If Wishes Were Horses by W. P. Kinsella

Author:W. P. Kinsella
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0002244012
Publisher: RosettaBooks

I showed the item to Francie.

“I knew his name was Joe,” she said brightly.

The son of the Courteguayan ambassador. Curious.

Toward the end of my career I played one season of winter baseball in Courteguay, a country about as big as Delaware, shaped like the moon of a fingernail, squeezed in between Haiti and the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispanola.

Courteguay is a bizarre, baseball-mad country, ruled by a president-dictator, also named Blanco, who had, at least when I was there, twenty-three first names. President Blanco claims to be a wizard, dresses in a dashiki-like coat of many colors, festooned with stars, asterisks, and other symbols that American cartoonists use to designate four-letter words.

I was assigned to a team that, as near as I could translate, was called the San Cristobel Anthurium Rapists.

The country is engaged in a perpetual civil war. The guerrilla leader, Dr. Lucius Noir, the offspring of a Haitian prostitute, has a degree in chiropractic medicine from a college in Davenport, Iowa.

It is said that President Blanco hired Bill Veeck to supervise the construction of the scoreboard at the San Cristobel stadium. Under the guise of security, the entire army got to watch games for free. The public address announcer had to repeat between batters, “Please do not point loaded weapons toward the baseball field.”

The soldiers, supposedly on alert for insurgent snipers, had to watch the games with their necks swivelled. Baseball neck was the most common injury in the Courteguayan army. I suggested to our manager that they employ Dr. Noir to treat the necks of the soldiers, thus ending the civil war, but he did not take me seriously.

In New York we used Francie’s American Express card to register at a charming old hotel in the theater district. We hired a babysitter, went to a Broadway play, ate dinner at a Greek restaurant, cuddled deep into the night while Little Joe slept in a crib at the foot of our bed.

“Here we are!” I called to Francie the next morning, almost jubilantly folding open a page of The New York Times so she could read the small article.

LOS ANGELES: FBI today named the suspects in the disappearance of the infant son of the Courteguayan ambassador to the United States. Wanted for questioning concerning the alleged abduction are ex-major-league baseball player, Joseph Armbruster “Kid” McCoy, of Los Angeles, and Mary Frances Bly of suburban Boston.

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