Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul

by Bryan Allen Fierro

  Nana is stuffing all the breakfast remains into one tortilla. She rolls it into a paper towel, cuts it in two halves, and holds them out straight-armed for us to choose. Ricky comes in right behind me and inspects the two halves. Nana knows better than to help start a fight. She matches the top of each half and holds the bottoms in a closed fist, choking out chorizo and cheese like breakfast lava. It is difficult to tell which is the larger of the two cuts. Then she says something in Spanish that commands us to make a decision. I am shorted.

  “Ricardo,” she says, “help your nana. Get the shovels.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Ricky waits for the screen door to close, then turns around for me to get the full shot of him taking a bite out of each burrito. He does a victory dance that I have seen before. Nana directs me to wash Saint Jude. I reach under the sink and grab a new sponge from the box marked Super Kleen. The water from the faucet will take about five minutes before it is hot enough to use on a saint. I know this.

  I put the sponge under the scalding water, holding the smallest corner edge with my pinched thumb and pointer finger so as not to get burned, and walk to the breakfast table, leaving a path of small, steaming droplets behind me. The Human Torch looks right at home now, the steam swirling around his fiery, torching fists.

  Nana is counting the cracks that look like hair along Saint Jude’s faded robe.

  “There’s more cracks this year, mijito.” I push down on the sponge, and it begins to hiss.

  Scrubbing this Saint Jude is similar to how Nana describes her scrubbing Uncle Joe in the middle of the night, back when he woke up cursing those goddamn leg-taking gooks. Nana doesn’t say goddamn or gooks. She says the Lord’s will. Our mom says gooks every chance she gets, and I have come to believe that gooks means more than one thing or another to her. The scratchy side of the sponge has cooled some, but it is still warm enough to take off the bird crap and sap from Saint Jude’s shoulder blades, where everything hits him square. I stop when the last of the paint around his armpits begins to fade away.

  “Take the corners of the newspaper, mijo.” Nana instructs me on how to best wrap this Saint Jude. His size is never the same from year to year. “No, like this, mijo.” She pulls the paper, twisting it above his head like a flower that hasn’t yet bloomed. Saint Jude is packaged much like the gold Christmas ornaments our mom gets in the mail every month. There is a stack of the velvet ornament boxes in the back bedroom underneath Uncle Joe’s rucksack. They smell musty like the porn magazines Uncle Joe keeps inside. I look at the magazines every chance I get. Lacie is on page sixteen inside Cherries. She has a red ponytail and a necklace of white pearls that extends the length of her body. Her skin is freckled and the color of buttermilk. She is outside on a windy day and never looks directly at the camera as she plays and tugs the pearls down between her legs. The caption under her photo asks if I want to be inside her. I guess. I look at her so much that if you dropped the magazine on the floor, it would open to that spot every time. As much as she wants to, Nana won’t throw them away. She says that Uncle Joe has to come back for something, and that our Lord and Savior works in mysterious ways.

  I know it won’t go anywhere, but I can’t resist bringing up Uncle Joe. “Nana, do think he will come home someday?”

  “What would you say to him if he did?” she asks.

  “I don’t know what I’d say,” I say. It is a question I have never really been able to answer, and it gets harder the older I get. I’d probably ask him what it was like to lose a leg. One minute you got two legs, and the next minute all you can do is think about the things you’ve never done when you had both. Except hopscotch, of course.

  “You were too young to remember him,” she says. “And that’s why I want you and your brother to talk to him every morning. When he does come home, I don’t want you to be afraid.”

  “I am not afraid of a one-legged man,” I say.

  She tells me to count my lucky stars, mister.

  Ricky is doing his best to juggle the remainder of my breakfast and two shovels in the breezeway. From the kitchen, I can hear when a shovel gets loose, scraping its metal head across the red-painted concrete, leaving a chalky white line that I will have to scrub off when we are done. Nana tells me to stop paying Ricky any attention, just to something something in Spanish, and focus on the task at hand. She says she thinks I have perhaps forgotten the importance of burying a saint.

  “Saint Jude, mijo,” she tells me, “is the saint who comes to those who are in desperate need.” I think to myself that this particular Saint Jude is in desperate need of another Saint Jude to come and rescue him. The little fake flame is working its way out the top of the newspaper, ready to ignite the whole damn place.

  “Why is Saint Jude’s head on fire?” She has told me before, but I get it confused with Jesus’s inside-out heart and Saint Teresa’s crying roses out her eyes. I read that it wasn’t roses she was crying, but the blood she was spurting up from lung disease. I never mention the things I read because I don’t want to have to apologize to the Saint Teresa statue on Nana’s side of the bed. This is the first year that I am taller than it.

  “Your arms, mijo. Put them out,” she orders. Nana pushes Saint Jude into my chest. “I’ll get the map.”

  I rock Saint Jude back and forth like he might start to cry at the noise Ricky is making in the backyard. The force of my grip turns my fingernail beds white, and the blood in my body feels as though it is circulating the wrong direction. My thumb punctures through the newspaper, straight through Magic Johnson’s toothy game-winning grin and up Saint Jude’s butt. I start to laugh, and I have to take a long, deep breath before I tell myself to stop. I put him on the kitchen counter in a better position to get a look inside where guts should be. My goodness, what a great hole! Had I known he was hollow inside, I would have packed him full of army men a long time ago, extra troops to pull out when Ricky thinks he has me surrounded, would’ve stored the soldiers Nana took away from me, the ones with all the legs cut off at the knee. Why Nana was so upset is beyond me, asking me why would I do such a thing as to snip off the legs of every soldier with her good Gingher scissors.

  “Such a thing to do,” she had said.

  “Uncle Joe is the only soldier I know, a one-legged radio private.” I had him machine-gunning with one leg, throwing a hand grenade with one leg, squatting down and one-legging it under barbwire, past the gooks and the Lord’s will. “He’s my supersoldier, Nana.” For six months, Nana kept my army of Uncle Joes in a bag high up in the garage. The plan was to wait until she forgot all about them and then, under the cover of night, sneak across enemy lines for the covert rescue attempt, a mission thoroughly planned out while watching an episode of The Rat Patrol. On an in-service Friday, I came home from school to find my army of Joes melted into a green plastic glob holding open the door to my room. Nana’s kiln in the garage is as hot as hot gets, and apparently it takes eight hundred and twenty-five degrees to melt my Uncle Joes into green army juice. Nana believes that we should never forget how we got to our current place in life. That is the exact message she had carved into my waxy new doorstop.

  Nana unfolds the map as she walks past me and out the back door. I think about desperate needs, about how Uncle Joe hasn’t been home since two months after I was born. Nana says he is alive, but I am not sure what that means. I believe a lot of things.

  She says Saint Jude is alive in her heart.

  I will never leave here. I am just not interested in growing up and losing a leg. I think desperate needs, and go into the living room to the box that holds Uncle Joe’s medals. I open it and finger around inside. The only medal not inside the box is the purple one, which has its own case and hangs on the wall. It is a heart, but not inside out of anything. It is by itself, resting on black felt, on the wall underneath The Last Supper. He got it for blowing off his leg. I stare for a while, and it just comes out: “Go and blow your leg off,” I say in my deep army general voice. “Cle
an off, Private.”

  I slice the newspaper around where I think Saint Jude’s face should be and pull back the paper flap. The space where his nose is missing is now clean and white and bird crap–free from its honeycombed cement pores. “Take a look, Saint Jude,” I say, pointing at the picture of Uncle Joe on crutches, pants stapled at the knee. “It’s way too late to do anything about the leg, but I’ll take bets you can bring him home.” I finger a little more through the medals before finally deciding on a small bar of silver stars and a circle with two attached miniature rifles that cross one another. “Got this for being a spot-on shot.” That’s not good enough soldier, I think. “You got it for snapper killin’.” I move the remaining medals around in the box to take up the empty space and go into the back bedroom to tear Lacie out of Uncle Joe’s magazine. I wrap the medals inside her and push both deep into Saint Jude’s hollow guts as far as they will go.

  “She’ll take good care of you,” I tell him.

  Nana looks up from her map at me as I walk out the back door. She has a look like she knows—but doesn’t know—but knows that I have been messin’ around inside.

  “Judgment Day. That’s all I’m gonna say, mister.” She places her rocking chair cushion on the red concrete and kneels down, balancing with the unfolded map. Ricky looks at it with her, pointing out the Saint Judes he has buried—that one, and that one. The map is on nine pieces of grid paper taped together. Nana uses our Magic Markers to draw the entire backyard. There is a small orange yucca, purple birds-of-paradise, black rosebushes, and two brown lemon trees drawn on the map like you are staring down on the backyard from the belly of a huey.

  Between the lemon trees is a pedestal my grandfather made for Saint Jude back when my mother was a little girl. It is where Saint Jude lives throughout the year, a mostly shady spot that smells of citrus from freshly stepped-on lemon leaves and granite dust. It is the place where the birds bomb-crap most. I ask Nana if that is why we change Saint Jude out so often, but she is too busy working the top back on the green Magic Marker to answer me.

  Ricky and I stand at attention on the concrete side of the trim, ready to dig. Once we cross over to dirt, it is Nana’s show. She has the thin blue marker out and is checking off the already underground Saint Judes. I count off with her check marks because I badly want to know how many: twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four.

  “How many, you think?” Ricky pulls at my pants pocket to point out the small patch of marked dirt we will shortly start turning up.

  Nana is in my periphery, still flicking blue on the map with the slight lift of her wrist.

  “At least twenty-four.” I tell him some had to be buried under the lawn before there was lawn.

  Ricky nods.

  “Right here, mijitos,” Nana says, her finger pressed against the map. “Start from the first lemon tree and walk three steps to your right.”

  “Clicks, Nana, they are called clicks. Three clicks.” I press my back against the lemon tree after teaching Nana a thing or two about army talk and match my feet toe to heel three times before stopping. Nana is hunched over; her arched spine stretches out above her ruffled shoulders. It is a good dress she has picked out for this occasion, flowing green with bright red hibiscus flowers that look like midair explosions. She blends in with the yard as she hovers over the map to identify the marks in the creases of the lined paper.

  “Now take one step back and to the left. Stop two feet from the wall.”

  “Two clicks?”

  “This much clicks,” she says with her hands spread out shoulder width.

  I move, leaving minimal footprints. “That is perfect, mijo. Now start digging.” She pats Ricky on his back, startling him some. He breathes heavily as she instructs him to walk the same path to meet me. “Get in there and show your brother how it’s done.” His face lights up as though he really thinks he knows what he’s doing. I tell him to stay down in a low crawl and watch the horizon for the movement.

  “What am I looking for?” Ricky asks.

  “Silhouettes.”

  “What is that?”

  “You’ll know. But by the time you see it, though, it’ll probably be too late.”

  Saint Jude is resting on the lawn’s edge next to Nana. If she picks him up, she might very well hear the medals moving inside his stomach. But instead she just colors like a little girl, a big-fisted grip on the markers as she shades in all the new plants that have grown in around the backyard during the last year. It is important to keep the map up-to-date.

  Digging is all about your angle. I know how to properly plant my foot on a shovelhead to run it deep into dirt. Not like Ricky, who stabs straight into the ground, using nothing but his neck and shoulders. I mention this to him, but he tells me to leave him alone, that this is not his first time either.

  “Hey, Ricky,” I say. “How many land mines you think Uncle Joe walked over before he reached the one that got him?”

  “Ten thousand,” Ricky says. “I bet those gooks planted a million.”

  Nana looks up from her map. Ricky might be right, but I bet it was more like four or five on the road he was patrolling, until the pressure of his boot stamped out his leg’s future on number six. Nana told us that even in Vietnam, Uncle Joe was probably just being Uncle Joe, doing Uncle Joe stuff, and walking to the beat of his own drum out there in the jungle. I bet he was quiet on that dirt road. I bet he was thinking about Nana’s chile verde and the girls in his magazines when he should have been worrying about bouncing betties and the possibility of wearing one-legged Tough Skins from Sears for the rest of his life.

  I am halfway into my hole. “Nana,” I mumble, “Uncle Joe ever bury a Saint Jude out here?” She stares out over the lawn for what seems like forever and turns back, giving me a look that says she might start to fire up that kiln of hers. It doesn’t take too long before the hole is wide enough and deep enough for a saint. Nana sets down the map and reaches for Saint Jude.

  “I got him,” I say, dropping my shovel and stepping directly on the last twenty-four-plus years of saints.

  “Ay, Dios mio!” There’s just so much Spanish from Nana at this point to know what to do exactly, so I just do my best to lighten the weight of my footsteps and leap out over the brick trim onto the concrete.

  “BOOM!” Ricky yells, and starts laughing, but it doesn’t take long before Nana is staring him back down into the hole. He gets low and covers his head to protect himself from all the shrapnel.

  She scolds me. “You know better than to do that.”

  I apologize and check the bottom of my shoes like it might help explain damage assessment.

  “Nana,” I say, scooping up the statue.

  “You know what I’m thinking,” she says.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say.

  “You need me to read the map to you again?” she asks.

  “No, I remember.”

  Ricky steps out from the hole and wipes away the clay and crust from his knees. There always seems to be less dirt to put back into a hole than originally dug out. It’s as if someone stole two big handfuls when I wasn’t looking. I line Saint Jude’s hole with pea gravel so he has good drainage January through March. As I lean down to place him inside, he clanks—enough of a clank to get Ricky’s attention. He has no idea that I have stuffed Saint Jude with desperate needs, and that maybe Saint Jude is resisting a bit at the idea of going under. Ricky steps back, a little fearful that Saint Jude might blow up the perimeter. I don’t blame him. It took me a few years before I was comfortable putting Saint Jude in his hole. Nana pulls a water-filled mason jar right out of thin air. She instructs me with her twirling finger to pour it over the dirt, which I do, onto a small mound of dark clods that quickly turn into mud.

  “It packs well around the gravel, Nana.”

  “It’s holy water from Saint Thomas Aquinas.”

  “Did you steal that from the jug at church?” Ricky asks.

  We never used holy water in the past.

>   “It’s not a jug. It is called the font,” Nana says. “Say it, Ricardo.”

  “Font.”

  “The font,” says Nana.

  “The font,” says Ricky.

  “Father Lynch gave it to us. We don’t steal, mister.”

  Nana prays as we start to throw the clodded soil and a half-opened bag of Miracle-Gro over Saint Jude. I want to tell her that I got things covered. That Uncle Joe will be coming through that gate at any moment. Though it might upset her that I put the medals inside. And honestly, I don’t want to spend the rest of my summer digging up the backyard to prove to Nana that it was the first time I ever buried something in a saint.

  She holds the map out in front of her and peeks around its corners to exact her drawing. Then she folds it up and tells us to put the shovels away and clean the white streaks off the concrete or else.

  “Go inside and wash up. Take off those pants,” says Nana.

  She hands me the map and doesn’t say a word.

  I know where it goes.

  Before even thinking about lunch, we have to drive over the hill into Montebello and buy a new Saint Jude at Christ’s Basement on San Gabriel Boulevard. They have statues there just lined up and down the aisle, ready to take his place. Nana says the next one will be the biggest Saint Jude yet. One that will rise to the heavens, she says. And I wonder how big she is thinking, and when the time comes next year, two weeks before my birthday, if there will even be enough space to dig as deep as we’ll need in the backyard, where the lemon tree roots are starting to split the red concrete in two.

  100% CHEROKEE

  Ray warned Felix daily that if he did not get in touch with his Cherokee roots, dang it, all of this would end badly. He warned him of the coyotes, and how they’d been spotted running in packs, and not the pairs Felix recently read about in the paper. Ray quoted their escalating numbers in the Sierra Madre foothills, that it didn’t make no darned difference if it were three in the morning or noon, they were hunting—not scared and not resigned to staying in the thick brush of the wash. These coyotes were seasoned. They got the taste of seven-year-old Marisol in their mouths, the deaf girl who lived in the largest house on the corner lot. They got her jumping rope in the driveway one street over, just south of where Felix’s family lived on Mira Monte Avenue. They bit at her cheeks. The coyotes took the palms of her hands as she defended herself.