by April Smith
The plastic bag held one can of lemon soda and a neon-green lady’s golf glove. Alberto forced his left hand into fingers already split down the seams.
Cassidy stared. “What is that?”
“Local version of a baseball mitt,” Monroe told her.
Alberto had brought along a smiley voluble fellow in his forties wearing slacks and a Hawaiian shirt, introduced as Señor Gómez.
The town pharmacist.
Local version of an agent.
“You are extremely privileged to see Alberto,” Sr. Gómez began in grievously overcooked English. “He is part of the great tradition of excellent ballplayers from the Dominican Republic. Because God gave sugarcane a growing season of six months. Six months of beautiful sunshine! Six months of nothing to do but play baseball! God gave us the talent of Alberto Cruz as one of His finest blessings.”
Cassidy glared, peevishly uninterested. Tibetan monks often enter meditation with the ringing of a bell. Now she clapped her hands two times, signifying she and Alberto and his teammates straggling down the embankment were entering the purity of ballpark space. It didn’t matter that the field was bald and spiritless and looked like it had been raining stones—ballpark space exists between the white lines all players carry with the same precision inside their heads. It is quite possibly the only true universal—and those who are not in it, who are still concerned with cheap sales jobs, should fuck off.
First thing, Alberto ran the sixty yards in less than six seconds. The big, lithe strides would have made him a track star in any American high school. He went out to deep center and worked up to the long throw, making it to the plate five times dead on. She watched the flight of the ball. Told the catcher to let it drop and looked for the high quick bounce.
Then she picked up the old splintered bat, heavy as a two-by-four, and fungoed them out—long rayon skirt, pink cheeks, flying braid and all—with that tic she has of licking the fingers of her left hand before plucking the ball out of the air and giving it the small sweet toss, knocking out a pattern of grounders and flies with a practiced cadence that doubled the admiring crowd.
Kitchen chairs were set out and boom boxes, so merengue carried over this unusual dance between scout and prospect, her quick bat answered by his quick feet, the fluidity of his beautifully muscled frame matched by the elegant sinewy power of hers.
Alberto dominated the game against a ragtag bunch of Haitians from a rival sugar town with speed and power, even a hint of artistry. Good instincts on the base paths, such as they were. Cassidy hunkered down under the Dodger cap and shades, notebook and stopwatch in hand, locked onto Cruz, trying to look into the future, beyond this undernourished crew to major league competition.
When he stroked his third four-hundred-foot home run, she pulled out the cellular and punched in the number for Raymond Woods’s private line.
He had been sitting in his office, looking out at a hundred thousand square feet of Bermuda grass monitored by a vacuum chamber drain-line matrix microprocessed moisture control system.
While she had been sweltering in motionless ninety-degree heat, perched on rotting concrete steps layered with political slogans beneath a palm-frond roof that was dried to a crisp. Half-naked boys scampered in the rafters as her executive assistant, Monroe, snarled at them to go home and play with themselves.
“… And where are you?” Raymond had asked with legendary cool, over the long-distance crackle.
A beer right then would have been excellent.
“—What did you tell me, Ray?” she insists, continuing on. “I said he’s fast, great arm, above average instincts for the outfield, going to be a .300 hitter and above, and nobody else was on him. What was your response?”
Raymond doesn’t answer.
“ ‘Twenty thousand dollars.’ That’s what you said. And that’s what I did, even though, if anybody else found out about him, he would have been worth a hundred. That’s why we closed the deal so fast, and screw Jacinto Rincón, and you know it.”
The long pause. Raymond reaching deep into the mental cooler for that ice-cold calm.
“I told you something else, but you forgot. I said, ‘This kid better be able to play.’ ”
“I didn’t forget.”
He’s opened the door, looking past her now, across the busy office.
3
Papa’s is at its crowded, comfy best when Cassidy walks in that night, wearing tight black jeans and a navel-revealing aqua sweater, carrying her dog.
Marshall Dempsey springs off the barstool.
“Hiya, gorgeous!”
He can do nothing less than spring—an Australian hardbody tight as a basketball.
“I was praying to see you.” He kisses her cheek. “God is good. Take my place, sit down.”
“Keeping it warm for me?”
Cassidy settles gratefully beneath the faded awning that covers the bar, furled at the edge like a sail.
Big Tyson lays down a desiccated cork coaster that smells as if it crossed the ocean in a frigate.
“I have a new craft-brewed honey-wheat with notes of raspberry from Spokane.”
“Bring it on.”
“Right now you’d drink motor oil, is that what you’re saying?”
“Tyson, I appreciate your offer to share your blah blah blah honey-wheat.”
Tyson goes away.
“One must show respect,” suggests Marshall.
Cassidy mutters, “Artiste.”
“How was your day?” Marshall asks in his Aussie lilt.
“I need a hot bath and a full-body massage.”
“Then what for the love of Christ are we doing here?”
“Trying to regain our humanity.”
“What does that mean?”
She strokes his boy-soft cheek. “I don’t know. Who are you?”
Marshall smiles, puzzled.
Cassidy studies his face. It is a face you cannot fail to appreciate, unencumbered, barely twenty-eight, you can still see the Irish in it; along with the black-roots-bleached-out spiky hair and nose pierce there is a stubborn young optimism, based on nothing, really, except the day-to-day pleasure of being in that body, getting it to do new tricks. A worldclass surfer in Sydney, now a high-priced personal trainer in LA, Marshall works Cassidy out twice a week. When they had begun sleeping together last July, he had felt, touchingly, he had to make it clear “the occasional good-time bang” would not affect their professional relationship.
“Whatever it is, love, it couldn’t be worse than having to listen to a certain wife of a studio head go on about her boob job.”
“She finally had it done?”
“Will do. She’s mad at me because the pec dec doesn’t do it.”
“Big news flash.”
“I’ve been telling her there’s nothing for it but surgery.”
Big Tyson brings the ale. Cassidy takes a sip off the quivering foam.
“Nice.”
Big Tyson goes away.
Nat King Cole is singing “Smile.”
On the next barstool a woman is saying, “… That’s a great performance. Hitchcock could … come on … I’ve never seen a bad performance. He was a master.”
“Well, my guy,” says Cassidy, setting down the glass half-done, “could be in trouble.”
“Which guy?”
“The young man I found in the Dominican.”
“You had your hopes on him.”
“Still do.”
“Which is it, girls or drugs?”
“Weirder. Someone’s sending threatening notes to the stadium. The notes say if he doesn’t pay money by February first, they’ll kill him.”
“Who is? Why?”
“Nobody has a clue.”
She drains the rest.
“The boy’s a rookie, is he not? Still has to go through spring training and make the cut? Well then, that’s ridiculous. What do they think they can get from him now?”
“I love Rebecca,” the woman on the next bars
tool is saying. “No, Hitchcock is … Plus, you know what? He was a master at putting the right actor in the right role.”
Cassidy sighs. “Someone thinks he has money.”
“Or maybe they’ve got something so bad on him they figure he’ll bloody well get the money.”
“Marshall, I looked at him with my eyes. No way he’s bad.”
Big Tyson comes by to take the empty.
“Let’s be real,” Marshall says reassuringly. “The Dodgers can’t be taking it all that seriously.”
“Here’s the problem.”
Like the prow of the ship on the beer logo, the first brew has already cut cleanly through the sea of horseshit Cassidy finds herself, on a day-to-day basis, swimming under or, at best, through.
“The problem is—even if nothing happens—the problem is, it puts a spotlight on Cruz and a spotlight on me. Which neither one of us needs. I’m worried about his emotions, he’s raw, doesn’t know how to separate what’s on and off the field. And meanwhile, Raymond’s pissed at me for going down there in the first place, although, obviously, if I were a guy, none of this would even be an issue, they would be all, ‘Way to go. That took balls!’ ”
Tyson sets down a fresh ale.
“What did I tell you?” he interrupts with the irritating condescension of one who is sober. “You were sitting on that exact same stool when you got the call. What did I tell you at the time?”
“That’ll be fifteen dollars and seventy-five cents.”
Marshall laughs.
“I said”—Tyson points emphatically at the bar, an oversized gnome in a wool beanie—“ ‘Cassidy … leave it.’ ”
“Oh, bull!” she exclaims. “Why don’t we rewrite history?”
Edith struggles. Cassidy puts her down on the sawdust-covered floor.
Tyson, “That dog better not shit.”
“She only shits on beanies.”
“—Because that’s what I said,” Tyson insists. “ ‘Cool it! It is not your bag. People are going to get pissed.’ Just like when I said, ‘Cassidy? Don’t jump off a radio tower.’ Was I wrong?”
Neither of them answers.
“Was I wrong?”
The woman on the adjoining stool says, “Big Tyson is never wrong. Wrong about what?”
“She goes and jumps off a freaking radio tower.”
Disgusted wave of a chubby hand. Three silver rings.
“What kind of radio tower?”
“You know those tall things with a radar thing on top.”
“It shoots out microwaves?”
“I dunno about the freaking microwaves,” says Tyson. “Ask her.”
The woman cranes around to have a look at Cassidy. She has two-tone hair, probably because she is habitually too looped to know the difference: a yellow bowl that goes halfway down the bangs, the rest bleached cotton-white. She is wearing a soft pale dress made of something like angora. A brown-skinned man with Asian eyes, with whom she has been discussing the films of Alfred Hitchcock, is reaching out from an adjoining barstool and stroking the dress.
Cassidy gives the lady a friendly tip of the glass.
“It was a fourteen-hundred-foot FM radio tower. Probably was shooting microwaves.”
She swallows the rest of the beer.
“You jumped off it?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you die?”
“I had a parachute.”
The woman nods seriously as if this made sense. It is hard to tell whether she is aware of the man stroking her dress.
“People do these things?”
“I did it once.” Cassidy smiles blankly. She would like to go home.
“That’s how we met.” Marshall has intervened, leaning across Cassidy with a wink. “It was the ultimate adrenaline rush, I’ll tell ya.”
“You two jumped together, holding hands!” the woman cries, delighted.
“Not me.” A shiver passes through Marshall’s tensile frame. “I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid.”
“We had a mutual friend who was killed on Bridge Day,” Cassidy says, hoping to wrap it up. She teases a folded twenty from the inside ticket pocket of her jeans, which are tightly sucked against the bone of her hip. “That’s when a bunch of people get together and jump off an eight-hundred-foot gorge.”
“We met at the funeral,” Marshall explains. “The funeral was in San Francisco.”
“You must have been sad.”
“It was sad.”
“He was a good guy.”
“Do you know?” The woman smiles beneficently beneath the bicolor bangs. “I think that is so romantic. In a very special way.”
Shadow Lane is south of downtown Laguna Beach, four blocks from the ocean and less than three minutes from Papa’s. Most of the houses are hodgepodge makeovers of summer bungalows built in the thirties and forties, but the little number Cassidy rents hasn’t been too messed with and retains a rustic charm, from the Dutch door on forged-iron hinges to the redwood floors and beams; the ocher squares with orange-flower patterns around the fireplace claimed to be original Malibu tile.
Cassidy turns left into the kitchen as Marshall goes right into the living room, picking up the remote and punching in MTV before turning on the lights, the two of them flowing through the house with the careless intimacy of partners whose bodies and psyches have been worn to a smooth fit by the repetitive wave action of hundreds of workout sets over hundreds of hours, weaving in and out of each other’s limbs and mental space. Bottles of Corona are in their hands and they share a covert cigarette as Cassidy moves through the living room, picking up the week’s residue of filmed glasses and Fiestaware plates with toasted crumbs. The expectation of sex curls through the air.
“I just have to make one call.”
Marshall waves.
She dials Dulce at home.
“How is Alberto? I intend to burn his butt on the mountain tomorrow. Can I talk to him?”
“He’s not here.”
“Why not?”
“He’s at a club. In Glendale.”
“Doesn’t he know we have six days left to get him in shape for winter workout?”
“He knows.”
“Then why is he out dancing?”
“He is eighteen years old.”
Cassidy exhales into the phone.
“Do you want me to send Carlos to get him?”
“No. Listen. Sorry I called so late.”
As pliant as she is with Raymond, Dulce does not hold back with girls: “You are too attached to this kid.”
“Not true.”
“Alberto will be on time for workout tomorrow,” Dulce tells her. “Or he won’t.”
Cassidy hangs up. Marshall is sprawled in a chair watching a pink Cadillac speed across a desert. Inside, a male ska band is wearing high heels and black lingerie. She clicks off the remote, then sneezes four times in a row.
“You’re stressing.”
“Allergies.”
“I know you. Miss Intensity. So the kid went dancing.”
“He’s got to make it, that’s all.”
“If you’re pushing him the way you push yourself, I feel sorry for the lad. Sometimes with my clients I’ll say, You’re doing fabulous, skip a workout, go get a massage. They love me for it, think I’m God. And you know what? Next time, they’re a hundred percent more focused.”
“You are a God,” teases Cassidy, offering her hands. She braces her feet and pulls all two hundred five pounds of him up out of the chair.
“Well done.”
But instead of proceeding directly upstairs, he remains standing still, head down, seeming to contemplate the way the red nylon wind pants bag over his untied basketball shoes.
“What do you need?”
“I need a drink!” he answers brightly, and grabs a bottle of Gordon’s gin off the mantel.
“You won’t get far with that.”
“Why not?”
“Look what’s in it, genius.”
“Shit! Well, what the hell’s the point?”
“It’s my little altar from the DR.”
Laid out on the mantel, on top of a nice piece of plastic lace she had found in a dry goods store in San Pedro de Macorís, is a collection of small trophies: a wooden crucifix, a miniature bag of woven straw with red tassels, a plaster Madonna and child, a house made of cowrie shells, and the merengue tapes which are there as a cosmic joke because afterward, when she had gotten home, she had discovered, like Raymond’s phony cubano cigars, she had purchased a stack of fakes. The liners were real but the cassettes were blank.
“What’s this crazy thing?”
Marshall has picked up a gourd dressed like a female in an intricate webbing of sequins and beads. Two arms of twisted cloth curve to its hips. There is a round mirror at the navel and, sticking up where the head should be, a plume of orange feathers.
“It’s a vodou charm. I watched it being made. The mirror is like a TV station that sends out messages of what’s going on inside.”
“What is going on?”
“That’s the mystery.”
Cassidy is unscrewing the cap off the Gordon’s gin bottle. An unnamable essence—like eucalyptus oil, rosemary and red chilies—penetrates their sinuses.
“Wow.”
“They call it Mama Juana.”
“No joke.”
“You put liquor inside and let it soak and the spirits in the wood are supposed to make it ten times stronger.”
“Wish we had some now,” says Marshall.
“We don’t need it now.”
Giggly, carrying fresh Coronas, they squeeze hip-to-hip up the winding staircase to the bedroom. She leans against him, weakened, intoxicated with the unbearable proximity of his smooth young hunky body, one layer of T-shirt, one pull of drawstring, away. Her fingertips snake eagerly beneath the shirt to stroke the warm obliques, solid as the slippery muscle of a deep-sea fish; a trophy fish, cherished for its conquest, like the mementos on the mantel.
Later, candles everywhere and heavy incense, on Laura Ashley bedclothes twisted up with a blue and gold Bruins blanket, it isn’t sweet Marshall Dempsey that gets her there, not even sweet Marshall in a bikini thong with a six-pack of abdominals tired Atlas would envy, no, after too much habitual straining, it is a trick of mind: tonight, a replay of the leap off the radio tower—a rickety elevator jerking up, gloves frozen to the metal struts of the platform, a billion stars, a moment of abandonment and then six seconds of purified terror, treetops rushing at you a hundred miles an hour, a force of panic so primitive just the recall of it jolts the heart like an amphetamine popper—that does it, until she is able to go ahead and Marshall follows, and eventually they roll apart, sated, figuring it had all gone pretty well.