by Gary Soto
We met on the lawn and taunted them. “Hey, how’s the surf. Your little deuce coupe, ese.” They came back, “Eat your tacos and throw up,” At that we lunged at them and sadly, since we were only fifth graders, we went down one after another from their sixth grader punches, holding our jaws and wiping our hurt noses. Lucky for us, I suppose, a teacher was walking toward the knot of onlookers; and the Surfers scattered while we ran to the jungle gym where we bared our teeth at one another to see if they were all right.
After lunch, while Mrs. Sloan read us Pinocchio and the class grew dreamy as we listened with heads pillowed in folded arms, I was called by the loud speaker on the wall next to the flag. The speaker crackled, buzzed, breathed hard, crackled some more, and finally spoke: “Please send Gary Soto to the principal’s office immediately.” I raised my head from my arms, looked around as everyone looked at me, and left the room wondering what I had done wrong. At the office a mother was there with one of the Surfers whose eyes were red from crying, and as I stepped into the principal’s office, scared at the possibility of a paddling, the Surfer cried out, “That’s him. He’s the leader.” Mr. Buckalew, usually so kind, frowned at me as the Surfer went loose-lipped; the mother wrung her hands and told Mr. Buckalew that her son had a heart condition, that any day he could die. I listened without saying anything but thought we were going to have to whip this “fink.” After the mother and son had gone breathless from complaining, the principal turned and asked me if any of it was true.
“They’re lying,” I lied, with a generous wide-eyed innocence. “Really, Mr. Buckalew.”
But in the end I leaned against his desk for a paddling, and the Surfer transferred to another school district when we chased him home for being a fink.
Hard times. All through elementary and junior high school, it was bob and weave, jab and stick. Only in high school did I get a chance to rest between rounds. I was amazed at the calm, almost pastoral, atmosphere of Roosevelt High and, for a while, was pleased to hover over tuna sandwiches during lunchtime without the worry of being jumped from behind. During the three years there I would only get into eight fights—the strangest one was with a 1963 Ford Falcon that tried to run me over as I crossed the street on my way to school. I kicked the car door, then the driver when he got out of his car, before I ran away to look for help.
Longing for the “good times,” I joined the wrestling team to exercise my combative genes. Wrestling is a difficult sport that demands top notch conditioning, followed by speed, desire, and tooth-grinding meanness. During the first week of training we ran miles, did push-ups and sit-ups until we hurt, and practiced take-downs and half nelsons. We worked out in the “oven,” a fifteen by thirty foot padded room, in which an overhead heater was turned on so we could sweat to lose weight. By the end of a two-hour workout, the room was puddled with sweat and so fogged that it was impossible to see across the room. We practiced with the intention of hurting each other, and Coach DeCarlo made no bones about it.
“When you get in there, don’t be a damned fish. You’re men, now. When you get him down, throw your chin into his back. Hurt him—or don’t come back.”
We all came back, either as victors or losers, and, if the latter, practiced even more fiercely to prove ourselves the next time. We wanted to hear the coach call us “animals,” and smile with pride.
I wrestled for three years at the one-hundred-three weight class and my record was not particularly sparkling: Twenty-four wins, eleven losses. Just an average wrestler. I earned three letters but no ribbons or pins to dangle from a letterman’s jacket. Still, I was loyal. I worked hard. I ran the miles, did the push-ups and sit-ups until I hurt, and by the end of the three years of wrestling I was in the best condition I would ever enjoy. If I lifted my shirt at my brothers, I could blink a row of taut muscles—blink, “Don’t mess with me,” or “Stay back, Jack.”
One night, in my third year, my mother decided to watch me wrestle. My family had taken little interest in my athletics and, in fact, had discouraged me from going out for the team because it meant expense: Insurance (five dollars), a check-up (seven dollars), and one knee pad (two dollars and fifty cents). Then there was the doctor bill of ten dollars for the blood poisoning I got from a scratch while wrestling. With the last, my mother kept saying, “No, it’s nothing,” even when I showed her a tangle of red veins that ran from my hand to my chest. I went to bed thinking about Jesus, but when I woke the next morning I was thinking of Dr. Welby, Dr. Kildare—anyone! I showed my veins to Mom again, and she said, “Well, OK, if we have to.” She put down her coffee cup, dabbed lipstick on her cheeks and lips the color of my veins, and drove me to the doctor’s. When I took off my shirt, his brow went dark with lines as he said, “This one’s a dilly.” He probed my armpit until it hurt and then set a row of injections on a stainless steel tray.
The night my mom decided to watch me wrestle, our match was with the perennial powerhouse, Madera High—and that night I was to face Bloodworth. His name was appropriate, since he was a city champion prone to head slapping and smearing his opponent’s face into the mat before he turned him over to show him the “lights”—the overhead lights we’d look up at as the referee counted.
There were a few spectators in the gymnasium that night. At Roosevelt High few sat together, even if they came together as boyfriend and girlfriend, brothers, close friends, or relatives. Wrestling at Roosevelt was a sport you watched by yourself with a ten-cent bag of Corn Nuts you munched quicker and harder when a wrestler was on the edge of being pinned.
My mother arrived just a few minutes before the varsity team was called out. I spied her from behind the door where the team had lined up by weight. She stepped carefully into the bleachers, looked around, and then sat quietly in about the fourth row, smoothing her dress as if she were at a restaurant.
Called out by our coach, we ran gingerly and in step to circle the mat shouting: R-O-O-S-E-V-E-L-T. After that we clapped, dropped to the mat for neck bridges and leg stretches, and stood up again to practice take-downs. We huddled together again, shouted “Let’s do it!” and broke away clapping as we turned to the folding chairs that faced the mat.
Madera was then called out and they followed with a similar routine.
I was nervous. I kept bouncing lightly on my toes and jingling my arms at my sides, all along knowing that I would be pinned. I knew Bloodworth was going to win, but I had to stay off my back and not see “the lights.” I bounced around and jingled my arms. I adjusted my headgear and repositioned my one knee pad, on which I had notched my wins and losses with a Bic pen. The coach came up to me, clipboard in hand, and asked me how I felt. OK, I told him, although my mouth was dry and my stomach had that feeling—a sense of nausea that issued from fear. Without looking at him, I knew he was searching my face and wondering, “Can he do it?”
The buzzer sounded for the first match. Mike Brooks, our ninety-five-pounder who had a mean grip and was our best wrestler that year, approached the mat looking vacantly at the referee as he explained the rules we all knew. They shook hands, backed away, and when the buzzer sounded, Mike dangled his arms in front of his opponent as he waddled toward him. He grabbed his wrist, yanked, pushed, and yanked again and the opponent was on the mat, head arched back as he tried to get up. A two-point take-down was not enough for Mike, so he hammered his chin into his opponent’s back. The other wrestler grunted to his knees, but Mike slipped his leg under his opponent’s and shoved an elbow into his back with the intention of working him on a cradle. He pulled on an arm until it gave, and within seconds the opponent was on his back trying to bridge his way out of trouble, and within another few seconds he was looking up at “the lights,” as the referee slammed his hand on the mat. Mike leaped off him and looked at the clock: Thirty-four seconds were left in the round. They shook hands and I could make out Mike saying, “Good match.”
Liar, I thought. The guy was terrible. That quick pin won’t help me out because Bloodworth will be upset at h
ow quickly one of his teammates had gone down. I searched the bleachers and found Mom searching her purse for gum, a cigarette perhaps. The few spectators there were untwisting bags for Corn Nuts, readying for a good time.
The buzzer sounded. I approached the mat as my teammates stood up from their chairs to clap and shower me with, “C’mon, Gary. Stick him.”
I approached the mat, looked at the referee moving his mouth, and shook hands with Bloodworth. We backed away two steps, each of us looking intensely at the other, and waited for the “Readyyyyy, wrestle.” When it came I waddled toward Bloodworth with my arms dangling in front of me, in a parody of Mike’s style. We locked heads together, pushed and yanked, and separated. I was already breathing hard, just from a few friendly shoves, and my ear, despite the headgear, felt raw from banging our heads together. We searched each other’s faces and waddled toward one another, arms dangling. When he teased me with a leg, I decided, “Well, hell, why not,” and scooted on my knees to grab his foot in a half-hearted attempt at a take-down. He ripped his forearm across my face. It hurt as he twisted my head and, consequently, my neck. He took me down, but I got up to my knees almost immediately to search out the clock, then the faces in the bleachers—faces that were busy going to town on Corn Nuts. I rose to my knees, then fell, but rose again when the buzzer sounded the end of the round. I stood up breathing hard, hands on hips as I circled the mat to stall for time and a precious breath of air. The referee asked Bloodworth to choose between heads or tails as he tossed a coin in the air. Heads, he called, and heads it was. He chose top. I circled around the mat one more time and then threw myself on the mat, on all fours. He set his grip on my elbow and around my waist, and I could feel his trembling—certainly from the rush of adrenaline. When the whistle sounded I tried to snap up into a standing position but was thrown down. I crawled, snail-like, my face smearing the mat with a moist nose, and could feel him trying to push his hand over my neck and across the back of my head in a half nelson. He pushed at my head, sweated on my head, breathed foully on my head. Bent down, the referee shouted at me to quit stalling—an insult, because I was trying to get to my knees. Grunting, I rose up on my padded knee and, for a second, it looked like I might even make it to two knees when Bloodworth slammed me into the mat and I continued to snail, nose pressed moist into the mat.
Just as I looked up to the clock, Bloodworth slipped his leg around mine and pulled at my arm in an attempt to roll me into the “cradle.” “Thank God it’s almost over,” I thought as I grunted and gritted my teeth. But the buzzer sounded and I was released. I got up slowly, threw off my headgear whose earmuffs had worked their way across my eyes, and walked around the mat with hands on hips and breathing hard. I searched the bleachers and the spectators were finishing up their first bags of Corn Nuts. My mom, with a clenched fist and a strained face, was yelling, “C’mon, m’ijo, kill him.” Some of my teammates clapped their hands softly and threw out words of encouragement while others bowed their heads and looked at their feet.
Bloodworth was already on all fours and poised beautifully, eyes straight ahead like a horse’s, when I plopped down on my knees to set my grip around his elbow and stomach. When the whistle sounded I pulled to my left, then quickly pushed him to the mat where he “snailed” to rise to his feet as I hung on thinking that I might not be pinned, that maybe I might even win. No sooner did such ideas snap from one brain cell to the next than Bloodworth rose to one knee, then the other knee, before he shot straight up like King Kong with me hanging desperately to his waist, as if I were begging him to stay. He slapped my hands away, turned, and ripped a forearm across my face while he took me down where he proceeded to tuck my arm into a half chicken wing, then into a full chicken wing before he rolled me slowly over on my back, and I glimpsed the wincing glare of overhead lights, and the spectators with their Corn Nuts, and the coach banging his clipboard against his thigh, and my teammates ripping their fingernails with their teeth, and my Mom standing up and yelling, “Hurt him, m’ijo. Kill him. Right now!”
I was pinned with forty-four seconds left of the third round. I got up breathing hard, head bowed, as I circled the mat. I shook hands with Bloodworth without looking up, returned to my folding chair and my teammates patting my shoulders, and sat down to towel off and watch Rhinehardt, our one-hundred-and-twelve, roll around the mat. While he was being turned over to see the lights, my mom called from the bleachers, “M’ijo. M’ijo, do you want some gum?” Turning around, I saw that she had torn a piece of Juicy Fruit into halves and was holding it up like a goldfish. “Here, son. Catch.” She threw it from the bleachers, and I opened my hands for its small sweetness.
One Last Time
Yesterday I saw the movie Gandhi and recognized a few of the people—not in the theater but in the film. I saw my relatives, dusty and thin as sparrows, returning from the fields with hoes balanced on their shoulders. The workers were squinting, eyes small and veined, and were using their hands to say what there was to say to those in the audience with popcorn and Cokes. I didn’t have anything, though. I sat thinking of my family and their years in the fields, beginning with Grandmother who came to the United States after the Mexican revolution to settle in Fresno where she met her husband and bore children, many of them. She worked in the fields around Fresno, picking grapes, oranges, plums, peaches, and cotton, dragging a large white sack like a sled. She worked in the packing houses, Bonner and Sun-Maid Raisin, where she stood at a conveyor belt passing her hand over streams of raisins to pluck out leaves and pebbles. For over twenty years she worked at a machine that boxed raisins until she retired at sixty-five.
Grandfather worked in the fields, as did his children. Mother also found herself out there when she separated from Father for three weeks. I remember her coming home, dusty and so tired that she had to rest on the porch before she trudged inside to wash and start dinner. I didn’t understand the complaints about her ankles or the small of her back, even though I had been in the grape fields watching her work. With my brother and sister I ran in and out of the rows; we enjoyed ourselves and pretended not to hear Mother scolding us to sit down and behave ourselves. A few years later, however, I caught on when I went to pick grapes rather than play in the rows.
Mother and I got up before dawn and ate quick bowls of cereal. She drove in silence while I rambled on how everything was now solved, how I was going to make enough money to end our misery and even buy her a beautiful copper tea pot, the one I had shown her in Long’s Drugs. When we arrived I was frisky and ready to go, self-consciously aware of my grape knife dangling at my wrist. I almost ran to the row the foreman had pointed out, but I returned to help Mother with the grape pans and jug of water. She told me to settle down and reminded me not to lose my knife. I walked at her side and listened to her explain how to cut grapes; bent down, hands on knees, I watched her demonstrate by cutting a few bunches into my pan. She stood over me as I tried it myself, tugging at a bunch of grapes that pulled loose like beads from a necklace. “Cut the stem all the way,” she told me as last advice before she walked away, her shoes sinking in the loose dirt, to begin work on her own row.
I cut another bunch, then another, fighting the snap and whip of vines. After ten minutes of groping for grapes, my first pan brimmed with bunches. I poured them on the paper tray, which was bordered by a wooden frame that kept the grapes from rolling off, and they spilled like jewels from a pirate’s chest. The tray was only half filled, so I hurried to jump under the vines and begin groping, cutting, and tugging at the grapes again. I emptied the pan, raked the grapes with my hands to make them look like they filled the tray, and jumped back under the vine on my knees. I tried to cut faster because Mother, in the next row, was slowly moving ahead. I peeked into her row and saw five trays gleaming in the early morning. I cut, pulled hard, and stopped to gather the grapes that missed the pan; already bored, I spat on a few to wash them before tossing them like popcorn into my mouth.
So it went. Two pans equaled on
e tray—or six cents. By lunchtime I had a trail of thirty-seven trays behind me while Mother had sixty or more. We met about halfway from our last trays, and I sat down with a grunt, knees wet from kneeling on dropped grapes. I washed my hands with the water from the jug, drying them on the inside of my shirt sleeve before I opened the paper bag for the first sandwich, which I gave to Mother. I dipped my hand in again to unwrap a sandwich without looking at it. I took a first bite and chewed it slowly for the tang of mustard. Eating in silence I looked straight ahead at the vines, and only when we were finished with cookies did we talk.
“Are you tired?” she asked.
“No, but I got a sliver from the frame,” I told her. I showed her the web of skin between my thumb and index finger. She wrinkled her forehead but said it was nothing.
“How many trays did you do?”
I looked straight ahead, not answering at first. I recounted in my mind the whole morning of bend, cut, pour again and again, before answering a feeble “thirty-seven.” No elaboration, no detail. Without looking at me she told me how she had done field work in Texas and Michigan as a child. But I had a difficult time listening to her stories. I played with my grape knife, stabbing it into the ground, but stopped when Mother reminded me that I had better not lose it. I left the knife sticking up like a small, leafless plant. She then talked about school, the junior high I would be going to that fall, and then about Rick and Debra, how sorry they would be that they hadn’t come out to pick grapes because they’d have no new clothes for the school year. She stopped talking when she peeked at her watch, a bandless one she kept in her pocket. She got up with an “Ay, Dios,” and told me that we’d work until three, leaving me cutting figures in the sand with my knife and dreading the return to work.