The Schwa Was Here ab-1

by Нил Шустерман

  “Sorry,” I said, then grimaced.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Wendell Tiggor,” I said, without missing a beat.

  “Very good. Now tell me your real name.”

  This guy might have been old, but he was as sharp as a shark tooth. I sighed. “Anthony Bonano.”

  He turned to the Schwa. “And your name?”

  I had hoped he might have forgotten the Schwa was there, but luck was in short supply today.

  “Calvin. Calvin Schwa.”

  “Stupid name.”

  “I know, sir. It wasn’t my choice, sir.”

  I could hear sirens now, getting closer. I supposed Wendell and the Tiggorhoids had all deserted. No one in that crowd would risk their necks, or any other part of their anatomy, for us.

  “Well, there they are,” said Crawley, hearing the sirens. “Tell me, is this your first arrest, or are you repeat offenders?”

  As we weren’t actually arrested at the American Airlines ter­minal, I told him it was a first offense.

  “It won’t be the last, I’m sure,” he said.

  I cleared my throat. “Excuse me, sir, but I think it will be.”

  “Will be what?”

  “I think it will be the last time I’m arrested.”

  “I find that hard to believe.” He leaned over, scratching one of his dogs behind the ears. “Can’t change breeding isn’t that right, Avarice?”

  The dog purred.

  Breeding? Now I was getting mad. “My breeding is fine,” I told him. The Schwa, who’s still mostly petrified, hits me to shut me up, but I don’t. “If you ask me, it’s your breeding that’s all screwed up.”

  Crawley raised his eyebrows and gripped his poker. “Is that so.”

  “It must take some pretty bad genes to turn someone into a miserable old man who’d send a couple of kids to jail just for trying to get a plastic dog bowl.”

  He scowled at me for a long time. The sound of sirens peaked, then stopped right outside. Then he said, “Genes aren’t everything. You failed to take environment into account.”

  “Well, so did you.”

  There came an urgent knocking at the door, and all the dogs went running toward it, barking. “Mr. Crawley,” said a muffled voice through the door, over the chorus of barks. “Mr. Crawley, are you all right?”

  The old man gave the Schwa and me a twisted grin. “Destiny calls.” He rolled off toward the door, calling back to us, “Either of you try to escape and I’ll have you shot.”

  I didn’t really believe that, but I also didn’t want to take any chances.

  “This is bad. Antsy,” the Schwa said. “Real bad.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Crawley rolled back in about a minute. Amazingly, no police officers were with him. “I told them it was a false alarm.”

  The sigh of relief rolled off the Schwa and me like a wave. “Thank you, Mr. Crawley.”

  He ignored us. “The police will only give you a slap on the wrist, and since you’re not crying hysterically in terror right now, I assume your parents will not beat you. Therefore I will administer your punishment personally. You will return here tomorrow by the front door, at three o’clock sharp, and begin working off your transgression. If you fail to come, I will find out what your parents do for a living, and I will have them fired.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “I’ve found I can do anything I please.”

  I thought it was just an idle threat, but then I remembered the great egg shortage. A man like Crawley had more money than God in a good economy, as my father would say, and probably had friends in both high and low places. If he said he’d have my father fired, I figured I should believe it.

  “What will you pay us?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s slavery!”

  “No,” said Crawley, with a grin so wide it stretched his wrin­kles straight. “That’s community service.”

  6. As If I Didn’t Already Have Enough Annoying Things to Do Every Day, Now I Gotta Do This

  I wasn’t too hungry at dinner that night. Sure, I was no stranger to failed schemes, but never had one backfired so badly. The fifty-four bucks were the least of my worries, now that Crawley was pulling our strings. It was enough to kill any appetite.

  For the entire meal I just sort of moved my food around my plate. My parents didn’t notice, mainly because I wasn’t Frankie or Christina. If Christina doesn’t eat, right away they’re feeling her forehead to see if she’s got a fever. As for Frankie, not eating isn’t one of his problems. He’s more likely to get yelled at for taking all the food. Once I tried to take a huge plateful like Frankie does, just to see what my parents would do. While I wasn’t looking, Frankie moved some food from my plate to his, and my parents got on his case instead of mine. He always complains that I get away with everything. Well, there are two sides to that wooden nickel.

  I was unnaturally quiet for most of the meal, which was probably a mistake, because it threw off the entire family equi­librium.

  Mom and Dad had begun a conversation about what sort of carpeting to put down in our unfinished finished basement. You have to understand that my parents live to bicker. You could stick them at the beach and they’d argue whether the ocean was bluish green, or greenish blue.

  They rarely argued over dinner, though, I think because when you eat, your blood rushes from your brain to your stom­ach, putting you at a strategic disadvantage, because how are you going to come up with the real zingers when your brain isn’t at full power?

  Like I said, it started as a discussion, and then it began heat­ing up to the point where I would usually throw in some wise­crack. When I didn’t, the discussion suddenly evolved into an argument.

  “We already agreed it should be Berber!” Mom says.

  “I never agreed to anything! The carpet in the basement should match the rest of the house.” It’s escalating to the point where food is flying out of their mouths while they talk. Frankie just shakes his head, Christina’s reaching for her journal, and I start thinking about dog collars, maybe because dogs are on my mind after being at Crawley’s. When dogs bark too much, you can put on special collars, so each time the dog barks, it squirts out a funky smell. It doesn’t really teach dogs not to bark, but it distracts them long enough to make ’em forget they were bark­ing.

  I decided to let the carpet argument build just a bit more, then dropped my fork on my plate loudly. “Jeez! What’s the big deal? Put down a hardwood floor and each of you can buy a rug.”

  “Watch that fork, you’ll break the plate!” Mom says.

  “What? Are you gonna pay for a wood floor?” Dad grumbles.

  “My friend’s got a wood closet to keep away bugs,” says Christina.

  “That’s cedar,” Mom explains.

  “We oughta build a cedar closet,” says Dad.

  And that was that. The conversation lapsed into an endless stream of other topics, and I went back to pushing my food around my plate. They never noticed I had stopped the argu­ment, just like they didn’t notice I wasn’t eating. Sometimes the Schwa had nothing on me.

  ***

  “What do you think he’ll make us do?” the Schwa asked as we walked as slow as we dared from school to Crawley’s the next afternoon.

  “I really don’t want to think about it.” Truth was, I spent most of the night thinking about it. I could barely get my homework done, which is not all that unusual, but this time it wasn’t because of TV, or video games, or my friends. It was be­cause all I could think of were the many forms of torture Craw­ley could devise. I once had a teacher who said my imagination was about as developed as my appendix, but I don’t agree, be­cause I came up with a whole bunch of possibilities of what Crawley could do. He could make us clean his dog-fouled patio with our toothbrushes—they do stuff like that in the army, I hear. He could send us on dangerous errands to Mafia types where we might get whacked, because anyon
e that rich in Brooklyn has gotta know a few of those guys. Or what if he wanted us to move the bodies he’s got locked up in a cellar be­neath the restaurant? At three in the morning, when you’re tossing in bed, it sounds almost possible, proving that my imag­ination is alive and well, or, I guess I should say, alive and sick.

  “I think we’re gonna wish we were arrested,” I told the Schwa.

  The restaurant only had a few customers at this hour of the afternoon. We identified ourselves to the maitre d’, who I guess doubled as Crawley’s doorman for what few visitors he got.

  “Ah,” said the maitre d’oorman, “Mr. Crawley is expecting you. Follow me.”

  He glided up the grand staircase real smooth, like it was a fast escalator and not stairs, then he took us through an unused part of the restaurant stacked with dusty old tables and broken chairs. We went down a hallway that led to the door of Mr. Crawley’s private residence.

  “Mr. Crawley, those boys are here,” the maitre d’oorman said as he knocked. Barking and the pounding of paws followed. Then I could hear all the bolts sliding open on the other side, and Crawley pulled open the door while blocking the escape of the dogs with his wheelchair.

  “You’re five minutes early,” he said, the tone in his voice like we were half an hour late.

  We stepped in, he pushed the door closed behind us, a dog yelped because his nose got caught in the door for an instant, and there we were.

  Crawley reached into the pocket of his fancy robe—a dinner jacket, I think it’s called. The kind of thing Professor Plum would wear before killing Colonel Mustard in the ballroom with the candlestick. From the pocket he pulled a few doggie treats and hurled them over his shoulder so the dogs would leave us alone.

  “I’ve decided to sentence the two of you to twelve weeks of community service,” he said. “Mr. Bonano, from this day for­ward, you shall be responsible for the sins. You, Mr. Schwa, shall be responsible for the virtues. Take all the time you need each day, but by no means are you to complete the task any earlier than five P.M. Now get to it.”

  I looked at the Schwa, the Schwa looked at me. I felt like I had just been called up to the board to explain an Einstein the­ory, but I don’t think Einstein could figure this one out, even if he was alive.

  “Why are you staring like imbeciles? Didn’t you hear me?”

  “Yeah, we heard you,” I said. “Sins and virtues. Now would you mind speaking in English that people who aren’t, like, ninety years old can understand?”

  He scowled at us. He was really good at that. Then he spoke, very slowly, as if to morons. “The seven virtues, and the seven deadly sins. Comprendo?”

  “Oigo,” I said, “pero no comprendo.” I hear, but I don’t under­stand. At last my two years of Spanish had paid off! It was worth it for the surprised look on Crawley’s face—to see that, as Howie would put it, I was only half the moron he thought I was.

  “Great,” mumbled the Schwa. “Now he’s really gonna be pissed off.”

  But instead of saying anything, Crawley put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. All the dogs came running.

  As they crowded around him, jockeying for position, he touched each of them on the head and announced: “Prudence, Temperance, Justice, Fortitude, Faith, Hope, and Charity.” He took a breath, then continued: “Envy, Sloth, Anger, Lust, Gluttony, Pride, and Avarice. Do you understand now, or shall I get you a translator?”

  “You want each of us to walk seven dogs each, every day.”

  “Gold star for you.”

  Crawley peered at me, but I just returned his unpleasant gaze. “Why not Greed?” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Avarice is Greed, right? That’s the way I learned the seven deadly sins. So why not just name the dog Greed?”

  “Don’t you know anything?” Crawley growled. “Avarice is a much better name for a dog.”

  He spun his wheelchair and rolled into the deeper recesses of his apartment. “Leashes are hanging in the kitchen.” And he was gone.

  ***

  At first we tried to walk them two at a time, but they were so strong, so untrained, and so excited to be outside, they practi­cally pulled us into oncoming traffic. There were no shortcuts. We each could only handle one dog at a time. Walking dogs for no pay for two hours a day wasn’t exactly my idea of fun. But the Schwa and I did it. We could have gotten out of it. We could have just told our parents what we had done, and taken whatever punishment they dealt out. Even if Crawley went to the police, they wouldn’t do much about it—especially after we had shown what decent guys we were by volunteering to walk his dogs for those first few days. Still, we kept on doing it. Maybe it’s because there was a kind of a mystique to it, walking the infamous Old Man Crawley’s dogs. Everyone knew whose dogs they were—it’s not like the neighborhood is teeming with Afghans. Somehow it made us important. Or maybe we kept on doing it because we gave him our word. I can’t speak for the Schwa, but for me, my word had never really meant much of anything. I can’t count all the times I gave someone my word, then flaked out. This time was different, though, because if I didn’t keep my word, Crawley would be able to sit in his dark apartment and gloat. He’d see it as proof that I was at the shal­low end of the gene pool, and I wouldn’t give him that satisfac­tion, no matter how many barking sins I had to walk.

  “Hey, Bonano,” said Wendell Tiggor from across the street while we walked Charity and Gluttony that first week. “So I like your new girlfriend,” he says, pointing to the dog. “She’s got real animal attraction.”

  “We’d let you have one,” I told him, “but we don’t got one called Stupidity.” The Schwa and I high-fived as best we could with two dogs pulling us down the street.

  Walking dogs also meant there was less time to hang out with my other friends. Namely, Howie and Ira. It’s not like they made any extra effort to see me anyway.

  During our second week of canine slavery, however, Howie did join the Schwa and me for a few minutes one afternoon while we walked Hope and Lust.

  “I can’t hang out long,” says Howie. “I gotta walk my little brother to tae kwan do.”

  “Is he a sin or a virtue?” the Schwa asked, but it goes right over Howie’s head.

  I thought he might offer to help us walk the dogs, at least for a minute, but his hands stayed firmly shoved in his pockets. “Is Crawley as crazy as they say?”

  I tugged on the leash to keep Lust from going after a passing poodle. “Well, let’s put it this way: If he’s got bats in his belfry, he nails them to the wall to watch them wriggle.”

  The Schwa laughed.

  “He’s real mean, huh?” says Howie.

  “He hates the world and the world hates him right back.” What I didn’t say was how much the nasty old guy was grow­ing on me. I actually looked forward to seeing him, just so I could irritate him.

  Right about now Howie looks over his shoulder like the FBI might be reporting his activities to his parents, who have re­cently begun a policy of preemptive grounding. “Listen, I gotta go. So long, Antsy,” and he takes off.

  It would have been all fine and good, except for one thing. He didn’t say good-bye to the Schwa. It seemed to slip his mind that the Schwa was even there. I could tell the Schwa didn’t like this, but he didn’t say anything about it—he just looked down at Hope, who was happily sniffing gum spots on the sidewalk.

  We were heading back to Crawley’s for the next two dogs when the Schwa broke the silence. “They didn’t even notice it was orange?” he said.

  “What?”

  “The sombrero. Not a single person noticed it was orange? Not a single person even noticed it was a sombrero?”

  It was the first time he had mentioned the experiments. When we were doing them, he seemed fine. He took a scientific interest in the results. It had never occurred to me that they might have bothered him.

  “Not one.”

  “Hmm,” he said, shaking his head. “Go figure.”

  “H
ey, it’s not a bad thing,” I told him. “This Schwa Effect. It’s a natural ability—you know, like those people who can memo­rize the phone book and stuff—'idiot savants.’” This was just getting worse by the minute. “Anyway, it’s a skill you oughta be proud of.”

  “Yeah? Well, tell me how proud you feel when you don’t get a report card because the teacher forgot to make you one. Or when the bus doesn’t stop for you because the driver doesn’t notice you’re at the stop. Or when your own father makes din­ner for himself but not for you because it slipped his mind that you were there.”

  “You’re making that up,” I finally said. “That doesn’t happen.”

  “Oh yeah? Come to my house for dinner sometime.”

  ***

  The Schwa hadn’t really meant it as an invitation, but I took it as one. I was curious. I had to know just what kind of home en­vironment could turn out an invisible-ish kid. That, and I wanted to know more about his mysteriously missing mother, but I didn’t dare tell him that. I figured his reluctance to talk about his home life must have been because he was embar­rassed about it—like maybe he lived in a broken-down shack, or something.

  The Schwa lived at the edge of our neighborhood, on a street I never had been on before. When I arrived there, I have to say I was disappointed by what I saw. It was a row of small two-story homes, packed in tight, with driveways in between. His house wasn’t invisible. It wasn’t even unnoticeable. In fact, it stood out. All the other homes on the street had fake plastic siding. You know the stuff—plastic that’s supposed to look like aluminum that’s supposed to look like wood. While the rest of the homes were white, eggshell, or light blue, the Schwa’s house was canary yellow. I had to double-check the address to make sure I had the right place. The front yard was well cared for. There was even a little bubbling rock fountain in the corner that appeared to actually be made of rock and not Pisher Plastic. It was exemplary, to borrow a word I missed on my last vocabulary test: the perfect example of what a front yard should be.