Shepherd Avenue

by Charlie Carillo

  Connie wasn't running anymore. No need for it. When she got to me her breathing was like the tearing of cloth as the southernmost portions of her lungs, dormant for fifty years, were suddenly being called to work. Zip Aiello appeared, having put pants over his long johns. He took five seconds to survey the situation.

  "I'll pick up the money."

  A black teenager in a feathered fedora came along, munching on a bag of french fries. He blinked huge inky eyes and shook his head.

  "Mutha-fucka," he commented. "I dig your feather more'n I do mine." He went away.

  Connie's breathing was slowing down but her nightgown clung to her lumpy body - she was sweating, something I'd been forbidden to do in her house! She wiped her forehead in disgust of the fluid her body was surrendering. I stayed on my back like a beetle, elbows and knees in the air. They felt as if they'd been soaked with gasoline and torched. People clustered all around me, most of whom had visited the house earlier in the night. There was a wall of legs in all directions and their tired faces looked prehistoric: I was a wounded animal to be slaughtered, butchered, and hauled back to their caves.

  Connie knelt and gripped my wrist as if to take my pulse. With her other hand she smoothed back her damp hair.

  "It's me or nobody."

  I yanked myself free, feeling the tear of a thin scab already forming at my elbow, and let out a scream that came all the way from my bowels. The people moved back. I gargled on my own saliva, spat it out in an upward spray, and felt it shower my face. I kept screaming at the sky, even as my shoulders were being pressed to the pavement. I opened my eyes to see Johnny Gallo gazing at me in terror.

  "Long Island, shut up already, for Christ's sake," he begged, but I wouldn't obey. I couldn't. I was even screaming as I inhaled, so it was a sound that could go on all night, all week, forever. I shut my eyes. Johnny maintained a trembling grip on my shoulders.

  "It's about time, Doc," Connie said minutes later. I felt the sleeve of my windbreaker being pushed to my elbow but wouldn't look. The pinch of a hypodermic needle: Johnny's hands came off me, to be replaced by many hands under my knees, head, and elbows.

  "One, two, three, lift!" said a voice I didn't recognize, and then I was out for good.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I woke up in my cot, my knees and elbows heavily bandaged. There were gauze pads against the wounds, bound in place by strips of adhesive tape even whiter than Roslyn's feathers had been.

  I sat up, careful not to bend my elbows or knees. An iodine-colored solution had been swabbed on them before the band­aging. It stained my skin beyond the boundaries of the gauze shields.

  Connie appeared carrying a bowl of minestrone, a dish towel under it to protect her hands from its heat. There were no trays in that house. This may have been the first time a meal had ever been served in bed.

  "Eat." She put the soup on the night table, and from her apron pocket she extracted a spoon.

  I cleared my throat, hoarse from all that screaming. "Who put these bandages on me?"

  "The doctor from up the block."

  "Where's my money?"

  "Downstairs. Zip picked it up."

  "I wanna count it."

  She went to get it, limping. The doctor really should have treated her after that remarkable sprinting. It took her five min­utes to return with a clear glass bowl.

  I dumped it and counted it. There was eighty cents missing, I told her.

  "Some fell down the sewer. . . . So you were a bottle man all this time, eh?"

  "Zip should keep his big mouth shut."

  I was starving but I didn't touch her soup. Soon steam stopped rising from it. The oil on its surface began to chill and harden around the edges, like ice on a lake at the start of winter.

  By the time she came back to the room the chilled oil coating covered the whole surface. I could have dropped a nickel on it without breaking through to liquid.

  "Now you're gonna starve yourself to death?"

  "I ain't hungry."

  She shrugged, picked up the bowl. "I got something for you. Your friend's address in Arizona."

  "I don't want it."

  "You can make a phone call if you want, a short one."

  "I don't want anybody."

  I didn't eat the next day, either. Connie phoned the doctor, who said it was okay to take off the bandages. I wouldn't let her do it. The pull of gauze against scab was a sweet pain that made my eyes tear. I kind of enjoyed it and was sort of sorry when the last one came off, except that now it would be easier to move. It was time to dream up another getaway.

  And while I tried to hatch a new plot nothing could rouse me, not even the sound of my father's Comet pulling into the driveway late at night.

  I feigned sleep. Down the hall I heard Connie's angry shouts ("You and your stupid postcards!"), and then his voice, surprisingly soft and apologetic.

  Footsteps toward me; I lay as still as I could. The door opened a crack.

  "Don't you wake him," Connie commanded.

  "I just want a look at him, Ma."

  A stripe of light slashed my face. "My God, he got older." When he finally shut the door I sighed deeply and bit the pillow. An hour later, when their talking died down and he'd gone to sleep in his father's bed, I locked the door.

  I didn't even answer in the morning when he tried the knob, then knocked, then pounded on the door. He said my name over and over. I coughed loudly in response but refused to speak. He went away.

  At around noon there was a scratching in the lock, and Con­nie came in. She'd had her own key all along!

  I pretended to be reading a book. I had to use the toilet badly and jiggled my foot to relieve the feeling. It didn't work.

  Connie's dress, stockings, and shoes were black, as I knew they would be for the rest of her life. Her garb made the catfish-like stripes of white hair on either side of her part stand out more than ever. I could hardly believe it but I suddenly felt a twinge of compassion for her, remembering certain things - the way she'd stood up for me that time in the church with Mel, the times we'd made macaroni together, the paint supplies she'd given me.

  But it only lasted a moment, winking out dead like a spark that floats from a winter bonfire.

  She put a paper bag down at her feet and sat on the cot. "Well, I don't gotta tell you who's here."

  I turned a page.

  "He wants to see you."

  "No."

  She took a breath. "This is what it is. We're all gonna live here. You'll go to P. S. 108, same school your father went to. And me," she said in wonderment, as if this had just occurred to her. "Anyhow you have to catch up with the other kids, they're in a week already."

  I put the book down. "Big deal. I ain't goin'."

  Her hands were folded. "Let him see you."

  "No. I hate him. If he comes in here I'll kill him." On stiff legs I went to the closet and took out a Johnny Mize bat. I could barely heft it, but a summer with the Ambrosios had taught me a thing or two about dramatics - for a moment, Connie seemed alarmed.

  Then she chuckled. "You can't even swing that thing."

  I put it down. "That was him I saw, wasn't it? Don't lie to me, Connie."

  She pushed back the catfish stripes. "He was in the city these past few weeks, yeah. Hotel room. But I don't know if it was him you saw."

  "It was him. . . . why didn't he come here that day?"

  "Don't ask me to understand my son. I didn't even understand my husband." Her voice broke and her hand went to her throat. She was trying to act as if something going down the wrong pipe had made her voice flutter.

  "School tomorrow," she said when she was back in control. "Every day you fall further behind."

  "Forget it, Connie."

  I flopped face down on the bed. My bladder felt the pressure of her hand on the small of my back. I jumped in surprise, but the touch was remarkably delicate, especially coming from a woman so sparing of human contact.

  "I'm not smart," she said fe
ebly. "You and me, we didn't always get along so good. . . . It don't matter. I killed your birds, I don't know why I did that, it sure didn't make me happy."

  She was sorry. Months earlier I'd never have identified the apology. Her hand moved smoothly up and down my back. My eyes formed wet spots where they pressed into the pillow.

  "I miss Angie," I said into the cloth. The words must have been gibberish to her because her hand continued to move steadily.

  "When you're ready, come downstairs. You can't stay here forever."

  I sat up and looked at her.

  "You and me, Joseph, it's wrong for us to be enemies."

  She left the room. I got up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. They banged into the bag she'd brought.

  I stared at it before opening it. I figured it would be some sort of peace offering from my father, a quickie gift to make up for all that neglect. I reached into it and pulled out something firm and roundish, wrapped in newspaper. Slowly, as if I were defusing a bomb, I unwrapped it. When the paper fell away I was holding a tomato coated with dry mud, one Angie had set aside in the wine cellar that day of the hailstorm.

  I used the paper to shine it clean. It gleamed a brilliant red.

  I unwrapped all of them and rubbed them clean. Sixteen red tomatoes made a dazzling sight, spread out on the white sunshine-splashed bedspread. After I put them back in the bag I went to the bathroom.

  The long, steady stream of piss felt like poison leaving my body, and then I went downstairs to see my father.

  THE END