Nan's Story (6 page)

“He’s not gonna’ find out,” Buddy replied. “I took ‘em right out of his pocket while he was sleeping in the chair. Never so much as twitched.”

Buddy blew the silver-blue smoke out in a series of perfect circles. Nan thought they were beautiful.

“Besides, it ain’t like he never stole from me, right?”

Nan winced at the truth in her brother’s words.

“I don’t know Buddy,” Arthur said with uncertainty. “I think your takin’ a chance. I hope I’m not around if he gets wind.”

“Well, as long as you keep your trap shut, he’s not gonna’ find out,
capiche
?”

“I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’,” John interrupted, snapping his lapels and walking with an exaggerated swagger. “I ain’t no stoolie, see?”

Buddy swung his hand intending to cuff John upside the head, but John ducked and Buddy missed. It was John’s style to lighten the load with humor, and he was mostly successful that morning.

“Quit cuttin’ up and keep walking,” Buddy said, some of the sharpness dropping out of his voice.

“Okey dokey, artichokey” John replied, attempting to bounce his step like Buddy.

The four walked the familiar tree-lined streets of the neighborhood they’d lived in all their lives. Densely packed rows of two-story brick duplexes and triplexes hugged both sides of the street. Each was fronted with a small square yard filled with toys and the occasional barking dog. Although most of the buildings looked defeated, Nan wished her house was more like them. It wasn’t in any worse shape, in fact it was better than most, but the Bower house was covered with faded gray clapboard not brick like the rest.
And
it was the only single family home in the neighborhood. Nan hated that it was different, as if shouting
‘look at me’.
It had originally belonged to her grandpa, a man she had never met, and when he died it was left to her mother. She asked Elsie once if they could cover the clapboard with bricks, but her mother had only looked at her like she was crazy.

As they neared Hislop Park, a white police cruiser turned the corner and began crawling up the road toward them.

“Beep, beep…it’s the fuzz,” John said punching Buddy’s arm lightly.

“Beep, beep…it’s the fuzz,” Buddy said, pile driving Arthur’s arm much harder than John had hit him.

If there had been more boys, the punching would have gone on and on until every last arm had been nailed. Because Nan was a girl she was exempt, and since there were no punch backs allowed, the game ended with Buddy’s hit. Nan didn’t know where or how the ritual had started, but like most things boys did, it didn’t have to make sense to be so. The police car drove by them and the passenger side officer gave them a cursory wave. Nan was the only one to wave back.

Arthur and John started bickering again about who would play short stop, though in Nan’s estimation they’d both be better off in right field. Not like Buddy. He was a natural. No matter what position he played, pitching, hitting and making jaw-dropping catches in the outfield, Buddy was amazing to watch. Coaches from the high school had started coming down to the field the year before to scout him, even though he had only been twelve at the time.

When they got to the field it was empty. The wind started picking up and rattled the chain link fence that encircled it. Buddy didn’t slow his pace at the vacant lot, but led Nan and her brothers past the bleachers, pausing impatiently while Arthur and John walked across the bottom bench like a balance beam. He looked like he wanted to slug them.

The playground lay dead ahead, and Nan asked Buddy if he’d give her a push on the merry-go-round. He didn’t answer, just flicked his cigarette away and kept walking toward the woods beyond it instead. John and Arthur followed him but Nan stood in her spot. As her brothers neared the tree line, she could just make out the start of a well-worn path that wound far further than her range of sight.

“C’mon,” Buddy yelled to her. “Let’s
go
!”

Nan had never been into any of the wooded areas that surrounded the neighborhood. Her mother, while not specific about why, warned her never to dare. Something in Elsie’s voice made it clear that there was no room for argument.

“Buddy,” she said walking slowly toward them. “Mama said I’m not allowed in the woods.”

Buddy gave her a crooked smile.

“Did she ever tell you not to go in with me?” he asked.

“No,” Nan replied. “but…”

“No buts about it then,” he told her. “And just so you don’t get in trouble, we won’t say anything, right guys?”

She didn’t realize then that Buddy would be in the doghouse beside her for bringing her out here in the first place and was ironically grateful for the loyalty.

“Okay, thanks,” she said, still unsure but following anyway.

A thick carpet of dead, brown pine needles made the ground slippery and Nan worried about losing her footing. She knew her brothers would never let her live it down, and after the way she cried that morning over the April Fools joke, she was anxious to recover a little face. She kept her eyes fixed on her boots and hoped if anyone was going to fall it would be one of the boys instead.

There were many forks in the path but Buddy took each turn without hesitation. It appeared he knew where they were going and she wondered where exactly that might be. A bird cawed from the trees above and Nan looked up. Beyond the naked branches she saw snatches of ash gray sky that now replaced the earlier frosty blue. Snow was more than a possibility now. It was a certainty.

Eventually they came upon a large, clumsy wooden structure with a piece of rusted wavy tin for a roof. It was surrounded by bicycles and junk, and smoke trickled out from the side of it. For one brief and alarming moment, the morning’s antics still fresh in her mind, Nan wondered if the fort was on fire. But she could hear voices from inside, and they didn’t sound as if they were choking or coughing.

Buddy stepped up to the door and tapped out a rhythmic knock. The voices stopped and Nan heard a similar knock in return. Three more short raps from Buddy and then the door swung open.

“Hey Baldy,” Buddy said.

“Hey Bowery,” replied a boy Nan recognized.

The kid stepped out of the way and let them in. Two other boys were inside, preoccupied with large pieces of paper strewn across a table in the corner. Nan knew who they all were since each had been to the house at one time or another. Marty Bald, a friend of Buddy’s since Kindergarten, was the one who answered the door. The other two, Butch Slovich and Charlie Parker, were in the seventh grade, one year behind Buddy and one ahead of Arthur.

“Watcha’ doing?” asked Buddy. “You knuckleheads up for a game?”

“Sure!” Marty replied. “Anyone else coming along?” he asked as he plopped himself down on a stained love seat. The smell of mothballs whooshed up from the cushions and stung the inside of Nan’s nostrils.

“Yeah, unless the cold turns ‘em all into pussies,” Buddy said.

Nan wrinkled her nose. She loved her brother but didn’t like it when he talked dirty. He usually didn’t in front of her, but after the morning’s disappointment, she decided to cut him a little slack. She wouldn’t even threaten to tell on him.

“What are they doing? Building an A bomb?” Buddy asked pointing Charlie and Butch. Arthur and John were at the table, obviously impressed by whatever the papers were.

“Nah, Charlie here has some big ideas about decking this place out. Turnin’ it into the effin’
Taj Mahal
.”

“Cool,” Buddy replied.

Nan didn’t know much about how forts were supposed to be, but thought this one was already in pretty good shape. In addition to the scads of furniture, which sad to say was no worse for wear than what filled the Bower home, a lit woodstove sat against the far wall and kept the room cozy. There was a glass paned window in one of the sturdy looking poster covered walls and the tin roof didn’t allow for any daylight that she could see.

“Look man,” Butch said, pointing to the papers. “Charlie’s gonna’ put in more windows and build us a freakin’ porch! This place is gonna’ be the cat’s ass for sure!”

Buddy gave a crooked smile and sat down next to Marty.

“Time to pay my tab,” he said, fishing the cigarettes out of his pocket once again. It wasn’t until then that Nan noticed a big green plastic bowl, not unlike the ones Elsie used at home to make her cakes, sitting on the roughly hewn coffee table in front of the loveseat. Instead of flour and eggs though, the bowl was filled with dozens of loose cigarettes and a few scraps of paper. It was the Community Chest.

The Community Chest was kind of a cigarette savings and loan for the neighborhood kids. When you had extras, you made a deposit. And when you needed one, an IOU would do until you could replace it. Nan wouldn’t leave her first IOU for four more years, but Buddy apparently already had, as he took out one of the slips of paper with his name on it and replaced it with a cigarette from the pack he’d stolen.

Nan stayed quiet, feeling somewhat out of place in the secret hideaway. She didn’t know if girls came here or not, but thought if they did, they were probably the kind her mother warned her brothers about. Growing up surrounded by boys, the species seemed kind of silly and at times pretty gross to her. Surveying the dimly lit room, she concluded that this crew was no exception.

But for Charlie, that was.

He had moved to Portsmouth almost two years prior, and while that should have branded him the “new kid” for a decade or more, his good-nature and quick humor carried him a long way. Nan never heard him talk dirty or say anything cruel about anyone, even when the boys around him dug in. But no one seemed to hold that against him. Something about his frequently blackened eyes and fat lips told the kids that Charlie paid his dues at home.

The boys started talking baseball in earnest and Nan sighed heavily. As they went on and on about the Red Sox dismal performance the year before and speculated about the team’s chances this season, she had to stifle a yawn.

The fort grew warm and Nan took off her jacket, laying it on the arm of the love seat next to Marty after stuffing her mittens and scarf in the pocket. Despite how sleepy the heat was making her, she was thankful that she’d worn a sweater over her coveralls. It would have been humiliating to have the boys see the baby bib covering her chest and buckles on her shoulders.

“Hey Buddy, you goin’ to baseball camp?” Butch asked, looking up from the blueprints.

Nan winced.

When Buddy first showed her the flyer advertising the week long chance to live in the dorms at UNH and play on the Wildcats home field, the twenty dollar registration fee at the bottom had not escaped her notice. Nan had been doubtful,
very
doubtful, that he would be able to go, but Elsie had surprised them all when she said she thought it might just be okay. At the time, Nan had felt a momentary spark of jealousy. On the heels of that though, she realized how much this would mean to Buddy and began to get excited for him. She didn’t know if her mother would be able to pull it off for sure, but was so proud of Elsie for trying to find a way. Of course that had been
before
the big fight between her mother and father the prior evening.

Nan had been asleep for hours when she was jolted awake by raised voices. Alone in her room, she almost snuck down the hall to be with her brothers, but in the end she lay stiff with fear and braved the tempest by herself.

“How could you?” Nan heard her mother shout. “How
dare
you!”

“Listen here Elsie,” Sam slurred back, “I’m your husband. You had no right to hide it from me. I’m your husband, goddammit,” he repeated, as if somehow that fact was the answer to the question.

“B’sides, I hadda feelin’, you know?”

Nan’s face reddened for her father.

“A feeling,” Elsie sneered. “My father left that money to me! Me and the
kids
! It wasn’t much, but it wasn’t yours! Not yours to take. It’s bad enough you throw away every dime you make at that godforsaken track, but to steal from your children? That’s a new low, even for you.”

Nan’s father said something unintelligible before her mother yelled again.

“You make me sick! I should have listened to my father and run far away from you when I had the chance! Don’t you understand that ‘Sam Bower’ is the punch line of every damn drunken Irish joke in this town? Your failure is legendary! Because of you, we are the laughing stock of this neighborhood. You are nothing but a miserable, drunken sot!”

“What did you say?” Sam replied sounding thoroughly dumbfounded. “You…
you
…has it ever occurred to you thatchu’ and your big mouth might have somethin’ to do with it, huh? I gotchu’ ridin’ my back all the time whinin’ about how you got nothin’. How the kids got nothin’. Well hey, why don’t
you
go get a job Miss all high n’ mighty? Why don’tcha get offa your ass princess, instead a sittin’ around here sayin’ what a bum I am, huh? ‘fraid to break a nail sweetheart?”

“Yeah, that’s right Sam,” Elsie said, her tone dropping an octave but taking on a razors edge. “I
could
get a job. And maybe right there in that little box on the application where they ask you just why you’d like to be considered for employment, I can write ‘because
my
husband is unable to climb his ass out of the bottle long enough to provide for his family’. And if that doesn’t do it, maybe I could add ‘and stole money from his children to piss away at the track because he had a
feeling’
!”