—What’s up with Marcela? How come she never calls or comes over your house?
—Her? She’s all hot now with her new boyfriend and his truck.
—I hated her in tenth grade. She thought she was so all that.
—What’re you gonna do tonight?
—Nothin’. Watch TV. It’s nothin’ but boring here.
—Me, too.
—Maybe we could go to the mall this weekend.
They spent their time talking secretively on the phone and with a lot of school-girl giggling, while Ricardo worked longer hours and spent more time with his friends away from the house. Esmeralda gained more weight. Ricardo sometimes came home smelling of beer or marijuana, but he always claimed other people were drinking beer and smoking; he never touched marijuana, he said.
Then the baby came. They named him Bill and called him Billy; Billy, not Osvaldo as Berta had hoped. Bill. Who was Bill, she wondered? What sort of name was that? Ricardo was home more for a while. Berta taught the girl how to care for the baby, but she often carried him slung sideways across her hip. Esmeralda took the baby to the mall with her girlfriends, and they sat together on benches and smoked and ate chips and drank soda and kept half an eye on their babies. Berta encouraged the girl to go for walks on the nice days or sit outside in the sun, but Esmeralda seldom did.
More and more Berta took care of the baby because the girl ignored him. Berta told the little one with the large eyes about the pueblo that was home for abuelito and her, and about the hacienda. She sang songs to him that she made up about the horses which ran in the corral from the sheer joy of being alive; of the snug little house; of the trees that the breeze played in as it lulled little babies to sleep; and of the sky filled with a million stars at night like diamonds scattered on black velvet. And the baby listened quietly in her arms and watched her with black understanding eyes.
Before she lost any of the weight from the first pregnancy, Esmeralda was pregnant again, and she wore it as a badge of honor to be pregnant with her second. She spent more time with her friends at their houses or in the living room of Berta’s house, but mostly at the mall, dragging Billy around with her. She was tired frequently, and she hit the baby hard if he cried, or she yanked him by his arm if he was tired or hungry. Berta spoke to her, and the girl told her that the little boy was being bad.
Daisy was the second one. Berta didn’t question the names. One day, soon after the second baby was born, Ricardo spoke to her.
—Don’t have hurt feelings, ‘Amá. We thought about naming her after you, but Berta is a name the Americans don’t use any more. That’s what the nurse said. She laughed when Esmy told her we were thinking about that name. Esmy asked her,—What about Flor?—How about Daisy? the nurse said, and we liked it. It’s not ‘cause we didn’t want to name her after you. You understand, ‘Amá, don’t you?
After a while, everything went back to what it had been, except that the house felt more crowded. Osvaldo loved the babies. Berta loved the babies. Their parents were babies themselves, the two older people agreed; it was just as well that they, Berta and Osvaldo, raised the children.
A few years passed. Ricardo and the girl hardly spoke to one another or spent any time together, but they didn’t fight. They were like boarders, strangers to one another, except that they went into the same room to sleep. They never spoke of moving out.
One morning three years later, Esmeralda came out of the bathroom and went into the bedroom she and Ricardo shared. She yelled at him and they argued behind the closed bedroom door. When he came out, he announced to Berta that Esmeralda was pregnant again.
They named this baby Ricardo Jr. and called him Junior. They moved into the garage, which Osvaldo and Ricardo converted into a beautiful bedroom, not like the draughty garage he and Berta and Ricardo had lived in years before.
When Bill was thirteen, Daisy was twelve and Junior was nine, Ricardo left.
He left a letter for all of them in which he said that he could not stand living there any more. He was going to go up to Ventura to find a better job, maybe go back to school. He would send them an address and send money for the kids. After a few months of silence, postal money orders started arriving. They were never for much, but it was something.
Even after three or four months, he had not sent an address or called. Berta and Osvaldo could not understand until a young man came by the house asking for him. They told him that they didn’t have an address or phone number.
—No wonder, the man said.—Did he tell you he had my sister?
—No, they said.
—She’s fourteen.
—He took her? He stole her? They were horrified.
—No, not really. She wanted to go with him. She thought she loved him. What does a fourteen-year-old girl know?
—Where is she now?
—Back home.
—Is she..? Berta could not bring herself to ask.
—No, thank God.
What did he want with a girl that age?
Berta felt hope drain away. They had come far, far from home. She longed for the simplicity of the little house she had grown up in, with its clean-swept dirt floors and low ceiling and the pungent smell of mesquite wood burning in the stove and the sour smell, almost human, of tortillas and frijoles in the morning; the low door one passed through into the world outside, chickens pecking in the yard and horses coming up to the fence of the corral nickering for food, the dog lying in the weak sunshine of a winter morning and the mist rising off the land to reveal fields and a guava tree and a pomegranate and mountains blue in the distance. Days of hard, sure work were followed by evenings spent promenading in the plaza to cool down and chat with the others of the pueblo. Children ran about, dogs barked, young men spoke quietly to young women and the young women passed on without speaking but with smiles on their lips or expressions of disdain.
Couples disappeared in the crepuscular light. Often there were hurried weddings, and sometimes there were betrayals and wailing and fights under the trees, even shootings and funerals for passionate young men or unfortunate young women or children taken by God. But She was there always to look after them, their sweet, quiet Virgencita, their Dark Madonna. She did not look to the heavens or to a child. She looked down upon all her children with infinite compassion in her eyes and in her hands joined in supplication. She had issued from their land, from la raza—skin of their skin, bone of their bone, of their heart and their soul. She and she alone understood them and gave order and reason to existence. If they sustained loss, endured great sadness or enjoyed great happiness and birth, it was all in a world under her watchful eye.
But here, in the United States, life was too busy, too noisy, too fast. It was too much. There was no center, just a swirling storm of things and noise and obligations and papers spinning around nothing. Her son had been torn away from her, and she had no resources with which to call him back. Her Virgén was so small here, so distant, without power. And the other one, the one here in this country with her white skin, She looked to Heaven or at the Son in her arms. This Virgin didn’t know, though maybe she tried; Berta thought maybe She didn’t care about her brown-skinned children. No, God forgive her, She must. Maybe She, too, got lost or confused in the fast pace and the noise.
Esmeralda and the children stayed on with Berta and Osvaldo. Esmeralda was hysterical for weeks, crying night after night like some wounded animal. Berta tried to comfort her, but soon she realized that the girl did not want to get over Ricardo’s leaving. At first, she spoke to her friends often on the phone, crying and cursing him, but soon the friends didn’t call and when she called them, they seemed to have something pressing to do. Her parents moved away to a condominium in Santa Clarita. The children could visit, of course, and play on the swings and seesaws in the small play area in front of the complex, but there was not enough room for them to actually stay there. They sent Esmeralda money regularly.
And then one day about three months later, Esmeralda h
erself disappeared. She had been going out a couple of evenings a week, alone, but Berta was sure she was meeting someone. Berta expected something to happen, but not that the girl would leave entirely, deserting the children with no word. When they asked, Berta lied and told them that their mother had gone to Mexico to visit her grandparents for a while. She would be back.
“He doesn’t want Ricardo’s children,” Esmeralda explained to Berta when she finally did return. She explained that she had found a new man. “You understand. I need to start life over again, too. I want to have his babies. I won’t ever stop loving these kids,” she said when tears started in Berta’s eyes. “I’ll always be there for them. I’ll give you money. I’ll come see them every week.”
For a while, Esmeralda was good to her word. She came one afternoon each week and spent time until dinnertime in the house. Bill and Daisy often had homework to do and didn’t spend much time with her. Junior sat with her, answered her questions in monosyllables, but he, too, had homework. She offered to help him. They sat on the sofa and spread his books and papers out on the coffee table. Sometimes he sat back in moody silence, and she grew irritated with him. She felt sorry for herself.
“I came here to see you, and this is how you are? What a way is that to treat your mom?” she asked, but he didn’t respond. If he could have found the words, he would have told her that she didn’t have a big place in his heart; she was a visitor. As long as he had his abuelita and abuelito…
Esmeralda did as well by them as she could, Berta thought, but she was still a girl who didn’t really know anything. Berta knew she would stop coming around if her children ignored her, and she did. Berta didn’t blame her and neither did Osvaldo. He was glad to have children in the house to sit with him in the evenings at the kitchen table when he got home from work and had his dinner. He listened to their stories about school with wonderment and real interest, eager to hear about their friends and what they were learning, ready to laugh when they told him about yelling teachers or fights, ready to have his faith in them confirmed by attendance awards or good grades, ready to pass out dollar bills to hard workers. And until each of them reached middle school, Berta walked them to school in the rain and the heat.
Two years after Esmeralda left, Osvaldo began experiencing the pain “down there,” and numerous trips to the clinic followed, and hours of sitting in waiting rooms and tests and weeks of waiting, and then the horrible pronouncement of cancer. In spite of the pills that made him sick and the vomiting and the blood, he went to work and hid the pain for as long as he could, and he refused to admit the fact that he was growing weaker by the day. But the day came when he had to quit and stay home.
He grew thinner, able to sit only for short periods of time and then on cushions. He spent more and more time lying on the sofa or in bed. He worried what would happen to them, but Berta told him to rest, she would find work. Hadn’t she always kept a nice house? Couldn’t she speak to her friends who cleaned houses for the white women? She did, and because she was pleasant and a hard worker, she found plenty of work. He could take his pills and rest.
In the evenings Berta returned late. She always feared the worst, but often she found him lying awake in their bed surrounded by the children. Daisy made dinner for them all. Bill sat with him and read to him from La Opinión. Junior sat silently on the edge of the bed and stared at him as though to will him back to good health, and then to prepare himself for what was sure to come. He didn’t touch him unless his grandfather took his hand in his own. “It’s okay, mi’ jo,” his grandfather said to him often. “I’ll be back at work in no time.”
Even at the end, Osvaldo talked about getting up and going to work, his poor face so drawn, his body so wasted away. Berta caressed his forehead and told him to rest; he had worked hard all his lifetime, and it was time to relax.
She returned one day to find the police and the coroner at the house, and she knew. She took the little money she had been saving for this occasion and buried him at the Mission cemetery. Neighbors helped. It was almost like being home again, the way they offered help without being asked, the way they came around with a few dollars here and there, food, and a sympathetic word. The women she cleaned for were saddened and some gave her extra money. Of course there was no way to get in touch with Ricardo.
That was four years ago. Nowadays, Bill is on his own and working, Daisy is on her own and going to college, and Junior is in high school. Berta has saved a little money during those four years. In a couple of years Junior will be through with high school. She can sell the house and move back to Mexico. She will take Osvaldo’s body with her and bury him at home. She will live with her sister. She will be considered rich there. Her journey away from home will be over. She will be back in the land she knows, whose pace and tempo, whose colors and smells are still in her blood. She will be back in the embrace and care of her sweet dark Madonna.
SATURDAY MORNING II
CHAPTER 8
Rickie arrives at the field in time for the warm-up. His teammates greet him, but no one comes over to him. They call from where they stand in the field or near the batter’s box.
“Hey, fool.”
“You ready, Rickie?”
“I told you he’d be here on time, Coach.”
“What’s goin’ on, Rickie?”
“Take second, Rickie, and warm up,” the coach calls to him from home plate. Rickie keeps his head down as he runs out onto the field, not wanting the coach to see the dark circles under his eyes.
“All right, you guys, let’s take some infield. Bobby, take the outfielders and hit some flies. Jose, you and Angel and Frankie go to the batting cage. No screwing around,” he yells at their backs as they run to the cage to be first. “Practice stroking the ball. Swing level.”
“Yeah, Angel, practice your stroke, fool,” someone from bench calls, and the boys next to him laugh.
Rickie watches the three of them run for the batting cage, elbowing each other out of the way, like kids.
The infielders wait for Coach Vega. He hits an easy ground ball to Rickie, who handles it cleanly and throws on to first. One for the shortstop. Third. First. One for the catcher. Third. The ball doesn’t come up for the third baseman but runs under his glove into left.
“Did you eat too much of your mamá’s good cooking last night, Beto?” Coach calls to him. “You gotta get down for those. Okay, turn the double play.”
He hits to Rickie, harder this time, just to the right field side of second base. He gets there quickly, takes the ball on a low bounce and shovels it to the shortstop covering. Coach Vega looks over at the coach of the opposing team. When they make eye contact, Rickie’s coach shrugs and the other coach shakes his head in wonderment.
There are no dugouts at the field. The team members sit on benches behind the fence. In back of them, on both sides of the field, there are bleachers for the fans. Since this is a semi-final game, the bleachers on both sides fill early. Rickie’s team, the Braves, sits on the first base side. The opposing team, the Red Sox, sits on the third base side, and the players have to look into the morning sun. The few Red Sox players who are finished with their warm-up sit on the bench with the bills of their caps pulled low. Spectators shade their eyes with a hand or, if they’re lucky, a piece of cardboard they find near the snack bar.
By the third inning, the Braves are ahead by a run. Rickie gets on by an error his first time up, ducking a high hard fastball. The ball hits his bat and rolls out to the shortstop, who charges and throws in the dirt to first, the ball skipping by the first baseman and rolling all the way to the fence. The runner in front of Rickie, who walked, comes all the way home.
The game moves into the later innings. The boy with the fastball loses the plate and walks in two runs. The Red Sox change pitchers. At his next turn at the plate, Rickie hits a fly ball deep to right. The right fielder goes back, turns the wrong way, turns back and catches the ball. He holds the glove and ball aloft in triumph. Rickie trots
back to the bench.
“Hey, ese, good hit. That dude’s lucky, dude!” says a heavy-set young man seated in the stands behind the team. He wears dark sunglasses that cause red indentations along his temples to his ears on his shaved head. He is dressed in a white over-sized T-shirt and creased khakis. He often attends an inning or two of a game before wandering off. He is usually drunk.
“C’mon, de la Torre, tell us a story,” he yells at the next batter. “If you’re brown, you’re down, ese,” he calls to no one. “Where the hell are Sandra and Rosie?” he asks the two other young men with him. They, too, have shaved heads and wear large, white T-shirts and black sunglasses. They don’t respond. Instead, they stand and head for the other side.
“Hey, where’re you mensos going? Sandra and Rosie are going to be here. Was it something I said?” he asks and laughs.
“We’re going to find Hector,” one of them calls back.
“Hector the Collector,” he says.
The Braves head for the field.
“What’s the pitcher’s name?” he calls to the three players sitting on the bench. Rickie hesitates before he takes the field. “Hey, what’s the pitcher’s name?”
“Gabe,” Rickie calls up to him.
“Abe? C’mon, Abe, honest Abe, get the save.”
“Gabe,” Rickie calls.
“Gabe?”
“Gabe. Gabriel,” he says, pronouncing it as a Spanish name.
“Oh, Gabe. My bad. C’mon, Gabe, get the save,” he yells. “I’m an asshole mother-fucker,” he says more to himself, but loudly enough to be heard. “Where’re Sandra and Rosie? What the fuck?” he says as though speaking to someone seated near him, though no one is.
“Hey, man, I’ve got little kids here!” a father yells from a few rows above. The father stares warily at the back of his head, but the young man doesn’t turn around. He sits hunched over and drops spit on the board at his feet. In a moment he gets up without looking back or saying anything and heads for the other side. People seated around the man who spoke up give him nods of approval. Everyone relaxes.
Rickie Trujillo Page 6
