Cars in yellow sunlight,
Buses in cloud colors,
A fire truck in a glassy candy apple cape,
Buildings like wrinkled accordions all in a row —
Some stand to one side, soft and powdery,
As if they were made out of colored chalk.
Wires! So many wires.
Wires into wires into wires connecting everything
So buses can drive through the streets — electric.

Everything is electric — the streets during the day
And at night, in rainbow dresses and neon parade hats.

Chacho stops outside Big Duke’s Bar.
Takes a dead mouse out of his front pocket.
“Trade you for your Duncan yo-yo? How about that prehistoric rock?” he says, pointing.
I take out a wrinkled stone I found at Potrero Hill, in the shape of a lopsided heart.

“Just kidding,” he says, and slaps me on the shoulder.
“Race you to my house,” he says, running ahead of me.

Mami said, “You visit your cousins but come home early.
Don’t get lost. Remember, now we live at Twenty fourty-four Mission Street, number two. Second floor. No more getting into trouble with those locos on Harrison Street!”

At least we didn’t move to another town. Maybe we should have — Aunt Faustina and Uncle Lolo live two inches from our apartment. We’re in #2; they’re in #3.

When I threw those bottles into Big Duke’s Bar thought I saw Papi sitting there.
See him everywhere. Rub my eyes.
At Patrick Henry Elementary, my new school, sometimes it looks like he’s standing under the black clock by the door, waiting for me, wearing his straw white hat and his favorite blue coat. If he were here Mami wouldn’t have to work so hard.
If we were in Ramona Mountain and if Papi still had his big-nosed Army truck we would be driving into Ranchita Garcia, parking in the shade of an avocado tree. But he’s not here.

And we are not there.
Papi’s somewhere in Mexico — I forget which Mexico — looking for water that will cure him. Why does he need water? What’s wrong with him?

Uncle Lalo thinks Papi is crazy. Aunt Faustina thinks he’s too old and doesn’t know how to live in the big city because Papi speaks only a little and when he does — one of his old pair of shoes for six dollars — Papi says things like.
“Get the hecka outta here!”

“How did Uncle Lalo get a hunch back?” I ask Mami.
“Be kind,” Mami says. “Always. It’s all the work he’s done, bowing down into laundry tubs.” I don’t say it but I think he got it by dragging home all the crooked machines he buys on Howard Street. There are winding machines he keeps stacked on the kitchen floor, talking machines with numbers and glass fuses he sells, and round TV-screen machines with electric submarine sounds that he plans to take to his new house in Mexico.

“Your uncle wanted to be a lawyer,” Mami tells me.