A Summer Life

by Gary Soto

  PART THREE

  ______

  The Hero

  TONY WAS HANDSOME and so strong that I stood next to him when baseball teams were chosen. I was picked third from the last, right before the kid with the eyeglasses taped together at the bridge, right before the fat kid with a river of blue veins on his belly.

  A slow pitch over the plate was nothing to Tony. The mousy scurry of a ball between short and third was nothing. A pop-up in a glaring sky was nothing. Tony was quick, fair when fights broke out, and the nickel in his pocket was yours if you asked. I kept my mouth busy with sunflower seeds, my fist popping in my mitt's pocket.

  I sat on a splintery bench those long innings while both teams scored a dozen runs. I clawed the chain link fence while everyone else became a hero. Their eyelids stung from the dust of sliding into second. Their hands were sweaty from standing in the outfield and pounding their gloves waiting for the ball to sail off a bad pitch. When a pitch connected on the wrong part of the bat an electric shock ran up their arms and died at the elbow. They were lucky to have these feelings.

  But I had my turn. I reached third base five times that summer and scored once when the wind peeled dirt around the plate, and the catcher, the boy with blue veins on his belly, couldn't see. The reason I made home, they said, was because I was skinny. I blended with the light, blended with the sand around the plate. Once, when I was hit in the back on a bad pitch, my teammates huddled over and begged Tony to let them take my place. Tony brought me to my feet by saying, “Try again.”

  Maybe Tony was smart. I don't know. But he was the first poet I knew. He thought a lot about life after childhood. Sitting on his lawn, he worried about the air. He said the mountains should be right there, and his finger was God's finger touching Adam's. I looked where he pointed and knew what he meant. After a rain storm, the air cleared and we had a chance to start over, to park every car for good and walk, to shut the factories down and feed ourselves more on prayer than red meat.

  We rode our bikes to the country thinking that nature began where the stoplights gave way to stop signs, and trucks outnumbered cars. We looked at cows, and neither of us was disturbed that flies crawled over their faces. Even the stink of the chicken hatchery was nature. We rode until we came to a dairy, where we each drank a quart of chocolate milk and then relieved ourselves on a patch of collapsed mushrooms. We sat in the grass of a quiet roadside, looking west where the mountains rose in a blue haze. Jays maddened the air with their bickering. The wind moved the shadows of the oak trees, and a chill ran along our arms.

  Tony, a stalk of sweet grass in his mouth, asked what I wanted to do with my life. I didn't have to think twice. I said I wanted to join the army so that I could travel. He pulled the grass from his mouth, and said he used to have the same wish but now he wanted to take the bullet for the president.

  I looked at him, confused. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I want to die for the president. Like President Kennedy. But it's too late for him.”

  I pictured my grandmother's living room where portraits of President Kennedy and Jesus with flame over his brow hung on the wall.

  Tony explained that someone had to step in front of gunfire for the president, that it might as well be him. He wasn't happy all the time, and he had dreams about water that kept him from a good night's sleep. In the summer light, his eyes didn't look puffy. They were clear in the corners. He did seem quiet, though, and he had gone from swimming at the playground pool to playing chess under a tree.

  “Don't you think it would hurt?” I asked.

  He looked at the mountains for a long time. I followed his stare to a hawk floating on warm air. A passing truck made him wake up and say, “Maybe.”

  The ride back home was slower, less fun, though we did stop at a canal to walk in murky water flowing west toward a stand of sunlit eucalyptus. We sat on the bank and chewed sweet grass, the sun flaring when the branches moved.

  All summer I slept hard as a stone, and only during a dumb, playground fist fight did I think about the bullet Tony would someday take. Summer was baseball, and the wish to hit someone home. Summer was a stalk of grass hanging from a mouth.

  Like other heroes, Tony moved away. He left without a goodbye. I peeked in his front window and saw a cardboard box of old clothes, an ironing board leaning against the wall, and yellow curtains crumpled on the floor. A bare light bulb burned in the kitchen. I went around to the back, where I lit a leaf fire and thought about the zero a bullet makes in flesh. The sky was gray. Faraway birds were migrating. The orange tree was turning orange, bobbing the perpetual fruit of all that comes back.

  ______

  The Beatles

  IT WAS SCARY at home. After Father died, after two years and many months, my mother remarried. The man who showed up with boxes of clothes sat in our only good chair, drank, and looked at a television screen with a flickering line through its middle. He never laughed at Jackie Gleason's bug-eyed jokes, Red Skelton's hobo walk, or Lucille Balls's bosom bulging a hundred chicken eggs. He just looked, crushed beer cans, and moved the box fan in his direction, the blades like a thousand spoons. His stiff hair, which was hard from a yellow paste in a jar, didn't move, but the lapels of his work shirt flapped in the breeze.

  I stayed outside a lot. It was scary to go inside, and besides, friends were sitting on their front lawns singing Beatle songs. Cathy was very good. She could start off humming “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and because she was older, in junior high, sing the words without feeling embarrassed. Her body rocked, yellow hair bouncing and perfuming the air about us, and her mouth made a near perfect “O” when her voice lifted on the word “hold.” At first, I didn't join her or the others, but when I saw my sister start singing, her words dragging softly behind Cathy's, I started singing too, but stopped just before the song came to an end.

  I was too shy to sing on the front lawn because my voice was flat, and I was scared that my friends riding by on bicycles would make fun of me. But they just rode by, squeezing bags of sunflower seeds, their mitts hanging on the handlebars. They wanted to join us, but didn't know how.

  David and I saved enough money from mowing lawns to buy a tape recorder from Long's Drugs. We wanted to hear our voices, to sing along with Beatle records. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was already off the charts, but we still liked it, that one and “Love, Love Me Do.”

  That winter we sang in David's bedroom because it was too scary at my house. My stepfather didn't like The Beatles because they were like girls, he said. He crushed a can and asked if we wanted to grow up queer. We shook our heads no. He turned his liquid gaze to the TV, the line cutting deeper into the screen, and we lowered our faces into our school work.

  On Saturday, I cut my hair to please him, a butch that showed that my scalp was blue under my black hair. But still he grumbled when The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, right after Señor Wences, who made his money by dabbing lipstick on his fist and making it open and close like lips. “Sí,” the fist said, “Sí, I drink the water.” My stepfather stared at the fist, which was dressed in a tiny wig. When The Beatles came on, John running onto the stage so that his hair bounced, my stepfather made a face and changed the channel. He crushed a can, and we, brother and sister, left the room to fill in dot-to-dot cartoons at the kitchen table.

  Because David paid two dollars more for the tape recorder and bought the batteries, he got to be Paul all the time, Paul, the cute Beatle with sad eyes. I had to be George and wasn't allowed to beat pencils against David's makeshift drum set of two shoe boxes and one oatmeal box.

  Neither cared what the other looked like when we jumped around singing “Love, Love Me Do.” David's beagle, which looked like Ringo with his mouth closed, pawed the bedspread and licked himself. David's mother was too kind to bang on the door, and only now and then threw us outside to get fresh air. With the bedroom windows closed, we sweated and beat holes into our paper drums.

  David had to cut his hair, to
o, because his father had bought him three fresh batteries. He had to stay on his good side because his father drank, too, and would sometimes stare at the sprinkler and become so self-absorbed that no one dared tell him that the water was flowing into the gutter.

  One evening, David let me take the tape recorder home. When I walked in the front door, my mom and stepfather were arguing in the living room. The blades in the box fan were turning faster than I remembered, rattling the pages of our dot-to-dot magazines on the TV tray. I went to my bedroom without looking at them, closed the door, and recorded my stepfather: “My feet hurt. You don't give a shit when the car don't work. You'll never give a shit. I work all day and your kids aren't happy with food.” My mother said: “You don't know a damn thing about my children. You've ruined the chair. Where were you when I told you to come home? You don't know a damn thing about anything. The cooler don't work. Damn fool, you got rice on your face.”

  While they went back and forth, I did a dot-to-dot cartoon, looking up now and then to stare into the mirror sadly because I didn't look anything like George of The Beatles. I would never be famous, never travel across the Atlantic Ocean, never pick up a guitar and have kids go crazy. When my parents stopped after the front door was opened and slammed shut, I played the argument back because I wanted to understand what they were saying and why they were so loud. They sounded scary. The batteries were weak, their voices slurred, and finally my mom's voice died on the word “face.” It took more batteries to make me sing again.

  ______

  The Babysitter

  WHEN FRANK, our babysitter from juvie, picked some black stuff from under his fingernail with a playing card and suggested that we take my mom's car (Mom was out dancing for the evening), I stopped marching around the living room with smashed Pepsi cans on the heels of my tennis shoes. I had never been in a car driven by someone who was only three years older than me, which is to say, a fifteen-year-old. Rick, my older brother, was camping in a friend's backyard, while Debra played on the couch with our baby brother.

  “You don't know how to drive,” I said, unhooking the Pepsi cans from my shoes. But I was eager to help drive the car. I had once started the car and revved it up until smoke filled the garage and the five kids sitting with me became sick. The mother of one of the other kids later called, and I was spanked from one corner of the room to the other. I thought of that day and shook my head. “Mom'll find out.”

  Frank fanned out a deck of cards on the kitchen table and asked, “How?”

  “She just will.”

  He shuffled the cards and said, “Pick one.”

  I picked a card: a jack of clubs with a little spittle of plum on his chin. He reshuffled the deck, fanned out the cards again, and said, “Pick another.”

  It was the jack, with the glob of plum.

  Frank got up from the table and dipped his pudgy fingers into the Disneyland coffee cup where the keys were kept. “Come on, don't be a baby.” My baby brother looked up with spittle from thumb sucking hanging on his face. Debra got off the couch. “Mom's gonna get you if you drive her car.”

  “No, sir,” I said. I looked up at Frank. “Will she?”

  Frank said we could go for a short ride, and if we didn't tell he would buy us a milkshake. He said he was almost fifteen, and on farms people knew how to drive tractors when they were twelve. I said he didn't live on a farm, but he said that I was missing the point. He reminded us that he would buy us a shake, a jumbo one if we agreed. Debra looked at me, and I at her. That was enough for us, and we carried the baby into our Chevy, which was parked in the driveway. While we snuck into the car, ever mindful of the neighbors, Frank walked tall as a Marine and twirled the keychain on his index finger.

  “Stay down,” I warned Debra and my baby brother who were in the backseat on their knees. Frank started the engine, adjusted the mirror and the seat, and said, “Here goes,” not looking over his shoulder as he backed out of the driveway. I peeked out of the window like an alligator and saw Cross-eyed Johnny shooting marbles in his driveway. A shirtless Mr. Prince was watering his yellow lawn. Mrs. Hancock was tying back a rose bush with strips of bedsheet.

  The Chevy purred as it picked up speed, a tail of blue smoke trailing. When the car slowed to a stop at the end of the block, we sat up. Frank seemed in control. He looked both ways, then accelerated smoothly, warm wind filling the car and rattling the newspapers on the floorboard.

  As we drove up a street past neighbors sitting in lawn chairs under the orange glow of porch lights, Debra said she wanted a banana shake. I thought chocolate would be fine, though banana would be OK as long as we had two straws to pump our cheeks full of sweetness. Our baby brother, who had yet to squeal more than “Mama” and “sha-sha,” said nothing. He was pulling at the thread of a busted seam in the upholstery.

  I noticed one of Franks's arms cocked on the window. I told him he had better drive with both hands, but he laughed and said driving was safer with one hand because the other hand was needed to signal for turns. He slouched down, and I said he should sit up so he could see more of the road. He laughed and said slouching was safer because if we got in a wreck his face wouldn't hit the windshield. Debra asked if we were going to get in a wreck, and he said, “Only if we stop.” He ran a stop sign and laughed so that spittle flew from his mouth. It was then that I knew we had made a mistake getting in the car with him. He laughed and looked at us with his eyes closed. He laughed and wriggled the steering wheel so that the car shimmied. He laughed and took both hands off the wheel. He laughed when the car veered toward the gutter and leaves exploded into the air. I socked him in the arm, hard, and told him he had better drive right, or else.

  Frank's laughter wound down to a giggle. “OK,” he said. He turned onto Belmont Avenue and as we approached the Starlight burger stand, he said, “Is that where you want to get your milkshakes?”

  “Yeah, that's it,” we screamed. Our baby brother got up on his knees to look. A silvery thread hung from his wet mouth.

  The car got closer and closer, and Frank repeated, “Is that it, that one?”

  “Yeah,” we screamed again.

  “That one,” he repeated, “that one?”

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

  Frank laughed and passed up the burger stand. “Oops, we missed it.”

  We sat back down, feeling cheated. The air about us stank of burgers.

  Frank made a reckless U-turn that made the tires squeal, and our baby brother rolled over like a sack of groceries. I socked Frank in the arm and warned him that he had better drive right. He said “OK, OK, all right already.” He smirked, then smiled a large, idiot grin as we approached the burger stand we had just passed. He pointed again and asked: “That one?”

  Debra and I leaned our faces into the open window, warm air gushing into our mouths. “Yeah, that one.”

  “That one?” Frank kidded.

  “Yeah, that one,” we screamed a little louder.

  The Chevy slowed but didn't stop. I saw a kid about my age, cheeks collapsed, sucking on a milkshake, and a baby in a stroller feeding on a spoonful of ice cream. At a redwood table, a family of four was biting into their burgers at the same time. Mad, I climbed into the back seat. Debra and I grumbled and crossed our arms. Our baby brother played with strings of his spittle. He smiled at me, and I could see real string looped on the back of his mouth. Grimacing, I scraped his tongue of string and a milky paste.

  I turned back to Frank. “You're a liar,” I said, trying to hurt his feelings. “You were a liar before you were born!”

  Frank laughed and said, “No, the car just didn't stop. I think something's wrong with the brakes.” He scared his face into lines and bugged out his eyes. He shielded his face with his arms and screamed, “Look out! Look out!” as we came to a red light. The Chevy groaned to a halt, and he turned around, with one arm on the seat, and said, “I guess the brakes fixed themselves.”

  Frank punched the gas pedal and the Chevy coughed and jerked forwa
rd while our heads jerked back. Baby brother rolled over one more time, fingers in his mouth.

  “We wanna get out, right now!” I said. “I mean it!”

  “I'm going to tell Mom,” Debra threatened.

  Frank looked into the rear view mirror with closed eyes. “Wanna get out? Good idea.” He opened the door and stuck one foot out. I saw the rush of asphalt, some burger stand litter, and one poor sparrow flattened to an oily shadow.

  “You better drive us back home, right now,” Debra said. “I mean it!”

  “Right now? No, we're gonna get a milkshake.” He closed the door and did a U-turn. We looked ahead: the burger stand's neon was fluttering, saying BU G RS FOR YO. There were two cars and people ordering under a stinky fan. Music was blaring from a loudspeaker.

  We began to smell burgers, and I could hear the slurp of a drained Coke. Frank pointed and asked, “That one? That one right there?”

  We looked but didn't say anything. I was wondering if Rick and I could beat him up. Debra could help out, and maybe we could pin him to the floor and let baby brother drool on his face. Maybe when we got home Mom would be standing in the front window with a belt in her hands. I figured that Frank would get the first spanking, and then Mom would be too tired to spank us that hard. She might not even spank us at all, only make us do the dishes until we moved out of the house.