by Terri Favro
Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I got love in my tummy
And I feel like a-lovin you
Love, you’re such a sweet thing
Good enough to eat thing
And it’s just a-what I’m gonna do…
The girls nod their heads in time to the music, eyes closed. Standing unseen at the edge of the concrete slab, Marcello gives himself a moment to take in the sight of the girls’ bodies slick with baby oil.
“Okay: why’d she marry him?” murmurs Christie lazily.
“Somebody ruined her, that’s why,” answers Jane.
“No, I’ll tell you why: she wants Senior’s money that he’s been hiding all these years,” says Judy. “There’s a thing a girl can do to a guy that will make him give her anything she wants.”
“Don’t let her tell you,” warns Jane. “It’s absolutely disgusting.”
“Well, you have to tell me, now,” says Christie.
“Okay, listen up, because I am only going to describe this once,” Judy says, keeping her voice low. “You pull down the man’s pants, then his underpants, then you put his thing in your mouth.”
They’re only fifteen years old – where did they learn this stuff? wonders Marcello, in the shadows with nowhere to hide except back into the house where bikinied Mrs. H. roams with a dust cloth, humming along to The Green Green Grass of Home.
“That really is disgusting,” admits Christie. “But if your mouth is full, how can you tell him what you want?”
“Maybe you tell him what you want first, then do the thing?” suggests Jane.
“Or after,” says Judy. “You can tell him you’ll do it again if he buys you a bottle of perfume, or a new RCA colour console TV, or something.”
“How long does it go on?” Christie wants to know. “Are we talking about hours, minutes or seconds?”
Jane makes a gagging sound. “That’s a disgusting question.”
Judy thinks about it. “Depends on how much he’s had to drink and how late he was up playing cards. Five minutes, give or take. Until he goes off.”
“Goes off?” says Christie in confusion.
Judy sighs. “You are such a child.”
His back to the wall of the house, Marcello finally clears his throat.
The girls look up at him, eyes wide, then glance at each other. “How long you been there, Cello?” asks Christie.
“Not long. Your mom sent me through.”
“So! What’s happening?”
Marcello shrugs and shoves his hands in his pockets, trying to act casual. “I was just wondering whether maybe you have some records you could loan me? Just for the afternoon.”
“Uh…I don’t listen to opera.”
“I’m not looking for opera. I was thinking maybe the Beatles – the White Album, if you have it? Something new.”
Christie stands up. “Give me a sec.”
She’s back in a moment with a stack of LPs. Revolver. A Hard Day’s Night. Help! And a bunch of others: The Guess Who, The Beach Boys, Dusty Springfield, The Byrds, The Doors, and, improbably, one lonely Tom Jones album.
“Ida likes rock and roll, huh?” says Christie, twisting her hair back off her face.
Marcello shrugs. “Why not?”
“Yeah, right – everybody’s mother wants to do the Watusi in the middle of the day,” murmurs Judy from her towel.
The other girls laugh as Marcello backs out of the yard, arms full of vinyl.
Marcello takes the albums upstairs and shows them to Ida, who starts playing them one after another. When he goes down to take his place behind the counter of the store, he can hear the music pounding through the floor; when she puts on A Hard Day’s Night, she cranks up the volume, causing the old wooden building to shake. Pop finally comes out of the storeroom: “What the hell is that noise? Sounds like cats.”
“It’s Ida, listening to music,” explains Marcello.
Senior throws up his hands in disgust. “Better tell her, this place got no breakers. She gonna burn the place down.”
“It’s okay Pop, I’ll let her know not to use the stove and hi-fi at the same time,” Marcello reassures him.
At lunchtime, Ida brings down panini, made with the good bread she bought that morning, filled with provolone, salami and fat slices of tomato, dotted with fresh basil, pepper and dribs of olive oil. Marcello eats at the counter with Ida, who flips through a Seventeen magazine while she nibbles at a saucer of carrot sticks. Pop takes his sandwich into the storeroom: Guiding Light is on.
Right after lunch, Marcello and Senior start anticipating dinner – penne with sauce that Ida spent the day simmering. Senior, amazingly, brings her a bouquet of flowers – a little wilted with more than a few naked stalks, probably from the trash barrel behind Kowalchuck’s Flower Shop. Ida makes a show of liking them and puts them in water in a cottage cheese container.
They eat late, after the sun goes down and the flat gets a little cooler. Ida opens a bottle of wine – where the hell did she get that? wonders Marcello. When he asks, all she will tell him is that it was a gift from a “young admirer.”
On cue, a knock comes at the door. Marcello turns in his seat to the blistered face of Bum Bum, shading his eyes through the screen.
“Ah, speak of devil!” laughs Ida.
“What the hell do you want?” demands Marcello, drawing a surprised glance from Ida.
Bum Bum ignores them both, and looks at Senior. “He said, come get you. He got a poker game up at his mother’s and he want to talk to you.”
Senior raises his hand in agreement and burps. “Okay, okay, tell him I come.” He stands and gives Marcello and Ida a stern women-and-children look.
“Business,” he states, with importance. “You two can watch TV, if you want.”
Instead, after Senior has trundled across the street to the flower shop, Marcello and Ida take their glasses of wine onto the front stoop and gaze at the full moon hanging luridly over the ships’ cranes at the dry docks.
“The Americans will be there in a few weeks. See? That’s the Sea of Tranquility, where they’ll be landing,” Marcello points out.
“I know. Apollo! Like you,” smiles Ida. “All you need are a white horse and chariot.”
Marcello hopes he can’t see the heat of embarrassment rising to his face. He’s got to get the hell out of here before he does something for which he’ll be damned for all time.
At midnight, Ida goes upstairs and Marcello goes back to the Chevy. He can’t sleep.
He stares at the stars through the open window of the car, thinking unhealthy thoughts of Ida. Ida, his stepmother, his father’s wife. Filled with self-loathing, he gets up, pulls his clothes back on and crosses the road; the craps game has floated back to the neighbourhood. A light is on in old Mrs. Kowalchuck’s flat: Senior must be up there playing cards and ‘doing business’ right now. Like father, like son, reasons Marcello.
Before disappearing down the laneway to join the craps players, he glances up at the window over the candy store. The light is still on there too. He sees Ida in a white night dress, peering down at Canal Road, brushing her hair; must be hotter than hell in there.
He listens to excitement building in the gamblers’ voices. Like music, rising to a crescendo when they throw the dice, diminishing when they lose. He wants to play but he’ll have to borrow from Stinky again, a bad idea. He turns and heads back to the car. When he glances up at the window of the flat, the light is off. Ida has disappeared.
5
July 2
Kowalchuck, Stinky and Senior are playing straight sevens and drinking beer in their shirtsleeves. Bum Bum sits on a bar stool, elbows on knees, back hunched; he’s following the game, ready to take orders for drinks or food or whatever else they want, the second they want it, or sooner. He�
�s trying not to show how interested he is in what they are saying about Senior’s bride. The boy loves her. If they ever found out they’d tease him to death.
The three men are slumped in captain’s chairs with padded leather seats, hearts and swears gouged into the wooden armrests. The chairs came from a Surf ’N Turf in the Falls; Kowalchuck made him carry them out of the dark restaurant to a truck in the middle of the night, then up the stairs to his mother’s place. Even with every window thrown open, the room is choked with smoke. Kowalchuck keeps mopping his face with a tea towel so that he won’t mark the cards with dribs of sweat.
“I thought she’d be bigger in the tits and ass department, like Anita Ekberg,” says Kowalchuck, scanning his cards.
“Cute, though,” comments Stinky. “And blonde, like Ekberg.”
Kowalchuck shows a seven, followed by an eight. “Yeah nice blonde hair. No complaint there.”
“Possible straight,” observes Stinky.
“Smart as a whip,” says Senior with a note of pride in his voice, showing a ten. “And talk! Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. One hell of a cook, though. Even better than Junior’s mother.”
“Pot stinks,” says Stinky.
Senior frowns and throws another fifty cents into the middle of the table.
The boy thinks of the circle of men around the table as a nest, but not a cozy one full of baby birds: an army nest, the kind in a foxhole with machine guns and stuff. Everyone has his special job to do.
Kowalchuck is the General. Stinky is the Lieutenant. Senior is Sarge. Bum Bum is Private Pasquale.
When they still had a TV there was a show he liked. Combat! Once there was a GI on the show named Pasquale. He was supposed to be from Brooklyn. This made the boy proud. But by the first commercial Private Pasquale was dead, his friend Littlejohn blasting a German artillery nest with gunfire, yelling: “That’s for Pasquale!” At first the boy was disappointed that Private Pasquale was never coming back. But then it didn’t matter because the TV itself disappeared along with most of the other stuff in the house, the couch and chairs and dining room table parading out the front door on men’s legs, arms and hands wrapped around their tummies, muscles bulging like Popeye’s. Bum Bum would have laughed if his Mamma and Nonna hadn’t been crying and cursing so loud.
It makes him extra tired to breathe in all the smoke. The men’s words are getting hard to understand. They keep saying that Ida belongs to Senior. But while Senior’s other girls are shiny, flat and dirty, Ida is all warm skin and not dirty at all. She’s like Our Lady. All that nice food! He smelled it through the candy store window. And when big Marcello was stacking boxes in the storeroom, Pasquale brought her a present, a bottle of homemade wine that he bummed off a farmer. Ida was delighted, talking to him like he was a regular kid. She even speaks Italian although she’s hard to understand. Her words sound like billiard bills crashing into one another. Some of his Italian words made her laugh, too, but not in a bad way.
He snaps back to attention at the sound of Kowalchuck’s raised voice. He’s yelling and throwing a newspaper across the table at Senior. “‘The state got no business in the bedrooms of the nation’ – fuck me. First, bootlegging. Now smut. All the government does is get in the way of business,” gripes Kowalchuck. “If they legalize everything, who’s gonna pay for it?”
Senior strikes a match to light a cigar. “Grocer over Beamsville way still got bust for selling Playboy but he say was worth it.”
“You’re shittin’ me,” says Stinky.
“No, is true. Business is good,” insists Senior indignantly. “Junior say we clear two hundred last week alone.”
Kowalchuck pounds a fist on the table, making the cards jump, startling Bum Bum. “Yeah, today, tomorrow, next week, we got customers. For how long? Pretty soon they can get what we got in any corner store, right out in the open. We can’t just sit on our asses and expect business to come to us. We got to change with the times.”
Bum Bum wants to sleep. Letting his eyes close, just for a minute, he thinks about the toy soldier the fire department brought him last Christmas. GI Joe. He had two different arms, one dark brown, one light brown, but he could still shoot, even though he didn’t have a gun anymore. His Nonna said the GI Joe came from some rich kid who broke it and gave it to the fire department who fixed it for poor kids like him so that they would be grateful and kiss the rich folks’ asses. Bum Bum took the GI Joe down to the canal and pushed him over the side. “Fuck you, Private Pasquale,” he said, but the GI Joe didn’t die right away because the shipping season was over and the water level had dropped, the little that was left freezing solid. GI Joe lay on the ice for days until a mid-winter thaw finally sucked him into the drink. The boy kept going back to check. When GI Joe finally disappeared the boy went to the door of the church and put some holy water into his cupped hand, carried it back to the lock and threw it in. “That’s for Private Pasquale,” he whispered.
Bum Bum comes back to life to a short, sharp whack in the face – nothing too bad, not the kind that would knock out a tooth. Kowalchuck hits Private Pasquale that hard sometimes, to toughen him up. When you’re a soldier, you can’t be too tough. “Check on my mother,” he orders and looks back to his cards.
The boy climbs off the stool and goes to the bedroom. Old Mrs. K. is in a recliner, her swollen legs up on a little stool that jumps out of the chair when you lean back. She’s watching an old movie on TV: a bunch of guys sway back and forth with music things in their mouths. There’s a vacant blueness to Mrs. K’s gaze that makes Bum Bum feel creepy but safe. She’s scary but can’t hurt him. Her big, soft body fills the recliner like a sack of sugar. When she sees him, she says something in Ukrainian and reaches out to stroke his face. She thinks Bum Bum is her son. The boy pats her hand and goes into the kitchenette to get her a glass of 7-Up.
When Bum Bum comes back into the living room, Senior is scooping the pot toward him with open arms, like the money is his girlfriend. He’s won the hand.
Kowalchuck folds his cards and looks across the table: “I’m going to speak plain to you, Senior: I don’t think you’re good for what you owe me for Ida.”
Stacking his chips into piles, Senior looks up at Kowalchuck in surprise: “We take it out of our profits, we shake on it.”
Kowalchuck waves his hand at the front page of the newspaper again. “That was before. Not now that Mr. Pisspot E. Trudeau put us out of business.”
“Commie asshole,” observes Stinky.
“The Bank of Kowalchuck’s calling your loan. You got one week to settle your debt to me. More than generous.”
Senior drops his cigar on the floor. Bum Bum jumps down to pick it up but Stinky gives him a warning look. He climbs back on the stool and tries to turn invisible.
“Come on Glen. You know I ain’t got it,” Senior says. “You pissed ’cause I won the hand?”
Kowalchuck moves into the captain’s chair one over from Senior and puts his hand on his shoulder. The hair stands up on the back of Bum Bum’s neck just watching him. “I’m thinking about giving up the magazine business. The future’s in movies now. Maybe Ida could do some modeling for us.”
Now Senior seems really unhappy. Bum Bum can tell by the way his mouth hangs open a little bit and his hands shake and his eyes don’t look at nobody.
After a while, Senior says: “She’s my wife. Get the girls at the pool hall to do it. They’re used to it.”
“I want a blonde. And what the hell, I paid for her. Why shouldn’t I get first dibs?” Kowalchuck stretches. “After I’m finished, you can have her back.”
Senior gets up from the table. Bum Bum can see sweat running from under his tangle of grey hair, down the neck of his shirt. There’s a big wet blotch between his shoulder blades.
“You don’t put a hand on her,” he says.
“You got another idea?” ask
s Kowalchuck.
Bum Bum knows. He grips his hands, one in another. Please please please please please. Don’t let them touch Our Lady, he prays. If they start playing with her, she’ll go dead inside. She won’t cook no more.
Senior stares at the chips. Not looking up, he says: “The only other thing I got is the store.”
Bum Bum can tell by the fat smile on Kowalchuck’s face that this is what he really wants, or wants at least as much as he does Ida. The store. He’s heard him tell Stinky about how he could really make something out of the place, instead of just letting it go to hell the way Senior does. Real estate, that’s the future, you think this lousy neighourhood’s gonna stay rundown forever? One day some smart developer’s gonna put a strip mall in and guess who he’s gonna have to talk to.
But Kowalchuck never says what he thinks, not right away.
“Store’s not worth enough,” he tells Senior. Then, as if in answer to Bum Bum’s prayer, he opens his mouth in a different kind of smile, showing all his teeth at once. “’Course, there’s always Junior. Throw him in too and we could have a deal.”
6
July 3
Morning dawns hot and bright. Everyone is complaining about the lack of rain but Marcello is grateful to be able to sleep in the car with the windows open without getting soaked. Lying on the back seat of the Chevy, he can feel the humidity already starting to build. It’s going to be another scorcher.
“Marcello! Vieni qua!”
He hears his name called from a window at the back of the flat, directly above him. Looking up, he sees Ida, hair pulled back in a ponytail, sticking her head out to call down to him.
“Do you smell it?” she calls out.
“Smell what?”
She laughs. “Good coffee! Come and taste!” Then disappears inside the flat.
