by Michael Nava
“What is that?” I asked, pointing to the building as we got out of the truck.
“Nursing home,” John said.
“That looks like a chapel, with the angel over the door.”
“Could be,” he said. “I’ll have to ask my dad. He lived around here when he was a kid.”
We headed toward the restaurant. “Did you grow up in this neighborhood?”
“Me? No. I grew up in Pasadena. That’s where my parents moved after my dad started making money from his business.”
“DeLeon and Son. Does he still work with you?”
He shook his head. “He’s seventy-seven now. He takes care of his garden, spoils his grandkids.” He smiled. “Gives me lots of unsolicited advice about the business, but damn if he isn’t usually right.” He pushed open the door to the restaurant and put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s nothing fancy.”
Piñiatas dangled from the ceiling over booths separated from one another by bamboo screens. On one wall were garish movie posters advertising Mexican movies of the 1940s and ’50s with Cantinflas or Dolores Del Rio; on another, a velvet painting of a pneumatically muscled Aztec warrior lifting a maiden with breasts like projectiles. The floor was covered with sawdust. Dusty paper flowers and strings of small earthen jars stretching across the ceiling completed the décor.
A smiling teenage girl greeted John as if she recognized him and led us to a booth. On the table between us was a candle, a jar of pickled vegetables, a Dos Equis beer bottle holding a paper rose, and a metate in the shape of a pig carved from volcanic rock filled with chile so hot I could smell it.
“My grandmother had a metate exactly like this one.”
“Every ’buelita had that metate,” John said.
The girl left for a moment, then returned with water, a basket of tortilla chips, a bowl of fresh salsa, flatware and menus. She laid them before us with shy efficiency and eye-averted modesty.
“That girl seemed to recognize you,” I said.
“I know the family that owns the place. The Huertas,” he said. “I did some work for them. The girl is a niece or something. They brought her up from Mexico.” He unfolded the menu. “Everything’s good here, but especially the fish. You like fish?”
I nodded, looked around the garish room and asked, “So what part of the décor are you responsible for?”
He grinned. “The kitchen.”
The restaurant was almost empty when we arrived, but the booths soon began to fill. The clientele seemed about equally divided between mexicanos in straw hats playing Javier Solis on the jukebox and would-be Anglo bohemians from nearby Silverlake, complaining to the waiters about the loudness of the music and anxious over whether the refried beans were vegetarian or not.
The young waitress brought our drinks and took our orders. After she left, I asked him, “What happened with baseball?”
“I tore a ligament in my pitching arm,” he said. “Nowadays, they just take a tendon from somewhere else in your body and transplant it, but not back then, not for a minor leaguer.”
“You must have had some talent to get called up, even if only for a couple of games.”
“I was a lefty, and there’s never enough of those to go around, so I got more attention than maybe I deserved.” He dunked a chip into the hot salsa and munched it. “Hijole, that’s hot. Don’t get me wrong, Henry, I had decent stuff when I could control it.” He tried another chip. “They may have been able to make something out of me, but when I ripped up my arm, that was it was adiós, Johnny.”
“Just like that?”
He gulped some water. “I was pretty immature. I don’t think they were that sorry to see me go.”
“You must have been barely out of your teens,” I said. “Immaturity goes with the territory.”
“I was a big blowhard, Henry. I was sure I was going to be the next big Latin star. Roberto Clemente, Juan Marichal, and me. The only problem was I didn’t have their talent and I didn’t like to work all that hard, either. That’s a bad combination. I’m surprised I lasted as long as I did.”
“How long was that?”
“Five years,” he replied. “I was recruited right out of high school. Man, my dad wasn’t happy about that.”
“Why?”
“He wanted me to go to college like my brothers and sisters,” he said. “I got three of each, and they’re all white-collar but me and my sister Josefa. She dropped out of college to get married. After baseball got done with me, I never made it back to school.”
“You went to work for your dad?”
Our food arrived on enormous, thick white platters. John had a whole fish while I had ordered the snapper Vera Cruz. There were piles of rice and beans on the side and a big bowl of salad to split, with a fragrant stack of corn tortillas. The food made me think of my mother, who was a wonderful cook. She frequently cooked dishes that she knew I particularly liked. The platters of chile rellenos and bowls of picadillo were messages from her to me seeking forgiveness. I would pass them, untouched, to my father.
As he separated the flesh from the bone of his fish, John said, “I didn’t go to work for my dad right away.”
“What did you do?”
“Partied,” he said, sprinkling the fish with lemon. “Buen provecho,” he said, and for a few minutes we ate. “Yeah, I partied for five solid years. Even getting married and having my kids didn’t stop me. When I wasn’t high, I was drunk.”
“And then?”
“I woke up in jail,” he said, piling beans on a piece of tortilla. He stuffed it into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, sipped his Coke.
“DUI?”
He nodded. “With injuries, mostly to me, but the girl who was with me in the car, she got hurt some, too. Oh, yeah, and she wasn’t my wife. Wasn’t my first arrest, either. My folks had bailed me out before. This time my pop told me I could either come back home and learn a man’s trade, or rot in jail.” He smiled. “It was a harder decision than you’d think. My father, he’s a great man, Henry, but a little on the severe side.”
“I know something about severe Mexican fathers,” I said.
“He told me loved me,” John said. “But that he didn’t respect me. You know things like that sound a lot worse when you say them in Spanish. He thought I was, you know, un playboy. When it came to construction, I couldn’t tell a hammer from a hole in the ground, so he put me on his crew and I learned.” He grinned. “I didn’t get special treatment for being the boss’s son. Some days, the nicest thing he called me was pendejo. If my mom knew how he talked on the job, she’d make him go to church twice on Sunday. After a while, I started to get the hang of things. I even found out I had some talent for designing stuff. My dad saw it. He offered to send me back to school to study architecture or something, but I told him I was happy where I was.”
“That still true?”
“There were years when I couldn’t watch baseball because it hurt too much to think about what I’d thrown away, but I’m forty-three now and whatever career I coulda had in the bigs would be over by now, so I guess I don’t have regrets I can’t live with.”
“That’s philosophical.”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “That’s me, Johnny DeLeon, philosopher. What about you? What do you do?”
“I’m a lawyer. Didn’t I tell you that the other day?”
“You were kind of out of it the other day, Henry. Wow, an abogado. I’m impressed, man. What kind of law?”
“Criminal defense.”
“Helping the people,” he said, nodding.
“Since the heart attack, my new career seems to be sleeping.”
He finished his Coke and signaled the girl for another one. “You don’t have family to take care of you?”
“My parents are dead,” I said. “I have a sister who lives in Oakland.” I decided not to tell about Vicky and her son, as it seemed a moot point.
“Man, I can’t imagine what I’d do without my family.”
“For me, i
t was good, not really having a family. I was able to live my life my own way without worrying about how the fallout might affect them.”
“You mean being gay.”
“Not just that,” I said. “I’ve tried to be true to who I think I am in other ways, too.”
He looked at me and said, “I think you’re brave, man.”
“Being brave is doing the things you’re afraid of doing, not the ones you were born to do.”
“There ain’t too many people can do either one,” he said. “I bet you’ve done both.”
“But I never pitched in the majors.”
He laughed. “Okay, I guess I’m embarrassing you. How are you feeling?”
I ran a quick check. “I feel pretty good.”
“You wanna go home, or would you like to get coffee somewhere?”
“Coffee.”
We fought over the check, but as it turned out our meals were on Mr. Huerta, who came over and thanked John effusively for the work he’d done in the restaurant’s kitchen, for which, I pieced together, he’d only charged for supplies. When I mentioned it in the truck, he shrugged and changed the subject.
We ended up at a coffeehouse on Beverly at the edge of West Hollywood as austere as Maria’s had been over the top: concrete floors, metal tables, actor-waiters clad in black and Edith Piaf singing softly beneath the din of cell phone conversations.
“This is different,” I said at the doorway.
“I was the contractor on this place,” he said. “There’s a table by the window. Grab it, I’ll get coffee.”
I comandeered the table and watched him approach the counter, completely out of place and totally comfortable. After a moment, I realized I was admiring his body: the long legs and wide shoulders and even the lap of love handles over his belt. The young athlete was still present in the easy way with which he carried himself. His body had never failed him. He returned to the table with two cups of coffee and a large piece of chocolate cake with two forks. He said, “You’re gonna love this cake.”
We dug in. “Why did you get divorced?” I asked John, picking up the conversation we’d started in his truck.
“After I stopped drinking, things changed. I changed.” He cut off a chunk of cake and wolfed it down. “You know what that’s like. A year later, you’re an entirely different person. Five years later, and it’s like another lifetime. I hung in there until the kids were in high school, but at the end, it was either a divorce or hit the bottle again.”
“Things were that bad with you and your wife?”
“There wasn’t anything wrong with Suzie.” He mashed cake crumbs beneath his fork. “It was all me. The divorce was hard on her, hard on the kids, too. My daughter still holds it against me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He looked at me for a moment. “What about you? After your friend died, why didn’t you hook up with someone else?”
I had the feeling this was not what he had intended to say, but something to divert the conversation away from him. I had been in what Josh used to call my cross-examination mode, and in that mode I sometimes overstepped. Maybe he was just showing me he could also ask painfully personal questions.
“It’s not that easy, John,” I said. “I never believed in just hooking up. A friend of mine once told me that my problem is that my dick’s connected to my heart.”
The words were out of my mouth before I considered that a gay man referring to his dick might push the limits of John’s tolerance, but all he said was, “Me, too.”
“You think you’ll get married again?”
“If I met the right person. I been dating this girl off and on for a while now, but it’s real casual. How are you holding up, man?”
“The caffeine and sugar rush is wearing off. I think it’s time for me to turn in.”
We drove back to my house in companionable silence, listening to a Mexican radio station.
John pulled into the driveway. I said, “I had a great time, John. Thanks for coming over.”
“I was wondering if you’d like to go to a ball game sometime.”
“You know, I’ve lived here ten years and I’ve never been to Dodger Stadium.”
“Then it’s time,” he said. “I’ll give you a call tomorrow. We’ll figure out a day.”
“Great. Good night, John.”
I held out my hand but he reached over it and hugged me. For a second, his cheek brushed against mine with that familiar sensation of stubble and heat. He released me, patted my back and said, “Sleep tight, man.”
I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I dreamed I was in a pawn shop on Spring Street, a neighborhood that seemed like it belonged in Mexico City rather than L.A. A greasy old woman stood behind the counter, arms crossed, an unlit cigarette clamped between her lips. I was frantically searching my pockets for my pawn ticket while she barked in Spanish, “Apreté, señor, quiero cerrar.” Finally, she came out from behind the counter, went to the door and was about to turn the sign from OPEN to CLOSED, when I found the ticket and waved it in her face. Grudgingly, she grabbed it out of my hand, went back around the counter and through a door that led into the dark recesses of the store. When she returned, she opened her palm. I saw the glint of gold and then I woke up.
6.
I GOT OUT OF BED filled with energy, and after breakfast went into my office for the first time since the heart attack. I turned on the computer and spent a couple of hours organizing my calendar, which showed about twenty appeals in various stages of progress. On most I was either waiting for oral argument to be scheduled or for an opinion to be filed. Fortunately, as it turned out, just before the heart attack I had been trying to clear the decks for a death penalty appeal with a ten-thousand-page transcript. The handful of trial court matters left on my docket I could either continue or hand off to other lawyers. When I finished working out my calendar, I saw the disk with the judicial application that Inez had brought me and copied it onto my hard drive. The application ran to ten pages, with almost a hundred questions, many of which, in typical legal fashion, had subpart piled upon subpart. The bar exam had been less complicated. The first question was easy enough, though: applicant’s name.
I had worked on the application for nearly an hour when the phone rang in the kitchen. I let the machine take the call, but when my office line rang, I picked it up.
“Law offices.”
“Henry? Is that you?”
“Hi, Elena. Did you just call on the other line?”
“Yes, when you didn’t answer, I called this number. Are you working?” she asked with a note of concern in her voice.
“A little.”
“Is that wise?”
“I’m not doing any heavy lifting. How are you?”
“I heard from Vicky.”
“She called?”
“She wrote me a letter,” Elena replied. “She said her husband found out she was staying with me and that’s why she left. She apologized for taking the money and she returned the credit card.”
“Did she use it?”
“I haven’t called to check.”
“Where’s the letter postmarked from?”
There was a pause, a rattle of papers. “San Francisco.”
“Well, at least you know she’s still up there.”
“Do you have any ideas about how I can find her?”
“She’s not missing, she’s hiding. She doesn’t want to be found.” An alarm went off in my head. “She said her husband learned she was staying with you. Did she tell you how?”
“No,” Elena replied. She was silent for a moment. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she told him.”
That tallied with my assumption. “Maybe she’s gone back to him and she’s ashamed to tell you.”
“I doubt that my disapproval means much to her,” she said. “If she was with Pete, she would have said so in her letter. I think she was struggling with what to do, and in a moment of weakness, called him and told him to come get
her and Angel, but then changed her mind and ran. Well, at least I know she didn’t leave because she was mad at me. I’ve got to talk to her.”
“What can you do for her that she can’t do for herself?”
“Persuade her to do what you suggested and call his parole officer or, if that doesn’t work, get a restraining order.”
“What’s going to restrain her if she changes her mind again?”
Exasperated, she said, “Henry, she needs help. She may not accept it from me, but she’s certainly not going to get any out there on the streets and neither is Angelito.” She paused. “Do you think I should call the police?”
“She’s not missing and she’s not the victim of a crime,” I said. “They won’t be interested.”
“He beat her,” she reminded me.
“And she didn’t report it,” I said. “They’re not going to pick him up on a stale complaint. Did she mention a friend or someone she might have gone to or who would know where she is?”
“She seems to be close to her mother-in-law,” Elena ventured.
“Pete’s mom? Wouldn’t she be on his side?”
“The way Vicky talked about her, she could have been her mother, too,” Elena said. I could hear that the admission pained her.
“What’s her name?”
“Jesusita. She lives down there in a town called Garden Grove. You know where that is?”
“Just south of L.A.,” I said. “Jesusita. I assume her last name is Trujillo.”
“As far as I know.”
“I’ll have my investigator try to track her down. If she’s in touch with Vicky, maybe she’ll get a message to her from you.”
“Thank you, Henry.”
“Elena, I know this is hard for you.”
“I’ll be all right,” she replied. “You really sound like you’re having a good day today.”
“I feel good.”
“Well, whatever you’re doing, keep it up.”
I called my investigator, Freeman Vidor, and gave him the assignment of finding Jesusita Trujillo. Freeman was suffering from a form of arthritis that was slowly crippling his spine and might have forced him to retire had his career not been saved by the internet. The dingy office he occupied on Broadway now looked like the headquarters of some dot-com startup.