Barnacle Love

by Anthony De Sa

  Ricky walked quickly behind me up Tecumseth Street, past the incredible smell of bread in the oven drifting over from Future Bakery. I stopped at the Queen Street crosswalk then hurried to the north side, Palmerston Avenue. I knew Ricky was running to catch up to me; I could hear him calling my name, to stop. I pictured him holding his big beautiful wings and quickened my pace.

  “Listen, Antonio, it’s not my fault that …” He moved in front of me and tried to catch his breath.

  “Those should be mine!” I blurted.

  “Who says?”

  “Angel Michael told me so.” I tried to catch the words but they rolled off my tongue.

  His eyes widened. “What are you talking about?”

  I tried to pass him but he held on to my arm.

  “Who told you?” Ricky asked. His cheeks began to tremble with laughter. “You’re nuts.”

  “You want to talk about nuts! They serve nuts at the pool hall, don’t they, Ricky? … You want to talk about that?” Spit sprayed from my mouth. I had said too much.

  Ricky dropped his magnificent wings and lunged at me. There was part of me that wished he had ripped his sword from its sheath and waved it over his head. But his attack was halfhearted. He drove his head into my chest, as if he had already lost. My fingers rolled and tangled in his hair. It was all I could grab hold of as a short gust caught my wings. I looked over my shoulder, reluctant to give up the hold I had on him. He snorted against my chest, his face wet. My wings skittered and flapped onto Queen Street, and finally came to rest on the streetcar tracks. I watched as the red blur of the streetcar cut over them.

  I saw a different kind of horror in Ricky’s eyes. I let go, scraped him off me like a clinging scab, and dodged the traffic to get my wings. I gathered the dissected pieces of wire, torn cardboard, and bald patches where feathers once had been and lifted them over my head. Cars stopped and honked. Some man craned his neck out a window. “Get off the road!” I turned and flipped him the bird.

  I dragged my mangled wings to the sidewalk. Ricky knelt on the sidewalk and looked at me with his snotty face. “Now look what you’ve done!” I said. He sat back on his heels, then moved his dirty hands and fingernails to his face.

  When my mother returned from trying to explain the unfortunate accident with the wings to Sister Pedrosa, she was angry. She said nothing until after dinner once my sister and I had gone to bed. I sat at the top of the stairs and looked between the spindles at my mother slowly clearing the table in a cloud of smoke. My father leaned against the counter with a cigarette and took long casual drags.

  “Then she said …”—my mother looked into the air as if she were trying to catch a bug—“a boy like that needs to understand respect. Can you believe it? Then she tells me we owe the church twenty-four dollars. I mean, where does she get the nerve.”

  “Judgment and money. One they give; the other they steal.” My father said these words without any energy. He didn’t care.

  My mother stopped scrubbing a pot. She wiped her hands along her rooster-trimmed apron, palms first, then the backs of her hands across her thighs. She spun around to face my father. I clenched my teeth and closed my eyes in prayer—Please don’t start. Let it go, Mãe. I heard the back door slam and when I opened my eyes my mother stood under the kitchen light, alone.

  I ran to my room and looked out my window, which had a clear view of the backyard. My father flicked the light switch and walked into the aviary he had built to house his prized white fancy pigeons. I knelt by my bed and whispered, “Angel Michael … I just wanted some wings. It was all I wanted for keeping the secrets. I’ll be good, I promise. Amen.”

  That night my sleep was pierced by violent squawks and sudden outbursts of frantic and rhythmic cooing. The next morning, I awoke to the reek of burning hair. My mother stood bent over the stove, singeing the feathered stubble from the pimply gray flesh over the blue flame. A heap of pigeons lay on the kitchen table. I thought of raccoons. My father had caught one trying to get into the aviary last week. He had drowned it in the laundry tubs in the basement; I had watched the trapped animal poke its human-like hands through the cage and desperately ram its snout through one of the holes.

  “Mãe, where’s Dad?” I asked.

  My mother turned to me with her dark, tired eyes, gave me a half-smile but didn’t answer. She just kept rolling the small birds—two fingers pinching their beaks, her other fingers holding their feet—over the gas flame. She stopped every so often and rubbed her forehead with a scrunched shoulder, absorbed in her work.

  Three weeks later and it was the festa weekend. I wanted to stay in bed all day. I came downstairs to raid the refrigerator and then barricade myself in my room.

  That’s when I saw them.

  You couldn’t miss them. Massive wings. They sat in their new back harness, tall and graceful in the center of the kitchen table. Their tips almost touched the ceiling. I circled the table a few times, daring to brush my fingertips lightly across their softness. I knew at once they were there for me. I dropped hard to my knees, looked up at my glowing new wings.

  “Hail Mary, full of Grace, The Lord is with Thee …”

  I heard the front door open and quickly stood up. I knew that my father had driven my mother to morning mass. My mother came in and paused for a moment. She gently shut the door then looked at me. Her eyes then scanned the wings. She pulled off her white gloves, exposing their gray, stained insides.

  “Where’s Pai?”

  “Putting the car in the garage.” She considered their magnificence, held her fingers to her lips in awe.

  There was joy beaming from her tired body. She removed her sweater, turned to get the multicolored housecoat she had bought at Kensington Market, zipped it up, blew her nose, and stuffed the front pockets with Kleenex.

  “Your clothes are ready. They’re in your closet. Go wash up. We don’t want to be late for the procession.”

  I turned to go upstairs as my mother circled the kitchen table, moving closer to study the wings. She held a fist to her mouth. I took two steps then stopped to look at my glorious wings again.

  Ricky’s going to be pissed.

  My father had covered the wings with a few garbage bags so that he could deliver them safely to the church. He had put them in the back of his truck and gently tied them down with string. My mother and I sat silently in the cab as he drove toward church.

  We were to get ready in the basement of the church hall. The only reason my father was there was because he wanted to carry the wings himself, afraid they would break or get damaged. Otherwise, he would have been home, covering the tomato seedlings with glass jars and digging up the fig tree that he buried every year in the dark earth, making it stand again for another year of growth. Sister Pedrosa saw us and approached like a snorting bull as she clapped her hands together to shoo us like field hens.

  “What is going on here?”

  “Are we late, Sister?” my mother began. “I’m so sorry that …”

  My father carefully lifted the dark green bags from my wings. I heard the rush of gasps turn into a collective hush. I reached up high, smiled and touched their arching tips.

  “Não! He can’t wear those in the procissão! They’re too large and Ricardo has been chosen. Ricardo is Archangel Michael and those wings are too large. I’m sorry if this has caused any embarrassment but—” She turned to walk away, shaking her hands in the air as if wiping them clean.

  “He will wear them!” my father shouted.

  My mother looked at him, pressed her hand against his chest. It gave him strength, a clear and passionate voice.

  “He will be an angel in this parade and no one will stop him.”

  My mother looked down at me, smiled and brushed the hair away from my eyes. Sister Pedrosa stopped in her tracks for only a moment. She then continued her march toward the rectory, certain to find a sympathetic audience there.

  I could see Ricky standing on a chair alone. Sister Pedrosa had been h
emming his long white robe. He stepped down and walked with his head low across the creaky floor. The sounds had slowly come alive again. He stopped in front of me. He smiled, raised the halo off his head, and moved to place it on mine.

  “No, Ricky—you’re Michael,” I said.

  Ricky helped with the straps as my father struggled to adjust the wings on my back.

  The moment we moved outside and onto Adelaide Street, my eyes adjusted to the sun’s glare and my body teetered with the weight on my back. I paced in front of the women who walked barefoot, some on their knees for the whole two-kilometer stretch, fulfilling their vows, their promessas—promises. They would begin to drop back and reach the church at night, but their pain would have left them a long time before, I thought. Or was the pain with them, a reminder of why they came, the sacrifice they made in order to get something in return? Behind me was the figure of Senhor Santo Cristo dos Milagres, his legs crossed on a cloud of plastic flowers. He seemed so small, covered in his bejeweled red velvet cloak. The large crown of thorns pierced his temples and the trickles of blood fringed his forehead and ran along his cheeks and down his tensed neck. The people who decorated him every year, adorned him with ribbons of gold and buckets of plastic flowers, made him look larger than he really was. As the statue passed, the thousands that lined Adelaide and Richmond streets genuflected and made signs of the cross in a wave. Children were nudged, pinched, or slapped into doing the same.

  I had to keep in step, although it became increasingly difficult with the wind that hit me when I turned west onto Richmond Street. But I kept going, shuffling along the street strewn with real petals and dyed sawdust, looking at the colorful hooked carpets or bedspreads that hung from windows or wrought-iron railings. Bands played and we stepped in unison with the rhythm.

  Some feathers fell to the ground. With every labored step more feathers would drop from my wings. Ricky looked back a few times and smiled. The last time he didn’t look at me, but at the tips of my wings. He seemed concerned. I looked over my shoulder and saw a freshly exposed area. I could make out a trace of CCM in red on the wooden frame that held my wings towering over my head.

  In my mind I saw my mother’s gray eyes, my father’s chafed fingers, the pile of dead pigeons, the hockey sticks that were meant to hold our tomatoes that summer.

  Every time a gust of wind caught my wings, challenging my balance, I thought of what it all meant and with a firm resolve straightened myself, shifted and adjusted the weight on my sore shoulders, over my weakening knees, until we made it to the church steps.

  God listens to your prayers if your knees hurt a little.

  I turned proudly to face the crowd. As I scanned the throng from the top of the church steps, I caught my mother’s wave. She raised her hand, placed it on her head, and shifted her black lace veil over her face. I saw my father making his way through the crowd, away from the church steps. He was the only one wearing a hat. I knew he wouldn’t stay for the mass. When he broke into open space, he turned to face me. I puffed air into my chest, threw my tired shoulders back, held the wings strong and straight. He began to walk up Bathurst Street with his straw hat, a feather tucked into its ribboned trim.

  “Ricky! Let’s go.” I grabbed Ricky’s hand and we wove our way down the steps and through the humming crowd, pushed sideways with our shoulders. Ricky raised his plastic sword and cut his way through. The crowd smiled at what they thought was a carefully choreographed liturgical dance. My magnificent wings only widened the path until we came to a clearing on Bathurst, past the orange barricades. We caught up to my father, who had parked the truck in front of Corrado’s barbershop. His knee was raised, about to climb into the cab of his new truck.

  “Can we ride in the back, Pai?” I asked.

  He was about to say something but the words didn’t come out. He simply smiled and nodded.

  We climbed up to the dumper, scampered through the rocks, dirt, and brick on our way to the top of the mound. Mindful of the rusted rebar that cracked the dirty surface like urban stalagmites, we planted our feet firmly, level with the rim of the dumper. My father revved the engine, then it kicked into gear. We moved slowly up Bathurst. He pulled the chain and released the deep honk from the belly of his truck. I turned back to see Padre Nunes splash holy water across the crowd in a final blessing. I grabbed Ricky’s hand and we locked our fingers together. He drew the sword from its sheath with his free hand and offered it to me. I took hold of it, stabbed the sword deep into the rubble and rested my hand on the handle to steady myself. My father turned and I could see his bobbing round face and blue eyes through a window at the back of the cab. A breath of wind curled around my legs, hit the underside of my graceful wings with such force that as I looked up into the pale sky I could feel a lightness run through my body, feel my toes lift off the dirt, my head bobbing above Ricky’s. If only a few inches—if for only a few seconds.

  SHOESHINE BOY

  “IF YOU FEET NO SIT RIGHT on pedals, even little wrong, you can lose balance, fall and hurt youself.”

  With my left properly placed on the pedal, I skipped with my right foot and hopped onto the padded banana seat.

  “Okay—you is okay.” I could hear my father encouraging me.

  I could hear his urging: “Balance! … Balance! No hurt youself!” His fading voice mixed with the warm wind humming in my ears.

  I was six then. As I grew older I ventured farther, past Senhora Rosa’s variety store where colored balls and blinking dolls wrapped in cellophane dangled from invisible strings tacked to the yellowed ceiling. Everything twisted and twirled every time I made my way into the store, pushing the large “Coke” handle and tripping the familiar chime. I pedaled to the clicking of colored straws that covered my spokes, all the way to the top of our street to the synagogue, “da church for Jewish peoples,” and onto Dundas Street with the blur of the Red Rockets. That’s where I stopped.

  By the age of seven, Palmerston, Markham, and Euclid Avenue all bored me. Manny had coined it “Name That House!” I’d call out a number and he would tell me the color of its brick: pink, blue, or lime green. For some, we were even able to name who lived there.

  “86 Euclid?” I’d shout.

  “Yellow with green porch, aluminum awning, Mr. Almeida by himself, breeds canaries.” A slight pause then, “Cheesy fingers—Rothmans!”

  Manny was amazing. He had it right down to the brand.

  When things got that predictable we moved on to new adventures, to the backs of our houses. I pedaled through the intricate labyrinth of laneways, with their crooked garage roofs, dark gurgling gutters, and tangled clotheslines. We would ride our bikes across the cracked and uneven concrete, dodging sewer grates and peeling out from gravel patches. Some nooks in the laneways had been good places to dump garbage: old shoes, a wedding dress, shopping carts, a wig, worn tires.

  By age ten I knew everything about where I lived, every picket and dented door, the pitch of every mother’s call when the streetlights came on and we scurried onto our verandas and then into our dimly lit homes like ants disappearing into sand holes. After a storm, I knew how the water ran from the garage spouts toward the center of our lane, how these small murky streams would meet and mix with spots of gasoline that dotted our laneway. Once together the colorful blue and violet film would swirl and gather before picking up speed and dumping itself into the storm sewer. We used to enjoy racing twigs or cigarette butts, anything that could float. We’d squat at the top of these alley creeks, name our men, and then drop them into the speeding rivulet. We’d run alongside, cheering.

  I felt safe growing up. I was comforted by what I knew, what was familiar. It was only at night that the alley became sinister. I had a recurring nightmare that someone was trying to hurt me … I dropped my bike and ran barefoot down my laneway. Small stones and shards of glass cut into my dirty feet. I couldn’t look back at their faces. I ran, opened my hands and chopped the wind in front of me. I could hear them breathing, mocking
, “You, boy, with the pretty hair. Why don’t you come in, got something I’d like to share.” The words swam inside my head like minnows, tickled my brain: “little boy with the pretty hair” …

  It took the summer that no one slept—the summer my family butchered a pig and Emanuel Jaques, the shoeshine boy, went missing—to realize the words my father had used to cushion me, balance and no hurt, and the place I knew so well could no longer protect me.

  I would wake up in the morning to the whir of my sister’s blow-dryer mixed with Streisand’s “Evergreen” or the high-pitched vocals of the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love” blaring in the background. She was sixteen and in a couple of weeks I’d be twelve, and that was one year before officially becoming a teenager, something I felt I was quite qualified to be considering only a week before I had found a hair between my legs—the first.

  My sister and I lived in separate worlds: she stayed on the phone for hours, watching TV and listening to CHUM, all at the same time. I chose to spend my summer outside where I could get on my bike and pedal up the street to see Manny or Dennis, to trade hockey cards, play nearest-to-the-wall or buck-buck, or hop from one garage rooftop to the next all the way up the laneway. We’d take a break outside Senhora Rosa’s store and cool off with a Lola. Our bikes were our constant companions, our ticket to the world beyond our street and our neighborhood.

  “Maybe that’s what he was doing,” Manny said.

  “Who?” I asked, sucking on the now white ice of my grape Lola.

  “Emanuel. He was working on Yonge Street shining shoes so that he could buy a new bike!” Manny was pleased with himself.