Salome could hit the ball from here to Tenochtitlan but struck out three times for every long ball, or six. No, I was batting five. High enough up in the order to come to bat with men on—at crucial moments, so I could try to knock them home, but still, where I liked it (and still do) in the shadow of bigger names and louder voices.
It was a steamy hot day in Villahermosa, Tabasco, a nearly below sea-level Cincinnati-sized city within tobacco-juice distance from the turbid bay of Campeche. Villahermosa was surrounded by mosquito wetlands and smelled of thick-sulfer air from the oil refineries that spoiled everything but the wallets of a dozen rich Gringos and the few dark men they allowed around them.
It was here, against the slow, old and fat Olmecas, that I would be batting fifth, fighting for my dignity against fastballs and sandflies and more often than not that long short season, losing badly.
Batting fifth against a young left-hander named Iturbe or Yturbe or even eTurbe. Every time you saw his name in print it had a different spelling like the birth-years of so many ballplayers whose parents never wrote things down in a world where paperwork meant you were rolling your own cigarettes.
Yturbe was tall and thin and had arrived in Villahermosa not too many weeks ago and was turning the league on its ear with a fastball that couldn’t be seen—but its whiz through the humid air could be heard like an angry cicada grinding its ill-fitting teeth.
Many pitchers are found like this. Long thin boys with long thin arms who, in the parlance of the day could throw a pork chop past a hungry wolf. Many pitchers are found like this. But their managers, thinking more of their success than their pitcher having a long career, would work their young arms into rag-dolls. They wouldn’t care if they threw every three days, 13 innings one game, eleven two days later, and a full nine four days hence.
Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a poem about this, First Fig, not about baseball but about living life with the tachometer fully into the redline.
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
With those lithe limbs, they were out to win ballgames now, not worry about next year and some young pitcher who next year might be somewhere else playing with a different name, or might be burning trash in a field somewhere, planting something because planting anything paid better even than playing ball.
Yturbe was on that twilight. Throwing pills past our boys, myself included. The Olmecas left the lights off in the stadium dimming everything as the night darkened making a hard-to-see Yturbe even harder to see.
He had taken us down without so much as a scratch through four innings, only one walk to Diablo, but nothing hard by us, not even one that curved foul. The top of the fifth came and the game seemed over already. The Olmecas had scratched three off of one of the Madranos and then the other Madrano replaced the first Madrano and they struck for two more against him.
So we were down five zip and were being no hit and had one out already when I came up in the top of the fifth. Yturbe whizzed one by me. A fastball more a sight-gag than a pitch and I didn’t even have the wherewithal to wave at it.
I heard Hector and Sisto from the bench.
“He’s no so fast, Jorge. Swat a good one.”
Most of what you hear from the bench when you’re down five zip is a lie and you know it. He was so fast and I wasn’t about to swat a good one. I could hope for a mistake, but Yturbe wasn’t making any.
But.
But I didn’t want to whiff. But I wanted to shake Yturbe. Do something to his composure like a fly does to you when you swallow it at a picnic. I wanted to get under his dark brown skin and chase him back to the tilted dust village he came from.
When his second pitch came in, it was tight and I turned my left elbow right into it, absorbing the horsehide in the thick of my forearm back from the time when my forearms still had muscles tiered like a Manhattan high-rise. The ball was deadened by my wing and landed thud at my spikes. The umpire pointed me to first and I stooped to grab the ball and side-armed it with malice to Yturbe with a medium-curse, something that would show I was pissed—without starting a fight.
The whole thing was an act, really. A calculus. It was my bad—I could have escaped the path of the ball, but I wanted to start something. I wanted to see if my being hit could start the boys hitting.
I didn’t even rub my arm, a “your-best-didn’t-even-sting” gesture. I “you-bastarded” him as I trotted down to first and yelled to our bench, a little too loud, “he is not so fast. There is nothing to be afraid of.” I refused to wince as I’ve refused so often in life.
Bustamante, big strong Bustamante who’s batting average was returning to earth after having been up in the high threes swatted a double, bringing me in, because down five-zero I was running on the pitch. Buentello went to the opposite field, a scorching grounder down the first base line that stopped in short right field because the grass hadn’t been cut. That brought Bustamante in, 5-2. Diablo bunted, a nice crafty one down toward third. Their catcher wanted to get Buentello advancing but bobbled the ball and with one-down Buentello was on third and Diablo on first.
Perez-Abreu pinch hit for Madrano, and though usually light-hitting, he lashed a sharp liner to the center-right gap. Buentello in, standing up, Diablo on third, Perez-Abreu on first. Then Cesar, then Adame, then Garibay, singles all. Like a cracked penny- arcade baseball game with a stout metal bat smacking a slow metal ball. We had tied the score at five.
Rojas, batting for the second time in the inning, tried to clear the bases, but too eager, the ball popped up not out and two were down. My turn at the plate against a rattled Yturbe came inside, angry at me for starting this off. Inside was my power and I turned my hips like a stripper and doubled down the chalk, the ball bouncing in the corner like it was avoiding “it” in a game of tag.
Bustamante popped out after that, leaving me stranded on second, but no matter. We were up 7-5 and after Dr. Jesus Verduzco, our back-up short stop and third-year medical student sprayed my forearm with some instant freeze spray, I was back at third for the remainder of the darkening evening.
We won going away, 8-5.
In the bus that night, driving from one sad stadium in one sad gang-raped Mexican city to the next, through the dust and the dirt and the headache and the lonely and the nostos-algia (literally sickness for home like Odysseus had) Hector grabbed an old Hillerich and Bradsby and bounced an old horseshide off its business end. He bounced a baseball off a bat on a bouncing bus like he had a ping-pong paddle.
I have tried the same and when the earth is still, I can bounce into the mid twenties. Hector routinely gets to one-fifty or one-seventy-five on a bouncing bus, a feat I’ve never seen anyone anywhere duplicate, or even come close.
“I know boys like Yturbe,” Hector reveried. “This season he will earn fourteen wins and lose just six. There will be talk of him being sold to Cleveland or Houston, or some city that is always short a long arm.
"Next year, Yturbe will be stronger and craftier, he will win nineteen and lose only five. The talk of him going North will increase in volume. But those who have seen the movie before, see something. They see that after almost three-hundred soup-kitchen innings, his arm will lose its strength. He will, on guile alone go twelve wins and lose nine. But very few have craft and guile at twenty.
"Then when he hits twenty-one, he will be through. He will win four and lose fourteen. One more season like that, and at twenty-two, he will be wiping an old terry cloth rag across the polished wood surface of a sticky bar in a still stickier city. And he will hope for a tips and drinks hardly touched.”
“Tonight, we could not hit him,” I murmured.
“We could not hit him, until we could. Until we realized all of us are hit. We get hit early. We get hit late. We get hit in the head. And hit below the waist. We get hit and bruised and bruised and hit. We have, all of us in common, just one thing. A surfeit of hit. So to survive we, in turn, hit too.”
“Yturbe hit me tonight. And bruised me too.”
“You bruised him redder, bluer, darker.” Hector kept richocheting the hard-ball off the bat. 121, 122, 130. “You bruised him redder, bluer, darker. But what bruises the most is the using up. The team, the owners, the managers treating his arm like a seam of wealth in the mountains, used by the Spanish. Something to be mined and stripped naked and rubbed raw. Removed. Ruined. Raped." 140, 146.
I looked at my left forearm, even in the starless night, I could see the bruise growing angrier. I rubbed at it, feeling the heat and enjoying the pain.
Hector through the dark saw me communing with my newest wound.
“A wound you can see is much less hurt than the wounds you can’t. A wound you can see is a reminder.”
He caught the bouncing ball in his free hand.
“A wound you can see is a reminder that the one best at hitting is many times the one least afraid to be hit. The one who is hit so much he is not afraid any more of being hit. That is sometimes how you learn to hit. From wounds you can see.”
I looked at the bruise. It was radiating like a storm on a TV weather map.
We drove on through the dark. Gordo our third-string catcher and first-string bus-driver grinding gears like an insomniac’s teeth at night.
We drove on through the dark.
So dark we could no longer see the stars or their pinpricks of light.
Only in the ink of eternity we could see the dark where the light used to be.
