by Gary Soto
Mother descended the porch with cigarette smoke squinting her eyes. She patted Mrs. Garcia's freckled arm that was propped outside the window. She told us kids to get in the car. We knew Mrs. Garcia. We knew her broken down house and the dirt that scudded across the floor when the front door opened and closed. Rick made a face, but followed Debra and me. In the back seat, the three of us made even uglier faces. Two of Mrs. Garcia's babies were jumping up and down in five-gallon tubs of chow mein. I looked at the noodles squirm like snakes and make the sound of snails being pulled apart. I felt sick because I knew Mrs. Garcia was going to try to feed noodles to us for dinner, but I was so glad that I had eaten earlier in the day.
The three of us made sour faces at the babies. Rick didn't smell so much of pickles because he had changed his shirt and pants, and Mother had washed him clean with a garden hose. He was dressed for dinner, and even his hair lay flat. Mrs. Garcia laughed when one of the babies climbed from the back to help put the car in reverse. Mrs. Garcia worked the brake and gas pedal and the baby did most of the steering. We moved down the street in fits, and while we were miserable the Garcias were happy to get going. They were looking forward to a square meal from the round tubs in the back seat.
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The Chicks
AT FIRST the three chicks were little puffs of yellow dandelion floating in our backyard, squeaking like rusty latches. I followed after them in big flapping tennis shoes and eleven-year-old awkwardness, happy because they were newborn and breathing the April air of blossoms and hope. They didn't seem to do much. They pecked at the sandy ground and flapped their tiny wings. They blinked a lot, too, scratched, and went to sleep standing up. When one started moving, the others followed. They traveled in threes with quick neck-bobbing jerks. I thought it cute that they liked to climb onto my feet until one shit on my tennis shoe and I had to clean it off on the grass. I kicked sand in the chick's face but immediately felt sorry for him because he didn't stop blinking for the longest time.
By the third week they were large and grayish-yellow with the start of red combs on the tops of their heads. I no longer fed them grain from my outspread palm or held up leaves of lettuce for them to perforate with their beaks. The mayonnaise lid I used for their water trough was replaced by a plastic dish. I no longer raced after them. Rick, my older brother, said it was stupid to care for them.
But I had to. They had outgrown their cardboard pen, and I couldn't just leave them because the neighbor's cat had sniffed them out. With wire and some mismatched lumber, I made a new pen. And just in time. The cat had attacked a chick, which gave up a few feathers and screams but no blood. Or so I thought. The next day when I let them out to “play,” the hurt chick seemed dizzy and quiet. His blink was slow. One wing seemed bent. I patted its nub of comb and purred, “What's wrong?”
I went inside the house to do the dishes and when I returned, the neighbor's cat was carrying the hurt chick over the fence. I threw a rock at the cat, and cuss words. I hated myself for leaving the chick alone. I sat down on the ground while the two other chickens continued dropping their round chicken turds in the dust. I stirred the ground with a stick and felt a great hatred for the cat. I didn't even have its body to bury, or a name to call it.
When they were a month old, the chicks, now named Henrietta and Willy, began to walk like chickens, high-stepping in the weeds and tomato plants. They began to sound like chickens too, clucking instead of squeaking. They also shit more. They became nasty, and when my younger brother tried to play with them, Henrietta pecked his belly button, which was showing under his T-shirt. Blood sprang skyward, and my brother, mouth open in shock, began to cry. Fortunately, my mother wasn't home. I washed his belly button and fit a flesh-colored, circle band-aid on his wound. I was scared because I thought that maybe his belly button would rip open and his guts would flood out. Then I would really be in trouble.
The chicks were now dusty white chickens. Although they were huge and scary, the neighbor's cat still hungered for them. I was still pained by the death of the first one. I decided to get my revenge by hiding behind a fort of cardboard while the two remaining chickens scratched about the yard. I waited with sweaty rocks in my hand. Finally, the cat climbed onto the fence, jumped down, and creeped toward Willy, who just looked and blinked at the cat. I rose quickly and threw a rock but missed. I threw others and missed, cussed, and climbed the fence to shout at the cat, which disappeared behind car parts.
I shepherded the two remaining chickens that had grown huge and so wildly stupid that they began to shit in their drinking water and peck the hand that fed them. I hit them with a mop, chased them, and was angry because they were so unappreciative of my concern for them. I would stay with them for hours, sweating under the early summer sun. I would spend my own pennies for a pinch of grain. I would walk to Country Boy Market where, shamefaced, I asked the grocer for wilted lettuce.
Because I was careless, Willy was the next to get it. Instead of carrying him away, the cat ripped into the chicken in our vegetable garden. His whiskers were bloody, his eyes narrow, his jaw white with feathers. I threw the mop at the cat and missed. I climbed the fence and went looking for the cat, calling “Here, kittykittykitty.” I returned to scoop Willy onto a shovel and bury him in the corner of the yard. Tears flooded my eyes. While I whittled a cross, Henrietta went about pecking grain and lettuce, unmoved by the passing of her friend Willy.
But Henrietta had her day. I became less and less interested in the preservation of my last chick, that onetime little puff of feathers. I was playing dodgeball in the front yard when I heard a chicken cry and raced to find the cat dragging the fluttering Henrietta across the yard. When the cat saw me, he let go and climbed the fence in two leaps.
Henrietta was badly hurt. I tried to catch and comfort her, but she trotted around the yard, trailing loose feathers and blood. Toward evening, she finally quieted and allowed me to pick her up, coo at her earless head, and place her in the pen. The next morning, she was very quiet when I let her out. She walked with a limp, but mostly sat blinking. She didn't eat or drink from her dish. Her beak seemed more open than closed, and for the first time I saw that a chicken's tongue was stiff, like a matchstick.
The following days she dragged herself about on her good leg, and a day later she couldn't flutter her wings. My brother said we had to chop off her head. I was scared, and my brother was scared. I picked up Henrietta and said, “I'm sorry,” and cuddled her as I carried her to a two-by-four set on bricks. I let her go at the last minute and told Rick that I couldn't do it. He couldn't do it either, and we sat on the grass, feeling awful as we listened to the chicken beat about on the ground. When I turned around, Henrietta was blinking her eyes at us.
Rick hit me hard in the arm and said it was my fault. He rose quickly, grabbed the shovel, and with three sloppy strikes and a lot of anger, Henrietta's neck came off and warm blood and feathers mingled with the grassy weeds. Rick threw down the shovel. I started crying because it was now my job to bury her. I scooped up her body on the shovel, then her closed-eyed head, and buried her next to Willy.
I didn't fit a cross over her grave until the following day. I pushed over the pen, flattening it by jumping up and down on it. For the rest of the summer the neighbor's cat climbed onto the fence every day to see if we had more chickens.
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The New and Old Tennies
MOTHER looks up from stirring dinner in a black pan, her hips cha-chaing under a chicken-print apron. A smell has touched her. She knows it from somewhere, but where? She taps her spoon against the pan and looks at her son with watered-down hair. He's a sloppy boy with sloppy posture which neither the nuns nor a strict father could correct. Moons of dirt dwell under his fingernails. His teeth are pasty. His arms are blue with the tattoos of pen markings.
Earlier in the day he had walked in a wet field and stepped on something soft. He scraped the bottoms of his new tennis shoes as best he could and continued an incline of mushro
om-dark hills, the ropes of his leg muscles tightening, his breath shallow. The canal was west behind the trees, where the leaves mulched in the shadows. Leprous frogs lived in leaf-spotted water, and the fish, dulled by chemicals, floated near the oily surface, their tails waving weakly, their gills like raw, pinkish wounds. He could have walked waist-deep into the canal, cupped a fish in his palm, and shared its misery. But the boy knew better. His mother would have scolded him for getting wet. So he walked along the canal bank, dull as the fish, and threw rocks and watched the rippling targets dilate. He hunched on the bank and wished winter would rise from the mountains, white as a nurse's hat. Then he could wear two socks on each foot and crunch the miles of frost with his shoes. Then he could slide on the ice and risk his face playing front-yard football.
Nothing sticks to the smooth bottoms of red tennis shoes like the scent of squashed bugs and thistle. The shoes are quiet, slick from the wear of climbing trees, and scuffed at the toe from kicking the boredom out of curbs. They are quick, though, swift enough to outdistance the orange-haired sister of the school bully. She would like to kiss him, drink from his neck, hug him and feel the air that lives in the deepest cells of his lungs.
Worn tennies. They smell of summer grass, asphalt, a moist sock breathing the defeat of baseball. He was no good in third grade, and now, in the sixth, he's still awful at the game. He blames the bat, the sloshed ball, and the sun angling sparks off the fence. He blames the pitcher, a fat kid who hides the ball in the wide screen of his gray T-shirt. His mother was wrong in marrying his thin-armed father who bared his teeth and grunted when he opened fresh bottles of ketchup. And his older brother was piggish for getting all the warm milk, all the best cuts of meat. Most of the players, the Lions, didn't get any milk or meat either. They are weak at bat and can't tell the difference between a ball and a piece of paper blowing across the field.
The shoes are grass-stained and itchy with foxtails and burrs. Sand has crept into the toe, and no matter how he pounds the tennis shoes against the curb, he can still feel the fine grains against his socks. The laces are gray and slack, and the rubber label that says P. F. Flyers is missing. It came off when the orange-haired sister caught up to him and filled his neck with kisses. She ripped off the label, said, “You're mine forever,” and left him sucking air because she was stronger than he had ever imagined. She had squeezed all his air and tasted his candy-red tongue.
He floated the shoes in a metal pail, two red fish that stunk of forty days and forty nights. He drowned them in detergent and hung them on a clothesline, dirty tears dripping from the laces. Meanwhile, he wore dress-up shoes and paced the floor, waiting for the sun to starch the tennies dry and stiff as a twig so he could wear them loose racing the base paths in a runaway game.
With worn tennies, the kid could sneak into ten o'clock mass when he's late. He could leap rose bushes and puddles. He could leap onto a boat as it pulled away and be the first to leap onto the dock when it returned, the deep-throated motor gurgling black water. With worn tennies, he has been somewhere. He has climbed and run, and run to climb onto graffiti-sprayed rocks. He has played good basketball on a lousy team, shopped with his mother, who can't believe her luck that no shoe fits, and has been stopped by dogs who will sniff and remember him for what he is—a rough hand on the collar, a kind slap on a dusty coat, a call to a bone with its strings of beautifully fleshed meat.
At night, moonlight spears the bedroom floor, the chest of drawers, and a pile of jeans and T-shirts. The tennies lay like struck animals on the side of the road. But they are warm and soft as they let off the steam of a full day.
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The Guardian Angel
A GUARDIAN ANGEL may follow you along a rust-colored river, up telephone poles to those humming canisters, or through hedges and vines where thirsty dogs pant. He may hover over a line of wet laundry, cleaning a fingernail and whistling for his own enchantment. He may even be that blue vapor issuing from a tailpipe of a car idling in the road. Guardian angels are always near, or so I was told by my mother, who also believed in fortunes laid out on a gypsy's wobbly card table.
But when my brother got his pants leg caught on the top of a high fence and hung upside down, weeping and muttering curses because his pants were newly torn and Mother would spank him for sure, no angel was with him. His guardian angel was asleep or dull-witted. He also snoozed when a pine cone hit my brother in the face, right under the left eye, which, along with the right eye, was looking skyward at a milk-throated bird he intended to bring down with a rock. My brother's guardian slept when he and a friend played frisbee with a tin coffee lid, and when a pan of boiling water splashed on his leg. But he did wake up in time to pull the steering wheel as he fell asleep. Three buddies were in the back, all boozed and stinking of the failure of the Giants to hit with men on.
It was tough luck for my brother. He chipped a tooth, broke one arm, then the other, and stepped on every tack in the house. Blood poisoning ran like a mouse up his arm, and knife-wielding cholos chased him from junior high to high school. And things kept falling on him from the sky: limbs from a diseased tree, rocks hurled from the neighbor's yard, and a virus that had him in bed for months, his eyes like the eyes of a sad panda.
My guardian angel was a light sleeper. He saved me from speeding cars, playground fights, and mercury splashing in my face. That was in fifth grade when we stole balls of mercury from the science teacher to shine coins and belt buckles. Finished, we closed one eye and flung the mercury at each another and giggled all the way to lunch.
He saved me from Frankie T., the schoolyard terrorist, and the pain of having my Valentine lollipop crunched loudly in my ear by the wrong girl. He saved me from taking a baseball in the face. He breathed “No” in my ear when I was popping open my mother's coin purse where bitter pennies slept.
Three times I was supposed to die. The last time, I fell off a waterfall, God knows how many feet. The ride over rock and slimy moss scared me. Just as on TV, I saw my life flash before me. For me, life was mostly summer days tramping in cut-offs and a peach-stained T-shirt. I loved my life, and loved playing and eating the same meal over and over and even the loneliness of a thirteen-year-old in jeans bursting with love. I survived, though. I sprained an ankle, limped for two weeks until the sparks of pain stopped, and then decided I should limp the rest of the summer because girls seemed to notice hurt guys.
Now I need my guardian angel more than ever. My soul is filled with holes, and both knees hurt from years of karate. Sometimes I scare my black brothers, but mostly they chase me around the karate floor because I'm the black belt with low kicks and wimpy punches. They hit and kick me, but not too hard because they know I'm the only one with a good job. They're struggling to live on a jingle of quarters, dimes, and green pennies. They just want to scare me, to send me driving home with a footprint on my chest. I enjoy showering and then sitting in the living room, nursing my welts with a cold beer in my hand.
Motorcycles scare me. From the front window, I see them speed by, reckless as stars let go from heaven. Sports cars scare me too, and dogs with mismatched eyes, widows in black, and fungus on newly picked apples. I'm suspicious of candles that sputter in church. Sometimes when I look up from prayer at 5:30 mass, I see a candle waver and go dead, sending up a spine of smoke. God is looking, I feel, the Lord is letting go of another meager soul. I clear my throat and think that someone is not being prayed for, someone in limbo is receding farther away, a dead father on a rack of dank earth, a mother with the slack smile of a failed life.
My angel was with me for years. I could do as I pleased and return unharmed. Now I'm uncertain. In the backyard, the leaves of the apple tree rattle across the lawn. The pond is black, and the slats of the fence are vented with disease. My friends are far away. Their crisp letters bring a fear of getting old. I close my eyes and pray that I'll know what to do with my free time. I'll listen to my breathing, make it stop and go, and catch the angel off guard. Is he really ther
e? Is he that sigh in the trees? Is he hovering over the clothesline or standing upright among the shovels and hoes? I want nothing more than to be happy by next fall, by the time the orange trees hang heavy with the water of perpetual fruit.
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The Fights
WHENEVER ANY aunt or uncle brought out a Brownie camera, my brother and I began fighting. We grunted and wrestled, the hot snot of anger shining our upper lips. We growled, teeth bared, and karate chopped with one eye on the camera. When we fell, our bony elbows ripped holes into their lawns, and worms squirmed to get out of the way. We breathed hard and cussed when a button came loose. We smiled at our relatives fumbling for coins in their pockets. We thought people liked to watch fights, and even better, liked snapshots of front-yard fights.
I visited my Aunt Jesse on a Saturday and sat on her long flowery couch, which was sealed in a clear plastic, and looked through her album of ancient snapshots also sealed in plastic. I drank from a ceramic coffee cup, laughed, and spilled four ugly drops of chocolate on the couch. I moved over, and let my jeans absorb the drops.
My aunt, chicken-print dish towel in hand, pulled a chair up next to me, careful not to rake the legs across her shag carpet. She wiped the couch and sat down. We pressed our heads together and looked at the photo album. In one black and white snapshot, I'm on the ground, balled up like a potato bug. In another, Rick's face is slurred from a right cross, and in the next Rick has me in a head-lock but both of us are smiling into the camera. In still another, only my legs are showing, and the shadow of my sister with a pin-wheel. The pinwheel, I remember, was later ripped from her hand when she hung it outside the car window. I liked the snapshot of Brother and me baring our new, grown-up teeth to the tops of the gums. Our fists are held high and Rick's cowlick is standing up like a feather. And there was one in which Rick has me pinned to the ground while blood wiggled from his nose to his cheek. I remember that well. He was mad because an elbow caught him in the face, and he had to go to our cousin's wedding with a bloody shirt.