“With who?”
Ralph points at the ceiling.
Clyde sits up. “God?”
“I believed in him more deeply than anyone I knew. More than my father; even more than our rabbi. I did everything right, followed every commandment by the book. But he never helped me when I needed it, not even when I begged him. He made my mother hate me, killed my cousin, and took away the only person I ever loved.”
“The soldier?”
Ralph nods. “My cousin, Yossi. It kills me to think of him now, helpless in his wheelchair refusing to speak to me.”
“I see. Thus, ‘there is no God’.”
Ralph glares at Clyde.
“Listen, Jimmy, my religious Aunt Doreen once told me about some rich man in the Bible who did everything right—and I mean everything—no being a bad son, no stealing, no stuffing dead bodies in freezers. You know, a totally perfect person. And still, your God killed everyone he loved and took away everything he had. And then, to make matters worse, he made him, like, completely sick, covered in boils from head to foot.”
“That was Job. He was being tested.”
“Yeah, right. I’m sure it didn’t feel that way to him.”
“Maybe not.” Raphael looks at his hands for a moment then looks back at Clyde. “Hen yikteleini, lo ayahel.”1
“What’s that?”
“It’s what Job said to his friends when they told him to curse God and die. It means, Though he slay me, still will I trust him. He never lost his faith regardless of what God did to him.”
“If you ask me, Jimmy, it’s not God that’s the problem. It’s your idea of God that’s wrong. You and my Auntie Doreen think of God as a person up there who watches everything we do and who’s supposed to reward or punish us depending on whether we follow certain rules—like some kind of nice daddy. But God’s not like that at all! In my mind, God is the indifferent life force that flows through everything and recycles everything. I’m afraid your God is an illusion, Jimmy.”
Ralph nods and looks around the hotel room, then he looks sidelong at Clyde. “You know about illusions, don’t you, Clyde?”
Clyde looks down and plays nervously with the edge of the sheet.
“Are you an illusion, Jimmy?”
“The name’s Raphael.”
“That’s a nice name. Raphael then… are you? An illusion?”
Raphael looks straight at Clyde, his expression softening. He takes his hand and kisses it. “Less and less.”
Later that night Raphael wakes up screaming. Clyde flips on the table lamp.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“It hurts… God, it’s burning.”
Raphael flails in bed, the sheets underneath him are stained with blood, and his wraps are soaked through.
“You’re bleeding again! I’m getting you to a hospital. I don’t care what you say.”
Clyde grabs the phone and dials.
“No—”
“I’m not fucking losing you, goddammit.”
Raphael stops flailing and is wracked with shivering. Clyde slams down the receiver.
“It’s dead. I’ll be right back.”
Clyde leaps out of bed, pulls on a pair of cut-off jeans and some tennis shoes, and bolts out the door. He rushes down the stairwell and pounds on the office door.
“Help! Help, please!”
He rings the night bell and tries the door handle, but the door is bolted shut.
“Open up, somebody. We need a doctor!”
Clyde’s screams echo back. He pounds on the door a few more times, then gives it a good kick before moving to the street. He runs down the darkened road in the direction of some music and turns left into a wide, garishly illuminated bar-lined boulevard jammed with drunks, hookers, and street toughs jostling past each other on a rubbish-strewn pavement. Ear-splitting dance music screams out of strip joints, beer halls, and the hotel lobbies that serve as fronts for whorehouses. A river of junky cars flows past incessantly honking and spewing clouds of exhaust into the humid air already heavy with the stench of burning rubbish. Clyde stares at the scene in bewilderment. Spotting a pay phone a block away, he fights his way to it through the crowd.
A rotund drunk sitting against a smashed-in parking meter hungrily tracks Clyde’s approach. He staggers to his feet, spits in his hand, and rakes his motor-oil-stained fingers through his unkempt black hair. Then he smoothens out his drool spattered T-shirt and lurches forward just as Clyde reaches the pay phone.
Clyde lifts the receiver, but the phone is dead. He screams in frustration and slams the receiver repeatedly against the metal case until it breaks in his hand just as the drunk approaches from behind and grabs a generous portion of Clyde’s ass. Clyde whirls around furiously and shoves the drunk against a parked car. His dentures fly out of his mouth as his head hits the windscreen, and he crumples unconscious to the ground. Clyde storms away down the cracked pavement.
The altercation catches the attention of three hard-faced, black-clad bouncers standing outside a strip club, a flat-nosed one in his twenties, the other two in their mid-forties, one short and round with a shaggy moustache, the other tall and hobbled by a clubfoot and bad knees. They exchange a conspiratorial look, then step into the crowd and shadow Clyde from a distance.
Clyde moves from person to person, gesturing wildly, trying as best as he can to ask for a doctor. The people ignore him, laugh at him, shove him aside. Up ahead, another block away, Clyde sees a sharp-looking police officer leaning against a railing in front of a large church and breaks in his direction. He pushes through the crowd, which is thickest at this point, in the direction of the church. The three bouncers pick up their pace behind him, elbowing their way through the crowd. They reach Clyde the moment he breaks free of the crowd at the intersection. The younger of the three clamps his hand over Clyde’s mouth, and the other two help drag Clyde, kicking and scratching, back into the crowd. The police officer glances with mild curiosity in the direction of the kidnap scene, but, seeing nothing, yawns and checks his wristwatch.
* * *
Ralph sits up in bed in the midst of a coughing fit and covers his mouth with the edge of a sheet. During a brief respite, he glances into the sheet, and his breath catches at the sight of the spattering of fresh blood that stains it. He grimaces and wipes his mouth.
He moves painfully off the bed and struggles over to his strongbox, which sits on the desk. He digs through the pockets of his jeans, which are draped over a splintered wooden chair, and pulls out a set of keys. Opening the box, he pulls out his notebooks and lovingly passes a hand over them. He opens up one of them to a page marked by a clipped article from the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and quickly rescans the article, which reports the attempted burglary of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio’s honeymoon home in Beverly Hills, and which is illustrated by a colour photo of the modest-looking house, a black-and-white picture of Marilyn and DiMaggio in a booth at the Brown Derby, and a grainy image of Clyde in the courtroom sitting next to his public defender.
Setting it aside, he sifts through some newspaper clippings and old photographs. He picks out a colour glossy of Yossi, still young and healthy, standing proudly in his military uniform holding his machine gun at a forty-five-degree angle across his chest. He stares at the photo for a few fleeting moments, focusing on Yossi’s beautiful eyes, at the thick black eyebrows that frame them, and presses his lips to it, holding them there for a few seconds. Then he places the photo on the nightstand against the lamp so that it faces the bed, and returns to the desk.
He reaches deep into the box and pulls out a blue velvet bag embroidered with Hebrew writing, a black felt kippah, and a prayer book. He pulls a set of tefillin out of the bag and arranges them on the table, the head tefillin on his left and the arm tefillin on his right. He stares at the black boxes and leather straps for a moment, slipping on the kippah, then he closes his eyes and rocks gently.
“Hen yikteleini, lo ayahel. Hen yikteleini, lo ayahel.
Hen yikteleini, lo ayahel.”
Tears course down his face as he chants the ancient words from the book of Job again and again and again until he is cut short by a fit of coughing. He reaches for a glass of water and takes a few calming sips. When the coughing subsides, he grabs up the ritual items and takes them to bed.
Sitting with his back against the wall, he looks at the photo of Yossi and cries again.
“Hen yikteleini, lo ayahel…”
He stares at the tefillin in his lap, passes his fingers over the leather straps, then raises the arm tefillin to his lips and kisses it. Putting his arm through the loop, he places the black box on his bicep below the halfway point between his shoulder and his elbow, directly across from his heart, the way his father taught him when he was a young boy. He utters the blessing while tightening the strap around his arm, then wraps it twice around his biceps, seven times around his forearm, and once around his palm, leaving a length of leather to be tied around his hand later.
Raising the head tefillin, he recites the blessing and places it on his head, centring the black box above his forehead directly over the point between his eyes. Then he stares at the remainder of the strap hanging from his fingers.
A car horn outside breaks his concentration. He looks around the room and sees the shambles, the ripped and bloody sheets, the overturned ice bucket, the mess of papers on the desk. Then he catches sight of himself in the closet mirror, a pitiful sight in his blood-spattered underpants, unshaven, black circles under his eyes, a black box on his head, and his arm bound in a black leather strap.
And then he starts to laugh.
* * *
The bouncers drag Clyde toward a strip joint with loud ’70s disco music pouring out of the doorway. They haul him inside and carry him through the smoke-filled auditorium where an overweight stripper on the stage coaxes a burro to mount her in time to the music under the flash of strobe lights. The patrons whoop it up and fall over themselves laughing, barely noticing the three thugs dragging a young man across the floor.
The bouncers shove Clyde through a door in the back of the club and drag him down a stairwell illuminated only by a bare red light bulb. The bouncers struggle to hold Clyde as he bucks and bites. One of his legs breaks free, and he kicks at the light bulb, breaking it off at the base and startling the thugs as the stairwell is suddenly plunged into darkness. Clyde spins free as their grip loosens, which sends all four of them tumbling down the stairs.
Clyde crash lands on top of the young one as they hit the concrete floor of a foul-smelling red lit cellar, then scrambles away as the young tough swings at him and screams obscenities in Spanish. He reaches the other side of the room just as the other two tumble out of the stairwell, both smashing into the young tough. Clyde tries to run around them to reach the stairway. But the two older bouncers leap to their feet and slam him back against a brick wall, stunning him for a moment. The young one tosses them a few lengths of twine from across the room, which they use to spread-eagle Clyde, tying his wrists to two metal hooks embedded in the brick for the purpose. Then they roughly pull off Clyde’s shorts and panties, exposing his cock. Clyde karate-kicks the short, fat one in the balls and he crumples to the ground.
“Es una luchadora,” says the taller one, “Eso sí me gusta en una mujer.”
He hammers Clyde in the face with a closed fist, bloodying his nose. Clyde spits at him. The thug wipes off the spittle with one sweep of his dirt-caked hand and flashes a mouthful of gold.
“Amarrale las piernas,” he says, spitting on the ground.
The younger one rushes forward and winds twine around Clyde’s ankles.
“What are you doing, you cocksuckers?” Clyde screams.
The younger one pulls a stiletto out of his back pocket; the blade shoots out, glinting in the dim red light.
“Callate la boca, pendejo, o te hago pedazos.”
“Cortale los huevos, Sixto!” the short one says, clapping his hands.
The other two thugs break into hysterical laughter at the suggestion.
Sixto caresses Clyde’s testicles with the blade.
“Primero me la voy a cojer, Taco. Después le cortamos lo malo que le sobra.”
He retracts the blade, slides it back into his pocket, then unhooks one of Clyde’s arms. “Agarre, carnal.” He holds out the rope to his short comrade Taco, who yanks it tight.
Sixto grabs Clyde by the chin and shoves his head upward.
“Wait, wait!” Clyde screams. “Money… you want money?”
“Que dice la perra, Pedro?” Sixto asks the tall one over his shoulder.
“Money… dinero… I’m worth mucho dinero!”
“Dice que tiene dinero,” Pedro says.
Sixto yanks Clyde’s hair.
“Donde esta el dinero?”
“Ahhh! Let go of my hair, you big ox! I’m a fugitive. Fugitiva. There’s a big reward for whoever turns me in.”
“Ahora que dice?” Sixto asks.
“A reward… ahhh, ouch! Clyde screams. “Una recompensa…”
“Dice que su padre es rico… y que pagará un rescate.”
“Que mierda,” Sixto says, unbuttoning his trousers and stepping back. “Inclínala sobre la mesa.”
Pedro unhooks Clyde’s other hand and pulls the rope tight.
“Wait!” Clyde screams as they drag him across the room to a table and bend him over it. “Wait just a fucking second!”
Sixto approaches him from behind with his trousers around his ankles, holding his cock in one hand and a tub of lard in the other.
“Desatale las piernas y extiéndelas.” Sixto shakes his cock at Clyde’s ass. “Necesito acceso abierto.”
“Dice que esperes, carnal,” Pedro says, reaching down to free Clyde’s ankles from the twine.
“Espere para que?” Sixto asks, putting the tub of lard on the table and dipping a finger into it. “Quieres que me ponga un gorrito primero, cariño?”
Clyde looks over his shoulder and catches his breath at the sight of Sixto greasing up his fully erect cock with the lard. His heart pounds and his mind works quickly trying to figure out how to survive this assault.
“That’s a really nice, big cock you’ve got there,” he says as Sixto grabs for his ass, forcing a smile. “Why don’t you let me suck it first?”
“Te la quiere mamar, carnal,” Pedro says. “Dice que tiene hambre.”
“Es cierto?” Sixto grabs Clyde’s hair. “Te gusta mi vergota, perra?”
Clyde grits his teeth and nods his head. “Oh yeah… let me swallow that juicy cock of yours. I’ll get it nice and wet, then you can ram it up my tight ass.”
“No sé lo que está diciendo, pero me parece bien,” Sixto says. “Bajamela.”
Pedro and Taco pull Clyde away from the table and on to his knees. Sixto pulls out his stiletto and flicks it open. He grabs Clyde by the hair and draws his face level with his crotch.
“Empieza a mamar, maricón.”
Clyde lunges forward and sucks Sixto’s cock.
“Ay sí…” Sixto closes his eyes, a twisted grin spasming his mouth. “Mmmm, es cierto que chupa bien. Que ricura.”
The other two watch enthusiastically. Taco unbuttons his trousers with his free hand.
“Apurate, carnal. Ahora es mi turno.”
Sixto thrusts deep in and out of Clyde’s mouth.
Taco holds out his end of the rope to Sixto. “Vamos, carnal, aguantala tu un poco.”
“Callate, buey,” Sixto snaps. “Me estás haciendo perder la concentración.”
Noticing the friction developing between the thugs, Clyde comes up for air.
“Let me use my hand. It’ll feel a lot better.”
“Que dice?” Sixto asks.
“Dice que es mi turno.” Taco shoves the rope at Sixto.
Clyde shakes his head and nods at Sixto.
“No, I want him.” He smiles salaciously at Sixto. “I like you, big boy. Me gustas. Let me use my hand. My mano.” Taking advantage of t
he slack on the rope on Taco’s side, Clyde makes a stroking gesture with his hand and licks his lips at Sixto.
“Te quiere chaquetear, mano,” the tall one says.
Sixto waves his stiletto at Taco. “Ándale! Sueltale el brazo.”
Taco releases the rope and masturbates. “Está bien, pero apurate. No me quiero venir esperando mi turno.”
Clyde simultaneously sucks and strokes Sixto with his hand. Sixto moans loudly as he gets very close to orgasm.
“Vengate ya, maldito,” Taco yells. “Es mi turno.”
“No, ahora me toca a mi,” Pedro says. “Me lo merezco, ya que me ha tocado traducir toda esta mierda.”
Clyde’s eyes roll up into his head as he braces himself and bites down on Sixto’s cock with all his strength, severing it at the base. Sixto lets out a deafening screech. Pedro and Taco recoil in horror as Clyde rears up, wielding the severed cock in his hand, and the rope slips out of Pedro’s hand.
Clyde leaps up and pitches the severed cock at Taco’s face. Then he rushes forward, grabs him by the hair, and smashes his head into the brick wall. Taco falls to the ground in a heap. Pedro lunges at Clyde, who sidesteps him and wraps a piece of rope around his neck, tying it as tight as he can until Pedro passes out.
Sixto runs around the small cellar howling, looking for something with which to stop the profuse bleeding. Spotting the switchblade on the ground, Clyde snatches it up and cuts off the ropes. Then, rescuing his shorts and panties from a corner, he pulls them on and bolts up the stairs.
Clyde pushes his way through the crowded strip club, wild-eyed and taking in deep draughts of the smoke-choked air. On the stage he sees a massive black woman sodomising a seventy-something with a dildo, and the sight makes him feel like retching. He breaks free of the crowd at the door and tumbles out of the club, then he crosses the pavement to the street and vomits into the gutter.
Straightening up at the sound of angry voices approaching from the distance, he staggers away from the boulevard in a state of total disorientation and spends the next thirty minutes stumbling aimlessly up one side street and down another. Finally, hobbling into a short cul-de-sac, he drops to his knees in a state of total exhaustion, his vision a blur. After a moment of rest, his head clears sufficiently for him to see that he is across the street from a two-story building with the words Clinica Medica Familiar stencilled in gold letters on the front window.
The Death of Baseball Page 39