Joan Zimmermann was born in New York, New York and currently resides in the state of Virginia. She has been a writer and editor since 1994, largely in technology and biomedicine. She has been an independent consultant with NASA since 2001. She holds a B.A in English literature/pre-medical studies and an M.S. in Biology. She selects her reading material from a number of large and disorganized bookcases and divides her remaining time between her grandchildren and a sweetly disobedient senior shiba inu. She has been writing fiction and poetry since she was a child.

Ronnie

By Joan Zimmermann

The southeast wind carried a sound to my ear. At first I took it for the school bell, a block away, attached to Public School 306 in the East New York section of Brooklyn. Its falsetto scream, unstilled in the summer time, conjured in me the nightmare scenario of nuclear holocaust. As I awakened, I decided it couldn’t be the bell. The wail was too near, too harsh. I finally recognized it as the car wash, across the street.  The grinding roar rose an octave, and began to sound like it truly sounded: a huge vacuum cleaner.

From my aunt’s apartment, my new home, I had watched a steady march of washed cars as the weeks passed. The whine that ended my sleep was forced from the depths of a barracks-like building made of dust-gray brick, darkened by city pollutants. The structure looked like a modernist rendition of a resting cat, with two low side walls serving as its paws, while from its mouth issued a stridor of gears, pulleys and rusted chains. Two attendants stood at the mouth, jumpsuit-clad incisors, holding flapping cloths that served alternately as tools of trade and mutual torture. Throughout the summer days they buffed automobiles, razzed impecunious tippers, and shouted taunts to one another. But as I listened sleepily on this morning, a diversion arrived. Above the wheeze of air dryers and clangor of metal I could hear them turn their attentions to a feminine target. Yawping and whistling replaced the aimless deprecations, and I could easily imagine a flame-faced girl, much like myself, fleeing the hail of sound.

Victim gone, the rush of air continued and the chain conveyance ground onward like the city itself, a hard, jerry-built machine. It was early and the impending midday heat, yet another new feature of urban life, felt due to be formidable. One wall of the car wash, facing the street that divided the car wash from my apartment building, was covered as if by ivy with vermiform scripts. “Eddie N LaWanda 4EVER.” “New Lots Boys Rule.” A peace sign. Overpowering these assertions in font and philosophy was the much-modified phrase, “WHITE POWER.” “WHITE” had been crossed out and replaced with a vehement “BLACK.” In turn, “BLACK” had been effaced with a single slash of spray paint and replaced with “PUERTO RICAN.” “PUERTO RICAN POWER” as it read, was appended with the word “SUCKS,” drawn in fat red letters.

Across from the car wash was a shopping mall. In it were the A&P supermarket, Brooklyn-style, with gefilte fish jars and boxes of fatback pork sitting cheek by jowl. Against one peeling white wall of the supermarket were several marine-green dumpsters, overflowing with discarded produce and supermarket jetsam. The parking apron was uneven and cracked, the lines of the parking spaces fading unchecked into the hot tar. In the absence of traffic, latch-key children staged battles with shopping carts. Sometimes their play would spill over into earnest warfare, sparked by rising temperatures. Later in the day, the wind would shift and bear along its back the insufferable stench of the nearby Sheepshead Bay landfill. Its odor was so powerful that shutting windows and stuffing towels into the doorway cracks could not allay its onslaught. The bouquet of generations of rubbish, coupled with the sharp odor of low-tide marsh, would lay trapped in the thick layers of hothouse air, immovable. On such days, the hour of noon passed with excruciating delay. Indoors, women skimmed their foreheads and snapped at prostrate offspring, the afternoon suspended in torpor, slouching toward the dinner hour. As darkness fell, the street corners emptied themselves, the tough kids betrayed by sensitive nostrils and empty stomachs. Street lamps would waver and ignite, and the sultry minutes would tick through the project canyons, clouds holding the night at bay with reflected light. Some nights a merciful wind would turn toward the east to rush the smell of refuse out to the tidewater marshes, and continue its weightless way to Rockaway and Montauk and the mysterious currents of the Atlantic. On such nights, signs of life would recur, kids spilling back onto the streets to drink in the fresh air. Clustered in groups determined by race and ethnicity, they related exaggerated sagas of the latest fist fight, smoked cigarettes filched from parental caches, and made adolescent love to their sweethearts.

As I lay in a pocket-sized room, wedged in a trundle bed between my two cousins, I reviewed the possibilities of the coming day. I was beginning to forget the distant moan of the Long Island Railroad locomotives, a call that once assured me I was safe, with my parents snoring in the carpeted depths of the room next to mine. Now I fell asleep to the sound of sirens and the continual rush of cars down the through-street around the corner. In my aunt’s apartment, where my mother and brother and I were newly housed, seven people made do in a cramped space. Aluminum lawn chairs substituted for armchairs, though there was an authentic sofa upon which my mother slept, inches from the empty air conditioner box, where her ever-present bottle of vodka lay hidden. The linoleum floor, institutional brown and flecked with shards of beige, managed to remain cool and inviting in the summer heat. My little brother Mike was stowed in with my other cousin in an adjacent bedroom. We had stopped our sibling fuss, caught up in this novel drama of survival and poverty. I did laundry twice a week in the dank basement of the apartment building, where the echoes startled me. I shopped for groceries, slopped detergent-soaked sponges over the terrace floor every Saturday, and cleaned the bathtub and sink every Sunday. There were no longer any books to lose myself in; the encyclopedia was packed away in “storage,” my mother said.

My mother had not found a job, and had indeed not tried very hard, preferring instead to curse my father each day as she cried into her vodka; he was disparu, a ghost. The vision of my father, his snappy fedora on his head, was now a painful memory. From my elevation of eleven years, I was also busy worrying about the crevice beneath my feet, swallowing my brother and myself. Mike had become a stranger to me since we’d moved away from the safety of capacious homes and mother substitutes in every house on the block. Each day, his ten-year-old figure disappeared into the streets before breakfast. The lure of Speed Racer and Rice Krispies commercials could keep him spellbound for only so long. On the street, I would see him from time to time, talking to people I did not know and given a chance, would assiduously avoid. What repelled me out of fear and catechized habit drew him like a hummingbird to a red petunia.

My mother had changed, too. I’d quickly learned not to show the vaguest hint of unhappiness. Any evidence of weakness on my part elicited mockery, rage, or worse, hours of her self-pitying monologue, delivered at me with savage pointedness, implying that the current debacle was somehow my fault. In her determined effort to find another man, she let me know that Mike and I were two little deal-breakers. My mother would brighten instantaneously, however, when she instructed me to do things for her. She praised me for helping with the housework and encouraged additional signs of strength and dependability. I ran her bath and fetched her drinks, lit her cigarettes, hoping to fend off her drunken tirades. And so it devolved upon me, eventually, to be my brother’s keeper in every sense. And whenever I was asked to search out my brother out for whatever reason—lunch, dinner, bedtime, I had to find Ronnie first.

Ronnie was the smallest and eldest of a trio of brothers who lived down the block. His skin was so dark that it had a sheen of blue in the evening twilight, and he had the worst case of buck teeth I had ever seen. His rolling gait fell somewhere between the stroll of a raven and the limp of a peg-legged pirate. I was closer in age and temperament to Ronnie’s younger brother Clifton, a quiet and serious student. When I wasn’t looking for Mike, I steered clear of Ronnie most of the time, only nodding to him while walking the dog or on my way to the supermarket. I had decided early on in that in East New York, it was wise to at least be on recognizable terms with the tough guys. One was less likely to commit destructive acts upon one’s familiars, a schoolyard lesson even in suburbia. I’d heard the rumors of Ronnie’s nefarious doings, always circulating but never confirmed. He could spit with accuracy and distance, impelling liquid deftly between the gap in his front teeth. You had to watch your shoes around Ronnie. At fifteen, he sucked his thumb in broad daylight and if anyone had anything to say about it, they didn’t say it. He had a dazzling smile common to angels and criminals. My brother and Ronnie had quickly become as thick as junior thieves, although Ronnie was older than the both of us.

In our new neighborhood, a stretch of junkyards ran toward a distant parkway for about a half-mile. In the opposite direction, there were several blocks of partially constructed apartment houses. In the midst of this unfinished urban sprawl was a driving range that was being diminished on one side by encroaching development, and on the other by the automobile graveyards. Behind the range in the littered fields lived ringneck pheasants and cottontail rabbits. Packs of the feral guard dogs would often go hunting there. I could hear them on humid summer nights, nails clicking on the sidewalk as they returned to their beds of rusted car parts. My own dog would turn into an unrecognizable fury upon hearing her cousins, hair stiff and upright along her spine. Mike would tell me how Ronnie often taunted the dogs for fun, knowing (hoping) that they could not respond in kind when they were locked behind tall fences. In Brooklyn I learned to fear the pack humans more than the pack dogs, but the only time I had to think about the dogs was when I passed near the junkyards. The ones not bound by chains could hurl themselves six or eight feet into the air and almost clear the fence tops. I considered myself a brave soul, but flying, slavering curs had the potential to unnerve me.

I rolled out of bed and started morning chores. It was a weekday so I was tapped to do the shopping while my aunt worked, my mother moped, and my cousins went about their teenaged business. I took the time to waste the better part of the morning. First I stopped off at the library to renew my copy of The Once and Future King. I had begun to hope that my own lineage was somehow Arthurian, and visions of being rescued by my real family sometimes soothed my spirits like an ermine-lined cape. Afterward, I visited the candy store, owned by a kind old fellow with faded blue numbers on the papery skin of his arm. His dark eyes were witness to a history with which I was yet unfamiliar. He sold comic books, wax Coke bottles and straws full of sweet-and-sour colored powders, one thousand permutations of bubble gum, parachute soldiers, Pennzy Pinkies, balsa wood airplanes, Rat Finks, and floss-haired, jewel-eyed trolls. The air of his store was redolent with the smell of newsprint, his occasional cigars, and the sugary breath of his little customers. After a long detour in his shop, I finally bought groceries and returned home at noon.

My mother emerged from the back rooms unsteadily as I entered the apartment. The sofa, flanked by the beach chairs, was still covered with rumpled bedding. The TV muttered midday advertisements. She asked me where Mike was. I avoided her eyes as I quickly unpacked the groceries, and I was back out the door in seconds.

Ronnie and Mike could sometimes be found in the driving range, collecting golf balls for cash. I wandered around the range, stepping through fruit-scented wild rose and bitter green saw grass. The range was built on landfill, and sand showed itself in patches on the surface of the trucked-in soil. The apartment buildings were said to be sinking at the rate of a few millimeters per year. It was warm and breezy, and clouds were beginning to condense over Sheepshead Bay. There were a few rabbit tracks and a large waste space separating me from the Belt Parkway, half a mile away. The air was filled with the warm perfume of sand and roses. I took advantage of this illusory sanctuary, and scanned the ground for moon shells and pretty pebbles, concentration bearing me away. Eventually, the angle of the sun pricked my conscience and I headed back in the direction of the projects, low-income housing built during the post-war era. The architecture was artless and ugly, but efficient. Earlier that summer I had met one friend who lived in one of the immense structures, and I decided to pay Sheila a visit while checking around for my brother.

I passed a junkyard where heaps of former automobiles stretched away from the fences. Tire hillocks emitted a rubbery aroma. Occasionally a human purveyor of the scrap trade could be spied idly smoking a cigarette or drinking a grape Nehi while perched on a baking slab of concrete, but no one was visible today. No dogs came running to the fence, and I didn’t spy any on the tire piles or chassis stacks either. I made my way past the gated entrance; sometimes the dogs waited there, huddled together like hardened inmates in an exercise yard. The gate was padlocked, but there was a gap between the gate and the fence. I quickly headed for a crosswalk and waited for the light to change.

The projects were the metropolitan equivalent of the Grand Canyon. The red brick could change hue like the sandstone layers of carved Western valley. Some buildings stood massive and block-like, much like buttes shaved into being by wind and water. Others were double-built, with wings that met in the crotch of a wide vee, joined by terraces screened in with thick steel meshwork. The rickety elevators inside lurched and wobbled. Alertness was required when boarding, both for passenger integrity and for a sixth sense approximation of possible elevator stalling. If the elevator were filled with passengers of a certain age, there was the inevitable pushing of the alarm button, or the emergency stop button, or the jumping up and down in unison while the elevator was in motion, to force an unscheduled stop between floors.  This time I entered the elevator alone, assured I would not have to endure at least three specific torments. Sheila lived on the fifth floor, but I checked the first four floors to see if Ronnie or my brother were in any of the common terraces.

Sheila’s door was at the end of a yellow-tiled corridor, which was slightly wider than my arm span. Her brother Stuie opened the door and told me through a barely contained mouthful of meatball sub that she was at Hebrew school. I decided to check the remaining floors above Sheila’s, where I finally found Ronnie pitching pennies with a few of his companions in the tenth-floor terrace. No Mike. The afternoon light slanted across Ronnie’s cheekbones, leaving sharp shadows. One of his friends looked up at me, frankly assessing my barely pubescent frame. I saw Ronnie turn his head suddenly, as if to counter his companion’s calculated delectation. He regarded me with a sly twist of mouth. “Hey Ronnie,” I squeaked, “you see my brother today? “Nah, man,” he said carelessly, and turned back to his game, all business. I almost thanked him, but felt such an amenity would be lost on his coolness. I walked to the elevator and pushed the down button, stepped back, and waited for the slow return of the car.

I could hear the cables whining and smell the black odor of heated oil. The door opened and I started to step in when Ronnie scared me witless with his brazen voice, calling “Wait up!” My heart thudded painfully as I held the door for him. He looked at me pointedly and said, “Lend me a dollar?” New as I was to Brooklyn, I knew this phrase to be code for “Give me all your money and I’ll beat you up anyway.” I swallowed hard. Not two weeks before I had been kicked and punched by a group of girls asking the same question. My face must have telegraphed all my thoughts, because Ronnie scowled and said, “Forget it.” I stammered and replied, “Just a second, let me look.” I knew I’d insulted him, though I was convinced he was a miscreant, right down to his untied high tops. I extracted a bill from my pocket, holding it out squeamishly. He snatched it from me and barked, “I’ll pay you back.” The elevator door opened onto the lobby and Ronnie strode out ahead of me, swift as a coyote.

I covered a few miles in my pursuit of Mike. Up to the junior high on Van Siclen where cars screamed by at highway speed. Halfway into Canarsie, where more projects stood, scattered like rust-colored Legos in the midst of green sward, remnants of the parklands that had made Brooklyn a turn-of-the-century haven. The ailanthus trees hunched away from the winds that blew in from the bay. I returned to the library for another brief inhalation of paper and leather and meditation. Then I roved past the delicatessen where sun-faded posters of Hebrew National hot dogs and knishes beckoned from the windows. Still no Mike. I reasoned that at this point, it was his hide, not mine, and I decided to go home. My mother would not be miraculously sober, but there was protection for me in numbers once my cousins had returned.

Short of a dollar but long on relief, I walked home under a cloudy sky, changing color as it hung low over the fading afternoon. Brooklyn could appear soft and beautiful when cloaked with mauve and amber, when dusk helped soften the edges of broken bottles, endless brick, and the stark metal edges of the apartment terraces. The streetlights started to glow. I cut through a large parking lot that was filled to capacity. Open windows breathed out the essences of pot roast and fried chicken. I completely forgot about Mike and started thinking about dinner, while passing one last phalanx of cars that separated me from home.

Like a macabre magic trick, a dog appeared and blocked my passage between the cars. His hungry brown eyes locked onto mine, and I was utterly shocked to see that I was being challenged. He was all eyes and rib cage, and he began to slink towards me. I assessed my options and slowly backed away. Behind me, I felt rather than heard an assembly of other dogs. I turned around to see a small platoon of mongrels covered in filth and oil, as undernourished and ill-treated as their apparent sergeant. When I turned back to face my initial aggressor, he had been joined by still others. I could see the message passing, dog to dog, as they scented their prey. The only option was to clamber onto a car, but these dogs lived in and on cars, and surely could not be inconvenienced by my move. My knees grew soft, and I felt my resolve and confidence drain away.

Suddenly, there was a loud report of object against metal. Some missile struck the door of the car to my right, and I had the brief, panicked thought that I was to be consumed by dogs while being shot at. Another clang, then a thump, and this time I saw a blur hit a dog flank. Time dilated and shrank, and then my muddled, fear-struck mind regrouped. A hail of rocks finally broke the spell of the pack, and after a few more direct hits from Ronnie’s  hand, the dogs reared and trotted away, looking back at me with unmistakable disappointment. I turned around and there was Ronnie, about 20 feet away.

He yelled in his brassy, playground voice, “Are you okay?”

I couldn’t speak for a few seconds. “Yeah,” I finally managed to shout. And then, just barely, “Thank you!” I wasn’t sure he had heard me. But I saw the brilliant white smile flash in his face as he wheeled around like a crazy raven and sped away. A few days later, he repaid my dollar.