Chapter One.

Parochial School Boys

With his face pressed into the lawn, Danny discovered a bustling microcosm before his eyes. Here, a parade of black ants snaking around grass roots in an unbroken chain. There, a daddy-long-legs, its pod-like body hovering on filaments over a small brown-shellac millipede, the ones that roll up into a tight spiral when you poke them and stink when you crush them.  He marveled at the tiny iridescent beetles, and how the clover sprouting from a patch of lime, spread out in tendrils close to the ground, putting down roots wherever the rhizomes touched the earth. He could smell the soil and the oily heat radiating from his dad’s Buick, an insurmountable obstacle parked between him and the safety of his front door. A honey bee, back lit from the glare reflecting off a chromed half moon hubcap flitted above the clover from bud to bud, so close he could feel the breeze of its wings on his cheek, its legs and abdomen clotted with pollen. He stowed these impressions away for later; his immediate concern was how to get up on his feet.

Wally Spattz, two years older, a foot taller and twenty of the meanest pounds heavier of one of the nastiest boys who had ever beaten him up was sitting astride his back, one hand weighing on his head—hence his current vantage point—the other hand slapped his rear-end like a bronco rider as the parochial school boys stood roundabout, in a tribal circle. All except fat Chris Kowalowski, who stood aloof, looking sideways, not at Danny.

Chris lived up on the corner. His interest and his loyalties were turned more towards Franklin than Henry, Danny’s dead-end street but sometimes, when no one else was around he would knock on Danny’s door to go ride their bikes down to the field and hit pop flies. Chris’ dad, who had a Marine Corps tattoo on his forearm, worked at the Rheingold plant and once brought a case of beer to the Fourth of July street party, although he usually didn’t show because he worked night shifts.  Danny and Chris snuck around behind the aluminum lawn chairs in the dusk, swiping sips from unattended bottles and spent rest of the evening karate chopping fireflies and laughing over things that in retrospect, made no sense. Since then, Danny considered him a friend.  He thought of Chris as clumsy and slow, but his cousin Bobby, who was 13 and knew better told him no, he was tough, a Tackle in Pee Wee Pop Warner and that Chris could take Wally, easy, if he wanted to. Danny was doubtful: Chris was a full year younger than than Wally. Bobby had shrugged that off saying, “Chris is the Hulk, Wally’s the Joker”, but that was cold comfort, since Chris made no move to take Wally, at this juncture. 

“Waddaya gonna do, pussy?”, Wally jeered, and the others took up the chorus. “Puss-sy, puss-sy, puss-sy.”

Danny flushed and gritted his teeth hard. He spread his arms out past his shoulders, palms flat and tried to push Wally up and off his back but his rage and the surging adrenaline and his pounding heart only seemed to throttle him. His arms trembled, he felt weak and vague. But no matter what, Danny had decided he would not say ‘Uncle’.

Eventually, he managed to raise his chest off the ground, which threw Wally off balance and dropped the jaws of the parochial school boys. Wally stopped toying with him and in a cruel flash slid his right arm under Danny’s armpit in a half nelson, twisting his shoulder up and back with a jerk that made him gasp.. He was surprised that the pain focused his anger in a way the taunting couldn’t, and he snapped up to one knee, but Wally was faster again, driving his own knee into Danny’s hamstring, slamming him once again face-down in the grass. As Wally bounced triumphantly on Danny’s back, the parochial school boys expressed their unanimous approval.

They lived on Gompers, Roosevelt and Van Buren, the parochial school boys and never came to play in the Estates, but one afternoon around four thirty in the afternoon, while Danny was leaning against the Broekker’s fence watching crows circle in the March clouds, describing arcs that Danny imagined were parabolic, a word he’d learned from his uncle who was a bombardier in World War II, they came crashing through the hedges in their disheveled uniforms, like a coiled spring compressed all day under the heavy hand of nunly discipline, suddenly released into the world and aiming to take out an eye. Wally’s cousin Vinny, a vicious loudmouth from Bayonne who stayed at Wally’s with his mother, sometimes for weeks at a time, called him “Benny”.

“He’s a Benny, a Benny from Noo Yawk”, he’d said, just like that, but Danny didn’t get it. It irked him, coming from this rat-faced greaser, maybe even more so because he didn’t get it, but the others did; they laughed and repeated it and from that day forward he would always be Benny, to the parochial school boys. Hopelessly outnumbered, he had stood his ground. A strategic error, he realized. If he’d submitted that first time they would surely have tired of him and gone tear-assing through the neighborhood, in search of fresh prey. But now he had given them a sacred mission, especially Wally whom the others followed, because he was the meanest, Danny guessed, and they kept coming back. His defiance was irresistible. His submission, their main priority.

Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry, raced through Danny’s mind as hot tears—of frustration more than pain (which was not insignificant), blurred his vision. He tucked his head to his chest and hunched his back with a low groan.

Then, as Fate had determined that his shame was not yet complete, from beyond the driveway, he heard the rattle of the screen door handle. Oh God, no, thought Danny. No, no, no.

“What’s going on out there?”

His mother’s high voice trembled from behind the screen, reaching for an assertive tone but her use of the passive voice belied her intent. She didn’t even step out onto the porch and threaten them, as he was sure the other boys’ mothers would, if the tables were turned.
At four foot ten she could barely see out the window, certainly not up over the car to the narrow strip of lawn by the fence where they were scrapping, but she always seemed to know when Danny was involved in some new ruckus. The boys spread out and backed away a step.

“Hi, Mrs Nevny”, said Chris, standing up straight to be visible above the roof of the Roadmaster.
“We’re just playing”, said Tony DiGiovanni with perfect innocence.
“Where’s Daniel?” said his mother, “Come in here now, Daniel! Your father’s on the phone. He wants you in the house.”

Slowly, Wally sat up and with a sharp elbow between his shoulder blades, dismounted Danny.

“Yes Daniel, go inside with mommy”, he said with cold emphasis. “We’ll play later.”  He waved to Danny’s mother, turned, straddled the fence and cut across the Garrison’s lawn to the street. The others hesitated, then followed. Danny heard Wally say,  “See you tomorrow.” Then, under his breath, “Pussy”. All things considered, Danny preferred “Benny”.

***

Danny’s father had not called. He could tell by his mother’s goodbye as she cradled the phone hanging on the kitchen wall. It was probably Mrs Doherty across the street watching from behind the curtains of her living room window and in a sudden epiphany, Danny realized that she was in all likelihood the infuriating ‘little bird’ who told his mom when he broke the Welch’s side window or slalomed his Stingray through the Hoesselsted’s tulips; things she couldn’t possibly have witnessed herself. But the little bird had also told her about when he tried to shimmy up the telephone pole, way over on Hamilton, a singularly bad idea;  shards pierced his dungarees and the flesh of his inner thighs and also wedged into his palms. And then again when he and his friends built an arch of cinder blocks in the Lot, taking turns running beneath it while the others chucked a single block at the base, trying to time it so the loser would get ‘avalanched’. There must be a whole flock of little birds watching and telling, Danny mused, and this, on top of Wally’s fresh threat, depressed him even more.

He kicked off his Keds and went to the den, stepping gingerly on the sharp edges of small Lego blocks wedged in the shag carpet. He clicked on the TV and turned the dial, chunk-chunk-chunk to the local station that showed old movies before the news came on at six, when his dad came home. He sat down cross-legged in front of the wooden cabinet and pulled a Revell model box onto his lap. It was the Stuka he’d got for Christmas, 1/32 scale with the removable cowling over the engine he’d painted black and silver. He’d glued it together in haste, carelessly fogging the clear plastic canopy in a rush to get to the part he cherished: applying the decals.

His mother stood in the doorway, indignant. “Why were those older boys bothering you?”
“I dunno, mom.” He didn’t look up from his model. “They weren’t.”
“Do I need to talk to their mothers?”
“Don’t!”
She wavered a moment. “They should pick on kids their own age. What’s the matter with them?” Danny sensing she wasn’t seeking an answer, offered none. “We’ll talk to your father when he gets home”, she said and returned to the kitchen.

Danny inspected the nearly finished model. He’d botched the camo paint job, using glossy green and brown because he didn’t buy matte colors like he should have. He opened the squat bottle of black and finished painting the tires, but as they dried, he realized that matte black would have looked better there too. What did it matter, anyway? This was kid’s stuff. He put the plane down on the box top and stared at the TV.
The smell of potato dumplings filled the room. He heard his mother going down into the cellar, to get cans of sauerkraut and apple sauce to serve with the pork chops he hated. Suddenly, he grabbed the model and a crumpled tube of glue and rushed out the back porch, snatching a book of matches from the tin box in the empty kitchen.

Hunched down behind the widest oak, he arranged the Stuka nose-down in the protruding roots. Tilting his head, he adjusted the angle of the plane, just so, and squeezed a blob of glue on the engine and along the leading edges of the wings. The glue lifted the dry paint into suspension and before it could setup, he replaced the cowling and drew out a bead from the propellers, along the ground and over the bare roots. He studied his work then rolling up the tube, squeezed out the last of it into a pool beneath the model, stepped back and touched a match to the bead.

***

A blue Oldsmobile pulled to a stop and idled in front of the Nevny’s driveway. As Danny’s father climbed out the passenger side in suit and tie over a white, short sleeved permanent press shirt with a pocket protector holding several pens and mechanical pencils, another man got out the back to take his place, his home the next stop on the carpool route. The driver turned hard left, up into the Doherty’s driveway and backed into a K turn. They never bothered to drive down to the end of the cul de sac to turn around.
He started up the walk then paused, sniffing the air.

Mr. Garrison came stalking around from the back his house dragging a lawn hose behind him, the nozzle still dripping as he gave it a final, angry twist. He spotted Mr. Nevny, dropped the hose on the lawn and approached him with a scowl.

***

It was about this time that Danny’s father decided to build a fence. Most of their neighbors had already fenced in their backyards, effectively ending the free-roaming games the kids had enjoyed ever since the neighborhood was developed from muddy woodland and extemporaneous waste dumps in the mid fifties. More often than not, they battled imaginary Krauts and Japs, Danny and his friends, moving from objective to dire objective, passing through the neighbors’ yards as liberators and conquerors. As heroes!

They landed on the beaches at the bottom of the cul de sac, a large pile of sand and gravel left there since the end of construction; a fortuitous dune of endless possibilities. They fought their way through hedgerows, took cover behind holly and poison oak, romped through pachysandra, dived and rolled over freshly sodded lawns. They held their plastic M-1s and Thompson machine guns overhead as they waded through the shallow end of the Broekkers pool and hurled dirt-clod grenades with practiced ease, in the stiff-armed overhand they learned from movies that aired on their black and white television sets every Sunday afternoon. Copped from tilled flower beds, the grenades exploded on street, sidewalk and driveway in a gratifying cloud of clay and pebbles, or were tossed sidearm into Nip pillboxes that were the Hosselsted’s sunken casement windows, smacking with a tuft against frames that had been carefully painted in pastel hues. Occasionally, Danny, Tommy or Pete would take a bullet, the result of a desperate flanking maneuver to draw fire away from the advancing platoon. Danny enjoyed dying and was proud of the fact that he did it in the most convincing way, according to the others, who took note of his understated theatrics.
Scratched, soaked and muddied, they battled their way through the open backyards to finish the job in the ruins of Berlin, the vacant lot up the street that surreptitiously collected bricks and dirt and rubble post hoc, from home improvement projects in and around Constitution Estates.

But they had all but outgrown such games anyway, so the closing of the yards was only a minor inconvenience. They had already graduated to the street for games of kickball and touch football.  And so, Danny’s father, one of the last holdouts, fenced in their quarter acre of backyard too.

In the Estates, which spanned the gamut of post-war middle class, barriers were widely divergent. Along the side lawns and backyards of the upper end homes on Hamilton and Madison, many neighbors planted hedges, which looked swell but required constant maintenance, while on the blue-collar end, chain-link was the obstacle of choice. In the vast middle, the wooden fence ruled, a subset which contained its own hierarchy. The simplest saddle fences were a cursory nod to the whole notion of property, marking territory without creating anything more than a psychological barrier. These were very popular with the kids since they were great for cutting through to the Dairy Queen out on the boulevard. Only girls ducked between the crosspieces, guys straddled, but if you straddled unartfully, you knocked the crosspiece out with a bang, then had to stop and wrestle the splintery, eight foot log back into the slots, all the while getting an earful from Mr. Garrison, the retired grocer napping on the sun porch. For this reason perhaps, the second wave of wooden fence went solid.

Mr. Broekker, who was in fact a broker— a fact that Danny thought was pretty funny— opted for a tall woven cedar strip fence which afforded them absolute privacy. This meant no more wandering into their yard in swim trunks, of a hot and humid August afternoon. From then on, their echoing cries and splashes teased, unseen and available to the public by invitation only. The classic white picket fence was strangely absent.

Mr. Nevny saw that such privacy was a thing to be envied and one day in early June, Danny came home from school to find the ramparts of Fort Ticonderoga deposited on the very side lawn where he had suffered his latest humiliation. This was the makings of a serious wooden fence with ten foot cedar posts and 6 x 8’ lengths of pre-assembled stockade, each individual tip hewn to a rough ‘V’. When the parochial school boys showed up to find their killing zone supplanted by stacks of raw material, they vented their frustration by climbing atop the piles and jumping from one to the other, then off with a crash and a roll, going for distance and maximum lawn-tearing heel-drag, cheerfully ignoring Danny’s pleas to just stop it. Mr Kowalowski, who was heading off to his shift, spotted the boys from up on the corner, pulled a U-turn and skidded to a stop in front of Danny’s driveway.

“Geddoffa dere, ya monkeys!” He rumbled and the boys scattered. He stepped out of his Dodge and gave Chris a clap on the back of his head. “Waddaya doin’, hanging around with those chimpanzees, huh? Go up home and help your mother.” Chris trotted off and his dad surveyed the damage.

 “They didn’t break nuttin’ too bad. Good ting, atsno cheap fence. But you’re gonna hafta reseed the lawn anyways.” He said, indicating the stacks of panels.
“It’s gonna turn yellow unnadere. I got a seeder if you need it. In the garage. Tell your dad.”

He slapped Danny’s shoulder, turned and with one tattooed arm slung over the bench seat, backed all the way up the street. Danny stood a long moment, listening to the quiet around him: blue jays calling back and forth in the oaks behind his house, a lawn sprinkler sending an arc of water pattering into the street, up on Franklin the pull-start of a lawn mower… for the first time in months, Danny had got his neighborhood back. He enjoyed this moment of respite but in the back of his mind a disquieting thought hummed and vibrated: That the parochial school boys would take the fight to another venue. Which is what they did.