We stood peering through the fence.
“Da-damn,” Sir muttered.
“My gun!” Mick said. Sir handed it back to him. “You ruined my gun.” A piece of the wooden stock had splintered off, and the connection between the barrel and stock was noticeably loose. One more good whack would have snapped it in two.
“Is that rat blood?” I said. There was a red, sticky smear along the side of the stock.
“I nailed it a couple good ones,” Sir said.
Mick dropped the shotgun as if it might be carrying rabies and walked away, fighting back tears.
For a week or so the shotgun lay in the back yard where Mick dropped it, rusting in rain, bleaching in sun. Finally, Mick forgave our father enough to pick up the gun again. The bloodstain was now a permanent feature of the splintered stock, and though the gun was the worse for wear, it had acquired a mystique it hadn’t had before its baptism in rat blood. It became Mick’s favorite toy all over again, the weapon he’d always take with him when he went down the alley to play guns with his best friend, JJ — short for Johnny Junior.
Johnny Senior was Johnny Sovereign.
When Johnny Sovereign was found dead in his own car, with a jockstrap on his face and his balls blown off, it was big news in the neighborhood, but Mick knew nothing about the specifics. My parents and I never discussed the murder openly at home. Mick had simply been told that it wasn’t a good time to go play at his friend JJ’s house, that he should wait until JJ called him. But Mick got bored waiting, so after a few days he decided to sneak over to JJ’s for a visit. He pulled on his cowboy boots, armed himself with the rat-blood shotgun, and snuck off down the alley. Alleys were secret thoroughfares for kids, and as long as Mick was sneaking away from our house, he decided he’d also sneak up on JJ. Surprise attack was one of their favorite games. He went past the garage where JJ’s father parked the yellow car, but the garage was empty. As always, pigeons hooted from inside. At the Sovereigns’ back fence, overgrown with morning glories and sizzling with bees, Mick paused, as he and JJ often did, to poke a finger inside a morning glory. He and JJ would pretend the flower was a socket, but unlike an electric socket, a morning glory was safe to stick your finger into. If you held it there long enough, you’d feel connected to the power coming through the tangled green wires of the vines.
Recharged with morning-glory power, Mick snuck past the back fence into the small patch of grassless back yard that led into a shadowy gangway. Instead of going to the back door, he sidled along the house, crouching under the back windows. He’d approached this way several times before to ambush JJ. He liked to catch JJ when he was least expecting it — still in his pajamas, eating Sugar Pops at the breakfast table.
The curtained kitchen window was partially opened, and Mick slowly rose and slid the barrel of the shotgun through the slit between the drawn curtains. He was into the make-believe of the game, and his heart pounded with a combination of tension and repressed laughter. When he heard the scream, he froze.
“Oh, God, no, please, please, I beg you,” a woman’s voice cried. “I don’t know anything about what Johnny did. Please, I won’t say anything. I have two little kids.” It was JJ’s mother, Vi, who’d always been nice to Mick. She was weeping hysterically, repeating, “Please, please, I wouldn’t recognize your voice, you never called, I don’t know who you are, it was all Johnny, for the love of Jesus, I’m begging you don’t, please, I’m still young.”
Mick will drop the shotgun and, crying hysterically himself, race through the alleys back home, but not before peering through a crack in the curtains and seeing JJ’s mother on her knees on the kitchen linoleum, tears streaming down her face as she pleads for her life, unaware perhaps that the straps of her yellow slip have slid down her shoulders, spilling forth my brother’s first glimpse of a woman’s naked breasts.
Blue Boy
Chester Poskozim’s younger brother, Ralphie, was born a blue baby, and though not expected to survive Ralphie miraculously grew into a blue boy. The blue was plainly visible beneath his blue-green eyes, smudges darker than shadows, as if he’d been in a fistfight or gotten into his mother’s mascara. Even in summer his lips looked cold. The first time I saw him, before I knew about his illness, I thought that he must have been sucking on a ballpoint pen. His fingers were smeared with the same blue ink.
On Sundays, the blueness seemed all the more prominent for the white shirt he wore to church. You could imagine that his body was covered with bruises, as if he was in far worse shape than Leon Szabo or Milton Pinero, whose drunken fathers regularly beat them. Unlike Szabo, who’d become vicious, a cat torturer, or Milton, who hung his head to avoid meeting your eyes and hardly ever spoke in order to hide his stammer, Ralphie seemed delighted to be alive. His smile, blue against his white teeth, made you grin back even if you hardly knew him and say, “Hey, how’s it going?”
“Going good.” Ralphie would nod, giving the thumbs-up.
When he made it to his eighth birthday, it was a big deal in our neighborhood, Little Village; it meant he’d get his wish, which was to make it to his First Holy Communion later that year, and whether Ralphie ever realized it or not, a lot of people celebrated with him. At corner taverns, like Juanita’s and the Zip Inn, men still wearing their factory steel-toes hoisted boilermakers to the Blue Boy. At St. Roman Church, women said an extra rosary or lit a vigil candle and prayed in English or Polish or Spanish to St. Jude, Patron of Impossible Causes.
And why not hope for the miracle to continue? In a way, Ralphie was what our parish had instead of a plaster statue of the Madonna that wept real tears or a crucified Christ that dripped blood on Good Friday.
For Ralphie’s birthday, I stopped by Pedro’s, the little candy store where we gathered on our way home from school whenever any of us had any money, and spent my allowance on a Felix the Cat comic, which I recalled had been my favorite comic book when I was eight, and gave it to his brother, Chester, to pass along.
Chester and I were in the same grade at St. Roman. We’d never really hung out together, though. He was a quiet guy, dressed as if his mother still picked out his clothes. He didn’t go in much for sports and wasn’t a brain either, just an average student who behaved himself and got his schoolwork done. If it wasn’t for his brother, the Blue Boy, no one would have paid Chester much attention, and probably I wouldn’t be remembering him now.