Last night the dog days officially arrived: the oscillating fan made its appearance on the dinner table. Every summer, we get a week or two, usually in August, with hundred-degree temperatures and hundred-percent humidity – our mother calls them the dog days. The days are oppressive, and the nights aren’t much better. Under these extreme conditions, the normal trappings of civilization start to break down. We start to break down. We start behaving in ways that violate everything we claim to believe in. The heat strips us to our essence and saps our energy and our appetites. Otherwise, I don’t think cannibalism would be out of the question.
Last night, when my father got home from work, he wore a glazed expression. Without saying a word or making eye contact, he took off his tie, hung it on the doorknob, and just kept going. He stripped down to the barest civilities, like some boxer entering the ring – sleeveless tee, Bermuda shorts, black dress socks, and patent-leather slippers. Mom, my sister Deb, and I stood in silence and watched as he emerged from my parents’ bedroom, walked down the hallway, and descended into the basement. Through the open basement door, we heard sounds of heavy objects being dragged from one side of the basement to the other, boxes being opened and closed, light chains being pulled repeatedly. And then all sounds stopped. A moment later, he reappeared carrying the oscillating fan with the solemnity of a rabbi carrying the Torah.
The oscillating fan is older than I am, with styling out of the ‘50s and solid steel construction. It harkens back to a time when obsolescence was a failure rather than an objective. This thing was made for the ages. It stands on the table at once hideous and holy, regarded with a mixture of reverence and loathing. We always called it “the oscillating fan” to distinguish it from the box fan, which usually sat in the living room where the consensus (another word for my father) thought it could serve the highest common good. It, too, was all-metal, with less stylistic flair than the oscillating fan. And I think I have the edge over it in years.
About the time that my father loses all concern for respectability or even human society, my mother becomes a broken record. In her defense, she is usually normal. She generally carries on conversations with people and often quite pleasantly. But when the heat starts to get to her, she starts just talking – to no one. Like a cricket, if she’s sitting still, she’ll sit quietly, with a lot of sighing. But if she gets up – say to get some ice water or a snack or just to look out the window – it starts, and it repeats, and it makes no sense. Last year my sister, Deb, set some of her babbling to the tune of The Banana Boat Song and performed the whole thing bouncing up and down in the shallow end of the Berger’s pool:
Boy-O! Bo-o-o-oy-O!
Dog days come an’ I wan’ ‘em to go.
Boy-O! Bo-o-o-oy-O!
Dog days come an’ I wan’ ‘em to go.
It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.
Dog days come an’ I wan’ ‘em to go.
Weather not fit for humanity.
Dog days come an’ I wan’ ‘em to go.
‘Ey Mister Weatherman, send a couple rain clouds.
Dog days come an’ I wan’ ‘em to go.
‘Ey Mister Weatherman, send a couple rain clouds.
Dog days come an’ I wan’ ‘em to go.
Ninety-five, ninety-six, ninety-seven — ugh!
Dog days come an’ I wan’ ‘em to go.
Ninety-five, ninety-six, ninety-seven — ugh!
Dog days come an’ I wan’ ‘em to go.
She nailed it.
With little relief to be had in the house, my parents were up past midnight playing rummy and solitaire at the dinner table in the yellow incandescent light of the fake-candle chandelier. Any game that didn’t require speaking to another human being. In our house, the kitchen and dining room are one and the same, but for the sake of decorum, they’re separated by a three-foot-high half-wall. Most days, the fluorescent kitchen lights flood the dining room. But on these dog-day summer evenings, we’re always careful to turn off the kitchen lights, as if someone (my father) thought they contributed to the heat, but no one had the energy to argue about it. This left the table and those in its miserable orbit cast in a saffron glow, like something that could fit right into Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” The heat, even at night, drives the unceasing sound of crickets and tree frogs to a pitch that gets on everyone’s last nerve. Moths and crane flies attracted by the yellow light buzz around the window screens and the screen door, and then, when you’re not expecting it, a June bug will hit one of the screens really hard – Bang! – like a shot from a .22. Your last nerve, boy-o.
Last night, my sister sat in for a couple hands of rummy before dragging herself off to bed. I’d taken my pillow and poured myself out on the floor right in front of the box fan, which my father had positioned in the doorway to the living room in hopes of moving the thick, stagnant air the length of the house straight through the front hall, kitchen, and into the dining room.
Unlike the oscillating fan, which only appeared for a week or two each summer, the box fan usually came up from the basement around the first of July and hung around through mid-September. The all-steel box fan moved a lot of air and made a lot of noise. Sitting close to it came at the cost of not being able to hear anything going on in the rest of the house – conversation, television, stereo, anything. That trade-off was fine with me. I was usually reading a library book or flipping through the Sears catalog or pounding a baseball into my mitt while I listened to the Sox game on a transistor radio with a single earphone.
And morning brought little improvement. We were all dragging after getting fitful sleep and little of it. And we came to breakfast with poor appetites and worse attitudes. Leaning against the kitchen sink, my mother stared blankly out the window and said to no one, “Hey, Mister weatherman, bring us some storm clouds.” I looked from my mother, still staring out the window, to my father, in shirt and tie, with his head in his newspaper.
He was seated at the far end of the table, his chair turned to the side as he stubbornly tried to read the morning edition of the Telegraph. He held the paper up in front of his face and shook the pages to full attention each time the breeze from the fan passed over it. With almost every pass of the fan, he would mutter one of his patented exclamations. “Go slammit!” It would be another four or five years before I would realize that “for cryin’ out loud,” “shiitake souvlaki,” “mudger-fudgin’,” and “Codnesset” were not quaint exclamations in use elsewhere in the known world, but thinly disguised versions of the juiciest bombs used by everyone else’s dads. “Pizza ship!”
We were all in the same house, but we were each in our own worlds. I had come to the table with my Revell one-thirty-second scale model Supermarine Spitfire – an eight-inch version of the plane that had won the Battle of Britain. With a propeller that moved freely and the appropriate camouflage pattern and authentic service markings of the period, the plane banked through the oscillating simulated hurricane-force winds as I held it up to the moving grill of the fan. I sat on the side of the table close to the fan. That way I caught the breeze at the end of its travel. The way the gears worked, it seemed to pause an extra beat or two before it started back in the other direction. And, of course, it was great to get the full effect of the breeze from sitting so close. As the fan started back toward the other side of the table, I moved the plane out as far as my arm could reach, the prop positioned to get every bit of airflow possible. (“K-r-r-rap on a cracker!”) And then I’d just sit there watching, waiting motionless for the table-top tempest to turn back on us, as it traveled to the far reaches of the room and then teased its way back again. (“Shut the front door!”) And the cycle would repeat. I’d hold her out toward the middle of the table. Then her prop would start to catch the breeze, increasing to top speed as I pulled it back toward me. I’d lead her through a graceful banked turn, and then follow the fan out again with my elegant Spitfire – until its prop slowed and eventually stopped (“Sun of a biscuit!”) and I was left longing once again for its tantalizing return, waiting, wilting.
My mother brought toast with concord grape jelly and deposited it on the table. No one looked at it. No one touched it. (“Boy-O boy, it’s gonna be a hot one!”) No one was cooking this morning. And no one really wanted much to eat, especially anything hot. (“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.”) (“Shut the fu-ront door!”)
My sister Deb appeared in the living room. She turned on the Today Show and then planted herself on the sofa, pulling her feet up beneath her. I had no appetite for jellied toast or conversation. (“It really is the humidity. But it’s the heat, too.”) I got up from the table and went into the living room to resume my position from the night before.
Now encapsulated by the roaring slipstream of the box fan, I turned my attention to the airflow over the wing surfaces of my illustrious Spitfire. The aeronautics and sleek design seemed sufficient, even in a scale model, to achieve lift, the plane rising from my hand – or maybe I imagined it.
The Spitfire, so named for its Eight. Thirty. Caliber. Browning. Machine guns. Opposing pilots quake at the sight!
But what that name came to mean to the people of Britain – and anyone who flew one or fought one or simply saw one up close – was the graceful contours of its unique elliptical wing. The compound curves that flow from the nose through the wing to the tail. Reduced drag and increased speed up to Three. Hundred. Seventy. Eight. MPH.
I imagined my airship maneuvering in and out of towering cloud banks to avoid German fighters; and climbing and turning out of the sun to spring furious attacks on unsuspecting bomber formations. The voice of Winston Churchill provided the voiceover: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets . . . I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat!” He waved his top hat with one hand and stabbed the other fist into the air. “It’s beastly already, this heat and humidity,” as he placed his top hat back on his head and clamped down on his cigar with his bulldog jaw. Ultimately, as the sun set over a free Britain on the final day of October 1940, Hitler had lost his stomach for air combat over Britain – thanks to the Supermarine Spitfire and the brave men who flew them!
As my father prepared to leave for work and my mother settled down at the table with a cup of iced tea and some magazine or other, I parked my plane on the coffee table and headed out to the garage where my bike beckoned. Even during the dog days, a kid could escape on a bike – escape from the heat, from society, from whatever ails him.
For her birthday, my sister had been given a glorious 3-speed 26-inch Schwinn Traveler with dual hand brakes and pink-and-white handlebar streamers. Then, without any prompting, in an impressive show of sleight of hand and misdirection, my father assembled the best parts available from the household’s other bikes and basically gave me my sister’s old bike – a single-speed 20-inch coaster-brake bike with a banana seat and raised handlebars. It could pass as pretty cool, with one glaring exception: The bike had a girls’ frame – no ball-buster bar. The old-style girl’s frame had two s-curve riser bars connecting the seat tube to the steering tube. I give my old man credit for good intentions but bad follow-through. My sister’s old bike, the source of the frame in what’s now my bike, had come with an additional bar that could be installed between the top of the seat tube and where the uppermost s-curve met the steering tube. It vaguely resembled the external gas tank from a P-51 Mustang. When he’d originally announced his plans, he’d left the bar on the kitchen table, a visible promise to deliver on his plan. My mother had promptly moved it to the bookcase by the garage door as soon as his back was turned. From there it’d made its way into the garage where it sat for a couple of weeks on the workbench. And then my father eventually moved it to the storage shelves on the far side of the garage, where it continues to sit today. I had basically been sentenced to a summer of riding a girl’s bike. To make matters worse, Mark Robbins right [next store] won – won – a new Raleigh Chopper at the July Fourth Lions Club Picnic Raffle. I must admit it was glorious: a sixteen-inch front wheel, a twenty-four-inch rear wheel with a racing-slick tire, high rise handlebars, banana seat with a back rest, dual handbrakes, and a 5-speed gear-shifter mounted on the top bar. The visual effect was that of the Zebra Three Gran Torino from “Starsky and Hutch.” Meanwhile, I was riding the equivalent of a beat up Chevy Chevette.
But this week there’s no Mark Robbins [next store] on his dreamy new chopper. The Robbins are on vacation. Pony League is over for the summer. (“We was robbed!”) And every year the Robbins go on vacation right after the regular season ends. They go somewhere in Maine, some campground on the fringes of civilization where all they do is canoe and play ping-pong and put nickels in a jukebox. No payphones, no toaster ovens. The Dunlops are gone, too. Gone to see their grandfolks in New Hampshire. That means I’m left with no one my age except Bernie Rochefort – or just Roach, or, if you prefer, Roach-face, Roach-fanny, Roach-fart, or any other combination of “roach” with any word beginning with “f”. (Yeah – that’s the best one.) We pick on him not just because his name is easy to make fun of, but he also has a weird mouth. His lips are constantly puckered. They seemed always to show his front teeth. And then when he actually smiles, he looks like one of those Scandinavian cloth dolls with the painted elf faces. Roach is normally fourth or fifth on my list of kids I want to hang out with in the neighborhood, but this week, it’s him and me. I can only play the hand I’ve been dealt.
Still, as a kid on a bike – even a girl’s bike – this summer has been marked by reaching new destinations. For three or four years, now, we’ve been able to bike as far as the dairy bar (five cents for one scoop, a dime for two, fifteen cents for three) or the Cumberland Farms in Ware Center. This spring we spent a lot of time exploring our road, Greenwich Plains Rd., in the other direction – past the horse pasture, past the farm with the goon on the front porch, past that blue house, and as far as the gravel pit at the intersection with Cummings Road. Then, right after school let out, five of us followed our road all the way to where it runs into the reservoir. That was a cool ride, but there’s always teenagers hanging out at the reservoir, so no thanks. The road by the horse pasture is a great straight strip – perfect for racing bikes. Then the road takes a turn and you hit a little rise that takes the wind out of your sails. Then a little downhill stretch follows as you go past the Krols’ farmhouse where the retard sits. And then you hit the biggest hill on the street. So, you have to get over that rise and then get back up to speed as fast as you can to have a chance to make it all the way up that hill without getting off your bike. But you’ve got plenty of incentive. That derp is usually sitting there on the porch staring out at the road with his tongue hanging out. My mother says he’s “touched by God” and then laughs. She calls him a full halfwit. Just simple from birth, she says. But you wouldn’t want him to come after you. My father says he prolly has super-human strength – common in the case of mental defectives. They say they took him to the state hospital and came right back with him. They wouldn’t take him. Probably too dangerous.
So, for today, I figure I’ve got three options: One – just lie around the house. The hell with that. Two – grab my army-surplus web belt and fill up my Scout canteen and explore Cummings Road on my bike. If I make it to the end of Cummings, I can get to Doanes Road and then come out at Ware Center and complete a loop, about a twelve-mile ride. That would be something new. Or three – see if Roach can come out. Maybe he’s up for exploring down Cummings Road and Doanes Road. Or maybe four – get my belt, fill my canteen with ice water, swing by Roach’s, see if he wants to come along. If so, fine. If not, the hell with him.
So, I headed over to Roach’s – it’s just three doors down. I get off my bike, drop the kickstand, and walk up to the door. I have to knock pretty hard because they have a sun porch. And they’re weird about people entering their sun porch to knock on the inside door. So, you have to knock really hard. I’m about to knock harder, when I see Roach’s mom coming through their living room to the door. It’s not good when a kid’s parents come to the door. Sometimes it means they’re doing chores or grounded or not wanting to go outside. And sometimes it just means you’ll have to talk to a grownup. “Good morning, Missus Rochefort. Can Bernard come out?”
“Let me see.” She turns and sings soprano, “Bernard, your little friend’s here.” Turning back to me, she says, “Just a minute.” She closes the door and goes back into the house. I can see her heading back through their living room and meeting Bernie as he reaches the bottom of the stairs. I can’t hear what’s being said, but his face falls and he shakes his head in resignation. His mother continues up the stairs.
Bernie comes to the door and sticks his head out. “Hi, Jack. I’ll be right out, but my mother says I have to bring my cousin along.” Without further explanation, he disappears into the house again and I can see a pair of tan legs descending the stairs. They’re attached to a pair of navy-blue shorts and a green floral top. The face that was attached was more normal – not like Bernie’s. The eyes were smiley but in a more pleasing way. As she crosses the porch, I can see she’s maybe an inch or two taller than me. She still has a boyish figure, but there is definitely a hint of some styling, some compound curves that remind me of something and at the same time seem like something altogether new.
“Hi.” I played it cool. I might have to find a way to free myself from this situation. “You’re Bernie’s cousin?”
“Yup.”
I turned to Bernie. “You never mentioned having any cousins?”
“I don’t have to tell you everything, Jack.” Bernie seemed to be trying to look like he was in charge in front of his cousin. Bernie’s never been in charge in his life.
“Where you from?”
“Woostuh.”
“Gee, sorry to hear that.”
“Oh. You’re from someplace better? Or do you just live . . . here?” She delivered the line with a pained smile and a squint. Well played. Roach had never mentioned cousins. That meant either he didn’t want anyone to know about them or they didn’t want anyone to know about him. She actually seemed . . . pretty cool.
I ignored her barb and redirected at Bernie,
“Maybe you should introduce us. That might be a nice thing to do.” I gave him an exaggerated head nod. I turned to his cousin, “I’m Jack.”
“Claudette.” She tilted her head slightly as she said it.
“Claudette?” I smiled. “What do people call you? They don’t call you ‘Claudette’ every time they talk to you, do they?”
“We call her ‘Claudzilla’ most of the time!” Bernie interjected, stepping forward slightly. He was clearly trying to establish his position in this new group.
She shot him a look like she was cracking a whip. “Bernie, no one calls me that,” she said holding up her fist, “and lives!” Turning back to me, she replied in a normal tone, “I go by Etta.”
“Who calls you ‘Etta’?” Bernie blurted out, as if it was pulled out of thin air. “No one calls you Etta!”
“My friends at school, that’s who!” Again, she turned from an angry look directed at Bernie to a more pleasant attitude toward me. Then she glanced quickly back at Bernie, “Kids in sixth grade are a lot more grown up than fifth-graders.” Her eyes widened to emphasize “lot” and she almost spit out “fifth”.
“Yeah, Bernie.” I piled on just for the fun of dissing on the Roach – and just in case Etta thought I might be a sixth grader.
Bernie tried to ignore my cut altogether. “You know,” he turned to look at his cousin. “Etta’s family lived here like six-seven years ago – up around Cummings Road.”
“Really? I was thinking of maybe exploring up that way.”
“Tha’d be cool!” she blurted out. “We could go by my old house . . .” She seemed to catch herself. Too much enthusiasm. She continued in a more casual, measured tone. “Bernie says I’ve developed a Woostuh accent,” she continued, “but you should hear our landlady tock. She’s like eighty yeahs oold and she tocks wickid fast. She dun’t say ‘Woostuh’ like normal people. She says, ‘Wista.’ She talks really, really fast.”
“Yeah, Wooster’s, what, less than forty miles away?” I followed up. “But people there talk like they’re from another planet. As bad as Boston – worse than Boston!”
“Yeah. Everyone should talk like theyuh from Wayuh. Right.” She looked away dismissively. I turned toward Bernie, but I watched her from the corner of my eye. Looking at Bernie, she continued, “So, we’re riding bikes?”
I turned to Bernie, “Does she have a bike? Do you have a bike she can ride?”
Bernie looked at me. “No-o-o-o.” He gave me the long No, like it was obvious. “But you can sit two on your bike, right?”
I looked back and forth between the two of them. “Ye-e-ah. But I may not be able to make it up the big hill past the farm with someone else behind me.”
Etta jumped in, “So we’ll walk up the hill.” She looked from me to Bernie. “That’s the Krol farm, right? They’re my cousins. Our name’s Krol, too.”
I turned again to Bernie. “So, you’re related to the Krols! You never mentioned that!”
“Well, it never really came up.” Bernie was on the defensive big-time. “They’re like second cousins to me, like hardly related.”
“Well, let’s get going, then.” I looked at Bernie and then turned my bike to face down the driveway while Bernie retrieved his bike from the open garage. I looked at Etta, “Hop on.”
She rested her hands on my shoulders to steady herself as she stepped over the seat and then moved her hands to grab the seat directly beneath her. “G’head.” And we started off, a little unsteady at first, then we smoothed out as we gained speed. Bernie jumped out a little ahead of us. We went down his driveway and then out past our house and a couple more houses and then we were into the straight stretch by the horse pasture. I built up speed on the long straightaway. My thoughts returned to soaring through the skies over England. We’d been scrambled: radar picked up bombers headed for London. RAF fighter squadron four-one takes to the skies. Unconsciously, I had begun growling like my Rolls Royce twelve-cylinder Merlin engine: “R-r-r-r-r-r!
“What you say?”
“Oh – I was pretending like I’m flying a fighter over London during the Battle of Britain.”
Etta said nothing for a moment. “Ok, be a dawk.”
I said nothing for a moment. “R-r-r-r-r-r-r.” I’m pedaling hard, picking up speed as we approached the rise before the farmhouse. We actually made it over fairly easily. And then as we started downhill I saw the goon sitting on the porch. He was sitting there like he always does, in his overalls, staring toward the road with his tongue hanging out.
But then he sits up, like he recognizes us. He seems excited. He gets up from the sofa. He’s freaking me out. He’s like six feet tall. If he comes after us – but I’m catching a little extra speed after that rise and pedaling hard. We’re going to clear this hill and leave him behind.
As I started to really attack the hill, I had to stand on my pedals. I needed all twelve cylinders of my magnificent liquid-cooled Rolls Royce Merlin engine running at maximum RPMs, cranking out 650 boiler horse power in order to make it. But each pedal stroke was harder than the last. We were losing speed. About halfway up the hill, I felt my center of gravity shifting. Turning back, I saw Etta turning toward the farmhouse and waving. And then we entered a stall. My pedals were now immoveable and time itself stood still. What happened next was over in an instant, but it felt we were joined to eternity. For one moment glory mixed with disaster as my bike’s forward progress completely stopped. Me and my bike were both completely motionless for one moment outside of time. And then motion started in retrograde. And accelerated. I could feel we were moving back and to the left. I instinctively reached back with my left arm to try to prevent Etta from falling. I swung my right arm across my body as I tried to break my own fall. And everything got crazy. I ended up hitting Etta in the mouth with my left hand. My hand continued and struck her somewhere on the way to her left shoulder – I think I know where. She then turned with catlike grace and caught herself with her hands and her left foot and executes a perfect roll. I, on the other hand, saw pavement rudely rising to meet me. With my left arm down and my right arm out, I managed a clumsy barrel roll on my left shoulder. I may have hit my head. I ended up lying on the sandy shoulder of the road. I was at least dizzy if not momentarily blacked out. I couldn’t be sure. Either way, I was momentarily disoriented. I saw stars and it took me a moment to make sense of staring into the sun and a hazy cloudless sky. I heard the angry sounds of Etta critiquing my piloting skills. And then I saw a hulking shadow moving rapidly into my field of vision – new overalls breathing through an open mouth with his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth. He eclipsed the sun and then the eclipsed sun began to crest around his head. Thoughts flashed through my hazy head. Sol Invictus crowned with light? No. And then out of the dark chaos, I saw a peaceful face in overalls leaning down toward me. “Little man, why do you persecute me?” And the face pulled back and became once again the goon with the tongue hanging out the side of his mouth. “Bebe, Bebe! You okay?” the hulk was frantic, yelling. “Bebe. Ando love Bebe!” The hulk was grabbing Etta in a bear hug and picking her up in the air. Still struggling to regain clarity and balance, I sprang to my feet, unsteady, and charged at the overalls to try to free Etta from her attacker. Etta, who had been distracted from her tirade about my piloting, had turned with a smile and joyfully greeted the hulk in overalls. Then she turned back to me. “What’re you doin’? Y’idgit! That’s my cozzin! Lee malone! Don’t tock t‘im like he’s some tod.”
Bernie, who had made the top of the hill easily, had by now circled back and stopped his bike at the crest of the hill. He shouted down toward the group, “Hi, Ando! You guys okay?” Bernie seems to be late for everything.
I stepped back and allowed the two a moment of greeting. After hugging and greeting Etta, Ando turned to me and smiled. He patted me on the head. He shook his head like an Irish setter. Then he smiled. “Nice . . . little man.” Ando turned to pick up my bike. He made a show of brushing it off, ineffectually.
“Ando,” Etta explained, “we’re tryna get up this hill. But dawko, heah, didn’t know when to stop and wok.”
Ando looked back and forth between the two of us and the bike. “Ando can help.” He nodded his head and moved his tongue from one side of his mouth to the other.
“Come on,” I started to say, “Let’s just walk up and go from there.”
Etta gave me a stare. “Be man enough to accept help when it’s awffid.” We had somehow transcended the dog days.
Ando steadied my bike as I climbed back on and Etta climbed on behind me. As I looked forward up the hill, an unseen force began to move us up, faster, faster, until we seemed to fly over the crest of the hill. But London was not beneath us. I looked back over my shoulder, and I could see Ando smiling, waving. And then, seeming to realize for the first time that he was standing in the road, he ducked his head and ran back toward the house.
We continued our intended trek. We rode in silence until we turned onto Cummings Road. I heard a voice in my ear. “You know, that was a pretty bone-headed move back there, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you know that was all your fault, don’t you?”
“Bu-u-ut you turned and . . . “
“Don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
One by one, Etta moved her hands from clutching the bottom of the seat to holding onto my web belt.
On Cummings Road, we had little shade. The direct sun was sharp, and I was sweating, but together with the motion of the bike, the effect was cooling. Before long we had turned onto Doane’s and we were coasting down toward Ware Center. By the time we’d made it through Ware Center and completed the turn toward home, Etta had gone from holding onto my belt to resting her hands on my shoulders and her chin on her left hand. My Spitfire had been talking in my ear the whole trip.