A Summer Life (5 page)

I was four and already at night thinking of the past. The cat with a sliver in his eye came and went. The blimp came and went, and the black smudge of tire. The rose could hold its fiery petals only so long, and the three sick pups shivered and blinked twilight in their eyes. We wet their noses with water. We pulled muck from the corners of their eyes. Mother fed them a spoonful of crushed aspirin, but the next day they rolled over into their leaf-padded graves.

Now the rhino was dying. We were rolling on his hide and turning corners so sharply that the shadows mingled with the dust. His horn was gone, his hooves and whale eyes. He was a tire pumped with evil air on a road of splattered dogs and cats and broken pigeons in the grills of long, long cars.

______

U
NCLE
S
HORTY WAS BACK
from the Korean War and living in our sunporch, his duffle bag in the corner, his ceramic Buddha laughing on the sill, his army uniform hanging like an invisible man on a hanger. He slept late, and when he woke, he drank water and ate fruit we snatched from the neighbors' trees. Back then there didn't seem to be much. We had sunlight, dogs, a blue-throated parrot, a cat that eventually ate the parrot, an almond tree in the yard, and the daily sounds of our neighbor's motorboat engine puttering alive and churning water in a barrel.

Uncle was home. My brother, sister, and I left him alone because Mom said he was tired, but we, my baby sister first, started piling onto him to wake him up because there was every chance that he would tie us with a length of clothesline and hang us upside down from the ladder leaning against the house. The world was different that way, upside down, my brother or me swinging like sides of beef in a cold-storage locker.

What I liked best about Uncle was his shirt, which was different from mine. My shirt I had to put on, button up, and tuck into my jeans. With a polo shirt like my Uncle Shorty's, you slipped into it and let it go unbuttoned. He sometimes, in a special flip-flap way, tucked his Camel cigarettes into the sleeve. I had a pocket for my things, which were mostly pits of eaten fruit, a broken-toothed comb, some shavings of leaves, and the tiniest of tiny pebbles.

Uncle knew I liked his shirt. I used to slip it on when he was asleep, and at the age of five I knew the smell of a man who went and came back from war. It was more than sweat and beer, tobacco and the splash of cologne. It was the shape of muscle, the anger of a tattoo panther hiding behind cotton, the hair in the collar, the small hole where a bullet could have entered and exited without his dying.

He said he could get me one if I helped him collect copper, which after the war was a precious metal. I started off with him early one morning, he in his polo shirt and I in my button-up shirt of giraffes, elephants, and lions. As we walked up the alley, Uncle jumped at the plums from a neighbor's tree and told me about collecting copper. He said that the metal was shiny, was in the shape of wire, and was often inside machinery.

“Why will someone give us money for it?” I asked. He gave me a second plum and said it was for the war. He asked if I had listened to the sirens, which during the 1950s went on when you were slurping soup and thinking that your life would march on forever. He said that the siren was a warning. He said that even inside the siren there was a bundle of copper wires that sent the electricity from the ground to the throat of the siren.

This was my instruction, two blocks from home, where our neighborhood gave way to diesels, oily railroad tracks, and the horrible slamming of machinery. I gazed at the ground, which I noticed was busy with so many things: the flakes of egg shells, nails, broken bottles, bottle caps pressed into asphalt, grass along fences, sleeping cats, boards, shattered snail shells, liquid-eyed jays, pot holes, black ants, red ants, jaw-lantern insects with blue eyes, half-eaten fruit, ripped shoes, buttons, metal slugs, cracks in the earth, leather thongs, ripped magazines—everything except copper.

The yellow sun was now nickel-colored, hot and vicious on our necks. Uncle managed to gather a few twigs of copper, which he let me hold. When he wasn't looking, I bit back the rubber insulation and saw that the copper was truly shiny, not bitter like a penny but somewhat sweet, like electricity.

We swiped more plums from an abandoned house where Uncle searched the fusebox. He let me keep the glass fuses, which I turned over in my hands because they were so beautiful. He slammed one on the ground, though, and with his fingers, pinched out a fingernail of copper. We walked through the house. Hangers banged in the closet. Water dripped from the faucet, and flies coupled on the lips of forgotten spoons. A crate of green oranges sat in the washroom. I sat on a stool and looked through
Life
while Uncle climbed into the attic and came down with dust on his eyelashes.

We looked for three hours and returned home. Uncle's shirt was wet under his arms. My shirt of giraffe, elephant, and lion prints was just dusty. When Uncle pulled his shirt over his head, I unbuttoned mine and let the breeze that lived around the almond tree cool my stomach. I looked at Uncle's stomach, which was pinched with muscle. His arms held tattoos of panthers with blood-red claws, and his arm said in blue: “Korea.”

The twigs of copper lay on the grass. There wasn't enough copper for a machine to stamp more than a dollar's worth of pennies. Uncle washed his shirt in the garden hose, wrung it hard, and hung it in the tree. An hour later, I got to wear it around the house and twice around the block.

______

T
HE TRACTOR INNER TUBE
hung in defeat on a nail, accompanied by three flies swinging back and forth, sentries of all that goes unused in a garage. The heat was oppressive for July, especially so for a one-car garage full of the smells of paint remover and open jars of red salmon eggs. I stepped over boxes of old clothes and warped magazines, a lawn mower, and oily engine parts. I kicked over a lamp shade, the bulb bursting its brittle glass, and pushed aside fishing tackle. I reached for the inner tube and touched the rigging of a spider web. I pulled it off quickly and leaped through the debris to the patio. Sweat flooded my face and forked down my arms. I grabbed our hose and washed the inner tube, a slack mouth that I carried over my shoulder to a friend's house.

David had a tire patch kit. He inflated the inner tube with a bicycle pump, and it filled unevenly, one side growing fat like a swollen mouth back-handed by a mean brother. He let the air out, stomped it flat as a shadow, and tried again. Again the air swelled to one side. We stared at the inner tube in confusion.

I asked, “What's wrong with it?”

David didn't say anything. Instead, he jumped up and down on the fat side, but although I joined his weight, laughing as I jumped, the air wouldn't move to the skinny side. After that, we stopped because there was no time to waste. Kathy's pool party was at 1:00, and it was already a quarter after twelve.

We lowered our ears and listened for the hiss of air.

“Put your finger there,” David said once we found the puncture. I licked a finger and pressed it into the deflating tube while he squeezed the glue and got the matches ready. But first he scratched the puncture so the patch would stick. I removed my finger, and he buffed the tube back and forth with the rough lid of the tire patch kit. He then smeared the glue and lit the match, the blue flame exciting us for a few seconds. He quickly fit the patch over the puncture and counted to twenty before taking his finger away. We lassoed the inner tube, now nearly deflated, onto the handlebars of my bicycle.

We sat under his cool sycamore waiting for the patch to dry. I asked David what went on at a “pool party,” and he said he thought there would be cake and ice cream and races in the pool. I thought about this for a while. The only party that I knew was a birthday party, so when I received an invitation in the mail to a “pool party,” I thought it involved the kind of
pool
that my stepfather and uncle shot at Uncle Tom's Tavern. After I caught on, I began to plan what to wear and what to take. I had a snorkel and fins, but my brother had lent the snorkel to his loudmouth friends and it disgusted me that I should fill my mouth with the rubber thing that others had sucked in dirty canals. And the fins were too small; they left painful rings on the insteps of my feet. At the last minute I remembered the inner tube.

David and I got up and poked the patch tenderly, as if it were a wound. The inner tube was healed. He pumped it up until it was huge, and a hollow
thump
resounded when I flicked a finger against the taut skin. I got on my bicycle, and with the inner tube crossed over my shoulder, David gave me a good push. The bike wobbled, but straightened as my legs strained for speed. I was off to a “pool party.”

By the time I arrived I was sweaty and nearly dead from not seeing oncoming cars, because every time I turned left the inner tube blocked my view of the road.

The mother who answered the door clapped her hands and said, “Wow!” When I had difficulty getting the inner tube through the front door, she suggested that I go along the side of the house to the backyard. I rolled and pushed and lugged the inner tube, and when everyone saw me come around a bush, they yelled, “Gary's got a tire.” I was more than sweaty. My once clean T-shirt was now smeared black along the front, and my hair, earlier parted on the right side and smelling sweetly of Wild Root hair cream, was flat as a blown-over hut. I licked my lips and tasted the hair cream.

When Kathy said hello, I waved my invitation at her and told her I nearly got killed by three cars. Then I jumped into the pool and stayed under for a long time. I was hot, so oiled up by the two-mile ride with an inner tube over my shoulder. I surfaced, got out, and threw the tube in the water. Someone asked, “How come it's big on one side?”

I shrugged, leaped in, and came up among an armada of pink and yellow air mattresses and an inflated plastic swan with a drooping neck. I tried to climb onto the swan, but it sank under my weight. I swam over to my tube, which was like a doctor's couch on the water, huge and plush. Two boys joined me, then a girl, and, finally, Kathy and her best friend. We floated around the pool, pushing aside the air mattresses and dunking the plastic swan for good. We stood up on the tube, the boys on the fat side, the girls on the skinny side, and bounced up and down, sometimes falling off but quickly climbing back on. We jumped and laughed, until a toe peeled off the patch and our feet began to mash the deflating tube. Stinky bubbles hissed on the water, and we began to sink, very slowly and happily.

The “pool party” was more than cake and ice cream. We had burgers as well, with potato chips and plenty of punch. I swam as much as I could. By the time I left—the last boy to go home—my eyes were red and my hair was parted down the middle from diving a hundred times into the pool. I enjoyed a cool ride home with the breathless inner tube hanging exhausted around my neck.

______

I
KNEW ENOUGH ABOUT HELL
to stop me from stealing. I was holy in almost every bone. Some days I recognized the shadows of angels flopping on the backyard grass, and other days I heard faraway messages in the plumbing that howled underneath the house when I crawled there looking for something to do.

But boredom made me sin. Once, at the German Market, I stood before a rack of pies, my sweet tooth gleaming and the juice of guilt wetting my underarms. I gazed at the nine kinds of pie, pecan and apple being my favorites, although cherry looked good, and my dear, fat-faced chocolate was always a good bet. I nearly wept trying to decide which to steal and, forgetting the flowery dust priests give off, the shadow of angels and the proximity of God howling in the plumbing underneath the house, sneaked a pie behind my coffee-lid frisbee and walked to the door, grinning to the bald grocer whose forehead shone with a window of light.

“No one saw,” I muttered to myself, the pie like a discus in my hand, and hurried across the street, where I sat on someone's lawn. The sun wavered between the branches of a yellowish sycamore. A squirrel nailed itself high on the trunk, where it forked into two large bark-scabbed limbs. Just as I was going to work my cleanest finger into the pie, a neighbor came out to the porch for his mail. He looked at me, and I got up and headed for home. I raced on skinny legs to my block, but slowed to a quick walk when I couldn't wait any longer. I held the pie to my nose and breathed in its sweetness. I licked some of the crust and closed my eyes as I took a small bite.

In my front yard, I leaned against a car fender and panicked about stealing the apple pie. I knew an apple got Eve in deep trouble with snakes because Sister Marie had shown us a film about Adam and Eve being cast into the desert, and what scared me more than falling from grace was being thirsty for the rest of my life. But even that didn't stop me from clawing a chunk from the pie tin and pushing it into the cavern of my mouth. The slop was sweet and gold-colored in the afternoon sun. I laid more pieces on my tongue, wet finger-dripping pieces, until I was finished and felt like crying because it was about the best thing I had ever tasted. I realized right there and then, in my sixth year, in my tiny body of two hundred bones and three or four sins, that the best things in life came stolen. I wiped my sticky fingers on the grass and rolled my tongue over the corners of my mouth. A burp perfumed the air.

I felt bad not sharing with Cross-Eyed Johnny, a neighbor kid. He stood over my shoulder and asked, “Can I have some?” Crust fell from my mouth, and my teeth were bathed with the jam-like filling. Tears blurred my eyes as I remembered the grocer's forehead. I remembered the other pies on the rack, the warm air of the fan above the door and the car that honked as I crossed the street without looking.

“Get away,” I had answered Cross-Eyed Johnny. He watched my fingers greedily push big chunks of pie down my throat. He swallowed and said in a whisper, “Your hands are dirty,” then returned home to climb his roof and sit watching me eat the pie by myself. After a while, he jumped off and hobbled away because the fall had hurt him.

I sat on the curb. The pie tin glared at me and rolled away when the wind picked up. My face was sticky with guilt. A car honked, and the driver knew. Mrs. Hancock stood on her lawn, hands on hip, and she knew. My mom, peeling a mountain of potatoes at the Redi-Spud factory, knew. I got to my feet, stomach taut, mouth tired of chewing, and flung my frisbee across the street, its shadow like the shadow of an angel fleeing bad deeds. I retrieved it, jogging slowly. I flung it again until I was bored and thirsty.

I returned home to drink water and help my sister glue bottle caps onto cardboard, a project for summer school. But the bottle caps bored me, and the water soon filled me up more than the pie. With the kitchen stifling with heat and lunatic flies, I decided to crawl underneath our house and lie in the cool shadows listening to the howling sound of plumbing. Was it God? Was it Father, speaking from death, or Uncle with his last shiny dime? I listened, ear pressed to a cold pipe, and heard a howl like the sea. I lay until I was cold and then crawled back to the light, rising from one knee, then another, to dust off my pants and squint in the harsh light. I looked and saw the glare of a pie tin on a hot day. I knew sin was what you take and didn't give back.

______

R
HINEHARDT
, twelve-year-old barber, dropped my mother's sewing scissors on the floor and ran out of the house, leaving me in the kitchen blinking the small eyes of a dull chicken. My hair lay in the dish towel wrapped around my shoulders and on the floor, with a few renegade strands floating through the air. I got up and looked in the hall mirror. My new haircut had all kinds of, weird angles. It parted on the right, the left, and even down the center. My scalp was bluish, and with so much hair gone, my nose was huge as an evil root. I'm going to get that Okie, I promised myself. I swept the floor and snapped the towel on the back porch. I chased down some floating hair strands and went outside to look for him.

The sun glared on the asphalt. The street was empty of kids and dogs. Mrs. Prince was whacking a dust mop on a holly bush. I walked down to Romain playground, which, except around the pool, looked deserted. I borrowed Caveman's swimming trunks. He was through swimming for the day, so I decided to postpone my hunt for Rhinehardt and jumped into the public pool full of fifty Mexican kids beating the blue water white. My school friend, Alfonso, swam crocodile style, his mouth and nose underwater and his eyes on the surface. He stood up and asked about my head. I explained it was a new haircut, and he ran a finger through one of the parts. I pushed him away, and he returned to his crocodile swim.

I stayed most of that afternoon on the bottom of the pool, avoiding my brother and sister, who had shown up with towels over their shoulders. I liked the sound of kicking legs and the dream-like sight of other kids holding their breath underwater with eyes open and seaweed hair wavering about. I came up for air, looked around at the racket, and sank once more to the bottom of the deep end of the pool where the water was cleaner from not being touched.

Exhausted and red-eyed from the chlorine, I got out after two hours, changed in the gray shadows of the men's room, and returned the swimming trunks to Caveman, who was playing ping pong with a crushed ball. My brother, Rick, already dry from swimming looked at my haircut and asked, “What happened?” I ignored him and played Sorry, then four square. Finally, a knot of hunger in my stomach, I returned home racing from patch to patch of shade. Like a dummy, I had forgotten my shoes.

I had also forgotten about my haircut. Mom was at the stove with steamed-up eyeglasses, refrying beans with one hand on her hip. Over dinner the fog cleared from her lenses and she asked, “What happened to your hair?”

I touched the top of my head, shocked, mouth open to reveal bits of half-chomped tortilla. I remembered Rhinehardt chuckling and hair parachuting to the floor. I remembered the cold scissors around my ears. Mom puckered her mouth into a bud of angry lines. She ripped her tortilla and said she would fix me later.

After dinner, she cut the rest of my hair on the backyard lawn, yanked roughly at each snip, and left me as bald as the belly of a boneless chicken.

I looked in the mirror and scared myself. Hate was in my heart, and I imagined Rhinehardt sitting in his own kitchen with a towel around his neck. I felt better only after Mother said we were having Kool-Aid ice cubes for dessert. I sucked on three cherry-flavored cubes in the backyard and did cartwheels with my sister.