Be the One

by April Smith

  “Which is why, Travis, you are always so understandably nervous.”

  She goes to Cruz.

  “I came to wish you good luck.”

  “I got good luck.”

  The ballplayer smiles the good smile, a smile so grand his eyebrows fly up under the bill of his cap.

  The scout grips his hand in a comradely shake but it turns into an embrace, and they hold each other as long as they can. And longer.

  “Ciao,” she says in a husky voice. “Watch those hips,” and makes a swinging motion as he nods and heads for the locker room.

  3:15 p.m.

  Cassidy puts her feet up on the seat in front of her. She is in a field box over the dugout, best view in the house. In the white burned-out sky you can see the end of summer. Soon will come the division playoffs, the series, the end of daylight saving time—but now is the moment of protracted fade, before the season ends and the light turns woeful at two in the afternoon. The press box is still empty, groundskeepers rake the clay. Cassidy is simply here, in ballpark space, wondering what has happened to her in the last twenty years.

  3:39 p.m.

  The stadium workers prepare for the game. Although their tasks unfold like clockwork, Cassidy is suspended out of time. Although nobody else is in the stands, she can feel a presence in her heart.

  The scoreboard lights up.

  The escalators start running.

  The food stands open. When the doors of the elevator draw apart, you can see it is crowded with hawkers wearing striped shirts and straw hats. Reporters trailing press passes hurry across the deserted deck.

  On the field, TV camera people are setting up.

  “It’s hot. I’m getting too old for this.”

  “If it were cold you’d be bitching about that, too.”

  An usher opens a gate, allowing a group of journalists onto the red track. Even the working press is wired, this close to the game.

  “Hey, whorehouse! Come over and meet this kid. Is he dumb. Even dumber than I was at his age.”

  It is a reporter from one of the northern papers, plaid jacket and Van Dyck beard, calling, “Watch us! We’ll show you the professional way to grill somebody!”

  And a gentle African-American sportswriter from Orange County, hat turned backwards and batik shirt, explaining to a visitor, “I like baseball because it’s ‘The Young and the Restless.’ You watch it every day to see what’s happening, like a soap opera.”

  4:30 p.m.

  The Dodgers come out onto the field, the starting lineup, famous multimillion-dollar names, larger-than-life big pumped-up bodies, land of the giants.

  “Okay, here we go!” shouts the trainer. “Left knee! It’s the full-body stretch, dude.”

  Half the players are standing around joking, some dutifully rolling on their backs.

  “Whatzup?”

  And, “Tsha!”

  And Alberto Cruz, happy as a puppy, rolling around on his butt next to Raul Mondesi, both of them laughing rapid-fire Spanish.

  5:00 p.m.

  The ground crew sets up the screens and the starters take BP, the coach calling, “One out. HO! Nice, double down the line. Two outs. Great play! Base hit. Man on first. Tough situation,” keeping them loose, keeping them laughing like when they were kids. Everybody hits home runs. The bleachers are littered with balls.

  Pedro always says, “If it wasn’t for two words in the English dictionary, everybody would be a hitter. The two words are, Play ball!”

  6:00 p.m.

  They let the public in. San Francisco takes the field and the Dodgers go back into the clubhouse. The sky has claimed some pigment, warm fall blue. Cassidy is resting an arm around the back of the empty seat beside her.

  She has been sitting in the empty stands, protecting this empty seat, for the past three hours.

  “This taken?”

  A jerk-off with long hair.

  “Yes, it is.”

  Later,

  “Excuse me?”

  Two little blond boys who brought their gloves. “Someone sitting here?”

  “Yes.”

  The boys turn at once and scramble down the aisle. Crew cuts must be in style again, at least for eight-year-olds. The afternoon sun creates twin blond coronas around the two small heads, bobbing through the crowd, undefeated and undaunted. They throw themselves into two empty seats right behind the dugout, put their feet up and hope for the best.

  That’s the way boys are. That’s the way Gregg was, the way he taught her to be. When they took that last walk through Lithia Park she had known, although her mind and body denied it at the time, that it was very near the end: because that is when he no longer had hope.

  The dogwoods had been in flower. They walked those peaceful path-ways one step at a time, Gregg leaning on her for support, needing to stop and catch his breath if he spoke more than five or six words.

  The goal had been chocolate-dipped soft ice cream cones at the Creek Cafe, but it might as well have been Seattle. As they inched along through the dense shade of a big-leaf maple, she was thinking of all the odd things she had seen in that park, which over the past hundred years had matured, as great parks do, into a collective dream space, where performers from the Shakespeare Festival might stroll in costume past a woman in labor being walked by two determined friends. Cassidy remembered bands of hippie children, dirty, wild. She wondered if the pair of runners that were coming at them, staring, had been shocked by the sight of her emaciated brother in such a pastoral setting.

  Gregg had been in and out of the hospital all that year. He’d lost more weight. His posture had been stooped, exaggerating the barrel chest that resulted from the effort of getting air into his compromised lungs. He had been wearing thermal underwear and a thick red flannel shirt, one sleeve rolled up to accommodate an intravenous PIC line attached to an IV bag hanging from a stand which Cassidy rolled beside them with a quiet clatter, a piece of hospital equipment never meant to see the sun. The shirt was tucked into sweats but the drawstring still had so much play it hung below his knees. The bony feet were bare, long toes flexing hesitantly in a pair of rubber thongs.

  It had taken scarcely more effort to guide Gregg along than the IV stand. He was nineteen years old but slight as an autumn leaf, a six-foot frame that should have supported two hundred pounds down to ninety. Cassidy was fifteen, athletically plump, hair bleached rebel platinum, chewing gum, a beaded choker, like his, around the taut, thick neck, wearing a Grizzlies sweatshirt and torn denim shorts, bare strong legs, hot-pink toenails.

  The contrast between them filled her with shame.

  “Can we sit down?” he had asked.

  “No, bologna head, we cannot sit down.”

  The view from the bench had been a small meadow filled with filtered light. For some reason the bad kids, the street kids, liked to hang out there. They wore punk hair and Indian dresses and lay with each other in the grass.

  “It’s the end of the line,” Gregg said, and at first Cassidy thought he was talking about the path. That he could not walk much farther on the path.

  “We’ll just rest,” she told him.

  “I told Doc Bill I don’t want him to share that information with mom.”

  “What information?”

  “I’ve been living with CF. Now I’m dying with CF.”

  Cassidy stared straight ahead.

  “I don’t accept that, Gregg.”

  “Dying? Or not telling mom?”

  “This end-of-the-line crapola. It’s never the end of the line. There’s always hope. You can always fight.”

  “No,” he said, kindly. “No.”

  He had taken her hand.

  “I can feel it. This past year I’ve been through the transition.”

  Sitting, it was a little easier for him to talk.

  “My energy level has been unbelievably low. The mornings are hell.”

  “I know—”

  “I can’t go through another pseudomonas—”

&nbs
p; “Yes you can.”

  He had coughed. Her hand tightened around his. She prayed he wouldn’t have a spell, but if he did she was prepared, a plastic bag jammed in her pocket along with the inhaler and a couple of paper towels. Sometimes he would cough four minutes straight. His skin would turn blue and he’d vomit.

  “Mom’s talking about taking that house on the coast for July—”

  “Mom is wonderful. She’s gold.” He coughed again. “But she’s in denial. And Dad’s on another planet.”

  “You’re not in denial?” Cassidy asked curiously.

  She didn’t really know what being “in denial” meant. She couldn’t grasp the grief and the deep slow torment that had, over the past four years, arrested the vital functions of her parents; their appetites, desires, the very pattern of their heartbeats. Her mom just seemed to be there, her dad, stoical, put on a sport jacket and sold houses and coached her softball team with aggression and an expectation of excellence that went beyond the Rogue Valley to the nationals, beyond nationals to the Olympics, which was coming in ten years, when Cassidy and D.J. would be at prime age and condition to make the U.S. team. They had been marked, Cassidy and D.J., with the certainty of the hometown pecking order: their bodies were strong and gifted, they would grow into champions, it was a fact of life; she had eclipsed her brother as heir to the Smoke Sanderson legend.

  This, also, was nothing but shame and guilt.

  “The conflict of death,” said Gregg, “it’s within me.”

  “Then it’s in me,” echoed his little sister.

  “That’s not what I want for you.”

  In the clearing the street kids had formed a circle, playing that game called Hacky Sack, passing a little beanbag by kicking it with the ankles, heels and knees. One of them played a recorder. The odd hair and transparent dresses had seemed ribald, Elizabethan.

  “I want you to be free.”

  “Gregg,” she said with teenage drama. “Nobody is free.”

  “So there’s no mystery, I want to tell you, I’ve thought about it.” He spit into a tissue. “There’s no way I’m going back to the hospital, okay? I’m going to die at home.”

  She elbowed him. “Don’t talk that way.”

  He never had before. She figured it was the depressing books he had been reading. On the Road. No Exit. The Catcher in the Rye. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

  “I also want to tell you”—forced to stop again—“this is tough.”

  “Forget it.”

  She stood. She moved the IV stand and the tubing played out, as if she could nudge him off the bench like a dog on a leash.

  “Let’s go get ice cream.”

  “When you went on in baseball,” Gregg said haltingly, “it was really hard for me.”

  Slowly she sat down and put her arms around her brother. She had never known it was possible to be this close to another human being, maybe because she had never known before how close they really were: one soul in two bodies. So close, they cried into each other’s eyes.

  6:40 p.m.

  She tries to imagine what Gregg would look like sitting in this seat, had he survived to be a man. How it would have been to have him in her life all these years; if she could, at times, just call him on the phone. If he had lived, no doubt he would have insisted that she take the genetic screening test, and maybe she would turn out not to be a carrier, and her children would be with them now. Is that what he meant when he said he wanted her to be free? Ghosts can’t answer. They are gone from us. But as she waits for Alberto Cruz to make his appearance on this green field, she feels an incandescence growing in her heart, the same feeling she’d had just knowing Gregg was watching from the stands; when he was sick and she was out there playing ball. One soul, two bodies.

  One forgiving soul.

  6:55 p.m.

  The announcer intones, “YOUR Los Angeles Dodgers!” and a full house stands up and cheers. Cassidy opens her eyes. The lights are on. The crowd, the very air, seem beautiful and polished. The team runs out and lines up, all in white. A very little girl with a very big voice from the Inglewood Children’s Gospel Choir sings the national anthem. Alberto Cruz takes off his cap. He looks once at the sky. He tries to be serious. He looks down. He can’t help it. He grins.

  8:20 p.m.

  The Giants make two errors. The Dodgers score three unearned runs in the fourth inning. Radios are buzzing with Vin Scully’s soothing voice, but even he can’t modulate the excitement of pennant fever: if they win this game, nine more and they clinch.

  A straight-looking girl about twenty is escorted out of the stadium by two security guards for dancing on the dugout.

  Cassidy will not give up the empty seat.

  8:45 p.m.

  Detective Nate Allen makes his way down the aisle carrying two chocolate swirl yogurt cones.

  “Sorry I’m late. Knew this would happen.”

  “No problem.”

  He wades past her knees.

  “Closing a case is endless.”

  He settles in and hands over a cone.

  “Great seats.”

  “Better be.”

  “Alberto up yet?”

  “Oh, he won’t play. They might use him to run.”

  “Still, you got him to the big show.”

  Cassidy doesn’t answer.

  Nate leans around, peering closely into her face.

  “You should be proud of yourself.”

  “I don’t know what I am.”

  “Are you okay?”

  She waits.

  “I’ve never had very good luck with cops.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, they’re crazy or depressed or can’t relate to women.”

  Allen circles a finger toward himself. “Moi?”

  She looks at him. “You tell me.”

  “No, you tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “I mean, you asked me here, so, is this, now, like a date?”

  Cassidy laughs uncomfortably. “I don’t know—”

  “I just want to make sure,” says Allen, “I’m not sitting in somebody else’s seat.”

  She looks out at the lit field. Night is almost complete, mountain ridges the last to fade. The flags move softly.

  “There was someone sitting here. But he’s gone, for now.”

  Roberto Kelly hits a homer in the seventh.

  The Dodgers win it, 4–2.

  Cassidy and Nate Allen trudge through the crowded parking lot. She unlocks the door of the Explorer, discouraged by the accumulated mess in the backseat, which she will, seriously, have to tackle. She has never noticed this before, but there is a wet suit tangled up in there.

  Oskar Kvorcziak rolls by in the golf cart.

  She takes the battered skateboard from the backseat and places it on the asphalt.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just don’t arrest me, okay?”

  Nate Allen hangs an elbow over the top of the open door and raises his eyebrows quizzically and waits.

  He gets the feeling this kind of thing, whatever it is, is going to be happening a lot.

  “Hey, Oskar!” she taunts. “Look at this!”

  Cassidy puts one foot on the board.

  She looks ahead.

  And pushes off.

  Navigating downhill, slaloming between oncoming cars and shouting attendants, staying just ahead of red-faced Oskar Kvorcziak in the golf cart; weaving deftly in and out of parking cones as they come at her—one by one, then blurred together—faster than the eye can see, strobing, and then one long streak.

  EPILOGUE

  Dawn in Santo Domingo. From where he stands on the roof of the apartment building in the Gazcue district, Pedro Pedrillo can see a large ship riding high on the lavender swells of the Caribbean Sea, lights still on, bejeweled and elegant. To the north, the laser beam of the lighthouse Faro a Colón, monument to dictators, continues to sweep the city, slowly losing strength as
daylight grows.

  He takes a sip of thick rich coffee. It tastes sweet. Why not: three teaspoons of sugar in a small porcelain cup. He likes it that way, almost unbearable, like a high-pitched note on a guitar string that pierces the ears yet somehow seems the right pitch for this too pink, too sweet morning.

  Ever since their trip to Miami, Rhonda has been hard on his case to retire. The grandchildren are growing up without them. And he has to admit, scouting Latin America has more and more become a dirty game. It is almost normal for boys to be coming now with forged documents, or expect that you will get them. Buscones are “signing” kids at the age of eleven and he has heard terrible stories how some even abuse the children. Rhonda is correct that he would have an easy coaching job in the United States.

  But then he would not be driving the sugarcane roads, and find a few boys playing, and see, coming toward him in the light and shadow of a gumbo-limbo tree, the good face; the face that is open and ready to learn.

  The dawn is gone. The pearly glow turns to harsh sun, the misty yacht revealed to be an oil tanker, the inspiring lighthouse beacon yet another overblown monument to political ego. Pedro can hear traffic and his nose begins to fill with dust.

  Eight blocks away a tour bus pulls out of the driveway of the Hotel V Centenario, forcing traffic on the Malecón to stop as it makes a laborious left-hand turn. Already the air is heavy with dust and the Caribbean Sea bright aqua with medium swells. The temperature is above eighty and climbing. The bus passes a movie theater and a row of small hotels and labors past the chirry-chingo bars along the beachfront.

  Inside, a German tour group praises the air-conditioning and stares at pastel benches set in zigzags beside the water. Despite the five-star rating, omelets made to order, packaged orange juice and American cereals, many could be observed at breakfast disinfecting their silverware with disposable alcohol wipes provided by the young tour guide. On the itinerary, besides the Parque de los Tres Ojos de Agua, is the Palacio Nacional, Old Santo Domingo, shopping at Plaza Criolla and dinner at a restaurant specializing in Spanish-style seafood. The tour guide taps his clipboard.

  On the airport road the bus picks up speed and passes along a five-mile park, deep green slopes of grass dotted with flamboyant trees, wavy trunks out of an Edvard Munch painting, then rolls by a middle-class housing development painted bright yellow. There are joggers in the park and sailors strolling in white uniforms. The driver’s radio plays merengue.