Kicking the Sky

by Anthony De Sa

  “This is crazy,” I said, but I found myself climbing up anyway. I looked along the line of rooftops in front of me. “There’s still snow, Manny. And the ice …”

  But he was off. I knew I needed to follow. I’d run slowly, allow him to beat me. Manny wasn’t holding back. He ran across the rooftops, laughing as though he had just stolen a bike and was getting away with it.

  “Manny! Wait up!” A couple of times I slipped on icy shingles. Manny did too, once almost rolling over into a gully between garages. But he got up and kept running, leaping from one roof to the next. He was on fire with something I couldn’t feel. I was six or seven garages behind him. He never looked back. As he got closer to the last garage, he showed no sign of slowing down.

  “Manny!” I shouted.

  He sprinted off that last garage. His arms and legs punched at the sky the way a long-jumper’s do. It seemed as if he hung in the air for much longer than normal, before he disappeared from my sight.

  I hand-dropped to the alley and ran, talking to God as I went. Please forgive me, I’ll never do anything like that again—swear or steal—the lapa was a mistake, and Baby Mary … I didn’t know what else to do. Please, God. Forgive me.

  I knelt down beside Manny on a nest of wet grass and frozen ground. He didn’t move and his legs were off at a strange angle. His upper body swayed, his mouth open and silent. His eyelashes flickered, and then closed shut.

  — 4 —

  MY FATHER DROPPED me off in front of Toronto General Hospital at eight at night and told me he’d pick me up at ten. And I wasn’t to talk to any strangers. In the entrance, a man in a uniform held on to a big buffing machine. He made slow circular passes down the hall. My mother said visiting hours would be over, but if I followed the green line to the West Wing elevators and went up to the sixth floor, room 603C, that’s where I’d find Manny. Manny’s father didn’t want me near him, so my mother had called someone she knew who worked in housekeeping who said I could sneak in after hours. Her friend also gave us a report: Manny’s broken legs had been set, one surgically with a plate. His spinal cord was okay, and he had a severely bruised coccyx, which normally would have made me laugh because of the way my mother said it. It was going to take a long time for him to get better.

  The night before I had watched Senhor Daniel climb into the ambulance with him. He worked in construction and could piece together a few English phrases. Manny’s mother had been a teacher in the Azores, but here she cleaned houses and didn’t know much English. She stayed behind and fell to her knees in the slush. The women encircled her. They tried to lift her to her feet. The men smoked and huddled together in a corner of the laneway.

  I stepped out on the sixth floor. The lights were dimmed. I was afraid to see Manny—I wasn’t sure what he’d look like, if he’d be hooked up to machines. I managed to sneak by the nurses’ desk and worked my way around the corner until I saw 603C above a door. A strange blue light flickered over the bed. Manny’s head was wrapped in a turban of gauze. His legs and one arm were in casts. He was strung like a puppet, his thick white casts up in the air, suspended by pulleys. A tiny television glowed just above his night table, mounted on a big metal arm that was anchored in the corner. He was awake, but didn’t look at me.

  I hated the smell of hospitals. They always reeked of the glop of hot food that melted the plastic trays it was served on. St. Mike’s smelled exactly the same. Every hospital did, I bet. I sat on a chair beside a partitioned tray with food barely touched, a noodle dish with green beans stuck together.

  “You need anything?” I whispered. He didn’t answer. I figured he was super-drugged. Walking past the foot of his bed, I tried to figure out the cat’s cradle they had him in. I waited for a few minutes. His eyes blinked slowly, watching the opening to The Six Million Dollar Man on the small TV set high above. We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. I sat quietly, watching along with him, thinking about Manny and how screwed in the head he was. I worried he’d never get better. I watched the whole show with him, and both of us never moved, never said anything. I got up to go, even though my father wouldn’t come to pick me up for another hour or so. I figured Manny didn’t want me there and I was beginning to feel I was making things worse by sticking around.

  “Okay. I’m going now. You need anything?”

  “Don’t go,” he said, and I could tell it hurt him to talk. I nodded and sat back down. The room was so quiet I could hear him swallow.

  “You sure you don’t want anything?”

  His pillow was wet. He had been crying.

  “Tell me how it’s going to be,” Manny said, choking on some spit.

  “Okay.”

  “Use your big words.”

  “I don’t know what you want.” I heard the desperation in my voice.

  “I want Ricky back, and I want my brother home,” Manny said.

  I slumped back in the chair and told him how our lives were different now, everything had changed—shooting the shit, he liked to say, using the biggest words I knew. I didn’t know if his brother had found Manny before leaving, or if they had spoken. It didn’t matter. I told him that the minute his brother found out Manny was in the hospital, he’d drop everything, no matter where he was, and he’d come and visit him. I sat there and talked until he fell asleep.

  I decided to wait outside the hospital for my father on University Avenue. Every so often, a car would drive by and slow down. I knew what that meant. I’d turn my back to them and start bouncing up and down to make it look like I was just a kid on the street trying to warm up, anything so I didn’t have to see their faces. Finally, I saw my father’s truck pulling up. I climbed in.

  “You okay?” he said.

  “Yeah, I’m fine now.”

  Not much was said on the way home. My father let me out, told me to tell my mother he’d likely be a while; he had to scour the neighbourhood to find a parking spot big enough for the truck. I went into the living room, flicking the snow from my hair. Edite held a folded newspaper in her hand and was reading aloud.

  “ ‘Robert Kribs left the University Avenue courtroom yesterday convicted of first-degree murder. Known as Stretcher, the thin man who left his Windsor home at the age of sixteen smiled as he sat down in the prisoner’s dock after hearing the verdict.’ ” She held on to the couch’s armrest with one hand, slurring. “ ‘I’m not trying to be maudlin,’ Goldman had said, nodding at his bearded client, ‘but there’s still a human being in there, and I think he should get whatever help he can before going to a penitentiary.’ ” Edite flapped the newspaper in the air with her other hand. “Hold on! Here’s the best part. ‘Those attending the trial had all looked at Robert Kribs, who had burst into giggles.’ ”

  “That’s awful,” my mother said.

  “It’s sad, really, that the paper prints that small detail.” Edite motioned my sister over. Terri had just turned away from the liquor cabinet carrying a tray full of shot glasses. “There’s a human being in there, somewhere.”

  My mother looked puzzled. “I meant the fact he giggled.”

  My father came in and went straight to the kitchen, came back with a bottle of wine and some glasses. He poured himself a large glass. His coat and boots were still on. He poured Edite a glass and slid it across the table from where he was about to sit. “Go ahead,” he said. “You no drink too much.”

  “You should talk.”

  Even though spider veins crawled across my father’s nose and cheeks as he grinned, I could tell he wasn’t drunk.

  “It’s time to go to bed!” my mother said. “Come on.”

  “Antonio had a nice visit with Manelinho,” my father said. “Why you no tell us how he is doing.”

  “Manuel, they have school tomorrow. I want them to go to bed.”

  Terri didn’t move and I stood close to her.

  “Georgina, why don’t you r
elax?” Edite said, then downed the wine in three gulps. She had left her job with the newspaper over a month ago, shortly before the case started. It had something to do with her having access to files she shouldn’t have had. I overheard my parents discussing it one night, my father suggesting she got herself fired for doing things she shouldn’t, always sticking her nose in the wrong places. My mother defended her, insisting that sometimes things needed to be done to get the truth out.

  “I made some piggies in a blanket,” Edite announced, “and while the oven was hot I thought I’d throw in some Pillsbury apple turnovers. They’re on top of the stove.” Terri and I would plead with our mother to buy the stuff we saw advertised in commercials, but she never did. Now Edite had made them for us, or for me. Maybe it was her way of saying sorry. I went into the kitchen to fetch the tray and brought it back to the coffee table in the living room. I folded back the plastic wrap and grabbed a sausage roll.

  “The killers are going to get life, Pai,” I said.

  “Now families can have some peace around here,” my mother said.

  Edite said, “Do you really think the problem is going to go away and you can all go back to living your safe little lives?” She tilted the garrafa of wine, let it gurgle into her glass.

  “You talking stupid things,” my father snapped. He got up and walked into the hallway. Edite followed, and we all shuffled into the kitchen.

  Terri went straight to the stove and began to make squiggly lines with the icing over the turnovers. She knew if we had any chance of staying up we had to make ourselves look busy.

  “What they did was wrong but it doesn’t change—” Edite began, almost pleading.

  “They kill a boy! They do things with him and they throw him away like garbage.” My father banged on the kitchen table with his knuckles.

  “Your lives will never be the same, is all I’m saying,” Edite said quietly.

  “You think I no know this? You think you are smarter than everyone here?”

  “It will happen again!” Edite shouted.

  My mother busied herself opening the fridge, reaching for a carton of eggs and placing them on the counter.

  Edite and my father sat there, their faces leaning into each other over the kitchen table. My mother cracked eggs on the side of a Pyrex bowl.

  “Are you making a cake?” I asked. My mother did not turn around.

  Edite finally broke the spell. She stood up slowly, then raised her cup in the air. “To you, Manuel, the man of the house,” she said calmly. “I’m sorry. This is your home and this is not the time.”

  “Why you do this?” my father said. He looked crooked at Edite and lowered his voice. “Why you think you know everything?”

  “I don’t, Manuel.” Her voice had slowed down and it was clear she was very drunk. “Listen, let’s just—”

  “You listen,” my father interrupted. “You live here for a year now. I can see, you know. I see the way you work your way into our vida, the way you make friends with my family. You is not a judge under my roof!”

  My mother turned from the counter. “Manuel, Edite apologized. Leave it alone.”

  “That is not apology!”

  “Apology? For what?” Edite spun around to confront my mother. “For speaking the truth?”

  “Terezinha, Antonio, go to your rooms.” My mother straightened her arm in the direction of the hallway. “Now!”

  “No!” my father said. “We all want to hear the truth. Edite is coming from America to tell us the truth because we is too stupid to know.”

  “You’re just being an ass now.” She slurred the word ass, made it bigger than it needed to be.

  “An ass? I think you is right. If a man has to live in his own house and you speak about me to my wife, and you give ideas to my kids so they listen to you and everyone spit in my face, then I am ass.”

  “Manuel, please,” my mother urged. “Calma.”

  “Is that it?” Edite’s voice got high. “Does that frighten you? Does it frighten you that when you’re not around she tells me things?”

  My father knocked the chair over and moved around the table. He tried to make his way past Edite, but he bumped her and she teetered a bit before finding her footing.

  “She tells me things she could never tell you.”

  “Stop it, Edite!” my mother said.

  My father reached the doorway but stopped mid-step. He leaned against the archway that led into the hall. “You want to talk about secrets?”

  “No more games.” Edite grabbed her purse from the back of the chair. She slung it over her shoulder and almost fell over. “You’re a waste,” she said, the look of disgust pulling at her face.

  My mother opened the sliding door that led to our backyard. Edite made her way toward the door. My father scrambled to block her.

  “No! You come into my house and say things that you want to say and then you leave so you can go for quiet. But my head is like a machine.” My father knocked his head twice, hard. “It no stop so easy. You think I’m garbage in this country, you no respect me and my family and—”

  “That’s not what I said!”

  “Go! Go ahead and tell me what I should know about my family because I no know what the hell you is talking about. All I know is—”

  “Your wife, Manuel!” she yelled, taking a couple of steps back and steadying herself on the back of a kitchen chair. “She doesn’t love you.”

  My mother took in a big breath.

  Terri’s hand tugged at my sleeve. “Let’s go,” she whispered.

  “I’m not stupid.” My father’s voice had softened.

  “She’s in love with someone else. And Antonio, he …”

  “Antonio, Terezinha, go to bed now.”

  “You should leave,” I said. I wanted to rush at Edite, to stop her from telling my parents what she thought she knew about me. “Go home, now!”

  “Antonio, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “What you want to say about Antonio?”

  “Get out!” my mother said, stepping in front of me.

  Edite took a couple of steps to the patio door. “I’ve got to go.”

  My father sprang at Edite, and spun her around to face him.

  “Your kids are ashamed of you,” she sputtered. My father let go. My mother stood between him and Edite. Edite seemed immune to the world. “All these years in this country and you still can’t manage to string a proper sentence together. They’re all embarrassed by you!” she shouted. My father’s eyes blinked as if he’d been sucker-punched.

  It was so quiet I could hear my own breathing. My mother steered Edite through the patio doors, out onto the back porch. My father had quietly moved back to the table. His face was streaky red and white, crabmeat. He stared down at his hand, which he opened and closed, slowly. I thought I could hear the air seeping out of him, getting sucked out the open door.

  “Edite,” my mother said, just as Edite took a few more steps. Edite wobbled a bit before turning to look at my mother. Terri stood beside me and took my hand.

  From her profile I could see my mother’s lips quivering. “It’s time to go home—to America.” Her voice was soothing. “Your Johnny is dead.”

  Edite turned away and started walking to our garage. Terri squeezed my hand. Edite walked along the narrow path, the same one I walked almost every day for two months—protector of the limpet, Jesus Boy.

  Edite reached for the door of our garage just as my mother flicked on the outdoor lights. She tried to grab the door handle twice before her fingers touched it and she held on. She wasn’t wearing a coat and it was cold. She tilted her head to the night sky and into the light that hung above the garage door. I could see the tears streaking down her cheeks.

  My mother stepped back inside, closed the door behind her. I heard the lock click. I let go of my sister’s hand and she ran up the stairs and slammed her bedroom door.

  I went to the window, looked out into the cold. Edite had slipp
ed into our garage and was gone.

  — 5 —

  ON SATURDAY, March 4, 1978, the newspaper reported how Saul Betesh had dismissed the twelve-year-old boy he raped, strangled, and drowned with a shrug and a rhetorical question: “What was Emanuel Jaques? I wasn’t thinking of Emanuel Jaques, except possibly before and possibly after. I suppose he was part of my fantasies.” He had smiled.

  I sat atop Senhor Coelho’s rooftop. My chin nestled in the valley between my knees. I focused on the spot where Manny had landed. He had fallen far, and it was no wonder he had been hurt so badly. Spring was coming. I could smell it. For what must have been the millionth time, I scanned the horizon, skimmed across the surface of worn shingles and the madness of poles and lines and antennas like steeples reaching up to nothing.

  “Antonio! Get down from there!” my mother yelled. My head snapped. I saw her coming through the laneway. I scrambled down from the roof, hand-dropped from the edge. I was dusting myself off when she got to me.

  “I told you I don’t want you on top of those roofs anymore.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. You’re not a kid anymore.”

  She reached for me and tried to draw me to her. I took a step back. My mother turned to look at James’s garage with disgust.

  “You stay away from that man, you hear me? I just came from Edite’s.” She let her words float a bit, and something in me knew that Edite had told her everything about James and Agnes and Ricky and how it was that James had wiggled his way into our world. I had been avoiding James. There had been no sign of him for five days. I assumed he had packed up his things and had taken off with Agnes. “Edite wants to say goodbye to you,” my mother said. “She’s leaving, today.”

  Edite’s convertible turned into the laneway from the top, near Adam’s burned garage. The white ragtop moved down the laneway and turned into her parking space, where she kept it covered all winter. My first thought was that James might be driving it; maybe he hadn’t left yet and he got it tuned up for her before she left on her long drive back to the States. I walked sheepishly along the car’s side. The driver’s window was half-opened and smoke was coming out.