“I had a bit of rice and some fish cake earlier this morning.”
“Did you sleep?” I ask. I figure it must have taken her a long time to fix everything and to get the pig into their bedroom. Just thinking about it makes me start to feel sad again.
“I slept,” she says quickly.
“Momma…”
“Don’t worry, baby. Everything is fine.”
“I feel terrible about Koneko. I can’t believe I killed her.”
“It was an accident, baby. Accidents happen. We’ll buy you a new neko.”
“But I don’t want a new one,” I say. “I want my old neko.”
“You can’t have your old neko, baby. It’s impossible.”
“That’s not what the monk said.”
“What monk?”
“That old, wrinkly monk from the Buddhist temple in J-Town that talked to Father about Hiro. He said people and animals get to come back after they’re dead.”
“The monk is wrong,” Momma whispers. She gets up from the table and stares out the window at our backyard. “Once someone is gone, they’re gone forever.”
“Never mind, Momma. It’s OK.” I gulp the last bite of pancake and rinse it down with what’s left of the orange juice. “I’ve got to get dressed for my game now.”
“Did I ever tell you about the beautiful house I lived in back in Japan?” Momma asks as I scrub the plate in the sink.
“Yes, Momma, only about a zillion times.”
“We lived on a rambling country estate a few miles outside Kagoshima,” she starts. “You couldn’t see it from the road; there were lots of trees hiding the main house, even as you got close to it.” She stares all shiny-eyed at the crabgrass growing in our backyard, but I think she’s really seeing her parents’ house in Japan instead.
“Yes, Momma, I know. It was a big, traditional house, not like the mansions they have in Beverly Hills.” I stand next to her at the back window and stare out at the weeds.
“I had my own outbuilding all to myself,” she says, “And the parties we would throw. It was a wonderful life. But once something’s gone…”
“Don’t worry, Momma.” I take her by the hand and lead her away from the window. “One of these days you’ll get to live in a nice house again. I’ll make sure of that. My teacher, Mrs Worthington, says that I’m a manifestor; I make things happen. When I grow up, I’ll make everything change for us, and you’ll be happy again, just like before. So don’t worry, OK? And thank you for the wonderful birthday breakfast, and for singing the birthday song to me last night. Everything’s perfect.”
Chapter 3
Momma drives me to the baseball field in Altadena, where my summer Little League team practices. My father’s supposed to follow in his truck whenever he gets up from his drunken sleep, but I hope he doesn’t.
As we drive up the hill toward the field, a big brown jackrabbit dashes across the road and Momma has to slam on the brakes to keep from hitting him. I hold my breath as he disappears into the bushes and then I start to cry.
“It’s all right, baby,” Momma says, hugging me tight against her boobies. “The bunny’s safe. Momma stopped in time.”
“It’s not that, Momma.” I pull away from her and wipe my face on my sleeve. “I’m still sad about Koneko. I feel like a murderer.”
“Stop that!” Momma frowns at me. “It was an accident, pure and simple. You can’t be guilty when it’s an accident.”
I stare out the window at the other kids on my team as Momma pulls into the parking lot, and I curl up on the front seat.
“Go join your teammates, baby. They’re waiting for you.”
I pop up and stare hard at Momma, who jumps a little and brings her hand to her mouth. “I don’t care if it was an accident, and I never want another neko!”
Momma’s eyes fill with tears. She pulls my head toward hers and whispers, “Let me tell you a little secret, baby. It’s OK to be sad about something you’ve lost, but not for too long. If your sadness doesn’t go away by itself, you’ll need to take steps to make yourself feel better.”
“What kind of steps?”
“Whenever you’re sad, try putting the thing you’re sad about into a box in your mind, bury it deep inside, and then pretend real hard that it never existed. Do you think you can do that, baby?”
Tears spill out of Momma’s eyes and down her cheeks. I wipe them away with my fingers and kiss her.
“Yes, Momma. I can do that.”
“Say it, baby: There never was a Koneko.”
“There never was a Koneko.”
Say it again.”
“There never was a Koneko.”
Momma hugs me tight, then reaches across me and opens the passenger door. I race across the parking lot to join my mates, putting what Momma just said into a big black box like this one → ______.
Our team is called the Braves, which is sort of funny, because none of us is all that brave, except maybe my super handsome hapa cousin Kevin, the son of my father’s older sister, Doreen, and her rich English husband, Alistair. Kevin’s not afraid of anything. Today, we’re playing a team from Glendale called the Pirates. I’m the catcher, and I’m really good at it. I can also hit the ball real far, sometimes over the fence. Nobody else on our team can do that, which is why I’ve won so many trophies. But the truth is, I hate playing baseball. The only reason I play is because my father forces me to. He says playing baseball is what boys my age are supposed to do. (Momma secretly told me he used to force Hiro to play baseball, too.)
“Hey, Koba,” the coach yells from the dugout, “get in here.”
Momma waves from the bleachers with a big lipsticky smile. She’s wearing a fuzzy red cardigan draped over her shoulders. The red of the cardigan looks pretty against her dress and the pearls.
My father hasn’t arrived yet, and I’m hoping he doesn’t make it because he always embarrasses Momma and me, yelling like a maniac from the sideline. Also, he hates it when Momma dresses too stylish, like today, because he imagines the other dads pay too much attention to her (which they sort of do). And that drives him crazy. The weird thing is that I love him, the idiot. Don’t know why.
“Come on, Slugger,” my cousin Kevin calls out. “You’re making us all wait!”
I scamper into the dugout and squeeze in between Kevin and a tall, skinny kid we call Skunk. Kevin pulls off my cap and rubs my head. He says he rubs my head for luck. But I think he just likes rubbing my head. I like it, too.
“I have something to show you after the game,” he says, with a big grin, “for your birthday.” I nod and lean against him, taking in the smell of his freshly washed crisp white uniform, and bite him on the tittie.
“Hey, watch that!” He gently pushes my face away. “These puppies are sensitive.”
Kevin’s one year older than me. I get to play on the same team as him because I’m bigger than other boys my age. The only reason I don’t complain too much about coming to play baseball is because I get to spend time with him.
“Look sharp, Koba.” Skunk jabs an elbow into my ribs. “Game’s about to start.”
I sit upright with a giggle. What’s the use of baseball if you can’t have a bit of fun, right?
The coach jumps into the dugout and gives us a quick pep talk, some purple-haired lady in an electric wheelchair with like a thousand earrings in each ear belts out The Star Spangled Banner, and the game starts. In the end, I bat in four home runs, and we win the game ten to three. Afterwards, a Mexican man with Coke-bottle glasses and huge lips comes up to me and tells me I’m a little Joe DiMaggio.
“Thanks,” I say, shrugging my shoulders. “Who’s that?”
“Only the best baseball player that ever lived,” Kevin whispers in my ear.
“That’s right,” Mr Coke Bottle says, “He had a fifty-six-game hitting streak, and nobody’s ever broken his record. They called him Joltin’ Joe.”
“Joltin’ Joe!” Kevin says, “I like that.”
“
I don’t,” I say. “It sounds weird.”
“Sounds better than Clyde,” Kevin says, winking at me. Clyde is the American name my father stuck me with so people wouldn’t look down on me for being Japanese—my real name being Kimitake, after my momma’s brother, who accidentally crashed his Zero plane into the ocean before it could reach Hawaii. But he should have thought of a better name than Clyde, seeing that kids are always making fun of me because it’s old-fashioned and dorky.
Momma walks up and tells me that we have to get home, but Kevin jumps in and says I’m invited for lunch at his new house for my birthday and that his parents will get me home in time for dinner. I’m surprised by his invitation, especially since he hadn’t mentioned it during the game. Then I remember he wants to show me something.
“I don’t know,” Momma says to Kevin. “Your Uncle Yoshi will probably be waiting for us at home since he wasn’t able to make it to the game.”
Kevin pushes out his lower lip. “Please, Auntie, I promise I’ll take good care of him.” He winks at me. “I’m sure Uncle won’t mind. My mom already said it was OK with her, especially as it’s Clyde’s birthday.” Kevin cups his hand around his mouth and pretend-whispers to Momma: “We have presents.”
Momma nods, and looks in the direction of the parking lot, pursing and unpursing her lips. After a few moments, she turns back and lays a hand on my shoulder. “Clyde, do you want to go to your cousin’s for lunch?”
“Yes, Momma, I do.”
“But what about your clothes?” She points at my uniform.
“No worries, Auntie,” Kevin says. I have plenty of clothes in my closet for him to choose from. We’re practically the same size.”
Momma half-smiles and kisses the top of my head. She makes Kevin promise again to get me home in time for dinner by five o’clock sharp, then she takes off.
Chapter 4
Kevin and I cross the baseball field in the direction of the old Cobb Estate, a big wooded area we have to hike through before we come out on the other side into his fancy neighbourhood. We hop the fence and slog through the dense underbrush between huge pine trees. I’ve never been on the grounds of the Cobb Estate before, but I’ve heard all about it from friends who’ve secretly camped here. Some people call it ‘the enchanted forest’ because they think it’s haunted, which I think is totally dumb. There are little creeks here and there, a crumbling old mansion that used to belong to the Marx Brothers, and a few wild animals, but nothing dangerous that I’m aware of. I’ve never seen any place so beautiful.
As we make our way across the estate, Kevin rattles on and on about girls until I start to get dizzy.
“Don’t you ever think about girls?” he asks as we get to the middle of the forest. “About doing it with them?”
Kevin starts to walk faster; he jumps and skips over tree roots and rocks and things.
“Wait up!” I sprint after him.
He stops and spins around with a grin on his face and catches me in his arms as I slam into him.
“I can’t wait to have sex!” he says. “I think I’d really like it. I just need to find the right girl.”
I pretend I know what he’s talking about, but I don’t. The first time he mentioned sex to me, I was completely confused. I’d never heard the word before. So I asked Momma to explain it to me, and she told me sex meant the difference between boys and girls.
“If someone asks ‘what sex are you’,” she said, “your answer should be ‘I’m a boy’. And if someone asks me that question, my answer would be ‘I’m a girl.’”
But Momma’s explanation doesn’t make any sense. What does the difference between boys and girls have anything to do with having sex, like what Kevin is talking about?
Kevin finally shuts up about girls (thank God!) and gets all quiet.
We walk on a little farther and get to a part of the forest where there are more trees. It’s cooler and darker, so I figure we’re getting deeper into it. I slow down and look back. Kevin notices this, takes my hand, and gently pulls me along the trail. “Don’t let go,” he says. “There are ghosts.”
“Don’t worry; I won’t.”
I love the way his hand feels. It’s big and warm and soft, with little rough patches where his fingers meet his palms from lifting weights in his dad’s garage. I slow down a little so as to feel the pull of his arm.
As we reach a small clearing, Kevin stops and smiles, flashing his beautiful white teeth.
“What is it?” I say.
“I want to show you something.” He leads me to a corner of the clearing.
We sit on the soft, mossy ground beside a little stand of birch trees. He pulls off my baseball cap and rubs my head again. Then he moves in and kisses me on the lips, like in the movies. And I close my eyes and let him. His lips are soft and moist and taste so sweet. I’ve never felt so good in all my life. I open my eyes and stare into his face as if for the very first time. He’s the most handsome boy I’ve ever seen. His hair is long and brown and wavy and beautiful, and it tickles my face each time he kisses me. He pulls me closer and holds me against his chest. His body is strong and soft at the same time, like a big firm pillow. It reminds me of how good he is at sports. But he’s never mean like those other sporty guys who make fun of me all the time.
“I’m just practising,” he says after a while.
“What do you mean?”
“Like for when I finally get together with a girl for real.” He sits up and straightens his shirt. “I want to be ready.”
“Oh,” I say. Then it slowly dawns on me. “Was that sex?”
“Was what sex?”
“What we were just doing.”
Kevin hops to his feet and chuckles. “No, silly! That was just kissing.” He pulls me off the ground and brushes the leaves from the back of my uniform. “You mean you don’t know what sex is yet?”
I shake my head, my face reddening a bit. “Nobody’s ever explained it to me, sorry.”
“Let’s go,” he says. “I’ll explain all about it when we get to my place. I have a picture book you can look at.”
We come out on the other side of the Cobb Estate and hike up the hill to Kevin’s new neighbourhood, which is way nicer than our ugly one in Pasadena. The houses are bigger and there’s lots of land between each of them, which I like. They’re also different from each other, being that they’re custom-made. In our neighbourhood, the houses are all exactly the same, squatty-looking one-stories pushed up against each other. Momma says they’re like that because it’s a cheaper way to build houses for poor people like us.
“You guys are lucky to live here,” I say to Kevin.
“Ha!” Kevin says as we turn the corner to his street at the top of the hill. “Luck has nothing to do with it. It’s not like we won the lottery or something like that.”
“No, I don’t mean that. I mean, I wish we lived up here, too.”
“You mean like with us?”
“Never mind.”
“No, really,” Kevin says, with a big smile. “Maybe you can come live with us for a while. We have plenty of room. I can ask my mom.”
“Nah,” I say. “I wouldn’t want to leave Momma all alone with my crazy father.”
“Oh, yeah. No kidding. Your dad’s twisted. Poor Auntie.” My stomach hurts when he says that.
We finally reach the gates of Kevin’s new house, which is super beautiful, almost like a movie star’s mansion. It’s a hundred-year-old three-story brick house with a green slate roof, a circular driveway in front, and a separate four-car garage, where Uncle Alistair has more space for his collection of antique British sports cars than at their old place in Glendale. Kevin tells me it has, like, six bedrooms, two kitchens, a library, and a basement where people in the old days used to keep wine.
Kevin punches his secret code into a little pad, and the gate swings open. As we cross his front lawn and approach the front door, he fishes deep into his pockets, looking for his keys.
“Ah, shoot
.” He takes a quick peek under the doormat. “Wait here. I’m gonna see if my mom left the back door open.”
“I thought your parents were home.”
“Don’t worry. Just wait here. I’ll be right back.” Kevin disappears around the corner and leaves me standing like a dumb-dumb on the front porch.
After a few minutes, the front door to Kevin’s house swings open, kind of creepy like, and I step into the foyer, but I don’t see Kevin anywhere. I move a little farther inside and peek around the corner into the big, empty living room.
“Hello?” My voice echoes off the walls.
“Come upstairs,” I hear Kevin say. “All the way up.”
I bound up the big staircase, two steps at a time. When I finally get to the top floor, I climb the ladder that leads to Kevin’s attic room.
As soon as my head pokes through the opening into his bedroom, I’m surprised to see a massive wall-to-wall, black-and-white poster of a cowboy above his waterbed. I climb the rest of the way into his room and stare at it. The cowboy is stretched out in an open-top truck, his cowboy-hat-covered head on one side of the poster, his stretched-out body across the middle, and his boots at the other end. And in between the cowboy’s head and his boots, there’s this old-fashioned Western-looking mansion far away in the background. I move closer until my knees are touching the side of Kevin’s bed, and I peer at the cowboy’s face, which is really handsome, even handsomer than Kevin’s.
“You like it?” Kevin’s voice comes from behind me.
“It’s amazing!” I can’t stop looking at the cowboy, and I suddenly get this hollow feeling high in my stomach that almost touches my heart.
“Don’t forget to breathe, little cuz.”
“Who is that?” I turn around and notice Kevin has already changed into a pair of kinda too-tight red gym shorts with a gold stripe down each side and a white tank top with the number 69 stencilled on it in red. He’s smiling and pumping his eyebrows.
“That’s James Dean. He’s my idol.”
“Is he a real person?”
“He was an actor.” Kevin jumps up on the bed and runs a finger along the length of the cowboy’s leg with a funny smile. “This poster’s from a movie he made in the fifties called Giant.”
The Death of Baseball Page 2
