When Dad Came Back

by Gary Soto

  As the two ran side by side, Gabe was envious of Pablo, who was not only good at sports but also a standout in school, a one-time spelling bee champ. Pablo had brainpower between his ears. Pablo once informed him, in private, so as not to embarrass Gabe, that an ignoramus meant not an extinct dinosaur but a stupid person.

  Besides smarts—Gabe swallowed this bitter truth like aspirin—girls liked Pablo. They liked him a lot. Between his shortened breaths, Gabe asked, “How's Veronica?”

  “Veronica Rodriguez?” Pablo asked.

  How many Veronicas does he know? Gabe had to wonder.

  “Yeah, Veronica Rodriguez,” he answered.

  “She changed her number,” Pablo said, without sadness. “Her dad made her, or something.”

  Dang, Gabe thought. If a girl had broken up with me, I would be shattered.

  As they jogged, Gabe rummaged through his memory, realizing that he had never had a real girlfriend, unless he could count Rebecca Garcia. In fifth grade, she had once filled her mouth with water from the drinking fountain and splashed it onto his shoes. The rumor then—she had given him a chocolate heart for Valentine's Day—was that she liked him. But in fifth grade, he was far more interested in soccer than in a girl who could spit a mouthful of water eight feet.

  As he and Pablo reached the baseball diamond, which was reserved for adult games at night, Gabe heard a voice calling, “Son.” He scanned the empty bleachers. His eyes finally fell on his dad standing in the dugout, which was littered with cups and candy wrappers. His dad's fingers gripped the chain-link fence in desperation.

  “Gabe, it's me,” his dad called. He rattled the fence. His wrists, Gabe noticed with embarrassment, were ringed with dark grime.

  Gabe grimaced. To escape the pathetic sight, he turned and began to jog back without Pablo. But Pablo sprinted and caught up with him. They ran in unison, even as Gabe picked up speed, trying to pull away. He should have known he couldn't outrun Pablo. Finally, when they slowed to a walk as they reached second base, Pablo remarked, “That guy was messed up.”

  Gabe stopped and bent over, panting. He touched second base with a toe—momentarily safe from his dad.

  “It seemed like he knows you,” Pablo said, after his breathing slowed.

  Gabe stood up, wiped his sweaty face with the hem of his T-shirt, and answered, “Yeah, I know him. He's my dad.” The truth was embarrassing.

  “Oh,” Pablo replied, and looked down at his shoes.

  Gabe was roused by a deep emotion that almost made him cry. During infield practice, Pablo, crouching with his glove lowered to the dusty field, let the ball—an easy dribbler that a three-year-old could have picked up—bounce off his shoe. Pablo, a bad actor, looked around frantically, as if he couldn't locate the ball in time to hurl it to first. But Gabe knew better. Pablo did it for him. He did it because Gabe had such an embarrassment for a father.

  Gabe would remember Pablo's gesture for a long time.

  At home, he showered, watched television, and went to sleep to the squeaking of the swamp cooler. In the middle of the night, the sound of pie tins clanging woke him. He peered out the window, his eyes adjusting to the darkness, and followed a movement across the lawn. By then, his mother had turned off the swamp cooler. The night was quiet, with crickets chirping in the yard. From Tulare Street, a bad muffler popped like gunfire.

  It might be him, Gabe thought. He got out of bed. His heart thumped as he tiptoed through the kitchen and opened the back door. His own cat, Gordo, spooked him by rubbing against his ankle. He shoved the cat inside and slowly descended the steps in his bare feet, amazed that the cement landing was still hot from the day.

  In the dark, Gabe called in a husky voice, “Who's there?”

  The neighbor's dog offered a single bark in response. The crickets momentarily quit their racket, and a breeze sighed through the apricot tree.

  Gabe made out the baseball bat propped against the garage. He called again, “Who's there?” He grabbed the bat. His chest heaved in anticipation of swinging at an onrushing body.

  The neighbor's porch light cut across part of their lawn, but its orange glow didn't reach the far end of the yard, where there was a pile of lumber, a broken-down lawn mower, the skeleton of his old bike, and a stack of four chrome rims—Gabe had rolled them home after finding them in the alley, certain that he could sell them in a yard sale. Two years later, they were pitted with rust.

  He advanced cautiously into the darkened area of the lawn, baseball bat cocked. He waited until his eyes adjusted to the night. He couldn't make out the figure that he had seen from his bedroom window. While he stood listening for sounds, a chill sent goose bumps up his arms. Was this fear or a cold shiver from the dewy lawn? He gazed up at the sky and the stars spread over the heavens.

  Why did my dad come back? Gabe asked privately. Why? Why?

  A strong breeze rattled the pie tins. The neighbor's dog whined, and the crickets, those little insects in armor, once again began to chirp. Then there was a sound of footsteps in the alley. Gabe, heart charged with terror, hurried to look: three homeys were scaling the neighbor's fence. Had they been in his yard and found nothing but tomatoes, his cat Gordo sleeping on the picnic table, and a pile of debris?

  The Mendozas lived in a small house near downtown, in a neighborhood of dilapidated houses and Section 8 apartments. Radios and loud televisions screamed from these apartments, and arguments that regularly grew into outright fights. At dark, people looking for trouble—or who were already in trouble—ghosted the streets in search of the livelihood called thievery. It was not unusual to hear gunshots at night, or grunts from body blows in the alley, or neighbors yelling obscenities from porches: “Hey, get away from my car, sucka!” How many times had he awakened to the thumping sounds of a helicopter, the whirling blades shaking the trees?

  Gabe returned to his bedroom, fell asleep, and had a nightmare in which he was wading neck-deep in water. The next morning he investigated the garden for clues and found two smashed tomatoes and evidence of shoe prints.

  It had to be his dad.

  His dad hadn't always been a deadbeat. One summer, when Gabe was six years old, they had gone to Bass Lake, where mosquitoes, thick as campfire smoke, orbited his head and feasted on his blood. But they'd still had fun fishing and skipping rocks. Another summer, they vacationed at Aunt Daisy's home in San Jose. The grown-ups got the extra bedroom and the kids—he and his cousins—slept in a tent in the backyard.

  “It's like camping,” his dad had said as he carried two blankets into the tent and handed the kids Gatorade bottles refilled with water. For a snack, he gave them each a candy bar. Gabe and his cousins ate the candy right away, leaving the wrappers near their chocolate-covered hands as they drifted to sleep. When they woke before daylight, they discovered ants scurrying down the length of their arms. They had gone to bed sticky and woke up screaming.

  It was his hero dad who doused their arms with the garden hose and softly patted away the ants, which were shriveled like commas.

  Life was good, then. His dad worked at Office Depot. He had advanced quickly from stock clerk to assistant manager. Because of his hard work, his dad was named Regional Manager of the Month. He got his photo up on the wall for that month and a weekend getaway at a resort in Half Moon Bay.

  It had been fun at that resort, even though it was a freezing December and they couldn't stroll on the beach very long. But Gabe had collected shells, rocks, and sticks, plus seaweed that he stuffed into a plastic trash bag and took home to show friends. For Gabe, the best experience was the Jacuzzi in their suite—he'd thought they were staying in a sweet, but later he learned the word meant a large, fancy room.

  A Jacuzzi in their suite. The memory was real. How he had giggled and squirmed when his dad picked him up and placed him in the center of the giant tub, jets churning the water. Gabe's mother was out shopping, so their escapade in the Jacuzzi had been a father-and-son secret. How they had laughed when his dad poured a bottle of
shampoo into the bubbling tide, which then began to overflow the sides of the tub.

  But even then, Gabe recalled, there had been beer bottles set on the edge of that huge tub, and through the bathroom fog, he could see the bottles lined up like soldiers on the floor. Later, they floated like buoys in the water.

  Gabe's mother announced that she was going to skip work—at least a couple of hours—in order to file a restraining order. Gabe decided to join her.

  At City Hall, on the fifth floor, there was a long line of strollers and mothers gossiping with other mothers. Some of the babies were sirens that wouldn't turn off, even when you plugged their mouths with pacifiers.

  “Ay, Dios mío,” his mother complained under her breath. “It'll be tomorrow by the time I get to the front. Look at all these people.”

  Gabe was also surprised. Were all these women seeking restraining orders against lousy husbands, exes, or boyfriends? Gabe's blood boiled at the thought of men who hurt women. He promised himself that he would be a good man when he grew up.

  “I'll wait here,” his mother said. She instructed him to see how far the line went around the corner.

  Gabe wove his way around the corner, muttering, “Excuse me, excuse me.” He counted sixteen women. Most were mothers with babies in strollers or in their arms, and one was an older woman with a walker—the tennis balls attached to its feet were dirty and chewed up from the clawing about on sidewalks.

  Gabe recognized Linda Ramirez, a girl from school. When she turned, he could see she was biting a fingernail. He forced himself to look away. He didn't want to embarrass her, or himself.

  When he returned, his mother was rummaging through her purse. She brought out a handful of papers: old bills, receipts, coupons, used Kleenex, and gum wrappers.

  “Mom, the line's really long,” he told her. In truth, he didn't want his mother to file a restraining order against his dad. Sure, he was a deadbeat, but what had he done except parade his sadness in front of his son? He wanted to talk to his dad first. If the man proved to still be a scoundrel, Gabe would wake up early and be first in line at City Hall.

  “This is ridiculous!” she bawled. “I can't wait. I have to get to work!”

  They rode down the elevator in silence. When the doors opened with a sigh, Gabe was surprised to see a crowd trying to enter. None of the people pushing their way into the elevator seemed happy. One of them had bruises around her eyes—from lack of sleep, he hoped, and not from being slapped around.

  His mother drove off in their secondhand Toyota, and Gabe, with time to kick around and a dollar bill his mother had pressed into his hand for a soda, started in the direction of the library. He became immediately uneasy when he saw three homeys eyeing him like vultures. He recognized one of them—Frankie Torres. He used to hang with Frankie at Romain Playground when they were little. They used to play with squirt guns, shooting each other at close range and screaming with joy because the guns were filled with Kool-Aid. Gabe supposed Frankie would be packing something more deadly than a squirt gun now.

  Instinct told Gabe to retreat. He turned on the squeaky heels of his athletic shoes and headed back to City Hall. There, in the shadows of two beefy cops posted at the door, he wasted a few minutes of life by standing still, time enough for Frankie and crew to move on.

  Then Gabe came out of hiding and hurried off to the library. It was nine fifty, and the glass doors wouldn't open until ten. The morning was cloudless, the flags already hoisted but barely rippling from the slight breeze. Along with others—all homeless people, it seemed—Gabe lurked in the shade of the building. It was not yet midday, and already Gabe was flapping the front of his T-shirt as he struggled to cool himself off. He considered splurging on a soda, but common sense told him to delay the purchase until it was at least noon. He could always drink water from the library fountain.

  Then he heard, “Son! Gabe!”

  Approaching over the lawn, which was wet from an earlier dousing by the sprinklers, was his dad. He held a hand up to his forehead to shade his eyes. “I'm not your son,” Gabe muttered, backpedaling with short steps. He realized that he wasn't making sense—the man with wet shoes was his dad. What was wrong with his dad calling him son?

  His dad closed the distance between them. He was now leaving a trail of wet shoe prints on the cement in front of the library.

  “Gabe, please don't be like that.”

  “Like what?” Gabe snapped. “Like I don't see you for four years and then you show up as a bum?”

  When his dad lowered his face, a tear, an errant drop of water from the sprinkler, or a bead of sweat—Gabe wasn't sure which—splashed onto the pavement. The wet speck spread to the size of a dime and almost immediately began to evaporate in the sun. Gabe regretted his outburst.

  “I'm sick,” his dad claimed, with a faint, pitiful whine in his voice. “It's my stomach.” His dad gritted his teeth, deepened his grimace, and pressed a hand against his stomach.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Gabe saw a security guard behind the glass doors flip the closed sign to open. He heard the jingle of keys and the lock open with a clunk-clunk. The homeless crowd, gray as a pool of pigeons, began to gather at the door. They were hurrying to get on the Internet or locate the choice seats in the magazine alcove. They were thirsty and ready for the drinking fountain.

  “You're lying,” Gabe braved, when he returned his attention to his dad. “You just need a bath. That's your problem.”

  Gabe's dad said, “See what I have raised—a mean child.”

  “You didn't raise anyone!” Gabe snapped. Surprised by his own anger, he spouted, “You don't know me. I bet you don't even know my birthday.”

  “Gabe, please.”

  “When is it?” Gabe challenged.

  “Gabe, come on, give me a chance,” he pleaded.

  “You don't even know when your son was born. And you call yourself a father.”

  “I know, I know,” he agreed, his hands clasped together, as if in prayer. The long sleeves of his shirt fell back to reveal thin forearms.

  They stood in silence, face to face, in the shade of the library. Against his will, Gabe felt himself starting to soften. He wondered where his dad bedded down at night. Was it the Rescue Mission? In the courthouse park, or in an alley in Chinatown? Or maybe he squeezed himself between low-life transients near the freeway, where encampments lined a frontage road?

  “I quit drinking, Gabe. I've changed.”

  Gabe folded his arms across his chest—he didn't want to hear any of it.

  His dad again clasped his hands. “Gabe, I made mistakes.” He was in Alcoholics Anonymous, he said, AA. It wasn't a glamorous group. Some of the men were like him, homeless, and there were women, too. But they were all trying to stay sober.

  “Where are you staying?” Gabe asked. Like the polar caps, the ice in his heart had begun to melt. His dad was pathetically dirty—grime filled the lines on his neck. And his shoes? They didn't even match. He could see that his dad needed help. Would it cause too much trouble if he brought him home and let him take a shower? He could fix a sandwich for him and pour him a glass of ice tea.

  “Places,” his dad answered, in a near whisper. “They're not pretty.” His praying hands had fallen to his side, where his shirt cuffs hid them—the shirt had belonged to a bigger man.

  His dad's cheeks were sunken, his eyes weepy, his skin yellowish, and his hands trembling like leaves. He waved a hand, turned, and began to walk away. Gabe heard him mutter, “Where I'm staying, no one should stay.”

  Gabe was uncertain whether his dad was truthful. Was he really sick, deathly sick? Was it cancer, leukemia, or possibly AIDS? The ice around his heart continued to melt with a steady drip. His dad was destitute, with all his worldly possessions in that suitcase he dragged along like a shadow.

  Gabe thought of calling him, of saying, “Dad, don't go.” But words failed him.

  His dad walked away, shoulders slouched, and Gabe entered the library. He felt j
ittery. He got a drink of water at the fountain, and found a free computer monitor in the reference room. He looked up “cancer” on the Internet. He read the definition, which didn't say whether you lived or died from it. He looked up AIDS and TB—the photos were frightening.

  Remorseful, Gabe left the library, determined to find him. He waited in the shade of the library until his eyes adjusted to the bright sunlight. When he could see again, three men were ambling toward the library, with bundles on their backs. Their faces were gray or yellow or an unnatural orange, and their hands permanently grimy. When one opened his mouth to speak to another, he revealed a toothless cavern. Their collars were starched with filth.

  Gabe stepped away from the door to give room to these men who had no beds on which to toss their worn-out bones.

  Before Gabe tried to locate his dad, he wanted to tell his mother about their most recent encounter. But she was at work. To kill time until his mother got home, Gabe headed to Romain Playground, using a detour that took him through a dilapidated area where guard dogs flossed their sharp teeth on chain-link fences.

  Ever since he was a little kid with scabs on his elbows and knees, Romain Playground had been his second home. There, he climbed the rope of experience. He had had his first fight there, his first kiss on the cheek when he was in second grade, his first injury requiring stitches when he fell off the slide, and his first experience getting robbed. When he was a skinny eight-year-old, two older kids pushed him against the chain-link fence and plunged their hands into his pockets. They pulled out his stash of Tootsie Rolls. They chewed that muddy candy as they pushed him around. Finally, they walked away in search of other little kids to pounce on.

  At the playground, he watched the little kids in the pool playing tag. Their screams were pitched higher than an ambulance racing down the street at full throttle.