Rainbow curve, p.1
Rainbow Curve, page 1
Rainbow Curve
At the manifest level this is a story about baseball. But it is much more than this. Baseball is a metaphor used with great virtuosity by the author Michael Boylan to explore at a deeper level larger universal themes of love, friendship, loyalty, betrayal, political intrigue, cultural conflict, and corruption. As the author intends, this is a novel of fictive philosophy that examines perennial philosophical issues concerning the human condition. Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher of the 1950s, did it with his famous literary classic Nausea. Boylan does it with Rainbow Curve. The two main characters of the novel Rainbow Billy Beauchamp, a former pitcher in the Negro Baseball Leagues, and his young protégé Bo Mellan who ends up playing in the Big League for the Chicago Cubs, reminded me of Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher, and his young gifted student Alexander who goes on to conquer Asia and become known as Alexander the Great. Just as Aristotle before him, Rainbow Billy Beauchamp tries but fails to instil in his headstrong baseball player Bo, the importance of a temperate and balanced virtuous character. And just as Alexander before him who succeeds to conquer the world but not his flawed character and well-intended but wayward ambition, so too young Bo succeeds to conquer the baseball world and become a legend but fails to master his own unruly passions. Ultimately, both young men are victims of political intrigue and corruption. Although set in America, this is a novel of universal dimensions. Boylan’s novel reminds us that ethics and responsible refection on our actions as individuals and communities are just as important now as they were in Aristotle’s time.
Edward H. Spence (PhD) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied and Public Ethics (CAPPE), Charles Sturt University, Australia.
RAINBOW CURVE
BY MICHAEL BOYLAN
Booktrope Editions
Seattle WA 2014
Copyright Michael Boylan 2015
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.
Cover Design by Greg Simanson
Edited by Joanna Jensen
Proofreading by Samantha March
Print ISBN 978-1-62015-623-0
EPUB ISBN 978-1-62015-634-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014921899
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
The De Anima Novels
Foreword
From Behind the Caravan
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
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Baseball fans are going to love Rainbow Curve. And even readers not familiar with the intricacies of the game, like me, will find themselves drawn in by the drama Michael Boylan conjures from the lives of multi-racial players who make baseball America’s national pastime and in Latin America a game “more serious than life itself.” As Buddy Bael, field boss and general manager of the Chicago Cubs, says to a crowd of Rotarians, “Baseball is just like life…It ain’t just no symbol of life; it is life. And you know it.”
Boylan knows it, and you will know it, too, because on these pages there is life aplenty: a sports world filled to overflowing with corruption and political intrigue, loyalty and love, aging and coming of age, betrayals and human barracudas all vying to make a profit from the players. At the story’s center is talented, blue-eyed, left-handed pitcher Bo Mellan, the quiet and good-natured protégé of Rainbow Billy Beauchamp, once a star pitcher in the Negro baseball leagues. Boylan describes those bygone days of glory with prose that makes palpable a very special era in sports history:
“It was in Chicago that the Negro Leagues held their All Star game. ‘My, that was a special game,’ Rainbow used to say. He had played in four All Star Games. The first in 1934 was when he threw for the Crawfords. Gus Greenlee had paid him a hundred fifty dollar bonus for being selected and for pitching several scoreless innings against some of the finest hitters in the country. They played to 30,000 paid customers. It was a fine day…Robert Cole, owner of the Chicago American Giants, had thrown a giant party for them the night before. It lasted till almost game time the next day. There was music, women, whiskey, and a big-time crapshoot bankrolled by some of the high rollers in the league. Thirty-four had brought in a lot of gate even though it was in the midst of the Depression. Perhaps people needed entertainment more than ever.”
Beauchamp feels he has one “last chance to hit the road again” and relive a little of that glory. After raising money by selling his dry cleaning business, he puts together a team––the Pan-Am Elite Giants––to barnstorm its way across South America. Among the players are whites, Mexicans, a Venezuelan, and one player who, like Judas Iscariot, masks his real reason for traveling with the team.
We travel the small town circuit with the eleven players, watch Rainbow sharpen their skills as players and entertainers, and see the ball club at play both on the field and in nightclubs. We also witness the political graft, “La Mordida” and the mounting danger that the Giants must deal with, specifically from a corrupt and sleazy baseball entrepreneur named Juan Cortez. Rainbow knows Cortez is “out to ruin us because we’re cutting into his territory.” That effort at sabotage reaches its disastrous peak in a field near Zacoala when they play a team from a local stone quarry, not knowing how they’ve been set up for an ambush. Boylan masterfully handles the suspense of this deception and its consequences for young Bo Mellan and Rainbow Billy Beauchamp.
But if playing ball in South America is dangerous, how much more so must the risk, treachery and reality of corruption be in a city “run by influence and infiltrated by organized crime?” Entering the Major League and becoming a star player for the Cubs, Bo Mellan finds himself in a snake pit of politics, and a “people’s war in Chicago.” Ruppert Cakos, the puppet-master who pulls Buddy Bael’s strings, is the Mogul who “owned a major Chicago newspaper (the Sun), TV and radio station (WDRT), Major League Baseball team (the Cubs), the largest construction firm in Illinois (Advanced Building Contractors) and extensive land holdings in Chicago.” Predictably, the power structure in the Windy City is feudal. “Beneath Dailey were his four lieutenants: Adam Wojciuk, Tony Ballestrieri, Sean Patrick O’Neil, and Jesse Jefferson. They controlled the Polish, Italian, Irish, and black voting wards respectively. O’Neil was Council president and Ballestrieri headed Advanced Builders as well as being the mob liaison with the ruling Acardo family. Jesse Jefferson and Adam Wojciuk also had indirect ties to Advanced Builders.” Bo learns from his childhood friend Angela that blacks in the city have pulled together what remains of the Black Power factions of the sixties into a new coalition, called Krakatowa, that aims to topple the existing power structure.
“You see,” says Angela, “there’s this big Federal contract called the Loop Redevelopment Project. It’s really for the whole city and is it huge! Ten billion dollars according to the papers…It just seemed as if Advanced Builders was going to get all of it by default. That’s why Krakatowa was started. They wanted minority businesses to get an even break on some of the money.”
“But doesn’t Advanced hire blacks?” asks Bo.
“Sure they do, but only if they work for the City Machine. It’s all so cozy. The blacks who take that money are either crooks or Oreos––because no self-respecting Afro American would work for Dailey.”
Bo hits upon an idea to help the city’s poor, disadvantaged blacks. He starts the Chicago People’s Project, a non-profit lending institution devoted to helping minority businesses, thus creating an alternative to Advanced Builders and the militant Krakatowa group. But Ruppert Cakos is Bo’s boss, and Bael feels he owns the player, and insists that Bo use his celebrity to “tell everyone how Advanced Builders are good for the city.”
The uncompromising ball player, now a “marked man,” finds himself between a rock and a hard place. He’s assaulted by two of Balestrieri’s goons, and told by al Sulami, a founder of the Krakatowa group, that, “If you’re not with me, you’re against me.”
With everyone bent on killing him, including a powerful figure from his days with the Elite Giants, Bo Mellan wonders, “How could he fight back? Could he get something on Cakos as Rainbow
Readers will keep turning pages eagerly for the answers to these questions, because the fate of Bo Mellan triggers surprising changes that sweep through Chicago and beyond. Like the special curve ball of Beauchamp, Rainbow Curve will keep catching you by surprise right to the very end.
From Behind the Caravan
Standing at the threshold without demanding the vainglory of Fame
We have come.
Seeking a refuge from the cruel battering of Fortune
We have come.
Traveling along love’s journey,
From the borders of nothingness to states of being
We have come
Seeing that vital cenacle from the Garden of Paradise
In search of Love’s greenery
We have come
Yearning for that most precious, guarded treasure
As humble supplicants to the door of the King
We have come
Pride and Honor are at stake; clouds release your purifying showers
For to a Sovereign Judge whose black book lies open
We have come
Hafez, throw off your overcoat!
It is with the breath of fire, behind the caravan,
We have come.
By Hafez of Shiraz, rendered into English by Michael Boylan
Chapter One
1984
IT WAS HOT. Too hot to live. But then there was no other time to live. Spring training. The only time a man could make it.
Sun City, Arizona. Most of the geriatric population was still asleep, eating breakfast or taking their medication. No cars were moving on the street and the sidewalks were vacant. The air was still except for the grumbling and the blare of a small transistor radio that was almost pulling in its station of country-western music.
It was nine o’clock and even the eager rookies groaned as they began stretching out on the all-dirt infield. If it’s eighty degrees at nine o’clock, what the hell is it going to be like this afternoon? Who the devil does Bael think he is putting them through all this as if they were high school legionnaires?
The bald headed, pot bellied manager, Buddy Bael, got up from the bench. He had been talking to the coaches. Before him spread artificial green: four practice fields built by the Chicago Cubs in the desert to prepare young athletes to fill the grandstands in the spring. Bael took off his hat and snagged an oversized handkerchief to wipe his forehead. It was time to clear his mind. It was also time to clear his face. The brown-spotted skin showed of the residues of mucous and tobacco juice that still lingered on his lips and mustache. It was oppressive and going to get worse.
These laggards had better clam up or he would give them something to cry about. They were worse than the Class A kids on the Iowa farm team after a six-hour bus ride through the hot, dusty plains. What would these pampered, overpaid brats do if they had to wear the real wool uniforms that he had been forced to wear when he was a ball player? None of these air-conditioned clubhouses and fancy equipment-why, even the water these pansies drank was brought in specially prepared glass coolers! What was the matter with the local tap? In his day, you didn’t take nothing ‘cept another chaw.
“Get going you lazy bastards, or you’ll be wearing those polyester jump suits in Iowa.”
More grumbling. The calisthenics continued as the non-roster players began to get into the routine of stretching their sore muscles. Behind this menagerie of trainers, coaches, scouts and groaning athletes was a solitary figure who was sitting on the metal and wood bleachers. He sat hunched over so that he appeared shorter than his still youthful six-foot two-inch frame. The unnoticed spectator sat with both hands thrust deeply into the pockets of a faded blue chenille jacket that was zippered, despite the heat, almost to his semi-shaven chin. The man had a somewhat decadent air about him such that if Sun City’s finest had not still been eating their eggs and bacon, this scruffy, sunburnt stranger might have been taken for a vagrant and been asked to move on.
Only the pale blue eyes of this indeterminately aged visitor could be witnessed to move as they darted back and forth, carefully taking in the proceedings. When the coaches broke the congregation into its specialized units, the onlooker deliberately and gracefully arose and carefully made his way off the aging gray structure, whose raised grain stood almost as if determined to yield part of itself into the body of the impetuous.
This mysterious figure stood in sharp contrast to the scattering ball players, who were jogging to their respective stations just ahead of cajoling coaches. He was out of place but not uncouth in this arena, carefully following the pitching coach, Sam Dowel, and his cache of young arms. Nobody paid any attention as the workout began. It wasn’t until there was a break, forty-five minutes later, that Dowel noticed and approached his singular audience.
“This ain’t no open practice or nothin’. You a scout or a reporter?”
Dowel was a thin man with premature gray hair on the sides. Before any answer could be given, the nervous, skinny forty-two year old answered his own question. “You ain’t no reporter – no press boy done wear a thing like that.” Then he motioned to the chenille jacket. “What do you want, anyway?”
“I’m a pitcher,” replied the stranger firmly.
“A pitcher?” cried Dowel.
“That’s right.”
“You mean you were a pitcher. Hell, up here we don’t look at nothing that ain’t the near side of twenty.”
“I can throw a baseball over ninety miles per hour.”
Dowel pouted and scratched the back of his head. He screwed up his eyes as if he were trying to see something. “Nope. You’re too old. By the time you gets seasoning…”
“I’m seasoned.”
“Oh yeah? Where? They done got rid of the Texas League, you know.” Dowel turned to go back to his resting crew.
“Wait a minute. Let me throw you a few pitches. You’re on a break anyway. What have you got to lose? Take out your radar gun and time it for yourself.” There was a slight edge to this stranger’s voice, a plaintive note that was not discordant.
Dowel stopped and scratched his head again. “There’s a catcher over there who you can throw to, but if you hurt your arm––understand me––you’re just a guy who wanted to play catch with a big leaguer.”
Without a reply, the curly haired pitcher showed the first signs of energy he’d displayed all morning. Not a minute had elapsed before the stranger was on one of the practice pitching rubbers and moving his arm about. A young, seventeen-year-old reluctantly put on a receiver’s mitt and with a condescending smirk yelled, “Okay, old boy, send a few down.” The other pitchers and rookie catchers smiled with amusement. The curly haired pitcher responded by tossing a half dozen easy pitches to the catcher. The gallery resumed their conversations and the catcher decided to get out of his crouch as he mockingly slipped down to a sitting position as if to let this neophyte hurler know that his break was being interrupted and the favor was not appreciated.
The pitcher reared back and smoked a pitch that bowled over the dumbfounded catcher. Suddenly there was no talking. Every eye was on the young man sprawled on his back and then the gaze shifted to this stranger with the redish brown, short curly hair that seemed to brighten in the midmorning sun.
The catcher righted himself and tossed the ball back. Again the pitcher brought the ball. Nobody needed a radar gun; the sound of the ball into the mitt told the tale. Then, a sinker that dropped so fast that it looked like a spitter. The break was so pronounced that the receiver couldn’t manage it and the ball popped out of his glove and hit the brash young catcher in the throat.
Now the gallery was laughing again, but this time the object of their mirth had changed. Sam Dowel yelled for another fastball. He wanted to time it. Ninety-six.
“Where did you say you played ball?” asked the pitching coach in an all-together different voice.
“South.”
“Class A?”
“Nope. Class A-merican. Latin American.”
For most major leaguers, Latin America is a mysterious realm in which baseball is taken more seriously than life itself. Because of extreme poverty, this one sport is greedily embraced as an escape that makes living possible. Some great ball players had come from Latin America, yet no major scouts wanted to go there because the climate and politics made such expeditions seem dangerous. Besides, most of the towns were in obscure locales and the hotels weren’t air-conditioned. Still, the words conveyed an exotic, powerful effect. Sam Dowel shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck. Then he screwed up his eyes and looked at the stranger. He peered straight into those pale blue eyes.
