The fourth time the neighbor kid broke my window, I was sitting on the other side, reading the newspaper. I saw him walk up to my porch, reach back his arm, and throw, and then there was a pop, and a few small tongues of glass fell to the floor and shattered while the rock landed, almost gently, in my lap. He sneered at me, watching as one large shard swayed and fell from the upper part of the the frame, knocking a few others free as it did. Then he was gone, slippery little bastard. I admired his speed, my ankles and knees and fingers would never move fast like that again, I would never throw a rock through someone’s window and disappear into summer light. The window, I could break a window, but then I’d have to just stand there with a stupid look on my face, whatever look I had would be stupid, and nothing would be proven, and someone would look out through the glass maw at me, what the fuck, their face would say, and I would shrug. Which is not to say I’m glad he did it, this being the fourth time, he a little bastard with nothing else worth doing in his meager life. It is meager, I know, because I see the outside of it, the shell. What goes on inside must be a good deal worse.
I stood and brushed the glass and rock onto the floor. Some edge or spur caught the heel of my hand, and blood came. I pressed the tail of my shirt against it and looked out the window: there he was, on the sidewalk, laughing at me, then raising his middle finger, then both fingers. Thank Christ I never had kids, getting snipped was the smartest thing I ever did. Cheryl would have left me anyway, kids or no, I was never going to make enough money or claw my way up to foreman, never going to take her to the country club for surf and turf and those little butter rolls she always talked about when she was on the rag. Lucky for her, her heart gave out before her dreams got salted and dried and put away. I went to the door and out to the porch to yell at him, but he was off down the sidewalk, toward the fish market. Well, maybe I couldn’t run, but I had grown person stamina, nothing else in my stupid life-type stamina, so I walked down the stairs and headed down the sidewalk after him.
He knew I was behind him, and stopped every to often to flip me off, or shake his ass and flap his hands, doing some weird dance. The dance he did in front of the fish market, and an old woman came out the door as he was spazzing and stood on the sidewalk, staring at him, white bag hanging from her claw. He flipped her off, too, and ran. She was still huffing by the time I reached her, her face splotches of pink amidst a bed of wrinkle.
“You ought to be ashamed!” she wagged at me.
“Huh?”
“You need to teach your boy some manners! I never…” she started shuffling across the sidewalk.
“No, no, he’s not mine…” I pulled my hand up to shrug, and felt dried blood pull off my cut. I wanted very much to call her a stupid old bitch, but someday I will be old and bad karma and all that. She went out into the street and a sagging pickup truck stopped and let her march on. The boy was gone, I kept walking, my bloody hand in my pocket, fingers fuddling with my keys.
Twelve houses past the fish market was the drug store, I watched it change from Eugene’s to CVS to Rite-Aid during the last 15 years, the only constants were the building itself, the builder’s worn dedication plaque (In Memory of Mama, 1893-1972), and the fact that I had been banned from all 3 establishments. I admire consistency. And, I get my drugs delivered now, very convenient. I pushed past a cluster of anguished looking folks near the door, they could have been in their twenties or their forties, worn, hard, feral faces waiting for someone to come out with a script, I figured. They ignored me. I am glad, often, that I am old enough to be ignored, and other times it nearly kills me and I wake on the kitchen floor. Next to the drug store was Mickey’s, a place from which I am not banned, but nor am I liked–in fact, I am treated with general disdain, and return it in what passes for a comfortable exchange of feeling in these parts.
Mickey’s had been a bar of some sort or another for eighty or ninety years, and hadn’t changed much in terms of décor in that time, to judge by the yellowed photos on the walls. The most recent owner had taken wholeheartedly to the idea of walls imbued deep and lasting tradition, albeit largely as as excuse to change absolutely nothing, not put much effort into the serious scrub down the place had needed since V-E Day. Everything, from the sink handles to the bar stool legs to the bartender, Loman, was both greasy and dusty, so rubbing too hard on anything caused its surface to clump.
“Whatcha need, Jewfro?” I’m not jewish, but I am white and I did used to have quite a frizzy head of hair, when I had hair. Someone started calling me “jewfro” back when I played bass with the Dirty Dick Blues band, and I got tired of explaining I wasn’t jewish around that same time I got tired of explaining that Dirty Dick would show up soon, that Bob, the drummer, could play no matter how fucked up he was, and that we didn’t play much blues except if some other rock band covered it first. By the time George Thorogood hit it big, I’d sold my rig and listened to talk radio. Loman, the string bean with a beer gut and baseball hat and four kids he wasn’t paying for scattered around town, the one sneering at me now from behind the bar, was one of Dirty Dick’s kids. Another one lucky he got out early, Dirty Dick. His name wasn’t even Richard.
“High Life and a shot,” I said.
“What kinda shot?” Loman had poured me, I guess, about six thousand shots, and every single one was Canadian Club, and every single time, he asked what I wanted. I had half a mind to say “Goldschlager.” The other half of my mind said “shush.”
“Canadian Club, just like last time.”
He frowned and went about collecting my drink. I winced as I pulled the cash out of my pocket, I’d forgotten about my cut hand.
“He’s a little bitch,” Fubar said, his gravel-dunked-in-kerosene voice as recognizable as his crushed face. The car accident that took his mom caved his face in as a kid, and the years had folded that face in on itself.
“Fuck you, he just needs a better coach,” Joey Lagano answered. Early for him.
I lost an hour or two or five that way, listening to the citizenry without sense enough to die brigade talking at the TV, watching the TV, watching Loman change the channel from sports news to soaps, grumbling about the soaps, shouting back at Fubar and Lagano and Heidi and the rest, staring at my blood-caked hand.
“What the fuck happened to your hand, Jewfro?” This was Kite, so names because of how high he got, or seemed, even when he wasn’t high. He was three million years old, I think.
“Ah, little shit across the street break, broke my goddamned window again.”
“Who?”
“One of those kids across the, I dunno, they come from Mayfield or something, buncha rednecks parking on the lawn, listening to NASCAR on the fucking radio.”
“And he broke your window?”
“Yeah, fourth fucking time.”
Kite’s eyes got bigger. “Four times? What’s wrong with you, man, put a stop to that nonsense.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Kite wandered away, and I was getting too tired to fight with the rest of the stupid at Mickey’s, so I wadded up the bar naps I’d gotten bloody and put them next to a few bills for Loman. That kid, that little bastard had broken my window four times. I’d forgotten all about it until Kite reminded me, really, that’s what Mickey’s was for. Now I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Sometimes an uncle or something would come over and play baseball or football with the kid in the front yard, he was hopeless, he could throw pretty hard—I could vouch for that—but he’d throw the ball right over the Uncle’s head, or he’d fall down trying to catch it, get hit right in the head and start crying, loud. His mother, I assume it was his mother, was too skinny for regular living and came home at all hours, or not at all, and other women took turns jumping out of cars with bags of food or laundry. He had a sister when they moved in, a few years younger, walked around in her diaper a lot, though it was past diaper time. Anyway, she went away a few months after they arrived. Wish they all went.
It was dark, and a mist was drifting down from a pearly sky. It felt good, like being brushed by tiny, wet wings. So long since someone touched my skin, I realized. The drug store was closed, the fish store was closed, people’s TV’s shone from their living room windows as I teetered by. A few houses before mine, at the closed-up optometrist’s, I heard someone squeal, then yell, then laughter, so I followed the noise down the driveway. There was my boy, the rock thrower, surrounded by five much older boys, laughing and throwing rocks a him as he crouched against a chain link fence. The tallest boy, part-black and trying hard to grow a beard to cover a chin that dove weakly into his neck, turned and cocked his head at me.
“You lost, old man?”
I shook my head. “Nope, just fucking drunk. Karma and all that,” I muttered, turning back down the drive.
After I nailed a board over the window, I sat on the couch and stared at it. I know I should have stopped them, the little bastards, or at least tried. I should have stopped Cheryl dressing those poor dogs up like beauty pageant bimbos, too, but I didn’t. I should’ve told my Dad “no” when he got my draft card knocked down to II-C, but I didn’t. I should have stopped after two beers and skipped the Canadian Club, too, but I didn’t, and so what, we all get to where we’re going by different roads, nothing better or worse in mine. That’s the funny thing about karma, when idiots say “what goes around comes around,” they think they’ll see justice here, in this world, but karma is longer than time, we never see it. We pay it back all the time, it’s always coming around, sure, just no point in trying to figure out where it came from. I figure every life I lived was just like this one, never been a worm or a god or anything, just a sad, tired old man the moment I got born til the moment I dies, over and over, the same kind of life, every time. Let the kid figure it out himself. I can always get more windows.
Marc Pietrzykowski lives and writes in Lockport, NY, with his wife and furry family. He has published 6 books of poetry and 2 novels, and can be visited virtually at www.marcpski.com.
–Art by Rona Keller
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