We dart between a row of parked cars, then head for the Carroll Street Bridge, a rare and decaying architectural jewel. Twenty yards from the water, it hits you, a wretched blend of raw sewage, chemical spills, oil from sunken barges and abandoned cars, garbage, feces, grease, bloated carcasses of dead dogs floating in and out on the tide.
How bad does it stink? In the 1960s, you could drive a car at speed down Carroll Street from Hoyt, accelerate, windows-closed, over the 100 foot-wide waterway—and gag.
We cut left alongside the John P. Carlson ink factory. On the bank, Sal and Rocco Cucchiaro are already stripping thin, whip-like branches from the sumac trees that somehow thrive on the canal bank. Short and dark-complexioned, Rocco’s mother dresses him like the accountant he'll never be: tweed overcoat, wool pants, polished shoes, white shirt stiff with starch, blue tie held in place by a fake pearl.
I pull my rod from the weeds. A McCrory’s five-and-dime reproduction of the ones I see in Field and Stream. (I sense a larger world out there that I desperately want to be part of so I cultivate mail-order hobbies: stamp and coin collections, a rock collection (mostly shards of industrial glass and brick fragments I mistake for quartz and feldspar, bright chemical crystals scavenged from the Golten Marine Company’s abandoned plant near the canal. Red plastic rockets powered by compressed air and water, obviously designed for kids with cornfields. I wait a month for them to arrive in the mail; one launch and the thing disappears over the rooftops.
I tie on a sinker and outsized hook. "High tide. Fishing’s gonna be good."
"Sunday morning's the best," adds Ernie.
Sal finishes stripping his branch and runs to the 10-foot diameter stone culvert that carries waste from our toilets and sewers directly into the water. (In 2010, the EPA declares the canal a Superfund site. By then, my mom, her three sisters and two of her brothers are dead of cancer. (See http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/losing-mom.html) He reaches down and begins trolling. Rocco picks a spot alongside a half-sunken barge smeared with oil and grease. Ernie elbows in front of him
"Thanks for helping me…You jerk!”
"Swear to God,” Sal mumbles. “I don’t know the stupid mystery!”
"`Swear to God,’" I mince. "Some friend."
"Screw you."
"Got one!" This from Rocco.
"That’s mines!" says Ernie. “Slippery bastids!"
Rocco hauls an eight-inch condom from the water.
"All right!” Sal says. "Whitefish!"
Putrescent water splashes Rocco’s pants as he manipulates the dripping tube—reminds me of my father’s stuffed calamari—onto a tire. Seven fly-buzzed condoms, Tuesday’s catch, shrivel in the sun.
"I got two!" shouts Ernie lifting his branch from the water.
"Your mamma was busy!" Sal says.
I watch a dead cat float by in the water; wary of the outsized rats that scamper along the canal’s rotting banks and pylons. For the next ten minutes, we concentrate keen as fly fishermen on a Colorado stream. Finally, I spot a rubber discharged (“released”) from the culvert. I carefully pluck it out of the water. Sal is bent over examining the catch of the day. I circle. Ernie sees me, backs away. I put a finger to my lips, creep closer, closer, and lay the dripping thing on Sal's shoulder.
"Somebody I want you to meet…”
He looks up. Wha…?”
I throw down my fishing rod, dart away.
"Eccch! Sciafuso!" Ernie points.
"What!"
Sal whirls once, twice, a dog chasing its tail. The condom leaves a snail track on his coat. By then, I’m 30-feet away, giggling like an imbecile, running among the piles of concrete slag and bricks heading for a path that winds through a salvage yard and out onto Carroll Street.
Sal, a track star, throws his raincoat at Rocco. "My mother will kill me!"
I climb a towering mound of garbage, turn and give him the finger. "The First Sorrowful Mystery," I scream, “your fucked-up coat!"
I lose my footing, skitter down the other side. Scramble to my feet, duck behind another pile of trash, accelerate toward a hole in the fence maybe 100 feet away. I trip over a roll of discarded linoleum, almost regain my balance—there’s broken glass, rebar, cinderblocks scattered like a minefield—then fall hard in front of a mountain of blue metal drums piled along the fence.
“Ah!”
Instinctively, I burrow between two barrels.
In the distance, the bells of Our Lady of Peace Church chime the Angelus, then ring the hour, a single note that reverberates in my metal womb like a funeral knell. One o’clock. I crawl deeper, imagining a pirate cave formed by the rusting drums, instantly forgetting about school and rats and packs of feral dogs. I find myself in a small clearing surrounded by drums leaching powdery yellow crystals. I stand up; notice my grease-stained school pants. Ruined.
“Shit!”
A brown paper bag rests against one of the drums. Curious, I walk closer, reach down and pick up it up, disappointed at how light it feels. (Neighborhood junkies who burglarize Cambie’s Trucking and other canal-side companies often hide their swag in the lots that are our fiefdoms. Like Robin Hood, we steal from thieves, expropriating expensive handbags, perfume, shoes, for our mothers. One time, we find a Carrier air-conditioning unit still in its packing crate.) A pillowcase is stuffed inside the bag. I pull it out. Stained a dark, clotty red.
"Jesus!" I fling the bag away with both hands.
The October wind, heavy with salt from the harbor, cuts through my thin jacket. I sniffle, wipe my nose on my sleeve. Acrid smoke—truck tires constantly burning in Smoky Joe’s junkyard next door, chokes the air. I look up, see the sun reflected in the back windows of a tenement; remind myself I’m only 50 yards from my own yard. My mother Gloria is in the kitchen doing dishes, getting ready for supper. I walk over to the pilowcase, step on the edge, and kick. The bloody cloth unravels.
A chicken flies out.
“Ha!” A dry bark that surprises me.
I step closer. A tiny claw-like hand. Closer. A baby, smaller than a plucked chicken, blackened, smeared with blood and dirt. A naked, dark-haired boy, one arm reaching up to the empty sky.
"Ahhh!"
I turn and duck back through the tunnel of barrels, bile rising in my throat. I’m trying not to gag when Sal leaps on my back. I fall to the ground gasping, spinning wildly, legs pinwheeling. In a second, he’s kneeling on my chest, forcing my arms back.
"Stop!”
He’s holding a dried condom ready to rub in my face.
"Please stop!"
"Fucking baby cry.” Sal says relenting. “You ruined my coat…”
***
We crawl together into the clearing and stand over the thing. I want to pick the child up and cradle it in my forearm. Or tell myself I want to. Sal looks at me like I’m crazy. And I am. I feel the tiny body shudder, but I’m the one trembling.
"He was alive.”
Sal tries to cover it with the pillowcase. Fails.
"We don't say nothing to nobody. Right?”
"I don't know. This is...this is a sin."
A rock clangs against the steel drums. We both scream. A second stone lands at my feet. A moment later, Ernie squeezes into the clearing.
“Ya two mamones! What’d yous steal?”
He’s laughing, rubbing his right thumb across the tip of his forefinger, the Neapolitan sign for a thief. And then he sees.
“Aggh! The fuck is that?”
He backs away, holding his hands in front of his face.
“We found it.”
“Sciefusos! It’s got germs. You’ll get sick…”
A stream of vomit, bits of Monte’s pasta and pastry visible, shoots out of Ernie’s mouth.
***
Ten minutes later, we walk out of the lot, chilled, smeared with grime, two hours late for school. The crazed Malachy no doubt waiting to torment me. She'd put chewing gum in girls' hair. Spell "O-b-e-d-i-e-n-c-e on my knuckles with a thick oak pointer that whistled as it cut through the air.
Halfway up the block Ernie says:
"You know it belongs to somebody?”
“Whaddya mean?”
“Somebody got rid of it…on purpose.”
“Threw a baby away?”
He looks at us like we’re idiots. “It ain’t a baby.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s a…a fetal. My sister Lucille is in nursing school. I saw these pictures…”
“Of what?”
“A fetal. A baby that ain’t been born…taken out of a girl’s stomach.
“Get out of here!”
“What for?”
“Because the girl ain’t married or don’t want it or…”
“That’s murder.”
Ernie shoots me a furious look. “Don’t say that! It’s like a business…Yous could get us a lot of trouble. I ain’t kidding.”
“Fuck the cops!”
“I ain’t talking about cops you moron!”
“What trouble?” I ask, glancing at Sal. “Over some little nigger baby?”
“It ain’t a nigger!” Ernie shouts. “Yous know it ain’t a nigger!”
We did know, and I’d like to say it didn’t matter. Limbo mattered. (“A place where souls remain that cannot enter heaven.”) Limbo is located on the border of Hell, a fitting definition for the Gowanus. Baptism mattered. Extreme Unction mattered. Justice mattered. But as I was to learn, it's easy to lose your way and threaten those you love best in such headlong pursuit.
See: http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-canal-part-i.html
No comments:
Post a Comment