A Summer Life (6 page)

I tried to forget about my hair. My palms tingled when I raked them over the bristles. My brother didn't tease me because he was feeling too sad about his girlfriend moving away. My stepfather, home late from work and red in the face from drinking at Uncle Tom's Tavern, grinned at me as he held onto the wall. He said he liked my hair because it made me look like a Marine. He dug into his pocket for some change and handed me a nickel, three pennies, and his nail clippers. His eyes floated in alcohol. He looked at the nail clippers and then said, “I got one like that.”

Before I got into bed, I curled thirty-pound weights in the garage under the halo of a twenty-watt bulb, feeling strong because a ribbon of sweat began to run from my armpits. I was sure that if my mother were trapped under a car wheel, I could save her with my leg strength. I stood in front of the mirror. My head didn't look that bad. I was as lean as Mrs. Prince's dust mop, but strong, I thought. I made a shiny muscle in my right arm and bared my teeth all the way to my gums. I ran a hand through my baldness. For three weeks, smooth was my favorite feeling.

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T
HE FIRST TIME I CONFESSED
, I admitted throwing bubble gum into a bush. The priest, Monsignor Singleton, asked, What else? I told him I called my sister terrible names and broke a just-opened jar of pickles, for which I received a spanking that caused hate in my heart for a good two hours. Monsignor smacked his lips and asked, “OK, what else?” I stuttered when I told him that I had stolen sunflower seeds from Ann's Liquors and lied to my teacher when I told her that I had once entered a cave and found fool's gold clinging to the ceiling. Monsignor's rosary banged against the wall as he shifted on his sore knees. He breathed deeply and asked, “Is there more?” I confessed pounding a Coke machine until it burped a quarter, and confessed having thoughts about stealing more bags of sunflower seeds because it would make me popular with the older boys on my block.

The priest nodded his head, and when he spoke, gave off the scent of a dry flower. I tried not looking at him through the wispy screen of right and wrong. I looked down at my hands. The air was dry as a twig, and dark but not so dark that I couldn't make out ballpoint scribbling on the little shelf where my hands rested in prayer. I was shocked, and began to think of my own ballpoint pen, which I loved for its chrome band which I sometimes wore on my pinky and sometimes sucked until it left a ring on my tongue. I also loved the spring that jumped up and down, and the reservoir of receding ink. I must have learned a lot that year because most of the ink was gone.

And now this scribbling. My pen jabbed the inside of my pocket. I knew I was in trouble because I always remembered too late and was spanked from one room to the next. I began to think that maybe I had done the scribbling while waiting in the dark for my turn to say confession. That had been the story of my third-grade life. If I poured from a half-gallon of milk in the morning, when I returned home from the playground, scuffed by grass and soccer balls, I would find the milk sitting in a triangle of sunlight. If I turned on the sprinkler, I would come home hours later to find the gutters running warm, murky water and my mother standing, hands on hips, behind the front window. I sometimes left my baby brother in his high chair for three hours before I remembered him. I would go to school without lunch, then remember. I would forget a book on the bus and cry because any time Mother had to open her purse to pay for something I lost, I knew I was in big trouble.

The priest spoke kindly. He said I was a good boy but could be better if I would go back to the bush and pick up that piece of bubble gum. I said, “Yes, Father,” and got tongue-tied when I started the Act of Contrition. Father helped me along, word by word, and then, sighing the scent of dry flowers, slid the sliding door shut. In the dark, I wet my fingers with spit and rubbed out the scribbling as best as I could.

I sneezed when I left the confessional. The air was cool with the draft of shadows where saints lurked with armfuls of snakes and half-bitten apples. The next boy was mumbling, his sins I suspected, and his shirt buttons were in the wrong holes. Kenneth Colombini, the class idiot who spent most of his school life in the wastepaper basket, asked, “How did it taste?”

“What do you mean?”

“The Host.” I made a face and said, “You better not scribble in there.”

Kenneth's arm was blue with ink markings. A line, like blood poisoning, ran up his forearm, and his name, “Ken the Great,” circled his wrist. Some blue was smeared around his mouth from sucking his pen. He slowly raised his palm to reveal the face of a laughing clown. He laughed until his chest heaved with a bronchial disease and then disappeared into the confessional, nearly slamming the door.

I said three Hail Marys and one Our Father, looked around at the paintings of tortured saints, and closed my eyes when I heard a rap in the confessional and Monsignor scolding Kenneth. Poor, dumb Kenneth. He was on his knees now, confessing to popping two erasers in Sister Marie's face.

I left with a drip of holy water on my forehead. Outside, the sky was bluish-gray and the wind was ripping petals from rose bushes. I looked at my hands and a prick of guilt made me jump. They were blue from a ballpoint pen. I thought of Kenneth Colombini, the laughing clown on his palm, and winced at the thought that I might be like him.

On the way home I had to look behind three bushes, each one more wicked with thorns than the next, before I found a wad of gum. It was gray, not pink like bubble gum, but I knew it was better to clean up another kid's sin than to let it lie forever in the earth, the house of the eyeless worm.

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R
OEDING
P
ARK
was five miles from home, far enough for me to act goofy and spit the shells of sunflower seeds during a hard-pedaling bike ride. A shell stuck to my forehead, and another clung like a fly to my cheek before the wind ripped it off. I let the one on my forehead stay until I got off my bike, sweaty and tired, and walked to a pond where black kids in collarless T-shirts fished.

I stopped to watch them a while, cautiously holding onto my bike because I was afraid one of them might throw down his pole and pedal off with what was mine. The kidney-shaped pond rippled with mosquitoes and water skeeters, and paper cups and ice cream wrappers floated near the edges. I left and climbed a gold-painted Sherman tank, also littered with paper cups and wrappers, the turret slashed with initials and dumb faces. The sun, yellow as a tooth, was already above the trees, the shadows leaning west instead of east as they do when the sun goes down. Although it was a weekday, some families were banging aluminum folding chairs from station wagons. One man was carrying an ice chest on his shoulder. A couple was smoothing an army blanket, placing a heavy object at each corner—purse, ice chest, two soft tennis shoes—so the wind would not peel it back.

From the tank I rode to the zoo. I didn't have fifty cents to get in, so I leaned my bike against the chain link fence and listened to the hyena laugh. The king of the jungle was sleeping, no doubt, and his kin, the spotted and black panthers, were pacing their stinky cages like mad doctors. The rhino was bathing in lukewarm mud, and the elephant and the giant turtle were doing nothing. The black bear was doing next to nothing, except yawning on a cement rock, and bantam roosters were pecking at the sandy ground where the gazelles ran with their young.

But I could imagine for only so long. I brought my palms to my face and inhaled deeply the salt of sunflower seeds and the long, sweaty ride. I was hungry. I had eaten cereal before I left home but now it was a little after eleven, and I was hungry. I pinched the last few sunflower seeds from my pockets and chewed them, shell and all, as I returned to the pond where there was now only one kid fishing. I dropped my bike on the lawn. I looked in his pail and saw three catfish looking up at me, their Fu Manchu whiskers brushed back, and an occasional burst of bubbles rising from their turned down mouths.

Without thinking, I asked the boy if he had ever eaten a sugar cane. He looked up, one eye squinting from the sun, and said, “What's that?”

After I took great lengths to describe the cane, the sweetness and woody fiber you could swallow without getting sick, he said “No.” I told him it cost twenty-five cents a foot, and measured a foot with my hands. He returned his gaze to the water without answering. I got down on one knee and looked, too. I was going to say a few more things about sugar cane when the line jerked and a catfish the color of a black shoe suddenly rose from the brackish water.

I jumped to my feet, scared. The kid took a few steps away from the pond, the pole moving like a crane and hovering over the lawn. Then the catfish was lowered and allowed to flop and smother itself in flakes of grass. Its gills opened and closed, a wound healing itself, and his bluish fangs munched on the fish hook.

We watched the catfish, mesmerized. I asked if I could undo the hook, and he asked where he could get sugar cane. I pointed to the Christian school across from Roeding Park. “A girl from where I live goes there, and she sold me some.” He looked at the school but said nothing.

I got down on my knees, careful not to scrape my hand against the whiskers because I had heard my stepfather say they were like razor blades. The catfish's eyes were fogged, scratched I assumed from turning over and over on the lawn. It was gasping, and when I looked into its gaping mouth I saw that its insides were mostly dark air. When I gripped the catfish and found it was icy cold, I stood back up quickly.

The kid unhooked the catfish. I picked up my bike and left, not nearly as happy as when I started off. That night, I opened my stepfather's tackle box and studied the furry lures and spinners. I took a plain hook and worked the point under my thumb, peeling away a little skin as if I had a sliver and was probing with a sewing needle. I didn't have to draw blood to know it would hurt.

I went to bed thinking that only so much meat hangs on a spine. When I closed my eyes, the catfish stared at me, then flopped over and stared at me again.

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I
T ONLY TOOK
one BB from an air gun to bring down a pigeon, and ten fingers to pull the feathers from its bony frame. Arnold, my mentor of poor days, showed me how. He stood in the cool shadows of his backyard, brushed his hair back with a hand, aimed, and a pigeon on a wire dropped like ripe fruit. It looked around, hurt, its wings fluttering like a piece of a gray sea, its eyes like the eyes of something far away. Arnold's thumb and index finger stopped that bird from breathing. I ran away because I didn't like the way things were going.

My barefoot brother was across the street at Coleman Pickle fishing large pickles from the open barrels. He climbed into a barrel, the green water sloshing the rim, and said that it felt weird stepping on pickles. It's like floating, he said, and squeezed his toes around a pickle and brought it to the surface. The pickle was large as a trout, green as something sick. I backed away when he threw it at me.

I ran home where I found Sister on the just-painted back porch. She was trying to crack an almond with her teeth. Her face was bunched up, one eye squinted into a pirate's wink. The almond creaked under the back-row anger of baby teeth. When I told her she was sitting on wet paint, she started crying. The almond glistened in her mouth, and for a moment I thought she was going to swallow it and choke. I told her to spit it out and she shook her ponytails, saying, “It's mine.”

The life of a five-year old lay between Coleman Pickle and the Molina's house. But when Mom wasn't looking, my brother and I sometimes risked going down to the 7-Up Bottling Company and standing in the entrance of the warehouse until one of the workers brought us an icy drink. Knowing that Sister was in big trouble, that Mother would scold her and then wash her, that I had at least a half-hour for monkey business, I crossed the street and fetched my brother who was now walking tightrope on the skylight of Coleman Pickle.

“Deb's in trouble,” I yelled in the funnel of cupped hands. “She sat on paint.”

He climbed down and we raced over to 7-Up Bottling. My brother stunk of pickles, but I was pretty clean. We waited at attention, and finally, a worker in a blue shirt, said, “What kind today?”

I got a 7-Up and my brother a Frosty root beer because he liked the way the froth lathered his upper lip. He agreed that 7-Up burned the nostrils and made more burps, but root beer was an older boy's drink. We drank eyeing each other and telling the other his drink was better. Finished, we placed the bottles in a wooden rack and raced back home. Mother was washing Deb with the garden hose in the backyard. We looked at her and said, “We didn't go anywhere.”

She sprayed us with the hose, and said,
“Mentirosos!”
Because it was summer, because a necklace of dirt darkened our chicken-skinny necks, we didn't move until the water was flushing out our eyes and we couldn't breathe anymore.

I returned to the Molinas' house. Arnold was inside stirring soup with a yellow pencil. I stood on tip-toe and looked in. The pigeon's head was bobbing as it carouseled in the current of brownish water. Three chopped carrots bobbed as well, and an armada of diced celery. He gave three shakes of salt, one of pepper, one of something else, and added a leaf from a jar. The pigeon bobbed in the whirlpool, and I watched it until I got dizzy.

I left Arnold and joined kids rolling a bowling ball in the hallway. The game was to jump at the last minute as it approached the pins—us kids standing at attention. The ball started off slowly, ricochetting off the walls, but by the time it reached us it was going fast. I played until the bowling ball knocked over one of the bigger babies, and I knew it was smart to get the hell out. I was already outside when the baby caught her breath and had enough air to start crying.