by Rick Wilber
“He was improving every game,” Linda said.
“He never wanted to play. I made him.”
Dusty leaned forward. “And I remember why you made him. You want that to happen again?”
“That’s a separate issue.”
“I don’t think so,” Dusty turned to me again. “Don’t let yourself become one of the quitters, Nathan. Don’t walk out on your team. The values you learn on the playing field, those are the values that make you a success in everything you do later in life.”
“I never played on a team,” my mom observed. “How ever do I manage to get through the day?”
It was a snotty comment. Really, she was the one who started it. Dusty was the one to go for the throat. “I’m sure his father wouldn’t want him taught to be a quitter.”
There was a long, slow, loud silence in the room. Then my mom was talking without moving her mouth again. “His father is none of your damn business.”
“Would anyone like a cup of coffee?” Linda asked. Her sandals tapped anxiously as she started into the kitchen, then came back out again. “I made brownies! I hope everyone likes them with nuts!”
Neither my mom nor Dusty showed any sign of hearing her. Neither would take their eyes off the other. “He didn’t quit on you, Dusty,” my mom said. “You quit on him.”
“What does that mean?”
“It was his turn to bat.”
“That was okay with me,” I pointed out. "It was really happy with that.”
“That was a team decision,” Dusty said. “That’s just what I’m talking about. If you’d ever played on a team you wouldn’t be questioning that decision.”
My mother stood, taking me by the hand. “You run your team. Let me raise my kid,” she said. And we left the house and one of us left it hopping mad. “On the planet Zandoor,” she told me, “Little League is just for adults. Dusty wouldn’t qualify. Of course it’s not like Little League here. You try to design a glove that fits on a Zandoorian.”
The other one of us was so happy he was floating. When we got home Victor, Tamara, and Chad were sitting together on our porch. “I’m not a baseball player anymore,” I told them. I couldn’t stop grinning about it.
“Way to go, champ,” Tamara said. She put her arms around me. Her body was much softer than my mom’s and her black hair fell over my face so I smelled her coconut shampoo. It was a perfect moment. I remember everything about it.
“What do you think of that?” my mom asked Chad. Through the curtain of Tamara’s hair I watched him shrug. “If he doesn’t like to play, why should he play?”
They were staring at each other. I thought he was a little young for her, besides being a fat jerk, but no one was asking me. “Saturday night,” she told him, “there’s a Take Back the Night march downtown. Victor, Tamara, and I are going. Do you want to come?”
Chad looked at Victor. “This is a test, isn’t it?” he asked.
"You already passed the test,” my mother said.
The next day she spotted Jeremy while she was dropping me at school. She waved him over and he actually came. “I’m so glad to see you,” she told him. “I didn’t thank you properly for helping with the car the other day. You were great. Where did you learn to do that?”
“My dad,” Jeremy said.
“I’m going to call him up and thank him, too. Tell him what a great kid he has. And you should come to dinner. I owe you that much. Honestly, you’d be doing me a favor. I’m thinking of buying a new car, but I need someone knowledgeable advising me.” She was laying it on so thick the air was hard to breathe.
Jeremy suggested a Mustang convertible, or maybe a Trans Am. He was walking away before she’d turn and see the look I was giving her. “That’s wonderful,” I said. “Jeremy Campbell is coming to dinner. That’s a dream come true.” I gathered up my homework, slammed the car door, stormed off. Then I came back. “And it won’t work,” I told her. “You don’t know him like I do.”
“Maybe not,” my mom said. “But it’s hard to dislike someone you’ve been good to, someone who’s depending on you. It’s an old women’s trick. I think it’s worth a try.”
Let me just take a moment here to note that it did not work. Jeremy Campbell didn’t even show up for the dinner my mom cooked specially for him. He did ease off for a bit until whatever it was about me that provoked him provoked him again. Not a thing worked with Jeremy until Mr. Campbell was laid off and the whole Campbell family finally had to move three states east. The last time I saw him was June of 1991. He was sitting on top of me, pinning my shoulders down with his knees, stuffing dried leaves into my mouth. He had an unhappy look on his face as if he didn’t like it any more than I did, and that pissed me off more than anything.
Then he turned his head slightly and a beam of pure light came streaming through his ears, lighting them up, turning them into two bright red fungi at the sides of his head. It helped a little that he looked ridiculous, even though I was the only one in the right position to see. It’s the picture I keep in my heart.
* * *
So that’s the way it really was and don’t let my mother tell you differently. Saturday turned out to be the night I won at The Legend of Zelda. I was alone in the house at the time. Mom and Tamara were off at their rally, marching down Second Street, carrying signs. The Playboy Bunny logo in a red circle with a red slash across its face. On my computer the theme played and the princess kissed the hero, again and again. These words appeared on the screen: You have destroyed Ganon. Peace has returned to the country of Hyruk.
And then the words vanished and were replaced with another message. Do you wish to play again ?
What I wished was that I had The Adventure of Link. But before I could get bitter, the phone rang. “This is really embarrassing,” my mom said. “There was a little trouble at the demonstration. We’ve been arrested.”
“Arrested for what?” I asked.
“Assault. Mayhem. Crimes of a violent nature. None of the charges will stick. We were attacked by a group of nazi frat boys and I did nothing but defend myself. You know me. Only thing is, Dusty is in no mood to cut me any slack. I don’t think I’m getting out tonight. What a vindictive bastard he’s turned out to be!”
“Are you all right?”
“Oh, yeah. Hardly a scratch.” There was a lot of noise in the background. I could just make out Tamara, she was singing that Merle Haggard song “Mama Tried.” “There’s a whole bunch of us here,” my mother said. “It’s the crime of the century. I might get my picture in the paper. Anyway, Victor wasn’t arrested. You know Victor. So he’s on his way to stay with you tonight. I just wanted you to hear from me yourself.”
I didn’t like to think of her spending the night in jail, even if it did sound like a slumber party over there. I could already hear Victor’s car pulling up out front. I was glad he was staying; I wouldn’t have liked to be alone all night. Sometime in the dark I’d have started thinking about nuns with hooks for hands. Now I could see him through the window and he was carrying a pizza. Good on Victor! “Just as long as you’re all right,” I told her.
“I must say you’re being awfully nice about this,” my mother said.
T. Coraghessan Boyle has published some two-dozen novels or collections and his stories regularly appear in such magazines as the The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Playboy, Harper's, and Granta. He is the recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Prize for best novel of the year (for World's End); the PEN/Malamud Prize in the short story (for T.C. Boyle Stories); and the Prix Medicis Stranger for best foreign novel in France (for TheTortilla Curtain). In this story, Hector Quesadilla is an aging ballplayer and a man of large appetite. Hector knows that baseball can be cruel to its players as their ambitions outpace their fading skills. But on a most unusual day, Hector hopes that, for him, the game might go on forever.
The Hector Quesadilla Story
T. Coraghessan Boyle
HE WAS NO JOLTIN’ JO
E, no Sultan of Swat, no Iron Man. For one thing, his feet hurt. And God knows no legendary immortal ever suffered so prosaic a complaint. He had shin splints too, and corns and ingrown toenails and hemorrhoids. Demons drove burning spikes into his tailbone each time he bent to loosen his shoelaces, his limbs were skewed so awkwardly that his elbows and knees might have been transposed and the once-proud knot of his frijole-fed belly had fallen like an avalanche. Worse: he was old. Old, old, old, the graybeard hobbling down the rough-hewn steps of the senate building, the ancient mariner chewing on his whiskers and stumbling in his socks. Though they listed his birthdate as 1942 in the program, there were those who knew better: it was way back in '54, during his rookie year for San Buitre, that he had taken Asunción to the altar, and even in those distant days, even in Mexico, twelve-year-olds didn’t marry.
When he was younger—really young, nineteen, twenty, tearing up the Mexican League like a saint of the stick—his ears were so sensitive he could hear the soft rasping friction of the pitcher’s fingers as he massaged the ball and dug in for a slider, fastball, or change-up. Now he could barely hear the umpire bawling the count in his ear. And his legs. How they ached, how they groaned and creaked and chattered, how they’d gone to fat! He ate too much, that was the problem. Ate prodigiously, ate mightily, ate as if there were a hidden thing inside him, a creature all of jaws with an infinite trailing ribbon of gut. Huevos con chorizo with beans, tortillas, camarones in red sauce, and a twelve-ounce steak for breakfast, the chicken in mole to steady him before afternoon games, a sea of beer to wash away the tension of the game and prepare his digestive machinery for the flaming macbaca-and-pepper salad Asunción prepared for him in the blessed evenings of the home stand.
Five foot seven, one hundred eighty-nine and three-quarters pounds. Hector Heman Jesus y Maria Quesadilla. Little Cheese, they called him. Cheese, Cheese, Cheesus, went up the cry as he stepped in to pinch-hit in some late-inning crisis, Cheese, Cheese, Cheesus, building to a roar until Chavez Ravine resounded as if with the holy name of the Saviour Himself when he stroked one of the clean line-drive singles that were his signature or laid down a bunt that stuck like a finger in jelly. When he fanned, when the bat went loose in the fat brown hands and he went down on one knee for support, they hissed and called him Viejo.
One more season, he tells himself, though he hasn’t played regularly for nearly ten years and can barely trot to first after drawing a walk. One more. He tells Asunción too—One more, one more—as they sit in the gleaming kitchen of their house in Boyle Heights, he with his Carta Blanca, she with her mortar and pestle for grinding the golden, petrified kernels of maize into flour for the tortillas he eats like peanuts. Una más, she mocks. What do you want the Hall of Fame? Hang up your spikes, Hector.
He stares off into space, his mother’s Indian features flattening his own as if the legend were true, as if she really had taken a spatula to him in the cradle, and then, dropping his thick lids as he takes a long slow swallow from the neck of the bottle, he says: Just the other day, driving home from the park, I saw a car on the freeway, a Mercedes with only two seats, a girl in it, her hair out back like a cloud, and you know what the license plate said? His eyes are open now, black as pitted olives. Do you? She doesn’t. Cheese, he says. It said Cheese.
Then she reminds him that Hector Jr. will be twenty-nine next month and that Reina has four children of her own and another on the way. You’re a grandfather, Hector—almost a great-grandfather, if your son ever settled down. A moment slides by, filled with the light of the sad, waning sun and the harsh Yucateco dialect of the radio announcer, Hombres on first and third, one down. Abueh, she hisses, grinding stone against stone until it makes his teeth ache. Hang up your spikes, abueh.
But he doesn’t He can’t. He won’t He’s no grandpa with hair the color of cigarette stains and a blanket over his knees, he’s no toothless old gasser sunning himself in the park—he’s a big-leaguer, proud wearer of the Dodger blue, wielder of stick and glove. How can he get old? The grass is always green, the lights always shining, no clocks or periods or halves or quarters, no punch-in and punch-out: this is the game that never ends. When the heavy hitters have fanned and the pitchers’ arms gone sore, when there’s no joy in Mudville, taxes are killing everybody, and the Russians are raising hell in Guatemala, when the manager paces the dugout like an attack dog, mind racing, searching high and low for the canny veteran to go in and do single combat, there he’ll be—always, always, eternal as a monument—Hector Quesadilla, utility infielder with the .296 lifetime batting average and service with the Reds, Phils, Cubs, Royals, and L.A. Dodgers.
So he waits. Hangs on. Trots his aching legs round the outfield grass before the game, touches his toes ten agonizing times each morning, takes extra batting practice with the rookies and slumping millionaires. Sits. Watches. Massages his feet. Waits through the scourging road trips in the Midwest and along the East Coast, down to muggy Atlanta, across to stormy Wrigley, and up to frigid Candlestick, his gut clenched round an indigestible cud of meat-loaf and instant potatoes and wax beans, through the terrible night games with the alien lights in his eyes, waits at the end of the bench for a word from the manager, for a pat on the ass, a roar, a hiss, a chorus of cheers and catcalls, the marimba pulse of bat striking ball, and the sweet looping arc of the clean base hit.
And then comes a day, late in the season, the homeboys battling for the pennant with the big-stick Braves and the sneaking Jints, when he wakes from honeyed dreams in his own bed that’s like an old friend with the sheets that smell of starch and soap and flowers, and feels the pain stripped from his body as if at the touch of a healer’s fingertips. Usually he dreams nothing, the night a blank, an erasure, and opens his eyes on the agonies of the martyr strapped to a bed of nails. Then he limps to the toilet, makes a poor discolored water, rinses the dead taste from his mouth, and staggers to the kitchen table, where food, only food, can revive in him the interest in drawing another breath. He butters tortillas and folds them into his mouth, spoons up egg and melted jack cheese and frijoles refritos with the green salsa, lashes into his steak as if it were cut from the thigh of Kerensky, the Atlanta relief ace who’d twice that season caught him looking at a full-count fastball with men in scoring position. But not today. Today is different, a sainted day, a day on which sunshine sits in the windows like a gift of the Magi and the chatter of the starlings in the crapped-over palms across the street is a thing that approaches the divine music of the spheres. What can it be?
In the kitchen it hits him: pozole in a pot on the stove, carnitas in the saucepan, the table spread with sweetcakes, buñuelos, and the little marzipan dulces he could kill for. Feliz cumpleaños, Asunción pipes as he steps through the doorway. Her face is lit with the smile of her mother, her mother’s mother, the line of gift givers descendant to the happy conquistadors and joyous Aztecs. A kiss, a duke, and then a knock at the door and Reina, fat with life, throwing her arms around him while her children gobble up the table, the room, their grandfather, with eyes that swallow their faces. Happy birthday, Daddy, Reina says, and Franklin, her youngest, is handing him the gift.
And Hector Jr.?
But he doesn’t have to fret about Hector Jr., his firstborn, the boy with these same great sad eyes who’d sat in the dugout in his Reds uniform when they lived in Cincy and worshiped the pudgy icon of his father until the parish priest had to straighten him out on his hagiography; Hector Jr., who studies English at USC and day and night writes his thesis on a poet his father has never heard of, because, here he is, walking in the front door with his mother’s smile and a store-wrapped gift—a book, of course. Then Reina’s children line up to kiss the abuelo—they’ll be sitting in the box seats this afternoon—and suddenly he knows so much: he will play today, he will hit, oh yes, can there be a doubt? He sees it already. Kerensky, the son of a whore. Extra innings. Koerner or Manfredonia or Brooksie on third. The ball like an orange, a mango, a musk-melon, the clean swipe of the bat, t
he delirium of the crowd, and the gimpy abuelo, a big-leaguer still, doffing his cap and taking a tour of the bases in a stately trot, Sultan for a day.
Could things ever be so simple?
In the bottom of the ninth, with the score tied at 5 and Reina’s kids full of Coke, hotdogs, peanuts, and ice cream and getting restless, with Asunción clutching her rosary as if she were drowning and Hector Jr.’s nose stuck in some book, Dupuy taps him to hit for the pitcher with two down and Fast Freddie Phelan on second. The eighth man in the lineup, Spider Martinez from Muchas Vacas, D. R., has just whiffed on three straight pitches, and Corcoran, the Braves’ left-handed relief man, is all of a sudden pouring it on. Throughout the stadium a hush has fallen over the crowd, the torpor of suppertime, the game poised at apogee. Shadows are lengthening in the outfield, swallows flitting across the face of the scoreboard, here a fan drops into his beer, there a big mama gathers up her purse, her knitting, her shopping bags and parasol, and thinks of dinner. Hector sees it all. This is the moment of catharsis, the moment to take it out.
As Martinez slumps toward the dugout, Dupuy, a laconic, embittered man who keeps his suffering inside and drinks Gelusil like water, takes hold of Hector’s arm. His eyes are red-rimmed and paunchy, doleful as a basset hound’s. Bring the runner in, champ, he rasps. First pitch fake a bunt, then hit away. Watch Booger at third. Uh-huh, Hector mumbles, snapping his gum. Then he slides his bat from the rack— white ash, tape-wrapped grip, personally blessed by the archbishop of Guadalajara and his twenty-seven acolytes—and starts for the dugout steps, knowing the course of the next three minutes as surely as his blood knows the course of his veins. The familiar cry will go up—Cheese, Cheese, Cheesus—and he’ll amble up to the batter’s box, knocking imaginary dirt from his spikes, adjusting the straps of his golf gloves, tugging at his underwear, and fiddling with his batting helmet. His face will be impenetrable. Corcoran will work the ball in his glove, maybe tip back his cap for a little hair grease, and then give him a look of psychopathic hatred. Hector has seen it before. Me against you. My record, my career, my house, my family, my life, my mutual funds and beer distributorship against yours. He’s been hit in the elbow, the knee, the groin, the head. Nothing fazes him. Nothing. Murmuring a prayer to Santa Griselda, patroness of the sun-blasted Sonoran village where he was bom like a heat blister on his mother’s womb, Hector Hemán Jesús y Mariá Quesadilla will step into the batter’s box, ready for anything.
