She spun back to me. “You do not bring young girls into this house to spend the night. Are you out of your mind? And you,” she said to Stan, “what are you thinking of, letting him bring a girl into the room at night?”
“Don’t lose your wig, they kept their clothes on.”
“That’s not the point! I should hope they kept their clothes on!”
She stared my brother down and returned to me. “You do not go with that girl, do you understand? Joyners and Witchers do not mix.”
“What book of the Bible is that in?” Stan sneered.
“Listen to you. You should know better than anyone about what happens when Joyners mix with Witchers.”
He opened his mouth to make a retort and faltered and looked away. That might have been a low blow on Mom’s part.
At any rate, the upshot was I got grounded for an indefinite period of time. The yard would form my front and my rear boundaries. Mom pointed them out like an avenging angel.
I shrugged. If ignoring Myra’s cries of distress meant not getting grounded, then getting grounded was worth it. Besides, my birthday was only days away and I felt pretty sure I’d receive a pardon when it came.
My brother, meanwhile, had got all agitated, and he pulled me into the room.
“Did you see the way that son of a bitch looked at you?”
“He was mad ’cause I kidnapped his daughter,” I said.
I could put myself in Mr. Joyner’s shoes well enough. Myra was a hothouse flower, a precious fruit. I’d be mad too if some kid came and plucked her away. But my brother was remorseless. He said I hadn’t forced Myra to do a damn thing. She was the one who started it with her goddamn letters.
“What was she doing leaving notes in our mailbox? She was asking for it, that’s what she was doing. And then you told the old shithook it was your fault.”
“Well, I’m the boy and she’s the girl.”
“What difference does that make?” Stan burned quietly. Then he said, “You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna go strolling past the Joyners’ house. I’m gonna walk up and down the street until Gaylord comes out.”
“What for?”
“So I can kick his ass.”
“Man, don’t do that, that’ll just make it harder for Myra and me.”
“Oh, get over the skinny twit, will you.”
He left the room.
After a while I realized I was just sitting there, staring ahead. That’s when it dawned on me I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere.
I sauntered meekly into the kitchen, where Mom was slamming plates to the table, preparing breakfast in a rage. Through the window I saw Pop’s head passing back and forth as he rearranged the junk at the side of the house.
She was making a point of not speaking. I cleared my throat and kept staring until her movements grew less furious. I made my eyes big and childlike.
She darted me a look, and a tight-lipped smile softened her frown. I was her baby boy, and I knew how to play that card.
She let some time pass, maintaining her indignation, and then she said, “You’re setting yourself up for a fall, you know that, don’t you.”
“With Myra?”
“Who do you think I mean?”
I thought about it.
“But she took my ring.”
“What ring? Where did you get a ring?”
“From Mr. Gladstein.”
“How can you afford a ring from Mr. Gladstein?”
“It only cost fifty cents. It’s junk, you know, costume jewelry.”
I wanted to abbreviate the details of my transactions with Gladstein, lest she become militant. I remembered how she had once hauled Stan and me to the drugstore, forcing us to return certain items we’d lifted.
“Mr. Gladstein doesn’t keep junk in his store.”
“Yes he does. He was getting ready to throw out a bracelet the other day and I took it and gave it to Myra.”
“Why on earth are you giving jewelry to that girl? Can’t you see she’s using you? She’s just getting what she can out of you. Don’t mess with the Joyners, the Joyners are snobs. She’s just slumming with you, boy.” I was ready to jump in and defend Myra, but she cut me off. “Don’t you let those people take advantage of you. You’re a good boy, you hear? You don’t come from trash.” Suddenly she was walking towards me and shaking her finger in my face, all riled up. “They can paint whatever they want on this house, but my mother and father were the nicest people that ever lived. They may not have had much education but they had good morals and they never hurt a soul. They gave a lot more than they ever received and I never heard them complain about it once. These narrow-minded people that live around here don’t know what they’re talking about. You’re a good boy, you hear?” And then she hugged my head, giving me a monkey-shine.
Mom was a right sweet old gal, although she had Myra all wrong. And even if she didn’t have Myra wrong (and a part of me was beginning to wonder), that wouldn’t change anything. I wasn’t going to quit the girl ’til I felt her breasts.
“Did I ever tell you how I met your daddy?” she said.
“In a bar.”
She laughed. “It’s the only time in my life I ever went in one.”
I knew the story by heart, I’d heard it a hundred times. It was the only time she ever smoked a cigarette, that night in the bar.
“Pop probably thought you were gonna be a lot of fun ’cause you smoked and drank,” I said. “Or so he believed.”
Mom was laughing at the memory. “We were in a booth in the rear of the bar, the Lakeside Lounge, you know, out on Lakeside Avenue. He talked to me all night and bought me dinner, tried to make me drunk. And you know what I was telling myself that whole time he was running his mouth?”
“You’re gonna marry that man. You’ve told me this story a thousand times, Mom.”
“But do you know why I wanted to marry him?”
Actually, I didn’t. It was a new wrinkle. She had never explained that.
“I knew he’d never get it in his head he was too good for me. He has an inferiority complex a mile wide. Most people can’t see that, but I saw it right away.”
“You mean you fell in love with Pop because he has an inferiority complex?”
“Plus he was good-looking.”
I stared at her speechlessly and she said, “What are you looking that way for? People fall in love for far dumber reasons than that.”
It made me feel funny, to think Mom didn’t fall in love with Pop for his charm. What are women made of? Is that why Myra liked me, because I was lowborn, humble?
I went to my room and meditated on the mysteries of women, deeper than all the philosophies of humankind put together.
20
THE COOL WEATHER KEPT ON, and the indistinct tones made by Pop and Snead played like music beneath my window. I’d be in and out of sleep, listening to their voices without making the slightest sense of what they were saying. Baseball, cowboy boots, blues records. I sort of half got it, floating in and out; and then I heard Gladstein’s name and I sat up to listen. Snead was telling Pop about the safe in the rear of the store. He knew the combination, the spinning numbers that would let you into that box like a magic charm.
“How’d you find out?”
“I was cleaning up where he keeps the dogs. Cat has the combination on a sheet of paper, it was tucked under the blotter on his desk.”
“No shit. So you rich now, Snead? You done pocketed a diamond?”
They laughed, and then they lowered their voices to a whisper, so I couldn’t catch what they were saying. That was frustrating. I wanted to know what they thought about Gladstein, whom I regarded with a kind of proprietary interest. He was mine. He belonged to my world. I knew things about him no one else did, and whatever Snead and Pop were saying I should be able to hear, by entitlement. I strained my ears and they kept murmuring, and occasionally my friend’s name would slip in.
I crept out of bed and crouched under the window so
I could eavesdrop.
I heard my father’s voice: “Hell Snead, all you gotta do is find a good fence.”
He said it in a joshing tone, but it made Snead uneasy, I sensed it.
At the time I didn’t know what “fence” meant, and I assumed the subject had been changed. I thought they were talking about doing yard work.
Snead said something about a man who lived in Hopewell who had a fence (or that’s what I understood) and Pop asked what the man’s name was. Snead told him, but I couldn’t make it out. They sat for a while without saying much else. Pop tooted on his harmonica once or twice and Snead neglected to pick it up on the guitar. Pop blew a little longer and then he quit.
They were off the subject of Gladstein and their silence had started to bore me. I was about to go stubbing back to bed on my knees when Pop said, “You know, if you were visiting him at his house then I’d know he wouldn’t be snooping around the store. If I’m gonna do the thing I wanna know exactly where he is.”
“How you expect to get in?”
“Through the alley door, no one will see. I can get that door open in thirty seconds flat.”
“What about the houses on Myra Street?”
“Man, they got those tall shrubs along the chain-link back there. No one can see through the shrubs, especially after dark. All I need you to do is find out if he has an alarm rigged to the door. If he does we have to figure out how to shut it off. Or maybe you could slip back there and unlock the door when he ain’t looking, right before you leave. Then after the two of you leave I’ll come and tamper with the lock to make it look like it’s been jimmied.”
Up to that moment I’d been struggling to apply sense to what they were saying. Now I felt the blood in my face. My stomach grew queasy. I returned to bed, not wanting to hear. But their mumbling kept drifting in and soon I was back under the window, unable to stop myself.
“All you gotta do is call and let me know. Call from Gladstein’s when you get there. Tell him you need to use the phone, pretend you’re calling your wife. We can set up a code. ‘Hi honey, you want anything from the store on the way home?’ So I’ll know the coast is clear.”
Snead didn’t say anything for a while.
Then he said, “I don’t know, Witcher, this could be more trouble than it’s worth. I got a mortgage, I got a baby sleeping in the crib.”
“What’s the trouble? You won’t even be there. There won’t be no risk at all, for you. If anything goes wrong I’ll take the fall.”
“You’re talking about a felony.”
“What the hell, I do the work, you get half. Just relax and let me take care of things.”
“This is hard time we’re talking about. I don’t wanna do no time.”
“Man, there ain’t no time to do. Anyone gets caught it’ll be me. You know damn well I wouldn’t sing, I’d just cool my heels in jail. That old treasure would be buried, man.”
“I never said you would sing.”
“In the mountains they used to say Witchers ain’t snitchers. That was a saying where I come from.”
Pop laughed, Snead didn’t.
“Listen, you think about it. Take your time. I ain’t gonna put your baby in danger. I got two sons myself. If I didn’t feel so sure about this thing I wouldn’t even mention it.”
They were quiet a spell.
I got afraid of what I was doing. I was afraid they could hear my heart, maybe feel my body warming the wall. I crawled back to bed and slithered in. I pulled the sheet over my head. For a half-hour their voices kept on mumbling, and then I heard the springy metal as Snead got up from the chair to leave.
Pop came in the house. A line of illumination appeared at the bottom of my door when he turned on the hallway light. Then he swung open the door to check on me, which he would do sometimes before he hit the sack.
I saw his form peering into the dark.
“You awake?”
I let out a groggy murmur, pretending to be asleep. I didn’t want him to suspect I’d heard anything.
“Your brother with Anya?”
“Yes sir,” I said.
His head wavered in the light, searching to see, and then he pulled the door to.
The hallway light went out.
I lay there with this big need inside of me. What was I supposed to do? Witchers ain’t snitchers. But the need was in me. I could hear it hollering. This was big, and it made me sorry Mom had got herself mixed up with a man who had an inferiority complex. And wasn’t that exactly what came of inferiority complexes? The inclination to knock off jewelry stores instead of finding a job? Wasn’t this precisely what Witchers were supposed to be about?
I wondered what Stan would do if I told. He’d kick my ass for telling, that’s what; and then he’d let Pop know I squealed. And Mom would leave Pop if she found out, and I didn’t want him getting left. And Gladstein would call the police. And Pop would go to the pen. And I didn’t want Pop to go to the pen.
I remembered how when old man Joyner was giving me that scornful look Pop had made him quit. Just because I kidnapped Myra didn’t mean Joyner could treat me like dirt. Pop had made the old man understand that. He looked out for his own. That’s where Stan got it, from Pop. No one would put me down as long as Pop was in the world. But there was also Gladstein, living in Jefferson Ward with the black people and letting me have his throwaway jewelry. And the way he took care of his yappy dogs. Not to mention he acknowledged my mother in the grocery store. And he was tolerant of Pop, when all Pop was doing was casing his store.
I had to speak with Pop and let him know what I knew. Which might keep him at bay. But boy. How did a kid have a conversation like that with his pop?
Maybe I would do it on my birthday. Pop was extra nice on birthdays. He would take me to ice cream parlors and minor league games and let me have sips of his beer when Mom wasn’t looking. The year before, when I turned twelve, he had let me puff three times on his cigarette. That’s how I started smoking. I had always wanted to smoke like Pop, drink like Pop, roll up my sleeves like Pop. But I didn’t know anymore. I just didn’t know.
21
IN THE MORNING, at the table, I sat there wondering how to broach what I knew. Pop was all pop-eyed and abstract, chewing on his toast. When Mom left for the Ben Franklin he hardly said a word; but then, there hadn’t been much between them for some time.
Stan picked up his cereal bowl and drank the flaky milk in the bottom and gasped and set it down. He smirked mysteriously and left by the back door.
Meanwhile I was staring at Pop’s profile. Because I had just observed something peculiar. The handle to my coffee cup was shaped exactly like his nose. In profile Pop resembled a coffee cup. I had never noticed that before. Somehow it rattled me and rendered me incapable of further communication. I set down my cup and left the house, remembering only when I reached the edge of the yard that I was forbidden to go beyond it.
I sat on the porch, near enough to the TRASH legend to serve as an illustration of its essential truth.
Rusty got up under my arm and licked my face, and I said, “Hey Rusty, how’s Myra?” He was my sole connection with her. It gratified me to imagine he’d just returned from licking her.
No longer were my letters being footed by Kathy Coghill to Myra. Being grounded, I could no longer scout the Joyner house and gather gossip on the streets. All I could do was imagine the ways in which she might hate me. I had got her in big trouble by smuggling her to my bedroom and I figured she must at least be tempted by resentment of me. Her parents no doubt were feeding her a steady course of anti-Witcher propaganda and I wasn’t sure she’d be able to withstand that. And don’t forget Gaylord, whom she regarded as next in line to the Prince of Wales. Myra would audit respectfully any forensics her brother made against Witcherdom.
It seemed hopeless, in a way. And yet my instincts kept telling me nothing was lost. Myra was a good girl, docile, obedient, sweet-tempered—until her family turned its back. And then she became willf
ul as all get-out.
I decided to write her one more note. I went to my room and penned the following:
Darling,
Don’t believe anything bad anyone says about me. I want what is best for you. You and I should be together as boyfriend and girlfriend. Let us not let them keep us apart.
Yours truly,
JW
The challenge would be getting it to her. I toyed with the idea of taping the note to Rusty’s collar and sending him off like a carrier pigeon, but how could I be sure it wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands? My next idea was to slip the note in the mailbox, raise the flag and hope that Kathy Coghill would come along. That seemed to have a chance: remote, but a chance. So I ran the note to the box and sat on the porch and waited.
I sat for two hours. The day grew hot. Our house stood alone and the sun beat down hard on us because trees, for some reason, refused to flourish in our yard, no matter how many times Pop tried to plant them. By noon there was no shade whatsoever. I was sitting in a T-shirt and dungarees. Even Rusty had abandoned me for cooler pastures.
It wasn’t just that Kathy Coghill was nowhere in sight—where was Dickie Pudding? where was Tim Hodges? (He lived on Raleigh Lane, a big, red-pawed country boy who belonged to a clan of deer hunters. One afternoon, when there was no one else around, he had hung out with me briefly, until dinnertime.) Didn’t anybody care that I was stranded? I grew more and more dejected, sitting there.
I am a Witcher, I reminded myself, and Witchers walk alone.
Just as I came to that conclusion, an old Rambler pulled onto the road, slowing down as it passed. Johnny Pendleton was at the wheel, driving on his learner’s permit. (The car was a secondhand gift from his parents.) He swiveled his head and grinned as the Rambler puttered by. Three boys from the wrestling squad were with him, and in unison they hollered, “Wi-i-i-i-tch-e-e-e-er,” following it with a wicked laugh.
That did it. I got up and went in the house, passing Pop on the sofa watching his soaps. I threw myself on the bed and fought away the tears.
Soon there came a rap at the door and Pop stepped in.
“What’s the matter, sport?”
“Nothing.” I stifled the grief.
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