Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [17]
I wanted to put the moves on Pam. Kind of sexy floating naked in the midst of that raw wilderness. But those eagles . . . they kept watching. There is nothing prudish about me, but the bald eagle is our national bird. The thought of making love in front of those two just seemed unpatriotic.
Bill invited us to stay overnight in his trailer, parked only a few yards down a small path hidden behind the visitor’s cabin. His refrigerator contained six bottles of vodka, two gallons of gamy bear meat stew, and a large battered tin of marijuana some park ranger from Maui had sent him. You know, the essentials.
We stayed up well past midnight and got hammered while Bill showed slides of him frolicking with the local bears and kayaking around Kodiak Island. I answered his many questions about the Red Sox. Not the greatest entertainment, for sure, but it offered us some taste for the life of the Native Americans who had inhabited these mountains centuries ago. Without Oprah or Seinfeld reruns to distract them after a day’s hunt, they had little to do but sit around the campfire, smoking herb and sharing stories much as we did that evening.
Except those Apaches apparently had greater resilience than we did. They would rise at dawn following a night-long debauch to sow the fields and hunt for food. Afternoon passed before we could rouse ourselves from bed and bid Calvin adieu.
Ten years later, I told this story to a businessman on a golf course. Before I could even mention our host’s name, the man said, “Bet it was Bill Calvin the sea captain. That old bastard used to work for me in Sugar bush, Vermont, as a ski instructor until the day he stole my car and drove off to New Mexico. The guy was a con man from day one. On the run ever since he lost that boat.”
So Bill had lied about the canoe trip from Florida to Texas, the walking tour across Mexico, and the lap dancer in Silver City. Hell, I appreciated the captain just the same. Outlaws appealed to me. Straight types may be more dependable, but they have zero amusement value. Anyone who can relieve the boredom of existence can always drink from my canteen. Besides, as it turned out, Bill’s tall tales were not the last flimflams laid on me during this trip.
We drove another fifty miles with our Volkswagen coughing and staggering the entire way. The car finally collapsed on the San Carlos reservation. We looked under the hood and discovered a cranky fuel filter had starved our engine. I performed an emergency bypass good enough to get us to Scottsdale.
The car sputtered again as we crossed the city limits and followed a narrow boulevard thick with palm trees and silver garbage pails. We rolled for a few feet before the engine died for good in front of a whitewashed, horseshoe-shaped concrete apartment complex. Turned out the Boston Red Sox used to stay there whenever the team trained in Arizona during the 1930s. I saw that as a good omen. The landlord rented us a one-bedroom right near the heated pool for $325 a month, fully furnished with all the black widow spiders you could kill.
I walked to the Phoenix Giants training facility early the next morning. Crickets sang in a frothy whisper. A heavy dew still coated the lawns, and every few minutes I heard the hushed clatter of milk bottles being gently placed on the stoop of some house whose occupants had yet to stir. I reached the Giants’ complex and found an empty parking lot. That troubled me. When you are a veteran trying out for a team, it is never a good idea to be the first to arrive. Makes you look desperate.
While I stacked my gear in a locker, the door swung open. I had hoped to see another player, but instead this tall, deep-chested, middle-aged man with bushels for hands swaggered in as if he owned the place. Tom Haller, a former major-league catcher, was the minor-league director for the San Francisco Giants. His greeting reflected just how much his organization wanted me in camp.
“What the fuck are you doing