Zoli nodded as if that, too, was something he understood.
On the second Saturday, Zoli took him on the paper route. It started at five in the morning, in a blue darkness that smelled of dew and river, and Ossie had to ride Lenny's sister's bike, which was purple and had a banana seat and a basket with plastic daisies on it. Zoli said if anybody saw him on it they'd never let him live it down, and then he made Spud swear a solemn oath not to tell anybody, and then he told Lenny himself, the next day, laughing so hard he had to sit down on the curb. But he showed Ossie the whole route anyway, every porch and every dog and every old man who wanted his paper folded and wedged in the storm door handle, not thrown. And in between houses, he showed Ossie the neighborhood.
He showed him Saint Stephen's, where Father Gyula said the eight o'clock Mass in Hungarian for the old people. He showed him the Hungarian Club and the rec center and the little shrine in Mrs. Sipos's front yard with the Virgin Mary in a bathtub. He showed him the old car barn on Front Street, a long brick building with boarded windows, where the streetcars used to turn around before they tore the tracks out, and he said Aunt Yolie used to tell him that Pista proposed to her on the platform there, in 1941, with a ring made from a twist of copper wire, and she said yes so loud the conductor rang the bell. He showed him the refinery gate down at the end of the road, where the shift men came and went, and the place on the Consaul Street hill where you could see the whole Maumee laid out silver in the first light, with the bridges stitched across it and the grain elevators on the far side like a row of giant teeth.
"That's Toledo," Zoli said. "Good morning, Toledo." He said it the way somebody else might say it to a girl.
Ossie sat on the purple bike with the plastic daisies and looked at the river, and something in his chest felt very full and very dangerous, like a glass of water filled past the rim and holding.
He did not tell Zoli about the sign. He didn't have to. They both knew it was leaning against the porch, waiting.
It was Ossie who started the map.
He had always drawn maps. In Parma he had drawn maps of imaginary countries in the backs of his school notebooks, with mountain ranges and rivers and capital cities named after Tigers players, and once a teacher had taken one away and then given it back at the end of the day without saying anything, which he still thought about sometimes. So one night, on the cot in the back room, with a flashlight and a spiral notebook from the Rite Aid on Main Street, he drew a map of the neighborhood.
He drew Consaul Street and Front Street and Bakewell and Paine. He drew the bench and the leaning sign. He drew Aunt Yolie's narrow white house with its loose step, and Mrs. Bocskay's house next door, and Lacko's Meats on the corner, and Saint Stephen's with its two towers, and the car barn and the refinery gate and the hill where you could see the river. Then, in small careful letters, he began to write names in the houses.
Mrs. Bocskay. Mornings, wash days, checks the stove. Lacko. Saturdays, two pork chops. Father Gyula. Sunday, walks her from eight o'clock Mass. Mrs. Sipos. Tuesday afternoons, cards. Zoli. Four o'clock. Lenny Rozsa, if Zoli makes him. Spud, maybe.