Kicking the Sky

by Anthony De Sa

  Our street felt like a ghost town. None of our neighbours were on their porches. They weren’t watering their lawns or hosing down their walkways and windows. It was a bit early but I figured the women were probably in their basements cooking Sunday dinner. Maybe their husbands had already escaped to Crupi Bros. Bakery for an espresso or to some other café where they could gather round a radio to listen to the Portugal soccer game. I stopped in front of Senhora Barbosa’s house. She sat dressed in black, behind her front window. Her lips caved in because she wasn’t wearing her dentures. She scowled at me and drew the curtains. I thought of the missing boy, Emanuel, and imagined what it would be like if we found him safe somewhere. We’d make the front page of the newspaper and they’d interview us on television. Our neighbours would look at us differently. We’d be saviours who might see some reward money.

  I headed over to Senhor Cardoso’s garage, which had recently been hollowed out by a fire. We had agreed to meet there by nine o’clock, which would give us a few hours for the search before we had to be home to get ready for Mass. But Ricky and Manny were not where they were supposed to be.

  I went past our meeting spot and on to Red’s house. I leaned my bike against his garage. He lived alone in the big house. Sitting bare-chested at an open window, he’d call us over to climb up onto his garage to pick the sour apples before they ripened and fell to the ground making a mess. Afterwards, he would invite us in for a glass of water, but we never accepted, choosing to drink from his garden hose instead.

  I climbed the antenna that hugged the clapboard siding, then scrambled onto the roof of his garage. From up there I could see everything. I bit into a small apple. Its sour juice ran down the corner of my puckered mouth. I saw Aunt Edite, arranging the lawn chair on her third-floor fire escape. She wore a big white hat, white sunglasses, and a bikini, carelessly covered by a kind of Indian sari dappled in little mirrors. Edite worked at the Toronto Star and people said she had taken the job in the hope of finding out where her son, Johnny, might be. She hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. He never returned home from Vietnam, and Edite was convinced he was somewhere in Canada, hiding from the American government, eating raccoons and berries and sleeping in caves or under spruce trees, biding his time until it was safe to go home. I pictured Johnny like the Vietnam War vets I saw in a television special—his brain fried because of the things he had seen and done. Edite wasn’t technically my aunt but we were told to call her that—a sign of respect, my father insisted—even though she preferred to go by her first name alone. She was my father’s first cousin, the daughter of an uncle he barely knew who had left the Azores years ago to make his fortune in America.

  I was just about to skip across the rooftops when I saw Peter. He was in his fifties and pencil thin. He lived in the garage at the top of the laneway and never spoke. A lot of the kids were mean to him, throwing rocks or yelling nasty things, in an effort to get him to chase. It never worked. He wore thick glasses like Buddy Holly. His clothes were always the same too: navy cigarette pants, a white shirt with a narrow collar, red Converse high-tops, and a pocket protector with an assortment of pens. The silver of his pens sparkled when they caught the sun, turning them into medals.

  “Hey, Peter!”

  Skittishly, he scanned around him before looking up and nodding. His squinty eyes looked to the ground and he walked faster, pulling his wire bundle buggy behind him. The hair on the top of his head was thinning and I saw a bump, the size of a golf ball, behind his ear.

  I took off. It was a game Manny and I loved to play. We chose opposite rows of rooftops, picking sides over rocks, paper, and scissors. I knew the Markham side was harder, a total of eight pitched roofs, compared to the five on the Palmerston side, but I wanted the thrill hopping from one to the next, some flat, others steep. Ricky would call out the start and then run between us through the lane, offering a play-by-play and adding to the excitement. I liked the jumps best, sailing over the dark crevices between buildings.

  I took my time leaping across the shingled roofs, jumping in long and graceful strides over sheets of tin and Plexiglas swatches. I made note of Senhor Pacheco’s freshly installed row of two-by-fours, lined with three-inch nails to shoo nesting pigeons, Senhor Cunha’s jumble of dragons-tooth barbed wire tucked under some gutters. Senhora Rego had a new laundry line attached to a post centred like a cross on the pitch of her sagging roof. I stopped above Mr. Serjeant’s garage, the tallest pitched roof in the lane. From there I could see MISSING CHILD posters taped to garage doors and telephone poles. They featured a black-and-white photo of the boy with his straight-edged bangs, and a smaller picture of the kind of shoes he was wearing when he went missing, white sneakers with three stripes along the side.

  I wasn’t sure how long I was up on the roof when Manny and Ricky appeared from the heat’s haze. They were crouched at the top of the laneway, in front of Peter’s garage. I hand-dropped from Mr. Serjeant’s garage, ran back up the alley, hopped on my bike, and with my ass in midair, pushed down hard on the teeth of the pedals until the bike no longer veered from side to side, the pace set. I skidded and kicked up some gravel.

  When I reached them, Manny was trying to zap an empty cigarette pack by holding a magnifying glass in front of the sun. Manny was darker than the rest of us—moreno, my mother would say, which wasn’t as bad as mulato—and he had darkened even more over the summer. His hair, which he styled with a pick he always kept tucked in his back pocket, was shaped in a sort of Afro, and it sparkled as if dusted with sugar.

  “Hey, we were supposed to meet at Senhor Cardoso’s. Aren’t we going downtown to look for Emanuel?”

  “Shh,” he said, raising his finger in my direction.

  Ricky shuffled his feet a bit but held his squat. He used his bruised arm as a visor. I couldn’t remember a time when Ricky’s arms or legs weren’t bruised. He said he fell a lot but we all knew his dad beat him. Ricky squinted up at me and smiled before his thin fingers resumed tapping on the lid of a Bick’s pickle jar held tightly under his arm. I could see bugs trying to climb up the side of the jar, only to slip down before they reached the top. Every once in a while I heard a ping: a grasshopper banged its head as it tried to hop out. Ricky placed the jar on a bed of gravel, made sure it was in the shade. Ricky’s bangs lay flat across his forehead, cut like the teeth of a dog. He trimmed his hair himself but never washed it. He had a tiny face, and his eyes, nose, and mouth were all bunched up like the holes in a bowling ball. Ricky was much smaller than the rest of us, a runt, Manny teased, like Wilbur the pig in Charlotte’s Web. But unlike Wilbur, Ricky actually did have a special gift. I once saw him pick up a robin that Manny had hit with his slingshot. He cupped the bird’s limp body in his hands and brought it to his lips, whispered something into its head, then threw it in the air where it took flight.

  “The fire’s gonna start,” Ricky said. “It’s gonna burn to a crisp.”

  “Shut up!” Manny wasn’t going to let Ricky break his concentration.

  “Look, there’s smoke! It’s gonna go.”

  “Shut up, Ricky.” Manny’s hand trembled as he forced a stream of spit from the gap between his front teeth. He had remarkable aim and could hit a pop can from ten feet away with laser precision.

  I rested my hand on Ricky’s shoulder. He bobbed his head into my shadow and looked up. I saw the birth of the flame, a black dot creeping wider. On its edge the dot became rimmed with blue, then orange, and in an instant the pack of Peter Jackson cigarettes turned into a ball of fire. I loved that moment, when fire took over and gobbled everything, the invisible trigger. Flashpoint.

  Manny fell back on his heels and banged the back of his head on the garage, laughing. He reached for Ricky’s jar. “Let’s try a grasshopper.”

  Ricky tucked the homemade terrarium into his belly, under his Keep on Truckin’ T-shirt.

  “Nah,” I said. “We should start looking for Emanuel. Gotta get that reward money.”

  Manny twirle
d a cigarette that had magically appeared from his sponge of hair. At school, Manny could hold a double pack of Laurentian pencil crayons in his big Afro of tight curls. The crazy thing was, if you asked for peacock blue, he knew exactly where to reach.

  “So are we still going downtown?” I said.

  Manny dropped an eggy fart.

  “Ah, Manny, that’s rotten.”

  Ricky pinched his nose and giggled.

  “We gotta go now,” I said. “My dad’s gonna be home soon.”

  “I don’t feel like it,” Manny said.

  “Why not?”

  Once Manny set his mind to something he wouldn’t budge. And if Manny said no, Ricky wouldn’t come either. Deep down, I knew we didn’t have enough time to do a thorough job anyway, to gather all the clues that would lead us to Emanuel. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a roll of cap gun tape. I held one end in my mouth and unfurled the long strip, holding it taut for Manny to aim his beam once again. Manny licked his lips and with fierce concentration raised the magnifying glass. Curls of smoke wafted into the beam’s path. He lowered the magnifying glass closer to the strip until his hand hovered about six inches above the first pocket of gunpowder.

  “I really don’t want to go either, but I have a feeling we’d find him, you know.” I wasn’t going to let Manny off that easy, but the truth was I was afraid to go. That’s why I had wanted to go to the pig hunt with my father. I’d have an excuse.

  “The kid’s been gone for two days now,” Manny said.

  “Three. Since Thursday afternoon, but if we start looking now—”

  “They say the guy he left with was a queer.” Manny shook his head.

  “So what?”

  “They just disappeared?” Ricky asked.

  “Yeah,” Manny said.

  “How do you know this?”

  “My mom was on the phone last night, talking to Senhora Gloria. It’s what Sean’s mother said. He’s the kid who was with the Jaques brothers on Thursday. Everyone’s talking about it. The man asked Emanuel to move camera equipment.” Manny swung his head from side to side in disbelief.

  “Is that all they know?” I asked.

  “That’s all they’ll tell us.” Manny grinned.

  A pop, followed by a succession of pop, pop, pop! Wisps of yellow smoke curled in the air, and the smell of sulphur travelled up our noses. Manny looked pleased with himself.

  “Look,” he said, digging into his pocket and bringing out the small Swiss Army knife his brother had given him when Emanuel went missing. “My brother said you need to be smart on the streets. We gotta stick together.” He drew the blade across his thumb, and the blood came out in a straight line. “You in?” I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but Ricky understood. He gave Manny his hand, thumb poking out like he was hitch-hiking. Ricky squeezed his eyes tight and Manny pricked his thumb with the tip of the blade.

  “You’re next, Antonio,” Ricky urged.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off Manny as I gave him my hand. He pricked my thumb, much deeper than I thought he had to. I fought hard not to show them how much it hurt.

  “So now I think we need to press our thumbs together, seal our blood,” Manny said.

  “I think it only works if you use chicken blood, like a sacrifice,” I said.

  “You got a chicken handy?” Manny said.

  “Would another animal’s blood work?” Ricky said. “I saw a dead squirrel in the laneway and—”

  “No, Ricky, we need the blood of a fuckin’ unicorn. See any of those in the lane?”

  “He’s just trying to help,” I said.

  “Let’s just get this over with.”

  “My grandmother told me you’re supposed to tape a coin to your pricked thumb if you want something to come true,” I said.

  We all made a teepee with our thumbs. Pressing hard made the burning feeling go away.

  “Do we say something?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Manny said. “What would your grandmother do?”

  I ignored him.

  “Go on, Antonio,” Ricky said.

  “To sticking together,” I said.

  “You’re a fuckin’ poet.”

  We squatted there, not saying anything. There was something about becoming blood brothers that made me feel stronger—a superhero transformation. I wanted to ask them if they felt the same way but I let the idea of what we had just done tingle my skin. I always dreamed of having brothers.

  “I think Emanuel was shining shoes so he could buy a new bike,” Ricky said. “Maybe he helped the guy with the cameras for some extra cash,” he added, before shoving his bloody thumb into his mouth.

  “What, and he never came back? You’re nuts. They’re saying he did things for money. And it wasn’t shining shoes. My mother says he—”

  “I don’t believe what they say.” I had caught the worried looks and whispers too. “My mom says his name means ‘God be with you,’ so God’s with him.”

  “Your mother still thinks the world is flat,” Manny said. “She probably crawls on her hands and knees, afraid she’ll fall off the edge. And your father, he thinks that landing on the moon was a scam, trick photography or something. They think like that, like they’re still living back on their farms in the Azores. Much as I’d like the reward money, if you ask me, this kid’s a goner.”

  My throat tightened and my eyes burned as if tears were already in them.

  “God can’t be everywhere. If He were, He’d have guided Emanuel home by now.” Ricky’s calm voice caught me off guard. He scrambled to his feet, lifted his bike, and rode away down the laneway.

  Ricky saw the world differently from Manny and me. I knew how he got all those crumpled bills stuffed in his pockets. There was a hole cut out in Senhor Jerome’s fence at his pool hall. Men were known to stick their dicks through the hole: a two-dollar bill got you a handjob, and a blowjob cost a fin. I caught him once, Ricky, grabbing a five-dollar bill a man slipped through the hole. He ran away from the scene. I pretended I hadn’t seen a thing.

  Senhora Rosa’s variety store was a square house she had converted to a storefront. It was halfway up Palmerston, exactly thirteen houses up from ours, and it was the corner house to the narrow laneway that led into the main lane. I pushed the door handle, which was shaped like a large Coke bottle, tripping the store’s familiar chime. Everything inside twisted and twirled: coloured balls and blinking dolls wrapped in cello-phane dangled from invisible strings tacked to the yellowed ceiling. Senhora Rosa catered to her Portuguese customers, selling assorted cheeses, barrels of pickled fish, salted cod, and olives bobbing in brine. I looked up at the large clock at the back of the store as Manny beelined for the ice-cream fridge. It was 2:20 p.m. Upon hearing the bell, Senhora Rosa scurried out from behind a curtain made of coloured strips of plastic, which hid her kitchen. She had her hair in curlers wound with a sheer kerchief.

  “Ah, Antonio.” She looked over and saw Manny reach so far down into the fridge that his feet lifted off the ground. “Manelinho!” When she spoke, the raised mole on her forehead moved; Manny called it her third eye.

  “Bom dia,” Manny said, sliding shut the glass door to the fridge. Tossing a dash of Portuguese always increased our chances of getting a bubblegum thrown in.

  “We’re going to go look for Emanuel,” I said.

  “You’re not going anywhere but home.” Her eyes darted from me to Manny and back. She reached for a bug swatter and came at me from around the counter. Manny dropped a couple of quarters on the counter and we ran out, stumbling on the broom handle that held the returned jugs of milk, stringing them by their red handles. We jumped all three steps, hopped on our bikes, and began to pedal off into the laneway. She called after us, “The streets aren’t safe. The boy’s still missing! No one should let …” Her voice grew fainter, the clicking of straws covering my spokes drowning out her warnings.

  Manny and I made our way to the Patch. The sun threw our shadows ahead of us. Manny tilted
his head back to squeeze the bit of grape juice from the silver foil inside of his Lola container. As we neared my garage, I saw Manny look up to my rooftop. My sister was lying on her bath towel just outside our second-floor window. She was listening to CHUM FM on a small transistor radio—it was the only station she listened to; it had all the best rock and pop. She wore a yellow bikini. Her shoulders were covered with a towel but the rest of her glistened with Johnson’s baby oil.

  “If the neighbours see you, they’ll tell Dad!” I shouted up to her.

  “Fuck the neighbours! I pinned up some sheets,” she called down.

  I screened my eyes against the sun. A couple of sheets clipped to the clothesline hung like square clouds and blocked the neighbours’ view from their backyards.

  I recognized the thunder of my father’s dump truck. The shiny red cab rumbled down the laneway. My father pulled at the chain and the truck let out a honk from deep in its gut. Up there in the driver’s seat, he seemed so much taller than he really was. He always wore a straw hat, a Sam Snead, which covered the top of his shiny head. Manny and I pressed our backs to a garage door to let the truck go by, Manuel Rebelo and Son Ltd. painted on its side in gold letters. The truck puked out fumes that made the air taste like pencil shavings as its huge tires kicked up the grit and gravel.

  When the cloud of dust settled, the truck had stopped in front of my uncle David’s garage. My father and Uncle Clemente got out. Their boots were caked with dried mud. My eyes darted up to my sister. I heard the crack of a flicking towel and saw her slink back in through the window.

  “We have a piggy for you,” my uncle Clemente taunted.

  My father grinned. “Climb up, boys,” he said. “Take a look at this.”

  — 3 —

  WHEN I WOKE UP EARLY the next day I ripped the bandage from my thumb, unsealing the penny I’d pressed against my knife cut all night.

  I dressed quickly. They needed a whole day to slaughter the pig and I was afraid I’d miss the most important part. I grabbed a Pop-Tart and ran through the lane. I reached my father’s truck just in time to hear the hydraulics hissing as the dumper lifted higher and the hinged door swung open. The animal rolled a bit, then slid along the bed of the dumper, before dropping through the tailgate onto the rough gravel. It was still alive.