A Summer Life (10 page)

I noticed one of Franks's arms cocked on the window. I told him he had better drive with both hands, but he laughed and said driving was safer with one hand because the other hand was needed to signal for turns. He slouched down, and I said he should sit up so he could see more of the road. He laughed and said slouching was safer because if we got in a wreck his face wouldn't hit the windshield. Debra asked if we were going to get in a wreck, and he said, “Only if we stop.” He ran a stop sign and laughed so that spittle flew from his mouth. It was then that I knew we had made a mistake getting in the car with him. He laughed and looked at us with his eyes closed. He laughed and wriggled the steering wheel so that the car shimmied. He laughed and took both hands off the wheel. He laughed when the car veered toward the gutter and leaves exploded into the air. I socked him in the arm, hard, and told him he had better drive right, or else.

Frank's laughter wound down to a giggle. “OK,” he said. He turned onto Belmont Avenue and as we approached the Starlight burger stand, he said, “Is that where you want to get your milkshakes?”

“Yeah, that's it,” we screamed. Our baby brother got up on his knees to look. A silvery thread hung from his wet mouth.

The car got closer and closer, and Frank repeated, “Is that it, that one?”

“Yeah,” we screamed again.

“That one,” he repeated, “that one?”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Frank laughed and passed up the burger stand. “Oops, we missed it.”

We sat back down, feeling cheated. The air about us stank of burgers.

Frank made a reckless U-turn that made the tires squeal, and our baby brother rolled over like a sack of groceries. I socked Frank in the arm and warned him that he had better drive right. He said “OK, OK, all right already.” He smirked, then smiled a large, idiot grin as we approached the burger stand we had just passed. He pointed again and asked: “That one?”

Debra and I leaned our faces into the open window, warm air gushing into our mouths. “Yeah, that one.”

“That one?” Frank kidded.

“Yeah, that one,” we screamed a little louder.

The Chevy slowed but didn't stop. I saw a kid about my age, cheeks collapsed, sucking on a milkshake, and a baby in a stroller feeding on a spoonful of ice cream. At a redwood table, a family of four was biting into their burgers at the same time. Mad, I climbed into the back seat. Debra and I grumbled and crossed our arms. Our baby brother played with strings of his spittle. He smiled at me, and I could see real string looped on the back of his mouth. Grimacing, I scraped his tongue of string and a milky paste.

I turned back to Frank. “You're a liar,” I said, trying to hurt his feelings. “You were a liar before you were born!”

Frank laughed and said, “No, the car just didn't stop. I think something's wrong with the brakes.” He scared his face into lines and bugged out his eyes. He shielded his face with his arms and screamed, “Look out! Look out!” as we came to a red light. The Chevy groaned to a halt, and he turned around, with one arm on the seat, and said, “I guess the brakes fixed themselves.”

Frank punched the gas pedal and the Chevy coughed and jerked forward while our heads jerked back. Baby brother rolled over one more time, fingers in his mouth.

“We wanna get out, right now!” I said. “I mean it!”

“I'm going to tell Mom,” Debra threatened.

Frank looked into the rear view mirror with closed eyes. “Wanna get out? Good idea.” He opened the door and stuck one foot out. I saw the rush of asphalt, some burger stand litter, and one poor sparrow flattened to an oily shadow.

“You better drive us back home, right now,” Debra said. “I mean it!”

“Right now? No, we're gonna get a milkshake.” He closed the door and did a U-turn. We looked ahead: the burger stand's neon was fluttering, saying BU G RS FOR YO. There were two cars and people ordering under a stinky fan. Music was blaring from a loudspeaker.

We began to smell burgers, and I could hear the slurp of a drained Coke. Frank pointed and asked, “That one? That one right there?”

We looked but didn't say anything. I was wondering if Rick and I could beat him up. Debra could help out, and maybe we could pin him to the floor and let baby brother drool on his face. Maybe when we got home Mom would be standing in the front window with a belt in her hands. I figured that Frank would get the first spanking, and then Mom would be too tired to spank us that hard. She might not even spank us at all, only make us do the dishes until we moved out of the house.

Only after baby brother messed his plastic pants, and Debra and I yanked together on Frank's hair so that a muscle in his neck popped, did we return to our street and the sound of hissing sprinklers in the summer dark. We slammed the car door, cussed, and stomped into the house with a smirking Frank offering apologies. We changed baby brother, who squealed and bit more holes into his rubber rattler. Debra and I picked up a bundle of crayons and sat down at the kitchen table. Frank shuffled the cards, played game after game of solitaire, cheating each time, and then asked as he got up to fix a pitcher of purple Kool-Aid, “Whatta you guys wanna do?”

______

S
TRAY DOGS
came with the rain. I found them at the garbage can, paws up, lapping egg shells and milk cartons, chomping yellow rinds of fat. When I whistled “Here boy” and snapped a finger, they turned to look at me. Their eyes were the eyes of sad mules. Their lolling tongues were barely pink. They looked thin in a coat of rain on bony shoulders. The rain came and went, and the dogs followed through the puddles.

Dogs of childhood. Once, after a scolding from my mother, I walked down an alley stomping rain puddles and kicking rickety fences. No one understood me. I turned over a garbage can and brooded until I was a mile from home and the sun, yellow as a vase of flowers, broke through the clouds. Slim fingers of steam wavered off the fences. Puddles reflected the rush of white clouds and the wind picked up the scent of washed blossoms. Some old mother taking out the garbage waved at me, and I waved back stiffly. Still, I was lonely. I wanted to run away, but didn't know how. Should I return home for my toothbrush and a change of clothes? Should I steal a dollar from Mom's purse and take a bus to the outskirts of town?

A stray dog looked up from feasting on the guts of a swollen garbage can. His tail wagged twice, and he rolled a tongue over shiny teeth. When I called him, he joined my side, his paws clicking against the ground, our breaths white in the cold.

We walked for a good mile, each of us dragging a sled of loneliness. We walked through a puddle, breaking the mirror of its surface. When the dog barked at a squirrel clawing up a tree, I barked too, and felt better. I helped the dog climb onto the hood of an abandoned car and told him about myself. I told him that my father was dead, that I didn't like home, that I was terrible at numbers. I told him that I had seen the sea once and loved it more than snow. I wanted to live near the coast, I told him. The trees were bent from wind, but the people walked straight up, happy to be near the crash of gray-white waves. I told him I thought about God, and that the statue of the Lord in our bedroom glowed when the lights went out.

But I could only say so much to a dog. It was better to touch. I ran a hand through his damp fur and scratched him behind his neck until he nearly fell asleep. His body was warm, and his shoulders stuck through his fur like wings. He breathed in hard puffs through a black, Tinkertoy nose. His ears were as soft as worn wallets.

I felt better. The sun slid behind a cloud, chilling the autumn air. I shivered and jumped from the car. The dog followed me up the alley, my strides now longer and my face open to wind and a silver mist. I tugged three oranges from a rain-glistening tree. Two went into the pocket of my jacket, and the other one I peeled, offering a slice to the dog, who snapped at it gently and held it in his mouth like a fang. He let it drop to the muddy ground, and I knew that this dog lived for meat. At a garbage can, I picked through soggy paper bags for bones and leftovers, any treasure I could spill into a pie tin. I dug past the light bulbs and egg cartons, past tuna cans and a mountain of coffee grinds. I flicked ants from my hands. I dug until I found a ham bone nearly the size of a baseball bat.

Stray dogs should live with human names. That day, I called him Charlie, but I could have called him Sam or Pete. I said, “Charlie,” and he looked up from his bone, a shred of meat hanging from his mouth. He licked his lips and lowered his face. His teeth clacked, and his tongue rolled over the best parts.

“Charlie,” I said, and he looked up. “Charlie,” I called once more. He looked up, this time whining and pumping his wet paws.

I dug my fingers into another orange and unraveled the skin in one piece. I ate standing in a rain puddle that reflected the bunched clouds and a tangle of telephone wires. It showed me, too, or most of me. My face was round, and my teeth were like long candles when I smiled. I smiled and picked at a piece of orange wedged between my front teeth.

I left Charlie and walked in the direction of kids playing front-yard football. They grunted to take each other down, fumbled catches, and snapped the ball on the wrong count. I watched them argue over a catch, then watched a player fall and shout that the other team was cheating.

I returned home to find my mother at the kitchen table bending over the sewing machine, her mouth shut tight on three needles. A bell of warmth rose from the floor furnace. I sat near the front window, tired but happier than when I left the house.

The next morning I found a stray near our garbage can. I called, “Hey, Charlie,” and he looked up with rain on his face.

______

J
ANUARY DOESN'T SHOW
its true face until you can scratch a cold window with a finger. As a kid I drew faces and looked out to the street through the eyeholes. I saw cars shrouded white with frost, gray gutters, and trees stiff with brown sparrows huddled on black boughs. I didn't like the cold much. It kept me inside, bored in every bone, because Mother believed that a cold or a flu lurked in the wind. Sometimes when we were outside and a wind was passing, she would make us stop in our tracks and tell us to hold our breath. Wind carried pollen and disease, a whip of dust that could hurt an eye. Wind carried omens and rumor, insects with multiple pincers, and chemical smells of faraway dumps.

Wind was one thing, frost another. I walked on hard lawns and looked back, happy that my shoe prints were visible, that a dog would stop and sniff them. I followed bike tracks and got nowhere. I followed clouds as well, the heavy machinery of rain that did more than keep me inside. It made my brother and me fight a lot, made my mother sit at the table stirring black-black coffee, the worry of bills resting on a sharp elbow. On those days I tried to stay quiet by rearranging my sock drawer. I owned a lot of mismatched socks, but blue was almost like black, and I figured with long pants no one would know the difference. With my gym socks, all white, it was an easy task, but more difficult to juggle. Three in the air, and every one of them coming down like snowballs.

Rain weeped on the kitchen window. Rain dripped like tears in our almond and plum trees. Spider skeins glistened and stray dogs working on three legs and two bitten ears showed up at the garbage cans. After the rain, puddles marked the world's dents. I enjoyed jumping puddles and riding a slow bike through deep puddles that welled at the end of our block. The gutters carried silt and gum wrappers, but when the sun came out, the rivers slowed and eventually came to a muddy stop. The fences steamed and an armada of snails, antennae up, crawled across the cement walk.

Hail spooked me. Just as I was ready to bite into a peanut butter sandwich, hail ticked the front window. I put the sandwich aside, and all of us poked our faces at the window. Hail bounced like popcorn on the lawn, and my brother, a big fool who would try anything, ran outside and danced under the hail, mouth open but eyes closed. The hail tasted faintly of metal when I licked a handful, and the pellets dissolved like a squashed bug between my thumb and index finger.

Hail wasn't much good for show-and-tell, but a branch struck by lightning made some of the students perk up when I told my class, “This branch got it, and if I was in the tree I would have got it, too.” I dragged it back home afterwards and let it fall in the backyard. Three foolish sparrows immediately jumped on and fluttered their wings.

Snow didn't come our way. We lived in a valley, but if I stood on a fence I could see the Sierras, their caps tipped white. Once, though, snow, like torn-up homework, fell and made everyone come outside to hold out their hands and tongues. The town was happy for ten minutes, and when the snow stopped and the white dissolved into the lawns, we all went inside.

Tornados were just pictures in a book, a disaster headline in the newspaper, or scenes in the movie
The Wizard of Oz
. But once, a tall, elevator shaft of dust whirls passed through our playground. My friend Victor tried to jump inside it, and was momentarily blinded by dust. We cheered for more destruction. The chewing gum was ripped from my sister's mouth. Cut grass crowned our hair and stuck to the back of our sticky necks. The dust whirl cut through a chain link fence, carrying away leaves, candy wrappers and kids who followed it for miles.

The sun gave us another kind of weather. In summer, the heat made you think twice about going outside. The asphalt softened, the lawns grew spidery brown, and the dogs crept like shadows. Chickens sometimes fell over, and June bugs hissed on the screen door, wanting in. A girl on our block had a three-foot pool, and although she wouldn't let boys swim, we were permitted to watch her and her girlfriends churn the water white and chant, “We're the queen of the surfers.” We sat in the mulberry tree, hot in the face and wet in every crevice.