Nick peeled a Milky Way and bit into it. He chewed thoughtfully, then offered the candy bar to me. I shook my head.
“You got to eat,” he said.
“Who says?” I replied.
“You make me sad, Charlie,” he said.
My father had been an old-time pipeline man whose best friend was killed by his side on the last day of World War I. He read classical literature, refused to mow the lawn under any circumstances, spent more days than he should in the beer joint, attended church irregularly, and contended there were only two facts you had to remember about the nature of God—that He had a sense of humor and, as a gentleman, He never broke His word.
The last part always stuck with me.
Benny had proved himself a liar and a bum. My sense of having been used by him seemed to grow daily. My mother could not make me eat, even when my hunger was eating its way through my insides like a starving organism that had to consume its host in order to survive. I had bed spins when I woke in the morning and vertigo when I rode my bike to school, wobbling between automobiles while the sky, trees, and buildings around me dissolved into a vortex of atomic particles.
My mother tried to tempt me from my abstinence with a cake she baked and the following day with a codfish dinner she brought from the cafeteria, wrapped in foil, butter oozing from an Irish potato that was still hot from the oven.
I rushed from the house and pedaled my bike to Nick’s. We sat inside the canebrake at the end of our old street, while the day cooled and the evening star twinkled in the west. There was a bitter taste in my mouth, like the taste of zinc pennies.
“You miss your dad?” Nick asked.
“I don’t think about it much anymore. It was an accident. Why go around feeling bad about an accident?” I replied, turning my face from his, looking at the turquoise rim along the bottom of the sky.
“My old man always says your dad was stand-up.”
“Benny Siegel treated us like jerks, Nick,” I said.
“Who cares about Benny Siegel?”
I didn’t have an answer for him, nor could I explain why I felt the way I did.
I rode my bike home in the dusk, then found a heavy rock in the alley and threw it against the side of the Dunlops’ house. It struck the wood so hard the glass in the windows rattled. Vernon came out on the back porch, eating a piece of fried chicken, his body silhouetted in the kitchen light. He wore a strap undershirt and his belt was unbuckled, hanging loosely over his fly.
“You’re lucky, dick-wipe. I got a date tonight. But wait till tomorrow,” he said. He shook his chicken bone at me.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I had terrible dreams about facing Vernon in the morning. How could I have been so foolish as to actually assault his house? I wished I had taken the pounding right then, when I was in hot blood and not trembling with fear. I woke at 2:00 a.m. and threw up in the toilet, then went into the dry heaves. I lay in bed, my head under the pillow. I prayed an asteroid would crash into our neighborhood so I wouldn’t have to see the sunrise.
At around five o’clock I fell asleep. Later I heard wind rattle the roof, then a loud knocking sound like a door slamming repeatedly on a doorjamb. When I looked out my screen window, I could see fog on the street and a maroon convertible with whitewall tires parked in front of the Dunlops’ house. An olive-skinned man with patent-leather hair, parted down the middle, wearing a clip-on bow tie and crinkling white shirt, sat in the passenger seat. I rubbed my eyes. It was the Cheerio man Mr. Dunlop had run off from the parking lot in front of Costen’s Drugstore. Then I heard Benny’s voice on the Dunlops’ porch.
“See, you can’t treat people like that. This is the United States, not Mussoliniville. So we need to walk out here and apologize to this guy and invite him back to the corner by the school. You’re good with that, aren’t you?”
There was a gap in the monologue. Then Benny’s voice resumed. “You’re not? You’re gonna deny kids the right to enter Cheerio yo-yo contests? You think all those soldiers died in the war for nothing? That’s what you’re saying? You some kind of Nazi pushing around little people? Look at me when I’m talking, here.”
Then Benny and Mr. Dunlop walked out to the convertible and talked to the Cheerio man. A moment later, Benny got behind the wheel and the convertible disappeared in the fog.
I fell sound asleep in the deep blue coolness of the room, with a sense of confidence in the world I had not felt since the day the war ended and Kate Smith’s voice sang “God Bless America” from every radio in the neighborhood.
When I woke, it was hot and bright outside, the wind touched with dust and the stench of melted tar. I told my mother of Benny Siegel’s visit to the Dunlops.
“You must have had a dream, Charlie. I was up early. I would have heard,” she said.
“No, it was Benny. His girlfriend wasn’t with him, but the Cheerio man was.”
She smiled wanly, her eyes full of pity. “You’ve starved yourself and you break my heart. Nobody was out there, Charlie. Nobody,” she said.
I went out to the curb. No one ever parked in front of the Dunlops’ house, and because the sewer drain was clogged, a patina of mud always drie
d along the edge of the gutter after each rain. I walked out in the street so I wouldn’t be on the Dunlops’ property, my eyes searching along the seam between the asphalt and the gutter. But I could see no tire imprint in the gray film left over from the last rain. I knelt down and touched the dust with my fingers.
Vernon opened his front door and held it back on the spring. He was bare-chested, a pair of sweatpants tied below his navel. “Losing your marbles, Frump?” he asked.