Cardboard Ocean

by Mike McCardell

  “So what happened to the bottle?” I asked.

  “My brother peed in it,” he said, “so we had to throw it out.”

  Vinnie and I passed the bottle back and forth as we walked.

  “How many drinks did you have?” he asked.

  “Four. How many you?”

  “Four. There’s only one drink left,” he said. He was still holding the bottle.

  “Well, take half a drink,” I said.

  “I don’t know if I can take half a drink. It might all go down my throat and I can’t stop it.”

  “Then I’ll take it,” I said.

  “No, I’ll take it.”

  I grabbed for the bottle. “No, you will drink it all.”

  We had a tug of war and I dropped the newspapers just as a truck was going by on Jamaica Avenue under the El with the closed-up furniture warehouses along the sidewalk and the wind from the truck had nowhere else to go but straight at the News and the Mirror.

  “No!”

  The papers started blowing down the sidewalk and we dropped the bottle and it broke and we ran after the sheets of separating news and sports. Vinnie grabbed some and put his foot on some other pages. I grabbed some and they crumpled in my hand. Another truck went by and some of the other pages took off flying away from us.

  I ran and jumped on them and held them under my shoes right under a billboard that said “don’t drive a death trap.” The sign was put up by an auto fix-it shop. I liked it because I always thought if I ever have a car I’ll make sure it’s not a death trap by going to that shop. Some things in life were so simple.

  The billboard next to it said, “don’t let your kids get polio. keep them away from dirty water and crowds.”

  I sure didn’t want to get polio. The sign had a picture of a kid on crutches like Richard French and another kid in an iron lung. No matter what, I would not drink dirty water.

  Jackie Robinson: Few have played better or lived braver.

  We had all the pages now, but it was hard to tell which ones went together. The Mirror, we were told, was the name of that paper that because it was a mirror of the News, the only thing different it had was Walter Winchell, and different sports writers. But we didn’t know who they were.

  We stuck the pages back together so at least both papers opened again and nothing was upside down.

  “Hope they don’t notice,” I said.

  “They just want to know about number forty-two,” said Vinnie. “It doesn’t matter what page they find him on.”

  Number forty-two was Jackie Robinson, the saviour of the Dodgers and the world we knew because that’s what everyone said.

  When we got to the bar, we handed over the papers nervously.

  “What’s this?”

  “Your papers.”

  The two men opened them, going from page to page.

  “They have holes in them. They look like they’ve been stepped on.”

  Vinnie and I looked at each other with shock.

  “I’m going to call up the papers and tell them off,” said one of the men. “How can they print papers like this?”

  That was truly a gift from heaven.

  “Yeah,” Vinnie said. “People were just grabbing the papers when we were there. We just got these two and left.”

  “You want your change back?” I asked.

  “No, of course not,” said one man. “Rotten papers.” He opened it and scanned down a page. “Jackie got two hits.” He was so happy he was giggling.

  He lowered the paper and his face was beaming. The world was okay.

  We crossed the street and walked over to Matty’s.

  “Want to split a Three Musketeers?” I asked.

  We spent our remaining nickel and walked down the block eating and pulling a three-way gooey, chocolate-covered bar apart two ways. It was hard to get anything better.

  “My mother says I have a guardian angel,” said Vinnie. “I think she helped us with the papers tonight.”

  Setting the Pins

  “Hey, you want to make some money?” Joey asked.

  Money? Of course I wanted to make some money. Then I could buy things like Cherry Cokes and candy and comics. The twenty-five cents my mother gave me each week was not covering it all.

  “My father told me the new bowling alley is looking for pin boys.”

  “I could be a pin boy,” said Vinnie.

  “My father says it’s real tough work,” said Joey.

  Vinnie shrugged. “Tough work is my middle name.”

  I wanted to ask, but I was afraid to ask, but I wanted to ask so badly so I asked, “What’s a pin boy?”

  Joey looked at me like I was stupid.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought maybe you knew.”

  He said we should go to the bowling alley and find out and maybe we could be pin boys and make some money. None of us had ever been in the bowling alley before. It was a couple of blocks away and we didn’t know how to bowl and it was lit up and there were a whole bunch of reasons we did not go. Most of all, it looked scary. This was not like climbing on a roof or going to Matty’s. This was a grown-up’s world.

  We walked in and it was noisy, and grown up. It was filled with smoke and people drinking. Crowds of people. It was right under the El, but there was so much noise that I could not hear any trains. There was crashing and banging and people talking and many of the people looked like they knew each other.

  We saw people rolling huge balls down the wooden lanes and most of the balls looked like they were gliding, not rolling. Then crash. The pins went flying. We could see the pins rising after that and getting set up straight. It was easy to figure out what a pin boy did.

  “You kids want something?” said a big man with a giant stomach. We did not see very many men with big stomachs, even the ones in the bar. They all said they had beer bellies, but they were not huge like this one.

  “We want to be pin boys,” said Joey.

  “Ha, white boys, I don’t think you’re strong enough.”

  What the heck was that? None of us had ever been called a white boy before. He pointed to the side of the alley and told us to go down there and see Charlie.

  “Wad he mean by dat?” said Buster. He talked fast.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m strong enough for anything.”

  “I mean the ‘white’ part,” said Buster. “Of course we’re white, what does he think we are?”

  We walked alongside the last lane and saw a ball going by us, then crash. The pins went flying again. We figured out the game before we got to the end, but then we saw some black arms come out of the blackness at the end of the alley. Black hands grabbed two pins each and stood them up on spikes that came out of the wood. Then the hands went down and grabbed four more pins and put them up on the spikes.

  Then the ball came down the lane where we were watching. Crash.

  The same black hands came out and swept away the pins that were knocked down but were still lying on the alley.

  Then a ball came down the other alley where the pins had just been set up. Crash.

  The black hands, the same hands, swept away the two pins that were on that alley.

  Then a ball came down the other alley where the hands had just left. Crash. The black hands came out and started to set up the pins. Then a ball came down the alley next to us. Crash. The hands were still setting the pins in the other alley.

  “Hey.” And after that came a nasty, face-slapping, insulting, painful word that we no longer say, not even in memoirs. It was the only word they used and it hurt the one who had to listen to it. “Hurry up.”

  The shout came from a group of men who were standing at the end of the alley where we had met the man with the stomach. The hands finished the pins in the other alley and then suddenly appeared in the alley next to us. But just as the hands were putting up the pins, a ball came flying down that alley before the hands could get away. Crash.

  “Owwww, owww, man, that hurts.”
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  The hands had still been holding the pins when the ball hit. The men burst out laughing.

  “No tip for you,” one of them shouted. “You’re too slow.”

  Then a ball came down in the other lane and smashed down all the pins.

  A great shout went up. “Strike! You’re the best,” someone shouted.

  “Hurry up with those pins.”

  We got to the end of the alley. A black kid about our age was holding the fingers of his right hand under his left arm. He was wearing a white t-shirt which made him look even blacker. He looked at us but said nothing.

  Another ball came down the alley and smashed into the remaining pins in front of him. He covered his face with his hand as the pins went flying.

  It was noisy, it was scary and I didn’t want to be here.

  The black kid slid over a low wooden barrier to the other lane and started putting up the pins.

  “Hurry up, kid, or we’ll get you fired.”

  We could hear the shouting from the end of the lane.

  He finished that side then came over the wooden barrier closer to us and stepped on a metal bar. A set of pins, like nails, came out of the end of the alley and he started picking up the wooden pins and setting them on the spikes. The wooden pins each had a small hole in the bottom.

  But before he finished with this side a ball smashed into the pins on the other side and the slamming and noise started again.

  “Hurry up, we said,” someone shouted.

  He finished on our side then went back to the other, but before he got there a ball hit the pins he had just put up. One pin bounced off the ball and hit him in the back as he was climbing over the barrier.

  “Ugh,” he groaned. But he kept setting up the pins on the other side.

  “Tough job?” asked Joey.

  “Not tonight,” said the kid. “I’ve only got two lanes.”

  “What do you mean?” Joey shouted over the noise.

  “Sometimes I get three, that’s busy.”

  We had never talked to a black kid before. Maybe we did somewhere in a store or something, but none of us could remember. We saw black men walking along the street sometimes, but we didn’t talk to them.

  There were no black kids in P.S. 54. Miss Johnson always told us about how the South was segregated and coloured people could not ride in the front of buses and they had to use separate toilets and they couldn’t even drink out of the same water fountains that white people did. But it did not make much impression on us because we almost never saw anyone who was coloured.

  They lived in South Jamaica and in Hollis and lots of them lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. But not in our neighbourhood. They stayed in their area and we didn’t go there.

  “We’re thinking of getting a job here,” said Joey.

  The black kid looked up from his pins.

  “I don’t know no white kid who could do this.”

  While he said that he took his eyes off the pins and didn’t see the ball that was thrown down the lane before he got the pins up. That must have been a joke. The ball hit and we could see horror all over his face. He was not ready for this one.

  The pins exploded and came right at him. One slammed into his face. He screamed. Blood came out of his nose. He dropped the pins that were in his hands and grabbed his face.

  He made some sounds; we thought he was almost crying. Then he lowered his hands and started putting up the pins.

  “Hurry up [that painful word again],” someone shouted.

  Vinnie said, “Let’s go. I can’t do this.”

  We walked back down the edge of the lane. At the end, the man with the big stomach was waiting.

  “You want the job?”

  “How much does it pay?” asked Joey.

  “Twenty-five cents a game, plus tips, but this kid won’t get no tips tonight. He’s too slow.”

  “We’ll think about it,” said Joey.

  We walked out of the bowling alley and a train was going by overhead but it seemed quiet compared to inside.

  “That black kid is stronger than any of us,” said Joey. “I think he’s stronger than all of us together.”

  “Blacks are born stronger,” said Vinnie. “My fadder told me that. That’s why we have to stay away from them.”

  We walked back to our street under the El.

  “That’s mean, the way they do things in the South,” said Buster.

  “Yeah, would you drink out of the same water fountain as them?” asked Vinnie.

  Buster did not answer. We were all wondering about the answer.

  “I’m glad they’re not in Rocky’s gang,” said Buster.

  We might not know if we would share a water fountain, but we did know for sure that we did not want to fight them.

  Poison

  “It’s neat if you break it. You can do lots of things with the mercury. But I don’t want to break it.”

  Vinnie was holding a thermometer while we were alone in the lunch room.

  “Where’d you get that?” Tommy asked. “And let me see it.”

  He held out his hand. We all knew you couldn’t see something unless you held it. You couldn’t just look at it. Unless it was in your possession it might as well have been on the other side of the world.

  “No,” said Vinnie. “I got it from Miss Johnson because she said we were going to do a science experiment this afternoon.”

  Tommy was still reaching for it, trying to pull it out of Vinnie’s hands.

  “What kind of ’speriment?” I asked.

  “That’s not how you say it,” said Vinnie. ‘Miss Johnson said it’s got an x in the front.”

  That was confusing. X’s aren’t in words. They were only in Xmas which we knew you only used if you were Jewish. On the other hand, we were told that X was okay because that was Latin or Greek or something for Christ, so it didn’t matter if you used X.

  “What kind of ’speriment?” I asked again.

  “To see if it’s colder down here.”

  “Of course it’s colder down here,” I said. “This is the basement.”

  Vinnie held on to the thermometer and Tommy kept grabbing for it and Vinnie held it up and he was taller than Tommy.

  “Get out of here,” said Vinnie and pulled it away, but Tommy jumped up and snatched it like a ball going by second base.

  “Got it,” said Tommy, but only for a second, because after he pulled the thermometer out of Vinnie’s fingers it kept on flying. Sometimes a ball or a thermometer did that. You never could be sure of what you had in your hand until you tagged the guy out. Sometimes you would tag and shout, “Got you,” and then you would see the ball bouncing down the street. It was just like now with the thermometer bouncing off a bench then bouncing on the floor. Then it shattered.

  “Now you’ve done it. Miss Johnson’s going to send me to Miss Flag,” said Vinnie, “and it’s not my fault.”

  Tommy was down on his knees scooping the mercury into a puddle.

  “Look at this stuff. This is better than the temperature. Look. It’s like water but it keeps rolling around.”

  He squeezed the sides of his hands together and some of the mercury popped up into his palm. He moved his hand around and the mercury rolled like a ball.

  “Neat stuff,” he said. “Look, I’ll put it on my tongue and see what happens.”

  He dropped what was in his hand into his mouth and made his tongue into a cup and we looked.

  “Looks like mercury on your tongue,” I said.

  “But isn’t it . . . ” He tried to talk but in moving his tongue he swallowed the silver ball.

  “Agggh,” he said. “I didn’t want to do that.”

  “I think you’re going to die,” said Vinnie.

  Tommy suddenly looked frightened.

  “I don’t want to die.”

  “I heard once that if you get mercury poisoning your brain rots and then you die,” said Vinnie.

  “Noooo,” said Tommy. He grabbed his head. “
I don’t want my brain to rot.”

  “Better get it up,” I said.

  Tommy bent over and started trying to make himself throw up. He stuck his finger down his throat and gagged.

  “Can’t do it,” he said.

  “You better or you’ll die,” said Vinnie.

  Tommy stuck his finger further down and this time it worked. He made some awful sounds and some liquid came up, but not the mercury. We would have seen that.

  “What’s going on over there?” someone shouted.

  It was Miss Flag.

  “I heard you down here and you are supposed to be in class.”

  “Tommy swallowed some mercury,” I said.

  “What?! That will kill him,” she said.

  That was when Tommy stuck half his hand down his throat and kept pushing harder. This time he gagged like I had only seen one person get sick before. I remember my father getting sick a couple of times, and he looked like Tommy looked now. But I never thought my father wanted to be sick with his face in the toilet and then gagging again when more came up, but Tommy wanted to be sick.

  Tommy was trying to get sick and that was kind of fun to watch, except I knew that he might die, which I really did not mind because then he wouldn’t bother Dorothy anymore.

  “I’ll get the school nurse,” said Miss Flag. “You two go to your classroom and Tommy, don’t worry, the nurse will fix you up, you won’t die. But later I want to know how come you swallowed it.”

  Vinnie and I looked at the white face of Tommy. He was not feeling well.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be okay,” we said. “But we gotta go.”

  But before we left, both Vinnie and I got some paper and scooped up some mercury. If you don’t swallow it, it was fun. We had never seen this before. I folded the paper like a little bag and then grabbed the broken thermometer and we walked away.

  “We’ll tell Miss Johnson that it was an accident and we’ll tell her you probably won’t die,” we said to Tommy.

  On the way up the stairs we both opened our little treasures.

  “What can we do with this?” asked Vinnie.

  “If we show it to Miss Johnson maybe she can tell us about mercury and that will get us out of whatever it is she is talking about,” I said.