Читать книгу Say That To My Face - David Prete - Страница 7

The theory is this: The way in which we tried to get the attention of the first person we ever had a crush on is the way we continue to do it for the rest of our lives. However creative, desperate, blunt or devious our young tactics were, we don’t give them up.

My tactic? Pretended I was a superhero. Pretended I had enough superpowers to rescue people from the ordinary world, that I came from a place better than earth, where superhuman things are a way of life. A faraway place, where magical powers are realized and saviors are born. Who wouldn’t fall in love with someone from that world?

So, that’s what I tried to convince the first girl I had a crush on—that I was different than the rest. That I had powers no one she knew would ever have.

When I was twenty-six I told my girlfriend about this theory—that as adults we still try to win lovers with our childhood tactics—and what my tactics were. “Yeah,” she said, “that is what you do, isn’t it?”

But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about the year I was in the second grade. The year there were regular kickball games up the block and a crazy guy going around New York killing people. I want to talk about the first girl who let me be a superhero.

EVERY NIGHT IN front of the Gallaghers’ house, a kickball game would start up. A group of neighborhood kids gathered there after dinner and, in place of doing homework, played ball. The kickball season began in early spring and ended when we started having to run the bases with our hands in our pockets. My sister Catherine and I walked the five doors down to the Gallaghers’ and played until dusk, when our mother would call us home.

Mr. and Mrs. Gallagher didn’t run the kind of house in which the neighborhood kids were invited inside all the time. We didn’t even know what the inside of their house looked like—never got closer than the curb. Mr. Gallagher would only pop his head out the front door every so often to tell us to keep it down because his wife wasn’t feeling well and she was trying to sleep. I don’t ever remember actually seeing Mrs. Gallagher. But the manhole cover in front of their driveway was the best natural home plate on the block.

Rory Gallagher had long brown hair. Of the five Gallagher kids, she was second youngest. She stood with hands on her waist and her bony hip kicked out to one side. She also had a habit—which she didn’t pick up from her older brothers—of spitting. With a low growl she would collect the saliva in her throat, then hock it onto the street, two feet from where you were standing. It got so we didn’t mind. The only time Rory ever caught grief for this was when she spit on the street during the kickball games. If someone fielded a ball that had rolled over one of Rory’s saliva patches, they wouldn’t try to get the runner out; they would run after her and try to wipe the ball on her.

I once got my nerve up enough to ask her why she spit all the time. She claimed she only spit after she ate chicken cutlets for dinner, because she hated the aftertaste.

It was Rory’s attention I was trying to get.

BATMAN WAS A superhero who was also human. When he was a little kid, Batman’s parents were murdered. To avenge their murder and fight crime of all kinds, Batman developed all the strength and skill of his mind and body beyond traditional limits. He didn’t get an overdose of gamma radiation or get bit by a spider in a lab experiment, nor could he breathe underwater, turn invisible or assume different miraculous forms. Yeah, he could scale walls and kick bad-guy ass like the rest of the superheroes, but ultimately, he was just an ordinary man making the best of what he had, fighting for his cause.

Every so often during the kickball games I would have to run back home when I heard the Batphone ring. A call from the police commissioner saying there was a problem the cops couldn’t handle without me. I’d run back to the game and announce that I had to get to an undisclosed location immediately to fight crime. I’d apologize to Rory for having to leave, but demonstrate a superhero’s generosity by leaving my own kickball behind so the game could continue without me. In that case my sister would bring the ball home and I wouldn’t catch hell from Mom for losing it. And it wasn’t easy to part with my ball. I was six. It was my ball.

There were times when I was able to handle the crime situation over the phone. In which case I would walk back up the street, assure everyone that everything was going to be all right, and I’d finish out the game.

When it was time to go home, our mother belted out our names from the front stoop like an ocean liner’s horn wailing during a launch. And if you missed the boat, you were in trouble. If you missed it during that particular kickball season, which started March of 1977, you were in an extraordinary amount of trouble.

YOUNG GIRLS WITH shoulder-length brown hair. That’s who we were told he went after.

“Under no circumstances do you kids go out when it’s dark out. Do you hear me?”

“How about if the ice cream man comes?”

“No. There’s ice cream in the refrigerator.”

The first murder happened in July of the previous year. Initially it was just another homicide, a story that took up a tiny space in the newspaper. But March 8, 1977, marked the fifth attack. By then he had gone after nine people. Then it drew a lot of attention. Sketches of him were on TV, in the paper, posted in Laundromats and on telephone poles everywhere. He looked as plain as anyone’s father. Except he scared the shit out of us.

“Mom, does he only go after people in the city?”

“They don’t know. He goes after people in the Bronx, where we used to live, and that’s only ten minutes away from where we live now. I want you to listen to me. If you see a yellow or a cream-colored car with a man in it, I want you to run away from it. You run home and you tell me. Do you understand?”

They were shot in parked cars, on their front porches or walking home from school. The cops knew it was the same guy because they were able to confirm all the bullets came from the same kind of gun—a .44-caliber revolver. That’s how he got his first name, which all the kids in my neighborhood called him: the .44-Caliber Killer.

“They said he hates women. And you know how the cops know he’s gonna do it again?”

“How?”

“Because his gun holds five bullets and he only shoots four of them. He keeps one for the next time.”

“That’s not true.”

“That’s what my dad said.”

“No, he keeps one bullet in his gun in case someone tries to run after him and catch him, then he can shoot them, too.”

He started to leave notes for the cops, poems about pouring lead on girls’ heads until they were dead, cats mating and birds singing. He also left drawings with circles and arrows and crosses that looked like the insignia of demonic worship. He called himself “the monster” and signed the notes with his second name: Son of Sam.

My sister once walked around the house with yellow guck in her hair and a cellophane bag over it for about an hour. Then my mother leaned her backward over the kitchen sink and washed the guck out. When my sister lifted her head up, her brown hair was now blond.

My mother was very excited. “Oh, look how pretty. Come look at yourself.”

I followed them into the bathroom. Mom sat Catherine up on the sink in front of the mirror for a second opinion.

“Catherine, it’s so pretty. You look like a movie star.”

Catherine touched her hair the way a kid fumbles with a new toy, not sure how it works.

“Do you like it, sweetie?”

My sister smiled. “Yeah. I like it a lot.”

WHEN I ASKED my mother how Mrs. Gallagher died, she told me she was sick with cancer. I was in the second grade; Rory was in the fifth. It happened in April, only a month after the fifth Son of Sam attack.

After the funeral, family, friends and people from the neighborhood went over to the Gallaghers’ house. It was the only time I ever saw it from the inside. For us kids, having to sit quietly in their strange house with a group of adults, in our nice clothes, with no game going on outside was the most disorienting part of the whole day. What I really wanted to do was poke around in their kitchen and bathroom and definitely get a look at Rory’s room.

I think I was the only one who noticed Rory walk up the stairs. I followed her. All the doors that lined the long hallway were closed; the daylight couldn’t get in. Rory opened the last door on the right and went in. I knew I was in a place I probably shouldn’t have been, but curiosity coupled with my crush kept me going. The power to turn invisible would have come in handy. I peeked in after her. The room had a huge canopy bed and two layers of curtains on the windows. Against the wall was a vanity covered with makeup cases and bottles of perfume like my mother had in her room. Also, there were bottles just like the ones my stepfather kept his asthma medicine in.

Rory opened a dresser drawer and was kneeling in front of it, her hands kneading through the clothes. She looked confused. She searched through the drawer as if what she wanted was there last time she checked. She took a green sweater out and held it up by the sleeves, but still wasn’t satisfied with what she found. Maybe Rory believed that she couldn’t have been brought to a scary place such as this earth only to be left unattended, and was convinced that folded up in that sweater she would find a perfect explanation for all this. She examined the whole thing, then reached inside and carefully read the label.

I forgot I was trying to be unnoticed and said, “What’s it say?”

My voice or my presence didn’t startle her. She seemed to know I was there the whole time. She turned her head to me; the sweater was draped over her lap.

“It says you can’t wash it.”

BETWEEN THE FIVE children in mourning and parents who were afraid to let their children out of the house, our kickball games really slowed down. A few of us would still gather in front of the Gallaghers’ house but felt we didn’t have the right to the playing field unless one of the Gallagher kids joined us. When they didn’t come out, we just stood around, bounced the ball around for a while, then reluctantly went back home way before the sun went down. And when one of them did come out to start the game, it was never Rory. She stopped playing altogether, and without her around there wasn’t much crime for me to fight.

From the street I would look up, trying to figure out which window was hers. I had visions of flying into their house, swooping down, grabbing Rory off her bed and taking her to a safe distance above all the lunacy. If I really was a superhero I could’ve gotten Rory out of the house, caught the Son of Sam and somehow saved Mrs. Gallagher’s life. I didn’t even know what a .44-caliber revolver or a cancer cell looked like, but they were the same—two invisible monsters that snuck up on people and killed them. Surely Batman must have had some kind of weapon that could beat both of them. But, pretend as I did, I couldn’t stop either one of them.

RORY HAD A kid sister named Kerri who was in my grade. To me, the most interesting thing about Kerri was that she had a sister named Rory. Kerri only waited a week to come back to school after her mother died and right off the bat there was an incident. I walked by her and accidentally bumped into her desk. Her crayon slipped out of the lines and she lost it.

“Look what you did! You ruined my picture! I’m sick of this! First my brothers and now you! I’m sick of it! Do you hear me? I’m sick of it!”

It was like I had accidentally knocked a knife off a table and didn’t catch it for fear of getting cut. I jumped out of the way and let it fall. I had a feeling it wasn’t about her picture, but I didn’t know what else to do. Mrs. Johnson said, “OK, Kerri that’s enough. Why don’t you sit down now.”

She didn’t even wipe her nose or her eyes until a drop landed on her picture.

Outbursts weren’t Kerri’s only form of grieving. A few times she just got really quiet and said she wasn’t feeling well. She’d go to the school nurse and her father got called at work to come pick her up. Mrs. Johnson explained to us that she thought Kerri wasn’t sick, but rather she was upset about her mom. That I understood.

The thing that didn’t make sense was the water fountain.

The class was silently staring into workbooks, trying to solve three-digit subtraction problems, when I went to get a drink. Bent over with my mouth near the faucet, I felt someone come up behind me. I turned around; it was Kerri. She was standing uncomfortably close but wasn’t looking at me. She had her eyes on the fountain. I wiped my mouth and stepped around her cautiously, not sure if she was done throwing tantrums.

Two days later, same thing again. Got up right behind me, stood close and still didn’t look at me.

I couldn’t see why the girl who, weeks before, chewed me out in front of everyone now needed to stand so close and put her mouth to the same faucet right after mine.

The third time I wasn’t even thirsty. I only wanted to see if it would happen again. By the time I had my face over the faucet, Kerri was behind me. Mrs. Johnson announced—so everyone could hear—how she’d noticed that every time Joseph got up for a drink, Kerri did also. When all the heads and giggles pointed in Kerri’s direction, Mrs. Johnson asked if Kerri was really thirsty. Kerri answered her question by sitting down.

In the second grade, we didn’t expect to have to deal with adults who couldn’t see it was uncool to publicly embarrass a kid who lost her mother a month ago. Nor did we expect in the summer ahead of us there would be a citywide blackout, that Elvis Presley would die so young, that a bomb threat would evacuate thirty-five thousand people from the World Trade Center or that the Son of Sam would turn out to be a twenty-four-year-old guy named David who lived in our neighborhood a few blocks from where we played. How could we have conceptualized evil as a quiet guy who worked at the post office, rented the studio apartment down the street and lived among us? Fifteen years earlier he attended our elementary school, was taught by the same teachers, sat at our desks and drank out of the same water fountain. As grade school children, we had no idea that we were months away from those kinds of thoughts.

WE THOUGHT IT was him.

Kerri and I tried to play as if the water fountain incidents never happened. Catherine and I pushed our curfew. The sun was setting. We stopped the game for the car coming down the street. When it got close, we saw it was cream-colored, then we saw there was one guy in it.

Some kids took off and ran through front yards, between houses. Some screamed. I couldn’t run. I fell backward, put my forearms in front of my face, not wanting to see or be seen. When I peeked out from behind my arms, he was halfway down the block; my sister was through our front door. It was time to run home, but not without my ball. I ran to Kerri, who was on the sidewalk, her whole body wrapped around the kickball.

I said, “Give me the ball,” and tried to pry it from her. She rolled over and wouldn’t let me grab it.

“Come on!” I said.

She wasn’t giving it up. On top of her, I tried to get my hands between her stomach and the ball. She was fighting me. I rolled her on her back—she was laughing. Not a good time for a game of keep-away, I thought. I tried to punch the ball loose but never meant to knock the wind out of her. She held her ribs and cried. I said I was sorry, but she didn’t even look back as she ran to her house. Someone had been yelling for her to get the hell inside. The screen door slammed behind her, then Rory appeared behind it. Her hair was gone, cut straggly, close to her head; it looked like she’d done it herself. She yelled at me, “Get out of here! Go home!”

My mother grabbed me by the back of my shirt and didn’t let go until we were in our house. She yelled at me for not running home like my sister and wanted to know if I knew how to listen.

Nowhere. From now on, after dinner, we were to go nowhere.

I went into my room, closed the door and slammed the ball against my dresser; my lamp fell. I thought about the smile on Kerri’s face while she wrestled me for the ball. Kerri Gallagher likes me? I grabbed the windowpane, tried to look up the block and only saw the streetlights come on. Kerri Gallagher likes me.

THE NEXT MORNING we ate our cereal without talking as the radio played the news in the background. When it was time to go to school, we were handed our lunch boxes.

We stepped outside. It felt as if an overnight snowfall had covered the entire neighborhood in three feet of silence.

When we pulled up to school, Catherine and I leaned over the front seat to kiss our mom goodbye. She waited until we walked in the front door to drive away.

Kerri spoke to no one. During lunch hour she was sitting on a bench next to two other girls who were making finger puppets out of lined paper. I didn’t have it in me to go over to her. Only when we were all making our way back into the school was I able to walk up next to her and ask if she was OK. She didn’t even answer me.

We all sat at our desks and were told to get our math workbooks out.

I didn’t want to do anything Mrs. Johnson said. It made no sense why she had embarrassed Kerri yesterday. It made no sense why the cops couldn’t catch the .44-Caliber Killer or why parents yell at their children when they’re trying to protect them or why we had to solve three-digit subtraction problems again.

While they all had their heads down, I went for the fountain. I drank, then turned back around. No one was standing close to me. Everyone still had their heads in their books. I went to the closet and poked through my lunch box. Mrs. Johnson asked me what I was doing. I told her I broke my pencil; I was just getting a new one. I opened my lunch box and took off the top of my thermos—the part that doubles as a cup. I went to the water fountain and filled it up. Walking toward Kerri, I was terrified that Mrs. Johnson was going to embarrass the hell out of me, too. I fought the urge to look to the front of the room to see if she was watching. Kerri was hunched over her desk, intent on her arithmetic. It happened so fast. I don’t remember walking back to my desk. Kerri never looked up to see if anyone saw it. She only slid the cup closer to her with her left hand and kept writing with the other. She kept it near her like she was going to save it for when she really needed it. I never noticed it before, but when she leaned over like that her hair was long enough to reach her desk.