Mr. Richard Duggan died last week. There was no funeral, Danny said. The City hearse just came real early in the morning and took the body away before it could smell. Mr. Duggan had no family, and he lived alone over the Millinis in one room on the top floor. He was old and he didn’t smile or talk to anybody, and he didn’t go out, hardly ever, and we almost never saw him except for once or twice a year when he limped real slow up the block to Jamaica Avenue to take the el.

Danny Millini was still sore at me because they put his dog to sleep after he bit me bad. I got like over thirty stitches but that was the summer before. Prince had tore me up like I was made out of cray paper. I had been on the sidewalk in front of the Millinis’ long driveway when I heard the cry PRINCE IS LOOSE. I froze, and just stood there. My dad had always told me the safest thing to do if a dog charges is NOT to run. But I guess that’s for normal dogs. Prince was crazy. My mom sometimes looks at my dad funny-like and she says that you can still see the scars on my face and arms and they’re still red but it doesn’t bother me. They don’t hurt anymore and the nightmares have stopped so who cares. I just can’t be around dogs anymore. Not even little tiny ones. I was the second person Prince bit and enough is enough, my dad said, that dog is a danger but neighbors don’t sue each other as long as the doctor bills get paid which I guess they did but then my dad said the Millinis didn’t have a lot of money and we were lucky cause we had a major medical since dad’s a machine-shop teacher and in the union at Brooklyn Tech, so who knows? My friend Charles lives next to the Millinis and he got bit first—like six months before me—and he got a hundred dollars when Prince got him, and he said my dad was stupid and a sucker not to sue but I just said back to him YOUR MOTHER! just like Al, my older brother, taught me to say to rank out somebody as he called it, but I didn’t say WHAT about his mother even though Al had said that was enough and that’s all you need to say. Anyhow, Charles didn’t want to fight and said he was just glad that he got his hundred dollars put in the bank for him for when he was older and he didn’t even need stitches. He said maybe I could of gotten even TWO hundred. Man! 

A few days after Mr. Duggan died, the Millinis emptied his room and carried out so much garbage to the curb. I spoke it over with Hans and Charles and we waited for our chance. When the Millinis all left in their old station wagon for Mass on Saturday night, which my dad told me the Church now said counted for Sunday (even though WE still went on Sunday morning), we attacked that stuff at the curb. It was me and my brother Paul, and Hans and Charles, and Pepo who mostly spoke just Spanish and just moved in and went to PS 54, not Cenacle like the four of us. Call us garbage pickers—I don’t care. We got some really neat stuff. 

I got a box of pencils and old fountain pens but I got ink all over myself and when I went home, all sweaty from running, my mom yelled at me and I had to wash up like it was Sunday night before school. There were all sorts of pencils in the box in bunches tied up with rubber bands that had dried and shriveled up and looked like dead worms wound around the pencils that mostly were worn down and had no tips and the erasers were all hard rubber and couldn’t erase nothing and would just tear your homework up because they were so old and now like a rock. There was a broken radio Pepo took to open and fiddle with and an old flashlight but the battery had busted and was all leaky. That got on me and burned a little but I wiped it off good on my shirt. There were a few tools which I took: a few screwdrivers and a pair of pliers and Paul got an old saw that was rusty and my dad later made him throw it out cause he could of cut himself and then he would need a needle or his jaw would lock up and not close, ever, my dad said. 

There were so many heavy boxes of old papers. Pepo found hidden in there a bunch of dirty pictures and some had words in a different language on them too. He shoved them in his pocket, and we couldn’t see but it’s a sin for us because we go to Catholic school, but he says HE could look cause he went to public school which was better than Catholic school with mean nuns hitting you with a paddle. We said that was dumb and he could go to hell. There were magazines and books but all of this was for old people. Nothing about baseball or race cars or bull fighting or other fun stuff. There were like a thousand gazillion pages of boring paper with numbers on it like math in school. Records of some kind. Over and over we threw up handfuls of these papers and yelled Happy New Year! and watched it rain over all of us and settle in a big mess in the street.

There were lots of clothes but to us these were just rags so we didn’t bother with this until Pepo found a dollar in one of the pockets, and then we emptied all the bags of clothes like a rummage sale my mother would sometimes drag me to, and we felt in every pocket but we didn’t find any more money. We told Pepo that when the Mellinis got back from church we’d tell Danny that he found a dollar in the clothes and he would have to give it back because it was from Danny’s house but he said in bad English and with some Spanish words thrown in that we couldn’t understand that then we’d all have to give everything back that we found, and also Mr. Duggan was dead and didn’t need it, and anyhow, finders keepers. That was all really smart of him to say so we shut up about it after that. 

Hans found an old duffle bag that had Mr. Duggan’s army clothes in there. It was motheaten and smelled and Mr. Duggan was no general, that’s for sure. The army shirts had just a few stripes on the sleeves so what comes after buck private? We looked for guns and knives and ammunition and grenades but there was none of that neat stuff.

There was a whole bag of old pills and medicine and bandages rolled up and ointments in tubes that we stepped on to watch them squirt, and there were all these old, small, dark brown and green, thick glass bottles. We smashed them hard on the black street with all the cracks and we threw some of them straight up really high and watched them crash and explode, and they almost hit us on our heads but we dodged them cause we were too fast. 

Paul found a book of all the green stamps that my mom kept but I took that from him because he didn’t know they were like money and when you saved enough you could get like a free car or who knows, maybe even a house. He tried to grab it away but I was bigger and so he jumped back into the garbage pile to see what else he might find. 

Charles found a suitcase that was locked but we took a rock to it and busted it open thinking there could be stacks of thousand-dollar bills or jewels inside but it was just more papers, including old photographs from when Mr. Duggan was just a little boy with his mom and dad, but the writing on the back of the pictures in pencil was smudged and you couldn’t read it. His high school diploma was in there too from some school from a faraway state like New Jersey or California or somewhere.  It was dated in the 1930s like before they had electricity.

There was a package of letters that fell out of the box. Hans took one look at the girly red ribbon wrapped around these letters and jumped back into the pile, leaving me to look myself. The letters were in their envelopes from so many years before. They had funny stamps and there was army writing on most of them and some of the words and sentences in the letters were blocked out good so nobody could read them. Plus it was hard to read anyhow, since it was all in script and Mr. Duggan had written them all because they all had his name on the bottom so I don’t see how he got them back from the girl Dear Ash, or Dear Ashley or My Dearest Lady Ashley that he wrote them to and they were all so mushy about love and real boring so I searched around trying to find any exciting war talk and there was some but so much was blocked out and he sure liked to say Jap and Dirty Jap a lot, and he also used a lot of bad words too but it’s a sin to say those bad words and I won’t. The letter on the bottom was different from the rest. The envelope had been sent to some army hospital to the attention of Mr. Richard Duggan which is how we learned his full name. It was in a girl’s handwriting and the paper was fancy and on top it said My Dearest Dick which made me giggle but I continued and it read I’m so, so sorry about what happened to you and I do love you but I can’t and have to write this letter. It was going to be more mushy stuff like what would make my mother sad and cry so I dropped it into the mess at me feet and jumped back into the pile.  

And then I found this. Buried all the way at the bottom of the heap I saw and grabbed a leg from a dummy they have in the store window like when you go at the beginning of the year to get your new school clothes. I grabbed it and threw it over my shoulder like it was a gun the soldiers carry while marching. Charles tried to take it from me but first I swung it like a sword and then jabbed at him like it was a bayonet and he couldn’t get it from me. I put it back over my left shoulder with my right hand holding it in place from the upper leg-end and the foot part out past by shoulder as I marched around, feeling victorious: hup, two, three, four, hup, two, three, four…

Hans, who had run into his house because he had to go to the bathroom, bad, came running back out like he was missing all of the fun and he wasn’t even off his stoop when he saw me and yelled loud for me to drop it. John! He shouted. EEEEEwwwww! That’s Mr. Duggan’s wooden leg! When he got all blown up and his leg shot off by the Japs in the war.

Instantly, I dropped that leg like it had come alive and would bite, and I began to run as fast as I could, in circles first, like a dog, and wiping on my shirt my right hand where I had held the end with my open palm just where the fake leg would have met the stump. I remembered back to a few nights earlier when my mom and dad had thought I had fallen asleep on the couch. They were talking about the war and someone wounded in Oak-in-ow-ahh. Dad had looked at my mom funny like and had said the leg maybe he could live with but that this other thing was worse than death even. What could ever be that bad I had thought. Then, scared that the leg was contagious and like I was infected, I tore for home, as fast as I could, my lungs pounding. Past the length of six houses I ran. It was like it was last summer and Prince was loose and kids were screaming and running and jumping on cars to escape this mad dog instead of just standing there, helpless, but this time I ran and ran so fast and if there was a dog I knew it couldn’t catch or bite me. I was young and could live for so long, really almost forever, and it was stupid to worry about dying. I had my legs still and they worked just as they were supposed to and they could carry me for many, many years till I got old like forty or fifty even, through a life that had every possibility open to it, maybe even for me to fall in love, and marry, and have children and maybe even become a general one day in a war and awarded all those stripes and medals. Yeah, me a war hero when I was all growed up.