Rooting for Rafael Rosales

by Kurtis Scaletta

  The day dragged on even slower than usual. He watched the clock, as he often did, counting the tick marks toward the end of school. Fortunately, he did not get called on again.

  He had to take Iván home before he could go to the baseball field to see Hugo play. Iván prattled about what he’d learned in kindergarten: a story about a stray cat who became king, a song about sunshine and rain.

  “I like school,” he said. “I like it a lot.”

  “Sure, it’s all stories and songs in kindergarten. Wait until you have to learn about Bartolomé Colón.”

  They arrived at home.

  Mama was waiting at the door, and Rafael nudged Iván toward her.

  “See you later.”

  “Rafael, play with your brother,” his mother said. “I’m too busy to keep an eye on him today. Besides, he misses you.”

  “I can’t!” said Rafael. “I have a game today!”

  “You play ball every day. You can miss it once in awhile,” she said.

  Rafael saw Iván looking up at him with hopeful eyes.

  “What if I take him with me?”

  “No,” she said. “Stay close to the house.”

  The unfairness of it was hard to take, but Rafael never argued with Mama. It would be like arguing with the sky when it rained: Mama decided how things would be, and that was that.

  Rafael took his brother in the opposite direction of the streetball games; he did not want those boys to see them. He walked quickly, making Iván hurry to keep up.

  “Mama said to stay close,” Iván whined.

  “We aren’t that far!” said Rafael. But they were nearly to the busy Calle Mir, which he wasn’t allowed to cross. There was a gap between a church and the row of houses where Juan and Hugo lived. “We can play here.”

  “Can we play pirates?”

  “Sure,” said Rafael, “whatever you want.”

  They lobbed pebble-sized cannonballs at an invisible ship in the distance and fought off the invaders with swords. After making them walk the plank, Rafael climbed a stout palm tree and pretended it was the mast of a ship. He made a telescope of his hand and searched the horizon. He looked in the direction of the game he was missing and saw a slump-shouldered boy crossing the Calle Mir. It was Hugo. Why was he leaving the game so early? It had not even been an hour since school got out.

  Rafael dropped to the ground. “I saw an island that way! I think there’s treasure!”

  “We have to take a boat.” His brother turned around and pretended to row. Rafael followed, walking backward and feeling foolish. Hugo was sitting on the curb in front of his house, his worn baseball glove resting on his knee.

  “Hola, Rafael.”

  “Hola, Hugo.” Rafael stopped. Iván stopped too and looked curiously at Hugo. “I thought you were pitching today,” said Rafael.

  Hugo stared at his glove, then looked up and grinned. “I got lit up like the Faro a Colón.”

  “He what?” Iván looked up at Rafael. “He says he’s a lighthouse?”

  “He means he had a bad game,” Rafael whispered. He could explain baseball slang later. “I wanted to watch, but I had to take care of my brother,” he explained.

  “We’re pirates!” said Iván. “Give us all your gold!”

  Hugo patted his pockets. “I have some doubloons right here.” He pretended to give Iván some of the pesos and made clinking noises with his tongue as the imaginary coins changed hands.

  “Thanks!” said Iván.

  “What are you going to buy with all that?” Hugo asked.

  “I’m going to buy a baseball glove for my brother and an elephant for me.”

  “You know, I saw an elephant for sale down there.” He pointed Iván back toward home and winked at Rafael.

  “Let’s go!” Iván tugged on Rafael’s hand. Rafael anchored his feet. He wanted to keep talking to Hugo. Iván sprang loose and took off down the street.

  “I remember when Juan was that age,” said Hugo. “He never wanted to do anything alone.”

  “Sí,” Rafael agreed. “Iván is the same way.” It wasn’t true, but he liked the way Hugo was talking to him—eye to eye, big brother to big brother.

  Hugo stood up. “Well, I better go in and tell Papa what happened.” He slapped hands with Rafael. “You better chase your brother down and help him buy his elephant.”

  Rafael wanted to be the kind of big brother that Hugo was to Juan. He wanted to tug the brim of his brother’s cap down over his eyes. He wanted Iván to boast to friends that his big brother was a future star.

  It also occurred to him that Iván was now six, almost the same age he’d been when he started watching the streetball games. He had been seven, but he hadn’t had a big brother to take care of him.

  “You should come with me tomorrow,” he told Iván that night in bed.

  “I don’t like baseball,” said Iván.

  “How do you know? You’ve never played.”

  “I’ve seen enough to know I don’t like it.”

  Rafael got up on one elbow to look his brother in the face. “Come on,” he said. “I played pirates with you today. You can play baseball with me tomorrow.”

  “Maybe,” said Iván. The next day he followed Rafael to the dead-end street where they played. Rafael saw that there were more boys than could play. “Go stand with the other little kids to watch,” he told Iván.

  “I thought I’d get to play!”

  “Watch and learn the game first,” said Rafael. “You’ll get a chance.”

  “At least let me stay with you.”

  Rafael sighed. “I have my brother today,” he announced. “He’s not really playing, but he wants to stay with me.”

  “Mamá gallina Rafael brought his polluelo!” Tomás hooted.

  “Why did he call you a mother hen and me a chick?” Iván wondered.

  “He’s still mad because I called him a turtle once.”

  “A turtle!” Iván shouted. “That’s funny.”

  “Shh,” Rafael whispered.

  Iván stayed close to him until the game started, and when Rafael batted, Iván ran after him. Rafael reached base safely, but Tomás tagged Iván.

  “Polluelo is out!”

  “No I’m not! Leave me alone, you dumb tortuga.” Iván pushed past him and tried to join Rafael on the base.

  “You’re out,” Tomás insisted. He pulled Iván away by the shoulder—a little roughly, Rafael thought.

  “What are you doing? He’s not even really playing.” Rafael stepped off the base, and Tomás tagged him out as well.

  “Double play!” he shouted. “That’s the third out.”

  “Don’t be a cheater.”

  “You’re the one who wants extra players on your team.”

  “Oh, come on!” He looked to Juan for support. His friend looked grim. “Tomás is right,” Juan decided. “That’s two outs.”

  “Fine,” said Rafael. He walked over to his fielding position. “You play there.” He sent Iván several paces back and hoped he would stay out of the way.

  Juan batted first and bounced the ball their way. Rafael scooped it up but found Iván between him and the base.

  “Let me out him!” Iván begged, tugging on Rafael’s arm. “I want to out him!”

  “Not now!” Rafael couldn’t get free. Juan touched the base and ran around to score.

  “You shouldn’t play when your polluelo needs you, gallina!” Juan hollered with a laugh. Gallina meant hen, but it could also mean a sissy and a coward. It was a fighting word in the barrio. Rafael didn’t care when Tomás used it, but it hurt when Juan did.

  “I’m no gallina!” he shouted.

  “Take a joke,” said Juan.

  Rafael tried to slow his heart from racing. He turned to Iván.

  “Stay out of my way, or go home,” he snapped. Iván froze, tears welling up in his eyes. That made Rafael feel bad, so the next time he came to the plate, he gave the stick to Iván.

  “Take my turn at the
plate,” he said. He nudged Iván toward the plate. “Nothing hard,” he said to Juan. But before Juan could throw a single pitch, Iván was running straight at him, wielding the stick like a club. Juan turned to escape the blows, and Iván whapped him again and again in the backside.

  “You don’t call my brother a gallina! You’re the gallina!” Iván shouted. Rafael caught him, picked him up, and hauled him away while he was still thrashing and screaming. Juan was curled up on the ground, his Yankees cap knocked askew.

  ***

  Rafael had to tell Mama what happened, because Iván’s eyes were red, his face streaked with dirt and tears. Mama told Papa when he got home. He sighed heavily, sat down at the table, and asked both boys to come over.

  “Your mother says you boys were in a fight?”

  “We’re sorry.” Rafael hung his head. He hadn’t been part of the fight, but he knew better than to argue with his parents. Besides, he knew he was responsible for what his little brother did when they were together.

  “I’m not sorry!” said Iván. “They called us names.”

  “You can’t fight every time somebody calls you a name,” said Papa.

  “Yes I can!” Iván clenched both fists like he might take a swing at Papa, and to Rafael’s surprise, Papa laughed.

  “You are like me as a boy, pugilista.” He reached out and pulled Iván to him, wrapping his arms around his shoulders. “But if you two keep fighting with those boys, you can’t play with them anymore.”

  “That’s not fair!” Rafael exclaimed, forgetting about not arguing with his father. “Iván was the one who started it!”

  But as he said it, he realized it would not be easy to go back anyway, not after what had happened. How could he face Juan ever again? Juan was the one who’d invited him to play in the first place, and he seemed to be the only boy who liked Rafael.

  That night Iván nudged Rafael. They were lying in bed, listening to the sounds of the city drifting through the window: loud voices and radios, car horns and music.

  “I’m sorry I hit that boy,” said Iván.

  “Lo que ha pasado pasado,” said Rafael. What happened, happened.

  Several weeks passed, and Rafael did not play. He waited for someone to come get him, to ask why he hadn’t shown up for streetball, but nobody did. That made it harder to go back.

  One Sunday, Papa took Rafael and Iván to the sugarcane farm where he worked. “We’ll give your mother some time to herself,” he explained, driving a battered truck he sometimes borrowed from work. The farm and factory were closed on Sundays, but Papa’s work was never done. His mind was always on the machines. “In every corner, something is breaking,” he would mutter over his coffee in the morning and his beans and rice at lunch. He worried about the machines the way the neighbors worried about the Estrellas, who were also always on the verge of breaking down.

  Normally Rafael would find a bat-sized stalk to break and swing. This time he didn’t. His baseball days were done. Instead he played cache-cache with Iván. They took turns hiding and finding each other among the high stalks. After a few rounds, Iván wanted to race.

  “I can beat you!” he shouted, running and disappearing into the cane. Rafael ran after him, holding back to let Iván think he was winning, but sprinting ahead as they came to the edge of the field. He finished one pace ahead.

  “I am first! I am the best!” he shouted.

  Iván laughed, then stopped. He pointed at a cluster of shacks and shanties where the cane pickers lived, no more than a kilometer from the building where Papa worked.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s the batey. You’ve seen it before.”

  But Iván must not have remembered.

  “Do people live here?”

  “Yes. They live here because they work here.”

  “Papa works here, and we don’t live here,” said Iván.

  “Of course not,” said Rafael. “Papa doesn’t pick cane.”

  “I don’t like it here,” said Iván.

  Rafael saw the batey for the first time with clear eyes—the leaky tin roofs of the shacks, the muddy lanes winding among the homes, the old boards that served for doors.

  “It isn’t great,” he agreed. It wasn’t simply that the people were poor. People were poor everywhere. These people seemed forgotten, like something left to spoil in the sun.

  A girl, three or four years old, chased after a chicken that had gotten loose and was hopping and flapping between the shacks. Rafael saw where it was headed and blocked its route. He was able to get his hands around the tame bird. The bird was smaller than it looked—all fluff and feathers. He handed it to her, and she took it—firmly, but gently.

  “Mesi!” she said. He’d traded a few words with the cane pickers before. Some were Haitian and spoke Creole. Others were Cocolo and spoke Caribbean English. This girl must be Haitian. He knew that “Mesi,” was “thank you.”

  “De nada,” he replied, because he didn’t know how to respond in Creole. “Bonjou.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I said hello. That’s how they say hello.”

  “Bonhoo,” Iván attempted. The girl grinned, showing a gap between her front teeth.

  “Mwen se Bij,” she said.

  “What did she say that time?” Iván asked in Spanish.

  “I don’t know,” Rafael admitted.

  “Does she really live here? All the time?” Iván whispered.

  “Don’t be rude,” Rafael whispered back. Most of the cane pickers knew a little Spanish, and Rafael didn’t want anybody to hear Iván’s questions. He waved goodbye to the girl and led Iván back into the sugarcane.

  “Of course they live there all the time,” he answered once they were out of earshot of the batey. “What did you think?”

  “I thought they might have nicer houses somewhere.”

  “But they don’t have any money,” Rafael said, exasperated.

  “Tell Papa to give them more money so they can build nicer houses.”

  “I will.”

  They found Papa inside the machine shed, tending to a machine with rows of curved blades.

  “Why don’t you pay the pickers enough to live better?” Rafael asked.

  “Do you think that’s my choice?” Papa asked. “Do you think I’m the boss of everything?”

  Rafael gulped. He had thought that.

  “Well, I’m not. I fix the machines and am boss of nobody. All of us are lucky to have jobs at all. Now let me work.”

  ***

  “What was that girl’s name?” Iván asked Rafael that night in bed.

  “How should I know?”

  “You talked to her.”

  “She said thanks, and I said hello. That was it.” There had been more, but he didn’t understand it.

  “Did she have lunch yesterday?”

  “I’m sure she did.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t. Stop asking questions.” Rafael rolled over in bed to face the wall.

  “Rafael.” Iván nudged him again. Rafael turned back, ready to yell at Iván for annoying him, but the anger left him when he saw Iván’s eyes were rimmed with tears.

  “What?”

  “Did that girl have to eat her pet chicken?”

  Rafael bit the inside of his lip to keep himself from laughing.

  “Well, did she?” Iván repeated.

  “I don’t know,” said Iván. “Maybe. If she did, it wasn’t a pet in the first place.”

  “Will you help her family when you’re a famous baseball player with lots of money?”

  “Sure,” said Rafael. “If I become a famous baseball player.”

  How would that happen when he couldn’t even play streetball? He could go back and beg Juan to let him play, but the thought made him sick to his stomach.

  He closed his eyes and tried to imagine himself playing a real baseball game in a stadium with thousands of fans cheering his name. He used to imagine that ever
y night before passing into sleep, but now he couldn’t. Instead he saw the chicken fluttering down the muddy lane of the batey, the girl’s smile as he handed her the bird.

  A gallina, he thought bitterly. The bird was a gallina.

  Getting called a name was a foolish thing to be angry about.

  He would have to tell Juan he was sorry. Juan would say, “Sorry for what?” and laugh it off. “Where have you been?” he would ask. “We missed you.” Or maybe Juan would scowl at him, tell him to vete a la porra.

  Rafael opened his eyes. Iván was asleep now, though murmuring and fidgeting.

  When morning came, Rafael wasn’t sure he had slept at all. He dozed off during the teacher’s lesson about Santo Domingo being seized by pirates—a true story, one he would have to tell Iván. He answered every question wrong on a math test and walked home.

  He did not go to Juan or say he was sorry that day, or the next, or the next.

  Maya scanned the smattering of other early comers at the stadium: a mix of old people whiling away the day; families, like hers, on vacation; and men in groups of three or four, all of them in baseball caps and jerseys, some toting big plastic cups of beer even though it was barely 11:00 a.m.

  She didn’t see how anyone could care about baseball when the ice caps were melting and the bees were dying. She wished she were still at the hotel.

  “Why do I have to go?” she’d asked. “I don’t even like baseball.”

  “Because it’s a family vacation,” Mom told her.

  “Then why isn’t Dad coming?”

  “Touché,” Mom said. “You’re still going.”

  So here she was, and although it was a family vacation, right now she was alone in the bleachers. Dad was back at the hotel handling a crisis that had come up at work. Mom was browsing the gift store. Her big sister, Grace, was down behind the visiting team’s dugout, bouncing on her toes like a little kid. She had a baseball and wanted somebody to sign it. Maya saw one of the men nudge Grace aside to get at the railing. Grace was now stuck in the corner, all but hidden from the players.