by Scott Brown
Then, with no warning, life at Eastern Avenue came to a screeching end. Midway through my second-grade year, my mother announced that the three of us were moving to Malden. She was marrying, again.
Chapter Four
Malden
My mother met Al Di Santo in Wakefield. He was a bartender at the Colonial, a large restaurant and function facility adjacent to a golf course. But he lived two towns away down Route 1 in Malden, Massachusetts, a town that dates back to the Puritans, who noted their discovery of “an uncouth wilderness,” and bought the land from “a remnant” of the once powerful tribe of Pawtucket Indians, according to the meticulous 1880 History of Middlesex County by Samuel Adams Drake. Like many budding Massachusetts towns, it tried one or two names, and was known for a while as “Mystic Side,” for its proximity to the Mystic River, before a group of local settlers petitioned to have its name changed to Maldon, named for Maldon, England. Two centuries later, someone inexplicably altered the spelling to Malden. In the 1690s, during the Salem witch craze, Malden imprisoned two local women for practicing witchcraft. In 1742, the town census valued both an “oald negroman” and a cow at ten pounds each. In April of 1775, Malden’s seventy-five-man militia was called to arms for the Battle of Lexington and may well have captured a British supply line. Over time, Malden evolved into a factory town, making nails, dyeing silk, and manufacturing shoes and pieces of block tin. It would become home to the Boston Rubber Shoe Company, whose treasurer was a man named Elisha S. Converse. But I never thought of the Converse sneakers that dotted the basketball courts as having some connection to my new home. What I knew was that across Route 1, Malden bordered the town of Revere.
Al was older, probably about forty-five or maybe just beyond; my mom was barely thirty. He had been married before and had two children, both of whom were much older than Leeann and me, and so much removed from his own life that I don’t remember meeting them. Al himself seemed ancient. He was literally Old World, probably first-generation American. I met his white-haired parents a few times. They spoke only bits of broken English, and most of their talking was done in Italian.
I don’t have any memory of meeting Al more than once before we moved in, although maybe I did. Or maybe my mother kept Leeann and me tucked away, hoping that once they were married, Al would adapt and adjust. But Al did neither. He looked at us, Leeann a toddler and me a rambunctious seven-year-old, and was overwhelmed. He didn’t want two young children touching his stuff, bringing disorder to his home. He wanted a life without kids, and he didn’t get one, unless my mother was able to drop us at my grandparents’ house. When we moved to Malden, C. Bruce Brown went into a kind of exile, or was dispatched from my life by my mother. As in Revere, as with Dan Sullivan, he did not come around much at all. Like instant soup, Al had an instant family, and the temperature was always set slightly below boiling. He was frustrated, and he spent his time grumbling.
His house was a small split-level on a cul-de-sac, Como Street, named for an Italian family who lived across the street, worked in construction, and probably built most of the homes. The Comos had a seven-year-old boy, and Bobby became one of my best friends. From the beginning, I knew that Al’s house was his house, and his alone. I walked from room to room as if I were tiptoeing around a museum, feeling Al’s eyes upon me even if he wasn’t home. But he was home a lot. He worked bartenders’ hours, and was gone in the evenings, to pour drinks for banquet-goers or restaurant diners. Unlike Dan Sullivan, Al was a small man, about five foot eight and thin, sort of like Sammy Davis, Jr., looking insubstantial but somehow graceful even in his black bartender’s suit. He had thick silvery-black hair, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and smoked all the time, until it was hard to tell where his fingertips ended and the cigarette nub began.
While I had been grateful to get out of Revere, this time I had not wanted to move. I did not want to leave Eastern Avenue, to leave my grandparents and the neighbors’ open doors, my school, my little group of friends. But my mother plucked us up with our few possessions and made off for Malden. We didn’t live in the local downtown—we were high above, on one of the cliffs. Behind Al Di Santo’s house was a sheer rock wall that I scrambled up and down, rocks that were probably the legacy of a million years of glaciers, advancing and retreating across the Massachusetts landscape. As the glaciers drifted down from eastern Canada, as much as ten thousand feet of ice accumulated, compacting the lush ground where dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles had once roamed. When the glaciers melted and receded, much of the fragile soil went with them, while the bedrock remained. The hill on which Al Di Santo’s home stood was the legacy of millennia of geological struggle.
Al’s foundation itself had been built into the rocks, and rising up from the floor of his basement was a giant cliff stone, tall enough that it almost touched the ceiling. I liked going down to the basement, and imagining the stone as a fort, I would shimmy up it and slip myself into the narrow space between the top of the rock and the ceiling. But Al didn’t like Leeann or me down there, where he had boxes of his stuff, tools, and other private things.
Without my grandmother’s projects table, I tried to create my own amusements. And whenever possible, I tried to do them outside, beyond the confines of Al’s untouchable furniture and walls. One afternoon in the backyard, not that long after we had moved in, I tied a two-by-four to a rope, swung it over my head like a lasso, and sent it sailing in the general direction of my sister. It hit the mark, slamming right into her head, bloodying her nose, and sending her sprawling to the ground. My mom heard Leeann screaming and raced outside. When she asked me what had happened, I probably said something stupid like the wood had fallen from the sky. Somehow she didn’t place much stock in my explanation, especially when she saw the rope, the two-by-four piece, and Leeann. Naturally, she immediately began screaming and waving her arms at me. Everyone was yelling and screaming. I was in tears. I had never wanted to hurt my sister; it was a backyard prank that had gone horribly wrong. But my mother would never allow me to forget that afternoon. She untied the two-by-four and kept it on the top of the fridge or some other storage spot in the house. When I misbehaved, she would haul it out and whack me with it. For years, she kept that vicious block of wood, until one day when I was much older and had finally grown too strong. Then, with my teenage hands, I grabbed it from her and threw it away, daring her to go get it. She never did, and the dreaded wood was gone.
I don’t remember my mother fighting with Al the way she fought with Dan. He wasn’t one to hit and he was never cruel. He actually was a good listener, a skill honed during all those nights of tending bar when people poured out their troubles to him over a scotch or a beer. He could have a temper, but I was never scared of him. He was not a violent man who raised his fists, and I grew immune to the strings of curses when he on occasion spewed them. Words, I felt, were nothing.
My mother and Al were both working, often at night. Many evenings, my mom would drop me and Leeann off with Gram and Gramps; we would play at their house and then fall asleep there in our pajamas. After her shift was over, my mom collected us, asleep, and drove us back down Route 1 to Al’s place in Malden, where it was easy to hear the rumble of the highway whenever the windows were open.
I was always in trouble, at home, in school. I seemed to gravitate to it, as if it had tentacles that it could unfurl and draw me in—as
when I decided to flick matches at the edge of the woods in a neighbor’s backyard on Como Street because I was bored and looking for something to do. I did not have a good history with matches. When we lived on Eastern Avenue, I had tried to build a campfire inside my grandparents’ garage. First, I gathered sticks and dry leaves from the corners of the yard; then I brought them into the garage. I stacked up my fire makings, struck a match, and touched it to the dry kindling. I was expecting a little fire, but instead the flames took off, almost taking the garage with them.
That should have cured my interest in fire, but it didn’t. One day at Al’s house, feeling bored, I grabbed a matchbook and wandered outside, flicking the matches against the striker. I walked into a friend’s backyard, still flicking the heads and watching them catch fire and sail through the air. They ignited like little rockets, gliding on the wind until they were consumed. But one didn’t—it reached the twigs and leaves at the edge of the woods in the back of one of the houses on Como Street. They were dry and waiting to ignite. I heard the crackle of fire and for a few seconds stared in disbelief as the twigs and leaves caught, the fire crumpling them up and sucking them in. They popped and sparked as they burned and the sparks carried, until it wasn’t just one little patch of leaves but an entire section of ground. Panicked, I raced over to stamp out the flames, but they were moving fast, fanning out across other dry leafy patches, and the heat was rising, melting the soles of my sneakers as I jumped up and down.
Water, I thought, and ran to get a hose, but it was dry and I couldn’t get the outside tap on. Buckets. I grabbed two and filled them at another house, but the fire had already started snaking back into the woods. The underbrush caught and then the trees, which made loud crackling sounds as they glowed and turned orange. I had dampened one foot of ground, but that meant nothing. The flames had taken on a life of their own. Frantic, I pounded on a neighbor’s door and yelled to call the fire department. The red engines roared up the steep hill, grim-faced firemen in full gear dragging their bulky hoses across the ground and spraying down everything, until there was only black char, and curls of gray smoke were hissing up from the ground. It took about an hour to put the fire out. The police came too and gave me a warning about matches, telling me never to flick them again. “You started a forest fire!” my mother screamed at me. I don’t know what Al said to my mother about having a kid under his roof who would walk out with a pack of matches, but of course with all the cigarettes, there were always plenty of packs lying around. It didn’t matter. My mother was hysterical enough for both of them, and I got smacked with the two-by-four for that one.
The next morning, the air smelled like soot, there were burn marks at least halfway up the tree trunks, and the ground looked as though someone had come and shaved it too far down. I wasn’t allowed out of the house.
But I wasn’t entirely chastened, and I was not terrified of fire. One day, while we were still living in Malden, my mother caught me sneaking a cigarette, lighting the tip and trying to inhale. She didn’t give me a lecture on smoking. She yelled for a few minutes and then she made me eat the cigarette. All of it. The white paper liner, the cured tobacco leaves, the filter that I had just moments before been holding between my teeth, and the singed end. She stood over me as I chewed and swallowed, choking down the last bite. “That will teach you to smoke,” she said. That and throwing up the chewed cigarette pieces afterward, the tobacco-tinged stomach acid burning my throat. Even as my mom and Al stubbed out their butts in ashtrays or tossed them into the bushes, I never went near another one, not even when I was in college or grown.
I was the kid who couldn’t sit still. As I had done on Eastern Avenue, I roamed. I made my way down to Broadway Street. There was a tile store there, and I used to root in the Dumpster for bits and pieces of broken tile, gather them up, and carry them home to make things to give as presents for holidays or for special occasions. I met a black family who lived on the main road, just beyond our backyard, and made friends with their son, and for a while the other kids in school would chase me home, yelling a few choice slurs. I had no idea that places like Newark and Detroit were about to ignite in race riots, with buildings going up in flames, or that Boston would soon face bitter fights over school busing and racial integration. My friend was a kid who would play with me, and I could play with him. When I wasn’t with him, I hung out with Bobby Como across the street. We watched The Lone Ranger and Speed Racer, rode our bikes, and played army and hide-and-seek across the backyards. I knew some of the older kids on our tiny block, including Jimmy and Henry McGowan. The McGowans lived in a small, white house on the curve of the cul-de-sac. Unlike the rest of the houses, which were bunched up against the street and each other, theirs had a real yard and a bit more land. Millie was their mom, and Fred, their dad, was blind. Jimmy McGowan was about eighteen or nineteen when I first came to live on Como Street, and I thought he was the best, the coolest guy in the whole world. He was happy-go-lucky and always laughing and smiling. Then he got a buzz cut and went off to Vietnam. When he came back, he was a totally different person. He didn’t smile. Before then, the concept of war had never registered with me, but now I began to think about war and conflict and soldiers fighting and I wondered what happened. I never got a chance to ask him, and if I had, I doubt he would have said more than a few words, and most of those might have been incomprehensible to an eight-year-old.
He had, I later learned, been an explosives-demolition expert. I was told that he had to blow up the bombs and hidden mines that ripped other soldiers to shreds in the camps and jungles of Vietnam. Henry, his brother, fought in the war too.
I had an absentee father and a stepfather who found me a nuisance, so the closest substitute was the older kids in the neighborhood. They were cool kids who seemed to have no rules or curfews and who could be out on their own. Not long after I moved to Malden, I started hanging around with one guy, a thirteen-year-old teenager who lived nearby in a standard postwar Cape house. Around the neighborhood, he and I often used to cut through a small patch of woods, the Dexter Road woods, which sat high atop our cliffside hill in Malden, two blocks above Como Street. It was the way I sometimes walked coming home from school. At one time, woods must have covered the entire crest, and even with years of clearing and building, this portion had remained intact. They were a partial continuation of the same woods that, flicking my matches, I would set a corner of aflame.
In the spring and summer, the Dexter Road woods were thick and overgrown, a tangle of vines and low branches springing from ungroomed trees, but they were passable in the fall, winter, and early spring, before everything leafed out in full bloom. Sometimes I would race through them, my feet crunching over the old, dried-up leaves, but mostly I wove into and out of tree trunks, inhaling the ground’s mossy, musty smell and the scent of decaying wood. To a seven-and-a-half-year-old boy, it was exciting to navigate, to roam where there were no manicured grass yards, nothing to worry about stepping on, no rules.
I was in those woods late, but not that late, on a winter afternoon when my teenage friend appeared. He looked at me and said, “Hey, let’s hit the path,” the path that snaked through the woods. We walked a little way down the worn trail and then he turned. He grabbed me and smacked me and showed me the knife in his hand. Initially, I did not realize what was going on. I thought he was my friend. Th
en, I began quaking. My entire body began trembling with fear and confusion. As he held the knife, he reached for his pants. At first, I thought he was going to take a leak. Then he undid his belt, and soon his pants were down. He had a look in his eye that I had never seen before.
He gripped me in one hand, held his knife in the other, and he pointed and told me to put my mouth on him. I had no idea why he wanted me to do it or what he wanted me to do. I was totally shocked, completely uncomprehending, and helpless in the middle of the path. I kept hoping that I would hear the crunch of another footstep, that someone would come down the path to help.
But it was just the two of us, hidden deep inside those woods. He flashed the knife and told me to get on my knees as he casually stretched himself out on the ground, with the ease of someone who had done this before. I reluctantly dropped down, feeling the chill of the decaying leaves and dirt seep against my pants. It was cold, and we were totally alone. I could have screamed at the top of my lungs and the sound would have been lost to the swaying of trees and the wind.
He settled on his back, with the beginning of a grin on his face, still clutching the knife, and yelled at me, thrusting his hips up in my direction. I lowered my gaze and took a last, frantic look around. I saw a rock. Not a small one, but a good, medium, fist-size rock with some heft to it. While he closed his eyes in anticipation, I shifted for a second and wrapped the rock in my palm. As I started to bend my head, he kept holding his knife, but he briefly let go of me. His free hand was splayed back and he was lying down, waiting, with his stupid grin splitting his face. I knew that I had one chance, just one. As he closed his eyes, I raised the rock high over my head, drove it down into his face and head, and took off. I heard him howl in pain, but I never looked back, I just kept running and running, twisting in between the trees, hearing my feet smack against the old leaves and the hard ground. I ran until I got home and went straight to my room. My chest was heaving, my heart racing. I didn’t know exactly what had happened, and I told no one. I was too sick to eat dinner.
