“ANTONIO! Come here and help.” Edite didn’t have a laundry room in her apartment, so she would come over and wash clothes in our basement, when she was sure my father wasn’t around. “Damn sheets. Just hold on to the end until it comes through the other side,” she said. “Don’t pull, though. I don’t want to break the wringer and have your dad blame your mom.”
A tip of white sheet peeked between the two rollers of the wringer washer. She dunked her hands into the machine, the water up to her elbows. She fed the wringer again, then patted her hands dry on my mother’s apron and pulled a cigarette from her pocket. She lit it, took a deep drag, and blew out the smoke like it was the thing she needed most in the world.
A small radio sat on a shelf, in front of three framed pictures: Pierre Trudeau, the Pope, and JFK. The radio was set to the Portuguese station. They were broadcasting live from Toronto City Hall, with José Rafael’s voice battling static to deliver its message. Nine days since little Emanuel was found dead and nothing so far. It’s time, I say. We can’t sit back any longer. That’s what we’ve done, and look what happened! He made it sound like the community had given up.
After the funeral, my mother had locked the front door in the middle of the day. She saw Billy, Senhor Matos’s son, punch his own father on the front lawn. Senhor Matos was afraid Billy’d go to prison if he kept running downtown and beating up the paneleiros—Portuguese slang for homosexuals. Other people were drawn into it. I overheard my mother telling my father that it came to blows and nasty things were said between neighbours. If I hadn’t been a prisoner in my own home, I would have run to the front yard to catch a bit of the rumble with my own eyes.
“My Johnny was able to wash his own clothes at your age. He’d just pop them into the machine.”
I turned up the volume on the radio.
“Then he’d press a button. Not like these washers you have up here.”
“My dad says dryers are useless—they waste electricity. Clotheslines in the basement are good enough.”
I could picture Rafael’s spit showering the microphone. We were proud and we worked hard. We did so quietly without bothering anyone. Rafael blamed the police and the politicians and the homosexuals for what had happened to Emanuel, one of our own. Where is our voice? he roared.
“Edite, do you believe that stuff?”
“What stuff?”
“That homosexuals are to blame for what happened to Emanuel.”
Edite shoved her cigarette butt into the pipe where all the grey water from the wringer washer drained. “Bad people did a bad thing. They’re to blame, no one else. But Antonio, don’t get caught in it.”
“In what?” I asked.
“Don’t be afraid, that’s all.” She blew her bangs into the air. “It’s when you’re afraid of the world that bad things happen.”
I looked into the tub of the washer. The load was almost done.
Edite leaned in and her breath tickled my skin. “I can tell you’re itching to get out of here. Before you go, though, I want to tell you something. Remember, when you fight monsters, be careful that you don’t become one. Do you understand?”
“Is that a proverb?” I asked.
“Yeah, the gospel according to Edite.”
I hugged her, and lingered in the smell of smoke trapped in her hair. She hugged me back and wouldn’t let go. I wriggled my way free, ran up the basement stairs, three at a time, then burst onto the veranda and jumped down the stairs in a death-defying bound.
The march had begun Monday afternoon. Our neighbours walked out their front doors and basement entrances onto the street. Senhora Gloria wore her wool dress but without the headband. Instead her hair was pulled back into a bun. She beamed hate rays at me because of what I knew about her. I turned away, pretending I hadn’t been looking. My uncle David had decided to take a vacation day and was in shorts, black socks, and sandals. He topped off his outfit with an oil-stained Kiss me, I’m Portuguese T-shirt. I ducked behind a parked car, afraid he’d make me walk with him. He closed his gate and walked down the street, toward the crowd that had swelled. Senhor Anselmo stopped cutting his lawn and, with grass clippers in hand, joined the march.
At first I walked on the sidewalk, but then I followed everyone else’s lead and began walking on the road. Beside me were strollers filled with crying babies, and old people with canes dressed in their Sunday best. A man in a wheelchair rolled himself along. I heard a little girl tell her grandmother she would skip rope all the way to City Hall, and as she began to skip she created space around her like a bubble. I waved up to Mr. Wilenski sipping from a tumbler on his porch. He wore sunglasses and a Chinese hat, like the ones people pictured in National Geographic wore when they worked in the rice fields. Mr. Wilenski and Mr. Robins lived together. They were always kind to us. After fishing at their cottage, they would often offer my mother the bass or trout they had caught. She accepted the gift with a smile and thanks, but then she’d order me to bury the fish in the backyard for fertilizer. We only ate ocean fish. The sea salt was what kept it healthy and free from disease. My mother explained once that Mr. Robins and Mr. Wilenski were brothers. I never told her I knew they had different last names. A couple of jeers were aimed at Mr. Wilenski. One guy cleared his throat and horked a greener toward him. Mr. Wilenski fumbled with his chair, then stumbled inside, slamming the door behind him. I walked along carefully now, more aware. People came down their walkways and through their front gates to merge with others that passed by in a rising jumble of roars. These were the same people who only a day before had been so sad at the funeral. Now they punched the sky with their fists.
A man held a placard that read TAR AND FATHER THEM. Photographers and television cameras were recording the march, recording the spelling mistake for the rest of the country to see. As we turned left onto Queen Street, chants for death battled it out with the honking horns of cars trapped in the jam of people. One driver in a Gremlin yelled, “Get off the fuckin’ road!” A group of men and women, including Senhora Rodrigues, who delivered homemade cheese to us every Saturday morning, swarmed the car and began to rock it. I recognized many of the men, even though I didn’t know all their names, who pounded their fists on the windows the driver had rolled up in a panic.
People came from all directions. A Chrysler Cordoba, statues of Mother Mary and one of Jesus strapped to the grille, led the parade.
I kept dodging in and out of the crowd, looking for Manny and Ricky. We were blood brothers; we should have been marching together. A forest of signs read HANG THEM and DESTROY THE DIRTY PIGS. At first, I thought they referred to the murderers. But one placard flashed above the crowd read KILL THE FAGGOTS, and I knew. Edite had told me people were too ignorant to know the difference between a homosexual and a pedophile, and neither did they care. People called for the return of the noose and a clean-up of Yonge Street. Police officers on their horses became the next target in the calls of “Where were you?” mixed with accusations of “You don’t care about the Portuguese.”
I couldn’t miss Manny in his pylon-orange T-shirt. He had managed to climb halfway up a telephone pole, in front of Brown’s Short Man, where my father had bought the suit he wore for my First Communion and my sister’s confirmation. I cut through the crowd and sidestepped my way onto the sidewalk. Manny was waving at me, pointing to a spot across the road, just north of the Kentucky Fried Chicken. I climbed atop a garbage can and clambered up the pole, stopping just below Manny’s dirty toes hanging out of his sandals. This time I could see my mother, her hair covered with a kerchief, getting out of a Mustang. A man held the door open for her. His ginger hair was parted far off on the side. He wore sunglasses and a sport jacket with patches on the elbows. It was Dr. Patterson. I had met him before, when I had visited the hospital. He let me reach into the jar on his desk, which he filled with candies wrapped in foil. He was my mother’s favourite doctor. At Christmas he wrote her long letters that he folded in cards, together with crisp fifty-dollar bills. I snuck a read of his letter the year before. He wrote about Africa and working with children in some of the poorest countries. I hated those Saturday morning commercials, with all the starving children, their faces like skeletons and their balloon stomachs. They would lie there, usually in their mother’s arms or cradled in the lap of a white-skinned volunteer. In slow motion they shooed the flies that buzzed around their heads or landed on their faces. The commercials asked people to send money to somewhere on Sparks Street in Ottawa. I always felt guilty when I changed the channel.
Dr. Patterson swung the car door shut and it looked as if he was leaning over to kiss my mother. My arms turned to rubber and I thought I was going to fall to the concrete. I closed my eyes, heard my heart beating fast. I took a few deep breaths and counted to five. If he kissed her it would only be a peck on the cheek, just a thank you.
I opened my eyes and saw my mother walking up the street, away from the crowd. He jogged around the front hood, jumped back in, then swerved at the corner and peeled into the laneway.
“Who was that?” Manny asked.
“Who?” I slid down the pole and ran back into the street. I tried to lose Manny, hoped the crowd would swallow me up, but every time I looked back I could see he was there behind me, stuck like Krazy Glue.
My mother had warned me over and over to watch out for strangers, not to take anything from them or go with them if they asked for help. Abre os teus olhos, she kept saying, cuidado. I had kept my eyes open and seen her with Dr. Patterson. I didn’t know who to trust.
At last I stopped. “Where’s Ricky?”
“He stayed back. Doing a favour for James.”
“What kind of favour?”
“Who knows?”
I was grateful Manny didn’t ask about the doctor again. “Don’t you care? Doesn’t it bother you that James showed up just over a week ago and we don’t know anything about him?”
“I know he’s not a faggot, if that’s what you mean.”
“Yeah, but we don’t know where he came from. What he wants from us.”
“You sound weird.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Kinda jealous that Ricky’s there and you’re here.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Look, I just like going over to his place and staring at all the tits he’s got plastered on the ceiling. A sky full of tits. That’s all I care about.”
“I get that. I just don’t—”
“Who cares. Don’t tell me the old farts have gotten to you. That Emanuel kid was fresh off the boat. We’re not like that. Anyone tries something with me—” Manny made a karate chop and jabbed his knee in the air like he was aiming for someone’s balls, “he’d get it where the sun don’t shine.”
There must have been thousands of people at City Hall when we arrived, more people than those that filled our neighbourhood streets for the Festa do Senhor Santo Cristo parade in the spring. Manny couldn’t resist flying some paper cups, newspaper, and then plastic bags over the subway vents. It was a competition—whose object could go the highest and stay up the longest—garbage kites without string. They floated twenty or thirty feet, hovered, as if taking in the whole scene, before suddenly twisting and dipping in midair. I pictured my mother getting out of Dr. Patterson’s car, how she looked with lipstick on, something I had never seen before. With every coffee cup I let go, my nervousness lifted away, until I was sure what I had witnessed was nothing. The streetcars had probably been blocked by the march. He was just giving her a lift. My mother would never do anything wrong. She went to church and she meant it, not like Senhora Gloria. Manny stretched his Bitondo’s Pizzeria T-shirt, letting it fill like a balloon with the gush of air that blasted up through the grates.
“One of our children has been killed.” José Rafael’s voice was picked up by the microphones on the stage and amplified across Nathan Phillips Square. “How many times did he cry for mommy or daddy … how many times did he scream”—at this point Senhor Rafael switched to English—“leave me alone?”
“Bandidos, bandidos!” the crowd chanted. I looked at all the angry people, mostly men who were out of work, others who had left their jobs in their construction gear or janitor uniforms, shouting like my father did after I brought him the wrong screwdriver from his toolbox. I needed to pee.
They were all waiting to hear from the mayor or some municipal politician to tell them their plans. They weren’t there for fancy words or promises to bring back the death penalty or strategies on how to clean up the city so it was safe again and people could feel protected. They wanted vengeance. They wanted to string the killers up in someone’s garage and slit their throats like slaughtered pigs.
I shuffled away from Manny, moving along the edge of the reflecting pool—its green bottom dotted with pigeon shit. In the winter it would transform into a skating rink. José Rafael saw the crowd growing restless. He urged everyone to continue their march to the legislative steps of Queen’s Park. One man tried to climb over in front of him to get to the stage. Another guy tore his shirt open and started thumping his chest with his fists. By now I was in the middle of it all.
“Kill them!” shouted one man who carried a sign that read DEATH TO ALL SEX CRIMINALS, and he chopped his free hand through the air.
The shouts began to swell. I made my way to a large concrete planter near the side of the stage and climbed up. I looked back over the thousands of bobbing heads to where I had left Manny. He stood atop the vents, still tossing garbage into the air. I looked again at the crowd. People shook their signs and huddled together toward the stage: STRIP THE STRIP and TODAY EMANUEL DIES TOMORROW OTHERS MIGHT DIE TOO.
I couldn’t hold on any longer. I jumped down and ran behind the stage, pulled open my zipper, and peed against some plywood. I looked over my shoulder before I signed my initials, A and R in streams of yellow cursive.
Minutes later, Manny caught up with me. “Hey! I was looking all over. Where’d you go?”
“I needed to pee.” I looked across Nathan Phillips Square. The crowd was breaking up. Some broken posters and signs and stuffed dummies that looked like the killers or the politicians, I wasn’t sure which, was all that was left behind. The city garbage trucks would get it all cleaned up and in a couple of hours you’d never know there had been a demonstration. My father said nothing would change until people started working again—work made people forget. My mother said the problem was everyone worked too much.
“Are you heading over to Queen’s Park?” Manny said.
“No. Are you?”
“I’m gonna stick around,” Manny said. “I’ve got my eye on some good ones.” He pointed to his butt. He had come prepared: his file and snips peeked out from his back pocket.
“You need help?” I asked.
“James says I can’t let you help.”
“Why would he say that?” I said.
“I don’t know, but I saw him talking to your dad the other day. At the funeral. Maybe your dad asked him to protect his golden boy.”
“Screw you!” I said as Manny disappeared around the corner.
It was getting dark when I wound my way back to my alley. I thought of how freaked out my mother would be, my having been gone all this time. But I’d let her sweat a little longer. James’s garage door was open just enough for me to see a sliver of light. I knocked before raising the door higher, surprised by my own courage.
“Anyone here?” I asked, stepping into the garage. The small black-and-white TV was on, its bunny ears bent and taped together. The picture was fuzzy—a bunch of mosquitoes on the screen. I could hear his steps on the boards above.
James climbed down the ladder in his bare feet. We were alone. I thought Ricky would be there; he had a way of making me feel seven feet tall and bulletproof.
“I don’t need a babysitter to watch over me—I can take care of myself.”
“I know that.”
“You’re not my father.”
“I know that too. I also know you’re a smart kid,” he said. “Edite told me.”
“Edite?”
“She asked me to keep an eye on you, that’s all. Your friends too. She interviewed a bunch of us who work on the strip. They’re closing it down. The head shops, the massage parlours, the dance clubs. Edite’s writing about it for the paper.” He explained things calmly, and I could feel my heartbeat slowing down. He moved closer to me. I heard the faint sound of tobacco burning as he took a drag. He bent down to pick up his paintbrush.
I closed my eyes for a second. James smelled of armpits.
“You’re a special boy, Antonio,” he whispered, taking another step toward me.
“Antonio!” Edite called out.
The light of the garage illuminated Edite, who stood tall in the lane, all dressed up in wedge shoes and her shawl tied around her waist. “What are you doing here?” I caught the concern in her face. James whistled and she cracked a smile. “Your mother’s worried sick. You need to go home right now,” she said, all the while looking at James.
I walked my bike home, but before going in looked back. Edite’s body had relaxed, slinked against the garage doorway. I could hear James still urging her to come in. For a moment, it looked as if she would. Instead, she turned and walked up the laneway.
My lungs were filling up with a burning fire—no room left. My mouth was dry, my throat blocked, and yet their voices grew nearer, louder. “Treat you good, like one of the boys. Have some fun, lots of play with our adult toys.” The alley seemed to stretch forever. I saw Senhora Gloria leaning against a garage door, her eyes smeared with black mascara. She lifted her skirt to show the dimply flesh of her leg. I ran past her. When I dared to look back I saw my mother instead. I stopped running and turned toward her. I was safe; she wouldn’t let the men catch me. I tried to call out to her but my voice was gone. I took off again, cupped my ears to stop the giggling and laughter. That’s when I saw Ricky crouched at James’s feet. James was handing him five-dollar bills. I stopped. Suddenly, the men who were chasing me touched me with their large hands. I felt them tearing at my shirt, tearing at me. I cried for help but again no sound.
The orange numbers glowed 1:20 a.m., then flipped to 1:21. I sat up in bed, with my arms crossed over my knees, hugging them to my chest. If I was quiet, didn’t move, the trembling might go away and I would hear my house breathe. I tried it for a minute or two, but I couldn’t stop shaking. I heard the smash of glass breaking. I ran to the window and saw two stretched shadows running down Palmerston Avenue. A glow came through Mr. Wilenski’s broken window. I drew the curtains and jumped back into bed. This time I pulled the clock radio under the covers and pressed it to my ear. I took in the scratchy static and the world got quiet.