A Summer Life

by Gary Soto

  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.

  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.

  ______

  The Shirt

  UNCLE SHORTY 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 U
ncle 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.

  PART TWO

  ______

  The Inner Tube

  THE 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.

  ______

  The Pie

  IKNEW 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 lea
ned 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.