T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

They approached the camp warily, the Chief ’s men fanning out with their weapons held rigidly before them. Surprise was of the essence, the Chief had insisted, adding, chillingly, that the guerrillas were known to slit the throats of their captives rather than give them up, and so they must be eliminated before they knew what hit them.

Aquiles felt the moment acutely. He’d never been so tense, so unnerved, in all his life. But he was a closer and a closer lived on the naked edge of catastrophe every time he touched the ball, and as he moved forward with the rest of them, he felt the strength infuse him and knew he would be ready when the moment came.

There were sounds now — shouts and curses and cries of rapture amid a great splash and heave of water in motion — and then Aquiles parted the fronds of a palm and the whole scene was made visible.

He saw rough huts under a diamond sky, a swimming pool exploding with slashing limbs and ecstatic faces, and there, not thirty feet away, the cookfire and the stooping form of a woman, white-haired, thin as bone. It took him a moment to understand that this was his mother, work-hardened and deprived of her makeup and the Clairol Nice ’n Easy he sent her by the cardboard case from the north. His first emotion, and he hated himself for it, was shame, shame for her and for himself too. And then, as the voices caromed round the pool — Oaf! Fool! Get off me, Humberto, you ass! — he felt nothing but anger.

He would never know who started the shooting, whether it was one of the guerrillas or the Chief and his men, but the noise of it, the lethal stutter that saw the naked figures jolted out of the pool and the water bloom with color, started him forward. He stepped from the bushes, oblivious to danger, stopping only to snatch a rock from the ground and mold it to his hand in the way he’d done ten thousand times when he was a boy. That was when the skinny kid with the dead eyes sprang up out of nowhere to put a knife to his mother’s throat, and what was the point of that? Aquiles couldn’t understand. One night there was victory, another night defeat. But you played the game just the same — you didn’t blow up the ballpark or shoot the opposing batter. You didn’t extort money from the people who’d earned it through God-given talent and hard work.

You didn’t threaten mothers. That wasn’t right. That was impermissible. And so he cocked his arm and let fly with his fastball that had been clocked at ninety-eight miles an hour on the radar gun at Camden Yards while forty-five thousand people stamped and shouted and chanted his name — High and inside, he was thinking, high and inside — and, without complicating matters, let’s just say that his aim was true.

……

Unfortunately, Marita Villalba never fully recovered from her ordeal.

She would awaken in the night, smelling game roasting over a campfire — smelling carpincho with its rodent’s hide intact — and she seemed lost in her own kitchen. She gave up dyeing her hair, rarely wore makeup or jewelry. The machine shop was nothing to her and when Romulo Cordero, hobbled by his wounds, had to step down, she didn’t even come downstairs to attend his retirement party, though the smell of the arepas, empanadas and chivo en coco radiated through the windows and up out of the yard and into the streets for blocks around. More and more she was content to let Suspira Salvatoros look after the kitchen and the children while she sat in the sun with her own mother, their collective fingers, all twenty of them, busy with the intricate needlepoint designs for which they became modestly famous in the immediate neighborhood.

Aquiles went back to the major leagues midway through the season, but after that moment of truth on the hilltop in the jungle of Estado Bolivar, he just couldn’t summon the fire anymore. That, combined with the injury to his rotator cuff, spelled disaster. He was shelled each time he went to the mound, the boos rising in chorus till the manager took the ball from him for the last time and he cleared waivers and came home to stay, his glory gone but the contract guaranteed. The first thing he did was take Suspira Salvatoros to the altar, defeating the ambitions of any number of young and not-so-young women whose curses and lamentations could be heard echoing through the streets for weeks to come. Then he hired a team of painters to whitewash every corner of the compound, even to the tiles of the roof. And finally — and this was perhaps the hardest thing of all — he sold the vermilion Hummer to a TV actor known for his sensitive eyes and hyperactive jaw, replacing it with a used van of uncertain provenance and a color indistinguishable from the dirt of the streets.

She knew in her heart it was a mistake, but she’d been laid off and needed the cash and her memories of the Strikers were mostly on the favorable side, so when Mrs. Striker called — Gretchen, this is Gretchen? Mrs. Striker? — she’d said yes, she’d love to come over and hear what they had to say. First, though, she had to listen to her car cough as she drove across town (fuel pump, that was her father’s opinion, offered in a flat voice that said it was none of his problem, not anymore, not now that she was grown and living back at home after a failed attempt at life), and she nearly stalled the thing turning into the Strikers’ block. And then did stall it as she tried, against any reasonable expectation of success, to parallel park in front of their great rearing fortress of a house. It felt strange punching in the code at the gate and seeing how things were different and the same, how the trees had grown while the flowerbeds remained in a state of suspended animation, everything in perpetual bloom and clipped to within a millimeter of perfection. The gardeners saw to that. A whole battalion of them that swarmed over the place twice a week with their blowers and edgers and trimmers, at war with the weeds, the insects, the gophers and ground squirrels and the very tendency of the display plants to want to grow outside the box. At least that was how she remembered it. The gardeners. And how Admiral would rage at the windows, showing his teeth and scrabbling with his claws — and if he could have chewed through glass he would have done it. “That’s right, boy,” she’d say, “that’s right — don’t let those bad men steal all your dead leaves and dirt. You go, boy. You go. That’s right.”

She rang the bell at the front door and it wasn’t Mrs. Striker who answered it but another version of herself in a white maid’s apron and a little white maid’s cap perched atop her head, and she was so surprised she had to double-clutch to keep from dropping her purse.

A woman of color does not clean house, that was what her mother always told her, and it had become a kind of mantra when she was growing up, a way of reinforcing core values, of promoting education and the life of the mind, but she couldn’t help wondering how much higher a dogsitter was on the socioeconomic scale than a maid. Or a sous-chef, waitress, aerobics instructor, ticket puncher and tortilla maker, all of which she’d been at one time or another.

About the only thing she hadn’t tried was leech gathering. There was a poem on the subject in her college text by William Wordsworth, the poet of daffodils and leeches, and she could summon it up whenever she needed a good laugh. She developed a quick picture of an old long-nosed white man rolling up his pantlegs and wading into the murk, then squeezed out a miniature smile and said, “Hi, I’m Nisha? I came to see Mrs. Striker? And Mr. Striker?”

The maid — she wasn’t much older than Nisha herself, with a placid expression that might have been described as self-satisfied or just plain vacant — held open the door. “I’ll tell them you’re here,” she said.