“That was only after I got arrested for trespassing, mind, but that’s a whole ‘nother story….”
All the while she talked, J-Cat was lugging and heaving and grunting with the effort of moving this huge, wet, heavy rock. I was still tangled up in how it got into the tree house in the first place, and I couldn’t imagine now how she was going to lift it up so Homer could get a good look. I wouldn’t have laid a bet on her, but there she was, squatting down and heaving that rock onto the bed like one of those puffed-up weight lifters you see on TV.
My blood must have been in all the right places at that moment because when the rock hit Homer’s hospital bed and made the mattress shoot up, there I was to keep him from falling into a heap on the floor.
Everything was in motion: the mattress, the rock, and Homer. For a minute, it looked like the rock was going to roll in my direction, too, giving me injuries I couldn’t afford. But I held my ground for Homer, and when J-Cat corralled it to one corner of the bed, I laid him back down while he swore at her, words I’m sure I’d never heard come out of his mouth before.
She seemed completely oblivious to his words and his pain.
“These here,” she said, panting and pointing at the rock, “are authentic zebra mussels … sharp as razors if you walk on ‘em barefoot. They’re what cut your face on the way down.”
When I finished arranging his butterfly-light arms and legs back under the covers, Homer asked, panting, “How do I know you got the right one?”
She started tapping the side of her head. “How do you know? How do you know? Because when I was down there, I heard it bragging, that’s how.”
She eyeballed Homer with a look that said, It’s on, baby, and I saw they were going to fight. Using force on a quadriplegic, that’s not a fair fight, so J-Cat was going into Homer’s mind. It was horrible to watch, like watching surgery on TV, but it was fascinating, too.
I didn’t know how to fight like that. I would take a hit for Homer, I loved him that much. But I guess I figured, like he did, that his life—his real life—was over. My job was to be with him while he did his time.
He was down for life, wasn’t he?
J-Cat didn’t seem to think so.
“It’s only right,” she said, patting the big ugly rock, “that I leave you two alone to get acquainted. So, Homerboy, what’s my next challenge? I figure I got to prove my allegiance, you know, like those knights of the Round Table.
“You asked for the rock, you got the rock.”
Clearly, Homer was done playing. He was looking past her into the cold October sky and focusing his thoughts on some poor leaf, petrified of falling.
But J-Cat had not finished playing.
“Now I know you’re partial to miracles, so how ‘bout this. How ‘bout I don’t come back here until I can find someone with the same C4 injury—same break—who will dance with me? Just to prove it to you. Just to open your eyes to the possibility.”
“You’re serious,” I said, before I thought better of it.
“Sure. We’re talking miracles here, are we not? I like a good challenge.”
J-Cat put on one of those mock-serious looks that makes you feel like she’s taking you for a ride, bowed deep, and said: “Do me the honor, Lord Homerboy, of letting me prove my allegiance.”
“Get away from me,” Homer said, not loud, but in this certain way he has, like he’s just invented the words.
J-Cat straightened up and asked: “Before I take my leave, may I kiss Your Lordship’s big ugly toe?”
“You can bring me the dancer. Fine!” Homer spit out. “But quit playin’ what’s left of me for a fool. And. Don’t. Touch. Me.”
It was a threat Homer couldn’t really make good on, so I helped out.
“Don’t touch him.”
J-Cat regarded us. You could be very insulting to her and she just narrowed her eyes a little with her look that said, No speaka English. Her fingers hovered over Homer’s toe.
“If a tree falls in the middle of a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” she asked, fingers inching closer.
I tensed and got ready to spring.
“If a home health aide touches the toe of a quadriplegic and no one feels it, does he still hate her?”
“Go!”
“See ya!” She kicked open the hatch and sank right through the floor.
We were alone.
Homer turned his face away from me.
He blamed me. I was his road dog, his crew, and I hadn’t protected him.
It was like she put me under a spell when she cracked me like that. I tried to hate her, for his sake, but I could shrug my shoulder without it hurting for the first time in memory. I wanted to think about what she’d done and what she said. About the blood.
What if I didn’t have to be in so much pain all the time?
What if Homer could draw?
I put my hand on the top of Homer’s shoulder, on a spot I knew he could feel.
“It’s like Hansel and Gretel,” I said softly. “Both of ‘em know hanging around with that witch and eating her candy is a bad idea … but they’re starving when they get to that gingerbread house.”
Homer moved his head a little, but he didn’t open his eyes. He was so pale. I could see a thin vein run across the lid. When I leaned close, it pulsed faster.
“I guess when you’re starving,” he said, “you don’t have much choice either way.” Then he gave me a little smile, one side of his mouth higher up than the other, and he opened his eyes.
“How did she get that thing in here?” I asked him.
“Some guy named Stan with a cherry picker. Pushed it right through the hatch.”
“You really think it’s the one?”
Even with his eyes shut, Homer could raise one eyebrow and give me a look that said: You playing me for a fool, Harry Sue?
Finally, he opened his eyes.
“My feeling is this: The rock was not my finest idea. But I can think of a thing or two to do with that pen.”
Chapter 24
“As long as we are in here, enjoying a meal together, it would be fine for you to call me Baba,” Mr. Olatanju said the next day as I wrestled with his name.
He was unpacking something from a cooler. Just the smell made the back of my mouth tingle.
“It means that we are friends. That is what my friends call me.” He looked up at me and smiled, just for a moment, before busying himself again with his meal.
“That is what they called me. Where I came from.”
“Maybe here,” I said. “But not always.”
I tried to imagine what Jolly Roger and his associates would do with the information that I was friends with the art teacher. It wouldn’t be safe for Mr. Ola … it wouldn’t be safe for Baba.
“Of course,” Baba was saying as he pulled plates out of a basket. “I understand. We create something together when we are here. And it doesn’t exist anywhere else. And when we are not here, it doesn’t exist in this room, either.”
He unfolded my napkin with a snap before handing it to me. “It is only present when we are present.”
I set down my backpack and unzipped it. “You got me thinking about a story, Mr…. Baba,” I said. “You ever heard of The Wizard of Oz?”
“I have seen that movie. It is about the girl … Dorothy?”
Oh, brother.
“But before it was a movie, it was a book. The book is the real story. And there’s a wizard in it. But he’s not really a wizard. He just starts playing all the Munchkins … and he does it for so long, they think he’s for real.”
I pulled Oswald out of my backpack and fished around in the bottom for his missing eye.
“Nothing is the way it’s supposed to be in that place,” I said. “But even after he gets busted, it’s like he can still fix things. He’s not magic, but he can still make all their dreams come true … well, except for Dorothy, but she’s a special case.”
I stopped, feeling out of breath.
I wasn’t used to talking about this stuff with anybody but Homer. And this idea that was in my head was slapping me around.
“Okay.” I decided to try again. “It’s like he set up Oz to work a certain way, but then when Toto knocks over the screen and everybody sees he’s just a little old man and not a big powerful wizard, he makes this great recovery. I mean, he loses ‘em when he gets caught. And the Scarecrow calls him a humbug—which was a real insult in Oz—but then—just with words!—he pulls them back….”
I fell back in my chair, exhausted. I couldn’t get it right, what I was trying to say. I wanted to tell Baba that I understood what he said about making a home just for a minute with words and food, knowing all the while it couldn’t last forever. It could only be real for a short time.
But I wasn’t sure how to say all that, so I held on to my tongue and put the bear on the table.
“Can you fix this?”
Baba reached out slowly and took Carly Mae’s precious bear into his big hands, giving me another chance to admire Granny’s handiwork. Oswald’s ear was nearly torn off, and the piece of yarn that was his mouth hung in a string. His plump tummy had gone flat, as if she’d beaten all the cheerfulness out of him.
“I figured since you’re an art teacher and all …”
“A substitute, remember? In the art classroom.”
Baba turned the little bear over. “He has met with an accident, no?”
I nodded. “It’s Carly Mae’s. She’s one of the crum … the little kids at Granny’s Lap.”
“Yes, I can fix him.” He laid the bear down carefully, next to the serving dishes. “But first, I want you to do something for me, Harry Sue.”
Har-ee Sue.
There was something about him today. Quieter. Slower. He left the covered dishes where they were and began pulling squeeze bottles of paint off the shelves. Red, yellow, purple, blue. He set them in front of me along with a big metal cookie sheet.
I looked at Baba, waiting.
“Will you paint with me, Harry Sue?”
“Paint with you?”
“My wife tells me that to heal we need to go back to the time before it happened, back to when we still painted with our fingers.”
I wasn’t sure what he was on about, but he looked so serious as he set another cookie sheet next to mine and squirted red paint onto it that I picked up the blue paint bottle. After blue, I squirted yellow right on top of it. Swirling my fingers in the paint, I made streaks of green appear from the other two colors.
I looked up at Baba. Was this what he wanted?
He put blue on top of his red and moved his fingers until they swirled purple.
I tried to remember before, but I couldn’t. I tried to, for Baba’s sake, but I’d laid too many pictures down after, pictures of how things would be after Mary Bell came back. They were on top of the old pictures—the real pictures. I couldn’t get to those anymore.
So instead I painted the way Baba’s food felt inside me … the food I was smelling at that very moment: tomatoes, lamb, peppers, spices. All the different things—the vegetables, the meat, the fruit—became one thing, one big green growing thing, like the runner beans that crawled up the back of Mrs. Mead’s garage.
And Baba made one thing, too, but all his colors became a muddy brown, like the shallow ponds that suddenly appear when the swamp overflows.
After a few minutes, he collected our sheets and put them in the big sink at the back of the room and ran water over them. Then they were just cookie sheets again. Because of the paint, we washed our hands in the sink and didn’t use the penny bowl and the pitcher. I wanted to, anyway, just to feel the cool water running over my hands, but I didn’t ask.
As we began to eat, I tried to put all my bad thoughts of what Granny had done to Carly Mae’s bear into a cupboard so they didn’t spoil the taste of the food.
“You have to go back, too?” I asked him. “To the time before?”
He looked up at me. In the joint, if somebody looks you in the eye after you ask a personal question, that means it’s okay to go ahead. So I did.
“Was that in Africa?”
“Sudan,” he said, nodding. He pulled a fat little banana from a bunch in his basket and cut the stem with an exacto knife.
“So that’s home?”
“The country is there, yes,” he said, chewing slowly. “We can find it on a map. But the village where I was born and where I was a young boy is gone. My family … all gone: my two brothers, my parents, my uncle Aboduin …”
Baba set the dishes in front of us on the table and unwrapped the bread. He took off the lids, and I felt like even if all I could eat were those smells, I would be happy.
“There was a civil war…. The soldiers came to our village and burned everything. They killed everyone. When the soldiers came, my mother told me to run. I was a very fast runner. I ran very fast and I hid. But when I came back, everything was gone….”
It seemed wrong to eat while Baba was talking about such things, but he set out the plates and placed a round fat pancake on each one. Taking the covers off of the dishes, he waited for me to begin. He wouldn’t talk again unless I was eating. I took a deep breath and tore off a piece of my pancake.
“There were a few other boys like me, who were left with nothing. There was nothing to do but leave our village. And so we began to walk. We walked because there was no reason to stay. And we were hungry. We didn’t know where we were going, and after a while, we didn’t know where we were.
“Walking was very dangerous, Harry Sue. Some of the boys were killed by lions. One was eaten by a crocodile as we crossed a river. And there were the patrols.
“I was much afraid to be so lost. But we knew that to be found could be even worse. If the soldiers found us … We had to keep going and trust. It was the fear that kept us moving night and day. Finally we arrived at a refugee camp. There were so many children, thousands, just like us. Most of them were boys. That is why they called us the ‘Lost Boys.’”
Even though Baba hadn’t eaten anything but the little banana, he pushed his plate aside and picked up Oswald. I shoved food into my mouth and smiled, wanting to make him happy again.
Baba went to the teacher’s desk and pulled out a small plastic case filled with needles and spools of thread and a tiny scissors. He came back and sat down again.
I tore off another piece of my bread and held it over a pot of creamy sauce with pieces of chicken floating in it.
“But how did you get here?” I asked him, dunking my bread and pinching the chicken.
“That’s very good,” he said, as I held it up for him to see.
He squinted, threading the needle.
“There is an Episcopal church in Marshfield. Many churches in your country have brought Lost Boys to America. I was one of the first boys to come. I have been here now for almost eight years.”
Baba took a piece of napkin and wiped the ex-acto knife clean. Then he held up Oswald and inserted the knife into his back, razoring him open at the seam.
He got up again and walked to a cupboard at the back of the room. When he returned, he had a bag of cotton balls. By the way he walked, with his shoulders hunched, I could see that telling this story was like making me relive my fall.
Soon as I knew that, I stopped even wanting to ask.
“This is really good,” I said. “Do you cook all this, or does your wife cook, too?”
He tore open the bag of cotton balls and laughed. “My wife cannot cook,” he said. “Or maybe I should say, we cannot eat her cooking. I am the cook in the family.” He set a handful of cotton balls on the table and looked at me. “You see, Harry Sue, in my country it is not the men who cook. But since this food makes such a … such a pleasant memory, I decided to learn.”
“Do your kids like this food as much as I do?”
My guess was that Baba didn’t have any kids, but how could I be sure? I didn’t want him to have any, I knew that, and if I’d been my old self, it w
ould have worried me to know I was getting so attached. But now, with the letters and everything, well, I was throwing caution to the wind.
Baba focused his concentration on Oswald again, inserting one cotton ball after the other and pushing them around inside the bear’s tummy with his thumbs.
“We cannot have children,” he said. “She was very sick when she was younger and the medicine they used to treat her made her sterile.”
What the heck was “sterile”? I thought it meant clean, but clearly it meant you couldn’t have kids, too. That must have made Baba really, really sad. He lost his family and he couldn’t make a new one.
“Sorry,” I said, swallowing. I thought he might cry after telling me all that, so I kept my head down out of respect.
“You don’t have to be sorry, Harry Sue. But let us talk of happier things, no? Do you think your friend would like it if I gave her bear a nice necktie to wear to church on Sunday?”
The rest of the time, he worked in silence. As he was knotting the last thread, Baba said: “You must remember, Harry Sue. Where I come from, no one is ever really lost to us. Not as long as you hold them in the palm of your heart.”
He smiled at me so sadly then that I wasn’t sure if I should say anything or not. I decided not. I thought maybe a look would be good, but the current Harry Sue catalog of looks did not contain an item for this moment.
Before I came, I had been thinking of telling Baba about the letters. But watching his face when he wasn’t looking changed my mind.
I didn’t want him to know how close I was to being found.
At that moment, I just wanted to stay lost with him.
Part 4
Courage
“You have plenty of courage, I am sure,” answered Oz. “All you need is confidence in yourself. There is no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger. True courage is in facing danger when you are afraid, and that kind of courage you have in plenty.”
“Perhaps I have, but I’m scared just the same,” said the Lion. “I shall really be very unhappy unless you give me the sort of courage that makes one forget he is afraid.”
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