Cardboard Ocean

by Mike McCardell

  “My mother will kill me.”

  Dorothy put her arm around his shoulder. I fell in love at that moment. Dorothy was kind and loving and understanding and she had her arm around someone else, and I was jealous for the second time in my life and over the same girl all in one week.

  “My uncle knows about fishing,” Dorothy said to Buster. “We’ll get your fish back.”

  She left and ran down the street and I saw Buster trying not to cry, but he was not doing a good job of it.

  “Don’t worry,” said Jimmy Lee. “Dorothy is good at fixing things and we’ll get your fish back.”

  We sat around the sewer without saying anything. This was much more exciting than leaning against a dresser while my father was beating on the door on the other side.

  When Dorothy came back, she brought a ball of string and some safety pins.

  “This is all we need,” she said. “You tie the pin to the string and lower it in the water and the fish will bite on it. My uncle said it always works.”

  We dropped the pins slowly down through the sewer grating and could feel when they hit the water. That was when the string went limp.

  “Just pull it up and down,” said Dorothy. “This is fishing.”

  We pulled and dropped and pulled and dropped.

  “I got it. I got the fish,” said Jimmy Lee. “I have it.”

  He pulled, with the string piling up on the asphalt. “It’s big,” said Jimmy Lee.

  “I see it,” said Tommy. “It’s right below the metal.”

  He squeezed his hand through the opening.

  “I can reach it. I can get it.”

  “See, Buster, it’ll be okay,” Dorothy said.

  “Yuck,” said Tommy. He pulled his hand back up through the grating and threw a blob of squishy plastic that looked like a balloon onto the street.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  We all looked at this long, ugly fat piece of clear plastic. We all came to the same conclusion at the same time.

  “Ugh,” said Dorothy.

  “It’s so big,” said Jimmy Lee.

  We all thought the same thing. It was huge and we knew we were not. We did not know how anyone would ever have something large enough to fill that.

  “Put it back,” said Dorothy. “I don’t want to look at it.”

  “But if we put it back we’ll have to fish it out again before we get the fish,” I said.

  Dorothy rolled her eyes and looked at the sky, which you could see between the buildings and the elevated tracks.

  “I’m going home. I’m not going to touch those things,” she said. “Good luck, Buster.”

  I watched her walk away and I did not stop looking. She was going and I was still there and I did not want to be there. I wanted to be going with her even if she was a year older than me.

  Buster and Jimmy Lee and I sat around the sewer until dark and Buster cried a lot. He figured his mother would yell at him for half the night and then kill him in his sleep.

  “She’s coming,” he said.

  He saw his mother walking down the stairs after a train pulled out of the station.

  “If only I had left the fish in the kitchen like she said.”

  His mother walked over to us.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. She seemed nice.

  “Trying to get the fish back,” said Buster. He did not look up. “It fell down the sewer.”

  “What fish?” she said. “Oh, that silly goldfish. Good, I was thinking of flushing it down the toilet anyway,” she said.

  Buster looked up with the question mark of a tilted head.

  “We can’t keep a fish in the house,” his mother said. “I would’ve had to get another bowl to put it in because we need the soup bowl and then it would die and we’d have a bowl we don’t need. You didn’t lose the bowl, did you?”

  Buster shook his head.

  “Come on in and have supper,” she said.

  Buster jumped up like it was the happiest day of his life. He carefully lifted the bowl from the sidewalk and ran after his mother.

  “How come the bowl didn’t break when it fell?” I asked Jimmy Lee.

  He shrugged. “Maybe the ghost of his dead brother saved it,” he said.

  I thought that was a good possibility.

  “Dead brothers and sisters always hang around to help. My grandfather told me that,” he said.

  Jimmy Lee and I went fishing over that sewer almost every night through the summer and into the fall until it got too cold to sit on the ground. We talked about everything that happened during the day, and he told me that his little brother screamed a lot because he was in pain. He wished his brother would die, but he never said that to his mother because she always wished he would get better. He had cerebral palsy. But his was very bad. He never got out of his crib, even though he was ten.

  The next spring we took up fishing again. Sometimes when we were sitting on the street over the sewer someone would try to park their car there.

  “Hey kids, get off the street, I want to park my car there.”

  We would both look up at the driver. We both just stared and shook our heads. This was our fishing hole. Nobody was going to park a car over it. The driver would honk, sometimes leaning on the horn, but we kept on shaking our heads.

  A couple of times they would drive up slowly and push against us with their bumpers but we still wouldn’t move.

  “Are you kids crazy? I’m going to run you over.”

  But we still did not move, and the driver took off, leaning on his horn. We weren’t really scared because this was our spot and we didn’t think they would kill us just to have a place to park.

  When Jimmy Lee was sixteen he met a girl, a real girl, not one from the neighbourhood. He got accepted into her neighbourhood because he told them he was a fisherman and a semi-professional ball player and a champion swimmer. They had never known such a person before. He sounded like he was very tough and knew things that no one else knew about.

  He got married when he was seventeen, with the consent of his parents. We all were in the wedding: Tommy, Vinnie, Joey, Buster, Johnny, Dorothy and Vanessa. I don’t know what the girls did, because the bride had her own wedding friends. But the boys had to get a shave from Augie the barber.

  Augie’s assistant barber, Alfonse, was not able to come to work for a few weeks because he was being charged with statutory rape of the daughter of the lunch counter people next to the barber shop. We all knew Alfonse was going out with their daughter, but we didn’t think he was raping her, we just thought he was making love to her. But we were told that since she was not yet sixteen and he was old, like in his twenties, that it was not making love but rape. We thought rape was bad and love was good, but we really didn’t know much of anything.

  Anyway, since Alfonse was not working, Augie had to shave all of us himself. None of us had ever had a shave before in the barber shop, just haircuts. I waited my turn and got soaped up and then Augie dragged the straight razor over my face. It scratched, but it did not feel bad.

  It was just one year before that when I told Augie I wanted sideburns like Elvis, but he said I would have to wait until I started shaving. Now I was shaving and he was shaving off my sideburns.

  “You can’t have sideburns at a wedding,” he said. “If you looked like Elvis they would throw you out.”

  That night I did not sleep. I spent eight hours rubbing my face on the pillow trying to take away the burning. I did not like shaving.

  Five years later while I was in the Air Force, I got a letter that Jimmy Lee had died of a heart attack while he was jogging. He had two kids. When the hearse took his body through the old neighbourhood it rolled over home plate where he had scored the winning run, and past the cardboard ocean where he ate chocolate wafers and it drove by the fishing hole where we had become friends.

  His widow and children riding in the car saw only the old neighbourhood where he grew up, nothing else. They did not see the sti
ckball games or the fist fights or the telephone Jimmy Lee and I had between our windows. They might have loved him more if they knew real stories.

  Cell Phones Without Batteries

  In his back room, Jimmy Lee passed the crib where his brother with cerebral palsy was screaming. Alex always screamed. I could hear him next door in the summer when the windows were open.

  That was the summer when Jimmy and I put a long string between two tin cans and ran it from our back windows across the alley. Then we tied knots in the string and hooked the string over nails that we hammered in the outside of our windows.

  “Hey, Mickey,” Jimmy shouted at me through my back window. He threw pebbles at the glass until I woke up.

  “Hey, you want to talk on our phones?”

  I got out of bed. My mother had gone to work. I was alone in the apartment. Jimmy was the first face I saw in the morning.

  “Yeah, wait ’til I pee.”

  “I’ll go back home and talk to you,” he said.

  I went to the bathroom which was dark and next to the refrigerator. The bathroom was really a disaster. I knew that even then, because the window on the air shaft that was supposed to let in light and air had been painted over many times before we moved in.

  There were air shafts all over the city. They were supposed to bring the heavens into the ground floor apartments, but they only brought in the garbage that was dropped from the top floor apartments and the mice from down below that lived off the garbage.

  We lived on the bottom floor so the garbage was piling high. Since there was no way of stopping the downflow of banana peels and newspapers, the only solution was to paint and seal the windows that were meant to let in air and light.

  But the really bad part was the ceiling, which was cracked from one end to the other. I said I could fix it, I told my mother. But I did not know much about fixing ceilings.

  When your mother sneaks away from your father when you are eight and raises you alone, you do not learn much about fixing ceilings. The only tool in the apartment was a screwdriver for chipping the ice from the freezer when it had to be defrosted twice a year because there was not enough room left in it to squeeze in some frozen peas.

  I got some pieces of plasterboard and nailed them over the cracks. I did not do a good job. So I got some plasterboard powder and mixed it with water and tried to fix it.

  “What are you doing today?” my mother asked once before she went off to work.

  “Trying to fix the ceiling.”

  “Don’t try,” she said. “Maybe the landlord will do it.”

  No. The landlord would not do it. The landlord was upstairs smoking and typing, sending out overdue notices for rent. I knew he was smoking because I found his typewriter in a pile of junk in the basement many years later. It was an Underwood, the same model that had been used in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case. That’s what everyone told me when I showed it to them, because that typewriter had become the most famous machine in the most famous kidnapping case in history.

  But the landlord’s typewriter was not part of the crime. I knew that, because the key that had J on it was yellow from the nicotine that had been on the landlord’s right index finger from too much smoking and the yellow had oozed and soaked through the plastic of the key and stained it forever.

  I said that was cool. He was a real smoker, not someone who used filters. I would be like him, I said, a real smoker.

  When I finished peeing, I leaned out the back window.

  “Jimmy Lee,” I shouted across the alley. “We can talk now.”

  He stuck out his head. His brother was screaming behind him.

  “Talk in your can,” Jimmy Lee said.

  I picked up my can from the nail and he did the same on his side. Then we both leaned out and pulled the string tight.

  “Can you hear me?” he shouted into the can.

  I tried to lean forward because his brother was making so much noise that I couldn’t hear anything except the screaming. The string went slack.

  “I can’t hear anything,” I shouted into the can.

  Jimmy leaned further to get away from his brother.

  “What did you say?” he shouted into the can, with the string hanging down toward the ground.

  “I said ‘what did you say?’”

  “I can’t hear you,” he said.

  He held up his can and looked at me.

  “We have to hold the string tight,” he said.

  Then he pulled it, but I was not ready and he pulled it out of my hands and my can went flying down to the ground where it banged and rolled.

  “I’ll get it,” Jimmy Lee said.

  He pulled up his string, like a fishing line. He swung one can back and forth then tried to throw it to me. But I missed.

  “What do you want to talk about when you catch it?” he shouted.

  He pulled it back in again and threw it, but a bed sheet fell on his head. Mrs. Belimeyer hung out her back window above Jimmy Lee putting out her laundry, but we know she dropped that on purpose just to hit him.

  “You rotten kids,” she shouted. “You’re getting my sheets dirty. I’m telling your mothers.”

  She would have raised her fist to us as she always did, but her hands were full with her next sheet.

  “Forgetaboutit,” I shouted to Jimmy Lee. “I just wanted to tell you Miss Johnson still doesn’t believe we are swimming in the Mediterranean.”

  “What’d you say?” said Jimmy Lee.

  He pushed the sheet aside and swung the can again. I caught it, pulled the string tight and shouted into it:

  “Miss Johnson doesn’t believe we swim in the Mediterranean.”

  Mrs. Belimeyer looked down at us.

  “You kids are good for nothing,” she said. “And you should drown if you ever went swimming, and you don’t know how to swim anyhow.”

  Then she put another sheet on the line. This one also hit Jimmy Lee on the head.

  “Ahh, forget about the cans. You going to play stickball later?” he shouted.

  “Yeah,” I shouted back.

  “And when you drown you are going to hell,” said Mrs. Belimeyer, not bothering to look at us this time.

  “And after that we’ll go for a swim,” said Jimmy Lee.

  Rooftop Rated XXX

  I walked down the street and met Buster and Joey and Vinnie and Tommy. That was unusual for them to be standing around doing nothing in the middle of the block. Usually they were standing around doing nothing at the end of the block.

  “Want to come with us tonight? We’re going to watch Vanessa undress,” said Joey.

  My heart sputtered. Actually, I don’t know what my heart did. Some other mysterious part of me sputtered.

  “What? How?” I said.

  “When she gets ready for bed she undresses by her window,” said Buster. “I’ve seen her.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “About ten, or maybe later.”

  Ten was bad, but later was pushing it. I could easily stay out in the winter until nine. Nine thirty was beginning to be a problem. Later was a big problem, but to see Vanessa naked, oh my gosh, for that, I could stand a screaming at.

  We broke up and went home early because it was already getting dark and it was suppertime for most. If any of us were late for supper, then we would be in deep trouble, and if we got into trouble we would not be allowed out. And if you are not allowed out and miss seeing Vanessa naked, you might as well kill yourself.

  “We meet at Buster’s house at nine fifteen, all of us,” said Joey.

  That was enough. I went home and waited for my mother and had hot dogs and potato salad and tomato for supper. We ate at the kitchen table and said nothing and I washed the dishes and tried to be nice.

  We all tried to be nice. Can you imagine getting into an argument at home and being kept in the house, being locked in and told no way are you leaving and you are going to put out the garbage and then do your homework even if you don’t have any ho
mework, and then clean your room, and then you have to go to bed, while your friends are watching Vanessa undress and you are staring at the ceiling?

  So we went home on time and tried to be as polite as could be. “Yes, ma’am, I would like some spinach.” “No thank you, I don’t care for any more bread.”

  “What’s the matter?” asked Tommy’s father. “I think you did something wrong.”

  “No, sir, not me,” said Tommy. “I didn’t do nothing wrong, not me, no sir,” he said while thinking of Vanessa naked and worried that if he looked guilty his father would find some reason to keep him in. He better act normal.

  “On second thought I don’t want any spinach.”

  His father looked relieved.

  At nine o’clock, half a dozen boys told their parents that they were going out to play basketball.

  “The schoolyard’s locked,” said Tommy’s mother.

  “We’re going to play at the end of the street,” said Tommy.

  “There’s no place to play basketball at the end of the street,” said Tommy’s father.

  “We’re going to make a basketball hoop,” said Tommy.

  “It’s dark,” said Tommy’s mother.

  “We’ll play under the street light,” said Tommy.

  “Be back by ten so you can do your homework.”

  “Don’t have any homework.”

  “You better have some or I’ll give you something else.”

  It was the same in every apartment. We would take the consequences. We wanted out.

  At nine fifteen, a half-dozen boys were squeezing their way between the cold cinder-block garages behind Vanessa’s apartment.

  “How do you know she gets undressed?” I asked Buster.

  “Sssshhh. If they hear us they’ll call the cops.”

  “But how do you know?” I whispered.

  “I’ve seen her. They’re not very big, but she has them. And I saw her touch them.”

  “What’d they look like?” asked Joey, who did not believe Buster had really seen what he said he saw.

  “This big,” said Buster.

  He held his hands together like he was holding something much bigger than an apple but smaller than a basketball.