Chapter Two

Outside Looking In

After Danny had set fire to the backyard, his father informed him that he was now on the outside looking in, a phrase that sounded dire but turned out to mean that his family would ignore him for a time, which was hardly any punishment at all. He was given a set of daily chores: yard work, tidying up the den and the garage, but it was summer so he took that in stride. His real punishment came from without. Maybe that’s what his father meant.

Mrs Doherty wouldn’t let Tommy play with Danny unless they stayed right out front of the house at all times. Tommy’s dad had painstakingly shown the boys how to throw a curveball, with the warning that their arms weren’t fully developed yet and that they would do permanent damage to their elbows if they tried it themselves. So, naturally, they spent hours in the street in front of Tommy’s house, throwing curves.
A car came slowly down the street and they sidestepped over to the curb, never slowing their cadence, then sidestepped back to the middle when it passed. Tommy said, “There, that one curved!” but to Danny it looked exactly like all the other slow, looping pitches.
“Let’s go get Pete,” said Danny. With Pete they could make a game of it. They headed up the street to the Chistodoulos’s .
“Tom-meee!” cried Mrs. Doherty from inside the house.
“Wait here,” said Danny. “I’ll be right back”.

Pete had a catcher’s mitt that his uncle, who owned a diner in Passaic, gave him and not even on his birthday, just because he came for a visit. Mrs. Doherty must have spoken to Mrs. Christodoulos because she informed him that Pete was busy, same as the other times Danny rang their doorbell this week, which was too bad because they had central air conditioning and it was nice to stop in for a 7Up after a couple hours playing catch in the sun. They always had cold sodas at Pete’s and sometimes Mrs. Christodoulos gave the boys some of the sticky sweet little cakes she was always making. She made food that smelled like rotting leaves too, but tasted pretty good.
He asked if he could borrow Pete’s catcher’s mitt. He could not.
Thus passed the first week of Danny’s summer vacation.



Mr. Doherty took Tommy to Englishtown one night to watch the dragsters and he described to Danny how they heated up the tires with bleach before each race. That sounded neat so they dropped their gloves and grabbed a bottle of Clorox from the laundry room and tried to smoke the fat slick on Danny’s Stingray, Tommy leaning back, braced behind the bike grabbing the sissy bar while Danny stood pumping the pedals. The rear tire spun in jerks and starts in the pool of bleach but it didn’t smoke. It did, however, spray Clorox in Tommy‘s eye and he ran into the house crying, a bright, spattered strip of white up the front of his blue tee-shirt. After that, Danny had to play by himself.

Friday morning, he was Mel Stottlemyre. He stood sideways at the edge of the lawn, his glove up to his chest. He glanced over his shoulder, checking the bases, paused, took the signal from the catcher, then wound up and pitched the tennis ball at his front steps. He found that if he hit the facing of the risers, the opposing batter sent back a grounder or a hard line drive; the edge of the step, a pop-up, or if he threw it just right, a fly to deep centerfield and he would back peddle into the street to make the catch.
Hot and sweaty after a nine inning shutout, Danny hopped on his bicycle and rode downtown, over the bridge. He leaned his Stingray up against the brick wall of the Hobby Shop— the owner would have a cow if you leaned your bike up against the plate-glass window— and went in. It was nice and cool inside so he crouched down and spent a long time looking over all the boxes on the shelves until the owner asked him in a rude way if he was going to buy anything or just sit on the floor all day? Danny counted the coins in his pocket and carried a small bottle of flat black enamel over to the register. The owner gave him the stink eye with his change and the little bell jingled on the way out.

That was the morning he first saw Teal. He rode home the long way, up Centennial, on the sidewalk because there was traffic going into town. The sidewalk was old and buckled; his stomach went whoops with each slab as he daydreamed, passing the old colonial houses on deep lawns that rolled gently down to the river, some of them dating back to the Revolution, perhaps. The story was that Washington forded at the spot where the clay courts stood, but his dad told him that was hooey; every town in the state claimed that Washington stopped there or passed through. It just wasn’t possible. Danny liked to think it was.

He imagined these houses, freshly painted in deep blues and reds and bright whites and young men wearing three-corned hats shouldered muskets and marched off, following Washington to Trenton, and Lenape Indians planted rows of corn in the fields around Harding School, and young girls sat on these porches sewing stars on flags, and then he saw her.
She was pulled by a great wolfhound, almost as big as she, down the wide steps of her columned porch, the leash tight as a strap, her tanned and downy arm stretched out so straight it bent backwards. Still, she skipped down the steps with with perfect ease in a yellow summer dress, her white sandals barely touching each tread and her long hair, the color of French toast and maple syrup, bounced on her bare shoulders. Danny stopped breathing for a second at the sight of Teal Priddy descending.

He saw her sister Rose around— she was in the Girl Scouts with his older sister, but he hadn’t seen Teal since she was the darling of Miss Dale’s preschool and he got sent to the corner for straddling her on the linoleum floor of the playroom, pinning her wrists over her head. She didn’t struggle, like his sisters would, but simply stared up at him, complacent, with an unnerving composure. Miss Dale took him aside afterward and told him he should never, ever, fight with girls and her stern and earnest warning stung him like an electrical shock. After that, he let his sisters tease him without reacting, even though he really wanted to sometimes, and they took full advantage of his beneficence. Teal went to Harding School now; the kids from the Estates, Sunnydale.

He swerved his bike off the sidewalk as the dog came hustling by, Teal striding right behind, erect as a ballerina. He said hi. She said, “Hello”, and graced him with a chaste glimpse of her calm blue-green eyes as she brushed past. She smelled like blueberries.

He peddled lackadaisically around the corner of Franklin lost in thoughts of her imperial attitude and why it piqued him, but instead of turning down Henry where no one was waiting for him, he coasted up the walk to Chris’ house on a whim and dumped his bike against the brick stairs. He cupped his hands to his eyes at the screen door to see if Chris was in the living room. He was about to call out his name when Mrs. Kowalowski waltzed into the hallway with a towel turbaned around her hair, wearing a short, pink terry cloth bathrobe that she hadn’t quite closed. She turned towards the stairs and met Danny’s inadvertent gaze.

“Chris?” she said, cinching the sash around her waist. “You friend is here.”

Danny felt the blood rush to his face and he felt very, very wrong but remained frozen nonetheless, pressed up against the screen. She walked past the door and up the stairs, never breaking stride, her bare toes leaving damp impressions on the carpet. He turned, shaken, not knowing where to look, now that there was nothing more he shouldn’t be looking at. Chris bustled through the door. Danny said “Get your bike.”

They rode down Franklin, past the ball fields and Sunnydale School in silence. “Let’s go see the pool”, said Chris, and they coasted the long downhill by the nursing home to the Junior High.
The town was building a municipal pool in the woods behind the Junior High School in swampy land where the river overflowed and no one ever played because of the mosquitoes, but the boys liked to hang around and watch the construction crews work. It was a big deal. It was scheduled to be finished next summer. They couldn’t wait.

The construction crew had bulldozed a road through the woods but it became impossible to ride over the gravel so they walked their bikes to the site. The biggest backhoe Danny had ever seen was scooping great piles of red clay out of the deep end. Workers standing in the shallow end tamped down the earth with jackhammery things that made a racket. A cement mixer churned idly nearby. Danny hoped they would pour some concrete so he could draw his initials in it, when they broke for lunch. They sat on a boulder and watched for a while in the shade, then wheeled their bikes over to the tall mounds of dirt. Chris wanted to try riding their bikes up and down on them but a man in a hardhat chased them off so they circled the work site and took a narrow trail that lead into the woods. They pedaled up the trail where prickly branches scratched their arms and faces, when they came to a small clearing.

“Benny!”
It was Vinny from Bayonne.
“And Chrissah the Pissah!” He and Wally were sitting on some fallen logs, looking at picture magazines. Danny and Chris froze but stayed on their bikes. There was no room to turn around.

Danny had heard the story from Tommy, who went to St Michael’s too; it had made the rounds of all the classes. Chris had to go to the bathroom but Mother Urban told him to wait until the end of class. He fidgeted in his seat for long minutes, holding his hand to his crotch. When Mother Urban noticed, she whacked a ruler on his desk and shouted “Stop that, it’s impure! “ Chris was so shaken he emptied his bladder right there, in his seat. Chris’ mom came to get him and brought some choice words along for the ride. Tommy said she was putting Chris in Sunnyvale next year.

“Hey Benny, We got some pictures of your mommy, right here, wanna see?” Vinny held up a page and waved it.
“Put it down, dummass!,” Wally said, making a grab for it, but was too late. Danny saw it was a nudie magazine. A woman in nothing but a pair of nylons sitting on her heels with her back arched and her fingers spread out over a very round rear end but her waist was so thin. Her bosom jutted skyward and she had a dark thatch of hair between her legs. Danny was dumbfounded. He had never seen a bare naked woman before and this one day he just couldn’t stop seeing them— He felt dirty and sick and…it confused him to admit it, excited, like when it was his turn to bat in Little League and there were two outs and two on, but different. Warmer.
But mostly dirty.

“Hey, pissy Chrissy, you wanna see sumpin that’ll really make you pee your pants?”
“Cool it, pinhead.” Wally said. “Just drop it, will ya?”

The rank, muggy air was charged with tension. Only Vinny, strutting and jesting seemed not to notice. Danny saw that Chris’ knuckles were white on the handlebars. Wally looked frankly alarmed that they had stumbled upon their lair and their cache of dirty magazines.

“Woo hoo!”, Vinny shouted, turning another page. “Lookathis. Benny, your mommy’s naughty, naughty.”
“Shut up, Vinny!” Wally said, hard anger rising in his voice.
“Benny knows what his nudie-cutie mommy likes.” Vinny chanted. “She likes some mannagot. She likes some kielbasa…”

Danny had no idea what Vinny was talking about, but the way he said it made him clench his jaw. It was an unspoken rule that you did not mock someone’s mother, or you did so at your own risk.

“She likes some big, fat brats…” Flipping the pages, "She likes her Oscar Meyer wieners..."

But, to Danny’s increasing shame, it wasn’t his mother he was thinking of, it was Mrs Kowalowski. She wasn’t like the other moms. She didn’t look…old. She didn’t act old. She was breezy and wore denim shorts and flip-flops like down the Shore, not shapeless house dresses, and her legs were long and smooth, not all stocky and chubby and bumpy. She looked a little bit like the nude lady in Vinny’s picture, as a matter of fact. Danny glanced over at Chris, who stood very, very still, staring blankly, his mouth open a little bit, his cheeks flushed.

“She likes some hot and sweet sausa…”

Danny let go his bike and without a thought snatched the bottle of flat black enamel out of his pocket, in the crook of his finger and whipped it overhand at Vinny, following through with all his weight on his forward leg, like his coach had taught him. The thick glass bottle whistled through the air and smacked into Vinny’s forehead leaving a white, v-shaped dent that slowly filled to pink, then gushed a torrent of blood down his face. He blinked twice, his eyes unfocused, clapped his hands to his head, then fell to his knees and squealed like a wild animal.

Danny marched over, picked up the paint bottle, wiped it down his pant leg and re-pocketed it. He was Mel Stottlemyre. He turned to Wally who stood transfixed by the sight of all that blood pouring through his cousin’s fingers.

“You tell,” he said, looking at Wally, then looking down at the magazines, then back at Wally. “And I tell.”

“Me too.” said Chris.

***

The story going around, the one that Danny’s older sister was reciting at the dinner table was that Wally’s cousin Vinny got hit in the face with a swing at the playground and had to get stitches, a story which shocked no one, since he’d broken his collarbone two summers ago, jumping off the top of the backstop on the Little League field. “He’s going to have a big scar on his forehead, in the shape of a V”, she said. Danny gripped his fork and froze, his head bent over a plate of spaghetti.

“V for Vinny,” she continued and broke into laughter.

Danny couldn’t help cracking up too in spite of, or perhaps because of his inner turmoil, he couldn’t tell. Even his father chuckled; Vinny was such a jerk.

His mother tssked and said to his father “Carol is staying with Dotty and Carl, for the summer.”
His father shook his head slowly. “She hasn’t had a smooth ride, that one.”

Danny noticed that Vinny’s mother cried a lot, for no reason. He would see her drive through town in her little Dodge Dart, with streaks of mascara on her cheeks, smeared from wiping them with the palm of one hand, a cigarette scissored in her fingers as she gripped the wheel with the other or, when he rode down Roosevelt often he’d see her through the branches sitting alone in a lawn chair, facing the back fence. Sometimes her shoulders trembled like she was sobbing. One time, when they came to stay for a full month at the Spattz’, he never saw her at all.

After dinner, Danny went into his father’s study, where he was preparing his Sunday School lesson. His Bible and some other books were open on the desk. He looked up from the lined pad marked Bendix Corporation at the top and asked “What’s up, champ?”
“What was it like in the Army?” Danny asked.
“Like wrangling wolves with chickens”, he answered. He had a lot of these strange phrases that never really answered the question Danny was asking.
“But, how did you… when you had to…”
“You just do what you have to do. Whether you want to or not,” he hesitated looking down at his pad, “and you don’t ever, really, want to. But…”he said looking back up at Danny, “you do what you have to do, when the time comes.”
“How did you learn how to fight?”
“Danny, if there’s one thing the Army knows how to do, maybe the only thing, it’s to teach you how to fight.”
“Will you teach me how?”
Danny’s father pushed his chair back from the desk and looked Danny in the eye. “What’s going on Danny-boy?”
“Dad?” Danny paused. “Did you hate the Krauts? I mean really hate them and want to kill them?” His father never told him about the war except in a vague way, or the opposite, painting detailed pictures of mundane things, like how bad the food they ate was, or the funny quirks of some of the soldiers, which were interesting, but were never what he wanted to hear. Still, Danny kept trying.
His father pulled his eyebrows into a furrow and looked Danny up and down, like he was sizing him up. Then his gaze softened and it was like he was looking right through to the bookcase behind him. “Sometimes,” he finally spoke, “when we lost men, in a firefight or an ambush…sometimes, we we held them and watched the light go out of their eyes, yeah, in those times we hated the Germans. We hated them.”

Danny was dead still, dead silent. He didn’t breath or even swallow.

“But mostly,” his father continued after a moment, “We just hated the war. And you realize, inside, that they were just like us, the soldiers, not the SS, the Nazis— they were demonic, inhuman— but the German soldier, you realized was just like you, under orders and fighting for his  life. They probably wanted to be home, with their families, doing anything else than fighting us. But we killed them, as many as we could, because they sure as hell would’ve killed us first.”
He’d never before heard his father say “hell”, outside of church.

That night, lying in bed, no breeze at all coming through the single window of his small, stifling bedroom, Danny listened to the sounds of the hot, humid night. The crickets’ incessant chirping; a cat screeching like a tortured baby; the distant sounds of trains coupling in the sidings behind the old brick factories that lined the boulevard, the squeal of steel on steel; The hiss of an air brake; the low rumble of a diesel engine ramping up; the clack-clack clack of a long, slow freight train pulling away, interminably, it’s rhythm marking time to bare feet mounting carpeted steps.

Danny found himself in the backyard, fenced in behind the high impenetrable wooden rampart that bounded the yard, it’s crenelated top reaching the lower branches of the flat black walnut tree in the Garrison’s yard. He stood, floating inches off the ground in the shade of a big oak, charred at its base, his arms out at his side for balance. Tentatively, he waved his palms down, the way he did under water in the pool at the Y and his body lifted gently in the thick air. Again and again, taking confidence, he lifted himself up, navigating slowly through the branches of the tall oak. Twisting his arms, hands and fingers like stiff paddles, he discovered that he could orient himself with remarkable precision and by pushing his palms up he could adjust his attitude or hover in place.

He swept up over the roof of his house, seeing each detail very clearly, the grain of the shingles, the copper flashing around the chimney, a black Superball lost among the leaves in the gutter, and out toward the street, twisting sideways to pass between the telephone wires. Then, the air seemed to lose its buoyancy. He dropped slowly, his sneakers dragging and bumping on the asphalt, but he willed himself up and rose higher and higher above the neighborhood and he could see vast distances, the roofs of all shapes and colors and the river, far off, snaking and meandering through the town and in the center, the spire of the First Presbyterian church. He circled over the town, above Washington and his men, fording the river and marching over the clay courts, Teal riding out before them on an Irish Wolfhound holding aloft a banner of red and white stripes over two crossed rackets. The redcoats amassed on the other shore wore swastika armbands and Danny tried to call out to Teal to stop, but he could produce no sound.

Then the wind took him like a riptide and he couldn’t stay in place or fight against it no matter how hard he flapped his paddle arms. Exhausted, he surrendered, allowing the current to carry him, lower and lower, to the corner of Franklin where it deposited him, like a wave on the shore, at the side of Chris’ house. He hovered before the bathroom window, unable to look away, at Mrs. Kowalowski, sitting on her heels in the bathtub, her back arched, exposing smooth blank breasts, like her sister’s Barbie doll, wiping blood from the tiles that flowed from a deep v-shaped gash in the ceiling, turning the bath water crimson red.