Downtown

by Norma Fox Mazer

  “Martha. She has a little place downtown.”

  Cary continued up the stairs. She peeked into Gene’s room, into the tiny spare room that was really a walk-in closet with a window, and even into the bathroom. “What a neat bathtub!”

  “Gene goes for old-fashioned stuff. This is my room—” I opened the door. “Excuse the mess, I didn’t know I was going to have company.” I swooped up a bunch of dirty clothes and shoved them into the closet.

  “Is this your shrine?” she said, looking at the Koren cartoons I had on the wall.

  “No, not the way the pictures downstairs are Gene’s shrine. I could never be a cartoonist, but I think this guy is a genius. He just makes me break out laughing.” I watched hopefully as she read each caption, looked up at the picture, then down at the caption again. The best Koren got out of her was one very small smile. Oh, well … nobody’s perfect.

  “I love this slanted ceiling,” she said. “This house is really wonderful.” She took a hairbrush out of her pocketbook and started brushing her hair.

  If I tried to kiss her here, would she think I was trying for a lot more? I perched on the windowsill. I liked the way Cary did everything—the sober little look she gave herself in the mirror, the neat way she put her brush back into her pocketbook, even the way she checked out each book on the table next to my bed. I guess, at that moment, she could have done anything at all and I would have thought it was fantastic.

  She gave the rocker a little push, then sat down in front of my desk. It’s a small rolltop with lots of little drawers and cubbyholes. She opened and shut one drawer after another. “Where’d you get this desk? It must be a real antique.”

  “I think it is. Gene got it for me a couple of years ago.”

  “For your birthday?”

  “No, just—he found it in an antique shop and he thought I’d like it.”

  “He really is sweet, isn’t he?” She picked up a notebook. I watched her do it without a twinge of alarm. I was still in the dream of her being in my room.

  “What’s this for?” she said. “What are all these numbers?” She had my license plate notebook.

  I jumped up. “It’s nothing. Give it to me.”

  “Uh, uh, uh, it is, too, something. Your face is turning red.” She studied a page. “Now what is this? A code or something? Oh, I get it! It’s love letters in code! SWW158. Who’s she? No, no, no, don’t tell me, let me guess. Sally Wilson Wade. But why is Sally in the NOTED section? Does that mean she noted you or you noted her? And who’s this? 706AAG. DEFINITE. My, my, my. Definite what? Definite love? Pete! With a name like that? Hope you gave her up. She sounds like a disaster.”

  I reached for the notebook, but Cary held it over her head.

  “Cary, come on.”

  She ducked under my arm, mimicking me. “‘Cary, come on!’ … Tell me how to break this code and I’ll give it to you.”

  I sat down on the bed and covered my face. I could never explain the notebook. My hobby is memorizing the license plates of cars I think are following me.

  After a moment, she sat down next to me. “Pete—did I make you mad or something? I was just teasing.” She tossed the notebook into my lap. “Was I really mean?”

  “No, it’s just—” I didn’t know what to say. “Can I kiss you?” I blurted.

  Her hair smelled like peanuts and rain. I never wanted to stop kissing her, or go away from her, or let her go away from me. We had our arms around each other, I couldn’t get close enough, I wanted more … more … more …

  Suddenly she pulled away, moved away from me, her face freezing into the princess mask. “Look,” she said, “just because we kissed—just because I came here, you don’t have to think—How about me? How about what I want?”

  I sat there, dumb and aching, shook my head, couldn’t speak. I didn’t want her to look at me that way. I thought, What if I told her about my parents? I’d often imagined telling someone, just spilling it all out—to Drew, or his sister Deirdre, or Totie Golden. Totie would want to know, wouldn’t she? It was history in the stream, not along the banks. Once or twice, in a strange reckless mood, almost as though I were sleeping on my feet, I had even thought of collaring a stranger on the street. Listen! I have to tell you something important … secret … I don’t do this lightly. Pay attention! My secret is going to be your secret.

  “Cat got your tongue, Pete? Hey—” Cary touched my head. “It’s not that bad.”

  Cary, my parents are not dead. They’re fugitives from the law … political outlaws.…

  “What are you mumbling about?”

  “My parents—my parents—”

  She bent toward me. “Pete, are you okay?”

  “My parents … Cary, they’re in hiding …”

  What had I said? What had I done? I’d never told anyone. I seemed to stop breathing. Everything in me froze. I had given away my parents, betrayed them. Suddenly I saw them hunched together in a dark closet. Safely hidden … until someone told on them. Me. My stomach did that lurching, grabbing thing. I yanked the closet door open, they tumbled out. Then I saw them in a car, driving through barren lands, miles of deserted desert. Outlaws … on the lam. My mother was a lamb … fierce lamb who had left a bomb in a wastebasket … and my father was a friendly frog with bulging green eyes and a great and glorious smile.

  “What? What did you say?”

  They bombed a lab, Cary; it wasn’t an act of terrorism, but of conscience.

  “Hey, you’re sweating like anything.”

  The lab was doing germ warfare research. Hal and Laura wanted to bring it into the open, bring the truth to everyone.

  She put her hand on my forehead. “You’re really burning. I think you’re getting sick.”

  The action was planned so the bomb would detonate when no one was there. Those two people—no, I don’t want to talk about it.… They weren’t supposed to be there. Laura and Hal wouldn’t hurt a fly, that’s no joke, our house was a safety zone for flies …

  From across the street, we heard the bells in St. Luke’s chiming the hour. Cary jumped up. “Pete, I should have left ages ago.”

  I followed her down the stairs. She hadn’t heard me. She hadn’t heard me! Outside, big ragged clouds raced through the sky. A sign banged against a post. I walked with her to the bus stop, dazed by what I’d almost told her, as dazed as if I’d had walked in front of a speeding car and only by a miracle missed being hit.

  That night I dreamed I was walking down a dark alley with a little kid riding my back, his arms choked around my neck. “Too hard! Too hard!” I yelled, but when I looked around, it was a squirrel on my shoulder. He bit deep into my ear. I screamed with pain. A moment later, I was in a high cool room being questioned by someone I couldn’t see.

  Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?

  I do.

  What is your name?

  Pete Greenwood.

  Liar. Your name?

  Pete Greenwood.

  Your name.

  Pete Greenwood!

  Take him away.

  No! Wait!

  Take him away.

  I woke up moaning, in the grip of the White Terror, choking for air, faceless, empty. A breeze blew through the venetian blinds and I rocked in the terror, sweating and holding on to myself until it passed.

  And when it was gone, I fell limply over the side of my bed and saw the notebook where I’d dropped it on the floor. I picked it up. The fresh odor of Cary’s hair rose faintly from the pages. I rolled back on the bed, holding the notebook against my chest.

  Twenty

  As I left the house for school, two men emerged from a blue car parked across the street and strolled toward me. One was tall, one short. Both were well-dressed but casual. The tall one had a jacket slung over his shoulder. The shorter one flashed a black leather card case with an official stamp at me. “Pax Connors?” he said pleasantly. “Can we talk to you for a few minutes?”
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br />   My heart thudded, my eyes fuzzed over. After all these years, they had found me, tracked me down like dogs after a rabbit. And like a rabbit, I wanted to dive for cover. I looked this way, that way; my stomach was watery, but the hounds were on either side of me, smiling their doggy smiles.

  “I don’t have to talk to you.” How many times had my parents impressed that on me? You never have to talk to them. You don’t have to tell them anything, not even the time of day.

  “I’m Frank Miner,” the short investigator said, in the same pleasant tone, “and my partner here is Jay Beckman. You on your way to school, Pax? We won’t hold you up too long. Jay and I just want to talk to you for a few minutes. No big deal. Just a little chat.”

  “My name is Pete,” I said, “Pete Greenwood.” Why had I said it? I didn’t have to talk to them. I didn’t have to tell them anything, not even the time of day.

  The taller one, Jay Beckman, gave me a knowing smile. “So, Pete, tell me, have you heard from Laura and Hal recently?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My lips felt peculiarly stiff.

  Frank Miner put his hand on my arm like a fond uncle. “Oh, sure you do, kid. Look, let’s put all that crappadappa aside. You’re Pax Connors, Laura and Hal are your folks, you know it and we know it. Hey! You know we’ve been looking for you for quite a while.” He chuckled, a merry sound, as if their looking for me had been nothing but a game, Hide-and-Seek on a spring night, and I was It, and wasn’t I the hell of a little devil to find such a terrific hidey-hole?

  “So here we are,” he went on, “and all we want to do is talk to you. No sweat. Say, are you okay? You look a little off—maybe we should go get something to eat, all of us. What about it, Jay? You drink coffee, Pax?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good,” Frank Miner said. “Coffee’s a bad habit. I don’t let my kids drink it.” Without my noticing, they had begun walking, one on either side of me. “I have a son just about your age,” Frank Miner went on. “Nice kid, you’d like him, you two would probably get along. Don’t you think so, Jay?”

  Jay shrugged. He was the silent one, the tough one.

  “Don’t worry about school, you can be a little late,” Frank Miner said. “We’ll make it okay with the principal. I’ll bet you’re a good student. You’re a smart kid. I read that you’ve got a high IQ. Do you get on the honor roll all the time? My kid works his butt off and never makes it. I don’t know who’s more disappointed, me or him. He wants to be a lawyer and an investigative agent like the old man. Well, I tell him, you need the marks. So what are you thinking about doing after you’re through high school, Pax? Oh, sorry, I guess you’d rather we called you Pete.”

  Read about me? Where did he read about me? What did that mean? Did they have a dossier on me? I stared around me as if I’d never seen these streets before. We passed stores I’d been into thousands of times, the Winston Savings Bank, Winston Square, the post office. How much did they know about me? Did they know about my place down in that little woods behind the post office? Did they know about Cary? Why was I walking like a sheep between the two of them?

  “These years must have been hard on you, kid,” Frank Miner said, turning to look right into my eyes. “Eight years without your old man or your mama—that’s tough,” he said, sounding so sympathetic the breath went out of me as if someone had whacked me with a bat between the shoulder blades. And a flood of words rose into my throat: I might have told them everything then, spilled it all without restraint.

  “I can feel for you, Pete, not just abstractly,” Frank Miner went on. “My father was gone for a couple of years—not my fault. Definitely not. He was a miner—yeah, he really was. Our name is Miner and he was a miner. But the name didn’t do us any good. The coal fields were down, there was no work for him. My old man couldn’t move the whole family, didn’t have the money, so he took off to find a job. He did it for us, right? But let me tell you, I missed him. I missed my father.” He squeezed my arm. “I still choke up, just thinking about it.”

  “Frank,” Jay Beckman cut in, “we have some business to do here. Let’s get off that old family stuff. Nobody wants to hear about that.”

  We walked on without speaking. There was a numbness across the back of my head. I had stopped thinking, was simply walking—or was I being led?

  “This looks like a good spot,” Frank Miner said, stopping in front of a diner painted in rainbow stripes. “You know this place, Pete? Rainbow Diner? I could go for a stack of pancakes right now. How about you?” He held the door open.

  I didn’t move.

  “Let’s go, kid.” Jay Beckman gripped my arm.

  I walked into the diner between them, compliant, will-less, numbed by that urge to blab, to tell everything. Wouldn’t it be a relief? At last, to get it all out of my mind, to empty all the little secret places, to pour out the accumulated debris of eight years—the grief, the anger, the notebooks, the license plates, the fears, the meetings, the hopes, the disappointments, the waiting, always the waiting … all of it, all of it. I only had to begin.

  Eight years ago, a man I called Uncle Marti told me my parents had to go away for a while …

  Good boy, good boy. They’d pat me on the head and feed me a doggie biscuit as I blatted everything out, as I gave them all the information they wanted and along the way betrayed my parents to the enemy.

  Frank Miner sat down in one of the scratchy little red vinyl booths. “Sit down, kid. Breakfast’s on me.”

  “I—I—” I stuttered and then, afraid of myself, terrified of my need to talk, twisted out of Jay’s grip and ran out of the diner.

  “Hey, kid!” Frank called after me. “Pete—come on back.”

  I ran and kept running and didn’t stop until I was in school.

  Twenty-one

  “You going to eat that turkey sandwich?” Drew said.

  “It’s all yours.” We were sitting in the bleachers near the playing field. I had no appetite. Ever since I’d run out of the diner that morning, my stomach had been churning.

  “Joanie was over to the house last night.” He ate the sandwich fast and crammed a cupcake into his mouth. “She gave me back my class ring. Threw it at me, threw it right at me.” Suddenly he stood up and shouted at a couple of guys out on the field, who were tossing a ball back and forth. “Get your arm into it, Matheson, you dumb ass!”

  He was quiet for a moment, then burst out, “You know what Joanie said? ‘I’m fed up with sharing you with a dozen other girls. I can’t believe anything you say!’ Hell! I never lied to her. My hand to God. My mom and Dawn were downstairs in the shop, but Deirdre heard everything … my adorable sister. She said I bloody got what I bloody deserved. What am I supposed to do now, Pete?”

  “You mean about Joanie?”

  “What else, man! Are you listening or not?”

  “I’m listening, I’m listening.” But I was thinking about the agents.

  “I tried to give Joanie back the ring this morning. She wouldn’t take it, she wouldn’t talk to me …”

  “God, Drew, I don’t know what to tell you. What I know about girls—”

  “You’ve got a girl friend now. Are you having problems with her? I know you’re not, because you don’t have crazy girls calling you up and screwing things up for you.”

  “Why don’t you disconnect your phone?”

  “I really appreciate that advice, Greenwood. Try again.”

  “That’s what you have to do. Try again. You never know till you try. Don’t give up so easily, Gregoretti.” The old clichés poured out like water from a faucet.

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Way to go.” I sank back against the bleacher. What had I said this morning? Had I said anything I shouldn’t have? What I remembered most distinctly were their names and their faces. Jay Beckman. Hollywood hatchet face. Frank Miner. Friendly eyed as a dog.

  Later that afternoon, not far from school, I saw a blue car with two men in it.
I turned into the nearest store, walked through and out the back door. I took a different route home. But then, near the Interstate loop, I saw a man standing at a window on about the fourth floor in the Flannagan Building, staring straight down at me. One of them. Later I asked myself, Why would they put an agent in a building that they couldn’t possibly have known I was going to pass? The answer was—they wouldn’t. But at that moment, fear was stronger than logic. I ducked out of sight, my stomach churning again.

  The worst moment came when I stopped in a market to buy milk. As I reached into the cooler, a man brushed briskly past me. Frank Miner! I must have groaned. He turned and looked at me for a moment. He was younger than the agent, shorter, fatter. Didn’t look like him at all.

  By the time I got home, I’d worn myself out seeing agents on every corner. I turned on the TV, then turned it off, then turned it on again. I couldn’t think, couldn’t make up my mind about anything. Should I tell Gene? I needed support. But why worry him? Well, he should know. Still, wasn’t it my problem? I went round and round, but when Gene walked in, I stopped thinking and blurted it out.

  “They’ve found me, Gene, they were waiting for me this morning when I left the house.”

  He went into the kitchen and filled the teapot.

  “Agents, Gene. Two agents. They called me by my real name. They were parked across the street, a blue car, but then they left it and just walked with me.” Why wasn’t he jumping up and down? How about a little reaction? Some fear and panic, to keep me company if nothing else. “Did you hear me? Did you hear what I said?”

  He poured boiling water into the teapot. “Of course, I heard you.” His voice was as even as usual. “What exactly did they ask you, Pete?”

  “They just said they wanted to talk to me. The short one, Frank Miner, he was chatty, pretty nice, but the tall one—the way he looked at me—real cold blue eyes, and tough. He asked me when I’d heard from Laura and Hal. And the way he said their names—”