Butterfly Winter Read Free Page B

practice his calling, and then with only limited success, due to the lack of arable land.

THREE
THE WIZARD
    H is journey to the island of Hispaniola came about after he became acquainted with a group of Pentecostal missionaries on the Miami docks. They mistook him for a man of the cloth.
    “We are off to spread the word of the Lord to the heathen,” they confided in him.
    “I share your dedication,” he said obliquely.
    Over his shoulder was slung a lumpy sack that might have been full of a many-armed invention. “Where might you be bound?” Sandor asked.
    The Pentecostals explained that they were headed for Courteguay, on the island of Hispaniola, a tiny landlocked country nestled like a snail between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, bordered by both, the shape of the moon of a fingernail, and not much larger.
    “We sent a team of missionaries to Courteguay a few years ago,” one of the tall, pale men explained. “At first they sent back enthusiastic reports, then we didn’t hear from them for a few months. Neither they, nor the follow-up team we sent have ever been heard from at all.”
    “Beyond there be dragons …” said Sandor, quoting from a medieval map he had seen in a museum. The phrase described the unknown, everything beyond the explored world.
    “Haiti is full of dark visions and strange deaths,” said a wiry-looking woman with bony, red-knuckled hands.
    “And the Dominican Republic?” asked Sandor, willing to risk a good deal for baseball, but not anxious to be eaten by savages, or burned alive as a sacrifice to some primitive god.
    “We are led to believe the Dominican is much more civilized than Haiti, though it is said to be heavily Catholic,” a short, rotund man said.
    “And Courteguay?”
    “Unknown territory,” said the leader of the Pentecostals, a red-cheeked man with a perpetual smile. “One of the newest and smallest countries in the world. Reportedly, a piece of useless mountain slope and swampy valley, given to a fierce old soldier, who so terrorized the governments of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, so disrupted their attempts at civilization, that they gave him his own country just to be rid of him. His name—he was given the land some forty years ago and was an old man then, so he must certainly be dead—is said to be Octavio Court, though he was known to one and all as the Old Dictator.”
    “The trouble with an island is that it is the end of the world,” said Sandor. “One cannot run and hide well on an island. People left with only themselves, with nowhere to hide, have to look inward, have to face the reality that they are trapped within their own skins forever. Sometimes they do not like what they see.”
    Sandor Boatly for some reason felt no fear at the idea of setting off for Courteguay. Perhaps they did not play baseball there, he thought, he hoped. He knew the Pentecostals would relish suffering, even death. They were fundamentalists so narrow they could look through a keyhole with both eyes. Martyrs have always been well regarded in religious circles.
    “What do you think of baseball?” he asked the missionaries, tossing an ermine-white ball in the air and catching it in his large, calloused hands.
    “A relatively sinless game,” replied their leader, “as long as it is not played on Sunday.”
    “How little you know,” whispered Sandor Boatly, smiling mysteriously, as he boarded the boat for the island of Hispaniola.
    No one on the mainland ever heard from Sandor Boatly again.
    He has become a legend, of course. You newsmen, journalists, writers, or whatever you call yourselves, must know all about that. By the time he departed America Sandor Boatly was already a folk hero, tales were told, songs were sung about his spreading the gospel of baseball across the continent. But because of his mysterious disappearance the legends grew, multiplied and prospered out of proportion to his actual deeds. Several books were written about him, the most