Kicking the Sky

by Anthony De Sa

  “You’re the lucky one,” Manny said.

  “What’s your fuckin’ problem?” I said.

  “Don’t play stupid. You got your aunt and your dad sniffing around, telling James to look out for you. You’re no better than us,” Manny said, his face close enough that our noses almost touched.

  “You jealous?” I said, my eyes glued to his.

  “Nah. The way I see it, I’ll do my part and James’ll let me spend as much time in here as I like,” Manny said.

  The roar of a familiar engine made him brush past me and lift the door. Manny’s brother, Eugene, was cruising up the lane in his red Trans Am, a golden phoenix rising from a bed of flames across its hood. Eugene’s fuckmobile, Manny called it. Manny said Eugene had no problem finding someone to get into it. Eugene was twenty-one, like James, and had been working in construction ever since he dropped out of school at sixteen. Eugene could afford a Trans Am and, according to Manny, an engagement ring for Amilcar’s sister, Lygia, who was seventeen.

  The car stopped in front of the garage and Lygia rolled down the tinted window. She had recently permed her hair with one of the home kits they advertised on TV. Manny had once walked in on her, half-naked in his bathroom when his parents were at work. He couldn’t stop talking about her tits for a month. Lygia flicked open a compact and fixed her curls.

  “What are you guys doing?” Eugene called, the furry dice swaying from his rear-view mirror.

  “Hanging around,” Manny replied.

  Eugene nodded, trying to take a look inside the garage. “Later!” he called out. His car farted a couple of times up the laneway before the roar took over.

  Through the Trans Am’s cloud of dust, we didn’t notice James walk up beside us. “Hey, boys!” he said. He had a faraway look about him, like Moses in the movie The Ten Commandments after he witnessed the burning bush. James had draped his T-shirt through the side loop in his painter pants, which were barely hanging on to his hips.

  “I made some coffee for you,” Ricky said. “Probably cold now but I can warm it up.”

  “Thanks, little man, but I just need some sleep.”

  “Where were you?” I said.

  He stretched his arms and rose on his toes. “You guys promise to keep a secret? I came across this Indian girl who got her face smashed up by her pimp, so I helped her out. Took a few bucks and got a motel room so I could clean her up, keep her safe for a little while. I must have crashed. Before long, this chick’s got her hand in my pants like she’s lookin’ to pay me back.”

  “So what happened?” Manny was practically drooling.

  “Will she be okay?” Ricky asked. I thought Manny was going to slap him.

  “Things’ll work out. I could use a shower, though. A real scrubbin’.” He picked at his groin, adjusted his cock. “Damn hose I hooked up from the backyard just trickles over my head like cat piss.”

  “Why didn’t you shower in the motel?” I said.

  Manny looked at me like I was a moron.

  “Didn’t think of it, I guess,” James said.

  “Well, no one’s home at my place,” I said, my scalp tingling. “You can take a quick shower in the basement.”

  Manny’s eyes got huge, and Ricky’s mouth made a perfect O.

  The minute I said it I wanted to pee. I wasn’t allowed to bring people into the house without my parents there, not even my friends. But I couldn’t take it back. Manny’d never let me forget it.

  James tossed his T-shirt into the corner of the garage and emptied his pockets: crumpled bills mixed with coins and a couple of Sheik condom packets. We had seen the wrappers before, windswept against the fences in our lanes, but those were always empty. “You sure?”

  I nodded, trying to look uninterested. He reached in his back pocket and placed some cherry bombs and a string of firecrackers on the counter.

  Manny stared at the firecrackers but didn’t move.

  “Now, boys, you better not blow up the joint,” James said. “Antonio, lead the way.”

  James ducked through the doorway and came into our damp basement. He trailed his fingertips over my father’s workbench, along the shelves stocked with Mason jars and tin cans. He stopped to look at the photographs that lined the panelled walls and started to fire questions at me. How long had we lived in the house? How high did I think the basement ceiling was, between the joists, of course? Who lived here before and how many bathrooms were there?

  “How old were you in this one?” he said, pointing to one of the photos.

  “Probably one or so,” I said.

  “It’s a nice family shot.” My mother sat on a chair with me on her lap dressed in shorts and a vest and tie. My father stood behind us, looking tall in his suit, one hand on the back of my mother’s chair, the other on Terri’s shoulder. She stood in front of him, wearing a tartan dress, bobby socks, and shiny shoes. She was the only one in the photograph not smiling.

  “You can’t go upstairs,” I said, without needing to.

  “Can I ask you something?” James said. “What’s that Portuguese word I hear in the laneway sometimes—sounds like feel you?”

  “Filho?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Son. It means son, but my uncles and aunts call me it too. Manny’s dad calls me filho. I think it’s a way of saying I belong to them, to the neighbourhood. It means they care, I guess.”

  “Nice.”

  I felt my mouth getting pasty and my joints were achy.

  “What’s that thing over there?”

  “It’s a bidet.” I turned the faucet on and the water shot up out of the spout in the centre of the bowl. “All Portuguese houses have them.”

  “I’ve never seen a drinking fountain in a bathroom before.”

  “It’s to wash yourself. You know, between your legs,” I said.

  He started laughing, hard. “I grew up with a shithouse, man, fifty yards back from the house. And here you all are.” I looked at him, filling the bathroom space with his body. He turned on the shower and began to unbutton his pants.

  “I’ll get you a towel.”

  Keeping watch upstairs by the living-room window, in case my sister came home, I heard James trying to mimic Rod Stewart’s voice—“Tonight’s the night, gonna be alright.” I looked over at Mr. Wilenski’s house, forcing myself to think of something other than James singing in my shower. A large sheet of plywood covered their window. I wondered what Mr. Wilenski was planning to do. My father said they’d be moving soon. “They better move. If they no move, lots of people make troubles for them.” Getting people right was one of the things my father was proud of.

  The shower finally stopped running. I raced downstairs just as James appeared from a cloud of steam: barefoot, damp hair, his underwear tucked in the front pocket of his jeans, which he hadn’t buttoned up to the top.

  “That was the best damn shower I’ve had since I left home.”

  “Where do you come from?” I asked.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Just curious, I guess. Where did you grow up?”

  “A town. Up north.”

  “Why did you come down here?” I asked. The fog in the bathroom was beginning to clear. I reached for a hand towel to dry the shower door.

  “There were no jobs where I’m from,” he said. He shook his head a little, wiggled his fingers in his ears. “Travelled around a bit. Moved all over the place before settling down. This is where it’s happening, little man.” I caught his reflection in the shower door. He buttoned up the last two buttons of his fly with one hand, staring at me as he did. I wanted to rewind to James’s garage, except this time I’d keep my damn mouth shut. “You wanna know something?” he said, flinging the towel at my face. When I whipped it off my head he was standing right in front of me, smiling. I could hear his breathing and I wanted to close my eyes. “Where I come from we don’t wash our asses in drinking fountains.” James laughed as he messed up my hair.
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br />   “Were you making that story up?”

  “Which one?”

  “About the Indian girl who got beat up.” When James had told the story I couldn’t shake the feeling he was just trying to impress us.

  “It went something like that.” He checked himself in the mirror one last time. “We should scram before you get caught in here with me. We don’t want people to talk.”

  We made our way back from the cool of the basement out into the backyard. I felt relieved to be outside again. I was crouching down to raise our garage door when James’s hand grabbed hold of my shoulder. “I won’t forget this, you know.”

  “It was nothing,” I said.

  “Okay, filho,” he whispered, before strutting into the sunny laneway. Manny and Ricky were standing outside James’s garage, waiting. Manny must have lit some firecrackers already—the smell of sulphur hung in the air. When they saw us coming, they ran down the lane to meet us. As we approached his garage, James raised his arms into the air. “Now, where’s my coffee?”

  Then we heard a scream. “Help!” It was Edite. I squinted upward and could trace her shape on her landing. She was pointing toward the alley that cut onto Palmerston. “Help her!” We all ran in the direction Edite was pointing and found Senhora Gloria standing over Agnes, pounding her fist into the girl’s head. With the other hand she whipped the braid across Agnes’s back. The garden shears were lying on the ground. We watched, our feet glued to the ground. Agnes had curled herself up like a pill bug and sobbed into her bare legs.

  “Puta! Why you go and treat us like this?” Senhora Gloria yelled from deep inside her guts. “You can die on the streets. I don’t care. You hear me?” Her Portuguese was slurred. “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to rip that sin out of you.” Senhora Gloria’s red face looked our way but she didn’t care about the audience. “You is good for nothing!”

  Agnes opened up and laid her cheek against the fence, her chin up in the air exposing the soft skin of her neck. Senhora Gloria picked up the garden shears and sprang toward her. Edite’s scream channelled through the laneway, threw Senhora Gloria off for only a moment. “Puta! You’re a disgrace!”

  James leapt into action like a superhero. He grabbed Senhora Gloria just as she was about to lower the shears. He squeezed her wrist until the shears dropped to the ground. He kicked them away, and Ricky picked them up and took off.

  “I no want you in my home. Mentiras! Ungrateful girl. Mentiras! You know how hard I work? How hard we work for you? And you do this. That baby will be a bastard! Perdida. Tas perdida!” She spat at Agnes and missed, before turning to stagger home.

  My mouth opened but the words didn’t come out. I closed my mouth and tried again. Still nothing. It didn’t matter, really. What would I have said anyway? The idea that Agnes was pregnant—that some guy had done things with her—was beginning to sink in. Once again, James had saved the day, while I could only stand there and watch.

  — 10 —

  IRODE MY BIKE DOWN to the Bathurst streetcar loop. Along the way there seemed to be more boarded-up stores. There were men outside the Paddock Tavern who should have been at work. I avoided the Princes’ Gates because it was the busiest entrance to the Ex, our city’s equivalent of a country fair, which ran for two weeks every August. I made my way straight to the Bulova clock tower, the tallest building at the Canadian National Exhibition, past the smoking carnies collecting tickets, moving cranks, levers, pushing buttons with their tobacco-stained fingers. A few of them were on break and had gathered along the side of the wooden rollercoaster, the Flyer, where a bunch of generator cubes rested on wooden blocks. Everything was hooked up to miles of rubber tubes and electric cables the same way my grandmother had lines connected to her before she died.

  One of the guys bent down and crushed his cigarette butt into the asphalt. He lifted a container of water over his head and let it drip over his oily hair, shaking off the beads like a wet dog. The guy caught me staring. He cupped his crotch with one hand, jiggled his package a bit, and then blew me a kiss. I ran away. I kept looking over my shoulder to make sure he wasn’t following me.

  Always the same dirty men and tattooed women working the game booths. They drew you in with promises, “Hit the black dot and win a prize!” “Everyone’s a winner!” They smoked their cigarettes under a sky of stuffed pink elephants, gigantic teddy bears and snakes with felt tongues, rubber bats and monkeys that dangled from long, sharp sticks, engraved mirrored plaques with western-styled letters next to a bottle of Molson—the kind of thing I’d try to win if we had a basement bar in our house. There were framed posters of Ann-Margret kicking up her heels, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, and a smiling Farrah Fawcett with her nipples poking against her red bathing suit. The food stalls sold hot dogs and fries. The smells of fried onions and popcorn mixed with the candy smell of Tiny Tom doughnuts. The candy floss hung upside down from the ceiling like blue and pink clouds. Corn dogs were arranged beside candy apples, all glossy red in their glass cabinets.

  Today was Children’s Day, the only day during the two weeks of the fair when kids got in free. Most years the place was crammed with a crush of kids my age, but today the grounds looked empty. Most of the kids I saw were with their parents, holding hands. Attendance numbers were down, even though city officials and politicians had been going on and on about how safe the city was. But the more they said it, the more it sounded like it wasn’t true. Edite said that fear had infected the city like a cancer.

  I sat underneath the Bulova tower. The clock read 11:08. My friends were late. They were supposed to meet me after Ricky got his dad into bed. I had told my mother that we’d be coming as a gang and that we’d stick together, even when we went to the bathroom. Staying around the house or playing in our laneway was one thing, she said—at least the neighbours could watch out for us—but going to a place like the Ex with all those people was just too dangerous. She refused to change her mind, even after I pointed out that she was always working, and that she would never be able to take me to the Ex herself.

  When Edite had called to say she might pass by the Ex and wondered if my family would be there, I told her—in a voice that made it sound like my life was over—all the reasons I had already given my mother for letting me go. She told me to put my mother on the phone. When my mother hung up, she went to her purse. “Here,” she said, and handed me twenty dollars. “It’s your birthday present.” I kept the bill damp and crumpled between my sweaty palm and handlebars the whole ride down. I wasn’t sure if Edite had told my mother she would be going to the Ex too, or if something else had changed my mother’s mind. I wondered if maybe she knew I’d seen her with Dr. Patterson. Maybe the money wasn’t really a birthday present. Maybe it was meant to keep me quiet instead.

  I climbed up on the stage to get a better view, and in the distance I saw Ricky floating in the air. A closer look and I could see him sitting on James’s shoulders, taller than anyone else. A stuffed snake was coiled around his neck, and he bopped up and down with every step. He looked safe, like no one could touch him.

  James had taken Agnes in to live with him. He told us to stay away. He said we needed to give her some privacy. That was a week ago—a whole week without meeting in his garage. The first couple of days, we went back to doing all the things we used to do: catching grasshoppers, racing across roofs, and rolling old tires down the laneway until they crashed into garages and we’d take off running. Despite the ban, I was still sneaking food over, enough for James and Agnes now. And Manny said there were things James still needed him and Ricky to do.

  “What things?” I asked.

  “Nothing really,” Ricky said.

  “I’m not sure what he has for dickless wonder here.” Manny sucked on his cigarette. “But James has to support Agnes and her baby now too, so I got a few more bikes to hawk, that’s all.”

  Ricky said he needed to steal more of the stuff James needed from stores like Woolworth’s and Senhora Rosa’s. He was
good at it. He was small and could get in and out quickly. What it was that James actually did was still a bit of a mystery to me. Edite said a lot of guys like James came to the big city to work the streets. Hustlers. She said they did things to survive. I told her Manny said James was some kind of gigolo. I left out the part where Manny said James took care of horny old women who would throw him fifty bucks to do things their rich geezer husbands couldn’t. “Manny says he saw it in a movie,” I added.

  “I’m sure James sometimes meets with women,” Edite said. “Do you know what I mean, Antonio?” I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure. “Deep down James is a good kid who just needs people to see the good in him, that’s all.” That part I understood. He was taking care of Agnes, while I was just a useless dipshit.

  “So this is it?” James said, sneaking up breathless as he twirled Ricky down from his shoulders. Manny leaned against the tower and picked his hair.

  “Agnes isn’t with you?” I said. I had hoped she’d come. I wanted to win her a teddy bear or maybe buy her something.

  “She wasn’t up to it. Still needs to rest.”

  “What do you want to do first?” Ricky asked.

  “It’s Antonio’s birthday,” James said, a smile stretched across his face. “Let him choose. Me, I don’t have much of a stomach for rides. But I saw here”—he unfolded the brochure he’d picked up at the entrance—“they have a Scottish World Festival. How ’bout that?”

  “Why?” Manny shot out. “I want rides, not a bunch of men in skirts.”

  “Kilts,” I corrected. I knew we’d all go with James, if that was what he wanted to do.

  “My father was Scottish,” James said. “But I didn’t grow up with any of it, just wanna see how it makes me feel.”

  James sat glued to the burly men tossing their logs and hammers. With every winning toss he would jump up and yell. Meanwhile, Manny scanned the stands for distractions.

  Three girls sat a few bleachers below us. Two of them had flipped hair, and the one that sat in the middle wore her hair in a ponytail. All three of them wore tight hip-huggers that went so low you could see the dimples above their ass cracks. Manny kept trying to throw popcorn down their pants. Whenever they turned around, they looked right past him, straight at James. He was wearing a tank top and a pair of jeans he called loons. The flares covered his wedgies. He stood over six feet tall but he seemed almost seven feet when, after the hammer toss, he bought himself a felt top hat with his name spelled in exaggerated silver sparkly loops.