As the flames arrived at the windows upstairs and fed themselves on his parents’ bed and curtains and wooden furniture, Sheldon made for the shed where his father kept the garden tools and the hunting gear that wasn’t out in the forest shack. He climbed inside with the rucksack and his last worldly items and, closing the door behind him, slumped down to the floor, bent his face into his knees, and finished his crying as the fire outside engulfed the rest of the house and collapsed it to the ground.
* * *
Sheldon wasn’t aware that he had fallen asleep until he was woken by an adult hand on his arm.
“Sheldon?” asked the man, as he pulled him out of the shed.
Mr. Simmons was the town sheriff and the father of Sheldon and Lenny’s teacher. Sheldon had never met him personally, but his father had often wished him a good morning in town. Mr. Simmons had a close-cut gray beard and thinning hair. He was a soft-spoken man. There was a revolver on his belt.
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re in my daughter’s class, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was there anyone inside?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, thank God for that. Stand up now.” The sheriff took Sheldon under his arm and lifted him up. The fire was still burning hot, but the top floor had long since fallen in and Sheriff Simmons wasn’t moving like a man in a rush. He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and cleared ash from Sheldon’s face. He grimaced at his own handiwork: “That didn’t help much.”
Sheldon didn’t reply.
“You OK?” he asked Sheldon.
“I guess so.”
“Where’s your dad?”
“There was an accident,” Sheldon said.
“What kind of accident?”
“We were driving back from Hartford and the truck turned over.”
“Well,” said the sheriff, removing his hat on account of the heat. “Where is he?”
“He’s . . . he . . .” The words caught in his throat, but Sheldon forced them out. “Dead.”
“He died? And you’re telling me you’re here all by yourself?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What happened?” asked Mr. Simmons. “You knock over the lamp or something?”
“The truck belonged to the Krupinski brothers. They did it. They stole my parents’ things and then burned down my house.”
Simmons was confused. He should have received a call about an accident, especially if the boy was here alone. “Why would they do that?” he asked.
“They came and took our stuff because of the broken truck. Payback, they said. And they knocked over the lamp on their way out. But my dad didn’t wreck their truck. Someone drove us off the road. Slammed right into us on purpose. A man with a mustache in a suit.”
“Ronny and Theo,” said Mr. Simmons in a way that told Sheldon it was not an inconceivable notion to him. He ignored the part about the man and the suit. “What did they take?”
“My dad’s clock and my mother’s jewelry box. The one with the diamond in it and the little green stone. Her clothes too. Took it all away in her suitcase with her initials on it.”
“Lila,” said Mr. Simmons, his voice dropping off slightly.
“Sir?”
Sheriff Simmons surveyed the catastrophe around him with his hands on his hips. The fire smoldered.
“You got anything you can bring with you? Clothes and such? You can’t stay here.”
“I got my bag in the shed,” said Sheldon. “Grabbed what I could.”
“Get it and come with me,” said the sheriff.
* * *
The Krupinski brothers lived with their father west of Whately. Their white house was set far back from the road at the end of a dirt path that split left to the house and right to the sagging barn. The brothers, Sheldon knew, spent most of their time in the barn. Light streamed from the cracks and edges of old planks. The house across the way was dark.
Sheriff Simmons pulled the car up to the barn and stopped thirty feet out.
“You wait here.”
The sheriff strode purposefully to the door of the barn. Without a pause, he knocked. When the door creaked open, Ronny Krupinski stuck his head out and Mr. Simmons took that as an invitation to walk in.
Sheldon sat in the car and waited. The only sound was the wind, and he could smell the smoke on the breeze.
Not more than two minutes went by before the sheriff had both young men walking out the door in handcuffs. Simmons had his revolver out as he marched them to the space between the barn and the house where the headlights from the patrol car lit up the grass in a golden stain.
Old Bruno was nowhere to be seen.
Sheldon watched as the sheriff’s gun motioned for the brothers to sit. “We didn’t do nothin’,” said Ronny.
“That kid’s a fucking liar,” shouted Theo. “He burned his own place down. You can’t trust them dirty Jews.” Simmons wasn’t interested. He vanished back into the barn and came out with his gun in one hand and Sheldon’s mother’s suitcase in the other.
At the car window, he stopped and leaned in. “It’s got L. H. engraved on the top. Lila Horowitz, I’m reckoning.” Sheldon nodded. “I’ll go back for the clock. You check to see if everything’s in here. I took a peek. That little diamond you mentioned. Three rings, four pairs of earrings, a few silver necklaces, and a silver broach with a green rock set in the middle.”
* * *
“An aventurine stone. It’s from India,” Lila had once told Sheldon. “The Orient. Someday you’ll go there, Sheldon,” she said. “You’ll see the whole world.”
* * *
“That’s my mother’s,” Sheldon said.
The sheriff nodded and picked up the new two-way radio they’d installed back in January after the new budget was passed. Radios were still rare and Simmons liked to use it whenever he had the thinnest of excuses. This time, the need wasn’t so thin.
“Alice? I need you to send Timmy out to the Krupinski place. They robbed the Horowitz family and then burned the place down. I got the boy in the back seat here. I can’t have them all in the same car. Have him hurry it up,” he said, and then was quiet for a moment. “Yeah,” he continued, “there’s more. Joseph Horowitz is dead—what?—no, they didn’t do it. An accident on the road. Let’s start calling around and see if we can’t find him. I’m gonna take the kid home with me and have Carol look after him until we track down some family. I remember something about the brother being in Connecticut.”
Outside, the Krupinski boys were popping up and down with indignation and threatening Sheldon, which wasn’t helping their case with the sheriff, who walked over to Theo and kicked him in the ribs as though he’d been thinking about it since first seeing his face. Timmy showed up twenty minutes later. Little older than Ronny, he pulled them both up and hauled them back to his car.
Stone-faced, Sheldon watched them with eyes fixed like a hawk. Ronny ran his finger across his throat and Sheldon looked on, impassive, as they disappeared into the shadowy depths of Timmy’s police car.
Hartford
SHELDON NEVER WONDERED WHERE Miss Simmons lived. Or how she lived. Like all adults he wasn’t related to, she seemed to magically pop into existence whenever he was around and vanish when he was gone. Aside from wondering what her legs looked like, Sheldon hadn’t given Miss Simmons’s private life any thought until he walked through the front door of her house.
Carol Simmons lived with her father. When Sheldon stepped inside, a floral scent hit him that was almost as powerful as the cigar smoke it was trying to mask. He didn’t understand it as the smell of intergenerational warfare, both combatants locked in an uneasy battle for supremacy inside a house neither could leave.
Miss Simmons greeted him at the door like a long-lost relative, not a teacher. She buried his face between her breasts and held it there as she hugged him, lamenting his suffering and pain, all of which was momentarily abstracted amid the smell of her and the feeling of her skin
against his right cheek.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“Of course he’s hungry,” said Mr. Simmons. “Give him the leftover pot roast.”
Sheldon ate like an animal. He placed his napkin on his lap first, like his mother had shown him, and he used a fork and knife rather than his hands, but those were the only concessions he made to civilization because after those preliminaries his primal needs took over. He hadn’t had a hot meal since Hartford. He drank three glasses of milk in the course of the meal, and when he was done, Miss Simmons took him by the arm as if he were a drunk and walked him upstairs to a guest room that smelled like laundry detergent. It was the best smell Sheldon could remember; it smelled like order, which was the exact opposite of death.
Sheldon tumbled onto the bed like a felled tree while downstairs Sheriff Simmons placed a series of calls that ended with Joseph’s brother, Nate Corbin.
* * *
The next day, Sheldon met Lenny at their favorite spot by the river. Word about his father had spread across town by lunchtime, and that meant Lenny would know and want to talk to him, assuming that he wasn’t angry for not being told.
They arrived at the river at almost the same moment in the midafternoon.
Lenny was magnanimous when they met, and he hugged Sheldon and then placed a hand on his shoulder after they had sat down.
“Why didn’t you say anything, Sheldon?” Lenny asked him.
Mill River was as wide as a stone’s throw. Today it flowed strong, and each piece of grass or bark or twig floating on it was a boat that twisted and turned on its way southward to the Atlantic.
“I don’t want to go crying in front of people.”
“I know but . . . this isn’t a skinned knee.”
Sheldon didn’t reply.
“You want to come live with us? My parents love you. Or the parts they know about, anyway.”
“My uncle Nate is coming to pick me up today. I’ve got to go live with my cousins.”
“In Hartford?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s hours away.”
“I know.”
“So, like . . . a whole different school and friends and stuff?”
“We can write,” Sheldon said.
Lenny didn’t look convinced. Lenny had never written a letter. He wrote some jokes and tried to write a radio skit once but never a letter. Soldiers wrote letters. And grandmothers. But normal people?
“You think you’re gonna come back?” he asked.
“Someone killed my dad, Lenny. Someone drove us off the road on purpose. And something’s telling me, they didn’t think it was my father who was driving.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know that army hat my dad wears? The one from the war? Old Krupinski’s got one too. We were driving his truck. And they were skimming from my dad and I’m thinking . . . who else were they skimming from? Somebody, that’s for sure. Why only fleece us when they could do it to other guys too? I think one of their dupes decided to teach the Krupinskis a lesson. So . . . I’m gonna find out who did it and get them.”
“The Krupinskis?”
“No. I already got them. I want the driver.”
Sheldon told Lenny the truth about the house fire. How he set it. How he blamed it on Ronny and Theo. How easy it had been to tell the lie and how good it had felt after what they said and did to him. How simple it had been to make things right with only a little courage and few well-placed words.
Lenny barely blinked as Sheldon told the story. At the end, he was duly impressed but worried.
“I’m not saying they didn’t have it coming,” said Lenny. “But . . . you burned down your house, Sheldon. I’m just thinking that . . . we’re not supposed to bear false witness against our neighbors and all that.”
“They weren’t very neighborly.”
Lenny nodded but not in agreement. His head always bobbed up and down when he was thinking, a strategy that bought him time.
“That guy ran us off the road on purpose, Lenny,” Sheldon said. “Even if they did plan on getting Old Krupinski and not my dad, the guy with the mustache saw me. I mean . . . we locked eyes. And he did it anyway. So, fuck ’em, Lenny. I’m going to get him. Because we’re also supposed to honor our mothers and fathers too.”
“You’re not supposed to avenge ’em,” said Lenny. His voice was low. They didn’t often talk about serious matters. Then again, until last year, serious matters had never come up.
“So, I’m supposed to sit back and take it? I don’t think so,” Sheldon said.
“How’re you gonna find him?” Lenny asked.
“The guy had a suit and a fancy haircut and a mustache. He’s got to be from a city. Springfield or Hartford, I think.”
“Could be New York or Boston or Miami for all we know.”
“The Krupinskis don’t go that far with that truck. Whoever it was knew the truck. They go to Springfield and Hartford. Maybe Boston and New York, but we were coming north, so that rules out Boston, which is east. I think I can find him.”
“How?”
“It’s like those books and radio shows, you know? Like with Dashiell Hammett and Rex Stout? Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin? You know. It’s just detective work. My dad used to read them to me all the time. Mom thought they were too grown-up for me, but my dad read them at bedtime when I was eight. When I was ten, he started making me do the reading and then even Mom would come in. We’d all take turns. I told you about that. You made fun of me for reading with my parents, and I pushed you in the river. You don’t remember?”
“Yeah, but . . . I wouldn’t have put those things together.”
“Think about it. How would Nero Wolfe put it all together? He’d think it through. Somebody tried to run us off the road. Who? Someone the Krupinskis fucked over. Who had they fucked over that ends up with a guy in a fancy suit driving us off the road on the way back between Springfield and Northampton? I’m thinking it had to be someone with money and power and muscle and stuff. Someone big who decided to go Al Capone on them. Not some farmer. Not some craftsman. A business type. If I can find out who the brothers were doing business with, and which of them might be up for dirty work, I might be able to get them.”
“Get them?” Lenny was growing incredulous. “Track them down and find the guy, Sheldon? Find the muscle who works for money and power? What are you gonna do if that works? You haven’t even had your bar mitzvah yet.”
“What the hell has my bar mitzvah got to do with anything?”
“You know. Being a man and stuff. And . . . you know. We’re Jewish.”
“What of it?”
“There aren’t any Jewish detectives, Sheldon. Come on. You think the Shadow is Jewish? Sherlock Holmes? Nero Wolfe? Jews don’t get to do that kind of stuff.”
“My father defended France, but he couldn’t have asked questions wearing a hat and smokin’ a cigarette?”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“Why not?”
“Because . . . I don’t know,” said Lenny.
“I do,” said Sheldon. “Errol Flynnowitz, that’s the reason.”
“You making jokes now?”
“No. I’m understanding one.”
Lenny wasn’t following this part of Sheldon’s thinking, but one thing was clear to him. “OK, try this one: You’re twelve,” said Lenny, opening his palms to release the crazy back into the cosmos.
“Come off it, Lenny.”
Lenny Bernstein looked at Sheldon. He’d never seen him like this. He’d never seen him ramped up. Not like this. Not even after his mother died.
“You gonna shoot the mobster?” Lenny asked.
“I got rifles in the shed. I know how to use them. I’m pretty good, actually.”
“You gonna put a rifle in your rucksack?”
“I got things to work out!” Sheldon said.
“I’ll say.”
* * *
An hour later Sheldon sat alone on the cur
b of the tiny brick police station with his shaggy hair, wall clock, rucksack, and a woman’s suitcase filled with frocks and jewelry. The day was spent, and dusk was rising to a wind. The sun was orange and its light sharpened the edges of the trees across the street.
Out of a bush came a raccoon.
Sheldon knew them as night creatures, but it wasn’t so unusual to see one about in the daytime from time to time, especially when garbage was piling up in the cans. This one found a stale crust of bread and—seeing Sheldon on the other side of the street—decided to sit there and watch him as she ate.
“I’m not the funny-looking one,” he said to her. “You are.”
He named her Sally. Sally was not convinced by anything Sheldon had to say.
“I mean, look at yourself. Sitting there on your fat ass stuffing your face with your feet out. Thieves have masks like yours when they’re gonna rob a bank or something. Did they get that from you, or did you get it from them? I’ll bet they got it from you, you little thief.”
Sally stopped eating. Sheldon thought he’d touched a nerve.
“My uncle Nate’s coming to get me and we’re going to drive back on the same road where my dad died, you know that? And then we’re going to drive right past the movie theater in Hartford where my mother died.” Sheldon looked out to the woods. “I could make a run for it, you know. Make for the forest. I can hunt and trap and stuff. I could live out there. Fresh water in the stream, meat in my belly.” If there was more to the thought, Sheldon didn’t share it with Sally.
* * *
Uncle Nate emerged from a black Ford wearing a dark suit, tie, and fedora. He tilted it back and placed a cigarette between his lips as he walked to the side of the car where Sheldon was sitting. Wordlessly, he flicked his lighter half a dozen times before giving up.
“I don’t suppose you have a light?” said Uncle Nate.
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 4