Dig, p.1
Dig, page 1
DIG
Robert Paul Moreira
Frayed Edge Press
Philadelphia, PA
Copyright 2022 Robert Paul Moreira
Published by Frayed Edge Press, 2022
Frayed Edge Press
PO Box 13465
Philadelphia, PA 19101
http://frayededgepress.com
Cover design by A.R. Melnik
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person,please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did
not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
“Centaurs” is forthcoming in The Canopy Review.
“License” appeared in Bluestem.
“Beneath the Encino” appeared in the anthology Along the River II, edited
by David Bowles.
“The Lighthouse” appeared in Aethlon: Journal of Sports Literature.
“Born in Blood” appeared in Breakwater Review.
“Dig” appeared in Azahares. Excerpts in Nahuatl and their respective English
translations are taken from Miguel León-Portilla’s Fifteen Poets of the
Aztec World (1992) and John Bierhorst’s Cantares Mexicanos (1985).
“The Runner” and “Proxima b” appeared in Langdon Review of the Arts in
Texas.
“Kiki” was commissioned by Mary Lily Garza, former Principal of Enrique
Camarena Elementary School in La Joya ISD in Mission, Texas.
“Heroes Come Home” was co-written with Josiah Esquivel.
Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication
Names: Moreira, Robert Paul.
Title: DIG / Robert Paul Moreira.
Description: Philadelphia, PA : Frayed Edge Press, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022937811 | ISBN 9781642510416 (pbk.) | ISBN
9781642510423 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: American drama—Hispanic American authors. | Families—
Fiction. | Hispanic Americans—Fiction. | Man-woman relationships—Fiction. |
Short stories— Hispanic authors.| BISAC: FICTION / Hispanic & Latino. |
FICTION / Short Stories. | DRAMA / American / General.
Classification: LCC PS3613.O74 D54 2022 | DDC 813 M67--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022937811
To Boston Mat, for taking that chance.
Contents
vivo
Centaurs
Mom Spit Blood
License
situ
Beneath the Encino
The Lighthouse
Born in Blood
utero
Caligula Pérez
United Irrigation District
Anagram
vitro
Dig
The Runner
Proxima b
Kiki
About the Author
More from Frayed Edge Press
Centaurs
Put down my Bulfinch and take a gander pregame to make sure no one’s looking before pincering the diamond red out of the cellophane bag and showing them to Temo.
“What is it?” Temo asks.
“Four-for-four, baby,” I say. “Guaranteed.”
“Seriously, man—what?”
I ogle the poster on my locker door.
“Wild Horse,” I say. And Temo, he laughs.
Then me and Temo, we pop one each.
And we hit the field before anyone else, all Olympian and shit, and we vacuum Coach’s ground balls with surefire feet and hands. And we sweet-spot the BP balls, no problem. And I wonder if Temo feels the same thing I do. The fluttering at the center; like I just swallowed Hermes’s ankle wings.
“Pinche, pussy.”
“Fuck you.”
“Prove it, then.”
Right in front of L.A.’s finest, Temo slaps a Jackson into the scalper’s palm and gets us two right field first-rowers. I celebrate with a high loogie on Sunset. Temo, he flips-off the badge, so we scamper up Stadium Way like a pair of Prometheuses on ’roids, past cliff-gulped tenements and dogs barking through three-headed convulsions and two endless rows of stop-n-go, kaleidoscope fenders. We stop only to pick up one two-buck bag of peanuts (’cause inside Dodger Stadium they’re a Lincoln a pop!) from Don Chiro in the bed of his barge of a truck, always chewing on that silver coin. We dash all the way up and into Chávez Ravine to where the stairs end and the asphalt plateaus into a path that’s much kinder to our Achilles tendons. We wade into the thick of the white and blue masses churning elbow to elbow in the wide, midday shadow of the Union ’76 scoreboard, watching as the young, the old stretch through the turnstiles like strands of blue-bagged Big League Chew caught at the bottom of a blender.
“Where?”
“Here, Temo. I told you already.”
“Then where the fuck is he?”
“He said to wait for him.”
“FUCK!!!”
Temo sucks his teeth, stomps his feet. Me, I lick cracked lips, run my tongue into the bloodied crevices, when I finally see Push rise. He chariots towards us in sandals through the thick crowd, all Dodgered up, too, all the way to where Temo’s slapping his triceps beneath the mammoth banner of our Dodger idol, Yasiel Puig. Push opens up his Dodgers jacket, his grin a cracked acropolis, and me and Temo gobble it all up like pomegranate seeds. We make our way to the right field pavilion after that, slalom and plop into our seats as the music clarions and thumps through the scoreboard speakers. Through my fleecy mist I turn to Temo sitting next to me. Feet up on the rail, peanut bag on his knees, his chest slowly heaving, Temo stares out into the field with the Gorgon’s eyes.
“But no one’s perfect.”
“Puig…is,” Temo says.
“He made that catch yesterday, yeah. But, shit—he didn’t even get a hit.”
“We…did,” Temo giggles.
“On Olympus. Who you think Puig’d be, Temo?”
“Olympus?”
“Yeah.”
“Wild Horse…man.”
“Nah, Temo. Really.”
“The most…the most powerfullest one, then.”
“Zeus had problems, bro.”
“Wild…Horse…man…”
Temo chortles, coughs. He closes his eyes and doesn’t say another word. He falls back on his bed, on his cloud, way up high.
It breaks on ESPN before squashing me, and I can’t believe it: seventy-game suspension for Puig, and in the middle of a fucking good season.
“The rest of the season, man.”
“Fuck that. And fuck him. Just give me some,” Temo commands.
“But I told you, I’m out.”
“Fuck you are!”
“For reals.”
“Bullshit. Where you hiding it? Where is it?”
“I’m out, Temo.”
“Fuck off! Not today!” he proclaims, rising like a thunder cloud. “You’re never out. Never. Where is it?”
“Temo, calm down--”
And Temo centaurs on top of me, starts pummeling me, hard.
“Motherfucker! You’re out? You’re fuckin’ out? You’re never out! Where is it? WHERE THE FUCK IS IT?”
And I’m a god, trembling in creation.
Mom Spit Blood
When Jónas reached the edge of the bus stop—the stop with the life-sized poster of Amanda Nunes, her back to the bench, head cocked left, one eye leering; the Feather and Bantam-weight belts draped over both shoulders; arms chiseled and beady and with a pair of Modelo beers balanced on thick biceps trekking up and into two tight, champion fists wrapped in UFC sparring gloves—he licked his lips and did his best to ignore the ants crawling up his thirty-five-year-old hands. He stood just outside the stop and set the plastic shopping bags on the sidewalk and began to shake the deep purple from the tips of his fingers. He caught his breath and peered through the late-afternoon glare into the long block of government homes that seemed to funnel hazily into that distant parking lot he’d just come from. He snapped each of his shoulders and remembered his mother, who had been lumbering behind him, but now was nowhere to be found.
Gloves, Jónas! Gloves!
Playful punches into his ribs swung him into his mother in her plus-sized gown and flip flops, her arms spread wide, her head angled. She stuck out her tongue, chuckled haughtily, waited for something from Jónas. Bah! she said, and turned around and plopped down on the thin, green bench beside a pretty girl in red scrubs.
Unbelievable! You did that in my day, walked into the Polideportivo wearing those things, in front of that enormous crowd, and let me tell you, the entire arena would burst into laughter, throw beers at you, and…
He bit the inside of his mouth as she went on and on, shadowboxing the hot air a few times, her triceps jiggling. He focused his ears on the traffic instead and let the sprawling locomotion drown her out. He tended to his fingers still, opening and closing his fists to get more of the feeling back; and as the blood coursed and returned to normal levels he couldn’t help but look over his mother to ogle that girl’s neatly-wrapped bun of blonde hair atop her head; that silver-crested earring that slivered down and coiled around a dot of a red stone on her right side, an attractive side; that high cheekbone made from the silkiest white skin; her long, lean neck; the graceful way her shoulders hung over the vee of her fold ed elbow, then surged up and into thin fingers packed neatly behind the spine of a Harlequin holding fast to the girl’s attention.
He slapped his hands together before realizing what he had done. The girl blazed a smile at him; his blood did a stop-n-go. He prepared to return the gesture when his mother leaned back and into his perfect view, stretching her water-logged legs out wide. By the time she eased forward the girl had turned away and cocooned into a perfectly curled spine, and Jónas was lost to the damsels and rogues in that book of hers.
…and skin, knuckles, elbows, knees, blood! That’s what it used to be about. Not gloves. Not gloves! Now it’s all about gloves and not getting hurt and protecting your face and the ref stopping the fight just when it’s getting good—Bah! Like I always told you, Jónas, but you never listened: You get in the ring, you should know you’re gonna bleed!
He didn’t answer. The traffic droned on beyond the curb, spurred on it seemed to Jónas by the steady flow of that relentless south Texas air. He swore he caught the sound of the girl in red scrubs turning a page. And as his mother snickered one last time and reached into her purse and pulled out the large bag of pumpkin seeds she’d picked up at El Globo, Jónas let out a deep sigh and decided to surrender to that game he used to play as a young boy while stuck at work with his mother on weekends. Having failed the Mixed Martial Arts “experiment”—two entire summers of bruised shins, quads, and ribs; split lips; and more than his share of swollen shiners—his mother finally put a stop to the embarrassment and pulled him out, deciding that an honest day’s work would transform her son into the man he needed to be. So bright and early each Saturday morning, instead of worrying about round kicks to his head, or knees to his chin from clumsy double-collar ties, or having to empty out the spit buckets for refusing to jab or defend, Jónas sleepwalked onto the Number 4 bus and took that twenty-minute ride with his mother to Our Lady of Sorrows, where she used her vintage Polaroid 180 to sell five-dollar photographs after baptisms, quinceañeras, and weddings. While the patrons suffered tight-waisted through the services, and while his mother cracked dirty jokes in Spanish with the other photographers (Here’s one my coach in Díaz Ordaz told me: What do you call a man with 99% of his brain missing?), Jónas sat on the well-worn steps of the church entrance and passed the time counting passenger-side heads through the car windows that drove by (Castrated!). For no reason he could think of (Good one, Eva! Good one!), he only took mental tabs of those heads erect and alert against the headrests (Okay, okay, before Padre Mario comes out, cabrónes: How do you make a pool table laugh?), each of them teeming with thoughts and dreams towards piano or Kung Fu lessons or Little League games at McAllen Sports Complex or family picnics at Anzalduas Park or the jetties at South Padre Island. Wherever they were headed (How, Eva? Tell us!), it was anywhere and everywhere unrelated to the boring work Jónas endured Saturday mornings, with no say in the matter at all (You tickle its balls.). And even in the present, over twenty years and a childless marriage later (Last one, then: What’s the useless piece of skin on a dick?), as head after head hastened by that bus stop, and as his mother feasted on seeds and patted her edemic legs (Foreskin, no?), Jónas couldn’t help but feel that same powerlessness enveloping him on the fringes of that convection oven of a rectangular enclosure, all of it gathering and breathing life into Nunes behind him (Uh, we don’t know, Eva.), setting those undefeated elbows free, so that nothing but hard bone pummeled into the back of his head, over and over and over (The man, pendejos. The man.).
He palmed the back of his sweat-soaked neck and noticed the heads before him had all come to a stop. At the vanguard and closest to him an old Kawasaki waited on the yellow line, sputtering and roaring with each flick of the wrist from its tanned, tattooed driver. Jónas welcomed those infectious fumes; through sunglasses, the driver gazed well beyond a group of pedestrians walking by, his long black beard nestled calmly on his chest. A rush and rumble of engines, that wrist flicked harder, a heavy boot to the gear shift, the beard bristled, and the Kawasaki led the loud charge away.
Jónas picked up the bags and decided to wait for the Number 2 behind his mother. He was toeing a few of the slavered shells over a crack in the concrete, annoyed at his mother for not chewing, then swallowing the seeds whole the way he remembered Lorena used to do, when he spotted someone new slouching behind the girl in red scrubs. The young man was set into a pair of beat-up black Converse and worn jeans ripped at both knees. Despite the heat, he sported a thick black jacket that reached below his shins, and under that a T-shirt of the same color with COME TOGETHER printed across his sunken chest. Above the phrase a slick set of fingers coiled over a guitar neck flowing into its headstock. A pair of headphones connected the young man’s ears, and that brown, bald head they belonged to, to an iPhone he thumbed through with his exposed hand.
And boy was he close! That infuriated but fascinated Jónas, both at the same time. So close—he toyed with himself—that Come Together could peer over that phone of his and confirm for him whether Red Scrubs was a natural blond, all the way down to her roots; if her left side complemented her right; eau de toilette, Carolina Herrera, he recognized the scent; and with just a little more effort and ingenuity: the title of that book of hers. That familiar sweat began building in Jónas’ palms. He set the bags down gently. He wiped his hands on his pants and imagined himself slipping into that coat and black Converse, cautious and cunning and calculating, close enough for the skin on his knees to brush her rump lightly, leaning in ever so slowly, slowly, his breath hovering just over her shoulder, his eyes invading that book of hers, and then…
Here, here, Jónas, take it. I forgot to give it to you earlier. Carmela at El Globo gave it to me. Don’t you lose it. She says the specialist there helped her with her legs. You’ll have to make the appointment for me, so don’t you lose it.
His mother punctuated her command with short bursts of compressed air that projected even more bits of spittled shells at his feet. He stared at that business card in her hand—on the front of it, a wide panorama of the medical complex on McColl and Dove, its countless beige-colored buildings jutting into a cloudless blue sky—and couldn’t, didn’t want to, didn’t know how to respond, when all of a sudden it was eight months ago again, Jónas no more than a teetering mess of nerves hunched over the kitchen table on white knuckles, his eyes averted, his dinner untouched, the refrigerator grousing behind him, Lorena slurring through bitter wine and words—You!—the crash of glass—You asshole!—following him to the bedroom—You fucking asshole!—pushing him to the bed and launching on top of him—Where the fuck do you go?!—then throwing her off, saying nothing loud, tipping over her Carolina Herrera, denting the fridge before falling out the back door and into the restless night. He had not seen Lorena since. A postcard—dedicated to “The Sickest Fuck in the World”—arrived at his mother’s apartment two weeks later, informing him the pupusas were so much better where she was now, that she’d broken the lease and donated everything to the Goodwill, and that Doctors Without Borders had welcomed her with open arms.
He sighed, took the card finally. He caught the faint drumbeats from Come Together’s headphones, a hip-hop soundtrack for the moment, while his mother beatboxed new shells onto the sidewalk. He turned to Red Scrubs—bent towards the curb now, still immersed in her book, holding a red bookmark to her right temple. A semi growled into gear. It trundled through to beat the red light, leaving nothing in its trail but the smell of worn diesel in a rush of hot air that wisped the bookmark from the girl’s grasp, past that bag of seeds on his mother’s lap, past Jónas, and down the sidewalk.
As if his mother had decreed it, Jónas immediately set out after that bookmark. It swooped through and outside of the stop, fluttered for an instant, then dove down the path he’d travelled earlier, landing on a patch of dried-out grass, where Jónas was sure he had it. But before he could put his fingers on it the breeze picked up again and set it dancing past a fire hydrant, then the beaten stump of an old oak, until it finally slapped into the base of a chain-link fence. Stuck like that, Jónas reached down and picked it up. He gave his back to the stop and took a few moments to study that thin piece of cardstock—a smooth red all around, warm and unmarked on either side, its corners slightly worn. He closed his eyes, slowly slid the bookmark under his nose, reveled in that deep breath. He’d just unleashed his tongue when he heard the commotion on the other side of the fence.
