Muckers (8 page)

“I was hungry.”

“You idiot, Rabbit!” Cruz says. “Ugly’s about ready to pass out.” Then Cruz lets out a wolf whistle. “Señor Francisco,” he beckons.
“¡Ven!”

I hear rattling. It’s Paradiso. Trotting over to me.

“Come esto,”
Francisco says, tossing a bag of pecans at my number. I tear the paper open and shovel them into my mouth.

“God gave you strength to finish,” Francisco says. “He gave you the strength of Goliath. He always gives us what we need.”

“ ’Cept a brain,” Cruz says, punching my arm. “Not only are you ugly, you’re stupid, too. So do me a favor?” he says, hauling me up. “Don’t ever not eat before a game again.”

* * *

10:08
P.M
.

I’m walking fast up the thirty-degree incline since there’s still a maze of cars working their way through Hatley after the game. I’m too close to the top of Hill Street not to go see Maw.

I know it’s past visiting time, but we won. And Mrs. Mackenzie usually makes an exception for me—she’s just as nice as her husband, Mr. Mac.

Ricky Sanchez’s mother is polishing the floor in front of the elevator and stops scrubbing for a minute. “Congratulations, Felix,” she says, smiling at me.
“Muy bien.”

I mumble
“Gracias,”
making my way up the stairs. I wouldn’t take the elevator anyhow.

They keep it clean and the floors are always polished, but the Eureka Copper Miners’ Hospital still smells like disease. I never much cared for the place even before Maw came here. It’s shadowy and dank. And no matter how warm it gets outside, the heat can’t burn off the stickiness holding in all the soiled smells. I’ve seen them wash down the walls first thing in the morning, but how do you get rid of something that’s rotting from the inside?

I pass the second floor—the only one where you still see flowers in the rooms and other signs of life: young miners with broken bones that’ll mend in a few weeks or wailing babies too small to go home yet, but they will. Things go downhill pretty quickly as you climb. And the higher you go, the stronger it gets. The scent of sickness. Overtaking any hint of talcum powder or ammonia from a newly bound cast, so that by the time you reach the fourth floor—which is the top floor—you know the stories must be true. And I don’t want Maw being part of them.

One time on the way home from first grade I looked up at the hospital after hearing a terrible cry. They were rolling a miner out on a gurney, his light still strapped to his head. He’d let out a bloodcurdling scream from a pain I can’t imagine, his two arms—if you can call them that—aimed at the sky. Only they weren’t long enough to be arms; they were more like a pair of stumps, wrapped like meat from the butcher. I sprinted the rest of the way home.

Those two severed limbs shooting skyward—and that scream—stayed with me all summer. Only I couldn’t tell Pop. He’d just accuse me of going soft. “Whatcha expect, you tink mining’s pretty?” he’d say with a deep-throated laugh. “ ’T’ain’t fer whisses.” But I’d heard him cussing and going over things with Maw that night, about how they’d
sent another to the fourth floor and that even if he did get to go home, he’d be forbidden from walking the streets in daylight—for the sake of the women and children. How daft the rule was. “ ’T’ain’t no secret,” he’d howled, “what the mines’ll do to ya.”

I feel a sudden urge to turn back and sprint home all over again because I’m never the same after these visits. The sadness sticks with me and I go over how it went with Maw, no different from a combination I haven’t got right on the field. Both needle my brain until only a hard tackle or a win can change how I feel.

I don’t turn back, and it sounds like Opal Hubbard’s winning again. I can hear those checkers skipping to victory in the fourth-floor lounge.
“Rah, rah, sons of Hatley High!”
Opal sings when he sees me, marching on the spot. Then he smashes the board with a fist and the pieces scatter like popcorn. “You cheated!” he shouts at his imaginary opponent. “I saw you.”

Phyllis Crawley shuffles over and buries her face in my shoulder. “I can let down my hair,” she says, showing me her long silver braid. “Then you can go home if you’ll do the same for me.”

“It’s another one with short hair, Phyllis,” Tuffy Briggs tells her. “You’re not going home.” Tuffy’s reading in a wheelchair by the window, his pajama bottoms billowing empty where they amputated below the knee.

“It’s 10:18, Red. You’re late. Two minutes and forty-five seconds late,” he says, holding up his stopwatch.

“It’s all those Rim Valley cars,” I say. “Wanting to hurry home after a loss.”

Tuffy likes holding my helmet, so I rest it gently on his lap and he fingers the indentations where the stitches grip into the leather. “Should’ve never lost in twenty-four,” he
says. Tuffy drove the school bus back then. “Saw it with my own eyes, what the Phoenix officials did.”

I lean closer and he takes my throwing hand, turning it over to examine it. “It’s your year, Red,” he says.

“I hope so.”

“You’ll make things right and let those Southern boys have it.”

Mrs. Mackenzie waves me over. “Your mother’s still awake,” she says, so I follow her down the hallway.

“Did she get out on the balcony at all?” I ask.

Mrs. Mackenzie pauses. “I was making the rounds in the maternity ward, so she very well might have.”

I know she’s just being kind.

“Mrs. O’Sullivan, look who’s here,” she tells Maw before I go in. Then Mrs. Mackenzie turns to me and says, “Just for a little while, okay, Red?”

I don’t find Maw at first—the light’s too dim. But when I do, I’m caught off guard—blindsided—every time I catch Maw this way, like being brought down to my knees the way it takes a while to recover from a sack. I keep imagining Maw as she was before, not who she is now—a shell of herself in the corner of the room in a wheelchair, slumped over, chin to chest.

I come closer and kneel beside her but she doesn’t move. The choppy layers of hair covering her face lift a little, sort of to a rhythm, so I know Maw’s breathing—that she hasn’t given up completely.

“Maw?” I whisper, turning up her chin so she can get a look at me if she wants to. “It’s me … Red.”

Maw rolls her head back and blinks at the ceiling. Her neck’s all shiny, which means she’s been drooling. I wipe some off her chin and gnaw at my lip.

Pop used to joke how even though Maw’s eyes were as
green as the Glens, she was destined for Hatley since they’d been sprinkled with flecks of copper. I angle her face so I can see those eyes, but they’re empty. Cloudy as ice cubes, hazy and dull.

“Would you like me to comb your hair?” I take the sable brush Pop got Maw five Christmases ago, just before she came here, and start at the temples.

Cruz asked me flat out one morning if Maw was like Loco Francisco, which she’s not. I know they call it “the ward for the insane” or “the nuthouse” but those are just names, really. Maw isn’t crazy, and I don’t believe Francisco is either. They call him
loco
because he aimed higher than most and started going on about God’s plan, telling them about his visions. Things like starting his own church to preach at and building it with his own two hands. It made the rest of the town so uneasy they kept giving Francisco hell for it, so he up and quit the mine. Now he keeps to his Bible and won’t share a word about what God tells him, living off the land instead.

Maw doesn’t say much at all anymore, but that doesn’t mean she’s crazy, or even gone for good. You can give up for a while and then snap out of it like you can with a coma, which is a lot worse than what Maw’s going through. You read about stuff like that all the time in the paper—little miracles, really. People waking up from the worst after years, asking for a cherry Coke, then remembering all the people who love them sitting around and staring. Never giving up.

I was helping Rabbit collect eggs from his mother’s hens last week. When one of them wouldn’t let go of the egg she’d been nesting, Rabbit wanted to know when Maw first let go of me. He said I was like an orphan.

It was when we first got the death notice. Maw stayed in bed for a week and only got up for Bobby’s funeral. She never cried either. “Strong as the white rocks in Antrim,” Pop kept saying. Then Maw stopped baking soda bread on Saturday mornings.

When school started up again, I came home and there was Maw, sitting in the parlor with her nightgown still on, counting the roses lining the wallpaper. When I asked why she hadn’t washed up, she just shrugged and said, “What for?”

By Christmas, Maw’d cut up her hair pretty good, and she thought the living room carpet was a wicked, screaming beast. “Open the windee and we’ll shoo the bleemin’ hallion away!” she’d cried, beating the border with her crimping iron. And I knew I had to tell Mr. Mackenzie.

That’s when Pop started taking on more shifts—night shifts especially—and I saw him even less, so by the time Sundays came, I’d eat up most of the bread meant for Holy Communion, and Father Pierre didn’t want that kind of altar boy around.

“Ten more minutes, okay, Red?” Mrs. Mackenzie says, poking her head in the doorway.

“Did he come visit?” I ask.

“Not today.”

I don’t know the last time Pop did.

I keep brushing Maw’s hair, which used to be like mine, but it’s pale and brittle now, as if the pigments have given up, too. When I reach the nape of Maw’s neck, she simply lets go and an envelope falls from her lap to the floor.

I know it’s a letter from Bobby. There’s a pile of them on Maw’s dresser in the old Victory cigar box next to her pearls.

It’s the one where he’s at sea writing to Mr. Mackenzie, who gave it to me the day we found out Bobby died. It’s the last one Bobby ever sent. The thing about Bobby was that you could never catch him hurting.

Don’t do it
, I tell myself.
Get all weepy and sentimental. It won’t bring Bobby back, will it?

Maw starts getting restless and reaches for the doors that lead to the balcony. She’s never done that before. “You want to go out?” I ask. She keeps reaching, so I take her outside. It’s a beautiful night. Not dark and murky at all, like it was in the Pacific. You could pluck any star you want from the sky. And Maw wants to see it.

“We won the game, Maw.” I lean over and whisper it in her ear. “I threw a pass that was nearly as far as Bobby’s.”

I rest my cheek against hers and look out at the sky. You can see everything from up here. We’re at the highest point before the mountain goes vertical. The hillside below is
covered with light and it’s blinking. And I can’t tell which houses are Mexican or Irish or Slav—they’re all blended together, forming a single glow.

On nights like these I feel like I can fight the sadness by throwing farther and running harder. That I can actually beat the odds. We’ve already got one game down—why can’t we take the rest of them?

I know this place is the opposite of Rapunzel’s castle. That no one’s clamoring to get up here and that the chances of leaving are slim. But if an awful event brought Maw here, then why couldn’t a happy one bring her back home? Something so important it would make her decide that it’s worth it to come back. To take that chance.

Maw reaches out again the way she did before and I give her my hand, but that’s not what she wants. She wants the letter.

I miss him, too.