Lamont was shaking his head saying no, he held up.
'We don't have a third base ump to call it,' Charlie said, 'but I'm pretty sure he came around.'
Billy Darwin said, 'Hey, Charlie, you threw it in the dirt, man. Come on, throw me a strike.'
Shit.
What he needed was a resin bag.
Darwin was swinging the bat now and pointing it way out past Charlie toward the Mississippi River, then took his stance, digging in, and Charlie wasn't sure what to throw him. Maybe another slider, put it on the inside corner. Or show him a major-league fastball - or what passed for one sixteen years later. Shit. He felt his irritation heating up and told himself to throw the goddamn ball, fire it in there, this guy won't hit it, look at him holding the bat straight up behind him, waving the fat end in a circle. Jesus, a red bat, one of those metal ones they used in high school. You can't strike out a guy waving a tin bat at you, for Christ sake? Charlie went into his motion and bore down, threw it as hard as he could and saw the red bat fly up in the air as Billy Darwin hit the dirt to save his life.
Vernice, making the toddies this evening, said, 'I don't understand why you threw it at him.'
'I didn't; it got away from me is all. I should've taken time to settle down, talk to myself.'
'But you lost your temper,' Vernice said, handing Charlie his drink, 'and your chance of getting that position.'
'I ain't finished the story,' Charlie said, in the La-Z-Boy where Vernice in her sympathy had let him sit. 'I started toward him as he's brushing himself off. He says to me, picking up the bat, to stay out there and you bet I stopped in my tracks, in my goddamn wing tips. Now he's swinging the bat to show me where he wants it, belt- high, and says, 'Lay one in right here.' '
Vernice said, 'He wasn't sore at you?'
'Lemme finish, okay? I laid one in and he hit it a mile out to right center. He says, 'There. Just so you know I can hit a baseball.' Then he says, 'You own a suit?' I told him of course I owned a suit. He says, 'Put it on the day we open, and wear a tie.' ''
Vernice seemed puzzled. 'He hired you?'
'Yes, he did.'
'Even though you knocked him down?'
Charlie said to her, 'Honey, it's part of the game.'
When the Women Come Out to Dance
Lourdes became Mrs. Mahmood's personal maid when her friend Viviana quit to go to L.A . with her husband. Lourdes and Viviana were both from Cali in Colombia and had come to South Florida as mail-order brides. Lourdes' husband, Mr. Zimmer, worked for a paving contractor until his death, two years from the time they were married.
She came to the home on Ocean Drive, only a few blocks from Donald Trump's, expecting to not have a good feeling for a woman named Mrs. Mahmood, wife of Dr. Wasim Mahmood, who altered the faces and breasts of Palm Beach ladies and aspirated their areas of fat. So it surprised Lourdes the woman didn't look like a Mrs. Mahmood, and that she opened the door herself: this tall redheaded woman in a little green two-piece swimsuit, sunglasses on her nose, opened the door and said, 'Lourdes, as in Our Lady of?'
'No, ma'am, Lour-des, the Spanish way to say it,' and had to ask, 'You have no help here to open the door?'
The redheaded Mrs. Mahmood said, 'They're in the laundry room watching soaps.' She said, 'Come on in,' and brought Lourdes into this home of marble floors, of statues and paintings that held no meaning, and out to the swimming pool, where they sat at a patio table beneath a yellow-and-white umbrella.
There were cigarettes, a silver lighter and a tall glass with only ice left in it on the table. Mrs. Mahmood lit a cigarette, a long Virginia Slim, and pushed the pack toward Lourdes, who was saying, 'All I have is this, Mrs. Mahmood,' Lourdes bringing a biographical data sheet, a printout, from her straw bag. She laid it before the redheaded woman showing her breasts as she leaned forward to look at the sheet.
' 'Your future wife is in the mail'?'
'From the Latina introduction list for marriage,' Lourdes said. 'The men who are interested see it on their computers.
Is three years old, but what it tells of me is still true. Except of course my age. Now it would say thirty- five.'
Mrs. Mahmood, with her wealth, her beauty products, looked no more than thirty. Her red hair was short and reminded Lourdes of the actress who used to be on TV at home, Jill St. John, with the same pale skin. She said, 'That's right, you and Viviana were both mail-order brides,' still looking at the sheet. 'Your English is good - that's true. You don't smoke or drink.'
'I drink now sometime, socially.'
'You don't have e-mail.'
'No, so we wrote letters to correspond, before he came to Cali, where I lived. They have parties for the men who come and we get - you know, we dress up for it.'
'Look each other over.'
'Yes, is how I met Mr. Zimmer in person.'
'Is that what you called him?'
'I didn't call him anything.'
'Mrs. Zimmer,' the redheaded woman said. 'How would you like to be Mrs. Mahmood?'
'I wouldn't think that was your name.'
She was looking at the printout again. 'You're virtuous, sensitive, hardworking, optimistic. Looking for a man who's a kind, loving person with a good job. Was that Mr. Zimmer?'
'He was okay except when he drank too much. I had to be careful what I said or it would cause him to hit me. He was strong, too, for a guy his age. He was fifty-eight.'
'When you married?'
'When he died.'
'I believe Viviana said he was killed?' The woman sounding like she was trying to recall whatever it was Viviana had told her. 'An accident on the job?'
Lourdes believed the woman already knew about it, but said, 'He was disappeared for a few days until they find his mix truck out by Hialeah, a pile of concrete by it but no reason for the truck to be here since there's no job he was pouring. So the police have the concrete broken open and find Mr. Zimmer.'
'Murdered,' the redheaded woman said.
'They believe so, yes, his hands tied behind him.'
'The police talk to you?'
'Of course. He was my husband.'
'I mean did they think you had anything to do with it.'
She knew. Lourdes was sure of it.
'There was a suspicion that friends of mine here from Colombia could be the ones did it. Someone who was their enemy told this to the police.'
'It have anything to do with drugs?'
The woman seeing all Colombians as drug dealers.
'My husband drove a cement truck.'
'But why would anyone want to kill him?'
'Who knows?' Lourdes said. 'This person who finked, he told the police I got the Colombian guys to do it because my husband was always beating me. One time he hit me so hard,'
Lourdes said, touching the strap of her blue sundress that was faded almost white from washing, 'it separated my shoulder, the bones in here, so I couldn't work.'
