Camino del Sol
A Latina and Latino Literary Series
Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul
BRYAN ALLEN FIERRO
TUCSON
The University of Arizona Press
www.uapress.arizona.edu
© 2016 by Bryan Allen Fierro
All rights reserved. Published 2016
Printed in the United States of America
21 20 19 18 17 16 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3275-9 (paper)
Cover designed by Leigh McDonald
Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fierro, Bryan Allen, author.
Title: Dodger blue will fill your soul / Bryan Allen Fierro.
Other titles: Camino del sol.
Description: Tucson : The University of Arizona Press, 2016. | Series: Camino del sol
Identifiers: LCCN 2015046820 | ISBN 9780816532759 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Hispanic Americans—California—Los Angeles—Fiction. | LCGFT: Short stories.
Classification: LCC PS3606.I3677 A6 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046820
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3447-0 (electronic)
for my mother and grandmother,
Rosalia and Amina Fierro
On that long westward morning, all the Mexicans still dreamed the same dream. They dreamed of being Mexican. There was no greater mystery.
—LUIS ALBERTO URREA, The Hummingbird’s Daughter
CONTENTS
Prologue
Beto Ordoñez
Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul
Homegirl Wedding
Heart Attack Drill
The Deepest Pool in Monterey Park
Minefield
100% Cherokee
Las Palmas Ballroom
Crop Duster Play Set
The Healing Caves of Marrano Beach
Fortress of Solitude
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
Anabel Flores remembered how she first felt when she was forced to read that book about the girl who loved that guy who remembered something about his past, and how his past really messed shit up between the two, and how it was supposed to be a book about how not to fall in love when the match is less than something someone would describe as top-notch. She hated it. And when her babies cried in the middle of the night, she would read that book so as not to come fully awake. And they’d cry well past the scene where the guy says that he would be there forever. Then came the two-page kiss. Anabel called bullshit: she’s heard that mess before and has the blown-out hips as proof.
Anabel worked evenings, six days a week at the Montebello Towne Center, at a store called Fashion Nova. The pay, no mames, the pay! She folded and unfolded slim-fit V-necks and the short-waisted cardigans the valley hueras wore to show off asses that needed no introduction. She took the garbage down the long underground mall corridors, down to the food court Dumpster, where she’d recount her job and nights to Emilio at Hot Dog on a Stick, the Montebello Towne Epicenter, where mostly young girls teased lemonade after school. They accepted Emilio because he ran with pretty boys on Saturday nights.
“This shit can’t be it for me, right?” asked Anabel.
And Emilio winced as she detailed how in the middle of the night her babies cried and cried and sucked her nipples raw into a hardened nub that hinted the last-known whereabouts of a missing appendage. While Emilio nodded his head at Anabel, the book about volatile love now shimmed the right side of the washing machine in her parents’ garage across town in Whittier, stabilizing the effects of uneven loads and soaking up linty water from an unreachable leak where the hose attached to the machine’s back side at an angle just so, rusting wobbly sheet metal that bent inwardly and bowed outwardly with the faint sound of thunder trapped inside a box canyon.
Anabel explained that she had read the book at night in order to not come fully awake while her babies clasped her downturned breast. The woman in the book was named Lola. Lola’s lover reminded Anabel of a fast car. They lived in the South—not La Puente, or El Monte, but the South-South. She couldn’t name all the states that took up space there, but she did know the houses, described in the book as big and white and pillared. This was the part of the book she didn’t mind so much, the part she thought that maybe if read aloud might sound arranged to music.
She asked Emilio, “Have you ever read this book?”
He looked up from the frozen packs of hot dogs, some of which were now fully thawed, some with the cornmeal split at the center from misshapen sticks. “I don’t think I’ve read anything better, Ana, except maybe my Silver Surfer collection, ’cause you know the Silver Surfer is a clean-chromed galactic badass.”
He explained to Anabel how the Silver Surfer searches the galaxies, selecting planets for the mighty Galactus to devour, so that he might feed the unfillable void and the loss that is his astro-hearted metabolism. He explained to her that the Silver Surfer only heralds space for Galactus so that he might spare his own planet in the long run, and return to his truest love, that otherworldly super-fine morena, Shalla-Bal. Emilio kicks this down to Anabel in such a way that she suspects the Silver Surfer just might be in the next room listening to it all, his chromed-out ear pressed to the unpainted drywall of the storeroom, nodding his head with some sense of relief that someone else understood, someone different from him, but just like him. This was the image in Anabel’s head, and she placed her palm against the wall to feel the Silver Surfer’s celestial heat.
“Galactus?” she asked Emilio, holding the shrug of her shoulders at their peak.
“A big ol’ pimp. Like my brother—he’s Efraín-sized, muscles drawn on muscles, fists of anvils one hundred feet high.”
“Tell me,” said Anabel, “does the Silver Surfer find his love after roaming those galaxies for Galactus?”
“For reals, Ana?” Emilio blew her a kiss. “Everything is a love story, mija. And they only end one way.”
She pulled her hand away from the storeroom wall, embarrassed that she might’ve revealed the burned-out, star-sized hole in her own chest, and how she has never spent time with a book or a man cover to cover. She did think to show the South-South and the Silver Surfer the vibrant Planet Los Angeles—Monterey Park, Montebello, and Pico Rivera—and Mexican singsong between Beverly Boulevard and Atlantic Boulevard and Rosemead Boulevard and the 605.
And it went like this . . .
BETO ORDOÑEZ
Beto sat in the convent basement as he watched the space shuttle Challenger explode over the Atlantic Ocean and rain down million-dollar space trash. He watched the CNN live feed with his class on a black-and-white Magnavox he had helped wheel from the rectory across the playground. Thanh Nyguen and Chris Ochoa pressed their fingers to the screen, announcing solid rocket boosters here and fuselage there until seventy-three seconds into it all, when everything space-age burst into a pitchforked column of smoke and indistinguishable superplastic parts. Beto sat with his feet propped up on the desk at the back of the room. He held the remote control out in front of his body in a way that suggested he might’ve masterminded the whole thing from Continuation Catholic Development camp.
“Say something,” he commanded, escalating ticks of volume as the telecast fell silent. “Man, oh man, did you see that? That was something else. There are special effects and then
there are special effects.”
Sister Viramona pushed Beto’s feet off the desk and took the controller. “I expect more from you.”
“I’m sorry, Sister, but did you see that thing all blown apart to smithereens?”
Sister Viramona shook Beto’s arm and directed him to stand with the other children who had all come together to make a circle in the prayer room, under the large crucifix that held all the space on the far wall from floor to ceiling.
“That’s a giant-ass Jesus,” Beto exclaimed.
Thanh Nyguen nodded.
Beto leaned back to get a look at the television. He tapped on Chris Ochoa’s shoulder. “Check it. Space trash takes a long time to fall.” They watched the looping footage of the shuttle breaking apart into a fireball that seemed to eat up everything inside itself before spreading outward across the sky. Beto was surprised every time the shuttle took flight, that it did the same thing over and over again, anticipating its destruction, each time with a great whoa! “I bet it’s ten thousand degrees in that cockpit.”
Some of the children whimpered softly. Giant-ass Jesus has that effect on the little ones, Beto thought. “What are you crying about?” He addressed two girls holding hands. “You didn’t know no one on that rocket ship.”
“That’s enough, young man. When we’re done here, we are gonna have a little talk.”
He deeply inhaled Sister Viramona’s lavender scent as she walked past to change the channel. Little bolts of blue static shot from under her polyester robe as it dragged along the carpet. “You don’t smell like a nun,” Beto said. “You smell like the perfume my moms used to wear when she she’d go out dancing.”
“I don’t wear perfume. And I don’t appreciate you—”
“You wear makeup, too. I can see it right there. It’s not as much as my moms—used to take her an hour sometimes to get her eyebrows kickin’.” Beto clasped his hands in prayer and bowed his head. “It looks tight on you, though, Sister.” Beto concentrated on the last image he had of his mother. Her hair arched high in a great wave. He had buried his face in her chest to say good-bye. The glitter from her lotion had stayed on his cheeks the entire weekend. Beto thought she resembled the caged, naked woman in the oil lamp that hung over the far end of the family couch. Hot oil droplets ran down the cage bars in a spiral, evenly spaced and lighted by a red bulb. Both had wide hips and sparkled like goddesses.
Sister Viramona wore soft hints of makeup that he had never seen on a nun. That’s the reason he’d mentioned it. Beto had never seen such a pretty, young-looking nun. Her habit cupped the edge of her face and forced the flesh around her lips into a constant pucker. She was attractive, much like the kiosk makeup counter girls at the Pico Rivera Towne Center. And she was the same height as him. He noticed how their hands were the same size, hers matching evenly over the top of his as she dragged him to the prayer room. They were soft baking hands, always in oil and corn flour, and unlike the other nuns’ hands, the old nuns who looked like the stocking dolls he had made for the craft fair, with their potato faces and pinto bean eyes. Their hands were callused stumps from spending so much time in the church garden pulling up crabgrass and daffodils. No, Sister Viramona was the freshest nun he had ever seen, someone he might consider inviting out for a game of bones with his boys. When the other kids Our Fathered, Beto repeated in his head, You are the prettiest, you are the prettiest, to Sister Viramona, and then he prayed a deep prayer that she somehow had gotten the message.
“I don’t know what you’re up to,” Sister Viramona said.
“Space shuttle don’t blow up every day, Sister,” answered Beto. “I know peoples died, but peoples die.”
“You scare the other kids when you talk like that. You’re older, Beto. They look up to you.”
“Eleven years old ain’t old,” Beto said. “They’ll be all baptized up like me someday.”
“Who used that word, baptized?”
Beto pointed to giant-ass Jesus across the room.
“Baptized by fire,” Beto said. “Just like them.” He tapped on the screen and counted down until the shuttle vaporized for the twentieth time that morning. “All burned up. Right there, see that? That box holds all the astronauts. If it falls any faster, there’ll be a mile of dead fish in the ocean before it stops.”
Sister Viramona shook her head.
He called out, “Torpedoes!”
Beto turned his attention to a sweep of crows outside the classroom window. Each crow dipped into the church garden, pecking at felled tomatoes like it was some kind of game. They were on the convent roof that stretched to the rectory in an L shape. They flew out from the garden and landed on the telephone wires. They cawed and pecked at the plumage that rose from their backs in blue-black mohawks. It was as if they were taunting Beto, who could do nothing about their numbers.
Beto karate-kicked the curtains and banged on the window before unplugging the television. He pushed it across the playground, past Father Lynch, who was smoking a cigar and playing kickball with some of the children, ash swirling on them like some sort of blessing. He pushed the television up the back ramp into the rectory living room, and lined up the wheels with the divots already cut into the carpet, plugged everything back into the outlets, and turned it on. This time there was no footage of the shuttle, only a picture of a woman he had seen on the news for the last few months. She was the teacher, Christa McAuliffe. Under her image it read, First female teacher in space. Beto looked around to comment that she never actually made it into space, but the rectory was empty.
The entire Challenger crew had their picture on the television. One looked like Sulu from Star Trek. Another, Issac from The Love Boat. When CNN came back to McAuliffe’s picture, planned had been added to her title in parentheses. He felt relieved knowing NASA wouldn’t be allowing Carmelites into the space program anytime soon. The newscast suggested it was possible that the crew could still be alive, that the cabin of the shuttle was made of reinforced aluminum and could handle a significant amount of g-force. Beto thought about the time he had ripped a Coke can in half on the first try, and then shut off the television.
The morning’s events drove a hunger stake through Beto’s stomach. “Gotta get me some eats.” He remembered the altar boys telling him after Mass on Sundays how they had to stock the Christ crackers. He knew what these were. Beto grew up going to Mass with his grandparents. This was so his mom could get away for a while, take her trips to visit her cousins in Monterey Park, where she’d go dancing all night at Peppers. He’d go to Mass those weekends and be amazed every time Father Lynch reached into the chalice after the Consecration that there were enough pieces of Christ’s body for everyone to get their fill, like some kind of magic trick: Watch, it’s gonna be a rabbit next. Every time, he thought that Sunday would be the Sunday they’d run out of Christ. It never happened. The more people who came to the front, the more pieces Father held in front of his face reciting, The body of Christ. But it made sense now, standing in the rectory storeroom, there on the shelf in a cardboard box—Jesus, wrapped all up in yellowing wax paper like a Ritz.
He rubbed his sweaty palms against his jeans and opened the package’s seam at one end. The hosts appeared like a roll of gold coins, each with a cross on one side in relief. Beto pulled a cracker out and hesitated, then put it deep into the back of his mouth, half expecting his head to explode. He felt a slow dissolve on his tongue and a wood-like taste that he surprisingly did not mind. Jesus dried Beto’s mouth all up, and when the good Lord started to stick to the roof of his mouth, the blood of Christ did the trick to help pry Him out.
He couldn’t wait to tell his boys. He would stand baggy on the corner and his boys would say, You did what? And Beto would respond, That’s right, putos. And when they called him “crazy-ass Beto,” he’d do his best to act as though the next thing didn’t happen. He wouldn’t mention how the scent of vanilla mixed with lavender from around the corner filled his head, or that he never expected to act like
a girl the way he did after spilling a box of red wine down the front of Sister Viramona’s robe. It froze the nun in place like a black-and-white snapshot. Beto sensed that the compassionate Sister was using all her divine intervention to control her response. It was as if she spoke in tongues, a hundred different responses broken up into fractured syllables that floated and fell on Beto like scorched space trash.
“Why in God’s name do you do these things, Beto?”
He shrugged. “It just takes me over sometimes, Sister.”
“Beto, there is so much devil in you.” She dried herself with the Kleenex from her pockets that appeared equally soaked. “What do you expect from life, acting this way?”
His mom would ask him the same question when he’d get in trouble at home, usually for coming home late from Cabrillo Beach, where he’d spend the day looking for dead pelicans. He gave her the same answer he always gave his mother: “To take over the world.”
“Great, we have ourselves a supervillain.”
He liked the sound of that, and pumped his fists.
Sister Viramona shook her head and told Beto that he would be spending a late afternoon at the convent washing the largest Jesus in Montebello as the first act of penance before a sit-down with Father Lynch.
“I have to get cleaned up. You’re coming with me. I don’t want you out of my sight for too long.”
Beto had already had his first and last confession as far as he was concerned! The confessional always smelled like incense, bacon grease, and old Mexican women. You know, that sour body odor. They were the ones who went to confession most often. He wondered what old women did to warrant going to confession once a week. Then he remembered Mrs. Mendoza. Mrs. Mendoza had taught first grade to three generations of his family. She was the oldest teacher in the school district when she retired at dinosaur. On Thursday nights, she chased Mr. Mendoza down the block with the family molcajete. Thursday night was the night he came home drunk and only spoke of pretty girls named Luba. Everyone knew this. Go ahead and ask. And after the couple attended Mass and confession on Sunday, all was forgiven. Beto watched them those Sundays as they walked out after Mass, hand in hand, laughing like the schoolchildren. Confession worked. So, as long as the confessional did not shift and fly like the Swirl-n-Whirl ride at the Santa Monica Pier, he felt okay about some small talk inside. He threw up two years in a row on the Swirl-n-Whirl. His mother had yelled at him for wasting good money on churros and hot dogs. She told him they would never come back to the pier because, after all she’s done for him, including giving up a dancer’s body to bring him into the world, he was becoming the kind of boy who would have to make his own way into manhood. That was a week before she died instantly in a fiery rollover on the 60, driving home from Peppers after a night of dancing with her girls, like some kind of stupid motherly lesson.
Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul Page 1