Rag and Bone (11 page)

E
DITH ARRIVED THAT EVENING
with a bag of groceries, said to Vicky, “Will you help me with dinner, dear?” and disappeared with her into the kitchen.

“You need a hand in there?” I shouted after her.

“We’re fine, Henry,” Edith replied. “You
men
relax.”

I smiled at my nephew. “Maybe we can catch some baseball on TV.”

We burrowed into the couch. I turned on the tube and flipped through the channels until I found a Yankees-Indians game on cable. I listened with one ear to the murmur of conversation coming from the kitchen but was unable to make out more than a random word or two, so eventually I gave up and watched the game. Angel, meanwhile, had scooted across the couch until he was almost touching me. I put my arm around his shoulders. Without looking up, he wriggled up against me. The Yankee shortstop made a jump catch that ended the inning.

“Wow, that was a beautiful catch. Who’s the short?”

Angel, who’d been watching raptly, said incredulously, “Derek Jeter.”

“I haven’t followed baseball since I was about your age, so I don’t know who any of the players are. Jeter’s good?”

Turning his attention back to the game, Angel said, “He’s the best shortstop, except maybe Nomar Garciaparra. He plays for the Red Sox. I play short, too.”

“When did you play baseball?”

“When my dad was living with us, I played Little League.”

“When was this?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Before he went back to jail.”

He must have felt guilty about telling me as much as he had, because he pulled away from me. I asked him about some of the other Yankees and soon he was back at my side giving me a running commentary on the game. As he reeled off stats, I remembered how knowing a pitcher’s ERA or a batter’s RBI or what phrases like “no hitter” and “fielder’s choice” and “squeeze play” had made me feel when I was ten years old, like I belonged to the world of men. Listening to him reminded me that after baseball, another myth of men had captured my attention and introduced me to a world that had obsessed me as much as the major leagues, with a more lasting effect.

At a commercial, I said, “I bet you like to read, don’t you?”

He looked at me and ventured a cautious, “Yeah.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said, and went into my office, where, tucked on a shelf amid my twenty-five-year-old law school texts, was an even older book. The battered brown cover bore the imprint of water stains and grease spots. The binding was loose and the gilt lettering on the spine nearly indecipherable but I could still make out the title,
The Tales of Homer,
and still felt some of the thrill I had experienced when I opened it for the first time almost forty years ago. I turned yellowing pages that bore finger smudges from a smaller hand, but the illustrations still jumped off the page: the great wooden horse being wheeled into the city; a fragile ship hurtling toward a strait where on one side was a whirlpool and on the other jagged rocks; a beautiful woman with a wand standing among a herd of swine. I had been given this book—a prose retelling of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
—when I was eleven by a teacher who observed my interest in Greek mythology, but it had opened up more than that world for me. Reading about Achilles and Patroclus had, even in this bowdlerized version, intimated something about the love of men for one another that I scarcely understood but never forgot. Ulysses’s long journey, filled with suffering and adventure, had in some obscure but palpable way consoled and encouraged me as I struggled through my own difficult adolescence.

“Here,” I said, handing Angel the
Tales
when I’d returned to the living room. “You can look at it after the game.”

He immediately opened the book at random and found the illustration of the Greeks pouring out of the great wooden horse.

Wonder in his voice, he asked, “What is this book about, Uncle Henry?”

“It’s really two stories,” I said. “The first one is about a war that happened thousands of years ago between people called the Greeks and the Trojans and how the Greeks won it with a trick, using this horse.” I pointed at the illustration. “The second story is about how one of the Greek soldiers named Ulysses tried for ten years to get home to his family and about the monsters he met and the adventures he had on the way.”

His eyes widened at the word “monsters.” He began to turn the pages, glancing up at the game every couple of minutes, and when we were called for dinner he took the book with him. Just as I had done when I was a boy, he propped the book up against his water glass and read while he ate. His mother observed him with equanimity as if this was familiar behavior.

“Angel,” I said, “we have a guest. Put the book away until dinner is over.”

Only then did Vicky chime in. “Do what your uncle says, Angelito.”

Grudgingly, he complied. He sat through the rest of dinner without saying a word but attentively listened to the three-way conversation among his mother, Edith and me.

After dinner, I saw Edith to her car.

“Did you have any luck with my niece?” I asked her.

“I don’t know what you mean, Henry,” she said.

“I was hoping you might have some insight into her.”

Edith smiled. “I’m a psychologist, not a psychic. Obviously, she figured out that I was here at your invitation to talk to her.” She unlocked her car. “I don’t think I’m the first mental health professional Vicky has dealt with. She knew the drill.”

“What drill?”

“Try to figure out what you’re supposed to say, and say it to make them go away and leave you alone.”

“What did she say?”

“Henry, you know I’m not going to tell you that,” she said. “In fact, you shouldn’t have come out here with me, because now she’ll assume we’re talking about her and it will make it harder for me when I see her tomorrow.”

“You’re seeing her tomorrow?”

She nodded. “I’m taking her and Angel shopping and then to lunch. I want to see them together without you around.”

“You can’t leave me out to hang.”

She got into her car and rolled the window down. “You want me to try to help her or spy on her?”

“Point taken,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Good night, Henry,” she said and drove away.

When I returned to the house, Vicky and Angel were already in their room. Angel had taken the book in with him.

John called the next morning. I took the call in my office to avoid being overheard by my niece.

“How’s the reunion going?” he asked.

“She seems to think I’m going to rape Angel if she leaves him alone with me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She told him I’m a fag who has AIDS. She called me
joto.
You’re right—some things do sound worse in Spanish.”

After a moment, John said, “She’ll feel different after she’s spent more time around you.”

“Plus she’s a born-again.”

“You don’t like Christians?” he asked in a tone that gave me pause. “Aren’t you Catholic?”

“My mother was Catholic enough for my entire family,” I said. “Are you religious?”

“I go to Mass every Sunday with my mom and dad. Is that going to be a problem?”

“My problem is with Vicky’s religion, not yours,” I said.

This got a dubious “Okay.” After a further awkward silence, he said, “Hey, the reason I called is I can get tickets to the game on Saturday for you and me and Angel.”

“I don’t know if Vicky will let Angel out of her sight that long.”

“Man, you’re really angry,” he said. “Let me talk to her.”

“Now?”

“Put her on the phone, Henry.”

I put the phone down and found my niece doing laundry. I explained that John, whom she had met the night she had arrived, wanted to ask her something. Reluctantly, she took the call in the kitchen. I went out into the living room where Angelito was curled up on an armchair reading the
Tales.

“How’s it going?”

He looked up. “They have funny names. I get confused.”

“I know,” I said. “In the first book, the important characters are Achilles and Patroclus, who are Greeks, and Hector, who’s a Trojan. The second book is pretty much all about Ulysses. How far along are you?”

“The Trojans want a truce but not the Greeks.” He put the book in his lap. “This part is boring. Do they start fighting again?”

“In a couple of pages.”

His mother came into the room. “John wants to talk to you,” she said to me. To Angel, she said, “John wants to take you to see baseball on Saturday. With your uncle.”

Angel smiled. “Really, Uncle Henry?”

“Yeah, if it’s okay with your mom. I’m going to get the phone. We’ll talk later.” I went back into my office and picked up the phone. “How did you do that?”

“I told her how much it meant when I took my son to his first big league game. As soon as she knew I had my own kids, she was okay with it.”

“She thinks you’re straight, so she’ll trust you with her son?”

With an edge in his voice, he said, “Henry, don’t get pissed off at me. I’m not the problem here.”

I said a curt, “Sorry.”

“Things must be pretty tense up there,” he said after a moment. “You need to get out of the house. Come down and meet me for lunch. H’okay?”

He was trying to charm me out of my sullenness as if I were a little boy. I didn’t know whether to be touched or annoyed, but I said, “H’okay.”

Around noon, I wandered down to the house where John was working. It was the first time I’d taken this route since the day John had rescued me and, as tired as I still often felt, I could also feel the increase in strength and energy. Only now as I was recovering did I realize that some part of me had not believed I was going to. John was standing in the driveway behind his battered truck talking in rapid Spanish to two men wearing red D
E
L
EON
& S
ON
baseball caps. He saw me, waved and continued his conversation. The two men—one middle-age, the other a boy in his twenties—listened to John with almost servile deference, glancing down, nodding respectfully, but then he said something that made the younger man toss back his head and laugh. I felt a prickle of jealousy.

“Be back at one-thirty,” he told them in Spanish.

The two men went off to a big wreck of a car parked beneath a jacaranda tree that had rained papery purple flowers on the windshield. As John approached me, he doffed his cap and fluffed his hair. There was a kiss in his smile.

“Hey, Henry.”

“Your crew?” I asked, as the big car sputtered off, the windshield wipers scattering the jacaranda blossoms.

“Two of ’em.”

“Documented?”

His smile turned wolfish. “Who are you, INS?”

“Just curious.”

He threw an arm around my shoulders. “How many generations your family been up here in
el norte?”

“Three, counting from my grandparents.”

“Same here,” he said, walking me toward his truck. “I bet no one asked your
abuelo
or mine if they had green cards before they put them to work in the fields or whatever. I don’t either, and I pay everyone the same and give everyone the same benefits.”

“I think that’s great, John, really, but you know, technically you are breaking the law.”

He squeezed my shoulder with powerful fingers. “I bet you wait till the light turns green before you walk across the street.”

“So what’s your point?”

“Nothing. I could kiss you.”

“But not with the guys watching,” I said.

The happiness faded from his eyes. “Hop in. I want to show you something.”

“That was a lousy thing for me to say. I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “Let’s get some food.”

We went to a drive-in on Sunset and ordered burgers and fries and milkshakes. Then he drove up into Griffith Park toward the observatory.

“Hold on,” he said, suddenly veering off the paved road into gray-green underbrush and onto a rutted dirt road that ascended an adobe-colored hill and terminated abruptly at a turnaround. Downtown unfolded beneath us in the baked brown air. Glass towers glinted through the sludge, palm trees lifted their fronds as if gasping, ribbons of freeway were clogged with noontime traffic. A coyote ran along the hill below us.

“This is some view,” I said.

He slipped a tape into the cassette player and a woman, a sob in her voice, began to croon in Spanish in a style I remembered from childhood.

“Thirty years ago when I came up here with my dad, you could still see the ocean sometimes. I love this city and I hate what’s happened to it.” He slurped some of his milkshake and unwrapped his hamburger. “If it keeps getting worse, I’ll leave.”

“Where would you go?”

“Down in southeast Arizona, in the Sonora desert, where my mom’s family comes from. They’re Yaquis. Indians,” he explained. “There’s a little town down there called Bisbee built on hills. The high desert’s real beautiful.” He munched his burger. “It’s only an eight-hour drive. We could go there for a long weekend.”

“I’d like to see it. Who’s this singing?”

“Daniela Romo,” he said between gigantic bites.
“Tu eres mí destino.
”

“You are my destiny. Doesn’t sounds as corny in Spanish.”

“It’s the language of love, man. How’s Angel?”

“Really excited about going to the game. We watched the Yankees play last night and he told me all about Derek Jeter.”

“Best short in the majors, except maybe Nomar Garciaparra.”

“Angel said the same thing. Johnny, I’m really sorry about that crack I made down there. I feel like a jerk.”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Don’t apologize. You were right. I wouldn’t kiss you in front of my crew, they’d lose all respect for me. They’re like your niece, Henry. They come from a different place and there’s times you gotta go along with that.”

“I don’t want to start a fight, but what are the times when you don’t?”

“We do work for gay guys all the time, and when we do, I tell my crew if I hear any fag jokes or any kind of remarks like that, they’re gone. I tell them, these people are feeding your families, you show some courtesy.” He looked at me. “That probably doesn’t seem like much to you.”