by Mike Lupica
Papi always made it sound as if that was supposed to be Michael’s first great dream in baseball, to make it to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania—Papi always showing him Pennsylvania on the ancient spinning globe they kept in the living room—for the world’s championship of eleven- and twelve-year-old baseball boys.
Michael knew better, even then.
Michael knew that it was more his father’s dream than his own. Papi had grown up in a time when a star Cuban baseball player, which Michael knew Papi sure had been as a young man, could never think about escaping to America, the way others would later, the most prominent lately being the Yankee pitcher Ricardo Gonzalez. El Grande, as he was known. So Papi, a shortstop on the national team in his day, never made it out, never made the great stage of the major leagues.
He became a coach of Little League boys instead, in charge of grooming them even then to become stars later for Castro’s national team.
And from the time he saw that Michael had the arm, he had talked about the two of them traveling to Williamsport together and having their games shown around the world.
Even now, Michael couldn’t tell where Papi’s dream ended and his own began.
The dream had moved, of course, from Pinar del Rio to the Bronx, New York. Papi was no longer his coach and Michael was no longer a little boy. He had grown into the tallest player on his team during the regular season, and now the tallest on his All-Star team.
It was the All-Star team from the Bronx that Michael’s left arm was supposed to take all the way to Williamsport in a few weeks.
As long as he didn’t get found out first.
* * *
• • •
His brother Carlos had promised they could have a catch behind the building when he finished his day shift at the Imperial, the food market across 161st Street next to McDonald’s, almost directly underneath the subway platform.
This was before Carlos went off to his night job, the one he said had him busing tables at Hector’s Bronx Café, a few stops up on the 4 train. Carlos said he had lied about his age to get the job at Hector’s, telling them he was eighteen already, and no one had bothered to ask him for a birth certificate. The main reason for that, Carlos had told Michael, was that he was being paid off the books. Making it sound like a secret mission almost.
“What does that mean, off the books?” Michael had asked.
Carlos said, “It means, little brother, that this is the perfect job for me, at least for the time being. In the eyes of Official Persons, I don’t even exist.”
Carlos was always talking about Official Persons as if they were the bad guys in some television show.
Now, cooking their Saturday morning breakfast of pancakes and chorizo, their Cuban sausage, Carlos smiled at his brother and said, “My little brother, Miguel, the hero of the South Bronx.”
“Guataca,” Michael said. Flatterer.
“Just eat your breakfast,” Carlos said. “You’re turning into a freaking scarecrow, Miguel. Even thinner than a birijita.”
It was a Cuban expression for a thin person.
In the small, rundown apartment, their conversation was always a combination of Spanish and English. Their old life and their new one. It was only here, when it was just the two of them, that Carlos would ever call his little brother by his birth name—Miguel. To everyone else, it was always Michael.
Michael still thought of Havana as home, because he was born there. And he had been Miguel Arroyo there.
Here, he was Michael.
“You’re not exactly a heavyweight boxer yourself,” Michael said.
“I have an excuse,” Carlos said, “running from one job to another.”
“And then running from table to table, right?” Michael said.
Carlos smiled at him. “Right,” he said. “Like I am passing plates in a relay race instead of the baton.”
“Maybe I could get a job,” Michael said.
Carlos laughed. “And maybe you’re too busy fighting crime, somehow turning baseballs into guided missiles.”
“I told you,” Michael said, “it was a lucky throw. I saw him running, I heard the policeman…”
“Then you just managed to hit him in the back of his hard head from…how many feet away?”
Michael grinned. “The trick is leading him just right.” He jumped up from his chair, his mouth full, made a throwing motion. “Like a quarterback leading his favorite wide receiver.” Then he added, “If I’d known it was that purse you got for Mrs. Con her birthday, I would have run after him and hit him with a bat.”
“Mrs. C is telling the whole building you were meant to be on the field, like you were an angel,” Carlos said.
“The only Angels are in the American League West,” Michael said, “with halos on their caps.” He poured more Aunt Jemima syrup on his stack with a flourish, finishing as though dotting an i. “If there are real angels in the world,” Michael said to his brother, “how come they’re never around when we need them?”
“Don’t talk like that.” Putting some snap into his voice, like he was snapping a towel at Michael.
Michael looked over and saw him at the counter, opening an envelope, making a face, tossing it in a drawer.
“Why not? It’s true,” Michael said.
“Papi said if we had all the answers we wouldn’t have anything to ask God later.”
“I want to ask Him things now.”
“Eat your pancakes,” Carlos said, then changed the subject, asking if there was All-Star practice today. Michael said no, but a bunch of the guys were going to meet at Macombs Dam Park before the Yankee game.
“It must be a national TV game,” Carlos said, “if it’s at four o’clock. Who’s pitching, by the way?”
“He is.”
“El Grande? I thought he just pitched Wednesday in Cleveland.”
“Tuesday,” Michael said. “Today is his scheduled day.”
“That means another sellout.”
“The Yankees sell out every game now.”
“It just seems like they squeeze more people in when El Grande pitches,” Carlos said. “What’s his record now since his family came? Five-and-oh?”
“Six-and-oh, with an earned run average of one point four five.”
“Before the season is over, we’ll get two tickets and watch him pitch in person,” Carlos said. “I promise.”
“You know we can’t afford them.”
“Don’t tell me what we can and can’t afford,” Carlos said, slamming his palm down on the counter, not just snapping now.
Yelling.
It happened more and more these days, Carlos exploding this way when he was on his way to one of his jobs, like a burst of thunder out of nowhere, one you didn’t even know was coming.
“Sorry,” Michael said, lowering his eyes.
Carlos came right over, put a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “No, Miguel, I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m a little tired today, is all.”
“We’re cool,” Michael said.
“That’s right,” Carlos said. “Who’s cooler than the Arroyo boys?”
He said he was going to get dressed for work, but had to pull out the stupid ironing board and iron his stupid Imperial Market shirt first. The one he said looked as if it should belong to a bowling team. When he was gone from the kitchen, Michael went over and quietly opened the drawer where Carlos had thrown the envelope.
It was their Con Ed bill. The same bill Carlos had been slamming in a drawer for the past three months.
We do need an angel, Michael thought.
* * *
• • •
Michael read the Daily News when his brother was gone, going over the box scores of last night’s games as if studying for a math test. Then he listened to sports radio, to all the excited vo
ices talking about how this would be a play-off atmosphere this afternoon, because the Yankees and Red Sox were tied for first place in the American League East.
At least this was a Yankee game Michael would be able to watch on his own television. When it was a cable game, on the Yankees’ own network, he would occasionally ask Mrs. Cora if he could watch at her apartment, if there was nothing special on she wanted to watch. She would always say yes. Mostly, Michael knew, because she liked the company, even if she didn’t really like baseball. Michael knew Mrs. Cora had a daughter who had run off young, but she didn’t talk about her too often, so Michael didn’t ask.
Sometimes, with Carlos’s permission, he would go and watch the night games at his friend Manny’s apartment, a few blocks up near the Bronx County Courthouse, as long as Manny’s mother would walk him home afterward.
Carlos promised they would get cable the way he promised they would get to see El Grande pitch in person.
There were all kinds of dreams in this apartment, Michael thought.
Sometimes he didn’t care whether the game was on television or not, even if his man was on the mound. Michael would take his transistor radio and go outside on the fire escape, the one that was on the side of the building facing 158th Street, and sit facing the Stadium and listen to the crowd as much as he did to the real Yankee announcers, hearing the cheers float out of the top of the place and race straight up the hill to where he sat.
From there, not even one hundred yards away, he could see the outside white wall of Yankee Stadium and the design at the top that reminded Michael of some kind of white picket fence. The opening there, he knew, was way up above right field, pennants for the Mariners and Angels and Oakland Athletics blowing in the baseball breezes.
Just down the street, and a world away.
Michael Arroyo would sit here and when the announcers would talk about El Grande Gonzalez going into his windup, the windup that Michael could imitate perfectly even though he was left-handed and El Grande was right-handed, he would be able to imagine everything.
Michael’s teammates called him Little Grande sometimes, even though he was bigger than most of them.
The ones who spoke Spanish called him El Grandecito.
He didn’t even try to understand why throwing a baseball came this easily to him, why he could throw it as hard as he did and put it where he wanted most of the time, whether he was pitching to a net or to the other twelve-year-old stars of the South Bronx Clippers, named in honor of the Yankees’ top farm team, the Columbus Clippers.
Michael Arroyo just knew that when he was rolling a ball around in his left hand, before he would put it in his glove and then duck his head behind that glove the way El Grande did, everything felt right in his world.
He wasn’t mad at anyone or worried about what might happen to him and his brother.
Or have the list of questions he wanted to ask God.
Papi would never stand for that, anyway. Papi always said, “If you only ask God ‘why?’ when bad things happen, how come you don’t ask Him the same question about all the good?”
As always, Michael imagined Papi here with him now, using that soft old catcher’s mitt of his, the Johnny Bench model, whipping the ball back to Michael, telling him, “Now you’re pitching, my son,” that big smile on his face under what Michael always thought of as his Zorro mustache.
And every few pitches he would take his hand out of the Johnny Bench mitt and give it a shake and say, “Did I just touch a hot stove?”
They would both laugh then.
Michael couldn’t remember all of Papi’s pet sayings, no matter how hard he tried. Mostly he remembered the way it felt when they were just having a game of catch, everything feeling as good and right to him as a baseball held lightly in his hand.
The way it did now, just sitting alone in the apartment, the way he was alone a lot these days, rolling the ball around in his hands, feeling the seams, trying different grips. Sometimes when he held a ball like this on the mound, before he would go into his motion, Michael could trick himself into believing everything was right in his world. Sometimes.
The phone rang.
Michael didn’t even move to answer it, knowing the house rule—Rule Number One—about never answering the phone when Carlos wasn’t here, just letting the ancient answering machine, the one with Papi’s voice, pick up.
Michael wanted to change the outgoing message, but Carlos said, no, it sounded better that way.
The voice on the other end belonged to Mr. Minaya, his coach with the Clippers.
“Mr. Arroyo,” Mr. Minaya began, because he called all the parents Mr. or Mrs. “You don’t have to get right back to me, but once we get to the play-offs, we’re going to need parents to drive to the game and since, well, you are a professional driver, we were wondering if you might be able to help out. Please let me know.”
Michael waited for the click that meant he had disconnected. But he wasn’t finished.
“Unless of course Mr. Arroyo isn’t back yet and I’m talking to Carlos and Michael…well, forget it. Just tell your dad to give me a call if he ever does get back.”
Then came the click.
If he ever does get back.
Not when.
Does he suspect something?
Michael grabbed his glove off the kitchen table where he’d left it, stuffed the ball in the pocket, locked the apartment door behind him, headed for the field at Macombs Dam Park.
The field had always felt like his own safe place. But now Michael wondered if even baseball was safe.
About the Author
Mike Lupica (www.mikelupicabooks.com) writes for New York's Daily News and appears on ESPN's The Sports Reporters. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Heat, Travel Team, QB 1, and Fantasy League. He lives in New Canaan, Connecticut.
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