Rickie Trujillo

by Nicholas Bradley

  Rickie takes the field and surveys the stands as he waits for the first Red Sox hitter of the inning. He looked the players over earlier and tried to find the cop’s brother. He thinks it might be the shortstop, the kid coming to bat now. He looks serious and intent on the game, as though there isn’t much in life that is fun or funny. Rickie knows that he looks the same way to other people. Often adults whom he doesn’t know, hasn’t ever seen before, fans or parents of other players, tell him to lighten up and enjoy himself. He just looks at them when they say that.

  He scans the crowd in search of the cop but doesn’t find him, at the same time relieved and disappointed that he is not there. The cop has to be working. He isn’t the kind of guy to miss his little brother’s game if he doesn’t have to. Rickie feels a surge of regret and self-pity, but he will not name the cause. Instead, he looks at the faces in the crowd again. There are a lot of fans his age and younger, brothers and sisters of the players or friends from school. Nice kids, quiet, not trouble-makers or kids who are very well known; kids who have gotten through middle school without calling attention to themselves, who will get through high school in the same way and then go on to junior college. Rickie envies them their invisibility, even resents their ability to get through without ever being noticed or remembered. Where will they end up? In jobs at hospitals or nursing homes; as teachers’ aides, as secretaries or paralegals. They will come and go and no one will know them very well, just like Rickie’s brother Bill and his sister Daisy. Rickie feels the fear of anonymity shiver through him. He wants to be elusive but not unknown, like James Bond, smooth, known for his artfulness in subduing villains and manufacturing escapes, universally admired by beautiful women and men alike.

  So far, it is all just a stupid daydream. People know him, all right, but it’s because trouble seems to find him. Like the time with the car. Or with Maltrey. He hadn’t wanted those things to happen. They just did. He doesn’t even remember very well what exactly happened, even minutes later. What did he say to Maltrey? Why? What did the teacher actually say? And he had to ask Alex exactly what happened when they took the car. When Alex told him, Rickie listened in a sort of dumbfounded admiration.

  “I did that, fool?” he asks. “I did that? What was I thinking?”

  “I don’t know, you idiot,” Alex says with a wry laugh, “but we gotta stay off that street. That fool will kill us if he ever sees us again.”

  Rickie shakes himself out of his reverie. He looks at the other people in the stands. Parents and relatives of the players and old men come to watch the kids play in the cooler morning. And on the top row now, Rickie’s sister Daisy sits all by herself.

  What is she doing here? When did she get here? She didn’t tell him she was coming. He is angry about that but quietly glad that she has come to see him play. He looks for Bill. No sign of him. Daisy sees that he notices her, sees also the glance in search of someone else. She waves bravely to Rickie, who nods almost imperceptibly to her and turns his attention to the batter.

  Rickie handles everything hit his way easily and effortlessly. In his last at-bat, he hits a double in the gap between right and center, driving in another run and scoring himself when the next batter singles. The kid coaching third tries to hold him up, but Rickie knows that most players don’t have accurate arms and that most catchers can’t move very well. The ball is thrown to the first base side of home and the catcher doesn’t get back in time to tag him out. He scores standing up.

  “Rickie. Pay attention to the third base coach, amigo,” Coach Vega says when Rickie comes back to the bench. The boy nods without speaking.

  “Let’s talk soon,” Coach says to him. “After the season. I want to talk with you about your future, okay? About college. You can do it, mi’ jo, but you have to give it your all. You have to start now. Concentrate on getting good grades. Work on your skills.”

  “Okay, Coach,” Rickie says. He wants to please the man, but how can he do it when he has already lost so much enthusiasm for the game? Coach can see it in the slump of his shoulders and his expressionless face.

  “Let’s talk seriously about the future before…” He wants to add, “before it’s too late,” but the talk ends when the weakest batter on the team gets a base hit. The Braves win the game easily. The players are jubilant, shouting and high-fiving. Even Rickie high-fives a player, the shortstop, Manuel.

  “Okay. Everyone gather around,” the coach calls. They all stand around the first baseline. “Tomorrow is Sunday. No practice, no game, but I thought I might come out mid-morning and hit some flies, give you a little infield, pitch some batting practice. Nothing serious. Just easy. What do you say?” He is speaking to the whole team, but he is looking at Rickie. “I’ll even take you for donuts afterwards. On me. Is it a yes?”

  A number of the team members are enthusiastic about it. Rickie nods to the coach. “I’ll be there if you’re buying.”

  “I am,” the coach says. He is relieved and happy. “All right, you guys, hit the snack stand before it closes.”

  “Nice game, dude,” the left fielder calls to Rickie as he crosses the field toward the snack bar. Others call to him, too.

  “Hey, man, good game.”

  “Next week the finals.”

  “Yeah, you, too,” he calls.

  Rickie stands facing the bleachers, waiting for his sister.

  CHAPTER 9

  You were great,” Daisy says.

  “What are you doing here?” Rickie says, but he doesn’t mean it the way it comes out. He sees the hurt come into her eyes.

  “Can’t I come to see my little brother play baseball?” She brings her hand to her mouth as she speaks, a gesture she still makes unconsciously. She began doing it years ago when she had braces.

  “Yeah, sure,” he says, uncertain what’s to happen next. She has climbed gingerly down the bleachers and now stands looking at him, holding a hand up to shield her eyes from the sun. She is about the same height as Rickie.

  “C’mon. I’ll take you home to change. Then we can go get something to eat. I’m starving.”

  He looks at her more closely as they walk across the field toward the parking lot. Her thick, wiry hair is pulled back into a ponytail, exposing her forehead and her round face. The acne has cleared up. She is wearing a little make-up. She is becoming prettier, thinner than he remembered, but her lack of confidence shows in her face and gestures. She always looks ready to bolt and run away, like a wild deer.

  “What?” she asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “You don’t want to go?”

  “Yeah, I do. I… I haven’t seen you for a while.”

  “No, I know. I’ve been working, mi’ jo. Going to school. I don’t have much time. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I was only saying.” He doesn’t want to say anything more, afraid that he will upset her. She has always been easy to bring to frustrated tears.

  They get into her grey Nissan, old now, but clean. Of course she keeps it washed and vacuumed on the inside. The paint on the driver’s side of the hood has flaked off in a large patch. She starts it and turns on the air conditioner.

  “I don’t know how you stand the heat, mi’ jo. It’s just barely eleven and I’m sweating.”

  “I don’t really feel it.”

  “You must have ice inside you,” she says and laughs. “Did you want to take a friend to lunch, Junior? I just got paid.”

  “They pay you good at your job?”

  “As a teacher’s aide? It’s not bad because I work with Special Ed. kids, but I don’t have much left over after bills every month.” He glances over at her. She tightens the muscles around her mouth and looks inward, as though puzzling how to change this state of affairs. “I thought you might want to take a friend,” she says, emerging from her thoughts and relaxing her facial muscles.

  “No, no friends. How about your boyfriend?”

  “What boyfriend? I haven’t got time for a boyfriend.” She laughs ruefully
.

  They drive slowly through the residential area to their grandmother’s house.

  People are still out in front of their houses finishing the morning’s work. Soon it will be too hot. Cars have been washed, lawns mowed and watered, yards raked and sprinkled to keep the dust down. Men lean deep into engine compartments of cars parked at the curb or disappear up to the shins beneath cars up on jacks or blocks. Vatos in pressed T-shirts or undershirts, some with bandanas around their foreheads or necks, stand in the diminishing shade at the front of a house and raise their cans of beer to Daisy. She acknowledges them by turning her head only slightly and giving them a little smile. They call something to her, but the rolled-up windows and the air conditioner blanket the words.

  “Take a shower and then we’ll go. Maybe we’ll get abuelita to go with us. Dress nice,” she adds as they get out of the car.

  After he has showered and dressed, he finds Daisy and their grandmother sitting at the kitchen table. Berta only works a few hours on Saturdays. The back door is open and Berta fans herself with the cardboard backing from a writing tablet. They look at him when he comes into the room. He has put on a clean white T-shirt, khaki pants, and his black Nikes.

  “What happened to that nice shirt I gave you for your birthday?” Daisy asks.

  “I got it. I wear it sometimes,” he lies.

  “Can you wear it now? You look… like everybody else in that,” she says, holding back.

  “No. It needs to be ironed.”

  His grandmother just looks at him and says nothing.

  “She’s not going. It’s too hot for her outside.” Daisy turns to her grandmother and tells her in Spanish, “They have air-conditioning. You can get cool there.” The grandmother only shakes her head. Once Daisy suggested that she get air-conditioning in the house.

  “Who pays?” her grandmother asked.

  The restaurant stands on a busy street corner, a little place with concrete benches and tables outside under faded green and red metal umbrellas. No matter that the owner hoses down the outside walls and tiled roof, and sweeps the wet benches and tables every evening, there is a permanent griminess to the place from the dirt and exhaust of the intersection. Inside, the restaurant has the gamy, sour odor of menudo and the pervasive reek of heated lard.

  It is the only restaurant they go to in the neighborhood. Bill and Daisy might go to other, better places near their apartments or near college, but when they return home, they come here. They have come here as long as anyone can remember. The previous owner had been a friend of their grandfather’s.

  Daisy and Rickie sit inside in the cool, heavy air blown into the room by the swamp cooler. They eat without speaking for a while. Rickie eats ravenously with a flat, otherworldly look on his face, forking in the food, hardly chewing before swallowing. Daisy watches him.

  “Slow down, mi’ jo. No one’s chasing you,” she says.

  “I’m hungry,” he answers. She eats slowly, in small bites. After every bite of her taco, she wipes her mouth. When the tacos are gone, she eats her refried beans, then the rice, and then finishes her soda. She takes a stick of gum and a mirror from her purse. She tears the gum in half, placing half next to Rickie’s soda. Before unwrapping her half, she holds a mirror to her mouth and inspects her teeth. She puts the mirror away, unwraps her gum, and puts it in her mouth.

  Rickie finishes his meal much before her, and he watches her with her food, the mirror and the gum. Her meticulousness, her fear of being wrong or laughed at, has always driven him crazy. He wants to yell at her, to tell her it won’t do any good, but he doesn’t really know what he means.

  She takes his tray and her own to the trash receptacle. She is wearing a white blouse, jean shorts and tennis shoes. He watches her as she walks away and back toward him. Her rear end is round and shapely in the tight jeans, and although her blouse doesn’t accentuate her breasts, it doesn’t hide them either.

  “What?” she asks when she catches him looking at her.

  “How come you don’t have a boyfriend?”

  “I told you. I don’t have time,” she says, but she blushes because he has noticed her. “Guys are…guys are stupid. No, not stupid. Immature. It’s all or nothing with them. And right now. I hope you’re not like that with your girlfriend.”

  He thinks about saying he doesn’t have one. “I’m not.”

  “You’re a…a gentleman with her?”

  He laughs. “She’s…she’s not like you. Maybe she doesn’t want me to be a gentleman.”

  “Oh, Junior, you could have a nice girl.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  “Well, who’s going to tell you about girls if I don’t.”

  “I don’t need you telling me about girls. I know about them.”

  They fall silent.

  “How are you doing in school?” she asks finally. He knew she would get to this topic. She always does.

  “All right.”

  “C’mon, Junior. What does that mean? Are you passing everything?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you getting along with your teachers?”

  “Yeah. No problems.”

  Rickie can tell she’s getting frustrated with him, but she presses on with her attempts to guide him.

  “People like us, Junior, no one wants us here. If we aren’t working in the fields or in the sweatshops downtown or doing day labor like our grandparents, they don’t want us.”

  “Abuelito talked with you, too, didn’t he?” he interrupts.

  “Yes, he did. But listen for a minute,” she says, a little deflated but clearly feeling her role as a big sister and surrogate mother intensely today.

  “You’re what? Seventeen? And almost a man. You’ve changed, grown more serious. It’s important that you understand.”

  Rickie doesn’t speak. He is trying not to grow impatient with her lecture.

  “What is abuelita going to live on when she gets too old to work? She has a little saved up, but no Social Security, no pension. Who’s going to care about her? The people she works for? Not a chance. They’ll just get someone else.”

  Rickie lets his eyes wander as she talks. First he reads the menu above the order window. It has been painted on the wall in black ornamental writing against a white background. Red and green vines, with chiles of the opposite color dangling from them, encircle the writing. A beautiful señorita with long black hair and in a traditional long dress with red and green piping dances gaily as she holds a sombrero above her head. A señor sleeps with his head on his knees against an adobe wall. A sleepy burro and a saguaro cactus stand off to the side.

  Rickie’s attention is drawn to a fly buzzing in the corner of the window. He takes a napkin and traps it, pinches it until he feels its body pop. He drops the napkin on the table. Daisy falls silent before taking the napkin gingerly by one corner and throwing it away in the trash. The two men sitting across from them watch her. One shrugs and nods his approval of her to his friend.

  “Junior,” she says quietly after she sits down again, “you don’t want to end up on the street or with your homeboys just hanging out.” “Homeboys” sounds like it doesn’t fit her mouth right, and he smiles. She passes it off and continues. “You’ve got to get your education, a college degree or something that will give you a good job. You’ve got to show them that you’re worth something. Even so, it’s going to be hard.” This last statement she says almost under her breath, as though speaking to herself.

  While she speaks, she leans forward with her hands flat on the table. Her earnestness makes him smile, but if she keeps it up, as she often does, he will grow tired of it and irritated.

  “Do you study this stuff in college?” he asks.

  “What stuff?”

  “About what people think of us. About…us. Mexicans and stuff.”

  “Yes, I took a class called Chicano Studies. We had to read books and talk about issues in class. Sometimes it got pretty wild. For a while I joined a political group, but I q
uit going to the meetings after a while.”

  “How come you quit?”

  “They had problems with women. With validating…with making women feel important or even equal. I got tired of fighting with them.”

  After a moment she says, “You get my point, right? They never wanted us to stay here and they still don’t. The only way to win is get your education.”

  “I know,” he says. He is ready to leave, but because she makes no movement at all when he pushes back his chair, he knows she has something else to tell him.

  “I get scared sometimes,” she says and looks out the window as though the source of her fear resides out there. At that moment, a mangy dog lopes by with its tongue out. It does not hesitate to cross the street, as if some destination still far off calls insistently. Traffic is light. An old pickup loaded with a rusty water heater, a washing machine and other metal to be recycled, swerves to avoid the dog. Daisy inhales noisily as she watches the dog stop just long enough not to be hit and then move on. Three men are crowded inside the pickup. The one riding shotgun yells at the dog and laughs loudly.

  Daisy looks back at Rickie. “Do you ever get scared?”

  “Of what? Of being hit by a car?”

  “Don’t joke. I’m trying to tell you something serious,” she says looking down at her hands on the table. “Not of being hit by a car. It’s just that sometimes I feel very alone. I wish I had someone. Not a boyfriend or a husband, just someone to turn to, to hold me and tell me that everything’s gonna be okay, to take over when I get tired. Like a mom.” She looks up at him. “Maybe you’re not like me,” she says, resigned to that possibility. She sits quietly for a while, building up courage to say what she is going to say next.

  “I found my father. I’ve been writing to him.”

  Rickie doesn’t understand. He stares at her uncomprehendingly for a moment.

  “Our father. Ricardo.”

  It’s like a punch to the abdomen.

  “Why? Why would you do that? Because you’re scared?”