The Death of Baseball Read online

  When the movie ends and the house lights come up, I follow my parents outside as they walk along Broadway. The Edison tower clock on Bunker Hill says it’s already eleven o’clock at night. They’re arguing about something all the way from the cinema to the two-dollar lot at the corner of Broadway and Third. Momma’s face is all tight and scrunched, and she shakes her head as my father opens the passenger door and she clambers into her seat.

  They speed home on the 110, and a CHP motorcycle cop pulls them over just as they’re about to exit at Marengo. Momma buckles over and sobs into her hands as they wait for the chippie to write the ticket. My father reaches over and strokes her hair, but she pushes him away and beats on the dashboard with her fists. Finally, the chippie hands them the ticket and lets them go.

  As they speed around the corner to come up our street, I see three Pasadena Police squad cars and an ambulance parked in front of our house, their red-and-blue flashing lights splitting the night. Momma screams when she sees them and launches herself from the truck, racing past our neighbours to the front door, just as the paramedics wheel a struggling young boy out of the house, strapped down on a gurney, blood streaming from the gashes he carved into his face.

  Momma crumples to the ground.

  And then I wake up.

  Chapter 8

  My pyjama bottoms are all wet, and I’m afraid I peed myself again. But it feels different this time, less cold and more sticky. So I reach down to touch my pyjama bottoms and bring my hand to my nose. It smells funny, like chlorine. I throw off the covers, switch on the light on my nightstand, peel down my pyjama bottoms, and find a bunch of sticky goo inside my underpants. And then I get scared. It came out of my chinchin, and some of the stuff is still oozing out. It’s the cancer! It’s here. The doctor was right!

  I grab a white towel from my drawer and try to clean myself. But the stuff keeps oozing and oozing. And I feel like I’m going to pass out. I have to tell Momma so they can take me to the hospital before I die! I run to the door and try to open it, but it’s still locked.

  “Momma,” I scream, pounding on the door. “Help, Momma! Help me, please!”

  The room feels like it’s spinning all around me, so I sit on the floor and keep pounding. After a while, I hear the door to Momma’s bedroom open. My father is screaming something in the background, and then I hear their bedroom door close, and I can’t hear him anymore. The sound of Momma’s slippers padding down the hall toward my room calms me a little. Then the handle jiggles as she unlocks my door and pushes it open.

  “What’s this all about?” she asks, staring down at me. “Where are your pyjamas?”

  “Momma, I don’t know what happened… but my chinchin… something came out of my chinchin.”

  “Go clean yourself off and put on some fresh pyjamas.”

  “I tried cleaning it already. It won’t stop.”

  “Clean it again… it’ll stop.”

  “I’m scared, Momma. Am I going to die? Is it the cancer?”

  “You’ll be fine.” She pulls me off the floor and leads me to my bed. “You can talk to your father about it in the morning.”

  “I don’t want to talk to him!”

  Momma takes a pair of clean underpants and pyjama bottoms from my dresser and drops them on my bed. Then she puts her hand on the top of my head, angles it over, and hisses into my ear. “No more commotion tonight, OK? We’ve had quite enough of you this weekend. Your father and I need to sleep now. It’s a workday tomorrow.”

  “But, Momma!”

  She walks out without answering and locks the door behind her. I check myself and see that the oozing stopped. So I put on the clean bedclothes, feeling relieved I’m not dying, and switch off the light.

  I spend the rest of the night staring into the dark thinking about everything that’s been happening to me. Everything is so confused in my head. My father hates me, that’s for sure. He wishes Hiro were here instead of me.

  Momma used to tell me I was a gift child for her after Hiro died. But she’s not acting like that now. And my father definitely doesn’t think of me that way. I once heard him tell the old, wrinkly monk from the Buddhist temple in J-Town that he thinks I have a bad spirit inside me, the same crazy spirit that made Hiro do what he did to himself. Maybe he’s right; maybe I do have a spirit inside me. But it’s not a bad one. The spirit inside me is sad sometimes, sometimes a bit angry, but mostly it likes to be hugged. And it likes nice music, bright colours, and stylish clothes. Every once in a while, the spirit inside me feels a little happy. But it’s never bad, and it would never do what Hiro did.

  At around five o’clock, the dawn light pushes into my bedroom, above, below, and between the moth-eaten Sound of Music drapes that’ve been hanging in here forever. I roll on my side and look around. It’s so ugly in here. Why did my parents give me Hiro’s bedroom? What were they thinking? That was their first mistake when they brought me home from the hospital. Every time they pass it, I’m sure they must feel like it’s Hiro in here instead of me, which must make them sad and a little afraid. And why won’t my father let me change it? I could make it look so much better, which might help them forget about the bad days with Hiro.

  I sit up and imagine how my room would look if they let me redecorate it. The first thing I’d do is change out those vomit-green drapes for nice wooden blinds like in Kevin’s room. Then I’d repaint the boring brown walls, maybe eggshell blue with cute little cherry appliques, and I’d hang a dancing mobile above my bed with sponge cherries to match the appliques. And that scratched up wooden floor! It has to go. I think maybe deep blue wall-to-wall shag carpet would look perfect with my new light blue walls and would feel soft under my bare feet. I’d want stylish furniture, too. Maybe a Frenchie-looking dresser with a round mirror over it and a comfy cushioned chair to sit in to look at myself. And on the mirror, I’d tape the picture of Marilyn and James Dean that Kevin gave me for my birthday.

  Outside I hear the sound of the garage door creaking open. I peek through the curtains and watch as my father rolls two garbage bins from the garage to the kerb for the Monday morning collection. I wonder if my Marilyn picture is inside one of them. Somehow I have to get to them before the garbage truck arrives.

  On a normal day, my father and I sit together in our kitchen and have a Momma-cooked breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, and fresh-squeezed orange juice before he leaves for work at the car repair shop he owns with his friend Sam Higashi, and afterwards Momma and I spend time talking about stuff while we wash the dishes. Then we drive to the tuxedo rental and wedding dress shop we inherited from my father’s parents, singing along to the music on the radio. But today is different.

  At around six thirty in the morning, I hear the roar of my father’s truck as he guns the engine in the garage. I look through the curtains and watch as he rumbles down the road on his way to work. Almost right away, I hear Momma’s slippers shuffling down the hall toward my room and see the door handle jiggle as she turns the key on the other side. Then she pads away.

  After my shower, I poke my head into the kitchen and see a box of cornflakes and an empty cereal bowl on the table. Momma is staring out the window at the backyard in a yellow housedress, which is not my favourite thing for her to wear, as it’s not the right colour for her.

  “Hello, Momma.”

  Momma turns and points at the refrigerator. I shrug and pull out the milk bottle and pour myself some cereal. Momma watches me from across the room without saying a word as I gulp down my breakfast and rinse the bowl.

  “We’re starting our Summer Clearance today,” she says. “So, I’ll need for you to be ready to concentrate.”

  “I don’t feel well, Momma.”

  “You’ll feel better once you get busy.”

  “I mean I feel sick.”

  Momma feels my forehead and looks inside my mouth. “You’re not running a fever. But your throat does look a little red.”

  “Can I stay home today, Momma? Please!”
r />   “Yes, that’s fine. But I want you to rest and get better. I’ll need your help with the fall inventory before you start school again.”

  I wave goodbye to Momma from the front porch as she drives away in her station wagon, but she doesn’t look at me. As soon as she turns the corner, I run to the garbage cans and rummage through them. The first one is full of smelly food scraps, empty tins, and dead leaves my father raked up last week. The second one is full of cardboard, and waste paper, and bottles, and plastic bags. I dig around in it for a while and hold my nose because it smells so bad.

  As I get near the bottom of the can, just this close to retching from the stink, I spy a folded piece of paper caught under a section of thick rope wrapped tight around a black plastic bag. Grabbing the rope, I lift out the bag, and fall back on the driveway, taking in big gulps of fresh air. After a few seconds, I turn to the plastic bag and slide the piece of paper out from under the rope and unfold it. It’s the Marilyn picture! I’m so excited to have found it that I bring it up to my mouth to kiss it. That’s when I notice it stinks really bad, just like the stink inside the garbage can. And it’s not just the picture. The plastic bag stinks, too, if not worse. Holding it as far away from myself as I can, I work to untie the rope. I struggle with it for a few minutes, pulling here and pulling there, when it suddenly comes free, sending the bag rolling down the driveway to the gutter.

  In the distance, the garbage truck is rumbling down the street. So, I run to the gutter, which is running with water and dead leaves, and fish out the bag. I open it up, and the smell that comes out is so bad I have to turn my head away and blink a few times before looking back at it. Inside, stuffed between a bunch of bloodied paper towels, I find the stiffened body of a dead neko. Before I know it, my stomach explodes into my mouth, and I heave sour milk and cornflakes on the lawn, the driveway, and into the gutter. I try to stand, feeling really really sick, and heave again and again until nothing else comes out except something clear and slimy. Then I shove everything back into the garbage cans, finishing up just as the skinny Mexican garbage man, who’s wearing denim overalls that are way too big for him, pulls up to the kerb in front of our house. He hops out of his truck, pats me on the head with his dirty glove, and dumps the stuff in the garbage cans into the back of his truck. Then he jumps back inside, lights up a cigar, tosses the still-burning match into the gutter, and winks at me as he drives to the next house.

  As I roll the garbage cans up the driveway and into the garage, I think it doesn’t make sense there should be a dead neko in the garbage can being that I thought I saw my father bury Koneko under the guava tree, and we only had one neko. So once I’m inside the garage with the door closed, I dig around in my father’s messy tool cupboards until I find a shovel, a crowbar, and a hammer and nails.

  It takes me more than a half hour to dig the wooden box out of the dirt under the guava tree. It’s still not even noon, so I have plenty of time to pry open the box and look inside, and to get it back into the ground and buried before my father gets home. Hopefully, he won’t detect anything different.

  To make sure nobody sees me, I drag the box into the bushes behind the guava tree and carefully pry it open with the crowbar so as not to break the wood. Once the top part is loose, I take a deep breath, lift off the cover, and look inside.

  The first thing I find is a layer of old newspapers. I pull out the first few and glance through them. They’re mainly about sports, especially baseball and Pasadena Little League. One of them has a section that looks like it was shaded in with a yellow highlighter, and I look closer at it. It’s a little article about Hiro, about what a great shortstop he is, and about how he might be good enough for the high school team. There’s even a picture of him in his uniform. And I wonder why my father would have buried it instead of keeping it to remember the good stuff about Hiro because not everything was bad. I put aside the paper and look through the others. They’re all the same, highlighted or underlined bits here and there about games and scores and awards, all having to do with Hiro.

  I reach into the box to pull out the rest of the newspapers and freeze when I see what’s underneath them. It’s an old, beat-up baseball mitt. Turning it over, I realise right away it’s Hiro’s old mitt, being that it’s left-handed like Hiro was. I look inside the glove and find This is Hiro Koba’s mitt! written under the heel pad with a blue marker in scribbly handwriting. My eyes get all teary. I don’t know why. I didn’t even know Hiro. But I feel sad, really sad, as sad as I’ve ever felt in my life, and I bring the mitt to my mouth and kiss Hiro’s inscription.

  I sit on the dirt and cry—for Hiro, for Momma, and for my father who loved Hiro so much. I cry for myself too, because I feel sure my life would be a lot happier if Hiro hadn’t hurt himself and died. It makes me sad and mad at the same time. So, I look up at the sky, which is really pretty today—deep blue with white puffy clouds—wipe my face and nose, and try to think about something else.

  A low-flying TWA aeroplane crosses the sky right above my head, coming in for a landing at LAX, the airport that’s not too far from our house. I can hear its engine—it’s that close—and I think about how I’ve never been on an aeroplane before. I promise myself that one day, when I have some money, I’ll buy a ticket and fly somewhere, maybe to England with Kevin. We’ll visit the London Bridge and the castle where the Queen of England lives, and we’ll go see Big Ben, that big clock on top of the fancy building by the London river. Maybe Kevin will take me to the big country mansion his great-grandfather used to own before the family sold it because they ran out of money. I think it’s a museum now. We might even stay long enough to start speaking with an English accent, the way Uncle Alistair and the Beatles do.

  Finally, when I feel calm again, I turn back to the box and find more old newspapers inside. And under the newspapers, I see some brown paper bags. I pull out one of the bags. Inside it, I find a magazine with pictures of naked people. But not like the ones I found in Kevin’s pencil drawer, which are just pictures of naked guys posing by themselves. These are pictures of men and ladies doing all kinds of dangerous-looking things to each other with ropes and whips and chains. There are lots and lots of these bags inside the box, and they all have the same kind of magazines inside. What are Hiro’s things doing mixed up with these crazy magazines?

  Reaching into the box, I pull out the rest of the bags and toss them aside. It’s then that I find, at the very bottom of the box, not a dead neko. Instead, I find an old, dust-caked greyish flannel washcloth, all flat and stiff from being pressed under all those paper bags. I blink a few times and stare at it for a bit. Then I reach deep into the box, pull out the washcloth, shake it out, and see it’s stained with dark brown splotches. In that instant, my mouth goes totally spitless; hot, dry air streams up my nose like a current of electricity and pierces my brain, and everything around me turns red, like blood.

  And then I remember everything he did.

  “I like to watch you bleed.”

  I remember my father leaning over me while I’m sitting in the bath, tears streaming down his dirt-covered face; I remember him pushing down on my head and holding me under; I remember struggling and splashing and holding my breath, trying really hard not to drown; I remember him yanking me back up and how I managed to squirm away; I remember running down the hallway screaming, naked and soaking wet, and slamming into Momma, who dropped the grocery bags on the floor when she saw me; and I remember us finding him in the bathroom, sitting on the floor, his back against the tub, his head slumped to one side, and blood all over the place from his wrists, which he’d slashed open with a shaving blade. And then…

  I remember the paring knife he used on me. And the scar on the back of my leg.

  And I PUSH it back. And everything goes black.

  It’s dark and warm and really quiet. I’m not really sure where I am. I’m not even sure who I am. I just know that I am. But I’m not afraid. The only thing I know is that it’s dark and warm and quiet—
and clammy on one side of my face.

  After what seems like a zillion years, I hear a sound far away in the distance. At first, I can’t make out what it is, being that it’s so far away. I have to pay close attention. It sounds like whimpering, a bit like when a puppy is crying, but different. It’s a sad sound, but the sadness doesn’t touch me. It’s there, and I hear it, the way you hear a sad song on the radio, but it’s someone else’s sadness, not mine.

  The whimpering gets louder, almost like it’s moving closer, and that’s when I realise it’s not a whimpering puppy at all. It’s the sound of a little boy crying, like in my dream. But it’s not me. It will never be me. Still, somehow I know the adults who were supposed to take care of the little boy have locked him in a room, have tied his arms to a bed, have turned off all the lights, and have left him in total darkness. And I know he’s scared and sad because nobody loves him anymore. I know all this, but I won’t let it touch me. I’ll never let it touch me again. And then the crying stops.

  I open my eyes and find myself laying on my side in the dirt, surrounded by newspapers, magazines, and paper bags. I turn my head and see the wooden box, with Hiro’s mitt and the other thing next to it. I sit up and rub my eyes and look at the sky. The sun is a lot lower now, so I figure I must have been passed out for a while.

  In the distance, I hear our kitchen telephone ringing and ringing. So I sprint to the house and answer it. It’s Momma. She tells me she’s been calling the house every hour for the past three hours, trying to get hold of me, and was almost ready to call the police. I lie to her and tell her I went for a walk. I don’t think she believes me because I never go for walks by myself. But at least she’s relieved to hear I’m OK.