“So, ‘Amá,” he says, “how have you been?”
“Things have changed and I have gotten by,” she replies. She does not look up from her food.
He waits, but nothing more is forthcoming. “That’s it? Nothing more?”
“What would you have me say?” She looks at him now. “Your father died and there was no one but these children and a few neighbors. You, his only son, were not there.”
“I didn’t know,” he complains. “Do you think I chose not to be there? I loved my father.”
“You made your choice. You left in a shameful way, my son. You gave in to what is lowest in you.”
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
“You will listen, if only for one last time.” She stares into his eyes until he can hold her gaze no longer. He has become a stranger.
“Your father was a man of great heart and pride. No man could say of him that he did not take responsibility for his family. No man could say that he was lazy. No man could say of him that he permitted circumstance to make him less--”
“And I am not my father. Is that what you are trying to say? I know that! But what is his greatness doing for him now? He’s dead, worked to death in a country that was not his, that had no use for him except to use him up.”
“But he was a man!” she says forcefully. A few people at the order counter turn around to look. She looks down at her hands in apology. “You must be a man as well,” she says quietly.
“I am a man. This is useless. We’re getting nowhere. I came down to see you --”
“Why now? Why not before? Why not when I needed you?”
He sighs resignedly. “Life is more…complex. Your life, Papá’s life, were different. You brought rules here from a simpler time and place.” He pauses. “I… couldn’t come home before. I admit it, ‘Amá, I did some things I’m not proud of. Not just the girl. Other things, too. But I have tried to make them right, things you don’t know about. I want to make things right with you and my children.”
“Why now?” she says without softness.
“Daisy has written me letters. She is worried about Junior. I want to take him back with me.”
Berta waves a hand as though brushing a fly away. She sits back in her chair.
“So now you are ready to be a father. As you wish. He is your son. I cannot keep him if he wants to go. Make sure, my son, that this is not just another of your crazy ideas like the fourteen-year-old, which you learn to regret later on.”
He looks as though he is about to snap back at her for mentioning the girl, but doesn’t. He looks out the window.
“Look at this place, ‘Amá.”
She looks around the little restaurant. “What am I supposed to see?”
“Not just the restaurant. The whole place, outside. Trash, dirt, the walls are written on, windows broken, the apartment buildings are dangerous, the streets are dangerous. Gangs all over the place. Nobody cares or does anything about it. Look, just look.”
Just then, two teenaged boys walk by. Each wears a T-shirt a size too big and jeans belted low on the rear end. Their heads are shaven, and they wear sunglasses on the back of their heads. Folded blue bandanas hang from back pockets. They walk slowly, stiffly, eyes glancing at their feet, to the street, ahead, at their reflection in the window, and down and to the side, in a constant play of self-consciousness, arrogance and wariness. They see the man and the old lady looking at them from the restaurant window as they pass, and they stare back for a dangerous moment. Ricardo shifts his eyes away to watch a young woman in the crosswalk who is looking over her shoulder and extending her hand and telling a little boy to hurry. Berta does not look away. A passing car honks and the boys turn quickly.
“Whether you want to admit it or not, these are Junior’s friends. Maybe not these gangsters particularly, but ones just like them. Daisy says he’s already been in trouble. He’ll keep on getting into trouble until he goes to jail or worse. He needs to get out of here. Up there the schools are better. I’ll be able to watch after him. He needs a man in his life, someone to guide him.”
“And you are that man,” she says without bitterness.
“I have become one.”
“Why now? Why do you want him now? School is not out yet. It is almost summer.”
“That’s the reason. It’s almost summer.” He stops; he has finally heard what she has said. “His school isn’t out yet?”
“No. Another two weeks.”
“Oh, I thought he might be finished. Friday was the last day for schools in Ventura.” His disappointment is obvious, but then he brightens. “Okay, two weeks then. I’ll come back. My apartment is near the beach. He might be able to get a job where I work--”
“Where do you work?”
“I am the assistant manager at a store in Ventura. Klein’s. Have you heard of it?”
Berta shakes her head. “What is it?”
“A place that sells affordable furniture.”
“Is the job good?”
“It pays good. Good benefits.”
Berta sits back in her chair. She is willing to wait and see.
When he says he wants to see Billy in Pacoima, Berta’s only comment is that Billy is still very angry with him, even after all of these years.
“I just want to see where he lives,” is Ricardo’s only comment.
They drive on surface streets past the junkyards and the huge holes in the earth from which crushed rock and gypsum and lime were once extracted, and which later have become landfills or simply remain deep and empty craters fenced off to the public; past the panderias and carnecercias and the little hole-in-the-wall restaurants advertising mariscos, and the hundreds of anonymous little store fronts that come and go. They drive toward Sylmar, one town bleeding into the next with no noticeable change. The day is warming and becoming smoggy. Shapes become indistinct, too bright in sunlight whitened by the haze. Ricardo squints behind sunglasses from the glare, from the acid hanging in the air.
They drive without speaking until they reach Bill’s neighborhood. Berta gives Ricardo directions onto his street.
Bill lives in an apartment building behind a tall, black wrought iron fence. On the other side of the fence, a small strip of tired grass runs up to the beige stucco. A big area of the lower portion of the street-facing facade has been painted a greyer shade of beige, but ghosts of black graffiti are still visible beneath the paint.
The gate is locked. Ricardo rattles it and looks hopefully at the windows facing the street. There is movement behind one of them.
“Billy,” Ricardo calls. “Bill.”
He stands there for some minutes, shakes the gate again, but no one looks out a window or comes out of a doorway. Ricardo turns back toward the car.
“I’ll try calling him,” he says after he gets in.
Berta says nothing. She watches him turn the fan on high and sit back to let the cold air blow on his face and throat and chest as he dials the number. In a moment he says: “Voicemail. I got his voicemail. I left him a message last night that I would probably be here only today. Do you think he’ll call?”
Berta looks up at the windows of the apartment building.
“Maybe. It would be better for you to talk with him face to face.”
When they return to Berta’s house, Rickie is standing at the open front door with his arms folded. He watches the man get out of the car and stand with the door open, looking over the roof of the car at him.
“Hola, mi’ jo,” Ricardo says.
Rickie tries to process this stranger before him. Clean-shaven, in his early forties, his face round and mournful, hair cut short and neat. He wears a pale blue wash-and-wear short sleeve shirt and black pants. Rickie waits for the man to speak.
“I come to see you play,” Ricardo says finally. “Are you playing today?”
“It’s Sunday. We don’t play Sunday.” Rickie is disdainful. Suddenly, he remembers why he should have gotten up earlier—Coach Vega talked ye
sterday about a light practice, hitting and catching some flies. He was going to buy doughnuts for the ones who showed up. With jealousy directed at the ones who did turn out and regret at the missed opportunity to hang out with Coach and listen to his baseball stories and his philosophies about growing up and the neighborhood and being Latino, Rickie feels even greater anger at this man who he realizes is his father and has shown up out of the blue.
“Why’re you here? Are you in trouble? Running from the cops?”
“You don’t need to know my story. Don’t worry about it,” Ricardo says. The tone is supposed to be tough and indifferent, but it sounds childish, as though he’s taking part in some schoolyard argument.
“I wanted to see my family,” he says in a conciliatory manner. “I’ve made some mistakes, mi’ jo. I wanted to see what I could do to change things.”
“Are you going to stay down here?”
“No, I’m going back up.”
Rickie relaxes a little at this news.
“I want you to go with me,” Ricardo adds.
“You want me to go with you? I don’t even know you. You don’t know me.” He looks to his grandmother for support, for an acknowledgement of the outrageousness of this idea, but she sits in the car and stares straight ahead.
“What do you need to know? I’m your father.” Anger has crept back into his voice. “It’s better up there,” he begins again. “Cleaner. Nicer.”
Rickie struggles to understand the significance of his father’s words. “What would I do up there?”
“Go to school. Play baseball. I don’t know, the same things you do here.”
“What about my friends?”
“What about them? You’ll make new ones up there.”
“What about your fourteen-year-old girlfriend? Don’t you have any babies with her?” The anger rises up in Rickie’s throat like choking bile. “You’ll run off again when you can’t take it no more.”
They are too distant, too loud, speaking to one another from the street to the house.
“I was a lot younger then, mi’ jo,” Ricardo says softly, approaching his son. “Things are different now. Yolanda went back to her family years ago. I don’t have any babies to take care of. I got a good job and a nice apartment near the beach. Things are good up there. You’d like it. And it would take you away from this.”
“What’s wrong with this? This is my ‘hood. I don’t want to leave it.” As though to make his point, like it is the established rhythm and melody of the neighborhood, a plane takes off and roars loudly overhead. Ricardo says nothing for a moment.
“What do you want?” Rickie asks when the sound has diminished. “Show up out of nowhere, some stranger I don’t even know, and expect me to jump around like a little kid and say, ‘Daddy, daddy!’ No way, dude. You’re a ghost to me. I don’t know you. I’m not going,” Rickie says.
“We’ll see.”
“I’m not going.” Rickie turns and goes inside. When Ricardo follows him inside a few seconds later, he finds Rickie standing by the sofa on his cell phone.
“I’ll meet you there in a few minutes,” he says. He looks defiantly at his father.
“I’m coming back after school is out. We’ll talk about it then and decide,” Ricardo says, but doubt plays across his face.
“I’ve already made my decision. I’m not going. Go back up to Ventura and your lonely apartment and your job.”
Rickie walks past him back out the front door. Ricardo grabs his arm.
“Don’t!” Rickie yells, turning to face Ricardo and stare with deadly fearlessness into the man’s eyes. “Don’t put your fucking hands on me!”
Berta reads the look in the boy’s eyes and watches his hands tighten into fists; Ricardo lets him go. Father and son are strangers to one another. Ricardo doesn’t know him; Junior doesn’t consider himself the man’s son. Berta watches as a new revelation takes over her son’s features, a revelation so saddening and profound that it roots the man where he stands at the front door: he really doesn’t want to know this boy. The boy is too distant, too unknown, and what he does see in his son he doesn’t like.
And Ricardo doesn’t have a home here any longer. He walked out on them years ago and his family is gone from him. He isn’t this boy’s father in any meaningful way and never will be. His older son wants nothing to do with him. His younger son is unknown to him, a surly boy with a shaved head and a cold face. Maybe his daughter cares about him, maybe Daisy…or is she just curious? Berta knows about the letters and phone calls between father and daughter. Will Daisy eventually close off to him, too, when she realizes he is not the person she has envisioned? Will the letters stop? Will they become cards with empty words on them and then nothing at all?
Berta looks down at her hands in despair. She has no answers for them. From the time of Osvaldo’s death, she has wanted to be able to depend on Ricardo and her grandchildren to help her navigate life in the United States and in Los Angeles, but Ricardo was gone until now and her grandchildren barely hold on with jobs and school and haven’t the time for anything else.
Ricardo turns as Junior crosses the little front yard, opens the gate and lets it slam behind him. He watches his son march angrily away, and then he looks around the neighborhood. Berta looks, too. Sunday. Quiet. The sky white and diffuse. Another stifling hot day.
“What will you do?” Berta asks.
“I will see Daisy and then go back up there; I can’t stand this heat.”
Ricardo looks down at what he is wearing. “I should have worn something different, better,” he says to no one as he smooths his shirt. “She would have liked that, like one of the handsome men in the novelas.” He looks at his mother to see if she understands. She does. She remembers going to Santa Monica one time when Osvaldo was still alive, years ago. They had driven the old pick-up to the beach to escape heat like today. While Osvaldo talked and joked with the men fishing off the pier, she watched the lost men who walked the pier that Sunday afternoon and looked longingly at the parading families and the couples eating outside at little tables and holding hands and laughing. Her son reminds her of those men—rootless and unloved. Her heart aches for him: he had wanted Junior to save him from himself. What had he been thinking!
CHAPTER 15
They are sitting on the bleachers—Alex, Dennis and Oscar—when Rickie gets there. Rickie sees the coach’s pick-up leaving the parking lot. Players crowd together in the box and in the front seat.
“Your coach was just here,” Alex says. “He asked about you, if you were coming. I told him I didn’t know.”
Regretfully, Rickie watches the pick-up turn and disappear.
“I should have been here earlier. He’s taking them to go get doughnuts.”
“You didn’t go to church either?” Dennis asks. “Tony must a been the only one.”
When Rickie doesn’t respond, Alex says, “I didn’t want to go. Too freakin’ hot. My mom took my little sisters.”
“Why they want to go there anyway?” Oscar says. “All’s they hear is the same stuff every week, about how God loves them and shit. If God loves them so much, how come we live here?”
“Did you go to early Mass?” Dennis asks Rickie.
“Stupid. I don’t go to church. My grandma does, I don’t.” He looks at Dennis with disgust.
“Soor-ree,” Dennis says in ironic apology. “What’s up your butt?”
“¿Que onda contigo?” Alex asks Rickie as he stares at Dennis to shut him up.
“Nothing. I had a fight with my old man.”
“Your dad? I thought he was long gone,” Oscar says. Everyone has heard about him running away with the fourteen-year-old years ago.
“He was. He showed up this morning. I don’t know why.”
“He start bossing you around, telling you shit?” Dennis asks.
“No.” Rickie looks at Alex. “He wants me to go up to Ventura or Oxnard or some place up there.”
“Damn, dude, they’ve got so
me fine girls up there. This one time I went up there for the Strawberry Festival…” Dennis begins.
“When does he want you to go?” Alex interrupts.
“Right after school is out. I told him no.”
“Is he an asshole like my old man?” Oscar asks.
“I don’t know. No. Maybe. I don’t know what he’s like. It’s not that.”
“Dude, it’s gotta be better than this,” Alex says. “We’re dying here. It’s either too freakin’ hot or raining and flooded. It doesn’t matter. Look at it. It always looks dead. Just dirt and sand and dust and weeds. Even the trees look like they’re dying.”
A scattering of five little clouds hangs over the mountains to the east. The heat pulls on them and draws them down to earth like white goatees. Curiously out of place in an otherwise cloudless sky, they seem full of portent.
“Shit, dude,” Dennis says anxiously. “Something’s going to happen today. Like an earthquake or some shit.”
No one responds. The sun beats down on the dirt field and the dry grey wood of the bleachers smoothed by the jeans and skirts of parents, brothers and sisters who have rooted for some boy or girl long departed from childhood.
All at once, they get up and move to the shade of a thick sycamore tree whose lower leaves are coated with dust; without rain or watering, they’re already turning brown. Dennis stands at the trunk of the tree looking for bark to peel.
“Didn’t Indians used to write on the bark of these trees?” he asks.
“Stupid, dude, that was the Indians some place else. They wrote on birch bark,” Oscar says.
“They could’ve wrote on this stuff,” Dennis says.
“It is nice up there, dude,” Alex says quietly to Rickie. “You ever been?” They sit cross-legged together in the shade.
“No.”
“My mom took me up there to Ventura. They’ve got this harbor with all these shops around it and restaurants and sailboats…”
“That’s not where my old man lives, you can count on it. He probably lives in the part of town just like this. Apartments and garbage all over the place and homies just like us.”
Rickie Trujillo Page 12
