by Gary Soto
"But we might change." I tapped my left knee to illustrate a point. "Our legs are short right now, but I think they're going to grow. Then our arms won't drag on the ground anymore."
"And our ears will magically fold back?" Joey asked snidely.
"Yeah—it could happen." I remembered Mom telling me that life is a continual change—we are babies with no teeth, then babies with teeth, then kids, then teenagers with acne, and then adults whose hair and teeth fall out.
Joey pondered my argument. He peeled a piece of bark and flicked it to the ground.
"Life is about change," I remarked.
"Maybe," he muttered.
My best friend had a great mom and a good dad. His grades were above average, higher than mine, and he could wrestle anyone. Wasn't life good? So what if a few pimples dotted his face? I sighed. Joey was in love, and his dream girl was somewhere in our little town doing cartwheels, backflips, and other daring exercises.
Then an image of Coach Bear played on the screen in the back of my mind. I had to hunt him down and get him to apologize.
"I got to go," I announced abruptly. I dropped like a cat to the ground, landing on my feet.
"Eat and run—is that it?" Joey asked. He feigned anger, but I could see that he was fitting his earbuds back into his ears. I wasn't concerned that he would wallow in loneliness; he had the Gnats to listen to.
"I got to do something," I called up to him. "I'll be back."
I jumped on my bike and returned to the barbershop to ask Uncle Vic if he knew where Coach Bear lived. However, I found my uncle asleep in his barber chair. His mouth was open and a rattling sound issued from its dark cavern. I tiptoed to a chair in the corner. I was determined not to disturb my uncle's departure to dreamland.
To kill time as I waited for him to wake up, I picked up the community newspaper and, to my surprise, discovered that a reporter had covered last night's awards banquet. There was a photo of two awardees—and me, next to them!
"I'll call him," I whispered. The writer was named Gerry Young and his telephone number was listed in the paper. I got up and, like a sneak, used the telephone hanging in the hallway that led to the restroom. It was the heavy black rotary dial kind that maybe some old president might have used in the 1950s.
"Young," a voice announced.
I stalled.
"Who is this?" There was annoyance in his voice. "Is this you, Jason?"
"No, it's me, Ronnie Gonzalez," I answered. "I was at the awards banquet last night."
"What's this about?"
I told him that my best friend was the boy who had climbed into the rafters last night.
"Tell him I want to talk to him!" Mr. Young demanded. His son Jason's baseball team, he said, needed a good center fielder, and though he didn't know if Joey could catch a ball, he had been impressed by Joey's athleticism.
"I guess I can," I said. I then advanced my question. "Do you know where Coach Bear—I mean, Mr. Puddlefield—lives?"
"Why?"
"I have something to return to him."
"How old are you?"
I swallowed and answered, "Forty."
Mr. Young laughed and said, "Stop monkeying around. If you were forty you'd be out playing golf or fishing. That's where Puddlefield is every Saturday."
I paused before I asked, "Which is it, sir? Golf or fishing?" I felt my palms moisten with sweat.
"Fishing, I'd guess. And about your friend—what's his name—tell him to call me. The season's just started. We're only two games out of first."
I risked another question.
"Where's he fishing, Mr. Young?"
Usually at French Creek, he informed me, and was promising to buy Joey a pair of cleats and the uniform, if need be, when I hung up.
I started a tiptoeing trek out of the barbershop when my uncle's eyes peeled open briefly The eyes closed again, and I got out of there, closing the door carefully My uncle needed rest from plowing the heads of the men and boys of Pinkerton.
Outside town flows a creek where teenagers gather to stare at the water and sometimes fight, hurl rocks at feral cats, and string cusswords together in new ways. Joey and I didn't fight, or cuss, or consider it our place to hurt the animal kingdom. But we occasionally hauled our loneliness to the creek.
"We're ugly," I recalled Joey lamenting one day when the sky was gray as cement. A depressing fog had settled into the valley.
"How ugly?" I asked.
We were seated on the creek's bank, tossing pebbles into the gray water, where ugly fish showed their faces now and then. Frogs croaked in the reeds and once or twice they revealed themselves—dang, they were way ugly, too. We ate powdery white doughnuts and swigged sodas, a luxury because most of the time we were too broke to splurge like that.
"I don't know how ugly. We just are."
That was two weeks before we turned thirteen and became chimpanzees. In the bathroom mirror, we faced the splayed ears, the flat nose, the bristles of hair on our chins, the arms hanging like garden hoses from our shoulders, and the short, short legs. There was also the side-to-side gait. Why couldn't we have straight noses and long legs like our classmates? Was life cruel, or what?
Now I searched the creek for Coach Bear, the sun flickering behind the leaves of tall eucalyptus. I passed two boys I knew from school—they were hunched like vultures on a downed tree—and grew silent as a cat when I heard Cory's voice somewhere nearby. He was bragging about sighting a dead dog three weeks ago. Cory said that the dog must be really messed up by now.
My heart thumped. Sweat clung to the new growth of hair on my upper lip. I wiped the sweat away and scampered up the creek, freezing to a standstill whenever I thought I heard Cory's voice.
Farther up the creek bank, I found Coach Bear sitting in a small chair, like a king on a dinky throne. He was wearing a hat adorned with a lot of colorful fishing lures, hooks, and a San Francisco Giants button. He was staring sadly at the current's slow chug.
"Something's bugging Coach," I muttered.
"Coach," I called as I high-stepped through the weeds. The dull gaze he presented to the slowly moving current was the same one I recognized on Joey's face.
"Coach Puddlefield!" I waved.
Coach Bear turned his attention to me and blinked.
He called, "Rios."
"Nah, Coach. Gonzalez. Rios is Joey."
Coach Bear's mouth flattened to a line. Maybe he was still angry.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"I was just walking by." I sneaked a peek at the fish in his red plastic bucket. Two were smallish and one was so big he was poking out. His head was above the water and his gills were pulsating desperately. I lifted the big fellow out of the bucket and turned him the other way. His face was pointed down so he could breathe—funny how we would die if our faces were in water and fish would die if their faces were out of water and breathing air.
I got to the point.
"Coach," I started, "I was looking for you. I'm here because you hurt Joey's feelings."
Coach Bear blinked his puffy eyes.
"You see," I continued. "You see, he fell in love with a girl last night, you know, the one who got the gymnastics award." I threw my hands up as I dramatically played out Joey's heroism of retrieving the balloon from way above. Here, I craned my neck skyward until it hurt.
"He's in love?" Coach Bear mumbled. "What does he know about love?"
I hesitated. Yeah, what did Joey know about love? Probably a lot because he had more books than me and once had a pen-pal relationship with a girl from Iceland. So I answered, "Plenty, Coach."
Coach Bear grumbled.
"Couldn't you tell? He took it like—" I considered the plight of the fish whose tail was sticking out of the bucket. "Like that guy there, the one you caught. He was hurting all over, but mostly in the heart."
Coach Bear regarded the preposterously giant fish that could feed a family of four, and maybe their cat, too. He sighed and said, "You know, I th
ought about that after I cleaned up."
"You called him a monkey—and do you know where he is now?" Coach began to ooze guilt in the form of sweaty nervousness.
"In a tree?" Coach Bear squeaked.
"That's right!"
His eyes glazed over with shame. "Yeah, I guess it's my fault."
I offered a description of Joey's condition. He had been up in the tree in front of his house since before dawn and was living mostly on bananas, pineapples, and apples, plus the generosity of his mother who had baked him banana bread and served homemade lemonade.
"See, Coach, you're already married and know what love is." Now, Coach Bear no longer looked to me like a massive king on a small throne but a fat little boy in a short high chair.
"You got it wrong, Gonzalez. I'm not married." He gazed into the bushes across the creek when he made this pronouncement.
I pointed out his wedding band.
"I can't take it off. Finger's too fat." He shrugged and corrected himself by saying he was married, but separated.
I was respectfully silent. I was convinced that Coach Bear was lonely, and—was it possible?—that he, born and raised in Pinkerton, had once nursed his young loneliness on the banks of this same creek, where the myth goes that two lovers once debarked on an inner tube and were never heard from again.
"Coach," I said softly. "Go visit Joey. Before it gets dark." The sun was wheeling west. In four hours the shadows would begin to creep up from nowhere. I gave him the address.
Coach sighed and absently touched his ring. He asked, "You want a fish?"
I chose the giant fish and left Coach casting his lonely eyes on the water. A hundred or so yards upstream, I returned the fish to the creek. I had asked for mercy from Coach, and I had to demonstrate mercy.
I bid good-bye to that granddaddy fish and sneaked away, catlike. Somewhere Cory lurked in the weeds. Nature could be dangerous.
Chapter 6
I returned home to fill up on bananas and apples, plus a heaping bowl of Froot Loops, and to wash my face and comb my hair. I had to get back to finding Jessica, but first I had to clean up. To get rid of the fish smell, I sprayed myself with cologne, a fine mist of sweetness settling around my throat. Since turning thirteen, I had become obsessed with my appearance, not to mention the scent I threw off.
I was gargling a mint-flavored mouthwash when the front door opened and my mom's voice crowed, "Ronnie, are you home?"
I went out to the living room. "Hi, Mom," I greeted with my fresh breath.
"It was a good day. I sold a lot," she announced as she set down her briefcase. She was happy but tired. Stepping out of her pumps, she moved slowly to her recliner, where after dinner she would park herself and spend an evening watching television.
A good son, I moved quickly into the kitchen to start the kettle—Mom was a tea person. Tea and cookies were her reward for hard and occasionally insulting work. How many times had she felt the breeze of slammed doors? Plenty, I think.
I returned to the living room and waved a hand at the Sacagawea coins on the coffee table. They were safe and sound. I asked if she wanted me to polish them.
"No, that's okay. They're pretty the way they are."
"I've been busy today, too," I remarked.
She presented me with a brief smile as she picked up the TV Guide resting on the arm of the recliner.
"I've been looking for this girl," I unwisely announced.
The TV Guide dropped from Mom's hands. Was that a storm brewing in her eyes?
"You have a girlfriend?" she asked, none too kindly. "You're too young to have a girlfriend. You should be like other boys and still be playing in mud."
"Nah, Mom, not for me. For Joey." I unfolded the story about Joey and Jessica, and how all signs indicated that he was smitten by love.
"It can't be love," Mom responded. She turned her attention to the television, off at the moment but an object for her eyes to settle on.
"But it is love. You should have seen him hyperventilate." In truth, he had drooled and leaked a tear. Plus, his knees had become so flaccid that his arms—I swear!—momentarily dragged on the gym floor. I was embellishing this love story with a scene of how Jessica had offered Joey a lock of her hair when the kettle began to sing. I hurried to the kitchen, fixed Mom a cup of tea, and arranged three pig cookies on a plate.
"Very nice," she declared when I returned. She seemed to have forgotten the story of my best friend. She excitedly described her five sales and sipped her tea. She gingerly nibbled the feet off the pig cookies.
"That's great, Mom." I tried to share in her happiness.
I grew courageous as I forged a question that I had been wanting to ask my mom since I turned thirteen.
"Mom, do I look like a chimpanzee?"
Mom lowered her teacup to her lap. She asked me to turn my head sideways, which I did. She offered a long Hmmmm. She then asked me to rattle my head from side to side. Again, a long Hmmmm. I obeyed her orders to jump up and down and to beat my fists against my chest. She pointed to the doorframe and asked me to swing from it. This was a piece of cake because I had years of practice.
"Yes, you are a monkey," she concluded as she brought the cup of tea back to her mouth. A smile sneaked from the corners of her mouth.
"Mom!" I bawled. She was making fun of me.
"But you are my little monkey." She placed the teacup on the floor. She patted her lap and I jumped onto her cushionlike softness. Mom mumbled how I was growing up to become a nice young man, but could I please not use so much cologne? She sneezed and rubbed her nose.
Too big to sit there long, I was soon out of her lap. If Mom watched Animal Planet, she would be more knowledgeable about nature. After all these years, she couldn't judge the difference between a monkey and a chimpanzee. But I figured I'd give her a break. Didn't she provide me with bananas and apples on a daily basis? And what about that blender with forty-four speeds she got me for Christmas?
"Oh, I forgot something," she exclaimed with a pig cookie in her mouth. She rifled through her briefcase for her notepad. "I want you to do a delivery for me."
She sent me to the garage for a box of Glorietta sunscreens, her best seller. In summer Pinkerton roasted under a sun that dazed the rich and poor alike, a sun that by summer's end turned all us kids dark as raisins.
The quest for Jessica would have to wait. I found the box without much difficulty, though I had to climb over stuff in the garage, including my old trike.
"Is this it?" I asked Mom when I got back to the living room. She was sitting with her feet in a pan of hot water. Her feet, already big and flat, were magnified by the water. They were way scary.
Mom lowered her reading glasses onto her nose, poked a hand into the box, and pulled out two tubes of sunscreen. She next sent me to her bedroom for two small boxes—Rainy Times Scrub Gel and Forever Young Skin Lotion.
"I want you to deliver this." She read the name scrawled in her tablet. "Her name is Mrs. Puddlefield and lives over on Barton."
"Mrs. Puddlefield? Coach Bear's wife?" I pictured Coach Bear on the edge of the slow-moving creek.
"That's the lady." Mom wiggled her toes in the pan of hot water. I couldn't help but conjure up an image of the fish in Coach Bear's bucket.
I was soon on my bike with a plastic bag of Glorietta Cosmetics swinging from the handlebars. I rode speedily, pumped up on fruit and six fistfuls of Froot Loops. It was late afternoon, almost four. I still had to track down Jessica by dusk, by which time porch lights would come on and moths the size of bats would flutter around them.
I easily found Mrs. Puddlefield's house on Barton Street. The house was nice and yellowy. There were yellow daffodils and a yellow swing where, I assumed, Mr. and Mrs. Puddlefield had rocked away the evenings when they used to be together. I theorized that Coach Bear, a large man, would have tilted the swing his way. Maybe he had even tipped it over on some evenings when the swing really got going.
I knocked on the front door and
swallowed nervously as I heard footsteps.
A young woman with yellow hair answered. "Yes?"
"Hi, I'm Ronnie Gonzalez." I explained that I was the son of the woman who sold Glorietta Cosmetics and had a delivery. I held up the plastic bag to make my point.
The young woman's face softened.
"I know who you are." She beamed happily as she accepted the purchase. "Coach Puddlefield's my dad. You're the one who climbed the rafters last night."
I stalled briefly, but confessed without shame that I would never attempt such an athletic feat.
"You sure? I was there with my boyfriend. You look like the boy." She opened the plastic bag and brought her face to it—she sniffed and remarked that the contents smelled nice.
"I'm sure," I maintained. "I'm Ronnie and my friend is Joey. Joey's the one who climbed up there."
Still, Coach Bear's daughter appeared puzzled. She was positive that I was the one who had retrieved the balloon.
Mrs. Puddlefield edged herself into the doorway. I rigged a smile. "My mom told me to deliver you your products."
The daughter pressed the bag into her mother's arms and disappeared when the cell phone in the waistband of her jeans began to sing a melody. I was thinking of getting out of there, as my job was done, when Mrs. Puddlefield, fiddling with a curler on her head, asked, "Can you do something for me?"
"I guess. What?"
"Climb up on the roof."
"Climb up on the roof," I echoed. She, too, held the notion that I was Joey, the boy who could scale dangerous heights and live to tell his story. I didn't take the time to correct her. I would just help her out and be on my way.
Mrs. Puddlefield leaned a ladder against the house and sent me up to the roof, where I was instructed to turn on the water valve to the evaporator cooler. It was an easy task, and provided me a moment to view the tidy street where neighbors were lacing their lawns with crystal-like fertilizers and children were patting beach balls back and forth. In backyards, laundry swung in the breeze, dogs frolicked, and a father was scouring a barbecue grill with an old rag.
