Best of Gowanus Crossing  2012


http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/03/union-busting-for-mob.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-cousin-richie.html

 http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/losing-mom.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/lonesome-death-of-louie-fag.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/05/fly-fishing-on-gowanus-canal-part-i.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/08/wounds-that-will-not-heal-parts-i-ii.html

http://gowanuscrossing.blogspot.com/2012/02/garden-of-unearlhly-delights.html

Fly-Fishing on the Gowanus (Conclusion)

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

Gowanus Crossing/A Life Along the Canal Chapter 1

PROLOGUE

A pestilent and stinking Nile, the Gowanus flows through the neighborhood, defiles it with stench and disease and dark secrets. In the decades ahead, many of those who’d grown-up near the stream would be dead or dying of an epidemic of cancers and birth defects long after they’d escaped to the ranch houses and stick-tree suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey; an epidemic veiled by other plagues—violence, AIDS abandonment and addiction—visited on South Brooklyn.

In the 1960s, the canal is poisoned womb … grave … open sewer. These things and more: it is a barrier that keeps the surrounding neighborhoods isolated from the rest of New York City, keeps them insular, with a fierce identity and demarcated borders.

The Gowanus has a history—unknown in the neighborhood--that in other places would be noteworthy. George Washington’s army clashed with the British along its banks. Its tides, rhythmic and regular, impose order on the chaotic lives that cling precariously to its banks. At flood, it carries the faraway scent of ocean; moonlit, a glimmer of primordial beauty.

Chapter 1

"In nomine Patris et Filio et Spiritu Sanctus."
"A-men."
Sister Mary Malachy crosses herself as she intones the prayer. She thrusts her prognathous jaw forward, an Inquisitor ready to swoop down on the budding apostates in her charge. She tugs at the baggy sleeve of her brown habit, taps the Timex watch on her thick wrist three times. Across her scarred desk, 35 eighth graders shift to attention, ink-stained hands reaching for their rosaries.
She studies them—ice blue eyes behind rimless glasses half-closed in feigned prayer--alert to every exhalation of breath, every shoe scuff, sigh and stomach rumble. Malachy knows that behind their frayed white shirts and clip-on ties, beneath the pleated skirts and Peter Pan collars, they dream only of stickball and lipstick, of stink bombs, dirty pictures, fireworks, rotten eggs; of Frankie Avalon, Ringalevio and Kick-the-Can. She knows the boys—the Italians--will touch the giggling girls in the darkness of the cloakroom, make them squeal in the crowded stairwells as they march from the schoolyard after lunch.
Malachy wears a wedding band signifying her marriage to Jesus Christ and her renunciation of the pleasures of the flesh. Pain is another matter. She will spare no effort driving her charges up the slippery slopes of Salvation. This is her purpose, the vocation that had carried her from the bottle green glens of Donegal to this vale of tears, this Golgotha called South Brooklyn.
She nods to a dark-skinned girl in a raveled green sweater in the fourth row, her mouth ripe and red as Original Sin.
"The First Sorrowful Mystery, The Crowning With Thorns," Rosa Perez begins. "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name..."
The class murmurs the response, voices echoing down tiled corridors, merging with the morning prayers of other students like the drone of honeybees. The rosary continues, the “Hallowed be’s” and “Holy Ghosts” as dry as the husks of dead insects. In the fifth row, Jenny Wilson inhales—her ripening breasts strain against her blouse--and announces the Second Sorrowful Mystery.
An aisle away, Americo Guzzi hunches over his catechism penciling a dove, the representation of the Holy Spirit, shitting on the head of Pope Pius XII. He stiffens, a feral creature sensing a predator’s approach. He counts heads.
"...Ten...eleven...twelve...Shit!"
It’s his turn to proclaim the next mystery. “The Third Sorrowful Mystery,” he mouths, prompting his brain to supply the answer. He waits. Nothing comes. Ascensions. Assumptions. Redemptions. Heaven is a cheap furniture store. Mysteries swim in his head. Malachy will have him scrubbing the church basement, the labyrinth where the hunchback monk Masseo lurks among the broken statues of martyrs and serpents.
Three more Hail Marys ratchet by. Americo cranks his head left, coughs, then whispers, "What's the Third Mystery?"
Sally looks at him. "Ya mother's box.”
"Don't fool around!"
"Her canary."
Ernie snorts, the sound among the murmurs loud as a breaching whale. Malachy's wimpled head rotates. Americo ducks, disappearing, he imagines, like Jonah into the belly of the Leviathan.
"Come on. Please!" he whispers.
The nun fills the aisle between the rows of bolted-down desks. She advances, seeming to sniff the air. Sally hunches over his beads,a monk lost in divine rapture.
"Hail Mary full of grace...” A drone four seats in front of Americo.
“Shit!”
He clenches his rosary. A tiny window in the crucifix reveals a bone chip floating in holy water like a carpenter's level. He clenches the holy bone. "Please Jesus…I'll …" He hesitates “I won't….”
A vision of Jenny blossoms in his head, plaid uniform skirt pulled up revealing coltish thighs, a darker shadow beneath her white cotton panties.
“I can’t, ” Americo sighs.
He steadies himself for the charge. Instinctively, his hand rises to the faded purple bruise under his left eye.

In the corner by the whistling radiators, Cacasotte stirs. The bolts holding his overburdened desk to the polished oak floor groan in protest. Malachy looks at him, a creature unfazed by Salvation’s promise or Darwin's heretical exigencies; a bag of guts, corruption and decay. Stained tie, frayed white shirt, grey work pants straining against elephantine buttocks like sausage casing; a mockery of all that is pure, clean, Christ-like. Friar Masseo and the Franciscans of Our Lady of Peace Parish count the days until New York State law allows them to discharge “Shit-the-pants” like so much sewage into the gutter.
An oak pointer materializes in her hand.
Cacasotte’s internal clock is chiming noon. He’ll feed at his mother’s Third Avenue diner, waddle home, root into his unmade bed. At 5:30 P.M., the Mouseketeers’ theme will stir him, and then only briefly, to masturbation. He raises his slobber-streaked face, squints, then lolls his tongue at Jenny Wilcox, a willowy German stranded by the flood tide of emigration out of South Brooklyn.
He lifts his haunch and farts. No discrete blast, but a barrage, a lament from his bowels that derails the Holy Rosary and wreathes the classroom in silence. The putrid fallout stops Malachy as she’s about to pull Americo from his seat. Rows of students surge forward, surfers riding a wave, coughing, pretend gagging, holding their throats. Shrieking, they sweep past Americo, past Malachy, out the front door of the classroom.
The lunch bell clangs. Americo stands, locks eyes with Malachy.
“The Third Sorrowful Mystery!” he shouts, slapping Sally’s still bowed head. “The Crowning With Thorns!”
He dodges right, dashes forward and out the door. He flies down the metal steps, out of the building, dodges a patrol boy and the thundering trucks onThird Avenue, races down Carroll Street past his house, past Jimmy the Morgue’s idling Buick Electra, past Monte’s Venetian Room, and Crusader Candles not stopping until gasping, he reaches the grey rail of the bridge crossing the Gowanus Canal.

In Monte’s, Sonny the Indian sips brown whiskey, watching Americo race down the sidewalk, feinting garbage cans, gangly body struggling to keep up with brain.
“Give Cochise here a drink.”
The voice grates against Sonny’s ears. He roots around in his pocket, pops two aspirin into his mouth, sips his drink. Further down the bar, Shaky Manzo is counting $20 dollar bills from a paper bag.
“....15....16 hundred!”
Snapping each bill like a playing card.
“All right!...Red, do me a favor, turn on the television.”
“Fuck that,” grunts Sonny. “Television is for morons.”
“On or off?” The bartender shrugs.
Shaky looks up. “You say something chief?”
“Cocksucker is what I said.”
“What?” Shaky is on his feet.
At his table along the mirrored wall, Honey is studying the Daily Racing Form. “You! Sit the fuck down!” he yells. “And you. Can I get a minute’s peace? What’s bothering you now?
“This fuckin’ retard for openers.”
Shaky brings his palm to his mouth, two, three times, pantomiming a cartoon Indian. He sits back down, picks up a Daily News from the bar, flips it open, turns the pages noisily.
Television. War-painted braves dead because they’re too noisy or too slow with the white man. Falling off their ponies. The Mohawk, Jay Silverheels, living in Bensonhurst, speaking Apache. “Kemo sabe,” Sonny broods. I'll give you Kemo sabe! He glares at Shaky, the idiot's lips moving, working the cartoons.
Sonny stares at the long mirror above the bar, lifts his chin. Whose face is it? What purpose the obsidian stare, the bunched muscles and tendons of the formidable jaw? The questions chase themselves behind his impassive eyes. After a moment he grunts, “Whiskey.”
“You got it.”

Winded, Americo walks back up Carroll Street. The night before, he’d seen a woman in red pants, kneeling, like a supplicant at the Communion rail, on the canal bank. Shaky had caught him staring at her bobbing head. At the Grand Army Plaza Library, another woman, this one with a face like parchment, had shown Americo sketches that depicted the Gowanus River in the 1600s. Apple trees flourished along it banks. Gowanus oysters were renowned for their size and abundance. He’d described these wonders to Ernie and Sally.
"Go fuck yourself!" they shouted.
Engulfed in a fragrant cloud of sautéing garlic and simmering tomatoes, he drifts off into history.
Crack! A slap off the back of his head ends his meditation.
Honey and Ernie are standing in front of Monte's. Honey, holding a thick Cuban cigar, is grinning. Sonny is to his left, Easter Island in a leather trench coat.
“Daydreaming, you mope?” says Honey.
Americo blinks. "What?"
“You hungry?”
“Nah, I’m fasting.”
“It ain’t Lent. Think them priests fast? Bullshit.”
“Fasting makes you think better. In India ...”
“Sonny’s an Indian. He don’t fast.”
“What happened to your face?” Sonny shakes his head in despair, then continues, “Your father go to work on you again?”
Americo shrugs, says nothing. He looks at Ernie. “You ready?"
“Yous better smarten up, Honey says. “Yous ain’t kids no more.”
He waves his cigar, digs into his pocket and pulls out a thick roll. He peels off two $5 bills.
"Get some ice creams. You, bring me the News and the Scratch Sheet this afternoon. Don't forget like last time."
"I won’t,” says Americo.
"That Irish twat busting your balls?"
"She hates us," says Americo.
"She hates ‘Merico ‘cause he's smart,” Ernie says.
"I ain’t smart!"
Americo tilts his head. The two boys begin inching away.
“Where yous a going?" Honey jerks his finger. "School’s that way."
"We don't gotta be back till one o'clock."
“Stay away from that fucking canal." Honey spreads his stubby arms. ("A baby tyrannosaurus!" Americo riffs, then bites his tongue to keep from laughing.)
"They got water rats this big. All kinds of shit. Yous a gonna get rabies. Something happens, I'll give you the rest! I’m telling yous, stay outta dere!"
Shaky walks out of the restaurant, greasy pompadour afloat on his pockmarked face.
Yo, you got a call. Carmine.”
“The fuck he wants now?” Honey groans.
“How things went.”
"Tell him we got the money.”
“He wants to talk to you.”
“More fucking bullshit.” Honey sighs.
He and Sonny walk into Monte’s leaving Shaky standing there. Ernie stage whispers to Americo, “Looks like a dog shit on his head.”
Americo giggles.
Shaky turns, shoots him a look. “Homo, whatta you looking at this time?”
Americo reddens. “Nothing. I ...”
“Jerk-offs, I’ll go to work on both of yous. Don’t think your uncle can stop me. I’m a made guy.”
“We’re talking about school,” says Ernie. “Ever hear of it?”
Shaky pulls a wad of bills out of his pants. “School is for jerk-offs.”
Ernie grabs his balls, “Fageddaboutit!”

The boys cut between a row of parked cars, then make for the Carroll Street Bridge, a rusting architectural jewel the city has ignored for 50 years. Twenty yards from the water, it hits them—“Perfume Lagoon”—raw sewage, chemical spills, oil from sunken barges and abandoned cars, garbage, feces, bloated carcasses of dead dogs and cats floating on the tide.
On the bank, Sally and Rocco are stripping branches off sumac trees growing on the canal bank. Rocco, short and dark, is dressed like the accountant he'll never be, tweed overcoat, wool pants and polished shoes, white shirt stiff with starch, blue, clip-on tie held in place by a fake pearl.
Americo pulls a fishing rod from the weeds, a 5 & 10 cent store reproduction of the ones he’d seen in Field & Stream. He ties a length of clothesline, a sinker and an enormous hook to the rod.
"Friday," he says. "Fishing’s gonna be good."
"Sunday morning's the best," says Ernie.
Sally finishes stripping leaves from his branch and runs to the 10-foot diameter concrete pipe that carries waste from neighborhood toilets directly into the canal.
"Thanks for helping me out!" Americo calls after him.
"Swear to God, I dont know the fucking mystery!”
"Swear to God," Americo minces.
"Screw you!"
"Got one!" Rocco yells.
"That’s mines!" shouts Ernie. "Slipped away."
As the boys look on, Rocco pulls an eight-inch condom from the water.
"All right! Sally says. "Whitefish!"
Putrescent water splashes Rocco’s overcoat as he manipulates the dripping tube onto a tire. Seven condoms, Tuesday’s catch, shrivel in the sun.
"Two points," Rocco says.
"No," says Sally pulling a notebook from his pocket. "Two is a French tickler. One point."
"I got two of em!" screams Ernie lifting a grease-smeared branch from the water.
"Your mamma was busy!" Sally says. He walks over, inspects Ernie’s catch. A dead cat floats in the water. At first, the stench is overpowering, but they get used to it.
For the next ten minutes, the boys concentrate, keen as fly fishermen on a Colorado stream. Americo spots a rubber being discharged ( “released”) downstream.
He plucks it out of the water, is about to yell when he notices Sally bent over his notebook tallying scores. Americo circles behind him. The rubber looks exactly like the calamari tubes his father stuffs and sautées in tomato sauce.Ernie sees him coming, backs away. Americo creeps closer, closer, and lays the dripping condom on Sally's shoulder.
"Somebody I want you to meet," he says.
Sally looks up. What?”
Americo throws down his rod and darts away.
"Eccch! Sciafuso!" Ernie shouts. "Disgusting!"
"What?" Sally whirls once, twice, like a dog chasing his tail.
The condom leaves a snail track on the shiny coat.
Americo is already 30 feet away, running among piles of concrete slag and bricks heading for the path that winds through the salvage yard and out onto the street. Sally who owns the Catholic School 60-yard dash record, throws the raincoat at Rocco and chases after him.
"My new coat! My mother will kill you!"
Americo climbs a towering mound of rubble. He whirls, gives Sally, 20 feet below the finger. "The First Sorrowful Mystery!" he screams. “Your stupid coat!"
He leaps, loses his footing and tumbles down the other side. Scrambles to his feet, ducks behind a pile of trash, then accelerates toward a hole in the fence. He trips as he vaults over a roll of linoleum, almost regains his balance, then falls hard in front of a mountain of metal drums piled near the fence. Instinctively, he burrows 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 the metallic womb like a funeral knell. One o’clock. Americo crawls deeper, imagining a pirate cave formed by the rusty drums, forgetting about school and the rats in the lots. He finds himself in a 20-foot clearing surrounded by orange drums leaching powdery yellow crystals. He stands up, examines his grease-stained pants and looks around.
A brown shopping bag rests against one of the drums. Americo walks closer, picks up the bag, disappointed at how light it feels. Drug addicts burglarizing the trucking companies alongside the canal often hid swag in the lots. Americo would steal from the thieves, Robin Hood, grabbing leather handbags, perfume and shoes. A pillowcase is stuffed inside the bag. Americo pulls it out. It’s stained a dark, clotty red.
"Jesus!"
He pushes the bag away from him with both hands. The October wind, heavy with salt from the harbor, cuts through his thin jacket. He sniffles, wipes his nose on his sleeve, half-tucks his shirt in. Acrid smoke—tires burning in the salvage yard, chokes the air. He looks up over the barrels, sees the sun reflected in the windows of Ernie’s apartment building, reminds himself he’s barely 50 yards from his own backyard. Gloria, his mother is in the kitchen doing dishes, getting ready for supper.
He walks back to the bag, steps on the edge of the pillowcase, then kicks. The bloody cloth unravels, a chicken flies out.
“Ha!” Americo laughs, a dry bark that surprises him.
He steps 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. It moves. The hand clenches and unclenches.
"Ahhh!"
He turns, flies through the tunnel of barrels, bile rising in his throat.
He’s trying not to gag when Sally leaps onto his back. Americo falls to his knees, gasping. He spins wildly, legs pin-wheeling. In a second, Sally is kneeling on his chest, pinning his arms back.
"Stop! ... Please stop!"
Sally holds a dried condom ready to rub into his face.
"Please!"
"Come on,” Sally relents. “Crybaby."
Americo hyperventilating, points at the barrels. After a moment, the two boys crawl into the small clearing, stand over the thing. Americo picks it up, cradles it in his forearm. Sally looks at him like he's crazy. He feels the icy body shudder and grow still. He lays it back on the ground
"It was alive.”
They stare at each other then turn away. Sally throws the pillowcase over it.
"Don't say nothing to nobody. Right?”
"I don't know," Americo mumbles, "this is...a sin."

To be continued