Marcus is on all fours with his legs crossed. Ankle over ankle. He is positioned under Gramps’s right leg, at the heel of his rust-red boot. His hands are stacked and pressing down on the brake. The other kids shout in an instructional orchestra, Turn right—brake left, turn right—brake left, turn right—brake left! Marcus is the best choice for brakeman because his dad drives a rig for Mayflower, though his press on the brake is not steady or even today. Marcus gives lopsided compressions, and everyone’s tongue is housed just behind top teeth, aspirating the beginnings of nausea. When he finally closes the gap between the floor and the pedal, the bus comes to a stop at Wilcox and Lincoln. Denise gives the wheel a turn in both directions. She grunts and struggles with the bus’s rubber grasp on gravel, then turns the key to quiet the engine. She pushes up off Gramps and lopes back to her seat. Everyone claps. The kids who can whistle, do.
Marcus stands up and brushes off flecks of grease and ferrous dust. He looks through the windshield to assess his work. Gramps mumbles, “You press the wrong pedal and we’re all goners, son. You remember that.” Marcus nods and makes his way down the aisle.
Then the big kids take over.
Ricky S. calls out while struggling with the red handle on the bus’s back door, addressing us as girls: “All right, girls, leave your books on the seat and line up.” He unhinges the lever and the shrill of the door alarm confirms our exit. The look on his face suggests he has just tilted the world on its end. “Girls,” he orders. “Smallest in front.”
The kid wearing the Green Lantern T-shirt jumps out the back of the bus and turns around to face the open mouth between two released yellow doors. His arms extend out to the first child in line. “Let’s move it, you!” he calls out to each of the twenty-three children being spit out the back of the bus. We step off a metal lip and he takes us into his chest. Spins us down to earth. Drill time is the only time the Green Lantern has anything to say.
The sweet smell of rising yeast from Amy’s Pastry, half a mile back off West Beverly Boulevard, fills our buzzy heads. And then there is nothing but the tall, sweeping brush of eucalyptus over concrete, separated by a line of city-planted oak that mirrors our single-file stance. Kids are picking the gravel and gum from their treads as we collectively look down the neck of the bus. Gramps’s thick still in position over the wheel, his arms extending ever downward. Fingertips, blood-pool swollen.
All of us waiting on the intent of his lean.
THE DEEPEST POOL IN MONTEREY PARK
Tomás suspected Alejandro had been using the key hidden under the fake yucca for over a week now. It was for emergency use only. Tomás had told Alejandro this after the phone call from the airline. The representative had described Valerie’s chances of survival as iffy at best, under the circumstances. It was odd to Tomás that a trained professional would refer to his wife’s disappearance and chanciness at life as one might the possibility of rain on a large, expansive dry plain, or the likelihood of a game-winning walk-off home run in extra innings. The phrase stuck with Tomás for days. It stuck with him up to the moment Valerie’s father, Alejandro, walked through the front door, whistling some exhausting tune.
“I can get you your own key if you’re staying longer,” Tomás said.
“You see this graffiti in the front yard?” Alejandro asked.
Tomás didn’t respond.
“They wrote fuck, Tomás. On the side of the fire hydrant. Fuck in green spray paint. That’s not coming off.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Alex.”
“It’s disrespectful.”
Alejandro’s silver-tipped cowboy boots tapped like ball peen hammers on the walnut floors as he navigated the house. That’s the thing with wood floors, Tomás thought, they were an informant of sorts, the way the boards creaked by the stereo and how the tongue and groove snapped in and out by the oversized chaise as built-in snitches.
Tomás had grown tired of the old man. His crevassed dark face shadowed under a derby hat, the same plaid shirt and painter’s pants he had worn for seven days. A mule kicked in Tomás’s head to get out and explain to Alejandro the depth and width of the oversized hole in his gut, a sadness he could fit both fists inside, and how he just wanted the old man to go on with his own life. Even if he was Valerie’s father, it was time.
Alejandro walked into the living room, where Tomás had been doing most of his sleeping. He took away several empty glasses from the coffee table. The collection of water rings suggested the dryness of the room and the length of time they had been there.
“I’ll take care of these,” Alejandro said. “I think today will be a good day. You’ll see. It will be a day to start again.”
Alejandro nodded until Tomás acknowledged his optimism.
He folded the blankets on the couch and leaned against the large bay window as if he were on display. He felt weak.
“I have a key you can use,” Tomás said again as Alejandro left the room.
“I don’t need one. The yucca has one, no?”
“I’ll just give it to you.”
“No es necesario. I’ll be leaving soon. It’ll be your problem soon enough.”
Tomás looked just off the tip of Alejandro’s pointing finger, out the front window.
“Did you see that pinche hydrant out front?” Alejandro asked. “It says fuck on it like it’s the name of the company that made it.”
“It’s the kids at the bus stop,” Tomás said.
“Maybe I will paint it before I leave,” Alejandro said.
“I don’t think you’re allowed to go around painting fire hydrants, Alex.”
Alejandro tapped the on the window. “Exact-a-mente.”
Tomás felt as though Alejandro was trying to pick a fight. Valerie had done the same thing on occasion, over nothing. Tomás could see her now in her father, in a way he hadn’t before. The men hadn’t talked about Valerie’s accident all week, how her plane had simply been erased away by a barely interrupted ocean on her girls’ trip to Los Cabos. It was something.
“One way or another, it is looking brand new before I leave.”
Tomás agreed.
“Have you seen my beautiful pool today?” Alejandro asked.
“The pool,” said Tomás.
“It is my favorite thing about this house. You know, Valerie learned to swim in this very pool.” Alejandro tucked in his shirt then stretched his arms out in a swimming motion, great big telegraphed circles, forward and then in reverse. “The neighborhood would come here to swim. It’s the longest and deepest pool in Monterey Park, you know. The guy who built it told me he hasn’t seen one longer, or deeper. That was years ago when people were building specialty pools with large plastic rock cliffs. Some people had those swim-up bars and fake lagoons.” Alejandro winked at Tomás like they had a secret between them. “I never went to those kind of parties.”
Tomás turned and looked out to the pool. It was kidney shaped. He’d seen it hundreds, thousands of times. It ran the length of the yard from the patio just outside the bedroom to the pile of cinder blocks lining the outside garage wall. There was barely enough space between the concrete-lipped edge and the three-foot chain link that fenced in the yard to put a BBQ or a table. It swallowed everything. For the life of him, Tomás couldn’t even remember Valerie swimming, or barely putting her toes in. She walked around the pool as if it weren’t even there at times, as though she could just walk across it at any given moment. Tomás was the only one who cleaned it. He’s the one who had to go to the pool store and buy chlorine, bromine, Ultra Clear algaecide, and pool shock. He’d bought the rafts with drink holders and the best automatic pool cleaner, the Kreepy Krauly Platinum. He had told her that it not only cleaned but also sanitized. He remembered pointing to the place on the box that showed a graph comparing it to other cleaners. She complained it stuck itself in the corners and sucked air like a dying fish. It’s not that Valerie didn’t swim. She was all-state in high school.
She just didn’t
ever swim here.
Tomás pressed the bridge of his nose to rub out the beginnings of a headache. He pressed his eyes down hard until the auburn light in the house flashed over.
“We didn’t use it much,” Tomás said.
“It’s so deep you can feel the temperature change at the bottom,” said Alejandro. “Tell me, what is the name of that gigante hole in the Pacific Ocean. The deepest hole in the world?”
“The Mariana Trench,” Tomás said.
“Yes, that’s this pool in Monterey Park. No one has touched the bottom.” Alejandro continued down the hall. “You were sleeping, no? I’m sorry if I woke you when I came in. You know, now that I think about it, before all this, it’s been since Valerie’s mother died that I saw you last. Death has a funny way, no? She always wanted me to fill the pool with dirt, to put in a big lawn,” Alejandro said. “Everyone knows that Mexicans and a good lawn don’t mix. It’s best to have the concrete around, all those cigarette butts.”
“Valerie mentioned getting rid of it when we got the house,” Tomás said.
“I’m surprised the dump trucks didn’t back in here the day I left her mother. But you have the house now, and that is fine, I suppose.”
“That’s why you’re still here, Alex, your pool? A fire hydrant?”
“What to do, right? This was my home too—you remember that,” Alejandro said.
Tomás surveyed the yard. “Yes, I know, but we also made a home here. We made a good home.” He thought briefly to offer the old man a sandwich or turn on the Dodgers game. Instead he watched eleven minutes go by on the microwave digital clock and headed to his room to nap.
Alejandro stepped in front of Tomás and took his arm as he walked from the kitchen. “It needs some work.”
Tomás woke to Alejandro’s silhouette just outside his bedroom window, a black figure framed by the brightness of the day. Tomás stared at the popcorn ceiling, the animal shapes that appeared and swirled like clouds in its design. When he blinked, they’d be gone. Alejandro extended his left arm across the pool as though he were Moses, now parting the kidney-shaped Red Sea. He tapped on the bedroom screen. “There’s a dog here, no?” With his hands cupped around his mouth, he whistled twice: “Here, girl!”
“We had a dog named Lila,” Tomás said.
“I don’t know any Lila,” Alejandro said. He whistled again.
“Had a dog, Alex. She died at our wedding.”
Alejandro paused. “Ah, I see. It’s strange that I didn’t think about it all this week until right now. I knew there was a dog story. I wasn’t invited to your wedding, but you know that. So, this Lila took my place? Perhaps it would’ve been me dead at your wedding, no?” Alejandro laughed something wet out through his nose. “No substitutions.”
He knelt down and splashed the surface at the shallow end.
“I’d throw mijita in on this side, and with La Madre as my witness, she would swim the entire length and back in one breath.” He held up one finger to Tomás like a promise. “Just one breath. I’d call her Aqua Girl.”
“Must’ve been proud,” Tomás said.
“She could’ve been better, but she never wanted to practice. I put this pool in for her. I remember when the excavator guy came to dig the hole for the pool, I woke up early and came outside with a shovel and dug the hole right next to his front loader, so I could say, Look, mija, I built this for you.” Alejandro held his hand just left of his waist. “She was this high, with a swimmer’s body. Long like a lizard.”
“I had no idea you did all that, Alex,” Tomás said.
Alejandro shook his head. “She won some races. I have boxes of trophies in my crawl space if you want them. She found other things to do, you know.”
“Still, you must’ve been proud,” Tomás repeated.
Tomás’s gift back to the world was redemption, but Alejandro didn’t seem to want any of it.
Alejandro coughed. “I said she could’ve been better, is all.” He tightroped the edge of the pool.
“I couldn’t swim for shit,” Tomás said, leaning the top half of his body toward the bedroom window. “I was the anchor in my father’s johnboat.”
Tomás knew how to keep his head above water. He recalled his father making him tread water the length of the dock at Bombay Beach, where they’d snag tilapia out from the Salton Sea. He’d thrust himself from pylon to pylon, and then back again to prove to his father that he could at least backpedal to the boat if he ever fell overboard. At the end of the day, he would pick away the salted crust from his nipples and from the few hairs he had on his chest.
“No trophies for me, but I could save myself if the situation called for it,” Tomás said. He wasn’t sure if Alejandro had heard, as the old man stood comatose near the deep end.
“She could make it now, you know,” Alejandro said. “If she wanted to, she could make it all the way back to this pool.”
“Sorry?” Tomás said, confused.
“Mija. Right to this spot,” Alejandro answered. He pointed between his feet. “I’d bet all the marbles in Marble Town that she could find her way back here. I’ve seen her swim in this pool for an hour straight.” Tomás watched as Alejandro kneeled at the pool’s edge and pointed into the deep end. “Back and forth. Try it. It looks easy, but shit. I think I told you already that this is the longest and deepest pool in Monterey Park. Not by a little bit, either. The man who built it told me he hasn’t seen one longer. That’s a working pool man talking, not some wetback.”
“You mentioned that already,” Tomás said.
“Well, if you think there are bigger pools here, I can assure you of two things in this world. Numero uno, they aren’t making any more land in Monterey Park these days. And numero dos, if they aren’t making any more land in Monterey Park, then they aren’t wasting what they do have building bigger pools here either.”
Tomás reached down and pressed on his flanks. He rubbed out a sharp pain that shot like an arrow into where he thought his bladder sat full. He took a thermos from the nightstand and unscrewed the lid. He peed inside the plastic bottle like he thought a trucker might do between two distant stops. He screwed the lid back into place until it made a clicking sound and then set it down on the floor just under the bed.
Alejandro skirted the pool where the space was the most narrow along the fence. A shed sat at the shallow end and had a shape like a Barbie Dream House, with small colonial framed windows on its sides. Its hinges opened the roof at its peak to access all the cleaning supplies. Alejandro reached in and took out three-gallon containers of chemicals and the collapsed telescoping broom for cleaning the deep end of the pool where he said the temperature changed so suddenly. He pulled out a canvas tool bag full of wire brushes used to clean the small concrete pores of the algae that made the pool’s edge slippery in early spring.
Alejandro placed the bag by the ladder. He took out several tools and inspected each for wear. Tomás wondered if Alejandro had any idea he was being watched ten feet away. He didn’t seem to as he spit on the head of each brush and rubbed the bristles clean with the corner of his plaid shirt. He scrubbed each for a minute or two, inspected each again, and lined them up on the concrete like toy soldiers. He stood and twisted open the broom. With a hard lean on its end, he positioned his hands as though he were preparing to pole-vault himself into the neighbor’s yard. Then he coughed violently and Tomás saw the bulging vein that stretched from the bridge of his nose to his scalp. It reminded Tomás of the garden snake he had chopped into bits with the lawn mower the week he and Valerie took over the house. Valerie had yelled something to him across the yard, but it was far too loud for him to hear. The snake had coiled in front of the lawn mower in a standoff, and Tomás simply tilted back the mower and closed down on the snake like a clamshell.
The fully telescoped broom entered the water and cut sharply in a mirage that zigzagged at a forty-five degree angle underneath the surface. For over an hour, Tomás watched his dead wife’s father clean th
e pool, its cement curved edge dipping seamlessly into the water as smooth river stone. This was the cleanest it had been since they moved in. Alejandro used a chamois to clean the tiles of their lime deposits. Tomás thought about how he had never cleaned anything so meticulously in his entire life. Loving was the word that came to mind.
The Fourth Street Elementary School bus interrupted Alejandro. Tomás couldn’t see the bus from the window, but its screeching brakes were a dead giveaway. Alejandro pulled the broom from the water and stood it on its end against the patio trellis. The noise of children getting off the school bus was a daily occurrence—girls squealed and called each other names, threatened to tell one another’s secrets to older boys. A ball bounced with tinny action on the paved walk. Alejandro stalked the backyard, pacing like a hyena just as a plastic soda bottle arched high over his right shoulder and landed in the middle of the pool. It sat upright like every SOS bottle Tomás had ever seen in a movie, ripples and gentle splashes against the tile now lovingly cleaned.
Alejandro walked out of Tomás’s view toward the fence line closest to the street, and shouted in Spanish at a group of girls. Tomás did not understand Alejandro, but he felt the concussion of his language twenty feet away in bed. He could hear girls’ voices talking back at Alejandro, quick-lipped backchat usually reserved for the older girls. Alejandro walked across the pockmarked concrete back into view and held a nine-year-old girl straight out over the deep end of the pool like chopped bait. Tomás half expected a trained killer whale to rocket from the depths and plant a mammal-fish kiss on her reddening cheek.
“Old man, eh?” Alejandro yelled at the girl. He held her over the water, with his hands slipped under her armpits, in a way that showcased his upper-body strength. “No respect for my property!”
Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul Page 6