Be the One

by April Smith

  It is the women’s world of spring training she remembers, a safe and secret club created by the wives. First thing in the morning, she would put on a bathing suit, then walk through this exotic fragrant hush to Rhonda’s, holding Maggie’s hand. Mother and daughter were like tender lovers, then, faces always close, gazing into each other’s eyes. TO: MOMMY, FROM: CASSIDY, she’d write on drawings of rainbows and hearts—quick sweet kisses on the lips, reading books by flashlight and falling asleep with an arm over Maggie’s neck, in absolute trust that nothing in this world would ever separate them.

  By nine a.m. the Dodger wives would have gathered at Rhonda’s bungalow in their swank terry cover-ups and gold lamé mules, young soft willows like Miss Americas in the swimsuit competition. There would be cigarette smoke and the antiseptic scent of lemons for their Bloody Marys, noisy shoptalk sharp as the men’s. It was an alternate baseball world, a sorority of fierce loyalties, where Cassidy, at five, felt accepted and in bliss—playing in the backyard pool all day, receiving special favors from the queen bee herself (awe-inspiring in high heels and a cocktail apron) because Rhonda and her mom were (equally as mysterious) “bosom buddies.”

  She will never find the house, but it is good to think of Rhonda (stout now, a thick curve to the back of her neck), an eternally reliable geyser of love. When Cassidy was ultimately torn from her mother’s arms by Gregg’s illness, Rhonda was there, not in Oregon but inside Cassidy’s self, radiant as she had seemed in childhood. Even now, running in downtown Vero Beach, out of the expansive shade through hot, depressed back streets—pool halls and rib shacks—she can invoke the power of Rhonda’s unconditional care, as present as it had been when they had encountered each other four months before, in the bathroom of the apartment in Santo Domingo, the day after she had arrived from Los Angeles.

  Six in the morning and Rhonda was already dressed in a skirt and blouse patterned with irises, gold necklace and gold loop earrings, lipstick in hand at the ready.

  “My God, preciosa, what happened to you?”

  Cassidy had been barefoot and in cutoffs, staring hopelessly into the mirror, the tissue around her left eye swollen up like a donut.

  “Something bit me.”

  Rhonda opened a cabinet to reveal shelves of American brand-name medications.

  “Whenever we go back I stock up. Pedro says I’m crazy, but see—we have an emergency.”

  “Where is Pedro?”

  “He got a call about an infielder. He had to leave this morning while it was still dark. To drive to Barahona,” she said bitterly, “to look at boys in the heat.”

  “He’s not coming with me to see Alberto Cruz?”

  “He said he was very sorry. He said he wanted to see your face when you watch that boy hit.”

  Cassidy smiled painfully.

  “He left directions.”

  Rhonda put her big concerned face close to Cassidy’s and patted on cortisone cream with the detached care of an artisan.

  “We could have such a good life in Miami. But what can I say? I’m only the wife.”

  In the kitchen she made Cassidy a packet of ice wrapped in a dish towel, then picked up a knife with an amber handle and began to slice small jasper-green passion fruits.

  Cassidy sat down near the window. The Caribbean sun was already hot, softening a flowered sheet of vinyl that covered the table. The air was sultry and laden with dust. Over the rooftops she could see—with half her sight—the ocean turned brown by the approach of the hurricane, big floats of seaweed tossed in the rough surf.

  She pressed the cold rag to her eye.

  “I remember that knife. You had that knife in Vero Beach. I remember you cutting avocados.”

  “Time to get a new knife.”

  “Time to get out of the kitchen.”

  Cassidy expected a laugh but Rhonda only glowered and punched the button on a small TV. A variety show had come up, young men in tuxedos playing merengue under hot red lights.

  “Spring training.” Cassidy was pushing the enthusiasm. “You and my mom were making guacamole. For the boat.”

  “It was fun on that boat. My boys and you and your brother, rest his soul—all together. Unusual in those days.”

  “You mean Cubans and gringos?” Cassidy said. “I guess. My dad always talked about how close you were, going back to the Hollywood Stars.”

  “Remember the manager, Bobby Bragan?”

  “I’ve heard about him. I wasn’t even born.”

  “That guy was one hundred percent crazy.”

  Rhonda had smiled and Cassidy recognized she was there, she was going to tell the stories—an astonishing turn grown-ups sometimes take when suddenly they give you something they have unequivocally denied. She settled her elbows on the vinyl cloth covering Rhonda’s kitchen table, happy to be enfolded again in the pleasures she felt as a little girl in the kitchen of the bungalow with the baseball wives.

  “I remember one game”—Rhonda was talking about the Hollywood Stars—“it might have been at Wrigley Field. I know it was against the Angels because we hated them. If we lost to them it was the end of the world. So in this game we were behind and I guess Bobby Bragan didn’t know what else to do. He sent the first hitter up to the plate, then took him out before the pitcher made the first throw. Sent the second hitter in. Pulled him out before the pitcher could throw. The third. Fourth. He did this nine times. Nine pinch hitters in a row before the first pitch! I thought the pitcher was gonna tear his throat out. The fans loved it.”

  “You could get away with that stuff.”

  “Oh my Lord, they used to drink whiskey in the stands! They used to get into fights, but not like today.”

  “Like the time my dad punched out the ump?”

  “Well,” Rhonda said quietly. “That was different.”

  She was twisting halves of passion fruit on the cone of a glass juicer.

  “No, no,” Cassidy enjoined. “That was famous. My dad started it off with a double. Then Pedro hit a single. Right? A bloopy little single down the line.”

  Rhonda didn’t answer, pouring orange-pink juice into a tall glass with ice.

  “It was a close call at first,” Cassidy went on. “You could argue the call. Perfect opportunity for Bobby Bragan to come storming out of the dugout, screaming and tearing his clothes off.”

  “He only threw down his hat.”

  “My mom told me he tore off his shirt and was unbuckling his belt when the security guys—”

  “It was the hat.”

  Rhonda wrapped a napkin around the bottom to catch the condensation and handed the glass to Cassidy.

  “So Bobby’s arguing with the ump,” Cassidy went on, less certainly, “and the ump is yelling, ‘He’s out!’ and my dad punches the umpire in the nose. Fourteen-day suspension, hundred-dollar fine.”

  Rhonda had been watching Cassidy with folded arms.

  “That’s not the way it happened.”

  Cassidy shrugged. “Family legend.”

  “You left one part out. The ump was, yes, very frustrated—maybe he had enough of Bobby’s tricks—but it wasn’t just that he was yelling, ‘He’s out!’ He was screaming, screaming so everyone in the bleachers could hear, ‘He’s out! The nigger is out!’ ”

  Cassidy exhaled a long breath.

  Rhonda stared with calm brown eyes. “That’s when your dad walked over from second base, taking his time, you know the way he was, and did it. The man didn’t have his mask on, he was a big man, he went down like a bull.”

  “So that’s why.”

  Why even-tempered Smoke would get mad enough to punch out an ump, and why, thirty years later, Pedro would confer on Cassidy the gratitude he perhaps could never adequately show her dad.

  “There were great Cuban players—light-skinned as you—but we didn’t rate. They thought of us like hired labor. ‘Watch out for Spanish niggers. They’ll stab you with a knife.’ ”

  “Pedro never told me this.”

  “Of course
not. It’s not a thing that makes him proud.”

  A humiliation he didn’t want to share when she had asked if the gift of Cruz had something to do with Smoke.

  “When this happened,” Rhonda said, “Pedro and Smoke hardly knew each other. After that, Pedro always loved him. We were out in California less than one month. I remember because I had morning sickness with Carlos. Your mother was saying, Never! She would never lose her figure!”

  Rhonda clucked her tongue and spread a slice of toast with guava paste. One year later Maggie Sanderson, cheerleader, basketball player, supplest of them all, would be fat and pregnant.

  And game after game Smoke would approach the mound with a laconic Minnesotan ease and deliver smoothly for six good innings, comfortable throwing fastballs, curves and sliders on any count. His niche was a likable consistency, with a killer move to first. Cassidy never thought of him as a raging libertarian but she could see how the reflex to right a wrong fit a simple sense of justice in her dad, for which she had never felt, until that moment, such quiet pride.

  “Your mother is well?” Rhonda was saying. “Give her my love.”

  Cassidy sipped the fresh passion fruit juice, unlike anything she had ever tasted, sweet-tart and fragrant as a gardenia, the essence of a subtropical dream. The skin stretched over her eye was throbbing and she felt the pulse of it again—the drive to find Alberto Cruz—deep inside her body memory, strong as the very first heartbeat; the result, she suddenly understood, of a most extraordinary conception—a friendship between two men.

  Rhonda looked up from whacking an egg. “What time is the game?”

  “Pedro said three.”

  “We better get out of here and rent the car.”

  Cassidy peered at a clownish reflection of her swollen eye in the toaster, as if a fat drop of mercury had acquired her face.

  “I don’t think I can drive.”

  “I’ll take you to the doctor.”

  “No time.”

  Rhonda frowned. “Pedro wants you to see this boy.”

  “I know.”

  For a moment both women were silent.

  “How far is Río Blanco?”

  “Two hours. You know I don’t drive.”

  “I have to get out there.” Again Cassidy looked at her watch. “Where can we get a car and driver?”

  “I know where,” Rhonda said resolutely. “We’ll ask the General. He lives next door. He has a big car business. His office is just down the street. Pedro despises the General. But Pedro isn’t here.”

  She whipped the eggs so hard they turned to lemon foam.

  The sun had been abundant in a way it never is in Los Angeles, soaking through the leafy mahogany trees of the Gazcue, a middle-class neighborhood of houses enclosed by pastel walls. After the first block Cassidy was feeling peculiar, from jet lag and heat. The sun assaulted the neck and shoulders, reflecting off the sidewalk and scalding the ankles.

  At the corner they faced a careening river of vehicles, mostly crashed-in Japanese sedans driven with euphoric abandon—since there were no lines on the road and certainly no crosswalks, why worry yourself? Cassidy tried to sense the rhythm and failed, stepping off the curb just as Rhonda yanked her back. They pushed on through a heavy, palpable torpor, the only Caucasians on the street, although the citizens of Santo Domingo paid them no mind. Peddlers were staked out all the way down Calle César Nicolás Penson, selling cigarettes and candy bars from wooden boxes. A vendor with amazing biceps was whittling the skins of oranges into perfect spirals, spraying the air with fine droplets of citrus oil.

  They passed boys sprawled on the hood of a car. Nurses in white uniforms at an outdoor café. The baseball Garden of Eden had evaporated by the light of day. Cassidy could not find the spirit of greatness in the jaded expressions on the street; all she could see was the lack of it.

  Finally they reached the ocean and a strip of high-rise hotels. A bony horse pulling a rickety black hansom cab with an unseen driver and unseen travelers passed slowly through the traffic. The peculiar feeling of misdirection Cassidy had felt when they stepped into the sweltering street resolved to the powerful knowledge that this moment, in this city, was exactly where she must be. Her life in Los Angeles, so full of bluster and importance, had receded to a speck lost in the sky as she stood bewitched by the sight of the shiny black wheels of the hansom cab, threaded with orchids, shimmying as they turned.

  Rhonda continued past the posh Hotel V Centenario—where the airconditioning in the sexy gambling casino was probably set at tantalizing flash-freeze—to a suffocating wasteland the size of a city block surrounded by a chain-link fence, in the center of which there was nothing but an ancient Volkswagen bus without wheels. Strange, Cassidy had thought, gazing across the Malecón, where brown surf hurled against an outcrop of volcanic rock, prime real estate for a broken-down taxi and car rental company.

  The General had been sitting at a card table in the shade reading the morning edition of Listín Diario, a cell phone and a can of Coke nearby. Rhonda made the introductions and he had risen, tipping the visor of a Licey team baseball cap, shaking with a dry thick hand and courteously offering each lady one of two folding chairs (the office), where Cassidy perched politely in a rose T-shirt and black-flowered rayon skirt Rhonda had strongly suggested that she wear, instinctively responding to the signals coming from the General as clearly as the laser beam of Faro a Colón; masculine signals reinforced by a .45 automatic pistol stuck into a belt just behind the right hip.

  “Do you always carry a gun?” she asked.

  “I was in the military.”

  The General smiled and his brown cheeks dimpled, long rugged creases that surfaced like a reminder of the younger man—reckless and brash—no thought, no reflection, no doubt. Even though he seemed the harmless abuelo in a pink-and-white-striped shirt, brown trousers and sandals, playing dominoes in the shade, Cassidy recognized an inflexible constitutional authority that comes of being born to a jackpot of gender, race and class: all the right cherries lined up in a row.

  “How do you like my country?” he asked.

  “Very nice except for the bugs.”

  “We don’t got bugs.”

  Cassidy lowered her sunglasses so the General could see the swelling.

  “We don’t got bugs,” he repeated.

  Armed or not, the General was getting on her nerves.

  “Do you have cars?”

  “Of course we got cars!” He leaned back and laughed.

  Cassidy hadn’t seen any cars in the empty lot. A couple dozen Haitian oil paintings were hung on the chain link, stylized scenes of marketplaces and religious epiphanies. A runty Dominican in an undershirt was haranguing a well-dressed European couple, “Are you Christians? Look at this beautiful painting of our Lord!”

  The General’s sideline. Art.

  Rhonda was going on about how she and Pedro had known this fine man for years—neighbor, businessman, loving grandfather. The General returned the respects in a meaningless flirtation that nonetheless made Rhonda’s moon cheeks turn pink. There are dances to be danced but it was eleven thirty-five and easily a hundred degrees.

  “What will it take,” Cassidy cut in, “to get me to Río Blanco and back?”

  “Pedro was going to drive,” Rhonda explained, “but he had to go to Barahona to see an infielder.”

  The General nodded seriously. “Always the search.”

  “We need your help.”

  “It would be a privilege.”

  For three hundred dollars.

  The General clapped his hands and the runty salesman trotted over.

  “This is my nephew.”

  “Whatzup?” Not just in English but in an accent wide as the East River.

  “You’re from New York?”

  “I’m from here but I drove a cab in New York. Spent time in Miami,” he added proudly, as if it were a graduate degree.

  “Monroe knows the countryside.” The General clapped his nephew’s bare
clove-dark shoulder. “He is a good man.”

  Good at hot-wiring cars, Cassidy thought, wondering how else they were going to get one, and if she should really drive off with this sleaze, a grownup version of the street boys at the airport. She recognized exactly where Monroe was from: hustling and getting high. Not because of the buzzed hair or the enormous baggy pants held up by a green plastic belt; it had been in the eyes, filmed over, not clear. The eyes sat on you like two oily brown-orange moons.

  She was still thinking about it while Monroe went off to get the car, while she and Rhonda and the General stood in an awkward row on the scorching sidewalk.

  “What would we do without the General?” Rhonda had purred with a coy smile Cassidy wasn’t positive had not been returned by a wink. “You know our friend held an important position under President Trujillo? A very difficult time,” she added.

  “I liked it better under Trujillo.”

  The General had been rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. A thick gold bracelet swung on his wrist. A heavy ring of keys swayed off a pinkie.

  “Really?” Cassidy asked. “Why did you like it better?”

  “There was more discipline.”

  Three hundred dollars and the relentless sun were making her testy.

  “Trujillo,” Cassidy said, “was a dictator who killed a lot of innocent people.”

  The smile faded from Rhonda’s coral lips but the General had remained unmoved.

  “People always die from one thing or another,” he had observed. “The enemies of Trujillo, they died faster.”

  Monroe pulled up in a blue Isuzu jeep. The General continued to rock, knees buckled and groin thrust forward, self-stimulation showing in a hard mound.

  Cassidy stared at his smug, bronze face in disbelief.

  He gave her dimples.