Be the One

by April Smith

  4

  By 6:30 a.m. the following morning the grande percent latte is in the cup holder and the Explorer is rolling east on Laguna Canyon Road, headlights on. In seven minutes it reaches the on-ramp where Cassidy, roused from hibernation mode, finds the 405 moving fast, comfortable passing distances, a relief to be driving with commuters who, like she, are freeway professionals, cooperating in a team effort to get to the office without tragedy.

  Marshall had left the cottage at six to meet his first client at the gym. Fifteen minutes later, Cassidy pulled out in the Explorer. The shadows of the flame trees had barely begun to shrink beneath the rising sun when already Marshall was gone from her mind; she had forgotten how they said good-bye or if they’d made a plan to see each other. It didn’t matter. In a day or two their workout schedule would swing by and round them up again with the tedious dependability of an Orange County Transit Authority bus.

  Cassidy checks the rearview mirror; not kind to those tiny fissures like fault lines that run vertically above the upper lip. You can forestall the aging of the body, but not the face. Do the cheekbones, plump as Rogue Valley peaches, the blonde bangs and wraparound sunglasses on a rawhide leash still pull it off? Are the small gold hoop earrings too plain? She has never gone in for makeup or a lot of ornamentation, maybe because when she was playing ball you had to look Spartan (although the Bruins secretly wore mascara), but recently she has begun to wonder if the Revlon counter isn’t in her future, and if those threads of ivory at her temples aren’t really pale, pale gray.

  Last night was good, she can’t complain, but there’s a failure at the heart of it, a clanking in the engine that doesn’t go away; an empty sound she’s heard before. Even in high school her tightest girlfriends were on the softball team and the boy athletes, at best, treated her like one of them. Women don’t seem to trust a female jock and men don’t stick around. So you concentrate on playing ball.

  That worked fine until she fell in love.

  She had a contract with the Colorado Silver Bullets. There was still a shot (astronomically long) that she could be the first woman in men’s ball since Toni Stone covered second base for the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro Leagues in 1953. Pedro warned her, but she walked away, for a moody cop named David Stohl.

  It had been what she called her “numbnuts period”—dating lifeguards and firemen and guys from the sheriff’s department. Stoli was a wild man—owned a Harley—they had some wicked times in Rosarito Beach, but she truly believed this would be it: teaching softball clinics in the summer, a white picket fence around a Spanish fixer-upper in Encinitas. At LAPD games, for the first time in her life, she found herself cracking beers with the wives in the beach chairs, happy to be part of the family.

  Then David Stohl took off and Cassidy went on a six-day bender, something she hadn’t done since her twenties—was told she wrecked her car and smashed a drinking fountain somewhere with a bat. When she came to she discovered he was still gone, along with a big chunk of hope of fitting in anywhere.

  Someone ripe as Marshall gets you going for a while, but how can you keep it up when you don’t feel responsible, not even for your partner’s pleasure? You know he will take care of himself (just like you)—all that is required is to mirror his ardor for his own body. How long can you keep faking it, as if the accident of winding up on the same coordinates in Southern California were enough to justify a kind of life together—Sunday brunch at the Cheesecake Factory, driving to Snow Valley for a day, partying at Papa’s, training for the marathon, skateboarding on Venice Beach with your dogs?

  Dawn colors clouds of steam billowing around the Arco refinery. Elysian Park, on the other side of downtown, where Alberto Cruz had better be waiting, ready to take the mountain, is at least forty minutes away. A warning flood of red taillights, and Cassidy enters ballpark space, despite six cantankerous lanes of traffic—deciding that today they’ll work on concentration, the hardest skill for an impatient young fielder to learn, how to focus on a hundred fifty pitches every game. They’d do visualization exercises, the one where you observe everything in your room; she’ll talk about relaxation, effortless effort, letting it flow; she’ll teach him to take four pitches in the cage, in order to see the ball really well on the fifth— By the time she stops thinking about where Alberto will resist and where he will understand these things, she is at the entrance, heading up Elysian Park Drive between rows of fifty-foot palms.

  She has driven the last thirty miles with no other awareness.

  The Explorer pulls into the parking lot. Alberto is waiting in the deep shade, throwing up stones and fungoing them carelessly with a stick. His eyes are clear, he’s ready to learn; no reason to come down on him for staying out last night.

  He doesn’t, after all, ask if she had gotten laid, or if it changed her life.

  Today’s turns out to be an inspired workout, excellent attitude and good communication.

  “You’re doing fabulous,” says Cassidy, echoing Marshall’s advice. “Let’s go to the mall.”

  It is a ten-minute drive from Elysian Park to the Glendale Galleria shopping center, a good place to buy Alberto shoes and teach him something about American culture, should he make the minors and find himself in Great Falls, Montana, starving for a pizza at ten o’clock at night.

  We are not talking the America of wheat fields and tractors. Or skyscrapers. Subways. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We are pulling into a salmon-pink parking structure where a nervous kid is directing traffic so badly the Explorer almost creams a teenage mom pushing a stroller. The young man shrugs. The girl, spaced on a Walkman, shrugs also.

  Not his problem.

  Not her problem.

  Hey. Not a problem.

  Cassidy guides Alberto between the yellow lines of a pedestrian crosswalk. Approaching from the opposite direction is a mix of middle-class Asians, Hispanics, blacks and whites carrying shopping bags, equally disoriented by the afternoon glare and the universal question: Now where in heck did I park that car? Cassidy feels a thrill of achievement. This is America, after all.

  She opens the glass door to the mall and plows ahead but Alberto has disappeared. Panic attack. Back outside she finds him standing right where he was, out on the sun-drenched sidewalk, shaking his head and laughing.

  “What’s the matter?”

  He giggles, searching for words.

  “For me a dream,” he manages finally. “A dream. For me.”

  Cassidy grabs his hand and pulls him inside, like leading a colt over a dance floor. Everything that glitters catches his eye and causes him to halt, all bollixed up in the feet, while shoppers dodge around him. They can scarcely get past the California Terrace food court, with fountains and brass railings, windsurfing boards with rainbow sails decking the upper reaches over neon waves of blue, without Alberto swerving toward the garlicky stench of Panda Express, stumbling at the knockout cinnamon-sugar punch of Cinnabon. Then there’s Hot Dog on a Stick with its surreal tanks of bubbling lemonade and high school girls in striped tunics and tall hats buzzing in and out of candied clouds of steam.

  “What do you think?”

  “Sweet.”

  Alberto grins and slaps her five, thanks for delivering all this amazing shit to him.

  Cassidy keeps them moving up escalators and down ramps, wondering what goes on in the kid’s head when he sees stuff like the window of FAO Schwarz—all that whizzing and whirring, sparkle Barbies and LEGO Ferris wheels—and outside the store a huge bronze bear, big as a church.

  How does it feel, when work is a hundred-year-old sugar mill and home is a shack near a sewage trench with pigs in the backyard, to find yourself in a completely fabricated environment, where the trees are fake and the sun, through arched skylights, is a shy and tentative guest?

  She remembers the darkness inside the mill, no electric lights, weak illumination filtering through cracks in the roof: a vast, pitch-black space filled with moving bodies and the hulking shapes of a complex assor
tment of antique equipment. Black faces slick with sweat looked up at her with tired amazement. She stared back with equal intensity, slowly panning every man: those hollow eyes, those grizzled cheeks, a yellow bandanna much too cocky, cleft palate, bald head, stupefaction, middle age—searching for the good face, the face of Alberto Cruz.

  Now Alberto Cruz is here, gaping up at a fairy-tale clock with exposed gears, passing folks sitting down and resting their feet who are spooning ice cream from paper cups and basking in the idea of an old-fashioned small-town square where good community behavior prevails, due to a satellite police station with friendly western lettering, someone’s shirt on a hanger, homelike, behind the storefront glass.

  Cassidy would like to know how you make such a psychological leap, monitoring Alberto’s every reaction from the corner of her eye, when, as they head toward Mervyn’s, the young man starts making click-click sounds with his tongue and the answer becomes clear:

  Babes.

  Forget the big abstract questions.

  Alberto is cruising the babes.

  Japanese babes in butt-skimming skirts, plastic mules, Prada bags and attitude.

  A gothic babe, black hair, chalk skin, purple lips.

  An African-American babe wearing a backwards leather cap and a shirt cropped to show off the ring in her navel, walking like she knows something.

  Alberto swivels to watch her melt down the escalator.

  Oh God, thinks Cassidy, snatching him from a collision with a planter, I will teach this kid to order a hamburger and see the ball off the bat, but I will not have a conversation about condoms. Let the coaches handle the rigors of the male anatomy, and welcome to it.

  They reach McDonald’s.

  The rookie eyes the counter where a Latin guy his age warily checks the gangsta in the bad threads.

  Alberto tries the dazzling smile. “Hola.”

  “Hola.”

  “Por favor, me puede ayudar con el menu.”

  “Tenemos una buena oferta—”

  “We are doing this in English,” Cassidy interrupts. “My friend wants to practice his English.”

  “Sure,” says the kid, puffing up. Eighteen months out of Chalchuapa. “So, what do you like?”

  Alberto studies a grid of photographs showing eight different Extra Value Meals while fiddling with the plastic heart containing the Virgin and Christ.

  “I like two.”

  “Two what?” prompts Cassidy.

  “Two hamburgesas.”

  “¿Con todo?”

  “Con todo, por favor.”

  “Go ahead. Say it.”

  Alberto balks, prideful, not wanting to make a mistake.

  “Two Cheeseburgers Meal.”

  They grab some stools. Two more teenage moms have found each other, feeding bottles to their babies. Alberto eats slowly, watching them.

  “You don’t want to go there,” Cassidy says.

  “No. I don’t.” He crumples the wrapping. “I know what I got to do.”

  “Which is?”

  “Do real good in spring training. Impress the people, show them I can play ball.”

  His eyes stray over the corridor where shoppers graze; then return to Cassidy with quiet purpose.

  “I got to do my best. Do what the coaches tell me. I got to speak with the Americans, try not to worry for my mistakes in English. I got to know I gonna be proud of myself one day, one day, I gonna have a great conversation. I got to stay away from drugs. In my village, when they know I going to the United States, they say, ‘Why you not go to New York and sell manteca—cocaine?’ Some people, they like baseball to get them off the island, but they no want to play baseball. I no understand that. They want to go to New York and make money. I have one friend, he is dead right now. He selling, got a lot of money. Car. House. In two years he is dead. Somebody shoot him. I know a ballplayer, Vargas, he was real good. He play in the major leagues one, two years, but he never make it because he swallow cocaine, and they catch him in the airport in Puerto Rico. Why he not worry, I might die for this?”

  “I know Vargas. He was talented. But not as smart as you.”

  “My mom? When I leave, she cry. I got to do these things for my family. Things are very bad in my home after the hurricane.”

  Alberto is unusually still, fingers clasped on the counter, resolve coming off his body in waves. Only the butterfly eyebrows seem to rise in an uneasy question.

  “I worry for these letters, too.”

  “You haven’t gotten any more?”

  “No more.”

  “That’s good. My boss says not to worry. You just play your game.”

  Cassidy pushes the tray away. It is beginning to smell like something dead.

  The store of choice is Champs, where young men can be outfitted like their favorite sports heroes in Official Merchandise. Alberto is tall enough to put his nose into the folds of the garments hanging from the racks suspended off the ceiling, lost in the sensuous pleasures of hooded cotton sweatshirts, boxer trunks, mesh shorts, polyester warm-ups in oxidized green.

  Cassidy has wandered over to the baseball section, marveling how they get eighteen dollars for a T-shirt with a blurry picture of Ken Griffey, Jr., when the commotion begins.

  It starts with a guy in work boots and jeans who says, innocuously enough, “Hi. Mind if I have a look at that?”

  Alberto is handling a gym bag. “No problem.”

  The guy opens the bag and finds a batting glove inside.

  “How’d that get in there?”

  “I put.”

  Immediately he reaches into a back pocket and comes out with a badge.

  “Police. Step to the wall.”

  “What I do?”

  “Don’t hassle with me, dude. Just turn around.”

  In the heartbeat it takes Cassidy to cross the floor, Alberto Cruz has been locked in handcuffs.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Police activity. Stay back.”

  Store people stop what they’re doing. Customers gather.

  “I do nothing!” says Alberto.

  Cassidy: “The young man is with me.”

  The cop is mouthing into a walkie-talkie.

  “I said, he’s with me.”

  “He’s with you,” the cop repeats. He seems incredibly tired. Disheveled hair, rings beneath the eyes. Physically, midsize and unremarkable.

  “My name is Cassidy Sanderson. I’m a baseball scout with the Los Angeles Dodgers. This young man is one of our prospects from the Dominican Republic.”

  Apparently the officer hears this kind of thing from tall blonde women in the Glendale Galleria all the time, because his tired expression does not change.

  “The lieutenant will be here in a minute, ma’am.”

  He is keeping Alberto at arm’s length with fingers just touching his back, making certain the boy stays face-front to a wall of athletic cups.

  “What are the charges?”

  “He hasn’t been charged with anything yet, ma’am.”

  Reinforcements arrive. A pair of brawny security guards with guns and a couple more undercover guys also wearing work boots who, in fact, look funnily alike—the same black hair, dark circles and double-shift exhaustion, like brothers running a failing restaurant.

  The lieutenant, a blow-dried job in a better shirt, studies her business card and listens to her story, explaining that nevertheless the suspect will need to be questioned on suspicion of shoplifting.

  “That is total horseshit!” Cassidy shouts, realizing, too late, she is exiting the Zone on a pair of Saturn rockets. “He was not shoplifting!”

  “He put a batting glove inside a gym bag.”

  “So?”

  “Why would someone do something like that?”

  The first cop still maintains the feather-light touch on Alberto’s back.

  “He didn’t walk out of the freaking store with the freaking glove,” Cassidy says, hoarse with frustration, “Which, by the way, he can get by the doz
ens. So what is this? Harassment?”

  Behind the lieutenant’s bleary eyes something finally clicks.

  “Piazza’s on a streak,” he allows.

  Cassidy isn’t buying: “I am really looking forward to when the general counsel for the Los Angeles Dodgers calls your supervisor.”

  When they are finally walking toward the exit Alberto says simply and without anger, “They think I am American black.”

  “I am ashamed that happened,” Cassidy replies with heat. “It’s not always like this. Not everywhere.”

  They push through the doors into lukewarm air and an eye-stinging shaft of setting sun. There, in plain view across the walkway, are two more cops—bicycle cops this time, wearing shorts—poking around the Explorer. But these two have probable cause. The alarm is sounding and the lights are flashing and the driver’s window has been smashed to nothing.

  Swearing lavishly, Cassidy trots over and identifies herself as the owner. She blinks off the alarm.

  “Stereo’s still there,” remarks one of the officers, a woman with excellent rectus femoris musculature. “Aren’t you glad you have an alarm?”

  Cassidy peers inside, heartsick. “Not a great day at the mall.”

  Alberto puts a large warm hand on Cassidy’s shoulder, then squats against a pillar to wait it out. While clipboards are brandished and questions asked, Cassidy’s attention becomes increasingly drawn to an ominous object resting on the front seat in a litter of broken glass. She reaches through the empty space where her window used to be and gingerly picks it up.