“What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”
—C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary
When I was twelve, my friends and I almost got arrested—shot, actually, though I didn’t realize that until afterward—trying to stick up an ATM. That is, we were trying to film a stickup, decked out in cowboy hats and sweaty ski masks despite the scorching desert heat, and one of us hadn’t been able to find his squirt gun, so he’d brought a hoe. But somehow, the cops who happened to be passing missed the movie camera we’d filched from Enrico’s dad’s stuff, mistook our blue plastic pistols for the real thing, decided the ATM might have thought we were serious, and got us all facedown on the pavement. They actually handcuffed Amir, kicked halfheartedly at my ribs a couple times, confiscated the camera (which really could have gotten Enrico killed, if his father had ever sobered up enough to notice), and booted us out of the lot. Only after the cops had peeled out and left us sullen and bruised on the empty San Bernardino street did Enrico pull a pistol from his sock, and only after he shot it in the air did I realize it was not only real but loaded.
“Where the fuck did you get that?” I asked.
“Same place I got the camera, pendejo, where do you think?”
All of which is only to say I kind of liked Blue Shirt. I mean, I liked them both, but everyone liked Frankie Violet. How could you not?
Blue Shirt, though, he was just a trier, trust fund or no, like Enrico, like most of the guys I knew when I was a kid, and San Bernardino was just poor, not murderous, or not as murderous as now anyway. He spent his life sticking his face into places he’d been told, in no uncertain terms, that it was not welcome and would never belong. He might even have been a little stupid, but only ambition-stupid. And he sure as hell didn’t deserve what he got, no matter what you think that was, which version you believe.
And the thing is, I was there. I saw what I saw. And no one—not Frankie Violet, and not Blue Shirt, either—deserves that.
I never even met the guy until the day of his game. Match—sorry, dude. Fixture—how’s that?
When the call came in offering me the gig—my usual, running sound and doing PA announcing at the Fault—I said sure without a second thought. Barely even blinked at it. Some Indian trust-fund kid’s start-up professional cricket league in the middle of July in the drought-strangled heart of the postindustrial wasteland in the dead center of the thousand-square-mile sprawl that is the Inland Empire? To be presented in a minor-league baseball stadium that has never once attracted one thousand people to any single event, ever, not even to Blow Up Your Boss’s Mercedes Night?
Well, as long as Indian Trust Fund was paying me. I couldn’t exactly afford to be picky. I’d long since chosen my pieced-together, contract-work life, and I liked it. And hell, for all I knew, trust-funded professional cricket was exactly what the good people of San Bernardino County—whoever they are, whichever shady bunkers they find to hide in on mid-July Wednesday nights—craved most. I’d seen and done sound and public address for far stranger nights. The Westside Bloomas vs. Ghosttown Crips vs. Oriental Lazy Boys jalapeño fry and eat-off, say. You think I’m kidding?
So I did my homework, learned my stumps from my leg byes, spent some quality time listening to different commentators from all over the British Empire pronounce the word googly. I discovered that Twenty20, the variant that Blue Shirt (though I didn’t call him that, then; hadn’t met him yet, hadn’t seen the shirt) proposed to have his players play, was the arena football of cricket, a bastardized, sped-up, thundering-hits-and-bouncing-breasts-and-pom-poms spectacle for the impatient or the philistine. All of which I translated to mean: cricket for people who had to work for a living and could spare or afford only a couple hours for entertainment, ever. And that made me think maybe Blue Shirt was onto something, after all.
I didn’t actually meet him until ninety minutes before the match, in the parking lot of the Fault, our local pre-abandoned cavern of a minor-league stadium. The joke went that in lieu of expensive retrofitting, the Fault’s builders had simply had the cracks in the façade and paving pre-installed. In reality, I think the heat had probably done it, baking down like the earth’s convection currents in reverse, forcing hot air through cracks in the cheap concrete and fake stone into the sand underneath, spiderwebbing the place in preparation for its inevitable implosion on the day the big one finally hits. The only silver lining being that there probably wouldn’t be many people in it at the time.
Other than my own dust- and sand-laminated Buick, I counted exactly four other vehicles in the lot when I got there. The Porsche, of course, belonged to Blue Shirt, and he’d parked it in one of the luxury VIP spaces up by the front gate, the ones with the stretched canvas sunshades on tent poles. The other three were clustered, grill to grill to grill, in the far northeast corner, like wolves around a kill, and I wasn’t happy to see them there. They’d all been black or maybe silver before the desert got them. Two were SUVs. A couple of the guys skulking around them were the brooding, scary-ass, pants-dragging teens you’d see on CSI: San Bernardino, if you can even imagine the existence of such a show, or anyone to watch it. The others were ropy, balding car-mechanic types, the only fat on them around their jowls, which made them look like boxers. As in the dogs, not the athletes. Theirs were the eyes you really didn’t want to meet. They were all smoking, barely even talking to one another, just leaning against the cars with their rib cages rattling to the racket pumping out of their overloaded car speakers.
I had a sudden and completely misplaced burst of affection for them, right then. As if they were all just kids playing drug deal, or whatever they’d planned, in what they’d reasonably assumed would be the empty lot of the Fault tonight. Filming a fake robbery of an ATM, maybe, before heading home to whatever was left of their families. None of them so much as glanced Blue Shirt’s way, and I saw only one with a gun in his hand. So the prospects for a peaceful night really did seem comparatively promising, at that point.
Blue Shirt was standing at the front of the lot, waving me forward by windmilling both arms, directing me toward the other VIP spaces. I headed that way but parked on the other side of the curbed barrier, in one of the paying-customer slots. I knew my place, even if Blue Shirt didn’t. He stopped windmilling, hopped anxiously over the curb toward me, and I had just enough time before he reached me to get a good look at that shirt.
You know Chinese movies, where #1 Wife steps out from behind a lacquer screen in her robe, and you have to blink, think maybe there’s a fire somewhere and it’s tinted the air with California wildfire light, because nothing natural has ever been that red? This was the blue equivalent. Blue like people who’ve never been out from under the smog have been told the sky should be. Like the color El Mirage Lake must have been before it became El Mirage Lakebed. Like the eyes on the woman who will never even turn toward you long enough to let you see them.
True, the picture of the giant, grape Popsicle stamped over the heart, with the words REAL KUCHI ICE! in eye-popping purple thread underneath, spoiled the effect a bit. But still.
That blue.
“Mr. Sifuentes, thank you for coming,” he said as I eased out of what passed for my Buick’s air-conditioning into the heat, in his musical, Indian singsong.
“Please, right away, the players need the keys to the locker room area, and we need to open the restrooms. The crowds will be here soon.”
I felt my tired, sun-dried, craggy face crack a little. Optimistic blue bugger, he was. “Keys,” I said. “They didn’t give you keys?”
“Who? Mr. Sifuentes, we have little time, and we have to—”
My face cracked a little wider. “Uh-huh. Listen. Mr….?”
That actually stopped—or, really, slowed—him, just for a second. Then he grinned. That’s when I really started to like him. “You couldn’t pronounce it,” he told me. “You can call me…Sachin.”
“As in Tendulkar?”
That was when he probably decided he liked me. Certainly, I’d surprised him. For a second I thought he was going to leap into my arms. “You know Tendulkar? You are a rare American indeed.”
“I skimmed the Wikipedia page.”
His grin barely wavered. “Well. Thank you for doing that, at any rate. You are a most professional man.”
“Can I call you Blue? Or Blue Shirt?”
He glanced down at himself, then up again. His grin went positively radiant. “It is a very blue shirt. Now come. The fans are waiting to get in.”
It took me a second to realize he meant the guys in the northeast corner of the lot. I couldn’t help it, I burst out laughing. That felt good, actually. It had been awhile.
“So, my new Blue friend. I’m thinking you didn’t actually meet the distinguished owners of this establishment”—I gestured, Vanna White–style, at the stadium—“when you chose it for your opening-day festivities.”
Blue Shirt just looked impatient. He kept looking not at the Fault or me but out of the lot, down the empty, dusty road. Maybe he was watching the sunset. On evenings like that one, when the wind’s just kicking up and the particulates are flying, the colors can take your breath away. If the particulates don’t.
“They took my payment over the phone,” he murmured.
“Yeah. I’ll bet they did.” I’d met the guys who owned this place, once. They really had come to town once. Didn’t stay for a game or anything. “Did they tell you I would have keys?”
That registered. His attention came back to me. He clutched his leather messenger bag—so new, I could smell it—against his chest, as though I’d just tried to rip it from him. And in his eyes, I saw something I thought I recognized. I’d seen that expression on kids around here, ballplayers, mostly: the ones who’d been to college, who’d just started to comprehend where they were, what that meant, and still couldn’t quite believe anything in their lives could ever have landed them here.
“They said…” he started. “They seemed to suggest that you would have…that your grounds crew and security team…”
“My grounds crew and security team. Uh-huh.” My smirk wasn’t for Blue Shirt, but he probably read it that way. I wiped the look off my face, patted his arm. “Don’t worry,” I told him, and started off around back toward the grounds-crew entrance with its broken deadbolt. “I’ll have at least one set of gates open in a sec.”
“What about the restrooms?” he called.
I didn’t even stop, just waved. “That you might want to worry about.”
Wind gusted past. Barely even a breeze, by Inland Empire standards. The parking signs hardly even rattled as they shook.
By the time I’d reached the walkway around the stadium, another couple cars had caravanned into the lot. Instead of continuing forward, though, they peeled off toward the northwest corner. Away from the fun patrol skulking in the eastern quadrant. Might want to worry about that, too, I thought. But I didn’t see any point in saying anything.
Then a real wind swelled out of the sand like a rogue wave and flung itself across the lot. Flagpoles juddered in their postholes, chassis clung to their wheel wells, and in the northeast corner, one of the bald guys tossed his cigarette into the air like an offering, and the wind grabbed it and spirited it off down the desert.
Blue Shirt’s players must have all carpooled or convoyed together, because by the time I’d slipped it in the unlocked door and popped the ruined, rusted padlock the grounds crew always left on the even rustier FAULT FAMILY FUN ZONE ENTRANCE gate for show, there they were, maybe two dozen strong. Nearly all were brown, clad in white or khaki pants that were probably meant to match, yellow or blue polos that did, 99-cent-store beach thongs, and athletic socks. They milled together around Blue Shirt’s Porsche, and Blue Shirt was calling them each by name, clapping them on the back, practically chortling as he checked them off on a list, like the world’s happiest camp counselor. The San Bernardino natives in the group were easy enough to pick out; they were the ones keeping their shoulders hunched in anticipation of the next wind, and also glancing—casually, carefully, and only occasionally—toward the northeast or northwest corner whenever Blue Shirt got too loud.
To my surprise, I recognized a few of the faces. One long, stringy kid, Wasim, a community college student, worked weekends as a concessionaire at the Fault and sometimes came up to the booth to smoke with me after the baseball games. He’d make me blast the Katy Perry “Last Friday Night” song again and again, to the empty stadium, and then just sit there grinning and grooving and smoking. “I could never play this at home,” he’d tell me.
When I pointed out that he was a big boy now and lived alone and could play whatever racy song he wanted, he’d shrug and stare out past the center-field fence into the vacant lots, the crammed-together subdivision roofs, and empty strip malls stacked out there in the desert like abandoned shipping containers. “It’s still my home.”
Now, when he saw me watching him, he threw his arms out, as though modeling his kit. He had big, foamy shin pads strapped to the front of his spindly legs, and took strides as though he strode often in those things.
“Mr. Sifuentes,” he called.
“Wasim.”
“We can have ménage à trois!” Now he was singing the song.
“Okay, dude. Maybe next Friday night.” I pushed the gate open, and in they all came.
Wasim was the youngest guy there, by a good ten years. More than a couple of the Blue Shirts players were bald. I recognized the lone gringo, a fireman, from the night the 7-Eleven at the end of my block got torched and the whole neighborhood came out and stood around to watch it go. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, two of the players on Team Yellow turned out to be women, one black-haired, one gray-and-black, both dark and long. Possibly a mother and daughter. Both studiously ignored Wasim, who kept hopping back and forth in his shin pads in their path like one of those exotic birds doing its mating dance.
Blue Shirt came in last, herding everyone else forward, no longer chortling as he consulted some sort of personal checklist on a clipboard he’d drawn from a custom flap in that new-skin leather bag.
“Fine-looking bunch of athletes, Blue,” I told him. “Thoroughbreds. Going to be StubHub or bust to get into Inland Empire Pro Cricket.”
“America’s Rockin’ Professional Cricket,” he murmured distractedly. “Please use the correct name at all times, and especially to the press, for branding purposes. It is an expectation of all who work for me, and of America’s Rockin’ Professional Cricket.”
So many things I could have had fun with there, I hardly knew where to start. Press? Branding? The fact that I was a one-night contract hire and didn’t work for him or America’s Rockin’ Professional Cricket? I was still mulling my options when the next gust hit; this one brought along a six-foot-long tree branch it had scooped up somewhere, which it smashed against the stadium not fifteen feet over our heads as it roared by. Blue Shirt flinched and ducked, long after either would have done any good.
“That is a very nasty wind,” he said.
I nodded. “In this county, even our natural forces do drive-bys.”
“That is not funny, Mr. Sifuentes. It is disrespectful. And you are behind schedule.”
“I…” The laughter rose in me like one of those winds, but he paid absolutely no mind.
“The crowds will be here soon. The festivities must be in full swing. Please get to your booth and get the music playing and make sure the press box is prepared for the reporters I have invited.” Then he did it again, glanced up from his clipboard and down the road toward the buzzing towers and wires of the power plant, as though he expected that place to sizzle him up some paying customers. Or maybe he was praying.
Instead of laughing, I patted him on the shoulder. “No worries, Blue. Might take a bit. Since we don’t have keys, I’ll probably have to climb up to the booth.”
Which, of course, wasn’t hard. The Fault has only one tier of sand-colored bleachers wrapping all the way around from foul pole to foul pole, and the “press box”—a bunch of boards nailed together and perched precariously at the lip of the roof like a treehouse—leans out over the top row. Plus, in the Cactus Club Elite section behind home plate, the bleachers have backs, giving even a fifty-something like me a relatively stable foothold from which to jump that extra foot or so, grab the rail, and pull myself over the edge onto the folding table wedged so tightly into the booth that I sometimes think the booth was built around it. Once in, I fired up the stereo, thumbed through the single drawer of CDs I’d left atop the mixing board, decided Blue Shirt had said he wanted “rockin’,” cued “Long Live Rock,” and pushed the volume all the way up to 7, which is as far as it would go before the mounted speakers started shaking out of their cracked casings. There was a squeal, a spasm of sound, then silence, and then drums rumbled over the infield, which really did have grass in it, even if it was roughly the same color as the basepath dirt.
When I next looked down there, I saw Blue Shirt, plus Wasim and the fireman and most of the other players, milling around just beyond where second base generally got affixed, unrolling a giant artificial turf mat. For the between-innings bikini/sunbathing contest, maybe? I wondered how that thing had got here, because it sure hadn’t hitched a ride in Blue Shirt’s Porsche. There were long wooden tent-peg things scattered at both ends, and the fireman had a stake hammer in his hands. He was brandishing it, playfully, at Wasim, and Wasim was shimmying to the music, screaming along, laughing. For that moment, in that purple-orange, end-of-evening smoglight, they looked like children, all of them, on some Habitat for Humanity junket in Haiti or somewhere. And it was the thought of Haiti, and by extension the West Indies, that finally triggered my understanding: That mat was the pitch. Or maybe the “square”—Wikipedia hadn’t been quite consistent on the name for it. But that was where the players would bat. Even from my prime vantage point, in this tiny stadium, it seemed a long way from the fans.
The fans. Smiling to myself, but not without a twinge of sadness on Blue Shirt’s behalf, I glanced around the stadium, taking in the row upon row upon row of dusty, empty seats.
I cued up a few more songs, then clambered back out of the booth and down to the field to see if I could help. But Blue Shirt was already striding past me down the tunnel out of the grounds, cellphone at his ear. Given the limits on the Fault’s speaker system, I heard him fine as he went by.
“I had been worried,” he was saying, but he was nodding, grinning, practically hopping, Wasim-style. “I’m glad you found him. I’m coming out to meet you.”
Not that I was invited, and there was definitely still work going on, stumps being erected out in the middle of the field. But Blue Shirt fascinated me. I had visions of his entire extended family showing up, possibly toting coolers full of chutney and baskets of samosas for the rest of us, maybe some hand drums and horns to give the place that charged atmosphere I’d seen in YouTube clips from Eden Gardens and VCA Stadium, the baked, perpetually crumbling cricket palaces where the real India Blue went to war with their hated Pakistani neighbors or their returning British cultural overlords.
What I saw, instead, was a gray, dented panel van rattling into the lot, honking obliviously as it passed between the clustered packs of not-cricket-fans at the far corners. Those packs, I realized, had swelled considerably, their members huddling more tightly together, eyeing one another across the expanse of pavement, which suddenly seemed way too small. Maybe after the cricket match, I thought, we could all sneak to the edge of the tunnel, stay in the shadows, and take in some more traditional local entertainment: San Bernardino’s Rockin’ Professional Gang War.
Rattling, swaying on its axles as though doing a hula dance, the van rolled through the lot. Behind and above it, the sky had gone wild, all those particulates flaring white and green and crimson and orange, as though the sun hadn’t set but burst, like a firecracker Blue Shirt had ordered up special. The driver had to have seen the curb dividing the general-admission spaces from the VIP section, but he never even slowed down. The van bumped up on the curb, over the divider, and shuddered to a stop, still swaying. The motor hadn’t even shut down when the side panel door flew open, and out spilled Frankie Violet.
A spattering of beer cans and three decidedly beautiful women—pulling down sweaters and straightening the barely-there blue skirts of their disheveled cheerleader uniforms—climbed out right behind him. Two of the women were barefoot. All of them were laughing.
I took in all of that, of course. But my eyes went right back to Frankie. Everyone’s did, the women included. You just couldn’t help it. Blue almost hopped right out of that shirt, nodded like a bobblehead, dropped the clipboard at his feet, and stuck out his hand. “Mr. Violet, it is so good to meet you, thank you for coming.”
And Frankie—to his credit, and I will never forget this—removed his arm from the nearest woman’s waist (though gently, and with a visible squeeze that somehow seemed more affectionate, or maybe just grateful, than I would have expected), smoothed his cricket whites on his chest and his waist, and stood up straight. He was towering, his skin midnight dark but his eyes bright, his shoulders swelling beneath his shirt like dunes in moonlight. He didn’t just shake Blue Shirt’s hand, he also patted it with his other hand.
“Thank YOU, boss,” he said, in his deep, Caribbean baritone. Reaching back into the van, he withdrew one of those floppy, red West Indian sun hats only a cricketer would ever put on his head. He donned it, straightened that, too, to the extent that you can straighten something with no shape. Then he grinned. “Where’s my team? Am I yellow or blue tonight?”
By the time Blue Shirt had drawn a wrapped and crisply folded blue polo out of that bag of his, Frankie was already headed for the Fault. When Blue Shirt tossed him the blue shirt, Frankie caught it, and he hardly swayed at all, as far as I could see. Which meant he probably hadn’t emptied all the cans that had clattered out of the van in his wake, at least not by himself.
Down the tunnel he went, bobbing and dipping to Survivor thudding from the speakers. “Blue team, come to Frankie!” his voice echoed, and he vanished onto the field.
“He was—he could have been—one of the greatest cricketers of the new century,” Blue Shirt was gushing. “A Viv Richards for our time.”
“Well, that is saying something,” I said. Just to goose him.
“Mr. Sifuentes,” Blue Shirt said and sighed. “Before this night is over, you will say to me, ‘Thank you, Mr. Blue. Thank you for the opportunity to witness Frankie Violet batting.’ ”
“Mr. Blue. I guess that name’s going to stick.”
He was gesturing in eight directions at once, issuing instructions to the van driver and the cheerleaders, gesturing toward the field. But he took the time to turn my way once more. That’s another smile I won’t forget.
“I quite like it,” he said.
“Frankie Violet. He’s really that good?”
“If he had not his substance issues…if he had stopped clowning on the field and pantsing teammates and demanding ridiculous contracts and making a mockery of the game…and especially if he had picked different English and Australian players to have sledging matches with and then accuse of racism…”
“They threw him out?”
“In cricket, one is not thrown out. One is simply not selected. And then one is too old. But he was a wonderful talent—a wasted talent—and perfect for America’s Rockin’ Professional Cricket. Plus, he lives in the area, and contrary to his reputation, he was willing to come be our marquee attraction for surprisingly low appearance fees. Of course, he has not played professional cricket anywhere in at least ten years…”
“Did his contract call for free beer and cheerleaders?”
“I would have provided that anyway.”
I laughed. “Right. This is rockin’ professional cricket.”
“Make fun all you like. But mark my words. By the end of this night, you will thank me. And so will all our fans. They will tell their friends and family, and bring them to next week’s match. Now back to your booth. Here are the elevens for both teams. Please look over the lineup list and be sure you can pronounce all names correctly. Do this now. America’s Rockin’ Professional Cricket always, always starts on time.” Off he hustled, leaving me with the women.
Up close, the cheer team members were older than I’d first thought. Old enough, in fact, to look a little ridiculous crammed into their uniforms, their stomachs slipping out under the bottoms of the sweaters and their post-motherhood breasts riding low. They were eying one another, now, smiling some, a little wistful, a little bashful, as though at the end of a bachelorette party.
I actually knew one: Mathilde. Mother of three. Long-time librarian at the Feldheym before the budget apocalypse. In her ninth or tenth year of an attempted dual MBA and M.A. in composition at CSUSB. I realized I hadn’t seen her around in a while, had no idea what she was doing to survive.
“You look beautiful,” I told her, and meant it.
“Callate, Sifuentes,” she said, “Puto.” Then she kissed me on the cheek.
“How’d you wind up with this gig?” I asked.
In a night of memorable smiles, hers barely registered at the time. It was too much like I suspected my own looked. Too skeptical, or maybe just tired. “Same as you, Sifuentes.” That was no answer at all, of course, and all the answer I needed.
We’d just turned for the stadium when shouting erupted from both corners of the lot. The ladies, wisely, never looked back, just hustled straight into the Fault. But I looked.
The fact that those guys were shouting at one another…who cared? But I didn’t like all the metallic things waving around. All those knives and gun muzzles not quite aimed anywhere, mostly pointed down, but moving in their owners’ hands, straining and snuffling at the ground like the noses on wolfhounds. I liked the way the cars had multiplied even less.
What the fuck are they even doing? Contesting territory? Holding a prom?
One guy from each corner broke loose from his respective pack, started sauntering across the asphalt. Then someone’s gun actually went off. Probably in the air. At least, I didn’t see anyone go down. But I didn’t hang around long enough to make sure. When I hit the tunnel, the wind came in after me, nipping at my heels, shoving at my back. By the time I got up in my booth, I felt like a treed raccoon.
Lights, I realized. No one had turned on the lights. I did that now, and after a while a couple bulbs in the two barely sufficient towers over first and third base buzzed and spat. In an hour or so, a few of them might actually start glowing some.
I cued “Friday Night” for Wasim, kept my eyes on the field, risked edging the volume just a little higher. If we couldn’t hear the gunfire, it wasn’t actually happening, right? Hide-and-seek logic. I glanced down, saw Frankie Violet chatting up the younger dark-haired woman and paying no attention to Blue Shirt, who was yammering away to his back. The fireman was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the wicket, watching the sky darken. Near home plate, Mathilde and her team were picking pom-poms from a ripped canvas bin Blue must have scavenged from some local high school. I watched Mathilde give hers a rueful little shake, as though checking fruit for freshness. She glanced up at me. That’s when the loneliness hit, the way it does. Hard as a San Bernardino wind, and only a little less fleeting. Thank God.
To my amazement, a few actual fans did show. Few, as in less than twenty. But more than zero. If they were Blue Shirt’s friends or family, he didn’t speak to or acknowledge them. But he knew they were there; once they’d come in, he hopped even higher as he skittered about, checked the stumps, talked to Frankie’s back, called the captains of the yellow and blue teams in for a coin toss. As if conjured by the slow-warming lights, an umpire appeared, lumbering out of the tunnel, an older black man in a spotless white suit complete with bow tie and a white, broad-brimmed boater with a red carnation in the band. He didn’t acknowledge the players or Blue. This guy was a performer, savoring his entrance whether anyone was there to see it or not. Head just slightly down, he ambled straight out to his station behind the nearer set of stumps. Blue saw him, waved once, received no acknowledgment, and seemed delighted by that. He signaled me to cut the music. True to his word, we started right on time.
Ten minutes into the match, the yellow batting side had already lost three wickets. Frankie Violet, in a borrowed blue shirt that barely stretched over his shoulders, kept circling the field. He gave one poor El Salvadoran guy a wedgie, darted between the stumps and the wicket-keeper to snag a bowled ball that had swung way wide, laid down at what I believe cricketers call silly point—because it’s silly to get positioned there, so close to the batsman, where if your hands are too slow you get a ball in your face—and moved his feet in a slow-motion circle, as though they were ducks at a shooting gallery. The batsman promptly skied a pop-up straight into the air, and it practically landed in Frankie’s lap as he took it for an out. In between bowls—and sometimes in the middle of bowls—he would spin from wherever he was and wave and wink at the cheerleaders, who mostly stood near the sprinkling of fans and waited for someone to cue them to chant something.
A little later, he was hanging out by the third-base fence, goofing with those same fans, when the whole blue team in the field behind him burst into simultaneous cries of “Heads!” Frankie barely seemed to turn, just glanced back, glided five or six feet to his right, and snagged an actual drive he hadn’t even seen get hit in his giant palm, as though plucking a plum.
Blue Shirt came up and joined me in the booth. Wasim had just gone in to bat, and he actually poked a few shots along the ground, looking almost like someone who’d played this game before, and then he up and smacked a ball straight out toward center field, right between the deep fielders, and it rolled all the way to the fence.
“Four,” I said into the stadium mic, and clapped. The sound of my voice startled a few of the fans into actually looking at the field for a second, and then they clapped, too. That triggered the cheerleaders, who dutifully bobbed up and down and yelled something indistinguishable, at least to me.
“I get that right, Blue?” I asked.
“Play him a song, play him a song,” Blue prodded, so I played Wasim some Katy. In the middle of the mat, Wasim raised his bat above his head and swiveled his hips around.
Blue Shirt groaned. “That is enough. Stop.”
I killed Katy. Had to give it to the Caribbean ump, though. That guy never so much as moved, just stood there like a figure in a cricket pinball game. Didn’t even look up.
“He’s good,” I said.
“Wasim is not good.”
“I meant the ump.”
“Mr. Seagull? Yes. But sadly, I suspect he will never umpire for America’s Rockin’ Professional Cricket again.” Abruptly, and only for a moment, Blue Shirt dropped his clipboard on my table and put his head in his hands. “They’re not even competent. And where are the reporters? I was promised the reporters would come. They said it would be a ‘rare, positive story for the whole region.’ A positive story.”
I couldn’t help it, and anyway, I was trying to cheer him up. I gestured over the roof of the stadium at the empty road. “Maybe they got stuck in traffic.”
“Mr. Sifuentes, sometimes I think you are not a nice man.”
This time, the gunshot startled us both and stopped everybody on the field right where they were. It echoed through the grounds as though it had gone off in the tunnel down there. Which it very well might have.
“Should somebody call the police?” Blue Shirt whispered, as though whoever was shooting might hear him. Given the cavernous emptiness of the Fault, that wasn’t an entirely ridiculous notion.
“Did that before I even pulled into the lot,” I told him. “If the strike rate slows down and Team Yellow stops dropping wickets, it’s possible you’ll see cops before the match ends.”
“Strike rate is for batters, not bowlers,” And with that, he sagged to the table, lowering his chin to his brilliant blue collar. “This is a disaster.”
“It’s a beginning,” I said. I even patted his back, because I really am a nice man, most of the time. Try to be. And what Blue Shirt was trying—which would never, ever work, not here, probably not on this continent—made him a man after my own heart. Even though I’d long since stopped trying anything, much.
And then—and this is hard to explain, and it lasted for only maybe fifteen minutes—the game on the field caught me. When a bowler bowls a set of overs, cricket people call that a spell. That’s as good a word for that next quarter-hour as any.
Team Yellow had lost their fourth wicket, having scored all of eighteen runs to that point. That brought in the fireman to bat with Wasim. After I announced him, he just stood in front of his stumps, leaning one way, then the other, looking about as stable and permanent as a just-planted sapling in a San Bernardino wind. He blocked the first few balls hurled at him back down the wicket for no runs. On the last ball of his first over, he abruptly dropped into his hips, and his body seemed to flow over itself as though it had gone boneless, become current sweeping his bat forward, and the ball exploded off it to his left and past everyone along the ground for a four.
Over by the cheerleaders, Frankie Violet actually turned his head. He did it at the sound of ball on willow, he didn’t even watch where it went. He just looked at the fireman.
With his next swing, the fireman stroked the ball between two fielders—the slips—and he and Wasim ran out three more runs. Beside me, Blue Shirt lifted his head. Out by the stumps, the umpire, Mr. Seagull…well, he didn’t nod approval or anything. But he straightened his hat.
After that, we were all of us—even the cheerleaders, who I was pretty sure knew even less about cricket than I did—leaning forward. Even the players, as they played.
It’s funny how little you have to know about a thing to know it’s being done well. In this case, what I noticed was the stillness of the fireman’s bat, the flow of his just-going-flabby, middle-aged body as he glided back on his heels, swept forward, seeming more in charge of the moments passing than most of us will ever get to feel about any moments we’re in.
Frankie Violet had left his perch by the cheerleaders, and now he was yelling things at his team’s bowler, taking up a position. Clapping his hands. The bowler bowled, and the fireman cut the ball 180 degrees away from Frankie, where it rolled all the way to the outfield wall. “Four!” I yelled, and Frankie clapped his hands at the fireman, howled with laughter, poked the hat off another one of his players, and dumped his own sunhat in the grass as he moved in toward the stumps. He settled maybe fifteen yards off the shoulder of the older of the two Pakistani women. The mom. He said something to her. In the bleachers, the fans were actually clapping and yelling, or I would have heard him clearly. But I’m pretty sure he told her to duck. Then he yelled and pointed at the bowler. Instructing. Aiming with a straight arm, like a golfer lining up a putt.
“There?” the bowler yelled back, gesturing toward a spot outside the fireman’s far stump. The off stump?
“Just there,” Frankie called, and he did a little swooning, sweeping dance-step right in place, and held up his hands. “Next time you swing, Boss. No matter what you do. It’s coming right here.”
Overhead, right as the bowler started the run-up for his next toss, one of the lights spasmed, and a burst of brightness flooded the field. That was the first moment I knew there really were people in the tunnel. I saw their silhouettes—three of them, weirdly long, like walking palm trees, the one out front also weirdly wide, almost winged—and then the fireman smacked another four, this time over his own shoulder, once again as far from Frankie Violet as it was possible for him to hit.
“No, no!” Frankie yelled to the bowler, his voice clear, now, and he was grinning as he trotted past the Pakistani woman, gave her a stroke on the back as though to reassure her, but closer to her ass than I suspected she was comfortable with. I have no idea what he said to her this time. I know it made her laugh. “Give the ball to me. Come on.” As he reached the mat, he snaked out a pointy finger, and I realized he was about to flick Mr. Seagull’s hat. I thought that might be a bad idea. So did he, apparently, because he didn’t do it.
Down near home plate, the three figures emerged from the tunnel. The lights that had spasmed before caught, now, like a lit fire in a grate, and so at least one square of dust-colored grass and a corner of the stands stayed lit. But the three figures moved away from that, away from the other eight or so fans, and took up seats way down in the shadows along the left-field line. The wide one, who walked in front, may or may not actually have been wide. It was hard to tell under his fur coat. But the skin of his neck and cheek—which was all I could really see between the collar of that coat and the giant, circular sunglasses over his eyes—was the same dusky brown as Blue Shirt’s. I first mistook the glinting, curving gold necklace—worn out, dangling down the front of that coat—for an American dollar sign. But it was actually a snake.
“Who is he kidding?” I muttered.
“He cannot do that,” Blue Shirt was saying, but he wasn’t talking about the newcomers, and indeed seemed not even to have noticed them. I glanced where he did and saw Frankie Violet spinning the cricket ball on the tip of his long index finger as though it were a basketball, right in front of Mr. Seagull’s impassive face.
“Change bowlers mid-over, you mean?”
“Look at him.” Blue Shirt clapped. Only then did I realize he was expressing delight, not approbation. “He is a wonderful showman. An ideal investment for America’s Rockin’ Professional Cricket.”
“Okay, now,” Frankie Violet was all but singing, waving the ball like a palm nut, swiveling his hips. “Now you see it…” He took six, seven, eight exaggerated steps backward off the edge of the wicket into the grass and held the ball aloft again for the nonexistent crowd.
Had he behaved like this during test matches, I wondered? When he’d played for the West Indies? Was this why he was no longer welcome? Obviously, there had to have been more to it than that, no matter how members-only, white-trousered, colonialist-gentleman cricket’s code of conduct remained (if it did), no matter how restrictive and rigid its governing bodies. I’m sure Frankie had been a right bastard to all sorts of people who deserved kinder treatment. He’d no doubt proven a shit role model. But he’d pretty much have to have shot somebody before I barred that guy from playing.
Not that anyone in a position to ask was asking me. Then or since.
Lowering the ball to his hip, crouching like a cat but never for one second ceasing to smile, Frankie rocketed forward. In his crease, the fireman seemed to withdraw under his helmet, a tortoise who has spotted the eagle. The bat settled against his leg pads, aimed downward to block whatever Frankie was about to hurl at him. Frankie reached the edge of the square, seemed to accelerate, and right as he reached the far stumps, he gave a little hop, and his hand flew up behind him like the basket of a catapult.
I never even saw the ball, just the fireman’s stumps exploding, the decapitated bale flying fifteen feet straight backward into the hands of the wicket-keeper, who looked as surprised as the fireman. In the middle of the wicket, Frankie came to a spread-legged stop, threw his arms wide and his head to the sky, and screamed, “HOWWWWZAAAAATTTT?”
The eightish fans near third base leapt to their feet—actually leapt—and started yelling and clapping. As the echoes of Frankie’s shout died, the fireman straightened, casting a single, rueful glance at the wreckage of his stumps. He started to shake his head. But he was also laughing.
And then came a moment so inconsequential—at least in the light of everything afterward, and yet I remember it almost more clearly than what came next—I’m not sure even Blue Shirt saw it. Behind Frankie, as the fans resettled and the Blue Team members who had surged in to congratulate Frankie returned, skipping and goofing and grinning, to their places, the umpire—Mr. Seagull—stirred, for what seemed the first time since he’d assumed his post. He took a single step closer to Frankie. And into the resurgent silence, I heard him say, flatly and clearly, “No ball.”
For a second, Frankie just looked blank, looked stunned, then started to whirl with his arms already gesturing in fury and disbelief. But all that stopped when he saw Mr. Seagull’s face.
The umpire was grinning, too. A ridiculously wide, white-toothed grin, as absurd on that stony face as a rose bush in the middle of the Mojave.
Even Mr. Seagull, it seemed, was no match for Frankie Violet.
“Aaaah, Boss. Good one,” Frankie said. For the second time, he reached out to poke the umpire’s hat, and for the second time, he didn’t. Laughing, he stepped off the wicket, turned, and stopped.
Froze, really. In mid-stride. He had his arms up, one leg raised, as though the ump had bewitched him, turned him to stone.
Except it wasn’t the umpire who had done it. That wasn’t where Frankie Violet was looking.
I followed his gaze down the left-field line, toward the three figures who had just recently entered. Beside me, Blue Shirt, still chuckling and clapping, glanced that way, too. Then he froze. Turned to stone.
Once, a long time ago, a woman I must have liked an awful lot got me to a Meeting, somehow. I don’t even know what sect. All I know is the way that woman sounded at the end of the service, kneeling on the floor of the tent while the canvas walls went wild in the San Bernardino wind, quietly crying, eyes aimed straight up, praying to a Jesus she really seemed to be able to see. That’s the closest I can come to the way Blue Shirt looked now.
“He came!” Blue Shirt whispered. “Mr. Sifuentes…he came!”
“Who came? Who is that, Blue?”
“The Destroyer! That was his nickname in his glory days. I asked my father to invite him. He is visiting my father from India. But I didn’t really think…he doesn’t typically approve of Twenty20, and he has never…” He gestured at the field. Maybe he meant the whole thing: the stadium, the game, the women, all of it. I have no idea.
“Destroyer, eh? So maybe I should hold out for the chance to see him bat?”
“Not that kind of destroyer. That is not where he got his name. He was at best a middling cricketer. But in his heyday…before the Indian Premier League, and Sky Television…as an administrator…as the secret power behind so many crucial world cricketing decisions…Have you ever before been in the presence of a Knight of the Realm, Mr. Sifuentes? A real one? An OBE?”
I shrugged, smiled, enjoying his reverence. “Not that I know of.”
“One thing is for certain. You have never been in the presence of one who was born almost an untouchable in Chennai. Though, of course, it was Madras, then. And it was only after the end of his brief test-match career, many, many years ago, that his true importance became known. That man was the architect of the Indian Test cricketing dynasty. And that is only the beginning.”
“Do tell.”
“I cannot tell. I do not know. As I said, he was a secret power. Only those—like my father—who had dealings with him knew of him. All I can tell you is, when he was sent by the International Cricket Council to Bangladesh, they were in total disarray, a nation of ragged amateurs. Within months, entire boards of directors disappeared and the boards were entirely repopulated. Whole leagues and local tournaments were wiped out and replaced with efficient, modern, and credible structures modeled on proven and profitable ICC systems. Today, Bangladesh has been granted full Test Nation status. Do you know what this can mean to a country like Bangladesh?”
“Think he could do it for San Bernardino?” I murmured.
That stopped Blue in mid-gush. “You are mocking, Mr. Sifuentes.”
“I’m not mocking you, Blue. I just hope he appreciates the enormity of your task, here.”
Blue waved a dismissive hand. “He is retired now, of course. A relic of another cricketing age. Nevertheless, his presence is a great honor, and his influence can not be overestimated.”
“You sound like you’re reading his Wikipedia page.”
“He’s here. The Destroyer has come to America’s Rockin’ Professional Cricket!”
He might have said something else, but by that point, he’d hopped over the table and out of the booth and was scurrying down the stadium steps. I watched him hurry past the gaggle of fans who’d been there all along. To Blue Shirt’s credit—he really was something—he slowed as he passed, touched several on the shoulders, thanked them for coming. He asked if they were having a wonderful time. But he didn’t stop. And he never quite got his head turned from the figures in the far seats.
Only when he was in their section, out past the square of light, a few rows below where they’d positioned themselves, did Blue Shirt slow. I saw him approach, nodding and waving, putting his hands together to clap but not clapping. I could no longer hear what he was saying. My first thought was that these guys were the money. And the reason I thought that was the posture Blue Shirt adopted.
Which wasn’t a loan-seeker’s, exactly. More like a vassal approaching a king. Or a supplicant. As I said.
I didn’t like it. Don’t ask me why. I think, mostly, I just liked Blue Shirt. I’m pretty sure that’s why I cued that particular AC/DC song. Just to alert Mr. Fur down there who had the biggest balls of all in this particular empty stadium.
Out on the field, Frankie Violet had shaken free of whatever was holding him, and he was skipping and racing around among his fielders again. But differently now. Instead of giving wedgies, sprawling Slip-and-Slide-style at their feet, or flirting with the Pakistani women, he was taking each player in turn by the shoulders, all but uprooting them, replanting them in new places. Proper positions. A couple times, he cupped his hands in front of them, bent his knees, as though showing children how to catch rain. Eventually, he circled back to the bowler and showed him something with the ball and two split fingers. Never once, after that first time, did he glance at Mr. Fur and his entourage in the left-field shadows. Not one time. He couldn’t have signaled more loudly that he knew they were there if he’d hurled himself into the stands and kissed their feet.
The last Team Yellow wickets fell in less than ten minutes. I hoped someone had been keeping track of runs, because I’d lost count, gotten too busy watching the pantomime below. Only the players—the ones who weren’t Frankie Violet—seemed completely oblivious to Mr. Fur and his gang. At every stumping, every stumbling run down the wicket, every (very occasional) accidental smack or cut for four, they all laughed. Every one of them.
Blue Shirt’s original schedule had called for a thirty-minute break between innings. “To please the concessionaires,” he had actually typed on the sheet in the folder he had given me, apparently still believing he’d rented some of those along with the stadium. “To give the excited crowd a chance to catch their breath.” That was also written in my instructions.
Dutifully, I set up some music. But Frankie had hustled and cajoled Team Yellow right back into the field in less than five minutes, gotten his Blue teammates situated in the first-base dugout, directed the younger Pakistani woman to the far end of the mat as his opening batting partner, and assumed his place at the nearest stumps. He reset the bale himself while Mr. Seagull checked the other.
In the brief breaks between songs, I heard more shouting from the parking lot. A lot of shouting. I remember wishing everyone out there would just get their business the fuck over with and get out of here, so we could all go home when the time came. How long could one deal gone bad/Wednesday-night fun brawl/mass murder take?
I always tried to think of those things that way—it had always seemed important, for my life—when I ran into them, which was way too often. In San Bernardino, gatherings like the one in the Fault parking lot were like Santa Ana winds, or brushfires. Something to wait out, go around. Something not to make more of than it made of itself. But this one must have been bothering me, because I kept thinking about it, listening for it, expecting a full-on barrage of gunfire at any second.
That’s why Blue Shirt had to leave the Destroyer’s side, come all the way back behind home plate, and yell before I realized he wanted the music shut off. When I finally looked down, he was chopping his hand back and forth in front of his face, in what I assumed was some subcontinent version of the good old American throat-cut. I killed the music.
“Mr. Sifuentes, can’t you see we are ready to play?”
From outside came a roar, a blur of swearing voices, like birds disturbed in a bush. Blue Shirt jerked his head that way, as if he was going to tell those guys off, too. Suggest that they needed to adopt a more respectful attitude if they wished to remain official parking-lot thugs for America’s Rockin’ Professional Cricket.
Fortunately, he said nothing, and the noise outside quieted again. I kept wanting that one more noise: car tires shedding rubber as they squealed out. But silence apparently was the best I was going to get.
Abruptly—and for the last time—Blue Shirt smiled at me. Up the bleachers he came. He didn’t climb back into the booth but took a seat in the top row just below. “Now. Mr. Sifuentes. Enjoy.”
He gave a signal to Mr. Seagull, who had resumed his treelike stillness just off the square, to the leg side of the far stumps. I have no idea what signal Mr. Seagull gave. But suddenly, Frankie Violet was hunched in position, taking a few practice strokes that looked nothing whatsoever like baseball swings. His elbow came up stiff and straight, the bat seeming to lever out of his legs as though unfolding from his tibia, coming to rest directly in front of his face, straight up and down. He looked less like an athlete than he did a parrying swordsman.
Also, he had his helmet tipped up on his head, unstrapped.
“Is that safe?” I said, gesturing down.
“Not at all,” said Blue Shirt happily. “He should not be doing that. Oh, he is wonderful.”
As if on cue, Frankie flung the helmet aside, just as the yellow-team bowler took his mark, held up the ball, and lumbered forward.
Maybe, sometime in your life, you’ve been around an exceptional athlete on their day. Some star high school basketball player you watched go around the world, side of the arc, swish, halfway around, swish, top of the key, swish.
This was not like that.
It was more like watching one of those automaton clocks. Something so regular, so predictable, it almost ceased to inspire wonder, became sheer, joyous spectacle. The first bowled ball swung wide, nowhere near the stumps. It probably shouldn’t have counted as an official ball. But Frankie pounced sideways—glided, really—and barely seemed to swing. The ball shot off his bat on a dead line, almost took the head off the nearest slip fielder, then kept rising. I thought it might make the right-field stands. But I underestimated the rise. It soared straight over the stands, over the roof, and into the night.
Blue Shirt leapt to his feet, along with everyone else not wearing a fur coat. Frankie just stood with his bat by his side, watching Mr. Seagull raise his arms, signaling six runs. Only when Mr. Seagull lowered his arms did Frankie glance over his shoulder, toward Blue Shirt and me. “Howzat?” he called, and winked. He actually winked.
The next ball traveled five hundred feet at least, straight down the ground to dead center, out of the stadium and into the desert.
“That should not even be possible,” Blue Shirt chortled. “It is not physically possible to hit a cricket ball that far.”
“You’re going to run out of balls,” I said.
This seemed to faze him not one bit.
The third ball came right back at us, like a foul in baseball, except this was in play, and intentional, and left the stadium even more quickly than the first two. I’d just surfaced from ducking behind the table, and Blue Shirt was standing and clapping, and Frankie was positively waggling out there, waving his batting partner, the older Pakistani woman, out to the middle of the square to dance, when I realized the danger.
I really did think this, I swear. Ridiculous, impossible as it should have seemed. But it was as though I’d dreamed what was coming.
Part of it anyway. The least important part, as it turned out but still.
“Hey. Blue,” I called, as the fans on the third-base side whistled and laughed and shouted their amazement, and Frankie twirled the laughing, dark-haired woman back into position and swaggered to his spot, woofing good-naturedly at Mr. Seagull, at the blue-team bowler, at Mathilde and the cheering team, who really were cheering, now. His grin was a glowing, sideways C-moon in the dead center of the diamond in the whistling San Bernardino night. Even the Destroyer seemed to be leaning forward out there, his hands on the bleacher bench in front of him. I could see his long, dusky fingers, winking with rings, and his forearms sliding from the sleeves of his fur coat. They looked thin, coated in dust where the light crossed them.
“Blue!” I snapped.
Finally, he looked up, just as Frankie swung again, sent a fourth ball soaring out of the Fault down the right field line this time. His shirt, his smile, his very skin seemed to bubble with his glee.
“Tell me, Mr. Sifuentes. Have you ever seen anything like it? I was watching on television, I was just a boy, when Frankie Violet got his one chance to play at Eden—”
“Blue. Tell him not to pull.”
He didn’t understand. Of course he didn’t. But to his credit—again—he proved so much more alert, sensitive to signals, than he seemed. “Mr. Sifuentes? What do you—”
“Don’t let him pull. I don’t want him to hit any of the—”
The sound of that last ball on Frankie’s bat…like a shotgun blast. Like a coffin lid slamming.
Everyone stopped dancing, laughing, yelling. Even Frankie looked startled, just stood by his stumps with his bat across his chest like a sword he’d ripped through someone. I don’t think even he tracked the ball. It left the stadium too quickly, hurtling right over the heads of the third-base fans, over the roof. Toward the parking lot.
I almost imagined I could see its trajectory, its heat trail hanging near that one buzzing, nearly functioning light tower. Like a meteor, that thing flew.
Like a guided missile.
I closed my eyes. I didn’t even have time to make a wish or formulate a prayer, for whatever good that reportedly really does do, sometimes, for the connected or the practiced or the lucky. The sound of smashing windshield was almost anticlimactic at this distance. Barely as loud as a bottle being dropped.
Then came a breath, a silence that lasted long enough to let me think that what I’d heard had been a bottle being dropped.
But what came next was even worse than I’d imagined. I’d expected swearing, shouted threats, maybe even a shot or two fired into the side of the stadium.
Instead—like a snippet of a dream, that dream every single resident of San Bernardino has, sooner or later—I heard the wave coming. Heard the whole gang out there, probably both gangs, however many members there were, pouring wordlessly across the lot toward the tunnel.
So many.
I had a lone action-man moment, spun for one crazy second around the booth in search of the lever I’d suddenly decided must actually exist, that would spring the secret motors I’d just decided must be buried under the Fault and swing the mechanized gates it didn’t actually have shut in all those furious faces.
“Shit,” I murmured, as that sound—it really was one sound, like a gust of Santa Ana wind—barreled into the tunnel, then split into separate sounds, a hundred individual slapping footsteps. Blue was on his feet and moving now, too. Not up into the booth with me, but down toward the tunnel mouth, his hands waving back and forth. Even then, I couldn’t help being impressed. He was moving at the problem, not away; either that or he was going to ask all our parking-lot friends to pay the six-dollar admission. Either way, I kind of loved him, right at the last.
Then all those punk-ass fuckbags erupted into the light, pouring through the stands and over the baked grass like angry ants from a demolished mound. The fans on the third-base side were screaming, scrambling away over the bleachers with three thugs chasing them. At least one of those assholes had a knife in his mouth, and what popped, absurdly, into my head was Israel Hands chasing young Jim ’awkins up the mast of the Hispaniola in my father’s favorite novel, the one he’d read to me five times when I was a kid before he gave up fighting his addictions and fled. On the field, players were either scattering toward the far, outfield walls or dropping and covering, as though this were an earthquake drill. Or an earthquake. All except Frankie Violet, who remained frozen in his follow-through in front of his stumps, like a Frankie Violet statue gazing off into the night.
“Blue, get out of there!” I was shouting, and somehow, not fifteen feet from a fuckball who was already lifting a revolver into his face, Blue heard me. And he looked up but not at me. And he stopped where he was, gazing past the melee toward the shadows along the left-field line. And right as the lights flared way too bright—right when it all really started—I heard him one last time, clear as if he’d been whispering in my ear.
“Oh, Father,” he said. “What have you done?”
Which means that he saw, too. Right at the last. Blue, and me, and Frankie Violet, and no one else. Because afterward, thinking back—the way I am always, every waking and most sleeping moments of whatever’s left of my life, thinking back—I realized that was exactly where Frankie had been looking, too.
I got just a glimpse, in that single flare of light: of the Destroyer’s attendants scattering, diving under the nearest seats for cover as the Destroyer stood and shed the fur; of that dusty, scaled body unfolding—sprouting—like a yucca stalk shooting up in time lapse, already dead even as it bloomed, long and emaciated and segmented like a skeleton, but oozing something thick, like sap, as its wings and its mouth unhinged, clicked open. Right as the lights went, I saw that thing lift from its seat, launch out of the bleachers, sweep up Blue without even looking at him.
Dark slammed down, and the shooting and the real screaming started.
The cops blamed the thugs, of course. And not without reason, after all. Even though the only people who actually got wounded were two punks who accidentally shot each other in the momentary maelstrom of shrieking and whistling and shredding right after the lights went. And the only ones who got dead were Blue Shirt and Frankie Violet, and the only way the cops even knew that was by DNA-testing the strips of flesh scraped off the cricket mat and out of the grass.
I did tell them what I’d seen. Knowing what they’d say. They said it, and sent me home with Blue’s last words—“Oh, Father, what have you done?”—ringing in my head, and my long-lost friend Enrico’s father surfacing in my dreams, reenacting the night he’d finally climbed out of his chair long enough to silence Enrico’s baby sister once and for all. Weirdly, I didn’t dream of my own father. Just woke up, for months afterward, wondering where he was. Whether he was still alive somewhere. The pirate addict bastard.
And when I realized I couldn’t just let it go, I tried the police once more. I sent them a typed report, which included the research I’d done at the library where Mathilde had once worked. That night at the Fault had rattled her plenty, too, and so it wasn’t hard to get her to come back to the library to help me navigate the digital resources. It didn’t take us long to dig up the actual name of Mr. Fur. The Destroyer. That turns out to be A. D. P. Mankad. A middling cricketer, at best, as Blue had said. All of two test matches played. In 1933.
1933. Eighty-four years ago.
There are occasional mentions of him throughout the pages of Wisden’s Cricketing Almanac, the annual bible of the sport, which we finally accessed through the library at Cal State–San Bernardino. Particularly during the late 1960s and early 1970s, his name appears almost yearly in some context or other. But the only picture I could find is actually in this past year’s edition. Suddenly, there he is in his fur, his dark hair capturing the light his snake-necklace refracts, in the legendary Long Room at Lord’s, London’s self-proclaimed and almost entirely undisputed home of cricket, in the company of a half-dozen similarly Marks-&-Spencer’d men in blazers, receiving some sort of plaque in recognition of “decades of service and unwavering commitment to maintaining the traditions and codes of conduct that have always defined the sport, even as it enters a new, global epoch.” His face is wrinkleless, his dark eyes expressionless. If Wisden’s caption told you he was forty, you’d have your doubts. If it said he was twenty-five, you wouldn’t. If it suggested he felt honored by the plaque, or the billionaires in the tie-less sportswear bestowing it upon him, you’d have laughed in its face.
And if you didn’t know fuck-all—as I didn’t, and don’t, really—about world cricket’s painful, ongoing transition from Last Great Colonialist Export to Last-to-the-Table Careening Global Sports Consortium, and if you weren’t one of the forty or so people at the Fault that night, and so had no inkling about how that man (or whatever he is) really came by his nickname, you might almost feel sorry for him.
What was it Blue had said about him? “Entire boards of directors disappeared…whole leagues wiped out…”
I did search the entire remaining eleven-hundred-plus pages of the 2015 Cricketers’ Almanac. Of Blue Shirt, and America’s Rockin’ Professional Cricket, and the late Frankie Violet, there is no mention.