New Stories from the Midwest

Rubber Boy

59 rubber Boy ■ David Allan Cates The first time I fell I was one and in a walker and I tipped down the basement stairs, head over plastic wheels. I was in a coma for three weeks—my mother sleepless at my bedside, my hand in hers—and then one day I woke up, all better. On my fifth birthday I fell ten feet off my uncle’s balcony onto the pavement and landed on the back of my head. As the story goes, I lay there perfectly still for about a minute, then got up and ran off chasing the same yellow cat I’d been chasing before I fell. After that my family called me Rubber Boy. Except in my mind, the nickname never stuck. Like so much else that happened to me, it seemed to bounce right off. I grew up in La Choza, California. You’ve probably never heard of it. From what I’m told, it doesn’t exist anymore anyway. My parents loved each other and my two brothers and me, and La Choza was a good place to be a kid. Herds of us went everywhere on bicycles, day or night. After school in the afternoons we hung out with friends in the shade of an old tool shed in La Choza Park. We’d shoot hoops or toss a football and always, endlessly argue about big-league ball teams. We often played ring-and-run, and one wild week went on a shooting rampage and punctured a couple dozen windshields with a BB gun before we were finally caught and had to wash cars for months to pay for repairs. We weren’t Bible thumpers, but we saw the neighborhood on Sundays, too, at church. It was there I first developed an image of my own soul: pink and malleable. And also a picture of death: a dark painting with a friendly white space in the middle shaped like the Virgin Mary. After service we kids played in the huge concrete basement with the lights out, while our parents gathered upstairs drinking coffee. This was the real religion, I suspect: happy kids hiding and seeking for thrills in the dark, adults gathering in the light, laughing away their fears. They were suburban pioneers, our parents. They’d all come from other places and built houses and a school and a church where before there’d been none. Our fathers 60 ■ David Allan Cates were working men, small-business owners and professionals, and our mothers usually housewives. They’d survived the Depression, fought the fascists and won, and now— plank by plank, shrub by tree, child by child—they built a community. I envy their moments sitting on their flagstone patios in the evening, drinking gin, saying silent prayers. Of course bad things happened in La Choza like everywhere else. I knew a kid who got sick and died when he was twelve. Not my best friend, but still a boy I liked and missed. And a couple of blocks away a man whose wife had left him walked into the canyon behind his house and shot himself. His two daughters got sent back East somewhere, and nobody ever saw them again. The neighborhood was white, too. Almost a hundred percent. A couple of black families moved in when I was still in grade school, and they were included in everything just like anybody else. Still, sometimes you’d hear things. Some people in La Choza were bigots, but most weren’t. This was a new community, and people wanted to do things in a new way. Most were fair, loyal, decent, earnest, and usually kind. I left La Choza when I was eighteen and joined the marines. Even then, that young, I knew I’d had a good life. I didn’t know how good, but I didn’t doubt it was worth making a sacrifice for. I didn’t know exactly what a “sacrifice” was, but I knew that making one was good. Everybody said so. It was something a man did when he needed to, and I knew I needed to be a man. So I went to Vietnam willingly. For a while after I arrived in country, I thought war was the truth revealed, and for a while I reveled, tumbled, and then wallowed in my new and bitter knowledge. La Choza faded to a dream. Death was a body in a black bag . . . and the soul? A body...