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than the Kid, still boys, fifteen years old, both cut up in six pieces
and stuffed in a trash bag which smelled like perished blood. I
don’t tell the Kid about it. I don’t want him to get spooked. Instead
I just pat the bags before I lift them and take a look around.
It’s not even three o’clock, but the Mae Grant playground is empty,
surrounded by sky-high brown brick. Why did they ever build
these projects How did this place go from a dream for the lost to
lost dreams—to forty blocks of tears and sandpaper knuckles and
grim stares over the bouncing ball
I hop back on the truck and it pulls me away. We keep riding
and working. And soon the rusty carcass of the Amtrak dips
below the asphalt—its metallic cling-clang now a rumble under
our wheels—and the street opens up to daylight. There is no more
graffiti. And when I see a narrow island of trees splitting traffic,
I know we’re on 96th and Park Avenue. Green awnings stretch
over the sidewalk, one after another on both sides, and potbellied
doormen, all frocks and black-ties, hover about like penguins
from the Captain Cook. These buildings are just as tall as the
projects, but older and cast a different kind of shadow—longer
and wider—blotches of darkness so grand that when they fall
they flood all the little shadows and make them disappear. The
smell is also different: jasmine, fruit, and a touch of baby powder.
Too different, come to think of it. We stop at the corner and I
jump off. Skip and the Kid are in the cabin, but they can smell it
too.
“Now that’s a sweet ice cream cone on a hot summer day,”
Skip bites his lip and fizzes from his nostrils.
“Mah-rone!” the Kid echoes, rubbing his chin.
I see her. She is in front of the truck, right on the corner,
waiting for the light to change. Tall and smooth like a statue, high
heels, little skirt cut at the thighs, and blonde hair—real blonde—
like streams of liquid gold parted down the middle. I know it’s
real too because no dark roots are showing. And even though she
is wearing sunglasses, those big oval ones with half-yellow shades,
I can tell she is young, eighteen, nineteen at most.
“Damn, she can get it,” Skip tilts his head way down to the
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