Part 2 (2/2)

”Because he's shy Don't you know that about him? Your father is actually shy shy” But Bruce wasn't, and he was looking at me in a way no adult ever had, not a man anyway

WE GOT hoht through the house to turn on the outside light and look atdead snakes Our cut bike chains were lying in the dirt and the rest of the yard was e, and how could we have been so stupid? Why did we go riding those bikes in this neighborhood, advertising thes to stay good I should have known that

Lying in bed that night, Nicole crying in her roo to soothe her, Jeb silent in his bed besideho the hacksaw to our chains In rownto the until they were dead Not hurt, but dead

A few days later I was sitting on our front step, one eye open-the way it alas-for Clay Whelan The sun was high over the town, and a kid on a bike ca up from Water Street I could see the chopper forks and the sissy bar I could see the knob of the five-speed gear shi+fter, and as the rider got closer I could see the frae but a dull, spray-painted black and red and green The kid started pedaling standing up and I sa the seat looked, how brightly orange it shone in the sunlight, though it'd been sliced down the uts

My heart was punching a hole in my chest and I was about to run into the street Then I saho the rider was: Cody Perkins He glanced down at me like I was not there Like I was not not And I watched him pedal my new bike all the way up Lime Street and away And I watched him pedal my new bike all the way up Lime Street and away

THE MAILMAN came in the afternoons while the four of us sat in front of the TV Our ainst the clapboards, and we could hear hi away on the concrete One afternoon ast the bills was a blue envelope from Lake Jackson, Texas It was addressed to all of us, and Suzanne opened it It was a card from our mother's older sister, our Aunt Jeannie, and her husband, our Uncle Eddie, two people we'd heard of but barely knew Inside it were four checks, each one made out to each of us kids for fifty dollars The four of us looked at each other We kept looking down at the checks in our hands, but I was drawn even more to the card and those two handwritten words: Aunt Aunt and and Uncle Uncle The fact of therandfather and grandmothers, too Mom had told us we had fifteen first cousins down there, that thirteen of thees, Pop's sisters' kids, and they lived one block away froe, Louisiana I knew only a few of their na that our faturn

JEB AND I fought a lot He was younger by a year but taller and stronger and he almost alon One afternoon in the house on Lime Street he had me pinned to the floor of the upstairs hall, his foot on my neck while he kicked , her black eyeliner looking so dark against her pale skin She o downstairs, then she went back into her bedrooainst the wall I don't reot it or where the other one was, but it was an adjustable stilt like circus perfor

The only bathroom in the house was at the bottoh the kitchen and the rear landing to get to it I knew Jeb would have to go sometime, and I stood there at the top of the stairs, the stilt resting over my shoulder like a spear, and I waited

Thirtyher favorite 45 at the tiain as the lead singer's character dies in the ambulance of an overdose I could hear the TV voices too, then there were footsteps over the kitchen floor and I raised the stilt and pulled my arm back and there was my seven-year-old sister Nicole's red hair, and I let out a breath and lowered the stilt

Twenty minutes later, Jeb came Over Suzanne's record player I could hear his heavier footsteps down in the kitchen I held my breath and when I saw his frizzy hair I hurled the stilt down the stairwell There was the dull clank ofsideways as he and the stilt fell to the floor

I thought he was dead But he began to cry and raised both hands to his temple Then he saw me at the top of the stairs and he dropped his hands and sprinted up the steps and he punched and kicked me and called me motherfucker

ONE AFTERNOON I chased him with a butcher knife He made it to the bathroo the blade through the cracks, trying to stab him in his wrists and hands

IN MOVIES nohenever a bad man would die a bloody and well-deserved death, I would feel soTall, Walking Tall, the true story of Buford pusser who single-handedly cleans up the evil that has overtaken his s a homemade bat into the bones and skulls of criminals Buford pusser is who I wanted to be Billy Jack, too And later, Charles Bronson in the the true story of Buford pusser who single-handedly cleans up the evil that has overtaken his s a homemade bat into the bones and skulls of criminals Buford pusser is who I wanted to be Billy Jack, too And later, Charles Bronson in the Death Wish Death Wish movies, Clint Eastwood in movies, Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry Dirty Harry When I thought of the word When I thought of the word man, man, I could only think of those who could defend themselves and those they loved I could only think of those who could defend theain, this time to Haverhill, and when the doctor evicted my mother and us four kids from his old office near the hospital, we moved to the west side of town and lived first on Marshland Ave, then, a year later, on Columbia Park These were streets of well-es and real lawns fathers mowed on weekends There were late-model cars in the driveways, and Colurassy center shaded by oak and elm and maple trees Our new rented house was a Victorian with a rounded turret and a front and back porch The yard was srass, and in the rear corner was a tall beech tree that rose as high as the house

Mo slus I knew shethis, and I knew Pop's child support was 340 a month, but just the rent for this new place was 500 a et evicted pretty quickly

But Bruce helped He had bought us new bikes again, a Sony color TV, and a stereo He gave Moroceries, and he started sleeping over not just on the weekend but weeknights too He was still warht say, but he also drank a lot of bourbon at night, quietly and alone, reading a book or watching some sport on TV By noe kneas separated from his wife, that they had seven children who lived with her south of Boston

Colu street than we'd ever lived on before, but three houses up lived a blonde stripper with large silicone breasts For weeks she'd cliauze taped to her cheek and jaw, and I thought she had an infection of some kind, but then I heard the real story, that the stripper's ot hter in the face

It was the kind of thing that happened in the avenues To get to them I just had to follow Suzanne down Columbia Park across Main Street to Seventh Ave, a narrow hill street of tin-sided houses behind chain-link fences They had no driveways and on the sidewalk or at the curb would be a battered station wagon or Pontiac LeMans with no hubcaps, a Duster with a sandblasted hood Plastic children's toys would lie on the cracked concrete aarette butts and empty nip bottles, and on their sides here and there would be shopping carts for when the car wouldn't start and the welfare checks cairlfriends would push the carts a mile and a half away to DeMoulas and load up with cans of Cas of potato chips and cases of coke and Budweiser, bottles of Caldwell's vodka

Halfway down Seventh Avenue was a cluster of yellow aparts, ts of theh The ground around the lot scarred froainst a field of weeds, was a green dumpster I'd never seen empty; it was full of babies' diapers and old mattresses, dozens of beer bottles, pizza boxes, damp condoms and instant coffee jars and plastic shampoo bottles, a broken chair or torn laht the apartments were lit up and loud, the s open in the su, the constant drone of TVs and radios, kids crying or laughing, a wo to shut the fuck up! up! So the cops, and there'd be one or two cruisers pulled up to the curb, the door open, the cab's light on, the dispatcher a static voice in the air So the cops, and there'd be one or two cruisers pulled up to the curb, the door open, the cab's light on, the dispatcher a static voice in the air

I don't knohen Suzanne started going down there, but I knehy It's where you'd go to cop soe sunshi+ne, or THC It's where you'd go to buy an ounce of Mexican gold or a tab of four-way purple blotter acid or to sit in a dark hot roorown men and women and take the joint passed your way and mooch a free hit It's where everyone else went, to the building farthest back fro families in this one, just men in their twenties and thirties who earned their rent by collecting it fro fro cash So the Devil's Disciples, and they had long hair that fell down over the devil's insignia of their black leather jackets They wore heavy motorcycle boots and faded oil-spotted jeans and dark T-shi+rts A lot of them had beards or mustaches and they carried folded Buck knives in leather pouches at their hips In the plywood half-wall of the top porch were three holes in a close grouping from a 38 or 45, and fro-Black Sabbath, Electric Light Orchestra, Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, and the Allman Brothers There were always three or four ht people ca at the bus stop too It was on the corner of Seventh Ave and Main Street right next to Pleasant Spa convenience store, a gray vinyl-sided box with dusty plate-glass s advertising Marlboros and Borden's ers brown froarette forever between them or his lips He called us punks and fuckin' assholes To the right of his store ooden steps leading to the apartments above, and that's where twelve or fifteen kids waited each

Some of them lived down in the avenues, some on the streets across Main, but we all looked the salasses and thin brown hair He wore a faded ar cash and the dope he sold, o boots, the kind I eventually got my mother to buy me, he carried a pint of Southern Comfort and he'd pass it around on the steps to Nicky G, Bryan F and Chuck and Al, Anne Marie and Dawn, my sister Suzanne, anddown my throat I smoked pot, too I drew in the smoke like everyone else, held it till my chest hurt, then blew it out, and I hated what happened next, how a part of o so dully through theBut I couldn't say no, couldn't draw attention to ht Only a year or so on this side of town, and I'd begun to wear my hair tied back in a ponytail, and every day I wore o boots, a T-shi+rt, and the brown leather jacket with the zippered sleevesfordown Main Street to work at seven any weekdayon the steps of Pleasant Spa, just another kid like Nicky G with his long hair, black as an Apache's, his sideburns like Greg Allarage, the fact he'd fucked every girl in that neighborhood at least once, including my fourteen-year-old sister, and then he was off after soirl and Suzanne cried for a week in her room and I despised him, tried not to talk to him or look at him or smile at any of his jokes, but if he passed me a joint or Glenn P's Southern Co yellow bus would pull up and I'd sit in the back with Suzanne and the Heads from the avenues Sometimes Glenn P would pass his bottle, sometih the streets, the driver stopping every few blocks to pick up irls dressed like Anne Marie and Dawn and ers that went so low you could see two dimples just above their butt cracks, and the Italian or Puerto Rican girls had that brown line in the skin that ran froht down past the pink and yellow riht tube tops and no bras, their nipples erect in the winter behind short leather jackets dyed green or red or purple Their hair ild or braided, and the eyeliner around their eyes was thick and black, their lip gloss glistening

As the bus pulled up in front of thearette and flick it into the street They'd climb onto the bus and make their way past the kids with lunch boxes and books and homework they'd actually done, to the back where the rest of us were

”Mornin', Tina”

”fuck you, Glenn Where's the fin you owe ot”

There'd be laughter and , of soel Dust due soon, who had just fucked whoot rid of it and iped out his bike down to the beach and

We passed the junkyard and a Catholic church, we rode down under the railroad trestle for Lafayette Square and all its barrooe store and car dealershi+p that year-round had Christhts lit up over its used and repossessed cars We rode up Broadway past a funeral hohway, the bus turning into the lane for the high school, a ralass, a statue of Michelangelo's Lorenzo de' Medici Lorenzo de' Medici sitting out front, though whenever I saw it, the form of the man with his elbow on his knee looked to h whenever I saw it, the form of the man with his elbow on his knee looked to me like a man on a toilet

The bus pulled around to the back lot where seniors parked their Monte Carlos and Ca the lot was the entrance between the M and L wings The kids in the front of the bus, the jocks or the studious ones no one had a name for, they went inside to make it to their lockers and desks before the homeroorates up against the walls There were dozens of kids already there, s whatever they had, a pocket for their product, the other for cash And there'd be a lookout for Perez, one of the narcs ore leather and pretended he was a senior though his shaved whiskers left a dark shadow and there were lines under his eyes and he was at least thirty and a pig, e still called cops fro to be a part of

BECAUSE OUR mother worked in Boston, she had to leave for her job before we got out of bed Most s, only Nicole would be on time and walk herself to school a half mile north Jeb, Suzanne, and I would sleep till oke two or three hours later than we should have to catch the bus Soo to school, which h town across Main Street down into the avenues past the Dobermans or German shepherds chained in their dirt yards In sos barking at etheracross Cedar down Sixth Avenue past the auto parts store and junkyard, the battered shells of cars sitting in the weeds, many of the windshi+elds collapsed into the front seats, the ri out at me