Kicking the Sky

by Anthony De Sa

  “Who?” I asked.

  “My Johnny,” she said.

  “I thought you said you spent last night—”

  “What?”

  “You told me you were looking over the reports.”

  She pressed her temples, made small circles with her white fingertips. “I’ll go back to bed. I’ll just have a refill and a smoke.” But she never moved toward her bedroom.

  “I better go,” I said.

  “Let me write you a note.”

  Edite tore off a blank corner of the newspaper, then got up to look for a pen. I stared at the coffee grounds sticking to the inside of her mug.

  — 5 —

  SATURDAY MORNINGS were quiet at our house, except for the sound of our screen door slamming when Senhora Rodrigues delivered her fresh cheese. Before cleaning, my mother went to Czehoski’s on Queen Street for Polish cold cuts and to Future Bakery for sliced rye. She’d do her banking before heading to Kensington Market, where all the rest of her grocery shopping was done. My father started the morning early with a basement excavation job. He’d be home for lunch and then get ready for the afternoon disciples. My mother called them visitors, which made them sound like friends or family. James was going to take over in the afternoon, dumping the truck’s load of dirt in one of the city’s landfills.

  I stood outside James’s garage in the morning, breathing in through my nose, out through my mouth, the way we were taught in gym class.

  The light in the garage was powdery. My eyes inched over a bicycle frame that hung from a hook, across to the hot plate, to a few baseboard heaters, unplugged and piled against a wall, over the shiny blue trunk and up to the window in the door that burned in the morning sun.

  James stepped out from behind the curtain. “I know why you’re here. You want me to quit.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Would it have made a difference? I thought you were old enough to understand.”

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “Extra cash. The baby is on the way. When your dad offered me a trucking gig on Saturdays I didn’t think twice. My hope is he’ll like my work and he’ll offer me a few weekdays too. Look around you. This ain’t no way to live, especially with a kid. I want to get something better for me and Agnes and the baby.”

  “But we’re helping you.”

  “Yeah, I just don’t want this to get messed up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, we gotta keep an eye on Manny, for starters. He’s getting sloppy. If that little prick gets caught stealing bikes, it leads the cops back to me. And then what? Who’s gonna take care of Agnes?”

  “So tell him to stop.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “You know how much a baby costs?”

  “Well, Ricky and me can—”

  “Ricky is a problem too. You and I both know about Ricky and what he does. He can’t get caught down on his knees,” James said. Dribbles of pee blotted my underwear. James took a step toward me. “He was doing this shit long before I came around. You just need to know that I’m offering him a kind of protection, that’s all.” Instantly the room turned hot. I couldn’t look at him because all I kept wondering was what else he knew. “Ricky came in here crying the other day because at the billiards, Amilcar’s dad, Poom Pooms or something, bent down and peeked through the hole.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Let’s just say I’m taking care of it.”

  Next thing I knew I was pounding my pedals along Queen Street, racing so fast that I passed a streetcar, James’s last words—“Don’t leave!”—pulsing in my head.

  Sunday morning, I woke to the sound of stones being thrown at my bedroom window.

  I pressed my face to the mesh screen and yelled through clenched teeth, “Are you nuts? What time is it?”

  “That thing freaks me out,” Manny said, glaring at Jesus on our lawn.

  My father had spruced Jesus up by applying Spackle to its chipped nose and painting its flaking face. The sacred heart, the size of an India-rubber ball, burst through Jesus’s robes, shiny from a fresh coat of glossy red nail polish. My father had also cut some Plexiglas in the outline of the tub, caulked and screwed it in place, trapping Jesus in a sweating coffin.

  “Manny, it’s seven in the morning on a Sunday.”

  “I like to work early,” he said. “Listen, if you don’t want to come, let me know. Believe me, I like working alone.” Before he even finished the sentence I had started to get dressed. I didn’t need him to get any louder and wake up my parents. I slipped on my shoes when I got to the front gate, then followed Manny to the mouth of the laneway opposite ours. This was not our territory. It was Amilcar’s. “Follow my nose. It always knows,” Manny sang in Toucan Sam’s dorky voice.

  “I don’t like this.”

  “Then stay home!” Manny shot back.

  “I’m coming.”

  “Hey, is it true about the vampire lady?” Manny asked.

  “What did you hear?”

  “Is it true, then? Did she stab you?”

  I rolled down my tube sock.

  “I don’t see anything,” he said.

  “It was a sewing needle, but man, did it hurt. See, it’s a bit red there.”

  Manny looked unimpressed.

  “The place went mental so my dad closed the garage early.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Old, hunched over and wrinkly, wearing a long black dress with a black shawl and kerchief tied under her chin.”

  “That describes every old lady in our neighbourhood.”

  “Yeah, but I never saw her before. Turns out her son had driven in from Buffalo to bring her to me. Anyways, she spoke in whispers, not in English but in Italian, I think.” There’d been something different about the old lady. Her eyes. Her eyes burned like someone’s much younger. They were caramel coloured and her pupils sparkled. If I told Manny that, he’d think the heat in the garage had rewired my brain.

  “So what happened?”

  “She bent down to look at the lapa but her hand and chin moved to my feet, like she was going to kiss them.” Manny made a disgusted face. “That’s when she pricked me.”

  “I heard she bit you.”

  “No. My dad heard me yell and he drew her back but not before she swiped some blood from my leg and sucked her finger.”

  “That’s crazy, man.”

  I had him hooked now. “My dad dragged her out as she licked her lips and kept chanting something.”

  I didn’t tell Manny that my eyes had locked with the old woman’s and I had seen things that scared me. They weren’t objects or places, but more of a feeling that made me think of James and Emanuel Jaques and my parents. It was hard to explain … it seemed like the person I was now was not the person I would’ve been if Emanuel Jaques had not been murdered, if James hadn’t dropped into our world out of nowhere. I’d never have the chance to be that boy again. Manny would think I was delusional if I told him any of that.

  “Where’s Ricky?” I asked, willing myself to shake it off.

  “You know he can’t leave till his old man gets home from work and crashes.”

  Manny walked slowly, bending down to stuff his pockets with stones. So I did the same.

  Ricky’s father was a phantom. Since Ricky’s mother took off, the only time his father left the house was to go to work. When he got home he’d sit on the couch in front of the TV drinking wine until he passed out. Ricky waited for him with his breakfast: five eggs, sunny side up, splotched with piri-piri sauce, five pieces of buttered toast (one for each egg), and a caneca of coffee, black. Everything had to be perfect, just the way Ricky’s dad liked it, right down to the way the ashtray was angled on the breakfast table. “Or else—” Ricky had said once, letting the threat hang. Ricky tried to sleep when his father did, and woke when his father went to work. He almost never went to school, and James called him Hoot. Ricky would tell
us things he had heard or seen in our backyards or laneway when everyone else was asleep.

  We never dared set foot inside Ricky’s house. His father’s belly, according to Ricky, was the size of a beach ball, but the rest of his body was thin and the skin hung off his shoulders. I imagined he was like the beast in Lord of the Flies.

  “Did you finish the book we got?” I asked Manny.

  “Yeah, it should be called Flies on Shit.”

  “I liked it.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “What don’t you get?”

  “I just don’t think that’s the way it happens. They’re stranded, right? They’re far away from any kind of rules. So the first thing they do is they make their own laws. That’s stupid right there. You’re finally away from them all, all their fights and lies, and then you go and make the one thing you hate—rules.” Manny shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense.”

  “Look at us. We’re in an enemy laneway trying to steal bikes. Look at your brother, he’s creating his own rules by marrying Amilcar’s sister. Your parents are flipping and—”

  “Don’t talk about my brother.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “I know what you’re saying. My brother doesn’t steal, he doesn’t kill.”

  “My father killed that pig. We are animals. Just like the kids in the book.”

  “Your father didn’t kill the pig to survive. He could have just gone to the butcher or the grocery store. He did it because he’s a pork chop and it’s the kind of thing they did back home.” Manny climbed up the downspout like a monkey. He scrambled along the roof before sitting on his bum and looking over the laneway. Silence as he fished out a cigarette from his hair and lit it. “But you’re right. We’re all animals,” he said, looking down at me and spitting his laser spit through the side of his mouth. “We do things because we can. Why does a dog lick its balls? Because it can. I’ll show you.”

  “What, you’re going to lick your balls?”

  “I’m going after the big one,” Manny said.

  “Manny, don’t even think about it,” I said.

  “Look, you don’t want to be here, fine. Just don’t go on talking about what’s right and wrong, rules and all that crap. Do you ever hear yourself? Do you ever look yourself in the mirror after your dad’s ripped off a bunch of people who believe in you?”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “I’m an asshole? I don’t sit on some throne and have people kissing my stinking feet.”

  “Fuck you!”

  Brilliant light, like the tail of a falling star, shot across the crisp morning air. The flash was bouncing off the frame of Amilcar’s bicycle, the big one, a ten-speed that had been stripped and chromed. Manny knew he could get at least fifty bucks for it.

  It was too easy. Amilcar wouldn’t have just left his bike there. It was a trap.

  Manny crept up the laneway, signalling me to stay back, but I followed. He lifted his feet, careful not to kick the gravel. Amilcar was nowhere. Manny got close enough that he touched the bike, brushed the handlebars the way the models did on The Price is Right.

  In one fluid motion Manny had hopped on the bicycle and thrown the kickstand up with his heel. I heard rustling behind the tall, narrow gate that divided the two garages. I saw Amilcar through the slats, leaning against the cinder block of the garage, his pants dropped to his knees. It looked like he was taking a leak.

  Manny looked back only once, punched the air with his pinky and index finger spread wide, like he was at a Kiss concert. He gave out a kind of primal cry, and then broke into a song about choking the chicken on a Sunday morn.

  I looked back and caught Amilcar scrambling through the gate. He had pulled up his pants but his buckle was still undone. He spat from the corner of his mouth and his cheeks bounced up and down. He was fast. Manny had already turned at the elbow in the laneway. He’d be far gone by now, but Amilcar had seen who it was. He wheeled around toward me.

  I raced up Palmerston, pumping my arms, my legs burning, past the entrance to our laneway. I looked over my shoulder. Amilcar was gaining on me.

  I reached the synagogue at the top of Palmerston and turned in the laneway. Amilcar was getting close. This is it, I thought. I’d never make it to James’s garage. Amilcar would catch me and beat me to a pulp.

  I turned into the neck of our laneway. I stopped and bent over to heave. Only spit came out. I grabbed at my heart, tried to calm it. I thought of all those people who came to be healed because they believed. It was a joke; I couldn’t even save myself. I leaned against a garage door and shut my eyes tight. The door wobbled a bit, then opened, and I stumbled into darkness.

  “Where are you, you little shit!” Amilcar yelled. “I’m gonna cut your fuckin’ head off.”

  Through the gaps in the boards I could see Amilcar in the laneway, banging on garage doors, turning handles. I guided my hand up the door, slid the latch to lock it.

  “I’m going to kill you! You better not go to sleep because I’m going to hunt for you, you faggot.”

  I looked around the garage, the mould and dampness from the packed earth tickling my nose. It was too dark to tell whose garage it was. I tasted the copper of my blood. I must have bitten my lip when I fell in. I looked out again. Amilcar was close enough that I could hear him breathe.

  “I know you’re in there,” he whispered, before banging twice on the garage door with his fist. “Come out or else—” He tried the next garage and pounded at its doors before heading to the next one.

  “I really don’t care,” I heard myself saying, much louder than I had expected.

  “You’re in there, aren’t you, you little faggot.” He rattled the handle of another garage, then tried to kick the door down. “I’m coming for you and your friend, shithead.”

  My breath filled my ears so I couldn’t hear anything else. That was, until the pop of a firecracker snapped my attention. I looked out with one squinted eye and saw Amilcar leaning against the opposite garage, a string of firecrackers in his hand. A cat, splotches of ginger against white, rubbed itself along his shin. Amilcar grinned, exposed the dark gap between his front teeth. He separated a firecracker from the row and brought the end of it to his mouth, the way you would suck the icing off a birthday candle or moisten a joint—something Manny had shown us once when he had stolen one from his brother’s glove compartment. The cat mewed and wove between Amilcar’s legs in a figure eight. Its tail was erect, quivered. Amilcar bent down to pet the cat’s head. With his other hand he drew the moistened firecracker from his mouth and screwed it into the cat’s ass. The cat only raised its rump to let him. I held my breath till I thought I would burst. Amilcar flicked his Bic, lowered the flame to the wick. The spark lasted a mere second before it cracked. The cat popped off the ground and dashed in circles screeching, dragged its hind legs up a wooden fence and disappeared over the top. Its screams faded into the distance.

  “And I’ll do it to you too,” Amilcar said.

  I inched backwards, into the garage, watching through the crack as Amilcar’s figure got smaller and smaller until it was gone.

  I looked at the old garage door I had fallen through. It was wooden and swung out to the sides.

  I tried to swallow. My knees trembled and I could feel the tears building. Then I heard the scratch of a match.

  I turned to see a flickering of light over the hands of a man. The flame rose to his face. “Might as well sit down.” He tilted his head, cupped the flame, and lit a cigarette.

  “Peter?” I said his name out loud without trying to.

  He wouldn’t look at me. “You need to wait it out,” he said, his voice new and strange.

  I stood there without making a sound. Outside the sun was bright, but Peter’s garage was shadowy and cool. I heard the scratchy nails of squirrels racing across the garage’s rooftop. Peter moved around quietly, lit some candles he kept in punched tin cans. From what I could make out, the inside of the garage was decora
ted in plywood and tarpaper. Though the garage was dark, he didn’t trip over anything, as if he knew every inch of the place. The candles lit up hundreds of books on shelves, piled high or their spines packed tightly. Paperbacks and old faded hardcovers, all of them brought there in his bundle buggy, I figured.

  “You can talk?” I whispered, smacking my tongue in my dry mouth, trying to whip up some spit.

  Peter nodded.

  I felt lucky, like I was the first one to hear him. But then I thought of all the nasty things that had been done to him, things he suffered without once complaining or fighting back. I thought of all the names we had called him.

  He turned to reach for something and I could see the lump on the side of his head, pushing his ear out like in a child’s drawing. My dreams had been wrong. He held a Coca-Cola bottle, popped off the cap with a flick of his thumb and offered it to me. He raised his hand and rubbed the lump a bit. He caught me staring and dropped his hand.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Is it filled with pus?”

  He shook his head, rubbed the frosted stubble on his neck.

  “You can drain it. I once had a blister. I popped it with a pin. I disinfected the pin with a match. My blister wasn’t that big but—”

  “It’s my ticking clock. Close to my ear so I’m sure of when it’s time.”

  “For what?”

  “For that which is inevitable.”

  I liked the sound of the words coming out of his mouth.

  “How come you never talked before?”

  “No one asked me anything.”

  As Peter manoeuvred his way through the room, my eyes followed: hot plate, cot, red scarf draped over the handle of his bundle buggy, an old washbasin and jug, like my grandmother’s, sat in a wired holder beneath a narrow mirror, and a small record player—the portable kind. The basics.

  Peter brushed his fingers across the spines of his books the same way I rattled a stick along the spindles of a wrought-iron fence. He stopped and tilted a book toward him far enough that it dropped into his hand.

  He held the book out to me. “Go ahead,” he urged with his chin. “It’s a gift.” I reached up and held the cloth-bound book with both hands. The Little Prince.