by Neil Smith
“It’s only a nightmare!” I call out in my sleep because I hear Johnny scream. One quick, panicked shout. I blink my eyes open in the dark. Circles of light dart across the walls and floor. The ceiling light turns on. My pupils constrict. My eyes squint. There are people in the room. Half a dozen people. In my daze, I think nonsensically that the janitors are here to take their office back. Then they are on top of me. Three janitors. They throw off my sheet, grab my arms and legs, and roll me on my side. Their faces look both grim and thrilled. My face squashes against a pillow. I spot Rover scrabbling along a baseboard. Across the room, janitors attack Johnny too. He screams bloody murder. One janitor atop him pulls out a curious object—handcuffs. As my arms are wrenched behind my back, I feel pressure on my wrists and hear a click. Janitors have handcuffed me. I go limp, the same as when the boys piled atop me on Halloween. So much for staying strong. Johnny does not go limp. He scissors his legs up and down. With bare feet, he kicks a janitor in the head. Another janitor smacks Johnny hard in the face with the back of his hand. Johnny stops screaming when a janitor snips off a length of duct tape from a roll and sticks it over his mouth.
These janitors, I finally realize, are wearing purple armbands.
Tonight Zig is playing jacks with thousands of twinkling stars across the heavens. I can even see the Milky Way, or at least the whitewash Zig uses to paint the night sky. I focus on the beauty above to distract myself from my ordeal.
I am tied with skipping ropes to an infirmary stretcher, which the do-gooders are now dragging across a grassy field in the manner of a sled. Before I was tied down, I was wrapped in a blanket, and so I feel like an American Indian baby bound in a papoose, except a baby would not have its hands cuffed and its mouth taped shut no matter how strict its parents might be. If my mouth were not taped, I would call out to the second stretcher being hauled across the field. I would tell Johnny not to panic. The do-gooders are kind and charitable, after all, so other than a little rope burn, we should come to no harm.
Two do-gooders are pulling a rope that is attached to my stretcher as a leash. They have flashlights to lead the way. A third do-gooder follows behind to ensure that I do not fall off. Again, if my mouth were not taped, I would tell these boys that this dramatic capture is pointless because Johnny and I planned to turn ourselves in at the crack of dawn.
Every previous night in the janitor’s office, Johnny and I had placed desks in front of the door because there was no lock to keep intruders out. Tonight, however, we had not bothered. I imagine Johnny is cursing himself for that. I turn my head to catch sight of my roommate’s stretcher and his own trio of escorts.
I see the other group’s flashlights glimmering at the opposite end of the field. They seem to be going in a different direction. Zig almighty, the do-gooders are splitting Johnny and me up!
Where are they taking him? Maybe Czar has woken, and they will take Johnny to the infirmary so his victim can pick him out in a kind of police lineup. Or perhaps he is going straight to jail (Do not pass Go). But why would I not go with him? I am guilty too. I played a key role in this fiasco.
After my group leaves the field, my escorts drag my stretcher down an empty street. The night is silent except for the scraping sound of board against pavement, which reminds me of snowplows in Hoffman Estates. Since I am at curb level, the dark buildings we pass seem larger and more foreboding than usual. They loom over me as though passing judgment. If they had heads, they would shake them; if they had fingers, they would wag them.
My three escorts have not uttered a word yet, so I am surprised when one says, “Oh, bugger, we took a wrong turn. We should be on Phoebe Caulfield Road.” They turn my sled around, and we head back and then up a different street.
I am thankful it is nighttime. If it were daytime and passersby were eyeing me, I would feel ashamed. So thank you, do-gooders, for your forethought.
We stop in front of what looks like a dorm. Two of the boys lift the stretcher to waist level and carry me down a cobblestone pathway past a hedge made up of skyrocket spruce. RHODA PENMARK DORMITORY is written on the sign above the front door. The dorm’s doorgirl meets our group out front. She takes one look at me, the giant papoose, and says, “This ain’t right.”
A do-gooder says, “Just hold the door, Inez.”
Inez holds the door as the do-gooders and I pass through. I am carried across the empty lobby and down the hall to a door marked 106, like my old locker at Helen Keller. Inez fiddles with a set of keys and finally inserts the right one and turns the lock. “You had to gag him?” she says as she steps into the room and flicks on the light. “He’s a newbie. You could’ve taken pity.”
“Shut up, Inez, or we’ll gag you.”
Dear Inez huffs and leaves the room.
The do-gooders set the stretcher on the bed. I look up at the twirling ceiling fan. For some reason, I think of Czar hypnotizing the haunters. I picture him twirling a pinwheel in front of their faces and saying, “You’re feeling sleeeeeepy. Real sleeeeeepy.” I am not sleepy, however. I am wide-awake even though it must be four in the morning.
The do-gooders untie the ropes. They roll me on my side and unlock the handcuffs. My wrists are scrawny, so they do not hurt from the cuffs, which I notice are plastic. Toy handcuffs! Johnny will be mortified.
I sit up, and one of the do-gooders, a boy with a big nose, says he will remove the duct tape. He has a bit of a British accent. He tugs on the corner of the tape over my mouth. “This might hurt a bit,” he says. “I’ll go slow.”
He peels the tape, uprooting the tiny blond hairs growing above my lip. I wince and say, “Where’s Johnny Henzel?”
“We aren’t permitted to say,” the British boy replies.
“It was an unfortunate accident,” I tell him. “We mistook Charles Lindblom for somebody else—for our murderer, in fact.”
The two do-gooders exchange glances.
I try to play on their sympathy: “We are gommers, but we haven’t gotten over our murders yet.”
My second captor, who has an American accent, says, “I need to get the stretcher back.” So I stand up, dressed only in my boxer shorts, the blanket over my shoulders, and let the boy drag the stretcher off the bed. He carries it from the room without a word.
“You’ll sleep here tonight,” the Brit says. “In the morning, the do-good president from your zone will come talk to you.”
Reginald Washington is coming to save me.
“I’ll be sitting outside your door, mate, in case you need anything. My name’s Ringo.”
“As in the Beatles.”
“It’s not my real name,” the big-nosed boy says. “It’s just what people call me. I’m from England, you see, but my family moved to Detroit a year before I passed.”
“Are you my jailer, Ringo?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. I work at the Gene Forrester in Nine.”
“Is that where Johnny is?”
“I am not at liberty to say.”
“Look, you have to take me to Johnny Henzel right now. He is a very sensitive soul.”
Ringo shakes his head.
“He is a little unstable,” I say.
Ringo gives me a deadpan look. “Yes, so I heard.” Then he leaves the room, shutting the door behind him.
I go to the window and draw back the dusty curtains. I try pushing up the sash, but it will not budge. In any case, even if I escaped from this room, where would I go? I cannot trot around in my underwear in search of Johnny in the dark.
Beside the window is a desk. I sit. I cannot sleep now. I will just wait for the sky to lighten and for Reginald to come. I try studying the stars in the sky, but my concentration is poor. I feel unstable myself. Zig in heaven, if I had a carving knife, I might amputate a baby toe.
“Hey, Oliver,” a voice says. “Time to wake up. Rise and shine. Rise and shine.”
A hand pats my head.
For a moment, I think the voice and the hand belong to you, Mother. I can pra
ctically smell the citrusy hair tonic that seeps into all your clothes on account of the hours you spend at Clippers.
I am not dead, I think. I am not dead after all.
But when I blink open my eyes, the face I see is not pink and skinny like Mother’s. It is brown and chubby. “Thelma,” I say, lifting my head. “Oh, it’s so nice to see you, even though you don’t smell of hair tonic.”
She looks confused but then says, “It’s nice to see you, too, honey.” She smiles to reveal the gap in her teeth.
I have a crick in my neck because I fell asleep seated at the desk.
Thelma looks at the desk blotter. “What’s that you drew?”
I look at the blotter. “A horse.” Last night, to kill time, I mapped stars and created a new constellation, not a winged horse like Pegasus but a regular horse. Yet my horse has only three legs because there were no bright stars to form a fourth. For those who believe in omens, a three-legged horse is most likely a bad sign. Luckily, I do not believe in omens.
“I brought you some fresh clothes, shoes, and even a toothbrush.” Thelma points to the items she has laid on the bed.
“Where is Johnny? Where was he taken?”
Thelma looks away. “Why don’t you get dressed, honey? Then we’ll have ourselves a little talk. I need to tell you a few things.”
There is something different about Thelma. It takes me a moment to pinpoint what. “You are not wearing your armband,” I say.
She glances at her upper arm as though wondering where the heck the purple band went. Then she sits on the bed and hands me jeans with faint grass stains on the knees. “Well, Oliver, I’m not a do-gooder no more.”
“Did you retire?” I ask, pulling on the pants.
“No, I was kicked out.”
“You got fired?”
“They’re calling it a ‘leave of absence.’ The council wasn’t too happy about our escapades.”
She means Johnny’s escapades and mine. Our attack on Charles Lindblom lost her a job.
“Oh, Thelma, I am so sorry.”
What a horrible mess I made! You would be ashamed of me, Father and Mother! Fractured skulls, lost jobs, sad and confused friends. Not to mention that poor Rover the roach was left behind at the Marcy. Johnny will be devastated if we lose his pet!
I accidentally put my T-shirt on inside out, a sign of how stupid I have become.
“I will accept any punishment the council sees fit,” I tell Thelma, and she pats the bedsheets beside her so I will come and sit down.
Her eyes are anxious and red. “You won’t be punished, honey. The council decided you did nothing wrong.”
“But it was my fault, Thelma. I am what is called an instigator. I told Johnny that Charles Lindblom was Gunboy. He looked like the boy in the dead-or-alive poster.”
Thelma moves her hand in the air as though erasing words on a chalkboard.
“Listen, Oliver. I need you to meet somebody.”
She glances at the door. Then she gets up, goes to it, and edges it open. She nods to whoever is in the hallway.
The door pushes open and in come a boy and a girl. I stand up. The boy I recognize. It is Reginald Washington with his splotchy arms, face, and even kneecaps (he is wearing shorts, and one knee is pink and the other brown). He smiles and says, “Hello there, young fellow.” As for the girl, I have never seen her before. She is very skinny, scrawnier than even I am. Two braids protrude straight out from either side of her head. Reginald nudges her toward me. She has an astonished look, as though she has seen a ghost.
To break the ice, I almost say, “Boo!”
She takes a few more steps forward, looking at me in an odd way, as though taking stock of each individual feature—my nose, my lips, my forehead.
“It’s him,” she says.
A sharp intake of breath from Thelma.
“Are you sure?” Reginald says.
The girl nods.
“On a scale of one to ten,” Reginald says, “one being least certain and ten being most certain, how certain are you?”
A spectrum of certainty. How strange.
The girl says, “Nine and a half.”
“May I ask what is going on?” I say.
“Honey, I’d like to introduce you to Sandy.”
“Hi, Sandy. Nice to meet you. My name is Oliver.”
“Yeah, so they told me,” Sandy says, still staring.
Reginald gives Thelma a nod. Then he says, “Well, now, Sandy, we should get going. We have a long day ahead.”
Sandy finally tears her attention away from my face, but just before leaving the room, she turns and gives me one last look. “Poor thing,” she says.
I do not reply. I do not know why she pities me.
Once they leave, Thelma mops her forehead and cheeks with the palms of her hands.
It finally comes to me who the braided girl must be. How stupid I have been! “That was the girl from Schaumburg, Illinois,” I say, and Thelma nods.
“She passed after Johnny and me. She knows who killed us, doesn’t she? She knows who Gunboy is.” I feel a shot of excitement. Not to mention a little ping of pain in my holey heart.
The whites of Thelma’s eyes are pinker than I have ever seen them. Her face scrunches up.
“There ain’t no Gunboy, Oliver.”
“What? You mean we were not shot after all?”
“No, baby, there was a boy with a gun.”
I am confused. “There was no Gunboy. There was a Gunboy. How can both be true? You are making no sense, Thelma.” Thelma takes me by the shoulders and looks me straight in the eye. Her voice comes in a raspy whisper: “Listen to me, Oliver. The boy who shot you was Johnny.”
She is pulling my leg. I draw away, emitting a ha-ha to show that I like her joke, though I in fact find it distasteful.
Thelma Rudd is crying now, tears as big and fat as the wooden beads she wears in her hair. “There was only two boys, not three,” she sobs. “The killer was a mental case, Oliver! A sadcon, just like Johnny said he used to be.”
Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon, sodium, magnesium, aluminum, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, argon, potassium, calcium, scandium, titanium, vanadium, chromium, manganese, iron, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, gallium, germanium, arsenic, selenium, bromine, krypton, rubidium, strontium, yttrium, zirconium, niobium, molybdenum, technetium, ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, silver, cadmium, indium, tin, antimony, tellurium, iodine, xenon, cesium, barium, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, promethium, samarium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, lutetium, hafnium, tantalum, tungsten, rhenium, osmium, iridium, platinum, gold, mercury, thallium, lead, bismuth, polonium, astatine, radon, francium, radium, actinium, thorium, protactinium, uranium, neptunium, plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium, lawrencium, rutherfordium, dubnium, seaborgium.
Father, you gave Johnny his last real haircut, his last before the head shave he must have had at the Schaumburg Medical Center during his stay there. The haircut occurred a few days before school started. As usual, Clippers was busy at that time of the year. Already Jermaine Tucker, Kevin Stein, Fred Winchester, and Henry Axworthy had come in, each asking for feathered bangs. You kept cracking the same lame joke about feathers: Were they Indians all of a sudden? Were Iron Eyes Cody and Sitting Bull all the rage among thirteen-year-old boys?
You like lame jokes, Father. Hence, the poster on the wall of a bald man with the caption HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW. Or the sign that reads, NO, I DON’T PULL TEETH because in the Middle Ages barbers did minor surgery like tooth extraction. As you told everybody, the red stripe in the helix of the barber’s pole originally stood for blood and the white stood for bandages.
In the summer and on weekends, I liked helping out at Clippers. I would sweep the floors, dust the bottles of shampoo and hair tonic kept in the shop window, and bring patrons glass
es of lemonade, which, Mother, you claimed was homemade (though it came from frozen concentrate). You would both send me to fetch lunches at fast-food restaurants. You wanted fried chicken, pizzas, and hamburgers: meals I disapproved of because they cut lives short. I would bring myself back a salad and a baked potato and explain to you how cholesterol built up in arteries till plaque dammed up the blood flow to the heart or brain.
I was describing arteriolosclerosis on the Saturday afternoon in late August when Johnny Henzel stopped in, hair wild and down to his shoulders. I had not seen him all summer. Henry Axworthy, who lived in our building, had taken over Johnny’s paper route. I would sometimes see Johnny’s sister, Brenda, walking Rover the basset hound. She looked a lot like Johnny: same double crown, same dimple in one cheek. One time I had asked where her brother had gone, and Brenda had frowned. Why did so many people frown when I attempted small talk? She had replied with a terse “He’s at camp” and then hurried off.
Johnny did not ask for feathered bangs. He asked for an eighth of an inch off (I figured his parents had sent him for a haircut he did not want). “An eighth of an inch?” Father said. “I never made it to high school, my boy. I can’t even measure that small.”
Johnny and Father came to a compromise: a half inch. Johnny did not talk during the haircut, or even look at himself in the mirror. He simply stared at his lap. He was wearing terry-cloth sweatbands around his wrists, like those worn by tennis players, and I thought he had probably been playing tennis at camp.
When I offered him some lemonade, it seemed he barely recognized me, as though I had changed over the summer instead of him.
Father, you trimmed the half inch and then whisked away the barber’s apron. (I always admired how you did this with a flourish and without leaving any hair clippings on your patron’s lap.)
After Johnny paid Mother his five dollars at the cash register, I went up to him and again attempted small talk: “So, Johnny, did you enjoy your experience at camp?”
“Camp?” he said.