Help Wanted by Gary Soto Page A

placed his hand over his brow, as if he were saluting, and made out his cat walking on a neighbor's car.
    "You're going to get busted, buster!" he yelled. He
liked his cat because he was an adventurer that sometimes scratched at the front door with a mouse in his mouth. Javier was about to get up to get him when the dirt at his feet began to swirl. He heard a sound above—
whump, whump, whump
—and when he peered up, in a confused state, thought he was seeing a washing machine falling out of the sky.
    His pants began to waver and his T-shirt flapped about his belly. The dirt powdered his face like makeup.
    "Hello down there!" a voice blared through a bullhorn.
    It's a helicopter,
he realized.
    "Did you win?" the voice called.
    Veronica,
he thought, rubbing his eyes with his fists to get the dust and disbelief from his eyes.
    The helicopter hovered over the vacant lot, swirling dust and bending the limbs of the pomegranate tree. The plastic bat and balls rolled away.
    Wincing, Javier could make out the pilot—a man wearing sunglasses and a soldier's hat with a shiny colonel's cluster. He could make out Veronica talking on a cell phone. She snapped closed the cell phone and picked up the bullhorn.
    "That was my brother. He's flying in to see the vineyard!" she yelled above the whirl of the helicopter's propellers. "Plus, my dad might buy the lake next to it." She then dipped her hand into a sack. "Catch!"
    Veronica tossed what he believed was a discolored baseball. But when he caught it, he discovered it was an onion. He sniffed it and recalled her saying that her father had an onion farm in New Mexico.
    "I'll see you at school!" she yelled.
    He had no choice but to wave as the helicopter lifted slowly and banked away, but not before he heard her yell through the bullhorn, "I'm taking off a week to go to Florida—sorry you can't come!"
    He watched the helicopter until it was a speck in the sky.
    "Yeah, right," he answered with dirt on his tongue and an onion he tossed like a baseball from one hand to the next. "Yeah, right."

How Becky Garza Learned Golf
    Becky Garza rubbed an old T-shirt up the shaft of her five wood and marveled how the chrome-plated shaft sparkled in the hot summer light. Uncle Andy had given her a set of used clubs (minus the putter) with the promise to take her to the golf course when she got good. And in order to get good, she figured, she had to practice. She first practiced in her backyard, but her cat, Samba, kept chasing the golf ball. Then she practiced in the living room but had to stop that when the golf ball slammed against the television screen. Becky was spooked.
That was close,
she thought. How would she explain a spiderweb-like crack like that? Her parents didn't like her horsing around in the house.
    The solution, she decided, was to make her own golf course in the vacant corner lot. She spent two whole
days removing rocks, boards, car parts, bicycle parts, paint cans, and other debris. She raked away litter and cut the long, brittle grass. Some kids from school came by to see what she was doing. They straddled their bikes, spitting sunflower-seed shells, and asked, "What are you doing?" She explained the course, and they listened awhile before riding away doing wheelies.
    Becky was in competition with her friend Dulce Rosales. Dulce was a smallish girl who played tough at all sports, especially soccer. Dulce wasn't afraid of playing football with boys or handball with grown-ups. She tied back her ponytail and taunted, "Let's go." But Becky felt that Dulce was too rough to understand the subtle nature of golf. Golf was a thinking person's sport, Uncle Andy said. Becky wiped her face and complained, "Man, it's hot."
    "What's hot is my play, you mean," said Dulce, who was using a three wood as her putter. On her knees, face close to the ground, she had the club positioned between her thumb and index finger and was pretending to shoot pool. With one eye closed, she slid the club