Rag and Bone by Michael Nava Page B

out more than a random word or two, so eventually I gave up and watched the game. Angel, meanwhile, had scooted across the couch until he was almost touching me. I put my arm around his shoulders. Without looking up, he wriggled up against me. The Yankee shortstop made a jump catch that ended the inning.
    “Wow, that was a beautiful catch. Who’s the short?”
    Angel, who’d been watching raptly, said incredulously, “Derek Jeter.”
    “I haven’t followed baseball since I was about your age, so I don’t know who any of the players are. Jeter’s good?”
    Turning his attention back to the game, Angel said, “He’s the best shortstop, except maybe Nomar Garciaparra. He plays for the Red Sox. I play short, too.”
    “When did you play baseball?”
    “When my dad was living with us, I played Little League.”
    “When was this?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know. Before he went back to jail.”
    He must have felt guilty about telling me as much as he had, because he pulled away from me. I asked him about some of the other Yankees and soon he was back at my side giving me a running commentary on the game. As he reeled off stats, I remembered how knowing a pitcher’s ERA or a batter’s RBI or what phrases like “no hitter” and “fielder’s choice” and “squeeze play” had made me feel when I was ten years old, like I belonged to the world of men. Listening to him reminded me that after baseball, another myth of men had captured my attention and introduced me to a world that had obsessed me as much as the major leagues, with a more lasting effect.
    At a commercial, I said, “I bet you like to read, don’t you?”
    He looked at me and ventured a cautious, “Yeah.”
    “I’ll be right back,” I said, and went into my office, where, tucked on a shelf amid my twenty-five-year-old law school texts, was an even older book. The battered brown cover bore the imprint of water stains and grease spots. The binding was loose and the gilt lettering on the spine nearly indecipherable but I could still make out the title, The Tales of Homer, and still felt some of the thrill I had experienced when I opened it for the first time almost forty years ago. I turned yellowing pages that bore finger smudges from a smaller hand, but the illustrations still jumped off the page: the great wooden horse being wheeled into the city; a fragile ship hurtling toward a strait where on one side was a whirlpool and on the other jagged rocks; a beautiful woman with a wand standing among a herd of swine. I had been given this book—a prose retelling of the Iliad and the Odyssey —when I was eleven by a teacher who observed my interest in Greek mythology, but it had opened up more than that world for me. Reading about Achilles and Patroclus had, even in this bowdlerized version, intimated something about the love of men for one another that I scarcely understood but never forgot. Ulysses’s long journey, filled with suffering and adventure, had in some obscure but palpable way consoled and encouraged me as I struggled through my own difficult adolescence.
    “Here,” I said, handing Angel the Tales when I’d returned to the living room. “You can look at it after the game.”
    He immediately opened the book at random and found the illustration of the Greeks pouring out of the great wooden horse.
    Wonder in his voice, he asked, “What is this book about, Uncle Henry?”
    “It’s really two stories,” I said. “The first one is about a war that happened thousands of years ago between people called the Greeks and the Trojans and how the Greeks won it with a trick, using this horse.” I pointed at the illustration. “The second story is about how one of the Greek soldiers named Ulysses tried for ten years to get home to his family and about the monsters he met and the adventures he had on the way.”
    His eyes widened at the word “monsters.” He began to turn the pages, glancing up at the game every couple of minutes, and when