It sat on the outer edge of the village, across from Morealli’s Pennzoil station. To walk there on a summer afternoon was not a challenge. My first trips would have been under the tutelage of my older sister—for milk or eggs, maybe a can of Campbell’s tomato soup—and she taught me to walk against the traffic, to move farther off the road when the big trucks came by. The force of the tractor-trailers and coal buckets—all the air they moved—pushed us back, death at arm’s length, where the wind caught you after the behemoths were past.
This was adventure, and my introduction to responsibility. I carried money, bought necessaries, avoided the oncoming cars. Sometimes we got a blue popsicle or a bottle of Double Cola, or the five grape gumballs in a single packet. The gum didn’t cost much, maybe a nickel, and Paul Panaro’s tiny store was a marvel, something notable and exotic in the universe.
When I was ten, I went to Panaro’s alone for the first time, tooled my bike southward across the bridge at the Foxburg Inn, and past Pagano’s Dairy Bar on the other side of the road. I’d gotten milkshakes there and wondered at what Broasted Chicken was, advertised in black script. My solo trips to the store gave me a taste of sweet independence.
By the time I was twelve, I noticed a shift in the world that I couldn’t explain. Or maybe I’d gotten to the point where I could understand something: there were bad people. I seem to have recognized this terrible fact at Panaro’s, a gradual evolution. The kids hanging out on Paul Panaro’s steps were the bad kids, and they stood guard, aimed to intimidate, glared and laughed, made you feel less-than, just for approaching the Sunbeam Bread girl on the screen door. Paul wouldn’t—or didn’t—tell them to leave, and whatever mystery the store held for my more youthful self was gone.
I suppose those boys didn’t do anything wrong, nothing beyond using up space on Paul’s steps, but I saw that they had nothing better to do. Sometimes there would be a girl or two among them, hovering in that awful space between youth and adulthood, sneering, maybe even smoking urgent, secret cigarettes, trying with all their might to look urbane and worldly, and not bothering to inhale the choking gray air that Camels or Marlboros offered.
A part of me believed that they must be more sophisticated than I was. But they looked mean on the surface, dirty, and I couldn’t detect a smidgeon of kindness in their faces, despite my great efforts to find it there. This was a phenomenon I couldn’t comprehend. And I secretly questioned whether I should fear them.
That summer of my twelfth year, a new day had me on the red Sky Rider bike I’d inherited from my brother Jack. My mom wanted to make chili, and she needed a can of kidney beans. It was my job to retrieve them at Paul Panaro’s.
Let’s get something out of the way now—I’d been inducted into the language surrounding testicles because that’s what boys do. I was familiar with balls and scrotums and dicks, and I also realized, as I approached the store that day, that kidney beans had an obvious connation where adolescence and reproductive organs were concerned. Everything about kidney beans was correct and perfect in this regard, shape and size included.
I was filled with the sincere hope that I might find the kidney beans on a rear shelf, a quiet effort—pay for them, ask Paul for a brown paper bag, and get back to my bike, free of any verbal abuse the beans might bring.
Like clockwork, there were six kids on Paul Panaro’s steps as I dismounted and brought the Sky Rider’s kickstand down to the red dog. There was a dollar in the pocket of my jeans, and I worked hard at looking assured and confident as I approached the cloud of evil that sat on the concrete steps—all of them waiting to make fun of me, to make me feel stupid, to hurl some simple word, so that I might know my low place in the world.
I suspected that they already knew my reasons for bringing Sky Rider in this direction, on this day, in all the possible chili days that might exist in time, because why else would I be there if it weren’t for kidney beans?
With great distress, I realized that three of their kind were inside the store, after I’d pulled the Sunbeam girl open and entered the wash of fluorescent light, after I allowed her aluminum smile to slam and bounce behind me. Paul was behind the counter, and his brown teeth grinned at me. For the first time, he seemed evil, too, in his stained green t-shirt, with stubble shading his double chin, and I thought that he was secretly happy that these hoodlums had invaded or polluted his front steps. Perhaps he had invited them.
The baseball cards were in front of the counter, on Paul’s right. The three boys there shuffled the packets of cards, tried to make the right choice, for only the good Lord knew which pile of Topps cards held a Pittsburgh Pirate. One could only pray for a Willie Stargell card, but hope springs eternal when you have a dime and the leisure of slow decisions.
I moved around the boys and began to explore the shelves behind the lunch cakes, where all of Paul’s canned goods were displayed. Every kind of soup, vegetable, and sauce imaginable seemed to live in the final, dusty vestiges, stranded there on the farthest frontier of the tiny store. Canned peaches screamed at me, with their sweet juice and sumptuous yellow hearts. But there was a possibility that even the mice from under the building didn’t visit this aisle, and I felt lost.
If my life depended on finding kidney beans, I was a goner—not a pioneer—and Paul would soon call the coroner and the state police; the hound dogs would be on my scent in the distant corners of this neighborhood grocery.
There were no kidney beans, and I was in a silent panic, foraging in a hungry world, where families need chili and the protein that only kidney beans can offer. My mother was depending on me.
The road back to Paul was rutted and scarred, littered with bones. Eternity beckoned in the glass countertop, and he stared down at my hopeful face. I saw a glimmer of goodness there, and I thought, for a brief second, that he understood my dilemma.
There was no way to communicate my need, though, my aching desire for deliverance. Mere inches stood between me and the baseball cards, and I could feel the withering heat of the boys’ sunburned arms, could sense the neat shadows of the short haircuts on red, sweating skulls, the haphazard freckles which taunted me now.
“Whaddaya need, kiddo?” Paul asked.
Hesitation was not an option, and I simply spoke. “Kidney beans.”
There are those moments in life when all fantasies of revenge and violence come down on you like a hard rain, but you are still defenseless, made more vulnerable by the fact that you exist in a very specific place and time.
The Stoney’s Beer clock above Paul’s head could not have moved a single, perceptible gear as I waited. That mechanism which gave each body there a sense of psychological time, a moving signpost for where we stood in the multitude of stars and planets and asteroids—the guts of the red and white clock must have been suspended, hanging just ahead of that frozen instant when the brass pieces dovetail and the second-hand ticks.
One of the boys said, “I got two kidney beans for you right here.”
All of them laughed, a kind of malicious laugh, even Paul. In their mirth and devious smiles, I understood eternity, then, and I glimpsed the fires of hell, where flames lick and grab and pull you into a boiling, messy abyss.
I finally retrieved the can under Paul’s steadfast direction, and the beans had been right in front of me, within reach, not far from the canned peaches. The ring of the cash register was loud when the money drawer popped open, and Paul made change from the dollar I handed him. I heard Paul Panaro close the drawer, too. He leaned into it with his substantial belly, and our transaction came to an end as he put a toothpick in his mouth.
I walked out to my bike and pointed it northward. The whir of Route 219 waited for me, and I knew that the Sky Rider would have to do most of the work. I could barely feel the pedals beneath my feet, and I grasped the brown paper bag with my right hand, where I had wrapped the top around the silver handlebars. My mother was waiting for me.
Hi, Gerry. I didn't realize you grew up so close to St. Benedict. You must have lived right on the border between the evil, uncouth, and unsophisticated Northern Cambria school district and the saintly intellectual nirvana that was Cambria Heights. I spent many wonderful afternoons in St. Benedict, where I grew up with a number of guys and even one or two girls who are still friends to this day.
I know exactly what you mean about Paul Panaro's old store. I was only ever in there once that I can remember for sure, perhaps twice at the most. Did you know that he was a combat medic in the Pacific in World War II? One of my old friends from up that way, Jeff Warner, who was himself a "seabee" in the Naval Reserve, told me about Paul's military service. You certainly would never have known that to look at him, but once upon a time, he nevertheless wore the uniform and served honorably. Back when we used to run our fantasy football league at the Foxburg---for the most part after it closed down---Jeff would always name his fantasy team "Panaro Punishers" after old Paul.