Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul

by Bryan Allen Fierro

  The girl whined.

  “Let me explain this to you un tiempo. I’ll wait if you need me to.” Alejandro’s arms did not tremor under the girl’s weight at any point. Her body stiffened in a yellow sundress that she pulled down against her thighs, a watercolor print that looked like a field of marigolds, but up close was nothing more than pastel smudges dyed into cheap secondhand fabric.

  “You are going to get that basura out of my pool, sí?”

  The girl squirmed and Alejandro adjusted his grip at her sides.

  She slowed her fight and nodded.

  Alejandro lowered her to the pool’s concrete lip. He kicked the canvas tool bag away from him, scattering his brigade of newly cleaned brushes on the narrowest path around the pool, where it settled at the base of the chain link fence. Tomás felt dizzy. His legs were for shit, so he sat at the edge of the bed and watched through the window as though it all were a horror movie. Alejandro bent at the waist, his face an inch from the unnamed girl, commanding her to get the damn basura out of my pool. He pointed to the bottle still floating at the pool’s center. It looked like a buoy to Tomás, and he thought about Valerie as this girl, swimming out to it and taking the tight line at the turn around and then back again, a task he could imagine Alejandro making her do over and over until her stroke was perfect.

  Alejandro took the girl’s hand, now holding her with one arm. They spoke too closely for Tomás to make out the exchange of words, and he could only see the girl nodding again, as though there had been a firm plan put into place. The two shook hands in some sort of gentleman’s agreement. The girl took off her shoes and stood in her white socks with purple crocheted trim that folded over at her ankles in tight, delicate nautical knots. Alejandro picked up her shoes inside each heel with his thumb and middle finger and moved them out to the front of the ladder.

  The girl secured her left foot at the edge of the pool. She looked up at Alejandro, who pursed his lips at her and nudged his chin forward. He controlled her left hand as a rudder, trimming her body out over the expanse of water. And from the side arch of her foot, she stretched out with a gaze that fixed on an imaginary object across the pool, as a ballet dancer might, to control the gyroscopic tendency in her spin, then down toward the bobbing bottle.

  “I can reach it,” she said.

  “This will be the last time you do this, yeah?” Alejandro said. The tiles bordering the pool caught the last of the afternoon light. The open bottles of unmixed chlorine released fumes in the air that burned Tomás’s nostrils. Alejandro overextended his reach and struggled with the girl out over the expanse of the blue pool as she balanced off the fulcrum of her arched left foot. “Not in my pool,” Alejandro said. “This is a good lesson for you.”

  Twice Alejandro had referred to the pool as his own.

  The sound of the girl’s face breaking water was an unfamiliar one to Tomás. For two years there had been nothing more than a fine and very quiet surface tension of water that separated what he knew about Valerie and what he knew now about her the moment the young girl’s lungs began to fill with water. Alejandro tried catching the girl, but he only bear-hugged the empty space she had occupied just moments before. He stretched his arm down into the pool with a force that only plunged the girl deeper at the very end of his reach. Her yellow sundress floated up and over her head, where it spread out like freshly spilled paint. He swiped at her again. This time he came up with her. The bottle floated to the spill drain on the far side of the pool and twirled on its side with the lapping water tipping it up, then tugging it back again gently. Alejandro set the girl down. They coughed together, and the girl pulled at her dress. Alejandro held her in his arms for at least a minute before letting go. He massaged the vein on his head and reached out to the girl with his left hand, but she had already closed the gate and made her way down Gerhart Avenue in socked feet, down the alley between Newberry’s and the row of pagoda-shaped public housing, her shoes left behind and neatly displayed on the concrete as though they were for sale in a store window. Tomás looked to Alejandro for his reaction, but there was none. He just charted the backyard for the bottle, now filled with water and in the catch of the pool’s deep current.

  Alejandro sopped down onto the lawn chair under the patio just outside the bedroom window. He skipped the chair’s aluminum frame along the concrete and crushed a small collection of gravel. Tomás sat up. The screen’s one-way tint only allowed for someone inside to see out. Alejandro leaned from the chair and pressed his face into the screen, causing a slight inward bow that stretched the screen from the hardware at its edges. His wet skin puddled against the screen and turned his face black.

  “You in there?” Alejandro asked. He blew hard through the screen.

  “What the fuck was that, Alex? You could’ve killed that girl,” Tomás said.

  Alejandro sat back in the chair—king of the pool, Tomás thought. The old man stretched out and then slid the chair closer to the bedroom window. He wiped his face with his shirt and stared at the pool’s edge, now rust colored from the crushed small tool soldiers. “You should watch what you say. I was teaching, and the best way to teach is to show. I’m a good swimmer, you know. Now, if you had to save her, well . . . we already talked about that. You mentioned you could save yourself.”

  “Her father is probably on his way now to beat your ass.”

  “If he’s around, I probably know him. Ten bucks he swam here.” Alejandro laughed.

  Tomás wondered if Valerie’s death still made Alejandro his father-in-law. He wondered how death clipped the lingering branches of a family tree.

  “I have done things I’m not proud to say out loud,” Alejandro said, trying to see inside. “Tomás, you in there?” Alejandro tapped harder on the window frame.

  “You need to leave,” Tomás said.

  Tomás felt a growing pressure inside his bladder. He reached for the thermos, but it had rolled under the bed.

  “I can’t see you in there,” said Alejandro.

  “I said it’s time for you to go, Alex.”

  “I don’t know about that. Is something wrong with you in there?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I think things aren’t so fine,” Alejandro said. “You should know that I’m not a man of penance.”

  The daylight fell away from the porch and made it difficult for Tomás to see the shadowy profile of Alejandro disappearing into the landscape of the yard. He rested his arms on the sill and squinted at the dark smattering of changing shapes.

  “Maybe I can tell you everything I’ve ever done wrong,” said Alejandro. He pushed away from the screen. “Right now. Right now, we’re the two closest people in the world.”

  Tomás stretched his foot out to reach for the thermos.

  “If we can agree to that, maybe I will ask you for forgiveness,” Alejandro said.

  Tomás leaned back in the bed and pulled the blankets over his body.

  Lila had eaten a dead jellyfish at the Water’s Edge Resort in Santa Barbara the day of the wedding ceremony. She suffered from anaphylactic shock at the hotel bar in Tomás’s arms. The bartender had cleared a spot next to the CD jukebox. Tomás told Valerie to enjoy the start of the reception, that he’d be fine, that there was nothing anyone could do about the situation, and that he would find her in time for their first dance. A waitress said she’d get her EpiPen from the break room, but she never returned. Tomás couldn’t picture her face when he tried.

  “No way, babe,” Valerie had told him. “I’m staying with you. This is our first real emergency as a married couple, and there’s no way I’m going to leave you. What’s happening to her?” Tomás explained anaphylactic shock. Lila’s breathing sounded more like she was slurping water from her bowl. He explained how her lungs were filling with fluid as it shifted from all the vessels in her body and into all the free space in her body. He used the word histamine several times and explained how they were too late in finding Lila, and that there was nothing anyone co
uld do now.

  “Interstitial fluid,” Tomás had said to Valerie.

  “Interstitial fluid?”

  “Lymph. Mostly water. All kinds of fluid besides blood, Val. Cerebral, spinal, but mostly water.”

  Valerie whispered from behind Tomás like a little girl. “Her face looks like a cartoon. Like it’s swallowing itself whole.”

  He turned his attention away from Lila to Valerie. “It’s filling her up like a water balloon. You can say she’s drowning from the inside.”

  The bartender offered to call 911 out of not really knowing what more to do. He mentioned to Tomás that he thought there was a pet emergency veterinarian downtown by the mission but that he couldn’t leave the bar to help out. He repeated the location of the veterinarian to Tomás three times, and also how he had to open the place in twenty minutes. Tomás looked at his watch and asked the bartender for some extra towels.

  “Why do they say drowning is peaceful?” asked Valerie. “They say it’s meditative.”

  “Meditative? Who says that?” Tomás asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “People who say that have never drowned.” Tomás lifted Lila’s bulk onto the bar top. “You ever try to breathe underwater, Val?”

  Valerie nodded.

  “And you’d still use that word, peaceful?”

  Valerie shrugged her shoulders and placed her hands around Lila, circumferentially. She held the dog in a measuring capacity to get some sense of what was happening inside her body. “I don’t think she’s breathing anymore, Tomás. She feels really tight.” There had been a slight flex in Valerie’s forearm muscles that Tomás burned into his memory. “She’s heavier, too.”

  “The body is a flawed system if you ask me.”

  “There’s got to be something we can do,” Valerie said.

  Tomás remembered how the bartender had nodded furiously.

  Valerie buried her face into the nape of Lila’s neck. She smoothed Lila’s whiskers back along her snout and released each one slowly to watch it spring back into place. She rolled her into a beach towel that had an oversized cartoon crab holding a child’s bucket and shovel. A small collection of sand had gathered under Lila, and Valerie brushed it onto the floor.

  “You can go, Lila,” she said. Valerie waited for the bartender to walk into the kitchen. He looked at his watch and gave her a sympathetic yet urgent can we move this along now look. “Sometimes that’s all you can do.”

  Alejandro walked out from the garage with two cans of spray paint and a roll of masking tape. Tomás watched him cross the yard twice, then back again for two empty moving boxes, and thought that he might be making room for Valerie’s car, which was still in airport parking and was going to cost a small fortune. Neither of the two men had thought to pick it up. Tomás noticed the Kreepy Krauly for the first time. It had wedged itself into the farthest corner and made that desperate sucking sound of water mixed with air. He sat up slowly and wrapped the wet sheet over his shoulders. He struggled with the window shade on Valerie’s side of the bed and pushed out the screen. The crawl through the window intensified the pain in his flanks as he stepped out naked, his toes webbed out along the porous cement edge.

  Tomás dove into the deep end, the side he had watched Alejandro clean for over an hour. He looked up through the water’s distortion at the old man, who appeared as an angular, wobbly mass. His lungs burned, and he couldn’t stay under too long without feeling the pull to the surface. He came up widemouthed for air, swallowing and swallowing. Alejandro walked around the pool to the faded side of the diving board, nearest the patio. He shook the rattle can of paint and yelled into the water, “You won’t find deeper!”

  Tomás waded at first to measure his body’s response to exercise. The blackness at the sides of his vision slowly expanded to view the pool’s bottom sloping grade, and the plastic bottle, far beyond his reach, tipped up and balanced on its neck in a pirouette. His thrust sent him into the shallows, fluid and wholly outstretched. Alejandro smacked the shell of the water with an open palm. Tomás heard this and the metal ball bearing inside the rattle can as Alejandro continued to mix the paint. It was this dullish, flat metallic sound cutting through the viscous fire-engine red that acted as the metronome to his quickened pace through the ping-ping-ping of open water.

  MINEFIELD

  The Saint Jude statue sits in the middle of the breakfast table with his head slightly cocked to the right, looking down on the calendar section of the Los Angeles Times like he is doing the crossword. His nose is split in two and his long robe is chipped away behind his left knee like he got hit from behind with a Louisville Slugger. He resembles my uncle the day he came back from Vietnam—one leg missing. Nana counts the cracks on Saint Jude and sighs. There is a flash of joy in her old face at the flame above his head, still-flickering paint-flecked mortar. But the way Nana spits on her thumb and rubs the empty space between his eyes tells me that Saint Jude is about to take a dirt nap.

  Ricky walks into the kitchen. He is half asleep and watches me stuff a tortilla with potatoes and chorizo and then sits down. Saint Jude is taking in some Beetle Bailey. I hand Ricky a tortilla, but he reaches for the one I just stuffed. “Hell no,” I mumble, so Nana doesn’t hear me mentioning that place. “Get your own,” I say. I know I won’t get another chance to eat until late in the afternoon when the digging is finished.

  I have to chew my food slowly because if I get to the digging too soon in this heat, the grease in my stomach will spill up and burn the back of my throat like acid. Ricky eats faster than he should, but then how would he know not to? He’s only dug two holes, and both of those were during the winter months. Nana can eat as fast or slowly as she wants. I have never seen her bury a saint, although I know there are Saint Jude statues under the backyard that are older than me and Ricky put together. This will be my fifth time digging a hole for Saint Jude, all of them in July, within two weeks of my birthday. It’s like he plans this as some sort of present for turning fourteen.

  “Did you say good morning to your uncle?” Nana asks, stirring eggs around in a smoking skillet.

  We answer, “YES!” at the same time.

  “Don’t be little jokers. Put down your breakfast and get into that living room right now before I whack you. You know what to do.”

  Nana pours milk into our Fantastic Four tumbler. Ricky carousels the cup in the palm of his hand to get a good look at its superhero lineup. He points out the Thing to me, then drinks more than half his share. And with his arms extended, his knees bent in a deep flex, he roars.

  “You better get moving,” she says.

  I give Ricky the let’s hurry up and do this face. We leave the kitchen, and Nana’s left eye follows us down the hallway, the right one still on the cooking.

  The living room walls are full of pictures—our mother in the backyard, dancing in a black-and-white photo when she was our age, her skirt twirling, frozen in the air, with Tata holding her above his head, squinting his eyes, and turning his face away to the left, in fear of her propellering skirt. There are Disneyland trips, that fat fish Shamu, and all the birthdays lined up and labeled by year and kid. Here is my baptism. There are pictures of women called Carmelites.

  Uncle Joe’s picture is in a twig frame and sits on the television next to a box that holds all his war medals. Ricky and I can’t watch a minute of Get Smart without looking up at him during the opening. He watches over us through the dancing flame of the lit candle that Nana keeps between his picture and the Sacred Heart statue. Ricky calls the Sacred Heart the inside-out Jesus, since the statue is holding a heart outside his body. And much like the top of Saint Jude’s head, it is on fire. Piercing through the heart is a small metal sword that slides in and out, and fits perfectly into the hand of the Bionic Man, or snug in the belt loop of his red one-piece jumpsuit when he needs to lift his half-ton engine block. The sword never leaves the living r
oom. That’s the rule.

  There is more than one picture of Uncle Joe, but this is the best one, him in his army greens. Look here. He is on crutches with a small American flag stuck into his armpit so he can hold up the plate of cookies our mother is shoving into his chest. He had just come home, back from killing. Nana is in the picture with her arms around him, keeping him balanced on his crutches. His right pants leg is rolled up and stapled at the knee. Our mother has snot running down her face, crying and crying. I think Uncle Joe should look happier to be home.

  “You say it first,” Ricky says, bouncing on his left foot.

  “Good morning, Uncle Joe.”

  “Why do we have to do this?” Ricky asks.

  “I think ’cause he got his leg blown off.”

  “Think he’ll ever come back?” Ricky asks.

  “Why do you ask that every time? I don’t know.”

  Uncle Joe left everything behind. Nana says he just got up from the dinner table, not even asking to be excused, and hopped on one foot out the back door. He even left his crutch. It’s right here where it’s always been, next to Tata’s old Stratocaster. Mom thought he might have been checking on some of his buddies driving up to the house, but that wasn’t the case. He hopscotched outside and got into a Datsun 210 that neither Mom nor Nana knew from the neighborhood, and has been gone ever since. They didn’t say Datsun 210, but it’s my favorite car, so that’s how I tell the story. Mom told us that he didn’t even look her in the eye when he left. She said it was exactly what our dad eventually did to her, and that if we ever do that to a woman, there will be hell to pay. Nana says that even though we have never really met our uncle Joe, he’s more of a father to us than our own.

  Uncle Joe had just whispered something to Nana that night, but no one can tell you for sure what he said because Nana keeps her secrets locked inside her heart. Ricky and I have been living with his ghost ever since. With the one leg gone, I am pretty sure he’d be easy to spot. So when I take the garbage out to the back alley, or run through the aisles in Newberry’s, I always keep my head on a swivel for a one-legged man looking for a place to sit down.