M
rs. Vasconcellos placed two long beef bones in each hand, between her index and fourth fingers and tapped her silver rings against the aged calcium—producing loud knocks, percussive chock-chock-clip-clop sounds that rivaled something in the school band, which was nonexistent, save for the air horn blaring after every touchdown. Not all the football fans in the bleachers knew exactly where the snap-clap sound came from after a first down or better, when the team scored, but her son Hector knew, bemused by the praise in every pop of the bones.
The score was 7-7 and play-offs at stake. With two minutes remaining in the 4th quarter, Mrs. Vasconcellos's son Hector, an offensive lineman who played defense that night as well, intercepted the opposing quarterback pass. The team, cheerleaders, and the crowd followed as all 295 pounds (the program exaggerated his weight at 317) of solid muscle and a slight belly-fat tire galumphed eighty yards into the end zone. Mrs. Vasconcellos rapped her beef bones, attached to her like splints, and Hector hopped a victory dance, aimed the pigskin at his mother who rattled the bones like castanet raptor nails, and his teammates swarmed him.
Unbeknownst to the frenzied crowd, a whistle blew and a referee frantically motioned that the touchdown was invalid because of a penalty. He displayed the charge—touching the back of his calf compounded by one wrist striking the other above his head, demonstrating a personal foul: "clipping" on Ivo, Hector's best friend, who knew nothing about football. He simply hit. The referee had waved a yellow flag that no one—not even the opposing team—had seen prior to Hector's foray past the goal posts. Finally, the coach for the away players and then the crowd noticed the beleaguered man in stripes standing alone with his gelid flag on the grass, urgently repeating the penalty motion.
Hisses and boos ensued and the stands roiled in pounding feet, louder than fog horns, train whistles, and cannery announcements emanating from the harbor, the tracks, or Terminal Island, respectively. Little Ivo sobbed, realizing his error, having robbed Hector of a rare touchdown.
In the uproar, Mrs. Vasconcellos hurled one long, curved-like-a-machete-blade beef bone over the crowd that spiraled through the spotlit air; a million yellow fluttering gnats dodged the trajectory caught in the blue light, all objects shimmering in the cool October evening—and the long side of the bone hit the referee who announced the penalty smack in the head. He went down.
Police officers surrounded the field and several met with the coaches, discussing shoulder to shoulder, fingers pointing, chins nodding. All season long, ambulance drivers who waited for dislocated joints and punctured spleens revved up their engine, loaded the ref onto a stretcher, and the driver and a medic took him away, his chest and shoulders covered in blood, pooling like a shawl around him. Sirens wailed toward Seventh Street.
"Ladies and gentlemen, please clear the field," proclaimed the announcer in the booth. "Good night and drive safely." The teams left reluctantly, disappointed, if not bewildered. The crowd in the stands murmured theories: "But we never heard a shot" or "I seen a bottle— a brown one— or "Maybe it be the phantom with a bow and arrow." The snack shack owners handed out the last of their goods, crying "Free churros!" which delayed a more peaceful exit.
"Good night and drive safely," the announcer repeated.
Hector wiped tears and sweat from his face. His cleat kicked something near the sideline and he picked it up, something sharp and weighty and bloody and dropped it into his helmet. He looked to the stands, but his mother was already a hectic tail of fabric, sailing in the breeze well past the exit sign.
Monday through Saturday, she mopped those floors and tiles and emptied trash from Obstetrics to ICU. She knew her way around that place like the back of her own hands. Guilty hands, she mused.
The referee's bloody shirt had been cut off. A towel draped about his neck, and Mrs. Vasconcellos examined his ivory chest flecked with auburn hair. She pulled a blanket to his chin.
"Maybe shock," she said justifying the blanket. "You gonna be okay?" she asked the ref, resting in a cubicle, yellow curtains drawn around him. He was a scrawny guy with pale blue eyes. "I saw the game."
"I'm fine. The head bleeds a lot."
"I'm so sorry."
"No worries. They're gonna stitch me up and I'll be back in a week or two. I need that money. Helping my niece through school." He laughed. "Nursing school."
"I never do again."
"My wife she died. Uterus," he said and waved his hands over his abdomen, a gesture Mrs. Vasconcellos found endearing from a man who signaled penalties and yards lost and gained to crowds and now signed to her with his hands where his wife's illness had spread. When he was not a referee, he taught middle school science at Holy Something; (Mrs. Vasconcellos did not hear the exact name because she was so distracted by his freckled shoulders, the blood smudged about the towel, his gray imploring eyes, and gesticulations with every word.)
"I never do again."
"Was a good match."
"I promise."
"What?"
"Never."
"Lady, you didn't throw the bottle."
"No, I throw a bone."
He laughed and cupped a hand to his forehead, then grimaced. "Like give a dog a bone?"
"You Irish?"
"Most of me."
"Irish play bones."
"Yeah, my dad did." He shifted in bed, trying to sit upright to see more clearly.
"You be fine."
He had to agree.
Mrs. Vasconcellos slipped out before the doctor arrived to stitch his head and she drove straight home where she found her son at the kitchen table with the bone on a plastic gold placemat.
She took its partner from her purse, and set it down.
"I'll bury these two in the back yard with all the others," said Hector. "Last time."
"What about playoffs?"
"Last time."
"Hijo, I think you should be teacher," she said, waving her hands as if the gesture secured depth.
"Thought about it," her son replied. In moments such as these, Hector missed his father, a man he never knew, one who left before he was born. His mother said he was probably married in Mexico and did not want to start another family. "Two is too much." His possessions included a few LPs and when Hector was younger, he played his father's music, trying to channel the man by way of Freddie Fender and Ritchie Valens. This saddened his mother who sat at the edge of her red velvet divan, as if waiting to greet someone at the door.
Mrs. Vasconcellos sought father-figures for her son, mostly in priests and scout leaders, whom Hector ignored. Not until he heard about football did Hector light up.
This venture was his and his mother thought that the Pop in Warner sounded endearing, so she signed the waiver and counted out the money for the uniform, helmet, and mouthpiece. Coaches provided a modicum of influence; Hector found their intensity occasionally alarming. They often admitted to minimal skills in their youth, but lugged great bellies of collapsed muscle up and down 100-yard fields; their wives agonized over losses, hearts and peptic ulcers, and their kids ran around on game nights with doting cheerleaders. Hector simply enjoyed the game, which allowed pushing other guys over and inadvertently trampling them.
He wanted nothing less than his mother's happiness. And he knew that if the men in her life did not embrace her son, then all her focus would continue to be on him. Oh, she had dated. There was Vincenzo the fish market manager who for Hector's benefit threw onto ice a sea bass that slid like a giant thigh onto a small woman and gave her whiplash. There was Carl the insurance salesman who never asked Hector a question except "How's football?" even in the off-season. And of late there was Richard, his mother called Ricardo, who took her dancing every Thursday at the Elks Club until she found out that other women filled out the rest of his week. "I am more than Thursday!"
"Absolutely, Mom," Hector agreed, rifling through
The Art of War. He actually liked Thursdays because they were football walk-through days when the team rehearsed each play. Donning helmets and cleats but no pads, tackling was forbidden, which disappointed Hector to some extent, but he understood the value of preserving the team for Friday night games.
After he reported a visit with a beautiful woman with wavy black hair and blood-red nails who talked about Irish jigs and castanets, the charrasca and keeping time, the hospital held the referee overnight for observation.
The next morning the local paper reported that Hector's run was "phenomenal," and the bottle hurled was never found. No arrests were made.
The videographer captured the play and fans erupting in joy, but not the iniquitous deed. An editorial decried violence at high school games and condemned the perpetrator. The score remained tied. One for the history books.
Unfazed, Hector comforted Ivo. "In the heat of the moment, anything and everything is a potential call." So he made local history.
Two weeks later during playoffs, Mrs. Vasconcellos joined the crowd in foot stomping as well as following the cheerleaders with Down-Clap-Snap-Clap. She was surprised to see the same referee from the previous game spryly run the field and at the start of the third quarter he leapt in the air over two gridiron hulks to avoid a collision. And once while the chain crew measured, he and Hector spoke. Hector had removed his helmet, and his black hair rolled to his shoulders. Their heads nodded; their fists bumped.
Mrs. Vasconcellos detected college scouts in the stands that evening, but from the field Hector raised his hand in the "Stop!" position and she complied and did not approach any, even though she had with her a small lunchbox full of freshly made tamales. Later, during official visits, Hector told the recruiting coaches he was only interested in a scholarship if he could remain in Los Angeles so his family (his mother) could see him play (crush others, the whole point of football, he decided).
The referee scanned the stands and spotted the angel with the black flowing hair and the red jacket from the hospital. At halftime, he made his way toward the bleachers and glanced up to her row, and she peered beyond him. She started gabbing with the couple sitting next to her, the quarterback's parents—tall, skinny, pale people with tawny hair who liked to appear calm, but inside they gnawed at their organs. She did not want the referee to locate her; the opposing side might think something amiss. So she removed her red jacket and curled up into her poncho, making herself small, pretending to be cold. Fraternizing with a referee. What would people think?
Once the game resumed, Ivo's father Big Ivo brought her a cup of coffee with three sugars and three creams. "You sure you not Croatian?" he asked in his rolling Slavic accent. "Defense! Defense, Ivo!--Rrrrun!" he cried when their team had the ball. Mrs. Vasconcellos explained yet again the rules of the game and the job of the offensive line.
Later that evening, she asked her son, "So I see you talking to Mr. Referee. What he say?"
"He said, 'Sorry about that penalty call, but a ref's gotta do his job.'"
"And what you say?"
"I agreed. No hard feelings."
"I see you touch fist with fist."
"Yeah, Ma. He said something interesting: 'Sometimes there's enough glory in the run.'"
Hector's team made it to quarter quarterfinals and lost by three touchdowns. The other team sported several linemen and a center all Hector's size. He and Ivo could not carry the game, but he was satisfied with his own performance. His mother thought that with different referees, perhaps the match would have been called differently. (Ivo had three off-side violations.)
In September, Mrs. Vasconcellos attended the opening season scrimmage at her son's alma mater and at half time when the drill team mangled a routine to "Every Breath You Take," Mrs. Vasconcellos leaned against the snack shack nibbling a churro and sipping coffee, her gaze following the blue spotlight and she listened to the foghorns in the harbor bellow, and smelled the hydrogen sulfide and iodine in the air until the familiar referee appeared and she feigned surprise.
In her handbag, two colossal ribs wrapped in paper towels rested against her wallet. Later that evening, a demonstration ensued at a small bar where they watched freighters and tugs lumber into the channel, and she showed the referee how she kept time and sang with the bones a Mexican corrido. Then he took them from her and played one of his father's ditties, an Irish song about a lonely sailor, and they ordered a second drink, coffee for Mrs. Vasconcellos with three sugars and three creams. "You sure you're not Irish?" the referee asked.
That night in her bedroom, the referee tested her gridiron knowledge and was surprised to learn how quick she was, correctly identifying delay of game, false start, illegal substitution, and his favorite, the touchback. The next day they attended one of Hector's games near downtown Los Angeles. Hector ambled onto the field three short times with special teams—something Mrs. Vasconcellos said she might write to the head coach about it. The referee dissuaded her from doing that. "He's a freshman. Give him time." On their way out of the stadium, they clasped hands, their fingers entwined like the instruments they knew.
In Hector's senior year, his mother and the referee sold their respective homes on Vinegar Hill and purchased a large condominium overlooking the harbor. The backyard bones remained buried until an excavation occurred to ready the area for a new development. The local paper reported that "all digging cease" to make sure the rather large discovery did not include human remains. They did not. Hector admitted to no one his relief.
Hector played football for four years, redshirted his last year, and completed a double major in Anatomy and Forensics. After his university days, he attended medical school and became a pathologist with the Los Angeles County Laboratory Division. When asked how her son was doing, his mother wanted to say that like his 80-yard run in high school, "He never looks back," but she decided against that, knowing Hector. For mother and son, organs and tissue and bones whetted familiar ground.
Later, Hector took up Brazilian jiu jitsu, valuing strength and grappling techniques, but also embracing the concept of yielding to an opponent rather than imposing force with force.
On a few occasions, Mrs. Vasconcellos and the referee played bones at Talent Night in their 55-and-older senior center, alternating songs in Spanish and Gaelic, wooing the crowd, winning a gift card for performing their rendition of "Every Breath You Take," reaching for each other's hands under the bright lights of the Bingo room.
