War

Every body played war, me and all my friends, my sister Jo, cousins Janise and Linda, and Frankie’s sister, even Wayne and his friend, even Yudock. Not the hillbillies. We never played with the hillbillies. Not Byron or his brother either, but everybody else, except Fat Georgie and Monica, because they couldn’t get dirty.

All the girls were nurses on one of the flatbeds parked in the truck lot next to Pumpilio’s garage. That was the field hospital.

We fought the Japs or the Germans but usually the Japs because Japs was better to say and my grand mother was German. She was dead but I still didn’t like killing people like her and I didn’t know any Japs and they had slanty eyes and were different so they were easier to kill especially when I got my fifty caliber machine gun an I could kill a lot at one time. It was okay to kill commies too, but you had to play spy to kill them. Indians too, sometimes, but sometimes it was fun to be the Indian.

Getting shot or blown up was the most fun if every body was on the same side fighting the enemy. I charged across the battlefield and get shot. It was hard to be good at getting shot. You ran as fast as you can and then just had to kind of stop doing anything except yelling you were hit and grabbing were you got shot and letting your self go flying at the cinders. Getting blown up was almost the same except you had to jump first before you let yourself go.

Yudock was terrible at it. He stopped running and lay down on the ground and roll around in agony forever. You were supposed to lay there and weakly wave your arm around and moan a little until the girls came and dragged you to the flat be and operated.

Sometime you had to recover enough to help get up on the truck bed but then you got worse and the nurse pinch you digging out the bullet or shrapnel and nurse you back to health and you fell in love with the nurse and she would cry when you went back to the war and she had to kiss you and you had to let her and not wipe it off. Sometimes you died and she put a towel over your head. She didn’t have to kiss you when you died but she had to cross her arms and sort of fall on you and then cry. But then you got cured by a miracle and then went back to the war so you could get shot and dragged back again.

One time the operation was real. Throwing yourself head long onto a cinder covered truck lot can be hazardous. Cinders have some sharp edges. My sister, secretly gleeful at the opportunity, dug a piece out of my forearm with a tweezers while I valiantly tried not to cry. Janise and Linda watched. I had to get kissed by all of them, three Florence Nightingale’s.

Old Horse

The ragman and the knife sharpener man both came down the street in horse drawn wagons, yelling to let people know they were coming. It was nice yelling, like singing, like the Italian Ice man in Peanut Park pushing his cart. “Rags. Rags for sale. Rags,” the rag man sang. And you could hear the clop clop of his horse pulling the wagon all heaped up with bundles of rags.

Their horses, the ragman’s and the knife sharpener man’s, were older than they were with grey stiff hair in their coats and a slow walk like they had one more step in them before they died, but they kept going. “Ready for the glue factory,” uncle John said. I couldn’t figure out how they make glue out of horses. I imagined them going through a big sausage grinder and coming out glue. They had to kill them first. Hit them in the head with a sledge hammer like cows. I wouldn’t like that job. Your arm would get tired and then you couldn’t hit them right and you’d have to keep hitting the over and over until they were dead.

The horses had blinders on, to keep them from getting scared, the ragman said. I wonder if they left them on when they went to the factory, so you could sneak up on them? The horses stood there tied to the wagons, snuffing, shaking their flanks and swishing there tales against the flies.

“Whoa. Whoa,” the men said quiet like, and the horse would swish its tail.

The rag man’s horse’s name was Betty. Old Bet. I was allowed to pet her but not to close to her mouth. She liked to bite. Sometimes she would go poo right there in the street. No one would say anything and she’d just swish her tail. She didn’t seem to mind the bit in her mouth but it looked like it hurted. Rags were a nickel a bundle and sometime we changed dirty ones for clean ones.

When they came I ran and told my ma. For the ragman she gave me a nickle to buy some rags. She came out for the knife sharpener man. He had a sharpening wheal on his wagon he rode like a bicycle. His horse didn’t bite and some time my ma give me sugar cubes for him. I could tell he was a boy horse because his thing was giant size. He was older than Betty and his belly hung down and he walked even slower. He pooped in the street too, splatty so it went flat.

The knife sharpener man was missing a bunch of teeth. He peddled his wheel with his tongue sticking out through the spaces. The knifes on the wheel made a loud hissing like sound and he would test to make sure they were sharp by cutting news paper. Then he wrapped each knife up by itself.

His horse’s name was Old Horse. “Gee’up, Old Horse,” he said when he left. Old Horse leaned forward and shook before he started pulling.

Failure To Duck

We were playing spears in the yard, hurling old broom and mop handles at rocks, Laginza’s stockade fence, sticking them in the dirt, and at targets of opportunity. The points became splintered and full of dirt, so when one of them hit me just below my right eye and I burst out in a caterwauling wail and ran for my mother, pieces of the spear came with me.

It is possible I did not pause in my wailing all the way to the doctor’s. I don’t remember how we got there. I do remember the intensity of my crying and screaming and wailing moving up several notches when he came at me with the scalpel to dig things out. Treacherously, I believe my mother held me down. I further believe I must have froze with terror as the evil Doctor Sheletskey dug in my face with his knife. He didn’t get it all. If you look close you can still see two little dark spots.

My mother should have known what she was getting herself into. When I was still in my highchair she turned her back for a minute and turned back around just in time to see me standing and launching myself out of it like Superman. Not even a year old and already I had a pretty good black eye. It was only the first in a long list of bruises, cuts, broken bones, and fights with which I terrorized my mother throughout my childhood. So I suppose she was only getting a little revenge when she held me down so the doctor could dig ineffectively in my face.

Somewhere in there I was told not to cry like a baby and be a big boy. After that I stubbornly refused to smile or say thank you for the suckers with the flexible loop handles he gave me after doctor appointments and the next time we went I ran around the office and screamed like hell when he tried to give me a shot.

This is the same doctor who prescribed Belladonna, also know as Deadly Nightshade, an extremely powerful and dangerous hallucinogenic, to my older sister when she was extremely young.