What About Reb

by What About Reb (retail) (epub)

  Reb went down the bulkhead stairs, ducked inside, and in the cool dark was greeted by old smells of muscatel grapes and home made wine. He saw the folded blanket. He saw the pick handle. Patsy had said a pick handle or a piece of two by four. The blanket was the same gray woolen one used that Labor Day weekend on the beach. Shapes began emerging, shovels and a rake against the wall, his father’s Belgian hunting gun. It was hard to think that his father and Patsy had once been desperate too. The plan was to make it look as if Reb had fallen off the ladder. Was Patsy going to break his. Jeezus, he couldn’t think about it. Reb took the shingles and a fistful of roofing nails. He guessed the blanket was to cover him.

  Out in the yard again he noticed someone watching at the window of the house next door. Soderini was back on the ground. Patsy took the nails and shingles and scattered them at the foot of the ladder.

  ‘Wait for us in the cellar, Pats,’ Reb said. ‘There’s something I want to say to my father.’

  When Reb had gone to Patsy a few nights before, had his father been there before him? He wanted to ask Soderini point blank. Reb wanted it clear in his mind that it was he and Patsy who had set this plan in motion and not his father. But no words came. The question seemed almost foolish. ‘Go wait with Patsy,’ Reb said. ‘Jennie was looking out the window and I better let her see me on the ladder just in case.’

  Reb climbed up as far as the eaves. The hammer and shears were in place on the slope. Jennie from next door was no longer at the window. On an impulse he clambered on all fours over the shingles and up to the ridge. Two or three months in the hospital, Patsy had said, and eventually an army discharge.

  Perched there Reb surveyed the neighborhood. Along the streets the Norway maples were putting out their soft green leaves. Backyards showed the patches of dark soil that had been forked over by hand where work had begun on the gardens. He glimpsed the low rooftop of his sister’s house and behind it the outcrop of Patsy’s ledge with its white oaks still in bud. Angelina was at Livvy’s.

  And then it struck him. Something about Emilio and Patsy and the way they expressed what they believed in. The purity, the absolute simplicity and purity of it. Theirs was an alternative view of the world, not a view of the world as it is. And for all that remained Italian about them, that always would, could they have pursued such hopes as fearlessly on any other ground but here? Both for good and for bad, Reb saw, America was a clean slate where each man starting from scratch wrote his own name.

  A flash like a flame took him out of his reverie. A pair of orioles chattered hysterically racing loops in the pear trees at the end of the yard. The thread was broken and his thoughts leaped to something else. How he would have liked just then, would have paid, to be on top of some house in sun like this, hammer in his hands, framing in a roof. To do your work, that was being alive.

  Patsy’s head bobbed up out of the open bulkhead as Reb approached the cellar.

  ‘Everything’s all right, Ribelle?’

  ‘I saw Jennie looking and wanted to throw her off.’

  ‘You could hurt yourself all alone up there, porca miseria.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Ladder’s full of the dry rot.’

  ‘Dry rot,’ Reb said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me. What if I broke my neck?’

  ‘Son of a gun,’ Patsy said. ‘Would of spoiled our plan.’

  They grinned at each other and started inside. ‘Can’t we do the rest of this alone?’ Reb said.

  ‘You know what I’m having to do?’

  ‘Belt me somewhere with that fucking pick handle.’

  ‘For a start. And after that I’m carrying you outside on the ground and throwing down the ladder. Patsy ain’t so young anymore for lifting you up this stairs all myself, you know.’

  ‘Then jeezus. I’ll be out cold.’

  ‘You’ll be waking up in the hospital.’

  ‘Look, Pats.’ Reb reached out and held Patsy by the cuff. ‘You ever done this before?’

  ‘Oh, I’m a bastard, you know,’ Patsy said.

  ‘Does that mean yes or no?’ Reb said.

  ‘This ain’t no experiment, Ribelle.’

  They joined Soderini in the middle of the cellar. A bulb burned. Soderini opened out the blanket.

  ‘Where?’ Reb said.

  ‘Gainst that post,’ Patsy said.

  ‘No. Where you gonna hit me?’

  ‘Kidneys.’

  ‘Not both of them.’

  ‘One’s plenty,’ Patsy said. ‘Take your choice, right or left.’

  Reb stepped up to the wooden post, pressed a shoulder to it, and threw his arms around it as if he were going to uproot it. His father held the blanket thick against the small of Reb’s back. When he saw Patsy’s grip tighten on the pick handle Reb sucked in his breath. The post bit into his shoulder.

  ‘Uh.’ That wasn’t so. ‘Uh.’

  Under his eyelids, on the impact, an instantaneous stream of visions was released, among them a journey at one and the same moment back to his birth and forward to his decay. His body went limp.

  A woman screaming from next door. Then something pinching his nose. A smell of vinegar.

  ‘My god. Call a doctor, call a doctor.’

  ‘Jennie, don’t move him.’

  There was the sound of someone running.

  ‘Ribelle, Ribelle.’

  ‘Don’t touch him, Angelina.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s nothing. He’s sleeping like a baby.’

  ‘Ribelle, Ribelle. He’s not moving.’

  ‘He’s all right, Patsy called the doctor.’ His mother weeping. Jennie weeping.

  ‘Please, somebody, call my daughter for me.’

  ‘Give him air, Angelina.’

  There was the sound of an ambulance and commotion. He was being driven away, the ambulance swayed, and he heard its siren howling. His father’s hand clutched his.

  There was a smile on Reb’s lips and his eyes came open.

  Closing

  Years and years earlier, long before that day in the cellar, Abe Lincoln said, ‘You have to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.’

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Lucerna

  This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by

  Canelo Digital Publishing Limited

  57 Shepherds Lane

  Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU

  United Kingdom

  Copyright © Norman Thomas di Giovanni, 2012

  The moral right of Norman Thomas di Giovanni to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781911420811

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First published by Lucerna in 2012 in an edition of thirty-five copies for the author’s family and friends

  Look for more great books at www.canelo.co