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was more than sweat and beer, tobacco and the splash of cologne. It was the shape of muscle, the anger of a tattoo panther hiding behind cotton, the hair in the collar, the small hole where a bullet could have entered and exited without his dying.
    He said he could get me one if I helped him collect copper, which after the war was a precious metal. I started off with him early one morning, he in his polo shirt and I in my button-up shirt of giraffes, elephants, and lions. As we walked up the alley, Uncle jumped at the plums from a neighbor's tree and told me about collecting copper. He said that the metal was shiny, was in the shape of wire, and was often inside machinery.
    â€œWhy will someone give us money for it?” I asked. He gave me a second plum and said it was for the war. He asked if I had listened to the sirens, which during the 1950s went on when you were slurping soup and thinking that your life would march on forever. He said that the siren was a warning. He said that even inside the siren there was a bundle of copper wires that sent the electricity from the ground to the throat of the siren.
    This was my instruction, two blocks from home, where our neighborhood gave way to diesels, oily railroad tracks, and the horrible slamming of machinery. I gazed at the ground, which I noticed was busy with so many things: the flakes of egg shells, nails, broken bottles, bottle caps pressed into asphalt, grass along fences, sleeping cats, boards, shattered snail shells, liquid-eyed jays, pot holes, black ants, red ants, jaw-lantern insects with blue eyes, half-eaten fruit, ripped shoes, buttons, metal slugs, cracks in the earth, leather thongs, ripped magazines—everything except copper.
    The yellow sun was now nickel-colored, hot and vicious on our necks. Uncle managed to gather a few twigs of copper, which he let me hold. When he wasn't looking, I bit back the rubber insulation and saw that the copper was truly shiny, not bitter like a penny but somewhat sweet, like electricity.
    We swiped more plums from an abandoned house where Uncle searched the fusebox. He let me keep the glass fuses, which I turned over in my hands because they were so beautiful. He slammed one on the ground, though, and with his fingers, pinched out a fingernail of copper. We walked through the house. Hangers banged in the closet. Water dripped from the faucet, and flies coupled on the lips of forgotten spoons. A crate of green oranges sat in the washroom. I sat on a stool and looked through Life while Uncle climbed into the attic and came down with dust on his eyelashes.
    We looked for three hours and returned home. Uncle's shirt was wet under his arms. My shirt of giraffe, elephant, and lion prints was just dusty. When Uncle pulled his shirt over his head, I unbuttoned mine and let the breeze that lived around the almond tree cool my stomach. I looked at Uncle's stomach, which was pinched with muscle. His arms held tattoos of panthers with blood-red claws, and his arm said in blue: “Korea.”
    The twigs of copper lay on the grass. There wasn't enough copper for a machine to stamp more than a dollar's worth of pennies. Uncle washed his shirt in the garden hose, wrung it hard, and hung it in the tree. An hour later, I got to wear it around the house and twice around the block.

PART TWO

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The Inner Tube
    T HE TRACTOR INNER TUBE hung in defeat on a nail, accompanied by three flies swinging back and forth, sentries of all that goes unused in a garage. The heat was oppressive for July, especially so for a one-car garage full of the smells of paint remover and open jars of red salmon eggs. I stepped over boxes of old clothes and warped magazines, a lawn mower, and oily engine parts. I kicked over a lamp shade, the bulb bursting its brittle glass, and pushed aside fishing tackle. I reached for the inner tube and touched the rigging of a spider web. I pulled it off quickly and leaped through the debris to the patio. Sweat flooded my