The summer I collected rattlesnake skins was the summer my father showed me how to keep a woman. We spent the summers in our cabin in the Sierras, repairing the damage left over from the past winter’s storms. In those days my father taught math at Fullerton and spent the summers watching over my brother and me as we tacked five- and six-foot snake skins to our bedroom wall. Our mother worked nights at Long Beach Memorial and on her days off drove long mornings up 99 and then east onto 198. She was Catholic and, by relation, so was my father.

Every summer there was a new problem: termites, missing shingles, a faulty stove, and, during the winter, a broken window that had let snowdrifts take over the family room. And the year I collected rattlesnake skins, a fifty-foot sequoia toppled over onto the roof. My father spent the first two weeks grumbling about chainsaws, costs, satellite reception, and winter storms. While Juan and I lay awake at night listening to the sounds of the television downstairs, I could hear the tree looming above us, its branches sweeping against the siding of the cabin.

For a month the tree rested there. My father smoked cigarettes as he climbed back and forth between the ground and the roof, assessing the situation. In the afternoons, Mr. Ramos came over and sat up on the roof with him, drinking beer and shooting rattlesnakes with my father’s .270. Mr. Ramos lived down the road in the next house over. He was younger than my father and had a mustache that smoothed out into a thin line when he smiled. He did not smile often, but grimaced, lowering his voice to match my father’s. “Bad luck for you,” he would say, looking up at the tree and grimacing, his eyes squinting into the sun.

During the days Mr. Ramos worked as a park ranger and we would wait hours for his wife to appear in the morning. She was a special sight. Mrs. Ramos was darker than my mother, skinnier in the legs and body, and only a few inches taller than me. Her hair was cut at her shoulders so that when pulled back it left a slender neck exposed and a few baby hairs drifting down. In the mornings, Juan and I waited by our window until she came out to water the plants on her deck or, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, to stretch in her shorts and tank before running. Through our father’s binoculars we took turns watching as she spread herself out on the wooden deck, one leg pulled back under her body and the other stretched out in front. And the way she would bend, until her head was almost resting on her knee and the lines of her collarbone became delicately exposed beneath her skin. We had the perfect view from our bedroom window and mostly we just lay there at the foot of our beds and watched for the first sign of her in the mornings. At night I could see the lights of their house through the trees and I would wonder what they were doing and what it was like to have a family with no children.

Back home in Long Beach we only knew other Catholic families, whose clans of children and cousins stretched into the double digits. At home we played intricate games of tag along lawns that remained brown all year and were bordered on all sides by the cement streets and the cement of the foundations holding our houses in place. Above, the sky was intersected by lines upon lines of telephone, electric, and cable wires, each with its own connection to our houses and minds. The Sierras were something else. Mr. and Mrs. Ramos were something else, younger than my parents by ten years. No family ever visited, no vanloads of children. The only thing that ever happened was Mr. Ramos leaving in the morning for work and Mrs. Ramos staying home during the day. In our first week back, we walked by her house ten times before she noticed us. We were kicking stones and chasing frogs through the ditches on either side of the dirt road. The giant sequoia trees stretched off into the forest, until they became a wall for which nothing could be seen beyond.

“Doesn’t your mother care that you’re out here getting all muddy?” We were standing on her deck when Mrs. Ramos put her hand to my face and used her thumb to scrape away the droplets of mud baked onto my forehead and cheeks. It was difficult not to lean into the warmth of her palm, and I hoped it seemed more like I was trying to push her hand away. But then Juan ruined it by smiling. “Mom is in Long Beach,” Juan said, still smiling as Mrs. Ramos chipped away at a stubborn piece of mud near his hairline. “Really,” she said, raising her eyebrows and looking at our house. Our father was outside with the tree. “And did he feed you this morning?” “No,” we both said together, although my stomach was beginning to hurt from the sugar I’d poured over my cornflakes that morning. Juan and I exchanged a smile as she turned back toward her house and we heard the burner go on and the sound of eggs cracking over the skillet.

It was easy for her to get our attention. She was petite like the girls at school and I always wondered if I hadn’t been a few years older if things could have been different. I was twelve then, and Juan was eight, and there were so many possibilities. So we sat up there on Mrs. Ramos’ deck, watching the dirt road as it wound out among the trees and passed the few cabins lining the road where the forest stretched out behind. Her house sat up above the road on a bump that rose out of the mountainside and everything smelled of bark and arid mountain dust. From there we could see my father looking over the sequoia resting against our house, sometimes making measurements, but mostly just standing there and looking up.

Mrs. Ramos asked us questions: how was school, what had Christmas been like, how many girls were we dating? Although she had asked it before, I always felt embarrassed by the last question, because I was still a virgin and hadn’t even kissed a girl. And from what I could tell from the older boys in church, life didn’t start till after virginity. My brother Juan was at the age where everything seemed confusing to him. Girls: friend or foe.

But what we agreed upon between the two of us was that Mrs. Ramos was nothing to be feared. On days like this she gave us popsicles and Juan asked questions, like how do flying squirrels fly without wings, or what is inside a rattlesnake’s tail? And for the most part Mrs. Ramos had the answers. And even when she didn’t, she could make up fabulous lies — like squirrels coated in butterfly dust — although we didn’t know they were lies then.

My mother did not like the Sierras very much. They were too far away, dirty, hot, and dangerous. She would say this standing in the kitchen after having driven three hours up from Long Beach, her hair in a bun and small lines of sweat coming down over her temples and neck. I sometimes got the impression she was not talking about the Sierras but about my father, the cabin, or when it applied, us. Although it was easy to see that she hated my father’s cabin, she came up every weekend and in some way I think my father appreciated it, although he would never tell her.

It took four weekends for her to convince our father to hire an arborist to come up and take the tree apart. We all stood out in the road watching as the men hacked away at branches and cut the tree down section by section. The Monday after my mother left they brought a large truck with a crane attached to support the weight of the tree. Out of boredom or curiosity, Mrs. Ramos walked over. She wore running shorts and a white T-shirt. We stood there watching as the men took pieces off little by little until it was only the bare body of the tree, and where the branches had been looked like red sores. We all watched, my father, Mrs. Ramos, Juan, and I, as the workers swung each piece out and away from the house. My father had his eyes on the sections as their weight brought the line of the crane taught — “Cuidado, cuidado!” the foreman yelled — and Mrs. Ramos came closer until I could see she was touching my father, her outstretched fingers resting on his forearm. Both had sweat beading up around their temples at the hairline. And as I watched, my father raised his other hand to cover hers as the foreman yelled “Cuidado!” once again.

By the time they had taken off the topmost sections, we had been standing there for half an hour, and as they worked their way down the tree to the wider, heavier sections, no one said a thing. Not even the foreman spoke, except to say a few quick words of instruction then watch, stepping back from the crane as the pieces came swinging outward. Mrs. Ramos took her hand back and raised it to her mouth as she watched, quieting some urge. The crane stopped, the line of metal chord swinging soundlessly as the section of tree steadied above the house. My father shifted, the sound of his boots audible against the gravel road, but he kept his eyes always on the tree. Every time a section swung free I felt the air tense as the workers went quiet, and my father let out his breath, watching the section swinging above the house like a wrecking ball.

What was left after the workmen went back down the mountain was a heap of trunk and branches just to the side of the house. The trunk of the tree lay turned over, its roots in chaotic battle with the air. The days our mother visited the cabin, we were forbidden to wander the woods looking for toads, salamanders, and snake skins and instead we attempted to climb the stump. Our mother could watch us this way, reading her books, the kind of books that had questions for titles, or strong-looking women raised off the covers. She watched from the family room with its large windows looking out into the woods. Most of the time we were screaming and yelling, making up elaborate games of king of the mountain. And when we had tired ourselves with these games and lay panting across the log, not saying anything, only catching our breath and watching the clouds pass far overhead, she would come to the window to make sure we had not snuck off to some hidden area past her vision.

“Tell me Raph,” she said. We were sitting in the family room, Juan watching cartoons and I with my chin on my arms, looking out the window. They were large alpine windows with double panes and I could feel the heat coming through. Across the room the door was open near the kitchen and I could hear the sound of my father’s pick outside, coming down again and again. “Where did you get the snake skins?” “Mr. Ramos brought them over,” I lied. Our mother had seen the skins we were beginning to tack to the white walls of our bedroom. They were translucent things that fluttered lightly when drafts came through. Torn and dirty in places, the cocoon like tail nearest the floor. “And what did Dad say?” “He said it was okay.” I watched my father lean the pick against the trunk, wipe the dirt off his face with his t-shirt, and walk toward the cabin. “I may have to talk to your father about this,” she said. “Why?” I turned to look at her.

My father came in the door and took a large bottle of juice from the refrigerator. He drank straight out of the bottle. My mother stepped over to the kitchen, grabbed an empty cup out of the cupboard and put it down in front of him. Juan and I could tell they were working hard at pretending to love each other.

I never told my mother about the things that went on when she was not there. I never told her about the afternoons our father spent on the roof with Mr. Ramos and the report of the rifle as they picked off rattlesnakes. I never told her about the hunting trips our father took us on, meant to make men out of us, or the days we spent with Mrs. Ramos.

What my father did during my mother’s visits was look busy. He did minor repairs on the house, things like checking for rot in odd places, hammering things, oiling door hinges, and minor landscaping. We had one dirt driveway and a bush; the rest of the house was surrounded by what could grow under the canopy of sequoias, which was very little besides moss and a growing amount of fallen trees. After he exhausted all of these options for the weekend he would come out to the trunk and sit with us, watching the clouds and dreaming whatever fantasies went through his head. Midway through the summer, on a day our mother was visiting, he came out to the trunk after oiling all the normal things and sat down. Juan and I were both lying out on the trunk, our backs curled across the wide roundness of the tree. Our father took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and thumbed one out, lit it and looked up into the windows to see if our mother was watching. “How’s the playpen?” he asked, patting the log. He said this in a way that I had learned meant very little to him, a way of speaking to pass the time.

I didn’t say anything back and gave Juan a look not to say anything either. I had caught Mrs. Ramos over at our place that past Wednesday. Although she left soon after with a Ziploc of flour, I couldn’t stop thinking about the day she put her fingers to my father’s forearm.

“With your mother here I’ve got no time for anything, no relaxing, just work.” He turned the cigarette in his fingers, studying it, then said, “What do you think about that?” He stopped and looked around at the surrounding forest. “Wouldn’t you rather be running around out there?” He motioned to the woods and put the cigarette to his mouth. “I’ll make it up to you this next week. We’ll have some good adventures then, eh?” “This is fine right here,” I said. He must have known I was mad about Mrs. Ramos. “I suppose this isn’t bad, is it boys?” he said, turning his head toward the sound of tires pressing gravel and dirt. All three of us watched as Mr. Ramos’ truck went by on the road, a cloud of dust following behind. We watched as he pulled into his driveway and got out. Mrs. Ramos sat out on the deck, her T-shirt tucked under her bra and the hem of her shorts pulled up over her hips. As if she had casually decided to get in a few moments of sun. When Mr. Ramos came up the stairs she put down the magazine she had been reading. Juan, my father, and I all stared at her for our various reasons, until she waved and we all waved back.

“That man,” our father said, still watching Mr. and Mrs. Ramos. “He sure knows how to keep a woman.” “Do you love your mother?” our mother asked one afternoon. We were sitting on the porch while she tried to pick a splinter from Juan’s hand. Juan squirmed and said yes. “And you,” she said, pointing the tweezers in my direction, “do you love your mother?” “Yes,” I said, the answer coming out automatic. The sound of wood splitting was in the air. I watched my father raise the axe again and come down across the wide cylinders of wood left over from the tree. The stump was still there and part of it was embedded in my brother’s hand, but everything else was being cut up. The sound echoed out among the trees and I thought about what it would take to love my mother.

The answer seemed to satisfy her, whether she believed me or not. She went on picking at Juan’s palm as he tried to wring his little body free from her grip. Our mother held his palm straight with one hand and manipulated the tweezers with the other.

“Don’t be such a little pussy,” my father said, holding the axe and watching my mother and Juan. Juan stopped moving and I could see the tears in the corners of his eyes. My father had said the same thing to me a few days before when he took us deer hunting and I would not shoot the gun. In the end, I waited too long and the deer picked up its head, took three hops and disappeared. Juan took his hand back and rubbed the palm with his other hand as he went inside. Moments later I heard the electric pop of the television and the sound of voices inside. I was still out there on the porch, my father cutting wood again and my mother staring off blankly towards the trees and the descending mountain ahead.

Our rattlesnake skins were still tacked to our bedroom wall. Our mother had forgotten about them, or simply given up. Mrs. Ramos started collecting them for us on her runs. I knew, though, that she couldn’t have found any along the road. We always found them up against a trunk, or near a rock, but never by the road. On our days over at her place we lay out on the deck measuring ourselves against the skins. Some were more than two feet longer than our bodies. We made chalk outlines of our bodies next to the skins. Mrs. Ramos would lie down too and we would draw a line from the top of her head to the laid-out snake skin. Sometimes they were more than a foot longer than she was. It was scary to see them this way. I thought then of what Mr. Ramos would say sometimes after he had been drinking and shooting rattlers from the roof. How they could eat a child, how their big snake mouth could open up, unhinged to take one of us in.

I loved to put my arms up next to the skins and measure the diameter of the snake, the large ones almost four inches wide. The thin, rounded triangles of scales all lined up together. But mostly I enjoyed the smells of being there on the deck with Mrs. Ramos. There was the smell of pine, but it seemed heightened there and no longer belonging to the forest but to Mrs. Ramos.

On days when it was too hot to sit out on the deck she brought us inside and we would all sit in the living room, which faced back, looking up the mountain. I sat there on days like that with my good fortune, watching as Mrs. Ramos made us peanut butter and honey sandwiches, her hair drawn up off her neck and a few wispy stragglers condensing along the skin around her forehead and down toward her back. I wished then — although it was not the right thing to wish — that Mr. Ramos would not come home and in some magical way this would give me the opportunity I was hoping for.

I dreamed up schemes to kiss Mrs. Ramos. I thought that if I stood up the moment she was putting the sandwiches down, our lips might touch. I thought about this all the time, practicing at home on the couch or in my room. I spent hours reliving the moment her foot accidentally touched mine under the table in her kitchen, or when I’d convinced her I was sleeping when we were watching TV and my head rolled toward hers. These were all gateways to something I did not understand yet, things I could dream up, hoping for some longer, more intense moment of contact.

Something about the way my father admired Mr. Ramos, and the way my mother appeared scornful every time she saw Mrs. Ramos sunning herself, convinced me that Mrs. Ramos was a good thing. Sometimes these feelings brought me to the woods behind her house where I could watch her going about her business. I would go with Juan in the morning before we took off into the woods to search for things like spider webs covered in dew, anthills, or bird nests. We would duck from tree to tree, sometimes rolling, sometimes crawling on all fours from one log to the next, always listening for the sound of rattlers.

By August my father and Mr. Ramos had just about killed every snake on the mountain. Whole days would go by when I didn’t hear a shot fired. There were two weeks left of summer and soon we would be heading back to Long Beach, my father’s teaching, and our school. My mother called often around this time, always at odd hours. She would not be coming up anymore, the Sierras had finally become too much for her.

Summer in the Sierras began to cool down around this time and my father sat out on the porch for hours listening to the sound of squirrels high up in the trees while he smoked through his cigarettes. A fire was burning down in the valley and we could all smell the scent of grass and pine in the air when the wind shifted. Often, our father would let us stay up late watching whatever movie was on TV, he sitting out in his lawn chair under the stars.

I went out on a night like this, expecting to find my father, but finding only the empty chair. The lights of our windows made long yellow rectangles along the ground, reaching out towards the forest. Inside I could hear the sound of the television rattling off laughter and hear the buzz of electricity in the wires overhead. My father was still gone and I listened harder, taking a few steps out beyond the light. Everything was dark out there and my eyes adjusted along with my ears. The air was growing cold. Within two months it would snow again and my father would begin his annual ritual of worry, his grumblings about repairs and money.

I waited, hoping that my father would come back from whatever darkness he had disappeared into. And as I waited I began to pick out sounds I had little experience with, though I had no trouble identifying them. They were sounds I am sure I was never meant to hear, the sounds that can be heard late at night and travel easily through open summer windows. They were not like the TV; they had a resonance no television could capture. I looked back at the house once with its golden windows and ceilings splashed in light, before I headed in the direction of the sounds, hoping more than anything I would not find my father.

I scrambled, head down, towards the woods behind the Ramos house. It was the same route I traveled during the day to spy on Mrs. Ramos, every tree a hiding place and every footstep calculated for sound.

I arrived there, quietly panting and holding back the excitement inside my heart, my body pumping with blood. The sounds were clearer now. The night lay across downed logs, making everything appear shallow, except for the silhouette of light tracing the edges of all things. In the darkness of the woods I found my father. His face lit up in profile to the windows of the Ramos house. The light caught on the stubble of his face, and as he bent to move closer through the trees, deep pockets formed on his face and distorted the uniformity of his eyes and mouth, as if all were open and unable to close. We stood there watching for some time, he and I. He not knowing I was there and everything inside the Ramos house as clear as day.

They were in the living room, the room in which I had so often hoped to kiss Mrs. Ramos. Only I knew then that I never would. There were no curtains across the windows, and only the TV offered any covering to the naked body of Mrs. Ramos, her body across Mr. Ramos and her back to the window. The movements of the couple coincided now with the sounds I had so dreadfully wanted to know. I stood there watching, peering into the house and feeling all of my fantasies being stripped from me. Where the light from the TV hit Mrs. Ramos’ back, shadows formed, giving her back a valley of flashing blues and greens and deep hills of black which flowed down from her shoulders and around her sides. And as I watched I realized all the things I had thought about her were untrue, she was not like the girls at school. She was some beastly thing, her body backlit as if the television put her in agony. It was uncomfortable — a feeling between jealousy and fascination — something I would turn away from without my father knowing.

Mr. Ramos knew how to keep a woman, my father had said, and I wondered if he was thinking about that then. I left my father there, watching them. His body still outlined in profile, one half in the light and the other somewhere else entirely.

The house was dark when I got back. The night’s movie already finished and the television set now turned off. Upstairs I lay in bed watching the shadows on our bedroom ceiling and tracing the outlines of the snake skins tacked against our walls. One skin had come loose from its bottom tack and fluttered out with the smallest breeze from the window. Juan lay in the bed opposite. There was the smell of toothpaste and the sweet sour smell of dirt and boyhood sweat heavy in the air. I propped my head against the pillow and watched as the Ramos house went out one light at a time, until there was nothing but a dark hole among the trees. Downstairs the door opened, then the sound of footsteps. I heard the latch close and the television flicker on. The phone rang, once then twice, and I heard my father pick up and hoped he could say just one good thing.

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