Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [19]
Bad news never holds me down for long. I have always believed the adage about a door opening for every one that closes. Lately, though, whenever I walked through a door, the temperature outside was twenty below zero. I needed to find warmer climes.
3
RINGSIDE FOR THE APOCALYPSE
Four a.m. on New Year’s Day, 1984. I strolled down a paved asphalt street just outside Caraballeda, Venezuela. This section of the city resembled a typical U.S. suburb with its picket fences, trim lawns, colorful flower boxes, and modern street lamps. I saw basketball hoops hanging in the backyards of wooden gingerbread houses. Glittering late-model cars and vans filled nearly every driveway.
About a mile into my walk, the pavement thinned before crumbling into dirt and middle-class havens gave way to dismal hovels constructed of plywood and mismatched crating planks. Broken street lamps slouched over the street; a full moon provided the only illumination. Cars loitered alongside some of the homes, rusted vehicles with dead motors. I saw just one toy, the only evidence that children lived in this squalor: a tricycle turned upside down in a ditch. A tricycle without wheels.
A dirt road winding behind this cluster of shanties narrowed into a trail that led up into the mountains. It was important to climb as high as my legs could carry me before the first morning light broke over the countryside. Once the sun appeared, I intended to sit and wait for the explosion. One more hour until dawn. Plenty of time.
Dense woods shrouded the mountain. I lost sight of the moon for whole stretches of the path and had to feel my way along the trees to continue walking. I heard just enough sound to make me feel isolated: the buzzing of the only mosquito still awake in the forest and the lazy drip-drop of a stream trickling through a nearby ravine.
My walk took longer than I originally estimated. After an hour, I had hiked barely a quarter of the distance up the mountain. No way could I reach the summit by dawn. A false sunrise had already pushed aside the night. So I paused to look out over the city, to watch it vanish before my eyes as all the street lamps fluttered and dimmed.
A world without color surrounded me until a slender mauve line rimmed the dark sky. I perched on a rock to watch the pink gold sun slip through that fissure in the horizon. Shadows poked up from the earth. Powdery russet clouds rolled over the flag-blue ocean. Lazy waves wrinkled the water. I could have sat there watching forever. Then the odor reached my nostrils: oil from the tankers crowding the docks in the harbor below.
I resumed climbing. A twig cracked loudly close to the path. Just a few feet ahead, a bush rustled though I could not detect a breeze. Oh, no. Banditos. Of course not, dummy. What respectable bandit would be stupid enough to lie in wait up here? Not enough trade. But that bush shook again.
Something alive hid on the other side of the leaves, pressed close to the ground. I could hear him breathing in short gasps. Was he winded from tailing me? My imagination talking, of course.
So why were those eyes blinking in the shadows?
I backed away, searching for a weapon. The rocks looked too small, the fallen branches too short and thin. I remembered leaving my Swiss Army knife back at the apartment. What could I do? Calling for help would be useless in such an isolated spot. A line from the ad for that movie Alien came to mind: in space, no one can hear you scream. Whoever hid behind that bush must have sensed my fear and decided to make his move. A figure darted through a thicket, dove for my legs, and scurried down the path. My murderous pursuer was Porky Pig’s Latino cousin, a wild black swine who had been foraging for his