T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

We were two feet apart. I didn’t like the look she was giving me because it spared nothing. I could have kept it up, could have said, “What money?” injecting all the trampled innocence I could summon into my voice, but I didn’t. I merely bent to the cabinet under the sink, extracted the white plastic bag and handed it to her. She took it as if it were the bleeding corpse of our daughter — or no, of our relationship that went back three years to the time when I was up onstage, gilded in light, my message elided under the hammer of the guitar and the thump of the bass. She didn’t look inside. She just held my eyes. “You know this is fraud, don’t you?” she said. “A felony offense. They can lock you up for this. You know that.”

She wasn’t asking a question, she was making a demand. And I wasn’t about to answer her because the baby was dead and she was dead too. Radko was dead, Jeannie the secretary whose last name I didn’t even know and Joel Chinowski and all the rest of them. Very slowly, button by button, I did up my shirt. Then I set my empty beer bottle down on the counter as carefully as if it were full to the lip and went on out the door and into the night, looking for somebody I could tell all about it.

(2007)

When they took Aquiles Maldonado’s mother, on a morning so hot it all but seared the hide off the hundred and twenty thousand stray dogs in Caracas, give or take a few, no one would have guessed they would keep her as long as they did. Her husband was dead, murdered in a robbery attempt six years earlier, and he would remain unconcerned and uncommunicative. But there were the household servants and the employees of the machine shop ready to run through the compound beating their breasts, and while her own mother was as feeble as a dandelion gone to seed, she was supremely capable of worry. As were Marita’s four grown sons and Aquiles’ six children by five different aficionadas, whom she looked after, fed, scolded and sent off to school each morning. There was concern, plenty of concern, and it rose up and raced through the community the minute the news hit the streets. “They took Marita Villalba,” people shouted from window to window while others shouted back, “Who?”

“Who?” voices cried out in outrage and astonishment. “Who? Aquiles Maldonado’s mother, that’s who!”

At that time, Aquiles was playing for Baltimore, in the American League, away from home from the start of spring training in late February to the conclusion of the regular season in the first week of October. He was thirty years old and had worked his way through four teams with a fierce determination to reach the zenith of his profession — he was now the Birds’ closer, pitching with grit and fluidity at the end of the first year of his two-year, eleven-point-five-million-dollar contract, despite the sharp burn he felt up under the rotator cuff of his pitching arm every time he changed his release point, about which he had told no one. There were three weeks left in the season, and the team, which had already been eliminated from playoff contention by the aggressive play of the Red Sox and Yankees, was just going through the motions. But not Aquiles. Every time he was handed the ball with a lead to protect, however infrequently, he bore down with a fury so uncompromising you would have thought every cent of his eleven-point-five-million U.S. guaranteed dollars rode on each and every pitch.

He was doing his pre-game stretching and joking with the team’s other Venezuelan player, Chucho Rangel, about the two tattooed güeras they’d taken back to the hotel the night before, when the call came through. It was from his brother Néstor, and the moment he heard his brother’s voice, he knew the news was bad.

“They got Mamí,” Néstor sobbed into the receiver.

“Who did?”

There was a pause, as if his brother were calling from beneath the sea and needed to surface to catch his breath. “I don’t know,” he said, “the gangsters, the FARC, whoever.”

The field was the green of dreams, the stands spotted with fans come early for batting practice and autographs. He turned away from Chucho and the rest of them, hunched over his cell. “For what?” And then, because the word slipped into his mouth: “For ransom?”

Another pause, and when his brother came back to him his voice was as pinched and hollow as if he were talking through his snorkel: “What do you think, pendejo ?”

—

“It just shouldn’t be so hot this time of year,” she’d been saying to Rómulo Cordero, foreman of the machine shop her son had bought her when he signed his first big league contract. “I’ve never seen it like this — have you? Maybe in my mother’s time…”

The children were at school, under supervision of the nuns and the watchful eye of Christ in heaven, the lathes were turning with their insectoid drone and she was in the back office, both fans going full speed and directed at her face and the three buttons of cleavage she allowed herself on the hottest days. Marita Villalba was forty-seven years old, thirty pounds heavier than she’d like to be, but pretty still and so full of life (and, let’s face it, money and respectability) that half the bachelors of the neighborhood — and all the widowers — were mad for the sight of her. Rómulo Cordero, a married man and father of nine, wasn’t immune to her charms, but he was an employee first and never allowed himself to forget it. “In the nineteen sixties, when I was a boy,” he said, pausing to sweeten his voice, “—but you would have been too young to remember — it was a hundred nineteen degrees by eleven in the morning every day for a week and people were placing bets on when it would break a hundred and twenty—”

He never got to finish the story. At that moment, four men in the uniform of the federal police strode sweating into the office to crowd the little dirt-floored room with its walls of unpainted plywood and the rusting filing cabinets and the oversized Steelcase desk on which Marita Villalba did her accounts. “I’ve already paid,” she said, barely glancing up at them.

Their leader, a tall stoop-shouldered man with a congenitally deformed eye and a reek of the barrio who didn’t look anything like a policeman, casually unholstered his gun. “We don’t know anything about that. My instructions are to bring you to the station for questioning.”

And so it began.

When they got outside, to the courtyard, where the shop stood adjacent to the two-story frame house with its hardwood floors and tile roof, the tall one, who was referred to variously as “Capitán” and “El Ojo” by the others, held open the door of a blistered pale purple Honda with yellow racing stripes that was like no police vehicle Marita Villalba or Rómulo Cordero had ever seen. Marita balked. “Are you sure we have to go through with this?” she said, gesturing to the dusty back seat of the car, to the open gate of the compound and the city festering beyond it. “Can’t we settle this right here?” She was digging in her purse for her checkbook, when the tall one said abruptly, “I’ll call headquarters.” Then he turned to Rómulo Cordero. “Hand me your cell phone.”

Alarm signals began to go off in Marita Villalba’s head. She sized up the three other men — boys, they were boys, street urchins dressed up in stolen uniforms with automatic pistols worth more than their own lives and the lives of all their ancestors combined clutched in nervous hands — even as Rómulo Cordero unhooked the cell phone from his belt and handed it to the tall man with the drooping eye.

“Hello?” the man said into the phone. “District headquarters? Yes, this is”—and he gave a name he invented out of the scorched air of the swollen morning—“and we have the Villalba woman.” He paused. “Yes,” he said, “yes, I see: she must come in in person.”