The New York by Bill Branger Page B

said.
    â€œI never heard of such a person in my life,” I said.
    â€œRoxanne Devon is not a common name.”
    â€œNot to me. It would of stood out if I had met anyone with a name like that.”
    â€œShe lives in New Jersey and she wrote me. I got the letter Tuesday and she was telling me about you and her and how she was now shocked to find out that you had a woman on the side in Houston. It was some letter,” Charlene said. She said it in an even voice with only a little sarcasm thrown in.
    â€œYou believe that?”
    â€œWhat should I believe? What’s convenient for you, Ryan?”
    â€œCharlene, I have had girlfriends and girlfriends, which is only natural because I am thirty-eight years old and of the heterosexual persuasion but you are it and you have been it for the year we’ve known each other. There ain’t no Roxanne or Tanya or Mary or Janie or anyone else and I resent your thinking there would be,” I said.
    â€œThen why would this person out of the blue send me a letter?”
    All I could think of was Deke and George and the tax man and that terrible moment when I groveled for George in his office and agreed to stay on the Yankees one more year as his official Spanish interpreter.
    I knew this was all tied in somehow, but I couldn’t explain it. Not now, not to Charlene. She’d just get caught up in the same mess, wouldn’t she?
    â€œCharlene, you try to call this Roxanne woman up?”
    Charlene stared at me for a moment and then shook her head. “What could I say to her?”
    â€œThere ain’t no Roxanne,” I said.
    â€œWhat if there is?”
    That was a thought. What if there was? I mean, how clever was whoever was doing this for whatever reason?
    Then I thought of George. And the people in the White House, including the ghost of Abe Lincoln. No. They weren’t that smart, this was just preliminary bullying, like Booker did on that playground when I was in fifth grade. On the other hand, Booker did end up beating the shit out of me.
    I took her to the pay telephone in one of the lounges and we placed a long distance call to the information operator in Brunswick, New Jersey, which is where Miss Roxanne Devon was supposed to live. We tried an “R. Devon” and then any kind of Devon with initials. The operator said there was no such listing and Charlene replaced the phone and looked at me.
    I grinned at her. “Thank God we can still believe in the phone company.”

6
    Now we’re going to have to switch around in this story for it to make any sense about the way it turned out in the end. Raul Guevara told me all this much later, but at the time I was in Houston, trying to fix things up with Charlene, and George was running a fire sale on the team, Raul was having his own adventures.
    I can tell you for a fact that Havana is not the way I expected it to be, not when I finally saw it. It had the old American cars and it had a lot of crummy-looking buildings, but it had something else, something about the people. They still have style, Raul explained. Even if they wear rags, they wear them with style. He was right there.
    Raul said about this time — we are talking about at the end of the World Series in late October —- he was playing ball.
    The way Raul explained it later, I got the picture. Playing ball in Cuba is like waltzing on a battlefield with the orchestra going on despite all the gunfire. Not that there’s gunfire in Havana. It’s just so fucking poor is all, yet the Cubans got this thing about baseball — it just goes on and on and it’s glamour, it’s probably like the way it was in the 1930s here when Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were doing their dances at Yankee Stadium and the country was outside the walls, selling apples on street corners to itself.
    Raul. I can see him on that hot, humid Cuban night with the sweat soaking his uniform and that limber-easy swing of his. Not a big