Island of Divine Music (11 page)

The briefest tremor of pity for Los Angeles, for its millions of hapless fans, swept through him as he sliced the greasy meat. When he came back his little sisters were watching a cartoon. Paulie almost turned the channel back, but his mother told him it was their turn. It only took two games to win that rarest of baseball events, a pennant playoff, and the Giants were ahead 5-0 in the sixth inning of the second game. He finished his sandwich, got out his transistor radio, and opened his French text to an assignment due the next day.

The Dodgers had just scored seven runs.

Paulie told his father, and they commandeered the TV. He got the mitt and cap and began his rituals, but LA won it, 8–7.

One more game.

The next day American spy planes obtained photos from above the island of Cuba. The handsome young Catholic president met in secret with his military advisers, grim men with black eyebrows and silver crew cuts. A bald, gap-toothed Russian peasant and a tall Caribbean ballplayer with a bushy beard were the subject of their secret meeting. As they met, the Giants waited in a motel for evening to come to Chavez Ravine.

The shades were drawn, and the men stationed themselves before the TV. Some smoked cigars, and at least one sipped whiskey. The women and children stayed out of the living room except to make brief forays into the smoke to learn the score. Joe Verbicaro
passed chips to his brother, who dropped them in front of Pete Rinaldi, the Realtor. Joe’s nephew Gino picked them up and passed them to Paulie, who balanced the bowl on his mitt. Pete cleared his throat: What’s the score?

Get your head out of your ass, Ludovico told him. Don’t know the score.

The others laughed, including Pete. It’s two-zip, Joe said. Don’t listen to him, Pete.

Who’s ahead?

Christ sake, he don’t even know who’s ahead? This is historical,
baboso.
Pay attention.

We’re ahead, Paulie said. In the distorted, smoky black-and-white picture the Dodgers looked inadequate beside the Giants, they looked soft and oafish. As if the smog and heat of Los Angeles, the false dreams and sexual warmth of Disneyland and Hollywood, sapped a man’s strength and left him unfocused, uncoordinated. Their fans were the same, they always had some guy with a bugle and a casual bunch of sleeveless, suntanned people yelling
Charge
and laughing right afterward, even as they were losing. Weak. Paulie tapped his glove.

Who’s that? The guy warming up?

Don’t tell him, Lu said. Joe. He’s gotta learn to open his eyes and ears.

Hey, my wife’s on it. Don’t blame me, my wife won’t let me watch. He winked at Joe.

No excuse, Lu said.

Tommy Davis hit a two-run homer, and the men cursed and
tossed pillows on the floor. For the next half hour the living room was quiet, save for a few whistles from Pete and curses from Lu and Joe. At the end of the eighth the Dodgers led by two.

What happens if we lose?

That’s all she wrote, Joe answered.

They don’t play again tomorrow?

We lose, there ain’t no tomorrow,
capice?
Lu said.

Pete slopped whiskey onto his hand as he poured. That’s a shame.

No shit, Joe said. Excuse my French.

Paulie closed his eyes and prayed silently. He was like a man whose girlfriend has just met a handsome millionaire who speaks five languages and drives an Aston Martin. He’d given his heart, and he wouldn’t let go now.

In the top of the ninth Matty Alou led off with a single, and the men’s yelling brought the entire family into the room. However, the next batter nearly hit into a double play. Lu and Joe cursed the batter and the manager, Alvin Dark.

What’s the score?

Pete, shut up! Paulie’s mother said. It’s four to two, them, one out, last inning. Even Mickey and Janine know this.

Mickey had Down syndrome, and Janine was four years old.

He’s drunk, Lu said. Why’d you invite him?

Paulie and his father exchanged looks. Gino laughed. Gino’s mother, Paulie’s Aunt Min, who clung to her son’s arm as if she were watching a horror movie, suddenly laughed as well. They knew that Lu, not Joe, had invited Pete. Grouchy Lu was always inviting Pete, maybe just so he could complain. Joe barely knew the guy.

What thinks you make I’m drunk? Angie slurred his speech and staggered around the living room, making his mother and little sisters laugh.

McCovey came up to pinch hit, a towering man with a huge swing, and the Dodgers pitcher played cat-and-mouse with him on the edges of the plate until he walked him. The next man walked as well. This put Mays up with the bases loaded. I wouldn’t want to be that chucker, Joe said. Not for a million bucks.

Pitcher always has the advantage, Lu said. Always. He was rocking on the couch like a heroin addict. Paulie was silently chanting the Lord’s Prayer. Chavez Ravine was quiet.

Who’s the colored up to bat?

Joe and Lu each grabbed an arm and a leg, and they carried little Pete Rinaldi out of the living room. Gino opened the sliding glass door, and the men dropped Pete in a chaise in the backyard and hurried back inside. What the hell, Pete said before Gino turned the latch.

Mays lashed the ball off the pitcher’s glove, and a run scored. It was ruled a hit, and Paulie thought the pitcher was lucky to deflect it, lucky to be alive. When the family stopped whooping Paulie could hear the O’Malleys cheering next door. Orlando up next, down by one. Pete rattled the sliding door, then flopped back onto the chaise. Leave him there, Lu said to Gino. He’s all right.

The Dodgers manager and catcher were on the mound. A new pitcher was called in. Paulie’s younger siblings were drumming their hands on the floor, led by Angie’s chant of Hey pitcha, hey pitcha, hey pitcha, and his older sister, the sophisticated college student,
sat in a lotus position against his leg, pretending to meditate. It took years before Cepeda stepped up. He hit it deep to right, and the tying run scored on a tag-up. The entire family danced around the room, Paulie swinging his older sister, Penny, jitterbug style. Pete knocked on the glass and fell back into the chaise. The doorbell rang.

Paulie’s sister Mickey let her in. The collar of her trench coat was raised, and her hair was hidden under a scarf. We kicked him out to the back, Lu told her, and she laughed. Paulie felt unmoored by the sight of her in his house, by the realization that his uncle knew her, had probably sat at a card table with her. He waved.

A wild pitch sent Mays to second. Paulie tried to contain his excitement. She was standing behind him while he sat with the cap and glove on like a little boy, a kid in thick glasses, maybe a little developmentally delayed like his sister Mickey.
Bonsoir,
Paul, she murmured, and he said, Hi, without turning.

Is your team winning the match?

We’re tied. He wanted her to stop talking to him.

She stepped out back and lit a cigarette. Pete lay in the chaise, his mouth open.

They gave Bailey an intentional pass to load the bases. Tied game, two outs, bags full, last inning, and sober-faced Jim Davenport, the Gold Glove winner, the technician at third, stepped up. He watched the first pitch. He watched another. The third missed the corner. Son of a bitch, Lu said, he can’t find the plate! Hey pitcha, Angie said, yer mudder wears army boots. The reliever for
the best pitching staff in the game rocked back and threw it in the dirt, bringing in the go-ahead run.

For a moment the family was too stunned to cheer. Then Mickey yelled, Home run, and they all started laughing and whooping. Chavez Ravine was quiet as Alston brought in another pitcher. Mrs. Rinaldi sat on the edge of the chaise, smoking, while her husband slept. Her raised knees were pressed together, white in the scant light. The cigarette glowed near her frowning lips. Paulie watched her get up and stub it on the patio. On an error, San Francisco scored again before the last out. Six to four. Mrs. Rinaldi walked off into the dark.

When the Dodgers came up, their fans barely cheered. They were in shock, and their players looked the same. Wills stood at the plate looking lost, a space alien trapped on Earth under a thousand lights. Hey, batta, Angie said, yer sista’s got a mustache. Junior Gilliam looked like he’d never seen a bat and couldn’t decide where to hold it. Their last man, a pinch hitter, popped it to Mays. Willie caught it and threw it into the grandstands in one fluid motion before he leaped for joy.

Paulie spun with his sisters like a square dancer and stepped out to the front porch. He yelped at the harvest moon just rising over the Oakland Hills. He threw his hat and glove in the air, and the mitt landed on the roof. She stood with her arms out, maybe open for a hug, alone on the walkway, so he hugged her. He lifted her in the air, spun her around twice. She gasped and clung to his shoulders, the nape of his neck as she came down to earth, and they nearly toppled
against the house. She still hung on a moment, in the darkness near the hedge, her ecclesiastical scent, her long, cool fingers moving from his nape to his scalp, her lips touching his cheek, then his mouth, a smoky, fruited taste of wine and ashes.

E
very time his mind was consumed by the sensation of kissing her the Giants lost some ground against New York in the World Series. Their kissing was not so much a sin as a jinx, just as his leaving the mitt off and making a salami sandwich had been, an act which disturbed God’s will or the team’s momentum. He avoided her eyes in class and skipped a few more times for series games. They went seven against the Yankees, broken by a few days when the heavens dumped the worst storm in thirty years on San Francisco, turning some streets in the East Bay to knee-high creeks. They took Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra and Roger Maris, the most winning team in the game, to the last inning when, down one to nothing with two outs, Matty Alou once again started a rally with a hit. Paulie stood before the plate glass of an appliance store in Berkeley with a group of older men, most of them winos he’d been meeting there on the days he skipped. His mitt was on one hand, transistor radio wire and thick glasses frames under his cap. The window set was always on, as was a wall of tubes deep inside where the salesmen in neckties gathered and smoked. Paulie saw himself in the glass and wondered what Mrs. Rinaldi would think of him here, cutting class and leaning shoulder to shoulder among old guys
in similar caps who stank of piss. He felt her lips, remembered her smell. The next two men struck out.

The men on the sidewalk moaned, hugged their arms, cursed. Paulie had a brief insight about these men, that their hearts were big and broken easily, that they’d given their hearts to something or somebody and lost before. Willie Mays was up, and Paulie and the man next to him started praying out loud. Mays hit a double down the right field line, but Alou couldn’t get past third. McCovey stepped up.

The wino beside him hugged his arm. Paulie watched Willie Mack hit the first pitch over the fence, making the men scream, but he knew it was foul. He labored to keep his thoughts pure, his mind with Willie Mack. He tapped the glove and said,
Hum, baby.
On the last pitch McCovey cracked a rifle shot into the outstretched glove of Bobby Richardson at second. A few inches south would have won the series. A small shift in the cosmos, in the Earth’s rotation, in the place where ball and bat meet, and we’d have won. One hundred seventy-two games decided by three inches, or by Paulie’s lust for his teacher.

It was October 16, and it was over. The Catholic president was meeting in secret again, knowing by now that the Soviets were constructing missiles on Cuba and shipping more, but the American public was still in the dark. Paulie’s college prospects were over, his grades in the afternoon classes, particularly French and U.S. history, wadded-up piles of crap in a dustbin, his grace on the field a memory. And the memory of his teacher’s lips on his, of her hands on the nape of his neck, was the only thing he could take solace in
as he exchanged hugs with the stinking old men on the street and started for home.

He drove by her house a few evenings and always saw Pete’s Cadillac cheek to jowl with her Studebaker in the driveway. In class she scowled at him, and on Friday she kept him after school, along with the two girls she was always yelling at, to copy words from the board. She leaned over his work, and her breast touched his elbow.
Oui, oui,
she said.

On Saturday he unloaded cement sacks for his father and uncles. Ludovico and Joe stood and gabbed while his brother Angie moved a broom and Paulie stacked the building materials, working up enough sweat to take off his shirt on a cool morning. Maybe he would do this work all his life, lifting and moving things, getting covered with dust and mud. His glasses fogged when he stopped to rest. His brother was imitating Elvis, pretending to strum the broom like a guitar, singing into it as if it were a mike on a stand. His father and uncle were arguing about the last game, Lu whining about an umpire’s call while Joe spoke with calm authority.

Hell, no, Joe said, don’t blame the ump. If that manager had known his ass from a hot stone, we’d have won it. If he’d put his fastest man on first to pinch run for Alou.

Alou’s fast.

You’re not going to tell me we can’t get somebody to second base, by bunt or steal or hit-and-run, with no outs, to prepare for your big guns like Mays and McCovey? Cepeda on deck? Hell, Lu, Mays gets up with two down, and the runner should have been on second already. And when he hit that double, that runner should
have been on his bicycle with a twelve-foot lead and a three-foot rocket up his ass. What the hell does Mays have to do to win a game for Al Dark? Walk on goddamned water?

He practically does, for Christ sake, Lu said.

Best in the game, Joe said, and that manager can’t figure out how to use him. He looked over to Paulie and said, How’s the working man? He didn’t seem to notice Angie singing I Got Stung.

Paulie wiped his face with his shirt. How does Mays compare with DiMaggio?

I didn’t say he was DiMaggio, Joe said.

Nobody plays like DiMaggio, Lu said. They’d had this conversation before.