Читать книгу Secondhand Summer - Dan L. Walker - Страница 11

Chapter 4

On the last day of May, the Bargers drove down Hollywood Drive to our new home in the Hollywood Arms Apartments. Unfortunately, Hollywood Drive in Anchorage, Alaska, had no resemblance to the Hollywood that the rest of the world knew about. Ours was one of dozens of two-story apartment buildings scattered like Monopoly hotels on Government Hill across Ship Creek from downtown Anchorage.

We drove into Anchorage from the south and except for the mountains behind it, Anchorage looked like a city in a geography book, with neighborhoods and groceries stores and gas stations. As we neared downtown, the buildings closed in around our car, and on every block it seemed a building had collapsed or stood empty, damaged by the big earthquake the year before. Suddenly, the downtown ended, and the stores and other building were gone. Most of them were crumbled by the quake and then hauled away in dump trucks. It left a bare hill right on the edge of busy downtown.

The hill leading down to the railroad and the docks was empty. At the base of this hill, Ship Creek crossed under the railroad tracks, past the docks and the rail yards, and slid through the mudflats into Cook Inlet. We drove across and up the opposite bluff to Government Hill, where most of the traffic was headed for the air force base. Our neighborhood was on the bluff above the railroad yard and two blocks from Elmendorf Air Force Base. Hollywood Drive seemed, even to a bush kid, to be in the middle of nowhere going nowhere.

We parked in front of the Hollywood Arms and started unloading the car. Mary complained as soon as Mom was out of earshot. “You notice nobody asked what we wanted? This place is a dump. I can just imagine what the kids are like.”

“It’s not so bad,” I said.

“Not so bad! When you get to be my age, Humpy, you’ll be more particular. Peeling paint the color of chicken vomit, dirty, broken windows? It’s a dump!”

“So it’s pretty yucky. Well, orphans don’t get many choices,” I said.

“Oh lose the drama, Sam. We’re not orphans.”

“Wanna bet?”

“Don’t start that. Orphans go to orphanages or get adopted because they don’t have parents, moron. I think if you look, Mom’s in the kitchen cleaning cupboards.”

“I’ll find the dictionary and show you, as soon as we get unpacked.” And I did too, showing her in the dictionary that a child who loses one parent can also be called an orphan.

“You’ll see, Humpy. Orphan or not, when you go to school next year you won’t be the tallest kid or the fastest runner or anything. You’ll just be another stupid freshman in a big school. And I’ll be that junior girl that nobody knows or wants to.” She stomped off with a pair of boxes and disappeared through the dirty green door that led to our new home.

The sky was suddenly full of noise, and I looked up to see a trio of fighter jets roaring in low to land at the air force base. It was amazing to see real jets flying just above my head like the ones on the model airplane boxes. It wasn’t long though, after the flash and roar, that the ribbons of exhaust across the sky became just part of the incessant noise. Distant thunder behind the storm of cars, kids, and trains.

Our new home was a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor. Five rooms with white walls: a kitchen with an electric stove; a complete bathroom glistening with porcelain and chrome; two bedrooms and a living room with windows that opened to let the musty air escape.

My room had a window with a view of the gravel and potholes of the parking lot. Beyond that was the natural hedge of cottonwoods and alders along the bluff, and beyond that the screech, chug, and whistle of the railroad yard that carried a hint of mystery and adventure. No room for snares or traplines, no snug hummocks where a boy could hide and daydream, but I had to admit that back home had no railroads, fighter jets, or playgrounds. Luckily, for the time being, the excitement of newness had me forgetting the leaving part of moving.

I had three boxes piled on the bed. One box was jeans, T-shirts, and underwear that I sorted into the bottom drawer of a metal refugee from an army barracks. It matched the single metal bed that took up most of the space. The room was small, but it was mine and the first time I’d had a room of my own. In the coming months it would become a refuge from all things that weren’t.

The other boxes were the important ones. One was a Black Label Beer case. The bottom was reinforced with tape and packed so full of comics that I barely made it up the stairs without a rest. Half of the comics made a neat stack on the corner of the bureau; the rest went under the bed.

One box remained, a Smirnoff Vodka case with bottle dividers in place. One by one I removed the models packed in newspaper, slowly rolling the paper out in my hand like these were the last Christmas gifts under the tree. Each one had an importance that extended beyond the values of plastic models, glued and painted piece by piece.

There had been tough choices when I packed my things in Ninilchik. Mom gave me one box for my books and models, and I’d had to sort through boxes of treasures to find pieces that meant something, that would help me remember. Everything else went into two other boxes, one for things to give away and one to be stored in the attic of the cabin to wait for the day I returned. I could only believe that all of this was just temporary.

My plastic models that made the cut were a Ford station wagon, an X-15 rocket plane, and a Corvette convertible. The others were glue-stained or missing parts, so I put them on the closet shelf. The X-15 and the 1965 Corvette I lined up on the windowsill. The Corvette was from Becky, when she drew my name for the class gift exchange. I kept it to help me remember her. The rocket plane had been a birthday gift from Dad, the last, I realized. Now all I had were these pieces of plastic and paint and a strange sick feeling when I thought of them.

The Ford station wagon with wood grain trim was just like the car we had taken Dad in to the hospital when he had his first heart attack. When I set it in place on the bureau—a new place in a new room—I felt a warm knot in my throat.

Once we settled in our apartment, it became a home without a mother. Each day, Mom was up by five, showered, and sitting at the table with a cup of coffee in her robe looking out the window before she dressed and caught the bus downtown. She worked at the big hotel there. She was a waitress until three then a hostess or cashier until closing. Most nights she didn’t come home until ten. By then, she wanted her “sippin’ and slippers”: a short glass of whiskey and her sheepskin slippers. With those two comforts and a kiss from her kids she would sleep on the couch until it was time to start again.

There was no more fresh bread in the house. No hot stew with dumplings. The mother I’d had for all these years moved out and left her twin. This was a mother at work, going to work, home from work, or tired from work. She didn’t make jelly and she bought Wonder Bread.

Mary and I had a list of chores for each day, including cleaning and laundry until finally, Mary even admitted we had become orphans. I determined to get along by doing anything I chose for as long as I could, undisturbed. I daydreamed and read my comics, and Mickey Spillane detective novels. I inherited Mickey Spillane from Joe, who didn’t think I would understand them, but I did. Spillane wrote stories about tough-guy detectives, urban Tarzans taking on the rough jungle life of the city.

My third Sunday in Anchorage I lay with my feet propped up on the windowsill and a book under my nose. I was using up an afternoon helping Mike Hammer track a high society killer. Mom was running the vacuum up and down the hall in her weekend ritual of cleaning everything in the apartment, dirty or not. She was in her Sunday jeans and sweatshirt that she changed into after what Mary and I called “church shopping.” We had been to three different churches in a month, and she still wasn’t settled on one that fit her philosophy. This week she had walked out shaking her head. “What Bible has he been reading?” she asked in disgust. Mary and I just nodded and looked at each other.

She shut off the vacuum long enough to shout down the hall at me, but I pretended not to hear. Then I heard her footsteps coming to my room. She didn’t share my literary convictions, so Spillane went under the bed and out came a book called Touchdown Trouble—sports stories were more to Mom’s approval. She rapped on the door and followed that in.

She leaned on the doorjamb and glared. “Go and meet some of the kids in the neighborhood,” she said. “You’ll never make friends sitting in here with your nose in a book.”

“I don’t want to meet anybody.” I threw my book facedown on the rumpled bedspread.

“You don’t mean that. Go on outside.”

“One more chapter?”

“You can finish the chapter you’re on. That’s all.”

More arguments would just start a fight, so I read until she finished vacuuming and jumped me again. “I thought I told you to go outside.”

“You did. I’m going.” Then I stomped down the stairs into a cold, cloudy Anchorage June.

The only kids out and about in the neighborhood were three little girls playing on a rusty swing set. I roamed down the block away from the dreary apartment building and onto a street full of small houses. Mom was right. I wanted, perhaps desperately, to have friends, but meeting strangers seemed like a much-too-difficult way to do it. These people already had friends and lives. They didn’t need me.

How did a guy make friends? I was born with all mine, or they rolled into town and took up with the rest of the kids in school. I came from a place where friends were the kids you grew up with, like brothers and sisters almost, some you loved, some you hated, but, at sometime or another, you played with them all. Back home was too far away now, so I put it out of my mind.

I daydreamed I was playing tight end for a football team and trying to win the big one all by myself. My team was the underdog, and rain had turned the field to mud. I scooped up a fumble and ran, dodging, twisting, and turning through the stumbling tacklers of the other team.

Out of nowhere, a real football soared by me, nearly beaning me just before it bounced off the hood of a Plymouth station wagon. I stumbled after the ball and carried it back to a gang of kids in the middle of the street.

“Wanna play some touch?” a tall skinny teenager asked. “We need another guy.”

“Sure,” I said, a little nervous.

I was tall for my age, so the two teams argued over who deserved most to benefit from my obvious size and possible skill. I ended up with a short boy with a pug nose they called Macek and his bigmouthed pal, Taylor. I told them I could play tight end, which from my book-only experience meant I ran down the field and caught passes for touchdowns.

We formed a three-cornered huddle. Taylor squinted like a tough guy. “You catch a pass?” he asked.

“You bet. Just get it to me,” I answered with a line right out of Touchdown Trouble.

“Good, ’cause we’re three touchdowns behind.”

Taylor puffed up. “Okay, do a quick block and sprint down the middle of the street.”

For the first time in my life I took my place on the line of scrimmage. The skinny teenager lined up across from me and when Taylor said “HIKE!” he tried to push me over, but I moved to the side and dashed down the street, turning just in time to see the ball sail far to my left and once more bounce off a car.

Back in the huddle, Taylor glared at me like I was supposed to catch anything he threw. “Sorry,” I said.

Little pug nose chimed in. “Get it to him this time, Taylor. I’ll block.”

I never got a look at the ball that hit me in the back of the head, and on the next play Taylor never saw the tag that got him before he could move. He stood panting in the huddle. His face was flushed bright red behind a spatter of freckles.

“You guys gotta block this time,” he growled.

“Yeah,” said Macek, “throw me the ball.”

Once more we gained no yards but I got my block, paying for it with scraped knees. The kid named Taylor growled some more, “You guys aren’t trying. We can beat these guys.”

We only allowed the skinny high schooler and his team two more touchdowns before parents started appearing at the doors of the houses calling the boys home. Soon, only Macek, Taylor, and I stood awkwardly in the middle of the street.

Macek was short and stocky with a brown crew cut. Taylor was nearly as tall as I was, with a pile of red hair to match his freckles. “So, you just move here or something?” he asked.

“Yeah, from Ninilchik, down on the peninsula.”

“You’re from Chickenshit?” Macek said. He laughed.

I laughed, too. “No, Na-nil-chik!”

“My dad took me fishin’ there once,” Taylor said. “It’s out in the boonies. I caught lots of king salmon there.”

“In the boonies with the loonies!” Macek added. Only he laughed this time and I winced.

I tried to picture Taylor on the banks of the Ninilchik River in a sweatshirt and hip boots, trudging out from his dad’s camper with a salmon rod in his hand. Maybe last summer, Harry and I had sold him some of the lures we salvaged from the snags in the river. Maybe we’d go this summer, Taylor and his dad and me, and I could show them where to catch the big ones and the places where the snags could steal your hooks.

“Where do you live now?” Macek asked.

“Hollywood Arms, those big green apartments across Hollywood Drive. We’re on the top floor.”

“Now there’s a dump for you. My dad calls it the ghetto.”

I was surprised at him talking that way, even if I didn’t know exactly what a ghetto was. “It’s not like I get to choose where I live.”

“Yeah, well you better watch out. ’Cause them people got nothin’ and they’ll rob ya blind. That’s what my dad says.”

Taylor jumped to my defense. “Your dad just says that. He’s never even been in those apartments.”

“Yeah and he wouldn’t be either.”

“You’re a jerk,” Taylor said, “and your dad doesn’t know crap.”

“Sure he does. He knows you!” Macek said. He was chomping on a wad of bubblegum and the juice bubbled out when he talked. He laughed.

“I know you are but what am I?” Taylor returned.

“Where do you guys live?” I asked, interrupting their silly argument.

“Mr. Know-It-All lives way down past the shopping center, and I live right there,” said Taylor, pointing to a blue house with a garage and chain-link fence. “Heck, we lived in the Spruce Tree Courts when we first moved here, and it was just as bad as the Arms. My dad kept having to go yell at the neighbors to quit playin’ their music so loud. He’d have kicked their butts if they had the guts to fight him.”

Silently, I thanked Taylor for getting me out of that one. I’d never had to fight a total stranger before, even though Macek didn’t look like he would be much of a fight. It would be a fearful sort of encounter without any kind of relationship to fall back on when it was over. I always thought hitting a stranger would be easier than a good friend like Harry, but it didn’t seem to work that way.

To think I was going to tell them how cool it was to live in an apartment, on the second floor yet, and we were going to get TV. Now I find out it’s not cool at all. I suddenly envied Macek and Taylor for their yards and houses and dads to tell them things, though I couldn’t remember my father ever telling me rotten things like that about other people.

I risked an invitation, “You guys want to come over and play on the bluff behind the apartments tomorrow? The alders are neat and we can climb around and stuff.” How bold I felt to invite, to assume, friendship with two guys I’d just met.

“I’m spendin’ the night at Macek’s here, so yeah, why not? If Macek isn’t afraid someone will rob him.” We laughed and Macek slugged Taylor in the shoulder.

I left my new-found pals to finish their fight alone and ran all the way home. I had found some friends, but the apartment looked shabby and worn out. Did I imagine faces glaring at me from every window? The three little girls I had seen earlier were still on the swings and I observed that two were black and one brown. I hadn’t noticed before.

A guilty relief filled me when I found a little white girl with a jack-o-lantern grin perched on the steps. She was dirty and lean, a deserted runt on the front porch. I smiled when she said hello and tried not to let her know that I was staring at her forehead. It was impossible not to stare: a lump stuck out of her forehead just above her eyes. The strangest nodule of skin and tissue that I had ever seen jutted from her head like a misplaced navel. A giant mole? No, more like a belly button, one that stuck out instead of in. She had an “outie” right in the middle of her forehead.

I climbed the steps refusing to look back, though I wanted to stare and even touch the weird magnetic oddness of it. Never in my life had I seen such an astonishing curiosity on anyone’s face. I announced it when I walked in the door. “Did you see that little girl with the belly button on her head?”

“Samuel!” Mom was stretched on the couch with a stack of official papers on her chest, looking tired and lonely.

“Well, Mom, she does.”

“I’m aware of that, but don’t you think it’s cruel to make fun of her?” Then her tone changed. “I can’t believe her mother can’t have that thing removed.”

“They live upstairs,” offered Mary, dancing to the radio as she set the tiny table for three. “Her mom’s a drunk, and worse, I bet.”

“Where on earth did you hear such a thing?”

“Mom, you can hear everything in this place. The way that woman talks, you better stuff cotton in Humpy’s ears when he goes to bed.”

“His name is Sam, and that will be just enough of that. I expect you to treat that little girl nicely. She has enough to put up with without you two giving her a bad time. Get in there and put supper on the table.”

Supper was still strange with just three of us, but no one mentioned it. Instead we looked beyond the room for topics. “Mom, why do all these Negroes live here?” I asked around a mouthful of chicken. Back in Ninilchik I’d never seen but two black people before and now they were all around me. I didn’t say so, but they scared me a little.

“They’re just people,” asserted Mom.

“One of them talked to me today,” Mary said.

“That’s nice,” Mom answered tersely. “You just stay away from them.”

“But I was down at the laundry room,” Mary continued, “and this lady came in and got her sheets out of the dryer. She just asked me where I was from and stuff like that.”

“I didn’t say they weren’t friendly. I just said stay away. They have their life and we have ours. Now get after those dishes.” Mom left us with no chance for questions and went off to her bath.

I went to bed filled with images of that little girl with the belly button on her forehead. Maybe her mom was a witch who practiced black magic on helpless children. Maybe she wasn’t a little girl at all but a bat, or a unicorn changed by some trick of magic. After all, it was nighttime when I saw her.

The way Mom talked about our neighbors managed to make this place even more mysterious. The smells of cooking food and sounds of music coming from the other apartments were as foreign as any I could imagine. From the mold, the mildew, and the accented voices of the hallways, to the unfamiliar spicy food odors and pounding, pounding music that leaked through open windows, I was surrounded by this strange and sinister place that I must call home. I was glad it was summer so the night wasn’t dark.