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“You heard that?” asked Mike.
“Yep. You want to have a smoke or something?”
“I’m good. How long have you been there?”
“Awhile. You don’t get many conversations here, as you probably know. Most people are kind of flighty.”
“Good description.”
“Besides, I wanted to see what happened if things got hot. Never seen that before either.”
“How long you been on the bridge?”
“Ah, not long, ten, maybe fifteen years. Hard to say exactly. Time, right?”
“Do you know why you’re here? I mean, any of us, but let’s just say you?”
“Cursed, I guess,” said the ballplayer. “Cursed long before I took the last out.”
“Yeah?” said Mike. “Tell me.”
“You a baseball fan?”
“I watched a game now and then.”
“So you heard of Skipper Nelson, Giant’s shortstop, right?”
“Nope,” Mike said. “Sorry.”
“So I’ll start where it started,” said Skipper.
I used to think I was cursed because of the bird, but now that I’ve thought about it, it was probably because I planned the murder of Villarreal. I first ran across Villarreal in the minors, before the bird, so it was probably him. Probably.
I was drafted as a shortstop right out of high school by the Giants and sent to their double-A team in Richmond, Virginia, the Flying Squirrels, which is where I got my nickname—the squirrel—when I finally got sent up to the majors, because of the way I could track down a grounder and turn double plays—“like a squirrel after a nut,” the announcer says, and it sticks. It coulda been worse, though. I could of gone to the Grand Chute, Crotch Crickets, and then had to deal with that nickname for my whole career. A year after me, Villarreal was drafted out the Dominican League to the Chattanooga Lookouts, which were the double-A club for the Dodgers, a catcher, switch hitter, batted .325 in the Dominican, arm like a cannon. He was an early draft pick, so you knew he wouldn’t be in double-A ball for long, but a butterball, five nine, two-fifty—you could time his forty-yard dash with a sundial, so the Dodgers wanted to see if they could take some weight off of him and give him a little more speed on the bases.
First time I meet him he’s catching for a one-pitch lefty name Markley, one of those guys you see a lot in the minors—scary heat, pushing a hundred miles an hour, but no movement, a laser beam—you know if it’s going to be over, it’s going to be right at your knees in the middle of the plate, then, after about eight pitches, he’s going to be spraying deadly leather all over the goddamn place, so if you can avoid getting a burning, baseball-sized hole through your body somewhere, you draw a walk. One out, guy before me whiffs so bad, I can feel the wind off his bat in the on-deck circle. But I’m not worried, I can see heat. It’s a gift. Then, as I’m walking up, before I even get in the batter’s box, Villarreal starts talking . . .
“How you doing? Nice to meet you? Are you married? Got any kids? How’s your mother? How was the bus trip? You guys staying at the Travelodge? How’s the rooms? You got a mini-fridge?” And he just keeps talking, mostly questions, for the next fifteen fucking years, but I don’t know that. Right then, I know, absolutely know, I can hit Markley before he goes all Wild Thing on me, I just have to watch one go by to measure, but I’m listening to Villarreal the whole time, and I whiff. And so it begins . . .
Fortunately, that first one was an exhibition game, so we don’t play Chattanooga again, before I get brought to the bigs the next year when the Giants’ starting shortstop is trying to turn a double play and gets a knee bent back by a sliding base runner. Already I have a reputation as being nimble on the turn, and no matter what the odds of it happening twice in a season, a ball club loses a starter to a certain kind of injury, they want to avoid it happening again, so I get the nod instead of the shortstop at Fresno, who has a better batting average then me, but can be flat-footed at times.
Villarreal gets called up by the Dodgers the same season, backup catcher, because their starter has taken a lot of shots to the head and is kind of goofy. In those days, before the concussion rules, if a guy could count to ten and tell his left from his right, he was good to play, and to be honest, I know a couple of ballplayers couldn’t pass that test without getting hit in the head, but they have Villarreal ready, and he’s been batting over .300 in the minors with a lot of home runs, so he was coming up soon anyway, despite still being shaped like a pregnant mailbox.
So, I finally get my first at-bat in the bigs against the Dodgers. It’s bottom of the ninth, and we’re tied two to two. The utility infielder playing short ahead of me, Manny Ignacio, a lefty, strikes out three times, and they got a left-handed closer pitching, so the skipper needs a righty at the plate. We’re playing in Candlestick Park, which, as you know, sits out on a peninsula in San Francisco Bay, and usually has a prevailing seventy-five mile an hour wind, but what I’m not used to, is about the ninth inning of every game, the seagulls start coming in, getting ready to swoop down on the uneaten fries and hot-dog buns, and they do it like they’re psychic or they can read the scoreboard or something.
So it’s two outs, we got a guy on second with some speed, and I come up and who is catching, but Chava Villarreal. Chava is short for Salvador, which makes about as much sense as a guy named Villarreal that can’t pronounce the letter V even if you put him in a Volvo and drive him to Visalia for Valentine’s Day. And he’s off; “Hey, man, nice to see you again. How you doin’? You get married? You got any kids? How’s your mother? You like San Francisco? You been to the Mission?” And he goes on, and on, and on, until between him and the seagulls diving on the outfield beyond the pitcher, I think it’s going to be a miracle if I even see the ball, let alone hit it.
And, “You like Caribbean food? I take you for the best plantains in the city when you come to Los Angeles.”
And the pitcher throws me a hanging curve that moves like a balloon, time slows down, Villarreal is a mosquito buzzing in another city, and I let go on that son of a bitch—whole body swing, toes to hips to fingertips, and it has that clack-stick sound of a homer, I can feel it and the crowd can hear it and they’re on their feet—it’s going to be a line-drive homer, not high, just a rocket off the field, except before it gets off the infield there’s an explosion of feathers, a literal explosion—I’m not even out of the batter’s box and this circular snowstorm of feathers appears right over the second baseman’s head, and this bird drops, crushed and limp, and the ball drops, plop, and the second baseman shakes his head like he’s got water in his ears, because he was following the ball to go out like the rest of us, but now it’s sitting at his feet and he picks it up and throws me out at first. We go on to win, but my first big league at-bat, I kill a bird, and not a seagull or a pigeon, oh no. My line drive killed a friggin’ goony bird. An albatross. Like a five-foot wingspan. I basically knocked a turkey out of the sky with my first hit in the bigs, and the last thing I hear before the ball hits the first baseman’s mitt is Villarreal. “Oh, man! Oh, shit! I can’t believe it. Oh, man!”
So that’s it, right? I’m cursed. But it turns out, I’m not that cursed, and I bat .260 that season and we get to the National League playoffs and by next year I’m starting shortstop, but here’s the thing, Villarreal is starting catcher for the Dodgers, and we have to play those sons-a-bitches nineteen times during the season. And three or four times every game, for nineteen games, when I come up, that fat fuck is, “So how you doing? You feeling good? I heard you got married. You have any kids? How’s your mom?” And between that and the albatross I get to be almost worthless on offense against the Dodgers, batting a flat buck-fifty against them when I’m batting in the high two hundreds, low three hundreds against everyone else.
My third season with the Giants, we’re neck and neck with the Dodgers for the division and the guy I jumped over at Fresno is batting .375 and fielding just as well, so I figure I’m maybe two, three bad games from losing my starting position, so when I come up in the second game against the Dodgers, I say, even before I get in the box, “Villarreal, just shut the fuck up. Just shut your fucking mouth while I’m in the box, you hear me?”
Evidently, though, he didn’t hear me, because through three balls, four foul balls, and a swing and a miss, Villarreal jabbered, “I’m sorry, man, I didn’t know it bothered you. You want me to shut up, I’ll shut up. I’m a pro, man. A batter needs it quiet, I’m quiet. I was just wondering, you know, how your mom was.”
Two Dodger games later, right after the ump calls a third strike which was a gift to the pitcher, because it’s like a foot off the plate, I turn around and say, “You cocksucker, you don’t shut the fuck up I’m going to knock your fucking head off.”
