A Summer Life (4 page)

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.

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T
HE 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.

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G
RANDFATHER'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.

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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.

I looked at Father. His shirt was brilliant white in the late sun. He was working something from his teeth with a matchbook cover, and Mother was penciling words into a black book. I wanted to ask about the rhino but I knew that they would shush me.

It scared me to think that tires were being made from rhinoceros hides. So many things were possible. We were eating cows, I knew, and drinking goats milk in cans. Pigs feet came stuffed into cloudy jars. Cheese came in blocks from an animal that ate something very orange or very yellow. The Molinas stirred bony pigeons in pots of boiling water, and a pig's happy grin showed up on the bacon wrapper. Hop-Along Cassidy was a face that appeared on milk cartons, his hand on his pistol, and what I noticed was that his horse didn't have any feet. I imagined that someone had cut off his hooves and the horse had to lay down for the rest of his life.

I knew some of our clothes were cut from hides. Father's belt had an alligator look, his lathering brush was the whiskers of a docile pony, and his shoes, whose tips were mirror-bright, were cowhide. My own shoes were also leather and small as toy trucks. Mother's sweater was wool. Her pillow was a restrained cloud of chicken feathers. Her key chain was a rabbit's foot with a claw that drew blood when raked against skin.

Our neighbor had a bear skin rug spread on his living room floor. Uncle Junior had a shrunken head that swayed from a car mirror. The mouth was stiched closed with black thread and the left eye was half-open. My aunt wore a fox fur with claws clipped together in friendship. The fox's eyes were smoke-brown marbles, but his teeth, jagged as my aunt's, were real. And my cousin Isaac, two years older with kindergarten already behind him, showed me a bloody finger in a gift box. He wiggled the finger and I jumped back, terrified.

I sat back down. I watched mostly the sky, billboards, and telephone poles. A sonic boom scared Mother and had me back on my knees looking around. The sky was pink as a scar in the west where the sun struggled to go down. Birds huddled on a chain link fence, and because I could count to ten I used all my fingers to tell Mother there were eight. Mother looked up from her book, turned on her knees, and ran a comb through my hair.

Father pulled off the freeway, and after two sharp turns, he pulled into my
nina's
yard, scattering chickens and a large black dog. The dog sniffed us as we got out, and I was so scared that he might bite, Father pulled me into his arms and put me on a low peach tree while he went inside the house. I thought of eating one of the peaches but knew that the fuzz would make my face itchy. I pressed a finger into a brown sap, counted the number of peaches, and peeled bark from the limb. The dog trotted away and the chickens returned to peck at the dust.

That evening we watched boxing. Father drank beer and I sat near him with two links of Tinkertoy. The first television was on, and he and my godfather were watching two boxers hurt each other very badly. They sat at the edge of their chairs, their fists opening and closing. Father had taken off his shirt. Godfather's watch lay on an end table, glowing in the semi-dark of the living room. Both shouted and crushed beer cans when their fighter stumbled into the ropes. I let the Tinkertoys fight each other and grunt like the boxers. I said, “Mine is winning.”

Back home I had asked Father if our car tires were made from rhinos, and he laughed. Mother laughed and wiped her hands into a chicken-print apron. Uncle with his panther tattoo, claws tipped with blood, pulled on my cheek and said I was crazy. He assured me tires didn't come from rhino hides but from rubber that dripped from trees into buckets. He turned on the porchlight, a feast of orange light for the moth, and led me down the brick steps to the Chevy that ticked from a cooling engine. He pounded a front tire with his fist. I tried to wiggle free, but his grip held me there. He made me pound the tire and pet it like an animal. Black rhino dust came off, dust and fear that I washed with a white bar of soap when we returned inside.