A Summer Life (2 page)

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.

______

O
NE 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.

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.

______

M
Y 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.

______

M
Y 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. When 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.