Christopher Prato - Little Boy or, Enola Gay

She smiled. “Good idea. Let’s go.”

We rose and shook the snow off our bodies. I brushed icicles out of her hair as she wiped snowflakes out of my eyelashes.

We were just about to walk toward the door when some kid, a guy that must have been three or four years younger than me, hobbled down the street struggling with a giant red snow shovel. He walked over to Maria’s front gate and asked if Mrs. Della Verita was home. Maria said that she was, but no thank you, she didn’t want her sidewalk shoveled that day. The kid said okay and walked to the house next door. Maria didn’t say his name, but it looked like they knew each other.

“Who was that kid?” I asked.

“He’s, um, Louie.” She seemed perplexed by my question.

“Louie who?”

“Louie Gick. Who cares? He’s lives up the block.”

“Do you think he’s cute?”

“He’s fourteen years old!”

“I didn’t ask his age. I asked if you think he’s cute or not.” My voice was penetrating and monotonous.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Actually, What da hellaya tawkin’ about? Maria’s New York accent always surfaced when she was angry.

“I saw the way you looked at him. You think he’s cute, don’t you?”

Maria picked up a hunk of ice and smashed it in my face. Blood trickled from my nostrils, past my lips, and down my chin, all the way to the bronze interlocking teeth of the zipper on my bomber jacket.

“I’m sick of this shit!” she bellowed. “Just go the fuck home!” Her voice echoed down the quiet white street.

“Wait, what did I do?”

“Please, A.J., just please go home.” She started walking inside, but I ran up the icy stairs and yanked her by the shoulder. She fell on her ass.

“Leave me alone!” Maria shrieked, as she plopped down not one, not two, but three stairs to the frozen concrete at the bottom. She struggled to stand and then I grabbed her mitten-covered hand and yanked her to her feet.

Looking straight in her face, I said: “I know you think he’s cute. I saw you looking at him. Just admit it.”

“You’re nuts,” she replied, huffing and puffing from her brief but vigorous fall.

“Damn it, Maria. Do you think he’s cute or not?” Rather than answer, she watched me intently as an expression of self-doubt came over my face.

I turned my head to either side, first the right, then the left, still clasping her hand with my glove. I heard our voices echo down the serene, snow-covered street as a yodel does off a cliff side. The only thing moving was the frozen air roaring in and out of our noses and mouths. We were both shaking; whether it was the product of nerves or fright or frigid air, I don’t know. The air was like a wall between us. Silence shouted between our bodies.

It was at that moment that I felt lower than I had in months. It was the first time in a while that I’d actually voiced my innermost worries. Until that instant, I’d tried like hell to hold them all in. Until that moment I’d wondered many things, but seldom wondered them out loud. But my cover was blown. The jig was up. My most intimate and frightening jealousies had been revealed; I no longer could control my thoughts or my words. I was enslaved by my fears. I was a fool, a wimp, a pussy. I was a charlatan mind-reader who, when his E. S. P. was proven a sham, tried to coerce the desired answer from his client. I was a little boy fleeing from his own shadow, only to discover it behind him once again each time he glanced back—because you can’t get rid of your shadow.

But, the thing is, if Maria had waited just a minute longer to answer that question—if I’d had the time to thoroughly taste the bile of shame swelling within my gut—I still would’ve said what I wound up saying anyway. I couldn’t help it.

“Please just tell me if you think he’s cute.”

“No,” she answered, lifelessly.

January is the worst of all the months of the year. Not only does it begin after a week-long Christmas vacation which makes school all the more difficult to get used to, but it’s also fucking freezing. The January of my senior year was especially bad because of all the goddamn snow we got in New York. A few inches would’ve been acceptable, we got twenty inches in January alone. It was so bad that for a three-day stretch end of the month, all the schools in the city had off.

Everyone in my family was home those days. The snow began on a Tuesday evening. Spending the next five days in a cozy-warm house watching rented movies and TV provided a welcome relief to frigid air outside.

I’d always liked blizzards. Not being in them, but watching them. Slowly, but deliberately, each square inch of terrain gets covered with these mysterious white particles called snowflakes. Watching those snowflakes fall, I thought of good old Mr. Dick. Attempting to jolt some interest into his ordinarily mundane class, Mr. Dick used to wave his arms and say that we were pummeled daily with “billions and billions” of different wavelengths of all sorts, from ultraviolet to cosmic waves. He squealed it, in a high-pitched voice. Mike and I used to laugh about it during class. As I walked home from the grocery store, I kept thinking about the billions and billions of snowflakes that fell to earth and covered up everything that was familiar to me. All of the dirt and shit on the streets was gone. Old and new cars, Cadillacs and Fords, were identical beneath sheets of snowdrift. Children on my block burrowed through snow dunes and raced down their front lawns in garbage can covers.

A part of me hated those kids for upsetting the equality and peacefulness that immediately followed the blizzard. When my father asked me to clear the driveway and sidewalk, I balked at first not because I hated shoveling, but because, somehow, the snow looked like it belonged there, at least for a while. It concealed the city’s stains, and I liked that. Removing it was like waking a little baby when he’s asleep.

After a snowstorm, the sun is always so bright white and the sky so azure. I guess I just felt that the snow should naturally melt away as the sun glistened through the great blue sky and melted it, snowflake by snowflake. And then, within a few weeks, barring further snowfall, the neighborhood would return to its old self again. You always knew that sooner or later you’d see again what you’d seen before.

I thought of all this as I shoveled the sidewalk and steps in front of my house. As I did that, the mailman trudged up the street toward my stoop with a fistful of envelopes. I wondered why he was forced to go to work on a day when everyone else off. And I sort of felt bad for the guy.

To every guy in Queens, and all across America, February 14, 1993 was Friday. For women, however, it was Valentine’s Day, the most meaningful day of the year.

In light of this, I was determined to give Maria my best and most unexpected present yet. I would cook her dinner that night, that much was sure. But I had to do more than that.

I sat at my bedroom desk a few days before Valentine’s Day with one thought in mind: I won’t leave this back-breaking chair until I have written a poem about Maria. Three hours and a hand cramp later, I’d churned out the most truthful, accurate poem of my life: