Whenever the dream comes, Maurice falls out of bed. He doesn’t fall very far, since his mattress rises only a few inches above the linoleum floor. Nor does he fall very loudly, because the bed is ringed by a thin but complete cushion of shirts, socks, underwear, and baseball cards that muffle the thump of a small body. The sound does not awaken Rufus, his younger half-brother who shares the mattress in the small apartment above the bar on Sedgwick Street. But his mother has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years, and has ears primed for trouble.
Maurice does not answer, because if he does his mother will know that the dream has come again, and that he is scared. She’ll know that he can’t stop thinking about his cousin Lonzo and how he looked there in the yellow light of the entryway, all laid out and bloated up in his head from the bullets and the blood. How his mother shoved her way through the police lines and cradled Lonzo’s big head in her arms and got her good jacket so soaked that they had to throw it away. How all the Cobras came to the funeral home in their Oakland A’s colors, the white pinstripes that Lonzo used to wear. How they gathered around the coffin and kissed him on the cheek and curled his stiff finger in a Cobra C like they were his family, like they hadn’t tried to keep him in the gang, like they weren’t the ones who had gotten him killed . . .
“It ain’t really so bad, living here,” he once explained to a friend. “In summertime, we play baseball.”
“I got it, I got–”
Maurice is always saying things like that, things that make him sound old and wise. Last season the Kikuyus coaches sometimes wondered whether Maurice sounded a little too wise, whether he was mimicking an older sibling or trying to slide his way into the coaches’ good graces. They eventually concluded, however, that the question was moot. Maurice, whatever his affectations, was a bright, insightful kid, a model ball player.
For the Kikuyus, who finished the first year in the middle of the 9-to-12-year-old pack, 1992 figures to be better. Bill Bowman, the 26-year-old real-estate manager who’s the Kikuyus’ head coach, has already compiled a list: 13 names, carefully arranged and tabulated, kept pressed in a manila folder. Maurice, Rufus, Freddie, Jalen, Louis, Alonzo, Demetrius, Nathaniel, Calbert, T.J., Rickey, Otis, and Samuel. Some like Maurice, Jalen, and Freddie, are veterans from last year’s team. Others filled out an application at school and were assigned to the team by chance. Others just showed up at the field, and Bill jotted their names on the roster. Technically, this practice violates league policy, which states that new players are to be placed in a pool that league officials then distribute among teams. But to Bill and most other coaches, that doesn’t make sense. If you’re lucky enough to get a kid interested, you grab him, give him a glove and an application, and tell him three times when the next practice is going to be, because you might not get a second chance. This isn’t like suburban Little Leagues. That’s the point.
