Kicking the Sky

ALSO BY ANTHONY DE SA

Barnacle Love

I
T 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 neighbourhood 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.

Little Boy
^s

One night he forgot to put her under glass, or else the sheep
got out without making any noise, during the night …
Then the bells are all changed into tears!

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

T
HE 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 neighbourhood 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 neighbourhood 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 neighbours’ 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.