by Manuel Munoz
Santiago is surprised that Carrasco isn’t upset about the twenty minutes. “Haven’t thought about that.”
“Maybe a little time away,” Carrasco says, looking at him and then down at the clipboard. “Clear your head some.”
“Yeah, but . . . you know, money’s tight right now.”
Carrasco stubs out the cigarette and then leans down to pick up the butt. Even the warehouse environs are part of their regular duties. “Summer’s the best time to work. Best time to make money, my dad always said.” He checks off a few items on the clipboard. “You’re doing doorknobs today. Next two weeks, actually.”
“Doorknobs?”
“Superintendent lost the grand master key. Opens every single door in every single school building of the district. So we’re cutting new keys and redoing all the doorknobs.”
“No shit.”
“You got the kid in there cutting keys,” he says, waving to the air-conditioned office where one of the high school students logs hours in a summer work program. “I’m teaching him to code the keys. Sure you don’t want to take that time off?”
“What a mess,” Santiago says before stepping into the warehouse to put away his lunch.
“It better not be,” Carrasco tells him. “And don’t take the interchange next time. Everybody’s been late for the last few days.”
In the warehouse, past pallets of cheap paint ready for summer use, the rest of the crew comes in and out of Carrasco’s office. Two refrigerators sit in one corner of his office, along with a soda machine. Santiago wonders how Carrasco gets any work done in there. Carrasco’s phone keeps ringing because he is hardly at his desk to pick it up. The radio crackles with commands from crews already on the job at some schools, asking for an extra ladder, fresh paintbrushes, longer hoses. Blueprints sit stacked roll on roll on a counter, haphazardly labeled and dated. Fresno State calendars line the walls wherever there is space, sometimes partially covered by beer ads, bikinied women with high heels and big tits, smiling and bending over. In the middle of all of this chaos sit pictures of Carrasco’s family: his wife and his three kids, sometimes as a group, sometimes just the kids, but all of them displayed in oversize, ornate silver frames. In one of the pictures, Carrasco wears a button-down shirt and a tie, and only by stopping and looking closely could you tell that the shirt was patterned in tiny, lilac-tinged checks. Santiago never had the nerve to look that closely, but several jokers on the crew didn’t mind making an inspection every now and then, just to make fun of how Carrasco’s wife dressed him.
Despite the clutter and the clamor of the crewmen dusting up Carrasco’s office, Santiago carries a particular envy of the space. Though work can take him anywhere from a gymnasium to the dark upper catwalks of the high school auditorium, he has no place such as this to come back to, no quiet space to sit down in, where he can write out and organize his work reports once he completes a task. Everything is jotted down while he sits in the cab of a work truck or stands in the empty hallway of one of the school buildings, paper up against the wall because he has forgotten his clipboard. Of course, Santiago knows that it is ridiculous to expect that all thirty men on the crew would have their own offices, but nonetheless he wishes he had a comfortable chair, a phone, clutter still organized enough that he’d know where the important things lay hidden. A shelf above a desk to house photos of his family. A day of shopping on the weekend to pick out frames. Something silver with curls cut into the design, like vines climbing a trellis, or maybe just a simple, sleek finish. Something to gleam nicely against an office lamp, the fancy banker’s kind with the translucent green shade. Carrasco’s authority gives him license to exhibit the privilege of a good job: his wife still pretty in what must be her forties, his three kids smiling through the ease of their lives. They lack nothing.
“Mr. Salinas?”
It is the high school kid, standing in the doorway of Carrasco’s office, holding a box. “Mr. Carrasco asked me to give you these for the morning.”
“What is it?” he asks him, coming over and peeking into the box. There are neat rows of tiny manila packets on one side and a jumble of brass key chambers on the other, each looped with a small identification tag.
“It’s the first set of keys I made,” the teenager states proudly. “I’ve tested them, too, so they should work.” He is taller than Santiago by about two inches, and even though he is narrow in the shoulders, Santiago can tell there is another growth spurt coming, more change on the way.
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Yeah? Sophomore?”
“Yeah,” the teenager answers. “Well, I was. I’m a junior in September.” He holds out the box to Santiago as if it were suddenly heavy.
“All right, then,” Santiago says, taking it. The teenager walks back toward the main office, and Santiago watches. From this angle, all the awkwardness of his youth glares through. The pants are too short, hovering just past his ankles, and if he lives where Santiago thinks he does, the pants will have to last until the end of summer.
As Santiago walks out to the work truck, he thinks of his own kids, his own boy and girl, and the inevitable comparisons spin in his head. The teenager’s voice hangs with him — I’m a junior in September — the deep register, his Adam’s apple knotty. He is a boy progressing solidly past adolescence, and Santiago thinks of his son, Alejandro, but refuses the memory. There is still his daughter, Eva, who has fared well — pretty like her mother, reasonably smart in school, if a little lazy at homework. But better still, she carries a brashness about her that Santiago secretly likes and encourages, however much mouthing off to teachers and students alike gets her into trouble. What it means, Santiago believes, is that his Eva will be no one’s fool, and that eclipses all the easy, dumb dreams Santiago used to have of his children being doctors or lawyers. What matters more is temperament, self-sufficiency, persistence, doggedness, self-awareness, the ability to make others feel a little less important than you, even if you have to be mean about it. Look at Carrasco.
No one is at the work truck, so Santiago takes the driver’s seat and waits. After a few moments, he turns the ignition and beeps the horn at Carrasco, who still stands at the rolling doors of the warehouse, making a few last scribbles on his clipboard. Carrasco waves him on — a partner will join him later.
Better to be alone this morning. Better to be alone altogether, given how his mind has been working lately, always turning, never letting him rest. Carrasco knows — he needs the vacation. He needs the drive down to the coast, the waves approaching and never ceasing. He needs to get away from the heat, the tired wake at five in the morning to make it here on time with the summer hours. He needs to get away from sitting on the edge of the bed at that early hour, wondering how he can go on, how people go on when the speck of doubt turns into a weight too massive to ignore, where everything from Carrasco’s picture frames to a teenager’s yet-to-fill-out shoulders leaves him wishing things could be different for his own family.
He does not want to think of his son, Alejandro, but he cannot avoid it, his son who was several years younger than the key-cutting teenager, but a heavy kid, always heavy. Even when his son was a baby, Santiago had wondered in private about what the boy would look like years down the line, and he had watched in growing dismay as Alejandro slowly rounded in the arms and legs, his cheeks bulging. In the summers, at the hotel pools, he’d watched each year as Alejandro splashed around with Eva, his red swim trunks with the elastic waist still unable to control the rolls of fat, his widening chest beginning to droop and sag. By the tenth summer, his boy was entering the pool wearing a long white T-shirt.
“Just leave him be,” Luisa had told Santiago the day he came home from work after stopping at a sporting-goods store. She had peeked in the bag and tsk-tsked between her teeth. “He doesn’t even like baseball.”
At the school, Santiago parks the truck and takes down his toolbox and the new key chambers. He thinks ahead to the long wor
k of transforming all the doors, the monotony of every change, the testing and turning of each key in the set, the pencil check on the paper to keep the record straight. Once in the building, he stares at the long hallway of empty classrooms, thinks of the supply closets on either end of the hall, the electrical rooms, rooms within rooms. Deep within some of the older buildings, he knows, are doors that haven’t been opened in years, doors with lock chambers from years ago, detective-novel keyholes that will have to be replaced completely. Doors within doors within doors.
“Come here,” Santiago had called that late afternoon after work, motioning to Alejandro and showing him the brand-new glove from the bag. “What do you think?”
Alejandro had looked at the glove but hadn’t taken it until Santiago nudged it into his hands. He had tried putting it on his right hand. “It doesn’t fit,” Alejandro had said, and handed it back.
Santiago had smiled. “It goes on the other hand.” He pulled his son’s left arm toward him. “There. It should fit. Bend it a little.”
It looked like a claw, a lobster grabbing and flexing as Alejandro clenched and released, the leather squeaking a bit as it moved.
“So what do you think?”
“I can’t throw.”
Santiago dug into the bag again. “I’ll teach you,” he said, and showed him his own brand-new glove. A matching pair. One adult, one child. “It’s the same one,” he said to Alejandro. “Try this one on.”
Alejandro smiled as he tried it on, his row of white teeth, straight as soldiers, tiny and overwhelmed by the flesh of his cheeks. The bigger glove dwarfed his hand. He had been only nine years old. That was only four years ago.
In the bag were a softball and a baseball, and Santiago took the bigger one, leading Alejandro to the backyard. “We’ll practice with this one first. It’s softer and easier to catch. Now, stay right there.” He pointed and then walked to the other edge of their yard. “Just hold out your glove.”
Santiago knelt down, the grass cool against his knees. Alejandro stood the same way he had in the house, arm outstretched, the glove extended open and as useless as a broken claw. He pointed to the ball when it came to him, his feet stuck to the ground.
“That’s all right,” Santiago assured him. “Just move to the ball. Throw it back,” he instructed. “Look at me. Aim at me.” The ball wobbled back, but when Santiago caught it, there wasn’t that sound. That sound of the ball smacking into the middle of the glove, the sound it made when he and his brother used to play with their father. They had played out in the backyard of their old house, a grassless patch, dust everywhere. The ball had sailed through the air, curving or flat, fly ball or grounder, zipping no matter what. That hard sound, the result of a good arm knowing how to throw, of a wrist that knew to snap just when, knees that bent at the right time. Their father had taken his own glove off to shake his hand in mock pain. They all shared sodas afterward, on the porch that sagged sadly to the west, the smell of dirt on their hands.
With his own son, there was no fleetness, no movement, just standing on the green grass, arm outstretched, a glove waiting. Santiago had an image of him standing in the lonely stretches of an outfield, bored beyond belief, his Little League uniform spotless. He had none of the athletic gawkiness of a pitcher, all skinny arms and legs but still coordinated, nor was he a commanding little tank of a catcher, tossing his mask off every chance he got, mimicking what he’d seen on the televised baseball games. Kids were teasing him, Luisa had said late at night when they were in bed. “You don’t know what he goes through.”
Santiago walked over to him. “Put your arm lower,” he said, pushing Alejandro’s elbow gently and forcing it to bend. “Just like that. Now, just grab at the ball when it comes. It won’t hurt. I promise.”
They threw that way for a while, Santiago aiming for the glove, then testing him a little, bouncing the ball or veering the toss a bit in either direction. Alejandro closed his eyes as the ball came toward him, the ball sometimes ricocheting from glove to ground. A few times, he was lucky enough to clutch at the ball just when it came into the pocket, and he opened his eyes in surprise, grinning at the glove as if it had done the work. Most of the time, both of them scrambled around on the grass, Alejandro missing the toss, Santiago stretching to block the ball from leaving the yard after one of Alejandro’s errant throws.
Luisa watched from the back door, her gaze steady and determined. Santiago could feel her eyes from behind the shadowy frame of the window. But what did she know? How could she understand the cruelty of boys in private, the shenanigans in locker rooms, the mockery? He imagined girls did these things secretly, their jokes hidden behind shushed mouths, sly looks. Eva would be good at it. Boys were different in their ruthlessness, collectively rooting out a scapegoat, and who better to pick on than Alejandro, fast moving into his adolescence with all his baby fat still not gone. Santiago hated how Luisa called it baby fat, making it sound benign, something out of the boy’s control. He threw the ball a little harder, hoping to hear a solid smack in Alejandro’s glove — just one, just one hint that Alejandro was able to understand the importance of controlling one’s own body, of commanding an instrument that transformed everything in life. A body didn’t have to be sculpted in muscle, but it had to be active, mobile, capable, a way to carry oneself into the world, a posture.
“Come here,” Santiago told him after the last toss. He met Alejandro midway across the lawn and led him to the back step, where Luisa quietly moved away from the doorframe, pretending she hadn’t been watching. She busied herself at the kitchen sink, running the water and tinkling glasses against each other. But she soon stopped. She wanted to hear what they were talking about.
Alejandro breathed heavily, taking off the glove and handing it to Santiago.
“It’s yours,” Santiago said. “It doesn’t fit me.” He sat down on the back step, motioning for his son to sit with him. “So do you want to try again tomorrow?”
“I guess,” Alejandro replied, shrugging his shoulders, so that momentarily they stuck up like two little jagged points despite his fleshiness.
“Did you like it?”
“Yeah,” he answered, but not convincingly.
“You know, I used to play with your grandpa and your uncle when I was little.”
“Uncle Luis?”
“Yeah. Every day. Your grandpa taught us how to throw and catch, and then he would take us out to the vacant lots and show us how to hit the ball. It was a lot of fun.”
“Were you good at it?” Alejandro asked, and Santiago was surprised at the immediacy of the question.
“Yes, I guess. Your uncle was better, though. He won two trophies when he was little. Ask him to show them to you the next time we go over.” Inside, he could hear Luisa pouring liquid into glasses. “Would you ever want a trophy like that? Wouldn’t it be cool?”
Alejandro shrugged again, and when he did, Santiago felt a pang of guilt for asking him the question. Of course he would. Any kid would. But he knew from his son’s shrug that such a trophy was already out of his reach, a desire best left to kids moving toward another horizon. It was unfair of him to baldly ask about such a wish, to ask about what secretly lurked in his son’s mind.
“You want some lemonade?” Luisa asked, opening the back door. She held two glasses.
“Bring him some water, no?” Santiago asked, glancing down at his son’s head, Alejandro’s black hair shimmering dark against the fading daylight of the backyard. Luisa eyed Santiago, but went back inside. His boy could change. There were so many years ahead. He didn’t say anything to Luisa when she came back out with two glasses of water, handing his to him coldly but stroking the back of Alejandro’s hair with a gentle, proud assurance. Santiago sucked on an ice cube, turned his eyes to look at his boy’s big head and his round calves tight against his jeans. Alejandro drank his water and set the glass down on the spongy grass, hunching over. His back seemed to arch up and out, like an alley cat’s in Halloween pictures. San
tiago put out his hand and gingerly straightened the boy’s back. “You should sit up straight,” he said, and kept his hand on Alejandro’s back a bit longer than he needed to.
Lost in that moment, Santiago has forgotten his count. He is trying to remember how many doors he has finished — eight, nine? — when he hears the footsteps echoing at the end of the long corridor. At first, squinting to focus on the face, Santiago cannot tell who it is, but then he realizes the teenager is making his way toward him.
“Hey, Mr. Salinas,” the teenager calls out halfway down the hall. “They sent me down here to start testing doors.”
“I’ve been testing them,” he replies, maybe a little too defensively. “They’re all working.”
“There’s a whole bunch of other keys I have to check out. A grand master key, a master, a submaster.”
“What the hell am I doing, then? What are these?” Santiago points to his own stash of keys.
“Those keys are for the teachers,” the teenager explains. “It’s a system. The grand master opens everything in the district, but the master opens every door in only this building . . .”
“Save it.” Santiago waves at him and kneels back down to the key chamber he was replacing. “Do what you need to do. Just leave me alone,” he mutters, and the teenager walks off down the hall. Santiago can hear keys jingling, the slide of the brass into each lock, the knobs twisted vigorously, then the kid moving on to the next door in satisfaction. Santiago slides the latest chamber into place and tries to work faster, but he knows the kid will catch up to him eventually. For a moment, he visualizes himself back at the warehouse, the teenager sitting down next to him, explaining how the key system for the entire district is going to work, the kid’s fingers running dexterously past a list of numbers, Santiago himself staring blankly at the pages.
“Mr. Salinas?” the teenager calls out. “This door down here. Did your key work?”