The New York (13 page)

“What about the other owners?”

“If this works, George is a genius, he's their hero, the first guy to seriously show how to stomp”“ the player's union since the strike. If it doesn't work, they force him to sell the franchise to the next sucker in line. They are actively neutral, believe me, bet they are secretly cheering for George.”

Sid cut another piece of lettuce. Northern salads have lots of lettuce, a reason it's so hard to order a salad seriously.

“The Cubans in Miami are a smaller problem. Everyone hates everyone else in Miami — it's what holds the city together. They're like lobsters in a pot. Every time one climbs up to get out the other lobsters pull him back in. The Haitians hate the Cubans, they all hate the Anglos, naturally everyone hates the Jews, it's a mess. Which can work to the Administration's advantage. It's unlikely the Cubans are going to burn down the city, since they seem to own so much of it. The Haitians might be confused enough to riot, but who cares, Haitians are always rioting. Besides, they speak French. The Miami contingent is a wild card but a small one.”

“What about the player's union?”

“Well, I'm going to try to get you in their good graces again — you know, kiss and make up and stand by your man. What's done is done insofar as getting rid of the old lineup…. This salad sucks, you know that?”

“I ordered steak.”

“It'll kill you.”

“I feel self-destructive.”

“Don't let me down.”

“I won't, Sid.”

“You did once.”

“I won't, Sid “

“The union can be made to see it's getting no sympathy going after you, they have to keep their focus on George. The solution is pretty simple.”

“Solution?”

“George wants to break the union, demolish the agents, end arbitration, et cetera, all the things the owners always want. Remember the Big Strike. And he wants to do it in the name of international peace and brotherhood, which is a neat trick.”

“So what's the solution, Sid?” I said again.

Sid put down his fork and covered the remains of his salad with a red napkin. I thought he might say a prayer over the departed, but he said something else.

“Get rid of George.”

And he was smiling.

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.