Four Different Stories

by Pinkwater, Daniel;

  In the middle of a fight between Captain Marvel and Captain Nazi, Donald realized that Wingman was there. Donald remembered not to look at him. He saw Wingman’s feet balanced on the edges of the beam, and went back to his comic book, pretending to read, turning the pages slowly.

  Donald’s heart was pounding. As he turned the pages of comic after comic, he would glance up and see the feet. He wanted to look at Wingman, but he was afraid of startling him. Then Wingman sat down. There was a rustle of feathers, and Donald knew that Wingman was sitting across the beam from him, his feet dangling toward the river. Donald looked up slowly. He took in every detail, the sword, the armor, the cape of gray feathers, Wingman’s face.

  Wingman looked at Donald, smiled, and pushed himself off the beam. Donald looked down and saw Wingman falling, wrapped in his cape. He held his breath. Then the cape unfolded into two gray wings, and Wingman skimmed just above the river, like a sea gull. Then he soared up in a great loop backward, over the bridge. Donald turned and saw him coming from the other side, right toward Donald’s beam. As he approached, Wingman gathered his cape around him and hurtled right past Donald like a bullet. Then he spread his cape, and tilted his wings from side to side as though he were waving as he flew away, disappearing among the tall buildings of Manhattan.

  Donald felt very happy. He felt as though he were flying too. He didn’t read any more comics that day. He sat on the bridge and remembered how Wingman looked flying over the river.

  Donald put some sandwiches in his schoolbag in the morning. He went to the bridge and waited for Wingman. Once again he turned the pages of a comic book, not paying attention. Once again he got caught up in a story, this time about Plastic Man, caught by the police for a crime he did not commit. The bridge became silent as Donald read.

  When Donald looked up, Wingman was there, sitting across the beam as he had the day before. He was looking out over the river, not noticing Donald. Donald sat for a long time looking at Wingman. Neither of them moved. Wingman appeared to be watching something too far away for Donald to see. Hours passed. Donald was content to study Wingman’s cape, sword, and armor. The bridge was silent. Wingman was more interesting than any comic. Wingman never moved. Even the river seemed to be standing still.

  Then Donald felt a start, as though he had just come awake, although he hadn’t been sleeping. The bridge began to roar with traffic, the river began to move. Donald reached into his schoolbag and took out two sandwiches, salami and peanut butter combination. He put one on the beam next to Wingman and waited to see what would happen. Wingman didn’t move. He was still watching something far away. Donald held his own sandwich in his hand and waited.

  Still looking into the distance, Wingman reached for the sandwich beside him. He held it in his hand and gave a strange cry. Donald jumped; his hair stood up. Wingman gave the call again, a sad sound that came from high up in his nose. It made Donald’s skin tingle.

  Wingman’s eyes lifted. Donald looked out over the river and saw a big bird flying toward them fast. Very fast. As Donald looked, it got bigger and bigger; then it was right before them. It was as big as Donald himself. Its feathers were gray like those in Wingman’s cape. Its beak was black and hooked and sharp. An eagle! It landed between Donald and Wingman. Wingman unwrapped his sandwich and gave half to the bird. Then he took a bite from the other half, and looked at Donald. Donald gave half his sandwich to the bird too. It swallowed it in one gulp after shaking it in its beak. Donald and Wingman smiled at each other and ate their sandwiches.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Donald and Wingman sat on the beam in the sunshine. The eagle practiced tightrope walking up and down the edge of the beam between them, sometimes spreading its wings to keep its balance. When it was time to go home, Donald smiled good-by to Wingman and climbed down the bridge. When he reached the bottom, he looked up. He could just see Wingman sitting on the beam. The eagle was flying in circles, under and over the bridge and making piercing cries again and again.

  When Donald got home, his uncle Li-Noon was there. He was cooking. Whenever Uncle Noon came they had a feast. He had brought roast pork and lo mein noodles from Chinatown, and big oranges and dry sweet cakes. He also brought a little bottle of whiskey, and he and Donald’s father each had a drink out of little glasses. Donald’s father ironed in the laundry and Uncle Noon cut up vegetables in the kitchen, and they shouted to each other from room to room, talking Chinese too fast for the children to understand.

  At supper Uncle Noon gave presents to the children. Wing’s sister got crayons, his little brother got a puzzle made of bent nails, and Donald got lucky money in a red envelope, and a comic book. It was one he had, but he could trade it.

  Before he went to bed, Donald tried to draw a picture of Wingman and the eagle. He used his sister’s new crayons. He put it in his schoolbag to show Wingman the next day.

  In the morning the truant officer caught him. A big man in a linty black suit was waiting for him in the laundry when he woke up. Donald’s father kept his back to Donald. Donald knew he was angry. When his father got mad, he would turn his back, and it was worse than anything. He never hit the children. Turning his back to them was much worse.

  The truant officer put his hand on Donald’s shoulder. Donald began to cry, not because of the truant officer, but because his father was ashamed of him. He wanted to tell his father about how bad it was in school, about the bridge, and Wingman and the eagle, but it was no good. He had fooled his father, and that was the worst thing he could do to him. The truant officer said something to Donald. Donald couldn’t hear it. He was crying and all he could see through the tears were his father’s shoulders working as he folded shirts.

  The truant officer was Mr. Bean, and he wasn’t a bad guy. He tried to be nice to Donald. He kept his hand on Donald’s shoulder as they walked in the street. Donald supposed it was to keep him from running away, but it felt friendly. He took Donald into the Bickford’s Cafeteria on Broadway and bought him breakfast.

  “You’re not in such bad trouble, kid,” Mr. Bean said. “I’d like to know why you were cutting school. Maybe it’s a problem I can help you with.”

  Donald stared at his tray. He was still feeling bad about his father. He wondered if it would be right to tell Mr. Bean about Wingman, and afternoons on the bridge.

  “Why aren’t you eating your oatmeal?” Mr. Bean asked.

  So that was what the gooey stuff was! Donald had never tasted oatmeal. He didn’t feel like tasting it now. It didn’t look very inviting.

  “It’s good for you,” Mr. Bean said.

  Donald tried to pick from among his good reasons for not eating the stuff. “It’ll make me sick.”

  “Now you eat that!” Mr. Bean said. He meant it. Donald began to eat the oatmeal. He had a glimpse of the sad hopeless expression on Mr. Bean’s face as he vomited on the cafeteria table.

  Donald was told to wait alone in a room next to the office, when they got to school. There was nothing in the room but some chairs around the walls and a noisy clock. The window was frosted so he couldn’t see out, and it had wire fencing on the outside. “Like a jail,” he thought. A pigeon was fluttering against the wires. Donald could see its shadow, hazy against the frosted glass. He felt uncomfortable. He wished he had brought some comics. He sat on one of the chairs and waited. He waited for an hour and twenty minutes. The clock ticked. Donald tried to think about Wingman. He would be on the bridge now. Donald tried to imagine that he was there too. It didn’t work. The loud ticking kept him from imagining.

  The door opened and Mr. Frieda came in. Mr. Frieda was the one they sent you to when you got in trouble. Donald had met him before. Mr. Frieda wore wire eyeglasses that slid down his nose. Whenever they slid down, he would push them back with his middle finger. When he did this, he would stick his little red tongue out. The kids made fun of him behind his back, but he wasn’t funny when you met him.

  “The fat is in the fire now, boy. The fat is in the fire. You get that,
John Chinaman?” Mr. Frieda always wore the same necktie; the knot was black and shiny. “We don’t expect much from your kind, but we expect you to be here every day. You understand, boy?”

  Donald wished he had a sword like Wingman’s.

  “You savvy?”

  Swish, the sword would go, and cut Mr. Frieda in two. “Yes, Mr. Frieda,” Donald said.

  “Next time you catch it, Charlie Chan,” Mr. Frieda said. Donald wasn’t going to be punished; he had cut school day after day, but Mr. Frieda didn’t think he was worth bothering about.

  Donald was sent back to his class. It was the last day of school before Christmas vacation. Donald had been away almost a month. The class was having its Christmas party. Donald had to sit in a chair in the corner wearing a sign that said truant. He didn’t even get to face the wall, but had to watch the other kids playing games and eating cake.

  Donald walked home from school very slowly. His feet felt as though they each weighed a hundred pounds. He thought of going to the bridge after school to see if Wingman was still there, but he felt too sad and tired to climb.

  Donald walked into the laundry. “The roast duck man came today,” his father said. His father didn’t stay mad. The roast duck man was someone who brought such things as lop cheong, pork sausage, roast duck, and fresh bok choy from Chinatown. He stopped at all the laundries. Donald was glad he had come that particular day; the roast duck made him feel a little better.

  Donald’s father was looking at him. “Ah-Wing, some people are not very nice to us. Probably you have trouble with some people, but I want you to go to school just the same. When you get older you can punch them in the nose.”

  All of a sudden Donald didn’t feel so bad. It didn’t matter so much about throwing up in the cafeteria, and Mr. Frieda with his dirty necktie, and having to sit in the corner during the class party. He finished his roast duck, and helped his father wrap ironed shirts. His father was singing a song he liked, “I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me,” and Donald sang with him.

  Donald didn’t feel altogether better about all that had happened. That night he had a bad dream. He dreamed he was walking toward the laundry late at night. Just before he reached the door, Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman jumped out of the shadows and began to chase him up St. Nicholas Avenue. There is a steep hill on St. Nicholas Avenue, and in the dream it turned into a cliff just as Donald reached the top. There he was, stuck between jumping and getting caught. Then he woke up. The dream worried him. It made him think of Mr. Bean, Mr. Frieda, and Miss Spinrad.

  There was one good thing: there was no school for ten days. He could go to the bridge every day. The bridge was cold and gray. A little wet snow was falling, blowing about the girders. It made them slippery and hard to climb. Donald felt tired. The day was foggy, and he felt foggy in his head, too. When he got to his perch, the fog had hidden the city. He couldn’t see the water below. Donald huddled on the beam. The comic he tried to read was getting soggy, so he put it away and just sat, looking out into the pearly gray fog.

  He thought about the trouble he’d gotten into at school. He felt bad about disappointing his father, he felt bad about being embarrassed, and about the nasty things Mr. Frieda had said. The worst thing, the thing that made him feel heavy all over, was the realization that now he was going to have to go to that rotten school every day.

  Donald tried to think about Wingman. He could not remember what he looked like. Probably he had made him up. The noise from the cars and trucks overhead was a constant drumming. It felt to Donald as though it was coming from inside his head. He sat there for a long time, crying.

  Wingman was not real. Comics were a waste of time. Donald was just what the kids called him in the schoolyard, a dumb chinky Chinaman. The same kids made fun of his father. They called him chink too, and ran away. They didn’t run away from Donald; he ran away from them. He began to feel the same way he felt when he woke up from the dream about Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman.

  Suddenly Donald realized that he wasn’t going to be able to climb down. The bridge was starting to get icy—and, worse, he was scared. He couldn’t move. He was like a cat stuck in a tree. All he could do was shiver and think about how high he was. Donald studied the lumpy gray paint on the steel beam. He saw every crack and wrinkle and speck of soot. He watched the snowflakes land and melt and freeze. He couldn’t hear the traffic noise. He was bent over, staring at a little patch of paint, and he couldn’t straighten up, or even move his eyes. The wrinkled paint made mountains and valleys and rivers and towns. He watched the little map of bridge paint change from gray to red to green.

  Green. There were green fields beneath him. The air was not so cold, and there was no more snow. A smooth strong arm was around his waist, and Donald could hear the faint rustle of feathers. Wingman was real! He was carrying Donald, and they were flying.

  Donald liked it. He watched the countryside pass beneath them. Now and then a surge of warm air would rise, lifting them straight up. Donald felt perfectly comfortable. He felt as though he could almost fly by himself, without Wingman’s help.

  The eagle was with them, flying in circles to keep from getting too far ahead. Wingman flew so slowly that they seemed to be hanging still sometimes. Donald felt good. He felt that he was where he belonged. Even the countryside looked familiar to him, although he knew he had never seen it before.

  It didn’t look like New Jersey. There were strangely shaped hills, and little clusters of houses with roofs made of straw. Groups of people—men, women, and children—were working in the fields. They wore round hats, the kind Donald had seen in shop windows in Chinatown. No one looked up to be amazed at the strange sight of winged man, boy, and eagle passing silently above them.

  Donald knew that China was very far from New York. His father had told him that it was so far away that once you left, it was impossible to go back. But this was China for sure.

  The houses were getting more numerous and closer together now. Some of them had roofs of wood or tile, and there were lots of people and animals on the roads. They were coming to a city; Donald could see it in the distance. There were some tall buildings with tile roofs that turned up at the corners. There were houses with walled gardens. There were temples with carved ornaments covered with gold. In the center of the city was a big open space.

  Wingman flew low and circled over the open space. It was a market. It reminded Donald of Chinatown. People were buying and selling groceries. Boys were helping their fathers carry baskets of vegetables, eggs, meat. Donald could hear them talking. He could smell things cooking, shu-mai and wonton. It made him hungry. There was a little boy eating what looked like a lotus root cake while he waited for his father, who talked with friends. It was like Chinatown, but bigger, sunnier, happier. Donald wished Wingman would put him down. He wanted to talk to the boy with the lotus root cake. He wanted to walk among the grocers’ stalls. He wanted to smell up close all the things cooking. He had the feeling that he would meet Oi-Lai Bok selling newspapers and comics in Chinese. Then someone saw them. There was a shout, and Wingman flapped his wings hard. They rose straight up, into the cold air. The city fell away so fast that Donald had a funny feeling in his stomach.

  They flew over farms again, and hills. They were getting into a place where there were lots of hills. Some of them were very high, mountains almost. At times the peaks were as high as the tips of Wingman’s wings.

  Some people were moving on a path, two men and a boy. They were leading a horse. They were high up, close to Donald and Wingman, and Donald could see their faces clearly. One of the men looked a lot like his uncle, Li-Noon, except that instead of an overcoat and a gray felt hat, this Li-Noon wore a long cloak of a beautiful blue color. It came almost to the ground, and at the bottom showed a little of another robe that the man had on underneath. It reminded Donald of the robe his mother used to wear in the mornings, before she had left them for the hospital. Then they had passed over t
hem and they were out of sight before Donald had seen all he wanted to see of the man who looked like Uncle Noon.

  It was getting foggy. The hills were real mountains now. Wingman landed Donald on a little bridge that connected two rocky cliff faces. A long way down, below the little bridge, there was a stream. Wingman stood on the bridge and flapped his wings twice. Then they became soft, and fell about his shoulders and were his cape of feathers again. He sat down on the bridge, his feet dangling over the side, and Donald sat down too.

  He looked down at the river and heard a faint rushing noise. The noise got louder and louder as the fog closed in. It was getting cold, and late; the traffic overhead was getting heavier. Donald was back on the George Washington Bridge. Wingman was gone.

  He was holding something in his hand. It was a gray feather. It could almost have been a pigeon feather, but Donald recognized it as one of the feathers from Wingman’s cape. He put it in his pocket.

  Getting down from the icy bridge was not easy. Donald could not climb down the way he usually did. He had to slide down the slanting girders, or push himself along with his hands until he came to a place where he could drop to a lower level. He was constantly slipping and the ice hurt his hands.

  The only way to get down the big wall part at the bottom was to slide down. When it wasn’t icy he could slide down slowly by dragging the rubber toes of his basketball shoes against the concrete, and sort of hugging it with his body and the palms of his hands. This time he just slid down like a brick. It was almost like falling straight down for ten or twelve feet.

  When he hit the bottom, it knocked the wind out of him and he couldn’t move for a minute or two. The first thing he did when he could move his hand was to reach in his pocket and see if the feather was there. He hadn’t been afraid at all.