The Pitcher Read online

  “I want to know what you are doing to those boys who called my son a wetback and a beano!”

  That’s what Mom said at the team meeting. Dr. Freedom, the dean of Napoleon Junior High, sat up straight. She wore this blue suit with a silver bird and old lady granny glasses with a ton of makeup. She stared at Mom and me like we just came across the border.

  “We have zero tolerance for violence in this school, Ms. Hernandez,” she said in this calm teacher voice.

  “It was a plastic knife!”

  Which was my point. Mom asked her again what she was going to do about the boys hitting me with a racial slur. “We have no evidence anyone called your son a wetback or a beano,” Dr. Freedom continued, touching up her glasses. “But we have zero tolerance for any type of violence.”

  “So you just punish the Mexican defending himself,” Mom shot back.

  Dr. Freedom rolled her hands. Napoleon Junior High is a Blue Ribbon school and they don’t want some Mexican kid to screw up their national average. If you aren’t like in a wheelchair or something, they think you are just lazy. So they hope I’ll just kick it in, but my grades have really tanked, because when I’m in class, I’m really not there. It’s the same way on the mound. I just float off sometimes and Mom knows that.

  Even before the cupcake deal, Eric had it in for me. It really started at the tryouts. When I pitched I hit the backstop, but there was a coach from The Flyers there. After I was done he walked up to me and said, “You got the fastest damn arm I have ever seen on a kid your age. That’s a God-given gift.” Eric was next to me and turned red, then threw his mitt on the ground and kicked his batting helmet across the dugout. Ever since then, it’s been war between us.

  “Pull him, Devin!”

  That’s Mom again. Devin has a goatee, wraparound sunglasses, chewing gum. Supposedly he played college ball and pitched. He looks at his assistant coach in her blue and red coach’s jersey tucked into black athletic shorts. Mom’s curly hair flows over the back of the jersey in a long ponytail. Devin squints toward the field as John throws and crack! The batter blasts it down first base and it stays fair. Tri City rotates in two runs and we are chasing two. Devin kicks the dirt and swears. He pushes back his hat, pinching his chin worriedly.

  “Even if Ricky is a little wild they are going to go after it,” Mom continues, gesturing to the field.

  I know if Devin was left alone he would never play me. I don’t have a lot of control, but how can I get better if I never play? His entire approach to coaching could be summed up in one sentence, We are getting the boys ready to play high school ball. He doesn’t steal home and rarely steals second if he thinks the catcher can throw down. He goes for the out almost every time and lets the runners score.

  Devin takes this long breath and turns to me on the bench.

  “You ready to throw, Ricky?”

  I jump up and nod. “Sure coach!”

  “Need a warm-up?”

  “Just a few from the mound,” I say, catching Mom’s wink.

  Devin holds up his hand to the umpire.

  “Time, Blue!”

  “New pitcher! New pitcher!”

  I love that sound when I’m the new pitcher, when I’m drilling them into Eric’s mitt like there’s no tomorrow. Mom calls it being in the zone. I come over the top and the ball arcs down and cuts the strike zone like a rocket through a tire. Whoosh! Other coaches shake their heads. I wouldn’t want to bat against me when I’m on.

  I take the ball from Eric and breathe in the cut grass, watching dust tornado around home plate. I can hear kids screaming on the playground behind the field. Blue pulls down his mask and points to me, “PLAY BALL!”

  It’s like sixty feet from the mound to the plate for the majors and for league play it’s sixty feet. Mom is by the dugout sifting dirt through her fingers as Eric gives me a finger to the outside. I breathe and position my fingers on the ball. I breathe again, kick up my leg, lasso my arm over my head, whipping the ball down toward the batter. I hear the cannon pop from Eric’s mitt.

  “Strike!”

  Marauder parents clap and people shake their heads.

  “ALRIGHT, RICKY!” Mom calls out.

  “JUST LIKE THAT, RICKY,” Devin shouts from the dugout.

  “CONCENTRATE ON THE BATTER,” Mom calls again, squatting down.

  Eric touches his thigh for an inside pitch. I breathe again and kick up my leg and let fly. POP! The umpire jabs a finger and screams again.

  “Steeerike!”

  The kid whiffed on that one. He’s mad now and I know it. You want them mad so they will swing at a seventy-mile-an-hour pitch. A lot of kids won’t swing at a fast pitch. They just freeze and their coach gives the take sign. The take sign is your enemy when you are unsure. I hear somebody say, “How fast is he throwing?”

  “He’s balking. Watch the balk, Blue.”

  That’s Coach Gino. He is one of the best at knocking a pitcher off his game. I’ve got two strikes and the batter is crowding the plate to force a ball. I tug on my cap, dig my cleat against the rubber. All I have to do is give him another straight fastball. The batter holds out his bat and adjusts his helmet. He wants it now and taps his cleats against the plate, adjusts his wristband, moving the bat in a slow circle. I shake off Eric’s signal, but he’s the captain of our team and jabs his thigh again for an inside fastball.

  He gives me the signal again. I breathe, kick back, and throw inside, but my arm doesn’t track straight and my release is wrong. I hear a thump like someone kicking a pumpkin. Then everybody is running because the batter is on the ground holding his ribs with snot pumping out his nose. I feel like dying, because hitting somebody is the worst thing a pitcher can do.

  There is only one incident I know where a guy was killed by a pitch. It happened in the twenties when this guy named Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians stepped into Carl May’s inside fastball. The baseball cracked into Ray’s temple and he went down with blood streaming out his ears and mouth. They say he had a three-inch crack in his skull.

  “Breathe breathe … you’re OK. You’re OK,” Coach Gino says, helping the kid sit up. He’s blotchy and gasping to get air into his lungs. His mother is going “Oh, Oh, Oh” with her hand over her mouth. My face is burning and I hear somebody say Mexican, and then something I don’t want to hear. I stare at the ground and move dirt with my cleat. Eric comes up to me and shakes his head.

  “I signaled a curve,” he says loudly.

  “No you didn’t,” I cry out and feel the world shift. I’m suddenly like the Mexican and he’s the big American tourist. It’s the cupcake thing all over again. He’s the favored pitcher for the high school team and wants to make sure nobody shows him up, especially some Mexican kid with a fast arm.

  Coach Gino looks up in his wraparound sunglasses mirroring the field.

  “HEY COACH, YOUR BOY NEEDS TO CONTROL HIS PITCHES!” he shouts, making sure the umpire hears him.

  Mom opens her mouth, her chin beginning to move.

  “It was just a bad pitch,” Devin replies, waving Mom off.

  “He shouldn’t be using all that heat if he can’t control it,” he continues, shaking his head like this was our plan or something. Gino helps the batter to his feet to a smattering of applause. A couple of Tri City players flip me off as I walk back to the mound. I feel like hiding in the dugout, man, but Mom knows what I’m thinking. She just nods to me.

  “You shouldn’t put someone out there who doesn’t have control,” Gino finishes up, saying it loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Devin mutters, walking back to our side.

  Everyone goes back to their dugouts and the parents settle into their chairs. “ Maybe he should slow his pitch down” floats from the other side. I try and clear my mind. I take a breath and come out of the stretch, but I throw high and rattle the backstop. I do that three more times and Mom comes out with a time call. She walks up onto the mound and it’s just the two of us.

&nbs
p; “What’s going on there, champ?” she asks, giving me a quick hand squeeze. She pulls her glasses up into her curly dark hair and looks tired.

  Mom snaps her fingers in my face.

  “Hey, earth to Ricky … come in, Ricky” she says.

  “Yeah … sorry, Mom,” I mumble.

  She tugs on the brim of her hat and looks at me.

  “Are you taking a breath between pitches?”

  “Yeah.”

  She stares at me and I can see myself in her sunglasses. I can also see Eric with his mask off talking to Devin and the parents sitting in their lawn chairs. The umpire is glancing at his watch. “Look …” Mom turns to me. “I know you feel bad about hitting that boy. You just have to shake it off and concentrate on Eric’s mitt and getting the pitch in the strike zone. You can do this, Ricky,” she says, keeping her eyes locked on mine.

  “Yeah … OK,” I murmur.

  She holds up her fist for a knuckle bump.

  “You ready to knock them dead, Carlos?”

  She always says that because Carlos Zambrano is my man. He burns them down, although he’s been in a slump and got sent to the bullpen. But everyone knows it’s just for show.

  “Yeah, ” I say, bumping her back.

  “That’s coach to you, pal. So, give this guy a fastball and let’s get out of here.”

  I watch her leave and see Eric’s Mom talking to her husband, Coach Devin. Ever since the cupcake deal, she looks at me like I’m a criminal. If you’re Mexican, you know the look. She’s tall and skinny with these bulging brown eyes that dare people to screw with her. To me, she looks like someone who doesn’t eat enough. Anyway, I know what she’s saying to Devin.

  Pull him!

  So I try and hit the zone, but I have lost control. I walk two more batters and Devin calls time and then I’m walking back to the dugout. Mrs. Payne watches me the whole way like I just pulled another knife. And not a plastic one either. Eric finishes up the side and comes into the dugout. He has these weird blue eyes and a blond crew. He grins at me and spits sunflower seeds on my shoe.

  “You really suck, beano,” he says, the way you would say good morning.

  3

  A FEW WEEKS LATER MOM and I are sitting on our porch after one of our games. She is smoking a cigarette, looking real pale. She’s had lupus a long time and says it’s like chicken pox; once you have it you have it. I’ve been hearing her puke lately and I know she hasn’t gone to the doctor because we lost our health insurance.

  She got fired from Target right before school let out. They cooked up something about her long lunches. Mom says it’s because she passed around some petition against that Arizona immigration law. Mom says the law is un-American. She says any Mexican in Arizona who doesn’t have papers can be sent back and they will do the same thing in Florida. Sitting on the porch is where we have our best talks. She’s usually calmer there and explains stuff to me or just says what she’s thinking. Like a friend, you know.

  She lifts her arm and points across the street.

  “He was a pitcher?”

  “Yeah. MLB, Mom,” I reply. “He even pitched in a World Series. Straight up. The dude is the real thing.”

  I just finished telling her about the baseball going under the Pitcher’s garage and she’s staring across the street. Devin had given this big speech at our last game about making the high school team and I think that got Mom thinking. She takes another drag of her cigarette.

  “You need a coach,” she says quietly.

  She says it just like that, smoking her Marlboro with her foot bobbing. She knows that if I don’t make the high school team then my posters of the Cubs and the Yankees, and photos of Giants speedballer Juan Marichal, triple Cy Young winner Pedro Martinez and my man Zambrano, won’t mean anything. You got to start somewhere and that somewhere is high school ball. The tryouts are less than three months away in August. I’m so worried about making the team, I don’t even feel good about having graduated from eighth grade.

  The graduation ceremony was lame. I listened to some Kanye, Eminem, and this old Alice Cooper tune, School’s Out For Summer, a tune I ripped from the Internet. Mom was in the bleachers in a red off-the-shoulder number with her hair pinned up. She waved and I heard her voice all the way across the gym.

  “HEY RICKY! RICKY! RICKY!”

  Jimmy nudged me in our folding chairs. “Man, your Mom is kind of hot,” he murmured.

  I jammed my elbow in his side. “Dude, that’s my Mom!”

  “Sorry, man,” he said, shrugging. “Just saying.”

  So then Mr. Simons motioned our row up. I got like nothing under that slippery robe and you could see my bare ankles and oversized Nikes. Rumors swirled I was going to do something, you know, like flip off Principal Bailey, punch out Dr. Freedom. I thought about doing a little Napoleon Dynamite dance on the way out, but I really didn’t have the stomach for more drama. “Here you go, son. Congratulations,” the man from District 505 said, shaking my hand, giving me my plastic diploma. I raised my hand and Principal Bailey opened his and that’s when Mom shouted, “GO RICKY. YOU SHOWED THEM!”

  People turned to the woman snapping pictures with her phone. Mom faced them all with her Latino attitude, daring the entire gymnasium to mess with her. Principal Bailey shook my hand and stared at Mom like he could scarcely believe what just happened.

  “Congratulations, Ricky,” he said. “Your mother …” he trailed off.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, nodding, grinning sheepishly.

  And that was it.

  Summer.

  So Mom stares at the baseball on the porch a moment longer, then stubs her cigarette and jumps up. “C’mon. Time to practice,” she commands, motioning to the street. I’m still in my uniform, but we go into the street and start throwing the ball. Lately Mom has been reading on the Internet about pitching and brings printouts with her sometimes. Even though she’s my coach there’s a lot she doesn’t get about baseball. Like she has been reading about breathing lately and so every time before I pitch, I got to breathe. I never knew breathing had anything to do with pitching.

  Mom starts throwing the ball and looking over at the garage. She’s still in her Marauders jersey with her Oakleys as she wails the ball to me. My Mom has some heat, man. “Bring it to me, Carlos!” she shouts. Mom is hunched down and I go into my windup, but I don’t bring the heat. I’m a little wild and if you have a seventy-five-mile-an-hour arm, man, you got to be careful. Mom stands up and frowns, gesturing to the sky.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “My fastball.”

  “There was nothing fast about that pitch, cabrón.”

  Mom beats her mitt again and squats down.

  “Don’t forget to take your breath and keep your shoulder square,” she calls as I set myself again. And that’s when I hear Fernando’s Harley rumbling down the street. Mom turns and shakes her head. The courts told Fernando he was supposed to pay us, but when he gets hard up he comes and borrows money. I asked Mom once why she gives it to him. She just shrugged and said it was because he’s my father. I quit thinking he was my father a long time ago.

  Fernando parks his Harley, which is pretty sick. Chromed Super Glide. Mom still doesn’t know where he got the money for it. She says its part of his midlife crisis, which I call his asshole crisis. Fernando walks up in his sleeveless T-shirt and shades like he’s Mr. Dad. He gives me the knuckle bump and the gangbanger hug.

  “Hey, bro, how’s baseball?”

  “Good,” I mutter.

  “Hey, man, we got to catch a Marlins game, you know, bro,” he says, giving me another knuckle bump. He always says that and we never go and I always say, “Yeah, that’s cool.” It’s like our ritual, you know. Maybe it makes him feel better to say it or something. He went Kanye somewhere and tattooed up with the gold chains and low rides his pants down to his knees. He looks pretty stupid, but I just smile.

  “Throw it, man,” he calls out with his shades low on his nose.r />
  I toss the ball and he makes all these pitching motions like he’s Zambrano. He tries to tell me about pushing off the rubber and hiding the ball in my mitt. I listen and smile while he acts like a major league pitcher. Then he looks at the garage with Shortstop asleep on the driveway. He squints, shaking his head real slowly.

  “That dude still in there, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Man …” Fernando strokes his goatee and shakes his head. “He’s the real shit.”

  That is as close as Fernando comes to giving anybody a compliment. He turns to my mom and his voice gets low. I know what’s next. I know his play.

  “Oh come on, man … you spend all this money on his f------ baseball,” he says loudly, picking at her jersey. Mom whips around and faces him, her voice like ice water. “Go borrow it from your bimbos, Fernando,” she tells him. Mom is like maybe five foot, but makes up for her height with her personality. She slaps off his hand because now he’s trying to get all lovey-dovey. Mom points down the street and tells him in so many words to get the hell away from her. Most of the words I can’t even use, man.

  His dark pirate eyes come together and his tattoos swell.

  “Yeah, man … you spend all your time with him and what do I get?”

  “What you deserved,” Mom snaps, turning away.

  “I come to you and you won’t even give a man a boost of fifty bucks!”

  Mom gets in his face with her chin moving and her eyes rocking.

  “Why don’t you sell that motorcycle you bought and can’t afford?”

  Fernando slaps her hand away like a pesky fly.

  “Don’t tell me what to do, bitch.”

  “I’m not givin’ you any money, Fernando,” Mom says, turning away.

  Then he starts walking toward our house and she tries to grab him. That’s when he turns and hits her in the jaw. Smack! Ain’t like the movies, man. Fernando is like six-two and probably two-twenty. Mom goes down like a sack of clothes and blood churns red out of her mouth. My heart pounds away as I jump on his back and claw at his eyes.

  “DON’T YOU HIT HER!”