Shepherd Avenue

by Charlie Carillo

  "Why didn't you visit me?" I demanded.

  "'Cause your father didn't think it would be a good idea, Joey. All those years in between . . ."

  He put his hand out at knee level to indicate how small I'd been the last time he'd seen me. "He thought it would shock you too much, seeing me."

  "Oh. So instead he makes me live with you. God! . . . Did Connie go to the hospital?"

  "She never even knew I was goin'. She thought I was at the track."

  "Didn't she care?"

  "Of course she cared!"

  "Then why didn't she visit?"

  He picked up a Spaldeen and squeezed it. "When you're older you'll understand how it works. Okay?" His voice had grown testy.

  "I don't think I'll ever figure you people out," I snapped.

  Angie pointed at me. If his forefinger had been a gun the bullet would have hit my heart. "Hey, Mister. You are the same people as us. Don't forget that."

  He looked out the window, sliding his gun hand into his pocket for a sunflower seed.

  "Shit," I said, hoping to aggravate him. He didn't hear me, or maybe he just pretended he didn't.

  He nibbled a seed. "Look," he said suddenly, "I'm going to the Fulton Fish Market early in the morning. I was gonna go alone, but I figured you might like to see it."

  "I do," I said, as solemnly as people say it when they get married.

  "It's really gonna be early," he warned. "You'll go to sleep now and feel like you're gettin' up five minutes later."

  "I can get up earlier than anyone."

  He chuckled. "All right. Don't be mad when I wake you up." "Maybe I'll wake you up."

  He grinned at the challenge. "Eh, we'll see about that." He left the room. I shut off my light and went to sleep curiously happy. The only other guy who'd ever gone to the market with him was Freddie Gallo.

  It did feel as if I were being awakened five minutes later. But Angie had the gentlest touch in the world when it came to doing it; he just held my foot and barely squeezed it until my eyes opened.

  The sun hadn't yet risen. His dark eyes seemed to glow in the gray light like headlights through fog.

  "If you're comin', it's time to go."

  "Now?" I moaned. My joints felt stiff, my blood honey-thick.

  "Ah, stay, stay in bed," he whispered, holding out his hands as he backpedaled to the door. I was out of the cot a second later, yanking on my pants.

  "Knew it'd work," he said.

  Still afraid Angie might ditch me I urinated sloppily, hur­riedly, splashing the toilet seat. I left it wet and ran to the car, which I heard revving in the driveway.

  It was chilly. Our breath fogged the windshield. The inside of the car was a fragrant cloud of Colgate toothpaste and Rise lather, Angie's sweet smells. If he shaved regularly at this hour it was no wonder he was always stubbly by early afternoon.

  I hadn't even washed my face. When I blinked I could feel crusts at the corners of my eyes. Angie watched me pick them out and laughed as I tried to stifle a yawn.

  "Tired?"

  "Nahh."

  "Well I am, at quarter past four in the morning. Roll your window down, Joey, we gotta clear the steam. Smell this air, nice and heavy, you'll think you're back on Long Island."

  Cold air blew through the car. Angie's thick fingernails tapped the steering wheel as we barreled down Atlantic Avenue.

  "You busted those windows with Johnny Gallo, didn't you?"

  Betrayal! He'd gotten me out of the house just for this!

  "Yeah," I said, unable to lie at that hour. Angie just kept his eyes on the road and nodded.

  "Made you feel good, huh?"

  "It sure did, damn it." I was wide-awake. "You gonna tell the cops?" I glanced at the backseat, expecting to find all my stuff there - a quick dump-off at the reform school and Angie could get home in plenty of time for breakfast.

  He chuckled. "The cops. You been watching The Untouch­ables' too much." His eyebrows knotted and he shook his head. "Just don't do it again, all right?"

  "I won't." Off with just a warning. I stared at his profile. "How'd you know, anyhow?"

  He shut his eyes, shrugged. "I knew, I knew. You roughed up that Donnelly kid pretty good, too, didn't you?"

  I felt proud to admit that one. "Yeah," I said, trying to sound tough. "I think I busted his nose."

  "No, you didn't," he said wetly. "Mostly you gave him a good scare."

  "Angie, I hit him because - "

  "I know all about it, I know all about it."

  I believed him. He didn't probe for details. It was enough that we understood each other; however we'd arrived at that understanding was irrelevant.

  But how the hell did he know everything?

  "I get around," he said, as if I'd spoken the question aloud. We rode a few more miles in silence.

  "Connie know?"

  "I never told her," he said, and that was the end of the conversation. The sky remained gray for the whole ride down Atlantic Avenue. I kept looking out the passenger window. The only people around were leaden-eyed blacks and Puerto Ricans in flashy clothing, climbing out of neon-colored Cadillacs on the way home from wild nights of fun.

  The car had an AM radio but I didn't turn it on. When Vic rode home from ball games and turned on music I noticed that Angie seemed vaguely insulted, as if his conversation was con­sidered dull. I didn't want to hurt Angie's feelings - even though we weren't talking, the radio would have been an interruption. We were on the verge of a friendship we both needed, and neither of us wanted to blow it.

  I fell asleep. When Angie shook my elbow we were on the entry ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge, and just as we reached the first of its spans the sun appeared.

  "Ahh," we said simultaneously, in pure appreciation. We looked at each other, then down at the golden-orange water of the East River. The sun warmed us like a soft palm, all the way to South Street in Manhattan.

  You smelled the fishy fog of the market long before you saw the men in long rubber boots and rubber aprons stacking all kinds of fish into cases of cracked ice, shouting and swearing and laughing, getting high on sunrise and each other's wild company and the crazy sense of urgency that pervaded every­thing.

  In the alleys off South Street scraps of fish were tossed to the biggest sea gulls I'd ever seen, or maybe they were the same size as all gulls, but my God, they were so close, so defiant, the way they tore into the food and cawed and screamed at one another.

  The place knocked me speechless. Angie just kept laughing and roweling the hair at my sideburns, just enough to make it burn slightly. He knew a few of the workmen and introduced me to them, guys who didn't shake my hand but thrust giant green-black lobsters within an inch of my face to profess friend­ship.

  A morning of magic. When Angie and I left, the workmen were already cleaning up, using fat hoses and stiff brooms and shovels. The sun got hotter. The smell became a stench, some­thing to flee from.

  We returned to Shepherd Avenue with a basket of clams, a crate of scallops, and two big boxes of flounder fillets. It seemed as if we'd been on a long journey but it was barely past six a.m. Connie would be asleep another half hour. I'd have time to clean the toilet seat I'd fouled with my faulty aim.

  "I'm up before Connie," I said. "That never happened be­fore."

  Angie nodded, understanding. "It's a neat feeling, ain't it?"

  Minutes later, brushing my teeth, I felt unusually gleeful, as if I'd crammed two days of living into one and gotten away with it.

  I think my friendship with Angie Ambrosio might never have been triggered if I'd rolled over and stayed in bed that morning of the Fulton Fish Market.

  But now the delicate seed of a relationship was germinating, and even Connie was glad to see it happen. I took him off her hands. She had the basement kingdom all to herself again. Angie and I were out of the house as much as possible, often taking walks to the playground at Highland Park. We really liked the swings - we had contests to see who could swing higher, and he al
ways won. In midair on a swing the guy seemed sixteen years old.

  Then one day he examined the little patch of yard he'd owned for so long, and kicked at the hard black soil with his heel. "A waste, this land."

  "My father had a garden," I said. "He grew tomatoes in Roslyn." I held out my hands as if to heft softballs. "Some of them were this big."

  Angie seemed impressed. "I never knew Sal knew anything about gardening."

  "He used lots of fertilizer. I guess that's how come the to­matoes got so big."

  He folded his arms across his chest. "Think we could get anything planted in this place, Joey?"

  I knelt and rubbed my hand over the soil, as if my palm could detect the nutrient content. "Might. But the middle of the yard is shady. My father said shade's no good."

  "Nuts."

  I felt a pang of sympathy for Angie. "We could plant along the edge, by the fence," I said. "It's pretty sunny there."

  "Hey, maybe you're right."

  Together we pulled the ragged weeds and stuffed them into a brown supermarket bag. Angie took a shovel and turned the soil over and over, until it was loamy. He didn't touch the spot where Dixie the pooch had been buried.

  "We need fertilizer and stuff, Anj. That's how me and my father did it."

  He picked chunks of dirt off the shovel. They were almost as hard as rocks, because the soil had gone untitled for decades.

  "He had it better than me. All that space in that backyard."

  I shook my head. "That's not where it was. He said there was too much shade there, so he dug up part of the front yard."

  "You're kidding me."

  "He said grass was a waste, Anj. He said, 'If I had any guts, I'd rip out this grass and plant something really valuable.' Then he did it. He let me help him. We bought horse manure. Boy, it sure stunk bad. Nobody on the block would talk to us."

  Angie smiled as he ran his fingers along the shovel's silver-edged blade. "That's probably the way he wanted it." He knew his son, all right.

  I had to giggle. "The neighbors were so mad we almost hadda move. My father said he'd take us to the country, where nobody would bother us."

  "And that's where he is now," Angie mused, realizing too late what he'd said to remind me of being abandoned. "Hey, Joey, I'm sorry."

  "It's okay." But it wasn't. I clenched my teeth and thought about the change jar. Time spent with Angie had deprived me of bottle-hunting escapades; it had been about a week since I'd brought a load to Nat. I would have to get back to it, soon.

  "Hey, listen." Angie patted my shoulder. "A guy like your father, the only way nobody'll bug him is if he goes to the moon to live. Look!" He pointed at the sky. "It's daytime but you can see the moon. Ain't that amazing?"

  He was right. It was a half-moon, clearly visible against the bright blue sky.

  "People say you can't see the moon in the daytime," he continued. "That's 'cause they all look at their feet when they walk. . . How big was the biggest tomato you got?"

  Exaggerating only slightly, I spread my hands wide enough to heft a honeydew. "This big. A guy from a newspaper wanted to take a picture of it but my father said he'd sock him on the nose if he did."

  "Mad at the world, my son."

  "We gonna buy fertilizer, Angie?"

  He stuck the shovel in the ground. "Nuts to that. Connie's been throwin' food and coffee grounds out here for the past thirty years. If that ain't fertilizer, you tell me what is."

  Connie appeared at the window and began pegging laundry onto the line. "What are you two now, farmers?"

  "You got it," Angie said.

  "What?"

  "Tomatoes."

  "The A & P is two blocks away."

  "It's not the same as a fresh-grown tomato, woman!" he exclaimed, thrilling me by winking at me when he said it. Connie just shook her head and ducked back inside.

  "There's things you can't tell her," Angie said before we drove off to a garden center for the seedlings.

  But somehow, the Shepherd Avenue backyard looked even more pathetic with plants than it had looked barren.

  "Who are we kiddin'?" Angie asked when we were through planting. He stamped his foot and ground his toe into the dirt. "We'll be lucky if we get one tomato."

  I watered the last seedling in our single row. "They'll grow, Angie, I know about this stuff," I assured him.

  "Ahhh . . ." He spat into the yard's shadowy middle. "Even if we get tomatoes there won't be many."

  Strange, how the waste of space he hadn't noticed for decades was suddenly driving him crazy. Suddenly a light blazed in his eyes.

  "Chickens," he announced. "We'll raise chickens."

  Breathless with excitement I broke the news to Connie. "Not too many," she said.

  Zip Aiello provided the necessary lumber and chicken wire for a coop, free of charge.

  "God help him if he asks for money after all the meals he's had here," Connie had forewarned.

  Angie did almost all the construction work but tried to make me feel useful, letting me take the last two or three licks on a nail when it was too far into a board to be bent. While we worked, Palmieri stuck his gray head out the window and asked what we were up to.

  "Chicken coop!" Angie's voice rang with delight.

  Palmieri grimaced. "They bring rats." He ducked back inside. Angie laughed. "Imagine a guy like that worrying about rats? He ain't washed a dish up there in ten years!"

  How this project excited him, the way my father's garden had excited him! They were the same man in many ways - Angie was just older, shorter, and calmer. I began to understand that I'd resulted from a network of people, not just my mother and father. Despite my alien, ultraround head, they were part of me.

  I'd always imagined chickens as clean white birds that ran through green meadows and built nests in long grass, but to buy our birds we went to a place that looked like a factory. The building was cinder-block walls painted white, with small, dusty, deeply set windows. There was heavy mesh screening over them - you could barely see inside. Over the front door was a sign lettered in red paint: ROSIELLO’S FAMOUS LIVE POULTRY. The guy had obviously not hired a pro to make the sign. The words sloped upward and the letters TRY in POULTRY were wedged together.

  Inside, odors of urine, dung, and feathers made my nose go wet. It seemed that a soup of those ingredients was being made out back.

  There were empty feather-flecked bird crates all around. An­gie called out toward the back, from where a low, throaty cluck­ing steadily sounded.

  Rosiello was a fat, sweaty man. He wore an apron with blood­stains that were so old they'd dried brown. On his head was a straw skimmer with a faded red band around it. He squinted at us as he wiped his hands on his puffy hips.

  "Help you?"

  "We want some birds," Angie said. "Chicks."

  "Raise?"

  "Yes."

  Rosiello shook his head. "Got no chicks now. Only time I carry 'em's around Easter. All I got's pullets, two bucks apiece."

  "What's a pullet?" I asked.

  "It's a young chicken," Angie said. "Jeez, maybe pullets'd be better, they're a little stronger. How big are they?"

  "Show ya. Come on."

  In the back the smells were even stronger because the birds were stacked there, three or four to a crate. The crates were against the walls, leaving the center of the room clear for a work area under a single bulb dangling from a crooked black wire. With as little room for motion as possible the birds hunched in their prisons, chins tucked into their crops. Cracked corn was scattered over the dirt floor like driveway gravel. From one of the bottom crates a lean-necked chicken stuck her neck as far as she could through the wooden bars, stretching for a kernel just out of reach. Her beak left a mark in the dirt.

  I nudged the kernel toward the crate so she could get it. "Those birds are crowded. They need more room."

  "No they don't," Rosiello said. He seemed to be noticing me for the first time. "Your son?"

  "Grandson," Angie said.<
br />
  "I thought you looked kinda old to be his father," Rosiello said. "No offense."

  "They don't get any exercise," I persisted.

  "Kid, Chrissakes, this ain't no Jack La Lanne I'm runnin' here." He wiped his cleaver on the apron. Behind him were a kettle of hot water, a chopping block, and a machine shaped like a box.

  Steam rose off the kettle as if it contained a witch's brew. I pointed at it and asked, "What's that for?"

  Rosiello sucked in a deep breath. "You ask a lotta questions. It's for pluckin' the chickens."

  "The feathers come off if you just stick it in water?"

  "Nol" Rosiello stuck the cleaver into the chopping block. Big drops of sweat dripped from his forehead. He took off his hat and wiped his head. He was almost completely bald.

  Angie said, "Instead of gettin' all excited, just explain it to him."

  Rosiello sighed and put his hat back on. He was like the comedian Edgar Kennedy doing his famous "slow burn."

  "Jesus Christ, I oughta run a school here. Okay, kid. See, before I can stick the bird into this machine, I got to - "

  "What's the machine do?"

  Angie ducked his head so Rosiello wouldn't see him grin. The fat man took a long breath, like the ones people take before blowing out birthday candles. "This here machine…hell, lemme show ya." Rosiello took a bird from one of the crates. It cackled as he lifted her. "Maybe he shouldn't watch this part," he suggested.

  "Wait outside," Angie said.

  "I can watch."

  Before Angie could object Rosiello shrugged, bent back the flapping bird's head and slit its throat. A stream of bright blood rose and fell in a dying arc. Rosiello caught most of it in a bucket on the floor. Angie's hands were on my shoulders.

  "Breathe deep," he urged.

  "I'm all right." I really was. It had happened too fast to be repulsive. Rosiello had followed through the killing cleanly, graceful as Vic slamming a home run. He hung the bird over the pail to drain. The flapping grew feeble.

  Minutes. We all waited for the bird to die, and then Rosiello took it by the feet. The blood at its neck had coagulated, and the halves of its beak were apart. The eyes seemed glued shut.