Kicking the Sky

by Anthony De Sa

Genres: Coming of Age

Synopsis

It was 1977 when a shoeshine boy, Emanuel Jaques, was brutally murdered in Toronto. In the aftermath of the crime, twelve-year-old Antonio Rebelo explores his neighborhood’s dark garages and labyrinthine back alleys along with his rapscallion friends. 

As the media unravels the truth behind the Shoeshine Boy murder, Antonio sees his immigrant family--and his Portuguese neighborhood--with new eyes, becoming aware of the frightening reality that no one is really taking care of him. So intent are his parents and his neighbors on keeping the old traditions alive that they act as if they still live in a small village, not in a big city that puts their kids in the kind of danger they would not dare imagine.

Antonio learns about bravery and cowardice, life and death, and the heart’s capacity for love--and for cruelty--in this stunning novel.

Release date: March 25, 2014

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

— Prologue —

IT WAS THE SUMMER that no one slept. During the last sticky week in July, the air abandoned us, failing to stir and stream through our streets and between our crooked alleys. The grass in our lanes stood tall and still, barely rooted to an urban soil of gravel and discarded candy wrappers. The narrow brick row houses that lined Palmerston Avenue and Markham Street—painted electric blue or yellow or lime green—became buffers to the city noise. A persistent hum was all we heard.

I can pinpoint the very moment it all started to change, when the calm broke: when news that twelve-year-old Emanuel Jaques had disappeared spread through our neighborhood in the whispered prayers of women returning from Mass. They gathered along their fences and on their verandas speaking in hushed tones that went silent whenever children drew near. We ignored their anxious looks and their occasional shouts to get home and lock the doors.

Manny, Ricky, and I had agreed to meet in the Patch, a square of unpaved lane covered in rocks and waist-high weeds that grew amidst the dumped garbage the city wouldn’t take. We’d piled old tires and torn at cardboard boxes to construct a fort in the Patch’s corner. With our fortress built, we huddled inside, Ricky scooching close to me, his shoulder touching mine. I was eleven, almost twelve, and everything I said or did was an attempt to show everyone around me that I wasn’t a kid anymore. We could start our own search for Emanuel, be the ones to bring him home. Manny stabbed at the cardboard ceiling with a screwdriver, puncturing holes of blue sky. Ricky imagined how we’d look in the newspaper, HEROES splashed above our photo. His enthusiasm for my idea began to chip away at Manny, whose interest was heightened by the mention of a possible reward.

We weren’t exactly sure where to begin, but we figured we’d have a better chance of finding a missing boy than a bunch of clueless adults who worked all day, and most nights. We’d ride our bikes into the heart of the city, comb the Yonge Street strip until we found him.

Worry about what had happened to Emanuel, the Shoeshine Boy, was closing in on us. Our parents had told us to be afraid, warned us of the dangers lurking on the city’s main drag. But we wouldn’t let their fears stop us. They didn’t understand, but Manny, Ricky, and I did. As long as we stuck together we were untouchable.

THE OLD SCHOOL BUS screeched to a stop. It always arrived at the same time, just after I’d gone to bed. It parked in front of Senhora Gloria’s bungalow across the street. Senhora Gloria was the neighborhood gossip who saw and heard everything. She knew the details of all our lives, and what she didn’t know, she made up. She’d gossip with anyone who had big ears and was willing to listen. Senhora Rosa, who owned the neighborhood variety store, had the biggest ears and an even bigger mouth. My mother would say those who talk of others always have something to hide themselves. If my mother felt frisky she’d add, the devil makes grit. I didn’t really care how awful Senhora Gloria was. It was Agnes, her fifteen-year-old daughter, who made my stomach churn hot and turned the spit in my mouth to dust.

From my bedroom window I could look onto Palmerston Avenue and stare at Senhora Gloria’s bungalow. Every morning I’d wait to catch a glimpse of Agnes brushing her hair on their front porch. She’d pull it like a rope over one shoulder as she bent over the railing. When she finished brushing, she would hold her hand up and wiggle her fingers, as if playing an imaginary piano, allowing strands of hair to sift into the flowerbed. She always looked clean and fresh, like the girls in those Kotex commercials, her brown hair shimmering in the sun, her cheeks peppered in pink. She had delicate features—almond eyes and a tiny nose—like the statue of Our Lady of Fátima. But unlike the Holy Mother, Agnes’s lips were plump and glossy. Her sides pinched in, her waist carved out, so that her hips swung side to side as she walked. She was perfection.

My mother’s name, which she hated, was Georgina, spelled in Portuguese with a J. Part of me knew she hated her name for the same reasons she didn’t want to mix with other Portuguese women like her, hunched over and picking worms all night. My mother closed our front door behind her. The lock clicked into place, a sound I had first heard the night Emanuel Jaques went missing. I pressed my forehead against the window screen, into the bulge that had formed over the years. I could feel my hair sticking up, electrically charged. It had rained all day. It was a hot rain, the kind that falls when the sun is out. Clinging to the night air was the smell of wet concrete.

I watched my mother walk down our front steps. Her thick hair was tucked underneath a kerchief, and she was dressed in a housedress, with a light sweater buttoned over it. It was too hot to wear a sweater, but it wasn’t proper for my mother to go out of the house with her arms bare. The laced hem of her slip touched my father’s rubber boots. She carried a plastic bag, no doubt stuffed with cornbread, a wedge of Queijo São Jorge, and some fruit, probably bruised or overripe. My mother never threw anything out. The food would have been wrapped tightly with napkins. The moon’s glow that filtered through the chestnut trees above fell onto her kerchief and face.

She turned around to close the gate behind her. Poncho, the neighbors’ golden Lab, had a habit of shitting on our grass, or worse, lifting his leg and peeing on the statue of Jesus that stood on our tiny lawn, inside an old upright bathtub. The tub was half buried on its end in the same spot it landed after it had been dropped from my window when we renovated the upstairs bathroom three years before. The ball-and-claw feet—spray-painted gold—pointed back toward the house. Inside the cavern stood Jesus holding his plump sacred heart. My father had glued down plastic flowers, so that it looked like Jesus was floating on a cloud of petals. At night Jesus looked like a rock star lit up by a row of Christmas lights clipped to the rim of the tub.

My eyes moved past my mother’s silhouette, across the street to the porch lights that drew the moths and mosquitoes close in a swarm. Men and women filed out of their homes, locking their doors behind them. They headed down their front paths and when they met at the accordion doors of the bus, they nodded politely before they lowered their kerchiefs or adjusted their hats over their foreheads, and stepped onto the bus.

My sister came into my room and stood beside me. She leaned against the window, her hair in a towel, wound like a turban, another towel wrapped tightly under her armpits. “You better go to bed,” she said, like she was in charge. She was sixteen and she had been acting like that a lot lately. Terri’s fingers were slender, curled as they were around the sill. But she was tough. She had my mother’s coloring: olive skin, chocolate eyes, brown hair, which was not as thick or as wavy as my mother’s. I was fair and had pale blue eyes that turned gray on sunny days.

Terri had shiny pink splotches on her shoulders. One was the shape of Africa, and the other one I couldn’t figure out.

“You got sunburned bad.”

“You wanna peel my back?”

“No.”

She reached up and peeled off some skin, rolled it into a ball, and flicked it at my face. “Tomorrow’s gonna be a busy day, twerp. Piggy’s coming home.” She nudged me with her Africa shoulder and smiled. The clock on my nightstand glowed 10:55.

It was an annual event—a matança do porco—the slaughter of the pig. Usually my family killed a pig in the fall, while we pickled peppers, jarred tomato sauce, and made wine. But this year, my father had received word from his sister, Maria de Jesus, that she was close to clearing her paperwork with the government and was coming from Portugal to live with us.

“Do you know anything about the kid that’s gone missing?” she said, her eyes searching the street below.

“He doesn’t live in our neighborhood.”

“I know that, stupid. I’m just wondering what you’ve heard.”

“Not much. We’re going to look for him tomorrow.” Emanuel had last been seen by his brother and a friend on crowded Yonge Street, across from the new Eaton Center, our first real mall, which spread across two full city blocks and sparkled like an enormous glass cage. That’s where we planned to start our search.

“The cops have been looking for two days and haven’t found him, but you and your little friends think you will. Good luck with that.”

My mother was on the bus now, sitting at the back in the same spot she always chose. She placed her temple against the window. I hoped she would look up to my bedroom window and smile. She was fond of telling me that the key to success was good teeth, white and straight. No matter if you were a man or a woman, a row of pretty teeth drew people in. When I would ask how she kept hers looking so bright, she’d say, “Drink and eat your food at room temperature,” revealing her row of Chiclets, sometimes tapping them with her nail.

As the worm-picker pulled away, I wondered where the bus would take them this time. What deal had been struck with which Portuguese security guard at which park or golf course? They moved around, picking the juiciest worms for bait shops across the city. A penny a worm. In addition to this work, my mother had decided to postpone her holiday and had agreed to take more shifts at the hospital to cover other people’s time off. Payments on my father’s dump truck kept coming due and jobs to dig basements had slowed down. We all have to work together, make sacrifices, my mother would whisper.

My father had gone to a meeting at St. Mary’s church hall only a couple of hours before to get an update on Emanuel’s disappearance and to help form a community watch group to search for him. From there, he would head to his night job cleaning the TD Bank on the corner of Queen and Euclid. Once that was done, he’d make his way to a bar, the dark one without a sign on the corner of Queen and Palmerston. It was a block away from our house and we called it the cellar because of the metal hatch on the sidewalk just outside the side door. Through the hatch they’d roll kegs down a ramp made of hundreds of little wheels. He’d have a beer, or maybe two. My mother would be home before him. He wouldn’t even know she’d been gone.

BEFORE THE SUN ROSE and my mother stepped out of the house to board the streetcar that took her to St. Michael’s Hospital, she came into my room wearing her mustard-colored uniform: an angel emblazoned on her breast, and her quiet white hospital shoes covered in tiny holes that the German woman at Sasmart said were for aeration.

“How many worms did you get?”

“Shh. Sleep.” My mother laid out a fresh T-shirt and pair of shorts on my bed and sat down beside me.

“Are you going already?” I wanted her to lie down, the way she used to when I was small and she’d hum Portuguese songs as I doodled in my sketchbook. She leaned over and kissed my forehead, then blew on the spot. The gold medallion of Mother Mary was tangled with a tiny swallow charm I had never seen before.

“Is this one new?” I asked, reaching up to pinch the charm between my fingers.

She pushed my hand away from her necklace. “Play safe. Stay close to home.”

“Can’t you stay home today? It’s Sunday.” My mother worked in the hospital’s sterilization department, where they fired up all the test tubes and beakers that held diseases and body parts.

“They asked if I’d work another shift. I’ll be home this afternoon, and we’ll all go to five o’clock Mass. Your father’s driving up to the farm with your uncles to get the pig. If you need anything, your aunt Edite is home.” I felt her weight lift from the bed. She hovered over me and smiled, little gray pillows under her eyes.

“A benção, Pai,” I said, returning from the kitchen with a glass of milk in hand.

“Deus te abençoe,” my father replied. “Is early. Go back to bed.”

The kids whose parents came from mainland Portugal, the continent, did not ask for blessings from their parents or uncles and aunts; this was an Azorean show of respect. We did it without giving much thought to the words tumbling out of our mouths, the same way we prayed the Our Father or Hail Mary.

My father stood at the front door, struggling to slip his construction boots onto his feet. “I going up to the farm today with your tio Clemente.” The rule in our house was that, except for morning blessings, only English was to be spoken. Let this country shape you. My father would quote Mateus, the man who had helped him when he first came to Canada. “Words will make you strong,” he’d say. My father didn’t have a lot of words to express himself, and I think he felt not having them had held him back. It would be different with me. I learned about every word I could and used them in sentences to impress my teachers. I couldn’t use them with my friends, though. With them I could only think the words, but knowing I could use them was enough.

My father looked up at me with bright eyes as he tucked his Thermos under his arm. He had lost most of his hair at an early age and all he had left was a salt-and-pepper rim of clown hair, cut short. He was almost fifty years old, much older than my friends’ fathers, and quite small, five foot five or six. He blamed his height on not having enough food growing up and having too much weight slugged across his back.

“What you do today?” he asked.

“Nothing really. I could come with you,” I said, telepathically urging the invite out of him. Ask me to come, now. Come on, ask me. I took a sip of milk, watching him over the rim of my glass. He walked over to me and wiped my milk moustache with his thumb.

“Maybe next year,” he said, half grinning. He turned and left through the front door without another word. I swiped my wrist across my mouth.

When they first came to Canada, the women would go to the farm with the men. My mother said it wasn’t really a pig hunt, just a bunch of men who went to a farm, jumped into a pigpen, and chased the fattest pig down. The pigs all cost fifty dollars, so the men went for the biggest one. “The poor things don’t even know what’s going on. They just squeal and grunt as the men run and slip in mud and shit before landing their prize pig,” she had explained. “Maybe if they weren’t already drunk they’d see how ridiculous they were.”

After breakfast, I headed out the front door. I was about to hop on my bike when I saw Agnes. Her head hung low over the railing as she heaved. She tossed her hair back, then steadied herself by sitting in the lawn chair on the veranda. Her face was pale. She caught me staring at her. I looked to the ground. I found a branch I could brush against the fences—Rap, rap, rap, ping. Rap, rap, rap, ping—as I pedaled up the street.

I rode a Raleigh Chopper, red like the Ford Gran Torino they called Striped Tomato on Starsky & Hutch. My father had bought me the bike around Easter. He said it was a boy’s bike, not like the other one I had been riding, which had been my sister’s. I had spray-painted hers silver, but only small blotches of paint covered the purple frame because I hadn’t held the can far enough away. My new bike’s sloping main tube and curved back with its squared banana seat made it the best bike on the block. But it was the three-speed gearshift that gave me the kind of cool I wanted.

Our street felt like a ghost town. None of our neighbors were on their porches. They weren’t watering their lawns or hosing down their walkways and windows. It was a bit early but I figured the women were probably in their basements cooking Sunday dinner. Maybe their husbands had already escaped to Crupi Bros. Bakery for an espresso or to some other café where they could gather round a radio to listen to the Portugal soccer game. I stopped in front of Senhora Barbosa’s house. She sat dressed in black, behind her front window. Her lips caved in because she wasn’t wearing her dentures. She scowled at me and drew the curtains. I thought of the missing boy, Emanuel, and imagined what it would be like if we found him safe somewhere. We’d make the front page of the newspaper and they’d interview us on television. Our neighbors would look at us differently. We’d be saviors who might see some reward money.

I headed over to Senhor Cardoso’s garage, which had recently been hollowed out by a fire. We had agreed to meet there by nine o’clock, which would give us a few hours for the search before we had to be home to get ready for Mass. But Ricky and Manny were not where they were supposed to be.

I went past our meeting spot and on to Red’s house. I leaned my bike against his garage. He lived alone in the big house. Sitting bare-chested at an open window, he’d call us over to climb up onto his garage to pick the sour apples before they ripened and fell to the ground making a mess. Afterwards, he would invite us in for a glass of water, but we never accepted, choosing to drink from his garden hose instead.

I climbed the antenna that hugged the clapboard siding, then scrambled onto the roof of his garage. From up there I could see everything. I bit into a small apple. Its sour juice ran down the corner of my puckered mouth. I saw Aunt Edite, arranging the lawn chair on her third-floor fire escape. She wore a big white hat, white sunglasses, and a bikini, carelessly covered by a kind of Indian sari dappled in little mirrors. Edite worked at the Toronto Star and people said she had taken the job in the hope of finding out where her son, Johnny, might be. She hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. He never returned home from Vietnam, and Edite was convinced he was somewhere in Canada, hiding from the American government, eating raccoons and berries and sleeping in caves or under spruce trees, biding his time until it was safe to go home. I pictured Johnny like the Vietnam War vets I saw in a television special—his brain fried because of the things he had seen and done. Edite wasn’t technically my aunt but we were told to call her that—a sign of respect, my father insisted—even though she preferred to go by her first name alone. She was my father’s first cousin, the daughter of an uncle he barely knew who had left the Azores years ago to make his fortune in America.

I was just about to skip across the rooftops when I saw Peter. He was in his fifties and pencil thin. He lived in the garage at the top of the laneway and never spoke. A lot of the kids were mean to him, throwing rocks or yelling nasty things, in an effort to get him to chase. It never worked. He wore thick glasses like Buddy Holly. His clothes were always the same too: navy cigarette pants, a white shirt with a narrow collar, red Converse high-tops, and a pocket protector with an assortment of pens. The silver of his pens sparkled when they caught the sun, turning them into medals.

“Hey, Peter!”

Skittishly, he scanned around him before looking up and nodding. His squinty eyes looked to the ground and he walked faster, pulling his wire bundle buggy behind him. The hair on the top of his head was thinning and I saw a bump, the size of a golf ball, behind his ear.

I took off. It was a game Manny and I loved to play. We chose opposite rows of rooftops, picking sides over rocks, paper, and scissors. I knew the Markham side was harder, a total of eight pitched roofs, compared to the five on the Palmerston side, but I wanted the thrill of hopping from one to the next, some flat, others steep. Ricky would call out the start and then run between us through the lane, offering a play-by-play and adding to the excitement. I liked the jumps best, sailing over the dark crevices between buildings.

I took my time leaping across the shingled roofs, jumping in long and graceful strides over sheets of tin and Plexiglas swatches. I made note of Senhor Pacheco’s freshly installed row of two-by-fours, lined with three-inch nails to shoo nesting pigeons, Senhor Cunha’s jumble of dragons-tooth barbed wire tucked under some gutters. Senhora Rego had a new laundry line attached to a post centerd like a cross on the pitch of her sagging roof. I stopped above Mr. Serjeant’s garage, the tallest pitched roof in the lane. From there I could see MISSING CHILD posters taped to garage doors and telephone poles. They featured a black-and-white photo of the boy with his straight-edged bangs, and a smaller picture of the kind of shoes he was wearing when he went missing, white sneakers with three stripes along the side.

I wasn’t sure how long I was up on the roof when Manny and Ricky appeared from the heat’s haze. They were crouched at the top of the laneway, in front of Peter’s garage. I hand-dropped from Mr. Serjeant’s garage, ran back up the alley, hopped on my bike, and with my ass in midair, pushed down hard on the teeth of the pedals until the bike no longer veered from side to side, the pace set. I skidded and kicked up some gravel.

When I reached them, Manny was trying to zap an empty cigarette pack by holding a magnifying glass in front of the sun. Manny was darker than the rest of us—moreno, my mother would say, which wasn’t as bad as mulato—and he had darkened even more over the summer. His hair, which he styled with a pick he always kept tucked in his back pocket, was shaped in a sort of Afro, and it sparkled as if dusted with sugar.

“Hey, we were supposed to meet at Senhor Cardoso’s. Aren’t we going downtown to look for Emanuel?”

“Shh,” he said, raising his finger in my direction.

Ricky shuffled his feet a bit but held his squat. He used his bruised arm as a visor. I couldn’t remember a time when Ricky’s arms or legs weren’t bruised. He said he fell a lot but we all knew his dad beat him. Ricky squinted up at me and smiled before his thin fingers resumed tapping on the lid of a Bick’s pickle jar held tightly under his arm. I could see bugs trying to climb up the side of the jar, only to slip down before they reached the top. Every once in a while I heard a ping: a grasshopper banged its head as it tried to hop out. Ricky placed the jar on a bed of gravel, made sure it was in the shade. Ricky’s bangs lay flat across his forehead, cut like the teeth of a dog. He trimmed his hair himself but never washed it. He had a tiny face, and his eyes, nose, and mouth were all bunched up like the holes in a bowling ball. Ricky was much smaller than the rest of us, a runt, Manny teased, like Wilbur the pig in Charlotte’s Web. But unlike Wilbur, Ricky actually did have a special gift. I once saw him pick up a robin that Manny had hit with his slingshot. He cupped the bird’s limp body in his hands and brought it to his lips, whispered something into its head, then threw it in the air where it took flight.

“The. . .