Chapter 11: Um Beijinho

   "Don't get run over Cuz" warns Tony the trainer as I head out of JM Yard for a run home after a Sunday double header in late June.

"Very unlikely" I reply. "I'm taking the tow path."

"In that case don't get lost" he calls. "And good work this week after that rough start!"

__________

   "Hey trainer" called the soft voice of someone sliding onto the next barstool. "What happened out there in that wild first inning?"

I had popped into the West Brook after our comeback win on opening day for my usual bottle of Bud before bed.

"Boa noite to you too" I replied, swiveling to face a tall dark woman dressed in tight bluejeans and a loose black blouse.

"Sorry to be so blunt" apologized the Topps photographer. "I'm Raven but call me Ray."

"Joao Nossick" I smiled, glancing down at her lowtop Doc Martins. "I guess you could say our battery was discharged in one swell foop" 

"Funny man" she laughed. "Well Cicotte needed to go, but why that asshole of a catcher too?"

"The owner caught them trying to throw the game" I whispered with a hand curled around my mouth. "They'll be banished from baseball for life."

"Wow, it's the Chicago Black Sox all over again" she mused.

"That'll be Joao to you" I frowned before giving her a grin. "Did you know that Shoeless Joe Jackson was later exonerated?"

"Say it ain't so, Joao" she whined, and we both giggled, tapped our bottle tops, and took a slug.

__________

    My seven mile run home starts down the back sidewalk out of the stadium parking lot and past the Walmart Supercenter, turning left onto Main Street of Manville, a borough named for the factory that graced it's citizens and streams with asbestos for most of the 20th century. 

   Dodging parked and turning cars through town, I catch a glimpse of the twin azure turrets of Ss. Peter and Paul Orthodox Church in the waning light of a long midsummer's eve and pause to gulp half of a Mounds bar, dropping the other into the back pocket of my red running shorts. Immigrants from eastern Poland and the Ukraine flocked to this river town in the 1940s and 50s for holy communion and unholy factory jobs.

   A left on Wilhousky takes me over the Millstone River bridge and onto the Delaware and Raritan canal towpath, now an 8-feet wide greenbelt cutting across the 70-mile waist of New Jersey. I pass the watered down Zaraphath Pillar of Fire compound lodged between canal and river where self-proclaimed bishop Alma White preached white supremacism in the guise of a biblical mandate until her death in 1946. 

   Pondering these churches and the immigrants they brought to central Jersey, I'm soon flying down the path and reviewing my own peregrinations. The hardest was to leave my mother and three little brothers in Favela do Pantanal, with only the hope of them following allowing me to accept Sinclair's philanthropy. Playing baseball in Bound Brook was a big win, but it's driving me into a life of running got me to the postseason. The adoption by Mrs. G granted citizenship, inheriting her house autonomy even with occasional brown water churning through the living room. And now the Army Corps of Engineers was finishing a dike and channelization project that promised to reduce the flooding.

   I feel like the luckiest man alive as I cut under the 287 bridge into South Bound Brook. Then a big black bird glides along the darkening Raritan, it's bright white head catching the very last rays. In the vacuous flap of it's huge wings I hear a soft giggle, in the imperfect alignment of tail feathers I see dark bangs.

   Then I'm crossing the wooden walkway of the Queens Bridge and cutting left at the circle onto Bound Brook's old Main Street. Running past Dominican storefronts in the growing gloom, I glimpse a big guy stumbling across the street toward Torpedos go-go bar and know without seeing who it is. An unseen slap on the back propels the drunken Paulino to the curb. I sprint away and a smile grows as I take the jog over to Talmadge Avenue heading for my buff stucco house in the west end. And there on the decaying wooden porch is a small upright package.

   I sit on the top step, untie the ribbon bow at the neck of the package, and pull down the red tissue paper. My mouth falls open as the words Cachaca Companheira and then Parana Brazil are revealed. I fumble with the little card, finally flipping it open with a fingernail. A single tear glides down my cheek as I find, imprinted in red on a white background, an utterly perfect little kiss in the guise of a pair of photographer lips.