“Can you imagine how strong that tree was?” Joey said. “It pushed the cement right up.”
We stopped to admire this feat. There was a square patch of dirt next to the broken sidewalk where a tree had once been. We could almost make out the stump, but it had been stepped on so many times that it was hard to know where the dirt ended and the living thing had started.
“What do you think happened to it?” Dorothy asked.
“Probably got sick and died,” I said. “Look, it could only get water from this little spot. And trees need a lot of water.”
“Want to go swimming?” Dorothy asked.
Wow, suddenly I saw a connection between two things. One thing led to someone mentioning something else that was the same thing. I felt my brain grow. I had never felt like this in school. Plus I thought Dorothy was going to crawl through the boxes and maybe I could touch her.
“How long will it be before your father gets out of jail?” she asked Buster.
“Five years, with good behaviour,” he said. “By then, I’m going to join the Marines and make him proud of me.”
We turned the corner and the last of the white Bungalow Bar pickup trucks with bungalows on the back were getting packed up. Some of the drivers were ringing the bells which had to work or they wouldn’t. A couple of the drivers were picking up their empty cardboard boxes and walking across the street to throw them into our ocean.
When all the trucks left there was nothing left on the street, except . . .
“Do you see that?” Dorothy said.
It was steaming in the morning sun, a large cardboard box left alone and steaming. We knew what was in it and we ran. You don’t find things like this very often. In fact, we had never found anything like this, not this much.
“I can’t believe it,” said Vinnie.
“You know what we can do with it?” asked Johnny.
There was some silence. No, we did not know what we could do with it. If we were lucky we found little pieces of dry ice, maybe about the size of a finger or smaller, that had broken off when the trucks were getting loaded. Those we tossed back and forth to see how long we could hold them or put them in our mouths and pretended we were smoking.
But this was twenty pounds of dry ice. Some poor driver must have put it down on the other side of his truck, then loaded up the cooler with ice cream and driven off without remembering. That was awful. He would learn about it in about an hour at lunchtime outside some school.
Meanwhile, we had everything we had ever dreamed of having, except we had never dreamed of twenty pounds of dry ice.
“What do we do with it?” Vinnie asked Johnny.
“Well, you know what happens when you put dry ice in water.”
Vinnie nodded. I nodded. Joey nodded.
Dorothy smiled. I knew then she was making some kind of connection with what we could do with it that I had not made, but I also knew she was smarter than me, or anyone.
We had heard about dry ice in water from some of the drivers who said never put this stuff in water or it will fill up the whole room with fog that can kill you if you breathe it, but first it will freeze you to death.
So we got a paper cup and put water in it from one of the nozzles where they attached hoses to wash the trucks, then scrounged around until we found a couple of pieces about the size of our fingernails.
Ploop. Fizz. “Holy mackerel, look at that.”
It bubbled up and over the cup and we put it down on the sidewalk and watched in mesmerizing fascination.
“I’m going to stick my finger in it to see if it freezes me to death,” said Jimmy Lee.
“Well, don’t breathe it,” said Dorothy.
He put his finger into the fog then quickly pulled it out. He bent his finger.
“It still works.”
Then he got on his knees and leaned forward.
“Don’t, you’ll die,” said Vinnie.
“I wanna see,” said Jimmy Lee.
He stuck his nose in, sniffed, and pulled it back.
“Wow, that’s cold.”
“You didn’t die,” said Vinnie.
“Naah, the drivers just say that so we won’t steal it,” said Jimmy Lee.
Dorothy folded her arms while we looked at the big steaming box.
“I know what we can do with it.”
This mental connection stuff was happening everywhere. Why did we bother going to school when you could learn everything on 132nd Street, I wondered. But I still did not know what we could do.
“What?” asked Joey.
“Johnny knows. I know. Think about it,” she said.
“We can have fun,” said Johnny.
“We drop these down the sewers and see what happens? Maybe it’ll reach the street,” said Joey.
Dorothy nodded. She figured that out before he said it.
There were two sewers between Jamaica Avenue and 88th Avenue, at the edge of the factory. Two sewers with black, ugly water stagnating below the street. Two chances to change everything.
It took all of us changing hands every few seconds to carry the box from the ice cream factory around the corner to our street.
“Owww, golly, that’s cold,” said Vinnie.
“I can do it,” said Jimmy Lee.
He got ten steps before he put it down.
“I can’t hold it,” he said.
“Don’t drop it,” shouted Johnny. “We don’t want them to break.”
We tried to push it with our feet, but we couldn’t because the ground was too rough and the box too heavy.
I opened the box and tried to drag it with the flipped-open flap but a few feet later the bottom of the box was worn through and slivers of dry ice were being sliced off and left behind on the asphalt.
“Now what are we going to do?” asked Vinnie.
“We need someone’s shirt,” said Johnny.
“No way,” said Dorothy. “No one is going to get away with that at home.” Then she added, “Wait. Don’t do anything,” and she ran back to the ice cream factory.
She came back with another cardboard box from the ocean. She was so smart and I was hopelessly, totally in love.
We laid the new box on its side and tilted over the broken dry ice box into the open end of the new box and then lifted it and the ice slid into the new box. It was bigger and thicker than the one the ice had come in.
“Dorothy, do you want to be our teacher?” asked Joey.
Now with three of us, we could pick up the box by the flaps and carry it about ten feet, then put it down and pick it up again and move it and put it down.
“It’s not that heavy or cold,” said Vinnie.
But it was both. We needed everyone. This was not going to be something anyone could miss out on. “Stan, go get Stan,” said Johnny.
Buster ran.
“And Patrick, that kid who lives with his mother next to the El.”
I ran.
“And Vanessa, and those other girls who were at the party who never come out.”
Dorothy ran.
Johnny pushed the box under the front bumper of a car to keep the sun off it. In five minutes, kids were coming from both ends of the block.
I rang Patrick’s bell, but there was no answer. Luckily someone was going through the door and I ran in with him.
“Hey, kid. I can’t let you in here.”
“I won’t be long,” I shouted as I ran up the stairs. I had no idea which apartment it was, but there were only four on the top floor, and two were on the train side, so there were only two choices.
I knocked on the first door. Nothing. Knock again. I’m not going to wait. I ran a few steps down the hallway and knocked on the other door.
I could hear the bolt move behind it. The door opened a tiny crack with the safety chain holding it tight.
“Oh, it’s you,” said the woman who was Patrick’s mother. “Wait a second.”
She closed the door. I could hear her taking the chain off, then she opened it.
“Come in,” she said.
“No, no, I just want to see if Patrick’s home because we’re doing something and we don’t want him to miss it.”
“Patrick’s not home,” she said. “Why don’t you come in?”
She was wearing a tight sweater and tight pedal pusher pants. Her feet were bare. Her hair was falling down around her face. She took my hand.
“Come in,” she said.
I could see her bumps under the sweater. They were mountains. She had a pretty smile. This is not possibly happening. This is what happened in the book in Tommy’s cellar. This is not happening. Not now. Not when there is dry ice down the street.
“Come on, I won’t hurt you,” she said.
I knew something was happening behind my zipper. This was impossible and it was happening.
“I can’t, I’ve got to see the dry ice,” I said, and turned around and ran down the hallway and down the stairs and out the door and past the window of the bar and down the street until I saw all the kids around the sewer and I did not stop until I was in the middle of them.
“Did you get Patrick?”
“He wasn’t home.”
But suddenly all the running had felt so good behind my zipper and as I stood in the middle of all the kids trying to catch my breath, and I wanted to run some more but all the kids were standing around looking at the dry ice. Sex is a very strange thing.
“We break it into two parts and some of you go up near Jamaica Avenue and the rest of us stay here. When I wave my hand, everyone drops it all down together.”
Johnny was like the boss. But unlike the bosses we heard the men at the bar talking about, everyone was listening to him.
This was more than twenty pounds, we guessed. There were four large slabs, each one about five pounds. We divided ourselves up without choosing sides. I just wanted to be with Dorothy except I also wanted to be at Jamaica Avenue under the El next to Patrick’s mother’s apartment.
We dumped out half the ice. The rest was in the box and a bunch of guys and girls picked it up and ran toward Jamaica Avenue. It was easier to carry now.
Dorothy stayed here, so I did not move.
In two minutes we were in position. We could see each other although the elevated train was coming by and a Long Island Rail Road train was going behind the apartments, so there was no point in shouting.
Johnny raised his hand, looked north, whatever that meant, then dropped it like a signal.
Dorothy and I and Johnny and Vanessa and Buster kicked our ice down the sewer. We looked up toward Jamaica Avenue. The guys there were jumping up and down. They had done it.
We looked down into our sewer.
Blurp. blurp, blurp. White bubbles were rising, coming up through the blackness of the putrid air above the stinking water. Blurp. The bubbles kept coming. The bubbles were not bubbles, they were solid foam, rising both slow and fast.
It was slow because it wasn’t speeding. But it was fast because we could see it and it was getting closer and closer. “Here it comes,” said Johnny.
The white fog reached the bottom of the steel sewer grating and then wrapped around and over it. The grating disappeared. The fog spread out through the holes in the grating, then started creeping out over the street.
The sewers were more than a hundred feet apart. There was no way this fog was going to last long enough to really do anything.
“Do you think it’s going to cover the street?” I asked.
Johnny was standing over the sewer. The fog hid his feet. He looked at me and then at Dorothy and Vanessa and Buster then down at his feet again and smiled.
It kept coming. It was flowing out to the middle of the street. It was an inch deep at the highest point in the street, almost as high as the curbs. Now two inches deep in the middle, it crossed over the hump in the middle of the road and was sliding down to the opposite curb and more was rising from down below. The blackness was all whiteness now.
“Look,” said Dorothy. She pointed toward Jamaica Avenue. The fog was coming our way.
The street was slightly downhill, which we did not know until then, and our fog was going away from us but theirs was coming.
A car came up from the factory. It was going to ruin everything. We started shouting and waving at it to stop, but it must have been something on the street that made the driver go faster.
We got out of the way and it raced by. We could see the driver gripping the top of the wheel with both hands, and he looked terrified.
“Ha, did you see that?” Buster said.
The fog was pushed aside by the car, but it came back almost as quickly, filling in the path cut open by the wheels. And now the white cloud was growing higher. Three, maybe four inches deep.
And what was more wonderful, the Jamaica Avenue fog was just about to join our fog in the middle of the block.
“Look, there’s that old man who never comes out,” said Vanessa, pointing at an old man who was standing by his open door.
We watched windows open and heads leaning out. Then a truck turned off Jamaica Avenue, heading for the factory. It stopped. There was honking behind it.
Then we saw another truck coming up the street from the factory. It was amazing that we had this much time without traffic, but it still had been fun.
“Wow, wait, look,” shouted Buster.
The truck had come halfway up the street into the fog, but now we could see through the windshield the driver, who looked like he was Puerto Rican, making the sign of the cross. Then he did it again, and again.
It was a panel truck with a giant windshield.
“Look, he’s climbing up on his seat.”
I don’t know who shouted that. But we had power. We were doing something. We were changing things, sort of what Johnny said. This was wonderful. Except for the times when I thought about Dorothy and seeing Jackie Robinson and that feeling behind my zipper when I ran down the street, this was the greatest moment in my life.
The horns stopped as drivers behind the trucks rolled down their windows. We could see a lot of pointing and gesturing and some hands squeezed together in prayer. More apartment windows were opening. And except for the El and the Long Island Rail Road, the street was quiet. Between the trains it was almost silent. It had never been like this before, without cars and trucks, except maybe at 3 a.m. when I got up after a party to look for cigarette butts to smoke in the morning.
A little girl of about four or five came out the front door of a house with her mother. I had only seen her a few times since she wasn’t old enough to be interested in watching stickball.
But it was quiet enough that I could hear her say to her mother, “It looks like a fairy princess world.”
And it did. We made a fairy princess world. And then the fog started going down even quicker than it had come up and it began disappearing. I tried to wish it wouldn’t but I didn’t know how to do that.
“I wish it wouldn’t go,” I said to Dorothy.
“Me too,” she said.
Wow. Dorothy wished the same thing as me. That was better than getting the fog wish granted.
Then the sign-of-the-cross truck driver started his motor and began creeping ahead; from the opposite end of the street, the other truck started up and came our way, slowly. In two minutes, trucks and cars were passing like nothing had happened. Except it did happen. And we made it happen.
We gathered in one large group over the sewer where Johnny had started it all. There had never been a group this big on the street since the basketball game. It was neat to have friends. We started laughing and slapping each other and talking about what we had just done and how wonderful it was.
Then Mrs. Belimeyer leaned out of her window and shouted, “I saw what you kids did. I’m reporting you to the police, and you are all going to get in trouble.”
She closed the window. The fog was totally gone.
We were quiet. Mrs. Belimeyer was making all the noise. We looked at each other and started laug
hing and laughing.
That’s when we heard the police car.
No sense in running away. We would look guilty and since there was nothing here now, there was nothing wrong and no way could we get in trouble.
Two cops we had never seen before got out of the car.
“Alright, we just want some answers now,” said one of them, the biggest one.
“What happened and what did you kids do?”
Joey spoke, then Dorothy, then Tommy, then I did and Vinnie.
“It was scary,” said Vinnie.
“We don’t know what happened,” said Dorothy.
I added, “It was white. I think it was from outer space.”
“It was here then it was gone,” said Joey. “Do you know what it was?”
The cops looked us up and down. Then they looked up and down the street. They were not going to be fooled, but there was nothing here to arrest us on and take us away to jail, or at least to threaten us with.
“We’re going to investigate,” said one of them. “If we find you kids did anything wrong, we will haul you down to the station house.”
We looked so innocent. It was good to look innocent. We’d learned that when we were two.
Then the cops got back in their car and left. We waited until they turned the corner and we laughed like the best comedy show we had ever seen, except, you know, we had never seen a comedy show. But this was plain funny.
“I hope the ice cream guy found out before his ice cream melted,” Vanessa said.
“You sound like one of those religious people who are always hoping for good things,” Vinnie said. “Just imagine if he didn’t. He would open his cooler and he could sell milkshakes.”
That was enough to make all of us laugh, including Vanessa.
The World Series
The seventh game. The Bums might, could, couldn’t, no, impossible, not Brooklyn up against the damn Yankees. We could say “damn” and get away with it. We could say “Damn Yankees” and the guys on the corner would slap us on the shoulder instead of the side of the head.
“Damn” – it sounded so good. A real curse word but it was sent to a real devil, the Yankees, and now the Yankees were up against the real angels, the Dodgers who never won, and this was the seventh game and that never happens and the impossible was possible.
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