The Last Karankawas(13)

RED ZONE


Mercedes

First rule of the ballpark, at least for girls like Mercedes: Don’t sit with fans in the bleachers. Don’t crowd along the baseline fences. Don’t mix with the kids running in ball caps and too-big gloves. Look at her there. From where she stands in the entrance, she sees that for this playoff game, the Brownsville Vaqueros versus the Corpus Christi Sharks, people have brought lawn chairs and towels to sit even in the scraggly grass beyond the park. Perfect spots for catching homers, or for heckling the visiting outfielders. Her father taught her this, in another country, so close to Brownsville that on some evenings she can smell the smoke from their fires. So close that from the uppermost bleachers she can see buildings in the city where, on his good days, her father took her and her baby sister shopping. She doesn’t ever sit there—believe that.

Instead she climbs to the first row of right field bleachers, directly behind the home dugout. See how the girls like her grin, greet her with little hugs? Their seats are behind the players, a good view of the field, but she’s been told (by Jessica, whose fiancé is the veteran shortstop and who’s been here the longest) that the boys like it that way. De veras, the girls sit here because the boys can’t see them. They told them so, their boys, and they have obeyed. They sit in these spots so the boys can’t shoot them quick glances from the dugout, where they sprawl on benches or lean on railings, spitting into paper cups streams of dip juice or sunflower seeds chewed to pulp. Can’t get a glimpse of the girls when they’re at the plate, either, adjusting their grip, digging in once, twice, trying to follow and then disrupt the path of the ball. At least most of them can’t.

Mercedes’s guy, though—he can see her. He’s on the mound now with that ball in his glove, glove lifted to his lips, scanning the plate and the bleachers beyond. She loves him, but he brings her a whole different set of worries.

Please rise for the national anthem. She loves this moment, too, when the show starts and the lights don’t dim but brighten. Two flags ripple in the evening breeze—warm still because this is the Valley—and they stand as one, together. Even she, mojada that she is. Yes, she is. She will say it. Every game she sings the words, sweeter to her because they are stolen.

Play ball.

The team spreads into their defense positions, as choreographed as the tentacles of a firework. Jessica watches Andrew M. warming up in the hot corner. Bee-short-for-Beatrice keeps her eyes on Valentín in left field. Anita, José at catcher. Even their gazes belong to these boys.

Mercedes’s boy takes off his Vaqueros cap and wipes his brow, settles it back over the sweaty pile of dark hair. Sweaty from the bullpen since this is his start for the night. Which means he is ready. He buries the ball in his glove, and though she can’t see it, she knows he spins it in his hand to get the feel of the seams, the bumps and the white space in between speaking to him like braille. He leans in to check the signs José flashes. Straightens, side-eyes the empty bases out of habit.

He will see her if he looks this way, but he won’t. He has told her a thousand times since they were kids. Nah, I don’t even notice y’all there. Just don’t sit behind home plate. Red zone. Never sit in the red zone. So she doesn’t. Like I said, homegirl knows her place. I ought to know, she’s me.



* * *



I met Luis eight years ago, when he and I were both ballplayers, before he became an independent league pitcher and I his girl in the bleachers behind the dugout. Not long after I’d crossed.

Some people cross on jet skis now, tú sabes? In broad daylight. I’ve seen them. The last time I was in Mission visiting my aunt Flor, we took my cousins to Anzalduas Park on a bright blue Saturday, and I watched them climb off the back of the machine and step onto Texas soil that looked just like the Mexico across the water, scrambling behind scrawny mesquites we knew from home. The migra agents—in their olive green and khaki, their mirrored sunglasses—barked into radios and ran after a few who disappeared into the brush. The rest, the mass of them, gave themselves up by choice. They raised their hands high over their heads and walked straight at the agents, babies bound to their chests, children beside them. Things are bad in Honduras, in Guatemala, I know. But I couldn’t for the life of me, for the freedom I’ve taken, understand the urge to come so far and cross so many fences and, finally, cross the last one—which is just a fence of dirty water—only to see the men who want to send you back to all that and run straight at them, fall to your knees before them. Let’s go back to Tía, I said and led my cousins away, but not before I looked in the eyes of a woman who was trying to hug a border patrol agent and I spit on the ground in front of her.

No, not by jet ski, not me. Same place: near Anzalduas Park, outside Reynosa, across Mission. I was newly twelve, and it was night. It had rained in recent days, so the river was running high and fast. Some crossers, my mother and sister among them, crouched low in plastic rafts patched by duct tape and barely inflated enough to hold them up. The rest, like me, stripped down and put our things in garbage bags looped about our necks and swam. The coyotes hissed at us to hurry up, to not breathe or splash so fucking loud and putamadre, shut that baby up.

When we reached America, crawling up through the mud and tree roots and clumps of grass, I remember bodies drifting in the current, or lying still and swollen with the river inside them. Some of the others became bodies, too—live ones, weeping silently, vibrating with sorrow. Not me, though, because none of them were me or mine.