It was Zip Aiello, rocking on his heels as if he were on a sailboat during a squall. "Come over here, kid."
He beckoned with his free hand. I got close enough to smell his breath, sour from all the wine he'd drunk.
"C'mon, get on the train," he urged. "Hurry, she's gonna pull outta the station."
Tingling, I gripped the pole under his hand. His breath wheezed through my hair. For the first time since Mel was gone, somebody wanted to play make-believe!
"Careful, it gets shaky goin' over the river." Zip's heels clattered on the sidewalk. With his free hand he held his battered fedora to his head, as if there were a wind.
"You figure I'm nuts."
"No, I don't," I said, but of course that's exactly what I thought.
"You like me?"
"Yeah."
"Bullshit . . . really?"
"Except for that time you broke my balls and made me swear on my dead mother."
"I doan remember that." He frowned. "Nobody likes me. They invite me to these parties 'cause they feel sorry for me."
"Zip, I like you, you're just weird."
He grinned at my honesty. "You, maybe, but the rest of 'em . . . I ain't crazy. They're crazy." He gestured at the house, the block, the world.
"You better go home, Zip."
"Lemme ride the train awhile." He rocked on his heels again. Down the block the real train roared by. He smiled.
"So whaddya gonna do with all that dough you made?"
"None of your beeswax."
"Ah, is that a way to talk? Who got you started in this here bottle deal, huh? Thanks to me you got forty bucks."
"I do not."
"The Jew says you do. It don't matter, I gotcha beat."
A flame of competitive spirit heated my guts. "Yeah? How much did you make?"
"None o' ya business. Ha!" He didn't know it yet, but his knees had begun to bend. He finally caught himself when he'd just about sunk to his ass, then he pulled himself back up, hand over hand on the pole.
He squinted at me. "What are you, crying?" He made it sound like a disease.
I wiped my eyes. The tears felt bacon-fat slippery on my cheeks. "This stinks."
"What stinks?"
"Everything."
His laughter sounded like choking. "You just found out, huh?"
"Yeah. 'Cause it used to be nice when my mother was alive."
He took one of his hands off the pole and waved it at me, a move that nearly cost him his balance. "Your mother didn't do you no favors, lettin' you have it soft. Sooner or later you was gonna find out how bad this world is."
He said it as if there were another world we could flee to, but of course there wasn't. Hell, there wasn't even a whole world. There was only Shepherd Avenue, and nobody really left that street unless they didn't want to go.
Another train went by down the block, in the opposite direction of the last one. I was feeling better, somehow. I really don't know why. Maybe because I thought I'd hit bottom, and it wasn't so damn bad after all. True, I was crying in front of a drunken maniac who pretended to be riding a subway, but I still had my jar of money, no matter who didn't care whether I lived or died.
Death: I'd come within an inch of it days earlier, and if I'd died no one would have found my fortune! When I found that empty jar it sported a furry jacket of dust that must have taken at least a decade to grow. Undoubtedly it would have grown an equally luxuriant jacket and my coins in it would have tarnished to the color of coal before someone stumbled upon it, maybe another kid like me. . . .
But I hadn't died. Sorry, everybody. The money was there to serve me, and there suddenly seemed to be no more time to waste, even though I was less than halfway to my goal.
"Hey, Zip, which train takes you to Jamaica Station?"
"This here one I'm on." He stamped his foot, eager to continue the subway illusion. "Few more stops and we're there, kid."
"Come on, the real train. Which way?"
He pointed. "Why? You got a date someplace?"
"Nah. I just gotta know for my plan."
Gossip; how he loved it. He squared his shoulders. "Is that so?"
"Yup."
He let go of the pole, both hands, so interested that he forgot about the train he was on. "You gonna tell me more or what?"
"You promise not to tell anyone?"
He made a zipping motion across his lips; was that how he'd gotten his nickname? "Come on, kid, give."
"Okay. I'm runnin' away."
He seemed disappointed, as if he'd expected something more exciting. "When?"
"Real soon. I'm gonna make a little more money and then I'm going."
"All by yaself?"
"Yeah . . . no." Even as I spoke with him my plan was undergoing mutations. "First I'm gonna go out to Long Island and get Mel. Then we're both running away. I was gonna visit her anyway. . . ."
Now his brow was knotted in concentration. I'd never seen him do that before. It was a funny sight.
"That little tomboy with the big nose what got naked witchoo in your grandpa's garage?"
"Yeah, her."
He laughed low and mockingly, hee-hee-hee. "Whaddya gonna do, get married and have bay-beez?" He gripped the elbows of his shabby jacket and made a rocking motion.
"Maybe we will. I don't know. You quit laughing, Zip."
He let go of his elbows. His pantomime had been so real I gasped at the thought of the imaginary baby plunging to the sidewalk. He stopped laughing, though.
"Gonna buy a house?" he said. "A house and a car with them forty bucks?"
"No. A boat. We're gonna live on a sailboat and sail all over the place. And if people ain't nice we'll sail someplace else."
"Hee-hee-hee. And they say I'm crazy. . . . What about them chickens you like so much?"
I hadn't thought of that. "They're coming with us."
"On a BOAT?"
"Sure. You can do that. Long as you have food for them."
He let fly with the biggest belch I'd ever heard. I swear, it was a five-syllable job. "Forget about the boat, forget about the boat. How you gonna load 'em all on that train?" He pointed down the block, toward Step One of my trip to freedom.
He had me there. No way I could carry all those crates up the steps of the el.
"Okay," I conceded. "So I'll just bring Salt and Pepper, then. The rest can stay with Angie. They like him."
"Huh. That grandpa o' yours, he's okay. Your grandma?" he held out a flat hand and rotated it at the wrist, the mezzo-mezzo sign. "And what about all your udda stuff? How ya gonna carry the money, ya clothes?"
I gulped. I didn't even have a suitcase — my father had just loaded my stuff onto the backseat of the car.
"My sack!" I said brightly. "I can use my bottle sack!"
Zip frowned. "I gave you that sack, remember."
"I know."
"Well." His voice got sheepish. "Now you got money," he said, blinking and toeing the sidewalk.
I let him suffer a few minutes before saying, "How much you want for it?"
He picked his nose, flicked a bugger toward the street. "Half a buck'd do it."
"Wait here."
I got two quarters from my grape jar, my first withdrawal of the summer. I felt a weird twinge doing that, a sensation that my plans were backsliding. Then I ran back out and put the coins into Zip's puffy palm. He grinned as his fingers closed over the money. The poor guy had probably agonized over that freebie burlap sack all summer.
"Now we're square, Joey." He tapped my cheek softly with his fist, the coins as snug in there as seeds in an apple. "Don't you tell anybody my secret plan."
"Mmm. Someday you take me for a ride on that boat o' yours. I never been on a boat. Tried to join the Navy but my feet's flat. . . . Hey. You tell me somethin'." His eyes gleamed wet in the light from the street lamp. "You ever know a guy who found as much good stuff as me?"
"Uh-uh." It was the truth, and he knew I meant it. "There's gold in the garbage, Joey. I found
a TV set one time that needed one lousy tube. Worked perfect for years."
"Wow."
He winked a wet eye, forcing a tear down his cheek. "People don't know what they're throwin' out is why."
He shut his eyes and clung tighter than ever to the pole. Backpedaling away from him, I bumped into Angie.
"Every time you take out the garbage you're gone a week."
"I was talking with Zip, Angie." I was a little pissed at him for the way he'd shut me up during his lecture to Vic.
Zip had slid into a sitting position, still holding the pole. "He doing that train ride bit?" Angie asked.
"You know it?"
Angie shrugged. "It's an old routine, every time he drinks."
I felt a twinge of sympathy for Zip, who after all had made my fortune possible. "Let's take him home, Angie."
Zip snored. "Ahh, we'll leave him," Angie said quietly. "He gets mad if you wake him up before the last stop."
CHAPTER TWENTY
Uncle Rudy knew when he was licked and gave up the fight against the hamburger joint, selling his deli to a man with plans to turn it into a liquor store.
The buyer had foresight. In an Italian neighborhood a liquor store would have starved, but changes were coming to Shepherd Avenue, which was like an island that sinks a little further into the ocean with each tide.
Grace collapsed on the sidewalk while lugging shelf goods out of the deli. An ambulance took her to the Brooklyn Hospital, where she had to stay a week to recover from exhaustion. Rudy rode with her to the hospital and returned to Shepherd Avenue in time to sell his leftover shelf goods back to the wholesaler.
Vic wouldn't let Angie help him move his things back to the house, insisting on doing it alone by subway. All he brought back was two giant boxes tied with rough hemp that bit into the cardboard. They contained books and clothing, plus my portrait of Jenny, now framed.
"She didn't take it with her?" I asked. Even out of my life she was finding ways to break my heart.
Cool weather, the coming of autumn. Connie put heavier blankets on our beds. I pulled mine up to my chin and rolled onto my side. There were things I needed to know before I blazed my path across the world.
"Vic?"
"What."
Every time you spoke to him these days, you felt as if you were interrupting a daydream.
"What's a whore?"
"For Christ's sakes, didn't we go through this already?"
"You never told me what a whore was. You just told me about the clap and all that other stuff."
I heard him swallow. "A girl who treats a guy crummy. Or a guy who treats a girl crummy."
"That's all?"
"Yes."
"Are you sure?"
He was through talking. I hesitated before saying, "The opposite of a whore is a virgin."
"Wrong." He sat up. "A virgin's just a girl who never slept with a guy. You can be a virgin and a whore, both."
I stared at the ceiling, soaking in this new knowledge. "Well if that's all a whore is how come nobody ever told me?"
"I don't know, Joe," he said. "Maybe they didn't know."
"You gonna hang my picture of Jenny up in here?"
"I'm thinking about burning it."
"Fuck you, Vic."
In the moming I got a letter from another person I'd cursed that way. It shocked me to see Mel so vulnerable on the page, and it was impossible for me to imagine her saying the words she'd written.
Dear Joey,
Im sorry I said fuck you. I dint mean it. You are my friend. We have to be friends, there aint nobody else. Are you sorry you said fuck you to me? Tell me you are sorry. Don't keep saving monney. This is taking too long. You can sneak on the train and hide under the seat. I did that one time, they don't yell at you if they katch you cause your little. I cant remember what you look like. Your face I mean. I wish we never went in the garage that time. I wish somebody wood blow up that garage with a bom. It is going to be my birthday on Septemmber 12, I will be 12 years old. What I wood like is if you com here on my birthday. Say you will. You have to cause I miss you. A lot. If you need more monney you should go in your gramas pockabook. I have wrote down all the trains that come here from jamayka. All you have to do is tell me witch one your takeing on my birthday.
love, Mel DiGiovanna
Love! She'd signed the thing "love," in letters wavier than the rest of the letter. Not since my mother died had anyone used the word with me. The letter became slippery in my hands, and then I saw that my fingers were all sweaty. I dried them on a towel before I started writing.
Dear Mel,
I'm sorry I said fuck you too. I will come and see you on your birthday. My father is in New York but he doesn't want me. I don't want him eether. I saw him across the street, then I got hit by a car but I didn't get killed.
Here is what you have to do. Put some clothes in a bag when you come to meet me. Then we will get on another train and go for a nice honeymoon. I mean it. This isn't bullshit so don't laugh. I have enuf money for a wile but when we need more we can look for bottles. I know how, I am a expert. I don't have to steel Connie's money. I am bringing a chicken with one eye who is my pet. I thinnk your alowed to bring it on the subway. I will cover his cage with a blankit. If any buddy tries to stop us I will beat him up like I beat up Jack that time. Even if it's a cop I will beat him up. Even if it's my father. I am going to take the seven aclock in the morning train so I won't wake them up.
I hesitated before hastily scrawling the word, thrilling myself as I did it.
love, Joe Ambrosio P.S. From now on I'm Joe, not Joey
The walk to the mailbox: the plan and my feelings for Mel wouldn't become real until I dropped the letter through the slot. I opened the red metal flap and noticed its edge was rusting, resembling a row of rotted teeth. The dark mouth beckoned.
"Yes," I said as I scaled the letter in. I heard it hit bottom, the faint thud of paper on paper as soft as a chickadee landing on a telephone wire.
My proclamation of love for Mel frightened me as much as the journey itself. It would only be a matter of days before she found out everything, however long it took the U.S. mail to deliver my letter. It was all just a little more than a week away.
Little did I suspect that I would not be the first to escape.
I should have seen it coming. We all should have. There was something wrong about the way he was so quiet, how he let Connie get away with relentless ball-breaking. It was mild ball-breaking, like a low-grade fever that wouldn't break.
His beard. His hair. The bookstore job he rode to each day on the trains. The way he'd lost four thousand dollars by quitting the baseball team.
"That's a lotta hours in a bookstore."
Deeper and deeper the needle sank. She got around to reminding him of the college scholarships he'd snubbed to go pro. She told him about Rosemary and the dentist from Woodhaven. She teased him about how Jenny ate seaweed.
"Who were you livin' with, a goldfish?"
He'd just get up and walk away from her. Sometimes he cleaned the house to vent his feelings. Once he washed all the upstairs windows, reducing an entire edition of the Journal-American to dirty, wet wads.
"Jeez, Vic, I didn't even get to see the sports section," Angie said.
"Me neither," Vic answered. "Who cares?"
"You sure did, the times you had your picture in it."
Then one night he got out of bed in the middle of the night and spent half an hour in the bathroom without flushing the toilet. He came back clean-shaven, his cheeks seeming to gleam white. The closet door opened, and I heard his suitcase slide. That clean-shaven face would make him more streamlined for travel.
"Where?" I whispered.
He didn't break stride in his packing. "Boston, for a while. Guy I knew from the Nuggets lives there, his old man runs a bar I can work in."
"Angie said you can't come back if you run away." "Got no plans to come back, kid."
"Joe."
&nbs
p; "No! KID! Because that’s what you are. Someday you'll understand, these fucking people are crazy, man, they're so sick and fucked up it's not even funny."
"Quit it, Vic!" I was frightened. It was as if Vic's warmth and compassion had vanished with his whiskers, the way Samson's strength abandoned him when his hair was cut.
He hurled his pillow against the wall. "No, I won't quit it. Kid, you might as well know the truth. Your mother was maybe the sweetest fucking woman I ever knew, but that Connie, boy, she wouldn't give her a break."
"Why?"
"Ask her sometime! No, don't bother, she wouldn't give you a straight answer." He narrowed his eyes. "Do you know how long it takes to make a baby, Joseph?" His voice was scornful.
"Nine months," I spat. "We had that in science."
"Science." Vic chuckled. "Do you know how long after they got married your mother had you?"
I was silent. My blood tingled like seltzer water.
"Eight and a half months," Vic snapped. "That's how long they were married when they had to cut your mother open. You were premature, understand me? You hardly weighed five fucking pounds, you were in an incubator for two weeks."
"So what?"
"So nothing. But Connie, oh, Jesus, that was all she needed to start calling Elizabeth a whore. She said she trapped your father into getting married. Right downstairs in this house, she said it."
"You're lying, Vic."
"Nine months a virgin, eight months a whore. Connie's very words, may I be struck dead if they weren't."
"I hate you."
"Go ahead, hate me." He tossed rolled socks into his suitcase. "Think that changes the truth?" He pointed at me. "You were there, too, only you can't remember. The day your father left you off here, Connie asked if you remembered the last time you ate here, and I made her shut up. . . . Remember?"
"Yeah . . ."
"You were in a high chair, that's why you don't remember." Now Vic was laughing. "You want to know the funniest part? This whole stupid, fucking, crazy war happened over a bowl of lentil soup."
With each subsequent sentence Vic bent back a finger to make a point.
"Connie put a bowl of soup on your high chair. Your mother said it was too much for you. Connie said you were small because you didn't get enough to eat. Your mother said you were tiny 'cause you were a preemie. That's when Connie told her to cut out that bullshit story, that she knew the real truth."
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