Burning Second Street Park

A Novel

by Tom Bessette

Copyright 2009 BessetteBooks

Chapter 1
Bobby Nolette 

I opened my eyes and saw the sun coming through the back window, kinda like a shimmery curtain was taped to the top of the window and stretched down to the floor.  My big brother, Billy, was still asleep, the lazybones, and I would beat him down to breakfast for the third Saturday in a row.  You snooze, you lose, sucker!

Billy was six years older than me and was real mad that he had to share a room with me.  He always said that he was big enough not to have to sleep with a snivel-y runt. He got me back by always wrecking the games and projects that me and my friends set up in our room. It wasn’t my fault we had to share a room, it was because our house only had four bedrooms and there was one for my parents, one for my older sister, one for my old Pip, and then the one left for me and Billy.  He knew all that; I think it was just an excuse to be mean. He wasn’t hardly ever in our room anyways, only, mostly, to sleep, and slept late almost every day, except for school days. He was just a stupid big brother.

I got up and turned my new transistor radio on low to WTRY just in time to hear the end of ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ by the Beach Boys, the neatest song on the radio this month, and all the guys say so, too, especially Pauly.  Pauly and Dicky Boulerice had the record already; they always get all the new 45’s to play on their record player; the lucky stiffs. The idea of stealing a T-Birdie, like they talked about in the song, scared the heck out of me.  I just knew I’d crash the car and all the guys would think I was a scared-y-cat because I’d probably cry - even though I’d try not to, you just can’t help it sometimes.  At least I can’t.

The Boulerices had all the Beach Boy records, and the albums too, ever since Surfin’ Safari.  We liked the surfing songs even though we none of us knew really what surfing was, but boy we sure knew about the cars they were singing about now.  Well, we really didn’t know what a 409 was, even though Pauly said HE did, but I think he was lying.  He liked everybody to think he was real smart, when he wasn’t always so smart, except about baseball; he knew all about that.  He could tell you how many strikeouts Sandy Koufax had in every game he pitched for the dodgers, which was his favorite team, Pauly’s that is, although the Dodgers were probably Koufax’s favorite team too, since he played for them and all.  Him and Don Drysdale and all those other Dodger guys.  Me, I liked the Minnesota Twins. You know, Harmon Killebrew! Now that guy could hit homers like they were going out of style.

Of course nobody in our neighborhood had a T-Birdie to steal, anyways, like the one they sang about in the song I was listening to.  Pauly’s dad drove a Rambler which was always just about to break down and always smelled like burning.  My dad had a Plymouth Belvedere which had a ‘Pushbutton Transmission’ instead of a gear stick on the steering wheel.  He’d let me push the buttons to get from Park to Drive when we were gonna go someplace in the car, which was so boss, and I would tell everybody that I drove dad’s car again and they’d be amazed again. My dad bought a new car every three years because he needed a good working car for his sales job. It wasn’t a T-Birdie, or a Stingray, or a 413, but it was neat-o anyway, with those buttons.  I always rode standing up in the front seat, bouncing when we hit potholes in the road, which our street had a lot of.  But on long trips, I could lay up on the shelf next to the back window, behind the back seat, and it was always sunny and warm there, and I could just about fit.

Mom hadn’t patched the hole in my knee yet, but I put on my good ol’ dungarees anyway. My black socks from last night had a hole in one toe and my toe looked real neat-o sticking out and wiggling, so I put them back on, poking the toe through the hole really neat, like. I also pulled out my Batman T-Shirt and my Keds that were starting to get pretty dirty, just like I liked them.  If we had enough money, Mom would probably think I needed a new pair, but I liked these and wanted to wear them all summer. You could always run faster in sneakers that were dirty than new clean ones, especially new, clean white ones. Mom just didn’t get what was important at all, and was always trying to get you to wear new clean stuff and then stay out of the dirt.  Sheesh!

My Airfax army men were still set up in the battle formations that me and Joey Zlotnick had set up last night before he had to go home to bed. I wouldn’t see him again until Monday because he was going away to visit his grandma somewhere. He was OK because he was half French and only half Pollack and was Catholic too, like me, so I could play with him and nobody minded at all. I was all French and so was really OK, but half French was OK too. So was Italian, as long as they were Catholic. I had stayed up late in the dark and played with the Airfax men a little while, after he left, quiet like, so Mom wouldn’t hear. I was worried that stupid Billy might wreck it all when he got up and saw it; he’d do it for sure, if he thought of it, which he might not because he is the stupidest brother around, the jerk.  I threw some papers over it all to cover it and figured Billy wouldn’t see it because he was too dumb to look under papers. I’d beat him up if he did it, if I could, but he’s bigger, darn it, and always pushes me down, and I get hurt and Dad tells me that I have to fight my own battles, anyway, even though he could sure beat Billy up if HE wanted to. He’s real big. And real strong.  And has a real loud voice when he gets mad and says a lot of bad words, I think. That’s what Mom says, anyway. But most of the time he’s pretty friendly and will play the hockey game in the cellar or catch in the yard, although I can’t catch very well. I still flinch away from the ball when someone throws it at me and close my eyes, and dad says I’ll never be able to learn to catch ‘cause I can’t see the ball through my eyelids.  I don’t really close them all the way, just kinda squint and scrunch my shoulders in, and sometimes I catch it anyways. On Saturdays, dad had to go out and see customers, and he had already left and might be home by lunch, but mom would make him do stuff around the house, and so he wouldn’t be able to play with me.  Rats.

I did my hopping clunking thing down the stairs to the kitchen and Mom was already sitting in her chair, eating bread with jam and tea like she always did, with her radio on to a OPERA, which I really hated, all those screechy voices singing in German or Spanish or whatever it was, and you couldn’t understand a word, and Mom would have tears in her eyes and say it was so beautiful, I should listen; I’d love it.  If anything were true, it was when Mom said you’d love something; you just knew it was the stupidest, grossest stuff you could ever imagine, like liver or beets or something.  She was always trying to get you to taste yucky things and listen to stupid screechy opera and try on sissy clothes and stuff. Sheesh!

As I got to the bottom of the stairs, she said, “Bobby! You sound like runaway horses clomping down those stairs. You have to take it easy so you don’t get hurt or crash through the wall,” or something, like she was always saying.  Most moms were real sissies when it came to running and jumping and crashing into things, like her.  She smiled, though, so I knew she wasn’t real mad, only sort of faking mad, like she always does, especially when I ran out the door and slammed it like she said I was always doing for the hundredth time, only I never saw it. I thought I was always careful.

She got up and stuck some Freihofers bread into the toaster, and pulled out the butter and peanut butter and syrup for my breakfast.  I poured the syrup into a bowl, only spilling a little on the table.  I pulled over some of the morning newspaper to cover it so she wouldn’t see it, so she wouldn’t say “Tsk, Tsk, Tsk, what a mess you’re always making,” Bobby, and right away go and get a sponge to mop it up with.  I figured I’d use it all up with a piece of toast when she turned away, and she’d never know.  The toast popped, and one edge of each slice was burned again, as usual, stupid toaster, and mom cut off the edges so I wouldn’t have to eat black stuff and gag all morning like I was dying.  She spread the butter on quick, because I always wanted it ‘melted’ cause it just didn’t taste right with peanut butter and syrup if it wasn’t melted, I don’t know why but it’s true.  She melted the butter OK, then spread Jiffy on, not too thick, to save it, and served me up a platter of Ready Eddie toast and peanut butter.  I tore the bread into pieces and dipped them one by one in my bowl of syrup, dribbling more onto the table, and the newspaper, and a little on my Batman shirt, though I didn’t notice, and had some dribbles of syrup leaking out the corner of my mouth and down my chin. It was great.

Mom told me to drink my milk, but the only way I’d drink milk is when it was mixed with Nestlé’s Quik, which she knew already, for crying out loud, and she remembered and dolloped a teaspoon of the brown powder into my glass and stirred it with her spoon with a really fast, whirly, clinky sound.  She didn’t get it all completely stirred, but I liked the chunks, except when they got stuck in my teeth and people laughed because they knew I forgot to brush as usual, darn it.

I was running out the door as mom was clearing the table and her voice shrieked at me to “get back in here, young man!” and I saw she had moved the paper where I had dribbled the syrup and the paper was stuck to the table and she was trying to pick at it with her fingernails, and everything was all sticking to her.  I had forgot to use up the syrup from the table and now I was in trouble. Rats! She made me run hot water on her sponge and I had to rub it at the wad of paper and syrup grunge on the table for about an hour almost before it was clean enough for me to leave.

As I started to run out to the back porch again, she called at me to get back in here young man again and said that I forgot to help Pip with his leg and insulin. Sheesh, why can’t somebody else do it once in a while?

“Aw Ma, do I gotta,” I asked?

“Yes, you ‘gotta’,” she said, in that voice that told me I sure had gotta better gotta do it quick. Sheesh Cripes!

The Horsie Swings were creaking, off in the park; I could hear them plain as day through the open windows, and I knew somebody was there, maybe everybody even, and I had to go. Me and Gilly Beauchamp had big plans today, darn it, I hadda go!  Mom didn’t care, she made me help Pip anyway, and all the while her screechy opera ladies were still yelling at violins on the radio instead of the Beach Boys, or even Dave Clark 5 or somebody good whose words you could at least understand some of the time.  Mom sure didn’t know anything about music, that’s for sure.

So, anyway, I got the little glass bottle of insulin out of the fridge and clomped up the stairs as fast as I could to get it over with.  Pip was already sitting on the side of his bed in his under shorts when I got up there. He was pretty smelly since he hadn’t had a bath in a long time, I guess, and as always, I couldn’t help but stare at where his missing leg had been cut off.  I never really understood why his leg was cut off; it had been done a few years ago, before I remembered anything, something to do with his diabolic sickness, or something, from eating too much sugar, maybe.  He had a wooden leg and had to stick needles of insulin in his arm to keep from dying.  I mean the wooden leg helped him walk, it was the needle kept him from dying.  I think.

I handed him the insulin and he said for me to take it back and fill the needle.  I took his needle out of the glass with the alcohol in it and jabbed it through the cork in the insulin bottle and really carefully pulled the plunger out while this clear stuff, the insulin, drew up into the tube attached to the needle.  I had to bite my tongue to help me be careful, because if I drew too much or too little, I would kill him. It had to be perfect. I sure didn’t want to have to die and go to hell for killing my grandfather, sheesh!  I think maybe he wouldn’t have minded, but he was mom’s daddy and she would sure be pissed at me!  Oops, I’m not supposed to say or think ‘pissed’ or the other bad words that dad said, because I was too young, dammit!  Oops!  I did it again!  Sheesh!

When I had filled the needle exactly right, Pip was shaky, as usual, so I had to stick it into his rumpus and push the plunger so that the insulin went inside him, sheesh, yuck!  His rumpus was smelly and who wanted to see some old guy’s hiney anyways? Even if he is your grandfather? Plus I had to pinch him where I jabbed it into him so that it would get to his fat or something and who wants to touch an old guy’s hiney anyways?  Sheesh Marie!  My friends were outside swinging on the horsie swings like mad and here I was squeezing Pip’s rumpus and jabbing him with a needle.  No fair! I wanted to go outside real bad but we still hadda do the leg, dammit.  Oops!  Those words kept sneaking up on me.

Anyway, he pulled his under shorts back up a little ways and I got his leg from the wall where it was leaning.  I untangled the straps because they always got all twisted up, and helped him shove it onto his stump.  The skin at the edge of the stump looked kind of folded over and stapled shut so that his blood and other inside stuff wouldn’t leak out, and it always took some struggle to jam the stump into the top of the leg hole so it would stay on and not hurt him too bad.  When we had gotten the leg put on right, I buckled the straps so it would stay tight, and then had to help him on with his pants.

He always wore plaid shirts, either red or blue, a white undershirt without sleeves, and gray pants that were old and creased and pretty shiny, especially in the rumpus, I don’t know why.  He was pretty skinny so I had to buckle his belt tight too, ‘cause if I didn’t, his pants would keep falling down and my sister Annie would screech every time. Sheesh, you think she’d get used to it after a while.  All this dressing tired old Pip out and he had to sit on the bed and rest a bit.  I looked at him there, like I did every morning.  He was old and grumpy and not the kind of grandfather that I wanted. He might have been two hundred or a hundred and twenty years old or something. I had to help him with this way stupid gross stuff all the time and he couldn’t take me to do anything like fishing or having a catch or nothing. He couldn’t even give me a dime to get candy at Robinson’s, even. Cripes! He just sat and looked sad all the time. He hardly ever said anything to me except griping that I wasn’t doing something right and was gonna kill him or something. In fact, he still talked mostly french and did it with such a weird way of saying the words that, even though I knew french, I still couldn’t understand him. I just wanted to get away from him. He lived with us all winter until he went to my cousin’s in the country for the summer, so he’d just got back and it would be a whole school year before I could be free again.  Then I would have a whole summer where I wouldn’t have to jab his rumpus with a needle or shimmy his leg onto his stub, or whatever.  I couldn’t wait.

I gave him his wooden cane and ran out to fly down the stairs into the kitchen.  With the railing, he could get downstairs without help, so I was done now and could FINALLY get out to the park to play.  Lucky for me, my mom was doing something at the stove, talking away to my sister Annie, and she didn’t see me run through the kitchen, so I was free at last.  You never know when she’ll think of something else I forgot to do.

I ran down the back porch steps and curved back through the back yard.  Annie’s boyfriend Mike was in the garden with the hoe, chopping up the dirt around the tomato plants he liked to plant in our garden.  My dad used to do it, but now he let Mike do it, and we got lots better tomatoes now than we used to. And green beans too. When they started coming out, I could wait till nobody was looking and could get all I wanted.  Mike would always say that somebody was stealing the beans because there should be more, but no one ever suspected me, ‘cause I would never eat my vegetables at the table, so nobody expected me to steal beans at all. Dad said Mike had a green thumb but I couldn’t ever see it, so I thought he was kidding or something. His thumbs looked like anybody else’s, to me. I stayed away from Mike because I knew if he caught me, he’d pinch me and punch me, like he always did, to get me to cry, and then he’d laugh and call me a sissy when I finally did.  He was lots bigger than me, even bigger than dad or my big brother, so I don’t know what I was supposed to do. He had a big mean laugh and wouldn’t stop until I cried.  I hoped if Annie ever married him they would move far away so he would leave me alone.  If they ever got some kids, I wondered if he’d pinch them and call them sissies.  Probably, the jerk!

Mike was almost as bad as that jerk Yoder that had moved near us at the start of summer, after school got out.  Yoder had started giving me the creeps.  He always looked at you like he was thinking something real mean, or something. Like, he wanted to hurt you somehow, I don’t know.  He had a couple of the guys real scared, I think.  Lucky my brother would beat him up if he ever tried to hurt me.  I think, anyways.  But, Geez, Moose liked Yoder and played ball with him all the time, so I kind of had to hang out with him, you know?

Anyways, Mike was busy digging and didn’t see me, so I raced out of the yard and got into the Indian Trail before he turned around.  The Indian Trail was the main path through the weeds to the park, the one that everybody took from Main Street after they cut through by the side of our house next to the ravine. It was the one you used when you were really in a hurry, though I had a bunch of other paths through the weeds that were secret and involved more exploring and lots of places to hide and build forts on the way to the park.  The weeds were like my own private woods in my own backyard.  I don’t know who owned them but I played in them like they were mine.  The Malvern’s lived on a gravel side road off the alley that ran behind our house and they were old and didn’t care, and didn’t play in the weeds at all, and the park was on the far side and the ravine was on the right side, so no one else’s yard was attached to them. It was understood that they were Nolette’s weeds and you could only go in there by my invitation.  I was the boss of them, except when my mother yelled or my father grounded me or my stupid brother Billy and his stupid friends wanted to go there, the jerks.

The next most direct route to the park was the Apache Trail, which I had made myself.  While the Indian Trail left from the back right of our yard, after you crossed the dirt alleyway, and ended up right at the Teeter Totters, next to the Horsie Swings, the Apache Trail started from the center of our yard and took a curvy and dangerous route through pickers and then the sumac bushes and ended up right near the Sandbox, under the high tension wires.  The entrance was hard to find if you didn’t know it, and I made sure to disguise the end of it so that guys in the park wouldn’t see where it came out.  If I liked somebody, I would take them on a guided tour of the Apache Trail, and if they stayed my friend, they could use it anytime and help me build forts if they wanted.

The Cherokee Trail made a cross with the Apache Trail. It left the Indian Trail about halfway along its length, wound around pickers, crossed a grassy area, then crossed the Apache Trail and wound some more through some other weeds and ended up at the Monkey Tree on the edge of the Malvern’s driveway.  There was also another trail that wound through the Sumacs called the Hickory-Dickory Dock Trail but I didn’t talk about this one much to my friends after they razzed me about its name.  I guess I should have given it an Indian name but I couldn’t think of any more.  This actually was the trail that that led you to the deep sumacs where all the best forts could be built, and so was a popular trail, but most everybody called it the fort trail, and after a while I was just as glad.

There were always half finished and tumbled-down forts of one type or another in that big clump of sumacs on the Hick…, I mean Fort Trail, near the park. It was really easy to get a rusty nail in your foot when you walked through there and most parents had forbidden their kids to go in there, which of course they did every chance they got.  There were a lot of trips to the hospital and cases of ptomaine poisoning over the years.  I think.

The Monkey Tree was a trash tree, at least that’s what dad called it, though Mr. Miller next door called it a box elderly tree. I don’t know why. It had about a hundred trunks that went off in all crazy directions, except up, so that kids could climb up in it and do death defying feats of daring: hanging upside down and swinging from branch to branch until they slipped, fell, and hit their heads on the broken pieces of tore up road that was piled underneath the tree.  We had the tree divided into areas of scariness, from the simple baby monkey branches to the slightly more dangerous gorilla branches to the slim and bendable chimpanzee branches, which were the highest and farthest out.  Even though I hated it, I had mastered all the chimpanzee branches, which was important because it was my tree and I had to be the leader on it. It was just that when I got high up, my legs and arms would get weak with worry and I would probably get scared and freeze up there, afraid to move.   But I hadda do it, like I said, because I was the boss of the tree. As little kids got old enough to climb, we would lead them and tease them to climb as high as they could and reward them with one of the three scariness levels. They’d be so proud when they got beyond monkey.

Just as you got to the park, right at the edge of the weeds and over the Teeter-Totters and the Sandbox and Merry-Go-Round, were the high tension towers.  There were lots of them and they followed through the park all along the old canal.  Lots of kids liked to climb on them, better, even, than the monkey tree, they were so easy, but if your parents caught you, you would be grounded for sure.  the big wires at the top buzzed all the time with electricity and they say if you touched one it would be like getting hit by lightning, and you’d die. My mom said that the wires buzzing all the time was making all the neighborhood kids crazy, or something, but she was always saying silly stuff like that.

When I got to the park, a few of the guys were there.  Frecks, Gilly, and Timmy Patrick were making those Horsie Swings really creak. No Yoder, phew! I skipped up out of the Indian Trail and swung onto the last of the four swings and started pumping as hard as I could to catch up.  Gilly was way higher than anybody.  His swing was getting as high as the top bars, as usual, and Frecks was a good foot lower, though he was trying with all his might to catch Gilly.  Timmy was kind of a fatty, like his brother, and just never could get as high as the other guys did and was always saying that it was no big deal to go that high on the swings.

Gilly called out to me between breaths.

“Hey Baby, how’s your stupid grandfather’s leg doin’?  Is it walkin’ by itself yet, or what?  Did you pinch his ass again, like a sissy?”

We weren’t supposed to say or think words like ass but everybody did it when the parents weren’t around.

“Stop calling me Baby, stupid. And I have to help him, ‘cause I’m the only one what knows how to do it right. And, stop calling him stupid! He’s just old and smelly, is all.”

Gilly always had messy hair and stained shirts and holey sneakers.  My mom didn’t like to let him in the house because he might have rice in his hair, but I didn’t know why she had a problem with rice, unless it had cheese on it or something and would leak yellow out of his head and get on the couch, or something.  She kept saying I shouldn’t touch him because I might get the rice, but I figured I could just pick it off if any got on me and she’d never know. If I really got head rice, like she always said, wouldn’t I be able to see it right away in a mirror? Especially in summer when we all got brush cuts? She also was worried that the rice would get loose in our house and get on our pillows and stuff. I just never could understand my mother sometimes.

Anyway, Gilly was always a big tease. His family lived on the second floor of a house behind Second Street near the canal bed where the big square rocks were that used to be canal walls, my dad said.  The stairs to their upstairs house were all slanted over so that you had to kind of really hold on to the railing if you didn’t want to fall off.  They creaked and seemed like they would come off the house and throw you on to the big rocks and mash your brains out.  The house used to be painted green, too, but lots of paint had chipped off, so it was all kind of gray wood showing through, and kind of neat looking. Gilly’s sister Ginny was a little fat-bellied girl who always had a runny nose and a really dirty face, and tried to follow us everywhere we went and told on everything we did that she thought we’d get in trouble for.  She was a pain in the dupa all the time.  She was also all the time pulling her shirt off so that you could see her wobbly belly, and she would walk around the park sucking on powder candy straws all day, bothering us.  She was really skinny, except for that wobbly belly, and she looked really weird and messy and sticky all the time.

We were actually pretty good friends, me and Gilly, and he was so big that when you hung around with him, the bad guys and older kids didn’t bother you much.  He teased me a lot but my dad had told me a long time ago to just tease back and I’d be OK, and it worked with Gilly alright.  Most everybody called me Baby though, because I used to cry all the time when I got hurt, and it just stuck, the name, I mean, and it didn’t REALLY bother me anymore, but I couldn’t help telling people like Gilly to stop calling me that.  Dad said he didn’t mean anything by it but mom said he just came from a bad family, and maybe I shouldn’t hang around him so much.  I always thought that since he was French like us, and catholic and all, that he was OK, but there was something about the head rice and his old house that mom just didn’t trust so much.  She said his dad was a drunk and didn’t work and was lazy and I guess she thought Gilly would be the same.

Mr. Beauchamp did work sometimes, anyway Gilly said so, but he spent a lot of time home too.  Mom said he could be fixing those stairs instead of being goodfernuthin, but Gilly said his father wouldn’t because they were renting and didn’t own the house, and why should anybody put the sweat of their brow and their hard earned cash into fixing someone else’s stupid building, that’s what he wanted to know.  We could all see he was right, all the guys, I mean.  You had to watch it, though, when you went in their house, because Mr. Beauchamp would start yelling about all the kids, and he couldn’t sleep in his own house, and what the heck was going on with these brats in our house all the time, why didn’t they go to somebody else’s house all day long, and mess their place up for a change.  And you had to watch out for the rotted hole in the corner of the kitchen that showed through to the garage below.

Gilly’s mom always looked tired and dirty.  She kinda clumped around the house in crummy broken shoes and a wore out dress.  Her hair never looked combed or anything and I think there was dirt in the creases in her face.  She had some real yellow and brown teeth, but at least she had teeth, ‘cause Mr. Beauchamp had almost no teeth. Gilly’s teeth were always kind of mossy too, almost looked like they had fuzz, or something, on them, so I guess none of them had to brush everyday like the rest of us had to. Gilly’s dad left beer cans around all the time, and Mrs. Beauchamp had a hard time keeping them picked up, I guess, even though Gilly’s dad was always yelling at her to clean the goddam place up for a change, why don’t you?  He said goddam, not me. He just sat around looking at the TV and drinking beer, usually falling asleep and then yelling some more when we accidentally woke him up. 

Gilly’s mom always had black eyes and stuff, just like Gilly, and they always were saying how they had bumped into doors and stuff, but we all figured that Mr. Beauchamp liked to hit when he got really mad, which was pretty much always.  Gilly was real tough and always yelled back at his dad, even in front of us when we were over there, and if his dad came at him, like to wallop him, he’d run down their slanty stairs to get away, laughing his head off.  I guess sometimes he got caught, though.  Once, when I was walking up their stairs and the door was open, just as I got so I could see in, I saw Mr. Beauchamp whack Mrs. Beauchamp right on the kisser, so I knew that she didn’t bump into no door that time, for sure.  With her screaming and crying, the noise hid my footsteps running back down those creaky stairs to get the heck out of there before I ran into a door too. My dad could sure yell when he wanted too, but none of us at our house ever had to run into any doors or anything.

Gilly just always laughed about everything.  He went to the Joshua Ten Eyck grade school up on the hill beyond the tracks and was always getting into trouble for fighting bad guys and talking back to teachers, and even skipping school a lot.  I couldn’t do those things, one, because I wasn’t tough like Gilly, and also because I went to Saint James Catholic School and we’d go to hell if we ever did the stuff that you could do easy in public school.  Gilly said he was probably going to hell anyways so he didn’t have to worry about it like us Catholic School stiffs did, who had a chance, at least, to get to heaven.

He even smoked already, usually stealing cigarettes from his dad’s pack when Mr. Beauchamp was sleeping.  He always offered me one; we could go into the weeds behind his house that used to be the canal bed and light up, but I was pretty scared to do it ‘cause smoking was high on the list of bad things I would get in trouble for. It was hard to know if it would be worth trying when we could end up burning in hell because of it.  Maybe if we only burned in hell a little while, but they said it was for eternity, which meant forever, which meant that you’d never stop burning and would never die, just burn, burn, burn without ever stopping.  God sure seemed pretty mean to make you burn forever just for trying a cigarette once! 

Actually, I have to say a secret. Nobody better ever tell my mom, especially, because she’d get real mad.  I think it isn’t God that makes up these rules.  I think it’s the nuns at school that make them up.  They’re really mean and hate kids already, and I think they just convinced God to punish us for all these things that we sure did like to do.  I think they wanted things done the way they liked them and I also think they really enjoy seeing kids go to hell.  They sure act it, all the time.  I think God must actually be nice, especially Jesus, and it just doesn’t seem like something they’d want to do, God and Jesus, putting us in hell for smoking, or thinking about girls or whatever, if it wasn’t for the nuns and the priests lying to them all the time.  But they were the only ones that God and Jesus ever talked to, so we were stuck.

Gilly had been calling me Baby a lot lately, and I think it was because I wouldn’t smoke with him.  I finally decided to take a chance that the nuns and priests were wrong about going to hell for cigarettes.  I though maybe God would let me try it just once without burning me up forever.  After all, there was nothing in my Bible Stories book about smoking and it seemed that if God was so against it, he would have written it down in there, you know?  He wrote down about keeping Sabbaths and not coveting your neighbor’s wife, whatever that meant, but not one thing about cigarettes.  In fact, I remember seeing Father Archambeault smoking once when his black Cadillac was stopped at a light on Remsen Street.  There! If a priest could do it, why couldn’t a little kid?  All these stupid rules, anyway, it was so hard to keep them all remembered all the time.

Anyway, I had thought about all this while Gilly and I were riding the Horsie Swings with Frecks and Timmy when Gilly was teasing me about my Pip.  So, I said to him,

“Wanna swipe your dad’s butts and smoke ‘em?”

“Yeah? What, ya gonna finally stop bein’ a baby?”

I hated that but let it go; I knew he’d say that. He made it sound like we hadn’t talked about this yesterday after school.

“Not wanting to smoke and go to hell doesn’t mean you’re a baby” I said.  I should have said that I didn’t care IF I went to hell, anyways, but I forgot.

“Aw, stop worryin’ about hell, ya big baby. Baby, Baby, Baby!”

“But the nuns…”  I stopped, having already figured I was gonna do it anyway, hell with the nuns.

“Screw them stupid nuns,” Gilly said.  “Hey Frecks an’ Fatsy, wanna come?  Baby’s gonna be a man today!”

Gilly liked to call everybody by their nicknames, mostly because he made them all up and figured he was real smart.  Frecks had orange hair and my dad always called him ‘Red’, but Gilly said it was his freckles that covered his face and arms that deserved their own name.  Timmy really, really hated being called Fatsy, mostly because his big brother Shawn was bigger and fatter, and Gilly called him Fatstuff, and Timmy didn’t want to be seen as fat like his brother.  He really wasn’t fat at all, just a little pudgy, but Gilly didn’t care and said what he wanted to.  He knew nobody’d stand up to him, or nothing.

Neither Frecks or Timmy smoked either, but they weren’t friends with Gilly as much as I was, so he didn’t try to get them to smoke much.  Frecks got all happy when Gilly invited him, because he wanted to smoke for a long time now and was just waiting for Gilly to ask him.  I don’t think that Gilly meant that they would get to smoke too, just be able to watch, but Frecks obviously thought he’d be in on the smoking himself.  Timmy wanted to be brave, but he was like me, worried about hell, even though he went to the public school too.  His parents made him go to ‘religious instruction’ on Saturdays, and he and Shawn got teased a lot about having to study their catechism when we were all swinging on the Horsie Swings and having way neat adventures and stuff.

Actually, he was supposed to be at religious instruction now, for cripes sakes.  So, I asked him-

“Why aren’t you in religion now, had enough already?”

Gilly yelled out “Yeah, Fatsy an’ God are like this!”  He said this holding his thumb and finger real close together.  He laughed his mean, kidding laugh, and Timmy got upset quick.  He said-

“Naw, my dad’s sick and tired again so my mom has to wait on him, and he can’t bring me, so I don’t gotta go”.

Gilly said “Everybody’s sick an’ tired of yer old man, even your old man is sick and tired of his self, or maybe he’s sick and tired a his two fat brats!”

Timmy yelled “And your father is a stupid drunk who smacks everybody around all the time and yells.  And you’re a stupid-head.”

Timmy pulled his horse to a stop, crying, and jumped off and ran off home to his house at the edge of the park, bawling his head off.  I was glad for a minute because Gilly wasn’t teasing me.

“There he goes, the stupid crybaby” Gilly said, laughing as usual.  His eyes didn’t look like they were laughing though.  I can’t explain it but his face looked funny.

Frecks said “Yeah, the crybaby”. 

He was hoping to stay in good with Gilly, even though he and Timmy were supposed to be best friends.  He usually didn’t call Timmy Fatsy unless Gilly was around.  When he did, Timmy would look at him all sad, and Frecks would look embarrassed.  One of these days I thought that Timmy would tell Frecks to go to heck, but Timmy and Shawn didn’t have too many friends, being all fat and all, so I guess they had to take what they could get.

So, me and Gilly and Frecks pulled back our horses and said whoa, there, and hopped off and all three of us skipped together down to the end of the park to Second Street.  Gilly’s house looked like it used to be a barn or something and was behind the house that was actually on Second Street.  His Grandma lived on the second floor of the front house and a grumpy old man and his smelly wife lived on the first floor.  There sure were a lot of smelly old people around, I don’t know why.  Maybe they didn’t have any bathtubs or couldn’t afford soap or something, when they got old.  Gilly thought that when they got old, their skin started to rot and that’s why they were smelly. They all had the same real mad look on their faces and all hated us kids, especially when we were running around, yelling loud.  Gilly’s house had a garage on the first floor where the grumpy guy and smelly wife kept their old Studebaker car. Which nobody had seen them drive in a thousand years, or something. It had a tarp over it and smelled old.

We snuck up quiet up his creaky stairs, shushing each other and trying hard not to laugh.  We felt like we were in church or something, when you shouldn’t laugh but almost had to, I don’t know why.  We were laughing because me and Frecks were plenty scared of getting caught by Mr. Beauchamp and running into a door, and Gilly whispered that if we were too scared, we could just crawl back down and go home like babies.  Sometimes I laughed when I was so scared I wanted to cry. So, we kept following him up those stupid creaky stairs, thinking that it was better to get whacked and chased by Mr. Beauchamp than be teased by Gilly.

The upright sticks holding up the railing were all starting to fall apart.  They bent every which way and you could dig at them with your fingernail and scratch off gobs of the wood.  They were all wiggly and you just knew that if you crashed into one, it wouldn’t hold you.

Gilly’s mom had walked to the Central Market on Congress Street with Gilly’s snotty sister, so we knew she wouldn’t be home.  When we got to the kitchen door and looked in, we could hear Mr. Beauchamp’s snoring like a jet airplane was gonna crash through the roof or something.  Gilly said it was because Mr. Beauchamp had already tied on a package, whatever that meant, but I had heard my dad say that too. When they had tied their packages, they were hard to wake up, and snored a lot. It was a perfect time for stealing cigarettes.

We crawled across the kitchen floor on our hands and knees like James Bond, even though the floor felt kinda greasy or something.  I scratched in the linoleum and got a fingernail full of black stuff, but I didn’t want to say it to Gilly because he’d just laugh at me.  We had to crawl past the rotted hole and had to be careful we didn’t fall through and make noise to wake up Mr. Beauchamp. It sure did creak a lot; I thought sure we were goners.

We finally got to the front room and saw Mr. Beauchamp lying on the couch, sleeping with his mouth wide open, going “Snorrrrkkk” when he breathed in and burbling his lips when he breathed out.  He had spilled his beer; the can was on the floor next to his hand, which was hanging down, and his shirt had throw-up on it - Gilly said it was from last night - and he sure stunk to high heaven.  His pack of cigarettes was rolled up in his T-Shirt sleeve and Gilly reached up and started unfolding the sleeve to get them out.  Mr. Beauchamp kept mumbling between his snorks and we thought sure he was waking up, but Gilly smiled, silent-like, and kept digging at the fold in the sleeve.

Just as Gilly got the cigarettes loose, Mr. Beauchamp opened an eye and saw us there kneeling on the floor, then saw Gilly holding his smokes, and sprang up off the couch, yelling and spitting.  We all scrabbled up and took off towards the stairs, skirting the hole in the kitchen and, too scared to look back, heard Mr. Beauchamp clomping along behind us, yelling in his big raspy voice “Ya goddam li’l bas’ards, get back here with my cigerbutts, ya li’l mothas, I’ll bash yer goldam brains in when I get a-hole-a- ya” and more stuff like that, that turned me scared as heck.  I had heard bunches of bad words before when my dad tied his packages, but they never sounded as mean and dangerous as Mr. Beauchamp sounded now.

We crammed through the door and slid down the stairs on our rumpuses.  Frecks caught one of his legs on one of the loose railing uprights and snapped off three or four of them as he slid down, until his leg ripped free and he crashed the rest of the way down the stairs.  When we all got to the bottom, we saw Mr. Beauchamp come around the corner at the top and slip and start sliding down, and he bounced off the wall and slipped right through the hole in the railing that Frecks’ leg had just made, and he dropped right off the side of the steps and fell about ten feet onto the driveway with a big flump.

He kept right up screaming bad words at us, all about how he was gonna catch us and skin us alive and bash our brains out and stomp us to pieces.  I figured we were gonna get killed pretty soon, but Gilly just laughed at him, even walked over to where his father was lying in the dust and called him a stupid old drunk man and a dumb-head.  This only made Mr. Beauchamp yell louder and say even more bad words, most that I had never heard before, and swear to kill Gilly when he caught him.  Gilly just laughed down at him and said “In yer dreams, old man” and then we ran off out back to his weeds, leaving Mr. Beauchamp there in the driveway.  The last I saw, looking back, was the old grumpy man that lived downstairs in the front house walking over to him to see what was wrong.

We ran a ways back into the weeds and then down along the wall of the old canal bed until we got behind Saint Patrick’s church, where the Irish Catholics went to, and we knew a good hidden spot behind the Virgin Mary shrine there, where Mr. Beauchamp or the police wouldn’t be able to find us.  Me and Frecks were still scared, but Gilly said that when his dad was loaded, which was usual, he probably didn’t remember stuff and would forget all about this in a little while, after he went to sleep again.  Then we laughed with him about how stupid Mr. Beauchamp looked falling off the stairs, and imitated his bad words, and even saying things he didn’t say.  I was a little worried about what Mr. Beauchamp might say to my father about what I did, but then decided that either he wouldn’t tell my dad at all, because he forgot, or my dad wouldn’t care or even believe him.  I also figured that my mom didn’t like him and so might be happy that we stole his cigarettes.  So, then I felt alright.

We hunkered down behind the Mary Shrine and Gilly got out the pack of smokes.  Lucky there were matches inside the cellophane wrapper, although Gilly always carried a Zippo lighter just in case.  The place we were at was a clearing in the sumacs behind the church and was just about filled up with beer cans and beer bottles and rubber balloons that were wet inside and all kinds of stuff that we didn’t even know what it all was. There were even a few short pieces of some kind of cigarette mashed into the mud; the filter-less kind that came to a point at the end instead of being all round, and when you got your nose close, they smelled like burning leaves, so probably weren’t the good kind. It was a real safe place from the cops and the priests at the church and our parents and everybody.  You could tell because they would have picked up all the stuff, and maybe used the balloons at a party or something if they’d ever been in here.

Gilly tossed the matches away because it was manlier to use his Zippo, and, after all, we were doing this to be manly, so had to do it right.  Gilly knew how to do it.  He stuffed a cigarette between his lips like a straw and flicked his Zip and held the flame to the end of the smoke and it started to light on fire, not a lot, but kind of glow-y, red-y.  He sucked in some smoke, and then breathed it out through his nose and said “Ahhhh!”  Then he gave one quick cough and looked at us to see if we noticed, but we just sat there looking, like, wow, he was really smoking, like we’d seen big kids do.  Then Gilly sucked in another mouthful of smoke and smiled at us and then blew it out in rings, one puff at a time.  I had seen my big brother do that once, and it was just about the neatest thing I’d ever seen, except for Batman and Robin.

Frecks was all worried that Gilly would smoke the whole cigarette and not let him suck any and started wiggling like he always did when he got nervous.  He also started to do his engine humming thing, going “Grmmmmbbbb, Mennnummbb,” sounds like that, like he was imitating a car driving down the street.  Gilly saw this and said “None for you today, pal. Baby needs to be a man today. We already planned this all up.” which made me nervous because I didn’t want Frecks thinking that I planned for him to almost break his leg off falling down Gilly’s stairs, and I didn’t want him either to think that I had planned to get Mr. Beauchamp to fall into the driveway.  I now wondered if Mr. Beauchamp actually got himself hurt when he did that; we didn’t really find out, now that I though about it.  But Gilly didn’t care so I shouldn’t either.

Anyway, Gilly handed the cigarette over to me and I tried to do like he did; only I got some drool on the end, and he said that I should keep it dry so he didn’t have to suck up my drool when it was his turn.  I didn’t want to tell him that the end already had his drool when I first put it in my mouth.  So, to be like him, I sucked a whole mouthful of smoke into me, right down way into my stomach, and held it in, like you were supposed to.  Only, right away, it started tickling, and then burning, and I hocked it all out, right along with a whole bunch of spit and drool, and the cigarette went flying right into Freck’s face. Lucky it wasn’t Gilly’s or he might have punched me one. 

Frecks was suddenly jumping around, holding his face, saying- “Ow, Bobby, you threw it right in my eye, for cripes sake” and kept on jumping around, like that was going to help, or something.

I couldn’t answer right away because I was still hocking the tickle out, and felt like I wanted to puke my guts out, or something, and Gilly was laughing like it was all the funniest TV show he’d ever seen.  Frecks was still yelling at me and making some bad words himself, and still dancing around like a moron.  I coughed and choked and finally started telling Frecks that I didn’t throw it, it just flew out of my mouth, or something. 

This all went on for about an hour or so until we saw that the cigarette had landed in some dried leaves and a few of them had lit.  We all three of us stopped and looked at it, and right away all got real nervous, even Gilly, because we could get hauled off to the Pokey for starting fires, it was called Arsenic, and we had to get away fast before they found out it was us, the cops and everybody.

So, we right away ran towards Third Street, which was the other end of the weeds in the opposite way of Gilly’s house.  Even though we were all in a hurry to get away, we knew better than to head back where Mr. Beauchamp could catch us and run us into a door, or something.  We were all yelling at each other to run away and I guess we were pretty loud because when we got to Third Street and started running down the hill towards Robinson’s store, people were looking at us from in front of their houses.  We kept running, all the same, and probably kept yelling too, I don’t remember, and ran all the way down the Third Street hill to Robinson’s, so that the cops wouldn’t catch us.