Strike Zone

by Mike Lupica

  “Hey, Dad,” Nick said, coming in for a sideways hug.

  Then he immediately put out his hand to Marisol’s father, as if Officer Eddie Pérez were the last one in the handshake line, and said, “Thank you for coming to watch our game, sir.”

  “Hey,” Marisol said. “What about me? Officer Dad was late getting home from work. I was so afraid we were going to miss the game, I didn’t even let him change out of his uniform.”

  Nick smiled at her, because he couldn’t help himself.

  “Thank you all for coming,” he added.

  “A few nervous moments there at the end,” Victor said. “You seemed to have lost your command out of nowhere.”

  “You sound like an old catcher,” Nick said.

  “Because I am an old catcher.”

  “But you got it back in no time, Nick,” Marisol’s dad said. “Wish I had a fastball like yours when I was growing up. Might be wearing a pinstriped uniform instead of this one.” He gestured to his navy-blue shirt, with the NYPD badge sewn onto the sleeve.

  “You were going for the corners,” Marisol said. “Like I do on the court.”

  Victor García smiled at Officer Pérez. “The girl knows her baseball.”

  “More than she lets on,” Officer Pérez said.

  Nick was perplexed. “She tells me all the time she doesn’t really like it,” he said.

  Look at you, he thought. Just standing here chopping it up with a policeman, as if that’s the most natural thing in the world.

  “Well,” Marisol’s dad said, “I have to say, I’ve never seen my daughter so invested in baseball as when you were getting those strikeouts at the end.”

  He was tall, the way Marisol was going to be tall, with the same golden-brown eyes and chestnut hair. Nick could see her face in his.

  “Daddy!” she said, tugging on his arm.

  “Did I just break a law by telling the truth?” her dad said.

  “Yes!” Marisol said, her cheeks suddenly turning pink.

  “Well,” said Officer Pérez, putting out his wrists, “maybe you ought to cuff me and arrest me.”

  Nick observed his dad, to see if he reacted to jokes about handcuffs and arrests. All Victor García did was smile politely. But it wasn’t genuine, Nick could tell.

  “Nick,” Officer Pérez said, “I was telling your dad that our families should have dinner together at our apartment sometime.”

  Nick’s dad nodded and said, “We’ll have to set something up soon.”

  Then they were all back to talking about the game and what a fine pitcher’s duel it turned out to be.

  “The Giants’ pitcher’s name is Eric,” Nick said. “He’s one of the best in the league.” It was like he was reading off a script. Saying what he thought he should say, even though inside, he believed himself to be the better pitcher.

  “One of the best, but not as good as you were tonight,” Officer Pérez said.

  “Daddy,” Marisol whined, “are you and Nick just going to stand here and talk about baseball all night?”

  “Fine with me,” her dad said, grinning down at Nick.

  Officer Pérez might want to, but Nick surely didn’t, and he was grateful to Marisol for cutting their conversation short. He’d stayed behind longer than he’d planned to, and the rest of the team was already assembled, ready to get ice cream. So he told Marisol that he needed to go get with his teammates.

  “See you tomorrow?” Marisol said, as if they’d already made plans. It had sounded like a question, but they both knew it wasn’t.

  “See you,” Nick said.

  Marisol put out her fist and Nick gave it a quick bump.

  “Not a bad game,” she said, “for baseball.”

  Then she and her dad began walking toward the lights and noise of Yankee Stadium. As soon as they were out of earshot, Nick said to his dad, “We’re going to dinner at a cop’s house?”

  “He’s your friend’s father,” Victor replied. “And he asked. It would have sounded odd to refuse.”

  “He may be Marisol’s dad,” Nick said, “but he’s still a police officer.”

  “I know,” Victor García said.

  “All it would take is one of them,” Nick said, still wondering why his dad was being so blasé about the whole exchange.

  “I’m aware of that, Nick,” Victor García said, sternly reminding his son who the parent was.

  Nick calmed down a bit. “I’ve seen Officer Pérez plenty of times before,” he said. “Just never in uniform. It scared me; that’s why I lost my command out there.”

  Victor García got down on one knee in front of Nick and grabbed his arms on both sides. “You let me do the worrying, okay? You just focus out there and play your heart out. That’s all I want from you. You got it?”

  Nick nodded, but mostly because it was easier to agree than to fight back. Telling him not to worry was like telling him to stop throwing fastballs. It was never going to happen.

  Finally, his dad stood up and slapped a hand to Nick’s back. “Go be with your teammates.”

  * * *

  • • •

  It should have been a perfect baseball night. Their third win of the season, Nick outpitching his biggest rival, and Marisol showing up to watch.

  So why didn’t it feel that way?

  14

  Amelia was already asleep by the time Nick got home.

  He opened her bedroom door a sliver to check on her, but she was on her side facing away from the door, so he couldn’t see her face. Though if he could, he was sure she’d look as peaceful as ever. If she worried about the same things Nick did, including her own health, she never showed it.

  He had asked his mom one time if there was a chance Amelia could die from lupus. It was just the two of them seated at the kitchen table, where they did their best talking.

  She’d put a hand across the table, over Nick’s.

  “Someday,” Graciela García said, “when Amelia is even older than Mrs. Gurriel, your sister may die with lupus. But she is not going to die of it.”

  “But there’s no cure, right? So she’ll always have to suffer?”

  “She’ll always have to deal with it on some level, but that doesn’t mean she can’t have a good life.”

  “She never even complains,” Nick said.

  His mom let out a big laugh. “Ay, mi amor, of course she does!” she said. “Just not in front of you. She saves it for her mother.”

  Nick closed his sister’s door now and thought about watching the rest of the Yankee game in the living room, then decided to listen instead.

  He closed his bedroom door and lay down underneath the Michael Arroyo poster above his bed. Then he set the radio to the game, adjusting the volume so as not to wake Amelia on the other side of the wall.

  Amelia might complain to their mom sometimes. But Nick never saw her feeling sorry for herself. He often had to remind himself to be the same way.

  Nick rolled over on his side, propped his head up on an elbow, and looked up at Michael Arroyo’s left arm coming forward, straight over the top.

  Michael may have been Nick’s baseball hero, but he was far from the only hero in Nick’s life.

  * * *

  • • •

  Now that the Blazers were well into the tournament, and because there were other summer leagues using the field at Macombs Dam Park, Coach Viera told them there’d be fewer daytime practices between games. Instead, they’d gather in the evenings, once he finished work as one of the store managers at the Staples on White Plains Road.

  But Nick told Coach he’d try to organize some informal practices during the day if they could find a free field.

  The Blazers had just finished their final practice of the week the Thursday after the Giants game.

  Ben and Diego were the last two playe
rs on the field; everybody else had gone home. They were racing each other across the outfield. Getting after it. Looking like Bronx Blazers in every possible way.

  “I know what this tournament means to all of you,” Coach said to Nick on the bench. “And I know how much it means to you especially.”

  Nick sat, listening.

  “But if things work out, there’s more in it for you.”

  “You know me,” Nick said. “I’m only interested in winning the championship. And getting to sit together at a Yankee game.”

  That was another tournament detail arranged between the Dream League and the Yankees: the players on the winning team would get to sit in the fancy seats close to the field.

  “I hear you,” Coach said. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t live vicariously through you. So many times I’ve thought of what it would have been like to stand on that mound when I was a boy.”

  Nick laughed, but he was nothing if not superstitious. “It just feels like when you make a wish before blowing out the candles on your birthday cake. If you say the wish aloud, it won’t come true.”

  “That doesn’t mean we can’t say it to ourselves,” Coach Viera said.

  “Maybe sometimes we do that more than we should,” Nick said, thinking of Amelia and knowing he should stay humble. No use counting your chickens before they hatch.

  Then he met up with Diego and Ben, and the three of them walked across 161st Street to the Stadium. It was a short practice tonight, so the Yankee game would still be in the early innings. They walked up the steps of Babe Ruth Plaza, hearing the voices of John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman from inside.

  Diego started to say something, but Nick held up a hand.

  “Listen,” he said.

  “What? We hear them all the time across the street,” Diego blurted.

  “They’re talking about Michael Arroyo,” Nick said, shushing him.

  Ben looked sideways at Nick. “He’s pitching tonight. I’d think that much would be obvious . . .”

  “Yeah, figured you’d be running home to watch,” Diego added.

  “I will,” Nick said. “But it sounds like he’s trying to pitch himself out of trouble.”

  They listened to the announcers. It was bases loaded in the top of the third. According to John Sterling, there had been a single, an error, a walk after two were out.

  “Nobody’s really hit a ball hard for the Phillies in this inning,” John Sterling said. “But there’s no place to put the batter, and he’s behind in the count, two-and-one.”

  “He needs to throw a strike here,” Suzyn Waldman said.

  “He will,” Nick answered, as if she could hear him.

  “Here’s the pitch,” John Sterling said. Then his voice rose an octave as he said, “Cut on and missed!”

  The cheer from inside was loud enough to permeate the walls of the Stadium. Enough that Nick felt as if he were watching the game from inside, instead of standing outside it.

  They could hear the two-strike sound Yankee Stadium could make in a big moment, the crowd telling Michael Arroyo they wanted him to get a strikeout and end the inning.

  “Here’s . . . the . . . pitch,” John Sterling said, dragging out the words the way he did.

  Nick waited.

  “He . . . struck . . . him . . . out!” John Sterling yelled, before they heard the crowd go wild.

  “Now that was some high heat,” Suzyn Waldman said.

  “Was it ever,” John Sterling agreed. Then he recapped the last play. After two and a half innings, the Yankees still led the Philadelphia Phillies, 1–0.

  “Can we go now?” Diego said in his whiny voice. “If you hurry home, you can watch your guy pitch the top of the fourth yourself.”

  Nick surrendered, and they made for home.

  After dropping Diego at his building, Nick split from Ben at his.

  He was walking up Grand Concourse toward his apartment when he saw a van marked IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT parked in front of a neighboring building. Five or six uniformed people piled out, seemingly led by one man.

  The man Nick’s sure he had seen staring at his building only days earlier.

  15

  They wore dark-blue vests that looked to Nick like the bulletproof ones you saw people wearing in TV shows. ICE and POLICE were written on the back. They were mostly men, but Nick saw at least one woman in the group.

  Nick was sure that the man in charge was the man he’d seen staring up at his building that night from across the street. There had been six floors separating them, along with the Grand Concourse, and of course, tonight he was wearing a baseball cap.

  But this was the same man.

  Nick just knew it.

  Now the man directed his crew as they assembled on the sidewalk, motioning for them to fan out on either side of the entrance, and waving some of them around back to the building at 164th and Grand Concourse.

  Nick wanted to run, but he was frozen in place, as he watched what his mom called the “immigrant nightmare” playing out for someone else’s family, only a stone’s throw from where Nick lived.

  Two men walked inside the building now. Another man and the woman took up positions on the sidewalk, holding back the crowd that was beginning to form.

  There was another crowd gathering on Nick’s side of the Grand Concourse, most of them adults, but some kids, too.

  “Who do you think they came for?” asked a woman behind Nick.

  A man next to her said, “You mean, who did they come for this time?”

  “I guess,” the woman said.

  “I don’t know. But we’re about to find out.” He wore a faded blue cap with the Yankees NY on the front.

  These weren’t people coming out just to witness a spectacle, Nick observed. These were neighborhood folks, genuinely worried about their community.

  “What do you think happened?” the woman asked. Nick wished she’d stop asking so many questions. Especially ones he didn’t want answers to.

  “Probably a repeat offender,” the man said. “When they come out in force like this, it’s usually for somebody who’s been arrested before.”

  Nick felt light-headed all of a sudden. He thought he might faint.

  “Which law?” the woman said.

  “The law against being an immigrant,” the man said facetiously.

  “Not all of us are undocumented,” the woman argued.

  “Doesn’t stop them from looking at us all the same these days.”

  Across the Grand Concourse, they waited to see what would happen next. Nick kept telling himself to leave, get out of here. Just go home. He played out scenarios in his head. Like that the lead ICE official would suddenly notice Nick and come walking in his direction.

  But he couldn’t make himself leave. He had only ever heard about raids like this, like for Mr. Romero, whom he overheard his parents discussing in the kitchen that night. Now he was seeing one with his own eyes.

  The minutes ticked by until Nick heard a commotion coming from the crowd closest to the building. Two men in vests came outside with a young man between them, head down, hands cuffed behind his back.

  Right behind him was a young woman, screaming and crying as the man in handcuffs was escorted to the van.

  Nick couldn’t understand what she was saying in Spanish, the words flowing out of her hot and fast. But there was no mistaking the sentiment. Whoever this man was to her, whether a brother, a friend, a husband, or something else, she loved him, and it tore her apart to watch him being taken away from her.

  The woman broke away from the female ICE official restraining her and ran toward the van, before two more vests blocked her.

  The woman yelled again, reaching a hand hopelessly between their arms.

  Now the ICE man in charge, the one Nick had identified as the man from th
e street, turned to view the crowd across the way. Nick had moved to the front by then.

  There’s no way he’s looking at me, Nick thought. He doesn’t even know me. Now you really are acting crazy.

  But he ducked his head anyway, and weaved among the masses, squeezing himself behind one of the old neighborhood men.

  Of course, the old man decided that very moment to start yelling across traffic.

  “What are you looking at?” the old man shouted, his face angry and red.

  Nick sidestepped to put some space between them, and to further shield himself from view.

  “You wanna come over here and arrest us all?” the old man said, egging them on.

  “You think we’re all criminals if we look the way we do?” he continued, shaking a fist at the enforcement officers. “I don’t think you got enough handcuffs in there for all of us.”

  The ICE agent didn’t answer. His face remained emotionless, almost as if he were telling the people across the street that he didn’t make the laws, he just enforced them.

  It had suddenly become a long night. Now Nick just wanted it all to be over. He wanted to see the blue vests get into the van and drive off and leave them alone. Maybe he would find out later why the young man had been arrested in the first place.

  Finally, the old man stopped yelling. A handful of neighbors came outside to console the young woman, whose crying now simmered to a soft weeping. The blue vests climbed inside the van and closed the back doors from the inside. The head officer walked around to the driver’s side and took one last look at the old man, who stared back at him defiantly. Then he hopped in behind the wheel, slammed the door, and took off down the road, leaving everyone on Grand Concourse in his wake.

  As soon as the van was out of sight, Nick ran toward his building. Ran without once looking over his shoulder, never stopping until he was through the front door and up the stairs.

  He wanted to stop on Mrs. Gurriel’s floor; tell her that he’d just seen the future, too, but it wasn’t the happy future she envisioned for Nick, or Amelia, or their family.