Game Seven Read Free

across the teeth with a baseball bat.
    â€œSo I have to pay for
his
freedom? For
him
abandoning his family?”
    â€œIf some people get their way, yes,” Uncle Ramon said, nudging me forward to start walking again. “Nothing’s written in stone yet. I’m working on lots of solutions. You just concentrate on playing even better, nothing else.”
    I carried that heavy load out to the parking lot, where there were more beat-up bikes chained to fences than cars, including mine. Uncle Ramon suddenly veered off to the right to shake hands with an old friend of his named Gabriel, who’d been hanging around our games and practices for the past couple weeks. Luis told me that he’d even slept over at their house a few nights.
    Uncle Ramon had introduced Gabriel to us as somebody he used to play baseball with. Gabriel sort of nodded his head to that with an honest enough smile. But when a ball got away from some kids playing catch, I watched him toss it back. Gabriel’s form was awful, with a huge hitch in it. I would have believed he’d never thrown a ball before in his life. Besides, his hands were cracked and calloused. And the lines of his palms were embedded with grease, like he’d done more fishing than playing sports. I never mentioned it to anyone.
    â€œSee you tomorrow, boys,” Gabriel called out, waving to me and my cousin after a short conversation with Uncle Ramon.
    â€œReally?” I asked. “You’re driving all the way to Cárdenas to watch us play?”
    â€œNot so far for me. That’s where I live,” he said, getting into an old Chevy. “I’m hitting the road right now. I’ll meet you there. Maybe show you around.”
    It all seemed strange. But I had too much on my mind to think any more about it as my cousin climbed into the passenger seat of my uncle’s car, and I unchained my bike.

2

    I RODE STRAIGHT home to take a quick shower and change my clothes. Two old men in straw hats were sitting in the shade outside our building, playing dominoes and chewing raw sugarcane. I smiled at them as I slowed down enough to throw a leg over the seat of my bike, balancing myself on one pedal.
    Coming to a stop, I lifted the bike off the ground. Then I leaned back to get some momentum in my legs and started with it up the steep flight of stairs in our building.
    Opening our apartment door, I got hit with a blast of hot air, as if the walls had been absorbing every bit of heat from that day, refusing to let any of it go.
    Mama was at work, but my sister, Lola, was there, studying at the kitchen table. She was still dressed in her school uniform—a white blouse and yellow skirt—with textbooks spread out all around her. And every few seconds, a rotating floor fan from the living room would make it seem like a page from one of her open books was almost turning by itself.
    We had no air conditioner. We could barely afford our electric bill as it was.
    â€œHow are your math calculations, Julio?” she asked, turning a pencil over and nearly rubbing a hole in her notebook paper with the pink eraser at the other end.
    Lola and I actually shared an old laptop, though we didn’t have a license to be on the Internet. We couldn’t come close to making the kind of payments needed to become connected.
    â€œWhy aren’t you working on the computer?”
    â€œIt just makes me feel even hotter. Never mind that,” she said, with a hint of impatience. “Now, how are your calculations?”
    â€œOkay, I thought, until they started mixing letters in with the numbers,” I answered, dropping my equipment bag to the floor and hearing the bats inside rattle. “But no matter what, two and two still equals four. Unless your father’s a defector; then they try to tell you it’s something different.”
    â€œWhat’s that mean?” she asked, sounding irritated, with a bead of sweat starting down her