Crooked

by Laura McNeal

  “I’m afraid it’s our boy, Amos,” the voice said.

  “Amos?”

  “He has been struck by a baseball bat.”

  For some reason, this statement had a ring of truth that the voice didn’t have. For all its drama and strangeness (Mr. MacKenzie wouldn’t say “our boy,” would he?), the conversation began to seem urgent in some way.

  “Who would do that?”

  “We don’t know yet. A vandal of some sort. The main thing is that we’d like you to visit him tomorrow if you can.”

  “Me?”

  “He asked for you, actually. He said your name and mumbled something.”

  “Well,” Clara said, “I could come after school. Where is he?”

  “St. Stephen’s Hospital. Room 623. Let’s say three-thirty sharp.”

  Clara’s father came home shortly thereafter, complaining about the roads, wondering about Clara’s mother’s whereabouts, and acting generally distracted. Clara usually felt proud of the way her father looked and dressed. He almost always wore nice leather deck shoes, khaki pants, and a solid Ivy League shirt in pale blue, pink, or yellow—Clara called it his uniform. But tonight her father looked rumpled and worn down.

  To cheer him up, Clara told her father about Mrs. Harper, but he hardly listened. She didn’t mention Amos MacKenzie. She thought her father might disapprove of her going to the hospital or think the whole thing was strange, which it was, but somehow it was hers, personally. “Mrs. Harper said she’d hire me again,” Clara said. “She paid me fifteen dollars.”

  “That’s good,” her father said, as if he were thinking about something else. He shuffled through the stack of mail on the kitchen table, then tied an apron over his blue shirt and diced vegetables while the rice slowly popped its lid up and down. The kitchen windows steamed over, the smells of coconut and garlic steeped sharply into everything, but her mother didn’t come home.

  Finally, when everything was not just ready but growing cold, her father called Kaufmann’s. When he identified himself, he waited while he was transferred to someone else. Several minutes passed. Her father’s body seemed to be slowly going limp. Then suddenly he snapped to. “Yes, this is Thurmond Wilson. I’m trying to find out if my wife, Angelica, is still at the store.”

  What followed was short periods of her father listening and saying nothing except “What?” and, once, “Now wait a minute.” He was quiet for another few moments before he said, “And that was it? She didn’t say anything to anyone?”

  He glanced at Clara, who lowered her eyes.

  Then her father stood listening for an even longer time, and when he next spoke, it was in a tired voice. “And you say she left the store at two this afternoon?” He waited, listened, and said, “Well, I appreciate your candor. And I understand”—her father hesitated, and Clara knew he was suddenly aware of her standing behind him, listening—“your position regarding her continued employment.”

  After he hung up, there was a long, still moment before he turned to Clara. His face had changed. It looked gray and waxy, like Clara’s grandfather had looked in his coffin. “She hasn’t been at the store since two o’clock,” her father said. “Your mother just walked off.”

  Clara glanced at the kitchen clock: 8:35. “Are you going to call the police?” she said. “Maybe there’s been an accident.”

  Her father, almost more to himself than to her, said, “I think I’ll call her sister first.” But he didn’t call from the kitchen. He went upstairs to his office and closed the door. Almost an hour passed before he came back down. He was still wearing the apron over his shirt, and his face still looked deathly gray.

  “Your mother is going to stay at Aunt Marie’s for a while,” he said.

  A store of thoughts Clara didn’t even know she had came flooding out of her. “So she’s really going to do it. She’s going to leave us here and run off to that teaching job in France.” She felt her face twisting up as if she were going to cry.

  Her father stared at Clara closely. “What teaching job?”

  Clara managed to clamp back the tears. She narrowed her eyes. “In France. Or Japan. Aunt Marie knows all about it. Mom talks about it with her all the time.”

  Her father tried to act like this wasn’t news to him, but Clara could tell it was. “Look, Clara, your mother’s not running off to France or Japan or anywhere else. She’s upset right now, but she isn’t abandoning you.”

  Clara expected him to add, “or me,” but he didn’t.

  As she was scraping the uneaten food down the disposal, Clara remembered her mother conversing with audiocassettes in the living room. “Ça va?” the tape said. “Ça va,” her mother replied cheerfully. This was, Clara knew, the French way of asking how things were with you, and it meant, in literal translation, “It goes.”

  There was a gloomier phrase Clara wondered about. It was the French way of saying, “She went.”

  10

  DREAMLAND

  Room 623 of St. Stephen’s Hospital. Amos was twitching in his sleep. His eyes were swollen and yellowish black. Above his forehead, there was a long rectangle of shaved scalp where the doctors had stitched together a two-inch gash.

  Amos was dreaming of Charles and Eddie Tripp. In this dream, Amos is strapped into a chair watching Eddie Tripp eating something that Charles hands him one at a time. The food looks like Tater Tots, except Amos knows they aren’t. They are something else. Wooden-faced boys stand nearby and laugh each time Eddie licks his lips, pops one of the Tot-like objects into his mouth, and extends his hand toward Charles for another. While he watches, Amos’s feet feel cold. Finally he looks down. His feet are bare and have only two toes. The others have been cut off. With a sickening sensation, he knows what Eddie Tripp has been eating.

  “Amos?” Someone was tugging at his toes. “Amos? Are you off in dreamland?”

  With difficulty, Amos opened his eyes. It was his nurse. It was always his nurse. The protocol was that the nurse would awaken him every two hours, ask him a few questions to make sure he was lucid, and then move on. “What city are you in?” she might ask. “What’s seven times nine?” Today, after Amos had answered several such questions, she’d said, “A hundred percent! A+! Top marks!”

  “I’m deeply relieved,” Amos said in a groggy voice, and the nurse departed.

  Left to himself, Amos began again to think of the Tripp brothers. Amos hadn’t told anyone that it was Charles Tripp who’d knocked him gaga with a baseball bat. He hadn’t told the doctor, the police, or his parents. He knew in his heart he should say it was the Tripps, but he knew in his gut he wouldn’t. If he did, the Tripps would eventually come looking for him. So he’d said it was too dark, he couldn’t see faces. But somehow the police had suspected the Tripp brothers anyway. The investigator had shown him photographs of Charles Tripp, huge and smirking with his tongue poking his cheek out from inside his mouth, and little curly-headed Eddie, looking blank and almost confused. Amos had waited a long time—too long, he thought later—before saying, No, he couldn’t be certain it was either of them.

  Amos closed his eyes and was just beginning to slip back into sleep when Bruce popped through the door. “Big news,” he said. “Absolutely jumbo.”

  “How jumbo?” Amos said in a slow, thick voice. He was so sleepy. He was so sleepy and so tired of being poked awake every two hours by nurses. He’d been here two days. He wanted to go home.

  Bruce had visited Amos before. He’d seen the injuries. He called it Amos’s slash-and-gash look. “Jumbo squared,” Bruce said. “Jumbo cubed.” He folded his big body into the chair near Amos’s bed and sat for a moment savoring the information he was about to reveal. Then he leaned forward and said, “Jay Foley came to school with pictures of Anne Barrineau naked.”

  Pictures of Anne Barrineau naked were big news, and Amos knew he ought to be more interested than he was. It was just that he was so sleepy.

  “Foley got ’em with his telephoto Sunday afternoon through her bathroom w
indow right out of the shower,” Bruce said. He sat back. “So, anyway, I figured I owed you one for me calling Clara and saying I was the naked you, so I explained to Foley that you’d acted heroically in defense of a snowman, and after some serious negotiation, I have brought you the photos in question.”

  These words registered slowly. Amos turned in disbelief. From an interior pocket, Bruce withdrew a plastic bag containing a batch of photos, which he fanned out like a card hand, face sides down. “Pick a card, any card,” he said.

  As Amos examined first one picture and then another, he began to feel funny about it. What had Anne Barrineau done to deserve Jay Foley taking pictures of her in her own bathroom and then showing them around at school?

  “So whattaya think?” Bruce said. “Is it A. Barrineau au naturel or not?”

  Amos handed them back and touched his closed right eyelid, which hurt so much that he felt a little sick. “Maybe. But you can’t really see her face.”

  Bruce set the photos in a row at the foot of Amos’s bed and was studying them closely. Suddenly he slid them together. “It’s her all right. I’ve got a very strong feeling about this.” He put the photos into the Ziploc bag and slipped the bag into the lining of his coat. He looked around the room. The boy with the ruptured spleen who’d been in the other bed yesterday was gone this afternoon. “Where’s the spleenbuster?” Bruce asked, nodding toward the empty bed.

  “Went home,” Amos said, and thought about it. “Lucky him.” He closed his eyes. “See you later, Crook. I’m asleep. I’m a sleeping boy.”

  Amos thought he heard Bruce leaving but didn’t open his eyes. He felt suddenly lazy and serene, and then he was actually asleep, dreaming first of Anne Barrineau coming to a window and staring out, and then of Clara Wilson coming forward and saying, “Amos, it’s me, Clara.” In his dream, Amos was nodding. “Can you hear me, Amos?” she asked. “Amos, it’s me, Clara,” she said again, and this time Amos felt himself reach out in his sleep to touch one of her breasts, at which point, to his complete surprise, he heard Clara Wilson scream.

  11

  RENDEZVOUS

  “Where’s Mr. MacKenzie?” Clara asked in a sharp voice, stepping back and staring at Bruce Crookshank, who was standing at the hospital room door laughing his fool head off.

  “Who?” Bruce asked when he’d regained a portion of his composure.

  “Mr. MacKenzie,” Clara said. “Amos’s father.” She felt as if she were surrounded by lunatics. “Amos’s father said I should come and visit Amos.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be back directly. Our boy has a steady stream of visitors.”

  “No, I don’t,” Amos said weakly, but Clara ignored him because the second that Bruce said our boy, she knew that the reason Mr. MacKenzie’s voice had sounded strange on the phone was that it hadn’t been Mr. MacKenzie at all. It had been Bruce Crookshank.

  “And you—” she began in an even sharper tone, turning to Amos. But then she broke off. He looked too pale and shocked and uncertain to be yelled at right now. He had two black eyes and a partly shaved head. And the thin nightgown he was wearing made him look about ten. In a miserable, confused-sounding voice, he said, “I don’t know how what happened happened.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “No, I mean it.”

  But she didn’t believe it. He had to have been a part of this embarrassing prank, had possibly even been the brains behind it, and just so they could make her the butt of their awful joke. She stepped toward the door and stared hard at Bruce until he stepped aside. Before leaving, she turned back for a moment. “Just so you’ll know. I don’t think any of this was even the tiniest bit funny.”

  Clara walked down the corridor on legs that hardly felt her own. Cool beads of sweat coursed along her rib cage. She thought of Amos playing this joke on her and her mother leaving home, and suddenly Clara’s face was gathering around her mouth in the way it did when she felt like she might cry against her will. She heard tennis shoes squeaking behind her and glanced back. It was Bruce.

  Clara kept walking, but he caught up to her by the elevator, where a trembling man in pajamas stood braced by a walker. The walls were pink and lavender, like the floor. Clara looked at the man’s red corduroy slippers while Bruce’s words streamed past her. “Hey,” he said, “what happened wasn’t Amos’s fault. That wasn’t our Amos. Listen to me. He wasn’t trying to do that.”

  Clara ignored him. The elevator opened, and the trembling man started to move uncertainly forward behind his walker. To Clara’s surprise, Bruce held the elevator open for him. The trembling man inched his way inside and nodded at Bruce, and Clara stepped in, but Bruce still kept his hand on the door.

  “It wasn’t Amos’s fault,” he said. “It musta been the drugs that made him do that. Or maybe the anesthetic.”

  “Oh, piddle!” Clara said, stealing a phrase from her mother, then flushed to hear how silly it sounded, which annoyed her even more. She slapped Bruce’s hands from the door and pushed the first-floor button. The doors closed like a curtain, and Bruce was gone.

  The trembling man in the elevator didn’t say anything. Breathing took his attention instead, and the glow of the lighted numbers as the car went downward. A smell of disinfectant filled up the elevator car, and when the doors finally slid open, Clara gasped for air before turning back to help the man to a bench in the lobby. It was he who smelled of Lysol. That was one surprise. Another was the sight of Eddie Tripp sitting in the lobby with a magazine open on his lap, his face turned up toward the television screen.

  When he glanced her way, his expression jumped from boredom to real interest. “What are you doing here?” he asked after what felt like a full ten seconds of staring, during which time Clara became keenly aware of her nose. (She stared crookedly, she thought. She smiled lamely but crookedly.)

  “Nothing,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  Eddie’s grin had a sneering aspect to it. “They get more cable channels here,” he said, pointing toward the TV.

  Clara understood this was a joke, but she was too uncomfortable to laugh. In the next moment, Eddie was standing up and putting his hands in his pockets. “Hey, you want a Philly cheese steak?” he asked. “I know a place where they make a great Philly cheese steak, and I got a car.”

  “You drive?”

  Eddie grinned. “Yeah, I’m sixteen, remember? The oldest kid at Melville.” His grin stretched wider. “I flunked kindergarten a couple times.” A pause. “So how about it? Can I talk you into a Philly cheese steak?”

  “I’m not that hungry,” Clara said, uneasy with his asking and yet weirdly flattered, as she had been the first time Eddie Tripp took the seat in front of her on the bus and fixed his light blue eyes on her face. “I can’t,” Clara said.

  Eddie smiled. “‘I can’t’ is what a girl who doesn’t want to start living her life would say, but the truth is, you can. It’s as simple as saying, ‘Sure. Why not?’”

  Clara ignored this. Eddie kept walking beside her as she went past the emergency room. It seemed funny, walking with somebody and not saying anything, so Clara said, “How come you’re at the hospital?”

  Eddie’s eyes shifted slightly. “To see my grandma.”

  “Your grandma,” Clara said doubtfully.

  “Yeah, she’s got Wilkinson disease, but don’t ask me what it is.”

  “And that’s why you’re here?”

  Eddie’s grin turned somehow cockier. “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” They walked a few more paces. “How about you? Why’re you here?”

  “I came to see a friend. Who got a concussion.”

  Eddie’s pace slowed so slightly that it was almost unnoticeable, but not quite. Clara noticed it. “A friend?” Eddie said.

  “Maybe an ex-friend,” Clara said. “Or maybe never a friend to begin with.”

  “What’s his name?” Eddie said.

  Clara stopped short. “I just said a friend. How did you know it was a boy?”
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  Again the slight shift in Eddie’s blue eyes. “Guess it was the way you said it.”

  Clara didn’t believe this. She continued walking. “His name’s Amos MacKenzie,” she said.

  Eddie took this in without any visible change in expression. “How’d he get the concussion?”

  Bruce, impersonating Amos’s father, had told her a vandal had hit Amos with a baseball bat, but that might or might not be true, so Clara said, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? He didn’t tell you?”

  “No, he didn’t. We hardly talked.” Clara didn’t like having to answer Eddie’s prying questions. And why was he so interested in Amos anyhow? She decided to turn the tables. “So where’s your big brother? How come he’s not visiting this grandma, too?”

  “Charles never comes.” A pause. “He makes me come instead.”

  “How does he make you come?”

  Eddie actually snorted. “Charles? Charles could write a book on making people do things.”

  “Well,” Clara said, “why doesn’t your dad make Charles visit this grandma?”

  “My dad’s long gone.” An odd, awkward pause. “In a way it’s good, though, because my mom’s tired of us and next week we’re going to move into a place of our own. Charles and me.”

  All of this was interesting and even sad, if it could be believed. But that was the hitch—if it could be believed. “So how was your grandmother?” Clara asked, and at that moment, over Eddie’s shoulder, she saw Bruce Crookshank appear at the far end of a long corridor, look around, and head her way.

  “Haven’t seen her yet,” Eddie Tripp said. He flashed his grin. “They told me they were dressing her wounds.”

  “You have to dress wounds for Atkinson’s disease?”

  Eddie kept his cocky grin. “Wilkinson disease,” he said. His grin softened to what looked like a genuine smile. “I was serious about the Philly cheese steak, you know. I’d buy you one if you want. All you have to do is say yes.”