“Be back by next week,” Kate warned me. Her blue eyes had gone a touch wild from caffeine and adrenaline. “I’m racing along with this one, baby. It won’t be long.”

  The next morning, I waved goodbye, promising to return after the team’s homestand in Knoxville.

  When I entered the Smokies’ clubhouse, Stump Hawkins nodded for me to join him in his office. It was midafternoon, several hours before the first pitch for tonight’s game, and most of the players, including Gabby Santos, had yet to arrive.

  “We have new information about his trips to Miami,” Stump said, as I sat down in the chair across from his desk. “Here we thought the kid was partying it up in South Beach. Well, he was in the clubs and the like, but he was hanging with some real unsavory characters.”

  I had a good guess at where this conversation was going.

  “They’re demanding a hefty cut of his salary,” Stump continued. “Up to 20 percent off the top—”

  “To leave Tyga Garcia alone,” I added.

  “How did you know?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Have you been sucked into this, too?”

  “Let’s just say I’ve been working it from another angle.”

  “Oh, Billy boy, be careful. My front office guys tell me these guys are real sharks and there’s blood in the water.”

  “Don’t I know it,” I told him, and for a moment I was tempted to tell him about my trip to Port-au-Prince. Instead I said, “Stump, he can’t cave to these guys.”

  “You know it, I know it,” Stump said. “But what about the kid? Does he believe it?”

  “I’ll talk with him.”

  “Whatever you can do, Billy. That kid may be the most frustrating player I’ve ever had,” Stump added. “Once or twice a game, you catch a glimpse of what he could really be. It may be on a routine throw to first, even at the plate, where he’s making a few strides. For an instant, everything will be so crisp, so perfect, that you wonder why he cannot do that every time. Perhaps now we know. Those devils in Miami have his soul in a noose, don’t they?”

  “I may be able to help him.”

  “Billy, you and I go way back in this game and I’ve always respected you for being fair and square with anybody. From what I understand, you were just about the perfect teammate. But if these reports are accurate, I’d stay as far away from these guys as I could. I know you feel you have a vested interest in all of this, after getting the kid out at all, but I wouldn’t cross these guys. There’s no reasoning with them.”

  I nodded in agreement and both of us turned toward his office door. The players were filing into the clubhouse and one of the last to arrive was Gabby Santos. He was dressed in a button-down shirt, khakis, and sandals. While his attire reflected the summer, loose and comfortable, one look at his face revealed that he was carrying the weight of the world. He barely acknowledged his teammates—most of them were talking excitedly around him. Instead he kept his eyes cast downward and began to dress for tonight’s game. He could have been a commuter headed to a dead-end job he detested.

  “Let me talk with him,” I said.

  “Be my guest,” Stump replied. “Talk to him until the cows come home, Billy. I’m afraid it’s not going to change much.”

  I closed the door to the manager’s office and walked into the players’ clubhouse. I’d been in more of these rooms than I could remember in my years bouncing around the game, and they hadn’t changed much. The music had shifted over the years from rock and roll to rap and whatever else these kids listened to these days. Yet through it all, the time before another game remained a mix of conversation and gaps of silence, with everyone dealing with the expectations in their own way as the minutes ticked down to the start of another contest.

  “How you doing?” I asked.

  Gabby had his back to the room, his game pants already on and ready to pull on his jersey. He was a handsome kid with jet-black hair and the build of a ballplayer. His square shoulders tapered down to a thin waist and long legs built for speed.

  He turned and briefly smiled when he saw me.

  “I’m fine, Señor Billy,” he said.

  I glanced around us. Even though the pockets of conversation continued throughout the room, I saw several of Gabby’s teammates checking me out.

  “When you’re dressed, meet me outside, in the dugout,” I said.

  “All right,” he replied.

  Soon the young prospect joined me at the far end of the Smokies’ dugout as another pregame routine swung into high gear. Knoxville, the home team, took batting practice as the fans began to fill the stands.

  “I hear you’ve been trying to make deals with them,” I said, as the sound of bat hitting another batting-practice ball punctuated the conversation.

  “How did you find that out?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Gabby looked around and even though we were alone, he switched to Spanish.

  “I’ve tried,” he said, “but it’s no good. They always want more.”

  “Most thieves do.”

  Gabby turned from watching the action on the diamond to me. “But I have to somehow help him. Tyga was the best coach I ever had on the island. He taught me so much.”

  “There may be another way.”

  The kid’s dark eyes widened. “What are you up to, Billy?”

  I decided it didn’t do any good to keep him in the dark, so I told him about the statue that was being crafted, how it would be ready in a few weeks, maybe sooner. Most importantly, I told him how Escalante and his people supported the idea. That it would free Tyga.

  To my surprise, Gabby was against the plan.

  “Señor Bryan, don’t offer up a gift like this,” he said. “It could work too well for them. Don’t you see? It’s all about yesterday in Cuba and they know how to play that game so well.”

  “I realize that—”

  “But you don’t understand. Something like this only gives them more words and ceremony to keep their lies alive in my country.”

  For a moment, we sat there, watching the activity in the batting cage.

  “It will get Tyga out,” I told him. “I’m sure of it.”

  He only shook his head and continued to gaze out on the field.

  “It isn’t your typical statue,” I said, realizing that I would have to tell him everything we hoped with this adventure.

  “What do you mean, Señor Bryan?”

  “If things play out, when the conditions are right, it won’t just stand there, beautiful in whatever spot they decide to place it.”

  The kid turned toward me, hanging on my every word.

  “I can’t tell you the science because I don’t understand it all myself. And besides it’s not all science. We need some magic, some real luck, to happen here, too. But if the gods are with us, sometimes, when the air becomes really humid, like on the verge of a storm, the statue’s eyes will appear to cry.”

  “Cry? But how?”

  “If we’re lucky and the rumors begin,” I told him, not knowing how to explain any more of this. Instead I simply stopped.

  “This sounds crazy,” the kid said. “Is this how desperate we’ve become?”

  “We have to give it chance,” I answered. “Put it out there and see what happens. See if our prayers to Malena Fonseca will be answered.”

  34

  Well after midnight, I pulled into Kate’s driveway back at Sewanee. The lights were on in her barn studio and as I slowly opened the wooden door, I found Kate asleep on the couch. I picked up a quilt from the floor and carefully placed it over her. In the middle of the room, half in shadow, stood the statue of Malena Fonseca. Her head was turned away from me and as I slowly walked around the work of marble, the look on her face, freshly set in the stone, peeled back the decades and brought me face-to-face with my Cuban past. The lines, the expression, reminded me of when Malena and I began our affair in Havana—me so intent on trying to sign Fidel Castro to a big league contract and her watching with concern and bemusement from the sidelines. Much of the time, she kept the world at arm’s length, perhaps seeing it as all some kind of cosmic joke, and that’s how I expected her statue to turn out. Yet Kate had somehow gone deeper, drawn something more from the past. Perhaps it was having Evangelina as a real-life model, perhaps it was how the stone had chosen to reveal itself, but the sculpted Malena appeared to be more resigned, more serious and, more importantly, more knowing of what lay ahead.

  In the statue, Malena’s eyes were cast downward, with her head half-turned to the side. She could have been contemplating everything about Castro’s revolution, everything that had transpired on the island since her death decades ago. For here was a cautionary tale from someone who had seen what grandiose, misguided actions can do a people, to a country. These eyes of stone warned one to go slow, to be aware of all the possibilities.

  “Do you like it?” Kate said from the shadows.

  She was up, with the quilt wrapped around her shoulders against the night chill.

  “It’s beautiful,” I replied.

  “She was handsome and mysterious, wasn’t she?”

  “That she was.”

  Kate stood alongside me and together we admired the piece of stone, which glowed like a distant moon reeled closer to earth.

  “I’ve never had a project like this one,” Kate said. “It was downright spooky at times.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like it carved itself,” Kate added in an exhausted whisper. “I mean it wouldn’t let me be. I usually take longer with a work like this. That’s why I was afraid to take it on. I knew you needed it quickly, to help the ballplayer and the old man. What if I was still working on it a year from now?”

  “It looks finished.”

  “It almost is. It’ll be done by this time tomorrow because it wouldn’t let me be. Once I started it, took away the first bit of stone, it was like it was talking to me.”

  “What did it say?”

  “To hurry—that people needed to see her again.”

  I put an arm around Kate and pulled her close.

  “What was she like?” Kate asked. “In real life?”

  I thought about this, not sure how to answer.

  “Never afraid to push back against the world,” I finally answered. “Especially if she felt somebody or something she loved had been wronged. As has been said, Malena Fonseca was the only true saint of the Cuban Revolution.”

  Kate looked from the statue to me. “Billy, I can’t promise anything else. That’s a science, a belief in the stone that nobody really understands.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I answered and stole another glance at the statue. “As they say, it’s a face that could launch a thousand ships.”

  I took Kate by the hand, ready to walk her across the small courtyard to the house so she could get some rest. “Enough ghosts for one night. You need to sleep in your own bed tonight.”

  35

  That next evening, I watched the Cubs-Braves on TNT, while Kate and Eván worked on the statue in the barn. Periodically, I’d wander into the backyard and watch them, with the work area lit up like a distant fire. But I knew better than to disturb them now. Both of them were fixated upon the project—Kate as the artist and Eván as the arbiter of the past.

  Too antsy to head back inside, I decided to go for a walk, heading along Arkansas Avenue and angling across the Shakespeare Green to University Avenue, the main drag through town. It was well past eleven o’clock and only a few students were out at this hour. Up ahead stood All Saints Chapel, my favorite building on the small campus. Ever since Kate had taken me there for services one Sunday morning, the first time I’d stepped inside any church in years, the place had spoken to me, as they like to say. Sometimes you come into a room or a locale, and you feel like you’ve been there before. That on some basic level you know it. That happened to me with All Saints. Perhaps I’d light a candle for the statue when I went inside this time. An offering to the gods to nudge things along in our favor. But I never got the chance to visit the chapel on this night. A block away from All Saints, my cell phone rang. It was Cassy.

  “Dad, did you hear the news?” she asked. Her voice sounded out of sorts—breathless and frantic.

  “What news?”

  “Turn on the TV.”

  “What’s going on, hon?”

  “Chuck just called, looking for you. CNN is reporting that Fidel Castro has died.”

  I hustled back to Kate’s and found the images. The Cuban exiles were already out on the streets in Miami. After so many decades, their prayers for something better had been answered. Deep down, I was happy for them. I truly was. Yet I also found myself thinking back to my winter-ball days on the island, when Castro first came out of the stands and showed a genuine interest in becoming a big league pitcher. One could argue that if I had done a better job of convincing him that he had the potential to play in the Major Leagues, if Papa Joe, that old scout that I now played in the movies, had done a better sales job, too, then none of this would have ever happened. Fidel Castro would have played a few years in the Minor Leagues, some place like Peoria or Asheville, and soon been forgotten. Instead he’d sailed his Gilligan’s Island–style cabin cruiser, somehow making it from Mexico to the Cuban coast with eighty-two would-be revolutionaries. They came ashore in a swamp, where Batista’s government troops had been tipped off to their arrival. Pinned down in a sugarcane field, Castro and only twenty other rebels (including Che Guevara and Fidel’s brother, Raúl) made it into the surrounding mountains. From such an inauspicious start, Castro’s ragtag crew somehow grew in power, taking control of the country three years later and turning the Cold War world upside down. Castro remained Cuba’s jefe through eleven U.S. administrations. That’s what the cable news headlines told the world now.

  Could Fidel have played in the Major Leagues? Highly unlikely, and even Castro sometimes enjoyed being in on that joke. But I knew he was a good athlete. Growing up, he had excelled in track, basketball, and baseball. Reportedly, he formed his own neighborhood ball team when he was a kid, insisting that he be the guy on the mound. At the age of eighteen, leaving his home on the eastern end of the island for prep school in Havana, he was an outstanding schoolboy athlete.

  In the Cuban capital, Castro first attended Belen Jesuit Preparatory School. Determined to be the school’s top pitcher, he routinely practiced until dusk, throwing a ball against a wall when nobody else was around to catch him. That’s been well documented.

  After his time at Belen, Castro moved on to the University of Havana Law School, where he became caught up in the growing revolutionary movement and drew crowds with his fiery speeches against the corrupt Batista regime. Revolution had trumped sports, especially his first love, baseball. So much of what we know about Castro today happened after I left the country, stopped playing ball there. After Papa Joe, Chuck Cochrane, and certainly I failed to convince Castro to stick with the game.

  I called the girls in from the barn and together we watched the reports from South Florida and Havana, and the parade of experts began telling us what this would mean for the world and future relations between the two countries. Kate mixed gin and tonics, and we continued to watch as the night settled deeper upon Sewanee. In gazing out on her quiet neighborhood at midnight, we seemed to be the only house still up at this hour. Yet news from Havana would be headlines for everyone by the morning.

  “What about our statue?” Eván asked.

  She hadn’t said anything in the longest time, and I couldn’t guess what was going through her head. One who had grown up so close to the dictator and his fabled revolution. Grown to hate it so much that she had no choice but to escape.

  “Will they still want it?” Kate wondered, a look of disappointment stealing across her face.

  “They’ll still want it,” I said, as they both turned to look at me. “They may not realize it at this moment, but they need that statue more than ever now.”

  36

  “The package is ready,” I told Escalante.

  I called him from a rest stop outside of Chattanooga, down the mountain from Monteagle and the Sewanee campus.

  There was a pause on the other end, and then Escalante said, “Sometimes it seems like you’re reading my mind, Señor Billy. This is the first good news I’ve had in days.”

  “We got lucky,” I told him. “The artists involved rose to the occasion.”

  Both of us knew I wanted Tyga out of their prison as soon as possible. “It’s a fine piece of art,” I added.

  “When can you deliver it? I can be in Miami in a few days.”

  “That will work.”

  “Where was the work done? That would be nice to know. Where are you now?”

  “Does it matter?” I snapped—determined to keep Escalante as far away from this part of my world as possible.

  “No, not if the work is done to everyone’s satisfaction. As we discussed, I will need to inspect it before sending it along to Havana.”

  I gazed out at the interstate traffic.

  “I can have it to you in two days. Three days max.”

  “Very good, Billy. Here, take down this address. It’s in the warehouses near the Miami harbor.”

  Back at Kate’s studio, we spent the rest of the morning carefully packing up the statue of Malena Fonseca. Before it was sealed in the wooden crate, Kate took what looked like a small electric razor to the smooth area below both eyes. As Eván and I watched, she briefly touched the instrument to the stone.

  “I can’t do any more than that or it will show,” she said, wiping the surface clean with a small cloth.

  “Will it work?” Eván asked.

  “I honestly don’t know,” Kate said, ready to secure the lid for the first part of its journey to Havana. “The best we can do now is pray.”

 

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