by Jeffrey Ford
For gym we had Coach Crenshaw, who for some reason always had at least one hand in his sweatpants, and I’m not talking about the pocket. When it rained or the weather was too cold to go outside, we’d stay in the gym and play dodgeball. We divided into two teams, one on either side of the gym. You couldn’t cross the dividing line, and you had to bean someone on the other side with one of those hard red gym balls in order to get him out. If he managed to catch the ball, then you were out and had to sit on the side.
One day, right before Christmas, Crenshaw got that glint in his eye, blew his whistle, and called for dodgeball. The usual game ensued, and Charlie managed to hide out and practice his powers of invisibility long enough so he was the last one left on his side of the line. On the other side of the line, the last one left was Bobby Harweed. No one knew how many times he’d been left back, but it was certain he’d already been arrested once before he’d made it to fifth grade. His arm muscles were like smooth rocks, and he had a tattoo he had given himself with a straight pin and india ink: the word “Shit” scrawled across the calf of his left leg. When Crenshaw saw the final match-up, he blew his whistle and instituted a new rule—the two remaining players could go anywhere they wanted; the dividing line no longer mattered.
Charlie had the ball, but Bobby stalked toward him, unworried. Charlie threw it with all his might, but it just kind of floated on the air, and Bobby grabbed it like he was picking an apple off a tree. That should have ended the game, but Crenshaw didn’t blow the whistle. Everyone in the gym started chanting Bobby’s name. Bobby wound up, and as he did, Charlie backed away until he was almost to the wall. He brought his hands up to cover his face. When it came, the ball hit him with such force in the chest that it knocked the air out of him and slammed him backward so his head hit the concrete wall. His glasses flew off and cracked in half on the hardwood floor, and he slumped unconscious. An ambulance was called, and for that Christmas, Charlie got a broken rib.
My father and Pop went out in the car to join the search for Charlie, and Jim and I hooked up George and headed for the woods to see if we could track him there. On the way we passed a lot of parents and kids from the neighborhood either in cars or on bikes out looking for him, too.
Jim told me, “He must have just gotten lost somewhere and couldn’t remember how to get home. You know Charlie.”
I didn’t say anything, as my imagination was spinning with images of myself, lost, unable to find my way home, or worse, being tied up and taken away to a place where I would never see my family or home again. I was frightened, and the only thing that prevented me from running back to the house, besides the daylight, was that we had George with us. I said, “Maybe the prowler took him.”
We were, by then, at the entrance to the school, and Jim stopped walking. He turned and looked at me. “You know what?” he said. “You might be right.”
“Do you think they thought of it?”
“Of course,” he said, but I remembered the hatbox in the garbage can and had my doubts.
Our tour of the woods was brief. It was a beautifully clear and cool day, the trees all turning red, but the idea that the prowler was now doing more than just peeping kept us on edge. We ventured only as far as the bend in the stream before giving up. Once out from under the trees, we peered into the sewer pipe, inspected the basketball courts, gazed briefly down into the sump, and followed the perimeter of the fence around the school yard back to the entrance.
“I have thirty cents,” said Jim. “You want to go to the deli and get a soda?”
Is That You?
There were cops all over the neighborhood for the next week or so, interviewing people about the disappearance of Charlie Edison and trying to piece together what might have happened to him. The story was on the nightly news, and they included a shot of East Lake in the report. It looked different in black and white, almost like some other school a kid would want to go to. Then they flashed a photo of Charlie, smiling, from behind his big glasses, and I had to look away, aware of what he’d been through since I’d known him.
There had been honest grief over his absence and the anguish it caused his family, but at the end of the second week the town started to slip into its old ways, as if some strong current were pulling us back to normalcy. It distressed me, though I couldn’t so easily put my finger on the feeling then, how ready everyone was to leave Charlie behind and continue with the business of living. I can’t say I was any different. My mind turned to worrying about Krapp’s math homework and the troubles of my own family. I suppose the investigation into Charlie’s disappearance continued, but it no longer entranced the neighborhood.
Even though the hubbub surrounding the tragedy was quickly receding, I’d still get a chill at school whenever I’d look over to Charlie’s desk and see his empty chair, or when out on my bike I’d pass his mother, who had certainly lost her mind when she lost her son. Every day she’d wander the neighborhood, traipsing through people’s backyards, inspecting the Dumpsters behind the stores downtown, staggering along the railroad tracks. She was one of the youngest mothers on the block, but the loss had drained her, and overnight she became haggard, her blond hair frizzed, her expression blank.
In the evenings she’d walk around the school yard and stand by the playground calling Charlie’s name. One night, as darkness fell and we were eating dinner, my mother, quite a few glasses of sherry on her way to Bermuda, looked up and saw, through the front window, Mrs. Edison heading home from East Lake. She stopped talking and got up, walked through the living room and out the front door. Jim and Mary and I went to the window to watch. She met Mrs. Edison in the street and said something to her. Then she stepped in close, put her arms around the smaller woman, and held her. They stood like that for a very long time, swaying slightly, until night came, and every now and then my mother would lightly pat her back.
Since it involved going out before sunrise each morning, Jim had to quit his paper route, and certain precautions were taken, even including locking the front and back doors at night. We weren’t allowed to go anywhere off the block without another kid with us, and if I went to the woods, I’d have to get Jim to go with me. Still, I continued to walk George by myself at night and now felt another specter lurking behind the bushes with Teddy Dunden.
On the first really cold night, near the end of September, the wind blowing dead leaves down the block, I went out with George and started around the bend toward the school. As we passed Mrs. Grimm’s darkened house, I heard a whisper: “Is that you?” The sudden sound of a voice made me jump, and George gave a low growl. I looked over at the yard, and there, standing amid the barren rosebushes, was Mrs. Edison.
“Charlie, is that you?” she said, and put her hand out toward me.
The sudden sight of her scared the hell out of me. I turned, unable to answer, and ran as fast as I could back to my house. When I got home, my mother was asleep on the couch, so just to be near someone else I went down to the cellar to find Jim. He was there, sitting beneath the sun of Botch Town, fixing the roof on Mrs. Restuccio’s house. On the other side of the stairs, Mickey and Sandy Graham and Sally O’Malley were working hard in Mrs. Harkmar’s class.
“What do you want?” asked Jim.
My heart was still beating fast, and I realized it wasn’t so much the sight of Mrs. Edison that had scared me, since we were by now used to her popping up anywhere at just about any time, but it was the fact that she thought I was Charlie. I didn’t want to tell Jim what was wrong, as if to give voice to it would make the connection between me and the missing boy a real one.
“I guess the prowler is gone now,” I said to him. There had been no reported sightings of him since Charlie’s disappearance. I scanned the board to find the shadow man’s figure, those painted eyes and straight-pin hands, and found him standing behind the Hortons’ place up near Hammond Lane.
“He’s still around, I bet,” said Jim. “He’s lying low because of all the police on the block in the last
couple of weeks.”
My eyes kept moving over the board as he spoke. Botch Town always drew me in. There was no glancing quickly at it. I followed Willow Avenue down from Hammond and around the corner. When I got to Mrs. Grimm’s house on the right side of the street, I was brought up short. Standing in her front yard was the clay figure of Mrs. Edison.
“Hey,” I said, and leaned out over the board to point. “Did you put her there?”
“Why don’t you go do something?” he said.
“Just tell me, did you put her there?”
I knew he could tell from the tone of my voice that I wasn’t kidding.
“No,” he said, “Why?”
“’Cause I was just out with George, and that’s exactly where I saw her a few minutes ago.”
“Maybe she walked over there after I turned the lights out last night,” said Jim.
“Come on,” I said. “Did you move her?”
“I swear I didn’t touch her,” he said. “I haven’t moved any of them in a week.”
We looked at each other, and out of the silence that followed, we heard, from the other side of the cellar, the voice of Mrs. Harkmar say, “Mickey, you have scored one hundred on your English test.”
A few seconds passed, and then I called out, “Hey, Mary, come here.”
The voice of Sally O’Malley said, “I’ll have to do better next time.”
Jim got up and took a step toward the stairs. “Mickey, we need you over here,” he said.
A moment later Mary came through the curtain behind the stairs and over to where we were standing.
“I’m not going to be mad at you if you did, but did you touch any of the stuff in Botch Town?” he asked, smiling.
“Could you possibly…?” she said in her Mickey voice.
“Did you move Mrs. Edison here?” I asked, and pointed to where the clay figure stood.
She stepped up to the board and looked down at the town.
“Well?” asked Jim, resting his hand lightly on her shoulder.
She stared intently and then nodded.
The McGinn System
The next day on the playground at school, I overheard Peter Horton telling Chris Hackett that there had been someone at his mother’s window the night before.
“Who was it?” asked Chris. “Batman?”
Peter thought for some time and then laughed so his whole giant body jiggled. “No, course not,” he said. “She thought she was lookin’ at a full moon, but then it was a face.”
“What a dip,” said Chris.
Peter thought just as long again and then said, “Hey,” reaching out one of his man-size hands for Chris’s throat. Hackett took off, though, running across the field, yelling, “Your mom’s got a fart for a brain!” Horton ran four steps and then either forgot why he was running or became winded.
The minute I heard what Peter had said, I thought back to the board the previous night and remembered the shadow man’s pins scratching the back wall of the Hortons’ house. When I got home that afternoon, I told Jim, and we went to find Mary. At first she was nowhere to be found, but then we saw little clouds of smoke rising from the forsythias in the corner of the backyard. We crossed the leaf-covered grass and crawled in to sit on either side of her.
“How do you know where to put the people in Botch Town?” asked Jim.
Mary flicked the ash off her cigarette exactly the way my mother did and said, “Ciphering the McGinn System.”
“You’re handicapping them?” I asked.
“From your morning line,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You read them to me,” she said.
“My notebook?”
She nodded.
“A town full of horses,” said Jim.
“It’s not a race,” I said.
“Yes it is, in the numbers,” she said, staring straight ahead.
“Do you figure it in your head or on paper?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” she said.
Mary stamped out her cigarette. We sat there quiet for a time, the wind blowing the branches of the bushes around us. Above, the dying leaves of the oak tree scraped together. I tried to understand what she was doing with the information I was giving her but couldn’t stretch my imagination around it.
“Where’s Charlie Edison?” asked Jim.
“Gone,” said Mary.
“But where does he belong on the board?” he persisted.
“I don’t know. You never read him to me,” she said, turning to me.
“I never read you his mother either,” I said.
“I saw her,” said Mary. “Saw her on the street and saw her with Mommy.”
For the next fifteen minutes we told her everything we knew about Charlie Edison: all of his trials and tribulations in school, what color bike he rode, what team insignia was on his baseball hat (the Cleveland Indians), and so on. She nodded as we fed her the information. When we were done, she said, “Good-bye now,” and got up and left the forsythias.
Jim started laughing. “It’s all luck,” he said. “There’s only so much space in Botch Town, and the figures have to go somewhere. There’s a good chance you’ll get it right sometimes.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You think she’s Dr. Strange,” he said, and laughed so hard at me I was convinced I’d been a fool. For my trouble he gave me a Fonseca Pulverizer in the side muscle of my right arm that deadened it for a good five minutes. As he left me behind in the bushes, he called back, “You’ll believe anything.”
In silent revenge I thought back to the night a few years earlier when my parents had told Jim and me that there was no Santa Claus. Just that afternoon Jim and I had been lying on our stomachs in the snow, trying to peer into the cellar, which had been off-limits since Thanksgiving. “I see a bike,” said Jim. “Christ, I think I see Robot Commando.” But when my mother dropped the bomb that there was no Santa Claus, I was the one who simply nodded. Jim went to pieces. He sat down in the rocking chair by the front window, the snow falling in huge flakes outside in the dark, and he rocked and sobbed with his hands covering his face for the longest time.
I left the bushes and went inside to dig around in the couch cushions for change. I found a nickel and decided to ride to the store and get a couple pieces of Bazooka. There was still an hour left before my mother got home from work and made dinner. The sun was already setting when I left the house. Night was coming sooner and sooner each day, and I rode along wondering what I should be for Halloween. I took the back way to the store, down Feems Road, and wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on around me when I suddenly woke up to the scent of a vaguely familiar aroma.
A few feet in front of me, parked next to the curb, was a white car. I knew I had seen it before but couldn’t recall where. Only when I was next to it and looked in the open passenger-side window to see a man sitting in the driver’s seat, did I remember. The fins, the bubble top, the old curved windshield—it was the car that had stopped the night we dragged Mr. Blah-Blah across the street. As I passed, I saw the man inside, wearing a white trench coat and white hat. He was smoking a pipe. His face was thin, with a sharp nose, and his eyes squinted as if he were studying me.
I panicked and took off down the sidewalk, pedaling as fast as I could. Behind me I heard the car start up, and that pushed me to pump even faster. I made it around the turn that led to the stores but didn’t stop. Instead of heading left to the deli, I made a right on Hammond and rode all the way down to Willow and back home. I was almost home and thoroughly winded when I finally stopped to see if he was still behind me. The street was empty, and night was only a few minutes away.
I didn’t want to tell Jim what had happened, because I knew he would laugh, but I couldn’t shake the memory of the way that guy had stared at me. It took a lot of effort to put him out of my mind. Mom came home, we had dinner and did our homework and went next door to listen to Pop play the mandolin, and after a fe
w hours I was able to forget him. When I went to bed, though, and opened the novel about Perno Shell in the Amazon, that face came floating back into my mind’s eye. Pipe smoke! The same exact scent that had made me look up during the bike ride now emanated from the pages of my book.
It Must Have Been the Black Olives
The next day Pop had to drive over to the school and pick Mary up. She was running a high fever and feeling sick to her stomach. Something was definitely making the rounds at East Lake. When my class was in the library that afternoon, Larry March, the boy who smelled like ass, puked without warning all over the giant dictionary that old Mr. Rogers, the librarian, kept on a pedestal by the window. Larry was escorted to the nurse’s office, and Boris the janitor was called in, pushing his barrel of red stuff and carrying a broom. I don’t know what that red stuff was, but in my imagination it was composed of grated pencil erasers and its special properties absorbed the sins of children. He used about two snow shovels full in the library that day. As Boris disposed of the ruined dictionary, much to Mr. Rogers’s obvious sadness, he said, “It must have been the black olives.”
Back in Krapp’s classroom, though, after library, Patricia Trepedino puked, and then after watching her, Felicia Barnes upchucked. Boris and his barrel of red stuff were in hot demand, because reports of more puking came in from all over the school. Krapp was visibly shaken, his nostrils flaring, his eyes darting. After everything was cleaned up, a lingering vomit funk pervaded the room. He opened all the windows and put on a filmstrip for us about the uses of fossil fuels, featuring a talking charcoal briquette. He sat in the last row in the dark, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief.