Butterfly Winter - W. Kinsella P.

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fields, or the guava plantations. I gamble. If you marry me my luck becomes yours.’

      Fernandella agreed. Within weeks they were married.

      But before they could be married there had to be a baseball game. The women of Courteguay played almost as much baseball as the men and some of them were exceptionally talented. Before a wedding could take place a team made up of the bride, her sisters and bridesmaids, and whoever else was necessary to a complete team, played against a team picked by the groom. The groom’s team could be made up of anything from rank amateurs to semi-professionals. For the wedding to go forward the bride had to make an adequate showing as a baseball player. The word adequate could be interpreted in many ways. If the groom was reluctant, a bride who went only 1 for 4 and made an error in the field might be rejected by the triumvirate who made the decision, the groom and best man being two, the third often one of the moth-eaten priests who lived behind chain-link fencing. The priest never saw the game but would be told about it by the groom, and was the third leg of the triumvirate to give an appearance of fairness.

      If the soon-to-be groom was madly in love, all the bride, if she was not an athlete, or many months pregnant, had to do was show up, stand helplessly in right field and swing weakly at the ball when she batted. But even if the bride was an excellent commercial league player, the groom might want an extra week to sow a few wild oats so would insist that she had not played well enough to be his bride, thus postponing the wedding for a week.

      Fernandella was coached by a woman named Roberta Fernandez Diaz Ortega, who now lived in the United States with her lover, a woman who once won the Dinah Shore Golf Tournament, and happened to be visiting her family. Several years earlier in a Wedding Game like this Roberta had been seen by a scout for the Baltimore Orioles. In cut-off jeans, a loose shirt and with her boy’s haircut, Roberta was mistaken for a boy, and the scout offered her a chance in A Ball in the USA. Roberta signed her name as Roberto and hopped in the back of the scout’s Jeep after the game was over. As Roberto she moved quickly up the ladder and played two seasons for the Orioles, batting over .300 and coming second in All Star voting her second season. Her teammates did not suspect her. She was often seen in the company of women.

      ‘Geez, Robbyo,’ said teammate Bubba, one evening before a game, ‘I seen you dancing last night. I thought that tennis player girl you was with was queer as a three-dollar bill.’

      Roberta stared him in the eye. ‘I am Courteguayan,’ she replied, ‘I am able to overcome any odds.’

      ‘Damn fine,’ said Bubba. ‘Maybe you could introduce me to one of them queer chicks, I’ve always felt that after one evening with Ol Bubba, they’d get over that foolishness.’

      ‘Maybe someday I will,’ said Roberta.

      It wasn’t until the last day of the season after Roberta had won the batting title in the American League and her teammates threw her into the shower that they discovered her secret.

      Management quickly covered up by announcing first, magnificent player bonuses, then in December that a torn rotator cuff had ended Roberto’s career. They paid out her contract, which made her a very wealthy woman.

       SEVEN

       The Wizard

      Her mother was certain that an evil wizard had put a spell on Fernandella.

      And, as if to confirm his mother-in-law’s worst fears, on the day Fernandella first told Hector she was pregnant he took her to see a wizard who lived in a tent near the baseball grounds.

      ‘If he is such a wizard why isn’t he rich, or President of the Republic, or both?’ Fernandella cried.

      ‘A true wizard never uses his gifts for his own benefit.’

      ‘Who told you that? The wizard?’

      Hector busied himself brushing dust off the cuffs of his pants.

      The Wizard, who called himself Jorge Blanco, existed by predicting the outcome of baseball matches …

      ‘You said Jorge Blanco was one of your names,’ said the Gringo Journalist.

      ‘If I said that then it must be true,’ replied the Wizard, anxious to get on with his story.

      In the mornings, a steady stream of gamblers made their way to the Wizard’s tent, paying five centavos for each prophecy. The Wizard seldom gambled himself, and hedged his prognostications. Unless a game seemed a sure thing, he advised half the gamblers to bet one side, half to bet the other, swearing each side to secrecy.

      The Wizard claimed that he had once been to America, had spent two whole days in Miami, where he had seen a hot air balloon. The moment he had seen it rise in the air, hissing like a million snakes, he knew the feel of magic, and realized his role in life was to be a wizard. It was the first time he had ever experienced wonder. His second exposure to wonder occurred the same afternoon when he stumbled on a Major League baseball team engaged in spring training, and by asking a few questions discovered that professional baseball players were well paid, well fed, and overly respected, considering that what they did for a living was play a child’s game.

      ‘There are inconsistencies here …’ the Gringo Journalist began.

      The Wizard glared at the Gringo Journalist.

      ‘So, sue me,’ he said. ‘This is Courteguay. Sometimes two and two equal five.’

      ‘Twins,’ the Wizard proclaimed proudly, pressing the newly taut skin on Fernandella’s belly. ‘Twin sons!’

      The inside of the Wizard’s tent was stifling, and smelled of fruit rinds and stale clothing.

      Hector beamed; Fernandella scowled at the wizard.

      ‘How much is this going to cost?’ she demanded.

      Fernandella was not used to being so poor. Her own family had little, but their adobe home was whitewashed, had mats on the floor, and food had never been a concern. Since her marriage, Fernandella stole fruit from the tiny orchards of family friends. The hovel in which she and Hector lived had been abandoned by a family of ten, and their goats, when it became too filthy even for them, a group of people only one step removed from the animals with whom they shared everything.

      Fernandella whirled about the hut like a Fury, making it livable. In a matter of weeks she was shrilling at her husband in a manner she had vowed she would never do, imploring, threatening, cursing, invoking saints that he might take a real job in the cane fields and provide for her properly. Still, in the night, when she slipped her hand inside the cool black shirt, when the sweetness of Hector’s hair pomade was close at hand, she shivered with ecstasy and forgave him his indolence and lack of ambition, praying that the baseball teams he had bet on might win.

      ‘The Wizard,’ scoffed Fernandella, ‘what does he call himself? Jorge Blanco? He is a scoundrel fallen on hard times who still wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral. I’ve heard rumors that he was once known by the name Boatly, a Gypsy from Europe, an immigrant, a foreigner. I have heard that in another life he walked up out of the ocean like a fish learning to be a man. Some say he was deposited on earth full grown, that he arrived from outer space, emerged from a glowing, ball-shaped object that whined like an ominous wind and vanished the moment he stepped clear. He does nothing to dispel such rumors.’

      This was not the last time Fernandella railed about the ancestry and shiftlessness of the Wizard.

      ‘He could not possibly be Boatly,’ said her studious son, Esteban, many years later. ‘Sandor Boatly brought baseball to Courteguay. Sandor Boatly, if he were alive, would be over a hundred years old.’

      ‘Never marry a handsome man,’ Fernandella would tell her own daughters, when they became teenagers. But none paid the slightest attention, and all of them

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