A Summer Life Read online

  GARY SOTO

  A Summer Life

  UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND

  HANOVER AND LONDON

  University Press of New England

  Brandeis University

  Brown University

  Clark University

  University of Connecticut

  Dartmouth College

  University of New Hampshire

  University of Rhode Island

  Tufts University

  University of Vermont

  Wesleyan University

  © 1990 by University Press of New England

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotation in critical articles or reviews, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For further information contact University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Soto, Gary.

  A Summer life / Gary Soto.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-61168-201-4

  ebook ISBN 978-1-61168-201-4

  1. Soto, Gary—Biography—Youth. 2. Poets, American—20th century—Biography—Youth. 3. California, Southern—Social life and customs. I. Title.

  PS3569.072Z475 1990

  811'.54—dc20

  [B] 89-40614

  CIP

  1 2 3 4 5

  BOOKS BY GARY SOTO

  A Summer Life

  Baseball in April

  Who Will Know Us?

  A Fire in My Hands

  California Childhood

  Lesser Evils

  Small Faces

  Living Up the Street

  Black Hair

  Where Sparrows Work Hard

  The Tale of Sunlight

  The Elements of San Joaquin

  For my brother Rick

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PART ONE

  The Buddha

  The Grandfather

  The Taps

  The Hand Brake

  The Giant

  The Bike

  The Almonds

  The Magic Tricks

  The War Years

  The Sirens

  The Colors

  The Rhino

  The Shirt

  PART TWO

  The Inner Tube

  The Pie

  The Haircut

  The Confession

  The Catfish

  The In-Between Dinner Snacks

  The Chicks

  The New and old Tennies

  The Guardian Angel

  The Fights

  The Gymnast

  The Promises

  The Locket

  PART THREE

  The Hero

  The Beatles

  The Babysitter

  The Stray

  The Weather

  The Canal

  The Nile

  The Drive-In Movies

  The Groups

  The Talk

  The Computer Date

  The Wrestlers

  The River

  Acknowledgements

  “The Locket,” “The Bike,” “The Inner Tube,” “The Haircut,” “The Taps,” “The Weather,” “The Hero,” and “The Computer Date” appeared in This World of the San Francisco Chronicle. “The Drive-in Movies” appeared in The California Monthly. “The Buddha” appeared in The Threepenny Review. “The Fights,” “The Handbrake,” “The Guardian Angel,” and “The Catfish” appeared in Puerto del Sol.

  The author wishes to thank Jose Novoa for helping shape this book, and the editors of these magazines, especially Lyle York.

  None of these essays may be photocopied.

  PART ONE

  ____

  The Buddha

  I KILLED ANTS HERE, and pulled puncture vine there. There was a small rise of earth and oily weeds at the junkyard at Van Ness and Braly. At the young age of five, I couldn't go far, maybe to the side of the house where I looked down the long throat of the alley, to Mr. Drake's palm tree where pigeons warbled at the top of a leafy world, or to the front steps where I played with the ceramic Buddha my uncle had brought back from the war. The Buddha was happiness, a great smile and large belly, soft colors, and a robe splotched with gold. He usually rested on the small table near the telephone and rattled when the phone rang. The Buddha was the most beautiful thing in our house, that and a Japanese garden sculpted in a seashell. When my mother was away, I took the Buddha out to the front steps and played a game in which he “Ho-Hoed” a belly laugh and walked on lines of ants.

  On a day when I knew my mother was going to be gone a long time and my sister fell asleep from the heat, I carried the Buddha to Van Ness Avenue. I held him up and said, “We can't go over there.” Van Ness was a busy street, bluish with diesels and large sedans, yellow with an occasional taxi. Buddha smiled, and I rubbed his belly. I pressed my thumb on his gold splotches. I listened to a diesel downshifting, the grind of gears hurting the air. I sat the Buddha in the dusty weeds and killed red ants with my thumb.

  I collected shards of broken glass lit with sunlight. I searched for wire, loops of bright copper that my uncle said were worth money. I worked my fingers into the asphalt to pull out a bottle cap. I couldn't read so I sniffed the cap. I thought I would smell root beer or 7-Up. I smelled the odor of metal, which lingered in my nose all day. I scraped the cork from the metal cap, and it came out in flakes.

  Diesels turned slowly onto Braly Street, their shadows square and full of dust, their gears grinding dry-toothed, their heavy brakes sighing. They were heading toward Sun Maid Raisin, where our family worked behind a penitentiary of tall windows. The diesels were moving so slow that I thought I could try to run through the space between the front and back wheels.

  I stood on the dirt curb, panting. I looked at the Buddha, half-hidden in weeds. His smile was dark and his belly busy with red ants exploring his roundness. I saw a diesel crawling slowly up Van Ness, large but not scary enough for second thoughts. When it entered Braly, I ran to its side, then drifted left until I was under it and looking up, my head just a few inches from the undercarriage, my legs pumping as fast as they could go. I gritted my teeth and told myself, Hurry! Hurry! After twenty steps I drifted out from under the truck, and skidded in the dust. I waved to the driver, whose face I could see in the mirror, but I didn't see him return my wave. Black smoke coughed from the truck's tall pipe, and its gears ground into third.

  I returned home with the Buddha, set him near the telephone and wiped his face free of dust while my sister cried in her crib. Mother came home carrying bags of plums and peaches that my sister and I ate on the steps. Later, we went to my grandmother's cellar and watched Uncle Junior cut balsa wood into parts for his glider.

  The cellar was lit by one bulb. Dusty jars of nopales lined one wall. I sniffed the air. Although the scent of bottle cap was still in my nose, I picked up a dank smell, a ghost of cool air blowing from under the house. I liked the smell, and liked my uncle when he said I could have the scraps. I made a tiny plane and later crashed it a hundred times until only slivers remained.

  When Uncle Junior's collie got hit on Van Ness, I watched him pant on the side of the road, his eyes quiet with the dusk that had captured the street. I couldn't see what was wrong with the dog. No blood flowed, no tears streamed, no protruding bone made the dog curl his lips. He just seemed tired, and Uncle seemed tired as he lifted him into his arms and told us kids to get the hell away. He started up the alley, with pain in his arms.

  The air was cool but the asphalt hot. I walked in a small circle looking for the bottle cap. I stood in the weeds and said to myself that there was where the Buddha had been. But I didn'
t know this place. The grass had sprung back where the Buddha had rested, and it was too dark to slash a stick across the hole where ants came and went with crumbs of the living in their great little jaws.

  ______

  The Grandfather

  GRANDFATHER BELIEVED a well-rooted tree was the color of money. His money he kept hidden behind portraits of sons and daughters or taped behind the calendar of an Aztec warrior. He tucked it into the sofa, his shoes and slippers, and into the tight-lipped pockets of his suits. He kept it in his soft brown wallet that was machine tooled with “MEXICO” and a campesino and donkey climbing a hill. He had climbed, too, out of Mexico, settled in Fresno and worked thirty years at Sun Maid Raisin, first as a packer and later, when he was old, as a watchman with a large clock on his belt.

  After work, he sat in the backyard under the arbor, watching the water gurgle in the rose bushes that ran along the fence. A lemon tree hovered over the clothesline. Two orange trees stood near the alley. His favorite tree, the avocado, which had started in a jam jar from a seed and three toothpicks lanced in its sides, rarely bore fruit. He said it was the wind's fault, and the mayor's, who allowed office buildings so high that the haze of pollen from the countryside could never find its way into the city. He sulked about this. He said that in Mexico buildings only grew so tall. You could see the moon at night, and the stars were clear points all the way to the horizon. And wind reached all the way from the sea, which was blue and clean, unlike the oily water sloshing against a San Francisco pier.

  During its early years, I could leap over that tree, kick my bicycling legs over the top branch and scream my fool head off because I thought for sure I was flying. I ate fruit to keep my strength up, fuzzy peaches and branch-scuffed plums cooled in the refrigerator. From the kitchen chair he brought out in the evening, Grandpa would scold, “Hijo, what's the matta with you? You gonna break it.”

  By the third year, the tree was as tall as I, its branches casting a meager shadow on the ground. I sat beneath the shade, scratching words in the hard dirt with a stick. I had learned “Nile” in summer school and a dirty word from my brother who wore granny sunglasses. The red ants tumbled into my letters, and I buried them, knowing that they would dig themselves back into fresh air.

  A tree was money. If a lemon cost seven cents at Hanoian's Market, then Grandfather saved fistfuls of change and more because in winter the branches of his lemon tree hung heavy yellow fruit. And winter brought oranges, juicy and large as softballs. Apricots he got by the bagfuls from a son, who himself was wise for planting young. Peaches he got from a neighbor, who worked the night shift at Sun Maid Raisin. The chile plants, which also saved him from giving up his hot, sweaty quarters, were propped up with sticks to support an abundance of red fruit.

  But his favorite tree was the avocado because it offered hope and the promise of more years. After work, Grandpa sat in the back yard, shirtless, tired of flagging trucks loaded with crates of raisins, and sipped glasses of ice water. His yard was neat: five trees, seven rose bushes, whose fruit were the red and white flowers he floated in bowls, and a statue of St. Francis that stood in a circle of crushed rocks, arms spread out to welcome hungry sparrows.

  After ten years, the first avocado hung on a branch, but the meat was flecked with black, an omen, Grandfather thought, a warning to keep an eye on the living. Five years later, another avocado hung on a branch, larger than the first and edible when crushed with a fork into a heated tortilla. Grandfather sprinkled it with salt and laced it with a river of chile.

  “It's good,” he said, and let me taste.

  I took a big bite, waved a hand over my tongue, and ran for the garden hose gurgling in the rose bushes. I drank long and deep, and later ate the smile from an ice cold watermelon.

  Birds nested in the tree, quarreling jays with liquid eyes and cool, pulsating throats. Wasps wove a horn-shaped hive one year, but we smoked them away with swords of rolled up newspapers lit with matches. By then, the tree was tall enough for me to climb to look into the neighbor's yard. But by then I was too old for that kind of thing and went about with my brother, hair slicked back and our shades dark as oil.

  After twenty years, the tree began to bear. Although Grandfather complained about how much he lost because pollen never reached the poor part of town, because at the market he had to haggle over the price of avocados, he loved that tree. It grew, as did his family, and when he died, all his sons standing on each other's shoulders, oldest to youngest, could not reach the highest branches. The wind could move the branches, but the trunk, thicker than any waist, hugged the ground.

  ______

  The Taps

  NOT MUCH HAPPENED when I set a rock on the railroad tracks. I expected a great noise of iron and pig squeals and an avalanche of lumber. I expected the conductor to hold onto his engineer's cap and sparks to bloom as the train slid on its side. I expected steam and hot, devilish coals bouncing down the street, setting fire to the broom factory, which in turn would set fire to the L & R Book Company. The flames would march from factory to warehouse, and in no time all of Fresno would be on fire.

  We were on fire. The July heat was a blond locust with square jaws feeding in the trees. The asphalt was a soft, blackish river on which cars traveled, windows down, the passengers soaked in sweat. Dogs whined, even in the shade of toolsheds, and my abuela, tired of watching me circle on her small brick patio, said for me to go play somewhere else. I had just hammered taps to the bottoms of my shoes and liked hearing their tinny music.

  I was happy to leave the brick patio. I figured I could hear my taps better on a cement sidewalk. I walked up the alley, crossed the street and stood in the sun, a mustache of sweat dripping around my mouth. Mother had warned us not to cross the street. She warned us not to do a lot of things, like eat raw bacon at the Molinas, like climb hand over hand on telephone lines, like play with matches in the weeds where our father poured used motor oil. But we weren't very good listeners. Now that I had crossed the street, I was scared of a spanking, but not scared enough to turn back. I looked down at my shoes, black puddles of leather, and stomped one heel gently. I loved the sound of taps, the way the little clinks made me feel grown up. I took one step, then another, left over right, right over left as I skipped and imagined sparks flying out from under my shoes. I watched my shoes intently, head down, and in no time I was lost. I turned around, hot in the face. I could see the Sun Maid Raisin Tower and Mr. Drake's palm tree, and had a feeling that my house was where the sycamore scared up wild branches.

  I looked down at my shoes, then shaded my eyes. A block away, train tracks wavered in the heat. I hurried over, less in tune with the music of my taps than with the long rip of the train whistle. A passenger train the color of spoons rushed by. I was disappointed because I wanted to wave to the engineer. I was also disappointed for not thinking quicker about hanging onto the gate as it rose straight as a sentry.

  A man the color of a sparrow walked near the tracks. I thought about waving and saying, “The train will be here,” but he was dirty, and his mouth was blistered. The soles of his shoes were tied with twine. His coat was ripped like a sail. I remembered Mother's warnings about poor men who lived near the train tracks and knew enough not to bother him.

  I played with the gravel as I waited for the next train. I pulled at foxtails and pounded a bottle cap with my fist into the soft asphalt. I smelled the inside of a Cracker Jacks box, crushed flat by a car tire. I stirred an ant hill with a splintered plastic spoon and collected the shark teeth of broken bottles. When I heard the far away sound of a train, I wiped my hands on my pants, set a rock on the tracks, and enjoyed wild thoughts about the train overturning. As the train rumbled closer, a plume of black smoke riding over its back, I felt a rumbling in my chest. The wind stirred dust and litter of candy wrappers and milk cartons. The sparrows on the shiny rails took flight. The gate lowered and a bell clanged to the beat of the red signal.

  I hid behind a spidery tumbleweed as the trai
n grew closer, its hypnotic eye of light swirling in its socket. The train was huge and black, and for the first time since my brother and I had tried to burn down our house, I felt something really exciting was going to happen. I held my breath, hands over my ears, as the train met up with its fate, me. But I stood up from behind the tumbleweed, again disappointed, when the rock just ricocheted off the tracks. Car after car swaggered past and the man in the caboose just stared when I waved.

  I managed to return home by keeping an eye on the Sun Maid Raisin tower. I snatched three plums from a Japanese family's yard and watched the Molinas hammer roller skates to the bottom of a rickety dog house. At home, I washed my face with a garden hose and rested in the shade of our almond tree, petting my dusty shoes with wet Kleenex. I waited for dinner and nightfall, when in the dark I could race around abuela's patio, whistling like a train and kicking up the engine of sparks that lived beneath my soles.

  ______

  The Hand Brake

  ONE AFTERNOON in July, I invented a brake for a child's running legs. It was an old bicycle hand brake, which I wore on a belt loop, the cable tied around my waist, and whose function was to help me stop when I came racing to the end of the street. I found it in the alley that ran alongside our house, among rain-swollen magazines, pencils, a gutted clock, and sun-baked rubber bands that cracked when I bunched them around my fingers.

  I couldn't read or write, or tell time without thinking that the long hand made the hours go by too fast. But I put the rubber bands to good use immediately by letting them fly at a sauntering cat. The cat, its face like a three-cornered hat, hurried away, keeping its tail up.

  The hand brake was made of chrome that hurt my eyes when the sun lit its edges. I sat on the magazines, mesmerized because every time I pinched the lever of the hand brake, the cable moved, not unlike when I pulled on a tendon of a chicken claw, and its filthy toes clenched.