by Terri Favro
That was when Bum Bum knew he was screwed. Once the other Andolini boys suspected that Cousin Rocco had abandoned him, they would start following him with baseball bats and mumbled threats of what-he-had-coming.
Marcello used to say: Measure twice, cut once. By which he meant, think ahead.
So, Bum Bum thought ahead. What would he need to run away from his so-called home? Money and food.
Money was easy, Prima being a big believer in cash transactions. As soon as she was zonked out on little white pills and in bed, her charge, her burden, her sacrifice, her unofficial foster child Bum Bum (ungrateful little rat shit bastard that he was) stuck his hand in her underwear drawer and pulled out a sheaf of freshly-ironed tens and twenties from among the tangle of elastic stockings, slipping them inside the cover of his favourite book, I, Robot. Marcello’s favourite, too, his name still scrawled on the inside cover. He’d given the paperback to Bum Bum, who read it so many times that the spine was held together with black electrician’s tape.
Sneaking through the dark kitchen, Bum Bum could hear Marcello’s practical voice in his head, advising him: Take some food along. You never know when you’ll have a chance to eat again.
He grabbed the biggest Tupperware container in the fridge, dumping the contents into a plastic bag without checking them first. Food is food when you’re on the run. But what did he take? The leftover cake. He wishes he had found some cheese, maybe a hunk of salami. By the time he realized his mistake, he had already painfully crutched through the yard where the family’s Buicks, Mercs, and trucks with ANDOLINI BROS. on the doors were ringed like circled wagons.
He worried that the old lady might wake up and catch him—not that she could stop him, but she might lay a guilt trip on him: Marcello, he say you stay here with me till you grown.
Yeah right. Like Marcello really gives a shit anymore.
In the two hours since he left Prima’s house, Bum Bum has managed to cover a mile, maybe. Inching along in the sweaty darkness feels like squeezing through the asshole of a pig.
Fuck his smashed-up knee. Fuck Rocco. But most of all, fuck Marcello for dumping him with the old lady instead of taking him along when he ran away with Holy Mother Ida, the only person Bum Bum ever truly loved.
Ida’s proxy husband, a paesan of the Andolinis known as Senior, liked to drop by the farm to get drunk and bitch about the treachery of wives and sons, his having run away together. When he was younger, Bum Bum would feel the brunt of Senior’s rage, a kick or a slap, because he’d been friends with Marcello—had helped him put one over on Senior, in fact. Now that Bum Bum was bigger than he was, Senior would just glower at him over the grappa bottle in the middle of the table.
Prima would always shrug and say, so what you want us to do about it, as if Senior should resign himself to his fate. Senior would answer that he’d like to filet the face of that daughter of a bohunk whore, so that no man would ever be tricked by her beauty again. As for his so-called son, Marcello — Senior would make a slashing motion across his throat, causing Prima to cross herself.
Over the years, Bum Bum himself had developed a mild resentment toward Marcello for turning out to be less than perfect. Marcello was too passionate, letting his heart and dick lead him around by the nose, causing him to make mistakes like leaving Senior alive to seek revenge. Mr. Spock from Star Trek was a better role model, all cold logic, except for a little bit of his human side peeking through during mating season on his home planet of Vulcan. Bum Bum had come to think of Marcello as a failed Spock, intelligent and noble, yet fallible in a way that the Vulcan science officer was not. He should never have left Bum Bum behind in the care of the Andolinis.
Prima would say Bum Bum was being ungrateful. That he should thank Marcello for saving him from his awful life, and thank God for his second chance, living on the farm with saintly Prima. She spent years trying to convince him that “God is Everywhere,” that Bum Bum could carry the Almighty in his pocket like a penny or a smooth stone—or even like the condom in its scuffed and wrinkled pouch that Rocco shoplifted from Big V Drugs. “I keep it in my jeans, just in case,” Rocco explained, his bulgy arm crooked behind his head, he and Bum Bum on their backs staring up at the clouds from the middle of the peach orchard, Rocco pointing out the one that looked like two horses doing it.
Prima used to get Bum Bum down on his knees to yawn pre-dawn rosaries and Saturday evening folk masses with teenagers in unisex hot-rollered flips playing Kumbaya on acoustic guitars and the groovy priest raising his hands in blessing like Bruce Lee getting ready to deliver double Judo chops. Despite all that, Bum Bum doesn’t believe God is everywhere. He sure isn’t out here on the concession road, unless He drives a 1969 Chevrolet Corvair Monza soft-top sedan with New York plates.
The car’s high beams catch him full in the face, blinding him for a second. Bum Bum is limping north-north-west (isn’t that where Marcello and Ida are, the closest things to Our Lady and An Avenging Angel he’s ever met?). God’s Corvair, however, is cruising north by northeast.
He’s so surprised he doesn’t have time to consider: should he stay hidden in the darkness or try to hitch a ride? His plan was to walk out of Bramborough Township, but his knee is killing him.
He steps closer to the pavement. Extends his arm. Jerks his thumb. To his amazement, the Corvair doesn’t slow down but veers wildly onto the gravel verge, coming straight at him. Bum Bum stumbles backwards, crutches flailing, knee wailing no no no no no as he tries not to fall into the weed-choked drainage ditch. The car screams to a stop.
Engine idling, the passenger-side window lowers on its own. Motown music and cool air trickle out.
Bum Bum is afraid to look at the driver. The power windows and air conditioning trigger a memory of being picked up in a similarly equipped car, a Caddy, years before he came to live with Prima. Some guy drove him up Hamilton Mountain to look at the flaring steel mill stacks and pass a bottle of sweet booze back and forth. “Tia Maria,” he called it. “You kids love it.” Then he lifted a big white box out of the back seat and put it in Bum Bum’s lap. Inside was a chocolate cake with pink writing on top.
“See what it says?”
Bum Bum shook his head. Ten years old and he still couldn’t read. (This was before Marcello taught him, in those shadowy years he tries hard not to remember.)
“What are you, retarded or something? It says ‘Happy Birthday Patty.’ She’s my little girl. I’m giving you her cake. Because I’m a nice guy.”
He insisted Bum Bum eat the whole thing in front of him. The boy choked down the soft shitlike cake with frosting as metallically sweet as buttered steel. On his final mouthful the man unzipped his pants and shoved Bum Bum’s head between his thighs and held him there, making him gag. He’s hated cakes ever since.
Don’t let it be the Tia Maria guy, Bum Bum prays to the empty sky. He peers into the car. In the gold lamé light of the dashboard, he sees a girl’s face curtained by straight blonde hair, her hands balled up in front of her mouth as if she’s getting ready to throw a punch. She’s sitting on a pile of crushed velvet couch cushions, brocaded and tasseled. Skinny arms, skinny legs, stomach as big and round as a beach ball, like one of the starving kids on the cover of Prima’s magazines from the missions.
“Jesus Christ, you almost made me hit you!” Despite her anger, her voice sounds high and light and harmless.
Leaning on his crutches, he lifts his hands the way soldiers do in the movies when they’re giving up: look, no weapons.
“I’m just a kid like you,” he tells her, stating the obvious.
“Yeah, and you were almost a dead kid just now. What the hell you doing in the road?”
“Hitchhiking.”
“On crutches? In the pitch dark? That’s nuts. Where you going?”
“B.C. I got friends there,” answers Bum Bum.
“I’m heading to Toronto. You want me to le
t you out on the ramp where you can hitch a ride west?”
Bum Bum stares at the front seat beside her. The smooth leather looks soft and comfortable. She has a Buffalo radio station on. The Jackson Five is singing A-B-C. As easy as one, two, three…
“I could go to Toronto, I guess,” answers Bum Bum.
“Get a move on and get in,” she says.
Tossing the crutches into the back seat, he slides in among crumpled chip bags, empty soda bottles, and Oh Henry wrappers. He hasn’t even closed the door before she floors it, peeling off the shoulder like Steve McQueen in Bullitt.
He steadies himself against the glove. Even sitting on the pile of pillows, she’s barely able to peer over the steering wheel.
She nods at his lap. “What’s in the bag?”
He’d forgotten he was still holding it. “Chocolate cake. My birthday’s today. Or yesterday, by now, I guess.”
“Cool. Reach in back and grab my purse, you’ll find some weed in there. Roll us a doobie and we’ll celebrate.”
Bum Bum removes the baggie and clumsily rolls a joint against his thigh, nice and tight, the way Rocco taught him. The girl tells him her name is Claire. “What’s yours?”
Bum Bum considers his answer. It’s hard to know whether to give her his real name (the only one who ever called him “Pasquale” was Prima—and Marcello and Ida of course) or his nickname which, although disgusting, has stuck to him for as long as he can remember, signaling that his ass is available to be kicked by anyone, any time.
“I could use a new name. Any ideas?”
The girl laughs. “Only one I ever named was our dog, Benny. He got hit by a car chasing some kids on the road. You want his name?”
He rolls the dead dog’s name around in his head. Benny. He likes it. But the coincidence worries him. “I got chased by dogs on a farm road, once. You don’t think Benny was one of them, do you?”
“Course not, I live in a subdivision in Niagara Falls, American side. Love Canal. Too far away for Benny to have chased you. Besides, all dogs give chase to show they’re the boss of you. Same as when they hump one another.”
Bum Bum thinks this over. If he takes a dog’s name, maybe it’ll mean he’s finally the boss of somebody else. The humper rather than humpee. “Benny sounds good. Thanks.”
The girl fiddles with the radio when the Buffalo station fades into static. CHUM Toronto comes in so loudly that it almost makes Bum Bum drop the half-rolled joint. He slides the doobie in and out of his mouth to spit-seal it, strikes a match, and takes a couple of puffs to get it started.
“Nice car,” he offers, handing her the joint.
Claire takes a long, greedy toke. “My stepfather’s. He locked me up so I took his ‘baby.’ That’s what he calls it.”
“Why’d he lock you up?”
She exhales, giving him a you-must-be-kidding look. “I started showing.”
Bum Bum is getting a nice little buzz on. Even his knee doesn’t hurt so bad. “If he was mad enough to lock you up, why didn’t he just force the guy to marry you?”
Claire goes alarmingly silent. Like she’s trying not to cry. Why’d he open his big mouth? But when she answers, she just sounds pissed. “There was no guy.”
Bum Bum scratches his balls; the money-laden paperback in his underwear is starting to chafe. “But you must have done it with someone,” he says.
“Nope. I woke up one morning, looked down, and saw the bump under the sheet. My mom got the Bible out and prayed over me but it didn’t do any good. It’s been growing ever since.”
Bum Bum knows he shouldn’t argue with her but the pot is making him honest and open and curious. “Come on. There had to be a guy.”
“Not to my knowledge,” says Claire, sounding like someone on the witness stand in an old Perry Mason.
Bum Bum can’t let this go. “The only one that ever happened to was the Virgin Mary. It’s like something out of science fiction. Star Trek, or Dune, or something. You’d have to be a hermaphrodite. Like worms.”
“Maybe I am,” says Claire quietly.
“Are what?”
“One of those things you just said. A hermaf… whatever. Where I’m from, a lot of kids are special.” Claire takes another long drag and passes the doobie back to Bum Bum. “I knew kids with big heads, or one regular eye and one screwed up one. Some retarded. Others get fits. There’s a girl went to school with me who had an extra set of teeth. It just goes to show. They say it’s ’cause of the black ooze. Big ponds of oil, coming right up through the schoolyard. We got a pool of ooze in our basement too. You touch it, it burns your skin.” She looks over at Bum Bum. “If the black ooze can give kids a giant head, why can’t it make a baby without a man?”
“I guess,” says Bum Bum, unconvinced. “How long you been locked up?”
“About three months. I missed junior prom, even though I was head of the decorating committee. They were going to keep me in my room till the baby came.”
“What were they gonna do with it?”
Claire shrugs. “Give it away, I guess. There’s ladies on my street who can’t have kids. Even some whose babies died.”
Something about this story seems horribly familiar to Bum Bum. Older people can be really scary, even when they read the Bible and are supposed to be looking after you. His own dimly remembered parents were terrifying. “That sucks,” he finally says.
“Sucks the big one,” agrees Claire. “My brother scored me the car keys so I could get away. We live ten minutes from the Peace Bridge, practically like we’re in Canada anyway. I just jumped in the car and went over the river. If my brother gets drafted, he’s coming up here, too. Not that I think the army’ll send him to Vietnam, with all his conditions. What about you, Benny? What’s your life story?”
Bum Bum takes a long pull on the joint and lets time fly backward like a flip card animation in reverse. Life as he knows it started the day he woke up behind the bars of a giant crib in a hospital room in Shipman’s Corners, the crucifix of Prima’s rosary swinging over his head.
“Marcello say I take care of you now, just like I take care of him when he was little,” she explained.
“Where is Marcello?” Bum Bum had mumbled in his delirium.
“He run off with that puttana!” stated Prima.
Bum Bum closed his eyes. Prima meant Ida, the most holy and beautiful and perfect woman he had ever met in his life. Ida was the opposite of the whore Prima said she was. But he was too tired to argue. And besides, he was only eleven. Both too old and too young to argue with elderly Italian ladies.
A few days later Prima returned in the Merc and took Bum Bum home to the farm in Bramborough Township. For the first time he slept in a bed every night, went to school every day, picked fruit in summer, went to church, ate three meals a day, every day. He didn’t miss the going-hungry part of his old life. He missed the freedom, though. On warm nights he’d sneak out of Prima’s house to sleep in the grass. Sometimes Rocco would come out, too, lie down next to him and stare up at the stars.
Curious about Bum Bum’s old life, Rocco prodded him for details: “What was it like, Bum?”
“Can’t remember,” Bum Bum would say at first, then go on to pick out jagged bits of memory, working their way to the surface.
Helping Kowalchuk rip people off. Hanging out with the craps players. Guys taking him into back alleys, stuffing a couple bucks into Bum Bum’s pocket then unzipping their flies. His mother mostly ignored him, his father hurt him sometimes, or worse, let other guys hurt him.
None of it seemed to shock Rocco or bother him much. “Did Marcello and you ever, you know, do it?”
“Whadya mean?”
Rocco shrugged. “I always figured Marcello for a fairy. All them books and opera records and shit. Real fag stuff.”
“He isn’t like that,” said Bum Bum. He considered a
dding, And I’m not either. But he was fairly sure that he was—a fact that Bum Bum accepted about himself without much thought, so long as it didn’t get his teeth knocked out.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, Rocco said he wanted to teach Bum Bum how to fight, the way he did in Golden Gloves. The two went into the tool shed. “Take your shirt off,” commanded Rocco.
Before Bum Bum could even get his shirt over his head, Rocco balled his fists and smashed him in the face. It wasn’t that hard a punch—didn’t even break his nose—but the pain drilled into Bum Bum, blood spattering on the tool shed floor. Rocco dabbed his fingers in it and smeared it across his cheeks like war paint.
“Okay, so I’ve bloodied you, big deal. Had to be done. Put ’em up.”
Bum Bum took a swing, and Rocco stepped away, then stepped back in, and punched him in the bread basket. Bum Bum ended up whimpering and winded on the dirt floor.
Rocco stood over him, one sneakered foot on either side of his chest. “On your feet, Bum,” he ordered. “Stop fooling around and I’ll teach you something so you don’t have to be scared all the time. You’ll thank me for it one day.”
He showed Bum Bum how to punch. Block. Dance like Muhammad Ali. They sparred. Got into a clinch, Bum Bum clinging to Rocco’s waist. Suddenly they’d switched from boxing to wrestling. Rocco put him in a headlock, rock hard bicep against soft windpipe. As Bum Bum struggled for breath, Rocco twisted his head and pressed his mouth down hard on his. For a second Bum Bum thought it was an accident or a joke or something but then he felt Rocco’s tongue thrusting between his lips, tasting his blood. Bum Bum’s hard-on was as big as his whole body, as big as the inside of the tool shed, as big as the whole world. Bum Bum could feel Rocco’s boner, too, pressing into his hip.
Enter Frank—son of Prima, father of Rocco, layer of concrete—looking for a posthole-digger. He saw Rocco’s arm around Bum Bum’s neck, Bum Bum’s lips on Rocco’s mouth. Next thing Bum Bum knew, he was on his back again, arms covering his head, as Frank stomped on his knee: “You little rat shit fag bastard. I warned Ma not to take you in.” Rocco stood by, head down, and did nothing.