B009XDDVN8 EBOK (6 page)

When the moving men left, my mother searched among the boxes for one in particular. She fell to her knees as she opened it, pulling out a bottle and a cut-crystal glass. While still on the floor, she poured herself a stiff drink.

“Go outside, dear,” she said, the liquor sloshing in her glass as she motioned me to the door, “and maybe you’ll find yourself a little friend to keep you busy while I unpack.”

See me there, sitting on the front steps with my dog, a lost boy surveying his new world. This was not the shallow yet idyllic suburbs of the American imagination, executive manses one next to the other with tennis courts and pools, or country estates linked by the train line into the city. That was the land I had emigrated from, the land I loved, a rich and fertile land that still seizes my imagination. Pitchford was a different type of suburb entirely, close and tired and overgrown already even though not more than two decades old, the demon spawn of Levittown, but without the charm. Some of the lawns had chain-link fences, some of the cars on the curb were rusted hulks. Garages were turned into makeshift bedrooms to house outsized families, driveways were littered with rusting toys.

Split-level hell.

I tried not to draw any attention to myself as I sat on the steps of my new house and watched the spectacle of the hockey game. I imagined I was invisible, but even so I felt like a mackerel at a tuna convention. I was wearing tan pants, a white button-down shirt, and a tie—my mom had dressed me for moving day—while everyone else was wearing jeans or shorts and a T-shirt. My hair was floppy and stylishly long, while everyone else had buzz cuts. And my dog was small and white and fluffy. I tried coming up
with names that might impress if someone asked me what kind of dog it was. He was a Prussian Warrior, he was a purebred Chinese Throat Slasher, he was anything instead of the prissy-sounding bichon frise.

The kids playing in the street were all ages, some in my grade, most older than I was. There were even some black kids. Whoa. They were a scruffy crew, and loud, knocking each other with violent thumps into the parked cars on either side of their makeshift rink. This was just after two Stanley Cups for the Broad Street Bullies had turned even the most tenderhearted Philly kid into a hockey hooligan. One boy, after a particularly vicious check, spit out a tooth, smiled a gap-toothed smile, and then decked the checker with a right to the jaw. And nobody seemed to notice. The game just kept going. Until the next car came through and the nets were glumly moved.

I was watching the game, while trying very hard not to look like I was watching the game, when a slap shot wide of the goal sent the red plastic puck skittering along the street until it died right in front of me.

“Little help?” someone shouted.

I was invisible, there was no way anyone could have been talking to me, so I just sat there while the players all stared. Finally, one of the black kids, big and pudgy, made his way toward me, his stick dragging like a caveman’s cudgel on the street behind him. He stopped at the puck and looked up at me.

“That a dog or a r-rat?” he said in a soft voice that sort of slurred through the consonants. “Looks like a r-rat.”

“It’s a dog,” I said. “He’s a Portuguese Water Shark.”

The boy looked up at me and blinked. “Does it swim?”

“Like Mark Spitz. And its teeth are sharp as a piranha’s.” Just then I pinched Rex’s hind and he snapped at me and growled. The boy took a slow step back.

“You m-moving into the Bernstein house?” he said.

“What’s the Bernstein house?”

“You’re sitting in front of it.”

“We’re only staying here until my father comes back and we get our new house.”

“Where’d he go?”

“China.”

“Why are you dressed for ch-church on a Wednesday?”

“We just came from a funeral.”

“Who died?”

“My grandpop.”

“That’s what they do, all right. You want to play? We need a goalie.”

“So you can shoot pucks at my face?”

He looked at me and smiled, like he had caught some glimmer of something he might like. “You can wear a p-paper bag over your head for a mask if you want.”

“Does it stop it from hurting?”

“Not really, but that way you don’t bleed all over your sh-shirt.”

“I’ll pass.”

“Okay. But whatever you do, don’t stay too long in the Bernstein house.”

“Why not?”

“B-bad luck,” said the kid as he started away, the puck now being slapped back and forth by his stick. “Just ask the Bernsteins.”

See me there, walking my dog along the pitted pavements of my new street. Rex pranced like a prince as I slumped along behind him in my tie and loafers. In this strange new place, women sat on the front stoops of their houses in flowered shifts, smoking and frowning at Rex as he sniffed their lawns. Babies in blow-up pools laughed at me. Dogs tied to stakes hammered into the ground gnashed their teeth. Rex barely gave them notice as he continued on his regal way, back arched and tail high, sniffing here, sniffing there. Finally, Rex circled a specific spot of earth,
nose pressed into the grass. He was on the front lawn of a dark split-level catercorner to our new place, the dark house’s wide picture window curtained tight, the paint peeling off its siding, its garage bricked up. A hulking motorcycle was parked in the driveway.

Just as Rex started his squat, a kid zipped up to us on a skateboard before kicking to a stop. “I wouldn’t if I were you, bub,” he said.

“You wouldn’t what?” I said.

“Let your little chipmunk do whatever he is about to do, at least not on that lawn.”

“Why not?”

“That’s the Grubbins lawn.”

“So?”

“Trust me, bub,” said the kid.

He was slight, thin, sharp-faced, with the front of his buzz cut standing straight up, and he spoke from the corner of his mouth as if one side of his face didn’t want the other side to know what he was saying. With his manner and his sharp voice, he sounded like one of the kids in the Bowery Boys black-and-whites that played Saturday mornings on UHF. Still, there was something about his manner that made me indeed want to trust him. Rex was just easing into his squat when I pulled him away. And just that moment I heard a shout directed my way from the hockey game.

“What the hell you think you’re doing?”

A blond kid, a year or so older and twice my size, charged toward me with a hockey stick in his hands. He wore jeans and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt, his head was shaved close as a convict’s. He threw down his stick as if dropping his gloves on the rink. The sound of the stick slapping onto the asphalt resounded like a shot and the hockey game halted immediately, as all the other players turned to stare at me. A skinny kid with round glasses and a runny nose came up behind the big kid like a pilot fish following a shark.

“I’m not doing anything,” I said.

“But your little piece of dog was,” said the big kid.

“He was just walking.”

“I saw him,” said the pilot fish. This kid’s eyes were beady and small behind his glasses and his two front teeth were twisted like twin doors opening. “He was about to go right there on your lawn, Tony. Right there on your lawn.”

“Butt out, Richie,” said the kid on the skateboard.

“I saw it.”

“It’s just a dog,” I said.

“Just a dog.” Tony turned to the kid on the skateboard. “Are you with this fool?”

“No way, Tony. I don’t even know the kid. He just moved into the Bernstein house.”

“The Bernstein house?” said Tony Grubbins. “Good luck living in that hole. It didn’t do them Bernsteins no good, that’s for sure. What is that you got there on the leash, one of those Mex Chihuahua things?”

“It’s a bichon frise,” I said, too flustered to come up with anything but the truth, and immediately regretting my mistake.

“Ooh la la, a little French dog.”

“I thought only girls in pigtails had little French dogs,” said Richie with the glasses.

“He’s not French.”

Tony peered down at Rex, Rex yipped back.

“He looks French. And he sounds French.”

“You’re right, Tony,” said Richie, laughing like a good little suck-up. “He does.”

“And you don’t sound like you come from here neither,” said Tony. “You talk like you got a screw in your jaw. Where you from?”

“Gladwyne.”

“Where’s that, France?”

“America.”

“I bet he’s a Frenchy, just like his dog,” said Richie.

“This is my lawn,” said Tony. “My brother makes me cut it and take care of it and pick the crap off it. I hate picking crap off the lawn. It makes me want to throw up. So if I see either one of you Frenchies on my lawn again, I’m going to kick both your asses back to Paris.”

Richie snickered.

“I’m not French.”

“Like I care where you’re from,” said Tony.

I could feel myself being stared at by the whole street, the hockey players, the ladies in their shifts, the kid on the skateboard, a host of dogs, mine included. Under such scrutiny I thought of holding my ground, making my mark in this new neighborhood. But I didn’t want to make my mark in this new neighborhood, I just wanted to leave it, in one piece and for good. And I had never been in a fight before. And while I might have been able to take the pilot fish, this Tony Grubbins looked like he was already shaving. So, like the Frenchy I was accused of being, I retreated, with some dignity and much haste, pulling the yapping Rex across the street to the Bernstein house amid laughter and catcalls from the hockey players.

See me there, sitting again on our stoop. I hadn’t run inside, I wouldn’t give that bully boy the satisfaction. Instead I sat on the steps and peered out through watery eyes at my new neighborhood. It had to be an aberration, this brutal dislocation that had happened to me. My dad would come back, my grandfather would rescue me. I belonged in the leafy suburb on the other side of the city. I was the kid at the country-club pool, the kid in the blazer ordering filet mignon. I wasn’t a Moretti, I was a Willing, dammit, I was made for better things. It is funny how certain we are of our places in the world when we are all of ten. Only later does it become an utter mystery. But at that moment there was no mystery. I didn’t belong here, in this house, on this street, in a place like Pitchford.

But I was wrong, I did belong in Pitchford; it was my country-club past that was the mirage. When I look back at the teary-eyed boy on the steps with his yabbering dog, the whole of the boy’s life to come will be determined by what he sees just then through the tears. That hockey game would soon become his hockey game, or his football game, or his stickball game, depending on the season. The morose stutterer who had come over to retrieve the puck and the boy on the skateboard would turn out to be his two great friends Ben and Augie. Tony Grubbins, as big as a barn, would end up chasing him not just on that street but as a specter through the decades.

And that house, the Grubbins house, with the peeling paint and motorcycle in front, with the sense of something foreboding behind its bricked-up garage and curtained windows, that house would be the furnace in which his life after Pitchford was forged.

I didn’t know any of this then; all I knew was that something terrible had happened to me, and nothing in my life anymore was certain, except for one thing and one thing only: my dog Rex was going to turn that lawn into a toilet.

P
HILADELPHIA
I
NTERNATIONAL
A
IRPORT
always gave me the willies. Being a mere twenty miles from my boyhood home of Pitchford left me feeling exposed, as if at any moment Tony Grubbins would emerge from the crowd and start chasing Frenchy down airport corridors. When do shallow adolescent terrors disappear? I was hoping at least by death; I had no desire to carry the hump of my Tony Grubbins fear through all of eternity.

But just then, two days after I found Augie’s bloated corpse, as I passed through the morning airport crowd with an outfit I had picked up in Chicago—a loose T-shirt, a pair of baggy jeans, a white baseball hat with its flat brim low over my eyes, the exact opposite of anything I normally would wear—I had fears more real to contend with than the ghost of a tormentor past. I could pretend it was over, that having missed their shot at me in Vegas they would just shrug their shoulders and let me be, but I could also have faith in the goodness of my fellow man or my wife’s fidelity, and where the hell would that get me?