walked out.
Thomas looked at me. He winked, but said nothing. Then he cut my hair. I finished sweeping then left.
Another year passed, and by then I was shadowing Dr. Agnelli’s coattails at the clinic. One day it had been relatively quiet, with only a few knife wounds, sick kids, and a lady going into labor unexpectedly. I once had joked that he needed to stock some Moxie in the refrigerator, and by golly he went out and stocked it!
I was always amazed at refrigerators. Like the barber, Mama and Papa had an ice box that needed a new block of ice at least once a week. But a refrigerator? Wow! Just plug it in, and things got cold!
Anyway, Dr. Agnelli and I sat there in the back room on a threadbare couch. He sipped a black coffee, and I luxuriated in a really cold Moxie.
Just then the outside clinic doors banged open, and loud shouts erupted. We ran to see a hysterical woman speaking in a foreign tongue followed by Thomas carrying the butcher in his arms. Dr. Agnelli immediately took charge.
“What happened?”
Thomas spoke quietly, but the tension in his voice was obvious.
“Chest. He clutch chest and fall.”
Dr. Agnelli steered Thomas and his burden over to an empty gurney cart, listened to the man’s chest, and then opened a drawer in the medicine cabinet and took out a brown bottle. He undid the cap, took out a tiny pill, and put it under the butcher’s tongue. Slowly, the man’s hand, which had been tightly clutching his chest, relaxed, and the sweat on his forehead stopped its heavy dripping.
By then the nurse had wheeled in a big wooden box, a new toy of Dr. Agnelli’s he had told me about a while back. She attached wide rubber bands with metal plates to the butcher’s hands and feet and placed one plate on his chest.
Dr. Agnelli turned on the machine and watched, as a two-inch-wide strip of paper unrolled with black marks on it.
“See, Berto, this is what a man’s life looks like.”
He held up the strip, and I saw the peaks and valleys that graphed out the electrical energy of the heart. I didn’t know it then, but the butcher’s pattern wasn’t good.
“Thomas,” Agnelli called out, “is that his wife?”
“Yes.”
“I need to speak with her. Will she understand me?”
“No.”
“Will you translate?”
The barber nodded then motioned the woman over to where the doctor stood.
“Your husband is very ill. He has had a heart attack. He needs to go to the hospital. I can call for an ambulance.”
Thomas spoke rapidly in the multi-consonantal language of his birth, and the woman started to shake and sob. He grabbed her by both arms and shook her, and she settled down. Again, rapid fire words poured from his mouth, and finally she nodded agreement.
The hospital ambulance arrived shortly afterward. Not as fast as today’s rescue squads, but in the end it made no difference.
That night, Nikolai Alexei Putchenkov, butcher, died.
Maria Ivanova Putchenkov became a widow.
And Thomas?
He went back to work.
Snip-snip click.
The Tick-Tock Man
There’s always one—that kid who’s slower than, not as sharp, not as coordinated as the rest of us. He’s the kid who’s picked last, even after the fat kid or the kid wearing glasses. He’s also the one who stammers in class, his every effort to speak a constipation of mind and body.
Today we’d call him developmentally delayed or a special-needs child.
Kids are not as kind.
They’d call him a sped, a retard, a spaz, or just stupid.
The favorite name in my neighborhood was dork.
Even now I’m ashamed to admit that I joined in such ritual childhood torture, taunting kids who couldn’t cut it, the ones at the bottom of the pecking order, something that seemed to construct magically without the aid or influence of adults.
That’s when I met Paolo.
I was nine—that fantasy age of unlimited energy and curiosity. School had just begun, and there was a new kid in class, a new kid to our tenement neighborhood.
“Paolo Cherubini?”
Sister Concordia was our teacher that year. Her voice carried a musical lilt only the Irish can convey to their words. She called the attendance roll, asking us one at a time to stand and say our names.
Paolo stood up from the ancient, dark-oak desk with the hole in the top that once held an inkwell. He barely avoided falling over himself as he stood away from his chair, and then I felt my skin crawl as he spoke.
My old-man’s memory recalls an olive-skinned boy, thin but with a head disproportionately large for his body. His mouth seemed set in a perpetual smile, lips a bit too large, eyes spaced not quite right, ears set slightly too far down. I had to look at him twice before the pieces of his face seemed to complete the puzzle.
After nearly half a century of dealing with the human machine and the toss-of-the dice results of chromosomal mixing I still cannot fit a label to that boy: fetal alcohol syndrome, in-utero infection, hydrocephalus, cerebral palsy variant, or a mixture of several of the nasties Mother Nature can play when She casts the genetic dice.
Even today the medical profession throws up its hands and just calls them “FLKs”—funny-looking kids.
Yes, doctors can be cruel, too.
He stood there, his arms moving back and forth. He opened his mouth and his jaw jutted forward.
“Uhhhh … I-I-I-I am-m-m-m…”
And then he gulped and said, “Puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-p-a-a-a-l-l-l-l-lo Che-che-che-che-eru-bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-bino.”
Thank God Sister Concordia was not like some of the other nuns. They would have forced him to say his name over and over “until you get it right.” Instead, she smiled and said, “Thank you, Paolo. You may sit down.”
I saw other smiles in the class that day, but they were malignant ones, and I knew what would happen at recess.
“Hey, dork face, where ya from?”
Sammy Welch was mean.
Paolo turned toward him, that broad smile infuriating the other kid even more. Welch collected his hand into a fist to punch Paolo, when my friend Sal grabbed his arm and said “No!”
Welch pulled away and yelled, “Yeah, one wop protecting another!”
The
