I embraced him. “No one could forget you.”
“How much would it cost to go?” he said.
“More than we’ve got.”
“I’d hitchhike.”
“Sure you would. And I’d sit here in Chicago and work and eat alone and pray you were okay. And then the people in the white coats would come and ask me if I was the mother who let her eleven-year-old son hitchhike alone to prison.”
17
Five weeks later I received a polite reply from the prison chaplain, informing me that he had relayed my messages to Neal.
“I can’t guarantee he will accede to your wishes,” the Reverend Wallace wrote. “Your son will be pleased to know that his father is recovering. I urge you to continue praying about your own response to him, though I would not presume to advise you.”
It didn’t take a brain surgeon to read between the lines. The response had taken so long, I guessed, because the Reverend Wallace was not happy with my letter. He had apparently hoped for more. It was clear that he assumed I had told Elgin everything. I would keep praying about my own response, but I was at peace with my decision not to tell Elgin about Neal’s attempted suicide.
When Elgin’s letter from his father finally arrived, I could tell the chaplain had written it and had Neal copy it. It read: “Dear Son, I’m sorry I haven’t written you in such a long time. I have been ill. I miss you and love you and wish I could see you. Maybe someday soon we can get together. Keep up the good work with your baseball. Love, Dad.”
It didn’t sound like him, and not one misspelling. Elgin didn’t notice.
“Mom! Do you think he’s gonna get out after all?”
I shook my head. “I think he’s hopin you’ll come and see him someday, Elgin.”
“Can I?”
“Maybe someday. You’re growing up and he’s gonna be there a long time.”
Elgin scowled at me.
I loved the fall in Chicago, but when the temperature began to bite, I wondered if I could squeeze a few dollars out of my budget for a warmer coat. For six weeks I put a ten-dollar bill in a small envelope in the cabinet above the refrigerator. A couple more weeks and I would be able to afford a coat I might actually look forward to wearing.
The day before my four-day Thanksgiving weekend, I trudged home exhausted. Pre-Christmas orders had taxed everyone in the office. Tempers were short, and bosses whose passes I had ignored seemed to take their frustrations out on me. I was working an hour extra each day and still getting criticized and corrected. I worried about my raise, which had been promised and then delayed and then promised again before the end of the year.
A drunk on the bus circulated among the women passengers, asking for money. I could not understand why these men thought women had more money or were more sympathetic than men. I shook my head and looked away, but the drunk stood staring at me with a hateful look. He scared me. The door of the dingy hotel actually looked inviting. It would be warm inside. Mr. Bravura would say something nice, though I would be only cordial. And the slow, rickety elevator would connect me with the reason I endured all this.
Mr. Bravura was occupied with another tenant as I walked past, but he sang out, “Oh, Mrs. Woodell, a word please, if it’s convenient.”
“I need to get to my son,” I said, slowing.
“Just a word. Anyway, your son only just arrived.”
I looked at my watch. It was an hour and a half after dark. “Is he all right?”
“He’s fine, ma’am, and if you could just give me a second…”
He finished with the other tenant.
“Now, Mrs. Woodell. Please, sit down.”
“I really don’t have a lot of time.”
“If you knew what I did for you today, you would give me all the time I need.”
Why did he have to play games? Had he rescued Elgin from some danger? Caught him hanging with gang members? I sat. Ricardo leaned forward far enough that I could smell him. Tobacco. Alcohol. Sweat. Breath. I fought to keep from wrinkling my nose.
“I did something for you today that I have never done for another tenant. When C.O.D.s come, I usually turn them away. Oh, I have paid a few extra pennies, but never have I done what I did for you today.”
He looked as if he expected a thanks before I had even learned the nature of the favor. I pressed my lips together, determined not to beg.
“Well, it wasn’t C.O.D., thank God. I would not have been able to advance you that much. But look at this.” He produced a carbon sheet from a stack on his desk. “The total cost of shipping this, this contraption, is hidden under these squiggly lines, but you can see clearly the difference between that figure, which was paid in advance, and the amount that had to be paid before they would make the delivery. I told them there was some mistake, that you were not here and that I couldn’t imagine your ordering such a—a monstrosity. It must weigh over two hundred pounds. I had to help get it to the base of the stairs, but they would not take it down for me. Maybe I should have refused it, but then if you were expecting it, what is a person to do?
“I knew for sure you would be good for the, let me see, sixty-three dollars and seventy-seven cents.”
It had to be the pitching machine. There goes my coat. “Elgin doesn’t know about this, does he?”
Ricardo shook his head.
“Good. And thank you for doing that for me. I’ll have Elgin run the money down in a few minutes, if you promise not to tell him about it. May I see it?”
He led me down a dark hallway to a steel door that led to the cellar. I hadn’t realized the building even had a basement. “Does anyone ever go down there?”
“Not often,” Ricardo said. He flipped on a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling and gestured toward the shipment.
I had seen the thing before, but never quite like this. Every protruding piece had been twisted or pivoted or folded down and wired to keep it as compact as it was, which was not very.
“May I ask what it is?” Ricardo said.
“A pitching machine.”
“Like a robot that throws the ball?”
“You could say that. Only it doesn’t look like a robot. It’s just a box that shoots baseballs at you.”
“I can probably store it for you downstairs.”
“I appreciate it.”
“It will probably take your son and you to help me move it. We can’t leave it here, and you don’t have room for it.”
“Can we do it tomorrow morning?”
“Of course. Tell me, is this normally an outside toy?”
“I’ve seen them in field houses,” I said, “but yes, it is intended for outside.”
“May I ask one more thing? Do you intend to leave us, maybe move somewhere with more space? I would hate to see you go.”
I shook my head. “If you can find a spot to store this, we’ll be here quite a while.”
Ricardo looked relieved and busied himself in his cubicle while I waited for the elevator.
“Why were you late?” I asked Elgin a few minutes later.
“Who said I was late? Big-nose Bravura?”
“He’s a nice man.”
“He should mind his own business.”
“I want him to look out for you, El! Don’t blame him. Where were you?”
“At a secondhand store.”
“A couple of blocks over?”
He nodded. “Chico was looking for something. I had never been in there before. They have everything! It’s like a pawnshop. I got to looking at everything and lost track of time.”
“You should have been able to tell it was getting dark.”
“I know. It won’t happen again.”
I sat in the kitchenette with my coat on and the envelope of ten-dollar bills in my hand. I took sixty dollars from the envelope and the rest from my purse in exact change.
“Run this down to Mr. Bravura, will you, El? Then we’ll have supper, and tomorrow I have a little Thanksgiving surprise for you.”
; “Turkey?”
“Better.”
18
Being able to sleep past six-thirty on a brisk Chicago morning was heaven. Problem was, Elgin was up and around. I hoped he hadn’t noticed the small turkey in the back of the refrigerator. Neither of us could hide anything in that tiny two-and-a-half rooms and a bathroom.
Elgin spent as much time at the stove as I did. Still I was amazed to hear the cabinets opening and closing, the match being struck, the rattle and tap of pots and pans. He sounded as much like a born housewife as an eleven-year-old boy.
When I smelled breakfast I lay on my back with my hands behind my head, wondering what Elgin was up to. I finally padded to the kitchen where Elgin greeted me with a grin and a set table. Coffee was brewing, bacon was sizzling, French toast frying, and scrambled eggs ready. To be able at his age to get those dishes ready within seconds of each other astounded me.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” he said.
“Ain’t you somethin?” was all I could think to say.
“Yeah, I’m somethin,” he said, for once not correcting my English. “I figure if you have a surprise for me, I can have a surprise for you.”
After we ate, Elgin started clearing. “You just get dressed so we can get to my surprise.” I shot him a double take and he smiled. “Don’t trust Mr. Bravura.”
“Don’t worry,” I said as I went to get into jeans and a sweater. “He’d be the last person I’d tell anything.”
We raced down six flights, laughing and bumping each other. Just before we turned into the lobby, we heard Mr. Bravura.
“What’s that racket?” he hissed, but he softened when he saw us. “Good morning, madam! Are we ready for our little chore?” He said he had found a length of chain and a rubber bungi cord that might assist us in lowering the contraption down the stairs.
Elgin looked stunned by the device. With its metal tubes and protrusions, it made a mass of parts about six feet tall and four feet wide. It was on wheels, but not all of them rolled. Elgin put his hands on the sides and shook it to feel the weight. The thing hardly budged.
“I hope the three of us will be enough,” Mr. Bravura said as he fed the chain in and around a couple of metal bars. He did the same with the bungi cord.
“I’ll hold by the chain,” I told Elgin, “and you can guide it down the stairs by the side. Whatever you do, don’t get in front of it.”
We maneuvered into position, centering the machine in the square landing at the top of the concrete stairs. It took all three of us scraping and grunting to get it facing the right direction.
“We should just let it fall down the stairs,” Elgin said. “I’m gonna have to put it all back together anyway.”
No one laughed.
Elgin moved down two steps while Mr. Bravura and I got behind and bent to push. When the front wheels slipped over the top step, just before the weight of the machine made it tilt forward, we stopped and repositioned ourselves, carefully wrapping chain and bungi cord around our hands.
I lowered my shoulder into the machine. Mr. Bravura did the same. Elgin held the side, hoping to keep the thing straight as we planned to go step by step to the cellar. But as soon as the weight of the machine shifted, the whole thing pitched forward and began to walk itself down the stairs, faster and faster.
“Whoa! Whoa!” Mr. Bravura cried, following as if taking a gigantic robot on a walk and finding himself dragged behind.
“Don’t let go!” I squealed. “Elgin, get out of the way! Get up here and help us if you can!”
Elgin flattened himself against the wall as machine, landlord, and I lurched by, picking up speed. He reached around Mr. Bravura and got both hands on the chain, but that only made my side move more quickly. The whole thing was turning to the right. Elgin let go and it straightened itself, but when he grabbed the bungi cord on my side, the thing jerked that way. Now it was humping and jumping and banging down the stairs with the three of us trying to hang on. I had the cord intertwined in my fingers, something Mr. Bravura could not do with the chain.
“I’m losing my grip!” he shouted.
“Hang on!” I said.
Elgin was crushed between Mr. Bravura and me now, trying to grab the chain again so one side wouldn’t rip free. Just as Mr. Bravura’s hands slipped off the chain, Elgin grabbed it. The landlord’s weight shifted to his rear and he sat on the stairs, unable to hang on or help.
Elgin may have been as strong as I was, but he didn’t weigh quite as much, and now our dead weight, trailing the lumbering appliance, was all that kept it from tumbling end-over-end.
When Elgin screamed that he too was losing it, I knew I was in danger. If he fell back too, it would be just me and heavy metal rolling down those ungiving stairs, my fingers and hands stuck in a contracting rubber cord. My weight moved forward, and I tried to plant my feet to keep from rolling over the top of the machine. Now I knew what a rodeo rider feels like when he’s thrown off an animal but his hand is still locked into the rope.
As the machine began to hurtle and crash down the stairs, Elgin pushed off with one foot and got his knee atop it. As he was going over backward with it, he somehow unhooked my bungi cord from the metal. I sat back and he jumped off, landing hard on the stairs as the three of us watched the thing reach the basement floor with a terrible crash and roar.
Elgin sat rubbing his thigh, where he had hit the edge of a step.
“Everyone all right?” I asked.
When they nodded, I began to laugh, and soon the three of us were howling. Dust rose from the basement, along with the smell of oil and grease. We went down to survey the damage.
“I wonder if you can hurt one of these things,” I said.
“Two wheels are bent in,” Elgin said.
“I hope we can still drag or push it somewhere,” Mr. Bravura said.
We scouted the musty, dark basement. Every imaginable piece of junk was stored in that cellar, from surplus furniture to tools, rags, gadgets, and moldy junk decades old. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I got an idea. I could tell from the look on Elgin’s face that he had the same.
Just around the corner from where the pitching machine lay in a heap were two walled-off areas. Both were windowless, and each had one bare lightbulb that looked like it was on its last tungsten. One was a square room piled three or four feet high with junk. I had my eye on the other room, which ran almost half the length of the building and was about twelve feet wide.
“What would you guess was the size of this area, Ricardo?” I said idly, trying to keep him from suspicion.
He straightened and looked to all four corners. “Oh, twelve or fourteen by thirty or forty.”
“I would have said twelve by forty myself,” I said. “There’d be more than enough room to store it in here.”
“Mr. Bravura,” Elgin began slowly, “is there an outlet in this room?”
Ricardo squinted.”Why?”
“Maybe someday when I get the thing figured out and put together a little, I could plug it in and see if it works.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. This is not an inside thing. And you might break something.”
“I’d move everything into the other room.”
I was afraid Elgin would offend Mr. Bravura. “Maybe, Ricardo,” I said, “the boy has a good idea. I’ll bet a thinker like you could come up with an idea of how we could make this work. Maybe I could give you a few dollars a month for your trouble and for the electricity.”
The light returned to Ricardo’s eyes. “I will consider it, of course. I was an engineer in the past, you know.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said, feeling sleazy. “But it doesn’t surprise me.”
“Maybe if the boy moved everything into the other room.”
“Yes,” I said. ‘Then you wouldn’t have to worry about what he does in here with the machine.”
“Precisely,” Ricardo said. “I would entrust you, ma’am, with a key to the basement. You would be responsible for whatever
happened down here.”
“That’s great!” Elgin said. “I’ll—”
“But,” Ricardo said, holding up a hand. “No one must ever be in this basement who does not live in this building. No boys from your team, no stickball players.”
“Stickball?” Elgin said.
“Whatever they call it these days.”
“Fastpitch,” Elgin said.
“Are we agreed?”
“If I got the thing working, I’d want to show my friends and have them try to—”
Mr. Bravura raised both hands. “No! No! See, ma’am? He does not understand liability and expense and a person’s job. Just store the machine wherever you can find room! No setting it up, fixing it, getting it to run, anything. And no key to the basement.”
“Ricardo,” I said. “Depend on me to carry out your wishes. I understand completely, and I’ll make sure your rules are followed exactly down here. You can trust me, and we both appreciate it.”
“You’ll explain it to the boy?”
“For sure.”
19
Mr. Bravura made a point of giving the key to me and not to Elgin. “Whenever you or whoever you designate is in the basement,” he said, “I want the door locked behind you.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Elgin?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You can always get out,” Ricardo continued, “but it’s a big steel door, so no outsider can get in without a terrible racket. I’ll run them off. I will not allow anyone to threaten my tenants.”
I told Elgin to wait for me upstairs. He looked puzzled and didn’t respond, but he slowly went to the elevator.
“Take the stairs,” I called after him. “Keep you in shape.”
“Oh, Momma,” he said. But he obeyed.
I could tell Mr. Bravura was already regretting his decision. “Ricardo,” I said. “Let me just say again how much I appreciate this. Next time you look in that basement, it’ll be straightened up, and we’ll be sure your rule is followed. You made me very happy today. Can I send you and your wife down a plate of Thanksgiving dinner later?”
The Youngest Hero Page 11