Kicking the Sky

by Anthony De Sa

  It lay motionless for five seconds—I counted—before it kicked its trotters in tandem. I jumped back. Its hind and front legs were bound, its mouth held tight with twine. There was snot stringing from its twitching snout. They hauled the pig into the cool shade of Uncle David’s garage. A few of the neighbours gathered round, nodding their approval. My father had chosen this day because everyone was home—the first Monday of August was always a holiday.

  “A nice pig!” Senhor Batista wheezed as he prodded it with his boot. He was Senhora Gloria’s second husband and Agnes’s stepfather. He looked like Ichabod Crane. Only he had a hole just underneath his Adam’s apple, the result of some kind of neck or throat cancer. He took a drag on his cigarette and blew the small puffs of smoke through the hole.

  The men standing together formed a fence. I had always wanted to be part of a slaughter but I was beginning to feel queasy. Blood trickled from the pig’s mouth, mixing with the sand and grit. My father wiped his neck with a handkerchief.

  “Agora, lift him up. Make him go on top of the mesa.”

  My father, especially when tired or drunk, would mix Portuguese with English. I looked away. I could tell by its breathing the pig was exhausted.

  My uncles were dressed in their rubber boots and plaid shirts. On a count of three—um, dois, três—four men lifted the pig off the floor and onto an old barn table. Later, the same table, scoured with hot water and bleach, would be properly set for the first meal. But the bleach and the hot water, and the way my aunt and mother would rub off the germs of shitted trotters and pig slobber and bloodstains, couldn’t erase what it was that we raised to our mouths. I wiggled my fingers in my pocket and touched a stick of Juicy Fruit, warm and mushy. I peeled the silver wrapper off, put it in my mouth, and chewed. I breathed in the gum’s smell with relief.

  The pig continued to struggle, letting out high-pitched squeals. My uncles took up their positions along the pig’s haunches and pressed their weight against its rough skin. An invisible force pulled me toward the pig, and before I knew it I had climbed onto the table and found myself sitting on top of the pig’s hind leg. My father held the animal in a headlock. He looked at me and I straightened my back and made myself taller. I glanced around me, trying not to look at its snout, trying hard not to meet the pig’s eye. Shoulders and torsos leaned in on me. I bit my lower lip so that the men wouldn’t see it quiver. Stupid. The heels of my hands pushed down harder onto the pig’s flesh.

  My father pulled up his sleeve. Uncle Clemente placed the blade under the pig’s throat. I stared at the men outside in the morning sun watching the slaughter.

  Swish!

  The pig’s muscles tensed, its squeal stretched into a cry. Out in the laneway, the men were laughing among themselves. I was looking for Manny and Ricky when I saw a face I had never seen before. He stood in the laneway with the others, but he didn’t belong. He was younger than all the rest, maybe twenty or so. His blue eyes looked at me sitting atop the pig. He smiled, and I thought he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, more handsome than the Marlboro Man or any of the actors or singers my sister had cut out of Tiger Beat and plastered on her bedroom walls. I turned away, pretending I had to swipe my snot on my shoulder.

  Blood dripped into the bottom of the bucket. The pig’s breathing grew softer, and then it hissed and stopped. I dared to look again, but the blue-eyed man was gone.

  I slid off the pig and slunk to the corner of the garage, wiping my hands on my shorts, trying to clean away the scratchy feeling of the pig’s skin. My uncles looped the rope over the rafters and pulled the pig up off the table by its hind legs. The I-beam creaked with the pig’s spinning weight. Uncle Clemente kicked the large pail under the carcass. His cigarette rested on the corner of his lip, the ash arched longer than the cigarette.

  My mother and Aunt Edite came into the garage, carrying a bucket of steaming water between them. Aunt Edite wore a gypsy skirt and an almost see-through shirt. Her ankles were strapped with the ties of her espadrilles, the same kind my sister wanted but my mother forbade. Edite’s arms were bare and tanned. Her streaked hair was tied up with a silk scarf.

  “Come inside,” my mother ordered.

  I began to move in her direction. I was stopped by a splash. I turned to catch my father swinging back the empty bucket as the pig swayed in the air, encased in a swirl of steam.

  “He’s staying!” my father shouted. “Is a man’s work!”

  My mother stopped at the door to look back at me. I puffed up. “I’m okay,” I said, loud enough for my father to hear. I walked back to the men, who had stopped what they were doing. I ripped the knife from my uncle Clemente’s hand. I reached up and scraped the blade down the pig’s haunches.

  “Força! Mais força!” My uncle Clemente pressed my hand, instructing me to apply more pressure against the pig’s skin. I saw my mother go inside.

  Aunt Edite remained at the garage doorway. She pulled out a cigarette pack from her skirt’s pocket. She tapped the bottom of the pack two times, then drew a cigarette out with her lips. It was a dare. Uncle Clemente took the knife from my hand and wiped it on his jeans. The smoke from Edite’s cigarette made everything hazy like in a dream sequence on TV. All eyes were fixed on Edite. When it was clear she wasn’t going to leave, Uncle Clemente reached out and cut an even wider slash into the pig’s throat. Now the blood streamed like a faucet into the plastic pail. Edite did not flinch. She took a long drag of her cigarette.

  My uncle David drew the full bucket to the side, blood sloshing out, staining the concrete, while Clemente placed a large plastic drum under the pig. I could feel my father’s hands on my shoulders. His hands were large and sun dark, and their backs were covered with golden hair. A gentle squeeze was my cue to look up. Uncle Clemente raised the knife over his head before plunging it into the pig’s belly, exposing the inches of white fatty layers that opened like flowers as the intestines tumbled into the pail, blue and purple and milky. The stench of pig shit and gases wafted across the garage and dug into my hair and clothes and throat. I started to breathe through my mouth.

  Edite stood at the door and let the smoke curl out of her nostrils. She tossed her cigarette butt on the ground and pressed the toe of her shoe into it before disappearing through the door.

  My father picked up a cup filled to the brim with wine. He took a drink and passed it around. The men all drank and mumbled prayers of thanks as they made the sign of the cross. My father offered me what remained in the cup. I took a sip, but I couldn’t throw it down the back of my throat the way the men did. They waited for me to finish it off, one big gulp was all it would take.

  “Filho, bring this stuff to the hole I dig outside.” My father pointed to the jumble of guts. They’d bury the guts in the big hole beside Uncle David’s fig tree and between the rows of peppers. It was good fertilizer, my father would say. He watched me stumble toward the open door then spew the Pop-Tart I had that morning onto the garage floor. I could imagine my uncles rolling their eyes, another thing to hose down on what was already a busy day. I could hear the men laughing in the laneway. Another hit of nausea pushed up my throat. I tried hard to hold it down, but the vomit poured onto the floor. I took a few steps, held on to the jamb, and bent over into the laneway, the sour gush pushing at my throat. I tipped my face up to the sun and my knees went soft. Blue eyes grew large as they swooped down on me. I felt hands grab hold of me under my arms, my face smothered in a chest, as everything turned black.

  — 4 —

  THE SOFA, CHAIRS, coffee table, and the console TV in my uncle’s basement had once been the fancy furniture on the main floor, but his living room had been converted to a bedroom when my grandmother and Aunt Luisa arrived from Portugal. A large floral bedspread hung from a line and was held up by wooden clothes pegs with rusted hinges. It divided the basement kitchen from the family room. When we had large family gatherings the bedspread came down and was used as the tablecloth.

  I lay still and watc
hed my chest rise and fall, felt my heart beat inside it. I could taste traces of puke in my mouth. My mother stroked my forehead with the back of her hand.

  “Did he hit his head?” Aunt Edite asked from behind the curtain.

  “No, the neighbour catch him before he fall down.” I could hear my father’s voice, but I couldn’t see where it was coming from.

  “Who?” my mother asked.

  “I don’t know that boy,” my father said.

  “You don’t ask the man his name? Did you thank him?”

  As my father was walking out the door, Edite called out, “His name is James.”

  “You saw him?” my mother said.

  “I saw him leaving. He moved into Paul Serjeant’s garage only last week.” Edite said garage in her New England accent, dragging out the r until it just floated in her mouth. How did she know James? I rode past Mr. Serjeant’s garage all the time and had never seen him there. “He’s looking for work. I don’t know much more than that,” said Edite.

  My mother blew her cool breath on my forehead. I was getting too old for her to do this. Behind the curtain, I could hear my aunts whispering in English for Edite’s benefit, their knives banging on wooden boards as they chopped onions and garlic and parsley.

  “It’s been a few days now. Still not a word. The boy is only twelve.”

  “They took his name away, you know. They gave him a new name, shoeshine boy. That’s not a Portuguese name.”

  “That poor boy’s mother must be crying like a Magdalena, cursing the day she came here.”

  “She knows. She must know,” Edite said. “A mother does.” The room went silent.

  My mother didn’t know half the things that went on in our world. She didn’t know about what Ricky did at the pool hall or that Manny stole bikes. Or that I sometimes stood watch when Manny and Ricky robbed the houses of families on holiday in Portugal. They only took small stuff, but it was still stealing. She didn’t know that Mr. Serjeant had shared a few beers with us in his garage a couple of weeks back. He called it his bon voyage party. That same night he made Ricky stand by the television and hold on to the two-foot-long rabbit ears so we could get a better picture. Ricky stood there for nearly two hours and never complained. A few days later, Mr. Serjeant left to live in the Algarve for a year with his Portuguese wife, Senhora Ana. She was homesick and he was going to try his hand at running a pub along the beach. He hadn’t said he was going to rent out his garage.

  “The ladies at the church are saying this,” Aunt Zelia, who was married to my uncle David, said. “Emanuel was trying to save money to buy a ticket for his mother to go visit family back home.”

  “That’s gossip. People say what they want to hear,” Aunt Luisa said. “How about the story where he wanted money to feed a new puppy? There are other stories too, you know, about what boys shining shoes do for … extra money.”

  “Antonio,” my mother said, “go home and lie down in the basement where it’s cool. I’ll bring over a bowl of sopa de estrelinha soon.”

  She blew hard into a tissue before she returned to the smoky kitchen.

  I made my way to my uncle’s front door and onto my bike, which someone had pulled onto the veranda. I took hungry gulps of air to clear my nose of the smell of pig.

  Across the street, I could see Manny’s sponge-like hair above the railing as he carried lawn chairs from his porch into the house.

  “Hey!” I shouted.

  He ran up to meet me at the gate.

  “Let’s go!” I said.

  “Can’t.”

  His mother stood at the front door. “Manelinho, bring the last chair inside!” She sounded anxious.

  “Why are you clearing off the porch?”

  “They found Emanuel. On the roof of Charlie’s Angels sex parlour. He was under some boards, drowned.” Then he whispered, “He’s dead.”

  “Manelinho!” his mother wailed.

  Manny jumped up all five steps of his veranda. He grabbed a lawn chair and pulled it inside, the screen door slamming behind him.

  I walked my bike home quickly. My throat had tightened, and the tightness drilled painfully right down into my chest. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. My fingers found the front-door handle. Making my way down the stairs into the basement, I breathed in the familiar smell of old paper and worms. The floor was painted concrete—battleship grey—and some of the walls were covered halfway up with wood panelling. At the far end of the open space was a bathroom with a large shower, which my father used when he got home from a dirty day of digging, and where Terri and I showered after we came home from the beach and needed to rinse off the sand. It was next to the laundry area and across from the stove—every self-respecting Portuguese family had a second kitchen in the basement they used daily. The kitchen upstairs was just for show and it was rarely used. There was an old back seat of a Chevy my father had brought home one day with a console television, which stood next to the doorway to our adega, where fat-bellied oak barrels rested on large wooden blocks. An old hospital sheet, St. Michael’s Hospital branded on its side, hid the wine. I was relieved to see that everything looked the same.

  I sat down and flicked on the TV. The backs of my legs stuck to the vinyl car seat. My tube socks had been held up all day long by elastic bands taken from a Baggie that my mother kept in a drawer. Now I rolled down the socks and scratched the itchy red rings that had been carved around my calves.

  We didn’t have cable, so we could only watch one station on the main dial and, depending on the weather, tuned the channel with the second dial. And remember, breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine. Anita Bryant, the former Miss America, strolled through an orange grove in her shiny white dress, her hair perfect. She looked so different from the woman who had been in the newspapers for leading the Save Our Children campaign.

  “She should have stuck to selling oranges,” Terri said. I could feel her presence behind the seat, the smell of soap moving with her. I hadn’t heard her come downstairs.

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  My sister plopped down next to me. She sat closer to me than she normally would. Tucking her legs under her bum, she leaned against me, her arm pressing against my side. I didn’t shift over. We listened carefully to the TV reporter.

  “This is the street corner where Emanuel Jaques was last seen. Four days ago he was shining shoes, like so many other boys here, and then disappeared into what many consider the cesspool of the city, Yonge Street.” The reporter spoke slowly, and his voice was level. “Reports suggest that he and his brother and friend were approached by a man …”

  Terri nibbled on some strands of her hair. I poked my chin into my T-shirt and lifted the ribbed collar into my mouth. I sucked on the cotton.

  “Emanuel’s older brother said a man had approached the boys for some help. He allegedly offered the boys thirty-five dollars to move camera equipment. Emanuel’s older brother and a friend ran to the nearest pay phone to call home to ask their mother’s permission. Upon their return, Emanuel was gone. He had vanished.” A picture of the large-eyed boy appeared on the screen. “Again, the search is over. The body of a twelve-year-old boy police have identified as Emanuel Jaques has been found on a Toronto rooftop.”

  “Ouch!”

  My sister pinched my thigh—the teeny kind of pinch that hurt. “Don’t ever go with anyone. Got it?” She got up to turn off the television, but stopped when she heard the cries of family from behind the interviewer’s questions. There were TV cameras in the Jaques’ living room, doilies on the tables and a big wooden cross in the corner of the room. Mrs. Jaques spoke in Portuguese between her sobs. She sat in an armchair with her eyes barely open, covering her mouth with a handkerchief. Her four other children stood frozen around their mother. Emanuel’s father was in the bedroom, too stricken with grief to come out and be interviewed.

  The reporter asked Emanuel’s mother, “If you were speaking to the members of city council, what would she tel
l them to do about the Yonge Street strip?”

  The oldest daughter bent down to translate into her mother’s ear.

  “Give me my son back” was the reply.

  I skidded on my bike into my uncle’s garage. I didn’t want to come off as some stupid kid, I wanted to handle the news like a man.

  It was clear from the way they were carrying on that the men didn’t know yet, which meant my mother and aunts in the basement were just as ignorant. There was no TV or radio in the garage, and the women were too busy chopping up pig parts. There wasn’t much left of the pig by now, just the hind legs dangling from the wooden rafters. Presunto or bacon, I thought. My uncle Clemente caught me around the waist and shoved the pig’s tail in my mouth. The men cheered him on as I squirmed in his hold. Part of the tail curled around my tongue and the rest lodged against the roof of my mouth. They all laughed as I gagged and tried to spit it out. I had to hook my finger to pull it out. I hunched over, and saliva filled my mouth to coat the taste. They patted me on the back while I looked to my father.

  “You is a man now,” he whispered, his stubble scraping against my cheek.

  I reached for my father’s warm wine and threw it hard against the back of my throat. This led to another wave of “Força!” and further bouts of approval with “Um homem. A man now.”

  I licked my hand clean.

  They truly had no idea Emanuel had been murdered, and I wouldn’t tell them.

  I jumped on my bike and sped away, riding east along Queen Street, past the vacant storefronts, past all the drunks, past the broad thoroughfare known as Spadina Avenue, past City Hall that looked like a building out of The Jetsons. I kept going, racing with the fluffy clouds that ran along above the trees. The breeze dried my tears, rushed up my nose and filled my lungs.