I didn’t know how to swim then, so my mother told me never to go near the pool. That summer, as I sat with her while she worked, she would issue her warnings. About the pool she told me, “Look at you; you’re as small as a mouse. The water is much deeper than you think.” About cars she said, “They can hit you and keep going.” About the needle on her sewing machine she said, “Watch your fingers; it can move much faster than you can run!” And about boys she warned, “They will try to press you into it.”
I wasn’t scared. I was curious. I wondered about the swimming pool. How deep was it at its deepest point? How many people would that be, if they stood stacked, each on the shoulders of the one before, with all those beneath holding their breath for how long? What did it feel like to jump as I’d watched the older boys do, leaping off the railing with a sudden push of their feet? Some of them made funny faces on their way down. Some ran in place, their arms and legs racing in the air. One boy, imitating Road Runner, bugged out his eyes and yelled, “Meep, meep!” Others closed their eyes and looked like they were sleeping. They pressed their arms fast against their sides, pointed their toes and plunged into the water like knives. As fast as they fell, the boys popped up again, laughing. Each boy’s hair would be plastered against his forehead, every strand shining and neatly in place, as if he was headed for the first day of school or a church Communion or a meeting with a girl.
That summer, with my parents asleep in the bed next to mine, my father lying on his back, his breathing like a whistle, my mother lying on her side, one arm thrown across his chest and her long hair fanning out behind her, I’d lie awake and think about things.
With the sheet pushed down to my waist and one arm cushioning my head, I’d gaze at the rectangular shape of the window above my parents’ bed and picture fish in the sea, their gills fluttering like eyelashes; clouds of sand roaming the desert for thousands and thousands of miles; the bright green streak of a gecko darting across a wall; how it felt to ride a horse and whether it made any difference whether it was a black or a spotted one.
On weekends, my mother and I would walk to the Chinese movie theater on El Cajon Boulevard and watch the kung fu movies. We’d push through the glass revolving doors and I’d run across the red carpet to the little man with the slow eye who sat inside the ticket booth and buy two tickets for whatever was showing. The movies we watched were epics; the stories so long and involved, Ma said we could come back every weekend for the rest of our lives and still there would be more to tell.
In these movies, the warriors could fly. Dressed in robes with swords slung across their back and hair flowing to their feet, they would point their fingers or turn a wrist in elaborate ways and go gliding across rooftops or float straight up into the arms of trees. There wasn’t much dialogue in these movies. The warriors didn’t do much talking. Ma said it wasn’t their nature. To express themselves, they would pick up swords or bamboo spikes and run at each other, screaming.
I had a hard time remembering who was fighting whom and which characters were related and which were the good and which the bad. As they fought, they would insult each other, and these insults would occasionally appear in English subtitles. To impress my mother, I read the titles out loud. “As long as I am on this earth with you,” I would shout toward the screen, “I must seek to smash your head in! Ha-ha!” “Very good,” Ma would say, smacking my knee with her fingertips.
After the movies, we’d walk across the street to the Vietnamese restaurant with the big smiling plastic cow’s head on its roof. The restaurant’s specialty was beef noodle soup. We’d order two bowls and while we waited for the food to arrive, I’d practice pointing my fingers and cupping my hands as I’d seen the kung fu warriors do.
“It’s rude to point,” my mother would say. “If you don’t watch out, the muscles in your hands will lock into those odd positions and you’ll never be able to hold your chopsticks properly.”
She was full of warnings that summer. “If you dance with your shadow,” she’d say, “you’ll go crazy.” “If you run around barefoot all summer, your feet will burn and fall off.” “If you swallow fruit seeds, trees will grow inside of you until the branches come out of your ears.”
She told me that my chicken pox scars were really diamonds and the day I met a boy who recognized this, I was to marry him. I told her that I didn’t want to get married; what I wanted was to fly like the people in the movies. She said, “Listen to me. How many times have I told you? People look like they’re flying but in fact they’re being pulled along by invisible strings.” I said that I didn’t believe her and she said, “All right. Maybe those people”—and she would point across the street to the Chinese movie theater—“Maybe they were flying. But that was a long time ago.” And she would draw out the words “long time ago” so that they sounded like three stones, one following another, down into a well.
The people from the Church of Jehovah’s Witnesses next door would come and visit our building regularly. They arrived in pairs, a man and a woman, and handed out pamphlets with colorful drawings of the Heavenly Kingdom.
The first time they came to our apartment, my father opened the door and said, “We no God, we Buddha.” The next time they came, he told me to answer the door. I opened the door and said, “We’re Buddhists.” But I knew this wasn’t true; my mother is Catholic. She had a painting of Jesus on velvet, kneeling beside a boulder, praying to a starry purple sky, his lips bright red. The painting hung on the wall behind me and I wondered, as I stood there lying, if the Jehovah’s Witnesses could see it.
My friends told me that if you gave the church people the chance, they would open their little books and pointing to the pictures of fresh fruit say things like “This is Heaven” and “Here is the Kingdom of God where no one suffers,” their fingers tracing an invisible line connecting all the healthy people walking through the sunlit fields.
My friends and I took the pamphlets the church people handed out and studied the drawings of people having picnics on the banks of a long blue river or harvesting wheat or standing arm in arm, looking into each other’s eyes. To us, these pictures were more unbelievable than the warriors we saw flying in the kung fu movies. As far as we could understand it, the church on our street was like a ladder to the Kingdom.
When the Jehovah’s Witnesses weren’t there, we chased each other up and down the stairs and around the towers of their castle. That summer, we made up a game called Kingdom. At first, Kingdom was about pretending that we were in Heaven. We tried to be the people in the little books. We swept the stairs and kept the castle clean. We walked around smiling, waving to invisible people in our heavenly community. We put our hands on each other’s shoulders and said things like “My son,” “My friend,” “God knows.” When we got bored, Kingdom became about having fights and waging war.
We made up stories about ships at sea, on the lookout for pirate ships. We divided into warring groups and occupied separate towers. Each tower was a country. The leaders and the people of both countries yelled insults back and forth until someone took off a flip-flop and beat it against a tower wall, yelling, “Attack!” We threw eucalyptus cones and chased each other out into the street. We fought with sticks and branches, plunging the sticks like daggers and waving the branches like swords. We fell to our knees clutching our sides or hung our heads crying, “My eye! My eye!” We agreed the best way to die was to wiggle on the floor or stumble slowly step by step, twitching and trembling, down the stairs. We fought over which side had killed more people and because we usually couldn’t agree, we’d have to collect more eucalyptus cones and have another war.
The youngest kids had a hard time dying. We had to explain to them that when they were out, they were out: they couldn’t just open their eyes again and keep on fighting. They had to be reminded that they were dead. “But what should we do?” they’d ask. “Just wait over there,” we’d yell, pointing to the two tall palm trees on the sidewalk in front of the church.
The ones who understood would stand like little ghosts between the tall trees and clap their hands together when their side was winning or wave their arms in the air when they thought their side was losing. They yelled: “Run!” “Get her!” “Come this way! No, THIS way!”
• • •
Though my parents didn’t want me playing near the swimming pool, they both liked having the pool in the courtyard. My mother said it wasn’t the sea but it was nice to open the door and have some water.
In the evenings, our family and other families in our building brought chairs out and sat on the terraces. The adults talked among themselves while the kids played ball in the courtyard or games of Marco Polo and Green Light–Red Light in the swimming pool. Leaning over the railing on the second floor, I’d watch my friends in the pool below, watch my parents walk around, talking with the neighbors. The adults talked about jobs and cars and what was on sale at the grocery store and how big the newborn baby had grown and whether the landlord would replace the broken washing machine or try to fix it again even though, as one woman reminded everyone, the last time he tried, it jumped up and down like an angry horse. In the pool, kids were tiptoeing up to each other only to freeze in mid-step. Holding strange contorted poses, they tried not to fall down laughing.
“Come down!” my friends would call up to me, waving their arms in the air. I’d look over to my mother, who shook her head no, and then to my father, who also shook his head no. “I can’t,” I’d yell down to my friends.
When the landlord pulled up in his truck to deliver the new washing machine, he caught the boys leaping off the second-floor railing into the swimming pool below. He ran over to the edge of the pool and shouted into the face of the boy who was climbing out, “Hey! Hey! Are you crazy?”
There were five boys waiting upstairs and they decided to jump together, landing with a big splash that enraged the landlord. “You’re going to break your necks!” the landlord yelled.
The boys didn’t care. They pulled themselves up and swung their bodies easily out of the water. They pulled their jeans on over their wet shorts and jumped on their bicycles and rode away, laughing. They didn’t even bother to close the gates behind them.
Early one morning not long after that, a team of workmen pulled up to our building. They opened the crooked iron gates and started moving their equipment into the courtyard. They worked all day. First they roped off the area around the swimming pool. Then they drained all the water out of it. The water rolled across the courtyard and spilled onto the sidewalk before disappearing down the street. Once all the water had gone, the workmen began filling the empty pool with rocks. The rocks banged against the floor and the sides of the pool and rattled hard against each other.
When the pool was completely filled with rocks, the workmen poured cement over the rocks and drove away. In a couple of days, the first layer of cement had dried. The workmen returned and poured another. I don’t remember how many layers of cement were poured into the pool before the workmen decided it was enough.
Like a strange sand-colored skin that had grown over the swimming pool, the cement took the pool’s shape, even its curved edges. It hid from us nothing but the water.
When the workmen returned, they carried in a big wooden planter, and whatever was in the planter was covered with a black plastic bag. They placed the planter in the center of the courtyard, right in the middle of where the water used to be. When they cut away the plastic, what we saw was a squat baby palm tree.
One of the workmen gathered the plastic bag into his arms and rolled it into a bundle. He tossed the bundle into the back of the truck. Their work done, the men closed the gates behind them and drove away.
That night, my parents had an argument. My mother had just turned off the Chinese fisherman lamp. After a few minutes with the three of us lying in our beds, flat on our backs, staring at the ceiling, my mother asked my father why the landlord had done it.
“Done what?” my father asked. “You know what,” my mother said. “He’s the landlord. It’s his building,” my father said. My mother said, “It’s ugly.” “It doesn’t matter,” my father said. He turned toward the wall. My mother said, “It does matter. It’s ugly. What is there to look at now?” My father didn’t answer. My mother said, “I open the door and what is there to see?” “Well, what do you want to see?” my father asked. “Not a desert,” my mother said.
Then no one said anything.
What was there to say?
I lay in bed and remembered the things I had seen in the swimming pool. I remembered the body of a boy, gliding along the floor of the pool, sunlight streaming across his bare back. I remembered the reflection of clouds, families of clouds, and birds, migrating. I remembered the leaves that floated to the edges of the swimming pool and nested there. I remembered how the glare of the sun made the water glint like a windowpane. I remembered the reflection of a ball bouncing in the courtyard and the clotheslines, strung from rail to rail, the sheets fluttering like banners in the air. But what I remembered most were the boys, flying. I remembered their bodies arcing through the air and plunging down. I remembered how their hands parted the water and how as they disappeared, the last thing I would see were the pale soles of their feet. Falling asleep, I remembered the brightness of the full moon, shimmering in the swimming pool, so close, so close, like a caught fish.
My friends and I fished out of the Dumpster the box in which the new washing machine had arrived and we dragged it to the backyard of the abandoned house next door. We laid the box on its side and pushed it against the trunk of a eucalyptus tree. We hung towels over the opening, fixing them in place with rocks. The box became part of our improvements to the house, like the convoy of grocery carts we’d pushed back from Safeway, arranging them, each upended, in a semicircle in the front yard as our lawn chairs.
We called the box The Other Room and then just, The Room. It was a small, dark place two people could crawl into together and sit, knee to knee.
Before any of us had come to the neighborhood, there had been a fire in this house and now the place was charred and crumbly. Most of the walls were black and you could walk through some of them. The rooms were small and crowded with burnt and broken things. There was no running water and no electricity in the house. Our parents didn’t mind our playing there, so long as we washed our hands and feet before we went to bed at night. They called the house “The kids’ house.” “The kids are next door, in their house,” we’d hear them tell one another.
Among the things we found when we first came into the house was an empty chest of drawers, a dusty mattress with broken springs, eight bent spoons, a dead lamp with a melted cord, ashy paper, two chairs with missing legs, one chair with a broken leg, smoke-stained curtains and scattered across the floor stuffing from the torn cushions of an orange plaid couch.
Also scattered across the floor were pictures of a couple. The woman had red hair and wore it piled high atop her head. The guy had short, spiky blond hair, skinny lips and very blue eyes. I didn’t look at him too much. In the pictures, she has freckles and her skin is pale, almost shining. She doesn’t look healthy although I imagine her skin was probably soft to the touch.
My favorite picture was the one in which the woman is sitting on the man’s lap. He has one arm across her chest with the other reaching out toward where the camera would be. The man took the picture himself, holding the camera at arm’s length. Neither of them is smiling exactly and she looks distracted, as if eager to get back to that cigarette she just lit and has been holding between two fingers of her left hand.
We dragged the dusty mattress out to the middle of the living room and took turns jumping on it. We pretended that the mattress was a trampoline with the potential to project us across oceans and into outer space if we jumped hard enough.
After playing on the trampoline, we’d pick through the empty kitchen cabinets and pretend to find french fries, hamburgers, and fried chicken, which we devoured loudly, with ou
r mouths open. For dessert, we biked to the corner store across the street from our school. There, we would pool our pennies to buy a box of Lemon Heads or Atomic Red Hots, which we divided among ourselves as we stood in a circle. Sucking on our candies, we’d bike over to the school playground and there disbanded, running across the blacktop to climb the jungle gym, or hang by the backs of our knees from the monkey bars, or ride the swings standing up or bury each other up to our necks in the sandbox. As the sky darkened and we could smell the jasmine blooming, we would aim our bikes toward the Jehovah’s Witnesses towers and ride home. Those of us who, like me, didn’t have bikes would ride on someone else’s handlebar. When we rode in a straight line, like the cars of a train, I’d be in front, the horn and the smoke announcing our arrival.
That summer, I went into The Room with a boy. After a few minutes of not saying anything, hardly even breathing, he put his hand on my chest. I said, “Hey.” I thought my voice would come out high like an alarm but it came out low and quiet, with a lot of space around it. I felt the heat from his palm pass through my shirt. He moved his hand slowly across my chest and down. “Hey,” I said. There it was again, not the alarm but the quiet. He stopped, his hand resting against my stomach. Neither of us moved. I touched my fingers to his wrist and then his forearm. Goose bumps formed beneath my fingertips. The boy shifted a little. I heard someone walking by outside. The footsteps came toward us and then went away. The boy slipped his other hand around my waist. I closed my eyes and followed the goose bumps up his arm, my fingers slipping under his shirtsleeve to rest on his shoulder. He leaned closer, his hand on my back now, his fingers pressing softly into me. Someone’s mother called her name. It wasn’t mine, but I opened my eyes anyway and backed out of the box.
The Gangster We Are All Looking For Page 4
