The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [3]
For lunch he was drinking cane juice, which, though of little nutritional value, was sweet and refreshing, and the sugar gave a momentary energy boost and made an empty stomach feel full. Part of the trick was to find the ripest stalk, and he felt through the hundreds of reddish stumps sticking out from the two-ton pile in a full wagon ready to be hitched to the locomotive. When he found a juicy one, recognizable by touch and its dark maroon color, he grabbed on and yanked the five-foot stick out of the wagon. He held it horizontally with his left hand and with his right lifted a hard wood stick, which he smacked several times into the center of the cane. Then he turned the cane and struck a few more blows until the fibers in the middle appeared slightly mashed. Then he leaned his head back and, holding the cane with both hands, twisted it until green juice poured into his mouth as though from a faucet. He repeated the process with several carefully chosen canes.
About five miles away, in the center of San Pedro, was a two-story apartment building constructed in the style of a motel. It had a chain-link gate so that it could be locked to protect the apartments, the large late-model SUVs parked in front of the building, and the privacy of the well-known tenants.
A fit-looking man in a bass-fishing T-shirt was on the lawn by the building with a bottomless metal cage. “Watch this, this is funny,” he said to another muscular man. One end of the cage was propped off the ground with a plastic water bottle with a blue nylon string tied to it. The man in the bass-fishing T-shirt sat fifteen feet away, holding the string. He had spread corn under the cage for bait. Some pigeons were approaching it.
His name was Manny Alexander, and he had grown up not far away in downtown San Pedro. His family was so poor, their small house so crowded, that he shared a bed with several brothers and sisters. Then, in February 1988, when he was sixteen years old, he signed a contract with the Baltimore Orioles as a shortstop. The Orioles organization paid him a signing bonus of $2,500, a small bonus today but a respectable one in 1988.
“The first thing I did was I bought a bed,” Alexander recalled. “I wanted a small bed all to myself. Then I got a radio, some clothes, food.” More toys followed. Although his major-league career was not illustrious and he was not a top-salaried player, in his eleven years in the majors he did earn more than $2 million, which, here in San Pedro, could go a very long way.
Had he been working, this would have been lunchtime. But Manny was on no particular schedule. He wanted to show his pigeon trap to his friend José Mercedes. Mercedes was born in El Seibo, northeast of San Pedro, but had been living here since the late 1980s. He was a pitcher who also signed with the Orioles. His major-league career began at the age of twenty-three in 1994 and lasted only nine years. But that was enough time to earn several million dollars. He was relaxing this day after having started the night before for the Santo Domingo team, Licey, which had defeated the home team, the Estrellas Orientales, further diminishing San Pedro’s fast-vanishing lead in the final games of the season. Licey had a largely major-league pitching staff.
Manny squatted on the ground, string in hand, waiting to yank the bottle out and trap the pigeons as soon as they mustered the foolhardy courage to venture under the cage to eat the corn. The birds were inching toward the trap with jerky steps when suddenly a new bright copper-colored Ford van pulled up, blasting a merengue, which is the accepted way to play the