When You Reach Me

Things That Kick

Losing Sal was like a long list of bad things, and somewhere in the top half of the list was the fact that I had to walk home alone past the crazy guy on our corner.

He showed up around the beginning of the school year, when Sal and I still walked home from school together. A few kids called him Quack, short for Quackers, or they called him Kicker because he used to do these sudden kicks into the street, like he was trying to punt one of the cars speeding up Amsterdam Avenue. Sometimes he shook his fist at the sky and yelled crazy stuff like “What’s the burn scale? Where’s the dome?” and then he threw his head back and laughed these loud, crazy laughs, so everyone could see that he had about thirty fillings in his teeth. And he was always on our corner, sometimes sleeping with his head under the mailbox.

“Don’t call him Quack,” Mom said. “That’s an awful name for a human being.”

“Even a human being who’s quackers?”

“I don’t care. It’s still awful.”

“Well, what do you call him?”

“I don’t call him anything,” she said, “but I think of him as the laughing man.”

Back when I still walked home with Sal, it was easier to pretend that the laughing man didn’t scare me, because Sal was pretending too. He tried not to show it, but he freaked when he saw the laughing man shaking his fist at the sky and kicking his leg out into traffic. I could tell by the way Sal’s face kind of froze. I know all of his expressions.

I used to think of Sal as being a part of me: Sal and Miranda, Miranda and Sal. I knew he wasn’t really, but that’s the way it felt.

When we were too little for school, Sal and I went to day care together at a lady’s apartment down the block. She had picked up some carpet samples at a store on Amsterdam Avenue and written the kids’ names on the backs. After lunch, she’d pass out these carpet squares and we’d pick our spots on the living room floor for nap time. Sal and I always lined ours up to make a rectangle.

One time, when Sal had a fever and Louisa had called in sick to her job and kept him home, the day-care lady handed me my carpet square at nap time, and then, a second later, she gave me Sal’s, too.

“I know how it is, baby,” she said.

And then I lay on her floor not sleeping because Sal wasn’t there to press his foot against mine.

* * *

When he first showed up on our corner last fall, the laughing man was always mumbling under his breath. “Bookbag, pocketshoe, bookbag, pocketshoe.”

He said it like a chant: bookbag, pocketshoe, bookbag, pocketshoe. And sometimes he would be hitting himself on the head with his fists. Sal and I usually tried to get really interested in our conversation and act like we didn’t notice. It’s crazy the things a person can pretend not to notice.

“Why do you think he sleeps like that, with his head under the mailbox?” I asked Richard back when the laughing man was brand-new and I was still trying to figure him out.

“I don’t know,” Richard said, looking up from the paper. “Maybe so nobody steps on his head?”

“Very funny. And what’s a ‘pocketshoe,’ anyway?”

“Pocketshoe,” he said, looking serious. “Noun: An extra shoe you keep in your pocket. In case someone steals one of yours while you’re asleep with your head under the mailbox.”

“Ha ha ha,” I said.

“Oh, Mr. Perfect,” Mom said. “You and your amazing dictionary head!” She was in one of her good moods that day.

Richard tapped his right knee and went back to his newspaper.