Rickie Trujillo

by Nicholas Bradley

  “No, not that. I don’t know. Maybe. Because I needed to. I wanted to find him. I don’t even know what country my mom lives in.”

  “How did you find him?” Rickie is still astounded and stalling for time to process this new information.

  “Last year I began to call all the Ricardo Trujillos and R. Trujillos up that way—Thousand Oaks, Camarillo, Oxnard, Ventura. Do you know how many there are? More than a hundred! He’s up in Ventura.” She pauses, excited now that she has begun to tell him. He will allow no reaction to show on his face. He has never talked to her about their father; they don’t talk about their past at all, Bill included. Bill’s anger still remains on the surface. He dismisses their father and mother as ignorant Mexicans who only care about themselves.

  “When someone actually answered, I told them I wanted to speak to Ricardo Trujillo. A lot of times they’d hang up or say that no Ricardo Trujillo lived there. But this one time, a man answered and said, ‘Who is this?’ I told him I was Daisy, Ricardo’s daughter. He didn’t say anything for a long time, didn’t hang up and didn’t say he didn’t have a daughter, either. It was like he was deciding whether to admit who he was or not. Finally, he said, ‘How old are you now?’ I told him. He said, ‘What about Bill and Junior?’ and then I knew for sure.

  She stops. Rickie is looking at her intently, trying to understand what renewed contact with their father means to his life. Daisy looks down at her hands folded in front of her, then takes a napkin from the holder and polishes the space on the table in front of her.

  “You probably think I’m stupid for calling him,” she says without looking up.

  “I don’t care what you do. It’s your life. What did you tell him about me?”

  “That you were okay.”

  “That’s all?”

  “No, a little more. What should I have said?”

  “Nothing. I don’t want him to know nothing about me. What else did you say?”

  “I wrote him a long letter after he gave me his post office box number. I sat at the kitchen table the next night and told him about me, about Bill, about you and about abuelita…”

  “What did you say about me?” he asks. Suddenly, the food he has eaten is making him ill.

  “I only told him a little bit—about what grade you’re in… I told him you were doing well. Are you? I hope so.”

  Rickie doesn’t respond.

  “About baseball. About your arrest… I had to, Junior,” she says when he is about to object. “I wanted to be honest. I told him I worried about your friends. But I told him how good you are in baseball, that he’d be proud.”

  Rickie stares at her and shakes his head back and forth slowly as though he can’t believe what she has done.

  She pushes on. “I told him you didn’t have anyone, that we had our grandfather after he left, but that abuelito’s gone and our grandmother is old and worn out, and she doesn’t really understand how things are.”

  Rickie is too shaken to respond; he searches her face to try to understand why she has brought this stranger back into their lives.

  “After I was sure he had received the letter, I called again. We talked for over an hour. He cried, Junior. He was very ashamed. He cried like a baby.”

  The expression on Rickie’s face remains impassive, but he can feel something begin to constrict within him, as though it will eventually choke him.

  “Do you call him a lot?” he asks.

  “He wants me to, but I write him more. It takes my mind off things, gives me something to do.”

  “I thought you didn’t have time for anything besides work and school,” he says. His tone is accusatory.

  “He’s our father, Junior. I’m going to make time to write him. Besides, when I don’t have school at night, I have too much time. It’s not like I have this wild social life. I don’t even have a boyfriend, remember?” Self-pity has found its way into her voice.

  He feels the grip tighten. He wants to think that his sister is always moving forward, not alone, and not lonely and trying to grasp at something from the past. He knows so little about her. Even when he was quite young, he distanced himself from her because she bossed him around too much. He has always been willing to concede that she knows how things ought to be, how he ought to act, but he often resists her direction. She gives the people who make the rules too much power. She follows the letter of the law too perfectly and shrinks back in disbelief and fear if someone, Rickie or one of his friends, breaks the law or any of those unwritten laws she believes in. It is as though she knows something he does not, that some black-hooded punisher hides in the shadows and waits to hand out harsh justice if you break a law.

  “He won’t help,” he says bitterly.

  “What?”

  “He won’t help if you’re scared. He wasn’t there when we were little kids afraid of little kid stuff. He couldn’t handle that. What makes you think he can help now? He doesn’t give a shit about us. If he did, he’d of shown up years ago. He knows where we are. We haven’t moved,” he says dismissively. “Is he still with that fourteen-year-old?”

  “She’s not fourteen any longer, Junior. That was years ago. No, he’s not. He feels ashamed. He doesn’t come back because he is ashamed of everything he did. He told me over and over.” She pauses. She can tell that he doesn’t believe her or doesn’t care. “He always asks about you, Junior, wants to know about your baseball. He wants to see you play.”

  “The season’s almost over. There’s only the championship game. He’ll have to get his sorry ass down here quick,” he says quietly, but she hears him.

  “Junior.”

  “Does Bill know?” he asks, ignoring her scolding look.

  “I told him, but he doesn’t care. ‘He’s out of my life,’ he says. What about you, Junior? What do you think?”

  “I think he should stay up there with his fourteen-year-old,” he says and stands to leave.

  Daisy looks as if she’s going to correct him but thinks better of it. She takes a napkin from the dispenser and pushes the gum out of her mouth into it. She balls up the napkin and throws it away in the trash as they exit. In the parking lot, the afternoon heat engulfs them from all sides. It feels as though cool air has never existed and never will again, only hot, still air; as though they are inside a balloon filled with poisonous gas. He takes the gum from his mouth and throws it into the bushes. They go inside the house. Their grandmother is stretched out on the sofa, TV on, fan on and directed at her. She sleeps on her back in her dark blue dress, her mostly toothless mouth open and taking in air noisily.

  They both stare at her for a long moment, pity and love registering on Daisy’s face. She reaches out her hand to smooth the hair away from her grandmother’s forehead but holds back.

  “Okay, I don’t want to wake her up. I’m going to go.” She leans over and kisses Rickie on the cheek. He stands rigidly. “I’ll come see you play next week. That’s the championship game, right? Maybe Billy, too. I’ll call him.”

  He watches her get in her car and drive off. In this unguarded moment he feels a wave of sadness and regret and anger sweep over him. She is good, she cares about him, but the image of her driving away in her grey car with its front bumper dimpled from some parking lot mishap and the paint peeled off the hood, makes her seem small and vulnerable. They are alone, even if she calls that bastard and writes him. It isn’t other people—the whites or blacks or Chinese or whomever she means when she says other people don’t want them here. Those people aren’t the problem. Their own father and mother are the problem. They didn’t want them, not then, not now. Has Daisy forgotten that? She and Bill and Rickie didn’t walk out on their parents. Their parents abandoned them, he for his fourteen-year-old, and she for some broken-down biker.

  One time, one time only, Rickie remembers his father taking him to Toys “R” Us to buy him something. Even as young as he was, Rickie knew it had nothing to do with a father’s love; the boy was being bought off in an attempt by
the father to buy his way out of the guilt for not attending Rickie’s kindergarten or first grade class to ooh and aah over a stupid folder of his work or the performance of some simple-minded song. His father tried to make a big deal of the trip to the toy store, but Rickie was determined not to give him an easy out. He refused to pick a toy, choosing instead to stand by the cash registers looking at batteries. His father picked out a cheap yellow plastic squirt gun, which Rickie took out back when they got home and smashed by stomping on it without even taking it off the card. He didn’t bother to pick up the mess. His father never asked him about it.

  Every now and then when he sat with his mother on the couch to watch TV, she drew him close to her and held him tightly, but she never spoke when she hugged him, just held him tightly as though she wanted to squeeze the life out of him.

  She was Rickie’s age when she got married; she didn’t know anything about the world outside the neighborhood. She was a poor student, didn’t finish high school, so she did what other girls do who feel unimportant and without a future: she got pregnant and had a baby, had three babies, and later on, still feeling worthless, she married a fat, mean loser who rode a motorcycle and beat her and gave her more babies. To Rickie, she is just another pathetic victim, remote and unforgivable.

  CHAPTER 10

  Rickie sits on the end of his bed and faces his dresser with his trophies and the mirror behind them, but he doesn’t look at the trophies or the reflection of himself in the mirror. He stares at the nondescript, flattened carpet, aware that time stretches before him like an endless, empty desert. He tries to bring to mind the morning’s game and his sister and the fact that she is writing to their father. The game has already receded into that place of forgotten things, like a TV show that he has just watched, whose details he cannot recall. He tries to force the game to take on the significance of games in the past, about which he used to be able to remember each play and each at-bat in detail; be able to re-play them in his head with the clarity of a film clip. But this most recent game refuses to come forward into the present. He can’t bring it back vividly. Worse than that, he realizes that it doesn’t really matter.

  Daisy. Did she just take him to lunch to tell him that she is writing to their father? Rickie didn’t have to know, doesn’t want to know anything about that man. But why did she write him? What was her real reason? Was it because she’s lonely? She must be. Even though he can admit to himself that he is sometimes desperately lonely and feels as though he is an alien with little connection to the other inhabitants of the planet, and even though he sometimes feels a need for guidance, and in the still of the night feels a sob well up within him like the cry of some wild animal, he will not reach out or in any way show himself to this low-life who walked out on them because he was too hot to screw some fourteen-year-old to care about his own children. Rickie will never write him or talk to him. Never. Not to their mother, either. They are the past. Dead.

  “Smile now, cry later,” the saying goes. He sees it tattooed on the biceps of veteranos and the forearms of veteranas in a banner below the masks of comedy and tragedy. But that won’t be his motto. His will be, “Cry yesterday, laugh today.” He cried all he is going to cry years ago when they left. He cried until he emptied himself of tears and sound and vision and feeling. He learned how not to be present, to disappear behind flat, vacant eyes so that he feels nothing, and if something has the potential to bother him, to penetrate his outside wall, it will find only an echoing tunnel inside him. He has become a shark, the name they gave him, with no feelings whatsoever, just purpose.

  It has taken a while. He suffered the ministrations of elementary school teachers who discovered him crying at his table. His tablemate would proudly shoot a hand high in the air. “Maestra, Rickie is crying,” she would call out. “I think he misses his mom again,” she would say with the smug certainty of little girls.

  The teachers took him aside and gave him tissues and wiped his nose. They held him to them and stroked his head or patted him. And when his classmates found him standing by himself on the playground at recess, they came up to him, the little girls mothering like the teacher. “What’s wrong, Rickie? Are you sad about your mom?” they asked and stroked his skinny arm. The boys, except for his best friend, Alex, stood off a bit. “C’mon, Rickie, run with us. We’re going to jump over the benches by Miss Peterson’s room.” They were so sure that running and jumping or playing tetherball or kickball would cure the hurt. Alex put his arm around him and comforted him and walked with him to the benches. At the end of recess, the others ran up to the teacher and told her with earnest faces that Rickie had been thinking about his mom and dad again. Teacher shook her pretty head sadly.

  With the exception of Alex, they all, teachers and classmates alike, receded into an anonymous group he has trouble remembering as individuals. Yes, the students went on just as he had into middle school and high school, but he grew so distant from the child he had been.

  Only if someone, a girl usually, brought out a class photo from one of those elementary school years—of twenty-five beaming little boys and girls and a young, harried teacher standing primly at one end—and pointed to herself and then pointed to Rickie seated cross-legged on the floor or standing in the back row with a wan smile on his face, only then did he remember the faces and who they were. Rickie would look at the person standing next to him and back at the picture and finally make the connection, as though he were just waking from sleep.

  At first, during the middle school years, the others looked at him occasionally as though they remembered his hard times and had questions, but they did not speak. Quickly enough, they forgot his troubles to focus on their own. Only Alex speaks to him these days about the past, but Rickie usually cuts him off before it goes too far.

  “Why do you want to remember those days, fool?” Rickie asks. “They’re dead. I don’t think about them.”

  He sits without moving for a long time and becomes aware of the tightness in his shoulders. Probably from the game. Worse than that is the cramping anxiety in his stomach. He knows its cause. He has to do something, prove something to somebody. Stupid Oscar. He shouldn’t have to prove anything to anybody. Sharks never have to establish purpose; it is there at the moment of birth. The shark doesn’t think about what it’s doing and it doesn’t feel remorse or happiness; it is a killing machine because that is just what it is born to be.

  He wants to join the Marines in a couple of years. He wants some hardass D.I. to yell and work him to the point of exhaustion and empty him of every question or doubt or feeling. Then he will be lean, bright, hard and able to kill without question or thought.

  He looks around his room again and feels no more interest in it than he had the day before. Maybe he should clear the dresser, put the trophies, hats, newspaper clippings, and signed baseballs all in boxes. His Xbox—what should he do with it? He has only played once recently. Alex came over. They smoked a joint and laughed as terrorists were killed, cars crashed, snowboarders somersaulted off mountains and tumbled into deep ravines, and idiots fell off floating platforms into the abyss. But it all grew old quickly. Their laughter rang hollow. They quit in the middle of the game, at a loss as to what to do next. Alex went home soon afterwards and Rickie slept. He tries to sleep more and more these days.

  A pile of magazines sits on the floor by the TV—Black Belts and Lowriders and a Playboy. He bought the Black Belt magazines thinking he would learn some of the moves described in them. He and Alex made a couple of attempts to mimic the photographs frame by frame, but they became self-conscious when so many of the moves entailed grabbing one another’s hand or wrist or shirt front or pinning one another on the floor. They tried to laugh it off—“Hey, faggot, let go of my hand!” Eventually they quit trying the moves after a few more embarrassed attempts.

  He picks up a copy of Lowrider. He doesn’t care about the amateurish photos of shirtless vatos and bikini-clad jainas standing next to polished Buicks and Oldsmobile
s and Chevys rearing up on their hydraulics. It’s the drawings of the chicanos and chicanas who are ideals of la raza. The men are drawn with thick mustaches, flat stomachs, bandanas and tattoos, and the women are impossibly slim and busty. Both men and women have large dark eyes full of passion and despair. They have thick, black, straight hair, shiny and swept back. His hair has never been straight. Wavy and thick, it was an unmanageable mass, no matter how much Three Flowers he put in it to hold it in place.

  After taking the car, he shaved his head. His grandmother was horrified and told him that he looked like the photographs of criminals she saw in the newspapers left on the kitchen tables of the houses she cleaned.

  “What do you know, abuelita?” he asked dismissively. After all, she is an old lady who understands nothing.

  “They are in gangs, they steal cars, they kill people. You can see in their eyes that they are no good.”

  “I’m not a criminal. I don’t kill nobody. It’s just the style now.”

  “To look like a criminal? I don’t understand.” She shook her head in dismay. The lines seemed to deepen on her dark face. She reached out and touched the black stubble on his head and pulled her hand back quickly.

  “It’s no good,” she said and turned away from him.

  Rickie turns on the fan and lies back on his bed. The moving air comforts him, and he falls asleep easily. His facial muscles relax, the hardened face softens,

  He dreams. He is in the field in his usual position near second base. Someone is yelling in his face, too close to distinguish the features—is it the coach, his father, some male teacher? Whoever it is, he is yelling at Rickie to cover second, a runner is coming. No runner is in sight or any other players on his own team, but he hears footsteps pounding down the base path, not fast, but heavy. He knows if he turns his head completely to his left, he will see the runner bearing down on him, but he doesn’t. Instead, he watches the face of the man in front of him, which he finally recognizes as Maltrey’s face. He is furious, yelling at Rickie, spit spraying from his mouth. Rickie watches him impassively, both of them knowing that Maltrey cannot touch him, and that knowledge only increases Maltrey’s frustrated rage. Rickie would have been smugly amused by it, except that the sound of the footsteps of the advancing runner is relentless and steady. The runner has to be huge, has to be nearly on top of him, and Rickie hasn’t made a move toward second base. Now when he tries to, his legs are too heavy to lift. It, whatever it is, comes on and on…