Northwest Corner (12 page)

Most of the assembled twenty-odd people who show up at Arenas Municipal Recreation Park this morning are either SoCal employees
or Lopez blood relations, or both. Mostly male bodies in various states of gravitational and pharmacological crisis. Uniforms homegrown and haphazard. Coolers of Powerade, Red Bull, and Tecate thoughtfully set out behind home plate for constant rehydration, revivification, and general watercooler-like conviviality. I greet the others with clunky fist bumps and even, here and there, quick backslappy hugs, and introduce Sam all around. The weather is typically fine, the grass in our relatively prosperous township green and neatly trimmed, the recently rolled lines gleaming like fresh deck paint. Beyond the fenceless outfield ringed by half a dozen tall, lithely swaying palm trees are two municipal tennis courts, and in between our jovial beer-infused chants of “No batter!” and “He’s a chump!” and “You call that a swing?!” (and we haven’t even started playing yet) can be heard the distant hollow
thwock
of tennis balls being struck, which for some reason my ears always interpret as hauntingly inverse, like echoes before sound.

To all this Tony brings a high seriousness that might be comical if it weren’t underwritten by native competitive menace. One need only study his high-school sports trophies displayed in the window of the store to know that he’s a man used to winning and who, beyond that, hates to lose. When Tony takes the field against you, he wants to grind you into the dirt and, for good measure, kick you in the back of the head and steal your teeth. This is one of the reasons, I suppose, that I feel comfortable around him. The fact that we aren’t really a softball league, more a loose federation of Roman slaves gathered to fight the lions under the gaze of the emperor, doesn’t in any way diminish his vision of the game as a microcosm of everything we’re meant to achieve on behalf of his business interests. Teams are chosen the good old feudal way, which is to say that Tony acts as one captain and I, technically the next man down the SoCal totem pole, stand in as the other. Tony, of course, Big Chief and Grand Pooh-Bah, picks first from the pool of assembled talent—which on certain weekends, depending on attendance, can seem as
pointless as picking dead horseflies out of a swimming pool with a long, droopy net.

With Sam added to the mix for the first time, however, a new level of excitement is palpable as we divvy up players. Rumors of his prowess on the college diamonds of the East Coast have already spread through SoCal and the large extended Lopez clan, and now, as Tony nods proprietarily at my son, drafting him first, a murmur of baseball-fantasy appreciation rises from those still waiting to be noticed. Like all true athletes, Sam seems to accept this awareness of his talents as his due, indeed to grow more relaxed amid the incipient admiration, unbuckling his shoulders and easing himself loose-limbed across the invisible line into Tony’s stable, like the prize thoroughbred he is.

My turn next, I pick Derek, who, bong habit and lack of social affect notwithstanding, actually hits for decent average and plays a nice, tight second base. And so the process goes, ending only with my final pick of Sandra to play catcher. We break huddle and I lead my gang over to the chain-link backstop to ready ourselves for our first at-bats. Overall, despite having lost Sam to the competition, I’m feeling reasonably satisfied with my roster. We’ve gained some small but decided advantages. Sandra’s lower-back tattoo of a naked angel that peeks into view whenever she crouches down behind the plate or swings gustily for the palms, for example, makes her presence on our team an unequivocal plus for morale, if not necessarily for the virtue of old men.

Batting in the third with two men on, Sam slugs a ball so high and far it clears the forty-foot-tall palms at the back of the outfield and lands on the farthest of the two tennis courts, about a yard from a bald dentist just making his approach to the net. The dentist gives a shout of alarm that can be heard in every corner of the park, and the falling meteor, propelled by its contact with the hard earth, takes
flight again, eventually coming to rest in a sandbox some twenty yards distant. Thankfully the sandbox is empty and no one gets hurt. Save for my son, who can be seen humbly rounding the bases, the entire park appears to have come to a standstill, in a state of communal awe. The dentist is leaning on the net, too unnerved to continue.

Tony is first in line to greet the hero at home plate. The Captain is beaming, left fist pumping the air in unbridled joy, eyes wide with
did-you-fucking-see-that?
wonderment, right hand reaching to clasp Sam’s hand in a vertical amigo handshake, thumbs up and palms cupped, the grip that ends naturally in a kind of chest-bump hug—reserved, in Tony’s unwritten book of code, for family and superstars.

I myself am thrilled for Sam for my own reasons, and profoundly impressed with his physical abilities (that body that in part came from me, even if I can’t at present perceive the connection), standing at first base oohing along with the rest of the crowd. There’s only one thing I genuinely need at this moment, and that is to make eye contact with my son. Just a glance, a privately enacted moment between us. Though I can’t but be aware that this is a selfish and sentimental impulse, not in fact a passing of the paternal torch (I’m no Athenian) but rather a childish yearning to bask in the warmth of his brightly burning flame as he runs by on his way to some other, more glorious Olympics. Maybe it should come as no surprise, then, that my look never lands and my glance goes unmet, but the surprise is there anyway (as it always will be on the parental end), along with a sting that’s slow to bloom and long in fading. And then the next batter’s coming up and it’s time to get back in position.

And that, more or less, is all I’m conscious of till the seventh, when once again Sam strides to the plate, this time with nobody on and his team ahead by a good five runs. A game situation without interest whatever if not for the young god at the plate, who, with one epic swing and a couple of nifty plays in the field, has already made groupies of us all, including his old man.

Now we watch him let the first three pitches go by, none of them quite right. The pitcher—Tony’s accountant and “numbers guy,” Brew Donadio, relegated to light field duty by an arthritic hip—finally turns up his palms in mock frustration, as if to say,
Whaddya want?
And someone on the sidelines starts chanting, “Lo-ser batter!,” drawing ironic chuckles from the crowd, though Sam himself remains unsmiling at the plate, calm as a sniper. Then the next pitch is on its way, underhanded and right down the pipe, and Sam steps into it with a long stride of his left leg and swings smoothly from his hips, rifling the ball on the fly into the gap between right (Tony’s cousin Chuckie) and center (Chang Sook Oh). As soon as I see the ball’s flight—a classic inside-the-parker—I start jogging for home to back up Sandra at catcher. Sam, reaching full speed after just a couple of strides, flies by me heading for first. He’s rounding second when the ball strikes one of the outfield palms and ricochets back onto the field, allowing Chang to scoop it up rabbit-quick and fire to the cutoff man Derek, who turns and hurls a strike to me at the plate, bypassing Sandra, who’s stepped out of the way.

The ball smacks into my glove with Sam just a few strides past third and coming hard. I look up the line at my son pounding toward me and grin at him—as if to say, all in good fun,
Hey, look what just landed in my mitt! I’m going to tag you out, sport!
I stand and wait, glove and ball on prominent display, for him to concede, downshift his headlong sprint for glory into a trot acknowledging that I’ve got him dead to rights.

But he does not slow down. If anything, he runs harder. I watch him with a kind of numb astonishment. And then, a moment before impact, I see him lower his shoulder.

Of the actual collision at the plate I remember nothing. I am a relatively big man, heavy-chested, bearing a certain amount of muscled bulk. And my son, too, is good-sized, though sleeker and faster than me, befitting his mother’s more refined genes. What Sam possesses, though, and of which maybe I’ve never had enough, is sheer will. He wants to make it safely home, and, maybe more than anything, he
wants to run through me to get there. It is, in a sense, not complicated at all.

Someone helps me to my feet. I don’t remember who. I don’t remember anything about those seconds but the ball lying off to the side, where it’s rolled after being violently dislodged from my glove. And the dust on my tongue. And the pain in the center of my chest where his shoulder struck me. And my tall, beautiful son, having picked himself off the ground and been called safe at home, standing among his new teammates and receiving their shouts of congratulation, their wild slaps on the back, looking every minute as if he hates his own guts.

PART TWO

RUTH

H
ER FLIGHT LANDS
in Los Angeles at two-thirty. She rents a car and drives two hours up the coast, following directions printed off Google. Even in the middle of the afternoon the freeway traffic confounding, claustrophobic: briefly it speeds up, only to come inexplicably to a slamming halt. She keeps her windows closed and the air-conditioning on high, taking small sips from a bottle of water she cadged on the plane.

After an hour of stop-and-go riding in her chilled little econobox, she begins to shiver. She turns off the air-conditioning but keeps the windows closed. Her body is still unnaturally thin; maybe it always will be. Although she has recently vowed to herself to give up the word
always
, because it is fraudulent. There is only now; there is only this. She drives toward her son, eyes darting between the small, carefully positioned mirrors and seeing nothing but other cars, behind and around and in front of her, more and more of them, as if no one in this strange, disconnected country ever finds where they’re going.

She didn’t want to tell Dwight the full news about Sam over the phone; she would prefer, in fact, to tell him as little as possible about the situation. She doesn’t trust him not to take the bad news and immediately make things even worse. She needs to be there in person to intervene between father and son, mediate, lead, regroup. A plan that struck her as sound enough while she was on the plane, when it was still just thoughts in her head.

But turning into the parking lot of the sporting-goods store now and seeing her ex-husband waiting for her, brooding over a cigarette, comes as an old-time shock: solid as a New England drystone wall, a little gray dusting his short brown hair, the masculine and unrepentant physicality of him looming as something more than the mere representation of her former life. Which instantly makes her angry in some way—with him, with herself; but then so, too, does the way he’s staring at her, that critically clueless expression of the arrogant cook at the farmers’ market holding up the scrawny wartime chicken and demanding to know why it isn’t the glorious pheasant of the salad days. She thinks she won’t deign to remind him, because he knows it perfectly well, that there weren’t any salad days. The promises they once made to each other were hastily scribbled IOUs, and the two faintly familiar bodies standing here, for better and mostly worse, are undeniably honest products of their times.

He drops the cigarette, grinding it out with the toe of his age-inappropriate sneakers.

“Well.” He dips his large, lived-in head—almost humbly, she thinks—then tries on a half smile and spreads his arms to embrace his mock kingdom. “Welcome to California, Ruth.”

“Sporting goods?”

“You name it, we sell it. Need anything?”

“I need to see Sam.”

After what seems like ages, staring at her as if she’s crossed the country just to be near him, he replies, “I’ll get my stuff and be right out.”

Through the plate-glass window she watches him talking to a pretty young Latina behind the register. Leave it to Dwight, she thinks, to find his livelihood (if that isn’t too grand a word for it) in a business that manages to combine his boyish passion for sports with the fig-leaf ambience of Hooters.

But, to be fair, he seems to be doing all right. He is decently clothed and well enough fed. He doesn’t look broken or unhinged or permanently scarred, isn’t covered with the ugly ghosts of removed
tattoos or missing an arm. Beyond that, she assures herself, she doesn’t care to know. She hasn’t come all this way to exchange personal information. He isn’t a prospective anything but the opposite—an island she’s already visited, lived on, explored, and forcibly quit. She knows every inch of that terrain and wouldn’t believe in its reinvention as a luxury resort if the Four Seasons itself vouchsafed it.

The fact is you can put up palm trees where once there were elms ravaged by beetles, shine the sun all day and banish winter, bronze your skin and whiten your teeth; and still the pale depressed people who stayed behind will go on telling their pitiable or outraged stories of the old days. Because the place where they live isn’t in the end some artificial stage set that can be struck down after the show’s disastrous run, not just home but a constant reminder; because every dead tree and every endless winter are headstones beneath which lie the long-buried memories that no one, anymore, wants to hear.

DWIGHT

Got a ride to L.A. Back tomorrow
.

These unfortunate exit lines Sam has scribbled on the back of the morning note I left him the previous weekend—which he’s either been saving as some sort of voodoo memento or has simply forgotten to throw out. In any case, Ruth is standing in the kitchen reading and rereading his words as if they were clues to a tragic treasure map, the edges of the paper vibrating in her hands, while all I can do is stare at my own handiwork on the reverse side:

Okay
, so
Solvang’s kind of a ridiculous tourist trap. But trust me, Sport, those Danish waitresses in the pancake house across from the Best Western are worth the trip anyway. Don’t forget the bus map. We’ll talk about car and $$ situation when I get home. Call you later. Dad
.