CheapThrills: Guest Blog: Pittsburgh Summer, Part 2 of 3

By Nikki Keach

Missed Part 1? Read it here.

It happened one late-summer afternoon, just before our parents, (or in my case, Cousin Dorothy) came home for the lunch break. As usual, we were collected on the balcony when Eugene sighted something exceptional.

“Hey y’all! Looka, there.” Eugene called from the railing. “What’s that?”

“Holy Cow!” Billy said. “It’s somebody dead down there.”

“Naw, it ain’t nobody. Just one of them big dolls they dress up in new clothes and they put it in store windows.” Larry or Lee corrected Billy.

“Naw, it’s real. A real somebody,” Billy insisted.

“Lemme see!” the other boys shouted as they rushed to the railing to judge for themselves.

“Look at it good and hard,” Larry or Lee said, “It’s all stiff and straight, don’t got no clothes on it. Ain’t got real fingers or nothing else real. Besides it’s white. What would a white man be doing dead down there?”

By now most of us were pressed against the railing, straining to focus on those naked body parts. Those of us who drifted back to the glider to make room for the others had to accept Larry and Lee’s logic and the evidence of our own eyes. That smooth pink head and that perky facial expression told us that Billy’s corpse was indeed a mannequin. Then Frankie deftly redirected our thoughts with an invitation to begin what would surely be the summer’s best story.

“Wonder how come they put him in our backyard?” he asked.

We would have collected that prize, hauled him to the balcony and cleaned him up. We would have given him a name. From our homes we would have snatched hats and shoes, jackets and shirts, ties and trousers to cover his naked body in style. We would have pretended long conversations with him, tied him to a bicycle for our trips up and down the block. We would have spun stories for the rest of the summer about how our new silent friend happened to appear in the junkyard below Larry and Lee’s balcony. But we didn’t, because his story ceded to the one about to happen.

I remember setting my imagination to spin the core of our new friend’s story and scanning Aunt Florence’s closet for things she didn’t need that a man might wear, when a sound cut through my spinning and my scanning. I recognized the noise as the one produced inside my head when, after sucking the flavor from a Popsicle stick, I cracked and shredded it with my teeth. That afternoon, I heard that sound, but I hadn’t finished a popsicle and the sound was not inside my head, but outside, followed by shrill decrescendos, a chorus of children howling “oh no!”

The railing cracked, splintered, gave out, unable to accommodate the load of six children leaning against it and the weight of their imaginations. The railing fractured, with a force that hacked through the balcony’s floor. The railing collapsed with cataclysmic power that took it, a section of the balcony and three children pressed against it, chucking them all onto the disintegrating refrigerator, the rusty car door, the shattered windshield, the cans and the liquor bottles, the sewing machine and our almost new friend.

I recall that I ran downstairs into my bedroom and hid my face in the pillow. I remember trying not to remember, trying to erase what I had just seen. When I heard the sirens, I remembered Sondra. And Larry and Lee. Where were they? And Billy. Where was he?

I joined the throng of grown-ups including Cousin Dorothy assembled at the mouth of the alley, nearly hiding the boys from our group standing among them. I was relieved to catch sight of the blue pinafore. Sondra had worn it that day, and Frankie was holding her hand as she cried. I stood with them, letting the grownups push in front of us, shake their heads and get a good look to discern whose child lay in the junk. From their whispers I learned that the fallen were Eugene and Larry and Billy. We children waited, watched and then moved close enough to the stretchers to murmur something hopeful like, “See you tomorrow” as each child was loaded into one of the three waiting ambulances. From his stretcher, Larry looked right at me and smiled before his ambulance disappeared down our street.

News of the accident in the substandard housing in Pittsburgh traveled quickly across the city. Aunt Florence was on the phone all day and night. Cousin Dorothy had to bolt the door against news organizations insisting on an interview with Sondra and me. And the next day, Mama and Daddy arrived to take us home. But we wanted to continue with the summer we were having. So we convinced them to let us stay, telling them that we were safe, okay, having a “good time.”

Orders from the municipal government dispatched legions of carpenters, plumbers, bricklayers and electricians to our building. There were no more gatherings anywhere near the apartment as the workers demolished what had to be replaced and hammered, spackled and glued what could be repaired. We searched for a stable meeting place. Sometimes, it was Frankie’s front steps, or Willie’s, but never anywhere near the apartment. Sometimes a few of us would walk to the grocers for soft drinks and candy or ride our bikes.

In a few days, Eugene was released from the hospital, with a huge bandage covering the 30 stitches needed to close the gash in his forehead. Lee spent his days at the hospital during Larry’s long recuperation. And Billy? His hospitalization lasted only three days. By week’s end, he died. His death became another one of the many front-page stories about the incident, with a big headline quoting Billy. “Please bury me in my cowboy suit,” he had said. Dr. Forester obeyed. We all went to Billy’s funeral.

For the rest of the summer newspaper articles focused on some aspect of the tragedy – from corruption and neglect as consequences of segregation, to the progress on restoring the building and Larry’s recuperation. A few weeks after the accident, while the workers were still busy fixing everything, Cousin Dorothy asked me if I wanted to talk with one of the reporters. When she said that she’d be there as he questioned me, I agreed to tell him what I remembered. I lay awake all night preparing for the interview, searching for the right words to frame the catastrophe. I pictured my demeanor, where to put my hands and how to set my facial expression. Cousin Dorothy didn’t go to work the day of the interview. Instead, she tidied the living room, a chore she usually set aside for Sondra and me. In fact, my sister and I had been given no chores since the accident. She, like every adult we encountered afterwards, no longer treated us like annoying inconveniences. Instead, she coddled us as though we were the ones recovering from the fall. During the interview Cousin Dorothy stood next to me the entire time with her arms folded and drumming her fingers on her blouse. In that pose, she charged the air with two entirely different sets of emotions. I felt her sorrow and her compassion. I felt her concern and her attentiveness.

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Stay tuned for the conclusion of Pittsburgh Summer.
To be posted next Thursday, December 13th.