Cardboard Ocean

by Mike McCardell

Dorothy looked at me and laughed. “You look like Mickey with greasy hair.”

  My long and happy life was over.

  “I’m playing marbles tomorrow. Wanna come?” she asked me.

  It was not like she asked everyone, she asked me. You could see that. She was looking right at me when she asked.

  I nodded and felt the pomp in my hair hitting my head.

  Dorothy was the world’s champion marble player. It probably was the way she hooked her thumb into her index finger that gave her incredible aim, or maybe it was the way she put her head down so close to the ground that she could see a straight line from anywhere. Or maybe she was just good.

  Her reputation had spread way past our neighbourhood and even past our school. Kids from South Jamaica or Hollis would take a bus to our street just to compete with her. Once in a while she lost, but I think that was only because she felt sorry for someone if they were small and were losing all their marbles.

  “A kid from 102nd Street told his friends to tell their friends to tell me that he was coming on Friday after lunch. That’s tomorrow,” she said.

  “I’ll be there,” I said and I think I could feel the heat from my head rising into the grease in my hair and melting it because I felt all wet.

  I could hardly sleep. I got up early, and school went by and then I was watching for the bus.

  Dorothy and I and Vanessa and Vinnie waited on the corner at the bus stop under the El. Dorothy had been in so many games that not that many of our gang came out to watch anymore. We knew she would win. She never needed help. She had her bag of marbles. It was not very big.

  A bus pulled up and a kid got off gripping a heavy cloth bag. The challenger. He had a mean look on his face. Four kids got off behind him. The bus doors closed and it pulled away with a loud diesel groan just as a train was going overhead. We all stared at each other in the noise.

  Finally, almost a minute later, “You Dorothy?” said the mean-looking kid.

  “You want to take me on?” she said.

  He held up his bag. The kids with him laughed.

  “Where?” he asked.

  She looked around. “How about there?” She pointed to an empty space between two parked cars. It was half a car length and big enough to get a circle in and kneel down, so long as you didn’t kneel on the street side because then your legs would get run over.

  “Good,” said the mean kid.

  Dorothy took a piece of chalk out of her pocket, blew a bubble and made a circle.

  “Gonna play no rules?” asked the kid.

  “No rules,” agreed Dorothy.

  No rules was simple, you followed only the rules that everyone followed and beyond that there were no rules. The rules were you each put a marble in the middle and then you stayed outside the circle and tried to knock that marble out of the circle. Then that marble was yours. If there were four or five marbles in the circle when you knocked out the other person’s first marble then you got them all. There were seldom more than a handful of marbles that you could win or lose because most kids who played marbles were good. Some later went into pool halls and bowling leagues. They did not go into golf, but they would have been great at it.

  The kid laughed. His friends laughed. The kid put his hand in his bag and pulled out the biggest marble we had ever seen. It was three times bigger than the marbles we got from the variety store where I stole the ashtray. We almost gasped, except we would never do that and show that we were impressed.

  The kid put it down in the middle of the circle and laughed again. No way could Dorothy’s little marbles move that big marble. It was like a bully in the ring. The kid laughed again. A train passed by overhead. A delivery truck went past us. A police car went down Jamaica Avenue with its siren on. Dorothy blew a bubble.

  “No rules,” she said.

  “No rules,” said the kid, knowing that he could use any size marble he wanted.

  Dorothy blew another bubble and took a marble out of her bag. It was less than a third the size of the kid’s marble. The kid laughed. His friends laughed.

  Dorothy took the gum out of her mouth and wrapped it around the marble. No one said anything. Then she rolled her gum-covered marble along the edge of the gutter at the bottom of the curb. It was a place you didn’t want to go. It was filled with mud and gravel and broken glass and cigarette butts and pigeon goo. We didn’t know it but it was filled with the heavy metals from the outflow of some of the factories and shavings from the asbestos brake linings of passing cars and trucks and sediment from other things we still don’t know about.

  She rolled it that way, then this way, then back again. The marble grew.

  “You can’t do that,” said the kid.

  “No rules,” said Dorothy.

  “But I mean that’s not allowed. You can’t put stuff on your marble.” He looked mean.

  “No rules,” said Dorothy. She looked him in the eye.

  He said nothing.

  She kneeled down on the ground, put her head down on the asphalt and looked, then she fired her pebble-studded musket ball with a rubber bumper, and it slammed into his oversized attempt at fame, and one giant marble from another neighbourhood wound up outside the ring.

  The kid knew what he was up against. He cut his losses, picked up his bag minus the giant marble, and followed at a distance by his friends, crossed the street and stood at the bus stop going the other way. He said nothing.

  I don’t know who it was but one of us started to sing, “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog.”

  We laughed. We hit each other. We sang. I pulled down the pomp on my hair. I looked at Dorothy. My hero.

  White Christmas, Don’t Be Silly

  A few months later, it began to snow. It snowed all night. It always snowed a couple of times in the winter. That’s what winter was for.

  And in the morning the snow was white.

  “Hurry up,” said Jimmy Lee. “It won’t last.”

  I knew what he meant. The snow would be around for a week, but white snow would last only a few hours, sometimes even less.

  In Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx, coal was being poured into furnaces by Con Edison to make electricity. Mountains of coal were being eaten by fires and the colder it was, the more coal that went into the stomach of the flames, and the more coal that was turned into flames, the more soot went into the air. Sometimes the air was grey, but around the furnaces it was black.

  In the summer when the furnaces were only simmering there was still enough soot falling that the shoulders on a white shirt would have a coating of black specks before you got to school. In the winter, black specks turned into dark downpour.

  “It’s turning black,” said Jimmy Lee.

  “No it’s not, we have all afternoon,” said Vinnie. Vinnie always looked on the bright side.

  He was wrong.

  “Turning,” said Jimmy Lee.

  Trucks passed by grinding through the white and with each one there seemed to be a trail of grey behind it. The exhausts were all black. The dripping oil was black. The snow was white, but just for a short time.

  Jimmy Lee picked up a handful of snow and made a ball then started picking out the black specks. Then he threw it at Vinnie.

  “Black ball coming your way,” said Jimmy Lee.

  It hit Vinnie in the face.

  “Uhh. You bum.”

  Vinnie grabbed snow and all in one motion made a ball and threw it. His aim was as good as Jimmy Lee’s. Every one of us could split a thread at thirty feet, even though no one would ever be so silly as to hold up a thread for us to hit.

  Jimmy Lee put up his hands and blocked the ball.

  “That’s cold.”

  “You need gloves,” said Vinnie.

  “If I put on gloves I can’t hit you,” said Jimmy Lee.

  That was the problem with having a snowball fight and trying to keep your hands warm at the same time. If we tried for the warmth we lost the aim and without the aim it was not worth h
aving a snowball fight.

  But it was cold so Jimmy Lee and Vinnie said they would go home and get gloves and meet back at this same spot in five minutes. Both ran home, but it was hard running since both had the same Army and Navy surplus shoes they wore all year. Every mother on the block bought their kids shoes in the military surplus store and everyone’s shoes looked the same. They were round in the front and highly polished when they were new. They also cost a dollar which was cheaper than going to a shoe store.

  Later when each and every one of us wound up in the Army or Navy or Air Force, except for Buster who went into the Marines, we all had the same thought when we were issued our first dress shoes along with our boots. They were the same shoes we wore on 132nd Street. They also were useless in the snow.

  Both Jimmy Lee and Vinnie came out of their front doors the same time with their hands covered and grabbed handfuls of snow and made them into balls on the run and then threw them almost at point blank range. Both missed. Both fell down because their shoes had no grip on anything except a parade ground.

  “I’ll get you,” said Jimmy Lee. But he didn’t. He threw another snowball, and missed.

  Vinnie came running at him with a snowball in his right hand, hauled back his arm like he had done a thousand times playing stickball and handball and catch. He used all the aim he had in his life and missed.

  “Can’t get me,” said Jimmy Lee.

  “You can’t neither,” said Vinnie.

  Both of them threw again and missed.

  “You can’t throw with gloves on,” said Jimmy Lee. “And besides, my hands are cold again.”

  They both peeled off the socks they had on their hands.

  “You can’t get your thumb around the ball,” said Vinnie.

  He picked up a handful of snow, packed it into a ball, and threw across the street. It hit a telephone pole smack in the middle.

  “It’s getting dirty, look,” said Jimmy Lee.

  He was right. Only a couple of hours after it stopped falling, it was turning grey. At night we couldn’t see what was happening, but by morning the white snow would be grey, which we called black, which is not the colour snow is supposed to be.

  “Let’s go inside and read comics,” said Vinnie.

  “You know that song ‘White Christmas’?” said Jimmy Lee. “I think they made that up.”

  Urban Farmer

  It was still snowing, but I said to myself, “I’m going to have a garden.”

  That was impossible of course, but I said out on the street, “I’m going to have grass and we all can play on it and I’m going to ask Dorothy and Vanessa if they want to lay down on the grass like the kids did in one of those books that Miss Johnson read us.”

  Tommy looked like he didn’t believe me. But he wasn’t paying any attention to me anyway.

  “I’m going to have a garden, even have to cut the grass,” I said.

  “Yeah, sure, and I’m going to have a ’49 Ford V8 with four on the floor and four spinners and fuzzy dice,” said Tommy.

  “But you don’t know how to drive,” I said.

  “Well, you don’t know how to cut grass.”

  But I knew I was going to have a garden. I taped two quarters to a piece of paper and wrote my name and address on a coupon I had cut out of a comic book. There was a picture of a backyard with a dog playing on the grass and a man with a lawn mower cutting the grass and a mother with a large skirt holding a pitcher of lemonade and watching her two kids playing on the grass.

  “Grow your own mini-backyard right in your kitchen or bedroom,” the ad said. “For only fifty cents you can bring the outdoors indoors.”

  That’s what I wanted – the outdoors indoors. I pictured my mother and me having hot dogs on the lawn. It would feel cool below our feet and we would pass the mustard without worrying about dropping it and if some potato salad slipped off our plates it would not matter. The grass would cover it up.

  The ad said the home garden would be 12" x 15" and would grow in just a few weeks. I got out a tape measure. Twelve feet was how long our kitchen was. But it was only seven feet wide. The garden could not go there.

  I measured the living room. Twelve by fifteen. We would have the outdoors indoors if I could just move the chairs and the coffee table and the record player out of the room. No problem. My mother would be happy. We could take off our shoes and walk through the grass. We could not take off our shoes any other time because the floor was so chewed up that if you walked barefoot or in your socks you were sure to get a splinter driven right up between your toes and that hurt.

  “I’m going to invite everyone for a day in the country,” I told Joey. “Even Junior. He can play on the grass and not get hurt.”

  I waited every day for the ups man because I knew that a garden that size would take a delivery truck. Then came the snow. I saw Vinnie and Jimmy Lee having a snowball fight, but I did not have the time to join them. I was getting ready for my garden.

  Then there was a pounding on my door.

  “A ups truck is stuck.”

  It was Vinnie. I looked out onto the street and there was a big brown truck with its wheels spinning.

  ups, my garden, needing help. I did not put on a jacket. In two steps I was outside in the snow, slipping on my Navy surplus shoes running to the truck.

  “Can you push?” the driver asked.

  “I can push,” I said. “Do you have a garden in there?”

  He was a big guy. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but can you push?”

  “Of course I can push.” I felt my shadow boxing muscles flex.

  He looked down at me from behind his steering wheel. He was large.

  “You get in here,” he said to me. “I’ll push.”

  He got out of his seat. He was almost a giant. I got up in his seat. I put my hands around the wheel. I was driving. Me. I was driving. It was snowing and I was driving. And there was Tommy coming. I could see him through the side window and I was driving. And there was Dorothy coming. And I was driving.

  “Just hold the wheel straight,” said the driver.

  “Okay,” I said. I was driving. Do you out there on the street in the snow know that I am driving? I am behind the wheel of this truck and I am driving? Me? Driving? Me?

  “Put it in first,” said the man.

  I wasn’t driving.

  “What?”

  “First, put it in first. You know how to drive?”

  “Of course I do. But where’s first?”

  He jumped up on the running board and sighed. I know he did. I saw him. I wasn’t driving.

  “We’ll try once. The worst you’ll do is stall it. Push that pedal down with your left foot and hold it.”

  I pushed, and he moved the gears and put it in first.

  “Don’t lift your foot up until I tell you. And then lift it just a little and slowly. And at the same time just lightly push on that one with your right. If I tell you to stop, slam down on your left foot and hold it.”

  He got outside and told everyone to push.

  “Lift your left and push on your right,” said the big guy.

  I did. I was trembling. I was staring at my feet.

  “Not so hard,” he said.

  I froze.

  “Easy.”

  I lifted my right.

  “Easy!” he shouted.

  I trembled more and lifted the left.

  “Nooooo!” he shouted louder. “Down on the left.”

  “I can do it,” I heard Tommy say.

  “Just push,” the driver said to Tommy. “Now ease up the left.”

  I eased, they pushed and the truck moved.

  “Steer,” he shouted.

  Oh, God. The wheel. Steer at what?

  “Hold it straight.”

  I can do that. The truck moved and there was a cheer from behind me.

  I got it right. Me. I got it right. Me. I am driving a truck. And Dorothy is out there. And Tommy. And I am driving.

&n
bsp; “Down on the left.”

  I went down and held it like I was pushing it through the floor.

  The truck stopped. I held on to the wheel. I could have driven away, because I could do it, I knew that. But I didn’t want to because Dorothy would not have seen me get out of the truck.

  “Stop.”

  Stop? Is he crazy? Stop? How do you stop? I picked up my left foot and the truck started going.

  “Stop,” he yelled. “Hit the brake.”

  Brake? Middle one?

  I pushed down. The truck jumped and stopped. The motor jerked, and stopped. Not good, I thought.

  “Great. Thanks,” said the big guy. “I’ll take over.”

  He was standing on the platform next to me. No, you won’t, I thought. But I said, “Okay, hope this helped.”

  Why did I say that? I wanted to say “I could take over from here,” but I didn’t. I got out of the seat and jumped down to the snowy street and he slid in and started the motor and waved and was gone.

  I drove a truck. Me. I drove it.

  “We did all the work,” said Tommy. “You had it easy.”

  “But I drove it,” I said.

  “Awww, come on. You just steered it.”

  “No, I drove it.”

  “Steered it,” said Tommy.

  “Drove it.”

  “You did really good,” said Dorothy.

  I love you. I’m not saying that out loud. But I love you. Have I ever told you that I love you? No. Well, I’m telling you now, except not out loud. I love you more than I have ever loved anyone, even more than Babe Ruth.

  “Thanks,” I said to her.

  “I thought he was bringing me my garden.”

  “You don’t got no garden,” said Tommy. “It’s winter. Nobody got no garden, whatever a garden is.”

  We all went home. The snow was falling. No, the soot was falling. It did not matter. Dorothy said I did well. She said it. She really said it and I heard it. And Tommy heard it. And Dorothy said it. Did I say Dorothy said it? She did.

  Back in my apartment I thought of grass. No, I thought I had driven a truck. No, I thought of Dorothy.

  The next day the mailman came with a brown envelope. My name was on the front. It was not from the school board.