A Summer Life by Gary Soto

Author:Gary Soto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England

______

The New and Old Tennies

MOTHER looks up from stirring dinner in a black pan, her hips cha-chaing under a chicken-print apron. A smell has touched her. She knows it from somewhere, but where? She taps her spoon against the pan and looks at her son with watered-down hair. He's a sloppy boy with sloppy posture which neither the nuns nor a strict father could correct. Moons of dirt dwell under his fingernails. His teeth are pasty. His arms are blue with the tattoos of pen markings.

Earlier in the day he had walked in a wet field and stepped on something soft. He scraped the bottoms of his new tennis shoes as best he could and continued an incline of mushroom-dark hills, the ropes of his leg muscles tightening, his breath shallow. The canal was west behind the trees, where the leaves mulched in the shadows. Leprous frogs lived in leaf-spotted water, and the fish, dulled by chemicals, floated near the oily surface, their tails waving weakly, their gills like raw, pinkish wounds. He could have walked waist-deep into the canal, cupped a fish in his palm, and shared its misery. But the boy knew better. His mother would have scolded him for getting wet. So he walked along the canal bank, dull as the fish, and threw rocks and watched the rippling targets dilate. He hunched on the bank and wished winter would rise from the mountains, white as a nurse's hat. Then he could wear two socks on each foot and crunch the miles of frost with his shoes. Then he could slide on the ice and risk his face playing front-yard football.

Nothing sticks to the smooth bottoms of red tennis shoes like the scent of squashed bugs and thistle. The shoes are quiet, slick from the wear of climbing trees, and scuffed at the toe from kicking the boredom out of curbs. They are quick, though, swift enough to outdistance the orange-haired sister of the school bully. She would like to kiss him, drink from his neck, hug him and feel the air that lives in the deepest cells of his lungs.

Worn tennies. They smell of summer grass, asphalt, a moist sock breathing the defeat of baseball. He was no good in third grade, and now, in the sixth, he's still awful at the game. He blames the bat, the sloshed ball, and the sun angling sparks off the fence. He blames the pitcher, a fat kid who hides the ball in the wide screen of his gray T-shirt. His mother was wrong in marrying his thin-armed father who bared his teeth and grunted when he opened fresh bottles of ketchup. And his older brother was piggish for getting all the warm milk, all the best cuts of meat. Most of the players, the Lions, didn't get any milk or meat either. They are weak at bat and can't tell the difference between a ball and a piece of paper blowing across the field.

The shoes are grass-stained and itchy with foxtails and burrs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.