Eggplant Alley (9781593731410) (24 page)

Nicky did not look at the tattooed boy.

“Hey, mozzarella, can't you hear? I said lemme see the rock.”

Nicky rolled the ball in his hand, not looking at the boy.

With astonishing quickness, the tattooed boy was in Nicky's face.

“Hey, mozzarella, what is your problem? I said gimme the ball, can't you hear good?”

Nicky numbly handed over the ball and the boy said, “Ha HA.” He examined the ball closely. He rolled it up his arm to the elbow and back to his hand.

“Like magic, huh?” he said.

“C'mon man, let's GO!” said one of the other boys.

Nicky's heart pounded deeply. His throat was tight, his mouth dry. He was afraid the tattooed boy would ask for the glove next, and that would mean real trouble. This was Roy's glove. Roy's glove from the old days, and it was precious on many counts. There was no way Nicky could give it up. “There will be real trouble if he asks for the glove,” Nicky thought. “Please don't let him
try to steal the glove. He will have to kill me to get Roy's glove away from me.”

The tattooed boy said, “Hey, lemme see the glove.”

“I can't,” Nicky said. He tightened his grip in the fingers of the mitt. “It ain't mine. It's my brother's.”

“It ain't even yours, then. Lemme see it.”

“I have to go,” Nicky said weakly.

The tattooed boy reached for the glove. Nicky jerked the glove away. The boy locked his arm around Nicky's neck.

“Oh, man,” someone said.

Nicky smelled sweat, beer, and sweet smoke on the boy. Nicky saw a skull tattoo on the forearm pressed against his chin. The boy swung Nicky around, twirling him, flinging him toward the asphalt. Nicky bent his knees and stayed on his feet. The boy leaned his weight onto Nicky. Nicky planted his sneakers and stayed on his feet. Then a leg swept into Nicky's ankles, knocking his feet from under him in the classic schoolyard takedown. Nicky felt a plummeting in his belly and he braced himself with his hands and landed hard on his rear, chattering his teeth and shaking his eyeballs. His right hand stung sharply.

Nicky sat on the gritty asphalt for a moment, dazed and utterly helpless. The tattooed boy was muttering and walking away, nodding his head as if he had accomplished some great triumph. Nicky's hand felt sticky and he turned his palm up. A ragged cherry-red gash seeped blood with the rhythm of his heartbeat. He had driven the hand into a lemon-slice-shaped shard of clear glass.

Nicky's eyes were wide with pain and astonishment. He absently
wiped his hand on his T-shirt and left a bright red smear. He watched the boys walk casually toward the gate to Groton Avenue. One of the boys shook his head. He looked disgusted. The tattooed boy strutted. He glanced back and caught Nicky's eye.

“Hey, piss ant, whatcha looking at?” the tattooed boy shouted, enraged. “You want some more?” Nicky could not help glaring. He was scared, shaken, brimming with tears. He was also filled with an uncontrollable fury.

The tattooed boy stopped at the gate and looked in his hand. He seemed surprised to have the pink ball. He reared back, knuckles nearly touching the ground near his heel, and heaved the ball over Nicky's head. It bounced once then vaulted down the steps toward Summit Avenue.

Nicky watched the ball disappear. When he stared back toward Groton the boys were gone. Nicky hoped they had not walked into Eggplant Alley. He hoped they were not new tenants.

Nicky popped to his feet. He looked at Eggplant Alley, windows flat and colorless in the dusk. He thought the building looked down at him sadly. He examined his palm. A fresh glop of blood was forming. He wiped his hand on his shirt again. He wanted the hand to stop bleeding. He wanted the pain and fear to disappear. He wanted the terrible episode to just go away, with no lasting effects.

Nicky took stock. He had managed to hold on to Roy's glove, thank heavens. The hand. It would stop bleeding, any second. The ball. It was Roy's ball, the one that had been safe and snug at the back of the closet all those years. And now it was lost, rolling somewhere along Summit.

Nicky thought, “I must find that ball. To fix everything.”

He hurried for the stairs and was surprised his right ankle ached. At the top of the stairs a breeze cooled the tears on his cheeks. He hurried down the steps, calculating the path of the ball.

Nicky searched under cars parked on Summit. He looked along the curb, down the sewer, along the chain-link fences in front of the two-story houses. He peered into the postage-stamp front yards.

“The ball has to be somewhere,” Nicky thought, and he was reminded about how deeply he hated to look for lost things.

Summit was sloped and angled in such a way that a ball could bounce against a curb or car and roll toward Mayflower Avenue, the narrow street that plunged steeply all the way to Broadway. Nicky squatted painfully and looked under the cars parked at the top of Mayflower. He kicked at cans and bottles in the gutter. He sidestepped dog droppings and searched the length of hard-packed turf between the sidewalk and curb. He found himself in front of the Only House With Trees.

“This would have to happen,” Nicky said angrily, not knowing that if the tattooed boy hadn't assaulted him, if the tattooed boy hadn't thrown the Spaldeen over the fence, Nicky would not be standing on Mayflower Avenue at that moment. And Nicky would have forever missed what happened next.

“Where is that stinking ball?” he whined.

He gazed down Mayflower. He saw a small figure, barely in sight, trudge up the hill. The figure climbed closer, and he saw it was a woman. A young woman, with long straight chestnut-brown hair that bounced and shimmered as she walked. Nicky
stood and watched, baseball glove on his hip. The young woman must have seen the glove, because she held her right hand above her head. In her hand was the pink ball. Nicky smiled. She smiled back at him. Even from this distance, in the fading fall light, he could tell that the smile was something special.

Something familiar.

“Hey-lo, there,” the young woman called out.

And slowly her face came into full focus, and Nicky placed the smile as that belonging to Roy's horrid hippie girlfriend, Margalo.

T
he smile flickered from Margalo's face. She narrowed her eyes and wrinkled her forehead, like someone working on a math problem. She was trying to place this kid with the baseball mitt. Then she remembered. Her forehead relaxed. Her smile did not return.

“You're Margalo,” Nicky said stupidly. “Do you remember me? I'm …”

“I know who you are,” Margalo said softly. She took a deep breath. She locked her blue eyes on to Nicky's face. She held out the Spaldeen. Nicky opened the glove. Margalo dropped the ball into the glove.

Nicky thought Margalo was waiting for him to say something.

So he said, “Nice day, isn't it?”

She exhaled.

“I am a numbskull,” he thought.

Margalo said, “I better be going.”

Nicky didn't say anything.

Margalo said, “You should get back to your game.”

“Game?”

Nicky followed her eyes as she lowered them to the baseball
mitt, which held the Spaldeen. He said, “Oh, yeah. There's no game. I was just playing with myself.”

“Numbskull, numbskull, numbskull,” he thought.

“Well, good-bye,” Margalo said. She edged backward, half turned away, all the while locking her blue eyes on to Nicky's face.

She said, “Do you have any …” She blinked against the strands of hair in her eyes.

She pursed her lips.

“Good-bye,” she said, nodding firmly.

Nicky wiped his right hand across his shirt, adding a bright red smear of blood to the maroon smears, and waved meekly.

“My Goddess, what have you done to your hand?” Margalo gasped. She stepped quickly to Nicky. She looped her hair behind her ears. She cradled his wounded hand.

“It's really bleeding. What did you do?”

“I fell,” Nicky said. “Making a catch. A diving catch. Think I hit some glass or something. It's nothing.” He was trying to come across tough and stoic, a regular John Wayne. “I broke my ankle once, you know.”

“Dumb, dumb, dumb,” he thought. Nicky could feel his IQ plummeting in the presence of this girl.

Margalo pressed her fingers to his palm. Nicky winced and sucked in air.

“I think there's glass in there,” Margalo said gravely. “Come with me. That might need a stitch or two. It surely needs cleaning out.”

Nicky withdrew his hand. “No, really, it's nothing.”

“Don't be silly. Come with me.” She moved toward the black
iron gate to the Only House With Trees, motioning for Nicky to follow.

“You live here?”

“Yes, I live here. You didn't know that?”

“Yeah, I knew that,” Nicky lied. He shrugged. He examined his hand. “I think I'll just go home.”

“Look. My father is a doctor,” Margalo said, as if that settled that.

Nicky didn't say anything.

“Please come with me,” Margalo said softly, sweetly, with a slight smile that gave a glimpse of perfect white teeth.

And that was that.

Nicky followed Margalo through the gate, past the tall, thick green hedges, onto a gray cobblestone path, into the grounds of the Only House With Trees. Nicky's head swiveled as he walked toward the sprawling, clapboarded house. He passed a sundial; a gazebo; a wrought-iron black bench; a cement fishpond, drained and collecting orange leaves. There was a statue, right out in the open—a stone cherub playing a small harp near some bushes. Nicky passed under the trees. Tall, old, healthy trees with thick, corrugated trunks. Nicky gawked up at the canopies of lime green and orange and red.

The path led to a magnificent wooden door, high and wide with a brass knocker the size of Nicky's head. The doorway was guarded on each side by stone lions as tall as Nicky. He looked at the stone lions. The lions looked back with suspicious eyes.

“We'll go around to the kitchen,” Margalo said.

Margalo cut to the right. Nicky followed, sneakers crunching on a gravel path. He watched Margalo walk. Her hair was longer than last time he saw her—it reached halfway to her wide leather belt. A peace symbol was sewn onto the back pocket of her faded, flared jeans. He forced himself to look away from the peace symbol. He stared at the back of her head, at this young woman who smelled of green apple shampoo, the fourth thing that ruined his childhood.

They reached a short set of steps that led to a standard-sized door with a small, round window. Margalo pulled open the door. Nicky could not believe the door to this house in this neighborhood was left unlocked.

He followed Margalo through a darkened breezeway into an airy room. Margalo turned a switch and the room was bathed in soft, yellow light. It was a kitchen, roughly the size of the entire Martini apartment.

“Over here,” Margalo said.

Margalo walked Nicky to one of the sinks and pushed up a stainless-steel lever to turn on the water, which came on with a mighty rush. (The water here did not have to climb five stories to reach the faucet.) She tested the temperature with two fingers and turned down the water pressure. Margalo gently held Nicky's slashed hand and guided it under the warm water. Nicky jumped at the sting, not wanting to jump. He watched the side of Margalo's face as she examined his cut. He inhaled the scent of green apple in her hair.

“I think I have all the glass out of this,” she said. “I don't think it needs stitches.”

Stitches—merely the sound of the word made Nicky queasy.

Margalo snapped a clean kitchen towel out of a drawer. She pressed the towel against Nicky's palm.

“Hold that there,” she ordered. “I'm going to see if my father is home. He can take a look at this.”

Margalo left the room, moving deeper into the grand home, turning on lights as she went along.

A stately red dog trotted loftily into the kitchen. The dog sniffed Nicky's ankles, nosed a water dish, and trotted out. The dog brushed past Margalo in the doorway.

“Martha,” Nicky said out loud.

“You have a good memory,” Margalo said. Now her hair was pulled into a ponytail. She said, “My father is not here.”

Nicky shrugged. “Thank you,” he said. He tried to think of something more to say. Something snappy and clever. But what? He and Margalo had one thing in common.

Nicky said, “Roy …”

“No,” Margalo said. She held up both hands, like a basketball player on defense. She averted her eyes, shook her head from side to side, ponytail wagging. “No, no, no, no.”

“No?” Nicky said.

“No.”

Nicky said, “But Roy …”

“NO,” Margalo said. She touched Nicky's forearm. Her eyes were shiny.

“No,” she said, softly. “Please. No.”

Nicky shrugged. “Okay.”

“I can't hear about Roy. I can't hear how he is, what he is doing.”

“You haven't heard from him?”

Margalo drew in her bottom lip. Her eyes went somewhere far away. “I have not. We have not communicated, not since he left.”

“He hasn't written you?”

“We have not communicated.”

“Oh,” Nicky said. “Oh. Well, if you care, he's okay.”

“Enough,” Margalo said. She wiped the backs of her hands along both cheeks.

Nicky's bottom lip stuck out. He was bewildered, and his customary response to bewilderment was retreat. He said, “I guess I better get home,” hoping she would beg him to stay.

“Yes, you had better,” Margalo said.

She walked Nicky out of the kitchen, through the breezeway, to the outer door. He stepped out into the evening, onto the gravel path. Margalo stood in the half-closed door.

“So long,” Nicky said.

Margalo said quietly, “Good-bye, Nicky.”

Nicky walked along the path, now lit by unseen amber lights. Dead leaves crackled beneath his sneakers. The door hinge squeaked behind him.