The Planet of Junior Brown

by Virginia Hamilton

  “How come I can go with you now?” Buddy broke in on him.

  It took Junior so long to find an answer Buddy was ready to believe he wouldn’t answer at all. But then Junior began to stammer, “You … you know … Miss Peebs is different … you know it better than me … some people are different from all other people …”

  Junior didn’t know how to describe Miss Peebs in a way that would explain her to Buddy. The place she lived in would seem like a madhouse if he tried to talk about it.

  “She is having some trouble,” Junior said. “She’s got this somebody, this awful relative who forced himself in on her. She has to let him stay because it turns out he’s pretty sickly, even though he can still get around.”

  “Well, what was he like?” Buddy asked him.

  Softly, Junior began about it. “I was so afraid of him.” His voice, getting louder, “Oh, man, he was dirty. He stank. He was stinking from his filthy socks!”

  Junior heaved himself in a rocking motion, the way a caged bear will sway in a summer’s stifling heat.

  “Junior, stop it,” Buddy said. “You about to knock me out of my seat!” Buddy grew alarmed. People on the bus were turning around. The bus driver kept his eye on them through the mirror.

  Abruptly Junior stopped when he realized, like an explosion in his head, that the man he described to Buddy had been someone he had imagined.

  “Fool,” Junior said, “why do you have to bother me all the time? I didn’t even see him. I wasn’t anywhere near him.”

  “Then how come you have to lie like that?” Buddy said. “I’m through with you!” Disgustedly, Buddy folded his hands on the seat in front of him and rested his head on his outstretched arms.

  “I didn’t see him because he slipped out of the house,” Junior said. “I didn’t want to tell you since she’s got to get rid of him. But he ain’t just sickly, he’s so bad off, he can infect a lot of people.”

  Buddy sat up, looking at Junior. “You mean, this cat’s got a disease so bad, he supposed not to go outside?”

  Junior had not thought about diseases. “I guess so,” he managed to say.

  “And you stayed in that house where there’s a cat with a disease and you want me to go there too?”

  “I didn’t even see him,” Junior said again, “I wasn’t anywhere near the room she makes him stay in.” He lied without knowing what he said was a lie.

  “You have to come with me Friday,” Junior told Buddy. “You got to help me … I mean, help her … because he doesn’t want me to have my lesson. He maybe even could damage her concert piano… .”

  For some time Junior had kept secrets from Buddy. Now everything was coming out in the open. Still Buddy could hardly believe that Junior suddenly wanted to have him come to his music lesson next Friday.

  “Maybe sometime next week I can come see you at your own house,” Buddy said. He looked unconcernedly out the window.

  In Junior’s mind, his mother’s fearful presence tried to warn him against bringing Buddy home. By gritting his teeth, Junior was able to hold her back.

  “I guess so,” Junior said. “I’ll figure out a good time when Mama isn’t feeling too sick.”

  “Maybe about Wednesday,” Buddy told him.

  “And then on Friday, you can come with me to Miss Peebs’,” Junior said.

  “We straight then,” Buddy said. “Nobody going to keep you from having your lesson.”

  On the bus, Junior and Buddy watched people hurrying along windswept Broadway for fifty blocks. Junior felt safe with Buddy and safe hidden in the seat. Except for hunger which had gnawed a numbing hollow inside him, he had a long, nearly peaceful ride all the way uptown.

  4

  FOR BUDDY, THE CITY of darkness was deeply familiar and as fine a treasure as any he could have dreamed. He had accepted its mindless indifference to life because he knew it was he, alone, and others, as alone as he was, who gave it what little humanity it had.

  There were hundreds of kids like him who had never known what even the poorest home was like. No one worried whether they had a floor to sleep on or food to eat; whether they had got into trouble, or if they were getting along all right. It was not that no one cared about them, Buddy knew. It was simply that no one had any idea they existed.

  Rarely did Buddy trouble himself about his mother, whom he hadn’t seen since the age of nine. He knew she had abandoned him because his presence reminded her how completely unable she was to care for him. Out of desperation she had walked away from him. Buddy had been glad to never again have to see her suffering. If Buddy longed for anything, it was for a brother. He had known many brothers, but not a single one whom he could run with or just even make angry once in a while.

  Buddy recalled living in the hallway and in the basement of the building where he and his mother had lived before she left. People knew him and felt sorry for him. They gave him clothes and some food. Once in a while people would take him in to live with them. But people had children of their own. Just when Buddy thought he was going to stay one place, the children there would fall into a fit of jealousy. The next thing Buddy knew, he was back sleeping in the hallway.

  Maybe that was why somebody had called the Children’s Shelter on him. He’d barely gotten away in time. He’d seen the car pull up about the time he was bedding down for the night. He’d had to lay there and be cool about it, sitting up, rubbing his eyes when they kneeled over him. They asked him his name and if he had any living relatives. He had taken his time. His plan for escape had depended on his sounding truthful. Buddy had told them his name. And then he first made up the story about his mother really being his aunt.

  His mother had left him, Buddy told them. So he stayed with his aunt, who lived over on the next block. But she had told him to get out; she wouldn’t even let him take his little sister, who he was afraid would starve. That had done it.

  “Where does your aunt live again?” they had asked. He explained and when they took him outside, he pretended he thought they were kidnapers and he wouldn’t get into the car. He began to cry. “Just walk around the corner with me and I’ll show you where she live,” he told them. He threw a fit until finally one said, “We can walk around there, leave the car, we’ll get it later. Let’s find out about the other child, his sister.”

  That was how Buddy had won them over. They all had walked around the corner. Buddy had walked in front, planning which building would be the one where his aunt lived. There were three good buildings which had courtyards connecting with buildings on the next street. If he could get on the next street, two streets over from the street on which they had parked their car, Buddy knew he would be free. He could run in and out of buildings so fast, they never would find out which way he’d gone.

  Buddy’s plan had worked like the charm he knew it was. He had lost them in the maze of tenements in his neighborhood. Only hours later, when he had stumbled into an incredible, new world, did he wonder why he had run away from the only people in the whole city who might have taken good care of him.

  “Come listen to my sto-ray … Did you ever want a brother?” Buddy made his way down to Broadway and 42nd Street, singing his song as he walked part of the way, or humming when he had to take a subway to keep warm. He had to get over to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where he kept his things. Close to dawn, Buddy would start making his way back uptown to end up outside Junior Brown’s house. But during the night he never once thought of Junior, whom he had seen safely home.

  Buddy had to keep his mind on himself and what he was able to do. He avoided walking on Eighth Avenue, where he knew too many people, especially sticks who sometimes followed him around all evening bumming from him what little money he kept for his work. He knew every kind of hustler there was on Eighth Avenue, and his instinct warned him away from those vacant-eyed young sticks walking the streets.

  Buddy made his way quickly across Eighth Avenue over to Ninth and then Tenth. He had a place on Tenth Avenue in a boarded-up bui
lding that was due to be torn down in some vague future. He had chosen the building with care. The first floor had caved in on the basement. It had been necessary for Buddy to fashion a ladder out of rope, which he used to lower himself into the rubble. He had knotted the rope ends of the ladder tightly around the first-floor cross beam. The ladder hung down into the middle of the basement next to a mountain of debris. Although the upper floors of the building were used occasionally by all kinds of wandering men, never did any of them stumble on the hiding place in the basement.

  Buddy entered the building through a window on the first floor, at the side away from the corner. The building next door was quite close and the space between it and the window was pitch black. Buddy felt along the window until he found the loose boards he had crossed in such a way that they could not be pushed in. He uncrossed them and set them on the ground. Then he yanked at the planks covering the window opening. They came out in one piece. Buddy eased himself gingerly through the opening and sat on the ledge inside, replacing the boards and the planks. He could accomplish this feat in about twenty minutes, but there had been a time when getting into the window opening had taken him most of an hour.

  Buddy relaxed on the ledge a moment. Beneath his feet was a section of floor extending around a small bedroom for about a foot before it caved in to make a jagged hole seven feet across. Buddy gripped the window frame and stretched his leg straight out. He swung his leg back and forth through the air until he had located the rope ladder. He stretched out his other leg and caught the ladder between his ankles. After a minute he was able to loop the ladder around one foot, bringing it back to where he sat.

  Buddy let go one hand from the window frame to grab the ladder. Leaning back out of the window so he wouldn’t fall forward before he was ready, he took a strong grip on the ladder with his hands and feet and swung himself out into darkness. Buddy climbed down the ladder with his eyes tight shut. He had the eerie sensation that he was suspended forever in space, that there was no beginning to the ladder and no end. Again he told himself as he had before that there was no need for him to keep his eyes open and chance dirt and mortar falling into them.

  That’s not why I keep them closed, he thought. Actually he didn’t want to be reminded of his blindness in the dark.

  I’m not afraid.

  It was true, his heart beat steadily and he was not even breathing hard.

  To be afraid of the dark is to be afraid of Buddy Clark.

  Finally Buddy’s feet touched the solid basement floor. He eased himself into a standing position, grunting with relief. His hands were sore from the hemp of the ladder but otherwise he was fine. He held onto the ladder with one hand in case he would need suddenly to swing back up again. The ladder was as invisible as he was in the blackness.

  Buddy didn’t move. He listened, relaxing one arm and hand at his side. Sounds from outside were muffled here. He could tune them out of his mind from long practice, so that he was aware of only sound from the basement. He heard breathing. Buddy listened to it for a long time and located it to the front of the mountain of ceiling mortar and floorboards. Next he listened to hear if the breathing was strained at all. There was tension in the sound; it told Buddy that whoever breathed so hard was frightened.

  Buddy smiled to himself and waited for whatever kid it was to control his fear. Alone in the city, courage was an important bit of schooling, for the kid without it couldn’t survive long.

  There was a scramble of feet around the mountain of debris to a place on the other side from Buddy. Figuring out the sound of movement, Buddy knew there were two kids hiding. He was disappointed in them. He let go of the ladder. Bending, lifting one foot and then the other, Buddy removed his shoes and socks. Barefooted, he walked soundlessly over the icy floor. The rope ladder hung to the right of the mountain of debris. Some eight to ten feet in front of the ladder and the debris was the basement wall. The kids would expect him to come forward from the ladder to the open space in front of the debris. Buddy guessed that they would be crouched on the other side facing front, in the hope of hearing him coming, getting around him and reaching the ladder before he could find them.

  They don’t know it’s me, either. They are going to break for it because they’re sure it isn’t me.

  Buddy made his way around the back of the mountain. When he had taken four steps on the other side, he was directly behind the kids without their having heard him. Inside himself Buddy felt the contentment of his own confidence. In the dark he had taught himself to see with his mind. His senses heard and smelled and registered in him the smallest detail about the boys. And then Buddy crouched and sprung on them, catching their necks in the crook of his powerful arms.

  Soundlessly the boys struggled to breathe. As Buddy applied more pressure to their throats, they grew stiff, stunned by the knowledge that they were at someone’s mercy.

  With a gruff laugh Buddy loosened his hold, flinging the boys away like stuffed toys and then rushing them again to grab each one tightly by the shoulder.

  “Tomorrow Billy!” One of them said, “Jeesus, it’s you!”

  “Is it really him?” the other one said. This boy was younger than the other. Gripping his thin shoulder, Buddy could feel him shaking.

  “It’s me,” Buddy said. He loosened his hold on the younger boy but kept his hand on him. As the boy moved closer to him, Buddy gently held him by the scruff of his neck.

  “Okay now,” Buddy told them. He kept his grip on the older boy. “Before we move, tell me what’s happened.”

  “Nothing’s happened,” the older boy said.

  “Nobody’s come in to sleep or anything, on the upper floors?”

  “Nothing,” the boy said.

  “Please, Tomorrow Billy …” It was the younger boy talking against Buddy’s chest. “… turn on a light … please.”

  “Not yet,” Buddy said quietly. “The first thing you must remember is not to hurry with anything. And next, you got to stop being afraid. I know,” Buddy said, “it’s hard to be cool in the deep dark. But if you remember not to hurry, you’ll have time to beat the fear. Now,” he said, “just listen.”

  They listened. The older boy was able to separate the outdoor sounds from their own breathing. His pulse still beat too loudly in his ears so that he could hear little else. Also, he was tired, having had to coax the smaller boy down that rope ladder for half an hour.

  The younger, smaller boy could hear only his own ragged breath. He could smell the damp and musty black of the basement but he was not even aware of sound outside.

  Buddy heard everything. He captured the sounds of outside and held them in his memory. If they changed at all, if footsteps were added, if any part of the traffic flow at the corner slowed or turned into the street, he knew it.

  Buddy could distinguish sound. But he had not known sound at all when he was the size of the younger boy whom he held onto now. When he was that age, about nine, he had stumbled upon a vacant building all boarded up. And climbing to the top floor of the building to escape the people from the Children’s Shelter, Buddy had come upon that unbelievable world of homeless children. There had been six or seven young boys and one bigger boy in that boarded-up tenement. When Buddy came upon them, none of them had moved. The bigger boy had been sitting on his haunches, his every muscle ready for battle if a fight were needed.

  They all had looked at Buddy. It had been the bigger boy who motioned him to come forward, who had given him a bowl of soup to eat.

  “This is the planet of Tomorrow Billy,” the bigger boy had told Buddy. “If you want to live on it, you can.”

  Buddy remembered he had feared the bigger boy at first, even when he had decided to stay. He had been afraid they were crazy addicts, or that the big boy forced the others to steal for him.

  The bigger boy had told Buddy, “If you stay with us, you’ll do as I say to do. There’re no parents here. We are together only to survive. Each one of us must live, not for the other,” the boy had
said. “The highest law is to learn to live for yourself. I’m the one to teach you how to do that and I’ll take care of you just as long as you need me to. I’m Tomorrow Billy.”

  In the dark of the basement, remembering that time, Buddy smiled to himself. He scooted along the floor, moving the two boys with him until he reached the wall in front of the mountain of debris. There Buddy released them. They moved quietly until they were sitting with their backs against the basement wall.

  There was a low table next to the two boys. Buddy found the one patio candle on it and lit it. The weak light seemed suddenly bright to the boys’ unaccustomed eyes. Buddy sat on his knees with his palms flat on the table top, staring into the candlelight.

  How many Tomorrow Billys had there been, and for how long? It had taken Buddy three years to learn all that the bigger boy on his planet could teach him. Each night, the boy came to where the group lived high up in the tenement. When he had taught them and fed them and furnished them what clothing they needed, he would prepare to leave them again. Always they’d ask him, “Tomorrow, Billy? Will we see you again tomorrow night?” The boy had always answered yes. But one time, after about three years, they’d somehow forgot to ask the question. Tomorrow Billy had never returned. The group had broken up then. Long after each had gone his separate way, Buddy realized why the boy had not returned. It was not that they had forgotten to ask the question, “Tomorrow, Billy?” It was that they no longer needed to.

  Turning from the candlelight, Buddy surveyed the two boys against the wall. Their eyes hadn’t left his face. He recognized the older of the two to be one of the few kids he had passed along to be part of a group down on Gansevoort Street in the West Village.

  Under Buddy’s steady gaze, the boy thought to tell Buddy his name. “I’m Franklin Moore,” he said. “You may remember me as Russell. That was my real name, the one I had when I first came here.”