“Call her fuckincunt” advises Richie Jeskulski as my sister Kathy walks by kicking up orange and red leaves.  I shout the mysterious word from behind a hedge.  A crow flies up from the maple tree as she turns back toward home.  Richie cackles “I showed her, dint I?”

 

            As a skinny four-year-old starting kindergarten, I like hanging out with Jeskulski despite my mother’s warning “Doncha play with him, he’s a bad egg.”  Richie lives halfway around the hank of Hanken Road and is also just starting at LaMonte School but is about twice as tall and devious as I am.  We keep yelling out at the Esposito girls across the street until I hear Kathy’s whistle, my signal to come home.  Dad had promised to take us little kids, Kathy, Karla, and me to Silver Saddle Ranch.  Our Uncle George owned the place and would pop open green bottles of Coca Cola from the big red machine after we rode his horses.  I hadn’t ridden alone and thought this might be the day. 

            Dad, the second youngest of nine, had followed his oldest brother to New Jersey in 1950 for work in George’s trucking company, leaving Mom in Kentucky with Mickey, Karen, Alan, and newborn Bobby.   None months later, shamed into retrieving his family by his own mother, Dad carted them out of the southern Appalachians in an old tractor-trailer.  The southern born kids were initially called hicks by neighborhood Italian gangs.   “Hey Kenfucky, get the fucky off our court”, chided Louie Patullo when Mickey tried to join a basketball game.  But by 1960 the southern drawl was gone from all but Mom, and Dad was supporting seven of us young’uns by driving all week and fixing up trucks on the weekends. 

 

Kenfuckians

 

            Hearing Kathy’s trademark whistle into her cupped hands, I hop on my rusty red bike and peddle down the concrete sidewalk for home.  Rattling over the cracks reminds me of my last mad dash home: 

 

“Stand up on your seat and pull that handle” commanded Richie, pointing to a little white box sitting in the middle of a red stripe up on a telephone poll in front of his house.

 

“I can’t reach it” I lied, afraid to stand on the tricycle.

 

“Guess I’ll have to do it” he conceded.

 

I held the handlebars while he stepped up onto the seat, stood on tiptoes, and tugged the handle as he jumped.  A loud bell rang out from the box so we scattered, Richie around his house into the backyard and me peddling as fast as I could.  I was nearly home when a fire truck came blaring by.  After laying low for a couple weeks, I had only recently ventured around the block again again.   

 

After my second dash home now on a two-wheeler, I hop off in our driveway imagining I’d just galloped home on Uncle George’s white horse from the Ajax commercial.  Kathy smirks as I open the kitchen door.

 

“C’mon you girls” blurts Dad as he stands up from the table.

 

“He aughta go too” says Mom, turning from the sink to see tears streaming down my cheeks.

 

“Shut your bigodamouth, I ain’t takin no cursin sonovabitch” spits Dad, stomping out to wait in the car.