Berto's World_Stories

by R. A. Comunale M. D.

  “What’s wrong, kid?”

  “You.”

  My friends looked at me.

  “Siddown, guys, let’s see what’s buggin’ your friend here.”

  Three little Italian Indians sat in council around the ‘bo, with me off to the side. He stared at me briefly then cleared his throat.

  “You’re a dreamer, kid, ain’tcha?”

  Sal, Angie, and Tomas nodded vigorously.

  “You wanna see the world, eh?”

  I gave a silent nod.

  “You will, son, just not my way. You got brains. That’s what’ll carry you away, not this,” he said, waving his arms to encompass the rail yard.

  Finally I spoke up.

  “Why do you do this?”

  I think I startled him. He remained silent a brief moment then grinned.

  “‘Cuz I want to, ‘cuz I don’t know anything else, eh?”

  My friends and I sat quietly, until we heard a deep-bass shout.

  Hey, you, get away from them kids!”

  Mordecai Jones muttered an “Oh, shit! It’s the bulls.”

  He grabbed his bindle and jumped up.

  “Gotta go now, guys.”

  He began a helter-skelter run across the tracks and around detached rail cars. We stood up as we heard the sound of heavy footsteps coming toward us. Three men approached in railway uniforms, wearing badges and holding Billy clubs and guns. I later learned they also were called “railroad dicks.” They specifically kept watch over the yards and chased away—or punished—unwanted trespassers.

  One breathlessly called out to us, as his two partners chased after the surprisingly fast-moving Mordecai Jones.

  “That guy hurt you?”

  We just shook our heads.

  “Okay, that’s good. But you don’t wanna hang ‘roun’ here. You never know who or what you’ll run into. Those ‘bo’s’ll talk yer ear off then steal yer last nickel. ‘Sides, there’s snakes ‘roun’ here.”

  The word “snakes” grabbed the four of us by the short hairs, and we sprouted beads of sweat. Sal let out a “thanks, mister,” and we took off at a run back to the safety of our own little tenement world.

  I never went back to the rail yard. Oh, I still love trains—the whistle howls, the locomotive sounds, the clickety-clacks and the swaying motion of the coach cars. Two of my favorite songs are Arlo Guthrie’s “City of New Orleans,” and Mack Gordon and Harry Warren’s “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.”

  Those are the romanticized views of rail life.

  I cannot forget Mordecai Jones, the professor. During my medical training I saw many Mordecais brought into the emergency room—barely alive or just plain dead. Alcoholism, fights, the harsh reality of living on the road, all took their toll.

  But sometimes, late at night, I hear the siren call of the rails, and I wonder: How did Mordecai Jones end his days?

  A few Hobo signs:

  /// - danger

  ## - danger—site of a crime

  0 ^ - rich people

  Cat - nice old lady who gives handouts

  The Dove

  Even in the chill of old age that long-ago October day haunts me still.

  “Mama, Papa, can I go, can I go?”

  I was almost eleven years old. Patience was still not a virtue. Papa looked at me with one raised eyebrow then cast a glance upward at the woman he had loved since his childhood. Mama smiled and put her hand on Papa’s shoulder.

  Desidera andare con il suo amico Giovanni ed il padre di Giovanni.

  Vanno guardare gli uccelli nella foresta.

  He wants to go with his friend Johnny and Johnny’s papa. He wants to see the birds in the forest.

  Papa looked at Mama. No words passed between them, but it was understood.

  He looked at me once more.

  “Si, Berto.”

  I was going to visit a country farm with trees, birds, and other animals.

  You might wonder, what was so special? Forests, trees, animals? Pretty tame stuff for most, but growing up in my neighborhood, where the nearest thing to plants were weeds struggling to survive in the cracks of decaying concrete, and where the only birds were the pigeons bobbing along the sidewalks and roosting in coops on the roofs of the tenement buildings.

  Well, it seemed pretty damned special to me.

  I still recall Papa opening the warped front window to our apartment and placing the remaining crusts of his bread on the sill. The pigeons would land in twos and threes, stare at him briefly, and gobble up what he should have eaten. Some even allowed him to stroke their heads.

  Mama would smile when I asked her why Papa did that.

  “Berto, your Papa and I, we came from the village.”

  That was all she said, but I understood. Mama and Papa had crossed an ocean in early 1914, leaving their tiny village to escape the guns of war and find opportunity in the gold-lined streets of America.

  Strange, even now I often lay in bed and wonder: What would my life have been like in their village?

  I cannot even imagine.

  I had met Giovanni in school. His real name was John, but we called him Giovanni, and he seemed to like it. His father worked at the metal foundry like Papa did, but Giovanni’s dad was the manager. He didn’t go near the furnaces. He also got paid a lot more.

  And Giovanni’s dad had a car!

  During the war, many things we take for granted today were scarce: meat, soap, even toothpaste. Scarcest of all were cars, tires, and the gasoline to power them. Giovanni’s dad was the manager of a critical war-industry factory. The foundry produced heavy-duty tools needed to build the ships and planes we hurled against Tojo and Hitler. Most other people could only buy as much gasoline as their ration cards permitted, but Giovanni’s dad could buy as much as he wanted.

  Giovanni’s dad was an important man. He owned a house in town, but he also had a farm far from the urban decay, and even the farm was considered important to the war effort.

  My friend Angie was the first to meet the new kid. We all went to the Catholic school located between our neighborhood and the well-kept, rich people’s enclaves. The nuns were the only ones who could maintain a semblance of order over us. Hooded and unflappable, the women could stare down a neighborhood tough ruled the classrooms with iron fists—and a heavy ruler they sometimes fiercely applied to the open palms of those who failed to pay attention or study their Baltimore Catechism.

  “Hey, kid, where you from?”

  Angie had no fear of confronting someone new. Oh, he’d run from trouble, but facing another kid to gauge where he would fit into the pecking order? That was no sweat.

  It’s also what got him killed four years later.

  “My dad just got transferred to the foundry here. We used to live in Pennsylvania.”

  He named a town that I later learned was famous for coal and steel production, but back then it meant nothing to me.

  Angie persisted.

  “Whatcher dad do?”

  Angie’s dad, like mine, worked at the foundry. He was a big man, taller than Papa but not as strong. He drank himself to death after Angie was killed.

  The new kid hesitated. I think he was actually embarrassed.

  “He’s the plant manager.”

  Angie’s eyes widened. No, he wasn’t afraid of the kid. Angie could always spot a hidden opportunity. If he had lived he would have put Sergeant Bilko to shame.

  “Whatcher name?”

  “Johnny.”

  “Naw, yer one o’ us, now. It’s Giovanni.”

  Far from being taken aback, the new kid grinned, as Angie corralled him with an arm across his shoulder and introduced him to the rest of us.

  “This here’s Tomas, he can really run. And Sal—hey, Sal, show Giovanni here your muscles.”

  Yes, Tomas could run. Thin as a rail, he could run like the wind. But he couldn’t outrun the bullet that cut him down when he was sixteen. And Sal, he became a neighborhood enforcer. It took a drive-by shooting and multiple wou
nds from shotgun blasts to kill him on his twentieth birthday.

  Then Angie pointed at me.

  “This here guy is Berto. He talks a lot and likes to read, but don’t let that bother ya. He’s really good to know if you ever get hurt.”

  I laugh at that now. Yes, I was Dottore Berto to my friends and the neighborhood toughs. But when those closest to me were mortally wounded, I couldn’t save them.

  I laugh now, but tears soon take over.

  Giovanni and I got along right from the start. He liked to talk about his home back in Pennsylvania and his friends there. He also liked to read, and when we weren’t batting a ball around in the paved lot behind the Greek Orthodox Church with the other guys, the two of us would hide out at the library.

  Strange, when I think of the old Greek church, just a block away from my grammar school, the aroma of piroghis and incense come to mind. And the library, at the very edge of our neighborhood, casts an olfactory memory of furniture polish and musty paper. For me those scents were the finest perfume in the world.

  The little brick building at the crux of Hamilton and Eastep was incongruously well kept, one good tooth set within the rot and decay. The oval, concrete silhouette of the robber-baron steel magnate stared down at us from the lintel of the big oak doorway. We would laugh at it and stick our tongues out, never realizing that the man who sought redemption and immortality by bequeathing libraries had once been the poorest of the poor.

  That library became our sanctuary, our magic carpet to other lands, other times. On bad-weather days, it sheltered us from the elements, as we read and looked at pictures of sun-filled shores.

  And Giovanni and I talked.

  I let him do most of the talking—unusual behavior for me. I listened, as he spoke of the dairy farms with hundreds of cows not far from where he once had lived. And then, almost in non sequitur, he said, “Wanna see it?”

  I was caught off guard. Yes, me, I was suddenly speechless. I tried to cover my lack of understanding by scratching myself—a guy thing, but it works among guys. Then I bluffed.

  “You don’t mean…?”

  “Yeah, my dad was talkin’ about going birding back at our farm next weekend. It’s dove season. Wanna come with us?”

  He really wanted a friend, and even though his dad was Papa’s “big boss,” I liked the kid.

  “Uh, yeah, but I gotta ask my papa if I can go.”

  And that was it. The plan was to leave Friday evening, drive to Pennsylvania, and come back Sunday evening. All I had to do was persuade Mama and Papa to let me go.

  “Berto, you will have to finish all of your homework first.”

  Mama wasn’t sure about me being away for two days, but I didn’t retort with what I was thinking: She had crossed the Atlantic Ocean with Papa to come to America when they were barely fifteen and spoke almost no English.

  Papa looked at me. I wore a big brass buckle on my belt with my name on it that he had made for my tenth birthday. He had called me a man then. I wanted him to see it, to remind him of what he had said.

  I was sneaky.

  “Figlio mio, what will you do there?”

  He knew who Giovanni’s dad was. He was the Big Boss, the one who could fire a man on a whim.

  “Papa, Giovanni says his dad goes birding, and there are doves there. I guess we’ll be looking at birds and walking around the farm and the woods.”

  I didn’t tell him that “birding” and “dove season” meant nothing to me.

  Papa nodded. I don’t think he understood, either.

  That’s how it went all week, until that Thursday evening when he finally said, “Si, Berto.”

  School on Friday seemed to last forever. I just missed being the target of Sister Grace Roberta’s wooden ruler and heavy hand. Sal was more restless than I was, not an unusual event, so her attention fixed on him. He stood there while she delivered her usual withering comments on his behavior and intellect, throwing in a few opinions about his immortal soul, then told him to open up BOTH hands. This was highly unusual.

  Sal grinned, did as he was told—palms up—and turned his head toward me and the other guys. I can still hear the “whap, whap, whap” of those smacks on his skin. I saw his eyes dilate, constrict, then return to normal.

  It wasn’t until I was in high school that I understood the body reflex that caused it to happen. All I could do then was focus on his eyes. Those large, dark, almost-black irises that later attracted the girls and instilled fear in his enemies—constricting, dilating, constricting.

  The only other time I saw Sal’s eyes dilated like that was when he lay dead on the sidewalk in front of the pizza joint that served as a meeting hall for the Sicilianos and their enforcers. He wasn’t smiling then. I saw Sister Grace Roberta praying at his funeral.

  But on that day Giovanni was excited and restless, too. We both managed to make it to the three o’clock school bell then ran like hell out the door to the school playground. I had brought my bag—literally, a paper bag—with clean underwear. Mama had yelled at me when I said I should be able to wear what I had on for almost three days.

  Mothers are girls, so they don’t understand how guys think.

  We waited about twenty minutes and then saw Giovanni’s dad’s car pulling up on the side street. I had never seen a car so nice. It was a 1937 Chevrolet Master Deluxe sedan with running boards and tire guards that today remind me of the nacelles on jet planes.

  Giovanni told me to jump on the right running board, and he did the same on the left, while his dad drove about a block down the street then stopped. He was laughing at our antics and, no doubt, we looked like little monkeys hanging onto his car. At that moment all three of us were boys.

  I wonder if kids today have as much fun.

  I am embarrassed to admit that I briefly wished Papa could have been fun like Giovanni’s dad. Why is it we have to learn by experience what should be so obvious?

  Cars didn’t have seat belts then, or collapsing steering columns, or air bags, either. The front windshield was two panes of flat-plate glass with a metal seam in the middle. Together the car’s features made quite an array of potentially lethal weapons.

  Giovanni and I took turns jumping from the front seat to the back, while his old man drove the wartime-mandatory 35 miles per hour along the back roads of New Jersey, finally reaching the Pennsylvania border and the almost-brand-new stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

  It took four hours, and by the time we left the ‘pike dusk had arrived. The twin, bug-eyed headlamps did little to light the darkness of roads without lights.

  Another two hours and the pavement became gravel and rutted. Then we pulled inside a whitewashed fence up to a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.

  Giovanni’s dad walked to the front porch, opened a storage bench, and took out a kerosene lamp. A quick strike of a lucifer and the flame illuminated the surroundings enough for us to find our way inside. His father threw some pieces of chunk coal into a cast-iron stove, put some kindling inside, and another lucifer soon had the coal glowing just right.

  It was an apple-butter October night, the cool Pennsylvania air carrying smoky scents from distant farmhouses, and the only light cast from a partially clouded, quarter moon.

  “Hey, Berto, don’t let the bats scare ya.”

  Giovanni leered at me, as we climbed the ladder to the house loft where we would sleep. The faint moonlight through the window outlined a single bed just big enough for two preadolescents to jump up and down on and wreak general havoc until they fell asleep.

  I never slept so well at home. It wasn’t until I was older and visiting the family farm of my medical-school roommate that I re-experienced that same deep slumber.

  I laugh now at the thought. We slept deeply, because we were young boys with no worries.

  Giovanni showed me the outhouse next morning, and even though I was used to seeing insects in our apartment, I never had to worry about snakes and other, unnamed creatures keeping me company whi
le relieving myself. I fought my natural inclinations and did not run screaming out the door with the little half-moon cut into it.

  The cold water from the hand pump braced me for what Giovanni’s dad had fixed for breakfast: cooked eggs he had brought from New Jersey, sourdough bread, and the most godawful-tasting chicory coffee—real coffee being another war-shortage commodity.

  Giovanni put on a bright red jacket and lent me another one to wear, along with a red hat to cover my head. I asked him why the red, and he matter-of-factly said it was to prevent us from getting shot.

  Getting shot at was not exactly something new to me. It went on all the time down on Hamilton, where the different ethnic territories converged. But I didn’t expect that type of activity around here, on an isolated farm. Then I saw his dad unlocking a tall cabinet and taking out a shotgun—a side-by-side, double-barrel, twelve-gauge—and a box of shells.

  “Come on, guys,” he said. “We’re heading out to the blind.”

  I didn’t say anything. It was all new to me, and besides I didn’t want to look foolish. I followed Giovanni out the door. The gun was empty, but his dad still carried it in the open-breech position with the barrels open and hanging down, a habit meant to prevent an accidental discharge in case of a fall.

  We walked through a nearby copse of trees. Giovanni told me his dad had planted them to act as a windbreak against storms.

  The trees soon gave way to an opening onto a large, grassy field. We stopped at the opening, and his father whispered for us to keep quiet. Then we moved about twenty feet into the tall field grass, to a place the man called the “blind,” a fort-like semicircle of stones that allowed us to sit and not be seen from the rest of the field.

  “Okay,” he said, pointing. “The doves make their nests over there near the tree line. Son, when I tell you, hurl that fallen branch as far as you can in that direction. It oughta flush them out. I’ll take the first shot. Then I’ll let you do it.”

  He took two shells from the box, loaded the shotgun, and closed the breech.

  I turned to Giovanni.

  “What’s your dad going to shoot?”