Rag and Bone (7 page)

“What did you say?”

“What could I say? When I put her up for adoption, I was struggling to start my own life. Giving her up was the best choice I could make for both of us, but I couldn’t justify giving her up a second time. That was just fear. I couldn’t explain it, I could only ask her to forgive me.”

“How did she respond?”

“She told me she was sexually molested in that group home, that it was probably going on around the time I came to visit. When Joanne and I returned from the weekend, Vicky and Angel were gone.”

“You think that’s why she left?”

“I think she decided her chances were better with a husband who beats her than a mother who deserts her,” she said.

“If she went back to him, Elena, it’s because that’s her pattern.”

“You didn’t see her face when I told her,” she replied.

“When she’s had time to think about it, she’ll realize that whatever happened in the past, you were willing now to take her in and help her.”

“Joanne says the same thing,” she replied. “I just want to know that she’s all right.”

“Have you canceled the credit card?”

“No,” she said. “Why?”

“Don’t cancel it for a while and find out what charges she makes on it. That may lead to her.”

“Yes, that’s a good idea,” she said. “Thank you, Henry. I haven’t even asked you how you’re feeling.”

“Better every day,” I replied.

In fact, however, three weeks after the heart attack there were many days when my body simply stalled and it was all I could do to stagger out of bed and into the living room, where I would fall asleep on the couch only to be roused in the afternoon by whichever friend was dropping by that day to check up on me. After eating something, I went back to bed, and when I opened my eyes, it was the next morning. I was having that kind of day when, one afternoon, I was awakened from the couch by the doorbell.

I thought it might be the pair of Mormon missionary boys I’d spotted Mrs. Byrne running off her property earlier. She was a born-again harridan, and in her book, Mormons were no better than devil-worshipers. They were not going to get a much friendlier reception from me. I composed my face into a scowl and opened the door. John DeLeon smiled and said, “Hey, how are you doing?”

He was wearing pretty much the same clothes as he had when he’d given me a lift home a week earlier—maybe the flannel shirt was a different plaid—and looked like he had just come off work.

“John,” I said. I canceled the scowl and put up a hasty—and I’m sure unconvincing—smile of my own. “I’m fine. How are you?”

He wore a small gold hoop earring in his right ear, almost hidden by a graying lock of hair. I felt the glow of his physical vitality. Rarely had I met a person of such palpable warmth. It made me all the more aware of the chill of my ill-health.

He took in my pajamas and bathrobe. “Am I catching you at a bad time?”

“I was asleep.”

He stood irresolutely at the door. “I thought maybe you might want to get a bite to eat.”

“That sounds great, but can I take a rain check? I’m really not up to it.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Hey, I’m really sorry if I woke you up.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“Okay, then. Later.”

“Good-bye, John.”

I stood in the doorway and watched him head down the driveway to his truck. There was something in the movement of his shoulders—the momentary droop of a small humiliation—that made me think this visit had not been as casual or as easy for him as he had made it sound. I thought about him driving off feeling bad because his kind impulse had been rejected, while I wandered back into my house for another long evening of dozing and waking and feeling sorry for myself.

“Hey, John,” I said. “Wait a minute.”

He turned around and walked back. “Yeah?”

“Actually, I think it would do me good to get out of the house for a while.”

“I won’t keep you out late.” He grinned. “I know this great place not too far from here.”

“Come in for a second while I get dressed,” I said, and stood aside to let him pass.

I angled my feet around the toolbox on the floor of the cab. A medallion of the Virgin of Guadalupe dangled from the rearview mirror, and stuck in the sun visor was a prayer card that depicted Michael the Archangel with a fiery sword and Satan prostrate at his feet. We rolled down the hill, past the red-faced Mormon kids, in the warm May twilight. A baseball game was playing on the radio in the background. He was telling me that he’d been hired at the house where he’d picked me up the other morning.

“Should take about three months,” he said. “Damn!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Braves scored.”

“What?”

He glanced at me. “The game. Dodgers playing the Braves. You don’t follow baseball.”

“Not since I was a boy,” I said. “I used to root for the Giants. You’re a big fan?”

“I played,” he said, in a voice resonant with quiet pride. “Played in the minors for the Dodgers organization. I made it up to the bigs for two games. Four innings.”

“That’s impressive.”

With a self-deprecating grin, he said, “It was a long time ago, man. Twenty-five years.”

“What position did you play?”

“Pitcher,” he said. He took a sharp left turn off Santa Monica and pulled up to the curb in front of a brown stucco building with a tattered blue canopy over the door and a small red neon sign on the wall blinking the words
MARIA’S RAMADA
. “This is it.”

Across the street was a long, three-story brick building with an institutional look. Over the door, however, was a bas relief depicting an angel.

“What is that?” I asked, pointing to the building as we got out of the truck.

“Nursing home,” John said.

“That looks like a chapel, with the angel over the door.”

“Could be,” he said. “I’ll have to ask my dad. He lived around here when he was a kid.”

We headed toward the restaurant. “Did you grow up in this neighborhood?”

“Me? No. I grew up in Pasadena. That’s where my parents moved after my dad started making money from his business.”

“DeLeon and Son. Does he still work with you?”

He shook his head. “He’s seventy-seven now. He takes care of his garden, spoils his grandkids.” He smiled. “Gives me lots of unsolicited advice about the business, but damn if he isn’t usually right.” He pushed open the door to the restaurant and put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s nothing fancy.”

Piñiatas dangled from the ceiling over booths separated from one another by bamboo screens. On one wall were garish movie posters advertising Mexican movies of the 1940s and ’50s with Cantinflas or Dolores Del Rio; on another, a velvet painting of a pneumatically muscled Aztec warrior lifting a maiden with breasts like projectiles. The floor was covered with sawdust. Dusty paper flowers and strings of small earthen jars stretching across the ceiling completed the décor.

A smiling teenage girl greeted John as if she recognized him and led us to a booth. On the table between us was a candle, a jar of pickled vegetables, a Dos Equis beer bottle holding a paper rose, and a metate in the shape of a pig carved from volcanic rock filled with chile so hot I could smell it.

“My grandmother had a metate exactly like this one.”

“Every
’buelita
had that metate,” John said.

The girl left for a moment, then returned with water, a basket of tortilla chips, a bowl of fresh salsa, flatware and menus. She laid them before us with shy efficiency and eye-averted modesty.

“That girl seemed to recognize you,” I said.

“I know the family that owns the place. The Huertas,” he said. “I did some work for them. The girl is a niece or something. They brought her up from Mexico.” He unfolded the menu. “Everything’s good here, but especially the fish. You like fish?”

I nodded, looked around the garish room and asked, “So what part of the décor are you responsible for?”

He grinned. “The kitchen.”

The restaurant was almost empty when we arrived, but the booths soon began to fill. The clientele seemed about equally divided between
mexicanos
in straw hats playing Javier Solis on the jukebox and would-be Anglo bohemians from nearby Silverlake, complaining to the waiters about the loudness of the music and anxious over whether the refried beans were vegetarian or not.

The young waitress brought our drinks and took our orders. After she left, I asked him, “What happened with baseball?”

“I tore a ligament in my pitching arm,” he said. “Nowadays, they just take a tendon from somewhere else in your body and transplant it, but not back then, not for a minor leaguer.”

“You must have had some talent to get called up, even if only for a couple of games.”

“I was a lefty, and there’s never enough of those to go around, so I got more attention than maybe I deserved.” He dunked a chip into the hot salsa and munched it.
“Hijole,
that’s hot. Don’t get me wrong, Henry, I had decent stuff when I could control it.” He tried another chip. “They may have been able to make something out of me, but when I ripped up my arm, that was it was
adiós,
Johnny.”

“Just like that?”

He gulped some water. “I was pretty immature. I don’t think they were that sorry to see me go.”

“You must have been barely out of your teens,” I said. “Immaturity goes with the territory.”

“I was a big blowhard, Henry. I was sure I was going to be the next big Latin star. Roberto Clemente, Juan Marichal, and me. The only problem was I didn’t have their talent and I didn’t like to work all that hard, either. That’s a bad combination. I’m surprised I lasted as long as I did.”

“How long was that?”

“Five years,” he replied. “I was recruited right out of high school. Man, my dad wasn’t happy about that.”

“Why?”

“He wanted me to go to college like my brothers and sisters,” he said. “I got three of each, and they’re all white-collar but me and my sister Josefa. She dropped out of college to get married. After baseball got done with me, I never made it back to school.”

“You went to work for your dad?”

Our food arrived on enormous, thick white platters. John had a whole fish while I had ordered the snapper Vera Cruz. There were piles of rice and beans on the side and a big bowl of salad to split, with a fragrant stack of corn tortillas. The food made me think of my mother, who was a wonderful cook. She frequently cooked dishes that she knew I particularly liked. The platters of
chile rellenos
and bowls of
picadillo
were messages from her to me seeking forgiveness. I would pass them, untouched, to my father.

As he separated the flesh from the bone of his fish, John said, “I didn’t go to work for my dad right away.”

“What did you do?”

“Partied,” he said, sprinkling the fish with lemon.
“Buen provecho,
” he said, and for a few minutes we ate. “Yeah, I partied for five solid years. Even getting married and having my kids didn’t stop me. When I wasn’t high, I was drunk.”

“And then?”

“I woke up in jail,” he said, piling beans on a piece of tortilla. He stuffed it into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, sipped his Coke.

“DUI?”

He nodded. “With injuries, mostly to me, but the girl who was with me in the car, she got hurt some, too. Oh, yeah, and she wasn’t my wife. Wasn’t my first arrest, either. My folks had bailed me out before. This time my pop told me I could either come back home and learn a man’s trade, or rot in jail.” He smiled. “It was a harder decision than you’d think. My father, he’s a great man, Henry, but a little on the severe side.”

“I know something about severe Mexican fathers,” I said.

“He told me loved me,” John said. “But that he didn’t respect me. You know things like that sound a lot worse when you say them in Spanish. He thought I was, you know,
un
playboy. When it came to construction, I couldn’t tell a hammer from a hole in the ground, so he put me on his crew and I learned.” He grinned. “I didn’t get special treatment for being the boss’s son. Some days, the nicest thing he called me was
pendejo.
If my mom knew how he talked on the job, she’d make him go to church twice on Sunday. After a while, I started to get the hang of things. I even found out I had some talent for designing stuff. My dad saw it. He offered to send me back to school to study architecture or something, but I told him I was happy where I was.”

“That still true?”

“There were years when I couldn’t watch baseball because it hurt too much to think about what I’d thrown away, but I’m forty-three now and whatever career I coulda had in the bigs would be over by now, so I guess I don’t have regrets I can’t live with.”

“That’s philosophical.”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “That’s me, Johnny DeLeon, philosopher. What about you? What do you do?”

“I’m a lawyer. Didn’t I tell you that the other day?”

“You were kind of out of it the other day, Henry. Wow, an
abogado.
I’m impressed, man. What kind of law?”

“Criminal defense.”

“Helping the people,” he said, nodding.

“Since the heart attack, my new career seems to be sleeping.”

He finished his Coke and signaled the girl for another one. “You don’t have family to take care of you?”

“My parents are dead,” I said. “I have a sister who lives in Oakland.” I decided not to tell about Vicky and her son, as it seemed a moot point.

“Man, I can’t imagine what I’d do without my family.”

“For me, it was good, not really having a family. I was able to live my life my own way without worrying about how the fallout might affect them.”

“You mean being gay.”

“Not just that,” I said. “I’ve tried to be true to who I think I am in other ways, too.”

He looked at me and said, “I think you’re brave, man.”

“Being brave is doing the things you’re afraid of doing, not the ones you were born to do.”

“There ain’t too many people can do either one,” he said. “I bet you’ve done both.”

“But I never pitched in the majors.”

He laughed. “Okay, I guess I’m embarrassing you. How are you feeling?”

I ran a quick check. “I feel pretty good.”