Eggplant Alley (9781593731410)

by Cataneo, D.

  “Mom, don’t worry,” Nicky said. “He’s a file clerk.”

  Nicky gobbled two of the eggs and mashed up the other three. He was happy. He had a promise to carry into the day. A sweet little treasure in the back pocket of his brain. Something to look forward to. It was like having a Yum-E-Cakes cream pie tucked into your lunch bag, only better.

  Dad walked into the kitchen, wearing his nylon jacket, jangling his keys, on his way to make Saturday deliveries.

  “Got enough eggs there?” Dad said to Nicky. Then to Mom, “I’ll be back around two.” He walked across the linoleum, then stopped and turned, as if an idea had popped into his head, out of nowhere.

  Dad said, “Hey. Nicola—you want to come with me?”

  “Who?” Nicky said, eyes wide. “Me?”

  “Is there anybody else here named Nicola?”

  “I’ll get my coat,” Nicky said, bolting from the chair.

  Nicky was going with Dad on a delivery run. This was a major development. Roy used to go with Dad in the good old days, and when Roy lost interest, Dad was hurt by the loss, and the subject of ride-along with Dad never came up again. Until today.

  To tell the truth, as far as Nicky was concerned, this was better than Willie Mays joining the Yankees.

  Nicky sat high, legs dangling, on the saggy passenger seat as Dad expertly steered the Yum-E-Cakes van through the narrow streets. Dad weaved around double-parked cars, dodged a jaywalking pigeon, sped up in order to catch a green light, and coasted nicely through a yellow light. Nicky proudly thought Dad would have made a fine fighter pilot, if given the chance.

  “Slide open the door for some air,” Dad suggested.

  “Are you sure?” Nicky said. “I might fall out.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Roy never fell out.”

  Nicky grunted as he slid back the rusting door and was hit by a rushing blast of warm air, exhaust fumes, and the sounds of passing car radios. The sensation was thrilling.

  Their first stop was the DeSerpico Bros. distribution warehouse in the South Bronx. When they passed the bright white hulk of Yankee Stadium, Nicky gawked and felt a surge of longing and excitement.

  “Dad, think we could go to a game this year?”

  “Maybe,” Dad said without enthusiasm. “Or maybe next year, when Roy is back. The three of us. Like the old days, huh?”

  Now they were rolling along narrow, potholed streets bordered by junkyards, barbed-wire fences, weedy lots, and abandoned factories with punched-out windows. Nicky was enthralled by a magnificent mountain of crushed cars, tailfins glittery in the sun. Nicky’s teeth chattered and he was nearly bucked out of his seat when the van rattled over a stretch of broken railroad tracks. He grinned wildly and held on tight as the van rocked along the muddy dirt road leading to the DeSerpico warehouse, hard by the banks of the green, smelly Harlem River.

  Dad braked sharply, toppling an empty coffee cup from the dashboard.

  “How was that, squirt?” Dad said.

  “Better than a ride at Playland.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Dad yanked a dolly from the rear of the truck. Nicky watched his father in the side-view mirror. A man stacking boxes on a loading dock called, “Hey, Sal, howzit going?”

  “Hardly working. I mean, working hard,” Dad said.

  “Yuh,” the man said, grinning.

  Nicky wondered if he would ever grow up to be as witty and quick as Dad.

  Dad and Nicky worked their way north, delivering Yum-E-Cakes on a route that ran through the Bronx and looped into Yonkers. Dad told inside stories about each stop. Adolph of Adolph’s Luncheonette once appeared on the television prank show Candid Camera. He was victimized by a talking mailbox. They bleeped out his swear words. Bob Hope once dropped into O’Brien’s Sundries for an egg cream. “They had the best egg creams in the Bronx while O’Brien was alive,” Dad noted. “Now—not so good.”

  Dad said Moe’s Deli used a rigged scale. Ching’s Grocery had a rat problem. Scungilli’s Meats did a thriving business illegally selling pig intestines.

  And so forth. Nicky ate up every morsel of juicy, inside information, because it made him feel in-the-know, grown-up, savvy, and best of all he felt like a confidant of Dad’s. The way Roy used to be.

  Dad double-parked in front of J&M Variety in Yonkers and said, “After this, what do you say we swing over to the Nathan’s and get a couple hot dogs? How does that sound?”

  “That’s sounds great,” Nicky said, amazed that this great day kept getting better and better.

  “Keep your eyes open out here,” Dad said over his shoulder. “This ain’t the best neighborhood anymore.”

  Nicky kept his eyes open. The street was quiet, except for a handful of black teenage boys up the block, one boy sitting on the hood of a car, two standing in the street. Nicky wasn’t sure, but he thought one of the boys gestured toward the Yum-E-Cakes van. He wished Dad had not turned on the van’s blinkers, which surely drew attention. Nicky wished Dad would hurry up.

  Dad stumbled out of J&M Variety, doubled over, clutching his stomach, holding on to the door. At once, Nicky knew what must have happened—Dad had interrupted a holdup and was shot or stabbed. Nicky opened his mouth to shout, but the scene was too horrible, too unbelievable for his brain to grasp. The words stuck in his throat.

  Still doubled over, Dad leaned against the truck and worked his way to the driver’s side. With great effort he climbed behind the wheel.

  Nicky said in a small, terrified voice, “Dad, were you shot? Knifed?”

  “Worse,” Dad said numbly, staring at the windshield. “Nicky …”

  He turned his face toward Nicky. Dad’s skin was gray.

  “There was a message in there. From Mom. It’s Roy.”

  “What about Roy?”

  “He’s … gone. He’s gone.”

  “Daddy …”

  “He’s gone. I don’t know what happened. He’s a clerk. I don’t know. Oh, God.”

  Dad started the van and roared away from the curb.

  “Oh, God. What did I do?” Dad said in a small tight voice as he careened down the streets. “What did I do? What did I do?”

  Nicky and Dad said nothing on the drive home. The only sound inside the van was the squeaking of Dad’s hands as he twisted them on the steering wheel. Dad wordlessly drove like a madman, speeding, weaving, cutting off cars, narrowly missing pedestrians.

  Nicky’s mind worked on what to do next, with Roy gone. He came up blank. All he could think about was the day Roy took him to Popop’s variety store and bought him a set of plastic dinosaurs. Then Roy took him home and helped him fashion a dinosaur park on the coffee table out of paper plates and plastic forks.

  At a stoplight, Nicky caught the festive, happy smell of french fries on the warm air, and the odor made him sick to his stomach.

  When Dad careened off Lockdale and roared down Groton, straight toward Eggplant Alley, Nicky picked out their kitchen window. As the van rumbled down the ramp into the underground garage, he caught a glimpse of Mom’s face at the window. Her face was twisted into a horrible mask of grief. Even from five stories down, from a speeding delivery truck, Nicky could tell Mom had been sobbing. So it was true after all.

  Nicky followed his father in a mad dash up the stairs thinking, “Our lives will never ever be normal again.” And as they reached the fifth floor, “I’m sorry I ever ever complained about anything, because now I really have something to be sad about.”

  Dad’s back heaved as he worked his key into the door. He pushed the door open. Something made the door push back at him, and Dad straight-armed the door so that it swung open with a bang, the way cops burst into an apartment on a raid.

  Mom appeared in the hallway, and the sight of her unglued Dad. His hands were shaking. Dad pulled at his fingers like a little boy and whimpered, “What have I done? What have I done?”

  Mom said, “Salvatore? What’s the matter with you? Are you drunk? Take it easy. Don�
��t get so upset. You’ll give yourself a heart attack. Salvatore?”

  “Don’t get upset? You just said I shouldn’t get upset. Is that what you said? So this is just a nightmare, right? I wanna wake up.”

  Dad rocked from foot to foot. He whispered, begging, “Come on! Wake me up then!”

  Mom slowly reached for Dad’s shoulder. She put her hand on him carefully, as if he might shatter. She called to him, as if talking to a person on a bad phone connection. “SALVATORE? Sal? Sal? Can you hear me? Take it easy. I’m sad Checkers is dead, but he was an old dog. Count your blessings. Thank God it wasn’t me or the kids. Can you hear me in there? Did you take too much cough syrup again? Pull yourself together.”

  Dad stared blankly at Mom.

  “Checkers?”

  Mom made a motion with her head, indicating behind the door. Dad and Nicky looked at the remains of Checkers, stiff on the tile. Nicky gasped. He had never seen a dead creature bigger than a rat. Checkers lay on his side. Checkers was like a rock. Nicky had never seen anything so completely still. The dog’s black nose was tucked under the door. The last movement of his life was one final sniff of hallway air, to see if Roy was coming home.

  Dad said, bewildered, “Not Roy?”

  Mom exploded, “Roy? Whaddya mean, Roy? Bite your tongue. What’s the matter with you? Who said anything about Roy? How could you say that?”

  “Malena,” Dad said, suddenly calm. “Take it easy. I need to sit down.”

  Mom and Dad sorted out the mess. They put it all together at the kitchen table. How on this particular afternoon, once again, one thing had led to another.

  Mom had found Checkers dead by the door long after Dad and Nicky left. After a hearty cry in the living room, she faced a dilemma: Checkers’s body blocked the door. There was no way she could bring herself to move him. She didn’t know what kind of horrible things might ensue when you moved a dead dog, and she didn’t want to find out.

  As the hot morning dragged on, Mom grew nervous about the heat. Checkers might start to smell. Then what? She was trapped. Mom considered climbing down the fire escape, but in the end she was more terrified of heights than of bad smells. She considered packing Checkers with ice cubes, but there were only two ice trays in the freezer.

  She called Uncle Dominic at the butcher shop, but he would not close his business to move a dead dog.

  Mom said, “Then who? The superintendent? He took three days to fix a faucet. The cops? They don’t come if you’re getting strangled. The fire department?” Mom kept the fire department in reserve.

  She got the idea to call J&M Variety in Yonkers. She knew Dad’s route. Mom tried J&M and got old lady Ottaviano on the line and filled her in about Checkers. Mom asked her to tell Salvatore Martini, the Yum-E-Cakes guy, to swing by the apartment as soon as possible.

  Old lady Ottaviano needed to leave J&M Variety for a doctor’s appointment. She wrote on a paper bag, “Wife called. Come home right away. Dog is dead.” She ordered the girl who worked the register part-time to pass along the message on the bag.

  “You give this to the Yum-E-Cakes delivery man. You make sure,” she said.

  Dad arrived at J&M Variety, stocked the shelves with Yum-E-Cakes, and wheeled his dolly toward the door. The register girl said, “Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. You’re the Yum-E-Cakes guy, right? I got a message for you.” She handed Dad the paper bag.

  Old lady Ottaviano’s handwriting was poor, and her mastery of English was shaky. Her pencil was dull. Dad’s worried imagination was sharp. And the word dog could easily be scribbled poorly, the letters not closed properly. Dog could be scribbled to read very much like the word Roy. That was the case here, at least. Dad thought the pencil writing on the brown bag broke the news: “Roy is dead.”

  Now Dad wobbled out of the kitchen to the embrace of his living room chair. Nicky followed and plopped onto the sofa. His legs ached as if he had walked twenty miles. There was still the matter of Checkers at the door, and Dad would do his duty and deal with that. But first he had to pull himself together. Dad’s hands were still shaking.

  It was an hour before Dad said, “I’ll take care of the dog.” He lifted himself out of the chair. “I wish there was some way to call Roy in Vietnam, just to make sure that this wasn’t one of them premonitions or anything.”

  “There’s no such thing as premonitions,” Nicky said scientifically, glumly.

  “Smart guy, huh?” Dad grunted. “Poor Checkers. I’ll bet it was from eating that Blue Castle hamburger.”

  Nicky didn’t want to know Dad’s plans for Checkers. What can you do with a dead dog in the Bronx? They didn’t even own a shovel.

  Dad passed through the living room carrying an old sheet, the one traditionally spread under the Christmas tree. Nicky heard Dad grunt and swear, the jangle of Checkers’s dog license, the door open, and the door slam shut.

  “No more dogs,” Mom said from the kitchen. “They just die.”

  Nicky sat on the gritty front steps of Eggplant Alley and watched the sun sink behind the aspirin factory. He shook his head at the memory of the morning, when he tingled with the sureness that something good was on its way, like a special delivery package.

  “And what happens?” Nicky muttered. “What happens? I get the crap scared out of me. And Checkers kicks the bucket. And now Dad is out there, tossing my dog in some dump.”

  He flung a bottle cap off the steps.

  “I am a numbskull, for ever tingling about anything.”

  And the thought would never occur to him: If Checkers had not died that morning, Nicky would not be seated, at that very moment, on the front steps. And he would have missed, forever and ever, what happened next.

  Lester Allnuts 12

  Nicky sat on the front steps in the dusk, hunched over, lost in his own little miserable world. He was not alert. He was tuned out, thinking, thinking, thinking. He didn’t hear the footsteps behind him until the feet were very close. A shoe clicked sharply on concrete nearby and Nicky jumped. He turned quickly and stared up at the thick glasses and evil scowl of the Creature from the Second Floor.

  The Creature from the Second Floor was actually a young boy, about Nicky’s age and not quite Nicky’s height. Which meant the Creature was pretty short. He had wiry, rust-colored hair. His glasses were in fact thick. The Creature had an odd, full mouth. Maybe he would need braces. But the scowl wasn’t all that evil and maybe not a scowl at all. It might have passed for a nervous grimace.

  “Do you live here?” the Creature said, in a flat accent that came from somewhere far beyond the borders of the Bronx.

  “Who wants to know?” Nicky said.

  “Me. I live here,” the Creature said. “My name is Lester Allnuts.”

  Nicky snorted.

  Lester Allnuts frowned at the ground and said, “That’s what everybody does when I tell them that.”

  “Oh,” Nicky said. He had too much practice at “good-bye,” not enough practice at “hello.”

  “I’m Nick Martini.”

  Lester said nothing.

  “Like the drink.”

  Lester said nothing.

  “I live on the fifth floor.”

  Lester said nothing. He didn’t move. Nicky thought, “What does this kid want, an engraved invitation?”

  Nicky said, “Sit down, if you want.”

  Lester examined the step and took a seat next to Nicky. He said he was from a small town upstate. He told Nicky the name of the town, and Nicky immediately forgot it. Something-ville. Nicky heard “upstate” and imagined cows in the road, men wearing straw hats and overalls, pigs in the living room. Lester said he and his mother moved to the Bronx to be near his grandmother, who lived in Washington Heights.

  “My daddy thought it was a good idea, to be around family and whatnot. He’s away,” Lester said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “On business.”

  Under normal circumstances, Nicky would have allowed the conversation to die right there. It was ge
tting dark. Supper would be ready. Television shows beckoned. And Nicky was not fond of talking to strangers. He was usually as talkative as a mummy. But because Checkers died that morning, Nicky was in no hurry to go upstairs to the apartment, now an apartment with plenty of gloom and without a dog. One thing led to another. So at this moment in time on the steps, Nicky was a regular chatterbox.

  Nicky said, “My brother is away, too.”

  “Very interesting.”

  “He’s at college.”

  Nicky was not happy about lying, but he had learned his lesson about the truth. The truth can hurt—him. He had no inkling whether this odd-looking duck was one of Us or one of Them.

  He couldn’t think of anything else to say, so Nicky said, “Did you notice how the elevator stinks?”

  “Yes. Like a barn.”

  “That’s Eggplant Alley for you,” Nicky said.

  “What is?”

  “A stinky elevator. That’s Eggplant Alley.”

  “Where is Eggplant Alley?”

  “You’re sitting in it, pal. You live in it.” Nicky liked calling the country boy “pal,” to show him how jaunty city kids talked.

  Lester twisted around and looked up at the archway over the steps that led to the courtyard. Soot-streaked gold-colored lettering spelled out:

  HUDS N VIEW G RDENS

  Lester said, “I thought this was Hudson View Gardens.”

  “Nobody calls it that. If you called the cops and told them to come quick to Hudson View Gardens, they wouldn’t come here.”

  “Very interesting.”

  Nicky said, “There’s a lot to know about living in these parts.”

  “Yes. Very interesting.”

  Nicky said, “It’s different down here in the city, you know.”

  “It surely is different in the city.”

  “Yeah, and getting worse every day,” Nicky said, sounding weary, old, and wizened. “You got to be careful around here. This is becoming a rough neighborhood. Lots of crime. Keep your doors locked. Don’t ever let anybody into your apartment. Don’t talk to strangers. If you see a guy named Mr. Feeley—run, don’t walk. Don’t trust anybody. Keep an eye out for shady characters.”