Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul

by Bryan Allen Fierro

  “You know, Beto, you’re lucky no one is here.” She walked out from the bedroom and pulled her straight black hair under a plastic band. “Because I’d get in trouble.” She had on navy sweatpants and a 1972 Sacred Heart Volleyball sweatshirt. “I didn’t plan on you pouring wine on me.”

  Beto’s body felt like a firecracker, his spine the lit fuse to a head that was going to jettison at any moment. He swallowed hard. “Nuns play sports?”

  “Four years varsity, actually,” she said. “All-state.”

  Beto stepped closer. “My mom went to that school.”

  “I know she did, Beto. Stay here, okay, and I’ll get the supplies.”

  The crows were back, darting from the roof again into the remains of the garden. Beto pointed out their tactics as Sister Viramona reentered the room, tracing their flight patterns overhead with his index finger pressed against the large bay window. “See how they look out for each other? It’s a damn stupid thing, those crows. You missed them this morning, Sister. It was just like that movie The Birds. You watch. I bet Father Lynch goes crazy and machetes those birds someday. That’ll be a day to remember for the parish, Sister. If they poked around in my trash, I’d do the same thing.”

  A half dozen more crows danced in the middle of the street.

  She placed her hand on Beto’s shoulder. “You know, Beto, I didn’t know her.”

  Beto nodded and took a bottle of lemon oil and two rags made from T-shirts from the last year the Dodgers made it to the postseason, a large-headed cartoon version of Fernando Valenzuela. Again, he felt the softness of her touch.

  You’re the prettiest, he tried one last time.

  She let go, and for the first time Beto could smell the real air in the convent, no vanilla or lavender, only the musty rot of a building with trapped moisture problems.

  Sister Viramona bent at her waist to get a good look at Beto. He stiffened his body, and through the slits in his eyelids, he watched as she ran her finger between the top of her head and the plastic band, pulling her hairline tight. She squeezed his arms to undo his spell, her warm breath on his face, prying his eyes open like oysters.

  “Beto, there is a time and place for everything,” she told him.

  These words—time and place—sounded like something he’d expect to hear from an adult.

  “Time and place for what?” Beto asked.

  “Taking over the world.” She faced the prayer room and whispered across the back of his neck, “And falling in love.”

  Beto shadowboxed his image against the wall. “Man, oh man, watch out, watch out.”

  “The Lord won’t let you off so easy.” Sister Viramona lined up the cleaning supplies on the counter and walked to the back of the convent.

  Beto mumbled, “I’m gonna need me a good woman, you know.”

  Sister Viramona did not respond.

  The only thing left to do was clean giant-ass Jesus all up. He scrubbed each toe, both calf muscles, the knees, and behind each thigh. He cleaned the concave of the stomach and gently over the cut below the rib cage, looking to Jesus’s face to measure His pain. Beto moved to the chest and under each arm, where he spent a considerable amount of time measuring the Savior’s biceps—“Boy, you all kinda ripped up, Jesus”—down each arm to the nail in each palm. He used WD-40 on any part that looked metallic and moveable. He didn’t miss a finger, then under the chin and behind each ear. It looked as though this was the first time Jesus had been cleaned. The water turned black. He was careful not to cut himself on the already bloodied thorns of the life-sized crown as he leaned in from the top step of the ladder.

  Beto put the used rags under the sink in the kitchen. He didn’t know if it was where they belonged, but it was where his mother had kept such things. Sister Viramona was in her room at the end of the hall. She hadn’t told him to check with her before leaving. He could hear music coming from her far room, a popular song he knew from the radio. It called to him, and he wanted to go down to her, to let her know he was no mistake. The shadows in her room flickered and the music grew louder. The other nuns were off on retreat. Beto thought about the first time he was alone at home, back when his mother had to work two full-time jobs. The evening had been spent practicing his mother’s dance moves from the club. He ate ketchup and pickle sandwiches, and turned the television volume to fifty. He ran around the house at full speed, stopping for no one.

  DODGER BLUE WILL FILL YOUR SOUL

  Mariana says Steve Garvey is mas chingon and has the forearms of a dream husband. “Arms that could hold me all night long,” she says to your face. She does her dance in the kitchen, the dance she did last night in the middle of the living room, a little salsa number she does during every Los Angeles Dodgers game, every time number six comes up to the plate. She does this dance to bring luck. Your nine-year-old son, Isaac, who criminally does not watch Dodger ball, dances with Mariana on the linoleum, matching his mother’s steps, side to side. He dances without knowing his role as a Dodger fan.

  A four-game stretch against the Houston Astros is stressful. Tonight you will watch game two of the series on the nineteen-inch TV with tinfoil and taped rabbit ears. Isaac laughs every time you try and improve the reception, mistaking poverty for ingenuity. He has seen you do this with the refrigerator, the clothes dryer, and all his RC cars.

  Isaac runs in and out of the house, not paying attention to the game. When strike three is called on Bill Russell to end the first, you let Isaac know as he passes through the living room, just to keep him involved in the game. “Strike three, Isaac. You hear me?”

  He finally settles down when cousins from your family’s side arrive in the top of the third inning. They’re a group of Mexicans that stumble into your two-bedroom home. They have long moustaches and teardrop tattoos leaking from the corner of their eyes. These are the cousins you never wanted to visit as a boy, back when you were the same age Isaac is now. They lived in Pico Rivera when you lived in Monterey Park. You just didn’t know how to talk to them, a mother tongue plucked out like tonsils. The girls were always nice to you. They spoke magic and called you soft Mexican names reserved for lost children. The second name on all your records is pobrecito. The boys wanted to see what you were made of. They hardly said a word to you at all, and when they finally opened up, they only asked questions about the girls you’ve been in, and then hissed laughter at your answers. When you said you were hungry, the boys gave you salted dried plums that you hid in a paper towel inside your dead uncle’s work boots that never left the back porch. The girls made you bean and cheese burritos and squeezed your cheeks as you ate. They took you into their room and let you place the needle on Thriller. You picked out their nail polish and never chose black. The boys stalked you in the house like a wounded gazelle. They tackled you and bent you over so your full stomach was pinched and you couldn’t breathe. And now you are here in Pico and there’s not much you can do anymore to avoid these situations, and even as a grown man, the air in your lungs escapes you. Your primo Hector pulls up his shirt to let Isaac trace his Our Lady of Guadalupe tattoo with an index finger. Isaac starts on the right side of her unenthusiastic look that says she has given up ever coming off Hector’s flaco chest, and works his way around. This is the moment Hector announces that he is taking Isaac to get his own novena etched to skin, inmediatamente.

  “One day, mijo, you will have La Madre art like your tío Hector.”

  No ink, Isaac. Not inmediatamente, not ever.

  Hector makes known his protest following Isaac, who is on his way to your lap and clearly confused about the infield fly rule. Out of all the things to happen during the game, you never thought a purposely dropped infield fly, with men on base, would grapple your son’s attention. Isaac doesn’t think it’s fair to be automatically out at any point. He hates the infield fly rule, but you don’t press it too much, so as not to distance him from the game. Hector would like to challenge you about his place in Isaac’s life, out of pure determination to dominate you
in your own home. This interruption is madness! Blessed Mother herself: Mariana dancing for Dodger luck in the kitchen. She has on her favorite game shirt, which has Dodgers splashed across the front as if flicked from a paintbrush. It is game-worn and thin enough to make out the dark skin of her sloping breast. Pressing.

  The rabbit ears demand your attention and Isaac expresses amusement in the bouncing jaggedness of the reception. Manny Mota and Rick Monday, in left field and center, bent like taffy. You tell him to pay attention to the game, to anticipate the next play.

  “Mijo, there are two outs and a man on first and third. If a ground ball is hit to you at third base, where are you going to make the out?”

  “I don’t like third base,” he says.

  You explain that third base gets all the action. “It’s the hot corner,” you say. “The place where the ball dances like fire,” you say.

  Isaac looks at you with his arms crossed. “I wanna be in the outfield.” He sits up from his Indian-style posture and places a finger at the top of the screen on Dusty Baker, who looks clearly bored to tears, filling the void in right field. The outfield—there is so much fat in the outfield.

  He tells you this without knowing what it might be like to be Ron Cey, “the Penguin,” as he’s better known, because of the waddle in his stride, glove as big as an outstretched wing.

  “Watch the game,” you instruct, knowing it best to leave him alone at times like this.

  Steve Garvey has been up to bat three times and has gone 0-for-3. His nickname early in his career was “Mr. Clean.” Dodgers skipper Tommy Lasorda was quoted as saying, If Steve Garvey ever came to date my daughter, I’d lock the door and not let him out. That was before rumors of illegitimate children with secretaries and marriage statistics to match his at bats in tonight’s game. You steer Isaac toward following the rest of the infield position players. It’s the bottom of the fourth, and Mariana comes into the TV room with a look you’ve seen before. “Where the hell have you been? Maybe Garvey would have made this thing a game.” In response, your drunken wife of six years attempts to dry hump the television like a wild monkey in front of your nine-year-old boy. There is no argument that Mariana is bang sexy in the glow of the Dodger at bats. She puts one high-heeled shoe on the television and digs the other into shag, thrusting her bare midsection at Steve Garvey’s face. You know everyone at Dodger Stadium can see his grin from the upper deck.

  “Come to Dreamer,” she screws. Dreamer is her nickname from another time and place.

  The count is full, 3–2, and she is blocking Garvey’s view of the defensive alignment on the first-base line. Houston’s Bob Watson is creeping up the line to cut the chances of a grounder to the outfield scoring Davey Lopes from third. Isaac looks at you with contempt of your love for the Dodgers. This is Dodger Blue. And despite all you think, you are Mexican! You can’t help but grab the world and Dodger baseball with your whole heart. Hector completely removes his wifebeater, exposing Our Lady of Guadalupe. Her head bows downward in a deep prayer as all her stars fall to the serpent coiled at her feet. Mariana yells out, “C’mon, Garvey, mi amor, get a hit for Dreamer!” She kisses the television screen, leaving a dark red lip print on the screen. The rabbit ears bend closer to her, eventually working their way under the knot tied into her Dodger tee that you bought her before she got pregnant with Isaac.

  Lighted by the television from the back-and-forth shots of Dodger players in their mostly white uniforms, Mariana’s breast falls from her shirt—a single to right-center for Garvey and the stand-up tying run, Lopes pumping his fists all the way to the dugout, as though he, too, has caught a glimpse. Your son’s self-proclaimed uncles wave their arms in the air and holler in Spanish. You have never been happier not to be able to speak the language. You and Isaac are the only two in the room unable to keep up with the high-speed chatter. Mariana clutches her right breast and turns her attention away from number six to Hector. She finishes his Budweiser. She looks into his eyes, applies more Ruby Woo lipstick, and says, “See what I can do? Dreams come true, no?”

  Garvey has a two-step lead off first and is thinking steal.

  The Houston Astros have managed their way out of the inning, taking the game into the top of the fifth. Still the game is tied. Pitcher Mike Cosgrove is at bat and Hector flips the TV a tattooed middle finger, the I from VIDA spelled out across four knuckles on his left fist. Mariana finally leaves to the back of the house to get ready for her night out dancing at Peppers.

  Isaac lays out the baseball cards you gave him last Spring Classic—he likes the colors of the East Coast teams more than the West Coast teams. You tell him the Dodgers were an East Coast team. From Brooklyn, you say. When he asks why they moved, you crack a joke about Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. You tell him about the white whale of a man named O’Malley and the uprooted people in Chavez Ravine who began everything here. He looks at you, suspicious about it all. His sex-bomb mother in the back room coupled with an on-screen 5–4–3 double play.

  Isaac suggests the two of you go outside and throw the ball around. You tell him to wait until the seventh-inning stretch and sit him down on the floor. You stare down to the end of the hall. Hector is nowhere to be found.

  He stands up. “Now,” he says, with one hand cupped around the back of your neck. “Play ball with me.” These words have never been strung together so neat and hard from your son’s lips: play ball. Catch in the street may be the only thing that separates the last three outs of the sixth inning—a Dodger lead thanks to a Manny Mota sacrifice—and you changing the landscape and rocket trajectory of Isaac’s future by doing something universe altering for Hector. Isaac’s timing is an effort to keep you from becoming the Mexican man you are so hell bent on him not becoming.

  You agree to go outside with Isaac because you think the boy should not hear the comings and goings of his mother’s ways. You don’t realize that Isaac is used to his mother’s sexual magnetism in Pico Rivera. All things come to this house. Sometimes he even hums to the rhythm and press coming from the next room on the nights you watch the game at Peppers. It is the infield fly rule and the lack of a good baseball glove that has Isaac presently upset as he ties his shoes to go outside, upset that the only gloves available are the ones from your high school days. Although well worn, none seem to mold to Isaac’s hand in a way that will protect him from the heat you plan on throwing, low and inside. He pulls out a white-creased, heavily oiled Rawlings from the corner of the garage, and seems content with the choice. But just before the two of you get to the screen door, José Cruz, that bastard José Cruz, takes one deep off Sutton to right field, over the head of a glazed-over Dusty Baker, tying the game at two all.

  “Damn it, Sutton.” All the interest in going outside has vanished while you watch Cruz thump his chest in a macho gallop around the bases.

  “Dad?”

  “After the game,” you tell Isaac.

  “But it’s almost dark.”

  You guide Isaac back through the screen to his spot on the floor. “We gots streetlights.”

  Your cousins and their indecipherable high-speed chitchat pace the living room during commercial breaks. You get up to grab a beer, and Isaac corners you in the kitchen.

  “Why don’t you know Spanish?”

  “I speak a little,” you say. “Honestly, mijo, I don’t know why.”

  Isaac has heard the language the last two-thirds of the seventh inning and has picked up on the basics.

  “I want to learn Spanish with you. It’s not hard.”

  “So learn it.” You shoo Isaac from the kitchen. “Go ask your mother.”

  Isaac steps back and looks down the hall. “She speaks it already.”

  Hector pulls on your 1974 Western Division Champs T-shirt from the dirty laundry in the garage, blanketing an oversexed and underpaid Our Lady of Guadalupe. He overhears the end of the conversation and says the only real way to understand a culture is to know the pop in its language. He says this kind of shit to you
r son until the bottom of the eighth, a few times pointing to you across the room. “You come live with your tío. I’ll teach it to you. Your father is too flojo pendejo to teach you.”

  Hector goes outside and rolls a smoke.

  Mariana walks down the hall and into the bathroom. After a few minutes, she comes into the living room and pulls and twists her hair into a tight bun at the crest of her skull. She shakes her head at Isaac when he takes his batting stance in the kitchen. He swings from the wrong side of the plate and tells his mother how much he wishes you spoke Spanish.

  “I didn’t marry Chico here because he’s Latino kick-ass. Knew that much,” says Mariana. She brushes her hands through Isaac’s hair and pulls him into her arms: this is how you love her most. She whispers in your son’s ear, “He was supposed to be a big-time player.” She says, “Shit, he ain’t no number six. Right, mijito?” Then she kisses him with that mouth.

  You played varsity baseball at Cantwell with your eyes closed. Played third base like a man on fire, with the hops and glove speed to pluck line drives from thin air. A defensive dynamo down the line, you were. The San Diego Padres scouted you your first year at UCLA on full scholarship—prodigy, they touted. You played in their farm, always keeping one firmly planted foot at the corner of West Hammel Street and Gerhart Avenue. It’s where your lucky horseshoe hung. Your first year you had 92 hits in 343 at bats, a slugging percentage of .440. Then one game you swung for the fences with bases loaded in a game that meant nothing and got numbness in your throwing arm that sticks with you today.