Blue World (26 page)

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I’ve got a story to tell, like everybody else in the world. Because that’s what makes up life, isn’t it? Sure. Everybody’s got a story--about somebody they met, or something that’s happened to them, something they’ve done, something they want to do, something they’ll never do. In the life of everybody on this old spinning ball there’s a story about a road not taken, or a love that went bad, or a ghost of some kind. You know what I mean. You’ve got one too.

Well, I want to tell you a story. Trouble is, there are so many things I remember about Greystone Bay. I could tell you about what Joey Hammers and I found in the wreck of an old Chevy down where the blind man lives amid the junked cars. I could tell you about the time the snakes started coming out of old lady Farrow’s faucets, and what she did with them. I could tell you about that Elvis Presley impersonator who came to town, and went crazy when he couldn’t get his makeup off. Oh, yeah, I know a lot about what goes on in Greystone Bay. Some things I wouldn’t want to tell you after the sun goes down, but I want to tell you a story about me.

You decide if it’s worth the telling.

My name’s Bob Deaken. Once upon a time, I was Bobby Deaken, and I lived with my Mom and Dad in one of the clapboard houses on Accardo Street, up near South Hill. There are a lot of clapboard houses up there, all the same shape and size and color--kind of a slate gray. A tombstone color. All of them have identical windows, front porches, and concrete steps leading up from the street. I swear to God, I think all of them have the same cracks in those steps, too! I mean, it’s like they built one of those houses and took a black-and-white picture of it and said, “This is the ideal house for Accardo Street,” and they put every one together just the same right down to the warped doors that stick in the summer and hang when it’s cold. I guess Mr. Lindquist figured those houses were good enough for the Greeks and Portuguese, Italians and Poles who live in them and work at his factory. Of course, a lot of plain old Americans live on Accardo Street too, and they work for Mr. Lindquist like my dad does.

Everybody up on Accardo pays rent to Mr. Lindquist, see. He owns all those houses. He’s one of the richest men in Greystone Bay, and his factory churns out cogs, gears, and wheels for heavy machinery. I worked as a “quality controller” there during summer break from high school. Dad got me the job, and I stood at a conveyor belt with a few other teenage guys and all we did day after day was make sure a certain size of gear fit into a perfect mold. If it was one hair off, we flipped it into a box and all the rejects were sent back to be melted down and stamped all over again. Sounds simple, I guess, but the conveyor belt pushed thousands of gears past us every hour and our supervisor, Mr. Gallagher, was a real bastard with an eagle eye for bad gears that slipped past. Whenever I had a complaint about the factory, Dad said I ought to be thankful I could get a job there at all, times being so bad and all; and Mom just shrugged her shoulders and said that Mr. Lindquist probably started out counting and checking gears somewhere too.

But you ask my Dad what kind of machines all those gears, cogs, and wheels went into, and he couldn’t tell you. He’d worked there since he was nineteen years old, but he still didn’t know. He wasn’t interested in what they did, or where they went when the crates left the loading docks; all he did was make them, and that’s the only thing that mattered to him--millions and millions of gears, bound for unknown machines in faraway cities, a long way off from Greystone Bay.

South Hill’s okay. I mean, it’s not the greatest place, but it’s not a slum either. I guess the worst thing about living on Accardo Street is that there are so many houses, and all of them the same. A lot of people are born in the houses on Accardo Street, maybe move two or three doors away when they get married, and they have kids who go to work at Mr. Lindquist’s factory, and then their kids move two or three doors away and it just goes on and on. Even Mr. Lindquist used to be Mr. Lindquist Junior, and he lives in the same big white house that his grandfather built.

But sometimes, when my Dad started drinking and yelling and Mom locked herself in the bathroom to get away from him, I used to go up to the end of Accardo Street. The hulk of what used to be a Catholic church stands up there; the church caught on fire in the late seventies, right in the middle of one of the worst snowstorms Greystone Bay ever saw. It was a hell of a mess, but the church wasn’t completely destroyed. The firemen never found Father Marion’s body. I don’t know the whole story, but I’ve heard things I shouldn’t repeat. Anyway, I found a way to climb up to what was left of the old bell tower, and the thing creaked and moaned like it was about to topple off, but the risk was worth it. Up there you could see the whole of Greystone Bay, the way the land curved to touch the sea, and you got a sense of where you were in the world. And out there on the ocean you could see yachts, workboats, and ships of all kinds passing by, heading for different harbors. At night their lights were especially pretty, and sometimes you could hear a distant whistle blow, like a voice that whispered,

Follow me.

And sometimes I wanted to. Oh, yeah, I did. But Dad said the world beyond Greystone Bay wasn’t worth a shit, and a bull should roam his own pasture. That was his favorite saying, and why everybody called him “Bull.” Mom said I was too young to know my own mind; she was always on my case to go out with “that nice Donna Raphaelli,” because the Raphaellis lived at the end of the block and Mr.

Raphaelli was Dad’s immediate supervisor at the factory. Nobody listens to a kid until he screams, and by then it’s too late.

Don’t let anybody tell you the summers aren’t hot in Greystone Bay. Come mid-July, the streets start to sizzle and the air is a stagnant haze. I swear I’ve seen seagulls have heat strokes and fall right out of the sky. Well, it was on one of those hot, steamy July mornings--a Saturday, because Dad and I didn’t have to work--when the painters pulled up onto Accardo Street in a white truck.

The house right across the street from ours had been vacant for about three weeks. Old Mr. Pappados had a heart attack in the middle of the night, and at his funeral Mr. Lindquist gave a little speech because the old man had worked at the factory for almost forty years. Mrs. Pappados went west to live with a relative. I wished her luck on the day she left, but Mom just closed the curtains and Dad turned the TV up louder.

But on this particular morning in July, all of us were on the front porch trying to catch a breeze. We were sweltering and sweating, and Dad was telling me how this was the year the Yankees were going to the World Series--and then the painters pulled up. They started setting up their ladders and getting ready to work.

“Going to have a new neighbor,” Mom said, fanning herself with a handkerchief. She turned her chair as if to accept a breeze, but actually it was to watch the house across the street.

“I hope they’re

American,“

Dad said, putting aside the newspaper. “God knows we’ve got enough foreigners living up here already.”

“I wonder what job Mr. Lindquist has given our new neighbor.” Mom’s glance flicked toward Dad and then away as fast as a fly can escape a swatter.

“The line. Mr. Lindquist always starts out new people on the line. I just hope to God whoever it is knows something about baseball, because your son sure don’t!”

“Come on, Dad,” I said weakly. It seems like my voice was always weak around him. I had graduated from high school in May, was working full time at the factory, but Dad had a way of making me feel twelve years old and stupid as a stone.

“Well, you don’t!” he shot back. “Thinkin‘ the

Cubs are gonna take the Series? Crap! The Cubs ain’t never gonna get to the--“

“I wonder if they have a daughter,” Mom said.

“Hey, don’t you talk when I’m talkin‘. What do you think I am, a wall?”

The painters were prying their paint cans open. One of them dipped his brush in.

“Oh, my God,” Mom whispered, her eyes widening. “Would you look at that?”

We did, and we were stunned speechless.

The paint was not the bland gray of all the other clapboard houses on Accardo Street. Oh, no--that paint was as scarlet as a robin’s breast. Redder than that: as red as the neon signs down where the bars stand on Harbor Road, crimson as the warning lights out on the bay where the breakers crash and boom on jagged rocks. Red as the party dress of a girl I saw at a dance but didn’t have enough nerve to meet.

Red as a cape swirled before the eyes of a bull.

As the painters began to cover the door of that house with screaming-scarlet, my dad came up out of his chair with a grunt as if he’d been kicked in the rear. If there was anything he hated in the world, it was the color red. It was a Communist color, he’d always said.

Red China. The Reds. Red Square. The Red Army. He thought the Cincinnati Reds was the lousiest team in baseball, and even the sight of a red shirt drove him to ranting fits. I don’t know what it was, maybe something in his mind or his chemistry, maybe. He just went into a screaming rage when he saw the color red.

“Hey!” he yelled across the street. The painters stopped working and looked up, because his shout had been loud enough to rattle the windows in their frames. “What do you think you’re doin‘ over there?”

“Ice-skatin‘,” came the reply. “What does it look like we’re doin’?”

“Get it off!” Dad roared, his eyes about to explode from his head. “Get that shit off right now!”

He started down the concrete steps, with Mom yelling at him not to lose his temper, and I knew somebody was going to get hurt if he got his hands on those painters. But he stopped at the edge of the street, and by this time people were coming out of their houses all around to see what the noise was all about. It was no big deal, though; there was always some kind of yelling and commotion on Accardo Street, especially when the weather turned hot and the walls of those clapboard houses closed in like cages. Dad hollered, “Mr. Lindquist owns these houses, you idiots! Look around! You see any of the others painted Commie red?”

“Nope,” one of them replied, while the other kept on painting.

“Then what the hell are you doin‘?”

“Followin‘ Mr. Lindquist’s direct orders,” the painter said. “He told us to come up here to 311 Accardo Street and paint the whole place Firehouse Red.” He tapped one of the cans with his foot. “This is Firehouse Red, and that’s 311 Accardo.” He pointed to the little metal numbers up above the front door. “Anymore questions, Einstein?”

“These houses are gray!”

Dad shouted, his face blotching with color. “They’ve been gray for a hundred years! You gonna paint every house on this street Commie red?”

“Nope. Firehouse Red. And we’re just painting this place right here. Inside and outside. But that’s the only house we’re supposed to touch.”

“It’s right in front of my door!

I’ll have to look at it! My God, a color like that screams to be looked at! I can’t stand that color!“

“Tough. Take it up with Mr. Lindquist.” And then he joined the other painter in the work, and when Dad returned to the house he started throwing around furniture and cursing like a madman. Mom locked herself in the bathroom with a magazine, and I went up to the church to watch the boats go by.

As it turned out, on Monday Dad gathered his courage to go see Mr. Lindquist on his lunch break. He only got as far as Mr. Lindquist’s secretary, who said she’d been the one to call Greystone Bay Painters and convey the orders. That was all she knew about it. On the drive home, Dad was so mad he almost wrecked the car. And there was the red house, right across the street from our own gray, dismal-looking clapboard house, the paint still so fresh that it smelled up the whole street. “He’s trying to get to me,” Dad said in a nervous voice at dinner. “Yeah. Sure. Mr. Lindquist wants to get rid of me, but he don’t have the guts of his father. He’s afraid of me, so he paints a house Commie red and sticks it in my face. Sure. That’s what it’s got to be!” He called Mr. Raphaelli up the street to find out what was going on, but learned only that a new man had been hired and would be reporting to work in a week.

I tell you, that was a crazy week. Like I say, I don’t know why the color red bothered my dad so much; maybe there’s a story in that too, but all I know is that my dad started climbing the walls. It took everything he had to open the front door in the morning and go to work, because the morning sunlight would lie on the walls of that red house and make it look like a four-alarm fire. And in the evening, the setting sun set it aflame from another direction. People started driving along Accardo

Street--tourists, yet!--just to take a look at the gaudy thing! Dad double-locked the doors and pulled the shades as if he thought the red house might rip itself off its foundations at night and come rattling across the street after him. Dad said he couldn’t breathe when he looked at that house, the awful red color stole the breath right out of his lungs, and he started going to bed early at night with the radio tuned to a baseball game and blaring right beside his head.

But in the dark, when there was no more noise from the room where my mom and dad slept in their separate beds, I sometimes unlocked the front door and went out on the porch to stand in the steamy night. I wouldn’t dare tell my mom or dad, but… I

liked the red house. I mean, it looked like an island of life in a gray sea. For a hundred years there had been only gray houses on Accardo Street, all of them exactly the same, not a nail or a joint different. And now this.

I didn’t know why, but I was about to find out in a big way.

Our new neighbors came to the red house exactly one week after the house had been painted. They made enough noise to wake the rich folks in their mansions up on North Hill, hollering and laughing on an ordinarily silent Saturday morning, and when I went out on the porch to see, my folks were already out there. My dad’s face was almost purple, and there was a mixture of rage and terror in his eyes. My mom was stunned, and she kept rubbing his arm and holding him from flinging himself down the steps.