A Summer Life

“Come on, Rick,” I begged. “Just teach me the bottle cap one.” He told me to go away, that he and Arnold, a neighbor kid whose arm was palsied from traveling through the washing machine wringer, were going to practice dangerous animal magic. He didn't want me to see. He said it was magic that sometimes leaped back on people, turning them into cats or dogs.

  “You're lying,” I snickered. I was getting used to my brother tricking me, saying things like, “Captain Kangaroo lives across the street from us”; “Annette Funicello is a fifth-grader at our school”; and “You can die three times before you're really dead.”

  I returned home to sit in the shade of the back porch with my sister. I practiced loop, bow, tug, but the laces, black from dragging in the dirt, kept getting knotted until they looked like my kindergarten scribbling. My sister Debra, with small fingernail-polished hands, helped me untangle them and wrap the long laces around my naked ankles. I walked around the yard thinking that maybe this was another way of tying shoelaces and perhaps Mother would be satisfied when she came home from work. I had two days to learn or she was going to take away my shoes.

  I was feeling good about learning to tie my shoelaces when Rick came back into the yard. He looked at us strangely, his eyes bugged out so the white showed. He said, “A car ran over me and used up one of my lives. I have two more.”

  “Rick, why don't you cough and show Debra the apricot pit?” I asked. “And you didn't die.”

  “I did.”

  “You didn't,” I argued, remembering that the man across the street from us was a plumber, not Captain Kangaroo, and Annette Funicello was just a picture cut from a magazine and tacked on the fifth-grade bulletin board.

  Rick coughed and a rubber ball rolled from his mouth, the kind used in a game of jacks. He sneezed, and a jack fell from his nose. He rubbed his eyes with his fists, and two marbles gleamed at us.

  I turned to Debra. “Magic.”

  Rick quivered his outstretched fingers at my shoelaces and said, “I predict they'll come untied.” I took a few steps and, sure enough, they tumbled from my ankles.

  I was proud that my brother knew magic, and trusted him when he said, “Go ahead and burn the house down.”

  We had started playing with matches, progressing slowly from burning gum wrappers to milk cartons. Bored with these smalltime fires, we decided to go all the way now that we had Rick's magic to save us. I stuffed newspapers in the corners of the living room and lit them with a tiny light of a match. We stood back, watching the flames leap waist-high into the air. Debra clapped, and I leaped to the rhythm of the flames. We were so happy that when Rick returned from the sun porch with a crate of cherry tomatoes, I had no qualms about having a war inside the house.

  “You missed, Kraut!” I shouted to Rick as I rolled from behind the couch to the stuffed chair. I looked over the chair, dodging the tomato bullets. Finally, one splattered my T-shirt, and I feigned death, then rose again. “You dirty coward,” I screamed. “I have two more lives.”

  The blood of tomatoes stained the walls, dripping seeds that reminded me of my sister's baby teeth. Pete, our yellow canary, beat his head against the bars of his rusty cage, terrified. The fire burned down to ashes that floated in the air.

  We were happily exhausted. Debra fell asleep, and I dozed in the bedroom, only to wake to Rick screaming that it was my fault. Mother was home, and the first thing that leaped to my mind that might save me from the biggest butt-whipping since the beginning of the world, was magic.

  I looked in the kitchen, the air still dark with floating ash. I wanted to tell Mom about how Rick could sneeze bottle caps, but decided she wouldn't listen. Snot ran from Rick's nose as he cried. A lump of hair stood up on his head from being yanked. Mom looked with eyes of fire at me, and I said sheepishly, “Mom, I can tie my shoes now.”

  I hurried to the bedroom for my shoes, sobs choking my throat like a whole loaf of bread. I was wrapping the laces around my ankles when, by magic, I dodged my mother's belt and scrambled out the window, with only one of my lives gone.

  ______

  The War Years

  THE KOREAN WAR WAS OVER, and after a year in Japan, our uncle was discharged. He returned with a porcelain Buddha, a tattoo of blue panther with red claws, and an army blanket for sleeping on our screened porch. In the summer light, flies circled the air, a halo of black, and the water heater popped and rumbled in the corner, where the mop and broom leaned. The neighbor's dog barked behind a slat fence, and chickens screamed as their necks were chopped off next door. In the nearby junkyard, an acetylene torch hissed against pipes and the lava flow of beaded metal. Still, Uncle slept soundly. His face was dark with stubble and moles, creased from a hard sleep. For the first few days his snores were frightening.

  By the third day, I was no longer scared of Uncle. I watched him sleep on his small cot, his blanket rumbled like a range of mountains. I pressed my thumb into the eye of the panther tattoo. I ate plums and watched him snore, then open one eye and look at me. He closed his eyes and snored even louder. I put a plum to his mouth, and he took a small bite, chewed but didn't swallow. He then turned over on his back and stretched. I fed him plums until he opened his eyes, got up, and helped himself to coffee.

  While Mother and Father worked, Uncle watched over my brother, sister, and me. He rose late, just before the mailman in his pith helmet leaned his bike against our fence. Uncle drank coffee, sat on the brick steps that faced the Coleman Pickle Company, played cards at the kitchen table while our dime-store parakeet looked on, and went away for hours at a time. Then he would come home and listen to the radio, the Venetian blinds filling with wind. The Buddha glowed splotches of sunlight from the window, and the siren at Sun Maid Raisin sent men home from work.

  Sometimes he played with us. Debra was always the princess. My brother and I were donkeys braying a set of small, childish teeth. The game was this: Uncle would pretend that the garden hose was off when it was really folded back, squeezed. When we got close, he would squirt us and chase us as far as the spray of water could leap. Rick was older and knew the hose was on. I was young and not too bright. It seemed like it was off, only a few drops dripping from the end of the hose. Therefore, I got my face drenched, my mouth filled, and an ear splashed with cool water. I tripped as I tried to get away and was black with mud by the end of the day.

  Sometimes he chased us, and once caught, hung us upside down by our feet from a paint ladder. We laughed, and Debra laughed, too, and did a jig from foot to foot. Once, Grandma spooked me by showing up while I was hanging from the ladder. She looked at me, and asked, “Are you Ricky or Gary?” I answered, “Gary,” then tried to explain why I was hanging upside down. She wiped off the giggling drool from my mouth. She went inside our house because she had a bag of lemons, and enough to do during the day without listening to a boy's explanations.

  Uncle never spoke of the war. It was 1954. Our street was an industrial street with a few houses, and the diesels that passed our house reminded him of work. His first job back in the States was collecting copper. He said that copper was important during the war. I helped him by learning to tie my laces because I needed shoes where we were going. After his morning plum and coffee, we set out for the alleys, pushing back dusty weeds, searching behind boxes and boards, yanking wire from abandoned cars and trucks. He said it was shiny and reddish-brown, and I thought of the markings on our Buddha when the afternoon sun flooded the living room. With a long fingernail, he stripped a wire of its rubber insulation. “See,” he said, “it's like this.”

  We looked for copper wire until we were out of sight of Sun Maid Raisin and walking, heads down, near the railroad tracks near Van Ness Avenue. Uncle was luckier than me. His hands gripped long and short strands of copper. I carried one strand, a twig of copper worth less than a penny.

  By the end of the day, all our copper was worth no more than two dollars. Uncle, now shirtless, drank ice water on the lawn, in the shade of the house. I sucked a plum and ran the hose over
my feet. Work was over. Our cat, Boots, dozed in the ferns. Uncle laid down and dozed until he heard a buzzing sound. He sat up quickly and looked skyward, eyes squinting. I followed his gaze, but saw only a branch of a brown tree, two flitting birds, and the madness of gnats hovering over the grass. The buzz got closer and closer, until I couldn't hear myself say, “Uncle, what is it?”

  Uncle stood up, wiping flakes of grass off his pants, and shaded his eyes. The panther tattoo on his shoulder tightened. The claws dripped red. The noise above was a blimp, white against the summer sky. Uncle followed the blimp to the front of the house. Some of the neighbors came out onto their porches. A car stopped and the driver got out to look. The blimp hovered over Coleman Pickle, then veered left, toward downtown, and became a feathery cloud in the distance. When I asked him if it was anything like war, he said, “No, it's nothing like war,” then returned to the backyard to nap on the summer grass.

  ______

  The Sirens

  THE GRASS around the junkyard was yellow, and the sky was blue above the brick warehouses. I liked the grass and the cough of dust that rose when I ran a hand through it. There, red ants carried white lumber on their backs and a cricket chirped music from its dry thighs. The rocks clacked when struck together and sometimes threw out sparks. The dragonflies scared me when I saw them out of the corner of my eye, but I never saw one touch ground. Since age five when I was more or less a part of the ground, I figured they wouldn't bother me. I played in front of the junkyard and looked up now and then at Charlie's Market. People came and went, fumbling for coins in their pockets. Cars came and went, and diesels wound down to a near stop as they turned onto Braly Street.

  Mother said that it was OK to play in the grass. Our house was still in view, and I could see the ceramic Buddha that I had taken out and left on the steps. The Buddha smiled as his belly shone. It was OK to walk up and down the street, from the end of the junkyard, where I could lean with one foot on the curb into Van Ness Avenue to the end of Mr. Drake's house, where I could lean with the other foot on the curb into Sarah Street. Sarah Street was mostly houses with dusty shadows, scraggly limbs of sycamore and elm, and Mr. Drake raking the same pile of leaves. He was as old as bark and too cheap to water his yard. His yard was dust, iron pipes stacked along the fence, stunted fruit trees and wilted tomato plants, and boards he sometimes burned to keep warm. His three chickens pecked the ground for seeds from the shedding palm and blinked the way rain blinks when it hits water.

  On Van Ness there was plenty to see: train tracks and trains, diesels, a pickup carrying yellow-white straw for the broom factory, and men loading and unloading furniture at Beacon's Storage. There was also Charlie's Market, where people came and went, munching on pies and sandwiches, and drinking from long, cool bottles. What I ate came mostly from trees, plums being my favorite and plentiful. And grapes, too. I ate them slowly, all the way down to the last sour grape on the naked stem.

  Because I was five, what I knew best was at ground level. When a siren first sounded, I looked around and thought it was coming from the junkyard. I looked in and saw pipes for plumbing and sewers, and sheets of aluminum flashing in the sunlight. I looked at Charlie's Market. Workers on their break were looking skyward, hands shading their brows. I followed their gaze. I thought I would see a plane, or maybe a punctured blimp tilted and falling as its air hissed out.

  But I couldn't find the source of the noise. The siren wailed a while longer, then stopped. For a few seconds there was silence. Even the birds on the telephone wire were still. Finally, the workers in front of Charlie's Market turned away. The diesels suddenly seemed not to make any noise at all.

  Later, at home, I asked my brother about the noise. He said that it was an air raid siren because a war was going to start. I asked my mother about the war, and she said that there would be one, and our uncle, who was living with us now that he was back from Korea, said that one might come soon. I asked him about the air raid siren, and he said it was to keep us safe.

  “Where will the war come from?” I asked. Uncle stood up from his cot, his tattooed shoulders taut with panthers, his ribs filled with shadows. He pointed west, to where I played in the grass in front of the junkyard. He said it wouldn't come from Japan or Korea. Those wars were over. It would come from China, he said, and said that it wouldn't last long.

  The next day the air raid siren sounded again while I was in the grass with the ceramic Buddha, doing nothing but watching the cars pass and people eating from wrappers in front of Charlie's Market. I knew something would happen. Fierce heat bounced off sheets of aluminum. Birds with splayed beaks leaped from the wire into the grass, their gray eyes depthless. I touched the Buddha because Uncle said he was a sort of god, and I could understand God because I knew one prayer. I thought I could hide in the grass, but the red ants found me out. When one bit me, I smashed him with my thumb as the sting of tears came to my eyes. But immediately I knew it was wrong. A bomb would be like a thumb, a shadow coming down. I tried to help the ant, but it was severed in two, and only one half was twitching.

  The ants were red with anger when the siren started and the workers in front of Charlie's Market stopped their chewing, then chewed again when they thought it was safe.

  ______

  The Colors

  GRANDFATHER'S FAVORITE COLOR was the green of dollar bills. On summer evenings he watered his lawn, the jet of water cooling his thumb from eight hours of stapling wooden crates at Sun Maid Raisin. He knew that his house, pink as it was, was worth money. He knew that if he kept the rose bushes throwing out buds of sweet flowers, the value of the house would increase. The fruit trees would grow and thicken with branches to feed his family and neighbor.

  Grandmother was also fond of green, but preferred the silver shine of coins that made her eyebrows jump up and down. She showed me a nickel slug from the county fair stamped: MILK IS GOOD. She could not read or write in Spanish or English and thought the coin was worth more than a brown child realized. I wanted to say that it was nothing. It could sparkle in the sun or make a nice necklace, but it was no rare coin. I drank my purple Kool-Aid, crunched spines of air trapped in the ice cubes, and made my eyebrows jump up and down like hers.

  Yellow was her favorite color. Yellow roses floated in a bowl on the windowsill. The yellow sunshine clock hummed on the wall, and her yellow refrigerator, the first on the block, blended well with the floor, a speckled affair with some yellow but mostly black. From a top shelf of the hallway closet, she took down a shoe box of papers, including a single stock certificate from a sewing machine company. I looked closely at the yellowed paper and noted “one share” and the date “1939.” It was now 1961, and even though I was young, nine at the time, I guessed that the stock was worth the memory of hope but little else.

  “When you marry, honey, I will give this to you,” she said, shaking the paper at me. “You'll be a rich man.”

  My eyebrows jumped up and down, and I went outside to the backyard to play with my favorite color, mud. At my grandparents’ house there were no toys, no pets, no TV in English, so when I stayed there I had to come up with things to do. I tried rolling summer-warmed oranges around the yard in a sort of bowling game in which I tried to knock over sparrows that had come in search of worms. But after twenty minutes of this I was bored. I did chin-ups on the clothesline pole, but that was sweaty work that bored me even more.

  So I fashioned mud into two forts and a great wall on which I stuck flags of straw-like weeds. When the mud dried hard as a turtle, I pounded the hell out of the forts and wall, imagining that a Chinese war had come. I made bomb sounds and moaned for the dying. My thumb pressed a red ant, and I said, “Too bad.”

  Mud was a good color, and the purple of plums made my mouth water. Peaches did the same, and the arbor of greenish grapes that I spied in the neighbor's yard. Their German Shepherd, ears erect, spied me too, so I couldn't climb the fence and help myself. But looking was almost like eating, and noon was near.


  The brown of frijoles was our favorite color as steam wavered in our faces. Grandfather, who came home for lunch, left his shoes near the door, smothered his beans with a river of chile and scooped them with big rips of tortilla. I ate with a fork and a tortilla, savoring little mouthfuls of beans with a trickle of chile. The clear color of water washed it all down, and the striped candy cane left over from Christmas sweetened the day. Grandfather, patting his stomach, smiled at me and turned on the radio to the Spanish station. For dessert, there was dark coffee and a powdered donut on a white plate. Grandmother sipped coffee and tore jelly-red sweetness from a footprint-sized Danish.

  While Grandfather played a game of solitaire, I fooled with the toothpicks in the wooden, pig-shaped holder, the only thing that resembled a toy in the house or yard. I swept the crumbs from the table and pinched the donut crumbs from grandfather's plate. Grandmother did the dishes, ever mindful of the sweep of the sunshine clock. “Viejo,” she said, “it's time.”

  I walked Grandfather to the front yard, where he stopped and said to me, “A pink house is worth lot of money, m'ijo.” We both stood admiring the house, trimmed with flowers and a wrought-iron gate, a plastic flamingo standing one-legged in front of a geranium. This was home, the color of his life. We started up the block, me taking two steps for every one of his, and he said no one's lawn was as green as his. When we looked back, when Grandfather said I should go because it was time to work, Grandmother was at the front window beating the dusty windowsills with a dish towel, waving goodbye until later.

  ______

  The Rhino

  I GOT UP QUICKLY on my knees in the back seat of our Chevy and stared at a charging rhino painted on the side of a tire company. His legs were pleated with lines, his horn broken, and his eyes yellow and furious. I stared at the rhino until my father's car pulled around the corner, its sluggish shadow following closely behind, and we flew onto the freeway.