A Summer Life Read online

  I walked home slowly and met up with the cat, who now crouched in the stench of weeds where motor oil was poured, its eyes large with worry because he sensed something was up. My brother was eating a watery peach and blowing on his palm.

  “What's that?” my brother Rick asked, a bib of peach juice on his shirt.

  “Thing from a bike.”

  My brother showed me his palm, where a sliver had gone in quick as a stitch on a sewing machine when he climbed the rabbit hutch at the Molina's house. I winced and asked if it hurt. He squeezed it until a bubble, clear as glass, popped from the wound.

  I polished the hand brake with the same liquid Mom used to clean the floor and spent the afternoon pulling the lever until I was bored and thirsty for something to do. I got it into my head that I should wrap the cable around my waist and think of the lever as the thing that made me stop and go. It was mostly go for a five-year-old running up and down the block, the sun yellow, tree-high and slanting over the junkyard.

  My brother, two years older, wiser from glass-punctured feet, nose bleeds, and now a sliver in his palm, didn't think much of this game. He watched me from the shaded porch where flies circled, a halo of black around his head, and called me stupid for staying in the sun. But nickel-colored water from the garden hose cooled my head, and yellow-green apricots from a low branch where sparrows flittered watered my tongue.

  Mr. Drake, our neighbor who had given up chasing his chickens, drank water from a hose and yelled at me to sit down because he was getting hot just watching me. “Your mother is going to find you dead,” he said. “It's not right to run out there.” There was the street, soft asphalt that we sometimes pulled up in little chunks because someone said it was good to chew.

  I looked at the sun's sparkling edges, and spiders dropping eggs on dry skeins. I listened to Mr. Drake, who wagged a wrench-thick finger at me, and sat under the chinaberry, where I ate a plum and fondled the lung-shaped leaves of bean plants. I liked how they felt, soft and cool, and liked how they drank squirts of water from a Coke bottle.

  Then I raced down to the railroad tracks on Van Ness. The sun gleamed off the steel rails. The wind moved a hat-sized tumble-weed, and I raced after it. I raced a taxi filled with sailors, and danced from one foot to the other foot when the crossing guard dropped and the red light and iron bell began to throb. The train, huge as a cloud, beat me by inches to the wind-whipped oleander that I had picked as the finish line.

  When I returned home, I was dusty from my naked feet to the crystals of dirt on my eyelashes. I drank water from the garden hose and cooled myself with six plums. I was tired but happy.

  I rose to my feet and went to my abuela's to run with her three chickens. When the cat came out of the weeds, shaking a lanyard of long grass from her paw, I tightened the hand brake and came to a stop. The cat stopped and looked at me for the longest time, knowing from this and previous lives that he should stay away from half-naked kids. He hurried away, ears pulled back, and I hurried after it, the cable jumping on my waist, the lever shining with sunlight and God's forgiving stare.

  ______

  The Giant

  MY BROTHER measured the length of the cement shoe prints with his hand. For all we knew, they were set before our grandmother came from Mexico to this country, which to us made them as old as the very dirt in our garden. Summer brought butt-faced plums, hours in the shade, and an itch to ignore Mother's warning about what lay at the end of the street, where we discovered a broom factory, rows of trucks loaded with blocks of hay, and a crazy neighbor who held a live chicken in her arms as she rocked on the porch, a tin can of drool at her feet. We looked and ran, nearly tripping over the broken sidewalk around a scabbed sycamore.

  The length of the shoe print was almost three of my brother's hands, and four of mine. We rose to our feet, knees creased with grass, and eyed each other, then followed the shadow of a rumbling moving van downshifting to a stop. We were amazed and couldn't hide our excitement when later, over dinner, we told Father, his shoulders giving off the fragrance of sawdust from his new job as a carpenter, that a giant lived nearby and we had better keep our eyes open if we didn't want to get squashed. Father didn't stop chewing to ask questions, or let our warning worry his brow. Mother, sweater over her shoulders, looked out the window, where in an hour the summer dusk would settle in the alley. Far away, we heard the sound of the broom factory starting the night shift.

  After dinner, we had to sit on the sofa. Mother said we would get sick if we played after we had eaten, and said our meal, a round steak and frijoles, was deciding where to latch onto, an anemic arm or a skinned knee. We sat fooling with our fingers and staring at the Venetian blinds that banged when a breeze stirred. This was before TV, before long pants and shoes on our feet, before Christ became a glow-in-the-dark statue we kept on a night stand.

  I noticed that my fingers were smaller than my brother's, not as dark, and a lot cleaner. Black dwelled beneath his fingernails, and a pink scar ran along his thumb where he got caught on barbed-wire. His breath rattled like a leaf. His neck held a pulsating blue vein as large as our father's. For a moment I thought my brother might become a giant, that it would be only a matter of time before he could fill the window with one scary eye. His naked feet were large, and his head had trouble staying straight up. It seemed to me that it always leaned one way or the other. I thought about this a while, then decided my brother was only a brother, not a giant with crashing feet.

  After ten minutes on the sofa, we got up and helped with the dishes by putting away the forks and spoons. Mother handled the water glasses and the plates, which were blue with ancient scenes of Chinese dragons and temples. When she finished, we stood watching the steam rise from the gray, soapy dishwater and thought deeply about the cold pipes that rushed water to us from snow-slushed mountains. We watched the water, mesmerized by the transaction of heat to air, both of us glad that we lived in a house where you could press an ear to the wall and hear the faraway sounds.

  With the dishes out of the way, my brother and I scurried down to the end of the block to look once more at the shoe prints, which now seemed smaller, though not small enough to calm our minds. I got down on my knees and measured my hands in the print: three-and-a-half hands, not four. When I lifted my hand, two red ants were pressed into my palm, staggering with bent antennas and broken legs. With a cheek fat with summer air, I blew them off, only a little scared of the red ant's bitter bite. Rick said that a million ants could easily fill those prints, and if the ants decided to do it one day they could flood over to our house when they were through.

  Rick and I returned home, darkness gathering around trees, bushes, and parked cars. We played with a punctured, multicolored beach ball under an orange porch light until I stubbed my toe on the cement steps and my sobbing reminded Mother that it was late and we still had to bathe.

  We bathed in scalding water and cooled off. In bed, I listened to the broom factory, the loud whack of straw being wired onto red, yellow, and blue sticks. That was another worry, because I had once said hello to a worker, and he had said hello back. One day, he might show me the machinery, and by accident I might fall into a hamper of straw and get tangled in the machine that tied the wire.

  I got up and stood at the window, the smell of crushed china-berry in the warm summer air. The junkyard facing our house was a silhouette of iron pipes and jagged sheet metal. A dog barked as a car circled out of a driveway, the sweep of headlights passing over my hands as they clutched the windowsill. Back in bed, I closed my eyes, convinced that because the giant's brain was so far from his feet, he would have no pity when he turned onto our street.

  ______

  The Bike

  MY FIRST BIKE got me nowhere, though the shadow I cast as I pedaled raced along my side. The leaves of bird-filled trees stirred a warm breeze and litter scuttled out of the way. Our orange cats looked on from the fence, their tails up like antennas. I opened my mouth, and wind tickled the back of my throat. Wh
en I squinted, I could see past the end of the block. My hair flicked like black fire, and I thought I was pretty cool riding up and down the block, age five, in my brother's hand-me-down shirt.

  Going up and down the block was one thing, but taking the first curve, out of sight of Mom and the house, was another. I was scared of riding on Sarah Street. Mom said hungry dogs lived on that street, and red anger lived in their eyes. Their throats were hard with extra bones from biting kids on bikes, she said.

  But I took the corner anyway. I didn't believe Mom. Once she had said that pointing at rainbows caused freckles, and after a rain had moved in and drenched the streets, after the sparrows flitted onto the lawn, a rainbow washed over the junkyard and reached the dark barrels of Coleman pickle. I stood at the window, looking out, amazed and devious, with the devilish horns of my butch haircut standing up. From behind the window, I let my finger slowly uncurl like a bean plant rising from earth. I uncurled it, then curled it back and made a fist. I should remember this day, I told myself.

  I pedaled my squeaky bike around the curve onto Sarah Street, but returned immediately. I braked and looked back at where I had gone. My face was hot, my hair sweaty, but nothing scary seemed to happen. The street had looked like our street: parked cars, tall trees, a sprinkler hissing on a lawn, and an old woman bending over her garden. I started again, and again I rode the curve, my eyes open as wide as they could go. After a few circle eights I returned to our street. There ain't no dogs, I told myself. I began to think that maybe this was like one of those false rainbow warnings.

  I turned my bike around and rode a few times in front of our house, just in case Mom was looking for me. I called out, “Hi Mom. I haven't gone anywhere.” I saw her face in the window, curlers piled high, and she waved a dish towel at me. I waved back, and when she disappeared, I again tore my bike around the curve onto Sarah Street. I was free. The wind flicked my hair and cooled my ears. I did figure eights, rode up the curbs and onto lawns, bumped into trees, and rode over a garden hose a hundred times because I liked the way the water sprang up from the sprinkler after the pressure of my tires. I stopped when I saw a kid my age come down a porch. His machinery for getting around was a tricycle. Big baby, I thought, and said, “You can run over my leg with your trike if you want.” I laid down on the sidewalk, and the kid, with fingers in his mouth, said, “OK.”

  He backed up and slowly, like a tank, advanced. I folded my arms behind my head and watched a jay swoop by with what looked like a cracker in its beak, when the tire climbed over my ankle and sparks of pain cut through my skin. I sat up quickly, my eyes flinging tears like a sprinkler.

  The boy asked, “Did it hurt?”

  ‘No,” I said, almost crying.

  The kid could see that it did. He could see my face strain to hold back a sob, two tears dropping like dimes into the dust. He pedaled away on his bucket of bolts and tossed it on his front lawn. He looked back before climbing the stairs and disappeared into the house.

  I pulled up my pants leg. My ankle was purple, large and hot, and the skin was flaked like wood shavings. I patted spit onto it and laid back down. I cried because no one was around, the tears stirring up a lather on my dirty face. I rose to my feet and walked around, trying to make the ankle feel better. I got on my bicycle and pedaled mostly with the good leg. The few tears still on my eyelashes evaporated as I rode. I realized I would live. I did nothing fancy on the way home, no figure eights, no wiggling of the handlebars, no hands in my pockets, no closed eye moments.

  Then the sudden bark of a dog scared me, and my pants leg fed into the chain, the bike coming to an immediate stop. I tugged at the cuff, gnashed and oil-black, until ripping sounds made me quit trying. I fell to the ground, bike and all, and let the tears lather my face again. I then dragged the bike home with the pants leg in the chain. There was nothing to do except lie in the dirt because Mom saw me round the corner from Sarah Street. I laid down when she came out with the belt, and I didn't blame the dog or that stupid rainbow.

  ______

  The Almonds

  IT WAS EARLY AUGUST, and the almonds were bitter, almost not worth cracking with a hammer. They were not worth the fear, either. I had taken my uncle's army belt, the wide one with black eyeholes on which grenades hung (or so he told me), and strapped it around my waist. Once up in the tree I could latch it and my small four-year-old body onto a sap-sticky limb. I could eat from there, look around and think of the past, which for me was a play that had already notched three or four scars on my imperfect knees.

  The furry outer shells I tossed to the weeds, or our cat, Boots, who sat near the water meter, her eyes spinning like the dials that registered how much water we used. The inner shell broke open with a squeak when the hammer came down.

  The first taste was bitter, the second less bitter, and by the fifth seed, I was liking them enough to think I could live in a tree and get by until the start of kindergarten. I ate like a squirrel with a burst of jaw motion, a quick look around, and more jaw motion. The wind stirred the leaves and my nostrils filled with the scent of almonds and oily smoke from the metal works on Van Ness Avenue.

  As I ate, I began to think that maybe I liked almonds better than my favorite fruit, the plum. I tried to remember the icy cold taste of plums, and how the juice trickled from my mouth when I bit too hard. But the plums were gone. All that remained of them were dark splotches on the side of the house. My brother and I had splattered them because we were bored and tired of eating them, because a hive of wasps lived under the eaves, and we thought we were doing good. But the wasps didn't leave, and the only thing we got from Mother was a spanking.

  From my position high up in the tree, I looked into Mr. Drake's yard, where a rooster spent his day walking in a circle, and Mr. Drake, an old man shrinking in blue overalls, spent his afternoons watching the rooster. They blinked alike, their small liquid eyes responding rapidly when the wind stirred the eucalyptus. They watched the mailman trudge up the front steps. They looked skyward when the shadow of a cloud touched them. They nearly stopped breathing when an alley cat climbed foolishly into his yard. And they were both skinny, the rooster from eating dirt and feathery seeds the trees dropped, Mr. Drake from living off the whittlings of a check his son sent monthly.

  Mr. Drake didn't like our family. Our water line was connected to his, and every three months he stood at his fence, waved the water bill from the city, and said we drank and flushed our toilet too often.

  “I could hear,” he would say. “That toilet of yours keeps me awake.”

  “Your chicken keeps me awake,” my mother would argue back. “Why don't you eat it?”

  He didn't have a toilet, just a lopsided outhouse, the weathered boards warped and slivery, the hole for fresh air dark as the hole he sat on every morning. He didn't have much of anything. His house was as lopsided as his outhouse, the roof a patchwork of shingles he must have come across in the alley. His garden was a scraggly vine of worm-dark tomatoes, and his fruit trees were stunted and cracked where an awful sap flowed. Not even weeds entered his yard.

  From the almond tree, I saw him watch his rooster. He sat on a tree trunk, his face pale as straw behind a straw hat. The rooster strutted in a dust-stirring circle, occasionally pecking at the ground, now and then running his beak through his feathers.

  I hammered another almond, my ninth. I hadn't liked the taste of almonds at first, but the more they became embedded in my back molars, the more I thought my brother would enjoy them too. I thought about other things I had eaten, white cheese for instance, the kind with holes like the holes in my T-shirts. Maybe I was wrong about not liking them and the circles of squash that mother smothered in tomato sauce.

  I adjusted myself in Uncle's army belt and heard Mr. Drake turn on his faucet. Nickel-colored water spilled at his feet as he lapped at the end of the hose. I cleared my throat of almonds and ran my tongue over my back molars because I knew it would take a lot of voice to reach our neighbor.

 
“Mr. Drake,” I yelled. “You're spilling the water on the ground!”

  Mr. Drake and his rooster looked up, their eyes liquid and small as seeds. He took off his hat, which was frayed with age, and asked, “Who's that?”

  “Me, in the tree!”

  He squinted into the shaking leaves as I moved to a higher branch. He backhanded the drops of water on his mouth, and asked again, “Who's that?”

  “Me, Mr. Drake. I live here.”

  I dropped the hammer, he dropped the hose, and the scrawny rooster, with a faint heartbeat, ran behind a block of wood.

  ______

  The Magic Tricks

  MY BROTHER pulled a penny from his ear when he was six. I was five and learning to tie my shoes because my mother said it was now or never, seeing that I was finished with an unruly year of kindergarten, where I managed to learn the primary colors but little else. She was tired of me getting my shoelaces caught in the spokes of my tricycle, tired of having to wipe her hands on her apron and trudge down the steps to set me free.

  Rick said, “Watch this,” and a bottle cap that I recognized from my collection then appeared from his nose. I touched his nose softly, amazed that my brother could do something other than beat me up. When he coughed and a dry apricot rested in his palm, I looked into his mouth. When he scratched his hair and a twig fell out, I smoothed his hair.

  “How'd you do that?” I asked. I coughed a dry cough three times but only the sour smell of just-eaten pickles issued from my mouth. I scratched my hair, and an oily film waxed my fingertips.

  “Magic,” he said and turned away. I followed him as he walked up the alley, begging to know, my shoelaces dragging in the dust, the tongues of my tennis shoes lapping up foxtails and sticker plants.