Shepherd Avenue. Charlie CarilloЧитать онлайн книгу.
one of his teammates shouted.
“Can’t!” he called back, gesturing at all of us. He gave one spike to me and one to Mel, allowing us to knock the dirt out of them.
“Ah, come with us for a little while,” the teammate persisted.
“I gotta go!” Vic yelled, sounding sort of timid. When the game ended so did his magic.
The ride back to Shepherd Avenue was crowded, with Mel and Rosemary added to the car. The inside of the car had a nice smell to it, a workman’s smell — grease, epoxy, cement, and other things Angie carried to his jobs.
Vic sat in front, wedged between Angie and Rosemary. I sat on Freddie’s bony knees. His beer breath blew warmly past my ear.
“That was your longest homer yet,” Freddie said. “Madonna mi, when it went over the fence I swear it was still climbin’.”
While the rest of us chorused our agreement Rosemary said, “You should have taken a shower, Vic.”
“School showers are filthy,” Connie said. “In five minutes he’s home in his own bathroom.”
Awkward silence. Mel said, “The singles were good, too.”
“Yeah, well, that pitcher stunk,” Vic said, uneasy with all the praise being heaped upon him.
Angie patted Vic’s knee at red lights. We got a quart of lemon ice at Willie’s and ate it on the porch. Vic took five minutes to shower, coming out with his wet hair slicked back. Freddie described his titanic homer to any passerby willing to listen.
The commotion excited my bladder, and when I went to the bathroom Vic’s clothes were all over the floor. He’d obviously yanked down his pants and his underpants at the same time — it looked as if he’d vaporized while standing there. Crowning the pile of clothing like a cherry on a sundae was the athletic cup I’d placed against my nose during my first hour in Brooklyn.
How long ago it seemed, and yet it was only a matter of days! It was getting hard to remember the last time I’d been in a room alone.
On my way back to the porch a man in a loose green bathrobe stood in the middle of the staircase leading upstairs.
“Vic win?” he asked. I nodded. “Good,” he said, and climbed back up, blinking eyes as blue as my father’s.
That was my official meeting with Agosto Palmieri.
By the time I got back outside, Vic, Rosemary, and Mel had left, and things were a little calmer than before. Vic was on Rosemary’s porch, practicing his diction lessons to sharpen his skills as a future sports announcer. As Rosemary did her knitting he read consonant-clogged sentences aloud. She corrected him without looking up from her work.
Freddie left minutes later. Angie and I knocked off the rest of the lemon ice. When Vic returned and went in to bed Connie finally let it out.
“And I suppose that girl smells like a rose all the time.” Rosemary’s shower remark had been recorded and filed indelibly.
When I went to bed a little while later Vic was fast asleep, his arms folded over his eyes. I stared at his heaving form, trying to figure out how a pile of bones and muscles cooperated to hit a baseball such a terrifying distance.
CHAPTER FOUR
WITH breaks for lemon ice Mel and I found things to do all day long, without plans.
My father had sneaked fifteen dollars into my pocket before leaving, a fortune spread over a summer. Punks sold at ten for a nickel, and a child with a lit punk had power. You could light a firecracker, or search for red ants in the cracked bark of sooty maples. A touch of the glowing, slow-burning punk tip turned an ant into a hissing ash.
When it got too hot to do anything we sat on my grandfather’s stoop in the shade of a maple. Our conversations were always future tense, what we’d do as adults, away from homes we knew were temporary. “We’ll probably get married,” Mel said, in the same flat tone she used to say the Yankees would win the World Series.
Two-cent chunks of chalk the width and length of plum tomatoes were great for street artists, and the rough gray sidewalks of Shepherd Avenue provided an unlimited canvas that was washed clean after every rain. I was a better chalk artist than Mel. She was spirited but untalented, and loved to draw horses. I pointed out flaws in her drawings — she made them with hind legs bent in the same direction as the forelegs.
“That’s wrong,” I told her. “The hind legs bend the other way.” I rapidly sketched a horse. In Roslyn I’d always done well in art class.
“See?” I said when I finished. “That’s how the legs are.”
“You’re nuts,” Mel said. “They ain’t like that.”
We ran to find a copy of my grandfather’s Racing Form, which had a drawing of a horse on it.
“See?” I said triumphantly, tracing my finger along the legs. “Told you.”
Pow! A punch to my stomach, and I didn’t see her again for days. Then she reappeared, as if nothing had happened.
* * *
On days Mel and I were apart, Connie sometimes got rid of me by sending me shopping with Grace Rothstein.
The worst thing about Grace was her eyes. They were blue but unattractive, because they bulged and seemed to jiggle, like eggs in boiling water. Her wild blond hair was pulled back and stabbed into a ball at the back of her head with a bunch of hair pins, the wide kind that don’t pinch closed.
Cooking was all she seemed to care about, and her husband’s deli was an excellent focus for her obsession. It was a tiny place but Angie insisted it was a gold mine for that “Real German.” Being a real German had something to do with being passionless, having a capacity for cruelty, and a love of gadgetry: flashlights, precision drills, and all things battery-operated.
Once I was having a catch with Mel in the driveway when she cut her hand on the ragged Cyclone fencetop. Blood pumped from the wound as Mel ran screaming to our basement.
While everyone else yelled and tripped over things Uncle Rudy set down his coffee cup, grabbed the arm, and briefly eyed the wound before pinching it closed with his thumb and forefinger and reaching for his coffee with his other hand.
“No need for a doctor,” he said. “A bit of pressure seals the wound.”
He was right, but he didn’t endear himself to anyone. Only a Real German could have stayed so calm.
He had been a deli man all his life, and I imagine that during their courtship — a German-Jew and an Italian-Catholic, now there’s a combination — Rudy must have figured he’d found himself a workhorse. Grace could slice a cucumber without a cutting board, using her callused thumb as the base. Without even looking at the knife she churned out an even shower of slices that fell like coins.
Angie took me with him once to fix a pipe at Rudy’s. Rudy stood in front, behind the counter, his red wavy hair neatly combed, iron-rimmed glasses pressed into the flesh pockets around his eyes. His full-length white apron looked stiff — you got the impression that his body had been sprayed lightly with a coating of clear glue.
It was twenty degrees hotter in back, where Grace worked. Had the Real German stepped back there for a moment he’d have lost the starch in his apron. Grace sweated away at a cutting board, while a wonderful smell rose from a sizzling pan on the stove. The pan contained thick patties, and at one point Grace stopped cutting, scooped them out, and laid them on a tray lined with paper towels.
They looked like flat meatballs. Grace handed one to me, and when I bit into it my salivary glands became waterfalls. I sucked on my fingers when it was gone but Grace offered me no more, on account of Rudy, no doubt. The Real German made a face at the empty grease spot on the paper towel: lost business.
What ingredients went into those patties! Scraps, nothing but scraps. Pork butt ends, heels of ham