Facts of Life Read online

  Mickey left by way of the alley. The first thing he did was saucer his Dodgers cap into a trash can, disturbing the flies bulking up on nasty garbage.

  "Good-bye, cap," he sang remorsefully. He had fond memories of it, but was savvy enough to realize it was a dead giveaway: Raul would be driving around in search of a boy in such a cap. He peeled off his Bart Simpson T-shirt, as this, too, was a giveaway.

  "Dang," Mickey whispered. He imagined himself stripping off all his clothes and arriving home naked; his laugh came out like a snort. But his mirth fled when he came upon a cops cruiser idling at the corner.

  "Aw, man, I'm busted," he muttered. He stopped in his tracks, wondering how to escape. The rabbit inside his heart began to run. When he was eight years old he'd been nabbed by a cop who'd caught him scratching his name in wet cement. Was a boy ever so dumb?

  He crept back into the alley, glancing now and then over his shoulder. Ratlike, he scurried down the alley and saw, not a light at the end of the tunnel, but another idling cop car.

  "It's messed up," Mickey told himself. "But just be cool." He sauntered into view, seemingly relaxed as he whistled "Cielito Undo." He picked up a stick and demonstrated, in a corny manner, his swashbuckling skills as a buccaneer: jab, jab, parry. Dramatically, he wiped his brow, as if to indicate the heat of the day. He had to convince the cop that he was only a sunstruck youth, and harmless.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Mickey eyed the cop. The cop's sunglasses turned in his direction, a glare sparkling. But he didn't roll down the window to ask, "Kid, you know anything about a break-in?" He remained in his air-conditioned cruiser.

  He's probably just doing paperwork, Mickey figured. Cops are always parked with their engines running and using good gas just to kill time.

  Mickey made his way down the street, tempted to turn and see if the cop was eyeing him with suspicion. But he kept himself looking straight ahead, not backward at that narrow escape, which he hoped would be a lesson in life—if he really did escape. He felt sorry for the old couple whose house he had helped rob. If only I could do something for them, he cried in his heart. But what? Arrive with a mower and cut their lawn?

  Mickey walked, shoulders hunched. His favorite baseball cap was gone and so was his Bart Simpson T-shirt. Dang, I'm almost naked, he realized.

  The day had started off so nicely with three bowls of Coco Puffs and continued with a bag of pork rinds as he walked to the baseball field. Yes, that's where it had all started, when he struck out and his teammates' angry stares became death rays.

  "That stupid dust," Mickey snarled. But at least that was in the past, he figured.

  But he was wrong there, too. The past came upon him when he spotted a member of his team bicycling toward him. It was Jesus Lopez, the guy he left stranded on second, and Jesus got bigger and bigger as he approached. He skidded to a halt, tossed a handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth, and asked, "Dude, how come you struck out?" He spit out the shells at Mickey's feet.

  "You saw what happened!" Mickey's arms flapped like wings. "It was the dust. And quit spitting sunflower seeds at me."

  "You messed up," Jesus sneered. "Get on."

  Mickey was glad for the magical appearance of Jesus. On the handlebars of the bike, he could increase the distance between himself and the scene of the crime, plus the police.

  At Jesus's house, Mickey helped pump up an inflatable pool and fill it with water from two garden hoses. "This is great!" He happily ripped off his shoes and socks, but kept his pants on as he stepped into the pool and sat down. A few bubbles rose around him like suds.

  "Man, you were supposed to hose off first," Jesus complained as he stepped into the pool. "You're going to get the water all dirty."

  "My germs are healthy" Mickey sighed, and splashed like a baby.

  Jesus's younger brother and a friend appeared. Their necks were ringed with dirt from hard play.

  "Let us in," Jesus's brother demanded. The corners of his mouth were blue from eating a Popsicle.

  "Get outta here!" Jesus shouted. "And take your friend with you."

  "Yeah, go play in the street," Mickey joined in as the two younger boys left.

  The boys were having fun listing all the food they would never eat, even if they were starving on a deserted island, when a bubble rose and popped in front of Mickey.

  "Did you fart in the water?" Jesus asked. He stood up, a sheet of water spilling off his brown body.

  "Nah, man, I didn't! I swear." Mickey laughed. "But I did pee!"

  Jesus was out of the water, and then Mickey was up and out, his belly rolling with laughter. "It was just an air pocket from my pants. I swear. And I didn't stream in your pool. It was just a joke."

  "You farted! You disgust me! Now I gotta change the water."

  Refreshed, Mickey dripped and savored the chills running across his body. His jeans clung to his thighs. He was still chuckling as he searched for his shoes.

  "Where are they?" He found his socks, so dirty they were black as night.

  Jesus turned in a circle, also puzzled. "I don't know, dude." Then he raised his face. "My little brother. I'm gonna kick his butt."

  They went to the front yard and found the shoes, laces knotted together, dangling from a telephone wire.

  "Your stupid brother!" Mickey scowled.

  "Don't worry, I'll get him for you. And his big-nose friend."

  They stood in silence as they gazed up at the shoes. But there was no way to get them down, and Mickey knew he had to go home.

  He arrived home nearly naked and with a blister on each foot as proof he'd traveled far beyond the confines of his own block. He felt much richer in life, and wiser. His father greeted him.

  "Heard you were over at your aunt Ester's," he reported from a chair on the porch. "Heard you helped her do something on the roof." He rubbed his stubbly chin and inquired about his son's clothes.

  "Yeah, Dad." Mickey gazed down at his absence of apparel and offered, "It's a long story."

  "I got no time for a long story." His father blasted his prodigal son, asking how he could walk five miles to help his aunt but not pick up the dirty clothes in his bedroom. "In fact, go get some clothes on, and come outside."

  Mickey snuck inside to avoid his mother in the kitchen. When he opened his bedroom door, he discovered his father was partially right. There were clothes on the floor, and a sock—how did it get there?—hanging from the overhead light. He snatched the sock, found it's mate under the bed, put on an ice-cream splattered T-shirt, and pushed his feet into tennis shoes. He went outside.

  "What do you want me to do?" Mickey asked.

  "You were monkeying around on your aunts roof, and now you're going to do the same here." His dad handed him what, at first, Mickey thought were seat cushions. They were cooler pads.

  For the second time in a day he was up on a roof, this time with a screwdriver in his back pocket. He opened the side of the cooler and detached the old pads, black as a smoker's lungs, and fit the new ones in. He stepped to the edge of the roof and dropped the old pads to the ground.

  "That's all done," Mickey said proudly, a mustache of sweat on his upper lip. He moved toward the ladder, flipping the screwdriver into the air. "I'm pretty good at this," he claimed, seeing himself as a sort of circus act. He tossed the screwdriver higher and higher—and then, out of the corner of his eye, he made out Raul's truck on the street, tailpipe popping.

  "Aw, man," Mickey sputtered.

  The screwdriver flew out of his hand, and stuck in the ground within inches of his father, who was gathering mint from around the faucet in the flower bed.

  "What the heck!" his father scolded. He hitched up his pants with both hands as he stepped back to locate his son on the roof. "Tryin' to kill your papi?'' His father bawled him out in Spanish, but Mickey was deaf to his father's wrath. He stepped farther back on the roof, his heart racing, and squatted into the familiar ducklike stance. The back of Raul's truck was empty. He must have unloaded it a
nd was making his rounds in a new neighborhood.

  Earlier in the summer Mickey had begged his father to get a plasma television, but his father, a penny-pincher, had waved him off. Now Mickey was glad. Raul, a clever thief, would have sniffed out the television and made an unannounced visit. There Mickey would be, kicking back on the couch, three empty cereal bowls on the coffee table, his parents gone. Raul would push himself into the house, singing, "Hey, champ, long time no see. So this is your crib." He pictured Raul swiveling around and pointing, "Hey, nice TV, the latest in technology. Come on, help me carry it out."

  Perish the thought that he, the prodigal son with blisters on his soles, would help rob his own house. Mickey remained on the roof until the truck disappeared and his father slapped open the front screen door, shouting, "Come on down, mi'jo. You've done enough for today"

  Capturing the Moment

  AS THE SCHOOL BUS bumped over the road, Lisa Torres did a quick sketch of her classmate, Gaby Lopez. Lisa, holder of two blue ribbons from the art contest at the county fair, was inspired by the moment: a classmate studying the rain-wet fields of February. Lisa felt that she had caught Gaby's pensive mood as she gazed out the bus window. The high clouds had darkened the landscape, the shadows racing east toward the Sierras, the jagged range of mountains tipped with snow. Any other day the valley's smog would have obscured their view.

  Lisa got up and moved unsteadily down the aisle. The next stop was hers. "Here," she said to Gaby.

  Surprised, Gaby accepted the portrait, and offered a smile. Her friends huddled around to look at the drawing and made Lisa think of ponies peering through a stall—would that be another sketch at another time?

  The bus groaned to a stop in the middle of the road. Lisa lived out in the country where few cars passed. When they did, they sped by, far faster than the posted fifty-mile-an-hour sign, as if hurrying to get away. Lisa had spent many summers sitting in a chair counting the cars: one car every hour, sometimes stopping to ask for directions. City people, Lisa learned, didn't know east from west, and couldn't name the crops growing in the nearby fields.

  Lisa shrugged her backpack onto her shoulder, descended from the bus, turned to wave at Gaby, and slowly walked up the muddy drive toward her trailer house set fifty feet back but visible to everyone. To Lisa, the trailer said "Poverty." The trailer said "Isolation." The trailer said "People live there, but why?" Lisa and her parents had called it home since crossing from Mexico six years earlier, leaving behind her two older brothers, a sister Lisa hardly knew, uncles and aunts, grandmothers, and a pony. Before they arrived in California, an excited Lisa had imagined places like Disneyland and movie theaters large as churches. She imagined herself eating at McDonald's every day. Her parents would drive something fancy, like a Lexus or a Mercedes.

  She soon learned the truth: Some people have to live in the middle of nowhere. They eat dust, they scorch under the sun, they whittle away the hours in boredom. They drive an '83 Ford Ranger with mismatched front fenders. But most of the time Lisa didn't mind.

  She leaped over a puddle, then another. She stooped to look at her reflection. She considered nature a better portraitist than her favorite artist, John Audubon, the genius who had drawn hundreds of birds. She had become familiar with this naturalist—a new word for her, a word she loved—when her dad found a book abandoned at a Laundromat. Audubon was a master artist, and his subjects were birds surrounded by sprigs of foliage, a leathery branch, or a small flower.

  Lisa could see that her reflection, even in a puddle in her rural yard, had captured the moment. Even on this ugly plot of land, nature was a better artist than Audubon.

  I want to go far away, Lisa thought, and draw and draw. That's going to be my life. She had heard about New York City—the Big Apple. That was where artists went to suffer for their art. If she had to suffer as well, she figured that she would do it in a large city—provided the suffering didn't involve scars and bruises.

  Lisa smiled at her reflection, then made a funny face. She wore a cap, and her long hair blew in the wind. Her cheeks were pinkish from the cold and the wind, and her nose was moist. Lisa stepped away from nature's mirror and was debating what after-school snack she would fix when she spied a lake of rainwater that extended from their squat trailer to the rusting tractors parked in the back.

  "Oh, wow," she remarked. The afternoon glare off the lake made her squint. How strange, she mused. It had rained just after lunch at school, but the downpour hadn't seemed that heavy. Had a cloud stalled above their trailer and poured out it's little heart?

  She strolled around the new lake, occasionally gazing back at her footprints in the soggy earth. The chickens in the yard were soggy, too, their feathers parted and showing the yellow skin underneath. Still, they scratched and pecked at the ground and left their own shallow prints in the wet earth.

  I'll draw the lake, Lisa decided. She liked drawing birds, but had grown tired of sparrows, blue jays, and blackbirds wrapped in glossiness. These days she liked doing portraits, though she could draw objects, too. The previous week she had drawn the pile of tires behind the tractors; the drawing now adorned the front of the refrigerator.

  Lisa produced a pencil and her sketch pad from her backpack. She had to capture this lake before it disappeared into the earth, taking with it the fluffy clouds mirrored on it's surface. Birds the color of asphalt flittered about the edges of the puddle, and she recognized them as common finches. She knelt on the wet ground, putting down on paper what her eye beheld, what her fingers were able to portray.

  Her gift was a mystery, as neither of her parents could draw. Their talent was to bring their faces together, like lovebirds, and warble Mexican songs, although most of the time they were working. Her father was employed by a dairy and her mother, from windy March to scorching July, worked in the fields—she thinned beets and cotton and was sometimes on a women's crew that harvested cantaloupes. There were also two seasons when she packed peaches.

  Lisa's dog, Pecas, roamed in the background. He paused, head raised and fur parting from the wind. Lisa had to smile. He seemed to be posing as the subject of her artwork. His breath hung in the air when he barked at movement in the grass—a rabbit, she wondered, or a quail in search of a mate? The gopher that had tunneled under their garden patch last summer and nibbled at everything her father had planted: cucumbers, tomatoes, chilies, and eggplant?

  I'll surprise my parents with this new drawing, Lisa thought. "Cállate!" she ordered Pecas, who turned, head lifted and tail wagging, and happily trotted toward her. But when two large white birds dropped from the sky, Pecas lurched in fear, kicking up water. "Oh my gosh," Lisa uttered, dropping her pencil. She searched the sky for other birds. But the sky was vacant, except for blackbirds wheeling over the fields across the street.

  As she took a cautious step toward the birds, she remembered that the night before she had been looking in her Audubon book at a picture of a bird that she would like to draw: the egret. Now before her stood a pair of egrets, which, against the backdrop of the grayish lake, were white as snow.

  Lisa's heart thumped with excitement and Pecas's tail wagged briskly. Lisa again turned her attention skyward: Where had they come from? What wind had brought them here at this moment? She reached for the pencil on the ground and rolled it between her palms to spark the fires of creation. She had to draw these rare and silent birds, who, if she remembered right, seldom whistled or twittered with song.

  Lisa turned and gasped. Over the lake arched a rainbow that began somewhere behind the tractors. The centerpiece was the pair of egrets, still as statues. Even Pecas stopped his whining. Lisa wondered, Can he really see the rainbow? She had read that dogs were mostly-color-blind, but that birds, even common ones like the sparrow and finch, could slice the color red into a dozen shades. Their world was richer in color than some of the greatest paintings.

  Lisa tried to sketch the scene quickly before it disappeared: First the egrets would fly away, then the rainbow fade,
and finally the deposit of rain sink into the earth.

  "It's so beautiful," she remarked.

  A black-and-white calf ambled out from between the rusty tractors. Splattered with mud, it moved with a heavy sway toward the water. The calf stopped, then raised it's heavy head to Lisa, as if saying, "Go ahead—draw me." It lowered it's gaze to turn and present a mournful profile, spittle hanging from it's mouth.

  "Oh," Lisa let out, and added the cow to the scene. She made a face when she heard the telephone ring.

  "Como lata!" Lisa muttered. She got to her feet, knees dimpled with mud, and hurried to the trailer with her sketchbook pressed to her chest. She petted Pecas's head as she bounced up the steps, slipped off her muddy shoes, then got the telephone on the fifth ring.

  "Bueno," she greeted the caller. "Hello." It was her mom calling from the Laundromat—Lisa could hear the sound of tumbling dryers and washers shifting into rinse and spin cycles. She could make out the wailing of babies and Mexican music echoing off the walls. Her mother asked Lisa to take some frozen meat out to thaw, then to vacuum and clean up around the trailer.

  Lisa hung up and looked around their small living room. In the corner stood her father's metal cabinet of Craftsman tools, which gave the air the faint scent of motor oil. Lisa's father, who'd been a truck driver in Mexico, had an ambition that would take them away from this trailer life. He wanted to become a mechanic. Mechanics earned good money, he argued, and they got to live in cities, not on ranchos. They got to drive clean cars, not ones flecked with mud or splattered insects on windshields. They owned tools, droplights, extension cords, and books with oil-thumbed pages.

  My papi is trying, Lisa told herself. Still, she frowned at this tool cabinet that took up so much room; her frown deepened at her mother's knitting piled on the coffee table. Lisa hated herself for this judgment, but the house was messy, and no matter what she might do, it would always be messy.

  Lisa released a sigh, and muttered, "I'll clean it later." She was determined to complete her drawing. She slipped into her shoes on the porch and clopped down the steps, then halted. Would surprises never end! Near the egrets under the rainbow's arch floated two fat geese.