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Overview
The Whale Chaser is the story of Vince Sansone, the eldest child and only son in a large Italian American family, who comes of age in 1960s Chicago. A constant disappointment to his embittered father - a fishmonger who shows his displeasure with his fists - Vince finds solace by falling in love. Classmate Marie Santangelo, the butcher's winsome daughter, entices him with passionate kisses and the prospect of entering her family's business. Yet he pursues Lucy Sheehan, an older girl with a "reputation."
When Vince abruptly flees Chicago, he ends up in Tofino, a picturesque fishing town on the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. He finds a job gutting fish, then is hired by Tofino's most colorful dealer, Mr. Zig-Zag, and joins the thriving marijuana trade. Ultimately, through his friendship with an Ahousaht native named Ignatius George, he finds his calling as a whale guide.
Set in the turbulent decades of the Vietnam War and the drug and hippie counterculture, The Whale Chaser is a powerful story about the possibility of redemption.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780897336338 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 09/07/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 382 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Tony Ardizzone a native of Chicago, is the author of six previous books of fiction, including In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu and Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood. His writing has received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award for Fiction and the Milkweed Editions National Fiction Prize, among other honors.
Read an Excerpt
The Whale Chaser
By Tony Ardizzone
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2015 Tony ArdizzoneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89733-923-0
CHAPTER 1
Chicago 1963
My story begins back in Chicago, the stinking onion creek, with me at fourteen, and with a girl named Marie Santangelo.
One of our eighth-grade classmates threw a graduation party. Crepe paper in our school's colors looped from the basement ceiling. "Walk Like a Man," the Four Seasons' latest hit, spun on the record player, its turntable flanked by a pancake stack of 45s. The host's father eyeballed us abjectly as he puffed on a panatela. The host's mother, whose lipstick was fire-engine red and whose stiletto heels clicked sharply wherever she walked on the basement tile, paused to ask each child's name.
"Oh, you're Vincent Sansone." She said my name slowly, as if it were something her mouth could chew. "Isn't your mother the one with all the babies?"
I nodded.
"And your father, not that we ever met him or see him on Sundays in church, he's a fishmonger down on Lake Street's Fulton Market, right? Gracious, it must be ten years since we've driven down there. My Harry doesn't really like that part of the city. You must eat a lot of fish."
I pictured my father at work, the sides of his face weighed down by his usual frown, wrapped in his blood-stained apron, walking amidst rows of tubs packed with crushed ice and fish. I nodded again and gave the woman our standard line. "In our house, every day is fry day."
"Well, well, well," she said, "I must say you certainly don't look the worse for it." She grabbed both my wrists and shook my arms, then seized me by my cheeks and gave them a hard pinch. "There, that adds a bit of color to your face." With one hand she ruffled my hair. "You might be a bit thin for your age but in no time you'll fill out. And they say that fish is brain food. You must be very smart. Are you a bright boy?"
I smiled and shrugged, just smart enough to know not to answer that one.
As I tried to pull away she asked, "If you don't mind me asking, Vincent, exactly how many babies does your poor mother have? Whenever I see them all with her in church they never sit still in the pew long enough for me to count."
"There's seven of us kids," I said. "Nine altogether in my family, that is, counting my folks." I began ticking them off on my fingers. "Me, Tina, Carmella, Angelina —"
She waved the rest of the names away. "And those two elderly people I always see with her, they're your mother's parents?"
"My father's," I said. "Nonnu and Nonna. They live upstairs."
As soon as she released me I ran a comb through my hair, which earlier I'd greased liberally with Wildroot Cream Oil. I combed my hair straight back. I loosened the knot on my tie, hiked up my black stovepipes, and headed for the clear space in the basement's center, where I commenced to dance with every girl who'd agree to dance with me.
At the time I thought myself a jitterbugging fool. The jitterbug was the main step I knew, other than slow-dancing, having learned the basics some months earlier from Lucy Sheehan in the alley outside Ronny Cannon's garage. I pulled the girls toward me, then let them spin out and away from me like a top, then drew them firmly back, moving them here, there, this way, that way, all without conversation or intention or thought, in perfect time with the music, with only the unspeaking body, which is one of the true pleasures of dancing.
After two hours or so of this, as the last dance was announced, I grabbed the hand of the girl nearest me, who happened to be Marie Santangelo. Dion's "The Wanderer" had just ended a great string of fast songs, and I was still singing the words.
"Yeah, I'm a wanderer," I sang.
Then the last song started to play, Shelley Fabares's dreamy "Johnny Angel." Marie smiled sweetly as she fell into my arms, then dropped her head against my shoulder. For a while she sang the words of the song softly into my ear. Then she shifted her right hand and put both arms around my neck and we shuffled together there on the dance floor — wordless and pure — dancing serious and close.
Then the lights came up and everybody scrambled for their shoes. The mother stood on the front porch steps, highball in hand, telling us all to walk home safely. The maraschino cherry in her drink bobbed desperately as she waved. The girl's father leaned against the porch railing, draining a beer, pausing only to slap at an occasional mosquito.
The night was cool and dark, the air sweet with the scent of flowers growing in front yards and the peppery smell of automobile exhaust. In the dark gaps between streetlights, the yellow tracers of lightning bugs zigged and zagged. I sauntered along, momentarily happy. Then Marie appeared just behind me saying, "Hey, Vince, wait up." Her shoes scuffed the sidewalk. "Hey," she said again, "I didn't think you even knew I was alive."
"Huh?" I said. "Huh? I knew you were alive." Whenever surprised, which back then was often, my default response was to disagree.
She was out of breath and had hurried to catch up with me. She had thick, dark brown hair, combed back and away from her face, curled up at the ends in that Annette Funicello style all the neighborhood girls wore back then. But what set Marie apart from the other girls were her full lips and her exceptionally clear complexion that glowed in the light beneath the streetlights. Marie had olive-colored skin, the kind that looks ever-so-slightly oiled or as if she'd just been in front of a tanning lamp.
"Well," she said, slowing her pace to match mine, "maybe a person might just not know it by the way you act."
I've never been very comfortable with conversation. Words are slippery eels. No sooner do you think you have them in the boat than they give a twist and a flip and, whoosh, confusion, chaos, and far more trouble than if you'd kept your dumb mug shut in the first place. Marie kept staring at me, indicating it was my turn to speak. "I know everybody's alive," I said, "even all the Chinese miles down below our feet drinking all the tea in China," which seemed an incredibly odd and stupid thing to say a second or two after I said it.
She didn't seem to mind. "You only sat in front of me in class for eight years." She laughed gaily, in that free and open way young girls laugh before self-consciousness sets in. Then she said, "It won't be too long before you like oolong." She had dimples in her cheeks that grew deeper when she laughed. I'd never noticed her dimples before. Her teeth were exceptionally straight and white. "No, wait," she said, "I believe I should stand corrected. If I'm not mistaken that would be seven years. Weren't we in different fifth grades?"
Who I was in class with wasn't really one of the things I kept track of. But as we walked along I realized that, not counting kindergarten when we sat at little tables, and fifth grade, when she got the nun and I got the lay teacher, I must have sat in front of Marie during seven of our nine years of grammar school. I pictured our classroom, its neat rows of desks. Estelle Roberts, Walter Ryczek, me, Marie Santangelo. "I guess you're right."
"Of course I'm right," she said brightly. Her fingertips brushed against my hand. In a moment or so we were walking down the side street together, holding hands.
"Nice night," was all I could think to respond.
That made her laugh again, which pleased me. I turned to look at her dimples, which I realized I enjoyed looking at. "Yeah, sure," she said slowly, licking her lips and giving me another sweet smile.
* * *
Marie's licking her lips reminded me of the day earlier that year when the Communion Host fell on the collar of her winter coat. I was serving that morning's eight o'clock Mass. Our parish had two Masses each weekday morning, the first at six-fifteen. Usually a couple dozen people, mostly old women and middle-aged factory workers, went to the six-fifteen. The women wore overcoats and babushkas and knelt in the first three or four rows. You could hear their rosary beads clacking against the pew in front of them as they prayed. Most prayed out loud, so you could hear their prayers, too, as if you were God. The factory workers knelt behind the women and were as silent as their gray metal lunch pails. You could see the impossible-to-scrub-out grease from the machines they worked beneath their fingernails and in the creases of their hands. Most left for their jobs immediately after taking Communion. At the eight o'clock Mass, which was for all the grammar school children, nearly every pew on each side of the center aisle was full. Each boy was dressed in dark trousers, a long-sleeved white shirt, a knit school tie. Each girl wore a pleated green plaid uniform skirt, white blouse with rounded collar, and white knee socks. From the altar you could hear the low rumble of feet and knees shuffling about, the occasional hiss of someone calling out Sister, the sharp snap of the teachers' crickets. Each nun and lay teacher had her own metal clicker, or cricket, which she clicked in special code whenever it was time for her class to walk in a slow and orderly fashion up to the altar rail for Communion.
This was before the Second Vatican Council, back when people knelt at the rail for Communion. Back then the Mass was in the universal language of Latin and the altar faced the back wall of the church. Or, as we were instructed, the altar faced God. Just behind the tabernacle was a huge white marble reredos featuring Christ the King flanked by a quartet of saints rising majestically toward the vaulted ceiling, and behind them on the rear wall three arched windows separating frescoes of the archangels Michael and Raphael. Their tremendous wings curved up in a manner that invited one's eyes to gaze even higher, at the round stained-glass window between them. The effect was such that anyone, even a non-Catholic, who looked at the altar couldn't help but feel his eyes being pulled up toward the lap of God.
We were taught that the church's steeple was the channel through which God's graces flowed down to us. As first graders walking from school to church, barely able to hold onto our winter mittens without the aid of elastic clips, the nuns had us pause on the sidewalk and crane our necks at the iron cross topping the steeple. God's grace enters through that cross, the nuns said, just like lightning through a lightning rod, and travels down past the painted angels and marble saints to the tabernacle, where in the gold monstrance the crucified Christ in the form of the Communion wafer lives. We were taught that when we folded our hands in prayer we made a miniature steeple for God to funnel grace down through our hands and arms into our souls. That was why when you prayed you held your crossed hands slightly higher than your heart, because your soul lay inside your heart. Grace flowed invisibly, like electricity, through the wires of your fingers and arms down to the soul in your heart.
That morning after the old monsignor consecrated the Host, raising it high in both hands up to God the Father, changing it from unleavened bread to the body of Christ, and after he raised the golden chalice, changing the wine within to Christ's blood, the crickets began clicking and the children commenced their soft shuffle up to the Communion rail. Since there were so many communicants, another priest normally came out of the sanctuary to assist. As second paten I worked at Father O'Reilly's side, my left hand on my heart, my right outstretched with my golden paten, which I positioned beneath each communicant's chin as the children tilted back their heads and opened their mouths and stuck out their tongues. My job, essentially, was to catch any fallen crumbs.
The priest's job was to say in Latin, "May the body of our Lord Jesus Christ bring your soul to everlasting life," make a miniature sign of the Cross before the child's face, then carefully top the child's tongue with Communion. Most priests compressed the blessing to its first two words, "Corpus Christi." Father O'Reilly was a fast worker, famous among the parish's altar boys for having said the shortest Mass — twenty-eight minutes — one Saturday morning while his golf clubs, each topped with a knitted cap bedecked with shamrocks, awaited him in the sacristy beside the wine closet. His "Corpus Christi" devolved into "Cor Crispy," a deft curl of the wrist and a sharp, two-fingered flip, like a cowboy snapping one playing card after the next off a fresh deck and flipping them in quick succession into his hat.
When we came to Marie the wafer skipped off the side of her slender tongue and onto the gold sheen of my paten, which I held in position beneath her chin. As the Host skidded away, she did one of those Little Rascals takes, where for a moment her eyes popped big as wall clocks. Her mouth formed a perfect terrified O. Despite my best efforts to juggle the wafer to a stop, it slid off the paten's slick surface and down onto the collar of her coat.
I cursed myself for failing to catch it. At once Marie's cheeks flushed with shame. I dropped to my knees in front of her. Father O'Reilly let out a sigh and lifted the Host from her collar, returned it to his ciborium, and walked heavily back to the altar. From practice with the nuns I knew that first he'd put the ciborium back in the tabernacle, then go into the sacristy to find a cloth of some sort — in the parlance of altar boys, this was known as the Sacred Rag — so as to cleanse the area where the body of Christ had fallen.
This was a situation for which all altar boys had been trained. Despite the incongruity of my kneeling, my role, in effect, was to stand guard. Should this be some sort of trick by an enemy of the Church, I was to defend the spot where the Host had fallen against any and all defamation or sacrilege. If necessary, I was to defend even the least part of the sacrament with my life. This wasn't a mock air raid or fire drill. This was real-world real. At the time I took these things dead seriously.
At the time I would have been more than glad to die in that situation. Who wouldn't? As a martyr I'd earn the immediate reward of Heaven through what was known as baptism of blood. In an instant my soul would be cleansed of all sin. One moment I would be in church, defending Marie's collar against atheists and communists, and the next I'd be in Heaven with God and all the saints, part of what the nuns called the Mystical Body. I'd get to see the Beatific Vision, which we were told was joyful beyond even our wildest imagination. I imagined it would be like gazing at an extremely beautiful woman — Marilyn Monroe or Grace Kelly or Sophia Loren — only even more intense. I'd be so joyous I'd vibrate and glow. Happiness more yellow than real butter would gush out from me, as if in a cartoon. More practically, I'd be free of my lousy life, which wasn't near as bad as some, I'm sure, but most days was no picnic in Lincoln Park. I looked about eagerly for any possible enemies of the Church, hoping to see one, hoping I could defend the crumbs on Marie's collar with my life.
By now all of the children waiting behind Marie had gone over to the other side of the communion rail. From the pews the nuns whispered to one another, trying to figure out what was what. "Did I do something wrong?" Marie whispered. She wasn't crying yet. She stared at me for a moment, then hung her head in shame.
"Nah," I whispered. "It was his fault. He flipped it off the side of your tongue."
"The side of my tongue?"
"He was in a hurry. You know how he is. He thinks he's The Flash. The guy from the comics. Fastest guy alive. Quickest flip in the diocese."
I didn't know if saying that was the right or wrong thing, but the conversation certainly opened the floodgates. All at once Marie gave out a stifled sob. For a minute or so I watched her tears plop onto the white linen cloth covering the communion rail. They made a pair of ever-widening splotches on the cloth. I hiked up the back of my cassock and handed her a clean handkerchief, which I kept in my back pocket. Head down, Marie nodded her thanks, then demurely wiped her eyes and cheeks and modestly, as only a young girl could, blew her nose.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Whale Chaser by Tony Ardizzone. Copyright © 2015 Tony Ardizzone. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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