“The pods are coming! Aaayyiiii! Everyone's a pod! This is the scariest movie I ever saw.”
“If you were up, why didn't you say so? I was just seeing if you were fakin.”
“Almost too horrible to look at!”
“I didn't really mean it.”
“Hold it. Stop the movie a second. I think I hear something. What? Did you wake up?”
“I didn't mean it.”
“Didn't mean what?”
“Whatever I lost points for.”
“Like what?”
“Calling you Toes.”
“Okay, even though I ought to take extra off for
ush
ing me, you can have the fifteen points back. Anything else?”
“Like sprinkling toe-jam in your face.”
“Jesus Christ! You might as well forget apologizing for that.”
“I swear I didn't really do it.”
“Don't lie. I felt it. I smelled it.”
“Honest to God! I didn't do it! I was just rubbing my fingers together making the noise.”
“His fingers sure smell a lot like his kregs, ladies and gentlemen.”
Kregs
was a name Mick had coined for the spaces between toes.
“I did it just like you did the peanut butter.”
“Just because I'm laughing don't mean I believe you,” I said, breaking up just thinking about it. A few days earlier, while Mick was reading a
Mad
comic, I'd snuck up on him with a glob of peanut butter on a sheet of toilet paper, smeared it on his arm, and told him it was shit. At first he didn't believe me, so I told him to smell it. He did and started screaming, “You really did it! You're crazy! I'm telling Moms!” I tackled him before he could get away and began trying to smear the glob off his arm into his mouth. He was fighting back hard, yelling I'd gone completely crazy, wrenching his face away, spitting it out every time I got it near his lips. I thought once he tasted it he'd see the joke, but I had a hard time getting him to believe that it was only peanut butter.
“You only gave me seventy-five points for not telling about that, so it's not fair I lose a hundred for this.”
“All right, you want to get a hundred points back?”
“How?”
“Stick your head out the window and tell Kashka you love her.”
“Go to hell! I wouldn't do that for a million stinking points.”
“I'll give you fifty if you just admit it to the ladies and gentlemen.”
“Admit what?”
“The truth, just say it out loud: Ladies and gentlemen, I admit it, I love Kashka.”
“No, it's not fair.”
“Okay, ladies and gentlemen, he had his chance. He didn't want to see the movie anyway.”
I disappeared under the sheet again and began to snore. Suddenly, I felt him land on top of me. He'd jumped from his bed
onto mine and was trying to strangle me through the sheets while kneeing me in the back.
“Hey, take it easy,” I said, “or Captain Roopus will hear.” But he wouldn't stop. “This is gonna cost your scurvy ass another hundred points.”
That made him punch all the harder. He tried to gouge my eyes through the sheet. “I don't care what you do,” he said.
“Sir's gonna hear.”
“I don't care.”
I squirmed loose, grabbed my pillow, and smashed it in his face, sending his head thudding off the wall.
“They'll hear that for sure. Better get in your own bed.”
Mick was half-crying. “I don't care. I'll tell them everything. I'll tell about the Point System. I'll tell I saw you playing with matches.”
He tried to break away toward the bedroom door. I grabbed him by his undershirt and tried to wrestle him down, but it tore away.
“I'm gonna tell you ripped my T-shirt.”
“No tell, no tell, Mickush,” I pleaded.
“Don't
ush
me.”
He managed to open the door and slip out with me still pulling on his arm. “No tell, no tell,” I kept whispering. It was too late to force him back. We were halfway down the dark hallway. The fluorescent light in the kitchen was still on and lit up the end of the hall. Their voices carried to us. Mick stopped.
They were arguing. We could hear them very clearly. Moms was already at that point when her hands shook; we could hear the tremors in her voice. When what she called her “nerves” got bad enough, her lower jaw would tremble, too, as if she was on the verge of a fit. She would continue trying to talk even though she could no longer control her voice, and it sounded as if she was gagging on words stuck in the back of her throat. Her attacks
of nerves had begun a couple years earlier. Usually, they'd come on at night. I'd wake to her walking the apartment in the dark, talking to herself, praying, crying. Sometimes, thinking us asleep, she'd enter our room and sit shaking at the foot of my bed. Once, Mick woke, heard her crying, and began crying, too, so now when the attacks came she'd lock herself in the bathroom and turn on the water taps.
“You gotta get ahold of yourself before you're in the same boat as your brother, Lefty,” Sir was saying. “I'm gonna call that phony-baloney doctor and tell him I'm taking those da-damn pills he's giving you to the police.”
There was a crash like a dish breaking. “I-yi-yi c-c-can't stand it,” Moms gagged out.
“He's turning you into an addict,” Sir said. “You take the pills and act like a zombie, and without them you fall apart.”
“Y-y-you ever t-t-try li-li-living without any sympathy? I-yi-yi can't stand it.” Something else broke.
“Go on, act like a da-damn nut and break it all so I can work harder to support us.”
“I'll give you all the points back. I'll take you to the movie,” I whispered. “Come on back to bed.”
Mick followed me, both of us creeping back to the room. I closed the door, and it was dark again. We climbed into our beds and lay there not saying anything.
Â
I was nearly asleep when the whining started from across the gangway. At first it was just there, a night sound like the crickets, sirens, and freights, but it grew louder and sharper and I realized I was feverish with sweat and sat up.
“It must be their new dog,” Mick said.
“Jesus, what's the matter with him? I never heard a dog sound like that.”
We tried to look through the screen again, but all we saw was the bulb behind the bedspread. Then we heard Kashka's voice.
“Janush, stop beating on him.”
The whining went on.
“That sonofabitch, that dirty bastard. He's torturing that puppy in there.” I threw myself back in bed and started punching the pillow until the whining stopped. In the quiet I could feel my lungs heaving and realized I'd been holding my breath. Then the whining started again.
“Why's he doing it?” Mick asked.
“I'll get him for this, the sonofabitch. I'll steal that dog and burn their goddamn house down. I'm not kidding. I'll wait till the bastard's passed out drunk and get him with a brick. I'm going to call the Humane Society tomorrow.”
“For shitsake, Jano, stop beating the goddamn dog,” Kashka yelled. She sounded more irritated by the noise than anything else.
“You said you wanted him mean, not like the other one, didn't you?” Jano answered. “This is when you gotta get them if you want 'em mean.”
He kept at it as if proving his point. There was an even worse sound, like a choking squeal, and I could imagine Jano holding the dog up by the clothesline they kept tied around his neck while his hind legs danced off the floor.
“Shut up!” Jano shouted, and it was abruptly silent.
“Maybe he killed him,” Mick whispered.
I pulled the nylon stocking from my head and peeled my undershirt off and put it on the radiator. It was soaked through with sweat. I lay back down and waited, my insides braced for the whining to start again. It was quiet, but I couldn't relax.
“Want to have a Radio Show?”
“Okay, you start,” Mick said.
“Hello again out there, ladies and gentlemen, this is your
friendly announcer, Dudley Toes, coming to you live from Dreamsville in the heart of Little Village over station KRAP, brought to you by Kashka Marishka's dee-licious melt-in-your-fat-mouth Frozen Rat DeLuxe Dinners!”
“And Jano's Hard-on Pickles. The only pickles especially made for shoving up your nose.”
“Thank you, Mick the Schmuck, and now, ladies and gentlemen, let's get the show on the road with the thing you've all been waiting for. Hey, ladies and gentlemen! Wake the hell up! I said the thing you've all been waiting for!”
Applause, cheers, boos from Mick's bed.
“And here it is! The Great Singing Competition between the world's two greatest singersâTex Robe and Boston Blackhead!”
“I'm Tex Robe,” Mick said. “I made it up.”
“But you made it up for me. And I made Boston Blackhead up for you. There's no reneging on Blackhead, old buckaroo. Now shut up till it's your turn, or you're disqualified. Right, ladies and gentlemen?”
“Right, right, right,” the ladies and gentlemen answered from the sides of their mouths.
“And here he is, ladies and gentlemen, Tex Robe singing the great new hit âSaxophone Boogie'!”
Saxophone Boogie, yeah yeah,
Saxophone Boogie, yeah yeah,
Saxophone Boogie, yeah yeah,
Oh man, that music's cool!
You hear the saxophone
When you're sittin there at home,
Hear that saxophone
And know you're not alone,
Hear the saxophone
When you're sittin there in school,
Oh man, that music's cool.
Saxophone Boogie, yeah yeah â¦
“Let's hear it for Tex Robe, ladies and gentlemen!”
Thunderous applause.
Then it was Boston Blackhead's turn. The ladies and gentlemen cheered again. Some booed and hissed. Boston Blackhead began to sing in a quavery, haunting voice, the voice of a ghost, of an ancient mariner.
“Oh no, ladies and gentlemen, not that, any song but that,” the master of ceremonies implored, but it was too late. There was no stopping the song, the same song that Mick had been singing on and off over the past months, ever since I'd brought a book on explorers home from the library, and, adrift on our beds in the expanse of darkness, we circumnavigated the world. Instead of returning the book on time, I'd hid it along with a flashlight behind the radiator, and after the house was quiet I'd read in a whisper about the five ships and two hundred and seventy-seven men who'd set sail, about the Patagonian Giants with their strange wordsâ
ghialeme
for fire,
settere
for stars,
chene
for hand,
gechare
for scratchâwords we began to use, as in “I hear you gecharing your balls, matey.” They passed the Cape of Desire, the Cape of Eleven Thousand Virgins, the Land of fireâ
ghialeme
âunder the Southern Cross, past the Unfortunate Isles, the Robber Islands. There were doldrums, shipwrecks, mutinies, demasting storms. “My men die fast, but we approach the East Indies at fair speed ⦠. I know a ship can sail around the world. But God help us in our suffering.” Their ankles swelled enormously, their teeth dropped out, the flesh of penguins stunk in the hold, they soaked the leather wrappings from the masts in seawater for days, ate sawdust and wood chips. Three years, forty thousand miles, only eighteen men returned.
I sailed with Magellan, ooo-ooo-ooo
Oh, oh, oh,
I sailed with Magellan â¦
Each time Mick sang it, the song got weirder, rambling without any one melody, its scale sounding foreign like a Muslim prayer, Mick never pausing, even if I laughed, he'd just keep singsonging on into a kind of trance ⦠I sailed with Magellan, oh, oh, oh ⦠boiled our shoes ⦠ate our sails ⦠without teeth ⦠chewed our ship down to the nails ⦠I sailed with Magellan, ooo-ooo-ooo
It kept getting softer and softer until finally he faded out. I could hear his breathing heavy and rhythmic and knew he was sleeping. The light across the gangway went out, leaving the room a shade darker. After a while, when the dog felt it was safe to softly whimper, I knew Kashka and Jano were sleeping, too.
Swimsuits on beneath our clothes, a towel each, and the bar of brown laundry soap Sir always brought, we rumbled out of the neighborhood in his latest bargain, a Kaiser the green of an army tankâone that had seen combat. At Twenty-third, Mick and I shouted for him to swing onto the flooded side street where a plank propped before an open hydrant made for an illegal fountain, but he ignored us, and we headed down Cermak, stop and go, never fast enough to make a breeze, past the lumberyards on Ashland, and the huge electric plant where Moms used to work, and the turnoff to Maxwell Street, then through Chinatown, with its crowded streets and pagodaed restaurants where it was rumored illegal fireworks were sold.
“Full of tourists.” Sir said. “Only place in Chicago where you see tourists.”
“Why don't we ever stop and look around Chinatown?” Mick asked.
Sir just gave him a raised brow.
After Chinatown the street turned shabby, trash in the gutters, factories and gutted apartment buildings side by side. Black people sat on the doorsteps, escaping the heat.
“Roll up the windows,” Sir said. “Hot nights like this anything can happen around here.”
We rolled them partway, but it was too stuffy. It had been in the nineties all week. The State Street El station looked as if it were silhouetted against the radiation from an atomic blast. The platform's shadow stretched in perfect detail, like an enormous negative superimposed on the street. Beneath its shady girders was a bar, its open door like an amplifier reverbing blues guitar. Black men sweating through their shirts and women in silky, sleeveless dresses congregated in front, foaming beer bottles in hand. They laughed and swayed, and the women fanned themselves to the music. They looked as if they were having a good time. We stopped for the light under the slatted shadows of the El tracks.
“Lookit! Lookit!” Sir yelled. “The guy with the chicken!”
“Where at?” Mick whirled in the backseat. He'd only heard about the Chickenman till now.
A bony, brown man, legs like stilts, shirt out over his trousers, strutted down State, nodding left and right as if the street were lined with people watching a parade. A white chicken perched at attention on his head. He passed the bar and stopped at the curb. The chicken stepped from his head to his shoulder, ruffled its feathers, and white droppings hit the sidewalk. Then it gently twisted its neck and rubbed its faded pink comb along the man's cheek.
The light changed. Sir stepped on the gas. The Chickenman blew us a kiss. I could see black kids running to catch up with him and wished I could follow him, too.
“He goes all over the city with that chicken,” Sir said. “Perry and I see him sometimes at Maxwell Street, right sonnyboy?”
“About every Sunday,” I said. For the last year, since I turned thirteen, Sir had been taking me along to Maxwell, an open-air bazaar that some people called Jewtown. He said he wanted to teach me how to shop. I didn't want to go at first, until I realized
the big shopping day on Maxwell was Sunday morning, and that going with Sir got me out of going to church.
“Maxwell Street is your father's church,” Moms would kid.
Mick, still too young for Jewtown, was stuck going to Sunday mass.
“That Chickenman had that chicken pecking corn right off his tongue,” Sir told Mick. “Poor crazy goof.”
I remembered a Sunday in spring when we'd seen the Chickenman close his mouth over the head of the chicken as if preparing to swallow it whole. The chicken didn't seem to mind. That was on Maxwell Street amidst crowds of people browsing and heatedly bargaining in different languages. Sir led me from one rickety stall to another, stopping to pick through boxes of used faucets, lengths of pipe, elbow joints, fittings heaped in musty, tangled piles on canvas tarpaulins lining the curbs. As usual, he was looking for some specific partâa three-quarter fittingâand, as usual, I was supposed to be helping him find it, though I had no idea what a three-quarter fitting was.
His ability to gauge instantly the dimensions of things both mystified and intimidated me. It was a gift I seemed to lack completely, one expressed in a language I was ignorant of, with a vocabulary one needed to gain admittance into the practical world of men. We might be rumbling in the Kaiser down a busy street like Western Avenue, and Sir would suddenly hit the brakes and stop in the middle of traffic before a piece of scrap that other cars swerved to avoid. While Mick and I slouched in humiliation below the dash, Sir would get out of the car, pick up the scrap, and singing aloud, wholly oblivious to the motorists honking and cursing as they pulled around him, he'd carefully fasten it to the homemade carriers he'd suction-cupped to the roof. He carried rope in case of such lucky finds, though in the absence of rope, twists of wire coat hangers served just as well. A coat hanger fastened
the tailpipe to the Kaiser, and we'd gone through a phase when coat hangers held the screen door to its hinges, secured the lids of trash cans, and appeared in a variety of other ingenious applications. Mick had remarked that he expected Sir to start using coat hangers as belts for our trousers and laces for our shoes. Whenâstill singingâSir got back in the car, we'd ask: “Yo, Dad, don't you think the Kaiser is junky enough without stopping to pile more junk on top?”
He always had the perfect comeback. “Do either of you guys know what a good two-by-four is going for by the foot?”
Not only did I not know the price per foot but I didn't know how by looking at a piece of busted lumber he could recognize its dimensions.
That Sunday on Maxwell Street, back in spring, it was a three-quarter fitting we were after, and I especially hated sorting through used plumbing. I couldn't help imagining the flood of excrement that had flushed through those moldy gray parts. I was lagging behind, thumbing through a carton stuffed with old comic books, when a gypsy girl came out of one of the storefronts on Maxwell and slipped an arm around my father's waist. Her earrings dangled nearly to her bare shoulders. Her peasant blouse scooped across the crease between her smallish, pointy breasts. A red scarf bandannaed her black hair, and her eyes were violet with mascara. Beneath the makeup, she didn't look that much older than me.
“You got black hair like gypsy,” she said to Sir. “Want gypsy good time? I give you.”
Sir took off walking, shaking her arm off, trying to ignore her. Suddenly, he slapped his wallet, pinning her hand to his back pocket. “Let go,” he said.
Instead, she reached a hand around and grabbed his crotch and, still smiling, stared up at him, whispering something I couldn't hear. It stopped him in his tracks.
“Da-dammit,” he said, screwing up his face as if he'd swallowed something sour, then shot a harried look back at me, a look I interpreted as
Don't tell Mother.
They stood stalemated, nobody on the street paying the least attention, the gypsy massaging the front of his trousers while Sir tried to work her hand out of his back pocket without the wallet coming with it. I just stood there, too, instantly entranced by her, until I saw two gypsy men stepping out of the same doorway toward my father.
A cop, gnawing a Polish sausage dripping sauce, ambled across the street and headed them off.
“Giving you trouble?” he asked Sir.
“Forget it,” Sir said, face still registering a sour taste. “I don't want no trouble.”
As we walked away, I turned and saw the cop slip his arm around the girl's shoulder, taking a bite from the sausage he held in one hand while his other hand nonchalantly slid into her blouse so that a bare breast almost lifted over the elastic neckline, flashing the tan areola of a nipple I didn't quite see. I watched the girl disappear back into the doorway of the storefront. Sir caught the look on my face.
“They get you inside there and
shlish,”
he said, drawing a finger across his throat. “Girls like that carry a disease that'll make you walk like Charlie Chaplin.”
It was the first advice he ever gave me about sex and, thankfully, the last.
We saw the Chickenman that day, stilt-legged, balanced on a hydrant above the passing crowds, with the chicken rising from his head like a weather vane. The bird hopped to his shoulder, and the man's mouth widened to a gaping hole in which the chicken bobbed his head. The mouth closed, and when the chicken slowly spread its wings, it looked as if the man's head might fly from his body.
I'd described the whole scene more than once to Mick on nights when I'd lie in the dark and think about the girl before I went to sleep, wondering where the gypsies had gone. Mick especially liked the part about her grabbing Sir by the balls.
Â
We knew we were close when we passed Donnelly's, a block-long factory where telephone books were printed. I could feel the pneumatic exhalation of its giant, racketing presses, smell the scorched ink of all those compressed names and numbers and the sweat of the night shift, who stared out like convicts behind mesh screens. Then traffic accelerated, and as we pulled onto the Outer Drive the sudden coolness made my head light. Soldier Field rose on the left, and the lake stretched past the breakwater and farthest sailboats, shimmering pink under a sun that glazed the park trees.
“Workin on the railroad, workin on the farm, all I got to show for it's the muscle in my arm,” Sir sang in a voice he lowered to a baritone he considered operatic. He often sang when he drove. “I had a Caruso-quality voice as a kid,” he'd tell us, “but ruined it imitating trains.”
Mick was rolling around in the backseat with his hands over his ears, groaning as if having convulsions.
“At least he's not singing âBrother Can You Spare a Dime?'” I said.
“And it looks like I'm never gonna cease my wanderin.”
“He's
never
gonna cease his wanderin,” I said to Mick.
Mick and a black kid in the backseat of a car in the lane beside us were giving each other the finger. The kid tried to spit into our Kaiser, but his spit blew back on him. We all busted up, including the kid.
Sir was pumping the brakes as cars weaved in front of him.
“Da-damn nuts,” he yelled, jockeying for the turning lane. “It's really dog eat dog on this thing.”
Brakes grinding, we shimmied off the exit for Twelfth Street Beach and crawled along the aisles of the parking lot looking for a space. Finally, Sir had to drive over the sidewalk and park on the grass. There were a lot of other cars parked on the grass.
“Can't give us all tickets,” he said.
We slipped our jeans off. Sir hid his watch and wallet under the seat.
“Leave the windows open a crack, so when we come back it's not like a da-damn oven in here.”
“Where's the door opener?” Mick asked.
“Just climb out this way,” Sir said.
“No,” Mick insisted, “I demand the door opener.”
I handed it to him over the seat, and he began to mash at the buffalo. Only the door on the Kaiser's driver side opened, so we carried around a sawed-off broom handle we called the door opener. The Kaiser had no inside door handles. Before the Kaiser-Frazer company went out of business, it had advertised its designs as the automobiles of the future. To their engineers, the future meant push buttons, so they'd replaced door handles with push buttons embossed with the Kaiser trademark, a buffalo. By mashing the buffalo with just the right amount of force, we sometimes got the passenger door to open. We'd turned it into a competition. This time Mick got it on five triesâaverage.
Sir checked to make sure everything was locked while Mick and I hopped barefoot across scorching asphalt to the beach.
“Don't step on any da-damn broken glass or we'll have a real mess,” Sir hollered behind us. “I don't know why the punks have to break the bottles instead of throwing them in the trash.” He paused to kick a bottle neck through a sewer grate. He was still wearing his socks and unlaced factory shoes, though he'd stripped
down to his old maroon bathing trunks with the gold buckle and the leaping aqua blue swordfish over the coin pocket. People didn't wear swimsuits like that anymore. Sometimes seeing it made me weak inside with a feeling that I couldn't name but that had to do with all the times I'd seen him wear it before, times when I was littleâyounger than Mick was nowâwhen Moms would always come with us to the beach, times before she got nervous, before we'd hear her pacing the house in the dark in the middle of the night crying to herself. Seeing the maroon bathing suit made me think of the old maroon Chevy, the first car I remembered. I thought my father had driven home from the Army in it. It had a running board he'd let me ride on while he parked.
It was a car we'd pack once a year with shopping bags full of old clothes and jars of jam and the dill pickles Moms canned. Leaving Moms behind, my father and I would drive a long time into what seemed to me to be countryside because the streets were shadowy with trees. We'd arrive at a high iron gate and follow a road that curved through park-like grounds where people in wheelchairs were pushed by attendants in white. We'd park and enter a cavernous building of gray stone, tote our shopping bags down corridors acrid with disinfectant, and wait before a bank of windows that looked out on lawn. An old man with stunned eyes and a jawline grizzled in gray would be wheeled in to where we waited. The three of us would sit silently together. There was never any talk, not even in Polish, a language my father relied on for secrecy. My father took the old man's veined, stony hand and traced its battered knuckles. Before we left he'd kiss that hand. We never stayed long, and I'd forget about our trip until a year later, when we'd again load shopping bags into the maroon Chevy and drive into what felt like a déjà vu.