Crazy Read Online Free PDF Page B

only one photo of her, one of those sepiatoned black-and-white jobs that had been taken of the two of them in Central Park and then slipped into a cardboard frame with SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S.A. at the top. Already blurry from the softness of the focus, the photo had yellowed and was badly faded so I could only make out that she was smiling and slim and had long wavy hair. I could barely even recognize Pop. Whenever I’d ask him to describe my mom he would always start to cry and then he’d go into the bathroom or he’d put on this black leather cap and go out into the street. I’d open a window, then, and watch him. I’d get worried if I saw him slowly walking toward the river.
    I also stopped asking about her.
    “Why so late, Joey? Almost ten o’clock. You want to eat?”
    Wearing a torn old navy blue sweater and with skin that was the color of a waxed pine floor, Pop had sharp, strong features with very high cheekbones and an aquiline nose that knew who it was. You couldn’t tell that he was over six feet tall because pushing those carts for all those years had curved his posture almost into a crouch.
    “You looking funny,” Pop told me.
    “What do you mean? Funny how?”
    “I don’t know,” he said, appraising me. “Different. Come on, now. You hungry? I fix you something good.”
    That was Pop. Concern about my care and well-being always coming ahead of any talk about discipline or who struck Juan. I thumped myself down into one of the two folding metal chairs set on opposite sides of this sad-looking, tan colored plastic card table just off the kitchen where we’d eat all our meals and I’d also do homework. Pop had made enough money off his trade to upgrade our pitiful furnishings lately, but after Mom died I guess he mostly lost interest in everything but me. Our apartment had only one bedroom and Pop made me sleep there while he slept on the living room sofa.
    “No, I ate, Pop,” I told him.
    “Ate what?”
    I said, “Spaghetti and pie and ice cream.”
    I didn’t think it was such a hot idea to mention the Tokay.
    Pop wrinkled his brow.
    “Spaghetti, Joey? Where? With the Pagliarello family?”
    My first thought was Are you out of your mind?
    “No, Pop. A little restaurant on Fourteenth Street.”
    “Joey, where you get the money? I don’t give you yet allowance for this week.”
    I said, “My friend paid, Pop.”
    “What friend?”
    “A girl at school.”
    Pop came out of his crouch at this, standing straight and tall for a second while his face was a gasp made flesh.
    “You let girl pay for your food?”
    “And a movie,” I threw in before I knew what I was saying.
    That did it, that was all the old man could take, and he launched into a rant about chivalry at first, and then the subject was “manhood what is true and not fakey” and the real and proper order of things and how I’d sinned against the code of some Incas who always made the boys have to wait to have their hearts ripped out until after the girls had gone first. Oh, well, for cripessakes, I knew he didn’t mean what he was yelling, it was really about the worry and the scare that I’d given him by not showing up for dinner, which he couldn’t let on to, of course, this being yet another strict part of the Inca Code. So I bowed my head and took it while pretending to be Galento just waiting for the moment to make his doomed move, which sort of came when I heard a lot of hollering out on the street, and now afraid I was about to miss a beaut of a fight, I kind of snapped and interrupted Pop’s tirade with “Why don’t you take a hike up to Machu Picchu and find yourself an eagle there to tell all your troubles with your Americanized kid!” I jumped up and stomped into the bedroom, making sure to slam the door in the hope of projecting the lying impression that I was the injured party.
    A second later I heard a rapping on the bedroom door.
    “You sure you no hungry, Joey?”
    Once again, that was Pop, that’s how