Now, at long last, the hour has come. It’ll be Bubo, Dorfman, and Tool for the Dodgers in their half of the inning, which means that Hector will hit for Dorfman. I been saving you, champ, Dupuy rasps, the empty Gelusil bottle clenched in his fist like a hand grenade. Go on in there, he murmurs, and his voice fades away to nothing as Bubo pops the first pitch up in back of the plate. Go on in there and do your stuff.
Sucking in his gut, Hector strides out onto the brightly lit field like a nineteen-year-old, the familiar cry in his ears, the haggard fans on their feet, a sickle moon sketched in overhead as if in some cartoon strip featuring drunken husbands and the milkman. Asunción looks as if she’s been nailed to the cross, Reina wakes with a start and shakes the little ones into consciousness, and Hector Jr. staggers to his feet like a battered middleweight coming out for the fifteenth round. They’re all watching him. The fans whose lives are like empty sacks, the wife who wants him home in front of the TV, his divorced daughter with the four kids and another on the way, his son, pride of his life, who reads for the doctor of philosophy while his crazy padrecito puts on a pair of long stockings and chases around after a little white ball like a case of arrested development. He’ll show them. He’ll show them some cojones, some true grit and desire: the game’s not over yet.
On the mound for the Braves is Bo Brannerman, a big mustachioed machine of a man, normally a starter but pressed into desperate relief service tonight. A fine pitcher — Hector would be the first to admit it — but he just pitched two nights ago and he’s worn thin as wire. Hector steps up to the plate, feeling legendary. He glances over at Tool in the on-deck circle, and then down at Booger, the third-base coach. All systems go. He cuts at the air twice and then watches Brannerman rear back and release the balclass="underline" strike one. Hector smiles. Why rush things? Give them a thrill. He watches a low outside slider that just about bounces to even the count, and then stands like a statue as Brannerman slices the corner of the plate for strike two. From the stands, a chant of Viejo, Viejo, and Asunción’s piercing soprano, Hit him, Hector!
Hector has no worries, the moment eternal, replayed through games uncountable, with pitchers who were over the hill when he was a rookie with San Buitre, with pups like Brannerman, with big-leaguers and Hall of Famers. Here it comes, Hector, 92 MPH, the big gringo trying to throw it by you, the matchless wrists, the flawless swing, one terrific moment of suspended animation — and all of a sudden you’re starring in your own movie.
How does it go? The ball cutting through the night sky like a comet, arching high over the center fielder’s hapless scrambling form to slam off the wall while your legs churn up the base paths, you round first in a gallop, taking second, and heading for third… but wait, you spill hot coffee on your hand and you can’t feel it, the demons apply the live wire to your tailbone, the legs give out and they cut you down at third while the stadium erupts in howls of execration and abuse and the niñitos break down, faces flooded with tears of humiliation, Hector Jr. turning his back in disgust and Asunción raging like a harpie, Abuelo! Abuelo! Abuelo!
Stunned, shrunken, humiliated, you stagger back to the dugout in a maelstrom of abuse, paper cups, flying spittle, your life a waste, the game a cheat, and then, crowning irony, that bum Tool, worthless all the way back to his washerwoman grandmother and the drunken muttering whey-faced tribe that gave him suck, stands tall like a giant and sends the first pitch out of the park to tie it. Oh, the pain. Flat feet, fire in your legs, your poor tired old heart skipping a beat in mortification. And now Dupuy, red in the face, shouting: The game could be over but for you, you crazy gimpy old beaner washout! You want to hide in your locker, bury yourself under the shower-room floor, but you have to watch as the next two men reach base and you pray with fervor that they’ll score and put an end to your debasement. But no, Thorkelsson whiffs and the new inning dawns as inevitably as the new minute, the new hour, the new day, endless, implacable, world without end.
But wait, wait: who’s going to pitch? Dorfman’s out, there’s nobody left, the astonishing thirty-second inning is marching across the scoreboard like an invading army, and suddenly Dupuy is standing over you — no, no, he’s down on one knee, begging. Hector, he’s saying, didn’t you use to pitch down in Mexico when you were a kid, didn’t I hear that someplace? Yes, you’re saying, yes, but that was—
And then you’re out on the mound, in command once again, elevated like some half-mad old king in a play, and throwing smoke. The first two batters go down on strikes and the fans are rabid with excitement, Asunción will raise a shrine, Hector Jr. worships you more than all the poets that ever lived, but can it be? You walk the next three and then give up the grand slam to little Tommy Oshimisi! Mother of God, will it never cease? But wait, wait, wait: here comes the bottom of the thirty-second and Brannerman’s wild. He walks a couple, gets a couple out, somebody reaches on an infield single and the bases are loaded for you, Hector Quesadilla, stepping up to the plate now like the Iron Man himself. The wind-up, the delivery, the ball hanging there like a piñata, like a birthday gift, and then the stick flashes in your hands like an archangel’s sword, and the game goes on forever.
Whales Weep
They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all….
I don’t know what it was exactly — the impulse toward preservation in the face of flux, some natal fascination with girth — who can say? But suddenly, in the winter of my thirty-first year, I was seized with an overmastering desire to seek out the company of whales. That’s right: whales. Flukes and blowholes. Leviathan. Moby Dick.
People talked about the Japanese, the Russians. Factory ships, they said. Dwindling numbers and a depleted breeding stock, whales on the wane. I wanted desperately to see them before they sang their swan song, before they became a mere matter of record, cards in an index, skeletal remains strung out on coat hangers and suspended from the high concave ceilings of the Smithsonian like blueprints of the past. More: I wanted to know them, smell them, touch them. I wanted to mount their slippery backs in the high seas, swim amongst them, come to understand their expansive gestures, sweeping rituals, their great whalish ecstasies and stupendous sorrows.
This cetaceamania was not something that came on gradually, a predilection that developed over a period of months into interest, awareness, and finally absorption — not at all. No: it took me by storm. Of course I’d been at least marginally aware of the plight of whales and dolphins for years, blitzed as I was by pleas from the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Save the Whales people. I gave up tuna fish. Wrote a letter to my congressman. Still, I’d never actually seen a whale and can’t say that I was any more concerned about cetaceans than I was about the mountain gorilla, inflation, or the chemicals in processed foods. Then I met Harry Macey.
It was at a party, somewhere in the East Fifties. One of those seasonal affairs: Dom Pérignon, cut crystal, three black girls whining over a prerecorded disco track. Furs were in. Jog togs. The hustle. Health. I was with Stephanie King, a fashion model. She was six feet tall, irises like well water, the de rigueur mole at the corner of her mouth. Like most of the haute couture models around town, she’d developed a persona midway between Girl Scout and vampire. I did not find it at all unpalatable.