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Chapter 5 opens with Eddie again philosophizing, this time that he “wanted to sprint straight into the future” but “kept going in circles” (69). The chapter begins at Holmes Playground. Here he encounters two young gang children who are getting high from inhalants. Eddie asks them if they’ve seen Angel, but gets no response other than laughter. Eddie heads into the rec room to talk to Coach, a role model who has acted as a guide and confidant for Eddie throughout his youth. A former gang-banger, Coach is accepted in the neighborhood, with some level of respect from and control over its adolescent population.
He and Eddie talk briefly about Jose. The story about Jose being knifed has run in the newspaper, interestingly enough on the obituary page. Eddie is unhappy his own name has been included in the story; he worries this means he will be attacked for being an unintentional bystander. Coach asks Eddie to paint the base lines on the softball field and Eddie complies. He uses a chalk machine with smashed chalk from “teachers who had given up” (71). A kid named Samuel and his young friends who have been watching Eddie work kick at the lines and mess them up. Eddie calls them punks and Samuel takes out a knife. Coach suspends them from the window and, flipping him the bird, the kids leave. Eddie also leaves, failing to finish chalking the baselines.
The teens continue to harass Eddie after his departure from the playground. Eddie jumps over a fence to get out of sight. People start shouting as they spot Eddie intruding, running through their backyards, dogs barking. He envisions himself speeding through the yards “like Flash Gordon” (74), and wonders again about Angel, thinking he could go home and just wait for him to show up.
Instead, Eddie goes to his godmother (his nina), who lives close by and is morosely making plans to take her old dog, Queenie, to the pound, to be anesthetized. While there, Eddie calls his mother to ask for money to get to Merced. She says she has just won some money in Reno and will send Eddie some. His nina then asks him to go to the pound with her, and Eddie agrees. He confides in her that it’s “bad out there” (78). She seems to understand, and complains about a group of young men they pass by while driving, who appear to be high on drugs. She says how glad she is that Eddie didn’t turn out like that, and he whispers agreement. Noting their shiny crucifixes, Eddie mentions how “our crucified Savior glinted on gold chains” (78). Eddie’s godmother calls the men “trash” and says they have ruined Fresno (78).
At the SPCA, Nina gives Eddie a twenty-dollar bill as a contribution to give to the organization. She does not go in to the facility. The pound takes care of Queenie, and Eddie splits the cash with the guy doing the processing, pocketing ten dollars of his godmother’s money. Eddie is bothered by his selfish act.
Eddie next heads to Lupe’s house. Lupe is the older brother of Samuel, who is a friend of Angel’s, and the up-and-coming gangster after Eddie. Angel is a role model for Samuel, and therefore in league against Eddie, alongside Angel. Eddie exhorts Lupe to deal with his younger brother. Lupe complies, looking like “G.I. Joe” (81), cornering Samuel, who keeps stammering, “I’m gonna get you“ (81) before running away.
Lupe and Eddie talk, and Eddie recounts what happened to Jose. Lupe asks if Eddie has ever been stabbed and claims, “it don’t hurt. It’s like ice” (83). They decide to go see Jose in the hospital and are briefly stopped by cops on the way there, for suspicion of possession of drugs. Once at the hospital, Eddie again notes that more people seem to be going in than coming out of the place.
In Jose’s room, Eddie is surprised to see Angel sitting on the bed by Jose. In spite of the tension, the group manages to talk about “sports and chicks” (85), with Eddie at one point softly apologizing to Jose for getting him in trouble.
Eddie leaves the hospital, convinced that “Angel would follow me,” and is “going to try to kill me” (86). He keeps watching for him, then realizes Angel must have “snuck out the back [...] where the dead bodies passed on their way to the mortuary” (86).
Eddie’s monologue at the opening of this chapter centers on which people might conceivably be able to advise him on how to improve his life. He considers going to a priest, to “one of those dank confessionals” (87), or seeking guidance from an old art teacher who has moved to Oregon. There’s a policeman that Eddie knows and trusts who has started an anti-gang program that gives jobs to “real gangster[s]” (87), but Eddie thinks he isn’t enough of a criminal to qualify.
Finally, Eddie decides to talk to Coach. Sitting on the picnic table while Coach works with the young kids, Eddie again regrets taking the ten dollars meant for the SPCA. Coach brings him a soda and can tell Eddie is burdened.
“I don’t want to live here no more” (89), Eddie says. He “tests” (89) Coach on his attitude towards Angel, telling him what Angel may have done— “I’m gonna beat his ass one day” (89) is the response from Coach. Eddie then asks Coach what to do about the situation with Mr. Stiles. Coach says he’ll call Mr. Stiles for Eddie. Coach wants to talk to him alone, so Eddie goes back out to the playground. Samuel is there, and again flashes his knife. “Me and Angel are going to get you” (92), he threatens, confirming Eddie’s worst fears about Angel coming to get him are likely correct. Coach reappears and Samuel leaves. Coach tells Eddie he has convinced Mr. Stiles to give Eddie his job back.
The two discuss military service, and Coach tells Eddie to “pick one” (92), meaning a branch of the armed forces. Eddie chooses the Navy, wondering if he needs to swim well, as he barely can float.
Eddie goes to a recruiting office. He sees the recruiter as an “eagle” and himself as a “thirsty gopher” (96). Eddie explains his whole life to the recruiter. The meeting goes well, and Eddie is relieved to find out that he doesn’t need to swim to get into the Navy. When it comes to signing on, however, Eddie begs off: “I need to talk with my mother” (99), he says weakly. It doesn’t help that another possible recruit in the office has, according to Eddie, “the IQ of a kid who plays with boats in the bathtub” (100).
On Sunday, there’s still no money from Eddie’s mother and Eddie’s phone has been turned off. He takes a bus to Mr. Stiles’ house, to reclaim his job, noticing some of his painted house numbers on the way. He is happy to see Mr. Stiles’ red truck has been returned. “I wouldn’t steal from you” (101), Eddie says, proud to have another chance, “glad to be trusted” (100), and believing he would now “slave for this man” (100).
Back in gardening mode, Eddie starts digging away feverishly. He is “[f]eeling good, humming like a bee” (108), when the police arrive to Mr. Stiles’ house and arrest Eddie—not for the theft of the truck, but rather for “the brutal beating of an old man in a Laundromat” (104), where Mr. Stiles’ stolen truck had been seen.
The chapter closes with an image of Eddie riding away in a police car, and the nasty youngster from earlier in the novel on his “trike racing along, trying to keep up” (104). Eddie’s previously renewed energy, hopes, and dreams are squashed.
The novel continues to undulate between crises and quietude, though even moments of quiet rarely translate to joy for Eddie. A cold glass of water from the fridge on most days is as good as refreshment gets for Eddie. Any moments of peace are interrupted, and Soto builds up layers of crises that consistently show the fragility of hope.
Chapter 5 opening symbolically with a mention of circles (“I wanted to sprint straight into the future, but I kept going in circles” (69)), shows a problem that Eddie himself is beginning to perceive; he just isn’t getting ahead. Negative situations repeat, both daily and generationally. Perhaps out of frustration from that, the version of Eddie we see in Chapter 5 is becoming much more assertive and aggressive. While he took care to preserve the peace at the hospital bed of his friend, Jose, where Angel was present, Eddie is building towards a confrontation with Angel, who would seem to symbolize all that’s wrong with Eddie’s neighborhood.
The novel’s settings grow increasingly noisy and frantic. Non-standard routes such as hopped fences are employed with more frequency. With few, if any, real-life role models to turn to, Eddie’s self-imagined image of Flash Gordon, a comic book character, becomes more poignant: Eddie leans on the fantastic as a last resort in the hope of surviving the danger encroaching upon him.
The visit to his nina’s provides readers with another quiet moment in the novel, but also results in Eddie’s most intense wave of guilt to date. The stealing of ten dollars from the SPCA, money his nina had intended to donate, in order help animals, illustrates a darker side to Eddie’s pragmatism. While Eddie’s guilt shows he still possesses a conscience, he is also going to do what he has to, in order to survive.
If there are characters to emulate in Eddie’s Fresno, they would seem, for many, to be the gangsters Eddie perpetually worries about. Samuel, Lupe’s younger brother, is eager to show his tendencies toward the violent, brandishing a knife on more than one occasion. While both Eddie and Lupe attempt to dissuade Samuel from aspiring to thug life, Soto also shows, through Samuel, that the violence and fraternity gangs provide are attractive to adolescents. While Eddie doesn’t take Samuel’s threats seriously, his concern is emblematic of broader concern about the cycle of gang violence, and how such a lifestyle is able to instill itself in adolescents.
Both Eddie and Lupe try to stop this trend and bring Samuel back from such emulation. Eddie goes as far as to defend Samuel to Coach, not wanting any serious trouble with authorities for the young teen.
If Eddie views Samuel as chiefly a nuisance, Angel has become scary business to him. Samuel’s affirmation that Angel is in fact after Eddie highlights the need for those that live in neighborhoods like Eddie’s to remain almost vigilantly paranoid, as the threats they imagine can actualize any time.
The amorphous, ephemeral quality of neighborhood-specific, gang-related crime—and the often overtly facile attempts to quell it—presents itself ironically when Eddie and Lupe are picked up on the way to the hospital for suspicion of having drugs. By this juncture in the novel, we’ve seen a number of minor characters who are in need of help, either from abusing drugs or due to the violence they have or intend to cause. That Eddie and Lupe are momentarily considered a part of such illicit activity reinforces how manifest the problem is.
We see this problem through a different lens via the scene with Angel and Eddie visiting Jose in the hospital. Angel’s ability to appear places seemingly out of thin air affords him the ability to live up to his name, while the fact the three men are able to chat about sports and eschew in-depth discussion of conflicts past and present creates additional tension and suspense.
Chapter 6 presents Eddie realizing that his only hope for a decent future is to leave the place he’s grown up. The ten-dollar theft at the SPCA illustrates how crime—endemic in his neighborhood—is able to transfer to him almost by osmosis. In regard to finances, there seems to be no middle ground: Eddie is unable to become upwardly mobile through hard work due to mistaken identity, while at Mr. Stiles’ house, and the only way his mother is able to send him money is through gambling in Reno. Running counter to these instances, and Eddie’s own theft, is the steady pay that the military can provide. Eddie initially balks at this option, however, perhaps in part because it arrives as juxtaposed to the manner in which those around him subsist.
Increasingly, Soto presents Eddie’s options of succeeding in Fresno as pipe dream: honest, entrepreneurial work will not be possible without a college education. Even with Coach’s help in repairing the situation with Mr. Stiles, Eddie realizes that landscaping is not a long-term solution. Eddie’s individualism is marginalized by his socioeconomic status, a truth reinforced by the arrival of the police at Mr. Stiles’ house, where Eddie is wrongly arrested. If Eddie’s imagination, to this point, has allowed him to cling to notions of success based around what he wants and dreams for himself, his anxiety over joining the Navy symbolizes the transition from innocence to experience, in which Eddie understands not only that his best course forward is to leave his hometown, but that he must do so by being in service.
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By Gary Soto