Sophomore Year

by Douglas Rees

  When the poles were pointing to the sky like bony fingers, we tied them into pairs so they made arches. Gregor bent them together like they were straws, and Turk and I tied the knots. We had the frame of our wigwam, and it hadn’t taken an hour.

  Then we took the next eight poles and did the same thing. Now we had a pretty complicated framework. We made hoops.

  The hoops were four rings that ran around the outside of the framework. We made them by tying the saplings we had left together in twos and threes. Then we lashed them to every pole they crossed. We finished just as the first cool breeze of evening came up from the river.

  I was panting. So was Turk. Even Gregor was breathing hard. But the thing was real. It didn’t look like a playhouse or a joke. People had lived in these things, and they had been strong enough and warm enough to protect a whole family against a Massachusetts winter.

  I crawled inside and looked up through the lattice of poles we’d made. The sky was turning a deeper blue, and the sun was just above the trees.

  It hit me for the first time: We’d done it. We’d actually homesteaded this place. We’d made it ours.

  “It feels right,” I said. “It feels like we belong here.”

  “Gadje,” Gregor said. “Gadje fantasies. You think you are pioneers now. Cowboys.”

  “What’s your fantasy?” I asked.

  “My fantasy is that you two forget about this place and never come here again,” Gregor said.

  “You’re right,” Turk said. “That is a fantasy.”

  “Anyway, we’re done here,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

  “You want a ride, Gregor?” Turk said.

  Gregor laughed and threw out his arms, jumped into the air higher than any gadje ever could, and changed. His wings unfolded, and he hovered over us. He seemed to fill the sky.

  “Tell me when you want to work again,” he shouted down.

  Gregor beat the air three times and pushed himself up to the level of the mill roof. He tilted his wings to catch the river breeze, and rose a little more. Then, screaming something in high jenti, he angled away from us and flew toward the night.

  “I guess that meant no,” I said.

  14

  The next week was busy. With eight hundred tons of homework to do every night, I didn’t have a chance to get out to Crossfield. Neither did Turk. I noticed that, smart as she was, she had to spend almost as much time as I did cracking her skull open to put into it everything that Vlad said was supposed to be there.

  So it wasn’t until Saturday that Turk and I went out to find that somebody had burned down our wigwam frame. There was nothing left but a circle of soot, ash, and the stumps of blackened sticks.

  The corn patch had been dug up, too.

  Turk said some really choice things in Spanish when she saw the remains. I stuck to English and jenti.

  “I wish I knew who did it,” Turk said when she’d calmed down a little. “I’d murder them.”

  “Ah, hell, take your pick,” I said. “Some gadje who doesn’t want us doing this, some jenti who hates gadje, some jerk who thought it would be fun.”

  Gregor came around the corner of the mill. “So you have seen it,” he said.

  “Hard to miss,” I said.

  “It happened last night,” he said. “I was out flying and I saw the smoke.”

  “Did you see who did it?” Turk asked.

  “I am not certain,” Gregor said. “I have my suspicions.”

  “Who do you think it was?” I asked.

  “I will not speak without more proof,” Gregor said. “And anyway, the important thing is to see that it does not happen a second time.”

  “Great idea,” Turk said. “How?”

  “Someone must be here every night from now on,” Gregor said.

  “Who’s going to do that?” I said.

  “We will take turns,” Gregor said. “My friends and I.”

  “You have friends?” Turk said.

  I knew Gregor’s friends. They were all guys from Europe who lived in the dorms.

  “The school’s just going to let you guys stay out all night?” I said.

  “We live in dorms, gadje, not prisons,” Gregor said. “Yes, we can do this if we use a little care. And there will be four of us. That will be enough. More than enough.”

  “Hey, we can help,” Turk said. “I can get out any time I want to.”

  “You will be of no value in this,” Gregor said. “If what happened means what I think it does, more than a wigwam is in danger.” He slapped the wall of the mill.

  “Then I am definitely going to be here,” Turk said.

  “It is already decided,” Gregor said. “You must trust me.”

  “That’ll be the day,” Turk said.

  “Look, you stupid gadje, I told you there were things going on that you do not know about. What happened last night was—come and see what I have been doing about it.”

  He led us into the mill. Back in one corner, he had piled up stones and dirt about three feet deep. They had been carefully piled, and bordered with rock, like an indoor garden. In the middle was a stack of new poles.

  There were three guys standing around, covered with dirt and holding the tools Turk had bought. I knew them slightly. On my first day at Vlad, they had helped Gregor try to take me apart, and had come close to doing it. Since then we hadn’t had much to say to each other.

  “Ilie Nitzu, Constantin Trifa, and Vladimir Bratianu,” Gregor said to Turk. “From now on, they will help.”

  They nodded to Turk.

  I wasn’t sure I liked this. Keeping Turk from jerking my idea in one direction was trouble enough. Now it looked like Gregor wanted to drag it in another, and had brought his friends to help him do it.

  “Hold on,” I said. “We need to talk about this.”

  “More talk?” Gregor said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You guys aren’t exactly members of the Cody Elliot fan club, so why should I trust you? You say there’s some kind of mysterious threat to this place, but you won’t say what it is, so why should I believe you? And let’s face it, you may have your own agenda that you haven’t told me anything about, so why should I let you?”

  “Good questions,” Gregor said.

  “Yeah,” Turk said. “You’re getting smarter, Cuz.”

  “Here is the only answer I can give you,” Gregor said. “I swear on my honor as a duke of the jenti that I really believe there may be a serious threat to this place. I swear that I have no ulterior motive. And I swear that each of us will do what he can to make this stupid idea of yours come to be. If it does not, it will be your fault, not ours. Believe me, and we can go on together. Say you do not, and I will send my friends away. But decide.”

  Duke of the jenti? I’d known Gregor was pretty high up in the jenti world, but I’d never known he had a title. But that didn’t matter. I might not like Gregor much, but if there was one thing I was sure of, it was that he’d never break his word to me. He’d be ashamed to fail in front of Cody Elliot.

  “Let’s get to work,” I said.

  “Wait a minute,” Turk said.

  “No, no more waiting minutes,” Gregor said. “Either help, or give orders. If we like them, we will take them.” He turned to his friends. “Come. We are going to be Indians now.”

  Ilie, Vladimir, and Constantin grinned like wolves and picked up the poles.

  By the end of the morning, we had our new wigwam frame up. It looked sad and lonely in the corner of the factory, but it would be safe enough. That’s what we told ourselves.

  I went outside and looked at what was left of the corn patch. I put a few of the mounds back together. Some had corn and some didn’t. It didn’t matter. It just had to look like we were back in the corn business.

  While I worked, I went over what Gregor had told us, and not told us. I was pretty sure someone must be watching us. If they hadn’t been before, they probably were now. And Gregor had an idea who it was, even if he wasn’t s
aying.

  It made me curious. I wondered if whoever it was had left some evidence.

  I walked slowly around the mill looking for anything that might have been dropped. While I was doing that, the windows of the mill began to screech open. Frames that had been painted shut back in the 1930s were being forced open by the jenti. And when they had them open, things began to fly through them. Old machine parts, mummies of dead rats, and bolts of rotten cloth came sailing out in every direction.

  Since I didn’t want to get hit by a cast iron flywheel or a hundred-year-old rat, I went inside.

  Turk was sitting inside the wigwam with her legs pulled up. She was shouting at the jenti, who were ignoring her while they cleared the floor junk.

  “Go amuse your cousin,” Gregor said when I came in. “I think she has not enough people to shout at.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’m on a secret mission.”

  It had crossed my mind that maybe whoever had burned the wigwam and torn up the corn had paid a visit to the inside of the building, too. I dodged past the jenti and went up to the second floor, then the third. Everything looked just the way it had. Dirty and cluttered.

  I got the flashlight out of Turk’s car and went down the basement steps.

  The door at the bottom hung open.

  Turk and I had been down here precisely once. And when we left, I had closed the door. I remembered that clearly, because it had been so hard to pull shut. Now the door handle was lying on the floor, snapped off.

  We had had company. Maybe we still did.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Down here. Now.”

  Turk, Gregor, and his guys appeared at the top of the stairs.

  “Aha,” Gregor said. “Interesting.”

  He came down and joined me.

  “Last night, when I saw the fire, I decided to stay here until morning,” Gregor said. “About an hour later, I thought I heard the outer doors open and close. But when I looked, I saw no one.”

  “So someone’s interested in this basement after what, eighty years?” I said. “Let’s see if we can find out why.”

  We looked at everything: the storerooms, the generators, the old circuit board. But nothing looked different.

  Nothing I could see.

  But Ilie nudged Gregor and pointed with his chin.

  “Ah,” Gregor said, and added something in jenti.

  Constantin, Ilie, and Vladimir all started whispering, and I didn’t understand more than two words of it. Damn.

  “What, what?” Turk demanded.

  I shined the light where the jenti were staring with their see-in-the-dark eyes.

  At first I didn’t see anything. But when I moved the beam around, I could see some faint lines scratched into the brick above one of the storerooms.

  No matter how I shifted the flashlight, the lines didn’t make any sense. But there were too many of them to be random. And they couldn’t have been done in a few seconds. They were too elaborate. If they looked like anything, they looked like a large, loopy Y with some angular squiggles at the bottom.

  So what were they and why were they here? And who had put them here, and when, and did it matter?

  “Talk,” Turk said to Gregor. “What do you see?”

  “Nothing that concerns a gadje,” Gregor said.

  “If it’s in this building it concerns me,” I said. “Tell us what it is.”

  “It is an old bit of jenti graffiti,” Gregor said. “Someone who worked here in the old days must have put it there.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “Who can say now?” Gregor said. “Some private joke, perhaps.”

  “A laugh riot,” Turk said. “But I don’t believe you.”

  Neither did I. I could feel the Rustle going on around me.

  That mark. We didn’t expect to see it here.

  No. But it is here.

  Why?

  It doesn’t matter. We find out who did it.

  Yes. And then we break their wings.

  That was what I thought was going on, all at the same time, as Gregor and his boys shifted quietly from one foot to the other. But without being able to see them clearly, I couldn’t be sure. The only thing that I was clear about was that they were angry.

  “Well, we are done here,” Gregor said suddenly. “Tomorrow we will finish the cleaning. But only if you tell us to do so, of course.”

  “I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s really going on,” Turk said.

  But Gregor was already leading his guys up the stairs. Their feet clumped heavily up the steps, and I heard the big front doors swing open and closed.

  “Come on,” I said. “These batteries won’t last forever.”

  Outside, the night was warm and the first stars were coming out. It would have been a perfect night to be with Ileana. But she was busy tonight. Busy as in “I’m mad at you.” So instead I was getting ready to go home with my least favorite relative after a happy day spent cleaning out a derelict building and, for all I knew, messing around with some ancient jenti curse. How did I get so lucky?

  Overhead, Gregor, Vladimir, Ilie, and Constantin were all flapping and gliding around the mill.

  “Hey, you said you were going to guard this place,” Turk shouted.

  “We are,” Gregor said. “From up here. Go home, gadje.”

  So Gregor thought someone was watching the mill, too. Someone he wanted to see him and his friends.

  Turk shouted something else to him, but he lifted himself up beyond the sound of her voice, and the others followed.

  “Some guys have all the luck,” I said.

  “What?” Turk said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Come on. We’ve got a fascinating evening of homework ahead.”

  We got into the Volkswagen and drove off.

  As we were crossing the river, Turk said, “That was a weird day.”

  “Like many in New Sodom,” I said.

  “Those guys who hang with him, they’re like servants more than friends. They hardly ever talked.”

  “They just didn’t want to talk to us,” I said.

  “Bunch of snobs,” Turk said.

  “Takes one to know one,” I said.

  “How does he get them to do what he wants?” Turk said.

  “He’s from an important family,” I said. “That’s all I know.”

  “Oh, yes. Duke Gregor. What a joke,” Turk said. “What’s that supposed to mean, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Hey,” Turk said. “Do you think he put those marks there to try and scare us?”

  “Are you scared?” I asked her.

  “Nooo,” Turk said slowly, like I’d asked her a very dumb question.

  “There’s your answer,” I said. “If Gregor wanted to scare you, he would.”

  “Hah,” Turk said.

  “All I know is, I’m pretty sure Gregor’s not telling the truth,” I said. “I think those marks meant something important when they were made. The question is whether they’re new or not.”

  Turk shook her head.

  “I don’t like it, Cuz. I don’t like any of it.”

  15

  But whatever Turk didn’t like, she had no cause for complaint on Sunday. She complained anyway, of course. But the jenti tore through the second and third floors of the mill all morning while Turk told them they were doing it all wrong, and Gregor told her to kindly shut up.

  An avalanche of junk came through the windows and bounced and crashed onto the ground around the mill. By noon, the outside looked like a yard sale at an insane asylum, but inside the floors were clear and you had a sense of just how big this building really was.

  “Not so ugly now,” Gregor said.

  “It feels like something could happen here, all right,” I said.

  “It will,” Turk said, passing out brooms. “It had better. Sweep, creeps.”

  We knocked down cobwebs, swept the floor three times, and dusted the walls. The fun
ny thing was, it started to feel like fun. We broke up into two teams without anyone saying, “Hey, let’s break up into two teams!” Turk, Gregor, and Constantin were one. The other was Ilie, Vladimir, and me. We each took half the long room and tried to beat the other getting done first.

  When we were finished with that, we took a break for drinks.

  “These walls are good brick,” Vladimir said, wiping his mouth. “Washed and scrubbed, they would be handsome.”

  “We don’t have a ladder that long,” Turk said. “I’ll have to get one.”

  Vladimir jumped to the top of a wall and hung there by one hand, clutching the bricks.

  “You have brush and water, please?” he said.

  “Brushes, sure, but no water yet,” Turk said. “We can’t go running down to the river for a bucket every few minutes.”

  “There is water,” Gregor said. “Or was once. See, there are sinks along that wall.”

  There were six sinks about the size of wading pools. Gregor walked over to one and tried to turn the taps. Constantin, Vladimir, Ilie, Turk, and I all joined him at the other sinks. They were like iron. Actually, I suppose, they were iron. Anyway, they didn’t want to move. We all stood there grunting and twisting, and finally one of Ilie’s let go. Then one of Gregor’s. In a few more minutes, every one of the jenti’s faucets was twirling back and forth like it was 1930 again. Turk’s and mine were still frozen solid.

  “You permit me to try?” Constantin said to me.

  Gregor just walked over to Turk and stood beside her.

  “Take your best shot,” she said, giving up.

  Gregor and Constantin growled deep in their throats and leaned on the taps, and in a minute they had rejoined the Land of the Working.

  Then we all went outside to the shutoff valve.

  The shutoff valve was big enough that two of us could get on it at once. Gregor and Vladimir tried to turn it, and it was interesting to watch. I’d never seen jenti faces get so red before. They made space for Constantin and Ilie. That valve didn’t even budge.