the can open with his wire cutters, hammered it flat, and nailed it over
the hole. He needed more patches, he said, so he had to go out and buy
another six-pack. After he polished off each beer, he used the can to
repair one of the holes. And whenever a new hole appeared, he'd get out
his hammer, down a beer, and do another patch job.
A lOT OF OUR NEIGHBORS on North Third Street were kind of weird.
A clan of Gypsies lived down the block in a big, falling-apart house with
plywood nailed over the porch to create more indoor space. They were
always stealing our stuff, and one time, after Brian's pogo stick had
disappeared, he saw one of the old Gypsy women bouncing down the
sidewalk on it. She wouldn't give it back, so Mom got into a big
argument with the head of the clan, and the next day we found a chicken
with its throat cut on our doorstep. It was some kind of Gypsy hex. Mom
decided, as she put it, to fight magic with magic. She took a ham bone
out of the beans and went down to the Gypsies' house, waving it in the
air. Standing on the sidewalk, she held up the bone like a crucifix at an
exorcism, and called down a curse on the entire Gypsy clan and their
house, vowing that it would collapse with the lot of them in it and that
the bowels of the earth would open up and swallow them forever if they
bothered us again. The next morning Brian's pogo stick was lying in the
front yard.
The neighborhood also had its share of perverts. Mostly, they were
shabby, hunched men with wheedling voices who hung around on street
corners and followed us to and from school, trying to give us boosts
when we climbed a fence, offering us candy and loose change if we
would go play with them. We called them creeps and hollered at them to
leave us alone, but I worried about hurting their feelings because I
couldn't help wondering if maybe they were telling the truth, that all they
wanted was to be our friends.