Angie and I walked into the yard. There was still food on the ground. I crouched to look at Salt and Pepper. She resembled a rain-stiffened handbag. Her lone eye was open, dull as a rosary bead. I stroked the feathers of her wing. It was like touching corrugated cardboard.
Darkness had fallen, and I was alone. "Angie? Angie!"
He was back in a flash. "I just went in to get shoes, take it easy." He put his arm around me. His skin was still wet, and he shivered. I pressed my face to his bare ribs. The flesh was soft and I could feel the xylophone of bones under it.
"Go inside," he said. "Lemme take care of this." But he let me keep my face against his ribs for a while.
"We have to call the cops," I said. "Let's get them to put Connie in jail."
"Shhh . . . go, go inside. Your grandmother's in her room, she won't come out. You won't even have to look at her."
I watched him work from the back window. He took a huge A & P grocery bag and stuffed the chickens into it. He rolled the top closed and went down the block to toss the bag into one of the big trash hoppers at the hamburger joint.
I knew he threw them there, because I couldn’t find them in our pail the next morning. I asked him where they were and he told me, with no bullshit. What was the difference? They were dead. It didn’t matter where they were now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Connie wouldn’t leave her room, except to go to the bathroom.
She wouldn't eat, wouldn't go near the kitchen. Angie and I ate simple meals like cold cheese cut over hard bread with oil and vinegar dripped over it. He lacked her delicate touch with food, soaking the bread with vinegar. You couldn't eat it.
We watched a lot of television and took walks, unconcerned about any truant officer. We didn't talk about Vic, my father, or the birds. It was as if a natural disaster had robbed us of these things: an earthquake, a tornado, locusts - something we couldn't get mad at.
I made "X's" on the kitchen calendar that marched toward September 12. Angie never asked why.
Sitting on the porch we heard brassy music coming from Atlantic Avenue.
"My God, Joey, the feast! I forgot all about it."
You smelled the feast long before you got to it, the smell of confectioners' sugar on sizzling deep-fried lumps of sweet dough. You heard it first, too, bands composed of neighborhood men playing dented trumpets and trombones and gray-skinned drums.
We broke through the crowd and saw an enormous statue of the child Jesus in a long red gown, a gold and velvet crown on his head. His right hand was held up, palm out, two fingers extended in blessing.
"Throw one our way, we could use it," Angie said.
A man standing on the statue's platform bent over to accept dollar bills from the people. He pinned them to the velvet curtain behind the statue. Hundreds of them fluttered in the breeze.
"Always hated that part of the feast," Angie said, pointing at the money curtain. "God knows where it really goes. That guy'll probably have a new Cadillac tomorrow."
Men with huge forearms and V-necked undershirts grilled sausages and peppers on wide griddles, squinting against the grease and the steam. Their chest hair was black and thick, burying the thin gold chains around their necks. Gold horns and miraculous medals seemed to be suspended from nothing between their pectorals.
Brown oil bubbled in a cauldron the size of a kettle drum. The woman behind it skimmed its surface with a big spoon full of holes, shook the zeppole, and dumped them into a pan.
Angie held up two fingers. "Don't tell your grandma about this," he warned, unnecessarily - as far as I was concerned, I was never speaking to Connie again.
The lady dropped two in a bag, sprinkled sugar over them and handed them over. The two-dollar tip from Nat was in my pocket. I pulled out a buck before Angie could reach his money.
"What the heck are you doin'?"
"I'm treating you, that's what I'm doing." I made my voice as rough as I could, tires on gravel. The lady gave back ninety cents. Forty-five small bottles, I thought - would I ever get the Deposit Bottle Exchange Rate out of my head?
"You don't have to spend your money on me, Joey."
"I want to," I said, remembering how Nat had told me to spend it on my father. Fat chance. I didn't even bother telling Angie to call me "Joe." What difference did it make now?
Angie shook the zeppole bag to sugar them up evenly. "It's just that your father sent you that money so you could buy stuff for yourself "
Oh boy. How long had I been looking for an excuse to tell Angie? With bottle-hunting days behind me, there was no reason to keep it a secret anymore.
"This money ain't from my father," I spat. "I made it all by myself."
He squinted one eye at me, the way his wife often did. "You did? How?"
"Ya know the guy who takes bottles on Atlantic Avenue? Empty bottles?"
"You don't mean Nat the Jew, where Zip goes?"
"Uh-huh. Well I went there too. All summer long. That's where I was when I wasn't with you, pickin' up bottles. Zip didn't care as long as I didn't go on his turf."
The eye squinted till it was nearly shut, like Popeye's. "So where'd you go?"
I told him.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. And you're alive to talk about it." I put my hands on my hips, gunslinger-style. "I wasn't afraid."
"You coulda got killed, you know that?"
"So? Nobody woulda cared." I gripped my belt buckle. Angie's jaws clenched. He looked over at the cauldron of oil as if he were trying to determine if it was big enough to boil my whole body. "Nobody woulda cared, huh?" he muttered, expecting no answer.
I released the buckle and clasped my hands together in front of my groin, as if to protect it. "I made over forty bucks and I'm leaving, Angie."
He seemed to have been more surprised by the bottle revelation than by this announcement.
"Leaving? Where you goin'?" Not, "Where do you think you're goin'?" but "Where you goin'?"
I took the deepest breath of my life, coating my lungs generously with zeppole oil vapors. For the absolute last time I recited my plan, ending with Mel and me walking off into the sunset. He said nothing when I was through.
"Don't say I can't do it, Angie. I'm really gonna do it and you can't stop me."
He pursed his lips, opened his mouth, and tapped his golden front teeth together, as if they were dentures he had to settle into place. "Forty bucks, huh?"
A gust of wind blew his hair forward. As he pushed it back I looked for streaks of blackness but, like the beard he scraped away, it had gone completely white, seemingly since the start of my escape tale.
But his eyebrows were still jet-black, and they arched into steeples as he said, "You're leaving me, huh?"
I'd have preferred another Phil McElhenny fastball to my head over that little sentence.
"How you figure on gettin' there?" he asked.
"Trains. I know what trains I have to take, it's easy."
"How about if you let me give you a lift?"
So that was his game. "Don't you try and trick me, Angie, I'm really going."
"Oh, I know, I know," he said, his voice thick with respect. "But you're gonna need more than forty bucks if you're gonna hit the road, Joseph. You let me drive you to Patchogue, you'll at least save train fare."
The zeppole bag grew greasier and greasier in his hands. He was running out of dry places to hold it.
"Hey," said the lady who sold them, gesturing with the spoon, "you're blockin' my customers here."
We walk-skated from her stand, the street slick with oil. People swarmed past us, eager to play rigged games of chance, buy heros, and go on the rides. Angie and I were the only ones standing still. In that sense we were very much alone out there, more so than we would have been in the house.
I said, "You'll really drive me out there and let me go with Mel and not make me come back?"
He nodded. "If that's what you want, sure." A dim smile. "But you know something, Joseph?" He looked left
and right as if to make sure no one was eavesdropping, and then his lips were an inch from my ear.
"I don't think you wanna go." He pulled back and winked, exactly the way he had the first time I met him, in the bathroom. He jutted a cherry-red lower lip and shook his head slowly. "Nah," he said, agreeing with himself, "you don't wanna go."
I still had the ninety cents in my hand. I poured it into my pocket and listened to the coins greet one another. I tried to pull my hand out but it had become a fist, too big for the mouth of the pocket.
"It's Mel's birthday soon, Angie. I want to see Mel. She hates it where she lives."
Angie's hand was relaxed as he held it up the way the statue did. "Fine, fine, you'll go see Mel. You could spend the whole day together, huh? And maybe her aunt'd let us take her back here for a few days, you could play stickball. Who knows? Or maybe you could stay overnight in Patchogue. . . . Hey, Joey, I ain't trying to tell you what to do, these are just ideas off the top of my head." He patted the top of his head, momentarily flattening his hair. "I shoulda thought of this stuff before, buddy. I'm sorry. What do you say, huh?"
"Call me Joe."
"Right, Joe."
"And gimme a zeppole."
We bit into them. As I chewed I became confused by a salty taste, and it took a moment for me to figure out that a teardrop had rolled down my cheek and leaked into the corner of my mouth. I threw the rest of the pastry toward the Ferris wheel.
"Hey! You wanna hit someone?"
"I don't care."
Angie licked sugar from his fingertips. It dusted his lips as white as his hair. "Joe, Joe, Joe." Steely fingers massaged the top of my head. "You can't go no place in this world on forty bucks. You mighta lasted two days. Then there's the truant officer to worry about. The police. The whole world woulda been lookin' for you two."
I could tell he'd bitten off the word "kids" at the end of that sentence. I pulled his hand off my head and held it by the wrist, the way kids clung to their parents at that feast to keep from getting lost.
"My mother told me if I had a hundred dollars I could go anyplace I want and do anything I want, Angie. I tried to get a hundred but I didn't make it."
His smile was benign. "Forty dollars, a hundred dollars, it wouldn't matter. You wouldn't get far. Either way it's a drop in the bucket."
I let go of his wrist. "You calling my mother a liar?"
He rubbed the wrist I'd held as if he'd just unstrapped a tight watch. "She wasn't a liar, Joe. She was just telling a story to a little boy when she said it. And you ain't a little boy anymore, are you?"
I didn't answer right away. Somewhere behind us a brass band launched into a tune that wasn't recognizable as "The Star-Spangled Banner" until the second stanza.
"No, I'm not," I finally said.
His hands went to my shoulders, light as two doves. "Now you tell me something." He tapped the bones over his heart. "What made you think you could just run away like that?"
"My father did it to me."
"Uh-huh. Well. A coupla things." He held up a forefinger. "He had a car." His middle finger. "He had lots of money." I waited for the ring finger but instead Angie crossed his flat hands over his heart. "And he's coming back. How many times am I gonna tell you this? Like it or not, it's true. And I know you like it, in here." He tapped my chest. "I'll ask you one more time - what made you think you could just run away?"
I finally knew what he meant. "Nobody . . ."
He nodded, urging me to say it, but I clammed up. He showed me the backs of his hands and twitched his fingers toward his face, a father coaxing a baby to take those first steps. "Come on."
"Nobody said I couldn't."
Cymbals smashed. The national anthem had ended. There was cheering and scattered jeering.
"All right," Angie said, pointing at himself with a jaunty thumb, "I'm saying you can't. Okay? Do we understand each other like men or what?"
"Yeah." Was I getting taller or was he shrinking? It seemed we stood eye to eye. All 1 could do was repeat his name as I grasped his hand. I held it in both my hands, pulling the fingers as if they were udders.
"Cheez," he giggled, embarrassed. We began walking. I let go of him.
"Angie, you're my friend, right?"
He stopped walking. "Friend? God, I'm your blood." He tapped a blue vein on his wrist, visible through a clearing in the hairy foliage. "What flows in here flows in here." He tapped the kink of my elbow. Warmth flooded my being but I didn't let it get me drunk because there was more to know.
"What I mean . . ." I rubbed the spot where he'd tapped me, as if I'd just taken an injection there. "Suppose you weren't my grandfather. Would you still be my friend?"
"Oh." We started walking again. "Well, let's be honest, I probably never woulda met you. I never see kids, am I right? But if I did know you, I'd be your friend."
"Swear?"
"I swear." He crossed his heart, even though I hadn't asked him to. Like the claw of an earth-moving machine his hand reached toward me, rustily, guided by an inexperienced lever operator.
"Shake."
I squeezed even harder than I'd squeezed Nat. He winked, hesitated, then lunged toward me. The one and only time Angelo Ambrosio ever tried to kiss me, we both nearly busted our noses.
"Jesus!" he yelped, his hands flying up to cover his nose.
I did the same thing. "What'd ya do that for, Angie?" I whimpered.
A trombone voice, behind the hands: "For Christ's sakes, I was tryin' to kiss ya." He wiggled the tip of his nose. "Whoa. Well. Least it ain't broken. You okay?"
"I think I'll live."
"Tough guy. That's the last time I'll kiss you, until maybe your wedding day."
We put our heads back and howled with laughter — God, how long had it been since we'd laughed like that? I gave another zeppole maker a dime for two more.
"You, ah, ain't tryin' to buy my friendship here, are you?"
I shook the bag. "I just want to treat you, Angie. You let me live in your house and everything."
The Ferris wheel was drawing us. Now, at dusk, white lights glowed all the way around it, and down each of its support spokes. It looked like a giant illuminated spider doing cartwheels.
The ride was fifteen cents - "Up a nickel from last year," Angie noted as I paid the operator, who secured us in place and slammed down the safety bar.
One by one, each bucket seat was filled. When the wheel bore a full load we stopped moving just a notch at a time and spun around smoothly.
Angie rubbed his arms. "We should have brought sweaters. . . . Hey, I could never get that grandma of yours up here. This thing scares her. She's afraid it's gonna break off and roll away. I keep tellin' her if that happens, it's better to be on the wheel — the people on the ground are the ones in trouble!"
He laughed. "Met her at a feast like this one. Know something? I don't think she ever called me by my name. She just talks to me." He pointed at a sausage and pepper stand below. "Look, look at Palmieri. Poor guy never had a wife. Hot food once a year. What a life."
I watched Palmieri walk, munching a hero, his elbows tight to his sides, as if he feared catching diseases from other people. The top of his balding head glistened in the light from the Ferris wheel.
Angie poked me. "Hey. Did your father ever tell you what our name means?"
"Uh-uh."
"Ambrosio. Am-bro-sia. One different letter, that's all, and it means nectar of the gods, what the gods eat and drink. See? That's your name, your core. It's inside you as tight as the pipes I put in all them buildings."
He pointed at Palmieri without looking down. "You could never in a million years be like that guy who lives upstairs. You're gonna taste everything, down to here."
He tilted his face back and slid his fingertips from his chin to the pit of his stomach. The gesture was noble and at the same time sort of effeminate, a princess feeling her own silky skin. Angie tipped his face forward and leaned against the protective bar as if he meant t
o break its lock and fly toward the horizon, me under his arm.
Our carriage rocked. Change fell from my pocket, sprinkling the people under us, who moments later were above us and then below us again with the turning of the wheel.
"It's only money, Joe!" Angie howled. The man at the controls cupped his hands over his mouth and howled, "Don't rock it!" as we whirled past him.
The wheel slowed down. The operator began unloading passengers, starting with the people behind us. What a break; we'd be the last to get off.
Notch by notch, we traveled upward, and when we hit the peak the whole neighborhood lay sprawled beneath us.
"Connie," he murmured. It was strange to hear; he rarely spoke her name, either. "I'd pay a hundred bucks for her to see this."
"She's not like you, Angie."
"No, thank God for that."
"I like you better."
"No you don't. You like me different. Your father and you and Vic are different but I love you all the same."
"Well, I hate Connie. Don't you?
"You nuts? She's my wife. I love her."
"She killed the birds and they weren't sick, Angie. You know that."
"How you're related to me, you're related to her."
"They weren't sick," I repeated.
He shrugged. "Maybe they were. I ain't a doctor. Maybe she knows more about chickens than both of us."
"Yeahh, sure."
He patted my knee. "You think you hate her but I'm tellin' you, you don't. She had a bad day. That's what you hate." He took my chin between thumb and forefinger to make sure I saw his eyes. "Chickens ain't as important as people. Don't you forget that."
"I know the story about the soup, Angie."
He let go of my chin. "What soup?"
"How the whole fight started because Connie gave me too much soup when I was a baby and her thinkin' my mother tricked him to get married and everything. Vic told me."
Angie's faint smile surprised me. "Vic gets carried away with his stories, sometimes."
"But isn't it true that one thing caused - "
"Joseph. Please. Bad stuff never happens because of one thing. You're smart enough to know that, I think. If it hadn't been the soup it woulda been somethin' else."
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