Cardboard Ocean

by Mike McCardell

  The sticks in stickball came when your mother turned her back and you unscrewed it from the broom.

  Now they were manufactured with electric tape and sold in a box with dreamy words written on the side.

  The bat was 75 percent off because, get real, nobody in Vancouver grew up playing stickball.

  I picked up a box with the stickball bat inside. At 75 percent off, they were almost giving it away.

  I stood in line. I thought of the games I had as a kid with my friends who would stay forever in the streets of my mind. I remembered the thrill of being ten and eleven years old.

  “Will that be cash or charge, sir?”

  “Never mind,” I said. I put it back. Things are not as real as memories, and fancy things that pretend they are something they are not, are not like the kids who lived in your past. I walked down the sidewalk holding my granddaughter’s hand. “Someday,” I told her, “I’ll teach you to play stickball, with a broomstick we swipe from your mother.”

  “What about your story of swimming in the Mediterranean,” my daughter said. “Was that better than stickball?”

  My head went into a dream. “The Mediterranean was so beautiful. I took the train to get there.”

  My daughter shook her head. “No wonder Miss Johnson said you were lying. You can’t take a train from New York to get to Greece.”

  “Of course you can,” I said. “That’s when my mother ran away from my father.”

  That’s a scary story. My father used to come home drunk every night and my mother and me would push the dresser in front of the bedroom door and lean against it while he banged on the other side.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “Your uncle will be home in the morning and everything will be okay then.”

  My Uncle John was a cop. He wore a suit to work with guns underneath it, so actually he was a detective. He kept his bullets in the top drawer of his dresser and I had to use a kitchen chair to climb up there to take one out of the box.

  Don’t get upset when your kid sticks her finger in the fan. She has to find out what it does and chances are the fan is made so little fingers can’t touch the blades. Fan makers have kids, too.

  The bullet was different. They were made before childproof packaging was thought of. I brought it outside and me and a friend spent a while hitting it with a rock to make it go off.

  “What are you doing?” my mother asked when she leaned out the window.

  “Nothing,” I said. We covered up the bullet. I knew we shouldn’t be doing this but I wasn’t sure why.

  My mother must have seen what we were doing because she suddenly ran out the front door and grabbed the bullet off the sidewalk.

  “You are crazy! Your uncle will kill you.”

  See, there are worse things than killing yourself.

  In the mornings, Uncle John would come home from work with his friends who were also detectives and they would laugh and joke and my mother would make them breakfast. My father, who was my uncle’s brother, was still sleeping.

  My mother would put out plates of bacon and eggs and pots of coffee and I would sit under the kitchen table and look at the guns they had strapped to their legs and listen to the stories of the night before.

  “He was running across the rooftop, but I got him, grabbed him and slammed his head into the edge of the roof. You know, the part that’s all metal.”

  I wanted to be a cop, like my uncle, and after his friends left I would say to him, “Can I be a junior policeman?”

  “You’re a little young,” he would say. “Maybe in a few years, but meanwhile, take care of your mother.”

  Then he got up from the table, walked into his bedroom at the back of the apartment and I didn’t see him again until night.

  “You think someday Uncle John will make me a junior policeman?” I asked my mother.

  “You should leave him alone for now, he is very tired.”

  She looked like she liked him very much.

  At night, before I went to bed, I would go into his room and watch him get ready for work. He took the bullets out of his top drawer and loaded them into one pistol that he put into a holster under his arm.

  Then he would check the bullets in another gun that he put into a holster and strapped to his right calf.

  Then he picked his blackjack off the top of his dresser.

  “Feel this, Mikey.”

  It was easy-to-grip rubber and only a little bigger than my hand, but it was so heavy. I opened my left hand and hit it like a ball.

  “Owww.” Oh, it hurt.

  “It’ll crack open a head. Almost kill someone,” said my uncle. “It’s my favourite little toy.”

  Then he straightened his tie and told me to take care of my mother and he left for work.

  The next morning I was waiting for him outside on the front stoop. He was alone and he was banged up. I knew this because his tie was pulled over to the side and he had a bruise on his face and bandages on his knuckles.

  “Can I be a junior policeman today?” I asked.

  He stopped and looked down at me for a long time. At least it seemed like a long time. Then he said, “Why not? Today would be perfect to swear you in on the force. We need more kids.”

  He told me to come with him. He said good morning to my mother as she stood in the kitchen, cooking, and the two of us walked down the hallway to his room. Inside he took a card out of his wallet. I could not read, but I knew it was real because it had a police shield on one side. He wrote something on the back.

  “Hold up your right hand,” he said.

  I did.

  “Repeat after me. I swear to uphold the law.”

  I did not know what the law was, but I said, “I swear to uphold the law.”

  “And I swear to be good.”

  I said, “I swear to be good.”

  “And this is most important of all,” said my uncle. “I swear to take care of my mother.”

  I raised my hand up higher and said, “I swear to take care of my mother.”

  Uncle John wrote something on the back of the card then leaned forward and put it in my shirt pocket.

  “By the power invested in me, I hereby make you a junior policeman,” he said. “And now I’m going to bed.”

  I jumped straight up. I ran down the hallway to my mother who was still in the kitchen.

  “I’m a junior policeman,” I said. “Uncle John made me a junior policeman. I’m a junior policeman.”

  “Well, I hope you thanked him,” she said.

  I had not, but his door was closed. I pulled the card halfway out of my pocket so that the badge showed. Then I got my plastic six-shooter and went outside.

  This was when a six-year-old could go outside alone and walk around the block even in Brooklyn, so long as he did not cross the street. And six-shooters are not bad, so long as they are plastic.

  Today there are daycares in Vancouver that will not allow boys to shoot each other with sticks they find in the park. Those boys will grow up to be judges and social reformers who will remember wonderful childhoods, until their sticks were taken away.

  When I ran outside with my six-shooter that day, the first person I saw was Mrs. Ruzzito. She was taking a newspaper from her neighbour’s stoop. I spoke to Mrs. Ruzzito.

  Then I saw an old man coming out of the bar where my father hung out. He opened a pack of cigarettes and dropped the paper on the sidewalk.

  I pulled up my badge and spoke to him. “Mister, you are not supposed to do that.”

  And then I saw the most terrible thing of all. Spike, who lived across the street, was letting his dog go to the bathroom on the sidewalk.

  I knew you were supposed to curb your dog. There were pictures on signs along the street with a dog by the curb and words above the picture for those who could read. “Curb your dog,” it said, even though that looked like black marks to me.

  I pulled up my card, checked my gun, then looked both ways and crossed the street.

  Can yo
u break the law to enforce the law? It’s a problem for six-year-olds and governments.

  I spoke to Spike. He had tattoos. He was scary, but I was a junior policeman, with a card that had a badge on it. “That’s not nice,” I said. I was shaking. He just stared at me then walked away. “You’re under arrest,” I said. I saw him laugh, but he did not turn around.

  The next morning I was sitting on the front stoop waiting for my uncle.

  It is funny that only in New York do you call it a stoop. We played stoopball, throwing a ball against a stoop and catching it. If it bounced once it was five points, if you caught it on the fly it was ten, and if it was a pointer which shot out like a home run blast after hitting the edge of a step, it was twenty-five points. Not many of us caught a pointer, but we all learned to count.

  In the rest of America, and the world, it is called the front steps, and you climb them to get into the house.

  I was sitting on the stoop, waiting.

  My uncle got out of a car along with three of his police buddies. My heart was pounding.

  “Well, junior policeman, how are you doing?”

  He remembered. He did not forget. He said it right in front of real policemen with real guns. I could not believe it. I stood up.

  “I arrested some people,” I said.

  His friends started laughing. I did not feel bad. Of course they would laugh. It was my first day on the job.

  “You what?” asked my uncle.

  “I arrested some people and told them to come here this morning and you would take them to jail.”

  While his friends were snickering, Uncle John sat down on the stoop, picked me up and put me on his lap. I had the feeling I did something wrong.

  He squeezed me tightly. I felt his gun next to my cheek, but he kept squeezing.

  “You know, Mikey, what I really wanted to be, more than a policeman, was a cowboy. Do you think you could teach me how to be a cowboy?”

  I knew I did something wrong. I wasn’t sure what, but I knew it was wrong and I had done it. But my Uncle John was not yelling at me, not like my father. My face was hurting because he was still squeezing me against his gun, but he was not yelling.

  “Do you think you could make me a junior cowboy?” he asked.

  He let me have room to breathe.

  “I think so, Uncle John. I think you could be a real cowboy, even more than a junior cowboy.”

  “I don’t know, I’ve never ridden a horse before. Someday could you teach me?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He let me slide off his lap and his friends were still laughing as they walked in the front door. He was the last to go in and he turned to me and winked. My uncle winked at me. I would do anything for him.

  I waited until the door closed and waited and waited until I figured they were in the kitchen and then I ran in through the front door. It did not have a lock. Can you imagine a door in Brooklyn that did not have a lock?

  I sneaked down the hallway past them and they were too busy eating to notice me. In my corner of the room which was the room where my mother and father slept, except they did not sleep together – my mother slept with me at night and my father slept in the day with his snoring and woke up with his hangover – I got out my wooden horse.

  It was just a stick with a horse’s head, but it was my horse. And I got out my cowboy hat, which was now too small for me because I got it when I was younger, and I put my police card with the badge in my cigar box. The box had my penknife and some buttons and coins, and now my official membership as a junior policeman.

  Then I sneaked back down the hallway and out the front door. I would have to practise riding if I was going to teach my uncle how to be a cowboy. I still had my six-shooter, every cowboy needs that, and my hat. I pulled the string up real tight so it stayed on my head, and I rode down the street.

  It felt good to be out on the range without having to worry about crime. I was looking for lost cattle.

  Twenty-five years later, just after I got out of the Air Force, I was a police reporter at the New York Daily News. Those were the last days of the old-fashioned newspaper when the rewrite men, even if they were women, wore green visors on their heads and their sleeves were held up by rubber bands and they wore a headset while talking to the reporter on the street.

  There was a murder on Canal Street. Stitch McCarthy, the old Irish heavy-drinking, always-in-debt reporter, was on the scene. He scribbled notes in pencil on some folded paper then went to a pay phone.

  “Hey, Dick.”

  There were three writers at the News when I worked there named either Dick or Henry: Two names, three writers. Dick Lee, Henry Lee and Dick Henry. If you were young like me and went to the wrong one with whatever you were going with, he would explode and rip you apart, making you wish you had gone into accounting or surveying or anything except news.

  “Hey, Dick. There’s three dead and they are mobsters and this is how they got gunned down.”

  Dick would take a drink of his beer and begin to write.

  “Copy!”

  The copy boy pulled the paper out of the typewriter. It had one sentence on it. He ran to the city desk where the city editor checked it for whatever he checked it for, libel, accuracy, then sent it to the news desk where they would find a place to put it in the paper. Then the single line went to the copy desk.

  That was the old-fashioned desk like you have seen in old movies about newspaper offices. It was shaped like a horseshoe and the slot man in the middle would give the line out to one of the editors who might change a word, and might not. They were brilliant editors.

  Then the paper would go down a conveyer belt to the composing room one floor down on the sixth floor. That was like a vision of hell with a hundred fires burning below pots which were melting ingots of zinc that would be turned into lines of type on the Linotype machines.

  “Excuse me,” said my daughter. “What the heck does this have to do with taking a train to Greece?”

  “Everything!” I said. “Everything leads to something. That may sound dumb, but much, much later in life I am with a cameraman for ctv, a very nice station I may add, and it is snowing and he says, ‘Which way should we go?’”

  I point my fingers in opposite directions. He goes to Queen Elizabeth Park and we find a little girl building her first snowman. And the nose keeps falling out.

  “Oh, story god in the heavens, thank you.” The little girl looks at the pebble which is a nose and it is on the ground. She picks it up and puts it back. She smiles. Then it falls out again. She does not give up. A two-year-old is facing a problem and conquering it.

  On television it is beautiful. How did we find it? Simple, it does not matter where you go because everywhere leads to somewhere. Life happens that way. Just follow it.

  “Go on,” said my daughter, not sure if we were talking about noses or newspapers.

  All the Linotype machines were going at once and printers were picking up the hot metal lines of type from each machine and putting them into trays that would be squeezed into metal forms on heavy metal trays which would become a story in a newspaper. Meanwhile Stitch McCarthy, who badly wanted a drink, was still on the phone next to the murder scene and Dick Henry’s typewriter was still writing the story, one line per page.

  By the time Stitch hung up, the last line of the story was being set into type. By the time the police brass were arriving at Canal Street because this was a big murder, the metal type had been pressed into a heavy cardboard, and then the cardboard filled with more melted zinc and formed into a plate that was bent like half a circle.

  By the time the coroner was arriving at Canal Street, the metal plate was on the presses and the paper was feeding through at a blurring speed.

  By the time the coroner was counting the bullet holes, the newspapers were on a truck heading for Canal Street.

  Bam. The papers were thrown in a bundle on the sidewalk and the wire holding them together was cut open by a paper seller.

/>   “Read all about it. Mobsters gunned down on Canal Street. Get tomorrow’s news tonight.”

  Some of the cops would buy the paper to see their names in it because they all knew Stitch, and whatever information they could get, they would give to him.

  That was when newspapers beat cnn.

  Another day I was in the morgue, what is now called the library of the News. They had information on everything. Reporters were supposed to have contacts with the church and underworld and police and judges and what information they had, they would file in the morgue because information was sacred.

  As a fluke I looked up my name, which is what people do now on Google.

  McCardell.

  “My God, there’s a file on McCardell,” I said to myself.

  A big file.

  “No, it’s not on me. It’s on John McCardell.”

  I pulled the paper and pictures out of the manila folder. They were undercover surveillance photos of my uncle. He was going into stores. He was getting something in the stores. He was coming out with bags, sometimes brown paper bags, sometimes sports type bags.

  More pictures of the same.

  There were notes behind the picture: Suspect in bribery scandal; Policeman out of uniform collecting payoffs; Protection money.

  When he was not catching crooks, my uncle was a crook. He was collecting cash from shopkeepers, mostly bars, and bringing the money back to the station house to split with the lieutenant and captain. Uncle John wore a badge but he was a criminal, a crooked cop.

  Some years before that I once asked my mother what happened to Uncle John after he simply disappeared.

  “He retired early and went to Florida,” she said.

  But he was a thief, a rotten no-good man who did not uphold the law and did not do what was good.

  On the other hand, what the heck. When I retire I will still rent a horse somewhere on some tourist ranch. I only sat on a horse once before in my life, but I will do it again and take his memory for a ride and teach him to be a cowboy. We all make mistakes.

  “So what about taking the train to get to Greece?” my daughter asked again.

  “It’s coming. First we have to get to the train.”