Everybody up on Accardo pays rent to Mr. Lindquist, see. He owns all those houses. He’s one of the richest men in Greystone Bay, and his factory churns out cogs, gears, and wheels for heavy machinery. I worked as a “quality controller” there during summer break from high school. Dad got me the job, and I stood at a conveyor belt with a few other teenage guys and all we did day after day was make sure a certain size of gear fit into a perfect mold. If it was one hair off, we flipped it into a box and all the rejects were sent back to be melted down and stamped all over again. Sounds simple, I guess, but the conveyor belt pushed thousands of gears past us every hour and our supervisor, Mr. Gallagher, was a real bastard with an eagle eye for bad gears that slipped past. Whenever I had a complaint about the factory, Dad said I ought to be thankful I could get a job there at all, times being so bad and all; and Mom just shrugged her shoulders and said that Mr. Lindquist probably started out counting and checking gears somewhere too.
But you ask my Dad what kind of machines all those gears, cogs, and wheels went into, and he couldn’t tell you. He’d worked there since he was nineteen years old, but he still didn’t know. He wasn’t interested in what they did, or where they went when the crates left the loading docks; all he did was make them, and that’s the only thing that mattered to him—millions and millions of gears, bound for unknown machines in faraway cities, a long way off from Greystone Bay.
South Hill’s okay. I mean, it’s not the greatest place, but it’s not a slum either. I guess the worst thing about living on Accardo Street is that there are so many houses, and all of them the same. A lot of people are born in the houses on Accardo Street, maybe move two or three doors away when they, get married, and they have kids who go to work at Mr. Lindquist’s factory, and then their kids move two or three doors away and it just goes on and on. Even Mr. Lindquist used to be Mr. Lindquist Junior, and he lives in the same big white house that his grandfather built.
But sometimes, when my Dad started drinking and yelling and Mom locked herself in the bathroom to get away from him, I used to go up to the end of Accardo Street. The hulk of what used to be a Catholic church stands up there; the church caught on fire in the late seventies, right in the middle of one of the worst snowstorms Greystone Bay ever saw. It was a hell of a mess, but the church wasn’t completely destroyed. The firemen never found Father Marion’s body. I don’t know the whole story, but I’ve heard things I shouldn’t repeat. Anyway, I found a way to climb up to what was left of the old bell tower, and the thing creaked and moaned like it was about to topple off, but the risk was worth it. Up there you could see the whole of Greystone Bay, the way the land curved to touch the sea, and you got a sense of where you were in the world. And out there on the ocean you could see yachts, workboats, and ships of all kinds passing by, heading for different harbors. At night their lights were especially pretty, and sometimes you could hear a distant whistle blow, like a voice that whispered, Follow me.
And sometimes I wanted to. Oh, yeah, I did. But Dad said the world beyond Greystone Bay wasn’t worth a shit, and a bull should roam his own pasture. That was his favorite saying, and why everybody called him “Bull.” Mom said I was too young to know my own mind; she was always on my case to go out with “that nice Donna Raphaelli,” because the Raphaellis lived at the end of the block and Mr. Raphaelli was Dad’s immediate supervisor at the factory. Nobody listens to a kid until he screams, and by then it’s too late.
Don’t let anybody tell you the summers aren’t hot in Greystone Bay. Come mid-July, the streets start to sizzle and the air is a stagnant haze. I swear I’ve seen seagulls have heat strokes and fall right out of the sky. Well, it was on one of those hot, steamy July mornings—a Saturday, because Dad and I didn’t have to work—when the painters pulled up onto Accardo Street in a white truck.
The house right across the street from ours had been vacant for about three weeks. Old Mr. Pappados had a heart attack in the middle of the night, and at his funeral Mr. Lindquist gave a little speech because the old man had worked at the factory for almost forty years. Mrs. Pappados went west to live with a relative. I wished her luck on the day she left, but Mom just closed the curtains and Dad turned the TV up louder.
But on this particular morning in July, all of us were on the front porch trying to catch a breeze. We were sweltering and sweating, and Dad was telling me how this was the year the Yankees were going to the World Series—and then the painters pulled up. They started setting up their ladders and getting ready to work.
“Going to have a new neighbor,” Mom said, fanning herself with a handkerchief. She turned her chair as if to accept a breeze, but actually it was to watch the house across the street.
“I hope they’re American,” Dad said, putting aside the newspaper. “God knows we’ve got enough foreigners living up here already.”
“I wonder what job Mr. Lindquist has given our new neighbor.” Mom’s glance flicked toward Dad and then away as fast as a fly can escape a swatter.
“The line. Mr. Lindquist always starts out new people on the line. I just hope to God whoever it is knows something about baseball, because your son sure don’t!”
“Come on, Dad,” I said weakly. It seems like my voice was always weak around him. I had graduated from high school in May, was working full time at the factory, but Dad had a way of making me feel twelve years old and stupid as a stone.
“Well, you don’t!” he shot back. “Thinkin’ the Cubs are gonna take the Series? Crap! The Cubs ain’t never gonna get to the—”
“I wonder if they have a daughter,” Mom said.
“Hey, don’t you talk when I’m talkin’. What do you think I am, a wall?”
The painters were prying their paint cans open. One of them dipped his brush in.
“Oh, my God,” Mom whispered, her eyes widening. “Would you look at that?”
We did, and we were stunned speechless.
The paint was not the bland gray of all the other clapboard houses on Accardo Street. Oh, no—that paint was as scarlet as a robin’s breast. Redder than that: as red as the neon signs down where the bars stand on Harbor Road, crimson as the warning lights out on the bay where the breakers crash and boom on jagged rocks. Red as the party dress of a girl I saw at a dance but didn’t have enough nerve to meet.
Red as a cape swirled before the eyes of a bull.
As the painters began to cover the door of that house with screaming-scarlet, my dad came up out of his chair with a grunt as if he’d been kicked in the rear. If there was anything lie hated in the world, it was the color red. It was a Communist color, he’d always said. Red China. The Reds. Red Square. The Red Army. He thought the Cincinnati Reds was the lousiest team in baseball, and even the sight of a red shirt drove him to ranting fits. I don’t know what it was, maybe something in his mind or his chemistry, maybe. He just went into a screaming rage when he saw the color red.
“Hey!” he yelled across the street. The painters stopped working and looked up, because his shout had been loud enough to rattle the windows in their frames. “What do you think you’re doin’ over there?”
“Ice-skatin’,” came the reply. “What does it look like we’re doin’?”
“Get it off!” Dad roared, his eyes about to explode from his head. “Get that shit off right now!” He started down the concrete steps, with Mom yelling at him not to lose his temper, and I knew somebody was going to get hurt if he got his hands on those painters. But he stopped at the edge of the street, and by this time people were coming out of their houses all around to see what the noise was all about. It was no big deal, though; there was always some kind of yelling and commotion on Accardo Street, especially when the weather turned hot and the walls of those clapboard houses closed in like cages. Dad hollered, “Mr. Lindquist owns these houses, you idiots! Look around! You see any of the others painted Commie red?”
“Nope,” one of them replied, while the other kept on painting.
“Then what the hell are you do
in’?”
“Followin’ Mr. Lindquist’s direct orders,” the painter said. “He told us to come up here to 311 Accardo Street and paint the whole place Firehouse Red.” He tapped one of the cans with his foot. “This is Firehouse Red, and that’s 311 Accardo.” He pointed to the little metal numbers up above the front door. “Anymore questions, Einstein?”
“These houses are gray!” Dad shouted, his face blotching with color, “They’ve been gray for a hundred years! You gonna paint every house on this street Commie red?”
“Nope. Firehouse Red. And we’re just painting this place right here. Inside and outside. But that’s the only house we’re supposed to touch.”
“It’s right in front of my door! I’ll have to look at it! My God, a color like that screams to be looked at! I can’t stand that color!”
“Tough. Take it up with Mr. Lindquist.” And then he joined the other painter in the work, and when Dad returned to the house he started throwing around furniture and cursing like a madman. Mom locked herself in the bathroom with a magazine, and I went up to the church to watch the boats go by.
As it turned out, on Monday Dad gathered his courage to go see Mr. Lindquist on his lunch break. He only got as far as Mr. Lindquist’s secretary, who said she’d been the one to call Greystone Bay Painters and convey the orders. That was all she knew about it. On the drive home, Dad was so mad he almost wrecked the car. And there was the red house, right across the street from our own gray, dismal-looking clapboard house, the paint still so fresh that it smelled up the whole street. “He’s trying to get to me,” Dad said in a nervous voice at dinner. “Yeah. Sure. Mr. Lindquist wants to get rid of me, but he don’t have the guts of his father. He’s afraid of me, so he paints a house Commie red and sticks it in my face. Sure. That’s what it’s got to be!” He called Mr. Raphaelli up the street to find out what was going on, but learned only that a new man had been hired and would be reporting to work in a week.
I tell you, that was a crazy week. Like I say, I don’t know why the color red bothered my dad so much; maybe there’s a story in that too, but all I know is that my dad started climbing the walls. It took everything he had to open the front door in the morning and go to work, because the morning sunlight would lie on the walls of that red house and make it look like a four-alarm fire. And in the evening, the setting sun set it aflame from another direction. People started driving along Accardo Street—tourists, yet!—just to take a look at the gaudy thing! Dad double-locked the doors and pulled the shades as if he thought the red house might rip itself off its foundations at night and come rattling across the street after him. Dad said he couldn’t breathe when he looked at that house, the awful red color stole the breath right out of his lungs, and he started going to bed early at night with the radio tuned to a baseball game and blaring right beside his head.
But in the dark, when there was no more noise from the room where my mom and dad slept in their separate beds, I sometimes unlocked the front door and went out on the porch to stand in the steamy night. I wouldn’t dare tell my mom or dad, but… I liked the red house. I mean, it looked like an island of life in a gray sea. For a hundred years there had been only gray houses on Accardo Street, all of them exactly the same, not a nail or a joint different. And now this. I didn’t know why, but I was about to find out in a big way.
Our new neighbors came to the red house exactly one week after the house had been painted. They made enough noise to wake the rich folks in their mansions up on North Hill, hollering and laughing on an ordinarily silent Saturday morning, and when I went out on the porch to see, my folks were already out there. My dad’s face was almost purple, and there was a mixture of rage and terror in his eyes. My mom was stunned, and she kept rubbing his arm and holding him from flinging himself down the steps.
The man had crew-cut hair the color of fire. He wore a red-checked shirt and trousers the shade of Italian wine. On his feet were red cowboy boots, and he was unloading a U-Haul trailer hooked to the back of a beat-up old red station wagon. The woman wore a pink blouse and crimson jeans, and her shoulder-length hair glinted strawberry blond in the strong morning light. A little boy and little girl, about six and seven, were scampering around underfoot, and both of them had hair that was almost the same color of the house they’d come to inhabit.
Well, suddenly the man in red looked up, saw us on the porch, and waved. “Howdy!” he called in a twanging voice that sounded like a cat being kicked. He put aside the crimson box he’d been carrying, strode across the street in his red cowboy boots and right up the steps onto our porch, and he stood there grinning. His complexion looked as if he’d been weaned on ketchup.
“Hello,” my mom said breathlessly, her hand digging into Dad’s arm. He was about to snort steam.
“Name’s Virgil Sikes,” the man announced. He had thick red eyebrows, an open, friendly face, and light brown eyes that were almost orange. He held a hand out toward my dad. “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.”
Dad was trembling; he looked at Virgil Sikes’ hand like it was a cow flop in a bull’s pasture.
I don’t know why. I guess I was nervous. I didn’t think. I just reached out and shook the man’s hand. It was hot, like he was running a high fever. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Bobby Deaken.”
“Howdy, Bobby!” He looked over his shoulder at the woman and two kids. “Evie, bring Rory and Garnett up here and meet the Deakens!” His accent sounded foreign, slurred and drawled, and then I realized it was Deep South. He grinned wide and proud as the woman and two children came up the steps. “This is my wife and kids,” Virgil said. “We’re from Alabama. Long ways from here. I reckon we’re gonna be neighbors.”
All that red had just about paralyzed my dad. He made a croaking sound, and then he got the words out, “Get off my porch.”
“Pardon?” Virgil asked, still smiling.
“Get off,” Dad repeated. His voice was rising. “Get off my porch, you damned redneck hick!”
Virgil kept his smile, but his eyes narrowed just a fraction. I could see the hurt in them. He looked at me again. “Good to meet you, Bobby,” he said in a quieter voice. “Come on over and visit sometime, hear?”
“He will not!” Dad told him.
“Ya’ll have a good day,” Virgil said, and he put his arm around Evie. They walked down the steps together, the kids right at their heels.
Dad pulled free from my mother. “Nobody around here lives in a red house!” he shouted at their backs. They didn’t stop. “Nobody with any sense wants to! Who do you think you are, comin’ around here dressed like that? You a Commie or somethin’? You hick! Why don’t you go back where you belong, you damned—” And then he stopped suddenly, because I think he could feel me staring at him. He turned his head, and we stared at each other in silence.
I love my dad. When I was a kid, I used to think he hung the moon. I remember him letting me ride on his shoulders. He was a good man, and he tried to be a good father—but at that moment, on that hot July Saturday morning, I saw that there were things in him that he couldn’t help, things that had been stamped in the gears of his soul by the hands of ancestors he never even knew. Everybody has those things in them—little quirks, meannesses, and petty things that don’t get much light; that’s part of being human. But when you love somebody and you catch a glimpse of those things you’ve never seen before, it kind of makes your heart pound a little harder. I saw also, as if for the first time, that my dad had exactly the same shade of blue eyes as my own.
“What’re you lookin’ at?” Dad asked, his face all screwed up and painful.
He looked so old. There was gray in his hair, and deep lines on his face. So old, and tired, and very much afraid.
I dropped my gaze like a dog about to be kicked, because my dad always made me feel weak. I shook my head and got back inside the house quick.
I heard my mom and dad talking out there. His voice was loud, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying; then, gradually, his voic
e settled down. I lay on my bed and stared at a crack in the ceiling that I’d seen a million times. And I wondered why I’d never tried to patch it up in all those years. I wasn’t a kid anymore; I was right on the edge of being a man. No, I hadn’t patched that crack because I was waiting for somebody else to do it, and it was never going to get done that way.
He knocked on the door after a while, but he didn’t wait for me to invite him in. That wasn’t his way. He stood in the doorway, and finally he shrugged his big heavy shoulders and said, “Sorry. I blew my top, huh? Well, do you blame me? It’s that damned red house, Bobby! It’s makin’ me crazy! I can’t even think about nothin’ else! You understand that, don’t you?”
“It’s just a red house,” I said. “That’s all it is. Just a house with red paint.”
“It’s different!” he replied sharply, and I flinched. “Accardo Street has been just fine for a hundred years the way it used to be! Why the hell does it have to change?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Damned right you don’t know! ‘Cause you don’t know about life! You get ahead in this world by puttin’ your nose to the wheel and sayin’ ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’ and toein’ the line!”
“Whose line?”
“The line of anybody who pays you money! Now, don’t you get smart with me, either! You’re not man enough yet that I can’t tear you up if I want to!”
I looked at him, and something in my face made him wince. “I love you, Dad,” I said. “I’m not your enemy.”
He put a hand to his forehead for a minute, and leaned against the doorframe. “You don’t see it, do you?” he asked quietly. “One red house is all it takes. Then everything starts to change. They paint the houses, and the rent goes up. Then somebody thinks Accardo Street would be a nice place to put condos that overlook the bay. They bring machines in to do the work of men at the factory—and don’t you think they don’t have machines like that! One red house and everything starts to change. God knows I don’t understand why Mr. Lindquist painted it. He’s not like his old man was, not by a long shot.”