I knew something was wrong when I woke up to a downshift and heard the gears of the old Blue Bird school bus which had been painted teal and adorned with a giant Seraperos logo, still grinding. Gordo, our third-string catcher and first-string bus-driver wrestled the bus upward through the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains through the night.
I had fallen asleep in my seat, stretched out with my Wilson A2000 as a slight pillow against the grease of the window, and my feet on the rubberized vinyl floor that ostensibly would make the bus easier to clean though no one ever did.
It was late black and we had finished a game hours earlier. Angry and tired and hungry--and not yet drunk--we were on our way through San Luis Potosi, the most-raped city the in world--hoping to reach Aguascalientes, where we'd be playing four games against the Rieleros (the Railroaders) in just three days.
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| The wages of fear are hard-earned. |
Through my closed eyelids I sensed we had passed through San Luis--the Spanish raped everyone near the town and took the silver wealth from the mountains, then raped again when the silver was gone--yet Gordo was still guiding the bus upward, above 6,000 feet in elevation onto 7,000 feet. He had missed the turnoff--it's barely marked--to Aguascalientes and was heading through to Cerro del Potosi at 8,600 feet elevation and likely to Cerro Grande, 2,000 feet higher still.
"Gordo," I barked. "Up we are still going." My Spanish word order was as ill-formed as my very arrival in Mexico some months earlier.
"Basta," Gordo said. "Enough." Gordo hated being wrong. Like most people, he hated admitting he was wrong even more.
Hector, also now awake, and laying across from me spoke in Sten machine-gun Spanish. "You must turn around or we will die with the wild goats."
"The road is so narrow and there's no place to turn."
Hector had Gordo stop the old bus, the diesel clacking like a time-bomb. He and I got out of the vehicle, me in front of the bus, Hector behind, with flashlights against the off chance of an oncoming car and Gordo executed a fifteen-minute U-turn, moving two feet forward and 26-inches back against the narrowness of the road and the un-guardrailed steepness of the cliffs.
Please. Sound on. Loud.
Most of the other boys snored through the whole thing, and in short order, Hector and I returned to the bus. Gordo was guiding the old machine down the steep in second gear so the brakes, what was left of them, wouldn't overheat. The low gear kept slowing us down against the force of gravity and the demons that built the road.
After twenty or so minutes of grind, Hector began.
"I saw outside the light of my father signaling me. I tried saying hello back to the stars. To say hello to my father."
"He is up in Canis Major or Alpha Centauri."
"He is up or he is down. He might be out walking Cerberus, the three-headed dog. No one knows. The last I saw him he was swinging a fist at my face, and like my eight brothers before me, all nine of us sharing the same bed, I said 'enough is enough,' and walked from his home to find a way away from home."
"He hit you."
"Everyone's father hit. But mine without an open hand. With a fist. Finally, I came back at him while a bat I had in my hand. And I left after that, I found a place to play ball."
"Like your brothers before you."
"They left too to play ball. But one was too slow. One was too fat. One was too butter-fingers. One was too Swiss-cheese glove. Two couldn't hit. And two drank too much."
"Then you. One of the all time greats."
"But still, no father to blink a light back to me."
The bus rattled downward and we thought about lights not blinking.
"And you, Jorge Navidad. Did your light find also your father, or was he too missing."
"My father was always missing most when he was needed most."
It took me years to figure out how to sum up a life of pain in one epigram. Missing most when needed most was where I settled, satisfied with the job I had done.
Hector sat with that. As I have for most of my life.
"He had a heart-attack when I was eight. After that we never once had a catch. He never once had a catch with me. He never once came to one of my games. He tonight was missing too, though still you try."
"A hurt maybe worse than a fist."
We sat in still stillness as the clicketyclackety bus gravity-ed down.
"May I," Hector asked the night, "quote from Homer's 'Odyssey.'"
Hector a poor man from an unnamed village found a second-life, a better one, in literature you wouldn't expect him to have read, though read he did. Like the great Mexican League pitcher, Estuardo Lambresas, who as a boy would climb to the top of a school house and take in his lessons through the narrow aperture of a chimney, Hector made himself an educated man.
"May I," Hector asked again, "quote from Homer's 'Odyssey.'"
A son whose father has vanished has to suffer
many sorrows
In his halls: there is no one else who might be there to
help to him.
So it is with Telémachus now. His father has vanished,
nor is there
Anyone among the people who might defend him
from harm.
"Unlike Telémachus, my father never returned. I blinked the light hoping for a blink back. But just the still of all of the sky answered."
We hit the flat part of the highway to Aguascaliente. Gordo shifted into third. Then fourth. We were in the wee small hours and Gordo raced to see the frosted neon of our the hotel sign.
Gordo saw the neon, like Hector and I saw what we saw. Like all of us that night of dark, through the mountains and the trillion cicada trills, we were looking through the galaxy for something we were missing or something we never had or worst of all something that vanished like a sky-high fly-ball in the too bright mid-day sky.
Gordo ground the gears and he stopped the bus across a dozen spaces in the empty, nearly empty, sidewalk athwart Hotel Colonial.
Hector banged the head of a bat on the floor of the bus with a boom, waking up the sleepers. He barked some instructions. Time for breakfast. Curfew. And the bus to Parque de Béisbol Alberto Romo Chávez. The parque named for a Rieleros from the 30s and 40s who was now in the Mexican League's Hall-of-Fame. Chávez had a ballpark named for him, not like they do today, name ballparks after a bank or a telco. A man commemorated not a company.
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| Alberto Romo Chávez |
The team, tired and stiff from six hours on the bus, peeled off their vinyl seats. They shuffled by, carrying their teal duffles, on the way to their small rooms with a broken ceiling fan and old Philco radio.
"No light blinked back," Hector said.
"No light blinked back," I dumbed.
"It is hard on a narrow road to reverse course."
We left the bus, the last two. Me in the lead carrying my duffle, Hector right behind me, carrying his.
I waited for him at the foot of the two steps off the bus. When he stepped down he patted the old machine like you would an old dog who loved you no matter what. Like an Odyssean ship, we crossed oceans that night.
I reversed course, went back and did the same.
No light blinked back.
They never do.
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