Be the One

by April Smith

  15

  The Coast Grill is deceptive.

  Low-slung, with a narrow red-and-white-striped canopy, it looks like one of those classic Atlantic fish places that have attached themselves to the end of a pier like a mollusk; been there forever, weathered and cozy, a comfortable safe harbor for the rain-soaked traveler or the mature affair, where the barkeep knows how to blend up a pretty good whiskey sour.

  Maybe, forty years ago.

  Today the Coast Grill has a gift shop that sells china replicas of itself, along with dish towels, recipe books, candles, lighthouse earrings, fish kites and Indian River grapefruits, shipped anywhere. In the lot, where Cassidy parked the rental car about an acre away, the preferred automobile is a Cadillac. In the cavernous series of dining rooms, lit by flickering “kerosene” lanterns, the preferred dinner jackets for gentlemen are robin’s-egg blue. For ladies, anything in the Easter palette.

  All in all, thinks Cassidy, striding past tables of gray heads, the perfect place to take a nervous kid from the Dominican.

  Pedro is waving. As she joins them in a booth Alberto cannot suppress an eighteen-year-old male smirk.

  “You look good.”

  Cassidy is wearing a short sleeveless black wool dress, black hose and black square heels. Her hair is loose.

  “Thanks,” she says. “So do you.”

  Alberto seems to shudder. He has on chinos and a black knit shirt. His cropped hair is glistening. As usual he cannot sit still in a chair, stretching and yawning, leaning back with hands clasped behind his head. At the next table there is a birthday party, a bouquet of Mylar balloons. Through the strings of the balloons, through the chatter (“I saw such beautiful gowns in Singapore—”), one wide-shouldered old geezer in a marigold-yellow suit is staring openly at the three of them.

  They are handed menus the size of newspapers. Alberto shuffles his feet and diddles the red tassel as Pedro translates one hundred fourteen ways to broil, poach, grill and bake a wearying selection of Gulf seafood.

  Cassidy says, “I saw you coaching those boys. That was a generous thing to do.”

  Alberto shrugs. “We having fun.”

  She pours another glass from the cold pitcher of draft. “What was going on for you out there on the field today?”

  “For real I play much better than you see.”

  “That part’s okay. Everybody has a bad night—”

  “I know what’s going on.” His eyes are earnest. “Here I play against thirty outfielders—big guys, they have good coaches. All they lives, they play with good conditions. I know I can’t go Double A or Triple A with those guys. I’m going to play rookie ball, I got to be real.”

  “Realistic.”

  “When I take that pressure off of myself, I can play my game.”

  Pedro: “Son, you’re right, you only got one problem. You are all tied up in a knot. You got to work with the brain. Because the body’s gonna do what the brain tells it.”

  “I have to work on my concentration.”

  “It’s not just that,” says Cassidy. “It’s what you carry with you. What you dream about at night.”

  She looks meaningfully at Pedro.

  “My dream is to play in Dodger Stadium.” Alberto laughs, believing he has given a good answer.

  “We know you got pressure,” Pedro goes on, “with guys like that looking over your shoulders.”

  Cassidy: “Like what?”

  Pedro nods toward the bar.

  “You see that bodyguard?”

  White hair and clipped white beard, a reddened, weathered face long past fifty. Gold chain, white nylon windbreaker, white slacks. In the midst of talk and motion, the crisp impassivity of the man provides a lesson in focus. Although his look seems aimed nowhere in particular, you can tell by the calm deliberate way his slender hand picks up a glass that he maintains a honed and disciplined balance between stillness and, should it be required, action.

  Cassidy blurts, “I saw that man in the park.”

  “The organization brought him down from Port St. Lucie to keep an eye on Alberto.”

  “Isn’t that a little paranoid?”

  Alberto is drumming the table. “The letters are coming here.”

  “What letters?”

  “The same.”

  “Blackmail letters?”

  Alberto nods.

  “They followed you here?”

  Cassidy is hoping that pure logical deduction will reduce the panic in her gut. If someone in Los Angeles who had been sending stuff to the stadium wanted to send something else to Alberto, it would make perfect sense to send it to Dodgertown. Of course they would know he’s at spring training, it’s in the paper, for God’s sake.

  “The letters were sent from Los Angeles?”

  “Florida,” says Pedro. “Sent from here. That’s why.”

  Again he indicates the man at the bar, who is taking a measured sip of orange juice.

  Cassidy scans the room of senior citizens with alarm.

  “Nothing to do. Someone put bad magic on me. Obeah,” Alberto explains.

  The waiter brings a basket of fried shrimp.

  “Come on,” scoffs Pedro, “you don’t believe in that stuff.”

  “Before I don’t believe, but now I don’t know. I feeling weak like a baby. I go on the field, I can’t do nothing.”

  Cassidy comes back to Alberto’s hollow eyes. “Are you eating right?”

  “The trainers say I’m okay. I eat great. The food here is great. But I no gain weight. My roommate he give me these cans? These supplements?” Alberto shakes his head. “My stomach no good.”

  Cassidy, impatiently, “If you fail here, Alberto, you go home.”

  He scowls. “Nothing gonna help. Someone put the magic.”

  “Only if you think so.” Pedro bites a shrimp.

  Eyes downcast, “I think the bad luck start when we run over that pony.”

  Cassidy takes a breath, absolutely dazzled.

  “We all know it wasn’t a pony.”

  The waiter brings a loaf of white bread on a wooden board and three tomato salads, barely deiced.

  “It was not?”

  “No.”

  Alberto laughs again. “What you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the woman on the tape the cops showed you in LA. That’s what we hit, not a pony. Somebody knows and they’re trying to blackmail you.”

  She holds back from saying, You and Joe.

  Alberto’s face retains the trace of an uneasy smile.

  Pedro: “This is serious. The Dominican police have been to my house. I don’t need that kind of trouble.”

  Alberto’s eyes grow round and his hands go to his chest.

  “Why you look at me?”

  Cassidy: “You’re the one who hit her.”

  Silence.

  Slowly, so there can be no misunderstanding: “You were driving the Range Rover.”

  Alberto slowly hunches forward until his forehead comes to rest on the table.

  “Yes, I drive.”

  His words are equally measured.

  “That is true. Mr. Galinis let me drive.”

  He straightens up and stares at them full bore.

  “But not when we hit the pony. Then it was Mr. Galinis. He drive.”

  He looks between Cassidy and Pedro.

  “Why you not believe me?”

  Cassidy’s heart is pounding. “That is not the way it happened.”

  Pedro: “Don’t disrespect the lady. She was there. She knows.”

  Alberto’s dark brown eyes pin hers.

  “You were sleeping. How you know?”

  “That’s my recollection. I can’t say I really know …”

  Alberto, triumphant, “Right! How you know who’s driving when you are sleeping drunk in a car?”

  The seniors are singing “Happy Birthday.” The almond-crusted pompano arrives.

  “Calm down,” says Pedro. “We are in a restaurant.”

  Alb
erto’s tapping with a knife. “I don’t believe this happening. Someone put the magic.”

  “Don’t tell us about magic—”

  “Cassie, is this true? You were passed out cold?”

  “I’m sorry about that. Really sorry. Can I just crawl under the table now—?”

  Alberto, at the same time: “—Right away you don’t believe me! How I can prove this? How I can go up against the American guy? What I can do? You know what happen to me if I go back? I go to jail or this woman family probably gonna kill me—”

  Pedro, “You’re important to the organization, we gonna do everything we can—”

  “—Sure, and I supposed to play tomorrow, like nothing?”

  “That’s right.” Cassidy, hard. “You have to play.”

  Alberto stands angrily. “How I play when this is going on?”

  “Then don’t!” Her hand slams down, jiggling glasses. “Forget everything!”

  “It was an accident. We gonna straighten it out,” says Pedro. “We gonna help you. And your family, too.”

  “What you know about my family?”

  “They are suffering,” Pedro replies steadily. “Sit down.”

  Alberto swipes the air.

  “Right! My nephews go to Santo Domingo, live in the street. Where my mother is, they got no water. Everybody sick. I here.” He punches his own chest. “I supposed to save their life.”

  “We know. We understand—”

  The man in the marigold jacket, who has been eyeing them all evening, elbows his wife.

  “Are you a Dodger?” the old man shouts.

  Alberto turns. “Yes, sir.”

  “You look familiar.”

  “Thank you.”

  The wife produces a clean new baseball and permanent marker—as standard in Vero Beach purses as photos of the grandkids—which are passed knowingly around the table to Alberto.

  “Sign it ‘To Dr. Wessendorf, Best regards.’ ”

  Alberto scrawls something. Dr. Wessendorf gives a one-finger salute and the boy runs for the door.

  The bodyguard slips off the stool and follows.

  Pedro continues to eat. Cassidy finishes another beer. It tastes like soap.

  Pedro says, “He is not in control of himself.”

  Cassidy folds her hands like a schoolmarm. It would be good if she didn’t start throwing things here.

  “He has a lot on the line.”

  Pedro chews with deliberation. “The Dominican police wanted to know if he’s involved with drugs.”

  “That’s what the cops said in LA. That Alberto might be caught in the middle of some drug dealers.” She shrugs stiffly. “I don’t know. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You never saw him getting high?”

  “We drank some Mama Juana—”

  Pedro groans.

  “—but that’s all.”

  “I try to talk to you about your drinking—”

  “Uncle Pedro, please. Don’t you think I’m sick about this? I was in the car, I’m the one responsible for him—”

  The waiter asks if they want coffee. No, they don’t.

  “He is almost a grown-up man. You are not responsible.”

  Cassidy puts her head in her hands.

  “I don’t like the police,” says Pedro, “but maybe they are right. We are a poor country, everybody takes from us. They build big resorts with gambling casinos, and it’s a gold mine. For who? Americans, Germans and Japanese. What do we got? Where’s our politicians? In bed with the Mexican drug lords. I’ll tell you one thing,” he warns. “You see the big rich ugly houses of the drug dealers in the towns like Nagua, you see them with the gold watches in the cafés.” He gives the slow contemptuous finger wave. “Over my dead body they not gonna get in our business.”

  He signs the bill.

  “I’m gonna go down there and ask some questions about Cruz.”

  “Go where?”

  “Río Blanco.”

  “Be careful.”

  The idea seems to strike him as absurd.

  “It’s my territory.”

  He slides around awkwardly and hefts himself from the booth and through the busy restaurant and out to the street where a Town Car is waiting to take him, Alberto and the man in white back to Dodgertown.

  Cassidy walks down the boardwalk.

  That Alberto is lying to save his family makes her heart hurt. She knows what it’s like to go out in the world and be the one who has to win it for the folks back home. It leaves you standing alone, leaning against a railing, watching floodlit waves break against the seawall.

  Damn her stoned-out brain. She struggles to remember. While she was groping the filthy floor, mesmerized by a little plastic dog, was Alberto out there drenched in rain, staring at his crime, watching his future wash away like watery blood? Did he panic, run, leave a stranger dying by the road?

  Then lie like a teenager to put the blame on Joe?

  Can terrible events melt even the good face? If so, what do you find underneath? An animal grimace fixed on escape with the indifferent eyes of a killer? Even Pedro had been shaken by the possibility; he did not want to see the opportunist in Alberto, so he’s off to indict the conquerors—builders, drug dealers, capitalists, smugglers, sugar kings, the European sex trade in the north—who have seized on island boys for centuries, forcing them to labor in their own personal gold mines.

  A spit of salt spray chills her despite the tropic breeze.

  The words hit with another meaning.

  Gold mine.

  They had also been Joe’s words, when he had been talking about the hotel in the Los Angeles sports and entertainment center.

  Another hotel for which he had put together the financing.

  She understood when he said “Gold mine,” he did not mean regular hotel profits, heads in the beds, but what would happen to his investment if down the line the city did make downtown an “entertainment zone,” where gambling would be legal.

  The Los Angeles hotel would have a casino.

  Just like the Gran Caribe.

  Cassidy hears laughter and turns from the rail. The party has drifted out of the restaurant onto the sidewalk, silvery balloons and the elderly birthday girl wearing a corsage, stoop-shouldered Dr. Wessendorf patting someone on the back. A warm bath of voices reminding her that she is alone.

  They had been in the Bentley outside Dodger Stadium, at a loss as to what to do on their suddenly disconnected date.

  “I’ve seen where you play,” Joe said at last. “Let me show you where I play.”

  They had driven slowly in rush hour traffic through Chinatown and Pershing Square to the deadened corners of the old industrial sector of downtown.

  “This is the future,” Joe said.

  Cassidy, in the business of futures, caught his excitement.

  “We’re coming up to the Convention Center. A beautiful piece of architecture designed by I. M. Pei’s firm, but it’s in the middle of noman’s-land. Not a neighborhood without character,” he added judiciously as they passed stately prewar office buildings with zigzag fire escapes and decorative swags, plastered with For Sale signs. The only moving figures in the abandoned cityscape were the most homeless of the homeless, unrecognizable as upright beings beneath sculptural piles of rags.

  “The multipurpose arena will be surrounded by a promenade of City Walk-type shops. The hotel will be to the west. We need a great convention center hotel,” Joe went on. “It will be economically fragile for a while, but if LA grows the way we think it will, the hotel will become a gold mine.”

  He had spoken with the polish of an orator about a thirty-screen movie palace, about “density and mass” that would tie the new development into the USC–Coliseum–Exposition Park area …

  Cassidy remembered, Gold mine.

  They passed a gated barbershop and a liquor store layered with gang signs and skulls as Joe brought to life the vision of a new power structure, Latin and Asian, that would emerge f
rom the shards of the white-dominated eighties; a three-hundred-million-dollar West Coast South Beach, Florida, that would be, in color, music and sophistication, in sync with the new ethnic beat of Los Angeles.

  They turned onto Tenth Street, where a huge comic-book warrior had been painted on the brick-walled factories and flophouse hotels so everywhere they looked he seemed to be aiming a laser gun, at them.

  When they arrived at the site she was surprised at how subtly the structure fit. It was skeletal, the caissons that go down to bedrock were in, and the footings and foundations, beams and columns that you could see formed an ovoid superstructure curving around to end abruptly in space.

  They went into a trailer and signed out badges and hard hats, and crossed the street to the entrance where dusty-faced workers with lunch pails were streaming home.

  “Just walk in like you own the place,” Joe said.

  A path of wooden planks led to the lobby—a floor of concrete—where Joe pointed out the sloping columns that supported the sloping roof, how the building was a series of curves, the prow of it an ellipse, conceived in strata—offices and restaurants, decks, concourses, private clubs—stuck in layers to the round arena portico. They stepped around piles of steel beams, squeezed between generators, wheelbarrows, hoses and wire. He held aside a curtain of black plastic and she stood a foot away from the edge of the stadium, looking down a hundred feet to the jam-packed event floor. Rakers wrapped with steel wire swung from massive skyhooks on ten-story cranes, and the blown-out chaos of work in progress, like detritus from an explosion, was littered everywhere. Joe pointed toward the cross-trusses on the roof. “Look at it on this plane,” he instructed, tilting his hand until she could make out an octagon of steelwork in the middle: “That’s where the scoreboard will go.”

  It was easy to imagine the lights on and seats filled, the scoreboard alive and blaring, cartoon characters and corporate logos pulsating, to claim the very center of the action.

  “Want to climb to the top?”

  They spiraled up several tiers of concrete steps until they reached the highest level. The deck was open, a thin wind blowing through the scaffolding because there were no outer walls. It was precarious. Empty elevator shafts dropped several stories down. “Don’t lean on those,” Joe warned of the wooden barricades. “They’re not always bolted.”