Bridge of Sighs

my mother he’d known when they were young, but apparently he knew my father, too. “Everybody know Lou Lynch,” he added, making me feel proud to be so like a man everybody knew and wishing I
was
Lou Lynch Junior instead of Louis Charles Lynch, who was notable mostly for having a girl’s nickname. The real reason Gabriel Mock called me Junior was that everybody called
him
Junior, a burden he felt should be shared. Early on I’d asked what I should call him, and he said he didn’t care. “Any name you want,” he said. “Call me something nasty, if that suit you. You can’t hurt my feelin’s no matter how hard you try. Anything ’cept nigger. Call me that, I’ll have to cut out your gizzard. I got me a knife, too, don’t think I don’t.”
    I had no intention of calling him that, and I’m sure he knew it. “What’s a gizzard?” I said, wondering if its similarity in sound gave it some mysterious connection to the word “nigger.”
    “A spare part,” Gabriel explained unhelpfully. “Don’t your mama feed you chicken?”
    I said she did, lots of different ways.
    “She prob’ly thown out the gizzard. Not good enough for white folks. Call me Gizzard, you want. Can’t hurt my feelin’s.”
    As soon as I showed up, he’d hand me a spare brush. “Slap that lacquer on good and thick,” he always reminded me. “Don’t be thin wit’ it. Ain’t gonna run out, don’t you worry.” Sometimes we painted along together, him on his side of the fence, me on mine. Other times he just stretched out on the grass and gave me instructions. “I be the job foreman today,” he’d say. “I’m a rest my eyes while you work. Don’t think I’m sleepin’, ’cause I ain’t.” It seemed to both please and amuse Gabriel that I’d just show up like I did, ready to paint his fence. He said my helping him out gave him more time to howl. “You know what I mean by howlin’?” He asked me this question every time I visited, and each time I pretended not to. “Sneak out the house some night,” he suggested. “Come by after the sun go down, you hear me howlin’.”
    He also wanted to know what I planned to do when I grew up, and I always told him I was still thinking about it. Apparently I was going to college, which meant I wouldn’t be a milkman like my father. Probably I wouldn’t live in Thomaston either, since according to my mother that would be a terrible waste of an education. Her idea was that I would venture out into the wide world, do things that people in Thomaston didn’t do, see things that people around here didn’t see. “Experience life” was how she summed it up. When I made the mistake of mentioning that maybe I’d return one day and live in a house in the Borough, as my father had suggested I might do, she looked at me hard. “You’re
trying
to break my heart, right?
That’s
why you say such things?”
    “All women like that,” Gabriel said, nodding. “They all got that go about ’em. Go here. Go there. Us? We stay put. Howl right where we’re at. Twist the cap off that bottle, drink it down, howl at the moon. Moon’s in the same place no matter
where
you’re at. Now if you could go to the moon,
that
might be worth it. Look down at the whole earth from up there. I’d do that.”
    I wasn’t sure about the wisdom or feasibility of that idea and said so. For one thing, I pointed out, if you were on the moon, you’d be looking up at the earth, not down. For another, you wouldn’t be looking for long, because on the moon there wasn’t any oxygen, which meant you’d asphyxiate before you had much of an opportunity to appreciate your privileged position. Gabriel conceded I was probably right about the air. He’d heard there wasn’t any on the moon, but it didn’t make sense that you’d be looking
up
at the earth. I tried to explain that down was all about gravity. On the moon, down would be the ground, where your feet were, and up would be the sky, same as on Earth. But Gabriel said it was more like a ladder. If you climbed up to the top and looked back at where you’d been, you’d be looking down. And if that ladder went all the way to the moon, you’d still be looking down.
    I knew there was something wrong with his logic and tried for about an hour to convince him he was wrong, but he was sure he knew up from down and was having none of it. In fact, he thought I’d do well to stick close to home and not lead the wanderer’s life my mother had in mind for