Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul

by Bryan Allen Fierro

  “You can just climb under,” she says.

  I pull the sheet in the window aside to check on the wedding down below. The old women are sitting in the same chairs. There are fewer people in the front yard now, which explains the hollers from the back. There is a red plastic cup on the rear passenger-side wheel well of Lonny’s car. The owner of the cup is a shirtless, sinewy pup, about sixteen. He is leaning back on the car, perched on his elbows. A young woman is running her finger along his zipper line while he nods to her a go-ahead. Her skirt is a tight black sausage casing with suspenders and a short gray jacket. The pup has placed his cup on Lonny’s car to claim it as his own under the current promising developments, and I wonder if Carmen was ever that girl, duped into growing up.

  “Get in here. I want to show you something.”

  I crawl under to Marlena shining the flashlight in my eyes.

  “C’mon now. What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Lay down next to me,” she says. She is supine on a pile of crocheted blankets, with her head resting on a Webster’s Dictionary. She scoots over and pats the space next to her. My eyes adjust back to normal. The skin on Marlena’s head is thin like tissue paper or an expensive Christmas ornament you find broken in the bottom of a box, poorly packed the year before. “Look up,” she says.

  She is waving the flashlight back and forth as fast as she can. She stops and catches her breath. “You know what that is?” she asks. Before I can answer, she whispers shooting star into my right ear. I nod and tell her that it looks exactly like all the shooting stars I have seen in my lifetime. She raises her eyebrows and I nod again.

  “I want to see one,” she says.

  “If the city lights weren’t so bright, you wouldn’t believe what you’d see.”

  “I love stars,” she says. She says she loves stars in such a way that suggests she’s given up on a whole laundry list of adventures.

  “You are one.” Marlena has the same reaction on her face that I had about cholas earlier in the day. I move in closer and hold my hand out for the flashlight. “Finish your soda and give me the cup.” She complies with curiosity as I take off my belt. It is going to be hard to explain if anyone walks in, but I do it anyway, and use the pin in the buckle to poke holes into the cup. I exact the placement of the holes the best I can and dry the inside with my shirttail. The head of the flashlight fits the cup with only a slight twist that clicks with a small bend and then back into place. My intent is indecipherable to Marlena, her look suggesting that she has met a lot of liars in her short life. I turn the flashlight upright, presenting her with a homemade planetarium, and all the doubt falls away from her. “We’re all made of the stars,” I say.

  She reaches out for the Big Dipper as I turn the flashlight, making it disappear and reappear again. I make the turn with a delicate lean that sits at twenty-two degrees to mimic this night’s sky. I explain that this is close to how the stars will look outside tonight.

  “We aren’t made of stars,” she says.

  “I can prove it.”

  “Prove it!”

  She reminds me of what it must be like to have a daughter who wakes you up at three in the morning to ask an impossible question because she just cannot sleep until she has an answer that functions as a lullaby.

  “You ready for this?”

  “I’m waiting,” she says.

  “Okay, so there’s hydrogen in stars, and it starts clumping together and forming suns,” I say.

  I take the cup off the flashlight and shine a bright ball on the ceiling of the fortress. She opens the dictionary and turns to H. “The sun converts the hydrogen into helium. It does this over and over again until it runs out of hydrogen to fuse. To eat, right? Then it starts in on the helium because all the good stuff to eat is gone.” She nods right along with me as though she’s familiar with all these consumption models. “It fuses the helium into carbon. You know all living things have carbon. You know that, right? I think most kids do.”

  Marlena yawns. Her skin is yellow in this battery-fueled light.

  “Well, the helium runs out, and it starts in munching on the carbon—chomp chomp—assuming the star is big enough.” I gesture again to the bright sun on the sheet and suggest that this star is just big enough with an okay sign. “Once the carbon is eaten up, the only thing left is a big ball of iron. And when you reach iron, the star is done for. Eating, or fusing, iron takes more energy than it releases.” I grab my gut and explain to her that it’s not this way with people. She giggles. “At this point, when the iron is fusing, the star collapses, and the energy rises dramatically, then . . . are you listening?”

  She nods.

  “Then the star explodes as a supernova, which is the most powerful force in the universe. There’s nothing more powerful.”

  She turns to S and scrolls down to supernova. She pieces the definition aloud: “A star that sud-den-ly increase-es greatly in bright-ness because of a cat-a-stro-ph-ic explosion that ejects most of its mass.”

  “Right, that’s what I said.” I attach the cup on the flashlight and spin it violently. “It spreads all that mass—stardust—everywhere. Then hydrogen, helium, and carbon start to find each other again, and from this, life starts up. You, my dear, were at one time at the very heart of a star. You’re stardust.”

  Marlena takes my hands and slows the light’s spin. “My mom told me that we are here because Jesus died on the cross.”

  In all my years of teaching, I have never had that response at the end of my lectures. And before I can answer her, screams come from downstairs as a herd of wedding guests moves through the house. My belt is off and I am under a sheet in a dying girl’s room. What kind of messed-up fuck am I? There is no way I can put together the supernova talk in such a way that will sound believable and simultaneously explain how I can use my belt buckle to create any documented starry night.

  Why didn’t Carmen just come find me? She’d get all this right away. The yelling is in Spanish and I don’t understand, but Marlena doesn’t look as startled as she does interested, like the two of us are invisible. She springs up and rubs out the sleep from her lower leg that had been crossed under her. The sheet pulls from the fan and Marlena limps to the window. She tugs away the covering and gasps at the sight down below. The voices are diffuse now, and when I step into the hallway to confront my accusers, there’s not a single wedding guest to be found.

  Marlena yells down to her mother through a closed window, using her first name. I get back to her side in time to burn the image in my head of Shy Girl in her white wedding dress, her veil streaming up like a mighty fin, kicking the woman in red jeans. The woman appears unconscious as Shy Girl yanks up the lacy trim of her hem around her thighs while dropping her spiked heel into the crook of the woman’s neck. Marlena’s mother gives a beatdown on the woman’s abdomen. That Crazy Silvia. The woman turns onto her side and pulls her arms up to defend herself. Carmen stands aside to it all behind a gathering of wedding guests.

  The men laugh behind the chain link fence and cheer Shy Girl on to fuck that puta up. Shy Girl’s eye makeup is sweating down her face. The woman in red jeans reaches up and twists Shy Girl’s hair back and strikes the side of her face with the hairbrush from her back pocket. It sends Shy Girl tumbling backward. The crowd has created a wall. The old women momentarily look up from their seats to see if the commotion will spill over. Their force field is strong. It is over this man-made wall in Boyle Heights that my Carmen emerges—flies really—over the top of Shy Girl and onto the woman. Carmen straddles her, clamping down with the viselike strength of her legs.

  I have no programmed response as I watch my ex-chola girlfriend repeatedly punch and claw the woman as she tries to pull back from under Carmen’s legs. I know how useless this can feel. Shy Girl sits at the edge of the front lawn, rubbing out the pain in her face. That white line on her cheek is gone now. Marlena looks up at me to measure how to react, her paper-thin head pulsing. I can only turn and look around the
room for my belt. She gives up on me and runs out of the room, calling downstairs for her uncle Lonny.

  “Forget Jesus,” I say to her as she leaves the room.

  By the time I come out of the house, one of Lonny’s boys has Carmen pulled away and already sitting inside the passenger side of Lonny’s car. The woman in red jeans throws in the towel and stumbles down to the sidewalk to lick her wounds. She turns around and flips a middle finger at Shy Girl, who shines a winning grin back. Carmen has no idea what year it is, and I wonder if I slip my face into her view, will she snap back to now? On the ground are three of her shattered midnight-blue press-on fingernails. I pick them up to give back to her when we wake up tomorrow morning. Lonny helps Shy Girl up from the concrete, and everyone yells like this was part of the closing ceremony. He walks her to the car and Carmen steps out to make room inside. Shy Girl hugs her, and they exchange some aggressive whispering between them.

  “Less go for a ride,” Lonny says. “I know what will make you both feel better.”

  He pushes the seat forward for Carmen to get in the backseat. She finally looks around and finds me waving from the other side of the car. She fixes her hair and smiles dimly like she might have broken a promise.

  “Can I come?” I ask.

  “Of course,” she says.

  “We can go to Alaska now if you want,” I say.

  “Just past stuff is all. It’s over.”

  I want to make this easy for her. After watching her lose herself like she did, I feel I have all the power, and the best thing I can do is let it dissipate into something neutral. Lonny looks me over like he’s not sure if I can sit in his ride.

  “I’m with Letty. Congratulations by the way,” I say.

  He extends his hand, and I muddle through a bro shake of sorts. “Get in, Chris,” he instructs. I look around the yard for Marlena, but she is gone. I look up to the bedroom window, and there is nothing. The sheets are all pulled down. My truck is at the end of the street, and from here I see that someone has stolen the box of dog shit. The straps are cut and draped over the side of the bed. I can only imagine their surprise when they open the box expecting a forty-seven-inch flat screen with HD. This lightens my body.

  Carmen leans against me, holding a circular section of white rope. It has knots along its length that remind me of rosary beads. “What is that?” I ask.

  Shy Girl turns around from the front seat. “It’s our wedding lasso.”

  Carmen hands it to Shy Girl. “Right, from the ceremony,” she adds.

  “Yeah,” Shy Girl says. “We kneeled at the altar, me and Lonny. Silvia twisted it in the middle like this and put it over us. It’s supposed to be like infinity, you know. So that Lonny and me are together forever, you know. That’s cool, right?”

  “I know infinity well,” I say.

  “You know infinity times infinity?” Shy Girl counters. “That’s what I thought.”

  Carmen squeezes my leg and tells Shy Girl that it’s nice and how she wished she could’ve been at the ceremony to see it in person, but you know how things are in her head about ceremony. Shy Girl hands me a beer from a half rack hidden under her dress in the front seat.

  “Where we going?” I ask Carmen, but Lonny responds instead, reaching into the glove box and pulling out a pocket-sized silver revolver. He hands it to Shy Girl, who then points it at Carmen and me. Carmen laughs. She laughs uncontrollably, snorting into my dress shirt. I am the only person not laughing, mostly because I am the only person in the car trying to figure out if one out of four people get shot at chola weddings.

  “We’re going to Elysian Park,” Carmen says. “We’re gonna shoot Lonny’s gun.”

  “I’ve never shot a gun before,” I say, and the laughing stops.

  “He told me just this morning that he’s never even been punched,” Carmen adds.

  Lonny adjusts his mirror so that he can look me in the eyes. “We can take care of both those things tonight, holmes.”

  Everyone is excited by my virginities.

  We exit the freeway and head into the park. The road winds up the back side of the Los Angeles police academy. The Dodgers play just on the other side of the hill at Chavez Ravine. There are billboards of Dodger players, old and new. There’s Steve Garvey handing a ball to the younger Adrian Gonzalez, and Tommy Lasorda shaking Don Mattingly’s hand in the dugout. Lonny turns off his headlights and cruises into heavily forested Elysian Park.

  The road ends at the top of the hill in a cul-de-sac lighted by three flickering streetlights. Lonny stops the car and gets out.

  “Gimme my gun, Becky.”

  Shy Girl is Becky. Everyone is showing me something new.

  “I’m gonna show you how to shoot a gun, Chris. And if you fuck that up, holmes, I’m gonna punch you in the face.” He laughs.

  Carmen shakes her head and pets my arm to let me know that he is kidding. For a moment, I wish I were back in Marlena’s fortress. “We used to come here back in the day,” she says. “We would shoot down at the cars on the freeway to let go after something big happened. You know, to get it out of our system.”

  “The cars. The cars with people inside,” I say.

  “You can’t hit anything from here, but it feels like you are.”

  Lonny walks under each streetlight. “This is a Saturday night special. A thirty-eight-caliber revolver you can use close up, you know. But I bet you I can hit that light.” He points his gun overhead, squints his eyes, and pulls the trigger. The pop is short and has a concussion that I didn’t anticipate. The housing on the light explodes overhead and the sparks spread out just like they do in the movies, hitting the ground and dancing for an almost immeasurable moment, and then they are gone.

  “It’s your turn, Letty’s boy,” Lonny says. He tosses me his gun and crawls up onto the hood of his car.

  “The streetlight?” I ask.

  “The freeway,” Lonny says. “We’re too far to hit anything. But you can get the feel, you know.”

  Shy Girl hollers out and stumbles to the dirt. All the beer she has been drinking is settling in on her. She pulls up her dress and climbs onto the hood next to her husband. There has never been a tenderer scene than watching Lonny break the heels off Shy Girl’s shoes so she can walk. He kisses away the bruise that has taken over her right cheek. It’s hard to even tell the two of them apart now in the darkened street under the shot-out streetlamp.

  “Stop worryin’, holmes,” he tells me, making a gun gesture with his thumb and pointer finger. He throws Shy Girl’s heels over an ivy-lined cinder block wall into a nearby drainage ditch. Then he says the most marvelous thing. “Marriage is the strongest bond the galaxy has ever known,” he says.

  “I’ll give you that one, Lonny,” I say.

  “Go ahead, baby boy,” Carmen says. She reaches into the backseat of Lonny’s car and comes back out with Shy Girl’s lasso. She steps into the rope ring and pulls it to her waist, twisting it at her hip to form a figure eight. She holds the empty side out to me.

  “Get inside,” she says. She is closer to me now than ever. This is called a blueshift. It indicates that an object is moving toward the observer, and the larger the blueshift, the faster the object is approaching. I can see us doing this again, coming up here and falling into our routine. I imagine getting two new dogs, just bringing them home and pretending they’re the ones that left under the fence. Carmen will say what the fuck are you thinking, and I’ll just keep pitching a squeak toy over and over again until the new mutts drop it at her feet.

  “Get in here.” Carmen throws the empty loop over my head and accidentally scratches me with her broken fingernails. “Oh babe, I didn’t mean to do that,” she says.

  I rest my head in the cup of my shoulder and take aim. Everything I ever wanted to know about my girl is just off the tip of Lonny’s Saturday night special. I shoot down on the Golden State Freeway. It is too dark to see where the bullets are going, but I imagine the miles pushing behind each one to the places
we’re headed. I fire five times into the passing traffic until the gun clicks empty. No one says a damn thing. There is no swerving in the sea below. Deep down I had hoped for something causal, a rollover or the sound of breaking glass, but everything’s moving uninterrupted. All the headlights amass in a comet that skirts the four of us. And if my calculations are correct, this won’t happen again for a million years.

  HEART ATTACK DRILL

  Gramps’s slump over the wheel is more convincing this week. The school bus moves about ten miles per hour down Wilcox Avenue, and it is eleven-year-old Denise Espinosa’s turn to take the wheel. Marcus’s turn at the brake. Denise stands with a leg on either side of Gramps, and bends forward over his back like a gymnast, hands at ten and two.

  Nadia Zamora mans the emergency radio. She keeps saying to herself, Don’t laugh. She holds down the call button, broadcasting her nasal slips and honks down a line of four overhead speakers. She grips the receiver and tangles the coil of the cord around her hand like she is on the phone with Mike Avila, flirting late at night. Under covers. She pretends to turn the radio to the emergency channel, her fingers motioning in circles a centimeter away from the knobs, like she’s screwing the lid off a tube of Colgate.

  “This is bus number twenty-six. We have an emergency.” She hints a giggle. “This is bus twenty-six.”

  A little drool—play drool, not the foamy kind—comes from the corner of Gramps’s mouth. The hump in his back tells everyone he is doing all he can to keep the horn from sounding. We know that if the horn sounds, the drill will either be over or his slump real.

  Gramps wants the kids to react to a heart attack without thinking. Like putting on a pair of shoes or eating a bowl of Trix. “Heart attacks happen just like that, kids. You just do. Like fires and flat tires, best to be Johnny-on-the-spot.” This is the phrase he will say to everyone just after the drill, when the saliva returns to our gums. Gramps is seventy-six, and he doesn’t talk like our grandfathers.

  Denise can only turn the wheel to the right because the angle of Gramps’s slumped body won’t allow her to rotate it left. He monitors her from the pretend dead. She moves over slowly, so as not to ditch the bus, killing first through seventh grade. A tinny voice hopscotches alongs from the backseat—“Denise . . . is . . . turning . . . too . . . fast”—and everyone laughs. It is clear Denise wants to go back to her seat, to finish stickering her Trapper Keeper.