Sam Weller - Shadow Show

She was just getting started. We ran outside. Auntie Maggie could go through three cups of coffee on a story. You could be ninety yourself when she got done. It was rude; but we just heard her laughing after us. We got away with most things.

Even though the Barlow knife was the better, Jackie said my bayonet had stains on it and that they had to be real blood. I told him I bet the bone that made the arms of his knife was tiger bone.

That’s how we was to each other. Tried to make the other one feel good. I don’t know if real brothers would have been that polite. Though our mothers were. They still are.

The only difference between our families back then that I could tell was Jackie’s parents lived in the upper of the two-flat. Because of the stairs, it was a little smaller than our house, though it had more bedrooms. No one ever said a thing about it or the fact that, even with them calling themselves partners—the plumbing truck reading NICKOLAI AND NICKOLAI—actually the rod, the pipe wrench, and the truck itself were Dad’s. The time Unkie left the new snake at the Emerson house and when they went back the snake had crawled off—as my dad put it—that was all he said. He laughed. No reproach. It was like family was a piece of lace that might already have a lot of holes but you handled it careful so it didn’t get more.

One time, my pop got my mother a lamb coat, ’cause she lost a baby girl born way too soon, and Jackie’s mother had to do with a long shawl knitted by Nana. Auntie didn’t complain. She said, “Oh, Marie, that collar brings out the red in your hair.”

And Mom would come right back with, “Maggie, it fits us both the same, so you take it to the Knights dance—”

“Oh, I couldn’t, Marie. If I ever got something on it—”

“No, Sissy, you just take it anytime you want…”

Which was why, with their having a little bit more trouble than us making ends meet, probably because Unkie played the ponies, we were all shocked when Unkie gave Jackie the Studebaker for high school graduation. It wasn’t new, far from it. But it was clean as a priest’s collar, not a scratch on her. We all knew right away whose it was. Marty Jaworsky’s. The diamond dealer’s car. We knew, too, that it couldn’t have had no more than twenty miles on it because Reb Jaworsky didn’t do a thing with it but drive down the boulevard on Friday before sunset taking his family to temple on a magic carpet so black it gleamed like a river in the rain, then have a guy drive them home after. We also all knew Reb Jaworsky wasn’t going to give it up for a nickel less than it was worth. Not because he was a Jew. Because he didn’t have to. Things didn’t go up and down in your job if your job was diamonds.

Then, the Sunday night after graduation, we found out why Unkie did it. He brought cherry wine, dessert wine. And he left on his fancy old-fashioned dress collar from church at dinner. Afterward, he stood up and said, “I want to say I am proud here that my only son, Jukka Andrea Nickolai, is enlisted in the First Calvary, the Big Red One, and will sail nine days after Christmas, with God we hope to watch over him to keep the mountains where our grandmothers and grandfathers lived and now they sleep, free from the evil one.” Auntie Maggie got up and put her apron over her face like she was ashamed and ran from the room, my mother right after her, muttering something at Unkie like she did when my father gave Mr. Emerson ten bucks to bet on a horse—despite Unkie’s problems with gambling.

“Jack,” Mama said later, “he’s Maggie’s only son. What if it was yours? What if it was Jan?”

Anyhow, Unkie was left standing there, looking like he wanted to cry, and the Russian cut-crystal glass right in his hand glowed like an icon with a candle in it at the Orthodox church on the South Side where Papa and Nana still went—though we went to Catholic church by then. The adults went into the living room and put on the radio. The shortwave could get the BBC. I started to ask Jackie why he enlisted; they would come and get a kid anyhow, soon enough, but for the first time in our lives he held up his hand, which told me as plain as words that his father made him do it, maybe because of newer immigrants having to prove something all the time, us being like German in the eyes of born Americans.

It wasn’t the same as my mother’s family. Of course, Jackie couldn’t admit that.

Which left the wine sitting there for us to finish. We did. And we didn’t have no stomach for it. Jackie said let’s take a ride. We went out to the car and polished off the fenders with our coats. Jackie had to stop and heave by the steps and clean his hands with a paint rag and his mouth with the hose before we could go.

I remember this.

Nora Finnian hung out the window across the street in just her full slip and yelled up the block, “Jackie, can I ride in your fine car then?” I couldn’t wait to sit in it myself; but the fact was, I felt about the same as Auntie Maggie. I didn’t want Jackie to go to war. It made me sick, though I knew a brave man should go. I had my own stuff to prove, supposedly. But I wore a shoe with a built-up heel and I never ran or took gym, though I could catch and throw in street games. I told girls poker was my sport. Swimming helped, so I did that. But I had to wear a brace to bed to keep my knee straight. I wouldn’t never be a soldier. Jackie, now, could run like a bastard wind. He disappeared at shortstop. He could outrun all the Carneys, even Amon, the youngest, Amon so thin he was like a rag twisted into a person. I wonder what he would have done, with those hands made for beauty and being able to run like that. Maybe gone for a professor, despite the way Unkie didn’t think men needed to learn much from books. Or I like to think of him playing pro ball maybe. He was so good the college guys came to watch him when we played American Legion.

That night we drove to Seven Sorrows Cemetery to smoke. They locked the front gates of the cemetery at dusk but they never locked the back. I guess they figured why would anyone want to go in a cemetery? So there was beer cans all over the place. We sat there and smoked a butt each, and I noticed Jackie inhaled now, and he said let’s take a walk so we got out, us knowing Seven Sorrows and the lanes between the graves as certain as we knew our bedrooms. We played there so much after dark when we was kids it was the school yard to us.

That night, we got to one of the little houses rich people bought for their dead—family crypts. Everyone knew this particular one; it was all covered with long strings of mirrors between the wrought-iron bars. It had little windows made of mirrors and a hipped silvery roof that came almost down to the ground. It belonged to Gypsies, Romany people the same as us but different. This being July and not long after the longest day of the year, the Gypsy queen and king’s children or subjects or whatever you please had hung ribbons, too, gold and blue and red. Nobody liked the tomb. People said it was haunted. Everybody took a long loop to avoid it, even on a Sunday stroll. But Jackie walked right up, pulled off one of the ribbons, and almost sneered at me when I gasped. He must have thought I was a priss.

“You don’t believe that shit?” he asked me. “Mirrors to scare off the devil if he should see his face, eh? Even Magda and Marie don’t believe that.” What made my hair prickle on my neck was the way he sounded different. Saying our mothers’ given names like they was girls from our street. Like there was a fan belt broke or a violin string snapped in him. Because we would never talk about our mothers that way. You just didn’t.

Then suddenly he had the Barlow knife out and was working away at the big padlock on the door.