Based on Prompt number 5 from the book Branches by Nancy Beckett
“Describe a wound that you got in a fight, a race, or because you took a wrong step by accident. Describe how this injury impacted the rest of you and how looking at it, dressing it, and focusing on the sore was a source of constant focus. Tell the story.”
The harder it rained, the faster we pedaled. Sammy was in the lead with Bobby right behind him. I was pedaling as fast as I could and keeping my eyes focused on Bobby’s drenched body ahead of me. The traffic along Peterson Avenue was always heavy but the pouring rain made the sound of the cars whipping by a lot scarier. We were riding on a narrow sidewalk. Thankfully we were not on the side of the street as the cemetery on my left. Rosehill Cemetery with its tall green iron poles protruding from the cement block wrapping around it took up a huge chunk of land and a huge chunk and was the main character in many of my childhood nightmares. I often felt my face pressed between the bars looking in on mourners in the middle of the night while I slept in the tiny fold out bed in the corner of my parent’s bedroom. I would wake up afraid wondering who had died. The rain ran off my bare legs and filled my shoes soaking my socks and making each turn of my bicycles wheels harder and harder to push through. I wondered if our daily searching for stickers from car dealers and gas stations all along Western, Peterson and California Avenues was really worth it.
Sammy had the best collection by far, but he had help from his dad who owned the one of the coolest cars in the neighborhood, a 1957 Chevy. And even though the car was only 12 years old, 3 years older than us, it looked like a toy when it came strolling down Rosemont up to big red and white brick building Sammy lived in with his dad, his younger brother and a maid who came in the mornings and left after dinner. Sammy’s mom was in a sanitarium somewhere. They had to put there when we were in first grade because she could not take care of herself let alone, two little boys. Their apartment, on the first floor had a porch that faced an alley where the screen door to their kitchen sat facing someone else’s kitchen door. We would take our shoe boxes filled with stickers from STP, Z Frank, and Purple Martin, to Sammy’s back porch and look at them. We never traded. We just looked at each others collection. Sammy was our leader at the time. I guess the need for a leader is something we are all born with. Someone has to take charge of alley, the playground, the neighborhood, and eventually the schools.
We had made it all the way to Ravenswood which was pretty far down from where we all lived on Rockwell. I am sure my mother had no idea where I was. I knew where she was, either in the basement doing laundry or in the back hallway washing down stairs from the 3rd floor down. Early that morning Sammy and Bobby rode their bikes up to my kitchen window facing the alley and yelled my name. The summer was just starting and there were a lot of adventures we would need to create in the next two months before we headed to Fourth Grade. I was not looking forward to Fourth Grade. Just before school let out we were told who our teacher for the next year was going to be, and I had definitely gotten the worst out of the three choices. Sammy was going to get a new teacher, something unheard of at DeWitt Clinton School where all the teachers were old. The big brown brick building with the enormous playground was built in 1917 and I knew that because the numbers were etched above the doors of the entrance on the side of the building. I once made a bunch of kids laugh when I looked up at the date as we waited for the bell to ring so we could enter by saying I thought some of the teachers were born in the same year the school was built. That sunny morning Sammy rode right up to the window and knocked while yelling my name. Everyone knocked on our kitchen window like it was a door. The door to the back hallway leading to our kitchen door was always locked because we kept our bikes in the little alcove between the stairs and our apartment. I came running as fast as I could out of my bedroom. Sammy asked if I wanted to go riding to look for stickers and it looked beautiful outside so it seemed like a perfect way to spend the day. We started out by going up Rosemont to California to our favorite Shell Station where Rick always looked annoyed but had a lot of stickers from a ton of different places. It was not just a gas station, they a big garage and parking lot where mechanics worked in blue shirts with the Shell Logo on the pocket. They all looked dirty to me, especially Rick. He was stingy. We knew he had a lot of stickers from oil companies, car makers and a bunch of other companies that made things for cars because when he opened the top drawer of his metal desk we could see them spread all over. He would always give us each one per visit and if we came two days in a row he would turn us down on the second day. Sammy’s dad took his car to Rick for maintenance and Sammy always got the best sticker. I knew it was the best one because Sammy said it was.
We head over to California and Peterson where there were two stations on the corners opposite the High School where my older brothers went and I would go one day. We scored at only one station and then head up Peterson toward some car dealers. We were so free back then. My children would never know that kind of independence at the age of 9. Sometimes when we would go to the car dealers we would leave our bikes outside and look around the show rooms and inside the shiny new cars. My dad had to buy a used car last year, but it did not matter to me. I was just thrilled my family finally had a car. Back then I thought it was the greatest thing we owned. Sometimes the Salesmen would give us suckers and balloons which we greedily stuck in our pockets along with the stickers that said Pontiac or Chevrolet.
We were going to go Z Frank on Western Avenue next but as we got on our bikes the rain started so we decided to head straight home. We were coming up to a lot of untrimmed bushes on the right, and a wide scathe of tall lush grass on the left. I remember thinking I did not want the bushes hitting me in the face as I rode by so I tried to hug the sidewalk as close to the lawn lining my left without falling into the crevice between the sidewalk and the wet grass when my wheel slid in and I fell. I screamed but I don’t know if Sammy or Bobby heard me and did not want to stop, or if my yelling was drowned out by the sound of the traffic and rain. I could see the stop light to Western Avenue ahead of me and knew I still had a ways to go. I hopped back on my bike. My left knee was pretty torn up and there was a lot of blood running down my leg mixed in with the cool rain. I started pedaling even faster. I did not care if it hurt or how much I bled. I wanted to get out of the rain. Sammy and Bobby were stopped at the red light at Western and I caught up just as it turned green. They flew across and I followed. We were all on our own at this point. It was every man for him self. I got to Rockwell, turned right and felt like those last three blocks were a million miles away.
I got home, pulled my bike into the hall way and grabbed a towel out of the linen closet before running into my bedroom. I dried off the rain and the blood and found my left knee had hardly any skin left on it. I changed, got some band aids and covered up the mess myself. I was too old by then to need my mom for any of that stuff. I took the three stickers, the green balloon and the tiny sucker out of the pockets of my shorts before throwing the dirty wet shorts into the pink hamper we kept in the bathroom. I stuffed my treasures in the Crawford’s Shoe box under my bed, and went into the kitchen and got something to eat. It was all in a days work for a nine year old on Summer Vacation. What amazes me is 40 years later, both my knees have scars on them, but there were so many more accidents over the course of time there is no way of knowing which ones may have left a permanent mark.
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