Chinaberry Sidewalks (11 page)

A tall man who was dressed like a shabby bank teller tapped Margie discreetly on the shoulder, indicating he’d like a word with her.

“He looks like old Ichabod Crane,” Dabbo whispered.

The gawky man’s sharp glance made it clear he’d overheard this remark, and that we were up shit’s creek.

When it dawned on Margie what we’d done, her mouth flew open and a giant wad of Days Work tobacco splattered on the sidewalk. Then came a breathless fit only she could’ve thrown. “I’m gonna kill you little bastards. Then I’ll whip y’all so hard you ain’t never gonna sit down again. Now, I’m countin’ to ten and y’all can march back in there and put ever’ bit of that shit back where you found it, and if you ain’t back here by ten I’m gonna cut both of y’all’s balls off.”

Considering the amount of goods we’d stolen, a count of ten would be cutting it close. Luckily, Margie’s ongoing stream of invective gave Dabbo and me just enough time to return everything and hotfoot it back to the automatic doors before nine and a half turned into ten.

Then it was the Sleepy Hollow guy’s turn. “Do you boys know I could be taking you to Gatesville right now?” Using the threat of reform school to intimidate us was a complete waste of time, since Dabbo and I were too busy blinking at the massive protuberance bobbing in the middle of our captor’s neck. Here’s the thing: For first-time juvenile shoplifters, an Adam’s apple that looks like a sewer rat swallowed by a water moccasin is ten times scarier than prison.

After Margie and Ichabod had a heated discussion, the possibility that we hardened criminals might still have some stolen goods stashed away on our persons was next on the agenda. Dabbo and I were led into a windowless room and told to strip down to our Fruit of the Looms. Why an eight- and a ten-year-old boy would want to hide treble-hook fishing lures in their underwear is a question Margie wasn’t too shy to ask. We just about peed ourselves watching the man’s Adam’s apple bouncing up and down like a hamster on a pogo stick when Margie switched to offense. “Listen here, Mr. Sears and Roebuck Head of Security, if there’s any lookin’ to be done down them boys’ drawers, I’m damn sure the one who’ll be doin’ it.”

“I tried as hard as I could to cut a fart when we was standin’ there with him lookin’ at us,” Dabbo said afterward, “but I couldn’t get one out. Wouldn’t that of fixed his wagon, me fartin’ like that?”

To ensure that we were tried as repeat offenders if we were ever caught stealing again, Sleepy Hollow called the store manager and a salesclerk into the interrogation room as witnesses to our crime spree. The manager made a halfhearted speech about how, with the merchandise returned to where it belonged and our sworn oath to repent, he was willing to forget the whole thing, so against Ichabod’s protestations we were released into the custody of one hugely pissed-off mother. Suddenly the idea of Gatesville State School for Boys had considerable appeal.

“Y’all don’t deserve no cool air,” Margie fumed, refusing to turn on the air-conditioning in her new ride. “Might as well get used to the hell both of y’all is fixin’ to catch.” She reached over the seat, eyes completely off the road, and whacked her son across the top of his legs at the end of each new charge. “I didn’t raise you to be no thief.”
Whack!
“Don’t you never let me catch you stealin’ again as long as you live.”
Whack!
“Do you hear me, Cleeve
Ben
iard Buck?”
Whack!

Dabbo got the rest of his whipping when we arrived back home. Of course my mother commanded me to cut a fat switch off one of the chinaberry trees in the backyard. Seeing no use in prolonging the inevitable, I cut a good one the first time out. With my jeans around my ankles, she whipped me over and over, covering my legs with five skinny red welts for every piece of merchandise I’d tried to steal. Finally, there was the whimpering letter of apology we had to write to the Sears, Roebuck, offices up in Chicago.

Nevertheless, we did salvage our fishing trip once Mr. Buck came to the rescue. “Aw, let ’em come go fishin’,” he said. “They done learned their lesson.” So on Saturday morning, two hours before daylight, I was plucked from a morose sleep by my mother’s chirpy “Rise and shine and give God the glory.” She herself had just been jarred awake by Margie’s scratching on the window screen, half-shouting that she figured it wouldn’t hurt to let the boys go on and do a little fishing. Fifteen minutes later, the giddy parolees were perched on lawn chairs in the back of Mr. Buck’s pickup, aping the ’53 Ford’s backfires with armpit farts. The river called, and no doubt a world record of some kind.

Judging by the Brazos’s disposition, rain had been falling steadily for days. The wagon road leading to Mr. Buck’s favorite spot was drive-shaft muddy, and as we drew nearer, raindrops the size of marbles forced us to abandon our post in the back of the truck and crawl into the cab.

“Y’all listen at me,” Mr. Buck boomed above the rain and thunder. “This here riverbank’s slicker’n snot, and I don’t want to see you boys drowned. Stay where the bank’s flat, and I won’t have to go in after ye.”

We did exactly as we were told … until boredom set in.

With neither of us getting a nibble in the first ten minutes, the rush of the river compelled us toward tomfoolery, and our fishermen’s discipline dissolved in the rain like sugar cubes.

Mr. Buck worked downriver slinging cut bait on a leader, a heavy lead weight pointing the direction of each cast. Wielding his deep-sea rod like a sword, he gave the impression of a man fully expecting to pull out a fifty-pound catfish—an optimism matched by the tenacity with which he negotiated the riverbank.

Our hopes of landing a world-record alligator gar quashed, we headed upriver improvising games of chance, imagining ourselves Indians on the warpath, tempting fate along the high bluffs we’d been warned to stay away from. One embankment, however, caught our eye: eight feet high and dangerously steep, with a narrow ledge perhaps two feet above the rising current. Only Dabbo could’ve hatched a plan to slide down onto the ledge, and with my help he managed to do just that—though I couldn’t guess what he planned to do after he was down there or how he planned to get back up. After all, the only thing between him and drowning was the tree limb I was holding from the top of the bank. Then again, seeing as how he is one-quarter Comanche and my great-great-grandmother was a full-blood Cherokee, we might have argued that the odds were decidedly in our favor.

Once he’d gained proper footing, we started a tandem trek upstream, him on the ledge below, me on the bank above, a rotting six-foot tree limb connecting our fate.

“Holler if you see any snakes,” he called from below.

“They’re all someplace dry.”

One step later the embankment collapsed beneath my feet. As part of the landslide, I wrapped my arms and legs around Dabbo as we plummeted into a high-speed liquid escalator, its next stop the Gulf of Mexico. The two of us tried dog-paddling as one toward safety, but without success. Whirlpools retarded our lateral progress, imposing their downward spin cycle before flushing us out into whatever came next.

“Let go of me!” Dabbo screamed as loud as his lungs would allow.

“
You
let go of
me
!” I yelled back.

Even though treading water together was entirely counterproductive to our efforts to stay afloat, neither of us showed any inclination to let go, and I maintained my death lock around Dabbo’s neck. Oddly, while I was scratching and clawing and swallowing water, I also felt as if I were floating down a lazy river on a rubber raft. A voice inside my head, curiously not my own, and therefore authoritative, was urging me to relax and enjoy the ride.

The river kept leaking into my stomach and lungs, but I found myself more and more inclined to embrace the passive acceptance this strange voice advised. Its reassuring warmth made the idea of letting go seem the most sensible option.

My mind made the decision to surrender, yet before it could send the message to my body a strong, big-boned hand grabbed my arm and yanked me from the river with Dabbo clinging to my torso, and Mr. Buck dragged us onto a flat, sandy bank. Knowing the river so intimately, he’d positioned himself on a sandbar and waited for a onetime shot at saving our behinds.

Sprawled there like fresh-caught catfish, Dabbo and I reacquainted ourselves with breathing, coughed up chalky-colored water, and braced ourselves for a hard reprimand.

“I thought I done told y’all to stay off of them high banks.”

That said, Sherman Buck picked up his rod and plopped a big chunk of bait into a deep channel near the far side. Satisfied with his cast, he relit his hand-rolled cigarette and took a deep drag. Rain was pouring off the bill of his cap down his chest, but the cigarette stayed dry.

On the trip home the sun came out. Steam rose from the blacktop, bound to reassemble itself as yet another rain cloud. We stopped at a roadside watermelon stand and were greeted by the smell of fresh sawdust and the sight of sweet Navasota stripers iced down and ready to be served by the slice.

The sunlight filtering through an oak tree and the sprinkling of salt on a cold slice of watermelon softened the experience of having almost drowned, and sitting at the picnic table spitting seeds, I found myself drifting down a peaceful river of thoughts. Now nobody had to tell me everything was going to be all right.

Presently, a rumbling, rattling voice filtered into my daydream. “Finish off your piss-chunk, boys, we need to be gettin’ on home.”

Ricky Schmidt and the Norvic Street Freedom Fighters

I
n the spring of 1961 a new craze took Norvic Street by storm. Overnight, or so it seemed, Dabbo, Ronnie Thomas, David Warren, and I had become obsessed with a potentially dangerous activity, and the number of errant feathered missiles whizzing along ill-advised flight paths went from zero to red alert. As usual, our parents had more pressing concerns than the safety of preteen males.

Archery, truth be told, is too fancy a word to describe what the sport became in our grimy, foolhardy hands. As so often happened, Dabbo defined the gist of the phenomenon best when, after yet another close call, he mused, “If one of us don’t get killed, shootin’ off bows and arrows is more fun than pootin’ in church.” Thus did our favorite new pastime become known on the street as “bows and arrows.”

The resources to outfit a reckless band of would-be William Tells came from a system of recycled barter by which empty milk jugs and Coke bottles could be transformed into bubble gum, jawbreakers, baseball cards, and trips to the public swimming pool. With the return deposit on a gallon milk jug set at a quarter and on soda-pop bottles at two cents, a little spending money wasn’t hard to come by. S&H Green Stamps, however, the miraculous by-product of shopping at the Minimax and Lucky 7 food stores, were the backbone of our arsenal. In many households, Green Stamps were the primary source of disposable family income, and this was the currency that produced the wooden bows and dull-tipped practice arrows that were wreaking minor havoc around the neighborhood.

My mother saved Green Stamps like my college education depended on them. She took comfort in knowing that, as long as my father could buy food, there was a better than average chance Santa Claus would find our house come Christmastime. Other than the Bible, which I suspect she never fully sank her teeth into, Green Stamp catalogues were her reading matter of choice. She gazed longingly at drab photographs of TV-dinner trays, basketball hoops, vacuum cleaners, bunk beds, pressure cookers, Skilsaws, desk lamps, wall clocks, golf clubs, and camping equipment as if she were looking at film stars in a movie magazine. All because of little green stamps, a wonderful selection of shoddy merchandise was sometimes attainable in a life otherwise devoid of entitlement. Four and a half lick-’em, stick-’em books, negotiable at the Galena Park outlet, could turn a ten-year-old boy into a modern-day Robin Hood or a woman of thirty-six with very few cooking skills into Betty Crocker. In my mother’s world a little green stamp was the only precondition for making dreams come true, unless, as was often the case, the dream item was out of stock. Were I to meet whoever invented these stamps, I would pledge them eternal gratitude for offering my mother hope in times of despair.

Around the time bows and arrows were taking off, a new family appeared in the neighborhood. Word spread fast that the father, a genuine member of the German army and a rich dentist to boot, had, as part of a nasty divorce settlement, moved his American-born wife and their children, a boy and a girl, into the house next door to ours.

I took an instant disliking to Ricky Schmidt. The big deal he made about being two years older than I—I had two full years on Dabbo and still we were equals—was my first glimpse of the Schmidt family’s twisted sense of offensive defense. To say the stigma attached to being of German descent in postwar Jacinto City made his integration into our tight-knit society no less abrasive than one of his father’s drills, however true, falls short of explaining the dark side of his nature. Forces more sinister than blind prejudice and wartime resentment were working against him.

I blame my mother’s dogged insistence that I “go the extra mile to make that new boy feel welcome” for our robotic pairing. “Bless his heart,” she mewled, before sending me off to make nice with the bully next door. “I can tell he’s had a hard old way to go.”

Dabbo in particular was incensed that the spawn of a “Kraut machine-gunner” should take up residence in our tiny corner of the universe, and considered my consorting with the enemy an act of high treason. My attempts to explain that it was all my mother’s idea fell on deaf ears. By his estimation, the Nazis had reconvened on our street and his best friend had joined up.

Early in my forced friendship with Ricky, I became part of a father-son ritual that perhaps sheds some light on the deformation behind his churlish façade. Two Saturdays a month, Mr. Schmidt used his visitation rights as an opportunity to terrorize his son. Being Ricky’s designated new best friend, I was required to attend this bimonthly bloodletting.

Come visitation Saturday, Ricky and I were driven to the sludge-filled reservoir dividing Galena Park and Jacinto City where, from positions high on the retaining wall, his father indulged a perverse passion for throwing dirt clods at us. With these exploding at our feet, whistling past our heads, or landing with a hollow
ka
-thunk in the green goopy chemical muck dredged from the ship channel and left to stagnate in the white-hot Texas sun, we were reduced to huddling like refugees on the dirt road lining the water’s edge.

Grappling with how to defend myself against the heartless German soldier masquerading as Ricky’s father brought me face-to-face with the cruel realization that in a world of bloodthirsty predators, a ten-year-old Mickey Mantle fan was as close to easy pickings as you could get. I offered a silent prayer that my father might suddenly appear to vanquish this beast throwing dirt clods at my head. That it went unanswered, I chalked up to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of the situation on the reservoir, it could be said that had our ability to dodge incoming fire not been honed with routine practice, things could’ve been a lot worse.

When he tired of war games, Mr. Schmidt rewarded our cowardice with ice cream cones at Zesto’s. From there we were dropped off unceremoniously in front of Ricky’s house. Ashamed and bedraggled, we parted company with an unspoken vow to keep what happened on the levee a secret. Ricky knew that I knew that once inside the door he’d collapse into his mother’s apron in tears. Why he elsewhere kept a brave face to protect his father is, doubtless, money in the bank for some expressionless Jungian getting rich by unmasking second- and third-generation sociopaths. But come to think of it, why was I, too, protecting Mr. Schmidt?

One afternoon, while enjoying the late-summer coolness found only in the dirt beneath Mr. Carnew’s house, which, being built on blocks, offered a handy crawl space for use as an underground headquarters and bunker against the hot and hostile world outside, I related the story of Mr. Schmidt’s perversions. David Warren and Ronnie Thomas offered wide-eyed “Unh-unh’s,” “He did not’s,” and “No shit’s” as a show of incredulous accord. Dabbo, on the other hand, remained mute.

“What you thinkin’ about, Dabbo?” I asked.

A long silence.

When at last he spoke, it was to announce a strategy guaranteed to rid the neighborhood of Nazi undesirables forever. To accentuate the hushed connivance of his scheming, Dabbo shot a quick glance over both shoulders before vowing, “We’re gonna fix his grenade-chuckin’ ass, and y’all can bank on that.”

The plan itself was simple. Come Saturday, Ronnie, David, and Dabbo would hide out on the reservoir. And when Mr. Schmidt resumed his ritual, the newly formed Norvic Street Freedom Fighters would strike a blow for liberty the likes of which the world had never seen. The orders he gave me were: “You just go on actin’ like nothin’s gonna happen. And once we got him on the run, you join our side.”

Having the old Dabbo back was a boon for all the Freedom Fighters. David was so moved by his commitment that he suggested they camp out overnight on the reservoir to ensure the element of surprise. Ronnie saluted the idea as a key to victory, adding that David should be promoted instantly to Lance Corporal. But as good as it felt being back on Dabbo’s team, there was something about his plan that left me unsettled. After all, I’d seen Herr Schmidt in action. Behind a pristine pair of Buddy Holly horn-rims lurked the steel-blue coldness of Hitler’s most depraved storm troopers. Caught staring into the rearview from the backseat, I’d had my daring rewarded with a knowing wink and menacing smile.
Yes
, he said telepathically,
I am what you think
. I knew the man’s secret self but my battle-ready friends didn’t, and I regretted bringing them into this mess.

Saturday morning dawned with more than the usual amount of dread. While waiting for the honk of Mr. Schmidt’s horn, I developed a case of the jitters my father couldn’t ignore. “What the hell you got to be so dang fidgety about?” he snorted, sending blue jets of Pall Mall smoke streaming from both nostrils. This set me to thinking about the snorting-bull trademark on Grandpa Willoughby’s Bull Durham tobacco pouch. Drawing comparisons between my old man and a pissed-off bull soothed my anxiety about what would happen if Dabbo’s planned offensive went awry. Glad for the distraction, I plopped down on the couch, almost relaxed.

On weekends, when my rambunctiousness grated on my father’s nerves, he usually, without looking up from his paper, would yell for my mother to come do something about the “wild Indian” she was raising in his house. To this she’d yell back, “Tell him to go out in the yard and play.” This banter would continue back and forth, neither of them addressing me directly, until something in the natural course of the day called me out of doors. But on this particular Saturday, something caused my father to assess my fidgeting differently. Letting the sports page fall to the floor, he leaned forward in his chair for a closer inspection. As far back as I could remember, he’d never examined the subtleties of my behavior this carefully. Slowly, almost considerately, he asked, “What is it ya’ll do when you go off with that bunch next door?” For him to be anything but brusque when questioning something was unheard-of. I was dumbfounded. The day had at last come when he sensed something was going on in my world that needed fathering. Feeling him probe my secret concerns worked on me like an opiate, and I gave myself fully to the moment. Tears started welling and I was prepared to welcome the flood—but this was interrupted by the sour
blat
of Mr. Schmidt’s horn. “Aw, nothin’,” I lied.

This morning, for some reason, Ricky tried hard to steer his father away from the reservoir, dropping hints about needing a little batting practice and how it might come in handy to shag some flies over at the ballpark. Instinctively, I chimed in with some lame-o crap about it being half-price Saturday at the skating rink. The thing I most disliked about Ricky, apart from my mother’s pigheaded insistence on pairing us up in the first place, was his inability to grasp the obvious, which in this case was the sad and simple fact that his father had little interest in him save for throwing dirt clods at his head. It wasn’t my place to say as much, but I had. “We might as well go on and get us some batting helmets for when your daddy picks us up” is how I’d put it the day before. Inexplicably, this bit of sarcasm drove the truth home for my fellow captive. After striking out on baseball, Ricky all but got down on his knees in the car and begged his father to take us to the zoo. Nothing doing. We were driven straight to the reservoir. Silently, I cursed the both of us for our spinelessness.

This morning Mr. Schmidt abandoned his usual frontal assault in favor of the more sporting method of lobbing much bigger dirt clods in the high-arching trajectory of a mortar shell, which deployment prolonged the anticipation of a direct hit and, in turn, his enjoyment of our degradation.

When the Freedom Fighters made their charge from the paved road beyond the reservoir wall, Mr. Schmidt was admiring the lazy arc of a massive clod bound for the top of his son’s noggin. On the run, Dabbo smacked our tormentor squarely between the shoulder blades with a sun-baked dirt clump the size of a golf ball. The sharp
thunk
echoed across the putrid waters like a rolling clap of thunder. Then Ronnie opened fire, infantry-style, taking potshots with a Daisy air rifle, the unmistakable mini-thuds of BBs signaling direct hits to his enemy’s kneecap. David got in on the action with a slingshot and pocketful of chinaberries; the white splatter marks on the back of Mr. Schmidt’s green polo shirt later proved that he’d found his target.

I was tempted, at first glance, to label the Freedom Fighters’ opening salvo a resounding success. Instead, I prayed my pals would hold off on the victory celebration. Soon they’d see Mr. Schmidt reduce the effects of a royal bushwhacking to a mild inconvenience, and come to understand what I already knew: Klaus Schmidt was no ordinary foe. Recovering from a well-executed blindsiding was, for him, a piddling process. Mild disbelief gave way to a survival instinct that had military training stenciled to its core. In a display of lightning reflex, the former soldier shoulder-rolled down the sloped retaining wall and landed in a warrior’s crouch on the dirt road a few feet from where Ricky and I were huddled together. When he came up grinning like the know-it-all mass murderer whose picture I’d seen in the newspaper, I ran as fast as I could away from the site where I knew he planned to fight to the bitter end.

Quick as a snakebite, Mr. Schmidt nailed Dabbo in the groin with an actual
rock
he’d scooped up off the retaining wall, which Dabbo now scampered behind with a painful yelp. With him down, Mr. Schmidt focused a hard-rock counterattack at Ronnie, also hiding behind the wall. David he sent scrambling with just a steely gaze.

Our battle strategy hadn’t taken into account the probability that father and son would join forces. In fairness to Dabbo, I’d have bet money against it myself. I’m inclined to think that for Ricky it was more of an involuntary reaction, not a true warrior’s instinct; yet remembering how Mr. Schmidt threw himself into battle, it’s hard to imagine the long-suffering son not pitching in. In any case, there’s no doubt that his falling into step with his father had an effect on the skirmish. Technically, Ricky added little firepower—his rock-throwing abilities were barely a cut above his sister’s. On the other hand, his enlistment seemed to double Mr. Schmidt’s resolve to annihilate the Freedom Fighters. The newly united family duo was turning the tide, and if momentum continued to shift in their direction the war would soon be over. A whose-side-are-you-on interrogation loomed in my neutral corner like one of my father’s unpaid bills.