Raising Jake

by Charlie Carillo

  Jake seems truly interested. “What’s the plan?”

  My father looks left and right before answering, as if an outsider might be trying to eavesdrop.

  “Cobblestones,” he all but whispers. “Gonna build a beautiful cobblestone path.”

  I laugh out loud. The two of them stare at me.

  “What’s funny?” my father asks.

  “You. You’re funny. You’d never spend money on rocks. You hate spending on food!”

  “Who said anything about spending money?”

  “What are you going to do, steal them?”

  “What I’m gonna do is none of your business, unless you decide to stick around, in which case you can help me.”

  “We’d love to help,” Jake says. “We’ve got no plans whatsoever.”

  “Jake!”

  “Come on, Dad! What have we got to lose?”

  “Make up your minds,” my father says, “because we’ve got to do this thing at fifteen fifteen.”

  I turn to Jake. “That’s navy talk for three fifteen.”

  Jake rolls his eyes. “I figured that out, Dad.”

  I’m really not liking the sound of this project. “Why do we have to do it exactly at that time, Dad?”

  “Because,” my father says, cackling like a pirate, eyes twinkling like a pair of sapphires, “that’s when the tide is at its lowest.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  My crazy father changes from work shoes to calf-high rubber boots and digs out some old work gloves for Jake and me. Step one in whatever the hell we’re doing is to load the busted-up cement chunks into the back of his station wagon, which I’m astonished to see is the same old clunker he was driving when I moved out.

  “This dinosaur still runs?”

  “Lubrication, my boy. The right lubrication and the motor stays shipshape forever.” He lays a tattered blanket down on the flatbed part of the trunk, and another blanket on the backseat of the car. Then the three of us begin to load the cement chunks.

  “Easy, now,” he cautions. “Lay ’em down gently. That’s it, Jake.”

  “Where are we taking this stuff, Dad?”

  “We’re dumping it.”

  “Where?”

  “You’ll see when we get there.”

  I’m not crazy about that answer, but I am pleased to see that my son digs right into the work, bending and hoisting and loading as if he’s done back-work all his life. He was the same way with the lawn-mowing at Fran’s, diving right into the job. It’s hard to know how city kids will handle manual labor, and this is a sweet surprise.

  “Load it evenly,” my father says. “Use the backseat, too. Got to distribute the weight.”

  When the last chunk of cement is loaded the three of us pile into the front seat, and nobody has to tell Jake to sit in the middle. He understands that he is our generational buffer, the reason things are going as smoothly as they are.

  The car starts up with a roar. My father puts it in reverse and begins inching his way out of the driveway. “Now I’ve got to drive slowly, so’s not to bust a shock with this load,” he says. “So be patient. We’re not going far.”

  We crawl along the streets of Flushing as if we’re carrying a nuclear missile. My father turns to Jake. “How’s school?”

  Funny thing to ask, considering it’s a question I never got when I lived with him.

  “I got kicked out yesterday,” Jake says.

  My father looks to me to see if it’s the truth. I nod, I shrug. He turns back to Jake.

  “Jesus Christ, what did your mother say? She worships at the altar of formal education, doesn’t she?”

  “She doesn’t know yet.”

  “Don’t tell me. You were at a private school, am I right? Very white, very expensive? One or two token blacks just to give the yearbook a little bit o’ pizzaz?”

  “You got it, Danny.”

  “What’d you do, punch a teacher?” he asks, almost hopefully.

  “I wrote something they didn’t like.”

  My father makes a snorting sound. “For that they threw you out? Words on a page?”

  “Yep. Also, I refused to apologize for what I’d written.”

  “Good lad. So what’s next for you?”

  “I’m really not sure, Danny.”

  “I still know people at the Transit Authority. I was a motorman, you know. I could get you in, but you’d need a high school diploma, or whaddayacallit, the equivalency certificate.”

  “He’s not going to work for the Transit Authority, Dad!”

  “I know he’s not. He can’t. He’s not qualified. But don’t piss on it, son. Good union, good medical, good dental. My pension check comes every month.”

  “I’m sure it does.”

  “It’s more than you’re gonna get from that newspaper you write for.”

  “I’m not there anymore.”

  “What the hell you talkin’ about? I was readin’ one of your articles just yesterday.”

  “I got fired just yesterday.”

  “Ho-lee shit!”

  My father looks from Jake’s face to mine in wide-eyed disbelief at these two losers in his car.

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” I assure him. “We’re not moving in with you. This is just a visit.”

  He gets his eyes back on the road, and then he begins to chuckle.

  “What’s so funny, Dad?”

  “You wanna know what’s funny? You really wanna know?” He thumps himself on the chest. “I’m the best-educated person in this car. Me. I actually got my diploma, from Franklin K. Lane High. Worst school in all of Brooklyn, maybe the world, but they gave me a sheepskin, all right, and that puts me ahead o’ you guys with your high-priced schools!”

  He’s laughing out loud, and so is Jake, and then, moments later, so am I. My father’s sense of caution abandons him for a moment as we dip into a pothole, and the bottom of the car gets scraped with a horrible sound that I just know involves a spray of sparks.

  Jesus Christ, what if the gas tank ignites? What if the car explodes, killing the three of us and sending chunks of cement in all directions like so many missiles? What would the headline be in the New York Star, and what in the world would Doris say?

  We head slowly but surely toward the murky shores of Flushing Bay. When I was a kid my father occasionally took me fishing here, and I don’t remember hooking anything that was alive. Once I snagged a skeletal umbrella, nothing but ribs and a handle, and another time a rusted hubcap, and that was pretty much the extent of my catch.

  There’s a chain-link fence running along the length of the street above the shoreline. We ride along this lonely stretch of road for a few minutes until suddenly we reach a section where the fence has been flattened, either by vandals or an out-of-control car. My father stops the car here, and we all get out.

  “There’s no parking here, Dad. Didn’t you see the signs?”

  “Don’t worry. Nobody ever comes through here, except by accident.”

  A wildly overgrown hill leads down to the gray beach, mucky and messy at low tide. My father periscopes the area, checks his watch and smiles. “Perfect timing. It is now fifteen oh three. We’ll need ten minutes to get rid of the cement, anyway.”

  We follow his lead as he takes a chunk from the car and rolls it down the hill. Before it can hit bottom, the foliage swallows it up.

  “Dad. I’d say this is illegal dumping.”

  “I’d say you’re right, which is why it’d be smart for us to do this fast.”

  We’re caught up in it now. The three of us grab cement chunks from the car and toss them down the hill, where they vanish whisperingly into the undergrowth.

  “We’re not hurting anything, Jake,” my father says. “It’s not as if anybody had plans for this area. It’s a goddamn dump, whether we dump here or not.”

  “I hear you, Danny.”

  “Jake,” I say, “please understand that we are doing the wrong thing here, whether my father wants to admit it or not.
He just doesn’t want to pay for private carting.”

  “Private carting!” my father laughs. “Sure. Some guinea outfit that takes the stuff away, and dumps it right where we’re dumping it, only in the middle of the night. At least we’re doing it in broad daylight. It’s more honest that way.”

  “Oh, we’re honorable people, Dad.”

  “Hell, you can go to confession on Sunday and wipe the slate clean. Oh, wait. I forgot. You don’t go to church anymore, do you?”

  I swallow hard before answering. “I’m a fallen Catholic like you, Dad, which pretty much means that I’ve gone from believing in everything to believing in nothing.”

  While we’ve been arguing Jake has been getting rid of the cement chunks. He rolls the last one down the hill and says, “That’s it, Danny.”

  “Good lad!” He turns to me. “Well, I may be a fallen Catholic, but I believe in cobblestones, if that means anything to you. So what say we go and get ’em?”

  He leads the way through the broken fence and down to the beach, a crooked, slippery walk through waist-high weeds with thorny seed pods that cling to our pants. The beach itself is ripe with sewage smells, more muck than sand, with the tips of plastic bottles jutting out all over the place. There’s also a half-submerged supermarket shopping cart sticking out of the muck. What the hell is that doing there? Salvador Dali would have to drop acid before he could paint a scene like this.

  We follow my father’s strident footsteps. He’s on a mission, impervious to the ugliness of it all.

  “Not exactly the Hamptons, is it, Jake?”

  Jake doesn’t answer me, but strides ahead to walk shoulder to shoulder with my father. My father pats his back. “How’s your mother these days, Jake?”

  “She’s okay.”

  “Still afraid of being mistaken for a Puerto Rican?”

  “She corrects people who get it wrong.”

  “I have to admit, I was always amused by that. ‘I’m Spanish, not Puerto Rican!’ Like there’s something wrong with being a P R.”

  “Oh yeah,” I say, “listen to the great civil libertarian.”

  “You got that right.”

  “Dad. Please.”

  My father stops and turns to face me, a gloved hand flat against his chest to indicate how I have wounded his pride. “For twenty-eight years I opened the doors of my subway trains for anybody who wanted a ride. Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Indians…everybody rode with me. Homeless people slept on my trains on winter nights. Never threw a soul off for any reason, unless they got violent, in which case I tossed ’em with my own two hands.”

  He smiles at Jake. “It was all in the timing, kid. You shove ’em through the open doors, hard enough so they hit the opposite wall. By the time they recover and try to get back on, the doors close in their faces. I especially enjoyed doin’ that to those Wall Street assholes when they got all liquored up and full o’ themselves.”

  He holds up a finger. “Never called a cop, not once. Handled all my own problems. I admit that I’m a little bit proud of that.”

  “Jesus,” I say, rolling my eyes.

  “Awesome,” Jake says, keeping his eyes trained on a man who’s clearly becoming his hero.

  We resume walking. Jake and I have to veer toward higher, harder ground, because the beach is getting muckier. Safe within his boots, my father ignores the muck, though he sinks to his ankles with each step.

  Suddenly he stops walking. He joins us on higher ground, checks his watch and smiles.

  “Fifteen fifteen on the nose,” he says. “The tide is now at its lowest. Now look. Look where I’m pointing.”

  He points out toward the horizon, maybe twenty yards out. A mysterious, uneven ridge of some kind bulges ever so slightly from the surface of the muck, like a row of rotted molars.

  “See it? See the tips of those rocks sticking up? They’re only visible at dead low tide, which is what it is now.”

  He turns to us with a triumphant smile. “Cobblestones,” he says. “The foundation of an abandoned pier, or some damn thing. Whatever they are, they’re mine! All mine!”

  He starts to laugh insanely, as if we’ve come upon Captain Kidd’s treasure. He even does a little bit of a jiglike dance on the sand. “We load ’em up, we take ’em away. Gonna have me a cobblestone path, that’s what I’m gonna have.”

  “Dad. You can’t be serious.”

  “Why not?”

  “This is stealing.”

  “It is? Who the hell are we stealing from?”

  I think it over. “One way or another, I know that this is city property.”

  He laughs out loud. “City property? You think the city knows there’s an old broken-down pier here on Flushing Bay, a pier that’s been forgotten for a hundred years?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not. But I have a feeling that if they did know, they’d have problems with a guy taking it away one stone at a time.”

  “Well, then, son, do me a favor and don’t tell them. These stones have been underwater since before any of us were born. It’s time they saw the light of day once again. It’s a sin, leavin’ them to waste away down here. It’s time they were useful again.”

  I turn to my son. “I really don’t think this is a great idea, Jake. We should go.”

  Jake’s eyes widen in disbelief. “Dad, come on. We have to do this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if we leave, Danny’ll try to do it by himself, and it could kill him.”

  “That’s right,” my father says. “I’m doing this with or without you. Me, a senior citizen. It’s a lot of stones and quite a bit of climbing, and if I drop dead in the process it’ll be on your head.”

  Just what I need—to be responsible for the death of another parent. My father knows he’s got me. He grins at me, and tugs on his boots to make sure they’re up as high as they can be. “Now I’m going out there and pullin’ these things from the muck. You either carry ’em up to my car, or you don’t. It’s as simple as that.”

  He squelches his way into the muck, his feet leaving holes that quickly fill with black water. Piss clams squirt into the air, jarred by his footsteps, and I’m amazed that anything is able to live in this stuff.

  My father reaches the ridge, bends over and pulls out a stone, which he carries back to us, cradled against his chest.

  It’s an ugly thing, ragged with seaweed and coated in muck. When he reaches us my father pulls off the seaweed to reveal it as a rectangular-cut cobblestone, bearded with barnacles.

  “Look at that beauty,” he says. “Ten, maybe twelve bucks if I was to buy it.”

  He hands it off to Jake, who takes it in his gloved hands and stares at it in wonder. “Why do you suppose they had a pier out there, Danny?”

  My father shrugs. “Who knows? Maybe this was a pretty place back then. Maybe people docked their sailboats here and had lunch in a nice restaurant, before it all turned to shit.”

  “Wow,” Jake says. “Imagine!”

  “Lay it down in the car the same way you did with the cement,” my father tells him. “Don’t carry more than one at a time. And watch you don’t slip on the hill, Jake.”

  “Gotcha, Danny.”

  It’s as if they’ve known each other for years. Jake heads off with the first stolen stone. My father looks at me, wipes a speck of muck off his nose with the back of his glove.

  “Your son is in. How about you? You in?”

  I tug the gloves on. “I’m in. You knew I was in. You guilted me into it.”

  “Yeah, I knew that’d work.”

  He heads back to the long-lost pier, pulls out another stone and carries it back. This one has even more seaweed on it than the first one, plus a cluster of mussels that clings to it like a bunch of grapes. He tosses it on the sand. “Find yourself a piece of driftwood and scrape it as clean as you can. No sense hauling crap we don’t need to the house, is there?”

  Without waiting for an answer he returns to the mother lode, while I look ar
ound for a piece of wood to scrape the stones clean.

  It quickly becomes an assembly-line process—my father plodding out to the muck and uprooting the stones, while Jake and I scrape them clean and carry them to the car. This bizarre Sullivan family reunion is in full swing.

  I can’t resist sticking it to my son. “See the kind of work you wind up doing when you leave school, Jake?”

  “Yeah, Dad, I see.”

  “Imagine doing work like this for the rest of your life.”

  “Don’t have to, Dad. Remember, I have a plan.”

  “Oh yes, your big plan.”

  “I never said it was a big plan. Just a plan.”

  “You ready to tell me what it is?”

  “I only want to explain it once, so I’m waiting until tomorrow, when I can tell you and Mom at the same time.”

  “Jake. Come on. Tell me.”

  “Dad. Be patient. I’m a little busy here, helping my grandfather steal a pier.” He won’t say anything more about it.

  Soon we fall into a rhythm, timed so well that each time my father returns with a stone, one of us is there to take it. There is no way to stay clean. The stinking muck is all over our forearms and the bellies of our shirtfronts.

  Again, I am struck by what a good worker Jake turns out to be. Soon his speed and enthusiasm upset the rhythm of the process—he gets up and down the weedy hill so fast that he “laps” me, and then the two of us are standing there waiting for my father’s deliveries.

  “Admit it, Dad,” Jake says, “this is kind of fun.”

  “Oh yeah. What could be more fun than helping your grandfather commit a maritime crime?”

  “You worry too much, Dad.”

  “That’s because my father doesn’t worry enough.”

  “You worry enough for all of us.”

  By this time we’ve loaded dozens of ancient cobblestones into the aged station wagon. They’re heavier than the cement chunks were, far more dense, and the car sags under their weight.

  “Dad,” I tell him as he chucks the latest stone on the sand, “we can’t take many more. The tires are starting to bulge at the bottom.”