Butterfly Winter (25 page)

“A flower?” said Moosey.

“Somebody’s screwed with the film,” said the Phillies President.

They watched a replay of Moosey’s bat swinging through the camellia, watched as the umpire raised his right hand to indicate the strikeout, replayed again and again the few petals that floated in the air like disturbed feathers, observed Esteban roll a ball back toward the mound.

Their conference lasted deep into the night.

B
y June 1st, many days after it happened, the news of the revolution in Courteguay reached the United States, Julio was 8-1, with 2.12
ERA
, and leading the National League in strikeouts.

The UPI dispatch read in part:

Knowing of Dr. Noir’s hatred of baseball and guessing that Quita would not be safe under the new regime, Julio caught the first available flight to the Dominican Republic, not even notifying Esteban of his plans, never mind team management. He sneaked across the border into Courteguay in the dead of night and dressed like everyone
else, in a cotton shirt and black slacks, made his way surreptitiously to his mother’s mansion, where he discovered his premonition had been correct, but worse than he feared. Quita had been in Dr. Noir’s power for nearly two weeks, since a few days after Dr. Noir had seized power again.

Julio dreamed all that night of herons, long, white, sleek as spears, the sky dappled with them. The flapping of wings gentle, but true, like his mother shaking a tablecloth outside her home in San Cristobel.

In the dream he and Esteban were walking on a beach; the herons filled the sky like clouds, the optical illusion became complete when he discerned that he could see black herons flying against a white backdrop, the backdrop too, being heron-shaped. Then they were in the water too, reflected on the sun-dazzled water; herons blue as Wedgwood, gray as fog.

In the morning Julio set out for San Barnabas.

As he was leaving Fernandella clung to his sleeve. “Don’t go,” she pleaded. “You don’t understand what Courteguay has become. A police state. You will be stopped at a checkpoint. You will disappear.”

“Courteguay has always been a police state. I am no more afraid of Dr. Noir and his thugs than I was of his predecessor.”

“Courage has nothing to do with anything. Hundreds of courageous young men and women are dead. They are the baseball martyrs,” she said.

“The what?”

“The baseball martyrs. Baseball is Courteguay. You, if anyone, should know that. After Dr. Noir’s edict that banned baseball, young people all over the country defied his wishes. It was instinct, I tell you. The Wizard tells a story, supposedly true, though one never knows with the Wizard, of monkeys in some country who were taught to swim by humans. Soon monkeys hundreds of miles away took up swimming. Who knows why? But young people all over Courteguay defied Dr. Noir by playing baseball.

“A ball and a bat would mysteriously appear, smiles would crease a half dozen faces, someone would dig frantically in the backyard and
a glove would appear, someone else would appear clutching a base to their chest like a baby. This whole group would make their way to a park, a baseball diamond, and the game would begin. Dr. Noir’s terrorists drove about the cities and towns in camouflaged trucks supplied by the United States. If someone was seen playing baseball they simply opened fire. If the players, who always had at least one lookout, saw the soldiers first, the players scattered wildly in all directions. Sometimes they would chase down one individual. Usually death was swift, the bullet-shattered body left behind as a reminder to those who escaped. But, occasionally the captured player was carried off to San Barnabas to the Presidential Palace where Dr. Noir would subject the player to days in the wound factory. What happened there is only rumor, but rumor too terrible to repeat.”

“And where is the Wizard when I need him?” said Julio. “How come he who claims to be in two places at the same time, is nowhere to be found? I’ll need some magic to find Quita.”

“Gone to the jungle,” said Fernandella. “It will be a while before it is safe for him to be in San Barnabas, even San Cristobel. The Wizard always tries to be on the side of both the Government and the Insurgents.”

“Don’t go!” Fernandella said again. “Go back to America. Stay there! I’m afraid there is nothing you can do for Quita now. She is one of the disappeared.”

But Julio could not wait to start his search for Quita. He shot out into the clear, blue morning as if he were stealing a base.

Instead of walking the oiled gravel that passed for a road he lurked through the jungle fern ever watchful for Dr. Noir’s soldiers. He decided he needed a weapon and stopped at the house of a boyhood friend, Ruiz Tata, where he hoped to borrow a machete.

The mother of Ruiz Tata answered the door. She was a large, smiling woman the color of toffee, but today she was not smiling.

“Julio, you don’t know?” she said, after he asked for Ruiz. “Dead,” she said, and hugged Julio to her. “One of the baseball martyrs. One of the first. A dozen boys were playing on the field where you got
your start. The soldiers sneaked up on them, parked the truck a mile away, and crawled through the jungle. Are they traitors those boys, the soldiers I mean? They are sworn to do a job, but it must be hard for them, if they were not in the army they would be on the baseball fields defying the ban. But there are bonuses for each kill of a baseball player. Ruiz was shot dead in the outfield, it is said the outline of his body remains on the grass as a reminder of evil. Two others were killed while running away. But by that night a dozen more, including Ruiz’s girlfriend Melita Diaz, were there in the dust tossing the ball in memoriam to their friends and lovers.

“Ruiz died a hero. A martyr. But what of you? Because you are a baseball player Dr. Noir will have you killed.”

“I am not afraid of Dr. Noir. I came to borrow Ruiz’s machete. I am on my way to the capital to rescue Quita Garza.”

“You are very brave, so I will do what I can to aid you.” The woman disappeared into the tin-roofed hut and returned with a small, gleaming machete, which she handed to Julio.

Julio spent the day wandering the streets of San Barnabas. He circled the Presidential Palace a few times, counting the number of guards, estimating how high he would have to jump to clear the whitewashed wall. He wondered if he could bribe his way inside. He had more money in his pocket than all the guards made in a year. But he remembered something Esteban had said, to the effect that money meant nothing to zealots, that they derived their self-esteem and sexual pleasure from having a single purpose in life. In this case their purpose in life was serving Dr. Noir and fighting his enemies. As darkness fell Julio caught the bus back to San Cristobel.

I
t was Alonzo Encarnacion, the right fielder, who exhibited the properties of ice. How Encarnacion came to Courteguay is not known. He appeared one day near the steps of the capitol in San Barnabas, bearded, wearing a slouch hat, carrying a rifle, with cartridge belts forming an X across his chest.

He rested on the lush lawn of the capitol, ate from a package of white cheese and dark bread, which he pulled from inside his filthy tunic. After he ate he sprawled in the sun and slept for most of the afternoon, his hat on the grass beside him. When he woke it was early evening and the sounds that reached his ears were like familiar birdcalls outside a childhood window. He heard the sounds of baseball: a ball thwacking into a mitt, the bat and ball meeting, the thumping of feet on the friendly earth, the encouraging babble of the players, the occasional gasp from the fans. When he rose up from where he lay his image was burned into the grass of the capitol lawn.

When Alonzo Encarnacion relieved himself, he passed an arc of yellow ice that broke into two-foot lengths when it came in contact with the earth. The pencil-thin rods of ice lay like lightning on the
Courteguayan grasses, melted with a sigh in the humid summer heat, but left behind black scars on the grass where the cold had taken its toll.

“Encarnacion cannot stand too long on one spot or he leaves his footprints on the earth,” the other players said, mystified. The first baseman, who was a carpenter, built a 3×3 square of fresh lumber and set it in right field for Encarnacion to stand on. Two ragged urchins with ill-fitting baseball caps covering their eyes were paid ten centavos a game to carry the square of lumber on and off the field.

In the shower a crust of ice formed around Encarnacion’s knees, slivers of ice, like shards of glass gathered like an aura. Encarnacion showered alone.

Alonzo Encarnacion combed his black hair back in a sleek pompadour until he looked like the villain in a melodrama. Women, thrilled by the danger implied by his dashing presence, arrived in record numbers at the baseball grounds. The wealthy arrived in limousines, driven by chauffeurs, the peasant girls arrived on foot, all gathered along the right field line, giggling, acting the fool, hoisting their skirts, sometimes with one hand, sometimes with two.

With his baseball salary Alonzo Encarnacion bought himself a scarlet velvet jacket, dark trousers, patent leather shoes, a ruffled shirt.

After he handled a bat the batboy would claim the instrument was frozen through and through, and take it out of service in case it would explode.

“He has the coldest lips I have ever tasted,” one of the girls exclaimed. After that he became even more desirable.

“That is all?” asked the Gringo Journalist, noting that the Wizard was taking a drink of mango juice and that his eyelids were drooping, indicating that he finished his story.

“What do you want? The rest of his life story is not very interesting. I only want to tell you interesting stories. When his unexceptional baseball career was over, after he had fucked perhaps five thousand groupies, he opened an ice cream store, which seemed a logical choice for him. He continued to piss ice until the day he died. Now, weren’t you happier not knowing that?”

“You are right, as always,” said the Gringo Journalist. “Still I have a concern.”

“And that would be?”

“You tell me stories, but the time frame seems more than just a movement forward or backward in time. Some events appear non-chronological, out of order as it were.”

“So. This is Courteguay,” replied the Wizard. “The word
chronological
is not in our language, neither is
sequence
. Things happen. That is all there is to it.”

“I need more of an explanation.”

“I thought such expansions and contractions of time would be obvious to you by now. You are a very slow learner, though I’m sure you’ve been told that often.”

“I’m not stupid.”

“Really? Where you come from and in many other places, maybe most other places, time is like a long highway with you standing in the middle of a straightaway while the highway dissolves in the distance in both directions, past and future. In Courteguay, if you picture the same scene, time occasionally runs crossways so that something that will happen in the future might already be behind you, slowly receding, while something from the past may not yet have happened.”

The Wizard smiled. “Pass the mango juice, please.”

T
he second time Esteban was murdered, Fernandella insisted that the body be cremated. A woman named Mme. Luzon had in recent months done many tarot readings for Fernandella. One of the cards had something to do with fire.

“If you cremate Esteban you will have to stuff me into the furnace with the corpse,” said Julio, his cheeks sunken, his eyes wild with grief.

“He is not only my brother but my catcher,” he went on. “He will be buried, and not even in a cemetery but on the lower lawn of our house, and in the manner I prescribe,” and Julio banged his fist on the glass-topped coffee table in the rose garden, where Fernandella took her morning coffee, making the delicate china cups jump and chatter like ghostly teeth.

“If you feel so strongly,” said Fernandella, “I will not stand in your way. All I want to know is does the Wizard have anything to do with your decision?”

Within hours of the announcement of Esteban’s murder, the Wizard, who now had sixteen first names in his self-appointed capacity as Grand Defender of the long-defunct One True Church of God’s
Redemption and Reaffirmation, appointed Esteban Pimental Bishop of Courteguay, posthumously of course.

“The pension of a deceased bishop is even larger than that of a retired baseball player,” said the Wizard, smiling benevolently.

In the days after the murder, the Wizard was everywhere, lurking like a spy on the grounds of the Courteguayan White House, appearing from behind a wing-back chair or by parting a set of silken curtains.

Hector was devastated that nothing was required of him. Julio took over funeral arrangements. The Wizard sent out invitations to world leaders and religious dignitaries. The Pope, while he declined to attend the service personally, issued a broadly worded statement condemning violence, and in favor of tolerance, understanding, tithing, and opposing family planning.

Julio, once he had frightened off Fernandella, took complete charge of the burial plans. Esteban was to be buried in a Plexiglas coffin, in his favorite baseball uniform, wearing his glove, and in his accustomed position, the catcher’s crouch.

The coffin had to be custom manufactured in Atlanta, and the funeral had to be delayed twice, once for two days, and once for three, because of its late arrival. Some dignitaries grew tired of waiting for the funeral and returned home, the Canadian prime minister among them.