A Summer Life Read Free

slanting over the junkyard.
    My brother, two years older, wiser from glass-punctured feet, nose bleeds, and now a sliver in his palm, didn't think much of this game. He watched me from the shaded porch where flies circled, a halo of black around his head, and called me stupid for staying in the sun. But nickel-colored water from the garden hose cooled my head, and yellow-green apricots from a low branch where sparrows flittered watered my tongue.
    Mr. Drake, our neighbor who had given up chasing his chickens, drank water from a hose and yelled at me to sit down because he was getting hot just watching me. “Your mother is going to find you dead,” he said. “It's not right to run out there.” There was the street, soft asphalt that we sometimes pulled up in little chunks because someone said it was good to chew.
    I looked at the sun's sparkling edges, and spiders dropping eggs on dry skeins. I listened to Mr. Drake, who wagged a wrench-thick finger at me, and sat under the chinaberry, where I ate a plum and fondled the lung-shaped leaves of bean plants. I liked how they felt, soft and cool, and liked how they drank squirts of water from a Coke bottle.
    Then I raced down to the railroad tracks on Van Ness. The sun gleamed off the steel rails. The wind moved a hat-sized tumble-weed, and I raced after it. I raced a taxi filled with sailors, and danced from one foot to the other foot when the crossing guard dropped and the red light and iron bell began to throb. The train, huge as a cloud, beat me by inches to the wind-whipped oleander that I had picked as the finish line.
    When I returned home, I was dusty from my naked feet to the crystals of dirt on my eyelashes. I drank water from the garden hose and cooled myself with six plums. I was tired but happy.
    I rose to my feet and went to my abuela's to run with her three chickens. When the cat came out of the weeds, shaking a lanyard of long grass from her paw, I tightened the hand brake and came to a stop. The cat stopped and looked at me for the longest time, knowing from this and previous lives that he should stay away from half-naked kids. He hurried away, ears pulled back, and I hurried after it, the cable jumping on my waist, the lever shining with sunlight and God's forgiving stare.
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The Giant
    M Y BROTHER measured the length of the cement shoe prints with his hand. For all we knew, they were set before our grandmother came from Mexico to this country, which to us made them as old as the very dirt in our garden. Summer brought butt-faced plums, hours in the shade, and an itch to ignore Mother's warning about what lay at the end of the street, where we discovered a broom factory, rows of trucks loaded with blocks of hay, and a crazy neighbor who held a live chicken in her arms as she rocked on the porch, a tin can of drool at her feet. We looked and ran, nearly tripping over the broken sidewalk around a scabbed sycamore.
    The length of the shoe print was almost three of my brother's hands, and four of mine. We rose to our feet, knees creased with grass, and eyed each other, then followed the shadow of a rumbling moving van downshifting to a stop. We were amazed and couldn't hide our excitement when later, over dinner, we told Father, his shoulders giving off the fragrance of sawdust from his new job as a carpenter, that a giant lived nearby and we had better keep our eyes open if we didn't want to get squashed. Father didn't stop chewing to ask questions, or let our warning worry his brow. Mother, sweater over her shoulders, looked out the window, where in an hour the summer dusk would settle in the alley. Far away, we heard the sound of the broom factory starting the night shift.
    After dinner, we had to sit on the sofa. Mother said we would get sick if we played after we had eaten, and said our meal, a round steak and frijoles , was deciding where to latch onto, an anemic arm or a skinned knee. We sat fooling with our fingers and staring at the