I caught one over the shoulder, whirled and winged it back to Red who leaped high and came down with it. Maybe some day we’d play for U.S.C. Then I saw five boys walking down the sidewalk toward us. They weren’t guys from my grammar school. They were our age and looked like trouble. Red and I kept throwing the ball and they stood watching us.
Then one of the guys stepped onto the lawn. The biggest.
“Throw me the ball,” he said to Red.
“Why?”
“I wanna see if I can catch it.”
“I don’t care if you can catch it or not.”
“Throw me the ball!”
“He’s got one arm,” I said. “Leave him alone.”
“Stay out of this, monkey-face!” Then he looked at Red. “Throw me the ball.”
“Go to hell!” said Red.
“Get the ball!” the big guy said to the others. They ran at us. Red turned and threw the ball on the roof of his house. The roof was slanted and the ball rolled back down but managed to stick behind a drain pipe. Then they were on us. Five to two, I thought, there’s no chance. I caught a fist on the temple, swung and missed. Somebody kicked me in the ass. It was a good one and burned all the way up the spine. Then I heard a cracking sound, it was almost like a rifle shot and one of them was down on the ground holding his forehead.
“Oh shit,” he said, “my skull is crushed!”
I saw Red and he was standing in the center of the lawn. He was holding the hand of his fake arm with the hand of his good arm. It was like a club. Then he swung again. There was another loud crack and another of them was down on the lawn. I began to feel brave and I landed a punch right on a guy’s mouth. I saw the lip split and the blood began to dribble down his chin. The other two ran off. Then the big guy who had gone down first got up and the other one got up. They held their heads. The guy with the bloody mouth stood there. Then they retreated down the street together. When they got quite a way down the big guy turned around and said, “We’ll be back!”
Red began running toward them and I ran behind Red. They started running and Red and I stopped chasing them after they turned the corner. We walked back, found a ladder in the garage. We got the football down and began throwing it back and forth…
One Saturday Red and I decided to go swimming at the public pool down on Bimini Street. Red was a strange guy. He didn’t talk much but I didn’t talk much either and we got along. There was nothing to say anyhow. The only thing I ever really asked him about was his school but he just said it was a special school and that it cost his father some money.
We arrived at the pool in the early afternoon, got our lockers, and took our clothes off. We had our swimming trunks on underneath. Then I saw Red unhitch his arm and put it in his locker. It was the first time since the fight I had seen him without his fake arm. I tried not to look at his arm which ended at the elbow. We walked to the place where you had to soak your feet in a chlorine solution. It stank but it stopped the spread of athlete’s foot or something. Then we walked to the pool and got in. The water stank too and after I was in I pissed in it. There were people of all ages in the pool, men and women, boys and girls. Red really liked the water. He leaped up and down in it. Then he ducked under and came up. He spit water out of his mouth. I tried to swim. I couldn’t help noticing Red’s half-arm, couldn’t help looking at it. I always made sure to look at it when I thought he was occupied with something else. It ended at the elbow, sort of rounded off, and I saw the little fingers. I didn’t want to stare real hard, but it seemed as if there were only three or four of them, very tiny, curled up there. They were very red and each of the tiny fingers had a little fingernail. Nothing was going to grow anymore; it had all stopped. I didn’t want to think about it. I dove under. I was going to scare Red. I was going to grab his legs from behind. I came up against something soft. My face went right into it. It was a fat woman’s ass. I felt her grab me by the hair and she pulled me up out of the water. She had on a blue bathing cap and the strap was tight around her chin, digging into her flesh. Her front feeth were capped with silver and her breath smelled of garlic.
“You dirty little pervert! Trying for free grabs, are you?”
I pushed away from her and backed off. As I moved backwards she followed me through the water, her sagging breasts pushing a tidal wave in front of her.
“You dirty little prick. You wanna suck my titties? You got a dirty mind, huh? You wanna eat my shit? How about some of my shit, little prick?”
I backed up further into the deeper water. I was now standing on my toes, moving backwards. I swallowed some water. She kept coming, a steamship of a woman. I couldn’t retreat any further. She moved right up to me. Her eyes were pale and blank, there wasn’t any color in them. I felt her body touching mine.
“Touch my cunt,” she said. “I know you want to touch it, so go ahead, touch my cunt. Touch it, touch it!”
She waited.
“If you don’t, I’m going to tell the lifeguard you molested me and you’ll be put in jail! Now, touch it!”
I couldn’t do it. Suddenly she reached under and grabbed my parts and yanked. She almost tore my dong off. I fell backwards into the deep water, sank, struggled, and came to the top. I was six feet away from her and began swimming toward shallow water.
“I’m going to tell the lifeguard you molested me!” she screamed.
Then a man swam between us. “That little son-of-a-bitch!” she pointed at me and screamed at the man. “He grabbed my cunt!”
“Lady,” said the man, “the boy probably thought it was the grate over the drain.”
I swam over to Red.
“Listen,” I said, “we’ve got to get out of here! That fat lady is going to tell the lifeguard that I touched her cunt!”
“What’d you do that for?” Red asked.
“I wanted to see what it felt like.”
“What’d it feel like?”
We got out of the pool, showered. Red put his arm back on and we dressed. “Did you really do it?” he asked.
“A guy’s got to get started sometime.”
It was a month or so later that Red’s family moved. One day they were gone. Just like that. Red never said anything in advance to me. He was gone, the football was gone, and those tiny red fingers with fingernails, they were gone. He was a good guy.
16
I didn’t know exactly why but Chuck, Eddie, Gene and Frank let me join them in some of their games. I think it started when another guy showed up and they needed three on a side. I still required more practice to get really good but I was getting better. Saturday was the best day. That’s when we had our big games, other guys joined in, and we played football in the street. We played tackle on the lawns but when we played in the street we played touch. There was more passing then because you couldn’t get far with a run in touch.
There was trouble at the house, much fighting between my mother and my father, and as a consequence, they kind of forgot about me. I got to play football each Saturday. During one game I broke into the open behind the last pass defender and I saw Chuck wing the ball. It was a long high spiral and I kept running. I looked back over my shoulder, I saw it coming, it fell right into my hands and I held it and was in for the touchdown.
Then I heard my father’s voice yell “HENRY!” He was standing in front of his house. I lobbed the ball to one of the guys on my team so they could kick off and I walked down to where my father stood. He looked angry. I could almost feel his anger. He always stood with one foot a little bit forward, his face flushed, and I could see his pot belly going up and down with his breathing. He was six feet two and like I said, he looked to be all ears, mouth and nose when angry. I couldn’t look at his eyes.
“All right,” he said, “you’re old enough to mow the lawn now. You’re big enough to mow it, edge it, water it, and water the flowers. It’s time you did something around here. It’s time you got off your dead ass!”
“But I’m playing football with the guy
s. Saturday is the only real chance I have.”
“Are you talking back to me?”
“No.”
I could see my mother watching from behind a curtain. Every Saturday they cleaned the whole house. They vacuumed the rugs and polished the furniture. They took up the rugs and waxed the hardwood floors and then covered the floors with the rugs again. You couldn’t even see where they had been waxed.
The lawn mower and edger were in the driveway. He showed them to me. “Now, you take this mower and go up and down the lawn and don’t miss any places. Dump the grass catcher here whenever it gets full. Now, when you’ve mowed the lawn in one direction and finished, take the mower and mow the lawn in the other direction, get it? First, you mow it north and south, then you mow it east and west. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“And don’t look so god-damned unhappy or I’ll really give you something to be unhappy about! After you’ve finished mowing, then you take the edger. You trim the edges of the lawn with the little mower on the edger. Get under the hedge, get every blade of grass! Then…you take this circular blade on the edger and you cut along the edge of the lawn. It must be absolutely straight along the edge of the lawn! Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Now when you’re done with that, you take these…”
My father showed me some shears.
“…and you get down on your knees and you go around cutting off any hairs that are still sticking up. Then you take the hose and you water the hedges and the flower beds. Then you turn on the sprinkler and you let it run fifteen minutes on each part of the lawn. You do all this on the front lawn and in the flower garden, and then you repeat it on the rear lawn and in the flower garden there. Are there any questions?”
“No.”
“All right, now I want to tell you this. I am going to come out and check everything when you’re finished, and when you’re done I DON’T WANT TO SEE ONE HAIR STICKING UP IN EITHER THE FRONT OR BACK LAWN! NOT ONE HAIR! IF THERE IS…!”
He turned, walked up the driveway, across his porch, opened the door, slammed it, and he was gone inside of his house. I took the mower, rolled it up the drive and began pushing it on its first run, north and south. I could hear the guys down the street playing football…
I finished mowing, edging and clipping the front lawn. I watered the flower beds, set the sprinkler going and began working my way toward the backyard. There was a stretch of lawn in the center of the driveway leading to the back. I got that too. I didn’t know if I was unhappy. I felt too miserable to be unhappy. It was like everything in the world had turned to lawn and I was just pushing my way through it all. I kept pushing and working but then suddenly I gave up. It would take hours, all day, and the game would be over. The guys would go in to eat dinner, Saturday would be finished, and I’d still be mowing.
As I began mowing the back lawn I noticed my mother and my father standing on the back porch watching me. They just stood there silently, not moving. Once as I pushed the mower past I heard my mother say to my father, “Look, he doesn’t sweat like you do when you mow the lawn. Look how calm he looks.”
“CALM? HE’S NOT CALM, HE’S DEAD!”
When I came by again, I heard him:
“PUSH THAT THING FASTER! YOU MOVE LIKE A SNAIL!”
I pushed it faster. It was hard to do but it felt good. I pushed it faster and faster. I was almost running with the mower. The grass flew back so hard that much of it flew over the grass catcher. I knew that would anger him.
“YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH!” he screamed.
I saw him run off the back porch and into the garage. He came out with a two-by-four about a foot long. From the corner of my eye I saw him throw it. I saw it coming but made no attempt to avoid it. It hit me on the back of my right leg. The pain was terrible. The leg knotted up and I had to force myself to walk. I kept pushing the mower, trying not to limp. When I swung around to cut another section of the lawn the two-by-four was in the way. I picked it up, moved it aside and kept mowing. The pain was getting worse. Then my father was standing beside me.
“STOP!”
I stopped.
“I want you to go back and mow the lawn over again where you didn’t catch the grass in the catcher! Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
My father walked back into the house. I saw him and my mother standing on the back porch watching me.
The end of the job was to sweep up all the grass that had fallen on the sidewalk, and then wash the sidewalk down. I was finally finished except for sprinkling each section of the lawn in the back yard for fifteen minutes. I dragged the hose back to set up the sprinkler when my father stepped out of the house.
“Before you start sprinkling I want to check this lawn for hairs.”
My father walked to the center of the lawn, got down on his hands and knees and placed the side of his head low against the lawn looking for any blade of grass that might be sticking up. He kept looking, twisting his neck, peering around. I waited.
“AH HAH!”
He leaped up and ran toward the house.
“MAMA! MAMA!”
He ran into the house.
“What is it?”
“I found a hair!”
“You did?”
“Come, I’ll show you!”
He came out of the house quickly with my mother following.
“Here! Here! I’ll show you!”
He got down on his hands and knees.
“I can see it! I can see two of them!”
My mother got down with him. I wondered if they were crazy.
“See them?” he asked her. “Two hairs. See them?”
“Yes, Daddy, I see them…”
They both got up. My mother walked into the house. My father looked at me.
“Inside…”
I walked to the porch and inside the house. My father followed me.
“Into the bathroom.”
My father closed the door.
“Take your pants down.”
I heard him get down the razor strop. My right leg still ached. It didn’t help, having felt the strop many times before. The whole world was out there indifferent to it all, but that didn’t help. Millions of people were out there, dogs and cats and gophers, buildings, streets, but it didn’t matter. There was only father and the razor strop and the bathroom and me. He used that strop to sharpen his razor, and early in the mornings I used to hate him with his face white with lather, standing before the mirror shaving himself. Then the first blow of the strop hit me. The sound of the strop was flat and loud, the sound itself was almost as bad as the pain. The strop landed again. It was as if my father was a machine, swinging that strop. There was the feeling of being in a tomb. The strop landed again and I thought, that is surely the last one. But it wasn’t. It landed again. I didn’t hate him. He was just unbelievable, I just wanted to get away from him. I couldn’t cry. I was too sick to cry, too confused. The strop landed once again. Then he stopped. I stood and waited. I heard him hanging up the strop.
“Next time,” he said, “I don’t want to find any hairs.”
I heard him walk out of the bathroom. He closed the bathroom door. The walls were beautiful, the bathtub was beautiful, the wash basin and the shower curtain were beautiful, and even the toilet was beautiful. My father was gone.
17
Of all the guys left in the neighborhood, Frank was the nicest. We got to be friends, we got to going around together, we didn’t need the other guys much. They had more or less kicked Frank out of the group, anyway, so he became friends with me. He wasn’t like David, who had walked home from school with me. Frank had a lot more going for him than David had. I even joined the Catholic church because Frank went there. My parents liked me going to church. The Sunday masses were very boring. And we had to go to Catechism classes. We had to study the Catechism book. It was just boring questions and answers.
One afternoon we were sitting on my front porch and I
was reading the Catechism out loud to Frank. I read the line, “God has bodily eyes and sees all things.”
“Bodily eyes?” Frank asked.
“Yes.”
“You mean like this?” he asked.
He clenched his hands into fists and placed them over his eyes.
“He has milk bottles for eyes,” Frank said, pushing his fists against his eyes and turning toward me. Then he began laughing. I began laughing too. We laughed a long time. Then Frank stopped.
“You think He heard us?”
“I guess so. If He can see everything He can probably hear everything too.”
“I’m scared,” said Frank. “He might kill us. Do you think He’ll kill us?”
“I don’t know.”
“We better sit here and wait. Don’t move. Sit still.”
We sat on the steps and waited. We waited a long time.
“Maybe He isn’t going to do it now,” I said.
“He’s going to take His time,” said Frank.
We waited another hour, then we walked down to Frank’s place. He was building a model airplane and I wanted to take a look at it…
The afternoon came when we decided to go to our first confession. We walked to the church. We knew one of the priests, the main man. We had met him in an ice cream parlor and he had spoken to us. We had even gone to his house once. He lived in a place next to the church with an old woman. We stayed quite a while and asked all sorts of questions about God. Like, how tall was He? And did He just sit in a chair all day? And did He go to the bathroom like everybody else? The priest never did answer our questions directly but still he seemed like a nice guy, he had a nice smile.
We walked to the church thinking about confession, thinking about what it would be like. As we got near the church a stray dog began walking along with us. He looked very thin and hungry. We stopped and petted him, scratched his back.
Ham on Rye: A Novel Page 6