My mother showed me the way of dogs. She was from hill country, a migrant picker’s daughter. Knew all kinds of towns and the dogs who ran their streets. She could rehabilitate some tough dogs, tell you what. We were out shopping for milk and such once. Mom eyed a dog, said, “Mack, see that straggly mutt gnashing his teeth at me? I’m-a have him rolling over for a belly scratch before you can say boo.” I said that was a good name for the dog, Boo. She laughed. She had that dog eating apple bits from her hand. That’s pretty much my favorite thing I remember about my mom. The old man forever complained at her, like “Get that dog out the house,” and “That is a
stupid
opinion,” and “Why can’t you ever be
satisfied
? You think you gonna get better than motel cleaning work?
You?
” Face like he sucked a bag of lemons.
I woke up a rainy morning some years back to find him reading the note. My mother was watching an old movie a few nights before and imagined herself in it. It came to her that God called her to be an actress, and she had to go north to New York. Me and my father followed her there, but we never did find her. We tried Philly too, then Los Angeles. To ditch the old man she changed her name to Miranda something, and I would have done the exact same thing.
My father couldn’t find steady work, so we shuffled back to Texas a few times before we struck out north again. We been here in the city almost four years now, and I don’t think we’re going anywhere, now that the old man has a regular job.
I saw her once on a commercial, Mom. One of them pills that make you crap. Late night. She was in the background. The old man pointed her out before he smashed the TV with a jug wine bottle.
Vic limps out back with his hands up for me to throw him the ball. He pitches pretty good, but the Tone has a world-class arm on him. He could strike me out easy, but he lays it right in there so I can crack it. We put electric tape over the ball to make it go far. The other side of the restaurant butts up on a tenement alley. The echoes are cool when the bat gets a good hold of the ball.
Vic huffs and puffs from chasing down the ball, and him and Tony are laughing because the dog won’t leave my side even when I’m batting.
The Tone wanted me to pair up with him for this big brother after-school thing, but in order to do an
after
-school, you have to go
to
school, and to hell with that. Everybody calling you faggot and snapping at your ears? And even after you get tall, they still push the books out from under your arm and put pennies in your milk when you aren’t looking, to choke you. Smacking the back of your head because you missed a belt loop, or telling you your fly is down when it’s fine? In the classes, I couldn’t stay awake. Making me look at all those boring books. Reading is just lame, I don’t care what folks say. I’m a working man, saving up to get a little land somewhere, set it up good for me and a pack of pit bulls and maybe a nice lady, if one gets retarded all of a sudden and starts to like me even though I could never look her in the eye. I don’t mean to say anything about retards. I like retards a ton—I’m no racist.
It’s not like I never been with a girl before, but she didn’t like me. She was sixteen or something. A few months back, I had a job delivering store circulars to the tenements. I saw her twice or so in the halls, and she never spent a look on me. But this one day, she does a double take and says, “Hot cocoa?” And I said, “What?” And she rolled her eyes and said real slow, like I was a moron, “Do, you, want, some, hot
cocoa
?” The slush kept getting in through the rip in my sneaker, so I was like, “Yeah, cocoa’d be real nice, thank you.” We went into her apartment and next thing you know she was pulling me into her room and pulling down my pants and we smacked it up real quick. She hurried me out right after, said her folks were coming home soon, and I didn’t get any hot cocoa either. I brought her daisies the next day and she told me to git. I found out she was using me for practice, because she liked this older dude, and apparently he was real experienced, and he didn’t want the responsibility of making a girl not a virgin anymore. So I don’t know if there’s a girl out there for me, but you got to have hope. Doesn’t cost you anything, hope. At least nothing I can see.
Word gets out Vic lost the restaurant to this online poker queen who calls herself Hammerhead, and Vic’s selling the food cheap to clean everything out before he has to turn over the keys to the shark. I like it busy. I’m scrubbing pots and driving plates through the washer, making sure they’re perfect. The bustle keeps me from hearing the hissing. It’s not really hissing, this noise inside my head, but that’s what I call it. Like when you roll the radio to static and dial up the volume? Like that. It reminds me of stuff I can’t let myself think about anymore. I have to move on. Anyways, staying busy blocks it out, most times. I don’t know. Just have to stay busy, I guess.
Come end of shift, Vic pays me cash. I missed the last few check-ins with my parole officer, and they scan the tax databases for AWOL parolees. Vic knows I’ve got a record. Burglary when my old man was out of town for a few weeks, looking for work, and I was damn near starving. I had this house staked out, knew when the folks were at work. A neighbor caught me sneaking out with three frozen pizzas and a pocket’s worth of jewelry, which ended up being fake. Then this other time these kids got at me, shoved me into a trash can and rolled me down the school steps, which is another reason you shouldn’t go to school. The radio static got real loud on that one. To stop it I got back at one of them boys with my knife. What else can you do? And anyways, he wasn’t hurt that bad. Crying over a few stitches in front of that judge. Ten stitches in your thigh? I got more sliding into a gravelly third base once. Man up. You don’t want to get cut, don’t say bad stuff about my mother when you’re rolling me down the school steps.
Me and the Tone leave work together. Like every girl we pass on the main street knows him. Tony says to one of them, “How’d your father make out with the operation, Jessica babe?” And I swear he remembers all their sisters’ and uncles’ names and their families’ doings and “How’s Marisol’s baby? She’s got to be two by now, right?” And don’t you know the baby just turned two? Tony introduces me, and I can’t look at them. I kind of mumble hey and keep my head down. Tony says we have to go, and the girls are all like “Aw, Tony, hang out.
Please?
”
We get to Tony’s street, and he says, “Hang a left, come on up my way.”
“I better get on home,” I say.
“I’m just down the block there. I want you to drop a hi on my sister.”
I get all red and I’m like “Nah.”
“You’re gonna be working together anyway now at the Too. She’s cool, I swear.”
“Nah, man.”
“C’mon in and say hi to my mother,” Tony says. “She’s always baking something and she’ll let you sip a half a cup of beer.”
“Baking in summer?”
“I know.”
“I’m up early tomorrow.” My other job is I walk dogs.
“Okay, look, I’ll grab us a pair of Sprites, and we’ll sip ’em by the curb. C’mon, it’s a nice night. Mack, I’m not gonna bring out my sister, okay?”
I force myself to trust him and grab some curb where the street slopes down by the sewer. Crazy stars tonight. Tony’s up and down the block in a minute with the coldest Sprites. We sip with no need for words passing between us, and I’m real glad I answered that sign in Vic’s window saying he was looking for a dishwasher that rainy day last March. I’ll miss Tony maybe more than anybody I ever met. “Yo, Tony, man, the army, you make up your mind?”
Tony smiles. He’s checking the sky. “See that slow mover way up there, the brightest one? It’s a satellite.”
“Nah, serious?”
“That thing just might still be sailing long after we’re all gone.”
“Yo, I hope you don’t do it, man.”
“Mack, if I go, I need a favor.”
“You got it, man. Anything.” I almost look him in the eye.
“Céce.”
“Huh?”
“My sister. I need you to look out for her.”
“What, like, keep the dudes away?”
“No, she can handle herself,” he says. “It’s just that she’s . . .”
“Yeah?”
“You’ll see.”
“Tony, man, stay, man. You don’t have to go over there.” He takes in the sky and then the neighborhood, which is kind of run-down but quiet with these little old one-family houses. He gets a little sad-looking, but he real quick smiles that away and punches my arm soft and heads up the block.
THE SECOND DAY . . .
(Saturday, June 13, morning)
CÉCE:
My mother, Carmella Vaccuccia, is insane. Would you name your daughter Céce, especially when you know it means chickpea? You say it like chee-chee. Like Vaccuccia isn’t bad enough. It means little cow.
Carmella just has to go to Costco, because everybody needs sixty-two thousand rolls of toilet paper and four assemble-it-yourself closets to store them, all to save a nickel and a half, even though the closets never come out right because they cheat you on the screws.
I tell her, “Carmella, I have a bad feeling about this one, I swear.”
“Babe, we’re
not
gonna crash,
I
swear.”
We borrow Vic’s car, more rust than ride. On the way back from Costco this ninety-six-degree morning, the Vic-mobile’s air conditioner craps out. Ma swerves to avoid hitting a sign that says AVOID SWERVING. The tire blows, and she plows the wall.
I look at her with slitted eyes.
She winks at me. “You don’t have it.”
“I
do
.”
“It isn’t even
real,
sister.”
“It
is
.”
ESP. Grumpy had it—my grandfather. The gift skipped over Ma, so I bear the curse doubly, I’m sure of it. For example, my neighbor’s cat Lola? Thing was looking at me weird one day, and I thought to myself, That cat is gonna die, and it
did
, squashed by a Prius in silent mode. Swear to God. It was like a year and a half later when chica became wheel grease, but still.
We pull out the toilet paper, Ma’s smashed beer, everything covered in hand soap and Heinz, to get to the jack and the slippery spare. Ma’s like me with the big rack, bent over the tire to show her cleavage to the world. This little chump in a Benz convertible yells out the window, “Yo baby, you got some junk in that trunk,” which around here means you have a big ass. He could be talking to either of us. Trucks are about to cream us because there’s no shoulder for a loser to swap her loser tire. Ma’s laughing. “Babe?”
“Yes, crazy lady?”
“Life is gorgeous.” That smile. Her pimp gold caps. She, like,
dated
this dentist once, I don’t even want to know. The woman is a mental.
We bring the car back to Vic. “Cannot tell you how sorry I am about the baked ketchup stink,” Ma says.
Vic shrugs. “Don’t sweat it.”
“It’s a potent scent, Vic.”
“Potent is good.”
“I’m gonna get the crashed part fixed, babe.”
“Nah, leave it,” Vic says. “Adds character. Anybody up for some Wiffle ball?”
“Always,” Anthony says. He’s working with us now at the Too. He grabs the bat and heads for the alley.
Peeking out of his back pocket is a picture of the American flag and that damned army brochure he’s been thumbing the past few weeks. The recruiter called the house the other day and left a message for him. I deleted it.
I can hear them out there, Ant and Vic, talking about it between pitches. “Should I do it?” Anthony says.
“Family is the most important thing,” Vic says, never mind Vic has no family except us. He leaves out the
I know what I know
and
You need to do this
. Because Anthony doesn’t need to do this, and everybody knows this except Anthony. Vic’s a vet. He did two tours in Vietnam.
“So, you’re saying I shouldn’t do it, then?” Ant says.
“Whatever you do, it’s the right decision,” Vic says.
“That’s not helping me much,” Ant says.
“It isn’t meant to.” Vic throws a moon ball, and Anthony creams it.
He better not do it. Great harm will befall him. I will be the perpetrator. I swear.
Lunch shift is hell. The restaurant is seven thousand degrees because like Vic’s so-called car, his dive joint isn’t hospitable to working air-conditioning. Plus there’s my lip. I burned it on a slice and it looks like the herp. Here I am walking up to the giant table with all the cutie-pies from the fastpitch league. “For your dressing, you want French, Russian, or creamy ranch?”
The guys are wincing as they try not to look at my mouth.
I suck my lip to hide it and head back to the kitchen to hang my order ticket. I nod to this dude waiting for his take-out. “Howya doin’, Derek?”
“Super, Céce,” he says, but his eyes say,
Except I just completely lost my appetite at the sight of that pus-leaking
bubble
on your lip.