"I see you!" he shouted. "You're right in front of me, all of you! Have some respect, huh? You ain't foolin' no one. Now cut it out or you'll spend the rest of your waking lives in the accommodation room and that's a promise!"
"Yes, Mr. Martin," a few scattered voices said back. Feet tramped up the bus stair grids. Some children made faces in the windows while others fought for the better seats in back. The pavement was clear for all but some stragglers.
Back at the school, Denny pushed through the doors and strolled toward 19th Street. He shook the long blond hair out of his face, closed his eyes, rocked up on his toes, and paused a minute right there on the empty playground to savor the wind. It was one of those deep, early winter breaths that felt keen in the lungs and tasted like dripping icicles. Images of wet snow, misted store windows, soaked sneakers, and roaring bonfires swept through his mind, followed by a sweet kind of sadness. Grown-ups didn't slow down to drink up the breeze. They were too serious. Too busy. And even a fourth grader could not stay this young forever.
"Yo, Denny! You can't be running ahead like that, man."
It was Stevie Ramano, Denny's T.S.S. from the Connect Program sponsored by the school district. If you lived within a four block radius of George Washington and your folks couldn't pick you up at the end of the day, you were given an escort home. Romano was one of the better ones. He cocked his winter hat a bit to the side, pulled together the flaps of his coat, and jogged up next to Denny.
"At least let me get you to the corner of 19th so you ain't taking off in view of the windows," he said. Denny shrugged and walked the short distance in silence. His chaperon stuck in some ear buds and sang with his iPod tonelessly.
"See you," Denny said. He slipped through the playground's far gate and made for the cross-street.
"Be good!" Romano called back, and Denny was suddenly in a footrace with this old, mustard-crudded hot dog wrapper caught in some running gutter water. He passed the check cashing store and ran through the warm, perfumy smell of Goldberger's dry cleaners. A mud-spattered bus threw on its blinkers and a Yellow Cab made a wide sweep around it. Denny turned the corner and ran down Cherry Street. At first glance, one would have thought that this was a burst of joy, a race for the sheer fun of it as growing boys were so often known for. A closer view, however, would have shown a grim, determined frown on Denny's face, a scowl usually reserved for adults with complicated responsibilities, problems, and debts. It was an expression that had hardened over time, like old leather.
He raced through an abandoned parking lot and hop-scotched through some uprooted cement tire bumpers. Between the empty lot shanty and a Porta-Potty, he did a tippie-toe across a narrow board covering deep hole made by the Philadelphia Street Department. He climbed a dumpster, scaled an iron fence, and ran along the top of a brick wall. He jumped down and turned a corner. The corner.
His chest was heaving, and his stomach cramped up a bit. The arrival always felt horribly new even though he repeated this tradition every day of every week, and that was why he rushed into it so. It was like diving into cold water or ripping off a Band-Aid.
There was a rusted mailbox, a bent stop sign, and a graffiti-covered newspaper box at the curb where the two cross-streets met. A tool and die company sat in the background with its windows barred up, and the gum factory under the train trestle still poisoned the air with that distinct, high stink of burnt sugar and machine oil.
It was a smell that Denny both hated and was drawn to, a signal that lovingly and at the same time cruelly preserved the importance of this particular corner. For Front Lane and Barrington was the third to last stop for the northbound subway, it was a block from the Veterans Administration Building, it remained a hot spot for Greek and Asian street vendors, an unofficial taxi stand, and the very place where Denny Sanborn's mother had been killed seven years ago.
2.
It was all a crazy accident and Denny did not really remember it except for some bits and pieces. Dad had been pushing him in the stroller and Mom had been walking out front with their little two-wheeled grocery cart. They had been on their way to the Acme and she had been hit by a car, not one driven by some drunk or runaway robber, but a regular lady in a station wagon.
Denny had a foggy recollection of his mother negotiating the cart over a spalled patch of curb. He had a dreamlike memory of a station wagon leaning to one side and hurtling through the intersection, but then it went blank for awhile. There was a scratchy vision of his father with his face in his hands, a woman with a ponytail and a baseball cap saying, "I just took my eyes off the road for a second," and an African American woman with a purple feather in her hat blurting something like, "Someone comfort this child!" Everything else was just a blur of what Dad refused to talk about from that day forward.
Denny walked across the street toward the sewer grating on the far side. He usually loved stomping on sewer gratings, and sprinting across subway street gratings, and spitting down the vent gratings that blew steam up into the cold air. This one, however, he always approached with respect.
He stepped carefully on the diagonal groove-cuts and looked down. Old leaves and a gritty run of mud had formed a long wavelike pattern that curved in a mild S-shape. Rust-colored water flowed over in rills and bubbled off into the dark recesses of the cavern. There was a museum of bottles, both broken and not, gathered on the near side of a piece of wood with five nails sticking out of it. On the far side of the makeshift wooden divider was Denny's collection of trinkets, only tainted by a torn Burger King bag that had caught on the edge of the Buzz Lightyear shoulder-launch missile attachment he had tossed down there last Monday.
Denny had been making sacrifices down the drain for three years now. There were tiddlywinks, tennis balls, Lego pieces, and Livestrong wristbands. There were marbles, Chuck E. Cheese gum balls, jigsaw puzzle pieces, and candy-necklace strings. When he couldn't find anything good, he hooked a crayon from school. Once he had thrown in a rubber band he found in the street. He always gave something.
Denny reached into his front pocket and pulled out his Mike Schmidt rookie card. It was faded across the back where he had once tried to annihilate the statistics with a pen eraser, and the front right corner had been torn off. He slipped the card between the bars of the grate, watched it drop, and sighed. Mom's favorite '80s Phil had been Bowa, but Denny couldn't find his card anywhere. He hated substitutes.
Denny sulked away from the corner of Front Lane and Barrington and made his way toward 20th Street. He stared at his bouncing sneaker laces. His mother was buried in Plot #7 in the St. John's Cemetery in Pennsauken, New Jersey, next to her mother and a step-brother named Patrick that Denny had never met. The headstone was small and only said her name and the dates. Dad used to take him there every Sunday morning, but they hadn't been out there for years.
Denny jogged through the small grassy plot splitting Creek Drive, C Street, and Wyoming and suddenly thought how nice it would have been if he'd worn a hat. Briefly, he pictured the shelf in the hall closet at home, but only saw Dad's bowling ball, hard hat, and slush boots.
Denny broke into a run. Did he even own a winter hat that fit anymore? If he did, he could not place the thing in his mind. And Dad never seemed to have a clue (or a care) where to find Denny's hats or socks or book bags or underwear, at least not until the socks had holes or his ears had already gone cold. The man just never seem to remember in time.
Mom would have remembered.
Denny slowed to a walk. He approached 20th Street and his breath felt thick in his throat. On the corner an unshaven fat man wearing a Christmas hat with white trim-frost and a pom-pom on top muttered swear words to himself, hiked up his pants, and lifted a tray of soft pretzels off the warmer to pack them away. Denny skirted around him and noticed that a few people on his street had their holiday lights up. The stringed bulbs looked like cheap smiles in the growing dark. There was a mini-electric Santa doing the twist dance in a window, a fake snowman smoking a cigar, and a few wre
aths hanging on door knockers. Suddenly, Denny had a strong urge to hook some of them, switch them around, and see if his neighbors would notice.
At the end of the day, Denny always found himself at war, half dreaming that he would hold so tight to the scattered memories that he could somehow bring Mom back, and half wishing for some magic non-stop thrill that would make him forget all about grocery carts, hurtling station wagons, purple feathers, and numb ears of the world. But magic was for nerds and wishes for babies. Weren't they?
Denny Sanborn was about to find out. For sometimes magic floated in the air just out of sight and other times wishes came true. They just didn't wind up exactly like the wisher pictured them to be.
It was 4:01 P.M.
The stranger was waiting for Denny on his front steps.
3.
"Hey there," she said. She moved her small purse to the other shoulder. "You Denny?"
He shrugged. The tall girl standing in front of him was about sixteen years old. She was African American, bone thin, and dressed in Catholic school clothes. Her teeth were slightly bucked, but it worked for her in a cartoon rabbit sort of a way. She chewed her gum hard. One hand was knuckled to her hip. She shrugged back at Denny and dug into her pocketbook.
"Here's my I.D., so you know I'm not some street freak or something."
Denny gave a glance to Josephine Thompson's temporary driver's license and shrugged again. Grandma Rosetta had been a much better babysitter, that was for sure. Grandma Rosetta always let him do what he wanted while she played with the downstairs remote and ate microwave popcorn all night, so any rules this Josephine Thompson was about to lay down were sure to be major league bummers.
But what could he do? Grandma was getting older by the minute, no, by the second, and had recently started calling Dad by the names of old relatives she had not seen in ten years. And though it was no secret that Bob Sanborn never much liked the Cleveland cousins to begin with, it became quickly clear that he liked even less a sitter (even family) who couldn't remember his first name, write down a phone message, or scrub a dish or two while she was at it. The whole thing had been building for weeks.
And so here stood the golden answer, chewing her gum and flashing I.D. like a pro. Josephine Thompson, daughter of Mr. Jarell Thompson, friend of Dad's from Core Cutters Concrete and Demolition for four years running, or so Denny had heard. Oh sure, if you worked the wreckers and dozers with Bob Sanborn on late shift you were the man. You were the bomb. And it gave your daughter full dibs to snag a house key, push Grandma out the door, and boss around a fourth grader all night.
"Well?" she said. "You got a key? It's cold out here."
Denny sniffed.
"What's a tampon?" he said. She didn't even blink.
"Every month a girl bleeds from her private place. A tampon's a sponge. Anything else?"
Denny's jaw dropped. Even though he had not known the exact answer until now (and awesome it was after all!) he had been quite aware that this particular question was a doozy. He had asked it twice before, once to the snack lady at the roller rink and the other to a meter maid giving his Dad a ticket outside the State Store at 30th and Arch. Both women had gone wide-eyed, tight-lipped, and flushed, the first spouting, "Never you mind!" and the other going off about Jesus, spoiled children, spare rods, and lead paint.
But this Josephine had given it to him up front and straight. He felt a small part of his heart warm to her, but he wasn't ready to show it off just yet.
"What's that stuff?" He was looking past her to the knapsack on the stoop and the large, square-looking zipper bag leaning against the screen door. She gave a half-turn back, swinging her long, tightly woven braids.
"It's my homework, some books, a few charcoal sticks, and a portfolio case filled with blanks. I draw. If you want I can show you, make a picture or two."
Denny moved to the first stair.
"Maybe and maybe not."
"Suit yourself," she said, and as Denny brushed past he realized that by her not seeming to care whether he checked out her drawings or not, he would now just explode if he didn't get a chance to see at least one. But again, he did not need to show this just yet. He turned the lock and pushed into the dark living room with his new sitter lugging her stuff in behind.
Dad had cleaned, but Josephine curled her lip just a bit once the lights were turned on. Sure, the couch was swept clear of last week's newspapers and the coffee table stood free of soda cans and other various recyclables, but Denny realized how stale the place must have seemed to a girl. Mom's curtains had been long taken down and replaced with gray blinds that were easier to maintain. There was an old brown chair but no footstool. There was an end table with nothing on it. There were no flowers, no books, no scented candles, and the imitation wood-panel wallpaper looked worn. The place was missing those soft, womanly things that made houses into homes, and being reminded of it in this unexpected way seemed unfair. Denny felt an unexpected responsibility and guilt for it as well, and that didn't seem too fair either. Denny slumped onto the couch.
"You can turn on the heat if you want, but it shouldn't go past sixty-two. If you look, you'll see the line my Dad put on the wall above the thermo-thing with red magic marker. Just match the arrow with the line,"
and you'll help keep a roof over our heads, he silently finished. Josephine walked over to the thermostat and Denny stared at the blank TV. He could have flipped the heat on himself. But he was not quite tall enough to do it without dragging in a dining room chair and climbing on it. No thanks. The sure-to-be awkward moment would have pegged him for a baby in his own house, and he felt strange enough as it was.
"Pizza money's right there," he said. He nodded toward the twenty-dollar bill in the hotel-style ash tray on the coffee table. "It's just a first night thing, so you may as well go for it while you can."
"You having some too?"
"Nah. I'll just heat up some of Dad's left-over franks and beans."
She laughed through her nose.
"Do I get a say in this? Old beans could be deadly. Silent and deadly. In fact, I think you busted a fart on the way through the door."
Denny looked over his shoulder and grinned.
"Did not."
"Did so."
"He who smelt it dealt it."
"I'm not a 'he,'" she said. "And the one who denied it supplied it."
Denny turned and dug his knees into the sofa's back cushion.
"The one who first whiffed gave the gift."
"Yeah, but the one to first blame laid the flame." Her return answer had snapped back like whiplash. She was good. Denny paused, then scrunched up his nose.
"Did not."
"Hmm." She tossed her coat on the chair and folded her arms. "Now seriously, what else is there in the fridge for you?"
"Nothing."
"Yeah right."
"Really."
Her look was hard to read, but for a second Denny saw strange emotions pass through her eyes. Did she think he was lying? He could walk her into the kitchen right now and prove the fridge held nothing but a half-loaf of rye bread, some ketchup, some French's mustard, an unopened tub of whipped butter, some old Hi-C, Dad's beer, and some crusted jars in the door that were a million years old. It was never stocked up. Dad called that a waste and besides, there were always leftovers from his last take-out lunch to throw in the microwave. Leftovers were the best, didn't she know that? Any guy knew it at least. Dad said so all the time.
"Draw me a picture," Denny said in a blunt effort to switch subjects. She surrendered a bit of a smile then, but the strange look in her eyes still left traces.
"Really?"
"Yes!" he nearly shouted, suddenly bouncing on his knees. The couch creaked beneath him. "Yes, yes, yes!"
She paused only a moment more.
"All right, then. Move the ashtray."
Denny did it and then made room on the couch for her to get settled. From her zippered bag she removed three different sizes of paper and c
arefully placed them an inch apart, side by side on the table. Next surfaced the thin black case that, when laid open and flat, revealed charcoal sticks of various lengths. Each was set in its own individual leather pocket and each had been honed to a different style of point. The knife had a sewn-in sheath and its sharpening stone sat in a half-moon shaped pouch.
"Can I have a paper towel, Denny?"
He hopped to it, intrigued to be part of the ritual. She folded the paper in half, placed it on the left side of the table, and proceeded to take off her rings, all eight of them. She arranged them in a circle with the left thumb-ring in the middle. She webbed her fingers, turned them outward, and stretched.
"OK, now what do you want me to draw first?" Her hands were floating above the art case, ready to select the right tool for the job. Denny shoved back, sat on his hands, and frowned.
"I changed my mind."
Josephine raised an eyebrow but kept her hands hovering over the charcoal sticks.
"You're playing me now, right?"
Denny shook his head and struggled to bite back the grin. He knew the game better than anyone, and Josephine Thompson was not going to march right into the Sanborn house and take over that easily. If she wanted to come back she would have to survive the report to Dad, so Denny was proving right here who was boss. Oh, he wanted to watch her draw in the worst way, but wanted more to see how far he could push. After all, it was her job to make nice-nice and he was just here for the ride.
"Tell me a story," he said.
"You're playing me," she said for the second time. "Tell me you're playing." Denny shook his head and smiled at his sneakers.
"Nope. Not playing. Don't you know any stories?"
"What kind of story do you want to hear?"
"A scary one." He looked back over. She was smiling now, not so much in a sweet way, but more in a knowing one. Her hands had migrated to her lap but the rings were still on the table.
"Do you want me to tell something like The Monkey's Paw?"
"Heard it," Denny said.
Seven Deadly Pleasures Page 8