'74 & Sunny

by A. J. Benza

  “What’s that?” he said, clutching my sleeve.

  “It’s a frog. Don’t worry about it. They don’t bite and they’re more scared of us than we are of them.”

  What’s more, Gino had a hard time stepping on the squishy carpets in the dimly lit area behind the cabana.

  “It feels like I’m stepping on bologna,” Gino said. “Can’t we wait until morning? I swear I’ll get up early—”

  “Shhh, man! These worms only come out at night. They’re like vampires.”

  “Oh God,” he said, holding a bucket of dirt. “This whole area, A.J. I feel like we’re in that scary silent film. I swear Dr. Caligari is going to come out any second.”

  That gave me chicken skin. “Don’t even joke about that movie,” I said. “That gives me the willies.”

  Gino was taken aback. “Oh my God, something gives you the willies? I didn’t think anything spooked you.”

  “Oh, I got my things that scare me shitless. Trust me.”

  “Tell me,” Gino said.

  “Nah, it’s stupid. Come on. We gotta get worms.”

  “I’m scared of clowns,” Gino volunteered.

  That amused me, but I wanted to know more. “Clowns, huh? Clowns like Bozo? Like Ronald McDonald?”

  “Nooo, not Bozo,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure Ronald McDonald isn’t a clown.”

  “Of course he’s a clown,” I said. “He’s got the red nose, the crazy hair, the big shoes. What else does he have to do to prove to you he’s a clown? What do you think he is? Seriously.”

  “I don’t know. I never really thought hard about it. Just a guy who sells hamburgers, I guess,” Gino said.

  I let a minute or two pass before I said anything. “Hamburger salesman, huh?”

  “I guess you’re right,” he said. “Now that I think of it.”

  I lifted a wet rug to see a half dozen or so really lazy earthworms. “Hold the light,” I said. “I got these suckers!”

  Despite the hard, quick work in front of us, Gino needed to be heard. I half looked for worms, and quickly scooped some up, while I waited for a response, any response, from him.

  “I guess I’m scared of, you know, like the clowns people paint in pictures,” he said. “Like sad clowns and stuff. Like the oil paintings of clowns that are in my basement.”

  “Yeah, well, you know what my father says?”

  “I get the feeling it isn’t good.”

  “My father says the clowns that show up at kids’ parties are the kind of guys you should stay away from.”

  Gino thought for a moment, moving the worms around the can with a stick. “What do you think?”

  I gave the dark yard a quick scan. “I think we need to lift four more rugs.”

  “No,” he said. “What do you think about guys who dress up as clowns?”

  “I think makeup is for girls, Gino,” I said. “Not for old men chasing after kids and making balloon animals.”

  Gino stayed quiet and skittishly lifted a soaked shag rug while I quickly grabbed a dirty dozen caught half out of their holes. We methodically repeated this process a couple more times as our teamwork began to click. When we came to the last rug it felt like it weighed 100 pounds. It took both of us to break the rug’s suction from the mud.

  “Holy shit! The mother lode,” I screamed. I held the flashlight in my left hand and went picking like crazy with my right. There were dozens of them all fat and happy that had squirmed too far from their holes. Even Gino grabbed a few and dropped them in the can really quick before wiping his hands on his shorts.

  “Feels good, right?” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Okay, one last rug,” I said. “The one right by the compost. That’s gonna be a tough one because we buried the fluke heads there on Saturday, remember?”

  “Of course I remember. I’ll never forget that for as long as I live.”

  “Okay, it’s gonna stink like crazy. I’ve done this alone a million times. Just take short, quick breaths.”

  “Wait . . . should I breathe through my nose?” Gino said.

  “Well, that just might make you wanna puke,” I said. “And it’ll take days before it leaves your sinuses.”

  “So then I should breathe through my mouth?”

  “No. Then it’ll feel like you ate them.”

  “Okay . . . so breathe through what hole, then?”

  “Just breathe through both. A little at a time. You’re not gonna die.”

  As we made our way over to the farthest corner of the yard, toward the croaking frog and nearer the stink, Gino piped up. “You never told me what you’re scared of.”

  “Now you wanna talk about this?”

  “It gets my mind off the odor.”

  “Fine. Okay. Definitely Dr. Caligari,” I said through shorts bursts of little breaths. “And, uh, Dobermans. Yeah, there are these two Dobermans that live in a house at the end of the canal. And whenever we drive the boat by they go berserk. The crazy owner named ’em Dead and Gone. You imagine that?”

  “That sounds horrifying,” he said. “And those poor dogs have no idea what their names mean.”

  “I don’t know, but the hell with that. This guy, he’s a real asshole. Sometimes when he sees our boat coming and he thinks we’re too close to his dock, he unchains them and they tear ass to the edge of the dock, barking and howling, with their feet kicking up rocks into the canal. Scary as all hell, man. It’s like they want to jump in the boat and attack all of us.”

  “What’s something else that scares you?”

  “Ummm . . . besides the toes that don’t bend on my father’s feet?”

  “No, really.” Gino laughed. “Come on. Tell me.”

  I downshifted the tone real quick. “It’s scary. It’s pretty damn scary to me anyway. And you might be too young to hear it,” I said. “If I tell you—do me a favor: I don’t need you trying to climb into my bed and get under the covers with me tonight.”

  “Yeah, as if . . .”

  “All right, I’m gonna tell you,” I said quietly. “But don’t get all crazy on me out here in the dark. We’re in the farthest, most stinky and scary corner of the yard. Gino, I’m warning you. This could keep you up all night.”

  “As long as it isn’t about clowns,” he said.

  “Okay,” I began. “I don’t like Dr. Caligari, Dobermans, and—ready?—dolls with wooden teeth and busted eyeballs. You happy now?”

  With that, Gino dropped the bucket of worms, scampered across the damp scatter rugs, and shrieked into the house. “Oh my GOD! Wooden dolls . . . broken teeth . . . lazy eyes! Who thinks of that?! Who thinks of that?!”

  Remember, he was reacting to things that scared me.

  It took me twenty minutes to get him settled and calm by slamming a package of Drake’s cupcakes on the table in front of him. “Listen to me . . . just eat these,” I said. “I don’t know why, but they’ll make you feel better and calm you down.”

  “I’m not allowed to eat sweets like this,” Gino said, rocking back and forth in his chair. “I’m not allowed.”

  I looked at this poor kid, staring at a cupcake like he was holding the losing hand in a million-dollar, high-stakes poker game. “Jeez, it’s just a little old cupcake. What’s the worst that could happen? Take a bite and see if you change at all.”

  Gino examined the Drake’s cupcake like it was a lost artifact.

  “I don’t know . . .” he said. “I just see my mother and father telling me not to eat it.”

  “Wanna know the way I see it?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “My father woke us up at the crack of dawn’s ass,” I reasoned. “We spent a lot of time in the hot garden, picking fruit and vegetables and dodging dog shit and mosquitoes the whole time. And then we spent the last hour in pitc
h-black digging out worms, while dodging toads, cicadas, and God knows whatever-the-hell else, just so we can have a pleasurable fishing trip this weekend.”

  “Yeah, that is true,” Gino said.

  “You’re goddamn right it’s true. And it was hard and scary. Do I have to even remind you of you running away at the mention of dolls with wooden teeth and busted eyeballs?”

  “Okay,” Gino said, covering his eyes and squirming in the big wrought-iron kitchen chair. “Please don’t bring that up again.”

  “But old wooden doll teeth and crazy eyeballs is something that scares me, not you,” I said.

  “I never thought of them before, and now they terrify me.”

  “Well, if you ask me, I say you earned that cupcake,” I said.

  Even in his panic, I managed to pick up the bucket of worms he dropped and scoop all of the escapees back inside. And I brought that bounty into the house and showed my father, who was deep in the cold cut drawer, looking to make a sandwich.

  “Dad, there’s gotta be fifty worms in here,” I said. “And more than a few ‘bull-greezers,’ ” which was our word for anything or anyone that was bigger than the norm.

  My father took a good, hard look at the can. “You think this is a good haul?” he said.

  I looked at the amount of Scotch in his glass. It was at least three fingers high, and I knew that couldn’t have been his first, since he’d been home from work for a while. Over the years, I learned those type of open-ended conversations could go both ways: splendid or scary. Happily or horrifyingly.

  He picked up the Maxwell House Coffee can full of muddy dirt and filthy worms and calmly dumped the can on top of the Formica kitchen table. My mother, who somehow always managed to stay nearby at pivotal moments, piped up.

  “Oh Jesus Christ, Al. Now all that shit is on the table we eat on,” she carefully said. “What are you looking to do? Is there something you want to tell the kids?”

  “Yeah, Lilly, there is something I want to tell the kids for your friggin’ information.”

  “Here we go,” my mother began, as Gino’s anxiety—which he wore on his cute little face—began to appear.

  “I want to tell my son and my nephew—while they scrounged around the yard—that what they did was . . . fuckin’ beautiful. Okay? They got the mother lode of worms here. You know what this costs at a bait shop? Do you know, boys?”

  “No, Daddy,” I said, somewhat relieved. “How much?”

  “I have no idea, because I don’t sell fuckin’ worms for a living.” He laughed, a bit too loudly. “But I can tell you worked hard and you found a shitload of worms and there’s no telling how many fish we’ll catch with the worms you have here. I’ll tell you one thing: we don’t have to go to Augie’s Bait and Tackle this weekend.”

  “Okay,” my mother said, trying to mop up the emotions. “A.J., can you put the worms and the dirt back in the can?”

  “I got it, Ma.”

  My father—most likely trying to turn his brother’s desperate phone call into positive results—hugged and kissed me and Gino before elaborating on how important the worms were to helping us put food on our table. “A.J., you’ve done this before. But, Gino . . . having never done this . . . I gotta say I’m very impressed.”

  “Thanks, Uncle Al,” Gino said, picking at his cupcake.

  “Were you ever scared at all, with the unknowns of the backyard?”

  “No,” I said. “He was great, Dad. He got right in there.”

  “Beautiful,” he said. “So, Gino, you had a good time?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It was different. It was a little scary. But, I got the hang of it. It was fun.”

  “Good,” my father said. “Tomorrow morning I’m gonna make you feel even better at o-seven-hundred hours.”

  “Wait, what?” I said. “We did good. Can’t we sleep in tomorrow?”

  “It’s not all about you,” my father said. “This is for Gino. You wanna feel better every day?” he asked Gino.

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  “Do you trust your uncle Al?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I’ll see you guys before I go to work in the morning.”

  “It can’t wait until tomorrow night?” I asked.

  “No. And hey . . . do me a favor. Clean the table. There are worms all over the place. Make your mother happy.”

  7

  RADAR LOVE

  My mother was nice enough to gently walk into my room and shake Gino and me awake a few minutes before 7:00 a.m. Neither one of us particularly cared that she had made some potato and eggs for us, but if she hadn’t woken us up, we would have probably suffered through the indignity of another reveille and canon shot from my father. So we got up, pulled on some shorts, and headed down to the kitchen. My father was seated there, dressed sharply for work and all, reading the paper and grimacing through a cup of what my own mother always admitted was the “worst coffee ever made.”

  We sat at the table with the potato and eggs too steaming hot to eat, while we rubbed the sleep from our eyes. Gino and I stared at each other—but didn’t dare say anything—as we readied for this gigantically important moment my dad promised us the night before.

  As usual, he was reading the obituary section first. “Let me see here,” he said real low. “Aaron . . . Abelson . . . Addison . . . Allen . . . Aponte . . . a lot of As checked out. Almost all in their sleep. Lucky bastards.”

  “Are those all dead people?” Gino asked me.

  “Yeah. He reads this section expecting to find his name.”

  Gino twisted his face in confusion. “What?”

  “Boys, eat,” my mother said. “It’s gonna get cold.”

  My father went on with the names of the dead. “Baker . . . Battaglia—I think I sold him carpet. Bay . . . Beale . . . Getting closer,” he said. “Behrens . . . Bellini . . . Bent . . . ah, shit, Bittinger. Nope. Not there yet,” he said aloud. “Your friend up there passed me by again.”

  He folded the paper away and got back to his last gulp of bad coffee.

  “Why do you check the death notices, Uncle Al?” Gino asked.

  “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me—like the rest of my family,” he said.

  Gino mounted up as much courage as he could. “Umm . . . why don’t you try me?”

  My father checked his wristwatch, knowing he could give Gino only the CliffsNotes version of his weekly nightmare/comedy bit. We had heard it a hundred times already.

  It was brand-new territory for Gino.

  “Maybe you’ve seen the funeral parlor down the street,” my father began. “It’s called Chapey’s. And I have dreams that the owner of the funeral home, Fred Chapey, he tosses rocks at my window to wake me up, see? “

  “Let me take it from here, Dad,” I said. I knew it by heart. “And in that shadow hour before dawn, his rocks at the window wake you up and he says real scary-like, ‘Al . . . .we need you. When are you coming up the street? Business is dead.’ ”

  “That’s terrible,” Gino said.

  “Did I get it right, Dad? What did I miss?”

  My father turned his empty coffee cup and laughed at the pile of bitter grinds at the bottom. “You forgot that he’s standing at the foot of the driveway and he’s holding a brand-new black suit that I’d be buried in. He’s holding a suit because I don’t own one.”

  “Ew . . . that gives me chills,” Gino said.

  My mother, as usual, stepped in to break up the calamity. “Jesus Christ, what are you filling these kids’ heads with? Don’t make your dreams become their nightmares, Al.”

  “You didn’t hear the rocks on the window?”

  “I couldn’t hear a hurricane over your snoring.”

  “That’s great, Dad,” I said, “but we woke up at seven—and this is my summer vacation—b
ecause you had something very important to do with us. Can we get to the point here?”

  My father reached into his jacket pocket and fished out a plastic bag of pills. He tossed them on the table toward Gino.

  Gino seemed a little alarmed, but not too much because he was very familiar with the pills inside the bag. I guess he was embarrassed a bit because we were all present.

  My father spoke up. “Now, I’m no doctor—but I am an ex-undercover narc—and it looks to me like there are about one thousand pills, vitamins, and supplements in this here bag,” he said. “Your father told me to make sure you keep up with this regimen while you are here with us. You know about this, right?”

  “Yes, Uncle Al,” he said. “Those are the medicines I have always taken every morning that will eventually make me feel better . . . and better.”

  “Better and better,” my father repeated.

  “Yeah, that’s the plan,” Gino said, finally eating his potato and eggs.

  “What does the term better and better mean to you?” my father asked.

  Gino put his fork down, twirled his hair with his left hand, and tried to answer the question. “I guess . . . you know . . . that the longer I take the medications, the more I will get better and better.”

  “Better and better,” my father said, with little emotion—weighing the bag of pills in his hand. “Is this a phrase you and your father say a lot?”

  “Well, yeah,” Gino said. “It’s part of the mind-control meetings my father goes to.”

  My mother and father exchanged looks like I’d never seen before. Like they had both just seen a UFO. He pulled her away from the table.

  “Take the kids out by the pool,” my father told my mother. “Do something with them. Use your imagination. I gotta call my brother right now.”

  I remember my father rushed to the phone like he was on a mission. I don’t recall the term better and better sounding too weird to me, but when Gino mentioned mind control, my throat got a little tight. Somehow I just knew it was tied to the bumper sticker my uncle Larry always had on the back of his many sports cars. Each time he visited with a new car it always seemed like he would replace the I’M OK—YOU’RE OK bumper sticker. I only remember that decal because I can’t ever forget my father’s disdain and confusion over people who needed to get a message to you through the use of their cars. And I especially remember the uproar that started the day my uncle gushed about the self-help book of the same name a couple of summers earlier. To Uncle Larry, the pioneering work of a brain surgeon in uncovering the neurological basis of memory that could offer complementary insights grounded in reality was something divine. Looking back now, maybe it was something he thought could make sense of what was happening to the boys in his family. To my father, it was all a bunch of nonsense—and I remember him saying it was even worse that so many millions of people were reading the book and buying into it. “But Al,” Uncle Larry said, “it’s just a bumper sticker.”