'74 & Sunny by A. J. Benza Page A

forearm would attest.
    Frankie leaned in real close as we headed back down the canal. “Who knows, maybe you’ll be teaching Gino by August. You guys can have circle-jerk parties.”
    â€œDon’t listen,” I said into Gino’s ear, as he was waking up. “These guys love talking about jizz.”
    â€œI don’t even know what any of you are talking about,” he said, his face flushed.
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    W hen we glided back to the dock, Gino and Uncle Larry had opened their bloodshot, salt-encrusted eyes and couldn’t wait to get on terra firma. They were both sunburned, soaking wet, and traumatized.
    â€œHow was everything?” my mother asked, while admiring the fluke we caught and the clams we grabbed. She and my sisters had been busy blending the whiskey sours and putting out the dried sausage and cheese we always had waiting for us ashore. “What did Larry and Gino catch?”
    â€œUgotz.” My father laughed. “Niente.” Nothing.
    She knelt down to be nearer his ear, as he was spreading out the clams, spraying them down with the garden hose, and organizing them by size. The big mothers for his homemade chowder, the littlenecks to be eaten raw, and the cherrystones to be steamed for posillipo sauce. “Al . . . are you gonna let Gino go again tomorrow?”
    â€œOh, yeah,” he said. “He’s going again. He’s going with the ones who are staying.” That meant, the next time the men were going to spend a day on the sea, Gino was gonna stay home with the women—the ones who were staying.
    My father got right to work whipping up a fresh clam chowder while Jack and Frankie cut the fluke into fillet strips. Gino and I had the job of burying the fish heads deep into the garden compost.
    â€œDo you do this after every fishing trip?” Gino asked me, gagging.
    â€œYep,” I said. “But I don’t think it does anything more than stink up the backyard.”
    â€œOh . . . the expert,” my father shouted through the kitchen window. “Is that what you think? Your father has the best earth in town. You’ll see when I’m dead.” He was feeling a little loaded, so I didn’t answer back.
    For reasons unknown to me, he always felt he made his point stronger by telling us how much more intelligent he’d become in our heads after he died. Come to think of it, maybe it was all his talk about death that made me chew through all those Tums.
    While everything was cooking, my father took me, Uncle Larry, and Gino on a trip through his garden and grape arbor and eventually stopped at a very fertile peach tree that was the eyesore of my youth.
    â€œCome here, Larry,” my father said. “Look at what I did with this peach tree.” He always presented it with a flourish, as if he were showing off a brand-new Picasso. “My son thinks he should be embarrassed of it.”
    Uncle Larry stood in the shade of the giant tree, which was bursting with too many peaches for us to ever eat, and marveled at it. “Oh, Al . . . Momma and Poppa would’ve loved to see this.”
    What they would have seen was my father’s jerry-rigged invention that had the whole neighborhood slowing down as they drove by the house to sneak a peek at our side yard. My father would search for peach buds the size of almonds, atwhich point he’d take an empty wine bottle and guide the branch holding the bud all the way to the bottom of the bottle. A piece of duct tape would secure the tree branch inside the neck of the bottle, so that the entire tree branch would heavily droop and nearly rest on the lawn. At any given time during the spring and early summer, there were at least two dozen bottles on the tree, and for rubberneckers driving by it looked like nothing less than a twenty-foot-tall alien with wine bottles for hands and feet. A District 9 for winos. But in