Cardboard Ocean

by Mike McCardell

  “We tell no one about this,” said Joey. “They will think we’re crazy. Just tell no one.”

  We went home. I got in the door with my key that I kept around my neck and my mother was putting cream on her face.

  “Well, it’s about time you got home. Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere,” I said.

  “What have you done?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, wash your face and go to bed. I have to be gone early in the morning.”

  She went into her room and I went to the bathroom. My arm was twice the size of the other one. I could not move it. I tried to wash, but it hurt too much.

  I lay down in bed and held my arm. I had seen a real ghost. My arm was killing me, but the ghost was real. It was as real as my arm. Then I fell asleep.

  Early in the morning, I was up before my mother woke. My arm hurt so badly I could not lay on it and I could not lay on the other side. I could not put it up or down. When her alarm clock rang, she came out into the kitchen.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “My arm.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Get dressed. We’ll go to the doctor.”

  I got dressed and she called work and said she would be late.

  “I hope it’s nothing serious,” she said as we walked up the street.

  The doctor’s office was in an apartment just under the El at the end of the street. We were the first ones in the waiting room which was in the hallway outside the room that would be the kitchen in any other apartment.

  “Broken,” he said. “How’d you do that?”

  “Tripped over a weed,” I said.

  “Amazing. How did you find a weed?”

  He put a cast on my arm and my mother said she would pay him when she got paid and then she went straight to work without going home. I went to school and never mentioned the ghosts.

  “How’d you break your arm?” some kids asked me.

  “Tripped over a weed,” I said.

  “Could we see the weed?”

  Ten years later, I was going to work at the Daily News. I was working nights and decided to take the subway from a different stop than usual. I walked past the cemetery. The gate was open and I was early. I went in, not thinking at all of the night of the army patrol. I just wanted to see the monuments.

  I walked farther and farther past the rows of graves. I had never been there before, except when we saw the ghosts and that was a long time ago. It was nice and peaceful, far from the El and the factories. And there, in front of me was a pond. So pretty, I thought. Then, from nowhere, came two snow-white swans gliding over the water.

  “I knew it was you,” I said. “I wasn’t scared. Not me. No sir.”

  I turned around and walked to the subway and went to work. I listened to the reporters and writers that night talking about murders and suicides and scary stories.

  I could tell you a real scary story, I thought. But not now. Not tonight. First we have to write about the murders.

  You Just Got to Help

  One night, Rocky and his friends grabbed one of the little kids from our block when he was coming home late from school.

  They pulled him into an alley and hit him a bit, but not too hard because he was little.

  “The next time you walk by our street we’re going to cut your fingers off, and tell your friends we’ll do the same to them.”

  Then they let him go. The worst thing that happened was he wet his pants and he would have to tell his mother what happened and he would be too afraid to go to school.

  I liked this little kid. His name was Patrick and he was born in 1950, which I thought made him very young and he and his mother lived in an apartment above the bar on the corner and their windows faced right into the El trains. It was very noisy.

  I thought his mother was beautiful, so when I heard about what happened I said to Patrick that I would go back to 130th Street and beat up Rocky so that he could go to school without a problem.

  You can’t say something like that and not do it. This was seven years before they cornered me and removed some of my dental work.

  I walked alone under the El, and then under the LIRR trestle that went under the El and sometimes you could watch one train going over another train with traffic on Jamaica Avenue going by under both of them. I thought that must be one of the wonders of the world.

  I was very worried what would happen if I saw Rocky. And there, in the no man’s land between 132nd and 130th Street, under the lirr trestle, which went under the El, was one of his guys.

  “Where’s Rocky?”

  “What’d you want to know for?”

  “I want him to stop hitting little kids.”

  My heart was pounding. I could feel it going real fast and I could feel my stomach trembling and my hands shaking. I did not want him to see that so I made two fists.

  “I see your fists,” he said. “I don’t want to fight. I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”

  I had never felt powerful before.

  “Where’s Rocky?”

  “He’s not here today.”

  “Well, you tell him to pick on people his own size.”

  Then I turned around and walked away.

  “How did that happen?” I thought. I won a fight without fighting. That’s impossible. It was the tactics the us and Russia were using in the Cold War but I did not figure that out for ten years. Right now I just knew that if you looked tough, you could win. I wanted to skip, but I thought if he saw me skipping that I wouldn’t look tough and he would come after me and pound me in the back of the head.

  The sun was setting because it was winter, and it was cold. I got back to 132nd Street and saw Patrick standing at the bottom of the stairs going up to the El station, which was just outside the door of the bar. He was waiting for his mother. I told Patrick that it would be okay for him to walk by that street anytime to get to school and he had nothing to worry about. And if anyone said anything to him just tell me and I would kill them.

  He looked up at me with big, young, thankful eyes. This was better than being Superman.

  Stumpy

  It’s not true that we didn’t have any pets. I had a turtle once, and we all had Stumpy. The turtle was neat. I saw it in the pet department of Goertz’s department store on Jamaica Avenue and 169th Street.

  My mother loved Goertz’s. We would walk from 132nd Street to 169th once or twice a week to go shopping. I hated shopping but the walk was fun and inside Goertz’s was a wooden escalator that I rode up and down and down and up while my mother looked at blouses or whatever it was she was looking at.

  But they also had a pet department in the store and one day I saw a bunch of turtles with pictures of palm trees painted on their shells. That was neat, a little thing that stuck its head out and looked at me and carried a picture around.

  “Mom, can I have one? Just one. I’ll take care of it. I promise.”

  The reason we walked was to save the forty cents round trip that it would cost if we rode the El that rolled by overhead as we walked down below. But I didn’t know that. I thought we walked just because we walked everywhere.

  “Can I, please? It’s only fifty cents.”

  I had newts once when we lived with my cousin.

  “What are you going to do with a newt?” my mother had asked.

  “Have it,” I said.

  We bought one and I put it in a flower vase made of glass and it went up on a bookcase in my aunt’s living room and I looked at it and it swam around and I fed it and I went to sleep.

  The next morning it was gone. I don’t think my aunt liked a newt swimming in her vase on top of her bookcase. I think it went down the toilet, but I never asked.

  Maybe it was because the newt disappeared that my mother said I could have a turtle. Maybe it was my mother who made it disappear to keep my aunt happy while we moved into her apartment and moved her son out into the hallway. I didn’t really care. I was a happy boy.

  I
carried the turtle home in a paper container that was also used for takeout Chinese food. I also had a jar of dried bugs to feed it. That was a total of a dollar, an hour’s pay for my mother. I did not think about that. I only thought I had to walk home quickly so that my turtle would have a wonderful life with me.

  I put the turtle in a bowl with some water and put the bugs in the water like my mother told me the instructions said on the back of the jar and I watched the turtle crawl up to them and snap, eat.

  “Mom, it ate a bug.” I had never realized that things eat other things. I thought we just ate hot dogs and peanut butter and Twinkies and Wonder Bread that helped build bodies in eight ways.

  I watched it eat and swim and hide in its shell all the next day. I hardly went outside. I took it out of the bowl and it crawled on the floor. I put it in the toilet and it swam.

  “Look, Mom, it will drink milk,” I said at dinner.

  I tilted my three-quarters empty glass of milk almost sideways and put the turtle inside the glass. It crawled forward, down the gentle slope and there, right before our eyes, drank some milk.

  “I trained it to do that,” I said.

  Then I reached in and took the turtle out and put it back into its turtle home that was on the table next to my hot dogs. And then I drank the rest of my milk. I was so happy.

  The next night I had a better trick.

  “Watch,” I said.

  I picked the turtle up out of its turtle home and put it into my mouth and closed my lips.

  “Don’t do that, it’s dirty,” said my mother.

  I shook my head. Then I opened my mouth and the turtle sitting on my tongue stuck his head out. I knew he would because when I practised it in front of the mirror he always stuck his head out of his shell when I opened my mouth and the pitch black night suddenly had an opening and I had a friend.

  I took him outside and showed him to everyone. I let him swim in a puddle in a pothole, except I had to sit in the middle of the street and grab him when a car came.

  Two days later, the turtle was dead. Later I learned putting pictures over half of someone’s body with lead-based paint does not make for a happy life.

  When I grew up and moved to Vancouver I found turtles that have the best lives. There are turtles living happily in every pond in every park in the city. They hurt nothing and have no enemies. They crawl into the mud in the winter and in spring wake up and sit on the rocks under the warm sun.

  I met a couple from Los Angeles who were taking pictures of the turtles in a small pond near the Granville Island public market.

  “We just came back from a cruise to Alaska and saw nothing. The weather was so bad we could hardly go out on deck.”

  But the turtles were different. They were right here in front of them and the weather was beautiful and they were filling their camera with close-ups.

  “We don’t have wild turtles in la,” they said.

  We don’t have them in Vancouver either, I told them. At least we didn’t before the Chinese moved in. Vancouver has more Chinese than nearly any other city in the world outside of cities in China.

  From being used as cheap and expendable labourers a century ago, they now dominate most professions. They are the lawyers and doctors and bankers. University computer courses are basically filled with Chinese students.

  And they are deep believers in anything that brings luck. And that faith has given turtles a good life, because the Chinese believe if you release a little turtle into a pond it will bring you luck. The result is Vancouver has many turtles now. And since the Chinese have done so well, it obviously works.

  And none of the turtles have paint on them.

  But our other pet, Stumpy, was different. Stumpy was a pigeon and we all had Stumpy.

  Stumpy was like the man who loved worms.

  This man might have been crazy. We weren’t sure. But we sure learned a lot from Gus. He taught us how to hold a baseball bat and how to steal second. He used to play in the minors, on a double-A ball team, which means that if he made it to a triple-A team he would have been only one step below the majors.

  Then he was hit in the head by a bad pitch, in the time before batters wore helmets. After that he just wandered about, unable to play and unable to hold a job for long. Sometimes he would get some work sweeping floors or unloading trucks, but he was never fast enough and he would eventually get fired.

  “You do a hook slide by coming around,” Gus was telling a bunch of us one afternoon. He sat on the front stoop of the house he shared with his sister and his mother. His sister was the only one of them who went to work. She left at night and there was a rumour that she did things most of us could not imagine.

  The guys in the bar always stood by the window when she went by. That was Pat’s Bar and Grill. It was a grill because they had one sandwich under a clear plastic cover on a plate on the bar. They had to offer food or they could not get a licence to serve beer and whisky. So they offered the sandwich. That fact that no one had a strong enough stomach to eat it did not stop them from getting a licence.

  The men there watched Gus’s sister walk to the train.

  “You know where she’s going,” they would say with a smirk.

  We kids would sit at the doorway of the bar and heard what was said when Gus’s sister went to work and so we repeated it.

  “You know where she’s going.”

  Gus said she was a telephone operator.

  “If you are going to do a hook slide, you have to bend your leg so you can steer yourself around the bag. But it can hurt.”

  We didn’t care about Gus’s sister and we didn’t care what people said about her, or him. We cared about hook slides, until it rained. That’s when Gus did the thing that made him odd, and we could only watch and feel sorry for him.

  “There he goes again,” our parents would say. “Crazy, crazy Gus.”

  In a downpour, he would walk the sidewalks picking up worms. They were crawling on the concrete. He would squat, slip a fingernail under a worm, scoop it up and carry it gently in the palm of his hand to a patch of dirt, dig a tiny hole with a finger, and place the worm in the hole and cover it up with dirt.

  There was not much dirt, but here and over there next to the curb Gus would return a worm to its home.

  People walking on the sidewalks, bent under their umbrellas, would leave a lot of space between themselves and Gus.

  The worms came from tiny patches in front of some houses where there had once been attempts at miniature gardens. Now they were dirt covered with litter. When it rained hard, the ground filled with water and worms had to come out so they would not drown. They crawled onto the sidewalk and Gus said since they were blind there was no way they were going to figure out where they were.

  We learned more than baseball from Gus. None of us had learned about worms, or blindness, in school.

  “It’s not their fault that we cover up their world with concrete,” said Gus. “They’re just lost.”

  “Man, you must be crazy,” the men in the bar shouted through the open door. And then, safely inside away from the rain, they would add that worms are dirty and how could anyone touch them?

  “Never shake hands with Gus,” they said, “Ha, ha, ha. He’s a goofball.”

  We got mad at the men in the bar but there was nothing we could do. I mean, those were big men with beer glasses in their hands standing in a group inside the door that we were not allowed to go through. In the summer we would sit on the ground just outside the door so we could see the baseball game on the ten-inch black and white television on a shelf on the wall at the far end of the bar.

  We really could not see much, but it was real and a different world than radio.

  “Hey, did you see that hit? That was a great hit.”

  We cheered. We really could not see the hit, but we heard it and we saw something moving on the screen before the men in the bar moved in front of the tv to watch the same hit and we had to move farther back on the sidewalk to s
ee over their heads. But back here we could not see anything, or hear anything because of the traffic noise behind us and we were right under the El now and a train was coming in.

  “That was a great hit,” said Buster. “I saw the whole thing.”

  “Yeah, like you got to see Vanessa’s bra,” said Vinnie.

  “No, I did, really. Just before they got in our way I saw it. Really.”

  But still, we could not tell the men in the bar to stop making fun of Gus because they might not let us sit in front of the door. It was a lesson in selling your soul, but we did not know that. We just knew we hated the men for making fun of Gus and there was nothing we could do about it.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Gus. “It doesn’t bother me.”

  Our parents told us to stay away from him because he was strange. “And don’t let him touch you. He’s dirty.”

  But we knew he was almost a professional baseball player and he did not act like he was above us.

  Then one day while it was raining, a guy from the bar stepped out on the sidewalk while Gus was walking up the street. The guy from the bar found a worm crawling on the concrete and pushed it around with the toe of his shoe. He waited until Gus was almost next to him.

  “Hey, watch this,” he said and slammed his heel down on the worm.

  Gus did the only thing he could do. He punched the guy. We couldn’t believe it. The men in the bar watching through the big picture window couldn’t believe it. We had all seen fights in the bar before. The men in the bar had occasionally fought each other. And in their fights one guy would hit another and the other would hit back and there would be yells, but both men would be standing.

  When Gus punched it was like a bullet, or a battering ram. The guy he hit went flying backwards and we all remember the shocked look on his face. He went back so fast he didn’t have time to fall before he hit the stairs coming down from the elevated train station. He hit it so hard that his head snapped back and hit the steel bars that kept people from falling off the stairs. We heard the crack. It wasn’t the steel that was making the sound, we knew. And then he fell.