Page 16 - Way Out to the Old Ballgame

El Brujo del Beisbol

water and the peppers in the food didn’t kill you, I said, then you’d
still be sure to die of boredom in good old San Trueno.”
“Yeah, I thought I had him there, because he just gripped the
steering wheel and drove on for a while without saying a word. All of
a sudden he hit the brakes and swung the car around, nearly throwing
me out of the window. What the hell, I said. You asked for it, Sparky,
he said. Now I’m going to show you something you won’t see back
in the U.S.A. Pretty soon we were off the main highway bumping
along a dirt road past a bunch of old shacks. No street lights. No
electric lights at all, that I could see. Just an occasional kerosene
lantern hanging in a window. It was so dark and I was so drunk I
couldn’t tell you where we were or how long we’d been driving. But
he finally came to a stop, outside a sort of compound surrounded by
small buildings built of scrap plywood and sheets of corrugated tin.”
“I thought this was a strange place to find a bit of nightlife, and I
was going to tell him something along those lines, but he grabbed my
shoulder and told me to keep my eyes open and my mouth shut. His
English always got scrambled up when he was drunk, but I got the
gist of that. Okay, I whispered, anything you say, Roger, old buddy.
So we staggered out of the car and he led me into one of the
buildings. It was dim and smoky inside, maybe two or three lanterns
and a few candles were all they had. I could see a bunch of people
after a while, some sitting on the floor, some on chairs, and a few
moving around. I could also hear a weird kind of singing, and a drum
being played. Not much of a nightclub, it seemed to me. Roger and I
were in the back of the room, and nobody noticed us at first. Maybe
they were all too stoned.”
“On the other side of the room, behind the people who I guessed
were dancing, an old man was sitting by a table with a lot of weird
junk stacked up on it—candles, bottles, little dolls, pictures in bright-
colored frames. I figured that was the bar and he was the guy in
charge, so I got Roger’s attention and pointed at the table with one
hand, pretending to drink with the other. That really cracked him up,
for some reason, and people started noticing us. Usually I didn’t give
a damn about that. I mean, we were ballplayers, right? If they didn’t
love us for being great heroes, at least they kept their distance. It’s

15