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

“I will,” Aquiles insisted. “I’ll pay them anything.”

“You won’t. You can’t. Because if you do, then every ballplayer’s family will be at risk, don’t you understand that? And, I hate to say this, but you’ve brought it on yourself. I mean, please — driving a vermilion Hummer through the streets of this town? Parading around with your gold necklaces and these disgraceful women, these putas with their great inflated tits and swollen behinds? Did you really have to go and paint your compound the color of a ripe tangerine?”

Aquiles felt the anger coming up in him, but as soon as he detected it, it was gone: the man was right. He should have left his mother where she was, left her to the respectability of poverty, should have changed his name and come home in rags wearing a beard and a false nose. He should never in his life have picked up a baseball.

“All right,” the Chief was saying, and he stood to conclude the meeting. “They call you, you call me.”

Both brothers rose awkwardly, the empty plate staring up at Aquiles like the blanched unblinking eye of accusation, the jar of horrors grinning beside it. The bodyguard poked his head in the door.

“Oh, but wait, wait, I almost forgot.” The Chief snapped his fingers once again and an assistant strode through the rear door with a cellophane package of crisp white baseballs in one hand and a Magic Marker in the other. “If you wouldn’t mind,” the Chief said. “For my son, Aldo, with Best Wishes.”

—

She was wedged between two of the boys in the cramped back seat of the car, the heat oppressive, the stink of confinement unbearable. El Ojo sat up front beside the other boy, who drove with an utter disregard for life. At first she tried to shout out the window at pedestrians, shrieking till she thought the glass of the windshield would shatter, but the boy to her right — pinch-faced, with two rotted teeth like fangs and a pair of lifeless black eyes — slapped her and she slapped him right back, the guttersnipe, the little hoodlum, and who did he think he was? How dare he? Beyond that she remembered nothing, because the boy punched her then, punched her with all the coiled fury of his pipestem arm and balled fist and the car jolted on its springs and the tires screamed and she passed into unconsciousness.

When she came back to the world she was in a skiff on a river she’d never seen before, its waters thick as paste, all the birds and insects in the universe screaming in unison. Her wrists had been tied behind her and her ankles bound with a loop of frayed plastic cord. The ache in her jaw stole up on her, her tongue probing the teeth there and tasting her own blood, and that made her angry, furious, and she focused all her rage on the boy who’d hit her — there he was, sitting athwart the seat in the bow, crushed beneath the weight of his sloped shoulders and the insolent wedge of the back of his head. She wanted to cry out and accuse him, but she caught herself, because what if the boat tipped, what then? She was helpless. No one, not even the Olympic butterfly champion, could swim with all four limbs bound. So she lay there on the rocking floor of the boat, soaked through with the bilge, the sun lashing her as she breathed the fumes of the engine and stared up into a seared fragment of the sky, waiting her chance.

Finally, and it seemed as if they’d been on that river for days, though that was an impossibility, the engine choked on its own fumes and they cut across the current to the far bank. El Ojo — she saw now that he had been the one at the tiller — sprang out and seized a rope trailing from the branch of a jutting tree, and then the boy, the one who’d assaulted her, reached back to cut the cord at her ankles with a flick of his knife and he too was in the murky water, hauling the skiff ashore. She endured the thumps and bumps and the helpless feeling they gave her and then, when he thrust a hand under her arm to lead her up onto the bank, the best she could do was mutter, “You stink. All of you. Don’t you have any pride? Can’t you even wash yourselves? Do you wear your clothes till they rot, is that it?” And then, when that got no response: “What about your mothers — what would they think?”

They were on the bank now, El Ojo and the others taking pains to secrete the boat in the undergrowth, where they piled sticks and river-run debris atop it. The boy who had hold of her just gave her his cold vampire’s smile, the two stubs of his teeth stabbing at his lower lip. “We don’t got no mothers,” he said softly. “We’re guerrillas.”

“Hoodlums, you mean,” she snapped back at him. “Criminals, narcotraficantes, kidnappers, cowards.”

It came so quickly she had no time to react, the arm snaking out, the wrist uncoiling to bring the flat of his hand across her face, right where it had begun to bruise. And then, for good measure, he slapped her again.

“Hey, Eduardo, shithead,” El Ojo rasped, “get your ass over here and give us a hand. What do you think this is, a nightclub?”

The others laughed. Her face stung and already the flies and mosquitoes were probing at the place where it had swelled along the line of her jaw. She dropped her chin to her shoulder for protection, but she didn’t say anything. To this point she’d been too indignant to be scared, but now, with the light fading into the trees and the mud sucking at her shoes and the ugly nameless things of the jungle creeping from their holes and dens to lay siege to the night, she began to feel the dread spread its wings inside her. This was about Aquiles. About her son, the major leaguer, the pride of her life. They wanted him, wanted his money he’d worked so hard to acquire since he was a barefoot boy molding a glove out of old milk cartons and firing rocks at a target nailed to a tree, the money he’d earned by his sweat and talent — and the fame, the glory, the pride that came with it. They had no pride themselves, no human decency, but they would do anything to corrupt it — she’d heard the stories of the abductions, the mutilations, the families who’d paid ransom for their daughters, sons, parents, grandparents, even the family dog, only to pay again and again until hope gave way to despair.

But then, even as they took hold of her and began to march her through the jungle, she saw her son’s face rise before her, his portrait just as it appeared on his Topps card, one leg lifted in the windup and that little half-smile he gave when he was embarrassed because the photographer was there and the photographer had posed him. He’ll come for me, she said to herself. I know he will.

—

For Aquiles, the next three weeks were purgatorial. Each day he awoke sweating in the silence of dawn and performed his stretching exercises on the Turkish carpet until the maid brought him his orange juice and the protein drink into which he mixed the contents of three raw eggs, two ounces of wheatgrass and a tablespoon of brewer’s yeast. Then he sat dazed in front of the high-definition plasma TV he’d bought his mother for her forty-fifth birthday, surrounded by his children (withdrawn from school for their own protection), and the unforgivably homely but capable girl from the provinces, Suspira Salvatoros, who’d been brought in to see after their welfare in the absence of his mother. In the corner, muttering darkly, sat his abuela, the electric ghost of his mother’s features flitting across her face as she rattled her rosary and picked at the wart under her right eye till a thin line of serum ran down her cheek. The TV gave him nothing, not joy or even release, each show more stupefyingly banal than the last — how could people go about the business of winning prizes, putting on costumes and spouting dialogue, singing, dancing, stirring soft-shell crabs and cilantro in a fry pan for Christ’s sake, when his mother, Marita Villalba, was in the hands of criminals who refused even to communicate let alone negotiate? Even baseball, even the playoffs, came to mean nothing to him.