'74 & Sunny (10 page)

They laughed and lagged twenty feet behind me, and frankly, the possibility of having any passing friend see my cousin, along with my mother's horrifying muumuu—which hung from the shoulder with its brilliantly colored floral Polynesian patterns—was too much for me to take.

“Come on,” I yelled. “You wanna see a conniption? We got slugs to kill!”

As beautiful as my father's garden was, there were infiltrators that we had to deal with. And my father didn't like to use any chemical sprays from the hardware store. He never trusted what that might do to his fruit or vegetables. Instead, he preferred we take matters in our own hands. But that tactic took an eagle eye, a strong stomach, and a memory without consideration for all God's creatures.

Finding the dreaded green tomato hornworm was the
equivalent of finding Waldo—thirteen years before the game was ever invented. The hornworm worked at night, devouring tomato, eggplant, and pepper plants. You had to wake up really early and look really closely to see them clinging to the underside of a branch near the trunks of the plants. They were almost impossible to spot because of their ability to camouflage so perfectly. And they were ugly and medieval-looking, with a bunch of little legs and a brown horn at one end of their thick three-inch body. Whenever we spotted one, our job was to pull it off the branch with a pair of pliers and drop it into a Maxwell House Coffee can of water and watch it drown. And these tough caterpillars—which, if they weren't caught, would become the five-spotted hawk moth—put up one hell of a fight.

I told Gino in no uncertain terms, “I'll go in there and pluck them. You just hold the coffee can. But if they start crawling out of the can, you gotta take a stick and shove them back in.”

Why we didn't step on them and get it over with, I have no idea.

My father's instructions to kill garden slugs was even more sinister. We were to find the slimy critters—with or without their shells—and resort to a different type of torture: lightly sprinkle table salt on them and watch as they squirmed and dissolved to death like the Wicked Witch of the West. After our murderous run—with a canister of Morton Salt—Gino had had enough.

“Why can't we just step on them or hit them or throw them in the canal?” he said with genuine concern.

“I think my father wants any other slugs with the same idea to get the message,” I said.

“It's like
The Godfather
in your garden,” Gino said.

“Goddamn right,” I said. “But it works, don't it?”

6

HOOKED ON A FEELING

B
etween the slicing and the dicing and the torturous melting of numerous insects in our garden, I had one more job I had to lay on Gino to see if he could pass some muster. It wasn't anything too nasty, but it did take place in the dark of night, and that could've easily made him mess his pants.

For as long as I could remember, we always caught our own night crawlers for weekend fishing trips. My father's reasoning was something on the level of “Whose fuckin' earth could produce better worms than the ones that crawl in our own backyard?”

And he was right. But how he was able to gather them was genius to a twelve-year-old. He would steadily bring home small scatter rugs from the store every few nights or so
and carefully place them on the grass behind the homemade wooden cabana he had built with Frankie and Jack. Between that and the behemoth of a garden compost (a full forty years ahead of the Green Movement)
and
a large carob tree, whose pods were the molted remains of hundreds of cicada, it was like a Bermuda Triangle of darkness that nobody wanted to walk through when the sun went down. But with my father's orders to persistently water that particular area for an hour each night after dinner, what we would uncover was the kind of bounty that could keep a bait shop in business for months. See, by flooding that part of the yard with water and letting the carpet remnants get soaked, my father was mercilessly drawing the night crawlers to the damp, dark, and dank confines beneath the rugs. It didn't matter that the screaming army of cicadas were falling on the ground all around us. All Gino and I had to do was have one of us lift the rug, while holding a small flashlight in our mouths, while the other dived in with both hands and successfully kept the worms from disappearing back into their holes in a split second. I'd been on the physical end of this practice a hundred times. I wanted Gino to do the handiwork this time out. And that made for a long night.

It was close to nine, and I really wanted to show my father that I could persuade Gino to get down and dirty with the worms. But it wasn't looking good. For starters, we heard a frog croaking somewhere nearby, so that made the mood more tense than usual.

“What's that?” he said, clutching my sleeve.

“It's a frog. Don't worry about it. They don't bite and they're more scared of us than we are of them.”

What's more, Gino had a hard time stepping on the squishy carpets in the dimly lit area behind the cabana.

“It feels like I'm stepping on bologna,” Gino said. “Can't we wait until morning? I swear I'll get up early—”

“Shhh, man! These worms only come out at night. They're like vampires.”

“Oh God,” he said, holding a bucket of dirt. “This whole area, A.J. I feel like we're in that scary silent film. I swear Dr. Caligari is going to come out any second.”

That gave me chicken skin. “Don't even
joke
about that movie,” I said. “That gives me the willies.”

Gino was taken aback. “Oh my God, something gives
you
the willies? I didn't think anything spooked you.”

“Oh, I got my things that scare me shitless. Trust me.”

“Tell me,” Gino said.

“Nah, it's stupid. Come on. We gotta get worms.”

“
I'm
scared of clowns,” Gino volunteered.

That amused me, but I wanted to know more. “Clowns, huh? Clowns like Bozo? Like Ronald McDonald?”

“Nooo, not Bozo,” he said. “And I'm pretty sure Ronald McDonald isn't a clown.”

“Of course he's a clown,” I said. “He's got the red nose, the crazy hair, the big shoes. What else does he have to do to prove to you he's a clown? What do you think he is? Seriously.”

“I don't know. I never really thought hard about it. Just a guy who sells hamburgers, I guess,” Gino said.

I let a minute or two pass before I said anything. “Hamburger salesman, huh?”

“I guess you're right,” he said. “Now that I think of it.”

I lifted a wet rug to see a half dozen or so really lazy earthworms. “Hold the light,” I said. “I got these suckers!”

Despite the hard, quick work in front of us, Gino needed to be heard. I half looked for worms, and quickly scooped some up, while I waited for a response, any response, from him.

“I guess I'm scared of, you know, like the clowns people paint in pictures,” he said. “Like sad clowns and stuff. Like the oil paintings of clowns that are in my basement.”

“Yeah, well, you know what my father says?”

“I get the feeling it isn't good.”

“My father says the clowns that show up at kids' parties are the kind of guys you should stay away from.”

Gino thought for a moment, moving the worms around the can with a stick. “What do
you
think?”

I gave the dark yard a quick scan. “I think we need to lift four more rugs.”

“No,” he said. “What do you think about guys who dress up as clowns?”

“I think makeup is for girls, Gino,” I said. “Not for old men chasing after kids and making balloon animals.”

Gino stayed quiet and skittishly lifted a soaked shag rug while I quickly grabbed a dirty dozen caught half out of their
holes. We methodically repeated this process a couple more times as our teamwork began to click. When we came to the last rug it felt like it weighed 100 pounds. It took both of us to break the rug's suction from the mud.

“Holy shit! The mother lode,” I screamed. I held the flashlight in my left hand and went picking like crazy with my right. There were dozens of them all fat and happy that had squirmed too far from their holes. Even Gino grabbed a few and dropped them in the can really quick before wiping his hands on his shorts.

“Feels good, right?” I said.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Okay, one last rug,” I said. “The one right by the compost. That's gonna be a tough one because we buried the fluke heads there on Saturday, remember?”

“Of course I remember. I'll never forget that for as long as I live.”

“Okay, it's gonna stink like crazy. I've done this alone a million times. Just take short, quick breaths.”

“Wait . . . should I breathe through my nose?” Gino said.

“Well, that just might make you wanna puke,” I said. “And it'll take days before it leaves your sinuses.”

“So then I should breathe through my
mouth
?”

“No. Then it'll feel like you ate them.”

“Okay . . . so breathe through what hole, then?”

“Just breathe through both. A little at a time. You're not gonna die.”

As we made our way over to the farthest corner of the yard, toward the croaking frog and nearer the stink, Gino piped up. “You never told me what
you're
scared of.”

“
Now
you wanna talk about this?”

“It gets my mind off the odor.”

“Fine. Okay. Definitely Dr. Caligari,” I said through shorts bursts of little breaths. “And, uh, Dobermans. Yeah, there are these two Dobermans that live in a house at the end of the canal. And whenever we drive the boat by they go berserk. The crazy owner named 'em Dead and Gone. You imagine that?”

“That sounds horrifying,” he said. “And those poor dogs have no idea what their names mean.”

“I don't know, but the hell with that. This guy, he's a real asshole. Sometimes when he sees our boat coming and he thinks we're too close to his dock, he unchains them and they tear ass to the edge of the dock, barking and howling, with their feet kicking up rocks into the canal. Scary as all hell, man. It's like they want to jump in the boat and attack all of us.”

“What's something else that scares you?”

“Ummm . . . besides the toes that don't bend on my father's feet?”

“No, really.” Gino laughed. “Come on. Tell me.”

I downshifted the tone real quick. “It's scary. It's pretty damn scary to
me
anyway. And you might be too young to hear it,” I said. “If I tell you—do me a favor: I don't need you
trying to climb into my bed and get under the covers with me tonight.”

“Yeah, as if . . .”

“All right, I'm gonna tell you,” I said quietly. “But don't get all crazy on me out here in the dark. We're in the farthest, most stinky and scary corner of the yard. Gino, I'm warning you. This could keep you up all night.”

“As long as it isn't about clowns,” he said.

“Okay,” I began. “I don't like Dr. Caligari, Dobermans, and—ready?—dolls with wooden teeth and busted eyeballs. You happy now?”

With that, Gino dropped the bucket of worms, scampered across the damp scatter rugs, and shrieked into the house.
“Oh my GOD!
Wooden dolls . . . broken teeth . . . lazy eyes! Who thinks of that?! Who thinks of that?!”

Remember, he was reacting to things that scared
me
.

It took me twenty minutes to get him settled and calm by slamming a package of Drake's cupcakes on the table in front of him. “Listen to me . . . just eat these,” I said. “I don't know why, but they'll make you feel better and calm you down.”

“I'm not allowed to eat sweets like this,” Gino said, rocking back and forth in his chair. “I'm not allowed.”

I looked at this poor kid, staring at a cupcake like he was holding the losing hand in a million-dollar, high-stakes poker game. “Jeez, it's just a little old cupcake. What's the worst that could happen? Take a bite and see if you change at all.”

Gino examined the Drake's cupcake like it was a lost artifact.

“I don't know . . .” he said. “I just see my mother and father telling me
not
to eat it.”

“Wanna know the way I see it?”

“Okay,” he said.

“My father woke us up at the crack of dawn's ass,” I reasoned. “We spent a lot of time in the hot garden, picking fruit and vegetables and dodging dog shit and mosquitoes the whole time. And then we spent the last hour in pitch-black digging out worms, while dodging toads, cicadas, and God knows whatever-the-hell else, just so we can have a pleasurable fishing trip this weekend.”

“Yeah, that is true,” Gino said.

“You're goddamn right it's true. And it was hard and scary. Do I have to even remind you of you running away at the mention of dolls with wooden teeth and busted eyeballs?”

“Okay,” Gino said, covering his eyes and squirming in the big wrought-iron kitchen chair. “Please don't bring that up again.”

“But old wooden doll teeth and crazy eyeballs is something that scares
me
, not you,” I said.

“I never thought of them before, and now they terrify me.”

“Well, if you ask me, I say you
earned
that cupcake,” I said.

Even in his panic, I managed to pick up the bucket of worms he dropped and scoop all of the escapees back inside.
And I brought that bounty into the house and showed my father, who was deep in the cold cut drawer, looking to make a sandwich.

“Dad, there's gotta be fifty worms in here,” I said. “And more than a few ‘bull-greezers,' ” which was our word for anything or anyone that was bigger than the norm.

My father took a good, hard look at the can. “You think this is a good haul?” he said.

I looked at the amount of Scotch in his glass. It was at least three fingers high, and I knew that couldn't have been his first, since he'd been home from work for a while. Over the years, I learned those type of open-ended conversations could go both ways: splendid or scary. Happily or horrifyingly.

He picked up the Maxwell House Coffee can full of muddy dirt and filthy worms and calmly dumped the can on top of the Formica kitchen table. My mother, who somehow always managed to stay nearby at pivotal moments, piped up.

“Oh Jesus Christ, Al. Now all that shit is on the table we eat on,” she carefully said. “What are you looking to do? Is there something you want to tell the kids?”

“Yeah, Lilly, there is something I want to tell the kids for your friggin' information.”

“Here we go,” my mother began, as Gino's anxiety—which he wore on his cute little face—began to appear.

“I
want
to tell my son and my nephew—while they scrounged around the yard—that what they did was . . .
fuckin'
beautiful.
Okay?
They got the mother lode of worms here. You know what this costs at a bait shop? Do you know, boys?”

“No, Daddy,” I said, somewhat relieved. “How much?”

“I have no idea, because I don't sell fuckin' worms for a living.” He laughed, a bit too loudly. “But I can tell you worked hard and you found a shitload of worms and there's no telling how many fish we'll catch with the worms you have here. I'll tell you one thing: we don't have to go to Augie's Bait and Tackle this weekend.”