Kicking the Sky (29 page)

I came into a clearing, around the entrance of the new courthouse. Police stood guard as reporters and camera crews
wrangled thick cables and wires, setting up cameras on tripods. There were trucks parked outside, their antennas twirling in the cold air. They each had chosen a spot somewhere in the square, set themselves up to bring live news into everyone’s home. I had almost forgotten this was the first day of the Emanuel Jaques trial. A woman passing by drew her kids close to her legs.

I picked up the trail of Adam’s red scarf before it disappeared down a side ramp, around the corner of the building. I stumbled once but dusted myself off quickly, just inside the underground garage. “Adam?” I called out. But there was no Adam. Suddenly, a caravan of police cube vans whizzed by me, then braked. There were four of them, all lined up. A chain rattled as the parking garage door closed slowly. Fluorescent lights flickered as the cops got out. They moved casually to the back of their vans, undid the latches, and then flung open the doors.

Out hopped the prisoners, each from a separate wagon. They barely looked at each other. The police officers handled them roughly, twisted them around by their arms and directed them to a large elevator door. There were two cops for each handcuffed man, one on each side. There were no prison-issue jumpsuits, no paper slippers. These criminals were dressed in suits and thick-knotted ties. Their hair was long.

I stepped forward, right underneath a flickering fluorescent light.

“Hey! How did you get in here?” An officer laid his hand on his holster.

I took another step forward. Everyone stopped.

“Stay back, raccoon boy!” a cop hollered. The other cops laughed, deep man laughs.

“Leave now!” a cop demanded, taking a couple of steps in my direction.

The killers were pushed toward the elevator. One looked back. Saul Betesh’s eyes burned into me. His lips cracked open just a bit, enough to see the flash of some teeth. He winked.
Little boy with the pretty hair, would you like to play?
I peed, the warmth spreading down my inner thigh. I caught an image of myself in the window of a parked car. Black mascara lines crawled down my cheeks.

I
REMEMBER MY MOTHER
wiping something cool and soft across my forehead and temples. I wasn’t sure how long I had been out, but now she was gone.

“How are you feeling?” Edite whispered as she leaned over to fluff my pillow.

“I saw them,” I mumbled, razor blades slashing my throat when I swallowed.

“Shh, it’s going to be okay. Nightmares can’t hurt you.”

“Where’s Mãe?”

“She had to go back to work. It’s been four days, Antonio.” She wrung a cloth over a bowl, draped it on my forehead. “The fever’s breaking. You’ll be fine in no time. Here, she left you some octopus stew.” Edite crinkled her nose as she lifted a spoonful of stew. “She said it was your favourite.” I pressed my ear to the pillow and tried to hold back the tears until the lump in my throat hurt. I couldn’t hold on. I turned to my side, buried my nose in the pillow in the hope I’d find a trace of her smell. My mother had spent four whole days with me but I couldn’t remember any of it. I wanted my mother, her hand on my forehead. I needed to feel her touch.

“I’m not hungry,” I said into the pillow. I heard the scratch of Edite’s lighter, the faint burning sound of tobacco being lit, and I took in the whiff of her cigarette.

My head felt heavy. I closed my eyes for a little bit, let go just enough so that I slipped away into a dark quiet.

Their hot breath nipped at my neck. They clipped at my heels. I couldn’t look back, I was too afraid. They laughed a deep gut laugh, the kind men share around suspended pigs as they hack them to pieces. I breathed in some spit and choked. My heart raced as I ran, arms pumping pistons. I hoped something would come down and pluck me from the concrete, lift me up, away from the men with no faces. A kite—the one I had almost given Ricky for Christmas—whipped into view. It shot across the blue sky, and then dipped from side to side over rooftops. I traced the string down until it met with a tiny fist. Ricky’s skin was dark like it got during summer, hair shiny like wet tar. I ran toward him. The men kept chasing me, their fingertips pinched at my shirt, callused hands brushed my neck, my arms. Tiny bolts of electricity ran through me and I wanted to close my eyes. Blood gushed across my temples. “Hey pretty boy with the golden hair,” they chanted. But before I could surrender to their rough hands, I glanced at Ricky, who smiled and held his finger to the sky. I stopped, looked up, and found a baby, a tiny grey baby—Mary—flying at the end of the string. The baby danced in the wind, swooped above our heads, her thin arms outstretched. The men could not touch me; a force field held them back. Ricky tugged on the string and the baby seesawed down like a leaf, drifted into Ricky’s arms
.

I found a newspaper at the foot of my bed. It was Thursday, February 9, 1978. I didn’t know time could move like mud. I located a story about Luciano Jaques, Emanuel’s older brother, who was fourteen and had testified that his brother was lured from their shoeshine spot by the promise of making thirty-five dollars an hour to help move movie equipment. The hope
was that in two days they’d be able to make a total of four hundred dollars. But it didn’t make sense, I thought. No one pays that kind of money. He should have known. That’s when it hit me. Maybe Emanuel
did
know; maybe he understood that the man wanted something more.

Emanuel’s brother went on to describe what Saul Betesh wore that afternoon: long denim overalls, no shirt, just bare skin and light brown boots. James was wearing almost the exact same thing the day I found him whitewashing the inside of his garage. The fine hair on the back of my neck tingled.

From the get-go, one of the accused, Robert Kribs, pleaded guilty. The Crown attorney told jurors, “The treatment received by Emanuel Jaques at the hands of his murderers is nothing short of a horror story.”

The phone rang. It rang at least ten times before I figured I had been left home alone. I swung my Jell-O legs out of bed and held on to the banister all the way down the stairs to get to the hallway phone.

“Hello?”

“Meet me at James’s,” Manny said.

“What for? Manny, I don’t—” I was speaking to the dead tone of the phone pulsing back.

I was feeling slightly dizzy but the sensation was slowly coming back to my legs and feet. It didn’t matter how I felt, because it wasn’t like Manny to hang up the phone. I knew I’d have to hook up with him, figure out what was so urgent.

I pulled a pair of jeans over my flannel pyjamas, stuffing the pants down. I stepped out into the laneway through our garage. There was a shine in the alley that looked like wet stones. The quiet of winter would last until the Festa do
Senhor Santo Cristo, five weeks after Easter. Then our garages would be cleaned, scoured, and washed with water and bleach, ready for tables to be set up for the feast, and all the neighbourhood would gather to talk about back home. I wondered if Ricky felt like Portugal was his home now, if he ran into his mother’s outstretched arms, like it was the place he should have been all along.

My head was still groggy when I arrived, and I could barely lift James’s garage door over my head. The electric heaters were on full blast, hot orange glowing off curly coils. It must have been a hundred degrees in there. “Manny?” I wasn’t very loud. I waited for a sound. Cups and beer bottles and plates were piled up in a bucket on the floor. When I kicked the bucket, a veil of black lifted; flies were all over the place. “Manny?” I hoisted myself up the ladder to the loft. I stood up in the tallest part of the loft space, where the peaked roof joined. It looked smaller to me, more crammed than I remembered. The sheets on James’s mattress were all rumpled and smelled of jeans that had been worn too long. When was the last time Manny had washed them? I had stopped bringing James food weeks ago. Instead, I delivered what I could to Agnes in her basement.

“Antonio?” Manny called, the metal clang of the garage echoing.

I didn’t answer right away. I listened to hear if he was alone or if James was with him. There was some rattling around, and then Manny was climbing the ladder. His hair was the first thing that appeared. A great big smile greeted me.

“What are you doing up
here
?” Manny said.

“You alone?”

“Yep.”

“Why aren’t you at school?”

“I faked a sore gut and got sent home.”

Manny climbed up to the top and sat at the lip of the loft entrance. He stuck the corner of his coat collar in his mouth and sucked, dangled and swung his legs into the garage below like a kid on a swing.

“What’s up with
you
?” I asked him. I wasn’t used to Manny being happy.

Manny’s legs kicked wildly. “They’ve sold their house.”

“Who?”

“Amilcar’s dad.” His grin was eating at his face as he climbed down the ladder.

“Your brother’s going to freak.”

“She’ll be far away in Portugal. She wasn’t his first and I’m sure he won’t be crying too much before he’s banging another one.”

“You told me he had made plans. You said after they got married and got a place of their own you’d go over and hang out. You said—” I could tell I was spoiling Manny’s moment, so I stopped.

“James said he’d leave me a couple of drop-off addresses around someplace. It’s a pigsty in here,” Manny said.

I lay on my stomach and watched him scrounging through the piles of old rags and empty paint cans.

“I guess we didn’t realize how much Ricky used to do around this place, keeping things tidy,” Manny said. “My mom says he’ll be happy back in São Miguel, back with his mom.”

“You think that’s for real?”

He found a cluster of brown paper bags, the kind we would fill with candy at Mr. Jay’s, and swiped them up in a fist. “What do you mean?”

“You think they’re lying about Ricky?”

“I don’t know. They kind of lie about everything.” Manny stuffed the paper bags in his pocket. “I gotta go.”

“I miss Ricky,” I said. I wanted Manny to hear me, but when he didn’t respond, I shouted down, “Hey, I need to speak to James.”

“What for?”

“He needs to stay away from us.”

Manny lifted the garage door. “Agnes was bad news. It’ll all work out, you’ll see.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Can’t help you. He told me he’d be here by early afternoon. Come to think of it, that was yesterday. Hell, doesn’t look like he’s been here for a couple of days.” Manny returned to the table and started shoving a note into his sock. “I almost forgot,” he said, taking a deep breath. “You’ve been stuck in the land of zees the last couple of days. I bet you don’t even know that I’ve been dropping off your homework. It was like you were drugged or something. It was a good time to be knocked out, though. Guys have been going around bashing homos.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“I’m just saying.”

“I’m going to check on Agnes.”

“I just told you. Agnes is gone,” Manny said. He lit a cigarette and squinted his eye from the smoke. “Disappeared right after Ricky got shipped home.”

“What do you mean, disappeared?”

“Poof!” Smoke billowed from his mouth as he waved his fingers in the cloud like a magician.

“Something’s not right,” I said under my breath, hoping the answer would click. I started to climb down the ladder. “Does James know?”

“I thought you didn’t give a shit about James.”

I pretended I didn’t hear him.

“You need to crawl back to bed, buddy. You look like shit. I gotta go.” Manny gave me a quick wave before he snuck under the garage door and closed it behind him.

Manny was right, even though it was his phone call that had dragged me out of bed: it was too soon for me to be wandering around the neighbourhood. I needed to build up some strength first.

Two blasts from the horn and I recognized Eugene’s Trans Am. The car door slammed.

“Manny, you in there?” I jumped back. “Open up!” I hoisted the garage door halfway, up to Eugene’s waist, before ducking underneath. “Antonio, hey. Have you seen my brother?” His eyes were all bugged out and red.

“He’s at school, no?” I said, trying to sound surprised. I wanted to lean on his car, the energy draining from my body.

“I just checked. He signed out, said he wasn’t feeling well.” Eugene kept looking over his shoulder, scanning the laneway as if he was expecting someone. Then Lygia came around the corner, running in her Cougar boots and shearling coat.

“If you see him tell him I need to speak to him. It’s important,” Eugene said. He jumped back into the car and spun out. He skidded to a stop next to Lygia and almost clipped her on her side. She was crying. She fumbled with the handle
and got in. The smell of rubber and the buzz of peeling tires was all that remained.

Back in the garage I reached up to the shelf where James kept the crock filled with crumpled five-dollar bills. It was empty, except for a dead moth, powdery white, on its back, its legs pointing up. I tried to beat down the image of Baby Mary in my head. The guilt made the back of my ears ring. I needed to lie down.

I banged my knee against Agnes’s cot. I didn’t think she had ever slept in it. I lay down.
Not long, just an hour or so
. I fought hard to keep my eyelids from closing. I tried to imagine where Agnes could be hiding—if she was hiding at all or had she taken off. Could she have left with James? I imagined James coming in, the way he always did, strong and handsome. He would ask Agnes for forgiveness. But he wouldn’t mean it. It felt like someone was pulling a blanket over me. Ricky was in a better place. James could argue it was part of his plan all along. He’d set Agnes up in a nice apartment somewhere close by, trying to get back on track. Manny would be fine, he always was. Confession. I would tell my mother I had stepped out of the house to go to confession.

“James!” I breathed out. The air was hazy. He sat next to me on the cot. I reached up to touch his sleeve, make sure he was really there and not just a mirage bubbling up from my tired brain. James winced. His lower lip was split open and swollen. I could tell he was having a hard time holding up his head and keeping his eyes open. His head hovered over my face, bobbing like a drunk’s. He tried to say something but it just came out as gurgling noise.