Shepherd Avenue

by Charlie Carillo

  "I'm gonna be sick, Angie." His powerful hands slid under my armpits.

  "Watch the duck, she's still movin' a little," he said to Connie as he led me by the back of the neck to the toilet. He eased me to my knees and I threw up. I'd eaten no breakfast so only saliva came out, but I couldn't stop retching.

  "You knew that bird had to die," he scolded. "You knew it, you knew it, so don't expect me to feel sorry for you."

  "I know," I said into the bowl. My words echoed on the porcelain. I tried to stand but my knees buckled. Angie picked me up and slung me over his shoulder. I shut my eyes as he climbed the stairs and laid me on my cot, where I fell asleep almost instantly.

  It felt like afternoon when I opened my eyes. How long had I been asleep - two hours? Three hours? I could hear voices. Angie was watching television in the parlor. My shirt was soaked cold with sweat.

  I went downstairs. Connie sat at the table, plucking Roslyn's feathers as if she were knitting booties for a baby. She looked up at me.

  "You still sick?"

  "No."

  "Hungry?" Even when I was in her bad graces, I rated meals.

  "No." I sat down across from her. Roslyn's body was half-stripped of feathers, the bare flesh a light pink. It wasn't a repulsive sight. It was the calm after the storm, compared to what I'd already seen. No way I was going to get nauseous again.

  "Can I pull some?"

  She looked at me as if I'd asked for a kiss. "You?"

  "Yeah. I wanna try."

  She held the bird's tail toward me. "Grab near the skin. Closer. Now pull."

  A feather came out cleanly, a dot of blood at its tip. I pulled another, then a third.

  "All right, that's enough, it'll take all year." She cradled the bird at her breast and yanked with remarkable speed.

  Angie appeared. "Hey. I didn't even hear you get up. Somethin' must be wrong with my ears, I'm gettin' old." His hair had dried and looked fluffy. I'd been asleep at least long enough for his hair to dry.

  "Come up and watch television with me, Joey."

  "I'm watchin' this,"

  Connie stopped plucking to look at me. "What are you tryin' to prove?"

  "Nothing." I didn't know what I was trying to prove — how tough I was, how tough she wasn't? My challenge to stay put intrigued Connie.

  "Eh, stay, I don't care," she said, and while Angie drank coffee she pulled Roslyn's remaining feathers. The bird's head twitched with each tug as if she were still alive. Downy feathers, the ones from the wing pits and the neck, floated to the floor like hundreds of miniature parachutes.

  Bored with the show, Angie went up to watch TV. When Connie was through plucking she brought the bird to the stove and burned the feathers too tiny to pick by turning Roslyn over a bare flame. The sharp smell penetrated the whole house.

  "What a stink!" Angie yelled down from the parlor.

  While Connie singed Roslyn I carried feathers in double fistfuls to the garbage pail. Connie grabbed a big feather and slid it into the hair at the crown of my head, the first playful gesture she ever made to me.

  "Yankee Doodle," she said. "He stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni." I stared stonily but left the feather. "Go upstairs now, your grandfather's lonesome."

  "He is not," I said. "Go ahead and do it, I can watch."

  "I'm all done here."

  "No, you're not." I handed her the white-handled knife. "Do it.'

  She put the knife down. "This one's too big. I have to use a smaller one."

  While sounds of the Yankee game drifted downstairs I watched Connie butcher Roslyn.

  First she spread newspapers on the table, then a paper towel directly under the bird "so the ink won't get on her skin."

  Then she sawed Roslyn's head off. I picked it up and worked the yellow halves of the bill.

  "Throw it out," she ordered, and I did, pitching it into the garbage pail. Her feet were sawed off at the drumstick tips, and suddenly my friend Roslyn was a store bird — nothing about her looked any different from poultry that lined refrigerator cases in supermarkets. I stacked one fist on top of the other and rested my chin on top to watch the finale.

  The tip of the knife disappeared into Roslyn's belly. Connie's hand went in after it, and the sour smell of entrails filled the room as she lugged them out.

  "This you gotta be careful with," Connie said, a female Ro­siello now as she gestured at a green fluid-filled sac. "If this breaks inside the bird you gotta throw it out."

  "Why?"

  Instead of answering she jabbed the knife into the sack. A sickly odor rose from the green puddle.

  "That there's the gall bladder. You got one, too, right here." She touched the knife point to a spot on my right side, just below my rib cage.

  Then she found the stomach in the pile and slashed it open. Wet bread crumbs tumbled from it.

  "What you fed her before. See?"

  I saw. She lifted the empty bird and carried it to the sink, where she rinsed it in cold water. "That's all," she announced. I began to fold the newspaper over the pile of guts.

  "No, no, don't waste it," Connie said. "Feed it to the chickens."

  "Are you crazy?" I shrieked. "They wouldn't touch this stuff."

  "Yeah? Go throw it in the yard," she said casually. "Go on, do it."

  I carried Roslyn's innards as if I were bearing a sacrificial offering to a pagan god. In the middle of the chicken yard I shook the bloody newspapers empty, and in an instant the five birds were all around my ankles, tearing into the stuff. One pecked at my sneaker out of sheer frenzy. The salt-and-pepper bird dragged a length of intestine away as if it were a fire hose. They even ate the barely digested bread crumbs of Roslyn's last meal.

  I balled up the newspapers and threw them away in the outside pail before returning to Connie.

  "Well? Was I right or what?"

  "Yeah, you were right."

  Connie was less pleased with her victory than I expected her to be. "It's just birds," she said, her voice almost consoling.

  I sneaked out of the house with my burlap sack and spent an hour or so combing my neglected bottle turf. It was a good trip that netted me around twenty empties. Nat seemed glad to see me but I just grunted hello.

  "How come you're mad every time you come here? Every­body else in the world smiles when they get money."

  "Just pay me, wouldja, Nat?"

  "What's with that feather in your hair?"

  I started telling him about how Connie had slaughtered the duck but he made me stop, genuinely upset by it. And he hadn't even known Roslyn.

  More coins into the grape preserves jar, new money on top of old: I was getting there, creeping toward my goal a dime-width at a time.

  That night the stupid deacon made a huge fuss over the fresh-killed duck, the likes of which he hadn't tasted in ages. I chewed on a hamburger while Connie and Angie slowly ate their por­tions of Roslyn. Only the deacon took seconds.

  You don't raise chickens - you keep them and they raise themselves, permitting you to watch. A chicken doesn't become loyal to his master, or protective of him. No pet ever really does, but chickens are honest about it. The arrangement is clear from the start: food for eggs. No confusion.

  I could easily watch those five birds for hours at a time. They fought, strutted, preened. They sprinted as if they meant to run for miles but always stopped at the fence line. At night, roosting, they tucked their heads into their crops. In the darkness they looked like feathered lungs as they swelled and shrank with each breath.

  Rosiello was wrong about one thing - they never did figure a way to reach the tomato plants, secure behind wire.

  Angie taught me how to hypnotize a chicken. He took one of the white ones and held her head down, beak nearly touching the ground. Then he took a stick and slowly drew a straight line in the dirt within the bird's line of vision. Over it he drew a curved line, then a straight line, then another curved one.

  He kept this up for a few minutes and told me
to release the bird. I did, my sweaty palms clinging momentarily to the feath­ers. The bird stayed still as a statue.

  "How come?" I whispered, watching the paralyzed bird.

  "Magic." Laughing, Angie aimed a soft kick at her tail, break­ing the spell in an explosion of noise and feathers.

  We threw a bunch of packing straw from a crystal set Connie had into the yard for nesting materials. They made nests and sat on them for a few weeks. The nests became dung-encrusted, but no eggs. Connie began to curse the birds.

  The first egg came from the salt-and-pepper bird the day after Connie threatened to make cacciatore out of the lot of them. Angie discovered it by sliding his hand under her. He pulled his hand out and made me feel it there, too. Salt and Pepper let me take it without a fuss.

  It was streaked brown and white with dung. I felt repulsed until Connie straightened me out.

  "Where'd you think eggs came from, their mouths?" She wiped it clean with a soft dish towel. "Nice," she admitted. "At least you bought one hen."

  "Give the others time," Angie said.

  Rosiello knew his birds, all right. Within a week all five were laying.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  August. An occasional postcard from my father (Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Washington) but no word from Vic. Angie and I went for haircuts together, to the home of an old Italian who spoke almost no English. He cut my hair first, running an electric clipper up the back of my neck as if I were a sheep. It took about two minutes, then he dusted my neck generously with talcum powder. I ran my hand over the back of my head: sandpaper.

  Angie got the exact same haircut, his white hair mingling with my brown on the floor. Angie said something in Italian to the barber, gesturing at me the whole while.

  "Sally boy?" he asked. "Painta pick-cha too?"

  "Oh yeah, he paints all the time," Angie said. "Just like his old man did."

  The barber kissed me brutally on the forehead, then Angie got the same smacker. We walked jauntily back to Shepherd Avenue, the breeze cool on our identical scalps.

  Rosemary was frantic because Vic wasn't writing her, despite her bombardment of letters, as well as cakes the size and heft of missiles. Connie wasn't much better as two Sundays passed without his usual collect call.

  Angie and I willingly went to church with Connie. We were entertained by Deacon Sullivan, though his visits to the house now were less frequent. He had a hard time looking me in the eye.

  On my own time without Angie I turned out paintings two and three a day. As much as the work itself I loved that rolltop desk and that musty corner of the cellar. No one could get me there. When I painted, Connie and Angie treated me as if I were a surgeon in the middle of an operation.

  But she complained about my pale color from all those hours indoors.

  "Casper the friendly ghost," she said. "What's Sally gonna say when he sees him? He'll think we kept him locked up."

  "Let's take him to the beach," Angie said.

  "Why? You wanna go swimming?"

  "I don't know," Angie said. "I might go in, once we get there. Joey'll go in the water, anyway. You can't keep a kid out of the ocean."

  "Well, don't expect me to go in," Connie said.

  "You don't have to," Angie said happily, the trip assured. "I probably won't go in myself.

  "So why are we goin'? We could put lawn chairs on the roof."

  Angie waved her off. "Ahh, that ain't the same. There's wind at the beach, sand. We can get hot dogs. . . . For Christ's sake let's just do it. You want a breeze around here you have to go down the block and wait for the train."

  Connie shrugged. "All right. Tomorrow." Angie winked at me. "But we bring lunch," she added. "Hot dogs." She shuddered. "If you knew what went into those hot dogs you wouldn't go near one."

  I never saw a bathing suit like my grandmother's. It was a black thing the shape of a sofa slipcover, with narrow straps that fit over her shoulders and bit into the flesh. On her upper arm was the largest vaccination mark I'd ever seen, big as a silver dollar and raised high off the skin like a burn scar. There were few blemishes on Connie's vast expanse of skin, just a couple of red freckles like confectioners' sugar dots. The suit ended at her knees in a lacy frill.

  Her bare feet were shaped exactly like her shoes. They had good-sized arches and well-formed heels, but the toes were a tangle. The big toes crossed over to the next ones, which were like shriveled cocktail frankfurters. The calluses were a thick, opaque yellow. It was as if her feet had been mangled in some vicious piece of machinery.

  At Rockaway Beach cigarette butts were mixed into the sand like caraway seeds in rye bread. The place was a carnival of whites, blacks, Puerto Ricans, and radios.

  We plodded through the hot sand. "If we sit near colored, we have to listen to jazz," Connie said.

  "So we'll sit near white," Angie said.

  "Then we'll have to listen to that rock and roll."

  "We won't sit near anybody, Con."

  "It's too crowded not to sit near anybody."

  Angie laughed, squatted, and scooped up two cigarette butts. "Eh, we'll stuff these in your ears, you won't hear nothin'."

  "You just try it, buster."

  It was crowded, though. There were wire litter baskets all over the place but they were crammed with junk, so beer cans and paper bags blew all over the place like tumbleweeds. Young mothers changed babies. Once in a while, when the wind was right, you smelled the ocean, but mostly the odors were suntan oil, hot dogs, perspiration.

  We set the blanket down about twenty yards from the surf. Connie said, "If the tide's comin' in, we're dead."

  "If it's comin' in, we'll move, we won't die," Angie said, peeling off his T-shirt. He looked great. The hair on his chest was a cluster of steel wool so thick you couldn't see the skin beneath it. He was lightly tanned to his elbows and halfway down his neck. His legs and belly were even whiter than mine.

  "Mr. America," Connie jeered. With the two of them in bathing suits it finally occurred to me that she outweighed him by quite a few pounds. If they were boxers they'd have been three weight divisions apart.

  Connie pointed at me. "Funny, this one's half Irish but he's darker than you."

  "I have a name, you know, Connie," I said.

  "Joey," she said, as if pronouncing a word from a foreign language. "Eh, I like to just talk. No sense usin' your name when I'm lookin' right at you, am I right?"

  Angie's bathing suit was black - Connie must have bought it for him - with a belt and buckle that fastened. He rubbed his palms along his ribs and took deep breaths.

  "I didn't even know until now that this was what I wanted to do," he said, his eyes on the ocean. "I was wanting to do something and it was come to the beach."

  "You said you wanted to come because Joey was pale," Con­nie said. Twice in one day, she'd said my name! It was a record never to be broken.

  Angie ignored her remark. "Who's comin' with me to the water?"

  "Mel" I said. Connie didn't budge.

  "Swim now, then you can eat," she said.

  "We won't be long unless we drown," Angie said.

  "The comedian."

  My experiences with swimming had been at the Roslyn pool, in bright blue water with lanes painted on the bottom. I'd learned to swim on kickboards alongside ropes strung with safety buoys.

  The sight of the ocean scared me. The water looked black as ink, and the surf slammed down so hard I could feel it through my feet.

  Angie took me by the elbow. "Jeez, I forgot to even ask - can you swim?"

  "Sure I can swim," I said indignantly.

  "Undertow's pretty strong, Joey. I'll show you what I mean."

  I held his rough hand. We walked into the surf and stopped where the waves broke at my calves. After they hit, foamy water bubbled around my ankles like tiny nibbling animals. It spread like a blanket ten feet behind us, groaned, hesitated, and began rolling back to the ocean.

  "Here it is," Angie said, his voice gleeful as he s
queezed my hand.

  The sucking sensation made me gasp out loud. Angie laughed.

  "Easy, pal, she can't hurt you." Sand swirled around my feet and squeezed through my toes. Suddenly I was standing in a pair of snug holes. Another wave broke, splashing my groin. My testicles tightened and crept high into the safety of my scrotum.

  Gooseflesh popped out on my arms. I was looking at a sailboat way out on the horizon, maybe half a mile away, and was certain the power of the undertow would yank me right out there and tangle me up in the seaweed at the bottom.

  "Let's go back to Connie," I said.

  "Already?" Angie splashed water on his back to get used to its temperature.

  "I'm cold."

  "Look, I'm gonna swim, I need it. Can you get back alone?" I yanked my feet free with two loud sucks. "There's a big white and red umbrella near Connie. I'll look for it."

  "Right. See ya later."

  He trotted toward the approaching wave and dove right into the teeth of it. I was paralyzed by his action and didn't notice it coming at me. The beast knocked me down, gurgled water past my ears, and started drawing me toward that sailboat.

  I flipped onto my belly, dug my fingers and toes into the sand. When the wave had drawn all the way back to the ocean I staggered to my feet, wiping sand and water from my eyes. I tasted salt. I thought I could hear the wave laughing.

  Angie's back was to the shore. He stood up to his waist in the water, beyond the breakers. His head looked small with his hair flat to his scalp. He crouched, pushed off, and began swimming, keeping his head out of the water.

  From the hard but damp sand where the tide had receded I watched his jerky strokes, white limbs swinging, silver head flashing and twisting toward alternate shoulders at each stroke, like the head of a golf course sprinkler. For a moment I thought I'd never see him again, that he'd be gone like my father and Vic and Mel.

  "No," I said out loud. "He'll be back." I watched Angie swim until the sun was too bright on the water for my eyes to bear it.

  With furry yellow sunspots still fading from my retinas I searched for that red and white umbrella.

  Connie laughed. "You didn't last long."