Mike Cosgrove strikes out the side and is going for the complete game. The Astros have the top of their lineup due to bat. Mariana struts herself across the living room right under your nose. She says under her breath, as if to seduce you, “I don’t know why they aren’t winning. I did all the Dreamer I can do.” She joins Hector in the backyard as he licks the fine paper edge on her rollie.
The reception on the TV makes the top of the ninth barely watchable. Tommy Lasorda is stretched out like a nineteen-inch pancake as he walks onto the field to relieve Sutton. He is tapping his left arm, calling to the bullpen for the closer. He wants lefty Stan Wall to face Cruz, who is 3-for-4 on the night. Hector has had enough of your TV and suggests a trip to Rafael’s for carnitas and beers. Mariana grabs her purse and tells you she is going out with her sisters for the night. She walks out with Hector.
Gets into his ride.
Isaac is asleep and has been since the start of the ninth. Just as well. You sit down to watch the end of the game. Before you can put your legs up, the first splitter out of Stan Wall’s hand towers high into the night sky above Dodger Stadium. You imagine the ghosts in Chavez Ravine throwing it back over the fence.
Cruz’s second home run of the night is the knife in your belly.
“Ah hell,” you say out loud while turning off the TV. You move to the other end of the house so not to wake Isaac, and go to the bedroom to get the radio off the dresser because the reception has now gotten so bad. When you turn it on to see if the batteries work, a buzz swarms through the house. As you walk out of the room, you see the box marked Dodgers in black marker sitting in the corner, the box with a picture of Bill Russell on its side. You stack the radio on top and take both to the kitchen.
The AM reception of the radio is worse than the TV. You can barely make out Dodger broadcaster Vin Scully’s voice. It cracks every few seconds as he announces: Farmer John’s hot dogs, Dodger Dogs, proud sponsor of Dodger baseball.
You open the box and step away to look out the front window to where Hector’s car was parked. It is important that everyone is gone. Using two hands, you take out the bubble-wrapped items. The arrangement is meticulous. Nothing out of order. There are Station 76 collector pins and lithographs. Championship team photos and ticket stubs dating back to ’58, when the Brooklyn Puerto Ricans called it quits. These are the Dodgers of yesterday, your father’s and grandfather’s. The items here on the table mark an exact time—in some cases, a very specific moment—in Dodger history. If you really think about it, you can say you were Dodger fan before you were Mexican. “This is my language,” you’d say to Hector, clutching an autographed 1963 championship baseball in your strong hand.
It’s the bottom of the ninth with one out, and Vin Scully announces Rick Monday’s return to the plate. There is a man on second, but because of the radio’s reception, affected by all the pots and pans in the kitchen, it is impossible for you to figure out if it’s Cey or Lopes. The Dodgers need a good baserunner with the winning run up to bat. Lopes will make it home on a single to anywhere in the outfield. The Penguin will only make it the ninety feet to third.
You pick up Isaac from the couch, waking him. “Let’s go listen to the game outside.”
Isaac rubs the squint from his eyes. “It’s too cold out there,” he tells you. “Watch it on the TV.”
“It’s busted. C’mon, we’ll sit in the car.”
You take the items off the kitchen table and pack them back in the box.
“Here, hold this,” you order Isaac, so you can grab a couple of jackets. He backs up and shakes his head no. You crack the box open. “Check these out,” you tell him. “Go ahead and grab something.”
He targets Zimmer and Nen, Koufax and Drysdale.
“These smell old,” he says and pulls his head away. “Like dirt.”
There is a chill in the air that Pico Rivera has not felt in some time. A thin layer of frost covers the windows of your 1976 Honda Civic. “I’ll start her up and get the heater going.” You set the box down in the front seat between you and Isaac. He rests his head against the passenger window. He expels bursts of air through thinly pursed lips like the smokestacks downtown.
The car starts and the radio blasts, straightening Isaac upright in his seat. He reaches for the volume and turns it down.
“What station is the game on?” he asks. “Wait,” he continues, “I know.” And as soon as he tunes in the game, Vin Scully’s excitable voice marches out from the dashboard. Rick Monday has put the ball in play, and Astros third baseman Ken Boswell bobbles the grounder before short-hopping the throw to first. Cey is the baserunner. He barely makes it to third in a headfirst slide. Vin Scully describes Cey’s slide in the broadcast as he calls time out to wipe the dirt from his chest.
“What luck!” you call out, slapping both hands on the dash. “That’s okay, we’re still in this.”
“Who’s up to bat now?” Isaac asks. It excites you that Isaac’s not being able to see the game has made him interested in its outcome, that somehow his senses have been heightened. “I bet it’s Bill Lopes,” he says.
“Russell,” you correct him, “Bill Russell, Davey Lopes.” Isaac looks to the floor of the car after being corrected, losing some of his excitement between the cracks of the seat. You yell out, “C’mon, Bill Lopes,” bang the inside roof of the car, and begin poking Isaac’s ribs under his jacket. Isaac laughs and reaches into the box. He pulls out a yellowing autographed baseball. “Can I hold this?” You shrug your shoulders and breathe in deeply because you are now this close to planting the Dodgers in your son.
Runners are at the corners with one out. Dodger catcher Steve Yeager steps up to the plate. He takes the first pitch and drives it foul into the left-field stands.
As he did with Hector’s tattoo of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Isaac now traces the signature on the baseball—Best, Gil Hodges—distinguishing ink from lace and leather. He pretends to lick it just to see if you’re paying attention, and then tries to replicate the signature on the frosted passenger-side window.
Yeager steps out of the batter’s box and is playing mental games with the pitcher. The next pitch is a curve that doesn’t break. It sends Yeager to the dirt. Isaac tosses the ball back into the box and sits for a moment, listening to boos coming from Dodger Stadium over the radio. He reaches in and takes the ball out again.
“Catch?”
“Sure,” you say. “Let’s do it.” And Isaac is first out of the car.
“Leave the doors open so we can hear the game.”
He walks off the curb into the street and hesitates in the well-lighted neighborhood as the night air smacks his face. He shudders, and you think Isaac might be having second thoughts about playing catch. But he turns to face you and hides his grip on the ball in his oversized winter coat. You expand your chest and shift your weight directly over the balls of your feet, like a catcher hovering over home plate. Pointing your index finger straight down between your legs, you give the sign. Fastball. Isaac waves it off and steps onto a pretend mound. You aren’t even sure he can make the long throw from where he’s lined up, four car lengths down the street. He leans in from the stretch to start his delivery, and looks to the parked Honda as it leans toward the steal. He throws a perfect slider. It starts out like a high fastball, seams spinning downward, and then bottoms out into the asphalt two feet in front of you.
Isaac signals you to move to the curb. “Car!” he calls out, pointing to the headlights coming your way.
The autograph is scuffed, Gil Hodges reduced to a last name. The leather is wet, and twenty years of dust turns to a light viscous mud. You pull at the seams. The casing starts to pull away without too much undoing. You try to wipe the mud from Hodges, but the signature smears under the pressure of your thumb. So you pack it like a snowball in an effort to return the throw.
Isaac steps off the curb and waits in the street. He rocks his hips back and forth. Vin Scully is doing postgame interviews from inside the car, and yo
u don’t even know the final score. You ask Isaac who won the game. He dances under the lights in the Big Show. “Bill Russell, Davey Lopes, Bill Russell, Davey Lopes.” And suddenly you feel the sixty-foot-six-inch distance between the mound and home plate contract in an unrivaled chill.
HOMEGIRL WEDDING
Today is Shy Girl’s wedding. It is a March wedding. This means I can show everyone in attendance the bright star Spica in Virgo, or introduce them to the Small Magellanic Cloud that is in the constellation of Tucana. It will take some imagination on their part. I will point out Canopus—the second-brightest star in the night sky. If everything goes to shit at the reception, I will keep the ninth-brightest star, Achernar, tucked away in my back pocket. I track the night sky for a living, all its celestial movements, and write down where they will appear ten, fifty, and one hundred thousand years from now. It’s simple math, really, so long as we keep spinning the way we do.
My girl Carmen is the celestial body of all celestial bodies. She uses the word cholas to describe Shy Girl’s bridesmaids, a roll call of middle-aged women that includes a La Lista, a Thumper, and another named Crazy Silvia. I make a face that suggests to Carmen something foul smelling. She says it makes her sad that I look down on that part of her life. I don’t look down on it. I just don’t know it, and I forget what it means to grow up in Boyle Heights. I grew up eleven point two miles away in Pasadena. It might as well have been one light year between us. She suggests I get a firm hold on the whole cholas thing, that I should practice in the mirror saying it over and over again until it sounds as normal as cat. More importantly, Carmen reminds me that I could get my ass kicked for less at this wedding.
“I used to be one, Chris,” she says.
“A bridesmaid?”
“You know I used to be down with my girls.”
“Don’t say it. Please.”
“Cho-la.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means I’m from somewhere.”
“I see.” The wedding is sounding much more complicated than the invitation ever let on. “I’ve never been in a fight,” I say.
Carmen rolls her eyes and feigns a lunge with two clenched fists.
“I don’t want to be hit in the face today,” I say. “And the older I get, the more difficult it is to think that I could at some point.”
Carmen agrees.
“Did you date a lot of guys who got into fights?” I ask.
“All my boys fought,” she says.
I wish she had phrased it differently. The way Carmen says all my boys makes it sound contractual. That somehow she still has their papers. She has fought and has a scar on her shoulder from a knife fight over a broken compact mirror to prove it. I date a girl who has been in a knife fight, and no matter how many times I say it, it still sounds otherworldly to me.
It’s been a while since she has been back to her old neighborhood. And even though she hasn’t spoken to most of her girlfriends in some time, Carmen says it’ll be like going home. She pulls me in and play-fights. I wrestle her to the ground and pin her. Her arms are spread out wide and I am sitting on her stomach. I can feel her legs kicking behind me and I am surprised at how much strength it takes for me to hold her in place. It is as if she’s letting me get the best of her, that if she decided to teach me a lesson, it wouldn’t take much undoing.
“Well, you aren’t one now, right?”
“Chris, let me up. I have to start getting ready,” she says. “And you said you’d clean up the yard.”
She pushes me off with ease, as I suspected she could.
“I don’t do that anymore.”
It is just getting warm enough outside that all the dog shit piles are starting to smell. I promise Carmen I will get it picked up before we leave. I put it off as long as I could and neither one of us can take it much longer. It is getting into everything, the way a sealed loaf of bread takes on the flavor of bananas rotting in a cupboard. But it wasn’t until I started seeing the Belt of Orion in the constellation of shit on the back lawn that I surrendered to the task. The dogs are gone. We had adopted them from the pound when we moved in, thinking they would help push us toward the family unit we had been silently suggesting to each other. You know how it goes—making comments about babies in shopping carts, or holding a pair of baby shoes in the palm of your hand and daring your significant other to not say aww. Carmen did everything with the dogs by her side. She napped with them at the foot of the bed when I worked. She took them for walks twice a day and fed them nothing but the best—the dog food they keep in the refrigerated section of the grocery store. She bathed them and sang duets with them. And then a month later, when they took off under the hole in the back fence, Carmen acted like they never lived one day with us. As though their leaving was some kind of commentary on what they thought of her as a mother. She never said one word about them after that.
“Are you sure you want me to clean the yard?” I ask. “It’s all we have left of the children.”
“I’m over kids,” she says.
She’s lying. The topic doesn’t dominate our relationship, but it floats around the room like wispy fingers of smoke when the two of us are trying to think of something to talk about late at night. She comes from a big family, so I understand the calling to fill the house with new bodies. I suspect she is lonely, which is why I don’t make a huge deal about going to this wedding today, especially since she needs a refilling of something she’s either willingly poured out or spilled all over the place.
The neighbors will complain if I just throw all this crap in the back alley, so I tear apart the garage and find two used garbage bags and the empty flat-screen box I wanted to keep in case we moved. I line the box with both garbage bags and fill them. The box seems sturdy enough, but when I pick it up on each end, it is heavier than I anticipated. I tie the bags off and lean the box on its side to tape the bottom. Here is what looks like a brand-new television. Carmen peeks through the bedroom curtains to see me laughing alone in the backyard at the shit-filled television box. She shakes her head and points to her watch. From here I can see how beautiful she looks. She is framed in the window just off center, like a portrait I might hang right there on the side of the house, if I were a man who’d do such a thing. The lawn, however, has seen better days, now peppered with patches of yellowed dead grass that gives it the polka-dot effect of a hundred rocket launches.
We’ve never looked this good together at the exact same time. Her dress is bronze and low cut at the top and bottom. I don’t mind showing her off, and have even gotten a thrill when she bends over in public and shows her ass, making a businessman choke back his latte, or a teenager witness the blast of his future. I take Carmen’s hand and lead her down the stairs to the patio where the television box sits.
“I present you the wedding gift,” I say.
“That’s our TV,” she says.
“Well, sort of our TV. Look.” I point out over the lawn. “The yard’s clean.”
She looks at me and then to the box, then to the yard and then to the box, and back to me. It goes like this for a moment. Box. Yard. Me.
“We aren’t gonna take that to—”
“No,” I say. “No, I just need your help getting it in the back of the truck. We’ll find a Dumpster on the way, and I’ll throw it out.”
Her look wants to know how I can be so technically educated and circus clown at the same time. There is a scientific explanation for this very phenomenon, but it escapes me.
“Look at me.” Carmen holds her hands up, and I take notice of her nails for the first time. They are fake and extend two inches off the tips of her fingers, midnight blue with a rhinestone in each corner. She laughs out her nose. “I can barely open a door.”
“Fake nails seem a bit much,” I say.
“Not for my homegirl’s wedding, they’re not.”
“You are really getting into this, aren’t you?” I realize how unsupportive I sound.
Carmen get
s up in my face. She slips one of her talons under my shirt button and pulls me in. I’ve never been this close to her with my eyes so wide open. Even during sex, when our faces are this close, I always close my eyes to picture her under me. “You make it sound like I’m playing dress up with a bunch of my girlfriends,” she says.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Doesn’t matter what you meant,” she says.
“Not what I meant, my darling.” I serenade her from the lawn, walking around the box. Shit is heavy. I hunch down and isolate my quads to squat up the box onto the tailgate. It slides easily to the front of the bed. Carmen gets into the truck and puts on her seat belt. Her face fills the side mirror as she looks back at me before applying more makeup. Unfortunately, the straps are behind the seat in the cab. I open the driver-side door and explain to Carmen about the straps and that I really should secure this thing because if it goes, it will be about the worst thing that has ever happened. She leans forward without missing a beat or saying a word. I ratchet it down until the rounded corners bend inward and then call it good. I take a minute at the back bumper to straighten my tie and watch Carmen put the finishing touches of mascara on her right eye. And then Hubble’s law splits my head in two. It’s the law of physics that states that the farther a galaxy is away from us, the faster that same galaxy is moving away from us.
“That one,” says Carmen, pointing to the full Dumpster behind Newberry’s. “No one will see you.”
Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul Page 3