Rag and Bone Read online

At a commercial, I said, “I bet you like to read, don’t you?”

  He looked at me and ventured a cautious, “Yeah.”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, and went into my office, where, tucked on a shelf amid my twenty-five-year-old law school texts, was an even older book. The battered brown cover bore the imprint of water stains and grease spots. The binding was loose and the gilt lettering on the spine nearly indecipherable but I could still make out the title, The Tales of Homer, and still felt some of the thrill I had experienced when I opened it for the first time almost forty years ago. I turned yellowing pages that bore finger smudges from a smaller hand, but the illustrations still jumped off the page: the great wooden horse being wheeled into the city; a fragile ship hurtling toward a strait where on one side was a whirlpool and on the other jagged rocks; a beautiful woman with a wand standing among a herd of swine. I had been given this book—a prose retelling of the Iliad and the Odyssey—when I was eleven by a teacher who observed my interest in Greek mythology, but it had opened up more than that world for me. Reading about Achilles and Patroclus had, even in this bowdlerized version, intimated something about the love of men for one another that I scarcely understood but never forgot. Ulysses’s long journey, filled with suffering and adventure, had in some obscure but palpable way consoled and encouraged me as I struggled through my own difficult adolescence.

  “Here,” I said, handing Angel the Tales when I’d returned to the living room. “You can look at it after the game.”

  He immediately opened the book at random and found the illustration of the Greeks pouring out of the great wooden horse.

  Wonder in his voice, he asked, “What is this book about, Uncle Henry?”

  “It’s really two stories,” I said. “The first one is about a war that happened thousands of years ago between people called the Greeks and the Trojans and how the Greeks won it with a trick, using this horse.” I pointed at the illustration. “The second story is about how one of the Greek soldiers named Ulysses tried for ten years to get home to his family and about the monsters he met and the adventures he had on the way.”

  His eyes widened at the word “monsters.” He began to turn the pages, glancing up at the game every couple of minutes, and when we were called for dinner he took the book with him. Just as I had done when I was a boy, he propped the book up against his water glass and read while he ate. His mother observed him with equanimity as if this was familiar behavior.

  “Angel,” I said, “we have a guest. Put the book away until dinner is over.”

  Only then did Vicky chime in. “Do what your uncle says, Angelito.”

  Grudgingly, he complied. He sat through the rest of dinner without saying a word but attentively listened to the three-way conversation among his mother, Edith and me.

  After dinner, I saw Edith to her car.

  “Did you have any luck with my niece?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Henry,” she said.

  “I was hoping you might have some insight into her.”

  Edith smiled. “I’m a psychologist, not a psychic. Obviously, she figured out that I was here at your invitation to talk to her.” She unlocked her car. “I don’t think I’m the first mental health professional Vicky has dealt with. She knew the drill.”

  “What drill?”

  “Try to figure out what you’re supposed to say, and say it to make them go away and leave you alone.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Henry, you know I’m not going to tell you that,” she said. “In fact, you shouldn’t have come out here with me, because now she’ll assume we’re talking about her and it will make it harder for me when I see her tomorrow.”

  “You’re seeing her tomorrow?”

  She nodded. “I’m taking her and Angel shopping and then to lunch. I want to see them together without you around.”

  “You can’t leave me out to hang.”

  She got into her car and rolled the window down. “You want me to try to help her or spy on her?”

  “Point taken,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Good night, Henry,” she said and drove away.

  When I returned to the house, Vicky and Angel were already in their room. Angel had taken the book in with him.

  John called the next morning. I took the call in my office to avoid being overheard by my niece.

  “How’s the reunion going?” he asked.

  “She seems to think I’m going to rape Angel if she leaves him alone with me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She told him I’m a fag who has AIDS. She called me joto. You’re right—some things do sound worse in Spanish.”

  After a moment, John said, “She’ll feel different after she’s spent more time around you.”

  “Plus she’s a born-again.”

  “You don’t like Christians?” he asked in a tone that gave me pause. “Aren’t you Catholic?”

  “My mother was Catholic enough for my entire family,” I said. “Are you religious?”

  “I go to Mass every Sunday with my mom and dad. Is that going to be a problem?”

  “My problem is with Vicky’s religion, not yours,” I said.

  This got a dubious “Okay.” After a further awkward silence, he said, “Hey, the reason I called is I can get tickets to the game on Saturday for you and me and Angel.”

  “I don’t know if Vicky will let Angel out of her sight that long.”

  “Man, you’re really angry,” he said. “Let me talk to her.”

  “Now?”

  “Put her on the phone, Henry.”

  I put the phone down and found my niece doing laundry. I explained that John, whom she had met the night she had arrived, wanted to ask her something. Reluctantly, she took the call in the kitchen. I went out into the living room where Angelito was curled up on an armchair reading the Tales.

  “How’s it going?”

  He looked up. “They have funny names. I get confused.”

  “I know,” I said. “In the first book, the important characters are Achilles and Patroclus, who are Greeks, and Hector, who’s a Trojan. The second book is pretty much all about Ulysses. How far along are you?”

  “The Trojans want a truce but not the Greeks.” He put the book in his lap. “This part is boring. Do they start fighting again?”

  “In a couple of pages.”

  His mother came into the room. “John wants to talk to you,” she said to me. To Angel, she said, “John wants to take you to see baseball on Saturday. With your uncle.”

  Angel smiled. “Really, Uncle Henry?”

  “Yeah, if it’s okay with your mom. I’m going to get the phone. We’ll talk later.” I went back into my office and picked up the phone. “How did you do that?”

  “I told her how much it meant when I took my son to his first big league game. As soon as she knew I had my own kids, she was okay with it.”

  “She thinks you’re straight, so she’ll trust you with her son?”

  With an edge in his voice, he said, “Henry, don’t get pissed off at me. I’m not the problem here.”

  I said a curt, “Sorry.”

  “Things must be pretty tense up there,” he said after a moment. “You need to get out of the house. Come down and meet me for lunch. H’okay?”

  He was trying to charm me out of my sullenness as if I were a little boy. I didn’t know whether to be touched or annoyed, but I said, “H’okay.”

  Around noon, I wandered down to the house where John was working. It was the first time I’d taken this route since the day John had rescued me and, as tired as I still often felt, I could also feel the increase in strength and energy. Only now as I was recovering did I realize that some part of me had not believed I was going to. John was standing in the driveway behind his battered truck talking in rapid Spanish to two men wearing red DELEON & SON baseball caps. He saw me, waved and continued his conversation. The two men—one middle-age, the other a boy in h
is twenties—listened to John with almost servile deference, glancing down, nodding respectfully, but then he said something that made the younger man toss back his head and laugh. I felt a prickle of jealousy.

  “Be back at one-thirty,” he told them in Spanish.

  The two men went off to a big wreck of a car parked beneath a jacaranda tree that had rained papery purple flowers on the windshield. As John approached me, he doffed his cap and fluffed his hair. There was a kiss in his smile.

  “Hey, Henry.”

  “Your crew?” I asked, as the big car sputtered off, the windshield wipers scattering the jacaranda blossoms.

  “Two of ’em.”

  “Documented?”

  His smile turned wolfish. “Who are you, INS?”

  “Just curious.”

  He threw an arm around my shoulders. “How many generations your family been up here in el norte?”

  “Three, counting from my grandparents.”

  “Same here,” he said, walking me toward his truck. “I bet no one asked your abuelo or mine if they had green cards before they put them to work in the fields or whatever. I don’t either, and I pay everyone the same and give everyone the same benefits.”

  “I think that’s great, John, really, but you know, technically you are breaking the law.”

  He squeezed my shoulder with powerful fingers. “I bet you wait till the light turns green before you walk across the street.”

  “So what’s your point?”

  “Nothing. I could kiss you.”

  “But not with the guys watching,” I said.

  The happiness faded from his eyes. “Hop in. I want to show you something.”

  “That was a lousy thing for me to say. I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “Let’s get some food.”

  We went to a drive-in on Sunset and ordered burgers and fries and milkshakes. Then he drove up into Griffith Park toward the observatory.

  “Hold on,” he said, suddenly veering off the paved road into gray-green underbrush and onto a rutted dirt road that ascended an adobe-colored hill and terminated abruptly at a turnaround. Downtown unfolded beneath us in the baked brown air. Glass towers glinted through the sludge, palm trees lifted their fronds as if gasping, ribbons of freeway were clogged with noontime traffic. A coyote ran along the hill below us.

  “This is some view,” I said.

  He slipped a tape into the cassette player and a woman, a sob in her voice, began to croon in Spanish in a style I remembered from childhood.

  “Thirty years ago when I came up here with my dad, you could still see the ocean sometimes. I love this city and I hate what’s happened to it.” He slurped some of his milkshake and unwrapped his hamburger. “If it keeps getting worse, I’ll leave.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “Down in southeast Arizona, in the Sonora desert, where my mom’s family comes from. They’re Yaquis. Indians,” he explained. “There’s a little town down there called Bisbee built on hills. The high desert’s real beautiful.” He munched his burger. “It’s only an eight-hour drive. We could go there for a long weekend.”

  “I’d like to see it. Who’s this singing?”

  “Daniela Romo,” he said between gigantic bites. “Tu eres mí destino.”

  “You are my destiny. Doesn’t sounds as corny in Spanish.”

  “It’s the language of love, man. How’s Angel?”

  “Really excited about going to the game. We watched the Yankees play last night and he told me all about Derek Jeter.”

  “Best short in the majors, except maybe Nomar Garciaparra.”

  “Angel said the same thing. Johnny, I’m really sorry about that crack I made down there. I feel like a jerk.”

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Don’t apologize. You were right. I wouldn’t kiss you in front of my crew, they’d lose all respect for me. They’re like your niece, Henry. They come from a different place and there’s times you gotta go along with that.”

  “I don’t want to start a fight, but what are the times when you don’t?”

  “We do work for gay guys all the time, and when we do, I tell my crew if I hear any fag jokes or any kind of remarks like that, they’re gone. I tell them, these people are feeding your families, you show some courtesy.” He looked at me. “That probably doesn’t seem like much to you.”

  “I’m no militant,” I said. “I understand discretion, but when I saw you, I was so happy, I didn’t care who was around.”

  “You called me Johnny just now,” he said.

  “That’s how you introduced yourself when we met,” I said, “but you corrected yourself and said John.”

  “I was Johnny when I played ball,” he said. “Back when I was a kid. Now I’m John.”

  “You can be Johnny with me sometimes.”

  His smile was a complex mixture of happiness and sadness. “What did they call you when you were a kid?”

  “Besides Flaco, you mean?” I’d been a skinny-bones until I fleshed out in college. “They called me Henry.”

  Then he leaned over and whispered into my ear, “I’m going to call you—” and the name he chose revealed it was something he had been thinking about. Then he kissed me and we made out like a pair of horny teenagers.

  When I finally came up for breath, I said, “Oh, man. That was intense.”

  He released a long, pent-up breath. “You thought I just brought you up here for the view?”

  I began to button my shirt. “I’ve never made out in the front seat of a pickup truck. It’s sexy, but kind of cramped.”

  “Next time we’ll try the flatbed.” He picked up what was left of his hamburger. He’d sat on it. “I guess I’ll leave this for the coyotes,” he said, tossing it out the window.

  I rooted around the floor and found the bag with my food. “Here, mine’s only a little mauled. Eat it.”

  “I’m not going to eat your lunch.”

  “You’re going back to work,” I said. “I’m going home to take a nap.”

  He took the bag. “We’ll share. What’s going on with your niece?”

  “My sister’s flying down this afternoon. We’re having a family meeting.” He held out the burger. I took a bite and gave it back. “I know it’s not Vicky’s fault that she irritates me, but honest to God, she’s so passive-aggressive. Instead of saying what’s on her mind, I catch these little looks she gives me. You know how she expresses disapproval of me? By doing my laundry. You should’ve seen her face when she tossed my boxers into the dryer. Like she should be wearing gloves.”

  John chuckled.

  “What’s funny?”

  “The way she pisses you off, she could only be family.” He dipped a mangled french fry into catsup. “You don’t have to like her, Henry. You just have to love her.”

  “Where did you read that?” I said. “A greeting card?”

  “Chistoso,” he said. “You’ll do it. You’ll do it for Angel. You already love him, don’t you?”

  “It’s funny how much, considering that I hardly know him.”

  John smiled and said, “The only time I fell in love at first sight was when I watched them deliver my son.” He crumpled the burger wrapper and tossed it on the floor of the cab, which was already littered with other fast food bags and wrappers. “You want Angel to be like you.”

  “He is like me,” I said.

  “What does his mom want?”

  “She says she wants a better life for him.”

  John pressed my thigh, a gesture more emphatic than erotic. “When you give him that better life, make sure she’s still a part of it.”

  “I’m not going to kidnap him.”

  “Being around you, Henry, seeing what you’ve done with your life, he could become ashamed of her. You don’t want to let that happen no matter how screwed up his mom is, because if he’s ashamed of her, some little part of him will be ashamed of himself, too.”

  “You know what, John, not everyone needs a fam
ily for a sense of identity. Some of us create ourselves.”

  He looked at me and said, “You’re all upset now.”

  “No, I’m not,” I pouted.

  He opened his arms. “Come here, m’ijo.”

  “M’ijo? I’m six years older than you,” I said as I scooted across the seat.

  John dropped me off to an empty house. In blissful quiet, I went into my room and took a nap. When I woke up, I heard Elena’s voice. I roused myself out of bed, put on my bathrobe and emerged. At the doorway of the kitchen, I stopped. Elena and Vicky were sitting at the table drinking coffee, deep in conversation. They were at an angle from which they could not see me. My sister cupped her daughter’s face as she spoke to her in a low voice. Vicky shook her head. Elena dropped her hands and slowly wept. I felt a small presence behind me, turned around, and saw Angelito. I felt momentarily nonplussed at having been caught spying, but then I remembered this kind of lurking seemed to be one of his survival skills.

  “Grandma wants us to go home with her,” he said in a low voice. He was carrying Homer, his finger wedged at the page where he had stopped reading.

  I stepped away from the door. “When?”

  “After we go to the baseball game.” He looked at me.

  “No one’s said anything to me about you leaving,” I said, trying to answer truthfully the question in his eyes. “How’s the book?”

  “Achilles’s friend, Patro—Patro—”

  “Patroclus.”

  “Patroclus dressed up like Achilles and Hector killed him. Now Achilles is mad.”

  “Patroclus was his best friend,” I said. “Do you want to live with your grandmother?”

  He feigned indifference. “Can I take the book?”

  “Sure.”

  Then he said, “Will you come to see me?”

  “You know I will.”

  “Henry?” It was Elena. “Is that you?”

  I winked at Angelito. “Busted.” I headed back to the kitchen, where I found Vicky stirring a fragrant stew and Elena at the sink washing salad greens. “Hi,” I said, kissing her cheek. “I’m sorry I was asleep when you arrived.”

  She dried her hands and hugged me. “You still look tired. How do you feel?”

  “Better,” I said. “Hi, Vicky, that smells great.”