The Greatest Show

by Michael Downs

  When they discovered the dog, Franco’s face reddened and his ears burned. The dog’s mouth was agape, and its neck was twisted so that it gazed with open, tranquil, bloodshot eyes at an upside down world. The boys stood in the street. Behind them a car hummed past, then another, spent leaves twisting into the air in their wake. Dominic sighed. He bent and unbuckled the dog’s collar. The tags jingled. He tucked the strip of leather into the pocket of his jacket, then disappeared inside his house.

  The police asked Franco’s name when he telephoned, and he gave it. They asked Franco’s street address, and Franco told them 229 Preston. Again he watched from the bedroom window, this time as officers questioned Mr. Nardi before walking to Franco’s house. He heard them knock, heard them ask questions, heard Pop answer. Franco closed his closet door behind him and with a flashlight read comic books.

  His shield stops all bullets!

  This is too easy—I suspect a trap!

  Captain America! Commie Smasher!

  Words, colors, crime! Mad science brought to heel. Powerful punches and final justice. The quiet moment respecting death, even that of a most villainous foe.

  Pop opened the closet door. “Out,” he said.

  They faced each other. Pop cuffed Franco across the head so hard Franco fell to the floor. He rushed to stand again.

  “We don’t need the cops,” Pop said. “We’re decent people, and we live a decent life. They’ve got no business here. None. Don’t you ever bring them to our door again. Don’t you ever bring them to our street. You hear?”

  Then Pop kissed his son and sent him to bed without supper.

  Later, after the routines that ended days in the DiFiore house (Denise clicks off her bedside radio, Mom rinses the glass of her nightcap, Pop closes his book and turns out the porch light), Franco peeked out his window. From behind another pane of glass and another window screen, Dominic Nardi stared back.

  Franco and his sister and Mom and Pop lived in a Hartford neighborhood that was more a village, its flat-faced houses wedged together, its needs met by a corner grocer, a post office, a city park with woods and a swimming pool, a car mechanic, a florist, and a baker. Pigeons thrived there, but not rats, and clotheslines went unused only in winter or in rain. In this neighborhood lived Polacks and Puerto Ricans and some blacks and a Jewish family or two. Mostly, there were Italians and Irish. The Irish owned houses with garages. They had settled the neighborhood first, and they ran things. Irish priests drank whiskey in the rectory offices of St. Augustine’s, and they visited the homes of the parish’s Italian families only when obliged by death. Irish cops made Tully’s Tap their off-duty headquarters, and that was why (so the joke went) neighborhood crooks never got caught: The stink of beer sweat and cabbage farts was always first to reach the scene of the crime.

  Mom was not Italian or Irish. She was an older Yankee type, a rarity in this neighborhood, of English descent with a blush of German, who had grown up among the ornate homes of Blue Hills and had quit college to marry an Italian factory worker. Pop used to joke that she chose him for his cooking. “Before me, she’d never heard of garlic,” he said. Except Mom did all the cooking and always had as long as Franco could remember (his favorite: her meatloaf with bacon strips baked across the top). It also fell to Mom to steer Franco and Denise through the rites of the Catholic church, because Pop refused. He would not attend Mass. He missed all services, including Easter and Christmas and also the occasions when Franco and Denise first received the sacraments. In his life, he told his children, he’d seen things that spoiled him for God. “You give a damn, that’s good enough,” he often said, and he called it Pop’s First Commandment. He lived that way, best as he could. If a neighbor needed help to spread asphalt for a new driveway, Pop went. When an old maid up the street didn’t know the man at her door, she telephoned Pop. Long before the incident with the dog, on the day a car accident took Mrs. Nardi, Pop sat with her grieving husband and son on their porch, sharing the silence. One time Pop even stopped a policeman too zealous with his nightstick from beating up some neighborhood teenagers. He could do that sort of thing. He wasn’t a big guy, but he had been a boxer when he was young—a welterweight—and in the ring he had learned things, that bleeding stops, that winning is better than losing, that the way to survive losing is to love whoever beats you. In his dealings with other people, he was never afraid. Sometimes, though, other people feared him, a reality he found upsetting because he worked hard to be affable.

  The DiFiores had moved to this South End neighborhood from Hartford’s Italian ghetto when Franco was seven years old and Denise was five. They left the ghetto because the city planned to raze it for a business plaza, but for the DiFiores the timing was good: They had already saved enough money to invest in their own house. They bought a two-story home, brick, with enough bedrooms that Franco and Denise didn’t have to share. On the summer day the family moved, brother and sister kept each other company in the backyard of their new house. They slurped water from a garden hose and played in the shade of an oak. Denise wanted to look at her brother’s comic books. Franco didn’t want her to. He yanked an issue of Robin Hood from Denise’s hands. The cover tore. Franco punched her in the stomach. Denise cried.

  Pop jerked Franco into the garage. He ordered Franco to make fists with both hands, then he wrapped each fist in duct tape, the tape shrieking as Pop peeled the roll. He wrapped the fists so tightly Franco’s fingers tingled.

  Then Pop made Franco sit next to Denise on a bench in the backyard. Because Franco could not use his hands, Denise had to turn the pages of the comic books. Franco had to read to her. His hands ached. He beat his hands against the rusty frame of the bench for relief. He begged Denise for a glass of water, and she laughed at him.

  After an hour, Pop called Franco back to the garage. Pop took a knee, then cut the tape with a pocket knife. Franco complained the tape jerked his skin, but Pop looked at him as if he knew it didn’t hurt much, and Franco shut his mouth. When the last bit came off, Franco tried but could not unball his fists. He could not unfold his fingers. All pink and mottled and useless, his hands seemed to belong to someone else.

  Pop said, “Only cowards punch girls.”

  Franco, who had always thought of himself as one person, became two on the day he and Dominic found the dog in the gutter. The collar tags jingled and Dominic vanished behind the Nardi door and Franco divided. One of him followed Dominic inside the Nardis’ yellow house. That Franco walked heartbeat-for-heartbeat beside his friend as Mr. Nardi, still dressed in his insurance sales tie and shirt, shadowed his son up the stairs to the boy’s room. The knot of the tie was loose and crooked, its red tails flopping over Mr. Nardi’s belly, and his collar was dark where he’d sweated into it. At the bedroom door he shouted, “You got a question? You got a question?” then slammed the door between him and his son. For hours he kept shouting and breaking things, and he left the TV on with the volume loud. When all that stopped the silence was scarier.

  The other Franco, the one left on the street, ran home so fast that pencils shook out of his book bag, and he left them on the sidewalk where they fell. That other Franco called the police and later got whacked with an open hand that made his head ring.

  When Franco woke the next morning he wandered about his bedroom sifting through papers in his desk, rummaging through his closet, peering under his bed, then staying by the window and watching the Nardi house a long time. He studied himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, but he saw nothing unusual, no parts missing. His skin hadn’t changed color, wasn’t more ghostly. He dressed (favorite plaid shirt, navy pants, sneakers with old chewing gum flat on the soles), and he snuck a comic book among his school books to keep himself from getting bored during math. At breakfast, nobody gave him a once-over as he expected they would. His mother didn’t ask whether anything was wrong. Denise ate Cheerios with bananas and sugar and read the back of the cereal box and ignored him. Pop sipped his coffee and read the newspaper. When
he finished, he knocked with his knuckles on the tabletop. He said, “Look, you two. New rule. No going inside Mr. Nardi’s house. No matter what. You hear?”

  He didn’t have to say why. Denise nodded and turned back to her cereal, but Franco watched his father. Pop, as if anticipating Franco’s question, said, “You and Dominic can stay pals. But he invites you inside his house, say you’d rather play at the park or something. Be polite, but don’t set foot inside that door.”

  That morning, Franco met Dominic and walked with him to school. They tried not to look in each other’s eyes. In class Franco teased a girl because she was rich, and he doodled on his penman-ship lesson, and at recess he played Smear the Queer, and everything was as it always had been. The walk home with Dominic happened in silence, and Franco was glad for it because he didn’t know what was right to say. This lasted more than a week. Then the quiet became boring. So one day after school, Franco stopped Dominic before he could start up the walk to the Nardi front door. He said, “We can hunt down the man who killed your dog. We can search the yard for clues. We can bring the killer to justice.”

  Dominic led the investigation, dividing the front and backyards into quadrants and deciding who would search each. When Franco found something, a smashed paper cup, a bag from a hardware store, he brought it to Dominic who decided whether it was truly a clue. Afternoon light became dusk. Dominic had chosen four things he said could unravel the case: a footprint, a cigarette butt, a license plate recovered from the duff beneath a lilac hedge, and a tangle of fishing line. The boys placed the clues, except for the footprint, in the overturned lid of a metal trash can and contemplated them.

  Dominic said, “It was my Dad.”

  “No,” said Franco. “He didn’t have a motive.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Dominic, and he hurried inside.

  Eventually, Franco and Dominic agreed that whoever killed the dog had escaped. It was too bad, but he would turn up again. Such was the way of villains. Meanwhile, there arose other threats to the world.

  Mrs. Vovonovitch. Mr. and Mrs. Hayes. Mr. O’Connell. All villains. Either evil scientists or communists or mobsters or Nazis. The boys spied on each, sometimes sneaking around their houses, other times pedaling bicycles past, popping wheelies or riding no-hands, pretending to be nothing more than boys. They might even wave hello. But later, at night or in the early morning or when the day grew muggy and grown-ups shut themselves indoors, the boys worked to right the scales of justice. They’d snip every stalk in a bed of poisonous daisies, or they’d destroy the secret lab in a neighbor’s house by running garden hoses through a cellar window and turning on the water. “Go home Commie” they’d paint on a fence. They fought evil throughout the neighborhood, ranging blocks away from home. Each successful adventure emboldened them to another.

  One summer evening, lying in dead grass behind a scruffy rose hedge, the boys spied on fat Mr. Schwartz, whose German name gave away his Nazi sympathies. “A war criminal,” Dominic whispered as Mr. Schwartz cut his lawn. “Escaped from the Fatherland as the Americans marched into Berlin. With that mower he sends secret messages to his masters in Argentina.” Franco crushed a beetle with blue-and-green wings that had been crawling on his shoulder, then flicked away the remains. “If the Nazis take control of Hartford,” he whispered, “New York will be next to fall, and then the whole country.” The boys watched Mr. Schwartz steer his mower into a shed at the back of his property, comb his few strands of hair with his fingers as he admired his work, then enter his lair. When they heard the rush of shower water through an open window, it was time to act. First they captured the mower from the unlocked shed. Then they wheeled it through yards and alongside fences to Goodwin Park where Dominic had hidden a baseball bat and a claw hammer under bushes in a wooded area. “We have to destroy the mower,” he said. “There’s no other way.” He used the bat. Franco wielded the hammer. They took turns swinging and smashing, the crunches and ringing of the dying mower muffled by brush and trees around them. Twilight dimmed as they worked, and they sweated in the slick summer air, and the boys couldn’t recognize the mower after a while, its push handle mangled, its wheels severed from its body. With the claw end of the hammer, Franco smashed, smashed, smashed into the gas tank, and gasoline spurted over his hand and arm. He stank, even after he washed using the garden hose in Dominic’s backyard. He scrubbed again in the industrial sink in his family’s cellar, powdering his arms with Ajax cleanser. Then, with an invented sneeze and sniffle, he escaped to bed without kissing Mom and Pop good night. He turned out the light without paging through a comic book. Under his sheet he twisted right, then left. He looked out his open window into the night. It had begun to rain, and water smelled hot off the asphalt streets, and crickets fell silent. Through the smell of bleach, Franco noticed now and then the sweet scent of fuel, and it reminded him of the evening’s heroics, the fear and the thrill, the single-mindedness of their purpose, the abandon in their arms.

  The signal was Dominic’s idea. When he needed to alert Franco to a new adventure he’d tape a five-pointed star, cut from black construction paper, to the inside of his bedroom window and leave a light on. When Franco saw the silhouette he knew to ring the Nardis’ doorbell twice and run and wait for Dominic at home base: a garbage dumpster outside the motorcycle repair shop on Franklin Avenue. One August night the black star appeared, and later, leaning against the dumpster, Dominic pulled a brown bottle from inside his jacket and uncapped it. “Super-soldier serum,” he said, and he drank a long gulp, then handed over the bottle. Franco smelled the beer. The glass was cold in his hand. He sniffed the lip. “Go ahead,” said Dominic. “We’ll be stronger and faster and better fighters.” Franco nodded, and together they drained the bottle, belched and giggled. Dominic smashed the empty against the dumpster, shards of brown mixing with the grit of the pavement. He howled like a wolf, and Franco howled, and then the two wrestled and laughed and wrestled some more, their sneakers scuffing in the grit and the broken glass, until Dominic pinned Franco against the dumpster.

  “Isn’t your mother German?” Dominic asked.

  Franco stopped smiling. “Only a little.” He waited for Dominic to say what they both knew he meant to say. But Dominic didn’t speak, and Franco said, “Just because she’s a little bit German doesn’t mean she’s a Nazi.”

  “I just wondered.”

  “How did you even know?” Franco pushed free of Dominic, then stepped away from the dumpster. He breathed hard to recover his wind.

  “I just heard. That’s all.”

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  “It means you’re German, too.”

  “Am not.”

  “Mein Herr!” Dominic shouted, and he shoved Franco with both hands so that Franco had to catch himself on the rough wood of a telephone pole. Dominic stepped forward as if to do it again, and he howled, and Franco ran. “German!” Dominic yelled. “German! German!”

  The Black Star Adventures ended when Franco began high school at South Catholic and Dominic at Bulkeley, the public school. Now, mornings, Franco walked south and Dominic east. The black star made no more backlit appearances in Dominic’s window. Franco joined CYO basketball, and he pitched for the South Catholic junior varsity. He made new best friends, boys whose parents sometimes visited the DiFiore house, who played cribbage with Mom and Pop and called them Lena and Nick. He visited these boys in their homes and ate lunch with them or sometimes supper. Sometimes on the way to a game or to practice, Franco saw Dominic—arguing with Mr. Nardi in the yard, or in the driveway fiddling with a carburetor—and Franco waved, or didn’t. He remembered the Black Star Adventures as mischief-making: fondly, with embarrassment and pride. He confessed them in church, asked forgiveness, and prayed his penance. The priest absolved Franco and answered his one question: No, the boy did not have to tell his father.

  This was the time in his life when Franco didn’t want to tell Pop anything, not even something so routine as Mom needing him
at the supper table. Franco did not want to be seen with Pop. He turned down the old man’s offers of rides home from practice, and he volunteered for other chores to avoid a drive with Pop to the hardware store. It was not that Franco hated his father or disliked him. It was not that Pop’s breath smelled of coffee, cigarettes, and blood, or that his eyebrows grew long and unruly, though both were true. It was not those things, or maybe it was, or a combination with others. Franco couldn’t figure it out, didn’t care to. He knew only that he had an animal’s instinct to escape whenever Pop was near.

  In late spring, Franco found himself waking early. He’d visit the bathroom, then crunch through a bowl of cereal while sitting on the porch. Morning air smelled clean, without the clutter of exhaust or coffee or onion simmering somewhere in butter. The quiet allowed him to hear the ticking of the refrigerator, the sighs of the house, the slap of newspapers against porch steps. Mornings brought his imagination to another world, a planet without sisters and schools, a place he alone possessed. But he was not the earliest riser, and Pop would eventually return from his daybreak run, sweaty, in a V-neck T-shirt and gray gym shorts, tube socks drooping. Pop stretched his muscles, then sat with Franco and unlaced his sneakers. They talked if there was reason—about school, about boxing, about potholes on Preston Street or about some game Franco’s team had lost or won the afternoon before. Sometimes Pop told family stories, about Franco’s sportswriter uncle who won big at a horse track in Arkansas and never came home, about their aunt Sophie who had died in a circus fire of all things and was the reason Pop stayed away from church, about a distant cousin who bought a new car every time a woman broke his heart. If they had nothing to talk about, Dad tuned a transistor radio to an AM station, and they listened to Hartford begin its day with broadcast jokes and music, amid the songs of finches and chickadees and a distant thrum of tires on Franklin Avenue.