A Frenzy of Sparks: A Novel

by Kristin Fields

  “No.” Gia cut the motor and drifted slowly into place. Her blisters stung as she tied off the boat at the bow and stern.

  “Nothing you’ve seen him take or do that seemed different?”

  Gia thought of the powder again but shook her head, maybe too quickly, focusing on the knots. Her father nodded. Gia was playing dead, but he’d circle back later like an eagle or a hawk, because little animals scurrying in the undergrowth were hard to catch on the first pass as the world rushed past.

  Another plane lifted into the sky. Gia imagined an anonymous someone watching from a tiny window as they covered the boat with a tarp and made their way back to the weathered white-shingled house in silence.

  Chapter Four

  As soon as the screen door slammed, Gia kicked the ground until her shoe turned green and her toe throbbed beneath the nail, wishing she, like Lorraine, had no father to teach her lessons only he thought were important. She hated him for it. He wasn’t even actually stopping her from taking the boat. The key still hung by the door with the others. But he split Gia’s thoughts, making her doubt herself. His voice always won, in her head. The pain in her toe dulled the ache of rowing and the blisters and the confidence she’d lost this morning.

  Across the canal, workers in sweat-stained T-shirts swarmed the hollow houses. Tools pounded on beams, reminding her of microorganisms in the grass, thousands, stamped dead in her fit. And she didn’t hate her father. Her eyes welled with angry, tired tears. She just didn’t want to be weak. Her own body had proved him right.

  The parakeets bounced on the telephone wire. Get up, they said. There’s a whole day of summer. Cicadas revved their hummers. The heat was heavy. They were right. It was too early to be tired and sad. The rabbits stirred behind her. They were hungry.

  Gia forced herself inside, tore lettuce leaves from the fridge, and took a box of Life cereal for herself, ignoring the measuring cups Agnes left out for Gia’s “figure,” which required lots of tools now—bras, slips, nylons, exercise belts, Tab—and food could no longer just be eaten. It had to be planned and measured, boiled or steamed.

  Metal clanged behind the house. The cereal box stuck to her skin.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be looking for a stupid job?” Why did she have to do everything just right, but Leo could do whatever he wanted?

  Leo was under the tarp, parts scattered on a towel, his bike propped up between bricks, the dent already hammered out. He was all arms and limbs, like a metal wire twisted to pick a lock, piecing the bike back together again, the money he owed for the Salernos’ fence and their father’s warning already forgotten.

  “This is my job.” He wiped sweat from his eyes.

  “But Dad said—”

  “I know what he said. I have ears. I’m selling it. I have a guy.”

  “How do you find these people?” She tore open the cereal so fast it spilled, shoved her unwashed hand inside.

  “Same way people buy your stupid killies.” Gia stopped crunching. Only little kids filled up milk-bottle traps with stale bread and sold silver killies for bait. She sat under the tarp, not because she wanted to sit with Leo but because her father was still inside.

  Tools dropped. Leo tightened a bolt until it wouldn’t budge any farther. The disjointed sound of it was soothing, even if there wasn’t anything like this she could do as well.

  “Want a ride?”

  “It’s done?”

  He kicked the bricks away and steadied the handlebars before throwing his legs over the top and revving the engine.

  “You’re not gonna take the fence down again?”

  “There is no fence anymore.”

  The bike rolled forward, picking up speed as he made lopsided figure eights, wind blowing the hair off his forehead, drying sweat. It was hard to tell where the bike started and Leo ended, his back blending into the curve of it, legs parallel to pipes, only he wasn’t metal. Yes, she wanted a ride. As far away as she could get.

  She wondered if her father was watching, but the window was dark. Gia climbed on. Holding Leo’s waist was weird even if he was part of the bike. Skinny Joseph Salerno was on the front lawn in his swimming shorts. Go ahead, Gia thought, make jokes. She wouldn’t hear him anyway over the wind rushing in her ears, spiraling her hair around her face, billowing her shirt.

  The bike moved before she’d settled on. There was never any warning with Leo. Houses whizzed past, the cicadas lost under the engine hum. Wind fuzzed her ears as her legs gripped metal, almost uncomfortably warm. The motion, the heat, the wind, her brother bouncing in place while everything rushed past—it was disorienting. So fast compared to the slow boat, stroke by painful stroke.

  The bike stopped at a red light next to New Park Pizza, lights on, ovens warming inside.

  “Turn us,” he shouted.

  Gia pressed her hip lower on the left, turning them onto Cross Bay Boulevard. There were just enough cars to remind them they weren’t supposed to ride here. She didn’t care. The bakery where Lorraine worked had a line outside the door and smelled like semolina bread. They turned toward the bait shop, where kids sold killies and hermit crabs, away from the supermarket, the bowling alley.

  It was a straight shot to Rockaway. After the kiddie rides, only a few of which moved in lazy circles, the stores fell away and the scrub brush opened up, just before Broad Channel, where houses waited on stilts for the bay to wash in. The trees and low brush had been sand pelted until they lost their lushness. Trash was scattered throughout, and a stray cat slithered between the bushes with a mouse in its mouth. She hoped the mouse hadn’t eaten poison that would kill the cat. The rushing of the bike made everything feel less real.

  They stopped on the bridge. The cars were gone, swallowed by parking lots for Monday errands. It was only Gia and Leo, the bike and the glittering bay. Gia wished she could open her arms and step inside the bay, more than she already was.

  “What a dump.” Leo pulled a cigarette from his pocket, pointed to the shell of a rusted car in the marsh below. Bay water flowed through the windows. In the distance a garbage barge trudged along, seagulls swarming overhead. The lighter sparked a flame, and Leo inhaled deeply, hopped up to sit on a ledge covered in bird shit, his back to the water.

  “The whole city dumps their junk right here. Lucky us.”

  It wasn’t a dump. There was trash, yes, but it was part of it somehow. In the distance, a bayman leaned over the side of his boat with a pole and pulled up a fishing trap. Shiny things slithered over one another until he dumped them into a bucket, reset the empty trap, and chugged off. It was late for baymen. The sun was long up, and baymen in their yellow slickers preferred to be out with just fish and seabirds. Gia understood the need to be alone with the water. It filled her lungs with air.

  Their ancestors had been fishermen in Sicily before they’d crossed the Atlantic, leaving behind their boats and traps for a better life, but part of them was in her blood, even if it had skipped Leo and her parents.

  “Someday,” Gia said, feeling bolder, “I’ll make them stop dumping trash and put oysters in the water.”

  “Yeah? How’re you gonna do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Gia said. “But there used to be oysters as big as dinner plates. You could walk across from one side to the other on shells.”

  Leo squinted into the sun, tossed his cigarette over the bridge. He’d probably rag on her later, but he was OK now. He was better without everyone else around.

  “Yeah,” she said, making the story a fact. “Oysters change gender to spawn more babies. And they clean the water. Actually clean it. They don’t just make pearls like everyone thinks . . .”

  It felt good to spew out facts she’d bottled up because no one would listen. A trash barge passed beneath the bridge. Leo glazed over. Gia sped up. There was only so long Leo could be bored.

  “Leo?” she worked up the nerve to ask. “What was it like? That stuff at Ray’s house?”

  In the sun, he had a grubby look to
him, like a flag on a pole for too long, but he was amused. “You want to know?”

  In one swoop, Leo was standing on the ledge, the street on one side, water on the other. The ledge was the same width as his sneaker. He walked on an angle, part of his shoe over the water. Gia’s stomach squeezed into a panic. One truck would rattle the bridge, or one breeze, upsetting the tightrope walk over the water below, which wasn’t very deep at all.

  “Leo . . .”

  “If I jumped, I’d land in that trash heap.”

  “Leo, get down, please.”

  But he wasn’t listening. His face was drawn as tight as the line he was walking. She should hold the back of his shirt or something, but she was frozen near the bike, which she didn’t even know how to ride. Gia squirmed as Leo balanced, arms out to either side, fighting the wind kicking up off the water.

  “Leo, can we just go?” The pleading in her voice was pathetic.

  He laughed, the sun blurring his face. He stood on one leg, the wind catching his shirt like a sail, and laughed as he jumped and landed with both feet on the sidewalk.

  “That’s what it’s like,” he said, pushing the hair out of his face, but it blew right back. “The realest you’ll ever feel.”

  Gia’s heart banged in her ears as Leo got on the bike and revved the engine.

  “On the way back, look for Help Wanted signs.” He smirked.

  Gia climbed on behind Leo, just like the way they’d been born, anxious to get home without anything to explain. The bike kicked to life, but Gia was ready this time. She stretched her arms out to either side just to be reckless too. Air whooshed between her fingers, cooling the blisters, as another summer day rolled past.

  The scrub brush ended abruptly as stores came into view. Leo turned into a gravel lot, tires crunching. The air stilled as the bike slowed in front of a mechanic’s garage with cars on a lift. A tire bounced and rolled to a stop as a man in a greasy jumpsuit cranked a tool on another wheel.

  “Hop off,” Leo mumbled.

  The mechanic tossed an oily bucket into the gravel as Leo rolled the bike forward. Gia cringed at the chemicals dumped on the ground under her feet, evaporating invisible plumes around her like seaweed swaying underwater. She took a few steps back, held her breath for as long as she could.

  The bike gleamed. Leo had even shined it. The mechanic was her father’s age. The sun had turned him the color of a catcher’s mitt. She didn’t know his name but knew where he lived. He heaped old things on the front porch and kept a cooler next to a plastic lawn chair, flying a torn-up skull and crossbones from a weathered flagpole. Beside him, Leo was wiry in his sweat-stained T-shirt and greasy jeans, needing a belt and a haircut, his skin different suntanned colors and scraped from taking down the fence, in a mechanic’s shop piled with rusting car shells beneath a mosquito cloud. He might grow up to be this man, Gia realized, not a war hero or a Hells Angel.

  The mechanic pressed the tires, bounced the handlebars, inspecting metal like a doctor telling the bike to open up and say ah. He shook Leo’s hand with a wad of cash, and Leo walked away without the bike, gravel crunching, sunlight gleaming off his forehead. He looked less without it, more like the fifteen-year-old he actually was. It made Gia feel less too.

  “You sold it? Just like that? How do we get back?”

  “Walking.”

  “What?” The sun was so hot, the air still. Gia pulled a face, but Leo was already ahead.

  “How much did you get for it?”

  “Enough for two sodas. One if you’re annoying.”

  “But really. How much?”

  “I don’t ask about your babysitting money.”

  “Is it enough to fix the fence?”

  Silence. Maybe losing a bike was like losing the boat. They walked in silence; Gia stopped only once to pick up a palm-size squirrel skull from the overgrown brush, its teeth still intact. She would put it with her mother’s seashell collection on the windowsill and see how long it took her to notice.

  Power lines buzzed staticky and hot. Too loud. Up ahead, sparks flew from a transformer. The traffic lights went dead. Cars stopped all over the street, blared horns, daring each other to move. People came out of stores to look around. Yes, it was everywhere, not just theirs.

  This was exciting. Stores would give away ice cream before it melted. Tonight, there’d be real stars usually hidden by streetlight haze. No airplanes. Everything would be quiet and dark like it had been when people had lived off eels and oysters. It was perfect, even if it meant her father would be called in to protect from looters and people who used the absence of light to do bad things.

  Cars inched along Cross Bay. Up ahead, a car slowed at the traffic light before peeling through the intersection, burning rubber to make a U-turn over the grassy divider. Ray and Tommy. When everyone else was going home to wait out the chaos, Ray drove right into it.

  “Hop in,” Ray called, shaking the hair out of his eyes.

  “And you didn’t want to walk.” Leo smirked, taking the front seat, Gia and Tommy the back. Leather burned the back of her legs. The car sweltered, even with the windows down, and then air rushed as Ray burned a cloud of smoke, weaving through cars. Gia gripped the door handle, and Tommy bounced into her; she counted down to home as everything rushed past. Ray turned the radio all the way up, so loud it jumbled words. Hair whipped her face, lashed her eyes. Tommy punched at the roof and yelled for Ray to go faster as Gia prayed to slow down.

  At New Park, Ray slammed the car to a stop. “Under fifteen, hop out.”

  Gia hopped out gladly. The sidewalk was gloriously still under her feet. But Tommy simmered.

  “What the hell?”

  Ray didn’t even turn around, just gave Tommy eyes in the rearview mirror, waiting him out until he gave up and slammed the door.

  “We could swim,” Gia suggested. They used to like diving for stuff in the canal. Popsicle sticks. Horseshoes. Holding their breath underwater. Racing from dock to dock. But Tommy stared after Ray’s beat-up Hornet like he’d passed up a date with Jane Fonda. Was she missing something? Leo’s hand was out the window as Gia’s had been on the bike, wind blowing through his fingers, catching the end of a summer that fall would soon forget, as they sped off through timid cars and broken traffic lights until they were gone.

  Gia rounded up flashlights, candles, batteries, and torches from the garage. The house sweltered. Her mother lit the barbecue and grilled all the meat in the freezer so it wouldn’t go bad. They ate hamburgers without buns and hot dogs on forks before the sun set behind the canal, and then they went swimming. Even Agnes waded out to her knees and splashed water over her shoulders. The hermit crabs brushed past their feet with fuzzy shells. Gia splashed and flipped in the water, spitting it from her lips and shaking it from her ears. There were mosquitoes and fireflies, but no one minded. They walked back without towels, the lingering water keeping them cool. Firecrackers popped in the distance. Dying coals threw off smoke behind them as a praying mantis watched them from the peony bush, still as a leaf, one leg poised in midair. She would watch it tonight in case it was mating and the female would bite the male’s head off. If the moon was bright enough, she wouldn’t need a flashlight.

  “Can I sleep outside?”

  “Yes,” her mother said, damp curls coiling on either side of her face, staring into the setting sun. It surprised Gia to see her mother enjoying this night without chores or TV, eating an unbalanced meal. “Only if your brother does too.”

  Gia sighed. Of course. Mentioning Leo reminded Agnes that he was not there, zeroing her attention in on him again. The dreamy look fell away with it.

  “Is he job searching?” She lit a cigarette with the citronella candle on the table. Straightened her shoulders. Ashes scattered in Gia’s direction. A mosquito danced above the flame. Gia felt like she was being dangled above a flame too.

  “I think so.” Her heart sensed the lie and picked up speed.

  “Where? Your father’s gonna want specifi
cs.”

  “Ask him. I don’t know.”

  “He should’ve been home by now. Nothing’s open. Maybe he found something and started working right away? That’s what must’ve happened. Good. He’ll take care of that fence. I don’t like looking at it like that. Makes me feel like we’ve done something wrong with it staring at us till it’s fixed.”

  Agnes’s mouth closed around the cigarette in a little O. She breathed deeply and tapped it against an ashtray.

  Did she really not see? Gia examined the things Agnes tried to hide: her foot grinding a circle in the grass, the way she leaned forward as she waited for someone to contradict her. Part of her knew, or she wouldn’t need a cigarette to calm the unease.

  “I hope it’s not a restaurant. They’re all owned by you-know-what. I don’t want him caught up in that.”

  She snubbed the cigarette out for emphasis and lit another. Gia thought of the man by the swimming canal and cringed.

  “He’s a good kid,” Agnes said to no one. “Just needs a little push.”

  A firefly landed on Gia’s hand, spread its wings, closed them again.

  “Let’s check on Diane. I worry about her in this heat.” Agnes pushed up from the table as Gia stacked cheeseburgers on top of one another and piled hot dogs, remembering Nonna suddenly. It was the first thing she’d eaten off the boat at Ellis Island, a hot dog.

  Tinfoil rattled as they crossed the street. Lorraine was at the door before they knocked, sweaty, her hair combed back into a ponytail.

  “Her blood pressure’s high, and she’s not in a good mood,” Lorraine said. Of course, Gia thought. Why would she be, without TV? To Gia, it was horrible, constant chatter, whirling fans, commercial jingles, laugh tracks. But for Diane, it didn’t matter what it was as long as it was on.

  “Let me try,” Agnes offered. Lorraine shrugged, and Gia thought it was brave of her mother.