Mom’s new friend Paul cocks his head sideways to look at us. “Looks like we got a lot of work to do. Which one of you is older?”
“I am,” Tony says.
“Okay, good, good. Maybe you can drive the van.” Tony smiles despite himself. “I can’t make heads or tails of that thing. You guys got any orange juice?” He walks right into the kitchen and opens the fridge. He says there’s milk but it needs Hershey’s syrup to make it chocolate.
“We’re not allowed to have sugar,” we say in unison.
“Are you Mikel?” He kneels down next to me. His wrists and knuckles are covered in dark strands of black hair like a Labrador. He talks fast and makes lots of jokes. “Are these your Legos? How many do you have? Do you have the ones where you can make a spaceship? Those are my favorite.”
He sits with me a while and we build Lego stuff while Tony asks him about baseball. “I’m more of a Pete Rose man. If Reggie Jackson’s so great, why’s he always striking out?”
“But he hits a lot of home runs too.”
“Yeah, true, true. You seem to know a lot about baseball. I’ll bet you’re pretty good.”
Tony blushes. “I’m okay. I want to be a pitcher.”
“That’s the best position there is! That or shortstop, as long as you’re not stuck in right field.”
Paul is the exact opposite of Reggie Jackson, short and balding, hairy, messy. But he doesn’t seem to care what we think of him which is good because most adults try to get us to think they’re smarter than us.
After we pack the van, we pile into the Vega and follow it through the rain down D Street to our new house. It’s still raining as we get out of the car. The air smells of damp plants, wet gravel and chimney smoke. My feet are cold because of the crappy heater in the Vega. None of it feels real, the green house that stands like a giant A. There are two yellow-brown trees on either side of a gravel walk that leads to six stairs and a porch and a house, a real house, with a redbrick chimney on the side. The odd hairy man carries boxes inside to the big living room with its painted-over fireplace, the kitchen with room for a table, the stairs that lead down to a basement underground where Tony and I get our own room. I can’t believe we get a whole building to ourselves.
There is a room at the end of the hallway downstairs that feels like a cave where a mother wolf would go to raise her pups. It’s dry, and warmer than the other rooms. Mom calls it a den which is exactly what wolves call it. In the corner of the den there is a black wood-burning stove next to a stack of wood and newspapers.
Paul opens the hatch at the front of the iron stove and builds a fire with some wood he brought.
I’m surprised by how good he is with the wood and the matches, how he’s fearless of splinters or brick dust on his jeans as he kneels on the ground. It’s strange how this short oddball of a man knows his way around the objects of the real world.
Paul disappears with the U-Haul once we unload all the boxes and returns in a black Chevy mini-truck with a camper shell and an orange stripe down the side. He walks around and opens the rear gate and out jumps a brown-and-white dog with floppy ears and a tiny nub of a tail the size of a fist. “This is Pepper,” he says. Pepper’s tail jerks back and forth as she licks our hands and runs around the yard to pee.
We go to A&W, where Mom lets me order a whole hamburger for myself and a root beer float the size of my head.
She tells us there’s a Little League nearby at a place called Parrish Field and a school down the street called Englewood Elementary. It has a great big field in front and a park behind it right in the middle of a little forest. She says that’s where we’ll go to school. Plus there’s a bunch of kids on the street for us to play with.
“Doesn’t sound too bad,” Paul says, dipping his fries five at a time into a lake of ketchup on his plate.
“Do you play baseball?” Tony asks.
“A little. But I’m more into fishing and hiking and camping and stuff.”
“Paul’s a woodsman,” Mom says in her dreamy way.
“What in the hell is that?”
Paul crooks his head toward Tony. “Don’t know, really. I guess it means I like trees.”
“Trees are boring.”
“That’s what I like about them.” Paul speaks quietly, a little smile around his lips like he knows the punch line to a joke but he’s not telling. I like him. I can tell Tony does too.
After dinner we drive back to the house and unpack the boxes of dishes and towels and clothes. Soon Paul says he has to go home and he gathers Pepper with a leash and grabs Mom by the waist and kisses her, right there in the living room in front of us. He stops at the door and gives us a weird little wave and walks out.
There is a silence in the house after he leaves, an emptiness that echoes off the furniture and boxes without Pepper running from person to person, without Paul’s big turtle childlike movements. I want him to come back, to maybe just lean in the doorway while I fall asleep on the floor.
* * *
WE PLAY THREE Flies Up in the street after school with the other kids from the block. We play Smear the Queer in the field in front of Englewood Elementary School. We play Butts Up with a tennis ball inside the covered basketball court next to the baseball diamond. We play street football, dodgeball, kickball, baseball, freeze tag and guns. We race our bikes down the hill to see who is faster, who is stronger, who is tougher, who has the balls to climb the fence and get on the roof of the school, who races their bike against the cars and who waits at the corner for the cars to drive by. There are never any girls and there aren’t any men.
Derek is the bucktoothed boy who lives at the top of the street. When he falls off his bike and skins his knee, he screams all the way home. A large woman in a white T-shirt and shorts comes out onto the porch and kneels down. He jumps into her arms. She says, “Are you okay, my little man? Show Mommy where the boo-boo is. Can you do that?” He nods his head, his eyes full of tears. She kisses the skin above the wound and says to wait while she gets a Band-Aid.
Derek sits quietly sniffling while Tony and I watch, in awe.
Why is she talking to him like he’s a baby? Why is he crying like one? It’s strange, like a dog howling at a siren, something that happens without thinking. The child cries. The mother comforts him. It doesn’t make any sense.
The woman we call Mom taught us to cook hot dogs and eggs on the electric stove so if we get hungry we can feed ourselves because the most important thing for a kid to learn is independence. She tells us she saved us from Synanon and that she had kids because she was lonely and that a boy’s job is to take care of his mother. If we skin our knees, we know how to clean the wound, how to put hydrogen peroxide on it to make sure it doesn’t get infected.
Derek’s mom returns with a chocolate cookie. She hands him the cookie and places a Band-Aid tenderly over the raw skin. “There. Like new.” She hugs him close and he leans his head against her cheek. I don’t understand any of it.
The woman we call Mom cries some nights and I lean against her and I say, “It’s okay, Mom. One day at a time.”
And she says, “How do you talk like that when you are just a kid?” But all I do is repeat the words written in wooden letters on the wall in the kitchen. It seems to make her happy to think of me this way, like I am older or wiser or bigger than her.