Fradey Cat

It was a hot Forth of July night. Earlier, while playing, I had fallen in the debris filled trench between Yudock’s and the path behind the semis in the truck lot across Peoria street. Now, the streetlights were on making zigzag orbs of yellow light down the block. Everybody was out on their porches. The big porch outside my aunt and uncles red brick two flat was filled with my mom’s side of the family, pretty sisters in flower print dresses and husbands in dago tees. My mom’s brothers were there with their wives, too.

The older kids were still out running in the streets. Us younger ones were confined to the porch and the side walk in front. My sister Laura and cousin Karen must have been babies in their mother’s arms, or maybe inside, watched by Carol or Sharon, there brother Donald off in the military maybe.

The air was filled with the acrid smoke of fireworks, the smell of diesel fuel, pops and bangs and the whistle of pop bottle rockets, voices of the neighborhood.
I was in my short pant pajamas, both knees and an elbow bandaged from my fall in the trench, waving sparklers. My sister in some frilly dress, playing grown up, sat on the bench next to my mom swinging her saddle shoes instating trouble, telling my mom I wasn’t being careful with my sparkler. I stuck out me tongue at her.

My father yelled at me not to stick out my tongue at my sister and I’d better behave if I didn’t want a lickin.

I sat on the edged of the porch and pouted because I couldn’t do nuthin with out my dumb sister getting me in trouble and I decided to run away.

The next morning I remembered what I was going to do and I told my mom in the kitchen I didn’t like it there any more so I was going to run away.

“Let me make you a sandwich so you don’t get hungry. Go get me a long stick while you’re waiting.”

Boy, I thought. She don’t even care. When I got back with the stick she wrapped the sandwich and some cookies in and old babushka and tied it to the end of the stick and handed it to me. I was stuck and had to run away them.

“I’m going,” I said.

“Don’t stay out past the whistle,” she said.

I went grumbling up the gangway and stomped up to street level. I look both ways and crossed over to the truck lot, kicked cinders to the furniture factory. I crossed under the railroad tracks and came out by yellow cab and made my way north to Chicago Avenue. I made my way east to the iron bridge over the river with Montgomery Wards on the other side. It was the farthest from home I’d been by myself.

It was a long way across the bridge. I had seen them open before, separated in the middle the section sticking up into the sky like gigantic metal jaws. Turning back was humiliating. I was a little fradey cat, just like my sister said.