A Novella by Peter Nolan Smith
THREE
Summer was a lazy time for New England. Most people slept late on Saturday. I was denied that luxury, because I had a paper route. 6:30am. 365 days a year. 50 Boston Globes. 34 Heralds. Delivering the newspapers took 45 minutes with my bike. A Raleigh 3-speed.
Throughout the school year I wore my uniform to save time. This morning I reached for the midnight-blue trousers, then realized I was on vacation. The jeans, tee-shirt, and sneakers felt funny, but only for a few seconds. I went downstairs to join my older brother at the kitchen table. The radio was playing Wilson Pickett. MIDNIGHT HOUR.
“I don’t know about you, but I’ll be glad when I don’t have to do this.” He wrapped a Boston Globe with a rubber band.
“I was thinking about quitting this year.” I sat down and bent the weekend edition into a third of its size.
“You were thinking?” This was our fifth year delivering the newspaper. My father believed earning our own money was good for our characters and had never given us an allowance. With six kids it was hard to generous with money.
“I can make my own decisions.” I had stopped serving as an altar boy on my own. I hated that surplice more than my school uniform and the Mass held no mysteries once Vatican II changed the Mass into English.
“You believe in free will?” He sped up his creasing the Globes.
“It’s what separates us from the animals.” This was a race.
“Freedom of choice.” He had a head start. “Why don’t you quit now?”
“Because it’s summer and I need money.”
“For what?” My brother had told me about the Mattapan Oriental. He had kissed with a girl in the balcony. Her name was Claudia. She came from Hyde Park. They had gone to the River Club to see the Ramrods. They were our favorite local band. “You can’t spend it on girls. You promised Kyla to be faithful all summer long. No kissing, no hugging.”
“At the end of it I will have Kyla.” It was not a life sentence.
“Three months is a long time.” He wasn’t losing any ground.
“Just as long for you as it is me.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“I have a girlfriend and you don’t.”
We bantered ‘do and don’t’ around like a badminton shuttle, until my father entered the kitchen.
He was in his mid-40s, but in good shape for someone that worked in an office and he could throw a baseball harder than either of us.
“Can you two keep it down?” While he had never hit us, he did scare us. “Your mother is sleeping and so is everyone else.”
“Yes, sir.” My brother never back-talked to my father. He finished his last paper and stuffed the rest into a canvas shoulder bag. “I’m ready to go.”
“And you?” My father eyed my remaining five Globes and shook his head.
“Almost.” I was always late in his eyes, mostly because I took my time.
“Well, hurry up.” Tardiness was a trait for someone else’s son.
“Yes, sir.” I didn’t like disappointing him, especially since his mood had been on the sullen side these last few months and I couldn’t help thinking that he might have heard about my vandalizing the decommissioned missile base on Chickatawbut Hill earlier that spring. Neither my mother nor he had mentioned this episode, despite this tale being common knowledge to every teen in my hometown. Sooner or later it had to get back to them.
“When are you going to learn?” My brother asked in the garage.
“I don’t know.” I wasn’t sure what lesson I was being taught.
“Do the paper route and do what he says.” My brother was my best friend most of the time. Not today. “You see how he is.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“yeah, right.” He had distanced himself from me after the missile base episode. “I don’t feel like being punished for your fuck-ups.”
“You won’t be.” My life with Kyla depended on the good in me and not the bad.
We drove off on our bikes. His route was further away. Mine had more papers. $10 a week could pay for sodas, comics, Levi jeans, or flowers for a 13 year-old girl. I rode past Kyla’s house without throwing a paper onto their steps. No one was home. Not even their crazy dog DJ. The grass on their lawn was long. It would get longer before the summer was gone.
Back at my house my father rattled off a list of chores. My brother and I swept the garage, mowed the lawn, and worked in the garden, while he chipped paint off a weathered wall. No one else had to work.
My mother played with my baby brothers. My sisters were acting out CINDERELLA with their friends and my Irish grandmother sat in a lawn chair, basking in the sun. Every 30 minutes I would give her some water to sip from a straw. A stroke had silenced her tales of leprechauns and her rugged Hibernian face struggled through expressions like a chameleon seeking the proper camouflage.
Nana was uncomfortable with her disability, since her simple motto in life had been that as long as you could tie your shoes then you hadn’t a care in the world. Now she wore slippers.
I missed our trips into Boston on the El from Jamaica Plains, when we lit candles in St. Anthony’s shrine. Lunch was grilled hot dogs at WT Grants. The best was a trip to Loew’s Orpheum. Nana liked the movies. She had taken us to see THUNDER ROAD and said afterwards in a voice straight from the bogs, “Robert Mitchum is so handsome.”
I liked the title song.
THUNDER ROAD was my first 45.
It had been over a year since she had her stroke and Nana was a little better now, but I doubted we would ever eat hot dogs at WT GRANTS again.
Nana had come to America as an 11 year old. All by herself and she was too strong to complain about her problems. Life was good with the warm sun on her face and Nana smiled, as the neighborhood come alive.
Lawn mowers razor-cut the grass. Kids bicycled on the sidewalks. I walked back to the patch of weeds. They smothered the smell of cut grass. My brother was sweating from the work and I grabbed two weeds in my hands. They left the earth without the roots surrendering their clumps of earth. I smashed them against a barrel. The dust sprayed against my feet. I was dirty and thought about the quarries.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
A swim in Brewster’s emerald water was a leap into paradise and Chuckie Manzi was waving for me to hurry up, but I wasn’t looking at him. His sisters were dancing around their backyard pool to Booker T’s GREEN ONIONS. Addy Manzi was wearing a light blue bikini. She was three years older than Kyla, but in her I could the future. Her laugh was a song and her smile the answer to a prayer. The light off the water painted her olive skin with silver. Her babysitting us on Friday and Saturday nights had almost been like dates. She had taught me the Twist, played WEST SIDE STORY on the stereo, and let my brother and me stay up late to watch horror films on late-night TV. When my parents came home, she would tell us to go to bed. Addy hadn’t babysat us for over a year. My mother said we were old enough to take care of ourselves.
My brother punched my arm. “Damn, stop being so obvious.”
“I’m only looking.”
“Yeah, like your eyes were octopus arms.”
“Addy is too old for me.” The chasm between 13 and 16 was a distance greater than that between 16 and 20. Her boyfriend had been to Viet-nam. His GTO was the fastest car in town. Our parents warned us not to turn out like Dennis Halley, yet his every word was the Gospel. He was that cool and I didn’t stand a chance with Addy.
“Stop day-dreaming,” my father shouted from the stripped-bare wall. “Lazy.”
My brother and I resumed weeding.
By noon the backyard had been cleared of weeds and I walked my grandmother around the lawn. She grabbed my arm with each baby step. After two hundred Nana squeezed my hand. She was exhausted by the effort and I helped her to the chair.
“That was good. More than last week.”
Her reply was lost in an avalanche of mumbles.
“Tomorrow even more.”
She smiled hopefully at my prediction and lifted my hand to her face. The wrinkled skin was strangely smooth and I kissed her face. I wanted her to be the woman of two years ago, but not at the cost of my being a boy again. Getting old was not good after a certain age and neither was getting younger.
My father shouted my name.
He had finished inspecting weeded lawn.
“Good work.”
“Can I go to Mattapan?” My brother was standing with my mother. “My friends and I are going to the movies.”
“Okay.” My asking the same question would have started an argument. Not with my father who walked up to me and said, “Come September you’ll be able to join your brother.”
My mother considered Mattapan the Devil’s playground. Nana hadn’t let her go anywhere until she was 16, but that was back in 1940. Before Pearl Harbor.
“September is a long way away.”
“Everything seems a long way away when you’re young. Sometimes when you’re older too.”
My mother was ignoring him. They wouldn’t say why.
He whistled between two fingers.
“Everyone get in the car.” He bent over to lift Nana from the chair.
“Can I stay here?” Once they dropped off my brother, they were heading for the South Shore Shopping Mall. My grandmother would have a bowl of clam chowder at Brighams. My sisters and brothers would eat ice cream, while my mother shopped at Filenes.
“You don’t want to come with us?” My father opened the station wagon door. My younger brothers and sisters were already in the car. He helped Nana into the back seat.
My mother was beside her. She said nothing to my father.
“No.” Going to the mall was no fun on my own. “Chuckie and I are going on a hike.”
“You be careful.” My father had heard stories about the woods. “And don’t be late for dinner.”
He glanced at my mother in the car. Eye contact between them was a rarity unless it was a glare. He had committed an unforgivable sin. Knowing the 1O Commandments by heart, I was scared to tell myself which one.
My brother ran out of the house. He was in a good shirt and long jeans. Girls went to the Saturday matinee at the Oriental. Rumors of make-out sessions in the balcony had reached 7th Grade. I was glad Kyla was out of town, if I couldn’t go to Mattapan.
“Sorry you can’t come,” my brother said too quickly to be the truth.
I wasn’t invited on his trips anymore and next year would be even worse, because he’d be in high school and high school kids didn’t hang out with kids like me.
“That’s all right, I’m going to the quarries for a swim.” The Quincy Quarries were off-limits to every teenager on the South Shore. I paid no attention to the ban.
“Last week someone dove off the cliff and hit a car under the water. A radio antenna went through his arm.”
“I heard that story last year.” And the year before it, but people did drown at the quarries and the danger was part of the quarries’ attraction to kids too young to care about dying. “I think it’s like Santa Claus. Something everyone believes because they want to.”
“No, probably because it did happen once. You be careful.”
“I’m not crazy.” I recognized my limits and truthfully I would have been going to Mattapan, if my mother let me. “What you going to see?”
“DARLING.”
“Oh.”
The afternoon matinee was never an adult film.
“It goes on at 4.”
Julie Christie on the silver screen and teenager girls on a pitch-black balcony threatened several Commandments.
The station wagon horn blew. My father was in a rush to get going. My brother sat in the back next to Nana.
“Tell me about the movie. Especially about Julie Christie.”
“I will.” He was a sucker for blondes.
“Don’t do anything stupid like burning down the house.” My father shouted from behind the wheel.
“I won’t.” Arson was my brother’s kick, not mine.
The car backed out of the driveway and then drove out of sight. Chuckie crossed the lawn and grabbed a towel from our clothesline. “I thought they would never go. You ready?”
“Been ready all morning.” I slammed shut the garage door.
Chuckie’s father had built a pool for his children. It couldn’t compete with the quarries. His mother would have been suspicious about our heading into the woods with towels, so we stuffed them under our shirts. A stone wall lay beyond our lawn. It was the boundary for a farm whose name had been forgotten by our town. We slipped under a large bush like delinquents escaping from the Billerica House of Correction.
Within seconds we were in the Blue Hills Reservation, which stretched from Quincy to Dedham. Most of the parkland was for hiking, swimming, or picnics, but not all. Mafia victims were dumped in the gullies off the road cutting through the park and an abandoned missile base sprawled atop Chickatawbut Hill. More remote areas served as cruising grounds for homosexuals. Most teenage boys avoided them like Sunday school. Nobody in his right mind wanted to be one.
Chuckie and I didn’t speak for several minutes. The trees buzzed with insects and the solstice sun painted their leaves a golden green. Summer seemed the same as last year, but it wasn’t the same.
“Anything wrong?” Chuckie throw a rock at a tree. He missed by two feet. “Nothing.” Explaining my fears about my parents would be too much like telling the secret wish after breaking the chicken’s wishbone, except unlike a spoken wish a fear might come true.
“Sure?”
The chasm between my parents was an open wound.
“Sure.” A thirteen year-old boy was powerless to staunch the bleeding. Prayers hadn’t helped my parents. Candles at church neither. I didn’t want them to be two different people. I wanted them to be my parents. My head lowered to the path. The rocks were sharp. My sneakers stopped them from hurting my feet.
“Then you ready?” Chuckie lowered his arms like a miler. Talking about my problems was only an opening for talking about his and young boys kept their mouths shut about stuff like that. We weren’t girls.
“Is this going to be a race?” I like imitating Jim Ryun’s start. The Kansas high schooler’s sub-4 minute mile in May had been shown on Wide World of Sports. It was cool.
“Ready, set.” Chuckie jumped ahead before the final word. “Go.”
His early speed gave him lead up a bridal path. The slope steepened and I passed him on a rocky trail crossing. He called it quits at the top of that hill. Regaining our breath we spoke about girls, rock music, James Bond movies, and my grandmother smiling in the sunlight. “It was like that movie ATACK OF THE MOLE PEOPLE only instead of turning me into dust, then sun made her come back to life.”
“My father says that the sun makes him feel young, but once you’re twenty, you’re old and nothing can turn back the clock.”
“Your oldest sister is 19.”
“And next year she’ll be old.”
“Which is why we have this summer to be young. To forget school.” Chuckie was a so-so student.
“We have another five years of school at least.”
“No me. I’m going to be a dry cleaner like my father. My grandfather left school went he was 14. That’s one year older than me.”
“My grandmother sailed here from Ireland at 12. She put four girls through high school. Your mother is the same.” My mother was repeating that task with her six. No way was she letting us leave school to work, unless it was on summer break or after school.
“School sucks.”
“Almost as much as church.”
“Bless me, father, I have sinned, it’s been ten years since my last confession. I masturbated every day and haven’t prayed to God since seeing the movie THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.”
“Charlton Heston was a good Moses.”
“But his beard was fake.”
My parents had taken us to see the movie at the South Shore Drive-In. A teenager had thrown a rock at our car. My father had chased him into the dark. He said he didn’t catch him, but my father was fast. It was the last time I wore pajamas to the drive-in.
We had reached a tumble of granite slabs marking the border of the quarries. Shouts and yells baffled through the trees. We scrabbled up a dirt path upon hearing the splash of bodies hitting the water and soon cleared the woods to the rim of Brewster’s Quarry. The walls of stone dropped fifty feet to a large pool of dark green water.
For over a hundred years men had dug out granite from this pit. The first railroad in America had transported the stone to the street below. Pumps had sucked the pits dry until the rise of steel skyscrapers doomed the quarries to a watery grave, which had become the playground for teenagers throughout the South Shore.
The city of Boston lay before a flat blue ocean spreading beyond the harbor islands. The expressway buzzed with the hum of rubber-wheeled cars. I stripped off my shirt and sneakers.
Chuckie tugged on my arm.
“Let’s go somewhere else.”
“Why? Rooftop’s the best.” The 35-foot drop was easily accessible from the water.
“Not now.”
Two boys in leather jackets were dropping stones off the slanted ledge. They were about our age, only bigger.
“They’re not doing anything bad.”
There was an unwritten rule against bringing outside feuds here, but no one was diving off the cliff.
“We can come back when everyone is in school.”
“School.” The larger of the pair heard that word.
His forehead bulged like he had taken a baseball to the skull and his eyes were swollen too, so that he resembled a frog and I realized that Chuckie had recognized him. It was not a good thing.
“Why you talk about school?” His friend pointed a finger at Chuckie.
He was a little taller than me, but outweighed me by twenty pounds. If I had gone with my parents, this would have never happened. It was too late to think about that. I was here.
“Nothing, we were saying that we’re glad school’s out.” Chuckie stammered fast.
“School’s out. You hear that Markie?” He laughed over his shoulder. “We have us some Catholic school boys and you know what they do with the priests.”
“What, Joe?” His brutish friend seemed embarrassed by the question.
“They get down on their knees.”
“We’re not altar boys.” Other kids were watching from the cliffs opposite Rooftop. Their faces were unfamiliar, however their expressions were easy to read. They were happy not to be us.
“No one said you were.” Joe jumped down from the ledge. His boots almost landed on my toes and he grabbed my shoulders. He wasn’t trying to be nice.
Skeeter Kresee had bullied me back in Maine. He had been 7 and liked to tease my younger sisters. When I told him to stop, he chased us into our house. My slamming the door in his face broke his nose. There was no place to run here and I wasn’t wearing sneakers.
“You don’t have to be an altar boy to kneel before a priest, ain’t that right, Markie?” His breath smelled on bad teeth and tobacco.
Father Gaveen exhaled the same odor.
I stopped being an altar boy after serving Mass with him. His form of prayers didn’t agree with mine. I still couldn’t tell my mother why.
“I don’t want any trouble.”
“Trouble, what kind of trouble can you have with us?” His hair was slick back like a 1950s biker. Not many greasers had survived the British Invasion, but these two boys were dedicated to reviving the fashion without seeking converts.
“We came up here to swim,” Chuckie said, as Markie took him by the arm to the ledge.
The quarries had no lifeguards and there were no police to call.
Chuckie looked to me for help, only I couldn’t help myself, because I had never been in a fight. Not even with DJ, so I said, “It’s like he said. We came here to swim.”
“Who’s stopping you?” Joe pushed me backwards with both hands.
I lost my balance and tumbled into free space like an airborne ranger without a parachute. A rock painfully scrapped my shoulder and I tilted more out of control, barely having time to hold my breath before striking the water on my side. The impact twisted my arm and I fought to reach the surface only to have something hit my legs. At first I thought it was a rock, but a flailing arm told me Chuckie had followed me into the water. We broke the surface sputtering for air.
The quarry walls echoed with two boy’s laughter. Several kids jumped into the water. They were worried we might be hurt. Joe and Markie shouted, “Good landing, altar boys. Be seeing you around.”
I started to shout ‘fuck you’, but Chuckie shoved my head under the water.
“Sorry, but I didn’t want to make things worse.”
“Things worse? How?” We had been thrown off a cliff.
“That’s Joe Tully and Mark Barco.” The first swimmer reaching us said with his eyes on the quarry rim. He was a year younger than us and clearly frightened for a good reason. “They were sent to reform school last year for setting fire to the high school.”
“Why would they want to do that?” Another swimmer asked with his eyes clouded with a suspicious apprehension about whether the two delinquents had left the quarries.
“Joe said he like fire.” The younger swimmer treaded water next to Chuckie.
“They also stole money from an old lady’s house, while she was there. Joe’s father is a cop, but he couldn’t get them off. They’re no good.”
“They suck.” Chuckie was close to crying.
“What school they go to?” I wanted to stay far from them.
“Supposedly a Catholic school. Something like Our Lady of the Mountain.”
“That’s our school.” Which wasn’t geared for bullies.
“Don’t worry.” The older boy swam to the Rooftop’s cliff. “They won’t make through the summer without getting arrested and then it’s back to Billerica Correctional for them. Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
No one in the quarries was aiming at sainthood and we were bonded by the fraternity of bending parental rules and teachers’ lessons of civil conduct, however Joe Tully and his friend existed on another plane than us. Chuckie was still shaken by the episode and I asked, “You want to go home?”
“No, I came here to swim.”
“Then let’s do it.”
We climbed to rooftop with our new friends. My sneakers and shirt were in the bushes. The younger boy was from Quincy and the old boy from Dorchester. More teenagers gathered on the ledge and we committed ourselves to a group jump. The quarries were our church and special deeds had to be performed to protect their sanctity.
“On the count of three.”
Chuckie’s smile was a joy to see. Mine matched his heart. This was my world. The quarries, the Blue Hills, my street, my school, my town, the South Shore of Boston and it wouldn’t change until Kyla returned home from Florida.
My toes gripped the rock. It was warm from the sun. The water would be cold. Chickie nodded and I counted out the numbers. “One-two-three.”
We leapt off Rooftop and our splash into the water washed away the bullies’ humiliation. The others followed our plunge feet-first. Their screams echoed off the rock walls. More boys jumped from ledges around the quarries. I threw my head back and laughed with Chuckie.
Life was back to normal, because it was once more summer and would be for the next three months, unless the Russians nuked us and if they did we would always have today.
For Chapter 2 click on this URL