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while he went inside the house. I thought of eating one of the peaches but knew that the fuzz would make my face itchy. I pressed a finger into a brown sap, counted the number of peaches, and peeled bark from the limb. The dog trotted away and the chickens returned to peck at the dust.
    That evening we watched boxing. Father drank beer and I sat near him with two links of Tinkertoy. The first television was on, and he and my godfather were watching two boxers hurt each other very badly. They sat at the edge of their chairs, their fists opening and closing. Father had taken off his shirt. Godfather's watch lay on an end table, glowing in the semi-dark of the living room. Both shouted and crushed beer cans when their fighter stumbled into the ropes. I let the Tinkertoys fight each other and grunt like the boxers. I said, “Mine is winning.”
    Back home I had asked Father if our car tires were made from rhinos, and he laughed. Mother laughed and wiped her hands into a chicken-print apron. Uncle with his panther tattoo, claws tipped with blood, pulled on my cheek and said I was crazy. He assured me tires didn't come from rhino hides but from rubber that dripped from trees into buckets. He turned on the porchlight, a feast of orange light for the moth, and led me down the brick steps to the Chevy that ticked from a cooling engine. He pounded a front tire with his fist. I tried to wiggle free, but his grip held me there. He made me pound the tire and pet it like an animal. Black rhino dust came off, dust and fear that I washed with a white bar of soap when we returned inside.
    I was four and already at night thinking of the past. The cat with a sliver in his eye came and went. The blimp came and went, and the black smudge of tire. The rose could hold its fiery petals only so long, and the three sick pups shivered and blinked twilight in their eyes. We wet their noses with water. We pulled muck from the corners of their eyes. Mother fed them a spoonful of crushed aspirin, but the next day they rolled over into their leaf-padded graves.
    Now the rhino was dying. We were rolling on his hide and turning corners so sharply that the shadows mingled with the dust. His horn was gone, his hooves and whale eyes. He was a tire pumped with evil air on a road of splattered dogs and cats and broken pigeons in the grills of long, long cars.
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The Shirt
    U NCLE S HORTY WAS BACK from the Korean War and living in our sunporch, his duffle bag in the corner, his ceramic Buddha laughing on the sill, his army uniform hanging like an invisible man on a hanger. He slept late, and when he woke, he drank water and ate fruit we snatched from the neighbors’ trees. Back then there didn't seem to be much. We had sunlight, dogs, a blue-throated parrot, a cat that eventually ate the parrot, an almond tree in the yard, and the daily sounds of our neighbor's motorboat engine puttering alive and churning water in a barrel.
    Uncle was home. My brother, sister, and I left him alone because Mom said he was tired, but we, my baby sister first, started piling onto him to wake him up because there was every chance that he would tie us with a length of clothesline and hang us upside down from the ladder leaning against the house. The world was different that way, upside down, my brother or me swinging like sides of beef in a cold-storage locker.
    What I liked best about Uncle was his shirt, which was different from mine. My shirt I had to put on, button up, and tuck into my jeans. With a polo shirt like my Uncle Shorty's, you slipped into it and let it go unbuttoned. He sometimes, in a special flip-flap way, tucked his Camel cigarettes into the sleeve. I had a pocket for my things, which were mostly pits of eaten fruit, a broken-toothed comb, some shavings of leaves, and the tiniest of tiny pebbles.
    Uncle knew I liked his shirt. I used to slip it on when he was asleep, and at the age of five I knew the smell of a man who went and came back from war. It