The Bronze King

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  There’s wide open space up by the lake. You can see people a long way off. This time I kept my eyes open and I looked around behind me now and then, just to make sure nobody was sneaking up on me. Nobody was. Nobody was anywhere near me. I might have been in Death Valley.

  I started to have this headache and this wobbly feeling inside like I was about to cry. Maybe I would end up crippled with migraines, the way my Granny Gran was sometimes. A thing like that could be hereditary, couldn’t it? That thought really scared me.

  Granny Gran was off in a rest home in New Jersey. Her name is really Grandmother Grahame, but she was Granny Gran the way I was Tina to my relatives and friends, rather than Valentine. She was no longer compos mentis all the time, and Mom couldn’t stay home and take care of her or afford a nurse to do it. I loved Granny Gran a lot, but I didn’t get to see her much anymore.

  I walked to the edge of the lake in front of Jagiello’s terrace, where some low black rocks stick out into the water. The lake was muddy brown and not very deep, so I could see the trash sunk in it—old paper cups and cigarette packs and some kind of twisted wire and so on. People are such slobs.

  Boy, did my head hurt.

  Make a wish, said something inside my head. Granny Gran used to say that: make a wish by running water and seal it with silver.

  Well, the lake water ran from somewhere. You could stand above the pipes that fed it from the middle of the north shoreline.

  “Jagiello,” I said, “come back and get things fixed the way they belong.”

  I flipped a dime into the filthy water and waited for something to happen.

  What happened was that a crazy guy came stumping past me, talking a mile a minute to himself and anybody else close enough to hear. He announced in a loud voice, “You know who comes here? Thieves and degenerates and prostitutes come here, that’s who comes here, and you know why? Because this is where Eve sinned. I don’t know the exact spot, but it was right around here someplace.”

  That was all I needed. I headed home.

  After I got some groceries at the store, I lay down in my room and read a book. I had an armload of books from the public library, mostly what they call “high fantasy,” like Tolkien’s books—full of prophecies, dethroned kings, magical swords, treasures, and battles with huge evil forces. No wonder Megan laughed at me and my “disappearances.” And yes, the kitchen floor was just as I had found it that morning. Fortunately, my mom got home so late that night that she didn’t notice at all.

  I always know when she comes home. New York is a dangerous place, and just because the men she goes out with are usually connected in some way with the magazine she works for doesn’t mean that they have to be particularly okay or responsible.

  So I sort of sleep very lightly and don’t really drop off until I hear her come in. It’s a habit from when I was still little enough to need a baby sitter and I really thought sometimes Mom wouldn’t ever come home.

  At least this guy tonight brought her to the door, and in fact inside, and then things got very quiet, which I didn’t like—it gave me the creeps, so I yanked the pillow around my head with both my elbows as clamps to keep out any sound, and I slept.

  My mom and dad had had a very uncivilized divorce with lots of yelling and crying and doorslamming and everybody hugging the life out of me all the time and assuring me that it wasn’t my fault, though I was pretty small and mostly didn’t know what they were talking about.

  Then he moved to Alaska and married a lady out there who had three kids of her own. The one time I visited was a disaster, so I didn’t mind that I never went again. Their phone was always getting disconnected and they moved a lot, and he stopped writing after the third letter, so that was sort of that.

  Mom and I hardly ever talked about him anymore, and to tell the truth I didn’t think about him much. Mom still did, though, sometimes, judging from things she said. And she worried about me and boys.

  I wonder what she would have said if she knew how I worried about her and men? I mean, staying up till she came home? It’s not the kind of thing you can exactly talk about with your mom, so I never did.

  * * *

  If anything new was missing that Saturday morning, I didn’t notice. I was tired and cranky and I spent most of the day hanging around in the corner store and browsing the magazines and the paperbacks, flipping through for the good parts. They knew me down there and they let me browse in exchange for my buying a chocolate malted, which they make very well. My metabolism handles any number of malteds without blinking. There are girls in school who would kill for my metabolism.

  Sunday morning there wasn’t a single Sunday Times outside the door of any apartment on our floor. I opened the door to get ours, and there was the Sneezer, our across-the-hall neighbor, with his head stuck out. He gave me this suspicious squint, as if I’d taken my paper and his, too.

  We call him the Sneezer because he has allergies in the spring, and you can hear his thunderous sneezes three floors down in the elevator.

  Then Mrs. Singh opened her door and glanced reproachfully out over her empty doormat at both of us, and I made a strategic withdrawal. Later I ran down to the corner store and got a Times for us, and Mom never knew anything about it. I made waffles for breakfast and read and brooded a lot.

  The thing that struck me was that the magic in the stories I read was so—well, so colorful. Missing linoleum is not colorful. Only my mother’s language on the subject was. I felt baffled and scared about whatever it was that was going on here. I couldn’t think about it a whole lot at a time without getting really nervous.

  Monday did not begin very well. I came in for some teasing by Kim Larkin and her pals which sometimes happened, probably because I was on my own a lot. I had had a couple of really good friends in the early grades in my school, but two had moved away and one had transferred to a parochial school and didn’t keep in touch. Lately I’d sort of wandered out in left field someplace, what with Megan mooning over Micky all the time and Barbara avoiding me. Kim was the school clique-queen, if you know what I mean, and since Megan and Barbara had begun drifting off, Kim had started picking on me or sending her drones to do it for her. I guess that’s how Kim’s crowd reminded each other what hotshots they were.

  They liked to tease me about my name, Valentine Marsh, saying things like, “Hey, Tina, how does Lennie like kissing mud?” Real heavy intellectual stuff.

  Lennie was this very nice, big, lunky, shy boy I’d had a couple of dates with. We started out pretty badly. I got things mixed up and waited in the wrong place for him for a half hour, so instead of going to a movie with him I called up my mom crying to come and get me, which was pretty awful. Then Lennie and I went to a party and while we were dancing my glasses fell off and he stepped on them. We made a sort of mutual decision to call it a day, I guess, though I should have been grateful: it turned out I didn’t need glasses anymore.

  So anyway, Kim’s crowd would make these stupid remarks which completely missed our real embarrassments, which nobody knew about because I would rather have died than tell (and I suppose the same was true of Lennie). I could never come up with anything smart to snap back, not until afterwards, naturally. Only once I said, “Go boil your head, maybe the freckles will come off,” to Madison, Kim’s right-hand jerk, but it didn’t get me anywhere.

  I think mainly I was just paralyzed by the injustice of it. As if Lennie and I were carrying on a wild affair or something! Which sometimes worried me, too, because when was this stuff with boys going to start making sense to me—without turning me into a burbling idiot like Megan? I mean, I knew I’d have to get into all this stuff sometime in a real way, but I did not want to leave my brain behind the way Megan had, and the way sometimes it almost seemed my mom herself still did. Some of the men Mom brought around! It was all still very much a mess and a puzzle and fearsome to me, and I guess you could say this was not a particularly smooth time in my life.

  Kim and her buddies didn’t make it an
y better, is what I’m trying to say.

  At any rate, I needed some decent company that day so I went home with Margie Acton, a girl who was okay but not somebody to spend a lot of time with. She was very timid and neurotic and she pushed too hard to have you like her, maybe because she was from the Midwest and people called her a hick and said dumb, outrageous things all the time to try to shock her. Her parents were a pair of pills which I guess she couldn’t do much about, but it did make it hard to hang around at her place.

  I couldn’t tell her anything about what was going on. She’d have leaked it to her mother, and her mother would have called up my mother. Mrs. Acton was one of those mothers who thought it was her job to get involved in everybody’s life. It just wasn’t worth the hassle to talk to Margie about the disappearances. We put on her records and played Battleship all afternoon, and then I went home.

  Margie lived in Peter Cooper Village. I had to take the subway.

  Something happened.

  It was just the kind of thing that Margie and her parents are terrified of about New York, but real New Yorkers get used to it early and hardly pay any attention. We know we can handle it.

  Ha.

  Three punky guys, about sixteen or seventeen I think, got on my subway car, looking for trouble. You could tell by the way they talked so loud and eyed everybody in that screw-you way that’s meant to scare you.

  The door near me, to the next car, was jammed. Some people in the car used the door at the other end to leave, but for me to get there, I would have to pass right by these creeps.

  One of them turned around. He was wearing a gray nylon jacket with a black skull on it and the words PRINCE OF DARKNESS. They were all wearing gray nylon jackets.

  The creeps started swinging on the holding bars like monkeys and kicking the seats. A man near them quit hiding behind his paper and got off at the next stop.

  I should have too, but I only had one stop to go and I was late already and why should I get chased off my train and have to wait for another one just because some creeps got on? It was just a lousy coincidence. I thought that the one who had tried to grab my purse was the skinny one with the tattoo—a snake-mouth open wide with fangs sticking out—on his cheek. There was something about the way he stood, as if he was balanced on a surfboard. Probably, I told myself, he grabbed purses all the time; he wouldn’t even remember me. I hugged my bag in my lap and sat tight. Mistake.

  Between stations the train idled along and then stopped dead in the dark tunnel.

  Nobody was in the car now but me and a sleeping drunk and these guys in their jackets and their chains looping down from their belts and their studded wrist straps and all the crap that guys like that like to wear. One of them had little enameled badges pinned all over the leather hat he was wearing, and he saw me looking and gave me a sideways grin. The third one chewed his gum and looked sleepy.

  They started hassling the drunk, yelling in his ear and laughing and propping him up and sliding him down again on the seat. Pins-and-Grins went through the poor guy’s pockets, making fun of finding nothing but holes and some pipe cleaners in there. The drunk was out of it, completely helpless, and the creeps were rough.

  “Hey,” Pins-and-Grins said, looking straight at me, “we got a class act in here with us, not like this old bum. Look at the little princess visiting the common people. Long as she’s on our turf, we should show her a good time, right?”

  I was really scared now. Was it better to yell some put-down at them, if I could think of one, to make them think I wasn’t afraid? Or just pretend I didn’t hear what they said? If only the train would start at least! Having a transit patrolman or a conductor show up was too much to hope for.

  The Chewer shifted his gum to his other cheek. “That’s her,” he said.

  “Sure it’s her,” Tattoo said. “And she’s got something for us, right?”

  I was whizzing over in my head what there was in my pocketbook that they could take—a couple of dollars, my tortoiseshell comb from Uncle Tim, my key ring with the souvenir medal from Colossal Cave that I’d found in a gas station rest room in the country

  They ambled down the car and stood over me. “Give it here,” Tattoo said.

  I clutched my bag and glared at him with my eyes all hot. The last thing I wanted to do was cry in front of these creeps, but I was scared. The Chewer grabbed my wrist hard enough to hurt.

  “I don’t have anything you want,” I said.

  “She don’t have anything,” the Chewer said in this disgusted voice. “Man, a princess shouldn’t tell lies. It’ll grow hair on the palms of her hands. Let’s see if it’s happening already.”

  He started to turn my hand over, and I knew he’d do something horrible, and Pins-and-Grins was reaching for my purse. And all of a sudden the jammed door next to me opened and a man stepped through, playing a violin.

  It was the craziest thing—I mean, in the subway where you can hardly hear yourself think, here was this stranger fiddling like mad, some kind of jumping, gypsy sort of tune, full of throaty swoops and high, sweet curlicues that filled the whole car.

  “What the hell?” yelped Tattoo, looking as if a flashbulb had gone off in his face.

  “Well, come on,” the Chewer said impatiently, and he pulled me up off the seat and started to dance with me.

  I mean really dance—a hopping, jumping, racing-along, three-beat gallop, with our elbows stuck out and lots of space between us. The weirdest part was not that the train suddenly started going, as if our dancing had moved it, but that I knew the steps. Or anyway my feet did the steps, though in my head I didn’t know how to dance any better than I ever did.

  We went cavorting up and down the subway car like a couple of loonies, him reeking of some supermacho musk and beer and staring off over my shoulder as if I wasn’t there, and me with my purse banging me on the hip.

  The other two stood and clapped their hands in time to the music, which sounded loud and clear over the rattle of the train.

  I was completely zonked myself and bubbling inside with joy because I knew I was safe. The music promised me that. I heard Tattoo yell to his buddy, “What a crazy old fart, playing the fiddle in the subway!” But he kept on clapping, and we kept dancing, until the train pulled into my station. Then the fiddler quit playing and whipped the cap off his headful of curly gray hair and held it out for them to put money in.

  The doors opened. The Chewer, panting hard from all that jumping around, let go of me and started patting his pockets for money.

  The fiddler gave me a look, right past the three creeps. He stared at me from under these tufty gray eyebrows and jerked his chin the way you point when your hands aren’t free: Get going.

  I got.

  Behind me the doors shut and the train roared away into the tunnel toward the next stop.

  My knees were so wobbly I almost didn’t make it up the stairs to the street.

  3

  The Fiddler in the Park

  MOM WAS ON THE WARPATH AGAIN, so I didn’t bother her with any of this. I probably wouldn’t have anyway. I wouldn’t have known how to tell her what had happened.

  Anyway, there she was with her new lawyer in the fight against the landlord. They were going over our apartment, making lists of the missing stuff (which now included all the plugs off the ends of the electric cords). If it had been a movie, the lawyer would have been some handsome, upscale type for my mother to fall in love with. Then she’d get married, and all my weird problems would disappear because what I really needed was a father, right?

  Actually the lawyer was this carroty-colored woman with an excitable voice. She and Mom were deep in that fast, bright kind of conversation that meant they were on the same wavelength and were going to be friends.

  I went into my room and shut the door and walked around in circles, telling myself I was not crazy.

  I kept seeing this subway violinist very clearly in my mind: thick gray curly hair and a squarish, calm sort of face, with nests
of lines around his mouth and deep sprays of them at the outside corners of his eyes. Funny eyes, with an Oriental slant, but light-colored and bright and watchful, like a cat’s. He hadn’t looked grubby, like most beggars, but very neat in a rust brown corduroy jacket and pants and a light blue shirt without a tie.

  And he had played and we had danced. It was the craziest thing.

  But what was it that I had that the Princes of Darkness wanted?

  I got very tired, and next thing I knew my mom was waking me up. She asked if I was all right because it was unlike me to sleep in the daytime, and here it was time for dinner.

  At the table Mom started in with carefully casual remarks about this guy she’d been out with the night before. That meant I didn’t have to listen yet. She wasn’t nearly at the point of talking about how I should meet him, how I would like him, how we could all go to a movie together or whatever. At least this one was some kind of senior editor, not a shrink like the last one she’d brought around. (I knew a kid once whose stepfather was a child psychologist , which meant everything she did or said or didn’t say got “translated” to her mother by this guy; and that’s no way to live.)

  So I put the conversation on automatic pilot and concentrated on my own problems. Mostly I decided that the subway dance had to have been a hallucination. Maybe Margie wasn’t as cubed as she made out. Maybe she had slipped me something in that ginger ale I had at her place.

  But I’d tried a couple of pills and things with Megan when she was raiding her mom’s medicine cabinet, and I knew what that stuff felt like. Not like this. There never was a pill or anything else that could make me know how to dance.

  Maybe I was getting a brain tumor like the boy in Death Be Not Proud, and I had imagined the dancing. Maybe I would never get to be introduced to Ralph or Howard or whatever the editor’s name was, because I would be a vegetable by morning.