“There it is,” the man with the knife said. “Somebody botched the abortion.”
Then they noticed him.
“Hey kid! Get outta here!”
He didn’t move, his jaw set in determination.
“I found her. She was in the river. What happened to her?”
The two men looked at each other. The shorter man, the one who had been speaking into the machine, laughed.
“Why do you want to know, kid?”
They looked at the stocky little boy standing there in torn brown corduroy pants, tee shirt, and worn brown shoes, looking up at them so intently. Strange little guy, one thought. Then they both smiled as he said, “I want to be like you.”
From that time on, he haunted the clinic where Dr. Agnelli worked. He watched him move from patient to patient, comforting some, scolding others, never stopping to sit or eat. He memorized the suture techniques the doctor used, went to his mama’s sewing box and, putting thread to needle, practiced sewing two pieces of cloth together.
And he waited.
“Berto, there’s a fight going down on Hamilton!”
Tomas and Angelo called to him late one Saturday afternoon soon after his tenth birthday party. Mama had saved to buy three cupcakes, one for each member of the family, and had put small blue candles on all three. Even his father had smiled and told him how grown up he looked now that he was ten. He had been so happy when his father reached under the table and pulled out his surprise gift: a brass belt buckle he had made from scraps at the mill, with his name on it! His father had taken the buckle and put it on his son’s belt.
“Siete un uomo, Berto!”
He had run outside afterward to show his friends.
“Berto, come on, let’s go watch the fight.”
He hesitated, looking back at the door to his apartment building. Mama and Papa had warned him to stay away from trouble, but what ten-year-old boy could resist watching a brawl? He turned back to his friends and ran with them to the Hamilton block. Something was always happening there. It was the crux of the neighborhood territories, the nexus point where the different ethnic groups converged, so it served as the natural battleground for the frustrations of the immigrants and their children.
The three boys turned the corner and began hearing the shouts and curses of the older boys and men—spitting, kicking, and lunging at one another. The more vicious held back, waiting for the opportunity to mutilate their enemies with sharpened metal or spring-loaded zip guns.
The boys hesitated at the corner, peering around, afraid to go farther, but then they heard a loud scream and saw one of the teenagers fall to the ground, blood spurting in a narrow stream from his groin. The rest of the fighters stopped and then ran, fearing the arrival of the police or, worse, the neighborhood enforcers.
“Come on, let’s help him,” Berto yelled as he moved toward the fallen young man.
The other two remained transfixed.
He reached the victim and immediately began to press on the site of the stab wound, just as he had seen Dr. Agnelli do.
“Tomas, go get a bottle of your papa’s vino. Angelo, get a needle from your mama’s sewing kit—quick!”
He could feel the pulsation of the artery under his hand. So this was how it felt! How did Dr. Agnelli say it? Blood runs down, walks up. So, the blood was being pushed by the heart from above. He put more pressure above the stab wound.
“Here, Berto.”
Tomas had returned with the wine bottle.
“Pour it over where my hand is.”
Angelo arrived with a big curved carpet needle and a spool of heavy thread.
“Put the thread in it then put your hand where mine is now.”
He had never felt this way before. His whole body vibrated with excitement. With Angelo pressing above and Tomas pouring the wine into the wound, he was able to see the tear in the thick tube that wanted to spill its life-giving contents onto the cracked flagstone sidewalk.
He slipped the curved needle into the blood vessel, first on one side, then the other. He repeated to himself the mantra Dr. Agnelli would recite whenever he watched: “Equal edges come together in prayer.” One stitch, two, three! That should be enough.
“Tomas, give me your knife.”
He knotted the ends of the thread then cut it. No blood coming out!
As he started to stand up he felt a heavy hand on his back. His two friends had disappeared. Turning, he saw an enormously stocky man, a neighborhood enforcer, looking down at him.
“Good job, kid. We’ll take it from here. What’s your name?”
“Robert Galen.”
The big man noticed the belt buckle with the boy’s name on it and smiled, the jagged teeth in his jowly face glistening with gold.
“No, kid. From now on, it’s Dottore Berto.”
“Berto?”
“Si, Mama?”
“Berto, your papa wants to talk with you.”
Uh-oh! All through his younger years he had never liked hearing those words, and it was still the same now. Was it because he had come home later than usual from his high school classes? He had been feeling increasing tension between himself and his father in the last few years, but he didn’t know what to do about it. His father was a strict, hardworking man, short but powerfully built, with penetrating dark eyes framed by years of labor and suffering. His stare alone was sufficient punishment for transgressions. He demanded only the best of his son, no excuses accepted. Speak, read, behave, perform, understand, and just plain do better than the other kids—or else!
“Berto!” his father would typically start.
“Si, Papa?”
“Your report card. You got a B in English!” he would say, always speaking in his native tongue.
“Yes, Papa, but it’s only a mid-term grade.”
“I don’t care. It’s not good enough!”
He sometimes would raise his right hand to strike the boy, who would wince reflexively, and then put it down slowly if he noticed his Anna was watching.
“Antonio, don’t hit the boy!” his mother would call across the room.
“He must learn, Anna. He must always do his best.”
He would turn and walk from the room, his wife following in his wake like a shadow.
“Antonio, why are you so hard on him? He is a good boy.”
“Cara mia, you know what we went through in the old country. Look at me. Am I a hard man? I do it to give him a better life than we have. I don’t want to see him sweat away in the mill, grinding metal, coughing up soot. He should not be like the other boys, hanging out on corners, trying to get in with those Sicilianos and their made men. Not my boy! Never!”
You don’t have to worry about me, Papa, he would think as he listened to them talking about him. I know what I want for my life.
He would remember his first friend, Angie, now dead from a knife to the throat. He had tried to save him, but the wound was too severe. The boy’s blood had spilled onto the street and into his lungs even as he had tried to stop its flow. So many others, his classmates from grammar school, were now dead, in jail, or hanging out. Not him. He knew what he wanted and was willing to work for it, no matter what.
When his father would smile at him, radiating happiness even through the mill-furnace darkness of his face, the boy would feel so proud, almost as if