The Street Belongs to Us Read online

  I head to the bathroom and brush the peanut butter out of my teeth. Looking in the mirror, I see my short brown hair sticking straight up on top. It’s my fault. I tried cutting it myself because my nana won’t cut it short enough for me. I pointed to an actor on TV whose hair was shaved on the sides and back, exactly how I wanted mine. My nana nodded and said she’d do it, but then she didn’t shave it at all. She said this was the girl version of the same haircut, like it was an official thing. I don’t buy it. She just doesn’t think girls should have short hair. So I found her clippers that night after everyone went to bed and cleared the hair away. My mom got really annoyed and said it was patchy. The only reason I’m not in real trouble is because it’s summertime, so there’s no school and nobody around to really care.

  The doorbell rings, and Johnny lets out another groan from his bedroom. “The whole point of summer is not having to wake up!” he yells.

  I run past his room and open the door before my nana can get up from her chair in the living room. Wolf stands before me in his uniform.

  Every single day, Wolf wears a white T-shirt and camouflage pants. Around his neck, he wears a thin gold chain with a tiny gold cross. His mom gave him that cross before she died, and he never takes it off. He wears black army boots and a green military cap over his curly brown hair. His hair is very thick and feels like a brush if you touch it. His green eyes look even greener underneath the cap.

  Wolf used to wear all kinds of different clothes, but since his mom died, he only wears his uniform. Kids at school make fun of him for wearing the same thing every day, calling him Rambo Boy. He doesn’t mind so much because he says he is just like Rambo from the movie: able to survive on his own, even if everyone in the world turns against him. In a very serious voice, he tells them he is a soldier, and he is wearing his uniform. They usually stop making fun of him then.

  It really bugs the teachers and the principal that Wolf wears the same thing every day and calls himself a soldier. They have meetings to try to get him to change his clothes. He refuses and they get madder, and the principal even suspended him once over it. I don’t ever bug Wolf about his uniform. It’s what he wants, so I don’t get what the big deal is.

  It’s like with my clothes. I like to wear my brother’s hand-me-down wide-striped shirts and blue jeans. And I have a favorite pair of gray jeans for when I want to look dressed up. It’s how I feel good, but some kid or grown-up is always asking me why I don’t wear girls’ clothes. Not Wolf, though. He leaves me alone, and I leave him alone.

  We go outside to see the machines. Wolf sits on the lawn next to me, watching the steel limbs slice through the street. His eyes are big and intensely focused like when he watches TV. I know he won’t hear me if I talk, but I can’t help it.

  “So, who was that woman who answered the phone?” I ask him.

  No response.

  “Is one of your aunts visiting?”

  No response.

  His chin is resting on his knees as he watches one of the machines burrow into the land right in front of my yard. He’s not going to answer, so I might as well drop it and think about something else.

  I look back at the machines. As they turn the pavement into crumbled-up bits of dirt, I suddenly feel incredibly happy.

  “Wolf, the cars won’t be able to zoom around here all summer,” I say.

  “Mhmm,” he utters, not listening.

  “And grown-ups won’t want to hang out in the dirt.”

  “Yep,” he answers, still not listening.

  “Do you understand the ramifications of this?” Big words seem to have a way of getting his attention, so I throw them in when it’s important.

  “What?”

  “Wolf, it could be an all-kid street.”

  “Wait, that’s true.”

  Now I’ve got him. He’s nodding slowly, imagining our future. “Then there’s no time to waste.” He stands up, scratching his chin, and begins pacing back and forth on the lawn. “We need to plan this out, grab strongholds quick, lay out paths.”

  “What?”

  Now it’s me who doesn’t clue in. But this happens a lot. I don’t really know military language. I am not a committed soldier like Wolf, or Rambo. I’m more of an accidental soldier like Hawkeye Pierce, a doctor who got drafted into the Korean War on the TV show M*A*S*H. He’s very smart and funny but not so good at being a soldier and gets into trouble. I think maybe something like that happened to my dad. Maybe he got shipped off by the government to go fight in a war, even though he didn’t want to. He’s been gone three years and I don’t know when he’s coming back. I don’t think my mom knows either, but she won’t really talk about it.

  I got drafted by Wolf because he’s my best friend and he only wants to play soldiers since his mom died. But I don’t have to go anywhere far away or get hurt or anything. Wolf just wears his army uniform and gives commands, and then we have pretend battles with other kids, think up complicated strategies, and look for new places to hang out. Our version of being soldiers isn’t such hard work.

  “Look, Alex, this is serious,” Wolf says. “The other kids will move in quick. If we don’t stake out our territory, Diego and Jaime and who knows who else will take over.”

  He looks out across the piles of dirt and walks over to the large hole the machines dug right in front of my yard. It’s a trench approximately six feet deep by six feet long by three feet wide.

  Wolf points down and shouts to me, “This is it!”

  “What is it?” I ask, alarmed.

  “Our headquarters.” He nods confidently. “Get a ladder.”

  I take a ladder from the garage out to our trench. It fits perfectly into the left side and Wolf climbs down. I follow after him quickly. Inside the trench it is very quiet and smells like mud. It’s wet and cool, like we’ve traveled to a different country. Somewhere magical. Like a cave behind a waterfall.

  Suddenly, it feels like there won’t be enough air, and I start breathing faster. I hold my hands up to my throat. I gasp, “I can’t breathe!”

  Wolf pushes me on the back.

  “Hey, what was that for?” I shout and hit him back on the shoulder.

  “So you’d stop breathing weird,” he says. “There’s no time for one of your panic attacks. We’ve got work to do.” I stand still and cross my arms.

  Wolf stares at me. “Hey man, sorry, okay?” he says. He looks me straight in the eye and breathes in a big, deep breath, puffing out his chest. “See, there’s plenty of air.”

  I give him a dirty look. It is very irritating when he pushes me, but it does seem to stop my freak-outs. It’s never clear to me, though, whether he’s trying to help me, or if he just wants me to do something for him. At least he notices when I start breathing funny. He’s the only one who can tell.

  “We need supplies,” Wolf says.

  I consider this. “We could raid the camping gear in the garage,” I offer. “But we can’t make too much noise, or my nana or Johnny could catch us and tell my mom.”

  Wolf nods and we climb up the ladder and run quickly and quietly like cats over to the garage. I open the door slowly and switch on the light. There are five women in swimsuits on posters beaming back at me from the far wall. This is what Johnny calls art.

  “Yuck!” I say and switch off the light, fast.

  “What did you see?” Wolf asks.

  “Um … ah, it was an old, squished, moldy banana,” I say. “Trust me, you don’t want to look at it. It’s over near the wall.”

  The light coming in from the door is enough to let us see what we need. We grab two folding chairs, two sleeping bags, a flashlight, a camping canteen, and some ropes and clips to hold our stuff out of the mud when it rains. I sneak into the house and grab the fancy silver binoculars my dad gave me, as well as my journal so that I can take battle notes when I don’t have anything else to do. On M*A*S*H, there are plenty of episodes where the soldiers get bored, Hawkeye especially.

  We make four trips
back and forth without a sound. On our fifth, I spot two sheets of tin that could cover the top of one side of our trench. I carry one of them out on top of my head, but it starts to wobble and I drop it with a crash onto the driveway.

  I give Wolf a terrified look, and then we run and climb down into our trench to wait.

  “Oh no!” I gasp and point at my nana, who is walking out of the house and toward our hole.

  We crouch down in the bottom of the trench, and I squeeze my eyes shut tight. I hear her footsteps walk right up to the edge. Maybe she won’t notice …

  “Alex?” she asks.

  “Nope,” I answer.

  “But I think that’s you, Alex,” she responds.

  “Not at all,” I confirm.

  “And that’s your little friend Lobito.”

  Wolf groans.

  “She’s trying to trick you,” I whisper. “Don’t fall for it.”

  But Wolf can’t help himself. “Doña Salazar, I told you that my name is Wolf. Or Lobo, if you want. I like how that sounds, too.” He sighs. “But not Lobito. I’m not small, and I’m not cute.”

  “Mira,” my nana chuckles, “see now. It is the two of you.” She scrunches her eyebrows. “I’m not so sure about you hiding down there.”

  “But Nana,” I say, “I haven’t found anything bad buried down here. Just some rocks.”

  She bends down and pats one of the walls. “Hmm, it does feel pretty solid, honey,” she says approvingly. “When I was a girl in the war, we had to hide in the caves.”

  I peek up at her for this story and add, “After the cannonball went through your house.”

  “Yes, mija.” She nods and ducks, holding her hands over her head to protect herself. “It shot splinters all over us.”

  “Whoa!” Wolf exclaims. “Was it exciting?”

  “It was mostly scary, Lobito,” she says and lowers her arms.

  Wolf is about to correct her about his name again, when my nana raises her finger and walks quickly back into the house.

  “Oh no.” Wolf chews his lip. “Do you think she’s gonna tell on us?”

  “I hope not,” I say. “Maybe she just remembered her telenovela is on.”

  Wolf climbs back out of our trench and uses the sheet of tin to cover half of it. He explains how it’ll make a strong shelter but still give us plenty of room to look out for potential enemies.

  We don’t have any real enemies that I know of, but I don’t say this because Wolf is so excited about our new trench. The closest thing we have to enemies are Diego from across the street and Jamie from two doors down. Four years ago they broke into my house through the cat door and ate a whole box of Ding Dongs. I was really mad because my dad bought them for us (my mom would never let us have junk food like that), and now he’s gone, and the Ding Dongs are gone, and we probably won’t ever get any more. Their parents yelled at them and made them apologize and pay my parents back for the Ding Dongs, so the whole thing was supposed to be fixed. But we never did get any new Ding Dongs, and in my mind that makes them archenemies. Still, we’re only talking about two dollars in damages. So they’re the ones we usually battle, but the truth is we mostly fight for fun and nobody actually gets hurt.

  We take some time to set up all of our equipment and stake out our spots. I lie on one of the sleeping bags spread underneath the tin part of the trench. I wedge the handle of a flashlight into the trench wall, click it on, and open up my journal to take notes. Wolf borrows my binoculars and perches on the second rung of the ladder, his eyes just an inch above ground level, ready to report any suspicious behavior.

  After a few minutes of nothing happening, Wolf announces, “We’ve got to make some mud balls.”

  “What for?” I ask, bothered by the idea of moving off my cozy sleeping bag.

  “A defensive artillery stockpile,” he proclaims.

  “What does that mean?” I wonder aloud.

  “We have to be prepared for any and all attacks,” Wolf answers with great seriousness.

  I nudge Wolf to one side of the ladder and climb up next to him. I raise my head out of the hole and scan the street. The five-year-old Mahoney twins are down the street riding around on their big wheel tricycles, but other than that, there’s nobody in sight.

  “No one’s even around,” I say.

  “Not yet,” he answers.

  I shake my head doubtfully but climb out of the trench and grab the garden hose. Wolf follows, and we get to work digging and rolling the mud beside our trench.

  My nana walks out of the house again, this time with a bag in her arms. When she reaches us, she gazes at the metal sheets over our trench. “Your little home is so beautiful,” she says. “Like the houses with tin roofs near the border, right before you walk over into El Paso.”

  Wolf gets serious again. “It’s not beautiful, Doña Salazar,” he informs her. “It’s a very strong defensive shield.”

  My nana doesn’t really pay attention to him, though. “When I was a kid, there were so many tin roofs that sparkled together in the desert sun that I thought it was the ocean.”

  “That must’ve been so pretty, Nana,” I say, because I love the ocean.

  Wolf gives me a dirty look. I shrug. Even though my nana was a little kid when she came to America, a lot of the things she can still remember happened in México.

  “It wasn’t the ocean, but the sparkling was the first thing I remember seeing as we escaped the war and walked right into the valley of Aztlán,” she declares. “Pay attention when the ground sparkles.”

  “Where’s Aztlán?” Wolf asks.

  “She means when she crossed the border into America,” I explain.

  “Only the Mexican part of the United States, mija.” She smiles.

  “What do you mean the Mexican part of America? The Mexican-American War claimed the new territories for the United States in 1848,” Wolf asserts. He reads information books all the time. Social studies and science are his only good grades at school. I try to avoid books, especially during summertime.

  My nana pats Wolf on the head. “They’ve never really taken the land away from us, though.”

  “But when President Polk invaded México—” Wolf starts.

  “You’ll need provisions,” my nana says, interrupting him, because she is all done listening to his facts. She lowers the bag into my arms. It’s full of candy bars, chips, and two little burritos she must’ve just made for us. “We didn’t have enough food in the caves,” she explains. “That was miserable.”

  “Wow! Thanks, Nana,” I say.

  “Whoa, yeah, that’s really nice of you, Doña Salazar,” says Wolf, who has suddenly lost his defensiveness and is grabbing a chocolate bar.

  “But always remember to bring the snack bag into the house at the end of the day,” she warns us. “Remember when that big rat ate up your whole chocolate bar in the backyard, Alex?”

  I nod sheepishly. “Yes, Nana.”

  “We will follow your orders, ma’am,” Wolf says and salutes her.

  The salute makes my nana grin, and she heads back to the house.

  Wolf sighs. “Do you think your mom will be that nice about our headquarters?”

  I shrug and rinse the mud from our hands with the hose. I sit down next to our new stockpile of mud balls, unwrap the foil on one of the burritos, and take a bite. Wolf sits next to me and opens the other one. The eggs and potatoes and cheese and salsa are warm and perfect. I feel lucky that my nana is here to help take care of me. My mom has to work way too much to make me a snack like this in the middle of the afternoon.

  I look over at our trench. “My mom would be mad if she saw what we took from the garage, but I’m betting she’s not going to think to look inside.”

  Wolf nods.

  My mom’s too busy these days with work and school and community associations and books and phone calls. She doesn’t have enough time or energy to look inside holes.

  chapter 3

  SIDEWALKS

  I don
’t recognize our street anymore. It’s turned into a big mess of piles of brown dirt and deep holes. It’s not like the ground in the desert, where the rocks and plants seem settled into their right spots. It’s more like a garden right before you plant the seeds. Everything torn up and ready for new life to grow.

  The street fills up with all the neighborhood kids during the day. We flood the ground with our garden hoses and ride our bikes through the mud in an enormous figure eight. We follow the path so tightly that it makes a permanent groove in our street.

  It has been a week since the day of the digging machines, and they haven’t come back. Some grown-ups are complaining, but not my mom. She is mostly away at work and doesn’t really spend much time on the street.

  “They’re giving us sidewalks. It’ll help the moms pushing strollers and the people with wheelchairs,” she explains to Johnny and me at dinner.

  The city promises that everything will be fixed before the fall, but it doesn’t look like it.

  “They probably ran out of money,” Mrs Vega from next door yelled over our fence last night when my mom was outside watering the bushes. “This city doesn’t know how to take care of money.”

  Mrs Vega has gotten her station wagon stuck in the mud twice while trying to get into her driveway. I don’t see what the big deal is, though. She just honks and all the kids come out from wherever they are on the street, and we push and push her wagon until she pulls free. Then we cheer and go back to playing. I don’t care if they ever put sidewalks in.

  “With sidewalks, you’ll be able to ride your bikes safely, away from the cars,” Mom tells us while we’re eating our chicken.

  I don’t know why she bothers telling Johnny this. He’s five years older than me and doesn’t do anything safely. Sidewalks won’t change that. Johnny’s long dark hair covers half his face so that it’s hard to see his eyes. Mostly what I see is Johnny’s mouth, and he doesn’t even stop to nod between bites of his dinner.