Mexican WhiteBoy

by Matt De La Peña

  “You my gift to the world, boy.”

  Uno looks up at his old man, mumbles, “Thanks, Pop.”

  “Don’t you never forget that.”

  Uno nods.

  Just then, Uno’s mom comes storming out of the house, torn screen door whacking shut behind her. “Uno, you come on in now! You been listening to this nonsense long enough!”

  Senior stands up, brushes off the back of his Dickies. “Oh, that’s how it is, Loretta? You eavesdroppin’ on people?”

  “Didn’t have no choice! The whole damn neighborhood heared you blabbering on like some kinda minister. But you ain’t a minister, Senior! You’re a plain ol’ garbage man.” She starts across the street. “Uno, you better get inside and finish cleaning up that bathroom. You ain’t done by the time Ernesto gets home you gonna be in some trouble.”

  “Hell with Ernesto!” Senior shouts. “This my son!”

  “Ernesto’s twice the man you ever were.” Loretta takes Uno by the elbow, pulls him to his feet.

  Senior jerks Uno out of his mom’s grasp. “You treatin’ the boy like a bitch. No wonder he’s actin’ out.”

  “He acts out ’cause he got a good-for-nothing black bastard for a father.”

  “Bitch, if I didn’t have the Holy Ghost…I swear to God.”

  “Oh, now you wanna threaten people,” Uno’s mom says, backing up. She spins around and marches back across the street, barks over her shoulder: “We’ll see about them threats when I call the cops.”

  Uno watches Senior key open his car door, slip into the driver’s seat, slam the door shut and start the car. The roar of the engine reminds him of Senior’s laugh, but the look on his old man’s face couldn’t be more serious.

  Senior rolls down his window, says: “You gonna come live with your old man, Uno. In Oxnard.”

  Senior peels away from the curb and speeds up and over the hill, out of sight.

  Uno starts walking up the same hill, on foot.

  Loretta flings open the screen door again. She steps out onto the porch with the cordless pinned between her ear and shoulder, shouts: “Where you think you’re going?”

  “Out.”

  “Where?”

  “Out!”

  She pulls the phone from her ear, holds it by her side.

  “That man comes down here once a month, Uno! I’m here every single day! You think about that!”

  Uno ignores her words, continues up the hill.

  5

  Uno’s mind is a mixed bag as he veers right on Twenty-eighth St., heads toward Las Palmas Park. His old man has never said anything like that before. That he’s a gift. That he should move up to Oxnard. And why does his moms always have to start bawlin’ the guy out like that? Almost every Saturday his old man comes through it ends up with the two of them yelling. And Uno’s stuck in the middle. One pulling his left arm, the other pulling his right. Like it’s some kind of tug-of-war between black and Mexican, and he’s the rope.

  When Uno’s a few blocks from the park he reaches down, picks up a couple stray rocks and shoves them in his mitt, next to his baseball. He pictures Senior’s scar, remembers those dreams he used to have. But how’s he supposed to raise that much paper over one summer? Five hundred bones isn’t no joke. Imagine how many money pots he’d have to win during Saturday home run derbies. And then he decides what he’s gonna do. He’s gonna move up to Oxnard. With his old man. He’s gonna figure out a way to get that money.

  Uno pulls one of the rocks from his mitt and fingers it a bit, flips it over in his hand. Then he turns quick and fires it at an apartment building, hard as he can. The rock flies through the security bars of a second-story window and crashes through the glass, setting off a howling alarm.

  Uno drops the rest of the rocks and tears down the road, laughing his ass off.

  He cuts into the mouth of Las Palmas Park, slides down the ice-plant-covered hill, races across the weed-infested baseball field and leaps the crumbling fence along the first-base line. He ducks under the rusted bleachers, chest heaving in and out, heart pounding in his throat. And he can’t stop laughing. Why’s he laughing? He’s already on probation. How’s this shit funny?

  He watches the hill for a squad car or a couple cops on foot, trying to catch his breath. Scans the sky half expecting a helicopter to come through aiming a high-powered spotlight down onto the field. But there’s nothing in the sky except a couple puffy white clouds. The foot cops’ll probably show up any minute. They’ll slip down the ice plants after him clutching their guns. Or their clubs. Or the guy who lives in the second-story apartment he just nailed will appear at the top of the hill gripping a bat.

  Either way, there’ll be someone looking for him. And soon. He knows that.

  Uno stays tucked under the bleachers for hours. Picturing his moms pulling him up by the elbow. Senior’s face when he rolled down his window. The Impala speeding over the hill, out of sight. The rock crashing through the window. Manny’s bloody face and Sofia’s cousin hitting the ground after he punched him. He pictures these things over and over while he waits for the foot cops. Or the helicopter spotlight. Or the guy who lives in the apartment.

  But nobody ever comes.

  Stuck in Uncle Tommy’s Apartment

  1

  After Danny’s trip to emergency, where he took five stitches under his left eye, ten in the back of his head—where he had to talk to cops and fill out paperwork and look his uncle Tommy and uncle Ray dead in the eye and lie—since then Danny’s spent almost two full weeks hiding out in Tommy’s National City apartment in a sort of depression. At least that’s what he’s decided to call it. Depression. He’s never actually been depressed before, but his mom has. And when she’s depressed she refuses to go to work or the grocery store or the bank or anywhere else. She gets stuck inside the apartment, day and night. Inside her room. Underneath the covers. Like she’s sick. Only she’s not really sick. Not physically, anyway.

  “Don’t worry,” she always says when Danny stands at her bedroom door. “Seriously, Danny, go throw the baseball around at school or something. I’ll be fine. Mom’s just sort of stuck right now.”

  Ever since his dad took off, Danny’s drifted apart from his mom. He hardly even acknowledges her presence these days. She’s the reason he went quiet in the first place. The reason his dad’s gone. The reason he’s whitewashed and an outsider even with his own family. But whenever his mom got stuck it was another story. It was hard to stay mad.

  And here he is stuck himself now. Meaning he’s depressed. Because all he’s felt like doing for the past five days is hiding out in Sofia’s bedroom, on his cot, digging into the inside of his forearm with his nails to remind him he’s a real person.

  He has to keep away from people so he can think things over.

  2

  Wasn’t three weeks ago that Danny was standing along the chain-link fence of Leucadia Prep’s brand-new, state-of-the-art baseball facility, watching the team practice for playoffs.

  He was always on the outside at Leucadia Prep, but it didn’t get more outside than having to watch the varsity baseball squad take the field without him. Daily. While he stood on the wrong side of the chain-link in his generic private-school uniform: white short-sleeved collared shirt tucked into pleated khakis, navy blue tie knotted at the neck and falling toward the school-emblem buckle of his belt.

  This had been Danny’s spot since Coach Sullivan pulled him aside after the last day of tryouts—in front of everybody—patted him on the back and tried to let him down easy.

  “Listen, son,” he’d said, walking Danny off the school’s manicured infield. “You got great stuff. You really do. But you have to learn to keep it in the strike zone. A high-speed fastball doesn’t do me a whole lot of good if it’s three feet off the plate. You get what I’m saying?”

  Danny nodded.

  “Do me a favor,” Sullivan added, unlatching the gate and pushing it open. “Spend the year working on your control, your location, an
d let’s try this again next year. Okay?”

  Danny nodded and stepped through the gate, secretly digging nails into forearm.

  Sullivan pulled the gate shut behind him.

  Over the course of the three-day tryout Danny had struck out three batters, walked four and hit seven. He lit up the radar with his fastball, sure, but he couldn’t put it where he wanted. Not the greatest situation when you consider Leucadia Prep baseball was perennially top ten in the state. When you consider that every other hopeful pitcher had an important business-suit dad cheering him on from the stands, chatting up Sullivan the second there was a break in the action.

  When you consider Danny was the new kid. Again. His third school in three years. The semi-mute Mexican kid. The kid whose dad, Javier Lopez, not only had failed to show up in a suit but had failed to show up at all. To anything. Three years and counting.

  So there Danny was, standing at the fence watching Kyle Sorenson pick up a bat to take batting practice. It was the team’s last practice before they went to the state finals in Fresno. Danny’s last chance to watch Kyle in the batter’s box. According to Street and Smith’s big preseason baseball issue, Kyle was the number one outfield prospect west of the Mississippi. Baseball America had Kyle penciled in as a surefire top five pick in the upcoming MLB draft.

  The entire Leucadia Prep outfield retreated at the sight of their big cleanup hitter. They shifted left and positioned the heels of their cleats just inside the warning track. Scouts, scattered throughout the brand-new bleachers behind home plate, sat up a little straighter. They opened their eyes a little wider, folded up well-worn newspapers and set aside Styrofoam cups full of sunflower seed shrapnel. Coach Sullivan emerged from the dugout, pulled off his cap and ran his fingers through his rapidly thinning hair.

  Kyle was eighteen but looked like a full-grown man. Blond crew cut and a square jaw. Biceps the size of most kids’ thighs. Broad shoulders like a running back posing in full pads.

  Danny studied Kyle the way his fellow honor students studied their biology textbooks.

  When Kyle was finally set, chin to left shoulder, knees slightly bent, aluminum bat pointing up at the heavens, the batting practice pitcher threw one right down the pipe. Kyle took a vicious cut, smashed the ball a mile high.

  The pitcher snapped his head around to watch the flight of the baseball. All four infielders looked straight up, watched the ball shoot up into the afternoon sky like a 747. The guys in the outfield watched the ball soar well over their heads. Coach Sullivan took a step forward and watched. Mr. Sorenson, Kyle’s defense-attorney father, followed the flight of the ball while offering the only technical commentary he could these days, “Way to keep your head down, Ky.” Several scouts stood up as the home run ball broke up a small flock of pigeons over the faculty parking lot behind centerfield. A pen-pocketed math teacher looked up, fumbled with his keys, opened his car door and ducked into the driver’s seat for cover.

  Even Kyle himself followed the ball’s rainbow arc across the bright blue North County sky.

  Only person who didn’t watch the ball off the crack of the bat was Danny. He started out in the same place as everybody else. Followed the pitcher’s leg kick, the pitcher’s release point, the pitcher’s follow-through, the spin of the baseball’s seams, Kyle’s stance, Kyle’s swing, but at the point of contact, when everybody else looked west to see where this particular Sorenson bomb would land, Danny stayed with Kyle.

  He studied post-swing mechanics: Where did his follow-through leave him? Where did his bat end up? His feet? His shoulders? His hands? His head? His eyes?

  But Danny was looking for more than just technical answers. He needed to figure out how Kyle got there. How he became a great player. A star. Because that’s exactly what he had to become. And it wasn’t for his ego, so that everybody in school would stare at him and talk about him the way they did with Kyle. No, he needed only one person to look.

  3

  That night Danny’s mom had arranged a big dinner party. He and his sis were finally going to meet the new boyfriend.

  Danny walked to the door, put an eye to the peephole and got his first look at Randy. Guy was standing in the hall business-suit slick, just like he’d suspected. Gray three-piece, sophisticated glasses and clean-shaven face. A bottle of champagne in one hand, bouquet of roses in the other.

  Watching Randy run a hand through his short sandy-blond hair, Danny shook his head. The way his dad might. Of course, he thought, a white guy. His mom had dated nothing but white guys since the day his dad disappeared. Yeah, she was white, and Danny himself was half white, but it was still disrespectful. She knew how pissed his dad used to get when he caught some white guy checking her out.

  All she had to do was go back to that day in Del Mar when they were at the beach and his dad rose up on some muscle-bound white guy for whistling. His mom was sobbing as she pulled Danny and Julia around to the other side of the public bathroom. She went to her knees clutching Julia to her chest and shouting “I’m sorry!” over and over. The sound of punches landing and shouting and then sirens and cops shouting. Danny’s mom said she was sorry, over and over, throughout the entire thing. While the cops handcuffed his dad and pushed him into the back of their squad car by his face. “I’m sorry, Javi!” she said. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  But was she really sorry? Danny wondered as he stood at the door, peering through the peephole. Because here she was again, inviting another white guy into the apartment.

  4

  Danny puts his fingertips up to his stitches, feels the jagged threads weaving in and out of his skin.

  Sofia walks in to check on him again, but he pretends he’s asleep. He feels her standing over him, staring down. Feels her touch the top of his head. “We saved you some tacos, cuz,” she says. “I’ll bring ’em to you when you wake up, okay?” He feels her stand there a few more seconds and then walk back out of the room.

  Danny opens his eyes. He’s so lucky he still has his dad’s family. The Lopezes. Throughout all the moving around they did after his dad left, the different towns and high schools and apartment complexes, Danny’s relatives made sure his mom still dropped him and his sis off in National City for Thanksgiving and Mother’s Day and every other Christmas. Where all his tíos and tías and cousins are cracking on each other and playing horseshoes in the dirt alley behind the house and eating baby empanadas and toothpick-stuck chorizo bites off plastic trays. Where they are drinking homemade horchata and Pacifico and Bud Light and tequila with lime—always tequila. And since their snaps are a random mix of both Spanish and English, Danny gets only half of every joke. Not enough to laugh. But he laughs anyway. He points at whoever’s currently taking the heat, puts a fist to his mouth and says in his head, Oh, shit, that’s cold! He slaps Uncle Ray’s hand and laughs some more, but they know he doesn’t quite have the whole picture.

  And he knows they know.

  This is why sometimes he feels as out of place at his grandma’s as he does at Leucadia Prep.

  And when his grandma passes out homemade tortillas, hot off the griddle, she does it based on family rank. It’s a subtle and unspoken ranking system, but one each and every person in the house understands. And ’cause he’s so guapo and gets such good grades and lives in such a better neighborhood these days—and ’cause in a weird way Grandma’s almost ashamed of being Mexican—he’s always the first to eat. Even before his uncles. His dad when he was still around.

  And sure, that’s when it seems like he belongs, but it’s more complicated than that.

  His uncles and cousins may smile and nod and even crack on him some—“D-man, Li’l D, D-money, roll it up right, man, fold it at the end, here do like this, homey, with your fingers, don’t hold it like no white boy now or else the butter’s gonna drip right out the bottom, get all over your hand”—but all he wants to do is give that tortilla right back to his grams. Hold off till the next round. Have her offer that first one up to his dad instea
d. Or Uncle Ray. Or Sofia and Veronica. Uncle Tommy and his new wife, Cecilia. Even Veronica’s gangster boyfriend, Jesus. He’d just as soon wait till everybody in the house had one in their hand before he did.

  And if people only knew how that felt. Having the whole family stare at him and his tortilla, these people he adores.

  That’s when he wishes he didn’t get such good grades. When he wishes he lived even closer to the border than they did, in a one-room shack in the worst barrio this side of Tijuana. Dirt floors and no running water. When he wishes he got in more trouble at school, maybe a suspension on his record for fighting or bringing a switchblade to class. Maybe he could cuss out one of his private-school teachers in the hall during lunch: “I ain’t gotta listen to you, white bitch!”

  ’Cause the very things Grandma gushes over are what shame him most. Such a good little boy. Such a pretty boy. Look at him doing all his homework before bed, studying for that big English midterm, taking out the trash without even being asked. Look at him writing letter after letter to his dad, even though his dad never even said goodbye to his bitch ass.

  If it came down to a choice, it wouldn’t be a choice. That top-tier tortilla? The butter running all down his fingers now, down his arm? Nah. To be a real Lopez, though—that’s what he’d pick. A chip off the old block. One of the cousins from el barrio.

  Things aren’t always as they appear. Try inside out. Try hung up in plastic like a pair of Randy’s dress slacks and put away for a special occasion—when all Danny’s ever wanted to be was a pair of Grandma’s worn-out house slippers.

  And what’s interesting is the way they all genuinely want him to succeed, to rise above the family history. Be the first Lopez to go to college. Come back one Mother’s Day as a doctor or a lawyer or a dentist. A wealthy businessman. Hey look everybody, it’s Professor Lopez! Look at him, Grams! The son of a bitch is pulling up in a brand-new Lexus!

  But at the same time, he bets they subconsciously resent him, too. He’s almost sure of it.