A. J. Padilla

Sharks

Henry was still sweeping up when I walked into The Eight Ball. The radio he keeps glued to the same all-news station day in and day out was the only sound other than the scratch of broomcorn bristles against the wood plank floor. 

How's it going, Henry?" 

"Okay, I guess."

“Don’t guess if you know,” I say, using a favorite expression of his.

"Just brewed a pot of coffee. How about a cup?"

"No thanks."

"Suit yourself."

I walked to my usual table at the far end of the empty pool hall, turned on the overhead lamp, and racked the fifteen balls slowly, precisely, until they formed a perfect “V” on the immaculate green felt surface. Selecting a cue stick had become a morning ritual and I hefted half a dozen or so before finding one with perfect balance. 

The nearby jukebox waited for me like an old friend. I dropped a stream of quarters into the coin slot and punched in the same number six times. The mechanism lifted a disc out of its place in the rack and slipped it onto the vertical turntable. The glistening black disc spun in place, its grooves trapping slivers of light and playing with them like a prism. After a momentary burst of static, it began: “Sleepwalk,” a Santo and Johnny tune from back in ‘59. I closed my eyes and let the music wash over me, the steel guitar sounding dreamlike and nearly human in its sadness. My hands gripped the lit face of the jukebox as I remembered the first time I had truly listened to that song.

It happened after my unit’s flight back to the States last year, while the transport sat on the tarmac at Travis Air Force Base. The corporal next to me reached into his duffle bag and brought out a green transistor radio. He fiddled with the tuner until he found a local station, and suddenly “Sleepwalk” filled the inside of the fuselage. I’d heard the tune many times before, but that morning was the very first time I really listened to it and heard how lost and lonely it sounded. 

"How about a game?"

I turned to face a skinny kid who seemed to come out of nowhere. He wore tan chinos and a red polo shirt and had slicked-back raven hair. It spooked me how much he looked like so many of the boonie rats I served with in Nam.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

"No thanks. Maybe some other time."

The kid stopped to have a few words with Henry before heading for the exit. 

I kept feeding the jukebox and playing game after game until it got to be noon. That’s when Henry’s regulars began drifting in. I recognized a few of them from my old neighborhood. We pass each other these days with barely a nod, even though I’d known some of them since grade school.

"Taking off?" Henry’s glasses rested on the tip of his broad nose as he sat reading the Daily News. 

“I’d like to talk to you about something, Ricardo. That is, if you don't mind."

"Shoot."

"I’ve known you since you were in a baby carriage, right?"

"I can’t remember that far back, Henry, but I’ll take your word or it.”.

Henry lived across the street from us and made his living driving a cab. He had nothing to do with the pool hall back then, except maybe as an occasional customer. 

After Henry’s wife passed away a few years ago, he told friends that he’d had it with being a cab jockey sixteen hours a day. His reason for working and saving was gone forever and he was going to retire. He sold his medallion cab and collected on his wife’s life insurance policy. A month later he bought the pool hall. 

Henry closed the place down for a while and when it reopened it had new tables, air conditioning, and a fresh coat of paint. He had also added a bar, a cigarette vending machine, and a used Seeburg 100 jukebox. The rusty old tin sign that hung over the over the entrance for decades was gone, replaced by a big electronic sign that flashed “The Eight Ball” in bright red and yellow neon. 

"The whole neighborhood is proud of you, son. I still got a picture of you tacked up in my office, wearing your dress blues, a ton of medals hanging on your chest, and looking for all the world like a Puerto Rican Audie Murphy."

I suddenly wanted out of there.

“You been back almost a year now and every morning you walk in right after I open up, shoot pool by yourself, listen to the same damned song on the jukebox over and over until you take off. Next morning you do it all over again. What I want to say is why don't you come by when there are people around? Play a few games with someone. Make some friends. Remember your buddy Pablo you used to hang out with? He's married now, got a couple of kids, and has a job out in Jersey. He came by the other afternoon and asked about you, wanted to know if you were still singing at that place, what was it called?”

“The Diamond Lounge.”

“That’s it.” 

“It burned down while I was away, Henry.”

“My point is, you got people who care about you. Stop keeping to yourself all the time. You get what I’m saying, Ricardo?”

"Yes, Henry. Thanks, really, but I have to go.”

I knew then who had sent the skinny kid in the tan chinos. 

I crossed the street under the shadow of the Third Avenue El tracks. Rows of cop cars sat baking in the noon sun over by the nearby precinct. A shift change was in progress and uniformed cops were everywhere. There was a military air to the scene that reminded me of Nam, as if a platoon was mustering before a Huey ride out to the boonies. A couple of neighborhood kids watched with awe in their dark faces.

I hurried away.

It was somewhere around ninety-five degrees and tropically humid. My shirt stuck to me like a second skin as I waited for Doc Willett out in front of the Concourse Plaza Hotel. A voice on Henry’s radio had said something about a Canadian cold front reaching the city the following day. It couldn’t arrive soon enough to suit me. 

 The green Rambler coupe, trailing clouds of bluish exhaust, pulled up to the curb. Doc Willett honked a couple of times to let me know he was there before turning into the next side street. A few minutes later he came up the sidewalk puffing away on his pipe, producing almost as big a cloud of smoke as his wreck of a car. 

Doc is a short guy with thinning, straw-colored hair. His office in the veteran’s hospital is cramped and airless and always smells of wet plaster. It’s a real rat hole that I suspect he hates as much as I do, which is why we decided to meet for our weekly sessions in other places around the Bronx. 

We shook hands and crossed the Grand Concourse to Joyce Kilmer Park. Doc Willett made a bee-line for the only bench offering a sliver of shade. He’d brought his lunch in a brown paper bag and I waited until he took a bite of his Swiss cheese on rye before saying anything.

"What'll we talk about today, Doc?"

"Why don't you tell me how you feel and we'll take it from there."

"I feel okay."

"How’s the physical therapy coming along?"

"Good. I’ve got an appointment this afternoon."

I’ve walked with a slight limp ever since my right hip caught a few pieces of shrapnel from an NVA mortar round.

“I’m heading back to the hospital when we’re done here. Would you like a lift?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

"Still having nightmares?"

"Yeah, but I'm getting used to them. They keep me from getting lonely at night." 

I try to laugh at my remark but it comes out a hollow cough. The Beast -– that’s what I call the worst of the dreams -- drops by on most nights around two or three in the morning and digs its claws deep into me. I lay there bleeding fear until first light brings a few merciful hours of sleep. 

"I see."

He took another bite of his sandwich and admired a nearby flower bed. 

"This is a nice place, Ricardo. Why don’t we meet here again next week?" 

"Anything you say, Doc."

"Have you thought about a job? We discussed that last time, remember?"

"Aren’t we going to talk about my dreams."

"We will, but first tell me if you gave the job idea any thought?"

"Yes."

"Have you been looking?"

"Not really.”

“And your music? Have you considered going back to that?”

I sang and played the piano at a supper club on weekends for two years before I was drafted.

“I told you, Doc, The Diamond Lounge burned down while I was away.”

“There are other supper clubs in the city.”

“I just don’t feel it anymore. I sit at the piano and nothing happens.”

“Well, that will come in time, Ricardo. What about school? We discussed that, too, as I recall. Perhaps, at this point, you'd be more interested in becoming a student than going back to work."

"I took the subway to City College a couple of times. And last week I went up to Fordham University. I like both places. You walk through a gate and it's like you're in another world."

"Then why not enroll? What's stopping you?"

"I don't know."

"I think you do know. Let’s talk about that."

That's how it went, back and forth, the two of us playing verbal ping pong. I know he’s trying to help me because helping people seems to be a religion for Doc Willett, and I usually don't mind his questions, but he asks me how I feel about something and the truth is I don’t feel much of anything these days. I’ve tried explaining that to him, how sometimes my life is like a movie going on all around me, a movie I don’t much care for but that I’m forced to be a part of. I can only hope he understands. It’s hard to tell with him. Most of the time he only nods and says things like, “I see” or “That’s interesting.” I’ve never seen him take notes like the shrinks on television or the movies, and yet he manages to remember everything I’ve said weeks after I’ve said it. Anyway, that’s how our sessions had played out since I got back. 

But that’s not how things went that day.

You see, I saw this girl in a yellow dress walk by while the Doc and I were shooting the breeze. She was brown-bagging her lunch and sat a few of benches down from us. Now here's the really weird part: she sits down, crosses her legs, and for a split second turns her face toward where we’re sitting. That’s when I realize that I know her, or used to know her. Her name is Sonia Sandoval and we went to the same school years ago. She wasn’t exactly a beauty queen, but had a nice face, curly dark blonde hair, hazel eyes, and a smile that brought out her dimples. 

I watched as she pulled an apple out of her paper bag and opened the book she’d been carrying. I kept sneaking looks in her direction, watching her take little bites of her apple as she read. I kept hoping she’d notice me and maybe come over to say hello, but she kept her nose buried in that damned book as if its pages contained all of life’s secrets.

Everything I recalled about her, things I hadn't thought about in years, came back to me in a rush. I remembered that her father had been in the Air Force before she moved into the neighborhood. I remembered how some of the other girls thought she was annoying, mainly because she was a lot smarter than any of them and wasn’t shy about speaking up in class. I remembered how she always laughed at my jokes, no matter how stupid and unfunny they were. I remembered, too, how one time, just before the start of an algebra class we both hated, she turned around in her desk and asked if I had a steady girlfriend. I told her no. She said “good” and flashed a strange little half-smile before turning back around to face the blackboard.  

Thinking about those days made me feel better than I had in a while, and I was grateful to her for bringing them back, even if it was only for a few moments. 

She got up and walked away before my hour with Doc Willett was done. I watched her cross 161st Street and, just before she disappeared behind the big bronze doors of the County Courthouse, look back in my direction. 

Later, while Doc Willet drove me to the veteran’s hospital, I made up my mind to see her again, even if it meant sitting on that damned bench every day for the rest of the summer. 

I left the pool hall early the next morning and walked to the park. I sat on the same bench I’d shared with Doc Willett and waited until one thirty. She never showed up. My luck was no better inside the courthouse lobby, where I stood around for a while pretending to be interested in a mural of a man and woman in Pilgrim outfits watching guys chopping down trees while a couple of bored-looking Indians stood in the sidelines. 

When it got to be nearly two-thirty, I gave up waiting and walked out of the courthouse. Standing by the entrance, I heard the big metal doors clang shut behind me. There was an awful finality to that sound, as if part of my life were being closed off forever, and a familiar sensation gradually took hold of me. The feeling is hard to describe. It’s as if I’m suddenly transported to a place apart from my surroundings. This sort of thing had happened to me at least half a dozen times since I got back home. I have no idea why it happens and haven’t told Doc Willett about it. The only way I found to cope with it is to move, to walk as fast as I can until it passes. The direction never matters because there is never a destination. There was one time, a couple of months ago, when that disconnected feeling hit me harder than usual and I wound up walking all the way to Battery Park before I finally snapped out of it. 

When I was a kid, I went through a phase where I couldn’t get enough of reading about sharks. I thought they were the most fascinating creatures on the planet and I devoured every book the local library had on them. Somewhere inside one of those long-ago books I read that some types of sharks have to keep moving all the time, their whole lives, or they die. The second they stop they're done for. That's kind of how I feel during one of my long, crazy walks.  

This time, the strange disconnected feeling left me after only half an hour or so, and I found myself standing in front of a movie theater a mile or so from the courthouse. More out of boredom than anything else, I decided to buy a ticket and go inside. 

The movie didn’t interest me at all and ten minutes into the film I dozed off and slept dreamlessly for the first time in days. When I woke up the movie was half over, and I was feeling rested and fine. I left the theater just as the screen showed a blind Audrey Hepburn fumbling around for something in her kitchen. 

Once outside, I started thinking about Sonia again. It occurred to me that if she worked at the courthouse, quitting time was probably around five. It was only four-thirty according to my watch, so there might still be time.

A cab was just then letting someone off in front of the bank across the street. I sprinted toward it, waving my arms, yelling at the cabbie to wait, and nearly got myself run over by a bus. 

The cab pulled up by the courthouse steps fifteen minutes later. I paid the driver and ran inside. I waited, pacing the marble floor, looking around every time an elevator rumbled to a stop to let out passengers. The same paunchy guard from my earlier visit kept giving me the fish eye. You could tell he was busting to ask me why I kept hanging around. 

Five o’clock came and went, then five-thirty, and I wondered if I hadn’t been wrong about everything from the start. She might not work at the courthouse at all. Maybe jury duty had brought her there the day before. If that was true, then I’d probably never see her again.

“Waiting for someone?” 

The guard had broken down and decided to satisfy his curiosity. 

“Yeah, I was, but I don’t think she’s going to show up,” I said, and left. 

Out on the courthouse portico, I leaned against one of its massive columns and watched the corner traffic lights go from green to red and back to green again. I thought of walking over to the Stadium to see if the Yanks were playing. A ticket in the nosebleed seats would only cost me sixty or seventy cents, but my interest in baseball was about the same as my interest in most other things, which is to say I had no interest in seeing a game at all. 

"Why didn't you say hello yesterday, Ricky?"

I turned and there she was, wearing a cornflower blue dress that looked like it was made out of a patch of sky. She seemed to have materialized right out of the afternoon’s hot and humid air.

I had spent most of the afternoon waiting to run into her, thinking about her, and now that she was standing in front of me I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

"I mean when you were sitting in the park talking to that friend of yours, the man with the pipe.”

"I didn’t think you noticed me."

"At first I wasn’t sure it was you. You’re a lot huskier than you used to be. I suppose the army did that."

"How did you know …?"

"That you were in the army? The grapevine. I still keep in touch with most of the girls from our old school even though I moved to Yonkers a while back. We tell each other all kinds of things. Remember Marsha, the tall girl with the long hair who was so good at math?"

All I could think of at that moment was Sonia leaning across a scarred, ink-stained desk and asking me if I had a steady girl.

"Not really."

"Well, she remembers you. She ran into your sister at the beauty parlor a few weeks ago and by the time they said goodbye she knew all about you. The next day I called her about going to see a movie together and she told me everything she’d heard. Ever since then I’ve been wondering about you. I mean, wondering how you’re doing. And then just like that there you were with that friend of yours, almost like my thinking about you made you turn up.” 

"Would you like to go have a cup of coffee with me?”

"I’d love to, but I've got class tonight."

"It won’t take much time. There's a place right down the street."

"The Seventh Heaven? I know it. A lot of the legal eagles I work with go there. They call it the House of Ptomaine.”

"How about it?"

She looked at her wristwatch and then up at me.

"Well, I … oh, what the hell. Why not? So I'll be a little late for class this one time. Let's go."

We sat in a booth near the back of the nearly empty diner and ordered coffee.

"You were saying how you know all about me from your friend?"

"Second hand, like I said. The lawyers over at the courthouse would call it hearsay evidence, always inadmissible."

"What is it you know?"

"Let's see. After we graduated, you turned down a scholarship from some school upstate and got a job in Manhattan instead. You took classes at a junior college at night for a while. And then you began singing and playing the piano at a supper club …”

“The Diamond Lounge. I was there until I got drafted.”

“That’s right. Marsha’s parents went there one night and heard you sing. They said you were wonderful, another Eddie Fisher.”

“Geez, I hope not.”

“All they meant was that you were really good.”

“I suppose.”

“Your poor mom nearly had a heart attack when they sent you over to fight in that stupid war. She was worried sick. A doctor had to give her pills to calm her down. They finally sent you home after you were hurt. You still limp a little because of what happened. You've been back just under a year now and you don’t like talking about your time overseas, or about how you got the medals they gave you. How's that?"

"Not bad. How about you? All I know about you is that you moved out of the neighborhood after graduation. What do you do over at the courthouse?" 

"I'm a court stenographer."

"Is that like a secretary?"

"Not really. I sit in on trials, hearings, arraignments, any meeting where what’s said has to be on the record. I take down everything on a stenotype machine."

"Everything?"

"Every last word."

"What if the lawyers get worked up over something and start yelling at the same time?"

"I still get it all. I’m really good at my job, Ricky."

She finished her coffee and smiled apologetically. 

"I've got to go."

We’d only been there fifteen minutes.

"Where are you going to school?" 

I didn't want her to leave. I wanted her to sit there smiling and telling me all there was to know about her life since we’d left school. 

"Hunter College, up by the reservoir."

She started to get up. 

"What are you studying?"

"English."

"Why? You speak just like a native."

Her familiar laugh went through me like a steel-tipped arrow.

"I mean English like in poetry and stories and things."

She opened her small black purse and took out a set of car keys.

"Sure you wouldn't like another cup? How about something to eat?"

"I need to get to class. It's summer session and if you miss a day it's almost like missing a whole week."

I paid the check, and we made our way back to where her bright red Chevelle was parked 

"It was wonderful seeing you again, Ricky."

"Want to have dinner with me tonight? Maybe go to a movie afterwards?"

My words surprised me, as if a stranger had spoken them. 

"I sort of have a date after class. Could we make it some other time?"

"Sure. Maybe we'll run into each other again. Who knows, right?"

Sonia nodded but didn't say anything and got in her car. She waved goodbye and smiled, only her eyes didn’t look happy at all. 

I stood on the courthouse steps and watched her drive away. What had I expected would happen when I finally ran into her?  It sure as hell wasn’t what did happen: a cup of coffee, some small talk, and a quick goodbye. 

Who was she going out with? Probably some college kid from her English class, the studious type with thick glasses, a jerk who’d bore anyone willing to listen to him talk about how goddamned spectacular his future was going to be. 

Was it possible to hate someone you’ve never met?   

There’s a small park just south of the courthouse. It’s really not much of a park at all, but I liked going there in the days before I shipped out, mainly because of the small plaza at its summit. No matter where you enter the park, if you follow an uphill path long enough you’re going to wind up in a tiny plaza surrounded by maple and oak and white pine. Look south from there on a clear, sunny day and you will see the Manhattan skyline shining in the distance like the Emerald City. 

With nothing better to do now that Sonia was gone, I walked into the park. 

The plaza was nearly deserted. Two old guys were hunched over a chessboard and a well-dressed man sat on a bench reading the Herald Tribune. One look toward the west told me why there were so few people there: a mountainous black storm cloud hung in the sky over the Harlem River. Before too long it would be barreling into the Bronx like a runaway locomotive. 

I sat on a bench near the two geezers and watched them play.

"Mind if I sit down?"

I looked up and saw Sonia standing there in her blue dress, a trace of perspiration on her upper lip. For a second, I was sure she was a hallucination. She had to be. I had seen her drive off only minutes before. 

"Sonia? I thought you were …"

"Don't look so startled, Ricky. I'm not a ghost."

"How did you know I was here?" 

"No big mystery. I pulled over to the curb a couple of streets away and looked for you in the rearview mirror. I saw you go into the park."

"What about your class?"

"I don’t think the professor will crucify me for missing one class. Besides, T. S. Eliot was really beginning to bore me.”

The well-dressed man looked off to the west, folded his Herald Tribune, and hurried out of the plaza. 

"Ricky, I really need to tell you something. I lied to you before. I don’t know why, but I did and I’m really sorry about it. I was the one who asked your sister about you at the beauty parlor a few weeks ago, not Marsha. The truth is that I’ve been thinking about you ever since, and then yesterday there you were sitting in the park with your friend. It was like an answered prayer.”

"I’ve got something to tell you, too. The guy you saw me with is not a friend. He's a doctor from the veteran’s hospital. I see him once a week."

"A doctor? What kind of doctor?"

"A shrink."

"Why do you need to see him?" 

She sat next to me, turned and put her left arm on the backrest so that her fingers touched my shoulder. Her perfume mixed with the still summer air and the damp sea-smell of the approaching thunderstorm. 

"He’s helping me with some problems I’ve been having since I got back."

"What sort of problems?"

“Bad nightmares. And some other things.” 

"Tell me about them."

"I can't.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re about things I saw … and things I did while I was away … some really awful stuff.”

"Ricky, I hear about the inhuman things people do to each other all the time. I take it all down on my machine during criminal trials, every awful, sickening detail.”

“I didn’t just hear about these things, Sonia, I was a part of them.”

“Ricky, look at me.”

I looked at her and saw that her eyes were tearing. She leaned over and stroked my cheek. Her fingers felt like a cool breeze washing over my skin.

“You can tell me all about your nightmares, about everything, when you're ready. You tell it all to me a thousand times, a million times, and keep on telling me until it’s all talked away and disappears forever."

"I wish it was as simple as you make it sound.”

"We’ll find a way to get through it.”

"We?"

"Yes, we, the two of us, you and me … if you want it to be that way. That’s up to you. You know something, Ricky? All day long I sat in that courtroom praying I’d see you again today, hoping that whatever brought you there yesterday would bring you back again today. I couldn’t wait for court to recess so I could run out and find you, but the idiot judge I work for needed me for a hearing in chambers that went on forever. By the time I got to the park it was way past my lunch time and you were nowhere around. I thought, well, that’s it, Sonia. He’s gone and who knows if he’ll ever be back. I went back to work and then, when I left for the day, there you were, and it felt like I had expected you to be there all along, like years and years ago we had agreed to meet in that exact spot."

"I was standing there because I had no idea where to go or what do, Sonia. That's all. I never know where I’m going anymore.” 

“Well, I know where you’re going tonight. You asked me out to dinner and a movie, remember? And don’t think for a second you’re going to get out of it.”

The first few drops of rain hit the canopy of leaves above our heads. The chess players quickly gathered up their pieces and ran out of the plaza. Sonia stood and held her hand out to me. I took it and got up just as a heavy downpour began. Then we stood there, not moving, ignoring the rain, holding hands and seeing each other for what seemed like the very first time.