SON OF CAPTAIN AMERICA by Michael Downs

The boy watched from his bedroom window as the neighbor beat the dog. The man used a branch broken from an oak tree. With one hand, he pushed the dog by its collar toward the hard-packed ground and with the other hit its flank with the stick. The dog yelped and snarled, and together the sounds – the dog’s, the stick’s – sickened the boy. The dog was big, and white and black, and in the dark from the second-floor window the black part was hard to make out. But the boy knew the dog. He petted it sometimes. He could picture its wet eyes, the scar across its muzzle, the fatty tumor over its rib cage that didn’t seem to cause the dog any pain even when touched. He remembered the trash can smell of its breath. Elbows on the sill and palms against the window glass, the boy imagined what was happening to the dog more clearly than he could see it. Another yelp, and the boy’s father came into his bedroom.
“What the hell’s the racket?”
“Mr. Nardi’s hitting Tiny.”
“Jesus. He’s waking the whole street.”
The father threw open the window. Shower water dripped off him, and he smelled of Ivory soap. He wore a towel around his waist. The boy’s name was Franco. He was eleven years old. He called his father Pop.
“Nardi!” Pop yelled. “Cut it the hell out or I’ll come beat the hell out of you, too!”
“It’s my goddamn dog,” Mr. Nardi yelled back.
“It’s five in the goddamn morning!”
Mr. Nardi hit his dog again.
“Last warning!”
When Pop left the room, he ordered Franco back to bed, and Franco pretended to go. He paged through a comic book as the noise continued outside, and he read as if he were counting one-alligator, two-alligator . . .
“You – and – your – Commie – Masters – have – a – lot – to – learn – about – America!”
Through his open bedroom door, Franco saw Pop hurry down the hall to the stairs, still barefoot but dressed now in work pants and a dirty T-shirt, his face fixed in a familiar way. Franco had seen the look on comic book superheroes who meant to save the world, and he’d often seen it on Pop, but on Pop it made Franco bite his fingernails. Mom in her bathrobe followed her husband to the top of the stairs. She saw Franco watching her and ordered, “You don’t go anywhere.” Then she ducked into his little sister’s room, shutting the door behind her.
Back at the window, Franco watched Pop snatch the oak branch out of Mr. Nardi’s hands. Mr. Nardi punched at Pop, who slipped his head out of the way – didn’t even move his feet – then returned two left jabs square to Mr. Nardi’s nose. Mr. Nardi fled to his house, his arms waving like he was batting at bees. The dog retreated to a corner of its pen, and there curled nose to rump. Franco tucked himself into bed and waited, lying still, shivering though warm, until Pop came back.
“You have to get up for school in an hour,” Pop said.
“I can’t sleep.”
“Let’s have breakfast then.”
While Franco toed a slipper onto his foot, Pop gathered open comic books from the bed and stacked them neatly on Franco’s dresser. His face had changed now. He looked darker around his eyes and forehead, the way Franco’d seen people get when they thought hard, and the skin around Pop’s mouth twitched as if he couldn’t decide whether to smile or frown. He said, “I shouldn’t have hit him.”
Franco checked under his bed for the other slipper. They were his favorite slippers. They looked like Indian moccasins. “He swung at you first, Pop.”
“Doesn’t matter. It was easy what I did. And mean. It’s easy to be mean. You gotta try for better, you know?”
On the walk home from school that day, Franco found the dog’s body left in the gutter for the street department to pick up. Franco was not alone when he found the dog. He was with his pal, Dominic. They had walked home together because they walked home together every school day, because they were neighbors and buddies. That day, though, neither had spoken to the other. Dominic was Mr. Nardi’s son.
When they discovered the dog, Franco’s face reddened and his ears burned. The boys stared for a long time. The dog’s mouth was agape, and its neck was twisted so that it gazed with open, tranquil, bloodshot eyes at an upside down world. The boys stood in the street. Behind them a car hummed past, then another, spent leaves twisting into the air in their wake. Dominic sighed. He bent over and unbuckled the dog’s collar. The tags jingled. He tucked the strip of leather into the pocket of his jacket, then disappeared inside his house.
The police asked Franco’s name when he telephoned, and he gave it. They asked Franco’s street address, and Franco told them 229 Preston. Again, he watched from the bedroom window, this time as officers questioned Mr. Nardi before walking to Franco’s house. He heard them knock, heard them ask questions, heard Pop answer. Franco closed his closet door behind him and with a flashlight read comic books.
“His shield stops all bullets!”
“This is too easy – I suspect a trap!”
“Captain America! Commie Smasher!”
Words, colors, crime! Mad science brought to heel. Powerful punches and final justice. The quiet moment respecting death, even that of a most villainous foe.
Pop opened the closet door.
“Out,” he said.
They faced each other. Pop cuffed Franco across the head so hard Franco fell to the floor. He rushed to stand again.
“We don’t need the cops,” Pop said. “We’re decent people, and we live a decent life. They’ve got no business here. None. Don’t you ever bring them to our door again. Don’t you ever bring them to our street. You hear?”
Then Pop kissed his son and sent him to bed without supper.
Later, after the routines which ended days in the DiFiore house (Denise clicks off her bedside radio, Mom rinses the glass of her nightcap, Pop closes his book and turns out the porch light) Franco peeked out his window. From behind another pane of glass and another window screen, Dominic Nardi stared back.

Franco and his sister and Mom and Pop lived in a Hartford neighborhood that was more a village, its flat-faced houses wedged together, its needs met by a corner grocer, a post office, a city park with woods and a swimming pool, a car mechanic, a florist and a baker. Pigeons thrived there, but not rats, and clotheslines went unused only in winter or in rain. In this neighborhood lived Polacks and Puerto Ricans and some blacks and a Jewish family or two. Mostly, there were Italians and Irish. The Irish owned houses with garages. They had settled the neighborhood first, and they ran things. Irish priests drank whiskey in the rectory offices of St. Augustine’s, and they visited the homes of the parish’s Italian families only when obliged by death. Irish cops made Tully’s Tap their off-duty headquarters, and that was why (so the joke went) neighborhood crooks never got caught: the stink of beer sweat and cabbage farts was always first to reach the scene of the crime.
Mom was not Italian or Irish. She was an older Yankee type, a rarity in this neighborhood, of English descent with a blush of German, who had grown up among the ornate homes of Blue Hills and who had quit college to marry an Italian factory worker. Pop used to joke that she chose him for his cooking. “Before me, she’d never heard of garlic,” he said. Except Mom did all the cooking and always had as long as Franco could remember (his favorite: her meatloaf with bacon strips baked across the top). It also fell to Mom to steer Franco and Denise through the rites of the Catholic church, because Pop refused. He would not attend Mass. He missed all services, including Easter and Christmas and also the occasions when Franco and Denise first received the childhood sacraments. In his life, he told his children, he’d seen things that spoiled him for God. “You give a damn, that’s good enough,” he often said, and he called it Pop’s First Commandment. He lived that way, best as he could. If a neighbor needed help to spread asphalt for a new driveway, Pop went. When an old maid up the street didn’t know the man at her door, she telephoned Pop. Long before the incident with the dog, on the day a car accident took Mrs. Nardi, Pop sat with her grieving husband and son on their porch, sharing the silence. One time Pop even stopped a policeman too zealous with his nightstick from beating up some neighborhood teenagers. He could do that sort of thing. He wasn’t a big guy, but he had been a boxer when he was young – a welterweight – and in the ring he had learned things, that bleeding stops, that winning is better than losing, that the way to survive losing is to love whoever beats you. In his dealings with other people, he was never afraid. Sometimes, though, other people feared him, a reality he found upsetting because he worked hard to be affable.
The DiFiores had moved to this South End neighborhood from Hartford’s Italian ghetto when Franco was seven years old and Denise was five. They left the ghetto because the city planned to raze it for a business plaza, but for the DiFiores the timing was good: they had already saved enough money to invest in their own house. They bought a two-story home, brick, with enough bedrooms that Franco and Denise didn’t have to share. On the summer day the family moved, brother and sister kept each other’s company in the back yard of their new house. They slurped water from a garden hose and played in the shade of an oak tree. Denise wanted to look at her brother’s comic books. Franco didn’t want her to. He yanked an issue of Robin Hood from Denise’s hands. The cover tore. Franco punched her in the stomach. Denise cried.
Pop jerked Franco into the garage. He ordered Franco to make fists with both hands, then he wrapped each fist in duct-tape, the tape shrieking as Pop peeled the roll. He wrapped the fists so tightly Franco’s fingers tingled.
Then Pop made Franco sit next to Denise on a bench in the back yard. Because Franco could not use his hands, Denise had to turn the pages of the comic books. Franco had to read to her. His hands ached. He beat his hands against the rusty frame of the bench for relief. He begged Denise for a glass of water, and she laughed at him.
After an hour, Pop called Franco back to the garage. Pop took a knee, then cut the tape with a pocket knife. Franco complained the tape jerked his skin, but Pop looked at him as if he knew it didn’t hurt much, and Franco shut his mouth. When the last bit came off, Franco tried but could not unball his fists. He could not unfold his fingers. He stared at his hands, all pink and mottled and useless.
Pop said, “Only cowards punch girls.”

Franco, who had always thought of himself as one person, became two on the day he and Dominic found the dog in the gutter. The collar tags jingled and Dominic vanished behind the Nardi door and Franco divided. One of him followed Dominic inside the Nardis’ yellow house. That Franco walked heartbeat-for-heartbeat beside his friend as Mr. Nardi, still dressed in his insurance sales tie and shirt, shadowed his son up the stairs to the boy’s room. The knot of the tie was loose and crooked, its red tails flopping over Mr. Nardi’s belly, and his collar was dark where he’d sweated into it. At the bedroom door he shouted, “You got a question? You got a question?” then slammed the door between him and his son. For hours he kept shouting and breaking things and leaving the TV on with the volume loud. When all that stopped, the silence was scarier.
The other Franco, the one left on the street, ran home so fast pencils shook out of his book bag, and he left them on the sidewalk where they fell. That other Franco called the police and later got whacked with an open hand that made his head ring.
When Franco woke the next morning he wandered about his bedroom sifting through papers in his desk, rummaging through his closet, peering under his bed, then staying by the window and watching the Nardi house a long time. He studied himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, but he saw nothing unusual, no parts missing. His skin hadn’t changed color, wasn’t more ghostly. He dressed (favorite plaid shirt, navy blue pants, sneakers with old chewing gum flat on the soles) and he snuck a comic book among his school books to keep himself from getting bored during math class. At breakfast, nobody stared at him as he expected they would. His mother didn’t ask whether anything was wrong. Denise ate Cheerios with bananas and sugar and read the back of the cereal box and ignored him. Pop sipped his coffee and read the newspaper. When he finished, he knocked with his knuckles on the tabletop. He said, “Look, you two. New rule. No going inside Mr. Nardi’s house. No matter what. You hear?”
He didn’t have to say why. Denise nodded and turned back to her cereal, but Franco watched his father. Pop, as if anticipating Franco’s question, said, “You and Dominic can stay pals. But he invites you inside his house, say you’d rather play at the park or something. Be polite. Don’t set foot inside that door.”
That same morning, Franco met Dominic and walked with him from school to home and back. They didn’t speak. They tried not to look in each other’s eyes. In class Franco teased a girl because she was rich, and he doodled on his penmanship lesson, and at recess he played Smear the Queer, and everything was as it always had been. But the walk home with Dominic happened in silence, and Franco was glad for it because he didn’t know what was right to say. This lasted more than a week. Then the quiet became boring. So, one day after school, Franco stopped Dominic before he could start up the walk to the Nardi front door. He said, “We can hunt down the man who killed your dog. We can search the yard for clues. We can bring the killer to justice.”
Dominic led the investigation, dividing the front and back yards into quadrants and deciding who would search each quadrant. When Franco found something, a smashed paper cup, a bag from a hardware store, he brought it to Dominic who decided whether it was truly a clue. Afternoon light became dusk. Dominic had chosen four things he said could unravel the case: a footprint, a cigarette butt, a license plate recovered from the duff beneath a lilac hedge, and a tangle of fishing line. The boys placed the clues, except for the footprint, in the overturned lid of a metal trash can and contemplated them.
Dominic said, “It was my dad.”
“No,” said Franco. “He didn’t have a motive.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Dominic, and he hurried inside.

Eventually, Franco and Dominic agreed that whoever killed the dog had escaped. It was too bad, but he would turn up again. Such was the way of villains. Meanwhile, there arose other threats to the world.
Mrs. Vovonovitch. Mr. and Mrs. Hayes. Mr. O’Connell. All villains. Either evil scientists or communists or mobsters or Nazis. The boys spied on each, sometimes sneaking around their houses, other times pedaling bicycles past, popping wheelies or riding no-hands, pretending to be nothing more than boys. They might even wave hello. But later, at night, or in the early morning, or when the day grew hot and muggy and grown-ups shut themselves indoors, the boys worked to right the scales of justice. They’d snip every stalk in a bed of poisonous daisies. Or they’d destroy the secret lab in a neighbor’s house by running garden hoses through a cellar window and turning on the water. “Go home Commie” they’d paint on a fence. They fought evil throughout the neighborhood, ranging blocks away from home. Each successful adventure emboldened them to another.
One summer evening, lying in dead grass behind a scruffy rose hedge, the boys spied on fat Mr. Schwartz, whose German name gave away his Nazi sympathies. “A war criminal,” Dominic whispered as Mr. Schwartz cut his lawn. “Escaped from the Fatherland as the Americans marched into Berlin. With that mower, he sends secret messages to his masters in Argentina.” Franco crushed a beetle with blue and green wings that had been crawling on his shoulder, then flicked away the remains. “If the Nazis take control of Hartford,” he whispered, “then New York will be next to fall, and then the whole country.” The boys watched Mr. Schwartz steer his mower into a shed at the back of his property, comb his few strands of hair with his fingers as he admired his work, then enter his lair. When they heard the rush of shower water through an open window it was time to act. First they captured the mower from the unlocked shed. Then they wheeled it through yards and alongside fences to Goodwin Park where Dominic had hidden a baseball bat and a claw hammer under bushes in a wooded area. “We have to destroy the mower,” he said. “There’s no other way.” He used the bat. Franco wielded the hammer. They took turns swinging and smashing, the crunches and ringing of the dying mower muffled by brush and trees around them. Twilight dimmed as they worked, and they sweated in the slick summer air, and the boys couldn’t recognize the mower after a while, its push handle mangled, its wheels severed from its body. With the claw end of the hammer, Franco smashed, smashed, smashed into the gas tank, and gasoline spurted over his hand and arm. He stank, even after he washed using the garden hose in Dominic’s back yard. He scrubbed again in the industrial sink in his family’s cellar, powdering his arms with Ajax cleanser. Then with an invented sneeze and sniffle, he escaped to bed without kissing Mom and Pop goodnight. He turned out the light without paging through a comic book. Under his sheet, he twisted right, then left. He stared out his open window into the night. It had begun to rain, and water smelled hot off the asphalt streets, and crickets fell silent. Through the smell of bleach, Franco noticed now and then the sweet scent of fuel, and it reminded him of the night’s heroics, the fear and the thrill, the single-mindedness of their purpose, the abandon in their arms.
The signal was Dominic’s idea. When he needed to alert Franco to a new adventure he’d tape a five-pointed star, cut from black construction paper, to the inside of his bedroom window and leave a light on. When Franco saw the silhouette he knew to ring the Nardis’ doorbell twice and run and wait for Dominic at home base: a garbage dumpster outside the motorcycle repair shop on Franklin Avenue. One August night, the black star appeared, and later, leaning against the dumpster, Dominic pulled a brown bottle from inside his jacket and uncapped it. “Super-soldier serum,” he said, and he drank a long gulp, then handed over the bottle. Franco smelled the beer. The glass was cold in his hand. He sniffed the lip. “Go ahead,” said Dominic. “We’ll be stronger and faster and better fighters.” Franco nodded, and together they drained the bottle, belched and giggled. Dominic smashed the empty against the dumpster, shards of brown mixing with the grit of the pavement. He howled like a wolf, and Franco howled, and then the two wrestled and laughed and wrestled some more, their sneakers scuffing in the grit and the broken glass, until Dominic pinned Franco against the dumpster.
“Isn’t your mother German?” Dominic asked.
Franco stopped smiling. “Only a little.” He waited for Dominic to say what they both knew he meant to say. But Dominic didn’t speak, and Franco said, “Just because she’s a little bit German doesn’t mean she’s a Nazi.”
“I just wondered.”
“How did you even know?” Franco pushed free of Dominic, then stepped away from the dumpster. He breathed hard to recover his wind.
“I just heard. That’s all.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“It means you’re German, too.”
“Am not.”
“Mein herr!” Dominic shouted, and he shoved Franco with both hands so that Franco had to catch himself on the rough wood of a telephone pole. Dominic stepped forward as if to do it again, and he howled, and Franco ran. “German!” Dominic yelled. “German! German!”

The Black Star Adventures ended when Franco began high school at South Catholic and Dominic at Bulkeley, the public school. Now, mornings, Franco walked south and Dominic east. The black star made no more back-lit appearances in Dominic’s bedroom window. Franco joined CYO basketball, and he pitched for the South Catholic junior varsity. He made new best friends, boys whose parents sometimes visited the DiFiore house, who played cribbage with Mom and Pop and called them Lena and Carl. He visited these boys in their homes and ate lunch with them or sometimes supper. Sometimes on the way to a game or to practice, Franco saw Dominic – arguing with Mr. Nardi in the yard, or in the driveway fiddling with an engine’s carburetor – and Franco waved, or didn’t. He remembered the Black Star Adventures as mischief-making: fondly, with embarrassment and pride. He confessed them in church, asked forgiveness and prayed his penance. The priest absolved Franco and answered his one question: No, the boy did not have to tell his father.
This was the time in his life when Franco didn’t want to tell Pop anything, not even something so routine as Mom needing him at the supper table. Franco did not want to be seen with Pop. He turned down the old man’s offers of rides home from practice, and he volunteered for other chores to avoid a drive with Pop to the hardware store. It was not that Franco hated his father or disliked him. It was not that Pop’s breath smelled of coffee, cigarettes and blood, or that his eyebrows grew long and unruly, though both those things were true. It was not those things, or maybe it was, or a combination of those and others. Franco couldn’t figure it out, didn’t care to. He knew only that he had an animal’s instinct to escape whenever Pop was near.
In late spring, Franco found himself waking early. He’d visit the bathroom, then crunch through a bowl of cereal while sitting on the porch. Morning air smelled clean, without the clutter of exhaust or coffee or onion simmering somewhere in butter. The quiet allowed him to hear the ticking of the refrigerator, the sighs of the house, the slap of newspapers against porch steps. Mornings brought his imagination to another world, a planet without sisters and schools, a place he alone possessed.
But he was not the earliest riser, and Pop would eventually return from his daybreak run, sweaty, in a V-neck T-shirt and gray gym shorts, tube socks drooping. Pop stretched his tight muscles, then sat with Franco and unlaced his sneakers. They talked if there was reason – about school, about boxing, about potholes on Preston Avenue or about some game Franco’s team had lost or won the afternoon before. If they had nothing to talk about, Pop tuned a transistor radio to an AM station, and they listened to Hartford begin its day with broadcast jokes and music, with the songs of finches and chickadees, and a distant thrum of tires on Franklin Avenue.
These mornings, Pop, somehow, became bearable – even interesting. Franco noticed that when Pop breathed through his nose, broken flat by a right cross in ‘47, the nose made a little whistling noise. He saw how Pop’s hair curled in the spots where his daily dab of petroleum jelly had been sweated or washed or wiped away. He marked that Pop said “Well – ” and clapped hands before lifting himself from a chair. Franco looked at his own hands and wondered how long before his thumbnails would grow so thick and his palms so calloused. This daily interest in his father, the mystery of Pop, persisted until someone – Denise, Mom, a neighbor out to walk a dog – interrupted, and Franco bolted from the porch to shower and pick out clothes for school.
Then it was summer and school ended, and Pop asked Franco whether he might like to join in the run.
“Get up a little earlier,” Pop said. “I start with calisthenics. Might get you in good shape come football season.”
They began the next morning in the cellar with one hundred jumping jacks. Then Pop unfolded gym mats, and they each counted off fifty sit-ups and forty push-ups, which Franco could only finish by taking them in groups of ten. On the front sidewalk, father and son stretched. Then, they launched themselves into the city.
To Goodwin Park, where they followed the lane around its edge for a mile, then up the hill they had tobogganed in winter.
Then Cedar Hill cemetery, where they rested that first day near the monument of Samuel Colt the gunmaker, and later by that of J. P. Morgan, whose name sounded rich. When they crossed a pond with lily pads, Pop pointed out deer and a heron and wild turkeys.
Along Fairfield Avenue with its houses of many windows and porch columns and sprawling yards. Down the hill at a hydrangea on White Street, then home. When Franco asked why they only ran through the South End’s pretty places, Pop said, “You want to run through a dump?”
Only a few days and Franco could finish the loop without stopping. Then Pop ran faster, so Franco did, too. Then faster again. Franco met every new push, ran stride for stride with his father, panted when he panted, breathed easy when he breathed easy, rolled his neck mid-run as Pop rolled his neck. Franco kept secret how he sensed himself grow taller each morning, but as days passed the cemetery’s monuments seemed smaller. Franco ran faster and grew stronger and, running alongside Pop, he became someone who could parade among the monuments of great men and be applauded.
One Sunday, Pop ran straight at the White Street hydrangea.
Franco turned, then doubled back. Did Pop forget? The next block then. But Pop turned the wrong way, heading farther from home. Franco sprinted to catch up, but drew no closer than to see the dawning sun shine off Pop’s sweaty skin, to see the colors of his shorts and T-shirt. A left turn. A right. Nearer West Hartford. Now Pop added distance between them. Franco grunted and picked up his pace. His knees shivered each time a foot slapped concrete. Pop ran through neighborhoods Franco didn’t recognize, along streets he’d never visited. Franco shook his face to keep sweat from his eyes. A leashed dog snarled and charged as he passed its yard; all Franco heard was his own panting. Pop added more distance. Now he turned a corner and Franco couldn’t see him anymore. Now he could. Across railroad tracks. Goddamn! Shit!  –  Franco’s lungs swelled bigger than his chest. Franco’s lungs turned to stone. What was Pop doing? What was he thinking? Franco hated Pop but couldn’t let him go. He did not think to stop. He did not think to turn home. He chased, he stumbled. He fell forward, step after step . . .
Pop stood outside a diner, waiting. He grinned. Franco gasped, “What the fuck?”
“Don’t use that language with me,” said Pop, but his tone sounded easy, happy.
Franco doubled over, leaned with elbows on his thighs. His stomach was in his throat. Pop took him by the shoulders, straightened him up. Franco couldn’t focus his eyes, couldn’t stand up, couldn’t lie down. Pop’s breath felt hot on his skin. Pop stared into Franco’s eyes, and Franco tried to blink him away but couldn’t. Pop said, “What a warrior.” He cupped the back of Franco’s head with his open palm, pulled his son near. “It embarrasses you,” he said, “that I love you. Okay. But listen. You chased after me. You followed when I went the wrong way, and out here, away from your friends and sister and mother, I can tell you this. You love me. And I love you that much and more, Franco DiFiore. That much and more.”
Franco opened his eyes. Lights flashed and Pop’s face looked blurry, then clear. Franco blinked hard, then looked again. Yes, Pop was crying. He had never seen Pop cry. Pop made no effort to hide his tears. He said, “French toast and bacon?”
After breakfast, Pop put a coin in a pay phone. “You better come get us,” he told Mom, “or Franco will miss Mass.”
Franco did not miss Mass. And he ran with Pop through the summer. Then, in August, the football team started its annual two-a-day practices, and Franco pleaded exhaustion and skipped the morning run. After practices fell off to one a day, Franco still slept late. Pop ran alone.

Franco turned sixteen. That fall, on a Friday night, he showered and shaved and slapped his cheeks with aftershave. He dressed in a fake silk shirt and black dungarees. He knotted the laces of his shiny leather shoes. He gargled mouthwash and when he spit in the sink it was a spit of disgust. He was unhappy. No one in the DiFiore family was happy.
He’d had plans: a community dance sponsored by the Knights of Columbus. A night for joking with pals and flirting with Catholic girls from the public schools. But then the telephone rang, and it was the Gentinos inviting Mom and Pop for cribbage, and Mom accepted, and then Franco had to explain that he had plans, too, and so he couldn’t hang out with Denise the way he usually did when his parents went out for an evening. Denise lifted her arms as if beseeching God and complained. “I’m a high school freshman,” she said. “Why can’t I be trusted on my own?” But Mom and Pop didn’t trust her, and they told Franco to stay home, which Franco complained about until he found himself begging to bring his kid sister to a dance. Imagine that.
Mom and Pop talked it out. They didn’t like their decision; they worried that Denise was too young for her first dance. But all right.
Now Franco went to fetch Denise from her room. He knocked, but she didn’t answer. He called upstairs and down and from the back porch. No reply. He circled the house, looked up and down the street. Now he looked over to the Nardis’ yellow house, the rain-sodden couch, the dented gutters, the weeds that choked its gardens. Dominic’s window. A light there and from the kitchen. Damn. Maybe it was true, what the girl from Denise’s confirmation class had whispered in his ear.
At the Nardi front door, Franco didn’t knock because he wanted to surprise them. Knock, and they’d run away. He popped his knuckles, then turned the knob.
How many years had it been? He stepped through the unlocked door and into darkness. The house was not what he remembered, and it was not like his house, which Mom kept well lit, which smelled of garlic and teenage girl perfume and fabric softener. The odors of this house spoke of ashtrays and sweaty shoes. The only light came from the back of the house, a narrow and harsh sliver that stabbed into the living room where he stood. Like a knife blade, it cut across a coffee table, across Mass cards and prayer pamphlets that were creased open, the blade reaching finally to illuminate a bird cage in the corner. The yellow and red bird inside called chirr-ip chirr-ip and pecked at seed on the tinny floor of its cage. Franco pulled the door behind him but didn’t close it, reached into his pants pocket, reassured himself that he still had the jackknife he always carried. Somewhere in the room, a radio played at a cozy volume, a familiar voice asking, “Anybody want to give blood? Anybody? It is in short supply. All types, but especially B-negative and O-negative are needed.” The bird scratched at the cage bottom. Chirr-ip! Chirr-ip! Franco thought of the dance, of letting public school girls touch his curly hair, of lighting their cigarettes. He stepped toward the brightness, careful with each footfall so he wouldn’t stumble in the dark. He walked on his toes to keep his leather heels from tapping.
He didn’t recognize her at first, because he had never seen his sister sitting on a kitchen counter, blouse dangling though still tucked into her skirt, her bra shiny in fluorescent light, the cup of the bra, the lift of her breast. She looked beautiful and perfect, his sister: her back arched, dark hair loose and bouncy, skin pale, her neck long and muscled and still bearing the thin gold chain and crucifix she’d received for her confirmation. She whispered. She whimpered. Breezes from deep inside her crossed the lips she offered him.
Who was blue-jeaned and shirtless, hunched over her like a skinny, hairless dog with its face in a bowl, growling, and pressing his fingertips into her skin . . .
The lovers broke their grip and looked at Franco as one, as if the roar in his brain had been loud enough to distract them. Denise shrieked and hurried off the counter out of view. Dominic did not act so startled. Had he even looked surprised? He leaned against a wall. He took a cookie off a plate left on the counter. As he chewed, he slid his already unfastened belt free of its loops and wrapped the leather around his right fist so the metal buckle lay across his knuckles.
“Franco,” he said. “Not a word, buddy. Not to me. Not to Denise. Not to your old man. Not to nobody. Not now. Not ever.”
Franco said, “She’s got a ten o’clock curfew.”
Dominic smashed his belted fist into the plate of cookies, crumbs and shards everywhere. “Didn’t I say not a word?”
Denise shouted from behind the counter. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You know Pop’s rule.”
“I know all of Pop’s rules.”
Dominic laughed. “Don’t go in the Nardi house,” he said, jeering, and he lifted his open hand as if it were the grasping claw of a Halloween monster. “They’re scary, those Nardis. OoooooOOOOoooo! Now here comes Franco the hero to rescue his sister. We’re fine, buddy. I’ll get her back by ten. Meet us for a grinder at Franklin Avenue at half past nine. My treat.”
“Denise, you don’t want this. You want to go home. C’mon. This isn’t right.”
Denise poked her head over the counter. “Go away!”
“You’re outnumbered, cowboy,” said Dominic. “Best run git the sheriff.”
Franco flipped him a middle finger, then headed for the door. In the living room, he stumbled in the darkness, grabbing a doorknob and yanking it. A puff of cool air hit him, but there was no street, only stairs to a basement.
“Wrong door, hero,” said Dominic, and he pointed across the room.
Dominic and Denise arrived late to the grinder shop, too near curfew to order a sandwich. Franco played with the wrapping paper of his Italian-sausage-hold-the-fried-onions, watching through the shop window as Denise did not kiss Dominic goodbye but instead swiveled her hips in a way that suggested more than kissing. The streetlights hummed. The shop door jingled and Franco stepped outside.
“Sorry we’re late,” Dominic said. “Here’s a couple of bucks for the grinder.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” said Franco.
“Yes you are. But for now Daddy’s got your back.”
At home, Franco followed Denise onto the porch, the two of them passing Pop’s book, face down, the spine cracked. In the kitchen, Mom sat at the table organizing recipes and sipping her nightcap. Denise poured orange juice over ice and lied about where they’d been, how they’d driven around in Joey Rome’s Impala listening to the car radio, how they stopped for grinders (hers eggplant; Franco’s meatball), then walked to Bulkeley for the dance but were glad to keep curfew because Franco noticed a gang of Irish boys there, and you know those Irish boys: they’re trouble.
“You take such good care of your sister,” Mom said, and she kissed Franco’s forehead. “You’re growing into quite a man.”
Franco said nothing, but on the way to his room paused by Pop’s door and listened to him snore, not an easy rhythm but an off-pace, sudden and violent snatching at air. The sound kept Franco awake through the night.

Dominic lay on a couch in the Nardi basement, working an imaginary throttle and gearshift, crowing about this guy Evel Knievel – “Yeah, that’s his name” – a motorcycle daredevil who jumped cars. It was November 1967. Senior year. Franco listened from a nearby easy chair that had been patched but still leaked stuffing, and he tossed a baseball from hand to hand. They’d become friends again. Denise had a new boyfriend, and Dominic and Franco forged a truce over icebox gin and their shared plans for life after high school, which were no plans. They had in common small paychecks: Franco from his work as a night janitor for a machine screw company; Dominic from a part-time job at a motorcycle repair shop. They greased their knuckles together on Dominic’s motorcycle, a cheap, wimpy, broken-down British bike that they could get to run every fourth or fifth day. They called the bike Mrs. Vovonovitch, or Mrs. V. For his assistance, Franco received rights to Mrs. V three nights a month. Now and then he convinced a girl to join him for a ride.
In the Nardi cellar that night, Dominic drank gin out of a jelly jar and chased it with a can of beer. They could hear above them voices from a television. Mr. Nardi watching My Three Sons.
“No shit,” Dominic told Franco. “This Evel guy cleared sixteen cars at a show in California. He’s gonna jump fountains at a hotel in Vegas on New Year’s Day. I can see me in that life. Black leathers. A helmet that shines in the sun. Bad-ass boots.”
“Can you wear that stuff in Vietnam?”
The night before they’d eaten Chinese takeout, and when they read the fortunes from their cookies, each of them added “ . . . in Vietnam” to the end. Generosity and perfection are your everlasting goals in Vietnam. An unexpected windfall will be yours in Vietnam.
“Maybe if we get tattoos they won’t take us,” Franco said. He tried bouncing the baseball off the concrete floor of the Nardi basement.
“Are you shitting me? I want to go.” Dominic reached into the drawer of a nearby table. He pulled out a handgun, checked the magazine. “Shoot me some gooks.”
Franco had never seen a gun in the hand of someone he knew. He stopped tossing the baseball and pushed back into his seat. “How’d you get that?”
“I know people,” Dominic said. “I bought it last summer after the craziness in the North End. Better to be prepared.”
“They weren’t mad at you,” Franco said. “They rioted because of the cops.”
“Everybody’s mad at everybody. Way of the world. So I’m ready. I’m always at the ready. That’s how you grow up when your old man is weak.” He sneered at the ceiling. “You have to be strong yourself. You wouldn’t know that. Your old man is strong. So you grew up weak.”
“Fuck you.”
Dominic giggled. “I’ll bet I can take your old man down with a squeeze or two of this Big Bertha.”
Franco smiled back at Dominic, a smile he hoped said, “You’re crazy, and I’m not playing,” but he pressed his feet hard against the floor as if ready to leap.
Dominic returned the pistol to its drawer. “I’ve got keys to the shop,” he said. “Let’s take a joy ride. Find bad guys.” He sneered that same sneer. “For old time’s sake. Whaddaya say?”
Some rich guy had brought in two motorcycles and given the shop a blank check to juice them. “Honda Scramblers,” said Dominic, as he and Franco circled the bikes. One motorcycle shined blue, the other red. A little wing marking the left and right of the fuel tank. Chrome fenders. Twin exhaust pipes. The bikes leaned forward like greyhounds.
“Three-oh-fives,” said Dominic. “We lengthened the swing arms, lowered everything so there’s about four inches of clearance. Put on new struts. Souped up the engines. They’re hot rods on two wheels.” He handed Franco a leather jacket out of a closet. Franco fingered the collar.
“C’mon,” Dominic said. He zipped his. “No one will notice. We always take bikes on test drives, make sure everything runs smooth.”
“What about helmets?” asked Franco.
“More fun without them.”
The bike lurched forward under Franco, yanking away from him when he touched the throttle. “Sensitive son of a bitch,” he shouted. Dominic grinned, and led them away from the shop into the night.
They dawdled as Franco grew accustomed to the machine. Old Mrs. V whispered when she ran, but the Scrambler screamed. Franco was still toiling herky-jerky with the Scrambler’s throttle when Dominic started to launch himself from red lights turned green, cranking fast enough to lift the front tire, then leveling out at the posted miles-per-hour. He wove in and out of traffic, and Franco strained to stay with him, pushing his speed as far as he thought he could, then pushing it more, faster than the law allowed. Then they ran easy through the city, the night air cold, the engines hot, and Franco imagined the envy of people stuck in clumsy cars or forced to walk – so slow – while the lights of storefronts and crosswalks flashed in his peripheral vision, fleeting constellations and Franco riding the rocket.
Downtown now and Dominic slowed near a curb, then eased the bike up over it. He pointed to Constitution Plaza, the concrete business park raised over the ruins of the ghetto Franco first called home. “Been a while since you played here, huh?” yelled Dominic. They filled the air with silver exhaust as they rode in circles around concrete water fountains, slalomed between young trees, spun donuts and jerked out of them into straight roaring thrusts, hot rubber tires leaving tracks on the clean concrete and a smell so strong they could taste it. Now and then they paused near each other and howled, then hurtled off again.
The police lights painted the drab concrete plaza in red and blue, so brief as the boys raced past, and pretty. The officers arrived on foot and in cruisers, and they aimed heavy flashlights, and shouted when Dominic and Franco shot away.
Through red lights and stop signs, they hurtled through the city, Dominic leading the way and Franco following, not wanting to run and not wanting to stop and not knowing what the hell else to do. He followed Dominic without knowing where they were headed, but he figured it out soon enough and thought, “He’s crazy.” Franco looked behind him as they turned onto Preston Avenue, and the police remained too close so Franco gunned past their houses, past Dominic, glancing only a moment to his left, where he saw the porch of his house lit, and Pop with book still in hand, a dark figure stepping outdoors, away from the brightness to better see the trouble.
Through alleys and parking lots. Through school yards and people’s lawns. Franco looked over his shoulder now and then to see whether Dominic stayed with him, looking for that single headlight, too often glimpsing police flashers farther behind. Tires tore up grass and screeched on pavement and twice on corners the bike started to slide away, but he heaved and leaned and pulled it back. Along the river, amidst factories and warehouses, he cut the lights on the bike and ran in the dark, feeling his way by memory and instinct, not looking over his shoulder anymore but trusting that Dominic would follow. In an alley, he skidded the bike behind a parked freight truck and stumbled away, down stairs to a cellar door where he crouched and tried to hold his breath. Dominic hurried in beside him.
“Jesus,” whispered Dominic. “Let’s do that again.”
Franco’s legs trembled. His arms trembled. He swallowed to keep from vomiting. They waited and heard police sirens pass the alley and fade. Franco counted to thirty, then counted to thirty again, and when he stepped out of the doorwell, unzipped the leather jacket and beat it against a cinderblock wall.
“Hey, we need to return that,” said Dominic. But he stopped talking when Franco shoved him against the wall, his hand around Dominic’s throat. “No!” Franco said. “It doesn’t go back. We dump it. We dump the bikes. We dump everything.”
With his jackknife he cut the handlebar grips. He reared back and chucked each one in a different direction, then went to work on Dominic’s bike. “Goddamn that was stupid,” he said. He laughed. “Goddamn, that was fun!”
They took the bikes to the river and pushed them off a promontory into a deep eddy, the bikes splashing into water and garbage, then sinking, ripples receding into the dark. They put stones in the pockets of the jackets, stuffed them in the sleeves, and tossed them in, too. Next to the motorcycle repair shop where they threw bricks through the display windows, then ran pell-mell away, hoping that what they’d left behind looked like a burglary. Blocks later, they stopped to catch their breath. “I need to eat,” said Franco.
At the grinder shop, Franco ordered meatball. Dominic had sausage. Dominic wore red sauce at the corners of his mouth. He grinned across the table at Franco. He said, “You felt it, didn’t you? You understand it now. When we were kids and did stuff, it was like you were only going halfway. But when you took off on that bike tonight. Man – ” and Dominic howled right there in the grinder shop so other people stared and shook their heads.
Franco didn’t howl. He didn’t need to. This wasn’t like Schwartz’s lawnmower. This was real. Franco knew what he was doing when he kicked that motorcycle to life. He sped away from the cops knowing what that meant. He followed Dominic onto Preston because he wanted to, even knowing Pop would be on the porch. Dominic was right: he understood now how easy it was, how much fun. He wanted to keep racing police and stealing and bullying Dominic into walls, which is why he wouldn’t do any of it anymore.
“You want a soda?” said Dominic. He was crouched over the table with its red and white checkered cloth, half standing, ready to fetch if that’s what Franco wanted.
Franco shook his head no, but said nothing. He said nothing for a few moments, and when next he noticed Dominic, Dominic’s expression had changed as if something about Franco surprised him. His jaw had gone slack, his eyes wide and static, his cheeks blushed. Franco recognized the look, or thought he did. He remembered one like it from the day they had discovered the dog in the gutter. Franco, who had been afraid, thought then that he saw something fearful and forlorn in Dominic’s face. Probably he did see that. But now he remembered, or imagined, with greater clarity his friend’s childhood face, and Franco recalled love, maybe, and loyalty, and Dominic’s abrupt knowledge of what he had just inherited. That face must have contained more than fear and misery, because Dominic did not run away. He opened the door of that yellow house where his mother no longer lived and his dog no longer lived, and he stepped inside where his father waited.
Franco knew what he’d done when he roared past Pop standing on the porch. He knew what awaited him back home. He’d walk through the door ready. And if he lost, if he took a beating, he was ready to love Pop even more.
“You sure you don’t want a soda?” asked Dominic.
“What the hell. Why not,” said Franco, and Dominic looked grateful, smiling as he counted out his change and signaled to the teenager behind the counter, who Franco recognized as an underclassman from school, and who wore a paper hat and a boy’s happy, ignorant frown.

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Michael Downs’ book, House of Good Hope (Bison Books, 2007), won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. His stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, and Five Points.