by Gary Soto
“Better?”
“When I'm cleaned up,” he clarified. When he started to walk away, the cigarette already in his mouth, Gabe called, “Dad, your stuff.”
His dad paused, smiled, and remarked weakly, “Yeah, my stuff.” He peeked into one of the bags. He brought out a Raiders T-shirt and pressed it to his chest. “Just my size—big. Thanks, Gabe.”
His dad ambled away, skirting the outfield, where the center fielder stood with a large mitt hanging at his side. Gabe almost ran after him, but he felt that his dad was embarrassed by his own failure. His hurt was not an injured eye, or an abused liver or damaged kidneys. His hurt was closer to his heart.
After the baseball game, the vultures by the kiddie pool approached Gabe in the parking lot—he had gotten to the gate and was going to cross the street for a soda. His instincts had been correct. The big vulture was Frankie Torres, who looked taller than Gabe, certainly uglier, and maybe stronger inside his baggy shirt and pants. Or was it just the way he was walking, with a swagger, his hands out like a gunslinger?
“Hey, ugly!” Frankie barked.
Gabe kept walking.
“I said, ‘ugly’!” Frankie barked again.
Gabe could hear the scramble of running feet, and he noticed shadows to the left of him. He swung around to face Frankie, who had a pumpkin seed shell hanging from his lower lip. Frankie licked his lip and the shell disappeared. “This is Holmes, not Romain—you in the wrong playground!”
Gabe breathed in and out as he tried to remain calm. He was sandwiched between them, like a little brown piece of bologna. Frankie had gotten bigger and meaner—and even more stupid. He had a homemade tattoo etched near his thumb, a little blue cross that was anything but religious. He also had a gold cross tucked into his white T-shirt, but what was Jesus to him?
“You feel me?” Frankie asked with spite, and pushed a finger into Gabe's chest.
“I'm on the team,” Gabe answered, aware that he had inflated his chest. He couldn't back down to Frankie. “And don't touch me!”
“The girl team that lost?”
Gabe didn't offer an answer. From the corner of his eyes, he could see the winning team from Kerman milling near the white vans, which had their engines and air conditioners running. The Kerman coach was handing out sodas and bottles of water, thirstquenching liquids Gabe himself could use right then. His mouth was dry, with fear, he realized.
“You a girl,” Frankie slurred.
“And boys don't hurt girls, right?” Gabe answered back.
“You getting bad with me, ese?” Frankie asked, stabbing his own chest with a finger.
His crew of homeys was smaller than Frankie. They were fifth graders, maybe sixth graders, learning the trade on the playground. They were learning ways to get to prison before they reached adulthood.
“Come on, Frankie, you and me go back years,” Gabe argued. “Why you treating me this way?”
Frankie sneered and pushed his face so close to Gabe's that they were almost kissing. The thought of them bringing their lips together disgusted Gabe. Frankie had Cheeto stains in the corners of his mouth.
Gabe had had enough. He stepped back, breathed in some good air, and said, “Why you sound so stupid, Frankie?”
“WHAT!” Frankie bellowed, his eyes wide with anger as he stepped back. The chain on his chest slithered like a snake.
Gabe remembered reading about preemptive strikes in defense of national security, and he decided that while his body was no nation, he had better strike before Frankie unloaded on him. Why let the other guy hit first? So he palm-slapped Frankie to the side of the head and followed up with a left and right into his stomach. Gabe pushed away and bopped with his fists up—let the homeys try to get him. They were only fifth graders.
While Frankie was bent over, catching his breath, the littlest homey threw a roundhouse that glanced off Gabe's shoulder. Gabe stepped back and threw a clean shot into the little homey's nose. Blood blossomed like a red carnation. The little homey, now bent over as Frankie straightened up, held his nose with both hands, as if he were going to sneeze.
Then it was on, a scrimmage under the amber lights of the parking lot.
Gabe took a barrage of fists as Frankie and the second little homey began to bang. There were moans, and the sound of skin against skin—knuckles against faces, elbows raking jaws, an off-balance kick that grazed forearms. Gabe was rocked twice, but he kept his hands up, bouncing on his tiptoes, like a pro fighter. His hours of watching mixed martial arts were paying off. He was getting shots in, and taking a few. He wiped his knuckles against his pants: one of the homeys had greasy hair.
Coach Rodriguez, lugging a duffel bag, appeared at the gate. He called, “Hey! Hey!”
Gabe moved away after he rocked the littlest homey a second time. But as he retreated a few steps, Gabe realized that he was hurt. He touched his mouth and looked at the blood on his fingertips. His right eye was beginning to swell.
“I'll get you later!” Frankie cried.
Gabe didn't answer back. He was out of breath and bent over with a string of blood dangling like dental floss from his mouth.
As Coach Rodriguez approached in long, purposeful strides, Frankie skipped backward, aware it was all over. He sneered and raised a middle finger, first at Gabe, then the coach. He fled, with the two homeys flanking him.
Coach Rodriguez sidled up to Gabe, placed a large hand on his shoulder, and bent down to examine his face. There was swelling around his mouth, the puffy eye, and an ear that was red and pulsating from a roundhouse punch.
“You'll be all right.” Coach gripped Gabe's chin and turned it left, then right. He reached down into the duffle bag, brought out his first-aid kit, and began to dab Gabe's wounds with rubbing alcohol.
Gabe flinched from the sting and the rough swabbing of a Q-tip. There was nothing soft about the coach.
“Who were those kids?” Coach asked, as he recapped the bottle of rubbing alcohol. He began to unwrap a Band-Aid.
“I don't know,” Gabe answered, mulling over the word kids. Frankie, his one-time friend from Romain Playground, was no longer a kid. He was a thug, a bully, a future dropout, and a large-headed fool with Cheetos on his breath. It was only a matter of time before he lay on a prison cot.
Coach Rodriguez scanned the part of the playground where Frankie and his wannabe gangsters had disappeared. He asked, “And who was that man?”
“What man?”
“The man in the outfield, the one you were talking to.” He knelt down to clap shut the first-aid kit. Even on his knees, he was nearly as tall as Gabe. Coach Rodriguez was a big man.
Gabe hesitated before he answered honestly, “My father.” He touched his mouth. It was hot and swollen.
Coach Rodriguez rose to his feet and turned when he heard Pablo grunting under the weight of two duffel bags filled with bats, catcher's masks, balls, and shin guards. “Did you get everything?” he asked.
“Yeah, I did,” Pablo answered and set the equipment at his feet. He looked at Gabe's injured face, but didn't say anything.
Coach Rodriguez's attention returned to Gabe. He touched Gabe's shoulder and asked, “Your father?”
Without shame, Gabe divulged the story of his family, beginning with how his mother got pregnant when they were in high school (he learned this piece of information from his Uncle Mathew), how his father had become addicted to gambling online, and how he had started drinking from noon until evening. He left out the squabbles his parents got into every weekend.
“He, like, left us a long time ago.”
Coach Rodriguez bit his lower lip, reflected, and said, “I'm sorry to hear all this.” His eyes seemed darkened. “I had a father like that, too.”
“And he's like homeless.”
Gabe looked in the direction of the baseball diamond on the other side of the field. The adult players were now out there, older men with guts falling over their belts, men who had never left the playground behind.
&nb
sp; “You need a ride home?” Coach asked, shouldering his duffle bags after spouting some words of encouragement. They were well-worn words—“Stay strong, don't let it get you down, I'll be there for you.” Still, Gabe appreciated Coach Rodriguez.
“Nah, I got my bicycle.”
But he was wrong about that. When he and Pablo returned to the dugout, they discovered their bikes gone.
“This is messed up,” Pablo protested. “I'm going to hurt someone.” He eyed three little kids in the bleachers. They were blowing bubbles, dipping plastic wands into bottles of suds and poking the bubbles into extinction. Pablo climbed the wooden steps and barked, “You see who stole our bikes?” He loomed over the kids as if the theft was their fault. The oldest of the three said, “Some boys.”
In Gabe's mind, it was Frankie who had rolled their bikes away. Frankie did it.
Disgruntled, the boys walked out of the playground to First Street, which was busy with traffic, taco trucks, and shirtless kids on bikes. Gabe was sure that he recognized his bike, and Pablo thought the same. They called out, “Hey,” but the kids on the bikes popped wheelies, gave them the finger, and made their escape. It was a hot night, and everyone was seeking some kind of trouble.
Gabe rolled home that night about nine. He removed the Band-Aid from his face before he opened the front door. He didn't want to worry his mother, who was on the couch, the remote in her hand, watching a repeat of American Idol. When he broke the news about his bike, she just sighed.
“I hooked him up with some clothes,” Gabe announced, when the program was muted during a commercial.
His mother's face showed that she knew who he was talking about. She sat up and ran a hand through her hair, pulling in such a way that Gabe could see white at the roots.
“What happened to your lip?” she asked, not bothering to push off the couch for a closer look. “And your eye seems all red. Did you get into a fight?”
He lied. He told her that a grounder had kicked up and smacked him in the face.
“Oh,” she answered. She looked at the television and zapped it off in the middle of one idol shifting his microphone from his left hand to his right. No matter which way he held the mike, the Asian boy couldn't sing.
After taking a shower, spooning out the center of a cold watermelon, and watching a sweaty bout of mixed martial arts on television, he reluctantly visited his bedroom, which was still an oven. The swamp cooler churned at full speed, but the house's stucco held in the day's heat. He raised a window: no breeze.
“It's got to be global warming,” he muttered.
In spite of the neighbor's amber safety light, he could see the stars pulsating. He wondered if there was cool air up in the stratosphere, and if God was keeping it all to himself.
Gabe slept uneasily. The only sounds in the backyard came from the crickets in the weedy flowerbeds and along the fence. The night had settled. There was no wail of cop cars. The rowdy Garcia family down the street had tired and gone to bed. Not even the helicopters frisked yards and alleys for crime.
At three in the morning, the pie tins in the garden began to bang. Gabe woke with a start. He peered out his window, waited, and listened. Minutes later, he saw a scurrying movement and heard grass crunching under footsteps. If his heart had been a rabbit, it would have leapt out of his body and scampered away.
In the dark, he looked around his room for something to use for protection. He found a small, souvenir bat his Uncle Jerry had bought him at a San Francisco Giants game. He grabbed it, and as he stood up, he faced the mirror over the chest. Even in the dark, he could see his own worried reflection. He was scared, yet not scared. A mixture of emotions creased his brow.
He crawled over his bed and listened to the figure cross the yard and finally scale the fence. Whoever the intruder was, he was nimble on his feet—or her feet. Maybe the homeless weren't the only ones who were letting themselves into the yard and stealing whatever they pleased. Maybe the rumor was circulating that Gabe's family had tasty, vine-ripened red tomatoes. With the price of produce in stores, why shop when you could hop a fence and help yourself?
Gabe closed his eyes again and slept a dreamless sleep.
When he woke at eight thirty, his mom had already gone to work. Gabe fixed himself a plate of huevos con weenies, plus two tortillas and a glass of milk. To finish off his breakfast, he ate three Fig Newtons, which he was washing down with a second glass of milk when Pablo called.
Early that morning, Pablo had returned to the playground, where he found their bikes stripped—the handlebars, pedals, and seats were gone. Worse, the spokes were kicked in, he said. Whoever stole the bikes had punished them for fun.
“Come and see for yourself,” Pablo said.
Gabe agreed to meet his friend in fifteen minutes. After he locked up the house, he surveyed the backyard. The tomatoes, bright as Christmas ornaments, hung heavily on the vines. Whoever had visited his yard last night had left shoe prints. He thought of Frankie and his crew, of his father, of the homeless in search of a place to sleep.
“It's going to be hot,” Gabe remarked, wincing at the sky.
He walked a mile to Pablo's house, not in the least concerned about the older men, the vatos locos, who sat on high porches, shirtless and tattooed, watching the street. Their running days were over. They were now fathers and husbands (or ex-husbands) with front-row seats to la vida loca, the crazy times in the neighborhood. It was cheap entertainment—beer, sunflower seeds, and the best view of every car, truck, baby stroller, bike, skateboard, and motorized scooter that rolled up the street.
When Gabe saw the remains of their bikes behind Pablo's garage, he rolled his hand into a fist. He was against fighting, mainly because he always got hurt, but now he was furious.
“Who do you think did it?” Gabe asked. “Frankie?”
“Nah, the fool didn't have time. He's too busy playing out his role with his wannabes.” Pablo peered at Gabe's face and asked: “Does it hurt?” His hand was touching his own mouth.
Gabe touched his tender lip, no longer puffy. “Nah, just when I laugh. And I ain't laughing right now.” Squatting, he plucked music from a bent spoke.
“We'll never know,” Pablo said calmly. “But I'm going to get new wheels.”
Gabe knew where they were headed: to the house of Manny Treviño, an old-school vato loco who sold bikes and bike parts from his living room. You could put in an order for anything, including cars and boats, and Manny would do his best to get it for you. The prices were good, and the merchandise first-rate.
Manny was a heavyset man who wore oil-stained jeans obscenely low on his wide hips. His customary white T-shirt reached only as far as his belly button. He was a veteran: not of foreign wars, but of the streets of southeast Fresno. He had done six months here, six months there. His last stop for time-out was Happy Valley Prison in Coalinga, where he plucked chickens at the prison meat-processing factory—for this work, he only had to serve four months of a six-month sentence, and he got the chance to learn about poultry. He learned so much about poultry that he would never eat chicken again.
Manny's wife told Gabe and Pablo that he wasn't home, and he was not about to come home anytime soon. He had been busted trying to sell a plasma television to an undercover cop—he was back at Happy Valley and getting acquainted with poultry again. Manny's wife scorched their ears about her husband being stupid.
“Did he care about me?” she roared. “No, I told him to stick to bicycles, but what does he do? He thinks there's more money in TVs.”
The two boys slowly edged away from the front door, but Manny's wife stepped out onto the porch, intent on telling her story. She was dressed in a nightgown and slippers. She ranted about one of Manny's kids from a previous marriage—something about his stealing the microwave oven right out of her kitchen. How was she going to reheat her coffee now?
The two boys hurried away, wondering what to do next. They didn't have to wonder long, because sliding up the street was Frankie
Torres, with a larger posse than usual—the two little homeys-in-training, and two new boys, who were as large as refrigerators. They were wearing white T-shirts that hung to their knees.
“This is messed up,” Pablo remarked.
Gabe was glad he had double-knotted his shoelaces and drunk two glasses of cold water. He was certain that in a few seconds, sweat would pour out of him as he sped away from Frankie and crew.
Gabe and Pablo bolted up the street, past dogs barking behind chain-link fences and the old-school vatos locos watching the action from high porches.
They had to live long enough to at least start eighth grade.
Gabe and Pablo found safe haven under a tree at Romain Playground. Jamal, the rec leader, who was playing four-square with three barefoot little kids, was their savior. If Frankie appeared and started a ruckus, Jamal would grab him by the back of the neck, shove him out the gate, and yell, “I don't wanna see your ugly face for a week. Now get out!”
“Why is Frankie bothering me?” Gabe asked Pablo.
Pablo had stuck a blade of grass into his mouth and was chewing on it, savoring its natural sweetness. After a moment of reflection, he mumbled, “Practicing.”
Good answer, Gabe thought. He and Pablo had softball practice in summer. Practice drills for a homey like Frankie must involve messing people up.
When they left the playground, they skirted the block of Section 8 housing and crossed Belmont Avenue, stopping for sodas, which they drank in hurried gulps. They were still hungry for something solid, so they tripped back into the store, bought powdery doughnuts, and began meandering toward Gabe's house.
On Angus Street, someone shouted from a porch, “Hey, little dude, what happened to my dog?”
Gabe stopped in his tracks, his last doughnut on his thumb. He rotated clockwise and was surprised to see Lupe, the vato loco from the Fulton Mall. Because he was squinting in the sunlight, his face had a hurt look. He was shirtless, and Gabe saw that he had more muscle than usual for a man approaching forty. His hair had been cropped so close his skull looked blue.
“I want that dog back,” Lupe announced. There was no threat in his voice as he came down the wooden steps, hitching up his pants.
