Help Wanted

  We put our shoulders into our work, a mistake because a wire snapped and struck at us like a snake. The antenna began to topple slowly.

  "Aw, man," I moaned as I skipped back, scared.

  The antenna struck the cooler, which sent it off its foundation and tumbling to the front lawn. We looked over the edge.

  "We didn't mean it, sir," cried Joey. "It was an accident."

  We heard the man cuss that he was going to miss Oprah and everything else on TV for the rest of the day. We knew enough to climb down off the roof and jump onto Joey's lowrider.

  "Go, Joey!" I screamed.

  The man appeared at the door, peeling his hearing aid out of his ear. He shoved the hearing aid into his pocket as he ran down the steps. "Stop, you monkeys! Stop right now. Look what you done to my cooler and TV! You're going to pay for this!"

  Joey's bike lived up to the words CHIMP POWER pinstriped to the frame. We sped down the block, stopped, and looked back at the calamity that we feared would be our undoing.

  "The antenna was real old," Joey reasoned.

  "Yeah, it wasn't our fault."

  "We risked our lives," Joey said.

  I pictured the wire wrapping around our chimp bodies and sending us earthward. I was picturing my own funeral when out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of my mom coming down a set of steps at one pretty house with flowers. Her step was light, full of hope. An Avon bag swung from her shoulders. My mom stopped and, brow furrowed with confusion, looked in our direction.

  "I'm busted," I cried.

  "No, you ain't," Joey answered. "She's probably thinking that we're monkeys, not chimps. You know how your mom can't see if she ain't got her glasses on."

  We rode away, though I thought I could make out Mom yelling, "Chango, is that you?"

  At my house Joey and I sat in front of the television, believing that any moment a newsbreak might flash across the screen. "This just in," the announcer would say. "Two teenage chimps cause havoc..."

  But nothing of the sort happened except that I saw my dad—or at least someone who resembled my dad—in a commercial advertising cheap car tune-ups. The mechanic was leaning over an open hood and striking the engine with a hammer. He was a grease monkey in a gray oil-stained jumper.

  "It's my dad!" I said, pointing.

  "No way," Joey answered.

  The man disappeared from the screen and another man appeared. He pointed at the TV viewer. "You, come on down! We're Tune-Ups for Less. Give us a call right now, and we'll throw in a car wash." The commercial cut to a mechanic beating the engine with a wrench. Two chimps, just like us, were jumping up and down on top of the roof.

  "Yeah, man," Joey said, "it looks like your dad all right." He smiled. "And those little dudes look like us when we were littler."

  I wagged my head. "Man, my dad's a loser." I got up, went into the kitchen for two apples, and returned to find Joey crying.

  "What's wrong?" I asked.

  I turned to face the television. Joey had changed the channel to the Animal Planet network.

  "They're operating on a gorilla."

  A gorilla, with a white cap, was on a table. He was drugged and out of it, though his leg quivered occasionally.

  We sat with our apples in our laps. We watched the surgeon, a light attached to his forehead, lower a shiny instrument toward the gorilla's stomach. We winced when the surgeon sawed back and forth.

  "I know it hurts," Joey bawled.

  We placed our hands first on our eyes, then over our ears. Then, smart me, I turned off the television. The television began to tick as it cooled.

  "He'll be okay," I said.

  Joey cried with his hands over his eyes.

  I tried to cheer him up by juggling little boxes of raisins and by opening the boxes and juggling the raisins themselves. But Joey seemed really down, and I began to think that it had less to do with the gorilla than with our own chimp status.

  "I wish I knew where they do Animal Planet," Joey bawled. He cupped his palms, shiny with tears, when I offered him some raisins.

  "I know where they make the Animal Planet shows," I lied.

  "You don't."

  "No, I do." I described a place outside our city, where the animals roamed the fields and hung out in the trees. I said that everyone was nice there. There were no bullies, no mean teachers, no litter, no drive-bys. There was a chimp girl for every chimp boy, and even the rhinos got paired off.

  Joey wiped a tear that rolled from his left eye.

  I told him about the smoothies that came in buckets and apples big as beach balls. I told him about the sunflowers that dotted the fields, and how you could go up to them and pluck out the seeds if you wanted.

  "Is it far away?" Joey asked.

  "Nah, not really," I answered. "But you have to go by boat."

  "We ain't got a boat," Joey scolded.

  "Nah, but we got an inner tube." I described the one hanging in my garage. I told him we should go and check out the location where they shoot for Animal Planet.

  "I don't believe you," Joey said. He played with his fingers as he muttered something I couldn't understand but sounded like a prayer. Then he agreed, "Let's go anyhow."

  I hurried to the garage for the inner tube, which was flat. I called to Joey, "Hey, come out and help me!"

  With Joey on one side and me on the other, we gripped the bike pump and jumped up and down until the inner tube grew as tall as King Kong, our big relative who could handle himself against all other beasts. We rolled it down the driveway just as my mom was coming up the driveway. She honked at us, but we ignored her. She honked a second time.

  "Where you going?" she shouted. Her giraffe boyfriend was sitting next to her. His head was sticking out of the sunroof.

  "Animal Planet!" I yelled.

  We rolled the inner tube to the canal, where we set it on the water.

  "You first," Joey said, shivering.

  Joey didn't like water, and I didn't like it much, either. But I liked traveling, and with a stick for a paddle I figured we could get far away from our summertime loneliness, even if it was only for a few hours. We couldn't find ourselves chimp girlfriends and had failed in making money at cleaning gutters. I pictured Melvin hauling his cooler back up onto his roof. I pictured him watching a snowy television all through the night.

  "Come on," I begged Joey. "Don't be a scaredy-cat."

  Joey got into the inner tube, his feet in the doughnut hole. I hopped in next and pushed away from the bank. We drifted to the center of the canal, and soon the current moved us slowly eastward. I paddled and kicked my feet occasionally, but mostly the inner tube moved under its own power. We traveled for a mile down the canal, and when we saw two teenage burros, I told Joey that we were getting closer. The two donkey boys were sucking on stalks of grass, and they had the look of two boys who would work all their lives for hay and carrots and nothing more.

  Joey laughed. "You're lying. We ain't getting close to Animal Planet. I don't care, either." His smile said that he was feeling better.

  "But we are!" I laughed.

  We drifted quietly. I pointed to a eucalyptus with a pair of owls staring down at us. Leaves followed the current, and shadows, too. I pointed out how the fish seemed healthier and not like the ones we'd seen throwing up what they ate.

  It was all made up, but I didn't care. I was with Joey, my best friend. At dusk I pointed out the first stars. I started to tell him about the star I had seen from my crib, but Joey said, "I heard that one already." Then he said he was sorry and that he would like to hear about it again. I paddled our inner tube, and sometimes reached up to touch the leaves that hung from the branches. I stripped some of those leaves and set them like canoes on the water.

  So I began again. I said that when I was a baby, I spent a lot of time in my crib. There I would think about the past—like when I first peeled my booties off my feet and how I once threw my blanket out of the crib, an act that made me feel guilty for years. I said that one
night a star appeared and winked at me. It winked actually three times, a sign that in the end I would be okay but for a long time I would suffer because of family, friends, and school. I would really suffer when I turned into a chimp—that is what the star told me. But then, in time, I would be okay again. Every mean person I knew would go away. And I would discover a really good friend.

  "That's me, huh?" Joey said.

  "That's right—it's you, Joey."

  I steered the inner tube back into the middle of the canal. I continued my story of the star that would guide us. Right then I realized that the light on the water was the light of a star that had been racing to reach us for a long, long time. It was reaching us chimp boys, two friends with hardly any looks. We were being saved by a god that was like no other god, but a cool silvery light.

  "You see what I see?" I asked Joey.

  "What?" Joey asked.

  I pointed.

  Joey stared at the water. He appeared confused and then his face brightened. "It's the star, huh?" He raised his head skyward.

  "O star, O star," I sang.

  Joey joined in, kicking his feet from happiness.

  "O star, O star," we sang in the early dusk.

  So I paddled our inner tube. The current was slow, but we were getting there all the same by the shiny light on a dark and cold canal.

  The Sounds of the House

  Three days after Maria's mother was buried, the house began to creak and moan, even without the shudder of wind or her father's late-night footsteps to the bathroom. In her bed, which she shared with Angela, her six-year-old sister, Maria could make out those sounds. She believed that they were telling her something—creak from their small living room, moan in the faraway bathroom. "Is that Mama?" she asked herself. "What does she want?"

  Maria listened with the covers to her throat. She listened and then stopped listening when a horn of moon glared through her window, splashing the bed with moonlight the color of spoons. She propped herself up on an elbow and watched the moon tugging along a few stars. "The moon is far away," she lamented, "and so is Mother."

  She fell asleep only after the moon moved west and her bedroom darkened. The next morning Maria rose from her bed without disturbing Angela, who lay on her hip, gnashing her teeth in sleep. Her father was at the kitchen table, his face gray in the early morning light. He was drinking coffee, a pile of papers in front of him.

  "Buenos días," Maria said, almost in a whisper.

  When he raised his head and saw Maria, he opened his arms and beckoned her. She approached her father slowly and let her body fall into his arms. She could smell his cologne and the work of cement in his clothes. She could smell his sadness.

  She pushed away and ironed down his hair with the flat of her hand. "Papi, you look sleepy," she said softly. "You need a shave."

  "Tired, not sleepy, mi'ja." He rubbed his chin and remarked with a lightness in his voice, "I might grow me a bigote."

  "Do you want something to eat?" Maria asked as she gazed over her shoulder at the refrigerator. Maria was thirteen, a good cook for a seventh grader, and felt that she should be more responsible.

  He ran a hand across his face and, lips pursed, wagged his head. But he raised his coffee cup, which Maria took. While she stood at the stove and reheated the coffee, she looked up at her mother's coffee mug, which hung on a hook under the cupboard. Maria thought of taking it down, but instead she took another cup, her own, and poured herself coffee, which her mother had forbidden her to drink.

  "Are you going to work today?" Maria asked as she handed her father his coffee. He had stayed home for a week and was restless to get out of the house. It was late spring, and the lawns were deep green and scraggly from months of winter rains.

  He blew on the coffee—blew three times and sipped from the edge cautiously.

  "Sí," he answered. "It's better that I work, that I forget." He looked up with the twilight of sadness in his eyes and sighed. "Your mother was a good person—"

  "I know," Maria said, cutting him off gently before he got started on the story of their lives.

  Feeling sorry for him, for herself, she sat down next to her father and looked at the papers in front of him. They were filled with doodling for a paving job.

  "Your math is wrong, Papi," she said after she had inspected his figures. "Mira."

  "¿Que?"

  "It should be three hundred, not two hundred. You forgot the one."

  She pointed a finger at his math, and her father, squinting over the pages, said in a laughing voice, "I've been cheating myself all my life, mi'ja. That's why we can't get ahead."

  Maria was fixing the math for him when she heard a creak. She cocked an ear and listened. The creak sounded again, this time louder. She let out a squeak and let the pencil jump from her fingers when she heard yet another creak and the scraping of a chair.

  "¿Qué pasó?" her father asked.

  "Did you hear that?"

  Her father raised his head and looked around. "No," he said after a moment of thought, "No oí nada."

  The door just then swung open to reveal Angela, her little sister, who stood sleepily with a stuffed whale pinched under her arm. She said, "I don't want cereal for breakfast. I want pancakes." Her lower lip pouted.

  Since their mother's death, Angela had been acting spoiled and would throw a tantrum at the least provocation. And in the past week she had gotten all kinds of toys, including Rollerblades and a three-ring swimming pool that they had inflated with an air pump. When she became bossy, their father let her have her way. He was sad and troubled by the accident. Their car's front left tire, a retread, had blown on a country road, and the car careened not toward a bush or harmlessly into an empty field but toward an orange tree anchored into the valley earth.

  "We have Cap'n Crunch," Maria said.

  "No, I want waffles," Angela said. She crossed her arms over her chest. "And hot chocolate."

  "How about hot chocolate first?" Maria asked.

  Angela's arms fell from her chest. She nodded.

  As Angela crawled into her father's lap, thumb in her mouth, Maria went to the refrigerator and brought out a carton of milk. She splashed a cupful of milk into a saucepan and then heaped three spoonfuls of chocolate into a cup.

  Angela looked over at Maria, who was watching the milk come to a hissing boil. "I want to use Mommy's cup," she snapped.

  "It's Mama's cup, Angela."

  "I want to use her cup!"

  "Stop it! Quit acting like that!"

  "Mommy's dead! She don't care!"

  "¡Cállate!" their father cried angrily, turning Angela toward him and shaking his daughter so that the stuffed whale fell from her arms. Angela began to cry and wiggle from his arms. She collapsed to the floor, a bundle of grief.

  Their father sighed and picked up his daughter, cooing his Sorrys into her hair.

  "Okay, you baby," Maria said, a frown on her face, and took the cup from the hook. When she turned over the cup, she discovered a smear of lipstick on the rim. She crossed herself and muttered "Ay, Dios" under her breath, a zipper of fear riding up her back.

  Maria fixed her little sister her chocolate and then brought out frozen waffles from the freezer. She dropped two waffles into the toaster and looked inside the toaster at the fiery filaments. She thought, Hell's like that—all red and hot. When the waffles popped up, Maria stabbed them with a fork and set them on a plate. She laced the waffles with syrup and left the kitchen in a hurry.

  "¿Qué pasa?" her father called as he looked up from his newspaper. His eyes were the color of newsprint, and as small as the letters he was reading. "What's wrong, Maria?"

  "Nothing," she answered. She ran to her bedroom and closed the door. She sat on her bed, with her knees to her chest and cuddling herself. She tried to warm her body that had grown cold with fear as she remembered her mother's words: "Mi'ja, I will never leave you. I will always be with you." She rolled over onto her stomach, buried her face in her soft blanke
ts, and started crying. But she stopped crying when she heard a crinkling sound, like the sound of paper being crushed into a ball. Is it Mother? she wondered. Has she come back? She turned and looked through her tears, scooting into the corner of the bed in fear.

  It was her kitten walking on her homework on her desk.

  She wiped her eyes and muttered, "You stupid thing. You scared me!" She flung a sock at the cat. It meowed and jumped from the desk, begging for attention. The cat leaped onto the bed, and Maria took it into her arms.

  "Are you sad?" Maria asked the cat. "We never got to say good-bye to Mommy."

  "Maria, ven acá!" Maria heard her father call from the living room. She could hear his heavy work boots ringing on the floor. She pushed the cat aside and jumped off her bed. Angela came into the bedroom. She was sipping from their mother's coffee cup, a mustache of chocolate staining her upper lip.

  "I want some more," Angela said, holding up the cup like a chalice.

  Ignoring her sister, Maria slipped on a sweatshirt, combed her hair in big long rips, and stomped out of the room with Angela trailing behind, begging for more than chocolate.

  "I want some more," Angela whined.

  "All right!" Maria yelled as she stopped and wheeled around, hair whipping her shoulders. She hesitated at first in taking the cup from Angela, but finally reached for it. She weighed it in her palm like an orange, thinking that it would weigh no more than a feather. But it was heavy as stone.

  "Me voy—I'm off," her father told them. His face was shaved and his hair slicked back. "I want you two to stay home today. Tomorrow you can go to school." He gave them each a hug, squeezing love from their small bodies and whispering that they should be good. He gave them each a stick of chewing gum and trudged to the front door, swinging his heavy black lunch pail. The screen door slammed and he was gone.

  Maria looked down at the cup in her hand, then at her sister, who was scratching a mosquito bite on her thigh.

  "What's wrong?" Maria asked.

  "It hurts."

  "Put some spit on it."

  Leaving her to scratch her bites, Maria went off to the kitchen to fix her sister another cup of hot chocolate. I should be good to my little brat sister, she figured. It'll make Papi happy.