Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [15]
Marty loved to discuss politics and the arts, but he was absolutely nut crazy when it came to baseball. He had nearly bought the Red Sox after Tom Yawkey died and was well aware of my large fan followings in Boston and Montreal. Marty believed signing me would boost ticket sales for his franchise. I accepted, hoping to pitch so well San Francisco would purchase my contract and return me to the major leagues.
To reach Scottsdale, Pam and I had to drive through Mesilla, New Mexico—the former stomping grounds of Billy the Kid—and Hatch, a town along the Rio Grande. Hatch is so small, you might pass through it without ever knowing you’d been there. Except for the roofs. Red roofs topped all the houses in town, and the color was not due to any paint or tiling. Chiles accounted for the crimson tide. Nearly everyone in Hatch raised those hot peppers. They spread the harvest on the roofs of their adobe huts or wooden homes or any other elevated surfaces so they would dry in the sun. We stopped to buy a couple of wreaths for $10 each. Would have paid five or six times that amount in some big city store.
We decided to take a shortcut through the Mimbre Mountains. At the Silver City cutoff, I noticed a large wooden sign that read CLIFF DWELLINGS. Oh, God, I wondered, could it be? Was this the road that would lead us to that sacred spot where Morrison encountered his visions? We drove for several miles but found no other signs indicating the site’s location. I pulled into the driveway of a small cabin near the base of a mountain and got out to ask directions. A knock on the door. No answer. The place looked deserted.
It occurred to us that the cliff dwellings had to lie somewhere up in the nearby rocks so we followed a dirt hiking path that coiled around the mountain face. After twenty minutes of climbing, though, we still had no idea how much further we had to go before reaching our destination. We saw no signs, no landmarks, nobody to guide our journey.
We stopped to get our bearings. Then the singing came. It was a woman’s voice but deep, cutting loose with a folk song in some ancient tongue. From around a large boulder leaning over a bend in the path, she appeared on horseback, this female Josey Wales: an oily, copper face; brown dungaree chaps frayed thin at the thighs by hard riding; red speckled bandana knotted around her throat; sun-faded denim shirt; a battered, sweat-stained cowboy hat tilted back on her shoulders. She wore her dark hair in pigtails, thick and coarse as raw wool. A large woman, but on that horse as graceful as any ballerina.
She kept a chaw of tobacco tucked under one cheek. Carried a carbine under her left arm. From a distance, we noticed something slung over the back of her saddle. Only when she pulled alongside us could we identify her cargo—the corpse of a freshly slain mountain lion. Her smile as she passed could not have looked friendlier, but you immediately sensed that no one trifled with this woman. She carried that carbine low and gave the impression she could blow off your balls while spitting a blob of tobacco juice smack in the center of your forehead.
We asked if she knew where we could find the cliff dwellings. She stretched from her saddle to point far up the mountain. “You just keep climbin’,” she said, “they’ll be on top of you ’fore you know it.” She and her horse loped down the trail.
Keep climbing we did, but the higher we stepped, the lower the temperature dropped. It felt like fall at the foot of this mountain; the climate turned wintry as we neared the summit. Frost crunched under our shoes. Snow covered the peaks and boulders. We shivered in our warm-weather clothes and found no comfort when we finally reached the cliff dwellings, only disappointment.
One look told me we had arrived in the wrong place. These dwellings looked half the size of those Morrison had described. God was not Tony Orlando. He or She would never play such a small room. We later found out the caves Morrison had visited were indeed located in the Gila Wilderness, but about three hundred