Cardboard Ocean

by Mike McCardell

  “Owwwww!”

  I screamed again, louder because it hurt more the second time when I realized what I had done, and Mrs. Belimeyer shut up.

  I knew what was going to happen next because this had happened before. When I tried to pull the zipper down it would hurt even more. That would last for a second before I was free but I could not stand more pain, even if it meant less pain. And I could not pull it up past this spot like you do when a zipper is caught on your coat because then I would not have a penis. And I could not just stand there, bent over, screaming because it was hurting worse than anything I could describe and I had do to something.

  “Stop your screaming. That’s not going to get you out of this mess you’re in,” shouted Mrs. Belimeyer louder than I was screaming.

  I pulled down on the zipper and screamed again, now louder than she was shouting.

  “Oh, that hurts,” I said after I was free and knew the pain would go away.

  “You two come with me,” she said. “I don’t want homosexuals doing dirty things behind my garage.”

  “We’re not that,” said Johnny. “We were just having a peeing contest.”

  It was easy to get past her because she moved aside, not wanting us touching her. She even pulled her hands back when we moved.

  “We’re not homo-sex things,” said Johnny. “I don’t even know what that is.”

  We got free and started to run, but it was hard because our pants were sticking to our legs.

  “You are going to hell,” she shouted as we hopped and limped and half-ran down the alley.

  “What’s a homo thing?” asked Johnny.

  “It’s when two guys do something together, but I don’t know how they do it,” I said. “So don’t worry, we’re not whatever it is.”

  Johnny later served two hitches in the Navy then moved to Florida where he was last based and opened a construction business. He and his wife had three girls, and there were always a bunch of kids hanging around his garage where he taught them to make things, like old-fashioned scooters and boats out of Popsicle sticks.

  The Arms Race

  “The Dodgers are on a streak.”

  “Are not,” said Vinnie.

  “Almost every game,” I said.

  “They’re bums,” he said. “They’re gonna lose.”

  We were swimming. We had come up for a serious talk about baseball and were resting on top of the ocean.

  “Look at all the Greeks,” said Vinnie. “It must be hot in those clothes.”

  The Greeks were wearing heavy white North Pole-type coats that had hoods with fur lining, which they wore because they worked in the freezer making ice cream. Their pants were thick and heavy. But on their coffee breaks they looked odd sitting on milk crates in the sun.

  It was early spring, probably April because a lot of people had ashes on their foreheads for Ash Wednesday. That was important because the Jewish kids had to be on time for school and we didn’t. But we didn’t want to go to church either because we had not been swimming all winter and this was the first time the ocean was getting filled up.

  So we went in the water and talked about the Dodgers and we could be late for school. All we had to do was get some dirt from the street and rub it on our heads and the teachers said nothing.

  “Why do you think Greeks have so much hair?” I asked.

  “To keep them warm in the freezer.”

  “But they were born that way. How’d they know they were going to wind up working in a freezer?” I asked.

  Vinnie crawled across the top of the boxes and I followed until we got to the edge by the fence and we could look down on the men in the thick white winter coats.

  “Look, you can hardly see their faces,” said Vinnie. “That’s because they’re Greeks.”

  We crawled out of the ocean. The easiest way was to swim down almost to the ground to a hole in the fence that had been there for years. That way when we came out we did not mess up the boxes which would have happened if we got out through the open end where they threw the boxes in.

  We did that a couple of times last year and they got mad at us and yelled things, but it was in Greek so we didn’t know what they were saying. But once we started using the hole, they just smoked their cigarettes and drank their coffee and watched us. It was funny that we never saw them eating ice cream.

  On the way to school, Vinnie and I passed an empty store when some arms reached out and grabbed us. They pulled us into the dark doorway and pushed us up against a wall. There were four of them.

  “Rocky wants to settle this once and for all.”

  We said nothing.

  “You hear?”

  Nothing.

  “You better talk and say you heard us or we’ll give you a knuckle sandwich and you’ll never talk again.”

  “Okay, we heard you,” said Vinnie. “What do you want? I mean, like what’d you mean?”

  “We mean a war, with guns. Zip guns tomorrow after school.”

  “We can’t do that, we don’t have any,” said Vinnie.

  One of the guys laughed. “Well then, you’ve got a problem because we’re coming after you and we’re shooting to kill.”

  “You got to give us an extra day to get ready or it’s not fair,” said Vinnie.

  “Rocky said tomorrow. We’ll meet you between you and us, up on the tracks, right after school.”

  Then they let us go and they ran away.

  “We better tell Joey,” I said.

  We hurried to school. Zip guns were dangerous. Only once did I see one and that was when a kid brought it to school to show off. We all knew how they worked. His was like a pistol, one piece of wood, one by one inch by eight or nine inches long. That was the barrel and another piece nailed to it that was the handle.

  A thick rubber band was held at the end of the barrel with a nail and you stretched the rubber back to the handle and hooked it over a headless nail that was sticking up where the hammer on the gun would be. Then you put a piece of square linoleum in the rubber band, aimed, and with your thumbnail slid the rubber band up over the nail. Zap.

  With a strong rubber band the linoleum could go thirty feet. If you used a little piece of sheet metal instead of old flooring, you could get forty or fifty feet. But most of all, if you made a rifle that was three or four feet long and used a sliced strip of inner tube you had something that would fire more than a hundred feet, well across four train tracks.

  “And it could put out your eye,” said Vinnie.

  We told Joey just as Miss Johnson was talking about the Civil War. But a train was going by and all we could hear her saying was, “I hate to talk about war but . . . ” Then the train passed and we weren’t sure why she did not like war.

  But we sure knew what Joey was thinking when Vinnie leaned out of his seat and whispered it in his ear.

  “What?” said Joey. “I can’t hear you.”

  “I said Rocky wants a zip gun war with us tomorrow.”

  Miss Johnson stopped talking.

  “Vincent, you know you’re not supposed to talk when I’m trying to teach. But what did you say about war?”

  “Nothing, Miss Johnson. We were just talking about how bad war is.”

  “You said zip guns. Are you making zip guns?”

  “No, Miss Johnson,” said Vinnie. “We don’t have any.”

  She closed her book. “Zip guns can kill you and put out your eyes and you will be blind forever and do you know how bad life will be then? You’ll bang into walls and you’ll spill food on yourself and you’ll never be able to go to a movie. Now I hope you don’t make any zip guns.”

  “No, Miss Johnson. We won’t.”

  But there was nothing else on my mind, or Vinnie’s or Joey’s for the rest of the day. We knew we had to get home, find wood, get Johnny to help us put them together and then get some linoleum or sheet metal and get it all done before we had to go in and pretend we were doing our homework.

  Miss Johnson may have talked about war
, but she never had to get ready for it. And if we didn’t do our homework it was because soldiers, real soldiers, don’t have time for that.

  The day went slowly. Three o’clock was the starting line. We ran home. By then every kid in the school knew there would be a zip gun war tomorrow and most of the kids said they were glad they didn’t live on our block. All of the kids in Rocky’s gang went to Holy Rosary school. It is good to have your own gang in your own school and on your own block. That saved on fights in school.

  “You gotta help us, Johnny. You gotta.”

  “But I’m sick. I have the stomach flu, that’s why I didn’t go to school today.”

  Joey looked at him straight in the eyes. Joey never looked scared, but this time I think that was the look on his face.

  “Johnny, you gotta help us. You can make anything.”

  “But I have diarrhea.”

  “So we’ll make them in your basement,” said Joey.

  “But the bathroom’s upstairs.”

  Vinnie moved alongside Joey. “Help us this once and we’ll do anything in the world for you.”

  “I don’t want anything except to stop going.”

  Then he groaned, an awful sound, and turned and ran upstairs to his apartment. “I can’t make it,” he shouted.

  “He’ll be okay,” said Joey. “Let’s find the wood and get some inner tubes and we gotta find some ammunition.”

  Linoleum was not hard to get. When it was worn out, most men just ripped it up off the floor and took it around the corner of one of the factories and threw it out. Then they bought some more and tried to measure it and lay it down themselves. That is why most apartments had big gaps between the end of the linoleum and the beginning of the sink or the stove.

  At first I thought that was the way it was supposed to be with the worn-out black wood showing around the edges of stoves and sinks. Then I went into Johnny’s kitchen and it looked so neat.

  “Who put in the linoleum?” I asked.

  “I did,” he said.

  But today he had to make zip guns.

  We got back to his basement with a pile of wood and an old inner tube and Johnny got a hammer and nails and a saw and started putting together some guns. They were not hard to make, just a few nails and some handles at the end of the wood. But Johnny made them look good. He even put rifle butts on them so we could hold them against our shoulders and aim them like real rifles.

  The inner tube was harder. We made thin slices with a razor blade then sliced the slices in half because they were still too thick. They had to be strong, but they had to be thin enough to stretch at least double their length.

  Johnny nailed the two ends of a rubber strip together at the front of the rifle right where the bullet would come out, then stretched the looped end more than three feet back to the tiny stub of a nail right below where our aiming eye would be. Vinnie and Joey and Buster and Jimmy Lee and I were cutting squares out of the lino as fast as we could.

  We test-fired one piece in the first rifle that Johnny made. The lino went snugly between the rubber straps and Joey aimed it at a wall and pushed the band up over the nail.

  Zap. It fired faster than we could see and hit the cinder-block wall and tore a chunk out of it.

  “Wow,” said Vinnie. “That would hurt.”

  “I gotta go to the bathroom,” said Johnny.

  He ran upstairs and we went on cutting up lino and Jimmy Lee cut some small rubber strips for one of the pistols. They were for close fighting if Rocky’s guys got over the tracks.

  In two hours, we had seven rifles and four pistols and more than a hundred rounds of ammo.

  “Tomorrow we will slaughter them,” said Joey.

  “I wonder how many guys they’ll have,” asked Jimmy Lee.

  “I think maybe ten,” said Vinnie.

  “We only have six, or seven if we can get Buster,” I said.

  We said nothing for a while.

  “Don’t be sick tomorrow,” said Joey to Johnny after he came back looking pale.

  Then we all went home and tried to do our homework.

  World War

  “You’re not going to fight with zip guns, are you, Mickey?”

  Dorothy looked worried.

  “Don’t worry. We can handle them.”

  “But you can lose an eye.”

  “If we don’t we lose everything. We won’t even be able to come out of the house.”

  We were walking to school and I never expected Dorothy to be walking with me.

  “I waited for you,” she said.

  What?!

  “You did?”

  “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  There is no way to tell you this without sounding like I was going to explode with happiness, so I won’t even try. But I felt very big. “I won’t get hurt. We just have to keep them from coming over the tracks.”

  “When is the fight supposed to be?”

  “Right after school.”

  We walked for a minute without talking. We passed the cardboard ocean and the Greeks who were taking their morning break. They were sitting on crates in the sun drinking coffee from Thermoses. I did not know how they got up so early and got to work before we even had breakfast. They had it hard, I thought.

  I could see they were turning their heads as we walked by and I thought I saw a couple of the men smile when they saw me with Dorothy. I don’t know if they knew what I was thinking.

  “How many do they have?” she asked.

  “Vinnie thinks ten and we have six, if we can get Buster. And seven if Johnny is not sitting on the can.”

  She said nothing. We walked past the Bungalow Bar trucks getting loaded with ice cream and past the dry ice that was steaming in boxes on the ground.

  “I didn’t see Johnny this morning. I think he’s still sick,” she said.

  “He’ll be alright,” I said. “He said he’d be alright so he has to be.”

  We walked under the El and the morning rush hour trains that came one after the other were thundering overhead.

  “You can’t call it off, can you?” she shouted.

  I shook my head. Of course not, she knew that.

  School took forever that day. Miss Johnson seemed to talk in slow motion. The whole day went by and it was only lunchtime.

  “We’re going to beat them,” said Vinnie.

  “I hope there aren’t too many of them,” I said.

  “Don’t be scared. You only die once.”

  I thought that was true and it was a good thing because I would hate to get killed by a zip gun and then have to get hit by a car later on.

  Three o’clock and I had an hour and a half to live. It might be less. Fights after school always started at five after three. But this was bigger so it would be later. But we had to be there when they attacked or they would come right over the tracks and be on our street, and then they could take over the street, and us.

  I thought the couple at the deli would miss me tonight when I did not come for hot dogs. They would wonder what happened and then hear I had been killed in a zip gun war. They would not know I died before I got to tell Dorothy what I thought about her.

  Tommy, Vinnie, Jimmy Lee, Joey and me knocked on Johnny’s door. His mother opened it.

  “Can Johnny come out and play?” we asked.

  “Johnny’s sick,” she said. “I even had to stay home today because he was so bad off. I thought I would have to take him to the hospital.”

  We walked underneath the El on our way to school. This is where I tried to talk to Dorothy about the zip guns but when one train went over another train no one could hear anything. The ice cream factory was behind the truck on the left.

  None of us could think of saying anything. We couldn’t say that the guns that her son made were still in her basement. She started to close the door.

  “Does that mean he can’t come out?” said Vinnie.

  She opened it halfway.

  “Of course he can’t come out. I
gave up a day of pay. Do you think he’s going to come out now? I’d kill him,” she said.

  She closed the door and we went down the steps to the sidewalk.

  “You think we could talk Rocky into waiting a day before we tried to kill him?” Vinnie said.

  “Are you kidding?” said Joey. “When he hears we don’t have any guns, he’ll be over the tracks and shooting us in the face.”

  I thought that would hurt.

  “Maybe we can break into Johnny’s basement and get the guns,” said Jimmy Lee.

  We looked down the alley alongside his building. The windows were only seven or eight inches high. They were made to put a coal chute into and were right above the empty coal bins. We could not open them, we could not fit through them and if we could, then we would wind up in a storage space upside down and stuck between piles of junk.

  “I don’t think so,” said Joey.

  “Let’s knock on the door again and tell his mother we have to get something out of the basement,” said Jimmy Lee.

  “That’s crazy,” said Joey. “She’ll be mad if she has to open it again for us.”

  Silence. I was thinking it is a tough choice, getting killed by Rocky’s gang or getting Johnny’s mother mad at us.

  “I’ll go,” I said.

  I went back up the stairs and knocked. Then I waited. And waited. And a lot of time went by.

  I started to knock again but the door opened.

  “I thought I told you Johnny was sick,” said his mother.

  “We’re sorry to bother you, but we left something in your cellar.”

  “What?” she asked.

  I looked back at the desperate tiny gang standing on the sidewalk then said to Johnny’s mother, “Just some things.”

  “Well, I can’t have you traipsing through my basement. Tell me what it is and I’ll get it for you.”

  What? That’s crazy. Worse than impossible. If I told her we needed guns she was not going to say, “Okay, just wait a minute and I’ll get them for you.”

  She would scream and rant and tell us we were ruining her son’s life and we should go away and never come back and what guns were we talking about and she was going to call the police. So I said, “Some sticks.”