December Park(166)

I nodded and asked what they were.

“Places to hide,” he said.

“Hide from who?” I asked.

“Bootleggers and slaves used them.”

“Who made them?” I asked.

“Maybe people did. Or animals. Or maybe they were always here even before the city was built, carved out by the water when the bay was higher.”

“Wow,” I said.

“We can catch bigger things,” Charles said, changing the subject so quickly that it took me a second to realize we were off the subject of holes in the cliff and back to crabbing.

“What things?” I said, staring up at the span of the great bridge. I had never been out this far before.

There were seagulls wheeling overhead. Charles motioned to them. His skin was freckled but smooth, the nipples on his muscular chest small and brown and ringed with sparse black hairs.

“Birds?” I said, laughing.

“Sure. Birds. Why not?”

“You can’t catch birds.”

He winked at me and said, “Just watch. You can catch anything. If you really wanted to, you could catch anything in the world.” He opened his tackle box, dug around inside it, and came up with a rusted barbed fishing hook. “Gimme your lunch.”

“It’s mine! You already ate yours.”

“I’m not gonna eat it, dummy. Just pass it over and watch.”

I handed him the chicken cutlet sandwich wrapped in cellophane that my grandmother had made me that morning.

Charles unwrapped the cellophane, pinched a bit of bread out from the center of the slice, and carefully rolled it into a ball. Above, the gulls cawed and screeched and deposited white clumps of shit into the water. His tongue propped in the corner of his mouth, Charles threaded the barbed hook through the white marble of bread. When he was finished, only the nasty-looking barbed tip protruded.

I watched, not speaking. Far above, cars and trucks thundered across the double-span bridge.

Bracing his feet at either side of the small boat, Charles peered up and winced at the dazzling sun. He shielded his eyes with one arm. Over his head, the seagulls shrilled like squealing hinges. When he tossed the ball of bread straight up into the air, the gulls took on a deliberate pattern that reminded me of old World War II footage of fighter jets bombing battleships. The tiny white sphere was snatched up by the most aggressive of the flock and gobbled down without incident.

I continued to stare at the birds, then at Charles, then back at the birds again. My brother stayed balanced, each foot planted on either side of the boat, one arm up to block the sun from his eyes. If he was disappointed the bird had not choked on the hook and plummeted to the sea or even into our boat, he didn’t show it; instead, he looked like the statue of a Greek god, his shorts rippling in the wind, the hair on his bronze and slender legs like fine brown fuzz.

When the birds saw that there would be no more food flipped into the air, they migrated across the water to where bits of debris floated into the coves.

Charles screamed, startling me. Sharp cords stood out in his neck, and his diaphragm, like a frown, jostled in his abdomen.

Because I thought this was some kind of playacting, I made the mistake of giggling. But Charles was not playacting. He leveled his gaze on me, his dark eyes cut to slits. His lips were firm, his eyebrows knitted together.

Slowly, he brought one arm up and pointed at me. He rocked the boat with such sudden ferocity that it was almost like we’d been struck from beneath by something extremely large and dangerous.

“Stop it,” I told him.

With increasing zeal, he continued to rock the boat.

“Stop it!” I shouted.

Charles laughed, but there was no humor in it: the sound was a witch’s shrill cackle.

With my arms splayed out for balance, I rose from my seat and attempted to negate his unbalancing of the little johnboat with a steadiness of my own. But I was seven and I was small and I was ill-prepared and—

(scared)

—growing increasingly panicked.

When I went over the side, I swallowed a lungful of cold water and got tangled in the crab lines. The world around me went instantly black. I flailed one hand, and it thunked against the hollow aluminum side of the boat like a gong. Forgetting that I was underwater, I took a deep breath and felt the water fill my lungs and permeate my entire body. Bright spangles capered before my vision. With the crab lines entwined about my ankles, I couldn’t swim to the surface. The bay thundered in my ears. Panic gripped me, yet a warm blossom of serenity, like the comforting embrace of a loved one, came over me.

Then I was back on the boat, coughing up brackish water and blinking stupidly at the blurred form that hovered over me.

“I’m sorry,” Charles said. He repeated it over and over like a litany, a prayer. “Angelo, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Once I regained my senses, I shoved him off me and crawled backward on my butt.

“I would never hurt you,” Charles said. The intensity in his eyes frightened me even more than having him knock me in the water. “I would never let anyone else hurt you, either. If anyone ever hurt you or tried to hurt you, I would snap their neck. I would bury their corpse in the quarry at the end of our block. I would leave them there for the rats.”

I just stared at him.

Then he laughed—that carefree, boyish laugh that adults found jovial and girls found charming.