As I lay there looking at Eddie, I hoped he would make it to be a teacher. He did a lot of my math homework for me. He was already a grade ahead of his age. In math, he was in Mr. Hart’s class.
I woke up the next morning to rain dripping on my head. The whole cardboard house was wet. I asked Eddie what we were going to do about the house.
“Plastic bags should do the trick,” he said.
We both had to pee. We hadn’t thought about that when we made our house plans. Daylight had arrived, and there were cars going up and down the street behind Kroger. I didn’t want to go out in the rain to pee, so I got up on my knees and scooted up to the front opening of the boxes, which was about three feet from the back of the Kroger building. I pushed the door flap out of the way, and I peed out the opening.
Eddie must have thought it was a pretty good idea, because as soon as I finished, he went. Then he asked “what happens when we have to poop? We can’t poop in the house. It’ll stink up the place.”
I thought about it for a while. “The park has bathrooms, don’t they? We’ll just make sure we go when we’re at the park.”
“Good idea,” he said, handing me a dark banana. Like most every thing else Kroger threw away, it wasn’t as fresh as we would have liked, but it was food.
We lay there and talked about the plan. At most, we would wait for an hour. Then we would go to the park, even if it was still raining. It seldom rained all day long in the summertime. If we were patient, we figured we would get our chance.
Skies began to clear shortly before eight, and we began our trek. The park was less than a half mile away. The Old Man was already off at work, and Feenie never got up that early, so we thought we were safe. Even so, we kept our eyes open for either the blue Chrysler or the brown Riviera.
We talked and played as we walked. We stopped and barked at a couple of dogs that barked at us as we passed their territory. After we mocked each other’s barks, we pushed each other and talked about how we wished every night could be as good as the night we just spent.
When we got to about a hundred yards from the park, Eddie took off running. For a split second, I thought he spotted The Old Man or Feenie. Before I realized he was challenging me to yet another race, he had about a ten yard head start. He could run pretty fast, but I was more than a whole year older, and I could catch him. Although I needed the whole hundred yards to the park to pass him, I touched the slide a split second before he did.
The slide was still wet from the rain. I decided I wasn’t going to wait for it to dry. The park had a lot of really big trees that kept the sun out. It would take at least two hours before they were completely dry.
I ran up the stairs and slid down, landing in a big mud puddle at the bottom. Forged by the feet of hundreds of happy children, it was a good two inches deep. I ran back up and slid down again. Eddie ran up and slid down. Back and forth, up and down, we rode the slide over and over again.
We ran to the merry go round. Nothing extravagant, it was made of six upside-down u-shaped bars welded to a metal platform. A well worn path encircled it, signifying that it, too, was a favorite amongst kids.
Eddie pushed the go-round, running as fast as he could through the sloppy mud. I had tons of fun. I think Eddie did too. We pushed each other several times, but quickly grew tired. Pushing it was hard work, especially in the mud. Besides, Eddie was never much for just spinning in circles. He always exited feeling a little queasy.
Though they were considered girly, the swings were fun. We swung for about ten minutes, then we raced back to the slide. We alternated between the swings and the slide for the next two hours.
Later, while chasing each other, we found a Frisbee. Though we spent the better part of an hour trying, neither of us mastered tossing it like we saw other people do. Others made it look easy, flicking the disk so it glided like a bird through the air. When either of us tried, it didn’t glide at all. It wobbled, then promptly dived, on edge, into the ground.
Sometime around noon, we decided to go back to our makeshift house to get some food. By the middle of that second day, we were growing adept at spotting blue and brown cars. Not yet skilled at identifying makes and models, we quickly ducked out of view whenever we spotted any blue or brown car that resembled the Chrysler or the Riviera. Sure, sometimes we had to make some last-second dives over hedges, or under parked cars, but we grew braver as time passed on. We were pretty sure we couldn’t be caught.
After we ate some stale bread and a green bell pepper, we decided to head back up to the park. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon, a time when The Old Man was working and Feenie was usually putting on her face for Bingo. Almost two whole days passed without a beating. Our wounds were beginning to heal. We felt renewed. We very much enjoyed our time in the park earlier.
We were nervous as began our trek. We kept an alert eye out for either of the cars. As we made our way up Randolph Avenue, we passed the General Tire Company. The Old Man worked there sometimes on Saturdays, when he wasn’t at the foundry. I’ll give him this: he must have loved to work, because he sure did enough of it.
Eddie peeked in to the open bays at the General Tire. To our relief, The Old Man wasn’t there.
We made it past a few home-based businesses. Then we passed the fancy church. I had never been inside that church, but judging by its outside beauty and elegance, I figured I had to be pretty rich in order to attend services there. I didn’t figure I’d be attending anytime soon.
All that was left was the laundry mat and Scottie’s, a restaurant famous in the area for their miniature burgers. The south perimeter of the park adjoined the road directly behind Scottie’s. We would have the whole afternoon to play.
We planned to play until about five, when The Old Man got off work, unless he worked overtime. We would hide for about half an hour, then come back out and play until dark. After that, we would head back to our new home.
Though meager by traditional standards, we felt the home was the best home ever. We enjoyed all the food we could eat. We didn’t feel the sting of belts or battery straps or switches or high-heeled shoes. It was serviceable shelter for two young brothers trying to forge a new life.
We made it to the laundry mat. We stayed on alert for the Riviera and the Chrysler. We paid no attention to the little yellow VolksWagon Beetle that had just pulled into the laundry mat parking lot. That turned out to be a huge mistake.
Our light-hearted discussion about playing at the park came to an abrupt halt. Out of the blue, Eddie said “oh, crap! There’s Dad.”
I laughed, thinking he was trying to scare me. I turned to him to tell him to stop messing around, but from the look on his face, I could tell he was serious. I began to turn around, hoping to gauge how far away The Old Man was. Before I could get fully turned, the hulking brute grabbed me by the shirt. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get away.
“Run!” I shouted to Eddie, hoping in my heart he wouldn’t. I knew I was going to get it good. But somehow, a good beating was a bit easier to handle when Eddie was there. Following a beating, we would spend hours plotting our revenge. Plotting helped us take our minds off of our pain. Plus, it always gave us a reason to get up the next day.
Eddie yelled at The Old Man. “Why can’t you just let us alone? We ain’t hurtin’ anyone. We got food and water. Plus, no one has smacked us around for two days now. Feels pretty good.”
Eddie was about ten yards away. The Old Man shouted “Get your little ass in this car now, boy!”
Eddie didn’t come.
“I SAID NOW!”
Eddie heard the anger in his voice. As he approached the car, he put his arms up over his head and waited to be slapped. But inexplicably, the slap never came. The Old Man grabbed him by the arm and firmly pushed him into the back seat.
As soon as he sat down in the front seat, The Old Man began to lecture us. Eddie tried to convince him to just leave us to live on the street. He told The Old Man “please let us live behind Kroger
, at least until school starts. We’ll come home on our own then, we promise.”
I think he really believed he could talk The Old Man into it, but The Old Man wasn’t having any of it.
My thoughts turned to the inevitable beating we would get when we got home.
The Old Man asked “why do you two always got to do things like this?”
Eddie quickly responded “because that’s what we’re supposed to do: run away from danger.”
Startled, The Old Man quickly proclaimed “you two dumbasses don’t know danger from your asses. The only danger you boys face is stepping on a snake when you’re playing outside.”
I thought “maybe he really is that blind. How could he see the all the bruises and welts all over our bodies, and not wonder how they got there? Maybe we should just walk around naked.” I saw the big bruises and welts on Eddie almost everyday. I know he saw them on me. We both saw even bigger bruises and welts on Lee.
As we pulled into the front yard, we were relieved to see the blue Chrysler wasn’t there. Jeff and Lee were washing clothes. The Old Man and Tom Higgins, the owner of the yellow Volkswagon beetle, went back to work to finish out their shifts. Jeff was told to not let us out of his sight.
Jeff told us Feenie and The Old Man had been looking for us almost all night. He said The Old Man didn’t get to sleep until three in the morning, then woke up at five thirty to go to work.
We asked him how mad Feenie was. He said she seemed more concerned than mad. But he also said she’d be pissed off when she got home. “I think she’s playing Bingo at the VFW tonight, so if you can stay out of her way when she gets home to get ready, then maybe she’ll get over it and won’t beat the shit out of you.”
Lee needed more water from the well, so Eddie and I went and got it.
I don’t know why we didn’t get beat that night. Maybe Feenie had a real good night at Bingo, or maybe The Old Man told her he already beat our asses. Either way, I was pretty happy to see the sun come up, not having been dragged from bed and beaten through the night.
We spent the next several weeks working the garden.
Chapter 8: Free Fall
Canning season had come and gone, with little turmoil, at least for me. Lee spent much of the inside time working closely with Feenie, while Eddie and I did most of the harvesting. School opened as it always did, with the first few days a feeling out process. After a while, I settled into my routine.
The play area at Third Ward School was small, with a set of swings, some monkey bars and a little merry-go-round. The school sat up on a hill, about thirty yards above the main road. The school grounds sloped steeply down toward the main road, stopping abruptly at the forty-two inch high steel rails sticking up out of an eight foot concrete retaining wall. Looking over the rails, a sidewalk butted up to the bottom of the wall, separated from the main road by a set of guardrails.
The school itself was old, like much of the town. Desks had seen many generations of students travel through. Lockers, stacked two high, lined the walls. First through third graders used the lower set of lockers, while the upper set was used by fourth through sixth graders. Older students and younger students rarely ran into each other during the day. The older kids had to get their books and be in the classroom seven minutes before the younger kids. I figured that the school created that policy to give the younger kids a chance to get their stuff out of their lockers free of torture from the older kids. At the end of the day, the young kids put their books back into their lockers and went to their busses seven minutes earlier than the older kids.
Snow fell the previous night. It usually didn’t get so cold in late October, about once every four years. It wasn’t much, just enough to cover the ground, maybe a half inch or so. A cold drizzle fell the day before, leaving the ground very slick. We promised Mrs. Poston we would be careful if she let us outside to play. She agreed, but reminded us that the grass was slick and would be off limits. She took us outside and told us to stay in the recess area.
I was running through the recess area, reminding myself to stay off of the grass. When I rounded the building, I caught the edge of the grass. Before I could get back onto the sidewalk, I slipped and fell on my butt, then went sliding down the hill, toward the rails.
When I woke up in the hospital, The Old Man and Feenie were bed side. I hadn’t yet become fully aware of my surroundings before I heard Feenie ask “why the hell were you playing so close to the rails?”
I didn’t answer. I remembered falling and heading toward the rails, but I had no clue how I ended up in the hospital.
Doctors and nurses scurried about. One doctor shined a little light into my eyes, asking me a bunch of questions. Still not completely coherent, I was unable to answer them.
Over the next few minutes, I slowly began to regain my wits. I desperately wanted to get up and get out. Try as I might, I couldn’t move. They had me tied down to the bed, with straps across my chest and my forehead. I could bend my arms at the elbow, but other than that, no matter how hard I struggled, I was locked in place.
I told the nurse that I was ok and that I wanted to go home. The doctor explained that I needed stay still, because I had hurt my head. He said they couldn’t fix it if I was moving. The Old Man, standing somewhere behind the doctors and out of my range of sight, declared “boy, you need to stay still so they can fix you.”
I spent the whole afternoon and evening getting examined. I think they must have used ten different machines on me. They took X-rays of my head and neck. They shaved most of my head and hooked up a bunch of wires to it. I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I didn’t feel hurt, except for a little headache.
I guess I must have been unconscious for a while. I remembered nothing from the time shortly after I slipped until I woke up. I didn’t remember Mrs. Poston jumping over the rail to attend to me. Likewise, I didn’t remember the ambulance ride to the hospital. Nothing registered.
I spent the next week in the hospital, each day growing more and more restless. On the third day, my head started itching. When I reached up to scratch it, I felt the stitches they had put in to sew my scalp together. I had needed stitches before, but never more than the nine they sewed my shoulder up with when I fell out of the apple tree, landing awkwardly on the metal pot we used to collect apples.
Later, when Feenie came to visit, I asked her how many stitches I had. She said that there was a hundred and twelve. She went on to explain that the stitches would come out in about ten days or so, but my skull had been cracked open and they did a lot of work to put it back together.
“The doctors say that you’re gonna have to take it slow for the next couple of months. You’re gonna need to wear a protective helmet for a while, until your skull heals a little bit,” she explained.
I thought about stupid I was going to look in a helmet. I knew my brothers would be ok with it, but other kids would probably make fun of me. Those same kids that poked fun at me and Eddie for being poor would have even more ammunition. I dreaded the thought, especially knowing that I wouldn’t be able to physically fight back for several months, at least until my head healed.
Feenie said the fall left me with something called epilepsy. She told me I might have unexpected seizures. Of course, I didn’t understand any of the medical terminology she used, and I never gave it much thought. I was just looking forward to going home.
The doctors did their best to explain it terms I could understand. They insisted that I needed to wear my helmet for the next few months, until my head healed. They impressed upon me the importance of taking my medication. Finally, they stressed that I would have to severely restrict most physical activity and completely forego any that involved heavy contact.
My arrival back home was met with apprehension. Not fully understanding the nature of my injuries, my brothers treated me gingerly. They each were far too cautious when playing around me. I reminded them constantly that I had a helmet on for protection, and that I could still do mo
st things that didn’t require my getting hit or tackled hard. Though once in a while I tried to mix it up with them, I was considered “off limits” when it came to fighting. To her credit and my surprise, even Feenie managed to temper herself if I did something that she didn’t approve of.
After a week at home, I made my return to school. Mike Anthony, a pretty tough match for me even when healthy, laughed and called me “retarded helmet head” on my first day back. We had come to blows on two previous occasions, both ending in pretty much a draw.
He picked and picked on me all through science class. Mr. Hartley informed him his behavior was unacceptable, but he continued. He threatened to pull the helmet off “to show the class what Frankenstein looked like.” When he slapped me in the helmet, Eddie told him he’d be talking to James right after class. He pushed Eddie hard to the floor, threatening to put him “in the same shape that your retard brother is in.”
I wasn’t there to witness what happened during lunch that day, but Mike lost three teeth. Rumors abound. One had James informing Mike that payment for fucking with his sick brother was two teeth, while payment for fucking with his littlest brother was one tooth. It was said that James even afforded Mike the choice of who would remove the teeth: James, Mike’s dentist, or Mike himself. When Mike told him that no one would be removing them, James felt he had no choice but to enforce his terms. The first punch knocked out Mike’s upper two front teeth, while the second knocked out a bottom one on the left side.
Rumor also had it that James then stood amongst the crowd of onlookers and calmly proclaimed that those same terms applied to each and every person in the school who messed with me or Eddie. He made it clear that those terms applied to first offenders only, saying “fuck with ‘em once, I’ll knock your teeth out. Fuck with ‘em again, you won’t get a third chance.”
I’m glad that Randy Weiss was a gentle giant. I can’t imagine James being able to enforce those terms on him. Randy just went about his business, never going out of his way to create waves. But it was suspected amongst the student body that he could take anyone in the school, if he so desired, including James. Thank God it wasn’t in his nature to see proclamations such as James’ as any sort of challenge.
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