Through and Through by Geha Joseph;

Author:Geha, Joseph;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2021-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

And What Else?

Only an hour or so after sunrise it begins getting hot on the street. But it is still quiet, and the faint honk and roar of the traffic farther downtown only adds to the silence and the sense of hush. A boy, who will one day marry an American girl and open his own supermarket with her family’s money, begins sweeping with wide, playful strokes in front of the grocery store. Slanted morning light fills Monroe Street with yellow, pushing the shadows of lamp posts and fire hydrants and boy down the long concrete. Scattered by the broom, wine bottles and beer bottles glisten as they roll along the curb to the gutter. The red brick of the buildings warms in the sun, the old, silent buildings that will be torn down twenty years from now, in the summer of 1958, and the holes they leave paved over.

Across the street a man turns the corner, a fishing rod and canvas sack in his hands. He is staring up as he turns, his eyes on the rooftops, and because of the silence of the morning, the slap-slap of his large shoes (he wears no stockings) carries all the way to where the boy has stopped sweeping to watch, shielding the sun from his eyes with what looks like a half-hearted salute. A woman, curled asleep in a doorway, stretches out her legs. The boy shouts a warning, but the man does not look down. He walks directly into the feet and stumbles forward on his hands and knees. He falls slowly, and it seems to the boy that with a little more balancing, a little more waving of the arms back and forth and trembling of the knees, he might not have fallen at all.

The man picks up the rod and sack and, saying nothing, nudges the woman several times in the legs with his toe. She stirs and rolls over, still asleep. The man moves on. When he has crossed the street, the boy puts a finger to his lips and points to the roof of the apartment above the store. A pair of pigeons flutters timid on the spine of a gabled window. The man sees. He smiles his thanks to the boy, then clicks the safety of his reel, and the heavy lead sinker, followed by a dozen hooks, falls and dangles about a foot from the tip of the rod. The boy salutes with both hands as he looks up again. One of the pigeons looks down from its perch, and the man casts. The heavy lead strikes, the hooks catch and dig. Blue-gray feathers fall in a small, thick cloud and the man and boy shout, filling the street with their noise.

“Got three of ‘em for ya,” the man says, and he dumps the sack on the thick wooden block in back of the store. “One of ‘em’s still alive.”

The butcher, whose English is not so good, puts down his knife and takes the living pigeon out of the sack.

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