“Who the fuck do you think you are?” It seemed like an easy question, and one he’d been getting a lot lately. He abandoned his untied shoe. “Are you from around here?” The woman shook her head. “I wrapped parts of my daughter’s face in a towel. She couldn’t sign to me what she needed because the palms of her hands were practically eaten away. They were hamburger. Tell me, what exactly do you tell a deaf girl to do as she shows you her hamburger hands over and over to you like you are blind? What do you think of that?” Felix thought about Marisol’s screaming and wondered if she could hear herself inside her head, or was it just an indecipherable vibration? The woman threw the water bowl at the fence. “Don’t ever come here with that kind of bullshit optimism again.”
The dog loped back across the yard and forced his nose through a square of chain link. His chest expanded with Felix’s scent; he exhaled and snorted saliva across Felix’s shins before following Marisol and her mother inside the house.
Felix read aloud to Ray a quote from a man named Jack Kilpatrick, an ethnographer who had spent much of his life studying superstar Indian Sequoyah: Sequoyah was always in the wilderness. He walked about, but he was never a hunter. I wonder what he was looking for. Ray’s face turned red and flexed what muscles he had left in his body. “Looking for the goddamned recipe on how to be the goddamnedest Indian ever made. Its not rocket math, boy.”
Felix scratched his head. “It sounds like most people thought that, at the end of the day, he didn’t do shit, Ray. Language or no language, he’s somewhere in an unmarked and unclaimed grave.”
“No matter. Sequoyah, you got yourself an empty gut, and I don’t know what to make of it.”
Felix opened Ray’s medication. He tapped the powder from the capsules into Ray’s soup. He wasn’t even sure the medication was doing anything for Ray, as much as he had been missing the doses that were now either being spit into the garden or fed to the cat.
Anita walked into the kitchen. “What’s all the yelling about?”
“Sequoyah here has got a raw gut,” said Ray.
“Honey, it’s easier if you just play along.” Anita picked up around Ray, petting his bowed back each time she passed him. “Did you give him his medication?” Felix held up the empty capsules and mouthed from across the room that he had sabotaged Ray’s meal.
“He’s a kid again,” Anita said. “The two of you are alike that way. But your grandfather is as unpredictable as they come. You—no, you never surprised me with anything the way he does.” Ray looked out over the front porch, down to the street. The loss of blood in his face and the drop in his shoulders told Felix that Ray was having an episode. His brain was changing shifts. Ray waved down to two kids on bright orange big wheels spinning donuts in the street. Felix could hear their mother screaming from a second-story window three house over to get their pinche asses inside, or else.
Felix tried to catch Ray before he completely fell out. He handed Ray his cowboy hat and bottom dentures, and made eye contact. “I saw her, Ray,” Felix said. “Marisol, Ray, the little girl from the coyote attack. I saw her today. She’s beautiful.” Ray didn’t respond as Anita entered the room with a robe in her hand.
“C’mon, Ray, let’s get you cleaned up.”
Ray smiled widely and reached out to her like a child.
Felix helped out Simon’s janitorial business when his mother watched Ray on her days off. It was only a few hours a week, but enough that Felix didn’t feel like an animal trapped in his mom’s home. The work contract alone made for interesting work. Orion Pictures went bankrupt in the late nineties and sold their remaining worth to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Orion just left all their shit and bailed. Most of the old movie props were sold to auction, or donated to fad restaurants to drive up the price of a BLT. What was left over ended up in rented spaces all over Los Angeles. Major studio property had no storage room for RoboCop 1, 2, or 3.
They had no room for The Great Santini.
Simon gave Felix a set of keys, cleaning supplies, and the instructions that even though Hollywood really didn’t give a shit anymore about any of this stuff, try not to break anything.
The warehouse was a one-hundred-foot-by-fifty-foot white metal-sided rectangle in Norwalk that had no identifying signage, just a blocked address number over a double-padlocked door. There were no windows. Felix powered on the fluorescent lights that matched the outfield intensity of a night game at Chavez Ravine. He walked the cinematic graveyard, running his feather duster along the row of decommissioned Terminator mannequins in fake black leather. Some had sunglasses with one lens missing. These were the versions used to throw through walls and roll out of semis at high speed. Felix felt inspired by the props to watch movies that he and Ray had never seen. He’d rent The Silence of the Lambs, The Falcon and the Snowman, and Platoon, paying close attention to items on the sets. Felix pictured himself throwing a no-no in Bull Durham, or playing the trumpet at The Cotton Club. He’d point out the props hidden in movies that were now decorations in the bathrooms he scrubbed. If Ray was ever impressed, he rarely showed it.
“Tell Ray I am on my way home.” Felix kicked his feet up on the desk and made tiny yellow airplanes from Post-Its.
Anita sounded exhausted on the phone. “I will, but it won’t have much effect. It’s been a bad day for Ray. This afternoon, I thought he was napping. Felix, I found him in the backyard, sitting in the fire pit. And it was an hour before I realized he had a dead bird in his pocket. I’m just saying he might not know who you are today, mijo.”
Felix flew a paper airplane from the desk that made tight loops before sticking into the mesh screen on the side of the metal trashcan. “He’ll know who I am.”
Mrs. Gutiérrez spotted the first pack of coyotes digging in the sand at the Montessori, as though they were uncovering hidden bones. Anita told Felix he’d better be careful getting home, that at this point she didn’t even trust the walk up the driveway. Some neighbors had set up rolling phone lists in case of an emergency, to get everyone’s pets inside, children rounded up and under their beds! Mrs. Gutiérrez called everyone on her list to update the last sightings. Ella was made for this. For a woman who stayed at home and raised a family alone, with a husband whose body came home from Desert Storm unrecognizable, this was her moment to brand Gutiérrez into the hillside with a hot iron. When Anita hung up the phone with her for the third time that evening, she turned to Felix and told him that this señorita was made of that super high-grade new-car steel.
“The soccer fields at Saint Rita’s, Felix. That’s a block away.”
It was also the most direct route between the business center of town and the trailhead.
“She said there were six.” And before Felix could ask their direction, Anita turned on the porch light and opened the drapes. “She said they were heading this way.”
Ray sat in the corner of the living room. He held his cane up like a gun and looked down its encrusted barrel at the television. “I’ll shoot ’em from the porch.” Ray swung his cane around and stopped with the drop on Felix. “You there. Help me up.”
Anita shut the drapes. “Ray, you are not going outside.”
“Woman, you been squabbling at me all day.” Ray reached into his pants pocket with a look on his face that said he expected something to be there that wasn’t. He waved Felix over to the couch and pulled him down by his shirt pocket to look him in the eye. “Your name?”
“It’s me, Felix.”
Ray took a moment, flipping his bottom teeth in and out of his mouth with his tongue. It reminded Felix of the hourglass symbol on his computer when he asked it to do too much.
“Well, Felix, you say. Get my old ass outside.”
“What do you need out there, Ray?”
“We’re only gonna get one shot at this.”
Anita shook her head. “He’s all yours. I am calling Mrs. Gutiérrez back to get an update.”
Felix rolled Ray’s sleeves down to cover the tears in his skin that came wi
th a bad day wandering. He lifted Ray to his feet and escorted him to the front of the house. “There’s wild dogs outside, and I’m gonna get me a few.”
“I can sit out here with you, Ray.”
Ray looked Felix over. “No, and hell no. You ain’t built this way.” Ray sat back on a worn Adirondack and reached out for his cane. “Just hand me my gun.” Felix cleaned the cane with the end of a wool blanket that Anita had bought on Olvera Street. He handed it to Ray and spread the blanket down over his legs.
“I’ll be back to check on you in a bit.”
“Mm.” Ray sat intent.
It took three times to turn her over, but Felix could see through the kitchen window that the roar of the Mustang’s engine had startled his mother. He got out of the car and unlocked the gate that separated the front and back of the house. Anita tapped on the kitchen window with a ladle. Felix could make out the words on her lips: You’re crazy, LO-CO! Again and again, pointing at her lips, LO-CO, LO-CO! She reached above her head, raising question about the Indian headdress Felix now wore—a feathered ceremonial headdress that fanned out from Felix down along his spine. Each barb was dyed blue with a dipped deep blood red at each tip. Felix rubbed his fingers across his forehead to feel its delicate beadwork that slightly dug into his forehead and then down into long strands that hung loose, framing the straight lines of his jaw. The feathers were the cleanest haircut he’d ever had. He tilted back on his heels like his cousins would in Montebello, nodded up to his mother in the window, and tucked his thumbs under soft hide. He pulled off the tag that slid from the plumage and read it aloud: “Check it, Ma—Dances with Wolves, lot twenty-three, item number one dash zero zero three.” Felix and Simon had debated at the warehouse after their shift was over about whether the movie was based on the Sioux or the Cherokee.
Felix propped the gate open with the two sun-warped trash cans. The upholstery in Ray’s Mustang smelled appropriately like horsehair. Felix settled into the driver’s seat as the stitching ripped under his Cherokee weight. The faded leather dashboard was split open around all the gauges. A desert crust. Felix tapped each gauge to see if they had as much play as the steering wheel that he rocked from side to side just to keep the car in a straight line for the twenty-foot stretch. He pulled the Mustang from the side of house and into Ray’s view. The Mustang popped and clinked before settling into a purring idle. Felix made sure to slide the transmission into park and double-check the emergency brake. He dusted off the passenger seat. He negotiated the loose hanging visor around the beaded artwork, bent down low so not to pull the feathers from headdress where it peaked ever skyward. He did the three-sixty around the car to check the tires and noticed there wasn’t one drop of oil on the concrete pad. The Mustang backfired and sent Felix to the ground. An orchestra of howls harmonized in the direction of Saint Rita’s. Felix waved his hand in front of the headlights to check the beam. The headdress had such a wingspan that Felix’s shadow darkened the driveway down to the street. Ray bent down to see the man underneath.
“Hot damn, hot damn, if it’s not you, Sequoyah.”
Felix took Ray’s hand and led him to the car. The headdress mesmerized Ray, and Felix made sure to let him know he could touch it. “Go ahead, Ray. It’s the real deal. One hundred percent Cherokee.”
Ray nodded with his approval. Felix opened the passenger-side door. “Wanna go for a ride?”
The howls continued, and it sounded as though the coyotes were on the move, perhaps even splitting up now, as the echoes bounced through the neighborhood from all directions. Ray straightened up and set his cane inside the car. “We’re gettin’ us some dogs, right?”
“We’ll see what’s out there, Grandpa.”
Felix turned the Mustang south onto the steep descent of Auburn. They crossed Olive Avenue and West Allegra before turning east on West Montecito. The Mustang ran strong. Felix pressed down on the gas and dropped it into a passing gear, knowing he had the straight. It settled back into a hum and vibration that lulled the two men out of starting any conversation. Under the neon waving cartoon enchilada sign at Taco Fiesta that filled the Mustang with warm red light, they turned north on Grove Lane and headed back toward the foothills in a search grid pattern.
“We got to cover our tracks, Sequoyah.”
It was the reflection off the back of six coyotes’ eyes, sitting on their haunches and perfectly divided by the double yellow lines that caused Felix to throw the car into neutral and slowly depress the brakes. They sat so beautifully erect that Felix thought this was not a quest for blood and terror. Then they skittered around in tight circles, a primal dance that Felix could not decode under streetlights. They reminded him of his boys back in Pico Rivera, cackling nonsense and disinterested in the world. He wanted to erase that image in his head. Reinvent him some Indian. He revved the engine and thought about Sequoyah—how Sequoyah wandered the desert, searching but never a hunter, that maybe his grave was unmarked because there was no such grave. That maybe Sequoyah ended up nothing more than food for wild dogs on a path to an old world he knew nothing about.
Felix shifted into drive. The click of the transmission sounded like the loading of a rifle’s chamber. Ray lifted his cane to the dash and pressed its curved end into his hollow shoulder. Felix pulled the nylon webbing on Ray’s seat belt until it cinched down snug. He straightened the feathers on the headdress over the center console and adjusted the rearview mirror. He imagined every house on the block to be little Marisol’s house. Ray leaned over and poked his finger into Felix’s ribs. He told Felix that he better not miss a one.
LAS PALMAS BALLROOM
Alma lay next to her son Robert in his bed to see the yard as he did. His view included a large mound of dirt that grew steadily throughout the summer, her heavily dented Chevy Malibu in the driveway, and the bus stop for the elementary school. There was not much movement in Robert’s day except early in the morning when the kids gathered and called each other shitheads. They’d sometimes fight in the late afternoons. She imagined Robert sliding on the loosened gravel and fighting with the Hernandez brothers. Bruising from a punch and not the pressure sores his thirty-year-old body endured from simply lying in one spot for too long.
Alma heard Carl’s boot heels tapping on the metal screen door. “Prima, where are you?”
“We’re in the back room.” Alma sat up and finished washing Robert’s hair over an empty basin in the bedroom. “I am cleaning Roberto.” She covered her son with a dry towel and removed the tape that covered his tracheotomy, which caused him to spasm.
Alma waved Carl away as he walked into the room. “Back up so I can put Robert back on his vent.”
Carl lifted Robert into his wheelchair. Alma opened a sterile package with new tracheotomy hardware inside. Her hands were damp, and it made it difficult to pull the gloves around her bony fingers. She applied lubricant to the breathing tube’s tip and tilted its end ninety degrees into the hole in Robert’s neck, then twisted downward into position, always careful to avoid the ribbed cartilage the nurse had told Alma she could poke right through if she wasn’t careful. That she would certainly know if she had.
“Cough, mijo.” Alma lifted her finger off the catheter that activated the suction. “Again.” Robert coughed again. A collection of clear phlegm lined the basin, which pleased Alma. She detached the suction unit and wiped the rounded opening that the nurse had called the obturator. She secured the tube with the inflated cuff at its end, which caused Robert to pull back. The Velcro neck strap was worn and took Alma several tries to get the two ends to stick together behind his neck. And with the same ease as the flip in her tortillas, she attached Robert to his ventilator.
Carl watched from across the room. “You can do that in the dark, Alma.”
“I’ve been taking care of a sick boy too long.”
“I’ll be in the kitchen. There’s something I’ve been wanting to show you.”
“Pour some coffee.” Alma looked to the floor at the pea gravel C
arl had stamped out on the carpet. “And clean all that up.” Alma gathered the used breathing tube, the suction, and guide wires, and placed them in a red bag the size of a pillowcase marked Biohazard. The black horned symbol on its side resembled the devil. She winced every time she opened its end. She took off the sterile gloves and blew away the fine baby powder from the creases in her palms. Alma exercised Robert’s arms and legs, measuring his range and the amount of lost muscle. She placed hand towels between his arms and the leather armrests, so that his paper-white skin wouldn’t burn from the direct sunlight that filtered through the large bay windows.
Carl sat at the breakfast table with a duffel bag opened at his feet. A stack of magazines lined up neatly between the table’s edge and his coffee, partially covered by his Brooklyn Dodgers cap, which had a large B stamped at its center. Alma reached across the place mat to pick it up off the table. “More comics. I told you, Carl, he’s not a boy.”
Carl grabbed Alma’s wrist. “Stop.”
“I’ve told you that Robert doesn’t need to read those anymore.”
“These aren’t comics, prima, and you better take a deep breath.” Carl turned the top magazine so that Alma could read the title. “I cleaned my garage last week and found these. I think they’d do Robert some good.”
Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul Page 10