High Heat

by Carl Deuker

  "We're not going to live in a car," I snapped. "Stop being idiotic."

  But later I wondered. Mom wasn't working. She owed money to lots of different people. Where would we get money?

  All through July strangers were constantly roaming through our house, poking into our closets, asking questions. I could pick out the people who knew about Dad by the way they looked at Mom and Marian and me. They felt sorry for us, but they didn't want to get too close to us either, and they weren't sure they wanted anything to do with a house that had had a suicide. Other homes in Sound Ridge sold, but not ours. One Saturday both Lexuses were gone from the garage, and in their place was a ten-year-old Honda Accord. "We never really owned them," Mom explained. "They belonged to the dealership."

  In early August the Robertsons, a family from San Jose, came to look at the house. The man was a hotshot lawyer who'd recently been hired by Microsoft. He hardly spoke, and he kept looking out the window at his gleaming white Mercedes, as if he were afraid someone might steal it. But his wife was one of those people who never shut up. They had a daughter, Anna, who was Marian's age, and a son, Reese, who was my age. "Wouldn't it be nice if the kids became friends?" the woman said, as if we were all going to live together in the house.

  She did the same things everybody else did—opened closet doors, poked around in our basement and attic looking at stuff that wasn't hers. "Are the winters as cold and rainy as people say? That's the one thing I worry about. I love the sun. We all do."

  "They're not that bad," Mom answered. "And our summers are beautiful."

  Three times that week the white Mercedes pulled up in front of our home, and each time Mom grew more anxious. "Both of you," she snapped, "on your best behavior."

  The last time, the realtor came with all the papers that needed to be signed, and Mom and the Robertsons sat at the kitchen table going over them. I thought Marian would be in tears, but instead she found her Hula-Hoops in the garage and took Anna onto the deck, where they played, laughing away.

  I was the one who was falling apart. I tried to hide out in my room, but after a few minutes Mom came up. "Shane," she said, her voice full of fake cheeriness, "I'm sure you and Reese could find something to do. This will take a while, and I don't think he wants to sit alone in the front room." Reese was standing behind her, a stupid smile on his face.

  Mom returned downstairs, and he stepped into my room. "What an awesome room," he said. "I've got a Barry Bonds poster that'll look great on that wall. I suppose you're a Mariners fan. Maybe I'll become one, but right now the Giants are my team. Can you believe the guy hit seventy-three home runs? My dad says Willie Mays was even better."

  I couldn't stand the way he took over my room with his eyes or the way he talked as if we were old friends. I wanted him out. "You play baseball?" I asked. "Or do you just watch it on television?"

  "I play. Center field. How about you?" There was a challenge in his voice.

  "I'm a pitcher." I paused. "How about if we play catch in the yard?"

  "I don't have my glove with me."

  "No problem. I've got an extra one."

  He followed me downstairs and into the yard. My dad's old glove was lying in a box by the back door. I brushed aside a spider's web. "This okay?" I said, handing it to him.

  He slipped his hand in. "Sure."

  My first few tosses were soft, but little by little I started throwing harder. My dad's glove is a million years old. There's so little padding he used to slide a sponge inside to protect his hand when I threw hard. The sponge was in the box, but I didn't give it to Reese. I threw a fastball as hard as I could. The ball smacked into his glove.

  "Wow!" he said, taking off the glove and shaking his hand, a pained smile on his face. "Go easy, will you? That hurt."

  "I thought you said you were a ballplayer."

  "I'm a center fielder, not a catcher. And this is definitely not a catcher's mitt."

  "There's nothing wrong with that glove."

  "I didn't say there was. I just said it wasn't a catcher's mitt."

  He tossed the ball back. I threw it to him again, fast—but not my fastest. The ball went back and forth a half dozen times or so.

  "I'd like to hit against you sometime," he said.

  "No, you wouldn't," I said.

  "Why not?"

  "Because I'd strike you out."

  He held the ball. "You're pretty sure of yourself, aren't you?"

  The screen door opened. "Reese!" his mother called. "Time to go."

  I followed him into the house. I could tell by the way the realtor was grinning that the papers had been signed. I walked right through the kitchen toward the stairs, but before I could escape I heard Mom chirping away. "You're going to love living here. It is so safe. Nothing but good families."

  The next weekend we had a big yard sale. Everything in the basement and attic and about three-fourths of the things from the rest of the house went. Mom's books, my old bicycles, almost all of Marian's stuffed animals, old clothes—you name it, we sold it. Marian liked playing saleslady, making change for customers and all that, but I hated everything about it. It was like having your whole life lying on your front lawn for people to pick over.

  Some of our neighbors didn't come. Sound Ridge was too fancy for yard sales, and Mom was breaking an unwritten neighborhood rule by having one. But lots of people couldn't resist a bargain. Most of them were millionaires, but if something was ten bucks, they'd want it for five; and if it was a buck they'd offer fifty cents. I would have told them to drop dead, which is why Mom didn't let me do any of the selling. She was polite through it all. "Well, that's done," she said as she counted the money on Sunday night. "Now we can move on."

  CHAPTER 14

  On Monday morning Mom called me into the kitchen. "Shane, I'm going to be out quite a bit now. I've got to find a place for us to live. While I'm gone, I want you to be kind to Marian."

  "I'm never mean to her."

  "I didn't say you were. I said I want you to be kind. There's a difference." She paused. "Look, you know how frightened she is. With me out of the house, it's up to you to make her feel safe. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  I nodded. "I understand."

  "Good." She looked at me. "How about you, Shane? Anything going on inside you that I should know about?"

  "I'm fine, Mom. Don't worry about me."

  That morning, and every morning, Mom scoured the Seattle Times classified ads, highlighting any ad that looked reasonable. After breakfast she'd go out, leaving Marian with me.

  Marian would slip upstairs to her room as soon as Mom left. She had her pet rats there. Before my father killed himself, she rarely took the rats out of their cage. But she played with them the first day we moved back into the house after the funeral, and ever since she'd have them out all the time. I'd hear her singing to them, talking to them, having them talk to one another. Sometimes I'd ask her if she wanted to go over to Harmony's house, or Anna's. "Not today," she'd say.

  While she was upstairs, I'd go through the newspaper. I'd kill an hour or so checking on the Mariners and going over the box scores of the other games. Then I'd spend the rest of the day listening to the radio, sleeping a little, and eating some.

  The last page of the Wednesday sports section is dedicated to youth sports. All the summer baseball tournaments were going full tilt. Levine coached a select team made up entirely of Shorelake players. While I was stuck in the duplex, Greg and Cody and the other guys were traveling up and down the coast playing baseball.

  The Robertsons were moving in on August 31. On August 15, Mom still hadn't found a place for us to live. She was drinking more wine than usual at dinner, and at night she'd sit on the back porch smoking one cigarette after another. I thought about what Marian had said about families living in their cars, and I was no longer so certain she was crazy. Then, while Mom was apartment hunting one day, the phone rang. "Tell your mom the place on 138th came through."

  "Who are you?" I ask
ed.

  The voice laughed. "I'm sorry. I'm Lisa Rodriguez. Your community service rep." I hadn't even known we had a community service rep. I took down her name and number. "Tell her it's the little duplex off Greenwood, just inside the city limits, not too far from where you live now. She'll know which one."

  When Mom came home that afternoon, I gave her the message. Her face brightened. She went straight to the phone. "Ms. Rodriguez, please."

  Marian and I stood watching as Mom spoke, her voice growing more and more excited. "And the rent?...Oh, yes, that is reasonable.... I'm sure we will.... We'll be by first thing tomorrow.... This is such a relief. I can't thank you enough."

  When Mom hung up the telephone, she bowed her head and cried.

  "What's the matter, Mom?" Marian asked.

  "Nothing's the matter," Mom replied, lifting her head and wiping away the tears. Then she hugged Marian tightly. "As a matter of fact, everything is wonderful."

  She went to the telephone and ordered a pizza from Romio's. "And we'll rent a movie, too. Some big Hollywood musical, South Pacific or something like that. We'll microwave some popcorn and just relax. Okay?"

  When the pizza arrived, she started to pour herself a glass of wine but stopped. With Marian and me watching, she poured down the drain all the wine that was left in one bottle, and then she opened two other bottles and poured the wine out. Once that was done, she took her cigarettes out of her purse, broke them in half, and threw them in the garbage. Then she turned and smiled at both of us. "No more of that," she said. "I promise."

  CHAPTER 15

  "Now don't be expecting much," Mom said as we drove to see the house the next morning. "It's not what you're used to. But it's clean, and we're all together, and we're healthy, and that's all that matters."

  I wasn't expecting much, but I still swallowed hard when she pulled up in front of a small, mustard-yellow house. There were bicycles and big-wheel toys strewn about in the front yard, which was more like a dandelion patch than a lawn. I saw the letters S.H.A. stenciled onto the garbage cans that were out in the open at the end of the driveway.

  "Why are there two front doors?" Marian asked as we headed up the walkway and onto the porch.

  "It's a duplex, honey," Mom said, taking out the keys. "We don't have the whole house, only half of it."

  It took some doing, but the door finally opened. Inside, a stairway led straight up. "I'll show you the bedrooms later," Mom said. "Let's do the main floor first."

  It didn't take long. There was a tiny living room, a kitchen that was like a hallway, and a little breakfast nook that wasn't much bigger than the breakfast table we'd sold.

  Upstairs were two bedrooms. Put together, they weren't as big as my room in Sound Ridge. "Marian and I will share this one," Mom said opening the door to the larger one, "and you'll have the other one."

  A puke-yellow bathroom was wedged between the two rooms. Mom turned the handle on the faucet, then flushed the toilet. "I can't say I agree with the choice of colors," she said, "but everything works."

  We trooped back downstairs. "Well, what do you think?" she asked.

  "It's nice," Marian said.

  "What does S.H.A. stand for?" I asked.

  Mom's face lost color. "Pardon me?"

  "S.H.A.," I repeated. "What does it stand for?"

  "Seattle Housing Authority."

  "So we're in city housing?"

  She looked me in the eye. "Yes, Shane, we are."

  I went back to the car, unloaded the few boxes we'd brought from our home, and carried them into the front room. As I started to unpack them, Mom picked up her keys. "I have to sign some papers. I'll be back in an hour."

  I finished unpacking the boxes. At the bottom of the last one was the board game Candy Land, which I thought we'd sold at the yard sale. When Marian saw it, her eyes brightened. "Let's play," she said.

  "Aren't you a little old for Candy Land?"

  "There's nothing else to do," she said.

  I don't know if the people in the unit next to us were talking loudly or whether the walls were paper-thin, but if we'd wanted to, we could have heard every word. Instead, Marian and I tuned them out. We just turned over the little cards with their yellow and green boxes, as well as the occasional picture card that jumped us around the board. Candy Land is a stupid game for anybody over six years old, but that day I enjoyed it. I was as intent on each card as Marian was.

  We'd played for ten or fifteen minutes, each of us close to winning, only to be dropped down by some bit of bad luck, finally Marian was almost at the top. A card of any color and the game would be hers.

  Eagerly she reached for the stack and flipped over a card. But instead of a color card, she'd pulled Mr. Plum, the worst card in the deck. She dropped all the way down to the bottom. Her face fell. A few minutes later, I won. "Do you want to play again?" I asked.

  She shook her head. "I'll just read." She got her book and headed upstairs to the little room she'd be sharing with Mom. I heard the door click as she closed it.

  I felt bad, but what could I have done? If she were younger, I would have cheated for her, but I couldn't do that anymore. She'd have seen me, and she'd have been angry. Besides, there was a truth to the game. Some people pull Queen Frostine and move all the way to the top. Others get Mr. Plum and just about drop off the board. She'd drawn Mr. Plum, so she might as well get used to it.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 1

  The new place was a dump, and I hated it. But by then I hated the house in Sound Ridge, too, hated that I was hiding in my own house, not wanting to see any of the neighbors, all the time feeling that they were watching us, talking about us, waiting for us to leave. Goodbye to all of you, I thought when we'd finally finished loading the last box and were driving through the gates for the last time.

  It took one full afternoon to unload our Ryder truck. Even though we'd gotten rid of three-fourths of the stuff we had, the new place still couldn't hold everything we'd kept. We ended up taking ten boxes to the basement and leaving them in the area reserved for us.

  "Somebody could steal this," I said to Mom.

  She laughed sardonically. "I wish somebody would."

  Daytime wasn't so bad. I kept busy painting the entire unit, top to bottom, closets to windows. But at night it was different. Sleep wouldn't come, my mind would start racing, and pretty soon I'd be seething. City housing. Why had Mom brought us here? I saw everything—the cramped rooms, the cracked bathroom tiles, the water-stained ceilings, the weedfilled lawn—through Dad's eyes. He would never have lived here. Never.

  Right before school started, Mom got a job as a waitress at Pasta Bella working the dinner shift, from six to midnight. "I won't get home until after one," she said, "so I'm counting on you to look after Marian. Make sure she does her homework, takes a shower, gets to bed on time. You understand?"

  "Yeah, sure. You want me to baby-sit."

  Her eyes flashed. "I want you to do more than baby-sit. I want you to be her friend, talk to her. But since that doesn't seem to be happening, then yes, I'll settle for simple baby-sitting."

  "That's not fair," I said, defending myself. "All Marian does is play with her rats or read. I can't make her talk if she doesn't want to."

  Mom frowned. "Fair enough, Shane. But if she ever does want to talk, I want you to be here to listen."

  My new school, Whitman High, began an hour before Marian's. Mom and Marian were still sleeping when I ate breakfast in the kitchen. The only company I had was the old black electric clock whose second hand would go slowly between the two and the three, and then race to catch up.

  After I finished my cereal, I packed my backpack, pulled the door shut behind me, and walked to the bus stop, which was at Greenwood and 140th, just two blocks from the duplex.

  As I waited for the bus, I thought back to the year before when my dad had driven Marian and me to Shorelake. Every morning we'd come right down Greenwood Avenue, past the very spot where I was standing. Someti
mes my dad would nod toward the clumps of Whitman kids waiting for the school bus. They'd be smoking cigarettes, nuzzling their girlfriends or boyfriends, or just standing there, shoulders hunched. "Look at them," Dad would say, his voice filled with contempt. "Just look at them."

  That morning I pawed the ground, glancing up every so often, hoping to see the ugly yellow school bus that would get me off the street. Where was it? Would it ever come?

  It wasn't the bus that came but something else, and for a moment I couldn't breathe. A white Mercedes, gleaming in the early-morning sunshine, was gliding toward me. Mesmerized, I stared until I was sure: Reese Robertson.

  He was sitting in the front seat next to his dad; both of them were laughing. I turned away, hoping they'd drive right by. But the traffic light turned red, and the Mercedes eased to a stop in front of where I stood.

  I turned around and faced the little closed shops on Greenwood, determined not to look back. But I had to look. I turned around just as Reese glanced out his window. Our eyes met, and in that second there was a flash of recognition, and then we both looked away. The light turned green; the Mercedes drove off.

  My bus pulled up a minute later. I flopped onto the first available seat, my heart pounding. Greenwood was the main arterial horn Sound Ridge to Shorelake Academy. I'd seen Reese today; tomorrow it might be Greg, and the day after that Cody. I could stand in the back of the crowd of kids, I could pull a cap down over my face, but they'd see me.

  It was the first day of my junior year of high school, but all I thought about was the bus stop. And I thought about it at home after school let out. I hated myself for letting it get to me. A thousand times I told myself that I didn't care who saw me.