Instant Winner

by Gary Soto

  Relieved, he trudged tiredly into the kitchen, washed his face in the sink, wiped it with a paper towel and pulled out some sliced salami from the refrigerator. He made himself a sandwich and returned to the living room.

  “Hi, Dad,” he greeted his father, who was waking up.

  “Hey, how was practice?” his father asked.

  “Like usual,” he said after he cleared his throat. “You know, I have a feeling that even if I wear the best basketball shoes, I’ll never be good. I quit the team.” There! It was out in the open: his skills as a basketball player were lacking. It was a piece of truth that was bitter as a pill—he had walked away from sports at the height of his junior high career.

  Over the years, his father had encouraged him to go out for soccer and baseball. When he proved average at best, his father suggested basketball. But that evening, after practice, Jason realized that while he enjoyed sports, he lacked physical talent.

  “You quit?” His father turned off the muted television and faced Jason. His large worker’s hands were like gavels on his thighs. Jason’s father was interested in what his son had to say.

  “You know, I’m kind of like…” Jason searched the ceiling as he cleared his front of a big bite of sandwich. “I’m kind of like interested in music.”

  “Music,” his father said softly. He chuckled. He ran a hand over his face. “Let me guess…guitar?” His smile resembled a Jack-O-Lantern.

  “Yeah, that’s it, Dad, like what I said over dinner.” Jason’s eyes brightened and the image of himself with long hair and a guitar in his arms made him smile—he, too, resembled a toothy pumpkin. His father, Jason gathered, was a born worker, but occasionally he saw him demonstrate interest in artsy things like music—oh, how his father loved mariachi music on Sundays! He recalled how gracefully his father danced with his sister at her quinceañera, her fifteen birthday party.

  “The sort of music your uncle plays?” his father inquired. He was picking at a gravy stain on his pants. He flicked the flake away.

  “That’s right, Dad! But not old school, more like hip-hop but with nice, clean words, and maybe with a political message about making the world green again.” Jason bit into his sandwich. He was beginning to think that beneath his father’s rough exterior was a sensitive soul. Gee, he thought, maybe my father is changing. Only last week his father had taken his mother to a movie that didn’t feature a monster chasing little people or hungry zombies staggering from smelly graves.

  Jason’s father nodded and scratched his chin thoughtfully. He then said softly, “So you can be like your bum uncle?” He chuckled. He looked down and picked at the gravy stain on the front of his shirt. “Is that it? So that you can sleep in a car like your uncle?” He sat up, a finger pressed into his cheek. “No, wait a minute—with your uncle?”

  “Dad, that’s cold. Uncle has had a hard life, and that’s the way to creating, you know, like, good art.” True, his uncle was having a hard time adjusting to adulthood, but he was no bum. That was so wrong! “I just want to learn how to play the guitar,” Jason argued. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Then go to jail like your uncle? Maybe you two can get bunk beds. Me and your mom can see you two on the weekends. Bring you a pie or pan dulce.”

  His mother came into the living room, a coffee cup in hand. “I heard that,” she said. She joined the two of them in the living room. “Rudy, that’s not fair.” There was no anger behind her words—it was just a flat statement. She told him that guitar playing was no more criminal than playing basketball.

  Jason wished she hadn’t said that because there were quite a few pro basketball players now behind bars. Perhaps his father would bring up the comparison. The man knew sports.

  Jason’s father reflected. He put on his reading glasses and tapped his fingers against the arms of his recliner. “Yeah, maybe it’s not. It’s just that your uncle…” He didn’t complete the sentence.

  Jason did that for him. “…needs to get a job. I agree. But all I’m telling you is that I’m not good at sports. I can see that. Why should I waste my time?”

  Silence filled the living room.

  “You want to play guitar, then?” his mother finally asked. Her face displayed worry. Was her son bound for the same fate as her brother?

  “Well, maybe not guitar, but, you know, experiment with something different.” He let them know about Blake’s plans to make a video. Perhaps he could buy some video equipment with his earnings from the lottery ticket.

  “Not a chance, Jason. That money is for your college education. In fact, hand over the ticket.” His mother beckoned with her fingers.

  Sighing, Jason rose from the couch and pulled the lottery ticket from his back pocket. It was bent from its long journey.

  “I’ll go downtown tomorrow,” she said. Then she remembered: “I have a hair appointment. And, buddy boy, I got to get you a suit.”

  “A suit?” Jason asked, already itchy around the neck from the idea of rough wool. “Why? I like how I am.”

  “For Marta’s wedding. You’re not going in regular clothes, or in white socks.” She pointed at the socks on his feet. “The poor woman deserves a nice moment.”

  Aunt Marta was his mother’s only relative—her parents had died one year apart when she was twenty-five.

  “What about Uncle Mike?” Jason’s father asked. “We could later visit him with a large slice of wedding cake.”

  “Rudy, enough of the sarcasm!”

  “What?” Jason’s father said. “I just said that we could bring him a little cake.” He smiled. “Maybe we can put a file inside the cake and he can use it to saw bars and make for freedom.”

  “Rudy, that’s enough!” When she placed her hands on her hips, he buttoned his lips, but permitted himself a low growl of disapproval.

  Suddenly, her face showed an idea tumbling in her mind. She turned a sweet face to her husband. “Rudy, we’re bailing Mike out of jail. He has to be at the wedding.”

  This pronouncement made Jason’s father growl. Agitated, he reached for the remote control for the television, found it, and palmed it like a grenade, but set it back down. His face showed that he didn’t like the idea one bit.

  “I know he’s lazy,” she said in an apologetic tone. “But he’s my little brother. He has to be there.”

  With his chin folded onto his chest, Jason’s dad resembled a stubborn bullfrog.

  “And true, he can’t play guitar worth beans,” she continued. She came and sat on the arm of the La-Z-Boy recliner. She cooed into his ear. “Come on, Rudy, he’s hopeless, but he’s really good here.” She tapped her palm against her heart.

  Dad sighed, lifted his face up toward her and said, “Maybe you’re right.” One of his former roofing partners, with the help of his in-laws, had become a bail bondsman, so he had connections. “I’ll make a call first thing in the morning.”

  Jason snapped on the television, and father and son sat together to watch a rerun of The Wire. The program featured real crooks, nothing like his uncle who, he imagined, was probably lying in his bunk, strumming an air guitar for the female news reporter who got away.

  Chapter Eight

  Jason eyed the photos on the walls of Forget-Me-Not Bail Bonds and thought he recognized a few of the rugged criminal types. Most of them were tattooed, thick, brown like him, with shaved heads that revealed thick veins, but with friendly faces. Some of their smiles sparkled with gold grills. One had no front teeth, but still he possessed a sunny disposition. He had a sparkle in his eyes.

  “This your lawyer?” asked Manuel, the bail bondsmen, from behind a desk piled high with papers. He chuckled and showed his stained teeth.

  Jason was dressed in the suit that his mother had bought him for Aunt Marta’s wedding. It was brown, and against his brown skin, it was difficult to tell where his complexion began and his suit left off.

  His mother chuckled. “No, he’s not my lawyer. He’s my son, Jason. Tomorrow we’re going to a wedding,
” she shared.

  Manuel joked, “They’re getting married younger and younger.” He reached for a box of breath mints on his desk. He popped a few in his mouth, but didn’t offer Jason or his mother any.

  Jason’s mother’s false mirth vanished. The suggestion of her son getting married didn’t please her one bit. She would have told him that, but quickly remembered where she was: a bail bondsman’s small and suffocating office adorned with photos of men with criminal records. She was there for one reason: to get her brother out of jail.

  “Of course he’s not getting married.” She smiled at Jason, and then told him to quit swinging his legs.

  Jason smoothed the pants of his stiff suit and looked down at his legs. Not only had he been fitted into new duds, but he also sported new shoes that cut off the blood flow to his feet. His entire lower body had fallen asleep.

  “So, what do we have here?” Manuel asked, done with the chitchat. It was time for business. “Is it serious?”

  “What do you mean?” the mother asked.

  “Your problem,” he replied. He waited. When she didn’t spill the goods about what tragedy had brought her to his place of business, he lowered his gaze to his interlaced hands. All of his fat fingers sparkled with gaudy rings.

  “My little brother had warrants out for his arrest, and now he’s in jail,” Jason’s mom stated. Her purse was in her lap, her hands on top of the purse. “He just won’t grow up.”

  “How old is your ‘little brother’?”

  “Thirty-two or three—I don’t know. But he’s acting like he’s twelve.”

  Jason was offended. What was wrong with acting twelve? He did that every day. Still, he watched the bail bondsman for his take on his uncle.

  Manuel twisted a paperclip into a shape that resembled a giraffe. He furrowed his brow and whistled as he worked on the paperclip. “What kind of warrants?”

  “The usual,” his mother answered vaguely.

  Manuel tossed the paperclip aside. He stated that he dealt mainly in minor family squabbles, such as afternoon barbecues in which a brother-in-law punched out another brother-in-law, or the mayhem when fists flew over a parking space at a mall. Now and then, he bailed out jokers who considered themselves bank robbers, con men, or specialists in breaking and entering. But most of them were sloppy: fingerprints everywhere, smiles stored in video security cameras, their DNA left behind on Big Gulps. “I’ve seen them all, and eventually they all see me.” His personality warmed up as he recounted such incidents.

  “But Mike isn’t a criminal. He’s mostly stupid. He just makes mistakes.”

  “Mrs. Rodriguez, could you be more specific?” Manuel demanded. “If it’s something serious, like murder using a pair of electric scissors, I’m not the guy.” He hooked a thumb at the photos on the walls. “Now, these fellas here, well, some are bad hombres and others are hotheads. They too, like you say, made mistakes, and some of them were honest mistakes, like when you accidentally roll out a computer from the warehouse without paying for it. It happens all the time.”

  Jason again scanned the wall of photos, and then looked at Manuel, a man with stubble rising from his fat, shiny jowls. For some reason, Jason thought that Manuel’s face would fit in nicely among the photos. He could see him rolling out a computer and a printer from a warehouse and then being stopped by security. He could see him patting his front and back pockets, and then palming his forehead and crying, “Oh, wow, I forgot to pay for it!”

  “It’s like unpaid parking tickets, my poor brother!” His mother appeared flustered, but Jason could tell that she was acting. She was throwing her hands about and reeling them back in. She dabbed her eyes, but there was no runoff of tears. “The problem is that he dropped out of high school.”

  “Statistically, most of my clients are high school dropouts.” Manuel glanced at Jason and smiled—a dissolving breath mint showed up on his tongue. “I presume you’re a scholar, that you’re getting As and Bs in school.”

  “Nah, more like Cs,” his mother volunteered.

  “Mom, that is not true,” Jason braved. Insulted, he had to defend the honor of his inflated grades. “I only had two Cs last quarter!”

  “And what was one of the Cs in?” Jason’s mother asked. “Would you like to share that with us?”

  Jason lowered his head, pouted. He folded his arms across his chest and muttered, “Art.”

  “What’s that?” His mother cupped her hand behind her ear for the answer. “I didn’t hear you. Was it finger painting, by chance?”

  “Art. I got a C in Art. It happens, even with geniuses. I bet if Picasso had gone to our school, he would have gotten a C.” Jason wished he hadn’t come with his mother, but he had been curious about this bail bond stuff.

  Flustered again, his mother’s hands flew about. She was no longer acting. A storm raged behind her eyes. “Now, who in the world gets a C in art? It’s just coloring, isn’t it?”

  “Mom, I have to correct you.” Jason sat up and defended his C, stating that the practice of art was more than coloring inside the lines. “It involves hand and eye coordination, and I’m no good.” He admitted that he didn’t possess an artistic bone, at least when it came to drawing or shaping clay into some sort of recognizable object, like a dog raising a leg to pee against a tree.

  “You must be good at sports,” said Manuel. He smiled as he once again took a paperclip and began to wrench it one way and then another.

  “No, I’m not good at sports either.” This pronouncement came out easily, but his next utterance was a little heated. Why were they grilling him? “Mom, we’re not here to listen to the story of my life, but to help Uncle Mike. Remember?”

  “That’s right,” Manuel said in agreement. He tossed another mangled paperclip aside. “What about your brother?”

  Jason’s mother brought out some papers from her purse. Manuel flipped through the six pages, let his fingers tap across a calculator, and finally concluded, “He’s as good a citizen as the next fella, except…”

  He let the sentence remain incomplete. The clock on the wall hammered away for a few silent seconds before Manuel said, “Here, look. Let me show you.”

  Jason’s mother rose and hovered over the papers, then looked at the calculation at the bottom of the page. Her face became distorted. “To get him out of jail will cost about $5,000? Why? He’s not worth that much.”

  Jason was hurt by her declaration. True, his uncle didn’t possess much in the way of material things, but he was family! Plus, he has his talent—the guitar! But Jason remembered that he didn’t possess the guitar anymore. No, it hung in the pawnshop window on Tulare Street.

  “Well, he has warrants totaling $4,300, and my cost is…” Manuel popped more breath mints into this mouth before he completed the sentence. He had to sweeten the experience of explaining the risks and duties of a bail bondsman. “You see, it’s going to cost this much for my services.”

  Jason figured out the cost of his so-called “services.” Manuel stood to make over $700 for signing some papers? Jason blurted out the answer, which made Manuel’s bushy eyebrows jump up. “Wow, kid, you might be lousy at art, but you’re good at math. That’s right.”

  “You mean to tell me that you’re going to get over $700?” A storm once again brewed behind Jason’s mother’s eyes. It looked like lightning from her eyes was about to strike the thief sitting across from her.

  “That’s true,” Manuel answered. He shrugged. He said, “I got to eat like everyone else.”

  Jason’s mother snorted, stood up, and spat, “We’re not that dumb, mister. In fact, we’re not dumb at all!”

  “Sit down, Mrs. Rodriguez,” Manuel ordered softly. “I know it seems high, and, in fact, it might be. But you have to consider the risks I take in this line of work. I’m working with the criminal element.” He smiled.

  “What risks are those?” Jason asked as he stood up. “You have everything to gain. You’re earning tons of money from each dude you repres
ent.” Jason was not surprised by his outburst—he knew unfairness when he saw it—and the words had rolled out perfectly from his mouth. Maybe there’s a lawyer inside me, he reflected as he continued with a story about a greedy ant that tried to bring a log home, but couldn’t fit it down its chute.

  Manuel bobbed his head and smiled at Jason. “So you must think I’m the ant? I live on crumbs? I got two ex-wives I got to take care of, three kids in college, and a dog that sees the veterinarian each month.” He picked up another paperclip and began to wrench it.

  “No, you’re not an ant,” Jason answered. “But you get my point, right? Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.” Jason looked at Manuel’s stomach—the satchel of fat was impressive. The man obviously ate well—and often.

  Manuel smiled as he pointed the paperclip, now a silvery wand, at Jason. “Not only do you look like a little lawyer in your new suit—you sound like one.”

  “That’s because he’s smart,” his mother cried. “We don’t come from a family of dumb-dumbs.”

  Jason wasn’t about to argue. He figured that the family was sort of smart—heck, his sister was back East in college, his uncle could play guitar and live on next to nothing, and his aunt had lassoed a million-dollar lottery winner. Plus, his father could figure out to the penny how much a roof would cost to re-shingle. And his mother possessed the common sense to pull a lottery ticket from a pile of smelly clothes before they headed to the wash. Not every mother could do that! Indeed, the family demonstrated smarts—everyday smarts—and this led them to rush out the door without a goodbye.

  * * *

  Out on the street, Jason’s mother, pink-cheeked from anger, roared, “Can you believe that crook? He thinks we were born yesterday.”

  “A crook! Mom, you got that right,” Jason agreed. Now he definitely thought that this Manuel fellow should go ahead and hang his own photo on the wall. He snapped his fingers. He had been trying to remember where he had seen one of the guys in the photos. Now it came to him. “One of those guys was from Los Blue Chones.”