A Summer Life (3 page)

______

I
T WAS EARLY
A
UGUST
, 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.

______

M
Y 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.

“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.

______

T
HE
K
OREAN
W
AR 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.