“Don’t you need an EIS for a change like that?” she said quickly.
“Zoning changes in themselves don’t require impact statements,” Alfredo said.
“Oscar, is that right?” Doris asked.
Oscar nodded slowly, doing his sleeping Buddha routine. “They are not required, but they can be requested.”
“Well I request one!” Kevin said. “Anything could be done up there!”
“I second the request,” Doris said. “Meanwhile, I want to have some things on record. Who made this re-zoning proposal, and why?”
An odd, expectant silence. Finally Alfredo said, gently, “As Kevin pointed out, this land includes one of the last empty hilltops in the area. As such, the land is extremely valuable. Extremely valuable. When we condemned those condos under the hill, I thought it was so we would be able to put the land to use that would better serve the whole town. That’s what I said at the time. Now, if the land is made part of Santiago Park, that’s nice for the park, and for the people living in the immediate area—”
Kevin’s chair scraped the floor.
“We all live in the immediate area,” Doris said, smacking her knee into Kevin’s and wishing she had a cattle prod.
“Okay, okay,” Alfredo said. “Some people are closer than others, but we’re all in the neighorhood. And that’s the point. That land is valuable to all of us, and Matt and I think all of us are concerned to see that it is used in the best way possible for the good of the town.”
“Do you have a specific plan for it?” Jerry Geiger asked suddenly.
“Well, no. We only want the possibility to be there.”
“Does this explain the request to buy more water from MWD?” Jerry asked, looking interested.
“Well, if we had the water…” Alfredo said, and Matt picked up the thought:
“If we had the water and the land was zoned for commercial use, then we could begin to look seriously at how to make use of the situation.”
“You haven’t looked seriously up till this point,” Jerry said, sounding sardonic—though with Jerry it was hard to be sure.
“No, no. We’ve talked ideas, sure. But…”
Alfredo said, “Of course nothing can done unless the infrastructural possibility is there. But that’s what our job is, to make sure the possibilities are there.”
“Possibilities for what?” Kevin said, his voice rising. Doris attempted to step on his foot again, but he moved it. “First you’re thinking about upping the water from MWD, supposedly because it saves us money. Then we’re given a zoning change with no explanation, and when we ask for an explanation we get vague statements about possibilities. I want to know what exactly you have in mind, Alfredo, and why you’re going about all this in such an underhanded manner.”
For a split second Alfredo glared at him. Then he turned away and said in a relaxed, humorous voice, “To repeat this proposal, made before the full council in the course of a normal council meeting, we are interested in re-zoning these lots so that we can then discuss using them in some way. Currently they are zoned five point four, which is open land and only open land—”
“That’s what they should be zoned!” Kevin said, nearly shouting.
“That’s your opinion, Kevin, but I don’t believe it’s generally shared, and I have the right to express my belief by proposing a change of this sort. Don’t you agree?”
Kevin waved a hand in disgust. “You can propose all you want, but until you explain what you mean to do you haven’t made a full proposal. You’ve only just tried to slip one by. The question is, what do you have in mind to do on that land? And you haven’t answered it.”
Doris tightened the corners of her mouth so she wouldn’t smile. There was something to be said for the mad dog approach, after all. Kevin’s bluntness had taken Alfredo aback, if only for a moment. He was searching for an answer, and everyone could see it.
Finally Alfredo said, “I haven’t answered that question because there is no answer to it. We have no specific plans for that land. We only want to make it possible to think about it with some expectation that the thought could bear fruit. It’s useless to think about it unless we zone the land in a way that would make development legal. That’s what we’re proposing to do.”
“We want an EIS,” Doris said. “It’s obvious we’ll need one, since as you say the re-zoning would mean a great deal for that land. Can we vote on that?”
They voted on it, and found they were unanimously in favor of an environmental impact statement on the proposed zoning change. “Of course,” Alfredo said easily. “These are facts we need to know.”
But the look he gave them as they got up at the end of the meeting, Doris thought, was not a friendly one. Not friendly at all. She couldn’t help smiling back. They had gotten to him.
Not long after that the Lobos had their first game of the season with the Vanguards, and from the moment Kevin stepped into the batter’s box and looked out at Alfredo standing on the pitcher’s mound, he could see that Alfredo was going to pitch him tough. The council meetings, Kevin and Ramona’s flights over the town—if Alfredo had not seen them himself, he had surely heard of them, and what did he think of that? Kevin had his suspicions…. Even the fact that Kevin was still batting a thousand, a perfect seventeen for seventeen—oh, yes. Alfredo had his reasons, all right.
And he was a good pitcher. Now softball is a hitter’s game, and a pitcher isn’t going to strike a batter out; but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing he can do but serve it up. If the pitcher hits the back of the square of carpet that marks the strike zone with a high-arced pitch, it becomes damned difficult to hit the ball hard. Alfredo was good at this kind of pitch. And he had honed the psychological factor, he had the look of a power pitcher, that Don Drysdale sneer of confident disdain, saying you can’t hit me. This was a ludicrous look for a softball pitcher to have, given the nature of the game, but somehow on Alfredo it had its effect.
So he stared in at Kevin with that contemptuous grin, seeming both not to recognize him and to personally mark him out at the same time. Then he threw up a pitch so high that Kevin immediately decided not to swing at it.
Unfortunately it landed right in the middle of the carpet. Strike one. And in their league batters got only two strikes, so Kevin was only a pitch away from striking out.
Alfredo’s sneer grew wider than ever, and his next pitch was ridiculously high. Kevin judged it would fall short, and held up. He was right by no more than an inch, whew! One and one.
Unfazed, Alfredo threw up another pitch just like the previous one, only a touch deeper, and with a sudden jolt of panic Kevin judged it would be a strike. He swung hard, and was more surprised than anyone when he saw the ball flying deep into right-center field, rocketed by the desperation of Kevin’s swing. Whew! He ran to second and smiled at his teammates, who were cheering loudly from the dugout. Alfredo, of course, did not turn around to look at him. Kevin laughed at his back.
In subsequent innings Alfredo walked Kevin twice. He was ridden hard for this failure by Kevin’s teammates, and he got noticeably sharper as he urged on his own teammates. Meanwhile the rest of the Lobos were hitting him unusually well also. So it was not a good game for Alfredo, and the Lobos were ahead 9-4 when the Vanguards came up for the last time. Alfredo himself led off, and hit a single up the middle. He stood on first shouting to his teammates, clapping with an excess of energy.
The next batter, Julie Hanson, hit a hard line drive over Kevin’s head. Kevin went to cover third, and then he was in that weird moment when things were happening all around him and he was very much a part of it, but not doing a thing: watching Mike race over and cut the ball off, seeing Alfredo barrel around second on his way to third, seeing Mike throw the ball hard toward him. He straddled the base to take the throw on one bounce. The ball tailed off to the right and he jumped out to stop it, and at the same moment he caught it boom! Alfredo slammed into him, knocking him head over heels into foul territory.