Cave Under the City

by Mazer, Harry;

  We jumped up. I was dizzy for a second and then we ran.

  30

  We walked slowly along the Concourse. My legs felt weak. Every couple of steps I stopped to rest. The streets were crowded with shoppers. It was cold, the sun was high, people hurried into stores, or waited for buses, or sat in restaurants or at lunch counters. We walked again. I was coughing and sniffling and looking at my hands. I was dirty and ashamed.

  “Tolley,” Bubber said, “you all right?”

  I coughed. I felt awful. I had to sit down. I couldn’t get the cough out of my chest. “People are looking at me,” I said.

  “No, they’re not.”

  I sat on the curb, leaned against a pole. I closed my eyes.

  King licked my face. Bubber tried to pull me up. He wouldn’t leave me alone. “You’re sick, Tolley. Momma puts us in bed when we’re sick.”

  My eyes started to close. I started to dream about my own bed, my room, the door shut.

  Bubber shook me. “Tolley!” He pulled me to my feet. “We’re going home.”

  “We can’t … You can’t …” I knocked into him. I was rolling around. I couldn’t stay on my feet. “McKenzie’s there.”

  “If we see him we’ll run away.” Bubber took me home. He held my arm and made me walk down Fordham Road. We turned on Webster Avenue. King ran into me. Bubber never let me stop. We walked under the Third Avenue el, getting closer and closer to home.

  It was dark when we stood across the street from our apartment. We entered the courtyard on the park side. Nobody saw us. But King wouldn’t go inside with us. He squirmed out of Bubber’s hands and hid in the bushes.

  “Okay, stay,” Bubber said. “Stay. Good dog.”

  We went up the stairs. Every sound made my stomach jump. Bubber took my key and unlocked the door. We tiptoed through the unlit apartment. I was home. I smelled the furniture and clean linen. Were we really home? Could we stay? Everything scared me. Why was the closet door open? Why was the bed unmade? Had I left it that way? The note I’d written my parents was on the table in the hall. Was that where I’d left it?

  In the other room the chairs pulled out from the table looked at me accusingly. Where have you been? Look at you. What have you been doing? You can’t sit on us with those clothes on.

  Bubber walked slowly to his bed and pulled out the box of toys from underneath and looked at it, then pushed it back under. He switched the light off and on and pulled down the shades and let them snap up.

  In the bathroom I leaned over the sink. The soap had melted. The sink smiled up at me. The mirror said comb your hair.

  I washed my hands and face and combed my hair. Then I undressed and got into bed. Bubber brought me hot water in a cup and half a Baby Ruth he had saved.

  A noise, a buzzer woke me. Startled me. I sat up. I was so scared I couldn’t speak. Bubber sat up. He had been asleep at the foot of my bed. Somebody was coming up the stairs. I heard the footsteps, wondered, as I always did, man or woman? Girl or boy?

  The steps reached our landing and paused. Was it somebody for us? Or the Chrissmans? The steps started again on the next flight of stairs.

  The house was waking up. I heard radios and water running and smelled coffee and eggs. The same old familiar sounds. Nothing had changed. Only us.

  31

  Bubber went downstairs to find King. I stayed in bed and waited for him. He came back alone. “King is gone.”

  “Maybe he went back to the cave,” I said. “He could be waiting for us there, right now.”

  Bubber shook his head.

  “He’s around,” I said. “He has to be.” Bubber didn’t say anything. “Look, he can take care of himself. He did it before us. He can do it again.”

  My brother just looked at me, like he knew something I didn’t know. “King’s not coming back.”

  I slept. Bubber went out and came back with Drake’s cakes and an orange. I got up and dressed. My throat hurt but my chest felt better. “You want to go look for King?”

  Bubber shook his head.

  We went up the stairs to the landing by the door to the roof. It was safer here. “You want to go back to the cave and look?” Bubber shook his head. He wasn’t looking anymore. He didn’t even want to talk about King. The dog had gone around the corner and disappeared.

  “I see Daddy’s hand,” Bubber said later. He was leaning on the railing, looking down the stairwell.

  I heard somebody coming slowly up the stairs. “It’s not Daddy! Let’s get out of here.”

  “I see Daddy’s hand,” Bubber said again.

  I looked. There was a hand on the railing below. “It’s somebody else,” I said.

  “I’m going down.”

  I was afraid it was McKenzie. I made a grab for him, but he had already started down the stairs.

  32

  My father was down on one knee holding Bubber in his arms and kissing him. Bubber was crying. My father was crying, too. I just stood there. I didn’t cry. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t move.

  In the apartment, my father turned to me. “Well?” He held his arms out to me. He wanted me to come, but I couldn’t make myself go to him.

  “Come here,” my father said. “You’re so thin. What have you been eating? Where were you? I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Nobody saw you. Nobody knew where you were. It was like the ground swallowed you up.”

  I couldn’t speak.

  He took hold of me. “What’s the matter with you? You don’t act glad to see your father.”

  I ducked away from him. “Leave me alone.” When he tried to pull me back, I knocked his hand away. I hit him. I hit my father. I was crazy. “Where have you been?” I was so mad I yelled at him. I didn’t care what I said. “We were sick. Bubber was sick. We didn’t have any money. Where were you? Why did you stay away so long? You didn’t write. I wrote you and you never answered. You left us. You forgot about us. Didn’t you know? Didn’t you know? How could you be so dumb?”

  I bit my lip. I wasn’t going to let myself cry. No crying. I held my breath. I started coughing and crying. My father got hold of me and I burrowed my head against him, dug in, held on to him. I was bawling and hitting my head against him and wiping my tears on his shirt.

  “A good boy,” my father said. “A good boy.”

  Later we got dressed and went out to eat. My father taped the soles of my shoes with adhesive. “Tomorrow we’ll go to Thom McAn and buy you both shoes.”

  In the cafeteria my father watched us eat. He went back and got us seconds. I worried that he didn’t have enough money. “Eat. Let me worry about the money.”

  On the way back to the house, my father told us about being away. He had found a little work in Washington, not a lot, not enough. “Things were no different from New York. It was worse than here because I was alone. I missed you. I wrote from Washington, and when I didn’t get an answer, not one letter from Momma, I got worried and I called a friend. He called me back and said Momma was in the hospital. He didn’t know where you were.”

  “They wouldn’t let us see her.” Bubber’s face filled.

  My father held Bubber in his lap and gave a long sigh. I felt something catch in my throat. “Momma’s very sick,” he said. “They sent her away to a sanatorium.”

  “Is she going to die?” Bubber said.

  “In the mountains, Momma will have fresh air. She’ll eat, she’ll sleep, she’ll get better.”

  “Buba?” I said.

  “She was in the hospital, too. Now she’s home. Tomorrow the three of us will go see her.”

  33

  Bubber and I are back in school again. My mother isn’t home yet. My father’s working downtown. The city is renovating a bunch of theaters and music halls. Maybe you think that’s crazy, spending money on shows when people are hungry, but it’s giving a lot of people work. Carpenters, painters, electricians, and actors and musicians, too. My father says the job is going to last a year, at least. He’s redoing the gold work and
says it’s a job for a fly. I went down to see him one day. The inside of the theater is like a church. My father was working on the ceiling. I didn’t see him at first. Then my eyes went up the scaffolding, up, up, up, and there was my father, all the way on top.

  Bubber still has trouble with his words, still reads things backward and sometimes writes them that way, too. He says he’s okay, he’s reading. What he’s doing is faking it better, guessing and listening hard. At night, if my father’s late coming home, Bubber and I go out and wait by the station.

  I missed a whole civics unit. The teacher said I’d have to read the pages on my own and answer the questions because it was going to be on the final test. I had stuff to make up in algebra and spelling (I missed a lot of words), and I have to write a composition about an imaginary adventure. I thought I’d write about being hungry and finding food in garbage cans, except nobody would believe it. It’s queer being here, at home and in school, and remembering how we lived under the burned-out restaurant. And then I think about the night we slept in a box, and I think of my grandmother, sick and all alone, and it makes me feel really bad.

  Nobody knows about what happened to us or where we were. I don’t talk about it. It didn’t happen to them, and I don’t want to hear people making stupid remarks like the only hungry people are too dumb or too lazy to work. I guess that’s why I won’t write about it, either.

  My friends sort of guess something happened to me. Once we went by the restaurant and I said, “What if there was a secret room under there? Someplace you could live that nobody knew about.”

  “Is that where you were?” George said.

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s right! Listen to him. I thought you said you were with your parents.”

  “That’s right, we were on vacation.”

  “You change your story every minute. Where’d you go?”

  “Florida. We traveled around a lot.”

  Irv sort of knew, though. “You really lived down there? Why didn’t you come to my house?”

  What would they have done? Maybe let us stay. Maybe split us up. Maybe sent us to the shelter. There were too many things to explain, so I kept it to myself. Bubber and I talk sometimes about the way it was. He still misses King.

  My father had a lot of questions, too. Why did I do this? Why did I do that? He didn’t think I had to do things the way I did them. Mr. McKenzie would have taken care of us. I didn’t answer my father. I didn’t talk back, not out loud anyway. Before, I never even thought back to him. Whatever he said was the way it was. But to myself, now, I said: You don’t know, Pop. You weren’t there, so how do you know what I should have done?

  I’m delivering papers door to door in the mornings before school. I’ve got the money for Mr. Lazinski for the doughnuts. As soon as I get up the nerve to face him, I’m going to go down there and pay him back.

  On my paper route, sometimes the only person I see that early in the morning is the milkman. We meet on the stairs, or going over the roof to the next building. He’s friendly. He calls me Tolley and I call him Mike. I always give him a paper. He wants to pay me but I don’t let him.

  We went to see my mother in Tupper Lake. It’s an all-day trip by train up to the Adirondacks, almost to Canada. Tupper Lake is in the mountains, but it’s flat where the sanatorium is. The mountains are all around it. My mother took a walk with us. She held Bubber’s hand the whole time. She held my hand, too.

  I didn’t like going away and leaving her again, leaving her in the mountains. I didn’t like those cold white mountains. They say there are bears in the mountains, and wolves and mountain lions. I don’t like to think about Bubber and me alone out there. I feel a lot safer in the city.

  About the Author

  Harry Mazer is the author of twenty-two novels for children and young adults. Best known for his acclaimed realistic teen fiction, Mazer has been recognized with the New York Library Association’s Knickerbocker Award for Juvenile Literature and the ALAN Award for contributions to young adult literature, as well as several best-book designations from the American Library Association, among other honors.

  After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, Mazer joined the US Army Air Force, serving in World War II from 1943 to 1945 as a sergeant. He received a Purple Heart and an Air Medal after his B-17 bomber was shot down in 1945. Mazer’s wartime experiences later inspired several of his novels, including the Boy at War series.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1986 by Harry Mazer

  Cover design by Heidi North

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-0995-9

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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