In those days we kids played with rocks and sticks we found in the street, battered pine cones from old Miss Yunt’s yard, bits of dusty twine, dented tin cans we plucked out of trash cans. The greatest treat was an appliance box abandoned on some curb. The newest ones smelled so caustic they burned our eyes, especially when we carved out little windows and doors with pocket knives and released the corrugated gases binding layers of stiff, chemically-treated paper. But this is not a story about poverty and cardboard boxes; this is a story of revenge most heinous.
Meet the villains, my cousin Jackie and me. Jackie wore a clunky hearing aid amplifier on his chest with a wire and phone plug running up to his left ear. He was two years older, wiry, fast and fearless. Jackie would take on any odds and I often used him to do our dirty work since his devotion to me was unwavering. I feared physical violence more than the polio germs our parents whispered about, more than the evil communists and A-bombs. I think Jackie felt so loyal because I alone in the neighborhood understood his garbled tongue. The deafness had mangled his speech; he had gone partially deaf, when, right before he was born, his mother came down with German measles. Jackie would do anything I asked; I could have made him my slave. Rumors of his impossible strength and ferocity hummed through the streets and alleyways, clacked with the swaying bamboo stalks in Uncle Achille’s backyard. No kid, unless totally ignorant or insane, would dare mess with my cousin.
Two or three blocks away there lived a much older boy, I’m guessing now around eighteen, but he was so massive, so obese and blobish, he could have been twenty-five for all we knew, an actual man and not a boy at all. Other kids called him “Ernest,” but we had our own name for this behemoth. Watermelon. Oh, he hated that name. We had no mercy. We taunted him whenever he hobbled past the house on his way to the bus stop, which was just about every day. “Hey, Watermelon,” we would cry, “when are they going to eat you? You’re about to explode!” Or Jackie, in his mangled way, might zigzag around him in a frantic little dance, screeching, “Wa-meln, Wa-meln, Wa-meln!” Watermelon would swipe at him, stretch out his blubbery arms and fingers, which looked like pale sausages, and try to grab him by the shirt collars, but Jackie always dashed away. Anyone was too fast for Watermelon, maybe even slugs were too fast.
The boy or man or whatever just seemed to sway along, a human boulder, the momentum of his weight propelling him forward. When he reached the bus stop, a concrete pole embedded in the mud, he leaned against it, kicked at the broken shells beneath his feet. We heard that he rode up Miro Street to Esplanade, then transferred all the way to the statue of Mother Cabrini near City Park. He kneeled before that statue and prayed for hours. That’s what we heard.
Watermelon never spoke to us or screamed or cursed when we attacked him, never talked back or gave us any lip, but he smirked, looked at us poisonously and smirked. That smirk drove us wild. We wanted to wipe it off his face. We were barbarous, I guess, though not a little afraid. But we trusted our speed, our energy, and our knowledge of every path of escape, however intricate, in the block. We simply could not imagine Watermelon ever catching us.
How we loved those gigantic appliance boxes. We scouted the streets, lugged them back to our sidewalk, jabbed at them with our knives, constructed outer space stations, forts, castles, club houses. Only rain thwarted our plans. One summer shower could melt those boxes into flat, brown, gooey gelatin that our parents made us shovel off the banquet. So whenever we found a box, we had to work fast, waste no time. A box meant instant gratification. And we shot our sisters with water guns from the windows. Sometimes they threw rocks at the boxes, but we just laughed. It felt good inside, especially when the sun smeared them with heat, and the heat made us sleepy. So we spent a lot of time just sleeping, right there on the sidewalk, as people came and went. In those days all kinds of people just roamed around. They didn’t have anything else to do. Sometimes a stray cat would push in the cardboard flap of a door and curl up with us. That was nice.
Well, one day a ferocious jolting instantly roused us from our snooze. The entire box quaked from side to side; we thought it was an earthquake the way it flung our bodies around. Then the box started to turn over on itself; we rolled with it for about twenty yards. Jackie’s elbow nearly poked out one of my eyes. Our skulls clacked more than once. When the box stopped moving, we shuddered in fear and wondered if we should try to dash out the carved door. Before we could decide, the box began to boom from every side as if someone were beating it with a baseball bat. One of the thwacks caught me in the spine and would leave a bruise for weeks to come.
In that particular box we had carved a skylight. Slowly, ever so slowly, something poked down the cardboard flap of that skylight. Jackie and I flattened ourselves at the bottom, cringed and awaited our fate not like good soldiers or tough cowpokes, but mewling little girls. And finally, when the skylight flap had fully distended, what should we behold but the monstrous, rapturous, sweaty, blood-flushed face of a crazed Watermelon! He stared at us, cackled, punched the sides of the box some more, growled and hissed like a crazed animal. His breath flooded the box with poisonous stench. It smelled like the manure the ragman’s horse dropped in the street. We were doomed. There was no hope of escape.
And then the worst. Watermelon pursed his lips, sucked down what must have been gallons of snot from his sinuses, and gave us that smirk. His lips parted and putrid phlegm rained down on us, on our faces and clothes, in our hair. One mouthful of rotten phlegm and mucus after another. It seethed with worms and maggots, seaweed, chunks of fat, gristle, dead minnows and goldfish, toothpicks, chewing tobacco, fish bones, coffee grounds, scorpions and human teeth. A maelstrom of disgusting filth from inside Watermelon’s body. Jackie and I prepared to drown and repeated the Hail Mary frantically. But suddenly, abruptly as the siege had begun, it ended. Watermelon’s face disappeared. He kicked the box one last time and hobbled on to the bus stop. We poked our heads out of the skylight and watched him cross the street. We screamed, cursed and threatened to kill him, burn his house down, chop him into little pieces with PaPa’s ax. He leaned against the bus stop pole, smirked and gave us the bird finger.
By this point we were hysterical and coated with slime. We crawled out of the box and rushed into our separate houses, which amounted to different sides of the same house that had been divided down the middle by the landlord. I flew through living room, bedroom, hallway, back to the kitchen, where I knew I would find my mother ironing. I sobbed shamelessly in the doorway. Mom dropped the iron onto the linoleum floor, quickly picked it up and turned it off. She dragged me to the bathroom, tore off my clothes and rubbed me down with one wet towel after another. She rubbed Dr. Tichenor’s Antiseptic into every pore of my skin. Some of it splashed into my eyes and I cried out in pain. Mom didn’t say a word as she toiled. But I screamed and whimpered, coughed, howled, cursed Watermelon and his fetid phlegm, vowed revenge and mayhem. Mom wrapped me in a towel and led me to the sofa. I spread out on it, my head in her lap. She stroked my hair and hummed her favorite song, which always soothed me. “Apple Blossom Time.”
And now, dumbfounded over the passage of so many decades, the tidal crest of time since the incident on Columbus Street, I am only beginning to understand that Watermelon let Jackie and me off pretty easy. He could have hurt us badly. He could have heaved himself onto the box and crushed us to death. He could have stoned us, stabbed us with sticks, wrenched up our arms and legs and snapped them in two. Instead, he showered us with spit and snot, which washed off easily enough. Of course we felt ashamed of ourselves; we mean-spirited savages had hounded him relentlessly.
Yet Watermelon, our enemy, had bestowed a kind of mercy on us. Jackie and I continued to plot against him, made plans to assail him with stones next time he passed, but our hearts weren’t in it. A part of us got thrown out with that box. And oddest of all, we never saw Watermelon again. He simply disappeared from the neighborhood. That’s what happened in those days, people just disappeared, and no one ever asked any questions. Or someone new would show up and you had to wait a while to see what would come of it. A few years later Jackie and I disappeared too when we moved away from Columbus Street. Not so long ago, seized with nostalgia, I drove past the old house, but it too had vanished, bull-dozed out of existence to make way for a low-income day care center. I spotted in the rear view, as I made my exit, some boys in the street swinging sticks and hurling rocks at a stop sign.
One of them looked sort of familiar.
