The Schwa Was Here ab-1

by Нил Шустерман

  I don’t know what came over me then. Maybe I felt I knew the Schwa well enough—or maybe I was just talented at screw­ing up a good situation. Whatever the reason, I turned to him and asked: “So, Schwa—what really happened to your mother?”

  I felt him go stiff. I mean I really felt it, like we were con­nected in some freaky way. He finished his fries, I finished mine. We left. Then, just as we hit the street, he said, “She dis­appeared when I was five.” And then he added, “Don’t ask me again, okay?”

  ***

  As for what happened next, call it fate, call it luck, call it what­ever you want, but the next dare was the one that changed our lives. It could be that both of our lives were leading up to this moment. But I always wonder what would have happened if we didn’t take Wendell Tiggor’s dare.

  I already told you about Old Man Crawley—the hermit who lived on the second floor of his massive restaurant that took up a whole block on the bay. I think every neighborhood in the world’s got a shut-in. There’s all these reasons for it, y’know, like outdooraphobia, or whatever they call it. They love to make movies about shut-ins, and it always turns out that it’s some lonely dude who’s just misunderstood. But that wasn’t the case with Charles J. Crawley. Nothing to misunderstand about him. He was old, he was rich, he was cranky, and although no one ever saw or actually spoke to him, he made it very clear he was not to be messed with.

  There was this one Halloween, for instance, some of the neighborhood kids, including my brother, went on an egg pa­trol—and there are lots of windows to egg on that second floor of Crawley’s restaurant. We never did see Crawley himself look­ing out of the windows, but there were always Afghans poking their noses out. So, anyway, my brother and some of his friends, they go out on Halloween a few years back, toss a few eggs at Crawley’s upstairs windows, and run off. We heard nothing about it, except for one thing . . . from November 1 until New Year’s Day, not a single market in the neighborhood had eggs—not even the big supermarket chains. “It’s a local shortage,” peo­ple were told—but everyone knew that it was Old Man Crawley. He had pulled some strings and shut down the egg supply to the whole neighborhood. No one ever egged his windows again.

  Which brings me to the biggest and potentially most profitable dare that our little invisibility enterprise with the Schwa took on. Like I said, it was Wendell Tiggor’s dare. It was a pretty clever one, which makes me think he didn’t actually come up with it, because Wendell Tiggor had about the intelli­gence of my mother’s meat loaf if you took out the onions. It was at the bus stop after school that Tiggor came up to me.

  “So, I’ve been hearing about this Schwa kid.” (Tiggor begins every sentence with the word “so.”)

  “Yeah?”

  “So, I hear he goes invisible or something.”

  “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” I say. “He’s standing right here.”

  “Where?”

  “Right in front of your face.”

  “Hi,” said Schwa, who happened to be next to me and, I might add, directly in Tiggor’s line of sight.

  “Oh.” Tiggor squinted his beady eyes and looked him over. “So, he doesn’t look invisible to me.”

  “Then why didn’t you see him when you were staring straight at him?” Tiggor has to think about that one. You can almost hear rusty gears turning in his head, like one of those farm combines that sat out in the rain too long. I figured if I let those gears turn anymore, one might come flying out of his ear and kill some innocent bystander. “Never mind,” I say. “What can we do for you?” By now a few other kids have started to take notice of our conversation.

  “So, I hear you do stuff,” he says to the Schwa.

  “Talk to my manager,” says the Schwa. Tiggor’s lip curls in confusion.

  “He means me. Is it a service you wish my client to provide? Because if it’s a service, you’ll have to clear it with the student officers, who have him on retainer. Government regulations. You know how it is. Of course if it’s a dare instead of a service, we can do that, no problem.” At the word “dare,” even more kids moved into listening range. Six or seven were clustered around us, and as everyone knows, when there’s a few kids in a group it draws more and more, like curiosity has its own gravity.

  “It’s a dare,” says Tiggor.

  “Dares come with a price, too; what do you want the Schwa to do?”

  “You say he can do things and not be seen,” Tiggor says. “So let’s see if he can go into Old Man Crawley’s and bring some­thing back.” A bus came and went, but none of the kids got on. The public buses run every ten minutes, and this was worth ten minutes of everyone’s time.

  “Let me consult with my client.”

  I pull the Schwa aside, and he whispers, “I don’t know, Antsy.”

  Tiggor laughs. “See, I told you,” he says to the other kids. “He’s a fake. Ain’t no such thing as an invisible boy.”

  “Well, he did walk through the girls’ locker room without getting seen,” one kid says.

  “So,” says Tiggor, “does he have the pictures to prove it?”

  “Yeah,” I tell Tiggor, “you wish you had pictures.”

  Tiggor looks at me and hooks his thumbs in his pockets like he’s a gunslinger ready to draw. “Twenty bucks says he can’t do it.”

  “You’re on,” I said without a second thought—such is my faith in the Schwa. But the Schwa tugs my sleeve.

  “Antsy...”

  “What do you want him to bring back?”

  “So, how about a dog bowl,” Tiggor says. Everybody agrees that’s the perfect item. There’s about twenty kids around us now.

  “Anybody else care to take the wager?” I ask.

  The kids who had seen the Schwa in action all looked down and shook their heads. Only those who were not yet believers would bet against the Schwa.

  “I’m in for five bucks,” says one kid.

  “Two bucks over here,” says another. And by the time the bet­ting frenzy’s over, fifty-four bucks are on the line.

  ***

  We caught the next bus, and all the way home the Schwa was bouncing his knees up and down like he’s gotta go pee, but I know it’s because he’s all nervous,

  “Come on, Schwa, take it easy. There are so many dogs in there, you’ll probably trip on a bowl on the way in.”

  “And if I get caught?”

  “If you get caught, I pay everyone fifty-four bucks out of my own pocket—no loss to you, except maybe loss of life—but that’s a real long shot.” I was only kidding but he took it seri­ously. I began to feel a bit lousy for rushing into the dare with­out checking out his feelings first.

  “We can always back out,” I told him.

  He didn’t like the sound of that either—it would make him look chicken. “It’s just that everyone’s heard how creepy Old Man Crawley is. There are all these rumors about him.”

  “So? There are rumors about you, too.”

  “Yeah,” said the Schwa. “And some of them are true.”

  He had me there, although I didn’t have the nerve to ask which ones. “Listen; if you actually go in there, you’ll be going in as just some guy—but you’ll be coming out as a legend: the one kid ever to penetrate Brooklyn’s last great mystery.”

  That hooked him. “People remember legends, don’t they?”

  “Always.”

  The Schwa nodded. “Okay, then. I’m gonna nab myself a dog bowl.”

  5. Which Is Worse: Getting Mauled by a Pack of Dogs, or Getting Your Brains Bashed Out by a Steel Poker?

  We set the operation for Sunday morning, 10 a.m.

  Wendell Tiggor and a cluster of Tiggorhoids showed up to witness and make sure we didn’t just go out and buy a dog dish somewhere, then say we got it from Crawley’s. A bunch of the other kids who had bet against us were there, too, leaning against a railing across the street, so when the Schwa and I ride up on our bikes there are all these kids already there, looking way too suspicious. It’s
called loitering, which is like littering with human beings as the trash. I checked to see if Crawley’s looking out on us, but all I see in the dark windows above the restaurant are a couple of furry dog faces in front of closed curtains.

  “So we thought you’d chickened out,” Tiggor says.

  The Schwa took off his jacket. He was strategically dressed in dark brown; the same color as Crawley’s curtains. He walked over to the railing that overlooked the murky water of the bay, and stretched like this was an Olympic event.

  At this point I was beginning to get nervous for him. “Lis­ten,” I say, “you might go unnoticed around people, but I don’t know about dogs. Our experiments didn’t include dogs. What if you’re like one of those whistles that people can’t hear, but dogs can—or what if they can smell you? We don’t know if you got a stealthy odor.”

  He sniffed his armpit, then looked at me. “I smell stealthy to me. Want a whiff?”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “So what’s taking so long?” says Tiggor. “Are you gonna do it or not, because I ain’t got all day.”

  “Hey, this is a delicate procedure,” I tell him. “The Schwa’s gotta get himself mentally prepared.”

  Tiggor gave an apelike grunt. I took the Schwa aside. “Just remember, I’ll be right outside. If you need help, you signal to me and I’ll be there in a second.”

  “I know you will, Antsy. Thanks.”

  I swear, it felt like he was going off to war and not into some cranky old geezer’s place. The thing is, none of the other dares had the Schwa venturing into the unknown, unless you count the locker room. Crawley, even without ever being seen, was scary—and who knew if any of those Afghans were trained to kill.

  I went around back with him, where a fire-escape ladder led up to the building’s second story. Old Man Crawley’s apartment was huge, filling the whole second floor—the only way in was through the restaurant itself—but by looking down from the roof of an apartment building a few blocks away, we had learned that there was a little courtyard patio in the middle of his apart­ment, open to the sky. That would be our point of entry.

  The stench of yesterday’s lobster wafted out of the Dumpster behind the restaurant, smelling like a fish market on a hot day, or my aunt Mona (trust me, you don’t wanna know). Ignoring the smell, we hopped up to the lip of the Dumpster so we could reach the fire-escape ladder. I gently pulled it down, try­ing to keep it from squeaking. The Schwa climbed on.

  “Stealth is wealth,” I said to him, which has been our little good-luck phrase ever since we started taking dares.

  “Stealth is wealth,” he said back. We punched knuckles, and he climbed up, disappearing onto the roof. I crossed the street and waited at the edge of the bay with the others.

  Tiggor looked at the windows of Crawley’s place, then looked at me. “So what do we do now?”

  I shrugged. “We wait.”

  Turns out we didn’t have to wait long. Although I wasn’t there to see what happened, it probably went something like this:

  The Schwa jumps down into the little enclosed patio filled with gravel, and more dog crap than you ever want to see in one place. A door is ajar so the dogs can come and go from the patio as they please. This is the door the Schwa slips into.

  The place is dark. The lightbulbs are just twenty-five watts be­hind dark lamp shades, and no sunlight makes it through those thick curtains. The Schwa stands there in the living room, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. There are two dogs fighting over a piece of knotted rope across the room. They don’t notice him. He does have a stealthy odor! Or the dogs are just too old to smell. He hears a TV on in another room somewhere far away in the huge apartment.

  So where are the dog bowls?

  He makes his way through the living room, across a formal dining room with a long table that hasn’t seen a dinner party in a millennium, and then he strikes gold. Fourteen dog bowls are lined up nice and neat against a kitchen wall. Products of Pisher Plastics.

  All he has to do is take one of the bowls and get out the way he came. That’s all.

  He bends down, grabs a bowl, and then he discovers something awful: All fourteen bowls are nailed to the ground.

  And now he begins to think that maybe he’s like a dog whistle after all, because there’s an Afghan growling in his face ...

  Meanwhile, from outside, I saw all the dogs suddenly disap­pear from the windows. This was not a good sign. I heard all this barking, then a man yelling, although it was too muffled to hear what he yelled.

  And Wendell Tiggor laughs. “So you lose,” he says. “Pay up.”

  In the window I now saw the Schwa pressed up against the glass, hiding behind the curtains. I knew he couldn’t last like that for long.

  “Think the dogs’ll eat him?” says one of the other kids.

  I didn’t have time for idiots. Instead I took off across the street, toward the building nearly becoming roadkill because I didn’t look both ways like every kid’s mother told them from the beginning of time. Narrowly surviving the busy avenue, I made it around back to the fire escape. I didn’t know what to do, but I couldn’t just leave the Schwa stranded like that. Leave no man behind—isn’t that what they say in battle?

  I scrambled to the roof, leaped into the little patio, and burst through the open door.

  In a second the dogs were barreling toward me. I tensed up, preparing to get bit. The dogs advanced, held their ground, and then backed away, not sure whether to protect their master, their home, or themselves. The smell of dog was everywhere. Dog food, dog fur, dog breath. The smell was overpowering, and the barking endless and loud. I didn’t dare move—but I glanced to the curtains where I knew the Schwa was hiding. Any dogs that had been sniffing around there had come over toward me. With any luck, the Schwa would be able to slip out unnoticed. As for me, well, I suppose this was what I have to do to earn my 50 percent. Damage control.

  “Get out of here!” said a voice much fuller, much stronger than I expected.

  My eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the dim light, so I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first. A low square shape moved at me through a doorway. Only when it pushed through the dogs could I see what it was. It was a wheelchair. Old Man Crawley was in a wheelchair.

  “Don’t move a muscle, or I’ll have them tear you to shreds, if I don’t do it myself.”

  He held a fireplace poker in the air as he rolled the chair for­ward with his other hand. His hair was gray and slicked back. His jaw was hard and square—it looked like he still had all his teeth, which is more than I can say for my own relatives that age. He wore a white shirt buttoned all the way to the neck, where loose skin flopped around like on a turkey—but mostly it was the poker that held my attention. The thing looked heavy, the thing looked sharp, and people in wheelchairs usually have lots of upper-body strength.

  “Which do you want?” I said.

  “What?”

  “You said 'get out of here,’ and 'don’t move a muscle.’ I can’t do both.”

  “You’re a wiseass.”

  Not at all happy with their master’s tone of voice, the dogs were now baring their teeth at me, in addition to barking and growling.

  “I can explain,” I said, which I really couldn’t, but don’t you always say that when you get caught doing something you shouldn’t be doing?

  “I have already called the police. They will be here momen­tarily to arrest you, at which time you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

  Which was good, because it meant he didn’t plan to kill me with the poker, or with the dogs. “Please, Mr. Crawley, I didn’t mean anything. It was just a bet, see? On a dare to get a dog bowl. That’s all. I would have given it back. I swear.”

  “The dog bowls are nailed down,” he informed me.

  “My mistake.”

  “How much did you bet?”

  “Fifty-four dollars,” I told him.

  “You just lost fifty-four dollars.”r />
  “Yeah, I guess so. So can I go now? It’s punishment enough, right?”

  “Fifty-four dollars is hardly a sufficient fine for breaking and entering attempted theft, and the assault of an elderly man—”

  “But... wait... I didn’t assault you!”

  He smiled viciously. “Who do you think the police will be­lieve, me or you?”

  By now most of the dogs had quieted down. A few had wan­dered off, a couple came over to sniff at me, but the rest all clustered protectively around the old man.

  “I really am sorry, Mr. Crawley.”

  “There are countries where delinquent children are caned for their misdeeds. Do you know what caning is?”

  “Kind of like whipping?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but more painful. You’d probably choose a few dog bites over a caning.”

  He put the poker down across the arms of his wheelchair. “You can tell your friend to come out from behind the curtains now.”

  My heart sank. “What friend?”

  “Lying does not help your case,” snapped Crawley.

  Before I could say any more, the Schwa emerged from be­hind the curtains, looking sheepish, like a dog who just dirtied the rug.

  “How did you know he was there?”

  “Let’s just say I’m observant,” said Crawley. “I don’t usually keep sneakers poking out from beneath my curtains.”

  Four out of five people didn’t notice the Schwa. It figures Crawley had to be a fifth person. He stared at us there, saying nothing, waiting for the police to arrive.

  “I ... I didn’t know you were an invalid,” I said, which is a pretty stupid thing to say, but my brain tends to become spongelike when under stress.

  Crawley frowned. I thought he already was frowning. “I broke a hip,” he said, annoyed. “The wheelchair is only temporary.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Sorry sorry sorry,” he mocked. “You sound like a broken record.”