In 1963, a week after I begin third grade, three men with rifles rob the savings and loan four blocks from my parents’ house in a small town just outside of Pittsburgh. A minute later, the police alerted by a clerk watching from the bakery across the road, there is a shootout along the main street of the business district.
My mother follows the action from the upstairs window in the office where she takes dictation from a hardware merchant, and she loves to tell the story of what she saw, including how our police Chief Frank Muschak stood sideways to hide behind a telephone pole. “His big beer belly hung out in plain sight,” she says. “He’s a hundred pounds past being protected by anything as thin as that pole.” She always pauses to make a big curve with her hands over her stomach. “Out to here,” she says, “like he’s carrying twins. The other policemen and the robbers exchanged gunfire for five minutes, and Muschak did nothing but try to suck that gut in.”
Each morning, Chief Muschak stops traffic so kids from our neighborhood can cross the highway two blocks from our school. I want to ask him how it felt hiding behind that telephone pole, but settle for yelling “fatso” and “lard ass” in my mind.
One Saturday in October, when the fire station sounds the noon alarm, everybody I am playing with, like always, goes home to lunch except me and Caroline Kennedy. She hates having the same name as the President’s daughter and wants to be called Caro, but nobody ever does except me. “Let’s go to the railroad tracks,” I say, picking a forbidden place, and she doesn’t hesitate. “Where’s fat Muschak?” I say after we cross the one street with traffic, and Caro laughs. I start to tell her how we could follow the tracks all the way to Pittsburgh without ever getting lost. We walk down Angle Alley, and I hold her hand, imagining we look, from behind, like the boy and girl in the painting my doctor has on his wall.
But there, just crossing the two sets of railroad tracks toward us, are three older boys who have b-b guns, and they point them at us as if we are tellers in a bank. Those leveled guns back us against a door, and Caro clings to my hand so tightly it hurts. The biggest boy yells, “Dance!” The other two laugh and fire pellets at our feet screaming, “Dance! Dance!”
I dance like all of the cowards in cowboy movies. Caro Kennedy cries like all of the women who listen, from behind drawn curtains, to the gunfire from a duel in a dusty street. Finally, all three boys take a stance like a firing squad, shouting, “Five, four, three, two, one” in unison before shooting b-b’s into the door above our heads. Instead of laughing, they lower their guns down and point to where a puddle is forming around Caro’s shoes. “She peed her pants,” one boy shouts. The others take a few steps back, and then they all march back to the tracks, going south as if they plan on walking to Pittsburgh. I squeeze Caro’s hand because right then I know that if I had been the one to pee my pants, they would have shot right at me because that’s what happens to boys who are sissies enough to wet themselves.
Caro pulls away and runs home. I don’t tell my mother when she asks why I’m late for lunch. Those boys fired so much at the same time I wouldn’t have known which one shot my eyes out. Or Caro’s eyes. I wouldn’t have known which one fired because he thought he had to. Or which one loved hurting us.
A month later, the Thursday before Thanksgiving, I ask Caro to walk down Angle Alley after school because I have something important to say. We don’t hold hands. Neither of us talk. But she stops beside that door where we were shot at, and she looks, like I do, at the splash of pock marks on somebody’s back door because all of the houses face away from the tracks. Whoever lives there might never see the marks, always entering and leaving by a front door that makes him believe he lives some place where people want to live, not across from a bare patch of cinders beside two sets of railroad tracks. When I tell Caro that tomorrow will be the last time I’ll be in class because we’re moving on Saturday, she says, “I’ll miss you,” but doesn’t ask where I’ll be going.
Friday morning, my mother tells me she’s made cupcakes and will bring them to school for a going-away party after lunch. “The teacher said ‘yes,’” she says. “Your friends will want to say goodbye.”
My father shakes his head and speaks quietly to her about Chief Muschak, the fat policeman, because the morning paper says that he’s been hit by a train and killed at the railroad crossing near the elementary school. “Muschak,” he reads, “stepped backwards into the path of a northbound freight approaching a couple of seconds after the southbound passed,” but my mother looks so puzzled that he repeats himself, going slower the second time.
My mother glances at me and says, “Something a child would do. Who would imagine?” She looks at the ceiling as if she expects some sort of explanation to be written there because that way of dying, for an adult, let alone a policeman, was impossible.
“A child wouldn’t do that,” my father says. “A child would turn around, and nobody would get hurt.” And for the first time, I realize that my father could be wrong. That anything is possible, no matter what you think will keep anyone, even the careful and well-guarded, safe.
