CHAPTER 24
Early the next week, Berta is washing the morning dishes when she hears a knock on the security door, but she doesn’t respond. The front door is open, but she keeps the security door locked now. She’s safe. Maybe she imagined the knock. She has been standing at the sink looking out onto the backyard but not truly seeing. Each morning she rises and hopes that she imagined everything. Any minute, she expects to hear Junior open his door and head for the bathroom, and she will be able to relax, even smile, at this. Order will be re-established. Life will go on, hope will blossom again.
There is another knock on the security door, this time definite and louder. Perhaps it is more reporters. Why now? She goes to the living room and leaning over, peers out the door without being seen. Three boys stand nervously foot-to-foot at the bottom of the steps, each holding a shoebox and looking down at his feet. She does not recognize any one of them.
“Señora,” Tony says quietly when Berta comes to the door. “Colectamos este dinero para usted.” He doesn’t look up.
“Para Rickie’s funeral,” Dennis says.
“Sí, Rickie’s funeral,” Tony says.
They remove the tops of the shoeboxes, carefully peeling back the tape that secures top to bottom, and proudly hold them out to her. Each box is filled with crumpled dollar bills. She opens the door, takes the boxes, and cradles them in her arms.
“Many thanks,” she says, and no one speaks for a moment. “Where is the boy that sometimes came here? Alejandro?”
“Alex? He was with Rickie that night. They got him,” Oscar says.
“Is he…?”
“No, Señora. The cops arrested him. He’s in Juvy… Juvenile Hall… jail…right now.”
She shakes her head sadly. “I haven’t seen you boys before,” she says in Spanish. She looks at them and speaks slowly. They speak a rough mix of Spanish and English; she doesn’t know how well they understand.
“Would you like to come in? See Junior’s…Rickie’s room?”
The boys look from one to another, unsure what to do. “You can see his trophies,” she says and opens the door wider to let them in.
They file in slowly and enter the bedroom. Berta has moved the votive candles from the little table in the living room where they have stood for years to a central place on Junior’s dresser, surrounded by his trophies and other baseball artifacts. San Judas Tadeo is here—the saint who cares for everyone, good and bad, and who listens even when the cause has been lost. Berta asks him to make Junior’s death the last one. No more death. No more heartache, please. Of course, La Virgencita and Jesucristo are here as well. The brightly colored glasses holding new candles have been washed and polished, and the low flames burn steadily, filling the room with the sanctified smell of candle wax.
Berta closes the boxes and lines them up neatly on Junior’s pillow, and then sits at the foot of the bed facing the crowded dresser, a place she has sat often during the past days. The boys stand in front of the dresser and look, their backs to her. Oscar picks up a trophy. Dennis and Tony look back at her to make sure it’s all right.
“Go ahead, look,” Berta says. “You can hold them. They won’t break.”
“He had a lot of trophies,” Tony says, shaking his head in amazement. Oscar looks at him and back at the trophy and replaces it.
“Yeah. Everyone said he was real good,” Dennis says. Tony nods in agreement. “He should’ve played at school, but him and Alex got caught… You know, the car.” He glances at Rickie’s grandmother. She sits quietly, fingering the beads of her Rosary.
“Was Junior your friend?” she asks. The boys turn to her. They look at one another. Tony and Dennis nod their heads yes.
“Did you go to school with him for many years?”
Dennis raises his hand. “Him and me did,” indicating Tony. “I remember he loved his grandpa. Alex and him and me and Tony had the same teachers in elementary. I remember you. Waiting for him on the sidewalk across the street.”
“He was a good boy. Happy then.” Her eyes have begun to glisten. The boys nod. No one speaks.
“Maybe he is happy now,” she says softly.
“Sí, Señora.” Tears leak down Tony’s cheeks, which he wipes away with the palm of his hand.
“I don’t know why he did what he did. Do you know?” she says after a while. They shake their heads. The beads click softly.
“He had all his life ahead of him,” she says. “You do, too. Your mothers want you to do good and be happy. That’s why they work so hard. Your fathers, too. Stay in school and work hard. Be good boys. Become good men, responsible,” she says, but she can see that the boys are growing restive, shifting their weight from one foot to the other and glancing toward the doorway. She knows their abuelitas and tías have given them the same message, probably over and over.
“Remember what I say,” she says as she stands. “Do good now and grow to be good men.” They nod as she escorts them to the front door. “Thank you for your kindness. I am happy Junior had good friends like you.”
One after the other, they shake her hand and mumble goodbye and shuffle off. She watches them go down the sidewalk; when they think they are far enough away, they break into a run, elbowing each other and laughing, like students released from school.
Berta pulls the security door closed and goes back into Junior’s bedroom. She looks around the room before she smooths the spread and leaves. She ignores the shoeboxes.
It is as though the shot that killed the policeman and the shots that killed Junior have blown a hole in this house. It is too empty, too silent, suddenly too big. She goes from room to room—the living room silent now with the TV off, the dining room with unopened mail and circulars spilled onto the table, her bedroom and bathroom, the kitchen. She stands at the kitchen door and looks out on the backyard and thinks of Ricardo.
He has gone back to Ventura with the promise to return home soon. He will move into the garage until he finds a job down here, and then they will decide. At first she was doubtful about his returning home, but not now—maybe he will fill the emptiness. And maybe he will grow to be a good man himself now that he has lost this son he barely knew; maybe he will work to re-establish his relationship with Bill and Daisy, and take responsibility as a man and a father.
Bill and Daisy have returned to work and school, but they come by often in the evenings to check on her, and she is happy. They bring her food and sit with her in the living room, watch TV without speaking, each absorbed in thought. Berta hopes Bill will listen to her about forgiving his father now that he, too, has seen how fragile life is and how quickly it can be taken.
She wonders if the day will ever come when she will join her sister in Mexico. She remembers telling Junior on the night of the shooting that she was going to move soon and how upset he was. Somehow, with his death, the happiness she envisioned seems farther away, maybe impossible—how will she escape this sadness?
She stopped understanding the boy when he became a teenager, when he became so intense and so quick to anger; she stopped being able to reach him when he withdrew so far into himself and hardly spoke with her. In order to remember and love Junior easily and freely again, she has to separate the boy who died from the little boy she walked to school and from the boy who went along on trips to the hardware stores and lumberyards so happily with his grandfather. She has almost forgotten that child.
When she is home from work and alone, Berta goes often into Junior’s room, re-lights the candles, and sits at the end of the bed to look at the trophies and hats and other reminders of his years playing baseball, hoping that being in the presence of his things will bring her close again to her grandchild. She prays.
She dusts often, believing that these things were important to Junior and that he would be happy to see them clean and shiny.
A couple of reporters, a man and a woman, show up a few days later and ask to come inside Berta’s house. They crowd into Rickie’s bedroom. It’s as though they be
lieve there is an explanation somewhere that others haven’t uncovered which will clarify everything. When she is asked the same questions again that she has answered all the previous week, she can only say she doesn’t understand how this could have happened and how sorry she is for the policeman’s family. They photograph her sitting in mournful confusion at the foot of the boy’s bed with the dresser full of baseball trophies and candles mirrored in the background. She gestures hopelessly at the dresser, opens her mouth to say something, but does not. Her hand falls back to her lap and the Rosary she holds there.
Finally, she says, “He made cookies that night. Is that the way of a bad boy?”
The events of this night seep into the sad landscape of the neighborhood and are absorbed and forgotten, unless someone mentions the good young cop who was killed or the killer who played baseball so well. Other deaths take the place of these, other disappointments, other losses, and other grief. Families move out and are replaced by people who have no memory of this night. The house where Rickie hid and where he died is bulldozed the following year.
Fellow students who wore “R.I.P. Grt Whyt” or “R.I.P. Rickie” scripted in white on black T-shirts or hats soon put them away. They move through high school onto other things. Every so often, they will come across the shirt in a drawer or the hat on a closet shelf. Some will have trouble remembering clearly whom this particular shirt or hat was for because others will have died in the meantime. Some will get rid of it when they come across it, as though to expunge all memory of those days. And some will refold the shirt and place it neatly in the back of a drawer or place the hat deep on a shelf. They will make a point of not looking at it, content to let its importance fade into obscurity, willing to accept it as a memento of bittersweet days gone by that they haven’t the time or desire to recall.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PHOTO: KIM DEVANNEY
NICHOLAS BRADLEY worked as an English and ESL teacher in junior high, middle, and high school in Los Angeles throughout his thirty year career. The schools where he taught were in neighborhoods of poverty and crime, gangs, drugs and graffiti that formed the setting Rickie Trujillo. Many of the students he taught and tutored during his career were, like Rickie, active gang members and/or taggers.
During the ten years in Los Angeles preceding his teaching career, Bradley worked as a road musician, truck driver, messenger, and pianist.
He has published fiction in the Red Cedar Review and conducted feature interviews with jazz and classical great musicians such as Med Flory, Pete Christlieb, Tommy Newsome, Glen Johnston, and Leo Potts, all of which were published in the Saxophone Journal. He has also been recognized in national writing contests for two of his short stories.
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