Rickie Trujillo

by Nicholas Bradley

CHAPTER 16

  When Rickie arrives back at his grandmother’s house, his father’s car is gone, and he is surprised by his feelings about that. Something in him wanted his father still there to press him further about going to Ventura. He’s not exactly sure why—either to acquiesce or to fight, maybe some of both.

  He goes into his room and slumps down on the end of the bed, finds the remote and turns on his TV. A Dodgers game broadens across the screen. Vin Scully’s voice, like the fond voice of a neighbor or relative so familiar that it insinuates itself easily into waking moments and dreams, enters the room. He is in the middle of an anecdote about one of the Arizona players. Rickie almost lets the smile reach his lips as he remembers that he used to imagine himself playing for the Dodgers with Vin talking about him on the air.

  “Well, the Dodgers”—he could hear the ‘o’ the way Vin says it—“young second baseman, Rickie Trujillo, has been quite a story, a home-grown product from the San Fernando Valley. Here’s the pitch. Ball, outside. What a find he’s been! This youngster has the savvy of a veteran in the field and at the plate. Garcia winds and comes home with the pitch. Trujillo swings and lines a base hit to right, Martinez around second and taking third,” Vin would say with that air of amazed inevitability he used when a player proved him right. “I’ll tell you folks, this kid is a dandy. He reminds me of…”

  Last year, at the end of the season, the coaches treated the team to pizza at Shakey’s. The other players ran around or played the video games like little kids, but Rickie watched the game on TV. Coach Vega slid in next to him and watched for a couple of minutes. When he got up to join the other coaches, he put his hand on Rickie’s shoulder and leaned in close to be heard over the noise.

  “That could be you some day, mi’ jo. You got a shot.” Rickie could finish high school, attend a junior college, maybe Glendale or Pierce, where he would be scouted by Riverside or UCLA, Arizona State or Texas maybe, one of the places with a solid baseball program, and then, who could tell?

  “Orale, mi’ jo. A lot of players come from L.A., from right here in the Valley. You could be the next one.”

  With a melancholy that grew during the year following that night at Shakey’s, Rickie came to realize that other people, anonymous and featureless, would fill the positions on the diamond, not him. He didn’t know when he had vacated the scene; he just had.

  He changes the channel, bored by the slow pace of the game. Golf. Movies he doesn’t recognize. A religious show featuring a woman with impossibly big blond hair and too much make-up and a man with silver hair sprayed in place. They look like Barbie and Ken grown old and weird—someone in school said that, and Rickie marveled how that person could see things like that, could connect things, could see one thing and make it into another. He can’t do that. He sees what is, nothing more, nothing less. Korean TV. He checks the Spanish channels. Boxing. He pauses to watch a couple of Mexican lightweights. These little guys never knock each other out, just box and win by decision, vatos trying to escape their destiny in whatever barrios they live.

  The last Spanish channel features a stout, affable host who thinks everything is amusing and worth a laugh, and two beautiful Latinas, one with her hair like a blond aureole, the other with satiny black hair pulled back close to her head, lips so full and alluring, wide smiles, blindingly white teeth, full hips, breasts overflowing their low-cut, tight dresses. Rickie watches them for a while, listens to the playful and sexually charged banter between the host and the two women, and feels himself aroused. They are a fantasy, Phelan said in class one day, a fantasy that makes you go out and buy something because you hope you get the girl if you buy the product. Something like that. And then he said that they were no more real than the religious Barbie and Ken and the young women on MTV, a fantasy that convinced you to send some money or to buy something, or ended up in a wad of tissue, he said. Some of the boys laughed and hooted. Some girls laughed quietly, some whispered to others, who showed they finally got it by blushing. Rickie wonders if everyone feels the crushing emptiness that follows, and the acute awareness of the silence of things in the room, but, of course, he said nothing in class. He thinks briefly of Claudia and yesterday in the deserted house, but that memory makes him uncomfortable.

  He turns the TV off and looks at the dead screen in silence.

  The phone rings. Claudia. “What’s up?” he says.

  “Rickie?” she sounds hesitant.

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing. What’s up with you?”

  “Just kickin’ it.”

  “Me, too. It’s hot in my house.”

  “You want me to come over?”

  She hesitates.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You got something else planned?”

  “Maybe with my mom. Rickie…”

  “What happened after I left last night?” he asks, wondering if there had been any fights or shots fired.

  “You heard? Oh, shit. I was going to tell you.” He hears regret and fear in her voice.

  “Heard what?”

  “You know. Who told you? Gloria? I told that bitch to keep her mouth shut. Promise you won’t be angry?” she wheedles. Rickie says nothing.

  “Promise?”

  “Okay. Promise. What are you talking about?”

  “I was… with one of the security. Gloria was, too. She was worse than me.”

  When Rickie says nothing, she continues. “He wouldn’t leave me alone. He kept after me and after me. I told him about you, but he said he didn’t care.”

  Rickie was going to ask for his name but realizes that she would probably not know it or lie. He tries to empty himself of anger, to feel nothing beyond a cold boredom urging him to hang up. But if he does hang up, that will leave him nothing to do again.

  “Where?”

  “In his car. He … It wasn’t very long.”

  “And you couldn’t say no.”

  “I’m sorry, Rickie,” Claudia says. She’s about to cry.

  “Did you do anything else with him?” Without warning, despair flushes through his body as though replacing the blood that runs in his veins. He hears it in his voice. He already knows the answer. Claudia doesn’t respond. He doesn’t love her, he tells himself, always knew she was too easy, at the same time wonders if she compared their quick and unsatisfying sex in the abandoned house with her time with the security guard and found Rickie wanting.

  “Rickie?” she says in a little girl voice.

  “You let him…” He doesn’t want to give it a name; that will make it too real, too final. His head begins to pound behind his eyes.

  “No. He forced me. He wouldn’t stop. I tried to make him, I really did. I thought he was going to hurt me if I didn’t let him. Oh, Rickie,” she wails. For a brief moment, he sees her as a young girl with her arms pinned, forced onto the back seat of a car by a much stronger predator in a black T-shirt who is determined to get what he wants, and he feels a terrible helplessness, for himself and her.

  “Did he force you to get in the car?” he asks, but she doesn’t respond because she is sobbing.

  Like an emphysema patient trying to suck air into damaged lungs, Rickie sits up straight and pulls air in and holds it. He hears Claudia’s mother in the background and the call ends. He takes the phone from his ear, still listening for Claudia’s despairing cries, but it’s silent. He expels the air he has been holding in.

  The silence in the room is deep. He feels out of his league, like when he plays a video game whose rules he hasn’t bothered to read and whose codes he doesn’t know. His characters die quickly and Game Over is displayed on the screen.

  When the phone rings, he holds it for a moment, then powers it off. He has nothing to say, no comfort to offer. What has happened to her feels like an inevitability, as though living in this neighborhood makes it so. Not Laugh Now, Cry Later, but Cry Now and Cry Later, an assurance that everything good, every innocent thing will be defaced and defiled, the source of great s
adness. The Claudia he knew is lost to him, broken and scattered, and he can do nothing to retrieve her.

  He has to escape this feeling.

  He stands up and goes to the closet, pulls out a pair of black dress shoes he wears to weddings and funerals. From the inside of one of the shoes, he withdraws a plastic bag with two joints and a package of matches. He takes out one of the joints and the matches and puts the plastic bag back in the shoe and the shoes back in the closet. He walks quietly through the kitchen and checks on his grandmother who is still asleep on the couch. He walks back through the kitchen and out the back door.

  The garage is detached from the house. It has two doors, one that faces the side of the house and one in the back. His grandfather added the back door when he converted the garage to a bedroom. Rickie enters by that door and leaves it open.

  His brother Bill was the last person to actually live in the room, and his posters of Los Lobos and Poncho Sanchez are still on the walls. They are curling at the top and the bottom. A single bed is pushed up against one wall; a small dresser, a table from a dinette set that their grandfather bought at a yard sale along with a single chair and a pink three-light tree lamp are against the other walls. An oval hooked rug covers most of the exposed floor.

  He lived in this room when he was a baby, but he doesn’t remember. He wants some memory of comfort and love from his parents, but it is not present. Instead, there’s his mother sitting on the couch eating chips and drinking sodas and only reluctantly giving him some after he begs and begs and is pushed away to the other end and cries… And, of his father? Nothing. Zero. A blank. Only whispered conversations between his grandparents at the kitchen table that ceased when he entered the room.

  What gave that bastard the right to rape Claudia? What gives his father the idea that Rickie would go live with him, make his life right by saying everything’s okay now? Not in a million years. He can die a lonely old man; Rickie works hard at trying not to care.

  It is dark and still and hot in the room, the only light coming from the open doorway and a window that faces the neighbor’s wooden fence which has been darkened and made splintery by the winter rains and summer heat. Rickie slides the window open and sits on the edge of the bed. He lights the joint and inhales deeply.

  It is as though his body wants to remember, but his mind contracts into a fist that will not release the heightened expectancy, the anticipation aching in his stomach. It will not allow him to remember anything, refuses to think about his father or what has happened to Claudia or baseball or this summer, any of it.

  The marijuana begins to take effect. The muscles in his stomach relax like a tangle of snakes unwinding and slithering off in different directions. It is as though his body finally exhales after holding its breath. The familiar sensation overtakes him, of withdrawing from and, at the same time, immersing himself in, the present moment. He focuses on the smooth curve of his nails, their pleasant, almost oily slickness when he rubs his thumb across each surface; the soft, cool skin of his fingers; a dog barking, someone mowing a lawn; the still, dark heat of the room which seems to entomb him. Each sensation comes to him one at a time at a pleasantly reduced speed. He imagines a Pharaoh laid out in his pyramid, deep within a small dark room and safe from thieves and enemies and the demands of his subjects, walled off from the sights and sounds of the world, the room still and dark, maybe with one beam of sunlight from some secret air vent so that he can see—dead, yet aware of everything about him—specks of dust like gold flakes floating in the beam of light. His life has been good. He has been wealthy and powerful, wise beyond his years, a great boy-king whom women young and old adored and desired, and men sought out for his wise counsel.

  For a brief moment, he has a vision of himself as someone else, someone powerful and smart, not just Rickie from the neighborhood or Rickie the baseball player, but a different human being completely: living elsewhere, dressing differently in a suit and a shirt and a tie, speaking differently and saying important things. Rickie feels like he’s on the verge of understanding something, something that will give him hope, but a thickness pervades his body, particularly behind his eyes and throughout his limbs, making it hard to think. The thickness gains substance and weight and holds him immobile as he sits on the edge of the bed. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t fight it. He takes a last hit from the joint, mostly paper now, which causes him to cough until he gags, and then he drops it on the floor and grinds it out with the toe of his shoe. He stares at the scrap of ragged paper and the smudge of ash on the floor; he will have to remember to wipe it up later on. He is tired now. He knows he can sleep deeply, a Pharaoh in this tomb-like room, a welcome sleep like death. Yes, this must be what dying is like, a sort of surrender, a letting-go of all the world’s worries, a wall constructed against life that forbids anything to enter and disturb a person any more. Death will be welcome if it is like this, a final relaxation.

  He lies on the bed on his back, his head on the slipless pillow, his legs crossed at the ankles, his arms folded across his chest. The boy-king at rest. He smiles at the thought. And in the Sunday quiet of a hot June afternoon, without the roar of planes taking off or landing for the moment, sealed off from the rank smell of the landfill and the other sights and sounds and smells of this neighborhood of poverty and neglect, he is winged off to dreamless sleep on fragile visions of pyramids and Pharaohs lying in state.

  SUNDAY EVENING

  CHAPTER 17

  When he wakes up in the early evening, it takes him a moment to orient himself, to remember where he is. He sits up and listens. The neighbor is wheeling his trash barrel down the driveway to the curb with a grinding, jarring noise. Trash pick-up tomorrow morning. School. Maltrey. Lopez. Phelan. Claudia trying to explain. Cold-eyed Oscar, waiting impatiently for Rickie to prove himself. Soon his father is going to return and fight with him again about the move to Ventura.

  He sits without moving for a moment and waits for those thoughts to vanish. They do not. His stomach rumbles hungrily.

  He stands, reaches down to pick up the scrap of paper from the joint and scrapes the spot clean with his shoe. He closes the window and smooths the bed. When he reaches the doorway, he looks back. It looks just as it had been. Every now and then abuela dusts and vacuums the room. He does not want her to worry about him using it. He locks the door behind him.

  His grandmother is sitting up watching TV.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Sleeping.” He can count on her not to ask too many questions. He sits down heavily in the armchair.

  “I thought you were with your friend.”

  He says nothing. “Where’s that man?”

  “He went to see Daisy. I think he is going back there tonight,” she says, and he knows she means Ventura. “He wants you to go up there to live with him,” she says finally.

  “I know.”

  “It’s better up there I think.”

  “I’m not going. I’m staying here.”

  “Why, Junior? It’s no good for you here. Too many bad people. You get in trouble too much.”

  “I haven’t been in trouble for a long time,” he lies, affecting an injured tone. Tomorrow she will hear from the school about Maltrey. Lopez will come to the house again, and Rickie will have to go to another school. “No one has called you.”

  She looks at him for a moment without speaking.

  “What is here for you?” she asks finally.

  “My friends. My school. My baseball team.”

  “You can get better friends and a better school,” she replies. She does not know about baseball teams.

  “I like it here. This is where I belong.”

  Again she looks at him without speaking. “No, Junior,” she says finally, “this is where your grandfather and I could buy, not where I belong or you belong.” She pauses. “I do not belong here. I belong home with my sister, Guadalupe. You can come, also, to Mexico, but I think you are too American. You will be unhappy there.” She pa
uses again and looks at him closely, this strange boy with whom she can barely talk. Even when he does speak with her, it is reluctantly and not spoken so much as grunted or mumbled, and almost impossible to understand. She fears that she has lost him.

  “This is no place for my good boy,” she says, using the words from his childhood. “You belong where the people are nice and the air is good and people take care. Your father is good. He made a mistake, but he was young. He has grown up. He could watch after you and help you and…”

  “I don’t like him,” Rickie says, and adds in English, “He’s an asshole.” He rises from the chair.

  Berta does not know the English, but she recognizes the anger and the disrespect in the tone.

  “It is not correct to speak like that,” she calls to his back.

  “Sorry. I’m hungry,” he says as he walks into the kitchen.

  “Junior, come here,” she commands.

  He comes back into the room and stands in a manner that says that the continuation of this conversation is an imposition. She stares at him hard.

  “What?” he says, shifting into a neutral stance.

  “I brought you up. I made life good for you. Now I am tired. I want to go home before I die. I want to take your grandfather with me and bury him where he belongs.”

  “You’re telling me that I have to go live with my father?” he says in English and then in Spanish.

  “Don’t raise your voice,” she says. “I know what is best and this is best for you. Soon I am going to sell this house and move.”

  “When did you decide this?” He is astounded and hurt by the suddenness of her decision. In an instant, he feels as though he is standing on wind-blown and shifting sand.

  “Today. After I spoke with your father. I did not tell him.”

  “Good, because I’m not going. I’ll go live with my friends,” he says and leaves the room again.

  She lets him go without responding. She sits looking at the worn and faded carpet at her feet, sadly shaking her head.