Eggplant Alley (9781593731410) (8 page)

He turned his face toward Nicky. Dad's skin was gray.

“There was a message in there. From Mom. It's Roy.”

“What about Roy?”

“He's … gone. He's gone.”

“Daddy …”

“He's gone. I don't know what happened. He's a clerk. I don't know. Oh, God.”

Dad started the van and roared away from the curb.

“Oh, God. What did I do?” Dad said in a small tight voice as he careened down the streets. “What did I do? What did I do?”

Nicky and Dad said nothing on the drive home. The only sound inside the van was the squeaking of Dad's hands as he twisted them on the steering wheel. Dad wordlessly drove like a madman, speeding, weaving, cutting off cars, narrowly missing pedestrians.

Nicky's mind worked on what to do next, with Roy gone. He came up blank. All he could think about was the day Roy took him to Popop's variety store and bought him a set of plastic dinosaurs. Then Roy took him home and helped him fashion a dinosaur park on the coffee table out of paper plates and plastic forks.

At a stoplight, Nicky caught the festive, happy smell of french fries on the warm air, and the odor made him sick to his stomach.

When Dad careened off Lockdale and roared down Groton,
straight toward Eggplant Alley, Nicky picked out their kitchen window. As the van rumbled down the ramp into the underground garage, he caught a glimpse of Mom's face at the window. Her face was twisted into a horrible mask of grief. Even from five stories down, from a speeding delivery truck, Nicky could tell Mom had been sobbing. So it was true after all.

Nicky followed his father in a mad dash up the stairs thinking, “Our lives will never ever be normal again.” And as they reached the fifth floor, “I'm sorry I ever ever complained about anything, because now I really have something to be sad about.”

Dad's back heaved as he worked his key into the door. He pushed the door open. Something made the door push back at him, and Dad straight-armed the door so that it swung open with a bang, the way cops burst into an apartment on a raid.

Mom appeared in the hallway, and the sight of her unglued Dad. His hands were shaking. Dad pulled at his fingers like a little boy and whimpered, “What have I done? What have I done?”

Mom said, “Salvatore? What's the matter with you? Are you drunk? Take it easy. Don't get so upset. You'll give yourself a heart attack. Salvatore?”

“Don't get upset? You just said I shouldn't get upset. Is that what you said? So this is just a nightmare, right? I wanna wake up.”

Dad rocked from foot to foot. He whispered, begging, “Come on! Wake me up then!”

Mom slowly reached for Dad's shoulder. She put her hand on him carefully, as if he might shatter. She called to him, as if talking to a person on a bad phone connection. “SALVATORE? Sal? Sal? Can you hear me? Take it easy. I'm sad Checkers is dead, but
he was an old dog. Count your blessings. Thank God it wasn't me or the kids. Can you hear me in there? Did you take too much cough syrup again? Pull yourself together.”

Dad stared blankly at Mom.

“Checkers?”

Mom made a motion with her head, indicating behind the door. Dad and Nicky looked at the remains of Checkers, stiff on the tile. Nicky gasped. He had never seen a dead creature bigger than a rat. Checkers lay on his side. Checkers was like a rock. Nicky had never seen anything so completely still. The dog's black nose was tucked under the door. The last movement of his life was one final sniff of hallway air, to see if Roy was coming home.

Dad said, bewildered, “Not Roy?”

Mom exploded, “Roy? Whaddya mean, Roy? Bite your tongue. What's the matter with you? Who said anything about Roy? How could you say that?”

“Malena,” Dad said, suddenly calm. “Take it easy. I need to sit down.”

Mom and Dad sorted out the mess. They put it all together at the kitchen table. How on this particular afternoon, once again, one thing had led to another.

Mom had found Checkers dead by the door long after Dad and Nicky left. After a hearty cry in the living room, she faced a dilemma: Checkers's body blocked the door. There was no way she could bring herself to move him. She didn't know what kind of horrible things might ensue when you moved a dead dog, and she didn't want to find out.

As the hot morning dragged on, Mom grew nervous about the heat. Checkers might start to smell. Then what? She was trapped. Mom considered climbing down the fire escape, but in the end she was more terrified of heights than of bad smells. She considered packing Checkers with ice cubes, but there were only two ice trays in the freezer.

She called Uncle Dominic at the butcher shop, but he would not close his business to move a dead dog.

Mom said, “Then who? The superintendent? He took three days to fix a faucet. The cops? They don't come if you're getting strangled. The fire department?” Mom kept the fire department in reserve.

She got the idea to call J&M Variety in Yonkers. She knew Dad's route. Mom tried J&M and got old lady Ottaviano on the line and filled her in about Checkers. Mom asked her to tell Salvatore Martini, the Yum-E-Cakes guy, to swing by the apartment as soon as possible.

Old lady Ottaviano needed to leave J&M Variety for a doctor's appointment. She wrote on a paper bag, “Wife called. Come home right away. Dog is dead.” She ordered the girl who worked the register part-time to pass along the message on the bag.

“You give this to the Yum-E-Cakes delivery man. You make sure,” she said.

Dad arrived at J&M Variety, stocked the shelves with Yum-E-Cakes, and wheeled his dolly toward the door. The register girl said, “Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. You're the Yum-E-Cakes guy, right? I got a message for you.” She handed Dad the paper bag.

Old lady Ottaviano's handwriting was poor, and her mastery of
English was shaky. Her pencil was dull. Dad's worried imagination was sharp. And the word
dog
could easily be scribbled poorly, the letters not closed properly.
Dog
could be scribbled to read very much like the word
Roy
. That was the case here, at least. Dad thought the pencil writing on the brown bag broke the news: “Roy is dead.”

Now Dad wobbled out of the kitchen to the embrace of his living room chair. Nicky followed and plopped onto the sofa. His legs ached as if he had walked twenty miles. There was still the matter of Checkers at the door, and Dad would do his duty and deal with that. But first he had to pull himself together. Dad's hands were still shaking.

It was an hour before Dad said, “I'll take care of the dog.” He lifted himself out of the chair. “I wish there was some way to call Roy in Vietnam, just to make sure that this wasn't one of them premonitions or anything.”

“There's no such thing as premonitions,” Nicky said scientifically, glumly.

“Smart guy, huh?” Dad grunted. “Poor Checkers. I'll bet it was from eating that Blue Castle hamburger.”

Nicky didn't want to know Dad's plans for Checkers. What can you do with a dead dog in the Bronx? They didn't even own a shovel.

Dad passed through the living room carrying an old sheet, the one traditionally spread under the Christmas tree. Nicky heard Dad grunt and swear, the jangle of Checkers's dog license, the door open, and the door slam shut.

“No more dogs,” Mom said from the kitchen. “They just die.”

Nicky sat on the gritty front steps of Eggplant Alley and watched the sun sink behind the aspirin factory. He shook his head at the memory of the morning, when he tingled with the sureness that something good was on its way, like a special delivery package.

“And what happens?” Nicky muttered. “What happens? I get the crap scared out of me. And Checkers kicks the bucket. And now Dad is out there, tossing my dog in some dump.”

He flung a bottle cap off the steps.

“I am a numbskull, for ever tingling about anything.”

And the thought would never occur to him: If Checkers had not died that morning, Nicky would not be seated, at that very moment, on the front steps. And he would have missed, forever and ever, what happened next.

N
icky sat on the front steps in the dusk, hunched over, lost in his own little miserable world. He was not alert. He was tuned out, thinking, thinking, thinking. He didn't hear the footsteps behind him until the feet were very close. A shoe clicked sharply on concrete nearby and Nicky jumped. He turned quickly and stared up at the thick glasses and evil scowl of the Creature from the Second Floor.

The Creature from the Second Floor was actually a young boy, about Nicky's age and not quite Nicky's height. Which meant the Creature was pretty short. He had wiry, rust-colored hair. His glasses were in fact thick. The Creature had an odd, full mouth. Maybe he would need braces. But the scowl wasn't all that evil and maybe not a scowl at all. It might have passed for a nervous grimace.

“Do you live here?” the Creature said, in a flat accent that came from somewhere far beyond the borders of the Bronx.

“Who wants to know?” Nicky said.

“Me. I live here,” the Creature said. “My name is Lester Allnuts.”

Nicky snorted.

Lester Allnuts frowned at the ground and said, “That's what everybody does when I tell them that.”

“Oh,” Nicky said. He had too much practice at “good-bye,” not enough practice at “hello.”

“I'm Nick Martini.”

Lester said nothing.

“Like the drink.”

Lester said nothing.

“I live on the fifth floor.”

Lester said nothing. He didn't move. Nicky thought, “What does this kid want, an engraved invitation?”

Nicky said, “Sit down, if you want.”

Lester examined the step and took a seat next to Nicky. He said he was from a small town upstate. He told Nicky the name of the town, and Nicky immediately forgot it. Something-ville. Nicky heard “upstate” and imagined cows in the road, men wearing straw hats and overalls, pigs in the living room. Lester said he and his mother moved to the Bronx to be near his grandmother, who lived in Washington Heights.

“My daddy thought it was a good idea, to be around family and whatnot. He's away,” Lester said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“On business.”

Under normal circumstances, Nicky would have allowed the conversation to die right there. It was getting dark. Supper would be ready. Television shows beckoned. And Nicky was not fond of talking to strangers. He was usually as talkative as a mummy. But because Checkers died that morning, Nicky was in no hurry to go upstairs to the apartment, now an apartment with plenty of gloom and without a dog. One thing led
to another. So at this moment in time on the steps, Nicky was a regular chatterbox.

Nicky said, “My brother is away, too.”

“Very interesting.”

“He's at college.”

Nicky was not happy about lying, but he had learned his lesson about the truth. The truth can hurt—him. He had no inkling whether this odd-looking duck was one of Us or one of Them.

He couldn't think of anything else to say, so Nicky said, “Did you notice how the elevator stinks?”

“Yes. Like a barn.”

“That's Eggplant Alley for you,” Nicky said.

“What is?”

“A stinky elevator. That's Eggplant Alley.”

“Where is Eggplant Alley?”

“You're sitting in it, pal. You live in it.” Nicky liked calling the country boy “pal,” to show him how jaunty city kids talked.

Lester twisted around and looked up at the archway over the steps that led to the courtyard. Soot-streaked gold-colored lettering spelled out:

HUDS N VIEW G RDENS

Lester said, “I thought this was Hudson View Gardens.”

“Nobody calls it that. If you called the cops and told them to come quick to Hudson View Gardens, they wouldn't come here.”

“Very interesting.”

Nicky said, “There's a lot to know about living in these parts.”

“Yes. Very interesting.”

Nicky said, “It's different down here in the city, you know.”

“It surely is different in the city.”

“Yeah, and getting worse every day,” Nicky said, sounding weary, old, and wizened. “You got to be careful around here. This is becoming a rough neighborhood. Lots of crime. Keep your doors locked. Don't ever let anybody into your apartment. Don't talk to strangers. If you see a guy named Mr. Feeley—run, don't walk. Don't trust anybody. Keep an eye out for shady characters.”

“Oh, that one I already know,” Lester said. “I know that. Right after we moved in, something happened when I was practicing riding the elevator.”

“You practiced riding the elevator?”

“Yes. I wanted to work on summoning the elevator to the lobby. So I went down to the lobby and just as I got to the lobby I saw the elevator door was closing. I reached in to stop the door with my hand.”