Molina Page 6

  Finally she called on me.

  My mouth went dry. I would rather run fifty laps in baseball practice than spend one minute up there.

  “Page thirteen,” Mrs. El-Khayyat said. “Let’s go.”

  There was no escape. I stood, careful not to raise my eyes from the book and see all those people staring at me. I took a breath. The words squeaked out in tortured chirps, like a bird being strangled. But no one laughed. Not even one stifled snigger. I was too pathetic.

  “Louder please, Benjamin.” She said Benjamín the English way, pronouncing the j like a g instead of an h.

  I repeated the sentence, trying to enunciate every syllable.

  “Next sentence! Louder!”

  She was not going to let up.

  I tried to produce some saliva. I read each word carefully. I had no idea what any of the sentences meant. My brain had gone blank.

  “Wonderful!” Mrs. El-Khayyat said. “Thank you!”

  I sank into my chair as another student took his turn. My heart continued to pound until the bell rang for lunch. We returned for two more hours in the afternoon, then we were done. Baseball practice wouldn’t begin for another week or so.

  I went straight to the pay phone.

  “I have to come home, Mai. This isn’t for me.”

  She told me I wasn’t coming home.

  The next afternoon I asked for Pai. He wasn’t as tough as Mai. He’d understand.

  “Mai says you’re in Arizona,” he said, laughing. “I thought you were going to Florida. Where’s Arizona?”

  “I don’t even know.”

  He asked about the dorm and the campus and the people.

  “Pai, I need a ticket to go home.”

  “I don’t have money for a ticket until my Christmas bonus.”

  I called every day for a week. Pai kept telling me everything would be okay once baseball started. I was so homesick I could barely sleep. If I couldn’t find the other Puerto Rican guys, I didn’t eat. I was too insecure to go to the cafeteria by myself. I felt sick every time I had to speak in Mrs. El-Khayyat’s class. I wanted to hear the coqui frogs outside my window and the rain on the roof and Cheo snoring in the next bed.

  Pai finally had enough.

  “You’re not going anywhere. Be a man. You haven’t even started practicing yet. If you talk about coming home one more time, you’re on your own. I’m not talking to you anymore.”

  I didn’t call the next day. Or the day after that. Then practice began. I had to get Kenny to ask the coach for a glove. The one I had used for the American Legion tournament belonged to my cousin. Pai had figured the coach would have one I could borrow, and he did. My spikes had so many holes that a teammate gave me his old ASICS, and by the third day of practice someone else gave me an old glove.

  I loved practice from almost the first minute. Everything was so organized. We split into groups and rotated from batting to fielding to throwing. We hit off a tee, then soft toss, then normal BP with live pitching. I was playing outfield, and we’d simulate game situations. “Man on second! One out!” We’d whip a throw to the cutoff man, who whipped it home. Bang-bang. It was so cool.

  At the end, everyone gathered at the plate to run the bases. The coach said some words and we were done.

  The two and a half hours flew by. I had never had a practice like that. Every single minute mattered. This was what baseball was like at the next level. It was amazing. I couldn’t wait until practice the next day.

  Pai had been right. I needed the grass, the dirt, the lines of chalk. I’d be okay. I knew where I was.

  PART

  2

  THE SUN IN Yuma felt like it had something personal against you. I kept waiting for a good rain. I missed that more than almost anything else about home. In Puerto Rico, you could smell the rain before it arrived. The air turned cool for a few minutes. The breeze rustled through the trees. Then the skies burst. Puerto Rican rain didn’t fool around. It came down in big, burly drops, roughhousing with us. I loved the sound of it clattering on our roof.

  In Yuma, if it rained at all, it rained wet dust. The first time it rained in Yuma during my first semester, my Puerto Rican teammates and I ran to the basketball court to slide through the puddles. But the heat dried the water before a single puddle could form, leaving only a film of dirt behind. On the baseball field, our spit disappeared the instant it hit the ground. The sun seared our bare necks and arms and hands. Whatever rays got past us on the way down bounced back off the ground for a complete, full-body bake. At the end of practice, our skin was slick with sweat and dirt and dust. Grit coated our teeth as if we’d eaten sand.

  I didn’t mind, though. I loved baseball practice. It felt like the pros. We ran at a certain time. We took batting at a certain time. Some days I’d take swings in the batting cage until my cheap batting gloves fell apart and my palms turned bloody. The coach was tough and demanding, and I liked that, too. He asked one day who had experience pitching. I said I did, and he had me pitching as well as playing outfield. Then when our shortstop went down with a season-ending injury, he asked who played shortstop. Again I raised my hand, and he tried me out. My teammate Bambi played second, and we turned double plays as if we’d been partners for years. I loved shortstop and pitching, my two favorite positions. I never returned to the outfield.

  One of the Puerto Rican guys, Roberto, was our best player. I knew him from home, and he had always been cocky. Now he was worse, exactly the kind of player Pai wouldn’t tolerate. I wondered how our coach would handle him.

  One day at the end of practice, the coach had us running from the foul pole in left field to the foul pole in right and back again. Twenty-five times. He stood in center field near the warning track. He gave us two rules: Don’t run on the warning track and don’t touch him when we ran past. We were almost finished when, sure enough, Roberto brushed against the coach.

  “Twenty-five more poles,” the coach said. “Everybody.”

  He gave us the choice of running the poles right then, which meant we’d miss dinner, or doing it the following the day, our one day off. We glared at Roberto. It was late and we were hungry. But we ran. We yelled at Roberto as we ran. For most of us, this coach and this college were our last shot at the pros. They kept us in the battle. Maybe we wouldn’t make it. But we were squeezing everything we could out of every practice and every game. And Roberto was treating the whole thing like a joke.

  “The rest of us are here trying to be better players,” I said, running alongside him. “You’re here just to have fun and make us run.”

  “I hate that guy.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you hate him or not. You respect the guy in charge.”

  “He’s an asshole.”

  I wanted to knock him to the ground. He didn’t deserve to be there. He didn’t want it enough.

  ONE DAY WHEN Pai was sixteen, the scout who discovered him, Jacinto Camacho, had a surprise. They drove to San Juan to watch the Senadores in the winter league. The 20,000-seat baseball stadium was the largest on the island. It had been built four years earlier, in 1962, replacing the old one, which seated about 13,000. The old stadium had been named for the island’s first boxing champion, Sixto Escobar. But the new one bore the name of Puerto Rico’s first Major Leaguer, Hiram Bithorn—a choice that underscored the shift from boxing to baseball as the island’s most popular sport. Bithorn had been a hero, so no one talked much about his tragic end. After achieving his historic milestone, he scuffled around the Majors for a few years before landing an umpiring job in the Class C Pioneer League. Then, nearly penniless, he tried to make a comeback in Mexico. He then disappeared. His family lost track of him only to learn that he had been murdered in El Mante, Mexico, in 1951 and buried like a pauper in an open grave. They had the body returned to Puerto Rico and held a memorial at the San Juan stadium that would later bear his name. Thousands of fans turned out to honor a national hero. They didn’t care that most of Bithorn’s life had been sad and trag
ic. All that mattered was that Bithorn had, one day long ago, reached the Major Leagues.

  Puerto Rico’s passion for baseball attracted the best players to the island’s winter league. In the 1960s and ’70s, baseball’s biggest Puerto Rican stars returned home every October to play a 70-game schedule following their 154-game (later 162-game) schedule in the Major Leagues. (In the mid-1980s, winter league games were pared to between 48 and 60 games.) But not just the great Puerto Ricans played in the winter league. Teams sent their best young prospects to hone their skills. Dozens of future Hall of Famers, from Willie Mays and Hank Aaron to Sandy Koufax, Johnny Bench, and Reggie Jackson, launched their careers from parks in San Juan, Mayaguez, Arecibo, Aguadilla, Ponce, Guayama, Humacao, Santurce, Caguas, Bayamón. Veteran players used the winter league to work their way back from injuries or to resurrect flagging careers. Journeymen came for a working vacation, enjoying the warm weather while earning extra money in the off-season.

  On Puerto Rican winter teams, you saw all-star combinations of players you never could in the United States. In the 1954–55 season, the New York Giants’ twenty-three-year-old superstar Willie Mays played for the Santurce Crabbers alongside a twenty-year-old Pittsburgh Pirates prospect named Roberto Clemente. The third outfielder for Santurce that season was thirty-seven-year-old Bob Thurman, a Negro League slugger from Oklahoma who would hit more career home runs in the winter league than any player in history. At one point, Mays was hitting .304, Clemente .378, and Thurman .366. On the mound for Santurce was El Divino Loco himself, New York Giants pitcher Ruben Gomez, who was fresh from his triumph as the first Puerto Rican to pitch in the World Series. Two-time National League All-Star Sam Jones, the first African-American to pitch a no-hitter in the Major Leagues (for the Cubs), also was on that team. So was Don Zimmer, the Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop who eventually played for or coached six World Series champions. Even the batboy had star power: Orlando Cepeda, the future Hall of Famer for the Giants and the son of winter league star Pedro “Perucho” Cepeda. No surprise: The Crabbers won the league championship and the Caribbean World Series. And Thurman’s great season convinced the Cincinnati Reds to give him a shot at the Major Leagues. (He made his Major League debut in 1955, a month shy of his thirty-eighth birthday. He showed glimpses of the star he had been in his prime, but in 334 Major League games over five seasons, he hit just thirty-five home runs.)

  Puerto Rican fans were not like any you saw in the States. They stood on seats, waved banners, jeered players and umpires, broke into song after great plays. They’d pass buckets or baseball caps through the stands to collect money for lower-paid players who made spectacular plays or hit home runs. Players went home with pockets full of nickels and dimes. Paper money flew from hand to hand in the stands, too, as bets were laid on strikes, balls, fouls, errors, who would score first, which pitcher would be yanked first, everything. Even the smell of the park was different. Instead of hot dogs and popcorn, Puerto Rican parks smelled like your mom’s kitchen—the deep-fried cod of the bacalítos, the meat of the alcapurrias, the flaky crusts of the pastelillos.

  Rivalries ran deep. In Puerto Rico, people take great pride in where they come from. You talk to anyone and they’ll tell you they’re not just from Puerto Rico, they’re from Santa Grande or Santurce or Dorado. You carry that place as close and tight as you carry your family. I was born in Río Piedras. I went to school in Vega Alta. But I am from Dorado. I grew up in Dorado. My struggles were in Dorado. My family’s struggles were in Dorado. There was a Puerto Rican poet named Enrique Zorrilla who captured our deep sense of place: “My pride is my land / For I was born here / I don’t love it because it is beautiful / I love it because it is mine / Poor or rich, with burning / I want it for my own.”

  This poet’s son, Pedrin, grew up to be the owner of that great Santurce team with Mays and Clemente. He saw the depth of the Puerto Rican connection to their hometowns every week of the winter season. It was said that fans attending a game at a rival ballpark—a San Juan fan visiting Santurce, for example—usually parked a good distance from the stadium; Santurce fans might vandalize a car with San Juan stickers or decorations. Fans lived for winter baseball, huddling around radios when they couldn’t get to the parks. I heard that during a game in Caguas one year, a rainstorm hit in the fourth inning. When it stopped, two inches of water covered the field. Players took one look and retreated to the clubhouse to change out of their uniforms. There would be no game. But the fans had other ideas. They already had missed almost a week’s worth of games to rain, so those who lived nearby raced home and returned with wheelbarrows, which they filled with soil from a big pile under the stands and spread across the infield. Forty minutes later, the game resumed.

  Pai loved the Senadores. He was eight years old when Clemente joined the team during the 1957–58 season. Two years later, after the Pirates won the World Series, Clemente returned to Puerto Rico a national hero. In the winter of 1966, when my father accompanied Jacinto to Hiram Bithorn Stadium, Clemente had already won three National League batting titles and the NL’s Most Valuable Player Award. He was a god, and Pai must have been excited about going to watch him play that day.

  But when he and Jacinto arrived at the stadium, instead of climbing the stairs to their seats, Jacinto took Pai straight into the Senadores clubhouse. There among the half-dressed players stood a tall, dark, graceful man in baseball pants and an undershirt. His shoulders and arms looked like they’d been carved from a ceiba tree.

  Roberto Clemente. He was thirty-one, in the prime of his career.

  I imagined Pai as a sixteen-year-old in that moment, frozen where he stood, his heart thumping against his chest.

  “Jacinto!” Clemente said.

  Everyone, it seemed, knew Jacinto Camacho.

  The two men shook hands. “Who is this?” Clemente asked.

  “This one’s a special player,” Jacinto said. “Benjamín Molina Santana.”

  Clemente shook the boy’s hand and looked him over. Pai was broad-shouldered and fit but hardly imposing at five feet eight. Clemente asked Benjamín what position he played and where he was from and whether he was still in school, chatting as if he were a guy on a street corner in the barrio. I wonder now how much Clemente’s humility shaped Pai’s belief that it was the most important characteristic of a good man.

  When Jacinto and Benjamín were about to leave, Clemente invited Benjamín to sit with him in the dugout. Even Jacinto was surprised. Nonplayers weren’t permitted in the dugout during games. But it was Clemente. Who was going to argue? When Clemente returned to his locker to finish dressing, Pai told Jacinto he couldn’t possibly sit next to Clemente. He was too nervous.

  Jacinto snorted. “Are you kidding?”

  He gave the teenager a friendly shove and left the clubhouse to find his seat in the stands. I never found out what Clemente and Pai talked about in the dugout during the game. I never knew that Pai had even met Clemente. I didn’t understand that about my father. If I had met Clemente, I’d be so proud to tell my kids. But he said nothing. Maybe in his mind it was bragging. Maybe in his mind what mattered was now, not yesterday.

  But Jacinto said he saw a lot of Clemente in Pai. Not physically; they had different builds and styles of play. But both were as tough as they come. Pai was small, but he was a bull. He’d get spiked by a runner sliding into second and still turn the double play. He’d plow into a catcher twice his size and pop back up. “You never heard him complain,” Jacinto said. “That’s what made him who he was.”

  Like Clemente, Pai never doubted his abilities. He could go 0-for-15 at the plate, and the next time up, he’d dig in to the box as if he couldn’t miss. He believed in his own talent, but more than anything he knew no one prepared more than he did. He’d watch every pitcher from the dugout, figuring out patterns, watching for weaknesses he could exploit. He noticed everything—on the field, anyway.

  He had no clue about the girl at the Vega Alta ballpark who had been watching him for we
eks.

  Gladys Matta Rosado was the fiery sister of Pai’s teammate, Felo, on the Double A team in Vega Alta. She was funny and outgoing and a savvy student of the game. She liked the look of Pai, his high cheekbones and warm smile. He was not a big man but he seemed to take up more space on the field than anyone else. He had steel and intelligence in his eyes—not that those eyes ever wandered her way. His focus never drifted beyond the baselines. Mai asked her brother about him. Felo laughed. He told his sister that this boy was so quiet and shy he wasn’t sure he had ever heard him speak outside the ballpark.

  I once asked one of my aunts how my introverted father ever started to court Mai.

  “How did she court him, you mean?” Titi Panchita said, laughing.

  Mai wrangled an introduction and, after Pai asked Mai’s father for permission, the two started dating. Pai’s best friend, Junior Diaz, also had a girlfriend in Vega Alta. Twice a week after baseball practice, they rode the bus from Kuilan to Vega Alta then headed off in separate directions to the houses of their respective girlfriends. Mai’s family was as poor as Pai’s. Until she was nine years old, the family lived in the woods at the top of a mountain in a cabin with dirt floors and cloth sacks covering the windows. Mai and her six brothers and sisters carried buckets to school and hauled water from the river on the way home. Mai’s father got a job at a tractor company as a security guard, and the family moved closer to town, into the house where Gladys lived when Benjamín met her. It had wood floors, running water, and an indoor toilet.

  When Pai visited, he sat with Mai and her family in the yard on plastic chairs. Pai left at ten to meet back up with Junior Diaz. The buses didn’t run that late, so they made the hourlong walk back to Espinosa in the dark.

  Mai was a good fit for Pai. She was lively and gregarious enough to fill Pai’s silences. And what luck to find a girl who loved baseball as much as he did.