Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul

by Bryan Allen Fierro

  The city of Sierra Madre issued new trash cans after the attack. They were large industrial plastic containers with self-closing lids. Residents had to use them or be fined for breaking a wildlife ordinance that said you couldn’t invite coyotes over for dinner. Felix pressed down on the lid to lock it in place, but it would just pop up and bend slightly onto itself, warped from the direct sun that hit the side of the house like a solar flare. Nothing survived on that side of the house. This was the first summer that Ray did not change the direction he parked his ’67 Mustang, so that the fading of the yellow and black racing lines would even out. According to Ray, buying the Mustang brand new was his last greatest memory. Felix had eyed the car since coming home early from school. He offered to park it in a storage unit for Ray, or maybe put up a tarp during the summer heat to stop the beating. Ray wouldn’t have it.

  “Can’t go hiding it away.” Ray pressed his cane into the long shag strands of the living room carpeting. He looked out the window down on the Mustang. “She’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen more beautiful age worse in my days.”

  Ray was Felix’s grandfather and job until he found a real one. There were some weekends that Felix did janitorial work with his cousin Simon’s company. This was the only way Felix’s mother would allow him to live at home. He cooked Ray’s meals and made sure Ray didn’t wander off into the foothills when the dementia sent him chasing ghosts. There was clearheaded Ray, and then there was the child inside his head that took over and caused havoc in the house. This was called heading up la resistance. Felix had to hide Ray’s dementia medication in his breakfast. Citalopram went in his chorizo and egg burritos. Fluvoxamine fit nicely with the backdrop of hominy and tripe flesh in his menudo. And after breakfast was over, Felix would find it half-chewed and wadded up in a napkin, or simply lined up on the table in defiance, Ray’s medications like tiny monuments of victory.

  Felix set down a bowl of oatmeal. Ray took out his bottom teeth and placed them on the lace runner that webbed out from the middle of the table.

  “No tricks, mijo? I’m an old man.” Ray settled into his wide-armed chair with gates that closed on each side like a high chair. Felix had left a gate open the first week he moved back into the house. Ray had missiled into the cherry hardwood floor like he was breaking a land speed record and had to be taken to the emergency room for yet another CT scan.

  “No tricks this morning, Ray.” Felix cleaned the corner of Ray’s mouth after the first bite.

  “You can call me Abuelo if it makes you feel better. I know a boy your age needs that. It means grandfather.”

  “I know what it means.”

  “Then what’s with the Ray nonsense?”

  “So you don’t forget your name.”

  “Don’t even speak Spanish, do you? Try it. Abuelo.”

  “I’m good, Ray.”

  Felix wanted to answer his grandfather with some smartass Spanish, but he couldn’t string anything together as quickly as he wanted.

  “How come you won’t do nothing with it?” Ray asked.

  This is how the Cherokee talk always started, always in the morning when Ray’s body snuck out of bed, leaving a note for his mind to sleep in. Managing Ray every day was repetitive, like shooting a hundred free throws at the end of basketball practice. It is the only practical way to getting better.

  Felix obliged. “Nothing with what?”

  “You’re damned Cherokee blood. One hundred percent black crow–haired Cherokee. Look at you.”

  “Nope. I’m a Mexican, Ray.”

  “You ain’t no kinda Mexican. Trust me, I’ve known a few.”

  “Ray, you were born in Santa Rosalía, Mexico. Your father was a federal from Monterrey. Not only that, but you told me that he was a federal who shot a round that ripped through Gustavo Madero’s sleeve. I’d say that makes me Mexican.”

  The words were wasted. “Shit, Sequoyah. How much do you weigh?”

  Sequoyah was the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, Ray’s favorite Indian. To Ray, the only Indian. Sequoyah created the syllabic construction of Cherokee language so that the Cherokee could pass on speeches, write books, and read the morning paper before starting their Cherokee day. The giant sequoia trees and Sequoia National Park in Northern California were named after him. The Cherokee seed was likely planted years before Felix was even born, when Ray would take his Mustang through Texas and Mexico, camping along the Rio Grande. But it was just after the coyotes made the local paper that the seed germinated. It was one of the many unpredictable switches in Ray’s head that ignited in him a consuming interest in the Cherokee.

  Felix sucked in his gut, flipped back his waistband, and lifted it above his navel. “One hundred and ninety-five pounds, Ray.”

  Ray tapped the spoon on top of his oatmeal like a skin drum. “Not gonna lie, that’s a good weight for a Cherokee. Real impressive amount of pounds.” Ray admired Felix’s bulk from the breakfast table. “Now you just have to learn how to throw it around. This wild dog problem ain’t gonna fix itself. Coyotes can’t be feeding on little girls.”

  “Ray, it’s not our problem.”

  “You are right as the desert rain, Sequoyah. Not our problem. It’s your problem, so you better figure out who you are.”

  Ray pressed his weight onto his rhinestone-encrusted walking cane and took a long rest halfway into his stance. He had the replica cane custom made after witnessing Evel Knievel’s famous rocket flight over the Snake River Canyon in ’74. When people asked Felix about what kind of man his grandfather was, he responded, The kind of man who will travel to see Evel Knieval in flight. He felt it summed up the man well. According to Ray, Evel’s cane was filled with Wild Turkey and had a one-karat diamond for every bone the daredevil had broken. There were more diamonds than the number of bones in the body.

  Ray took off his black cowboy hat and tapped Felix’s straining belly with its brim.

  “Don’t you worry, my Indian friend. We’ll get you there.”

  The leading news story on channel five was a pack of coyotes negotiating the rough terrain of the San Gabriel Mountains. Felix’s mother, Anita, mentioned the irony of coyotes eating Mexicans.

  “Been doing it for years, one way or another,” she said. The coyotes’ bodies were lean. They darted in ninety-degree angles like a school of fish, or how you might expect UFOs to move across the sky over Griffith Park on a stony night. Felix thought they ran proudly. He wanted friends like that, a pack he could run with. Felix couldn’t relate to the kids he grew up with in the old Pico Rivera neighborhood anymore, with all their light-speed Spanish chatter, and the spider web–tattooed elbows they used to snatch up unsuspecting güeras from the valley.

  Anita locked the front door and made her way to the couch. She wrapped her shoulders with a quilt and dug her toes into the seams of the cushions. “Was your grandfather a handful this morning?”

  “Ray was fine. He talked about taking his car out for a ride.”

  “Well, he’d skip outta town if we let him. Probably kill ten people before he got a mile away. The man can’t even stand in a shower or pee straight, let alone take care of himself behind the wheel. Felix, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if he were gone one morning. Mijo, he thinks he’s indestructible.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Mom. If you ask him, he’s a man who’s got nothing to lose.” All the local news coverage had stock footage of coyotes, a constant looping of National Geographic and Discovery splices: coyote heads poking out from underground, carrying small rodents across plains in a gallop, and paranoid in their movements, unlike the Sierra Madre coyotes that roamed like eastside gangs down in the L.A. basin, chests puffed out—vato dogs.

  Anita extended her legs across Felix’s lap. “He’s an outlaw.”

  “Maybe.” Felix nodded. “His mind is getting worse, though. He doesn’t take his medication like he should.”

  Ray walked into the living room right out of the shower, patches of soap stuck
to his side, an archipelago of Mr. Bubble on his mottled skin. His chest wall had a recessed cavity between his nipples that looked as though he had been hit with a carnival mallet. He turned to Felix and slapped himself across his naked flanks. “Still bleeds when I piss, Sequoyah.”

  Anita shook her head, leaned in close to Felix. “Ray still thinks you’re an Indian?”

  “No, Ray thinks I am the Indian.”

  The real Sequoyah died in 1843 while traveling to Mexico to find a group of Cherokee that had migrated south into Mexico after the Trail of Tears. Felix read that his gravesite has never been found and that it is supposed to be on Texas-Mexico border, in Coahuila. Sequoyah didn’t seem like much of a warrior to Felix, not like the image he had in his head as to how Indians ought to look and behave. For the most part, other Cherokees looked like Indians—Felix often thought about his own look, how it did not match with the Mexicans down in the valley, not the immigrants, but the extreme La Razas. He remembered his boys from Pico, and his cousins from Montebello, how when they bent back in their stance, their jerseys splayed out to the sides like insect wings. Stingers cocked. They had straight up told him, Holmes, you are a minus ten on the Mexican scale, and we don’t know what to make of you.

  His family had done its best to extract him from the Mexican he’d been hell bent on becoming. Lengua?! What language? Felix felt like the New Coke of the family, a reformulation of Mexican. The problem was that it did not hide his last name, Pérez. It didn’t cover the graffiti on the gray cinder block in the back alley where he grew up, or reattach his cousin’s thumb after a fight in that same alley with a puto named Poof. It didn’t stop the dancing at quinceañeras or turn piñatas into birthday cakes. Tortillas into Wonder Bread. It didn’t keep the Los Angeles Dodgers from getting their collective asses kicked by the New York Yankees in the 1978 World Series, the first year in the new house. Mostly, it didn’t stop his father from getting his hair cut twice a week by a huera who slipped a Chanel-smelling love letter into his pocket that Felix’s mother eventually found and then dropped to her knees while cleaning stains off his pants. It was the Mexican classic: the Farrah Fawcett–family switcheroo.

  No doubt Felix could relate to the full-page lithograph of Sequoyah in the Encyclopædia Britannica, and how it didn’t look anything like an Indian. Sequoyah wore a red cloth wrapped around his head like a turban. Felix showed Ray. “This guy. Right here. This is Sequoyah?”

  “Damn straight. Like looking in a mirror!” he responded.

  Felix read the caption a second time to be sure this was the Indian Ray insisted he was deep down. There were no feathers in Sequoyah’s hair, no war paint on his face. Talk about minus ten on a scale! When Felix thought he should have a harder look, he read the part in Sequoyah’s biography about how his father was European, and to Felix, this was the key to Sequoyah’s soft heart. Felix wondered how Sequoyah got to have a European father. No way it was accidental love. He read about how Sequoyah and his Cherokee people were part of the Five Civilized Tribes until their membership expired. Did Sequoyah really think he was Indian enough, especially when he looked north to his Choctaw brothers, the Indians who gave the Cherokee their Cherokee name?

  Felix had pen pals in Paraguay and Cambodia during his teenage years. It was in response to his mother telling him to get out and meet people his own age. Ray remembering anything at all was a shotgun blast at best, but for some reason, he remembered this about Felix.

  “You still writing letters all over the world?”

  “No, I stopped that a long time ago,” Felix said.

  “Did you stop, or did they?” Ray’s question felt like a setup.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “That means you stopped.” Ray slid his hand across the porch railing to take his seat. “If they stopped, you’d have an unfinished feeling in your gut, like you’re still waiting on something.”

  “I never thought about it that way, Ray.”

  “I never thought about it that way, Ray,” he mimicked. “You know, they called those talking leaves.”

  “Who’s they, Ray? No, no, let me guess . . .”

  Felix organized Ray’s silverware, unfolded his napkin, and put it across his lap.

  “Cherokee. They called letters talking leaves. You wrote so many damn talking leaves. Sequoyah, goddamn it. You don’t gotta invent another language, but for Chrissakes.”

  Ray slapped the newspaper on the breakfast table and tapped his crooked finger on the front page of the local section—a picture of four children spinning on a merry-go-round, their bodies moving faster than shadows trailing underneath them. It was a picture taken last December at the winter solstice festival. They had knit caps on, and smoky breath. The picture seemed surreal in the middle of July. Felix turned the newspaper around to read the headline. Ray used his butter knife, still married to a glob of margarine, to point at the article. Felix winced as he read, Dogs Will Hunt.

  Ray went back to bed, so Felix decided to go for a run before it got too hot. He felt a quiet toughness running through the neighborhood. No one to call him out. The trailhead that led into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains was marked by a collection of posters stapled to the visitors sign by the Department of Fish and Wildlife, warning of coyotes. Felix heard the rumbling of a vehicle coming up the road to the trailhead. A white Parks and Recreation truck hooked around the bend and pulled into the dirt parking lot. It stopped with its tailgate at the trash cans. A woman with a high-arching ponytail stepped out to check a green trash barrel and the heavy chain that held it in place. Her shirt was one size too big. The sleeve cuffs fell around her hands, and she had to keep pulling them back. Felix nodded to her and wondered if she might come over and warn him about being alone with a coyote warning in full effect. She rummaged through some recyclables, then climbed into her truck and drove away without acknowledging Felix.

  There were no other cars in the parking lot. What if he ran into a pack of coyotes? Felix conversed with himself about a possible confrontation. He couldn’t remember the finer details: Do you run, or do you play dead? Do you make yourself appear bigger, or do you lie down and curl in a ball? Or is that for bears? Shit, boy, you gonna have to fight your way out. It seemed like important information to know instinctively. He couldn’t outrun one coyote, let alone a whole pack. Felix knew that much. He turned and followed the tire tracks out of the dirt lot and back into the neighborhood to play it safe before heading back to commit to Ray the rest of the day.

  The steep route up Auburn Avenue was hell on his lungs. Felix stopped at the end of the block and doubled over to catch his breath. A dog barked and raced out from around the corner house. It was a gray-and-white akita that ran along the fenced yard, gnashing its teeth at Felix. It bloodied its nose against the fence as Felix swallowed the scream that started to creep out. The dog kicked over his water bowl and bowed the fence out from its cemented footings. It took almost a minute of wiping the sweat from his eyes before Felix realized that this was Marisol’s house.

  A voice boomed from the garage. “Heel!” A woman came out and grabbed the dog by his choke collar. “I hope he didn’t scare you.” She righted the water bowl and forced the dog to sit at her side.

  “No, I’m good. That’s why you have him.” Felix felt as though he was standing outside a celebrity’s house. “I mean, it’s his job, right? It’s why you got him.”

  “Not everybody thinks that way. It’s not the runners we’re trying to keep away.”

  “Sure.” Felix didn’t want to hint anything about a mauling. “I get it. It’s necessary to . . . you got to—” Before he could finish, a little girl ran off the front porch at full speed. She screamed mommy, but it sounded like muddy. It was deaf little Marisol. She burst onto the lawn and hid behind her mother’s leg, opposite the akita. The dog looked up at the woman, then tilted his head to lick Marisol across the face. Marisol pulled back and winced, then turned her attention up to her mother.

  She signed wit
h one hand and slurred something that sounded like, I need your help inside. She yanked her mother in the direction of the house. The first thing Felix noticed was the wetness in her voice. He couldn’t tell if it was because she was deaf, or because of what the coyotes had taken from her. She wore gloves on her hands that seemed as practical as a pair of socks—the thin white kind that pallbearers and Mickey Mouse wear. Marisol clasped the excess skin on the dog’s head with both hands and pulled back. Felix could see the fine capillaries in the dog’s eyes.

  “Again, sorry if he startled you.” The woman let go of the dog and turned her attention to Marisol, who was now out from behind her mother’s legs.

  “It’s not a problem. A lot of people are doing what they can around here to keep the neighborhood safe.”

  “Are they?” She picked up the water bowl.

  “A fence and a dog. That’s about all you can do, I suppose.”

  “It’s funny to me that you think people around here are doing what they can.” Felix felt the slow press of her verbal foot on his throat. “Going back in time is about the only thing that could help at this point.”

  The woman walked away, pulling Marisol in tow. Felix caught a glimpse of Marisol’s face in the sunlight that cut a pillared shape into the front lawn. She had scarring from under her right eye to just below her chin. Her lips were slightly offset and didn’t make a good seal. The San Gabriel Valley Tribune had said she would need multiple surgeries to fix the damage done by the coyotes, that she might never look the same again. Felix had expected worse. She pulled away and twirled in and out of the sunlight in tight circles around her mother. Felix didn’t know what she looked like before the attack, but here she looked and acted like any little girl. Felix turned to start up the hill. He tightened his laces and finished the conversation: “At the end of the day, she’s a lucky girl.” It did not matter how Felix meant the words, but he might as well have come out and said, You are a dumbass puta for not being a better mother. Look what you did to your own daughter.