IShongo, 1961

By Rich Chiappone

In the redawn darkness the Sunday a er Easter of my 13th year, I crossed the street to the Poretti house carrying my spinning rod in one hand, a can of nightcrawlers in the other, and a Sucrets tin of salted minnows in my acket ocket. Cosmo oretti was the first good friend I’d made when I moved into the neighborhood by the Niagara River and, unlike me, he had older brothers. One of them knew things about fishing and hunting. The other owned a car.

Although we lived only one block from the river, we were heading almost 100 miles south to the Allegheny foothills near the town of Shongo, to the headwaters of the Genesee River. There we hoped to catch trout, exotic creatures absent from the fetid industrial Niagara. I had caught a few chubs down at the cement docks earlier that spring, along with one sun sh. is would be my rst grownup shing trip. e rst time I’d gone anywhere in a car without one of my parents.

Groggy from lack of sleep and wound up about traveling to the quasi-wilderness of New York’s Southern Tier, I staggered beneath the elms arching above our street on my way to the Poretti house. e corner streetlight glowed with a halo of soot particles from nearby Great Lakes Carbon, where my father worked. Bathed in its hazy light were Cosmo and his brother Johnny, leaning against a two-door, blueand-white ’57 Chevy, the trunk propped open. e youngest and oldest Poretti brothers stared into the starry sky overhead, Johnny saying something about Khrushchev and dogs ying in space.

Eighteen-year-old Johnny Poretti was a grown man in my eyes, out of school, his face sporting an eternal ve o’clock shadow, dark as an eclipse. Still living at home, he worked at the Union Carbide plant and poured his paychecks into the Chevy. ere was always another shiny chrome part to buy. He was the broody, serious type and paid little attention to us younger boys. Johnny rarely seemed happy except when he was out in the street polishing the car, a stack of 45s blaring from his record player on the concrete stoop. Cosmo and I liked to sit on the curb and listen to the new “race” music the white kids were just beginning to embrace. Stagger Lee. Stand By Me. Spanish Harlem. One summer day a red Plymouth convertible pulled up and a great-looking blonde hopped out. Cosmo poked me. “Debbie,” he whispered. We gaped as she leapt into Johnny’s arms, wrapped her legs around his hips, and kissed him. Right in the middle of the street.

As I walked up to Johnny’s Chevy, Cosmo said to him, “I invited Richie, okay?”

“Tackle in the trunk,” Johnny said, neutrally, “knuckleheads in the back.”

Cosmo and I climbed in, the smooth white leather cool beneath us. Johnny slid behind the wheel and lit a Chester eld. I sat for a moment, inhaling the delirious adult aroma of secondhand smoke, nobody saying anything. I knew we were waiting for 15-year-old Jerry, their middle brother. Jerry was the real sportsman of the family. At Cruickshank’s Tackle Shop, down on Bu alo Avenue, I’d seen grown men ask him where the perch were biting,

what he was using for black bass.

Johnny tapped the horn impatiently and muttered, “Dickhead.” A moment later Jerry appeared at the passenger door, a cigarette of his own glowing in the dim light. Cosmo and Johnny both had glossy black pompadours, but Jerry’s hair was a basket of ringlets curling around his head like a strange winter hat. He climbed into the shotgun seat, an apt description with him holding an actual ri e upright between his knees like a stagecoach guard. It was springtime and all hunting seasons were closed. I knew that much.

“Jerry, what are you going to shoot with that?”

Jerry turned in his seat and gave me a puzzled look. “Who are you again?” at was Jerry’s running joke. I was over at the Poretti house nearly every day after school to escape my numerous younger brothers and sisters, and to soak up everything I’d need to know when I became a teenager in September. Jerry said that to me every time.

“It’s springtime,” I said. “I mean, what do you hunt now?”

Jerry stared at me over the seatback, smoke leaking from the corners of his tight lips. “ ere’s no season on varmints,” he said, nally. en he knitted his brow, quizzically. “Who are you again?”

Johnny snorted. “Leave the kid alone, Jer.” He punched the car into gear and we shtailed out of the neighborhood, adding to the patina of black rubber on the pavement in front of the Poretti house.

“Varmints,” I said. “Neat.”

Jerry stuck one nger in his ear and squinted up at the headliner like he couldn’t gure out where an annoying sound was coming from.

Cosmo jerked his thumb toward Jerry and mouthed, “Ass-wipe.”

Ithink hunting was in the Porettis’ blood. On Palm Sunday two weeks before,Cosmo’s grandmother had come to visit after mass. e old widow stepped out of the Porettis’ Fairlane station wagon in her black dress and ugly shoes, a scowl on her face, her purse hooked over one arm. In her other bony hand she gripped the Crossman air ri e her grandsons had given her. ey were that kind of family. She glowered at us kids playing Whi e ball in the street and muttered something in bitter Italian, clearly dissatis ed with all things modern and American— except her pellet gun. Cosmo and I followed her into his basement and watched her climb a step stool, poke the air ri e out the high cellar window, and shoot into the horde of starlings marching across the Porettis’ back lawn. According to Cosmo, she always cooked and ate the birds in the Old World fashion. Jerry Poretti, like his grandmother, loved shooting things. e oldest brother, Johnny was not really interested in hunting or shing and had been persuaded by Jerry to make the drive to the Southern Tier, seduced by the promise of rural highways and country roads where a guy could really step on the gas. ere was no point in owning a car like Johnny’s if you stayed in the city where the local cops were all too familiar with your vehicle and persistently heavy foot. You might as well drive one of those new Corvairs, or a Volkswagen or, God forbid, borrow the folks’ station wagon.

Leaving the chemical plants of Niagara Falls behind, we raced past Bu alo and the gigantic Lackawanna steel mills. I could smell the heat of the big coke ovens, the mills still throbbing with energy in those busy boomtime years, 30,000 workers toiling away unaware they’d all be unemployed in the next decade.

Miles south of the factories we crossed into the farm country of Cattaraugus County going 75, the yellow dashes on the pavement hurling themselves at Johnny’s headlights. With the windows down, the air smelled of grass and soil and clean rivers. e Motown girl groups the Porettis loved blasted from Johnny’s radio. Of course, whatever the Porettis loved, I loved too, although this music was all very new to me. At home, my mother ironed listening to Patti Page singing How Much Is at Doggie in the Window? Perry Como crooning Catch a Falling Star. Now the sounds of e Shirelles, e Crystals and e Ronettes had me squirming with desire for something I couldn’t name. We ew into the new morning, all four of us wailing, “Will you still love me tomorrow?” day. Beyond them, thick woodlots huddled in dark shadows. Every couple of miles, a house and a barn would appear tucked back from the road at the end of a long, rutted driveway. Otherwise, nothing but open country rolled away from us on both sides of the road. is far from the cities, the radio produced only static, or equally irritating country music—all banjos and yodeling—and Johnny turned it o . On the road for nearly two hours, we had little left to say to each other and slid into a comfortable silence that I was sure indicated a kind of grownup understanding among men like us. I was nodding o , mesmerized by the hum of the pavement beneath our tires, when Jerry yelled, “Woodchuck!” He had the ri e out the window before the Chevy bucked to a full stop on the gravel shoulder. e woodchuck was grazing in a eld of short grass a few yards from the foundation of a white two-story house, its windows still dark at that hour. At the sound of our tires skidding to a halt, the creature unwisely stood erect to identify potential danger approaching. Jerry laid his cheek against the ri e stock. e wind ru ed his curls. He clicked the safety o .

Johnny said, “Jer, it’s too close to the house!” e blast of the shot exploding inside the car numbed my ears. I inhaled the tantalizing aroma of gun powder. Out in the dewy grass, the woodchuck lay on its back, four feet in the air like a housecat luxuriating in a square of sunlight. As the ri e crack echoed away into the hills, two huge black dogs erupted o the porch and came howling down the driveway toward us. A light snapped on in a secondoor window.

“Shit!” Johnny yelped, his tires spitting gravel until they bit the blacktop and we were ying again. Holding his ears, Cosmo groaned, “Jerry, give us some warning, wouldya?”

Jerry turned in his seat, eyes lit. “It was a clean shot though, wasn’t it?”

By the time we drifted through the small town of Olean—Johnny carefully staying under the speed limit through its quiet Victorian neighborhoods— and back out into the open countryside, dawn was bleeding through the forested horizon. Newly plowed farm elds steamed beneath the rst light of

We parked by a one-lane steel bridge over the Genesee River, no other people in sight. Although the sky was cloudless, the river was high and dark from spring runo . With early morning optimism we cast our salted minnows into the murk but caught nothing. Troutless, hope soon waned. I switched to wriggling worms and caught a stone-roller chub and a stunted rock bass. Mid-morning, Jerry, accustomed to catching more desirable sh, walked back to the

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