The Death of Baseball

by Orlando Ortega-Medina

Auntie stands up and fixes her hair in one of the mirrors. “Come back to the dining room, shall we? You should have some cake and ice cream.”

  After lunch, Uncle Alistair takes Kevin outside to talk about something private, and Auntie leaves Maggie and me to clear the dining table and rinse the dishes before loading them into the dishwasher. It’s already four o’clock, and I start to get a stomach ache because I don’t want to get home later than five like Kevin promised Momma.

  “Don’t just stand there!” Maggie snaps her fingers at me. “Hand me the dishes. I want to finish putting them away.”

  “Sorry.” I grab a dish out of the sink and hand it to her. “I was just thinking that I need to go home soon.”

  “Well, then, let’s hurry it up,” she says. “Mommy! Clyde needs to go home!”

  “Where did they all go?”

  Maggie shrugs and holds out her hand. “Next dish, please.”

  I hand her a few more dishes and some water glasses, and she stuffs them into the dishwasher all crooked-like because it’s getting full.

  “Why were you crying earlier?” she asks, her face inside the dishwasher pretending to look for more space.

  “I had a stomach ache.”

  She straightens up and opens her eyes really wide at me. “No, you didn’t.”

  “OK, then I got something in my eye.”

  “Yeah, right! Stop lying.”

  “I’m not lying. I just don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Then just say so. Don’t keep making things up, or no one will believe anything you say.”

  I grab the rice bowl and pour the leftovers into a Tupperware container Auntie left us, and give it a good rinse before holding it out to her. She looks at it for a second and slowly takes it out of my hand.

  “Is it because of Kevin?” she asks.

  “What about Kevin?”

  Maggie sucks in her lower lip and turns back to the dishwasher, trying a few times to squeeze the rice bowl in between the other dishes.

  “When are you starting school again?” she asks.

  “In September, same as you. What about Kevin?”

  “What day in September?”

  “The fourth of September, Maggie. Just like you! What were you going to say about Kevin?”

  “We’ll be starting after we get back from our trip.”

  “What trip?”

  “Our trip to England.”

  “What trip to England?”

  “Mommy wants us to go to England to visit our nan and to maybe look for a school for Kevin. So we might not get back here until, like, a week or two after school starts.”

  I put the soapy serving plate back into the sink. “A school for Kevin?”

  “Yeah, Mommy’s scared they’ll send him to Viet Nam, so she wants to get him away from here so he’ll be safe. I thought maybe you’d heard about that from Kevin.”

  Just then Uncle Ali, Kevin, and my father step into the kitchen, and I feel all out of breath and dizzy like I’m going to pass out unless I sit down.

  “Look who I found outside the gate waiting in his truck!” Uncle Alistair says.

  “Uncle!” Maggie says. She runs to my father and throws her arms around him. “Do you like our new place? Do you?”

  My father picks her up and swings her around before putting her back on the ground. “You’re so grown up now. And so pretty, too.”

  “I’m not pretty! I’m clever.”

  My father laughs. “You’re definitely that.”

  “Hello, son,” he says, flashing the fake smile he always puts on in front of other people. “Ready to come home?”

  “Auntie and Uncle Alistair invited me to lunch and bought me a cake for my birthday. I’m helping to wash up. Where’s Momma?”

  “Clyde batted in four home runs, Uncle,” Kevin says. “He won the game for us.”

  Auntie Doreen comes into the kitchen and stops short when she sees my father. “Yoshi!” she says.

  My father spins around and looks at her.

  “We weren’t expecting you.”

  “Hi, Sis,” he says. “Nice place you got here. I just came by to pick up the kid. Hope it’s OK.”

  “Of course, it’s OK.” Auntie Doreen comes the rest of the way into the kitchen and kisses my father on the cheek. “We just didn’t know you were coming.”

  “Is it true you’re sending Kevin to England, Auntie?” I turn to Kevin. “Is it true?”

  Kevin shrugs. “She’s scared I’ll get drafted.”

  “Drafted?” my father says, looking first at Auntie and then at Uncle Alistair. “The draft’s over.”

  “That’s what they say now,” Auntie Doreen says. “But there are still American troops there, and the fighting hasn’t stopped. They could bring it back.”

  “But he ain’t old enough for that anyway,” my father says.

  “Not now,” Auntie Doreen says. “But eventually. We just want to be prepared. So we’re taking an exploratory trip at the end of the month.”

  “You’re tying yourself in a knot for nothing, Sono,” my father says to Auntie. “Leave the kid alone. He’s doing fine here. Ain’t that right, Nephew?”

  Kevin nods his head real fast, with a big goofy grin on his face.

  “I don’t want Kevin to go,” I say.

  Uncle Alistair clears his throat. “Can I interest you in the grand tour, Yoshi? I think you’d quite like what we’ve done with the garage.”

  “Some other time, thanks. We’ve got to get back. Tomoko will be waiting with dinner. Clyde, take off that silly apron and change back into your own clothes.”

  “It’s OK, Uncle,” Kevin says. “Clyde can keep them.”

  “No need for that. Clyde, go change.”

  “But, Father…”

  My father’s hand shoots out and takes hold of my wrist. “Don’t talk back. I want you in your own clothes and outside in ten minutes.”

  Auntie Doreen steps forward and put her hand on my father’s arm. “Yoshi, please.”

  My father lets go of my wrist and holds up his hands like he’s surrendering. “OK, fine. He can wear them home. But we’ll set them aside for you to pick up next time you stop by.” He moves to the front door. “I’ll be waiting in the truck, son.”

  Chapter 7

  My father doesn’t say anything for most of the ride home. He just stares ahead and doesn’t look at me. After a couple of miles, I switch on the radio and hum along to Goodbye to Love by The Carpenters. Just when it’s getting to the good part with the guitar, my father lurches forward and snaps off the radio, practically breaking off the knob, and we ride the rest of the way in total silence.

  As soon as we pull into the driveway, I jump out of the truck and run into the house and find Momma waiting on the other side of the door. I give her a quick hug and then run into my room and shut the door, pulling out the picture of Marilyn that Kevin gave me and smoothening it out on top of my dresser since it had gotten a bit crushed in my pocket.

  Momma comes into my room without knocking and sits on my bed. She looks like she’s about to say something, but instead, she folds her hands and puts them on top of her pink housedress.

  “Auntie Doreen and Uncle Alistair bought me a cake,” I say, after a moment. “They sang happy birthday to me.” Digging in my pocket, I pull out the pukka shell necklace and start to put it back on. Momma cuts her eyes when she sees it and shoots a quick glance at the doorway.

  “Put that away, baby,” she says real quiet-like.

  I shake my head, tears filling my eyes, and finish putting it on. “They were all really nice to me, Momma … especially Kevin.” I wipe my face. “Auntie and Uncle Alistair gave me presents, too. But I accidentally left them at Auntie’s.”

  “Your Auntie called a few minutes ago. She said they’ll come by and bring you your presents and your uniform later in the week. Kevin, too. But please, baby,” she says, “take that off before your father sees it.”

  Just then I hear my father’s boots c
lomping down the hall, and, remembering the Marilyn picture on my dresser, I speed across the room and snatch it up.

  “What is that?” he asks, stepping into my room and pointing at the picture.

  I quickly put it behind my back. “Kevin gave it to me. It’s a present.”

  My father holds out his hand and snaps his fingers. “Give it here.”

  “It’s a present from Kevin,” I repeat. “It’s mine.”

  He pushes me to one side, and I fall against my bed, and he snatches up the picture, which has slipped to the floor.

  “Yoshi!” Momma screams.

  I scramble up and try to grab it out of his hands, but he holds it out of my reach.

  “What is this?” he asks, waving it at me.

  “It’s a picture of James Dean smoking a cigarette! Kevin gave it to me.”

  “James Dean smoking a cigarette, eh?” He looks at the picture for a second, then glares at me like he wants to kill me and holds it higher. “What business do you have with a picture of a stinking hakujin? Or is it that you like boys?”

  “There’s a lady in the picture, too!” I say, straining to grab the picture out of his hands.

  “Give it back to him, Yoshi!” Momma says.

  He throws the picture at me, and it hits me in the face, which makes me real mad. “Look at you!” he says, as I snatch it off the floor and put it in my back pocket. “You look like a goddam sissy, dressed like that, with that necklace and them high heels.”

  “These”—I point at my feet—“are platform shoes, not high heels! All famous people wear them now.” I take off the choker and hold it up to him. “And this is a pukka shell necklace. Open any magazine, and you’ll see that boys are wearing them, not girls.”

  “Sissies are wearing them!”

  “These are Kevin’s clothes!” I scream. “And he’s not a sissy.”

  “Don’t raise your voice at your father,” Momma says.

  “I don’t care whose clothes they are,” he says. “I want you out of them, and I want you in the backyard in a half hour. We’re gonna have a ceremony for Koneko, and then you’re going to bury her under the guava tree.”

  I look at Momma when he talks about the guava tree, and she nods at me for some reason I can’t figure out. Then I look at my father and see his mouth moving, but I can’t hear what he’s saying anymore. Everything is quiet and confused at the same time, and I feel like I’m going to black out. So I take a few deep breaths to calm myself down.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I catch my reflection in the cracked mirror perched above my dresser, cross the room, and stare into it. I see Momma and my father behind me, staring first at me, then at each other, as I slide open the top drawer, pull out the roll of scotch tape Momma keeps in there to wrap presents and cut a big piece. Then I reach into my back pocket and pull out the Marilyn picture and flatten it out against the top left corner of the mirror.

  “What… the… fuck… are you doing?” my father says.

  “Yoshi…” Momma says.

  “I’m decorating my room.”

  “This is Hiro’s room,” my father says, his voice dropping to a whisper.

  “Yoshi,” Momma says, “come outside.” She takes him by the hand, but he shakes her off.

  “This was the last place we saw him before they took him away,” he says, scrunching up his face at her. She reaches out a hand to him. Before I can blink, he whirls around and snatches the picture off the mirror. “You’re not going to change Hiro’s room.”

  “Stop talking about Hiro!” I scream, covering my ears with both hands. “It’s not my fault he went crazy; it’s not my fault the two of you left him alone that night, and it’s definitely not my fault he hurt himself with a piece of broken glass”—I uncover my ears and point at my father—“from a bottle of your cheap whiskey.”

  My father brings his open hand across my face with a loud crack.

  “How dare you?” Momma says, taking hold of my arm. “Your father and I are still mourning. You have no right to disrespect us or your brother’s memory.”

  “Screw him!” I say, breaking away from her and turning on my father. “Give me back my picture!”

  My father grabs me by the hair, drags me through the house, and shoves me into our stuffy laundry room. “That’s it,” he says. “You’re punished. Don’t you move!” He comes back after a few minutes and orders me to strip off Kevin’s trousers. “I’m gonna fix you, dammit!” he says. “Now, I’m finally gonna fix you.” He whips out a couple of uncooked soybeans from his shirt pocket and makes me kneel on them, which is a punishment he learned at Manzanar, that camp in the mountains where Americans stored Japanese people during the war. He and Auntie Doreen spent time there when they were kids.

  Momma screams in the background, something like: “Please, Yoshi, he’s just a little boy.” And my father screams right back at her, something super naughty in Japanese that I am not going to repeat here. I hear some loud banging, and then it gets quiet. I imagine he probably locked her away somewhere in the house. But I don’t care, because I’m really angry at Momma for siding with him, and I’m furious he took away the Marilyn picture Kevin gave me for my birthday.

  Every once in a while, my father sticks his head into the laundry room to make sure I’m still kneeling on those crazy beans, and each time he shouts, “I’m gonna fix you” until I think I’m going to lose my mind between his shouting and the pain.

  “I’m not going through this again, no fucking way,” he says the next time he shows up.

  “They’re hurting bad,” I whimper, tears stinging my eyes. “I’m afraid they’re boring holes in my knees.”

  “Good,” he says. “Now it’s time for part two. Get on your feet.”

  He pulls me outside and makes me stand in the middle of the backyard in my underpants. The sun’s going down and shines straight into my eyes. So I raise my hand to shield them from the glare while he goes to the garage and comes back outside carrying two buckets of water.

  “Arms out to your sides,” he barks.

  He looks really scary in that moment, his face all twisted and red and his nostrils flared out to here. Almost like someone I’ve never seen before.

  I stick out my arms, and he puts a bucket in each of my hands. They’re crazy heavy, and I have no idea how I’m going to be able to hold them up for very long. But I do my best because I’m so tired of his yelling. I figure, the sooner this is over, the better. And so I hold the buckets.

  As the sun goes down, I can see him digging a huge hole under the guava tree; when he’s done he goes back into the garage and carries out a big wooden box; then he puts the box in the hole, covers it with dirt and chants some Buddhist stuff, lights incense, and disappears into the garage again. It keeps getting darker and darker. It gets so dark I have to squint to see the house. I have this terrible burning, tired feeling in my arms from holding those buckets. But worst of all, my stomach is rumbling and achy because I haven’t eaten since lunch at Kevin’s.

  Just when I think I’m going to drop to the ground from exhaustion, buckets and all, he comes out of the garage, drags me back into the house, pushes me into my bedroom, and locks me inside. Thank God it’s over, for now.

  I climb into bed, pull the covers over my head and cry until my eyes feel like they’re going to bleed. I cry from the burning pain in my arms that I think will never go away; I cry because I’m so fricking hungry, and I cry from how much I hate him, and Momma, too. And I swear that one day, when I’m a little older, I’ll kill him.

  I finally fall asleep to the image of me busting into his garage with a submachine gun and riddling him with bullets until he’s a bloody, pulpy mess, and stomping on what’s left of his face with Kevin’s platform shoes until it looks like mashed potatoes covered in ketchup.

  And then I dream.

  I dream of a cowboy stretched out in an open-top truck, like the cowboy in the poster on Kevin’s wall. Only, in my dream, it’s not James Dean. It’s Kevin
. Music plays over the scene like in a movie, except instead of singing, I hear sobbing, and over the sobbing, I hear a lady screaming in the distance.

  The cowboy wakes up, stretches his arms and legs, and lets out a big yawn. Then he sits up and takes off his hat and fans himself. Little streams of sweat trickle down the sides of his handsome face. He hops out of the truck and swaggers in the direction of a big poop-brown house in the distance, his spurs leaving blood-filled ruts in the dirt as he walks. The closer the cowboy gets to the house, the louder the sobbing gets.

  I follow close behind as the cowboy climbs the creaky wooden steps to the front porch and pushes open the front door. Inside the foyer, gliding away from the open door is a woman with long black hair that reaches the middle of her back. She’s wearing a tight, white ankle-length dress, with a rose-coloured sash wrapped around her waist. From where I’m standing the woman looks like Momma, only taller and shapelier, especially her bum. She glances over her shoulder at the cowboy and blows him a kiss, signalling for him to follow her with her middle finger, its red lacquered fingernail contrasting sharply against her pale skin. He steps into the house and pushes shut the door against my body, hard and steady against my chest, against my stomach, against my chinchin—especially against my chinchin. I hear Kevin’s voice in my head saying: The more you rub it, the better it feels.

  Somehow I can see through the door, and I watch as the cowboy reaches the woman. She holds him off with one hand while grabbing hold of her hair with the other, right where her forehead meets her hairline, and slowly peels it back. It’s then I realise she’s wearing a wig. Yanking it off, she kicks the wig into a corner and shakes out her blonde, shoulder-length hair, just as her face morphs from Momma’s into Marilyn’s, exactly as she looks in the picture Kevin gave me.

  The woman grabs the cowboy and kisses him hard on the mouth. He wraps his arms around her waist and draws her against his chest; she pulls his shirt out of his jeans; he pushes back and rips it open, buttons flying everywhere, and flings it on the floor. Then they grab each other again and kiss some more.

  The music gets louder, and so does the crying. It gets so loud that the cowboy and the woman stop their kissing and stare at the front door, at me and past me, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. I turn to see what they’re looking at and find myself inside a darkened cinema crammed full of people watching a movie playing on a massive screen behind me. My parents are sitting in the back row of the cinema, my father leaning forward in his seat, and Momma snoring away next to him. Somehow I know they’re watching Rio Bravo, a John Wayne movie about a drunk sheriff, a crippled boy, and a gunfighter who save their town from a bunch of criminals.