hollywood stuff where you get married as the last thing.”
“Neither do I.”
It was my turn to stare.
She stared back and I flinched first. When you’re thirty-eight years old and been playing a boy’s game for a living all these years, you kind of think young. I never thought about marriage. I mean, for me personally.
“You’ll want to give that some thought,” Charlene said, letting me off the hook. “So will I. Did you ever have an IQ test?”
“I suppose, I don’t know. They give you one to go to college, don’t they?”
“We might need an IQ test. I just don’t want to make a mistake because I’d be stuck with it,” she said.
“Why don’t you make it an HIV test while you’re at it, Charlene?”
“Why, are you gay? You do like wearing that pink bathrobe of mine.”
“I wear your robe because it’s the only warm thing you got and when we’re lounging around your drafty old apartment in our altogether, I get cold. I don’t wanna be cold so I put on your robe, I’ll go out and buy myself a regular robe and hang it in your closet except that I ain’t seen your closet or the inside of your apartment for more than a month “
“Are you shouting at me, Ryan Patrick? I won’t stand to be shouted at by any man,” Charlene shouted.
People in the restaurant started to look ‘round at us and then turn away, sly-like, the way people do when they’re catching a show.
“I’m just saying there’s no reason to worry about me wearing your clothes because you don’t let me come to see you anymore,” I said.
It’s amazing how your voice carries in a place with tile on the floor and walls. Like singing in a shower, makes you sound good or, at least, loud.
“Is there something wrong, Señor?”
The waiter was large and wore a Pancho Villa mustache. At that point, I realized we might possibly be making a spectacle of ourselves. I looked at Charlene and saw she realized the same thing.
“No, no, por favor the bill,” I said and he went away.
Charlene stared at me a moment and then laughed. She laughed and laughed and I didn’t get it.
“Do you speak Spanish, isn’t that what George asked you?”
“Yeah. That’s what started it,” I said, still not getting it, Charlene just had a fit of the giggles and couldn’t stop it.
“‘Por favor, the bill?’“
“Well, we’re in Texas, honey —”
“Por favor, the bill. Where’d you get your command of language? Reading Doritos bags?”
So, naturally, I had to start laughing, too. It was a good thing because we might have stayed mad — angry — at each other if I hadn’t said it that way and Charlene hadn’t been smart enough to pick up on it. I’m not too worried about dumb being in my genes, it’s just that I don’t always see the worst in other folks the way I should.
And there was another bonus that night.
Í got to wear Charlene’s bathrobe again. And a couple of other things happened before.