It's not that Mike Westberg's little brother was a bad kid. It's just that his whistling drove us crazy. It was always there; a few seconds of "My Sharona" or some Woody Woodpecker bullshit. He'd whistle the WLS jingle, that "You deserve a break today" crap from the McDonald's commercials and little bits of the stuff we had to sing in church, the "whiny folk-music garbage," like Frank Pantano's dad used to call it. When he started "Copacabana" when we were walking home from school one day right before Christmas break, we'd had enough.
"Really? Barry Manilow? Westberg, please get that kid to shut up," said Kevin Hanley as we crossed through Park 285. "It's making me crazy."
"Yeah, it's making you crazy," said Westberg. "Try living with him."
"Whittaker, please. Please," Hanley said. "Just give me five minutes."
Whittaker was the name we gave Westberg's little brother, whose real name was Christopher. Even though he was five years younger, he was always with us, mostly 'cause Westberg's mom worked a lot. Westberg's mom was kind of a hippie and was really laid back. The rest of us had wooden-spoon moms, the kind of mothers who loved you to death but spent most of their time yelling at you from the kitchen. And when you broke something or made your sister cry, she'd come at you full-speed with a wooden spoon, swinging at you like one of the three musketeers. Westberg's mom was always calm, like nothing got to her. Westberg's dad lived with a beautician from the hair salon he owned and really didn't come around. My mom said that's why she was so relaxed. But it wasn't just that. She was just different—always reading books, making salads for lunch when we shot baskets in Westberg's alley, watering the 500 plants she had all over the house. And she always wore these v-neck, embroidered dresses that made her braless boobs sway like the water balloons you'd cradle in your arms while running for cover from the kid who grabbed the hose.
Whittaker's nickname was obvious to anyone who watched "The Three Stooges" after school on channel 32 when those Roger Whittaker commercials came on. Roger Whittaker was this bearded singer, "internationally renowned," in fact, who was in every other commercial break when we watched TV. His "All My Best" two-record collection from Tee Vee Records included hits none of us had ever heard of, like "The Last Farewell," "Durham Town" and "Mexican Whistler." I'm not sure if we started calling Christopher Westberg "Whittaker" because of Roger Whittaker's whistling during the commercial or because the kid was a one-man greatest-hits album, but it stuck. The thing was, we only knew about Roger Whittaker from those commercials. No one I knew had any Roger Whittaker in their record collection. Most of our dads listened to stuff like Frank Sinatra and Harry Belafonte and the Beatles. Our moms? All those singers in tight pants who guest-starred on "The Love Boat," like Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck, and whiny guys with beards like Dan Folgerberg and Bread. Westberg's mom had decent records, like Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder and ELO. Of course, the Polish families listened to polka on the radio and the Irish families listened to those songs that sounded like everyone was getting drunk at a funeral. My dad had a pretty massive collection of albums—Elvis, opera, lots of jazz and stuff I'd hear on the radio, like Chicago and the Ides of March. But no Roger Whittaker.
Anyway, something was wrong with Westberg's brother. Something with his liver. He was a small kid, even for a third-grader, and he didn't say much. But he was a normal kid—played on the monkey bars, constantly picked up rocks, had this thing for dogs and always had a red mustache from Hawaiian Punch. Normal stuff. He walked a little slow but he had tiny legs and still stopped for those stupid rocks. He was basically a normal kid but there was definitely something wrong. There were days when he was an ugly yellow, like his skin was the color of the mustard that crusted up on the top of the French's bottle. We didn't talk about it too much, didn't ask too many questions. It got Westberg mad, so we just left it alone.
Besides, most days, we had the Ricci brothers with us when we walked home from school. Joey and Sal, a couple of twins in fourth grade. Their mother worked at Gladstone Bakery with Westberg's mom so he had to walk them back to his house and watch them until their mom picked them up at 4. If you ask me, a royal pain in the ass, but to Westberg, it was no big deal, mostly because every day, the Riccis kept busy with this game of theirs, Butts, Nuts and Weenies. Basically, they'd stand butt to butt and count to three before turning around like a couple of cowboys in a duel, moving like crazy to grab the other guy's nuts or weenie. A tug on the nuts scored one point and a grab of the weenie was worth two. The boys would play this until the winner reached ten or the loser cried uncle because of squeezed nuts or a sore weenie. Either way, it kept them out of Westberg's hair for at least a half-hour each afternoon. After that, they'd watch TV or zoom around on the floor and play with the Matchbox cars they kept in their lunchboxes, waiting for their mom to pick them up. Whittaker played Butts, Nuts and Weenies with them only once. He ended up crying in the corner with a bag of frozen peas on his nuts. Mrs. Ricci cried when she heard what her sons did and told them they couldn't play that game anymore. But they were back at it the next day. Westberg wasn't going to spoil their fun.
After the Ricci brothers left, Westberg and Whittaker walked dogs for a few of their neighbors who were getting old. They had a posterboard schedule on the refrigerator—King for Mr. Helinowski on Mondays and Wednesdays, Candy for Mrs. Bruno on Tuesdays, Bootsie for Mrs. McManus on Thursdays, Tuffie for the Kovals on Friday. Mrs. Westeberg wanted them to do it for free but the neighbors knew about her "bastard of a husband," as Mrs. Koval would say, and Whittaker, so they'd pay them a buck or two for the walks. Westberg and Whittaker had a Snoopy thermos in their bedroom that was jammed full of money. When the Westberg brothers were walking dogs, you'd always hear Whittaker whistling "Sweet Georgia Brown" or "Sir Duke." They were like a mini-parade—the normal-looking kid could have been the clown throwing candy and the yellow, whistling kid could have been the band. And the dogs, who'd stop and shit every block, were the horses. They were a daily sight in our neighborhood, as regular as the burnouts who smoked pot after it got dark, leaning up against the only backstop in the park.
But the dog-walking business took a big hit after we got nailed with about 30 inches of snow—the Blizzard of '79, Joel Daley called it on the Channel 7 news. The snowdrifts were so huge in everyone's backyard that some dogs would just walk over the piles of snow that had frozen over the chain-link fences that kept them in. We lost our dog Gypsy when we were shoveling off the top of the garage. We thought it would be funny to dump the snow on top of her and the next thing you know, she was gone. I thought we buried her alive but my dad showed me how she tunneled her way out to the alley. Despite our begging, my dad didn't go looking for her. I'm sure the fact that she had spent the past year dropping turds at the foot of his bed in the middle of the night when he wouldn't let her out had something to do with it. My mom cried for two days. She didn't do the dishes for three more days after that because Gypsy sat behind her every night after dinner, watching her wash and rinse, listening to the water, listening to her sing songs in Italian, waiting for a piece of a pork chop someone left on their plate. I promised her I'd find the dog but I figured it was a long shot, especially after not seeing any sign of Gypsy for almost a week. My mom kept the faith, though, reminding me to pray to St. Anthony until Gypsy came home.
"Isn't that just for stuff you lose around the house, like keys and money?" I asked.
"I'm sure he listens when you pray to find your dog," she said. "She'll come back. She's run away before. She'll come back."
It was true. Gypsy was a border collie and would take off if there was even a small opening—like an unlatched fence or if someone held the front door open too long—for the park. She'd run around for an hour or so and then come back home after she was worn out.
"I just worry because she's small and her fur's black and with so much snow and ice, I'm just worried cars won't..." her voice trailed off. "And your dad just doesn't..."
Another unfinished sentence. She did that a lot. The truth was my dad and mom didn't talk much at all and I'd swear it made him happy to see her sad. When we were running around the neighborhood and my dad was working on some project in the garage, Gypsy was my mom's best friend.
"I'll pray to Saint Francis of Assisi, too. He was the animal guy, right?" I told her.
"He was," she said. "That might help."
Pretty soon, other dogs in the neighborhood started to go missing. People would let them out in the backyard, forgetting they never shut the gate after shoveling the gangway. I figured a lot of the dogs just started walking in the yard on the snow and the next thing you know, they were in the alley or the street. "You have to remember, the average dog has the brain the size of a walnut so there's not much there," my dad said this one night at dinner. "Gypsy probably can remember one day back and that's about it."
I knew that was bullshit. When I'd take Gypsy for walks, I'd let her off her leash a block or two from our house and she would take off running, slamming on the brakes at our house like it was a red light on Harlem Avenue.
Walnut. Right.
About a week after the blizzard, we started seeing dogs walking around in packs near the park, kind of like you'd see by the Stadium, grabbing food out of dumpsters and nearly getting hit by drivers on their way home from a game. The dogs were easy to spot at our park, which was at Foster and Austin. It was one of those Chicago Park District pieces of land without a field house or a pool. It had a couple of baseball diamonds and a pretty boring playground. There was a sign at the corner that said "Park 285," like our park wasn't even worthy of a name. The whole thing probably meant nothing to those drivers who got off the Kennedy Expressway at Austin looking for a way out of traffic. For all I knew, the dogs set up camp there when no one was looking and planned to run around and eat trash all day and night, or at least until the softball season started.
We saw dogs crossing Foster or Lawrence or running down alleys. The city was too busy digging out streets and buses to send dogcatchers out to get them, so they just wandered around in the cold. When anyone tried to catch them, they'd take off. I thought I saw Gypsy once. When I started running to her and yelling her name, she ran into a yard and I lost her again.
When we saw the dogs on the street, Westberg would leave Whittaker with us and try chasing them down to bring them home. He almost caught Tuffie a couple times, and once, he had Princess, Mrs. Ricci's schnauzer, in his arms before she bit him on the thumb. The dogs didn't want anything to do with him or us. When our string of snow days finally ended and we went back to school, the dogs would follow us for a block or two on our way home, staying about five houses behind while Whittaker whistled through every song from "School House Rock." Westberg would try and walk backward toward them but they'd just run away when he got close. Whittaker used to ask his brother if he could try to help him catch the dogs but Westberg wouldn't listen. "What, so I can lose you, too? You'd do that to mom?" Westberg would say. And after a little whimpering from Whittaker—and maybe a few seconds of that Grinch song—that would usually end it.
Rocky, Westberg's dog, one of those shelter dogs Ray Rayer dragged out during his show to make kids guilt-trip their parents into getting them one, was also out there. He got out the front door when Westberg's mom had him bring coffee out to some guys from their block who were digging out cars. Rocky walked out like it was nothing and just kept walking down the block when Westberg handed out the coffees. Mrs. Westberg told us all the dogs couldn't find their way home because of the snow and ice, something about them not being able to smell their way back.
Westberg didn't buy it.
"I read this thing in "Boys Life" about a dog who got lost right before his family moved to North Carolina from California and about six months after the family moved, the dog showed up on the front porch," Westberg said. "And Rocky knows where he lives."
I told him my dad's walnut-brain theory. "Didn't your dad tell us Bob Avellini was a better quarterback than Terry Bradshaw?" Westberg said. "No offense but he's the one with a peanut brain."
"Walnut brain," I said.
"Pistachio brain," he said.
_________________________
After the snow stopped falling, it all had to go somewhere. So when the empty parking lots and roads by the railroad tracks filled up, the city trucks started dumping snow wherever they could find an empty spot. And aside from the snow that was already on the ground, Park 285 was wide open. The city dumped truckloads of snow in Park 285 for seven days straight. It seemed like the snow reached more than 30 feet high in some places. My dad complained about Mayor Bilandic every night at dinner but we loved the guy for what he did to our park. The entire thing was filled with snow, from sidewalk to sidewalk, street to street. You couldn't even see the backstop. It looked like a picture of Antarctica from National Geographic.
We were there every day. Sledding, snowball fights, snow forts, snow mazes—we spent days carving out small paths and tunnels, marking the territories with orange reflector flags from our bicycles and old end tables from our basements. We made clubhouses out of cardboard and obstacle courses with Big Wheels, fertilizer spreaders and whatever else we could find in our garages.
_________________________
Our Park 285 winter wonderland didn't last long. The snow turned to ice and our park of snowy hills became a small frozen mountain range that we were forbidden to enter, especially after one of the kids from Hitch School threw an ice ball at Victor Zelant's face that almost tore a hole in his cheek. When it melted, the snow turned into this gray slush, filled with dead squirrels and the occasional cat or dog that got run over by a plow. All those things that got caught up in the plows began to stick out. Chairs and tables and rusty red wagons meant to save shoveled-out parking spaces were slowly rotting away across the park, like abandoned cars in the middle of a parking lot at O'Hare.
It took about two months for the snow to completely melt and once it was gone, Park 285 was a mess. The melted snow left a small lake in the center of the field, right where the 50-yard line would be when we'd play light pole to light pole. The water was brown and smelled horrible. The weird thing is that all these birds kept coming to the park, hundreds of them. Mrs. Fodami, the librarian at St. Constance, had this huge National Audubon Society poster by her desk and she put silver stars by the birds she said she'd seen at the park. She said they were flying back to Canada after the winter and stopped because they thought the park was a lake. Stupid birds. Park 285 was 60 blocks from the lake, not even close. Everyone hated the birds. They were loud and they wouldn't move out of the way when you were on the sidewalk. The birds crapped all over the cars, too. All the windshields looked like those inkblot tests you see on movies after the 10 o'clock news, where a psychiatrist asks the killer what he sees and the killer says something like a tree or an astronaut or his father strangling his mother with a jump rope. And the park smelled like the inside of a refrigerator after the power's been out all day.
Yeah, it was still our park, but we looked at it a little differently now. The city screwed us. They dumped all their snow and garbage from the streets right in the middle of our football field and baseball fields. It was where we played homerun derby and Kill the Carrier and whatever else we could think of to avoid going home to do our homework. It was where we watched our dads blow off fireworks on the Fourth of July and where we sat in the grass at night, watching fireflies and talking about what we wanted to be when we got older and which one of our classmates might let us go up her shirt.
_________________________
"You'd think they could just melt the snow when they plow it," said one of the Ricci brothers when we were walking home from school one day. "Like with Godzilla! Or a dragon or something!"
"Are you effing kidding me?" said Hanley. "Do you know what we're going to have to listen to the rest of the way?"
But it was too late. Whittaker was whistling "Puff the Magic Dragon." But it was softer than usual. And he seemed out of breath.
“C’mon, Christopher,” Westberg said. "Enough."
"Yeah, Whittaker," said Hanley. "Enough."
"Who the fuck are you?" Westberg yelled, right as his Saint Constance Eagles Basketball gym bag slammed Hanley square in the chest and his left fist pounded him in the temple. "Tell him you're sorry. Tell him you're sorry!"
Hanley did.
"Whistle all you want, Chris," said Westberg. "All you fucking want."
Whittaker started up again, this time with a quiet version of "Bad Bad Leroy Brown."
"This kid is your own personal orchestra—he's your own personal soundtrack," I said as we tried to slide across the remaining patches of ice on the sidewalk that led to the playground. "It's like you're living a movie."
"Yeah," Westberg said. "Some movie."
Hanley said he forgot something at school and took off the other way. The rest of us whistled Jim Croce songs for the next two blocks, following Whittaker's every cue, making sure to fill in the notes he needed to skip to take extra breaths.
_________________________
We were a day away from the beginning of spring break and Whittaker hadn't walked home with us all week. He was in a room at Resurrection Hospital.
"You can hear all this liquid in his lungs when he breathes," said Westberg.
"I don't know, man. My mom says you guys should probably be getting ready for the worst," said Paul Gadomski.
"Goddamn, Ski!" I said, which was something we—or anyone—would say to Gadomski every time he opened his mouth. "What the fuck, Paul? Shut up!"
"He'll be OK," said Hanley. "He'll be home by Easter."
"That's what my mom said. Home by Easter," said Westberg.
"Home by Easter," I said.
But Hanley didn't mean it when he said it. Neither did I. And neither did Westberg. It was Holy Thursday. Whittaker had been in the hospital since last Friday.
We crossed Foster at Austin when Gadomski stopped us.
"I can't walk through the park today," he said. "Not even on the sidewalk. My mom says my shoes smell like dog pee every day when I come home."
We all agreed with Gadomski—our moms had been complaining about our shoes all spring—and walked around the park. I noticed a few dogs chasing those stupid birds and saw Gypsy for the first time in weeks. We all figured our dogs for dead. Someone said they were living in Ridgemoore, that golf course at Nagle and Gunnison, and that they raided the garbage at Butera every night but we rode our bikes there a couple of times and didn't see them. Gypsy was skinny and had this stuff that looked like woodchips stuck to her fur. I yelled her name. She stopped and looked at me for a second but turned and followed the other dogs back toward Austin. I was about to go after her but Westberg's mom was driving down Foster and started honking her horn like crazy when she saw us. Westberg got into the car and they drove away.
_________________________
Good Friday should be a blow-off day in school but it never was at St. Constance. All Fridays during lent were pretty bad, actually. We had to say the rosary in class in the morning, eat crappy PBJ, cheese or egg salad sandwiches we brought from home for lunch and go to the Stations of the Cross at 2 o'clock. It was torture sitting through it every week. Maybe the story of Jesus falling down and being whipped by a bunch of Romans was interesting in first or second grade, but we'd heard it so many times it was like watching Brady Bunch reruns. Is this the one where Marcia dates the rival school's quarterback? Wait, this is the one where Jesus falls for the third time. Either way, we knew what was going to happen. We'd seen them all.
But something different happened that Lent. Our pastor must've finally realized that the girls spent the entire stations' service daydreaming about making out with Shaun Cassidy and the boys racked up impure thoughts about Cheryl Ladd. So to knock us off our game, he decided to have a little re-enactment each week. And like most other things at our parish, he used it as a way to make a few bucks. Parents could donate money to get their kids parts in each week's re-enactments, like the Roman soldiers with the fake whips, the crying Mother Mary or the other two guys who died on their own crosses, whatever their names were. Those parts went to anyone in sixth grade or older. But the plum role of Jesus was reserved for an eighth-grader. Jesus had to wear a white pillowcase around his waist and carry around a cross made of leftover plywood. Most kids, especially the fat kids, begged their moms and dads to avoid the Jesus donation, and their parents usually listened. But not Victor Zelant's grandma. She didn't care that her grandson weighed about 200 pounds and had boobs the size of a couple of guinea pigs. She wanted him to be Jesus every week, so she'd pay the ten bucks or so it took to ensure Zelant was the King of the Jews. On this Good Friday, the students of St. Lucy's got to see Zelant's enormous butt cheeks sticking out of his underwear when the pillowcase got caught on a nail on the cross. The church was just about shaking from all of us laughing. I couldn't believe Westberg was missing this.
Zelant was facing the altar, totally clueless that his white ass was the star of the show. His grandma just stood there with that stupid camera in front of her face like it was all part of the act, like it was just another station—Jesus Moons the Crowd. Click. Click. Click. Victor's mother was sitting in a pew in the back of the church and started yelling something in German. Father Peter, who was the guy who came up with the idea of the Jesus auction in the first place, saw Victor's gigantic rear end and could barely keep a straight face. He read a few things from the bible, told us to have a safe Easter break, then asked us to go back to our classrooms until the bell rang.
After stations, when we got back to Mrs. Loman's room, Westberg was there. He wasn't in his school uniform. He was wearing jeans, a Wisconsin Dells sweatshirt and the scapular we got for confirmation. We stopped laughing about Zelant and circled around Westberg.
"Chris is pretty sick," Westberg said. "He's got too much water in his lungs and some other stuff. My mom's been crying all day. The doctor told her he's never going to get better. He's only going to get worse and eventually, his body will give up."
No one really knew what to do next. Eric Mikowski patted Westberg on the shoulder, I gave him a light slap on the back and Hanley knocked on his desk.
"Where's Whittak- uh, Chris now?" I asked.
"He's coming home tomorrow. He's spending one more night in the hospital."
I started to think about what a kid's funeral would be like. The wakes and funerals I'd gone to were filled with old people who were sad about a dead old person. I guess Hanley's dad wasn't that old when he died but I swear he looked like Burgess Meredith in that casket. When my grandpa died, I stayed in the funeral home's basement with my cousins most of the time, playing Go Fish and eating Maurice Lenell cookies.
I had no idea what a kid's funeral would be like.
Mrs. Loman was at her desk, looking at Westberg, smiling. But just barely.
"We have a few minutes. Let's say a prayer for Michael's brother, and then you can talk quietly until the bell rings," she said.
Westberg was already praying. He was hanging on to the front of his scapular like it was a Bill Buckner card. Gadomski, Hanley and Zelant were already praying with their eyes closed. Gadomski even had one of those finger rosaries with the cross and the 10 little beads, all wrapped around a ring, the kind you see old ladies praying with on the bus, probably saying a bunch of "Our Fathers" so that no one steals their purse.
"Where'd you get that?" I asked after the "Glory Be."
"Found it in the pew today. Some grandma must have left it there after 6:30 mass. I'm going to clean it up a bit and give it to my mom for Mother's Day. She'll love it."
"Great," I said. "Happy Mother's Day, mom. Here's a stolen rosary."
"It's not stolen, fuckface. Someone left it there."
The bell rang and everyone got up and headed for the door. Westberg stayed in his seat.
"You coming?" I asked.
"I'm waiting for my mom. She's talking to Sister Carmalina about my brother's homework, what he missed, what he needs to do, stuff like that."
I sat at the desk next to him.
"How long do you think he has, really?"
"He looks bad. He's been really sick lately. I don't know."
Mrs. Westberg came to the classroom door. Mrs. Loman gave her a hug. I didn't know what to say or do. I told her that my family would be praying for her and Michael and Christopher this weekend. She smiled and asked me if I wanted a ride home.
"We're gonna walk," said Westberg.
On the way home, we talked about Artis Gilmore and the Bulls and DePaul and Mark Aguirre. We talked about what we'd do during the summer but mostly, we just walked. It was weird to walk without Whittaker's whistling in the background, though, like when the sound on your TV is turned down when you're watching a Bears game. I kept thinking of Whittaker's wake. Would he be in a small coffin? Would his dad show up? Would we get the day off from school?
When we walked past the alley near Higgins and Marmora, we heard growling and barking. When we turned the corner, we were face to face with a big pack of dogs, as close as we'd been to them since they left. The dogs looked different now. They were skinny and dirty. Gypsy looked like she was about to drop dead. We tried to call them but they took off when we moved toward them.
"Those dogs are going to die out here," said Westberg. "Dumb animals. We want to help them and they just stay away, eating garbage, starving to death. Brains the size of walnuts."
_________________________
Whittaker got pushed out of Resurrection Hospital at noon on Holy Saturday in a wheelchair with so many balloons tied to the back of it, it looked like it could take off and fly to the clouds. He got to keep the wheelchair for a few days until he was strong enough to walk on his own. We were playing fast-pitch in the only sort-of dry spot in the park when he came home, so we took turns pushing him around the block, being careful to avoid the giant cracks and gaps in the cement that we usually take on at full speed on our bikes. We wanted to take turns on the wheelchair but Westberg told us to fuck off. But he laughed about it. "Maybe we should push the Riccis into the street," he said.
"Yeah," I said. "Butts, nuts and traffic."
The sky looked blue for the first time in months and we could see grass growing where the lake of melted snow was last month.
"You know how in art, Ms. Young says all colors have a smell?" said Gadomski. "I bet this is what the color green smells like."
"I bet you're what the color dipshit smells like," said Hanley. "What the hell are you talking about?"
We all take turns asking Whittaker the same questions: How was the hospital food? Any good-looking nurses? Did they have to give him a bath? And if they got to strip him down, did he get to take off their clothes, too?
We stopped talking when Whittaker started whistling. It was still weaker than usual, but it was there. Some Billy Joel, a little "Hey Hey, We're the Monkees" and some "Bear Down, Chicago Bears."
_________________________
Six months from that Holy Saturday, the day before Halloween, we were dressed in our confirmation suits at Whittaker's wake. The place was packed. Every mom in the neighborhood put extra tissue in her purse and a casserole in her car. After the wake, we loaded up Mrs. Westberg's brother's van with enough frozen pans of mostaccioli and tuna casserole to last for a year. We didn't go back into the funeral home after we walked through and saw Whittaker in his casket. He looked like a toy, like Pinocchio. Small and skinny. His skin was patted down with makeup but the yellow still came through. It looked like him but like if someone drew him from memory. Mrs. Westberg hugged each one of us and told us we were Christopher's special angels. She almost sang it when she said it. "Special angels."
Westberg took us down to a room in the basement where we had some Sprite and cookies. Mrs. Loman came down and told us to go back upstairs–that the food was for the family—so we just stayed in the parking lot and watched our dads smoke and stare at their shoes. Every once in a while, someone would whistle something but then we'd all feel stupid and just stare at the line of people that stretched down Milwaukee Avenue.
_________________________
On the Holy Saturday, when Whittaker came home from the hospital., we took turns pushing him around the park. We stopped for a minute to look at the fresh coat of light blue paint on the playground's benches.
"It's a start," said Pantano.
"That blue smells like … like …" said Gadomski, trying to figure it out.
"Let me guess," said Hanley. "Jesus."
"I was thinking more pierogi but whatever," said Gadomski.
"I want to punch you so hard in the nose. Then you can tell me what my fist smells like," said Hanley.
"Let me guess," said Pantano. "Jesus."
Ignoring the arguing, Whittaker whistled on—the Oscar Meyer commercial, "Disco Inferno" and the theme from "The Gong Show."
When we passed the alley off of Meade, we heard the jingling dog tags and saw Rocky. He was scrawny, like he'd been hollowed out, all fur and bones like he'd been drawn in pencil and no one bothered to color him in. Before Westberg even called his name, Rocky ran to him and licked his face like it was a melting ice cream cone. Westberg held Rocky's head in his hands and studied the patches of gray hair in his eyebrows and under his neck, all of which had been brown before Rocky left home. They rolled around on the sidewalk for a while until Rocky noticed Whittaker. Rocky sniffed his legs, pissed on the wheelchair, put his paws on Whittaker's shoulders, licked his face and neck and then and took his place alongside him, like a motorcycle sidebar. A minute or two later, two more dogs showed up, running through Park 285 with their ears perked up and their noses smelling the spring air. I couldn't blame them. The park smelled almost normal again. You could smell the grass, fresh paint, dirt. Gadomski was right. This is what green smelled like.
"Let's keep moving," Westberg said. "Maybe we can catch them."
We didn't have to. To the faint strains of "Let There Be Peace On Earth" and "More than a Woman," Westberg kept pushing, Whittaker kept whistling and the dogs kept coming. They ran toward Whittaker, almost single-file like they were kids lining up for hot fudge sundaes at Tastee Freez. First, it was Pepper who followed close behind Rocky and Whittaker's wheelchair, and then Gypsy, who ran up to me and dropped at my feet in some sort of plea for forgiveness. "You don't need to say you're sorry," I kept saying as I buried my head in her chest. "You don't need to say you're sorry."
Later, Bootsie, Candy, Tuffie, Mickey, Daisy, Blackie and King joined the procession, plus a few dogs we didn't know. Whittaker went through "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," "Here Comes the Sun" and the theme from "Happy Days" while his brother pushed him up and down the streets of the neighborhood. Gypsy and I walked behind the procession, watching as the two brothers dropped off Park 285's lost pets to the waiting arms of crying women, screaming girls and shocked fathers who mouthed things like "goddammit" before shaking their heads and smiling while placing their hands on the heads of their prodigal pets.
By the time Whittaker made his final delivery—an out-of-control King to Mr. Helanowski, who ran up to Whittaker, grabbed his face and kissed him on the forehead—Westberg and I headed back to our houses. I told him I'd call him tomorrow and to have a happy Easter.
Whittaker was asleep in his chair. "What was that? I mean, what was that?" Westberg said.
"I have no idea," I said. "All I know is your brother is like the Pied Piper."
"Right. Right. The Pied Piper."
"Whittaker, patron saint of dogs."
"Patron saint of Park 285."
Gypsy and I walked toward our house. She picked up the pace as we got close to McVicker. I took her leash off and she sprinted full-speed down the block, running up our stairs and scratching at the door. I saw my mom open the door, heard her scream and watched as she picked up Gypsy and wrapped her arms around her like she was one of those GIs in a World War II movie, seeing his "girl" for the first time since he was shipped overseas.
"Where have you been?" my mom screamed as she spun around the front lawn like Dorothy Hamill, holding Gypsy close to her chest. "Where have you been?"