by LR Wright
Betty snorted. “Hospital. Ha.” She stood up and shouted at him. “I’ve been to one of those and it doesn’t do a person any good, any good at all, people won’t talk to a person when they come out of there!”
“Betty, of course they will, of course they do—”
“Not to me!” She shook her head. “I went and when I came out he wouldn’t talk to me anymore, he hated me then.” She sat down again, exhausted.
“Tell me, Betty. Please.”
“I was a child,” she said dully. “I saw him fall, you see. From the tree. He hit his head on a rock or something. My brother.” She blinked rapidly. “Then he died. I was very upset, extremely upset. So I had to go to the hospital for a while. And when I got out— when I got out—she was different and he would not speak to me !”
“Who, Betty—your parents?”
She laughed loudly and looked down at the floor, leaned over to peer at it more closely. The carpet was dark blue. She saw that there were pieces of lint on it.
She stood up briskly. “I will think about the hospital. I will discuss it with Jack when he comes home the next time.”
“Betty.”
“Yes?”
“I want you to be helped. I care about you, Betty.”
She cocked her head and smiled at him. “I know,” she said, and left his office.
Chapter 18
ELIOT AND ALVIN SHIVERED in Alvin’s backyard waiting for darkness, getting a kind of shelter from a pile of rubbish lying under a big tree. Eliot made out a big old door, on its side, with a window in the top that didn’t have glass in it anymore; and an upturned wheelbarrow, its bottom rusted almost through; a scuffed soccer ball; and a swing seat with the chains still attached. Everything had been dumped in a heap underneath the tree, which was so big that its lowest branches didn’t start until way above Eliot’s head. Not far away stood a double car garage with its paint peeling off. When they’d first arrived, Eliot and Alvin had poked around in there. The garage, which had a dirt floor, was also full of junk, the whole interior piled with automobile parts and pieces of old gardening tools and cardboard boxes stuffed so full that photo albums and scrapbooks stuck out of the tops. You couldn’t see out through the one small window because of the boxes piled up in front of it.
“This here’s my stuff,” Alvin had said, pointing to some boxes just inside the door to the backyard. He pulled open the flaps of a few of them. “Yeah, see?”
Eliot saw a few books, a bunch of clothes, toys, teddy bears.
“Stuff I outgrew,” said Alvin, opening another box. He looked inside for a moment, not poking around in there like he had in the others. “Except I didn’t outgrow this stuff yet,” he said, and now he did reach into the box, and pulled out a heavy sweater that was navy blue. He looked at Eliot in amazement. “They cleared out my room,” he said. “Shit. I’ve only been gone a couple of days.”
“This is good, though,” said Eliot. “Now we don’t have to go into the house.”
They emptied the box onto a rickety Ping-Pong table that stood against one wall. Alvin changed into a pair of jeans and put on the navy sweater. He rummaged in another box and came up with a knapsack and a down jacket, some gloves, a scarf, and a pair of earmuffs, and stuffed these things plus several pairs of underwear and socks into the knapsack. “We should take a couple of these, too,” he said, indicating some rolled-up sleeping bags. “We do so still gotta go inside,” he said, wrestling himself into the jacket.
“No we don’t,” said Eliot urgently.
“Yeah we do. We gotta get us some food, and some money and stuff.”
Eliot argued with him vigorously. He realized that here in the city—and particularly here in his own backyard—Alvin was on familiar ground and Eliot wasn’t. But he didn’t know if that meant that he ought to trust Alvin’s judgment. In fact, he was very reluctant to trust Alvin’s judgment.
“It’ll be okay, Eliot,” said Alvin, hefting the knapsack onto his back, hair falling over his forehead. “Come on. Grab a sleeping bag.”
Eliot opened the door a crack and peered at the back of the house. “You got any sisters or brothers?”
“No,” Alvin grunted, working on the knapsack.
“It’s a big place for just three people.”
“My grandparents used to live with us. And my aunt. There.” He flexed his arms and pulled at the jacket, which had gotten scrunched up under the straps of the knapsack. He joined Eliot at the door. “Look. It’s almost dark.”
And then they’d moved outside, under the tree, behind the pile of junk, so they could watch the house.
Eliot was shivering by now, and trying to warm his hands by sitting on them, but the ground was so cold and damp that that didn’t help.
“Here,” said Alvin, turning his back toward Eliot. “Dig around in my knapsack for some gloves. I got more than one pair in there.”
Eliot got out some gray leather ones for Alvin and a pair of woolen ones for himself, even though woolen gloves were dorky, because he knew they’d stretch enough to fit his hands. And they continued to wait. The house remained dark; obviously unoccupied.
“Why don’t we go inside now?” said Eliot.
But Alvin shook his head. “My mom’ll be home from work any minute. We gotta wait till she goes out again, or goes to bed.”
Eliot groaned. “That’s gonna be hours. And what about your dad?”
Alvin shrugged. “Never know about my dad,” he said flatly. “Never know where he is or when he’ll be back.”
“Oh, great,” said Eliot.
Rain fell for a while, only the showery kind but still wet and cold, and then it stopped and after a while the wind began to blow, not a strong wind but more than a breeze. Eliot lifted his face to it and sniffed and thought he could smell spring a long way off.
“Okay. Well, I don’t know what’s going on here,” said Alvin. “She shoulda been here by now.” He stood up, staggering a little. “My legs got pins and needles in them. Wait a minute.” He stomped his feet a few times. “Okay. Come on. Let’s do it.”
“Jesus,” said Eliot under his breath.
Alvin crept to the back of the house with Eliot, crouched over, following him.
Eliot considered this a very scary house. In the weak light from a streetlamp somewhere behind him, in the lane, it looked even scarier than in daylight. It was tall and narrow, with three stories. In the gable at the very top there was a little window, and then there was a piece of roof that looked like a big eyebrow over the two tiny windows on the next level, and below that there was another piece of roof above the next level, where there was a big porch and some stairs leading down to the yard. Under the porch it was utterly dark. This is where Alvin led them.
“See, we used to have a dog once,” he said to Eliot in a hoarse whisper. He got down on his hands and knees—and then he vanished.
“Alvin?” Eliot breathed. “Alvin?” A little louder. He bent down and waved his hand around in the darkness, and brushed against a doorknob. He tried it, but it was locked.
“Come on,” said Alvin, his voice muffled, and he stuck his head through a flap in the door. “See?” he said, and Eliot saw the gleam of his teeth when he grinned. “A dog door.”
Eliot crawled through after him, into the basement of the house, and stood there blinking in the darkness. A tap was dripping, slowly.
“There should be a flashlight here someplace,” said Alvin from somewhere on Eliot’s right. Eliot heard him poking around and then a weak, quivering beam of light appeared. Alvin swept it around the basement, causing things to loom into view and then disappear again: a furnace, a double sink that looked like it was made of cement, an old-fashioned washing machine, and more piles of junk.
Alvin and Eliot made their way across the basement to a set of rickety stairs and started climbing, slowly, quietly, Alvin and the flashlight leading the way. Eliot heard the rattle of the knob as he opened the door at the top of the steps.
“Turn of
f the light,” Eliot whispered as they went through the door into the kitchen, and Alvin did.
Alvin said, “We gotta move fast.” He started opening drawers, hastily. “You get us some food—here,” he said, thrusting a handful of plastic grocery bags at Eliot. “You put food in here. I’m gonna go upstairs and look for money. I gotta take the flashlight,” he said apologetically, and Eliot heard the wheeze in his voice.
“Yeah, go ahead. But hurry. Shit. Hurry, okay?”
“Okay,” said Alvin, already heading down the hall.
Eliot heard him going up some stairs. “Shit.” His heart was pounding a mile a minute. “Shit,” he said, tearing off the gloves, shoving them in his pockets. He opened a cupboard and squinted, trying to see inside, and pulled out a couple of things until he knew what kind of stuff was kept there: brown sugar, flour, things like that. So he opened the next one, and here he had better luck. Crackers, cookies, cans of tuna, cans of soup, unopened boxes of fruit juices—he loaded them into one of the plastic bags and turned next to the fridge, where he took apples and oranges and a carton of cottage cheese. He spotted a covered casserole on the bottom shelf and took off the lid. Eliot was instantly ravenous. Saliva flooded his mouth. His hands were shaking as he squatted down and started shoving handfuls of macaroni and cheese into his mouth and heard himself moaning with bliss; he couldn’t chew and swallow fast enough…
“Hey!” It came from upstairs.
Eliot froze, his mouth full, hands poised over the casserole dish.
“You little bastard!”
“Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus.” Eliot staggered to his feet, still holding the casserole. He put it down on the counter. Heard feet running on the floor above. Grabbed the two plastic bags and the rolled-up sleeping bag and then hovered there in the kitchen, not knowing which way to run. Heard Alvin sprinting down the stairs.
“Here! Here!” Alvin hollered from the front of the house.
Eliot ran down the hall. “Oh, Jesus, oh, god.” He saw Alvin tearing open the front door, heard the pounding of heavier footsteps behind him on the stairs, pelted out onto the porch, down the steps, and along the street, following Alvin, who Eliot suddenly realized was laughing, so hard that he weaved and tottered as he ran, his whoops of laughter trailing behind him, streamers of glee.
Eliot risked one glance back over his shoulder and saw Alvin’s dad standing on the porch, his long underwear a lustrous white streak in the darkness.
Enid sat in the dark in a comfortable chair next to her bedroom window. The blinds were open. She had seen her lodger’s truck arrive some time earlier and had intended to go to bed then, but she was in the tender grip of a daydream and had decided to let it have its way with her.
Thus she saw him when he came around the house, carrying his duffel bag.
This puzzled her.
His bag would be filled with his clothes, clean and dirty. His electric razor would be in there, and his toothbrush and toothpaste. His deodorant. And the photograph of the child.
Enid watched him climb into the truck. An ache began, in the center of her, even though she knew he probably wasn’t going anywhere.
She waited for the engine to come to life. But it didn’t. Eventually he emerged and went up the walk, and disappeared around the back of the house. She couldn’t hear him, from up here, but she knew he was back in his apartment.
He’d forgotten about the ferries, that’s what had happened. Forgotten that the last one had left hours ago, and there wouldn’t be another until early morning.
Enid sighed, and felt sad, for he had wanted to leave, had intended to leave, and probably would leave, once morning came.
She closed the blind, turned on the light, and prepared for bed. What could she do, she wondered, to persuade him not to move on just yet?
Chapter 19
Thursday, December 1
IT WAS VERY EARLY the next morning. The gray day stirred around them. Eliot hadn’t slept—at least he was pretty sure he hadn’t. But Alvin had slept and in fact he was still doing it; his snores attested to that. Eliot found this fascinating. He had thought it was only adults who snored. He had thought snoring was the result of overindulgences like too much smoking or too much drinking or too much eating. People’s interior selves got slack and listless over time, and that was what made snoring happen. Or so he had believed. But here was this kid, honking away. Eliot was afraid somebody was going to come by and hear him.
They hadn’t run very far—not nearly far enough to suit Eliot. They’d gone only a few blocks from where Alvin’s dad had erupted out onto the porch in his white long johns.
“He’s not gonna come looking for us,” Alvin had said.
“Yeah, but he’s gonna call the detention center,” said Eliot.
“And what do you think they’re gonna do?” said Alvin. “I’ll tell you what they’re gonna do. They’ll call the cops, and the cops’ll come out and talk to my old man. But it’ll take them a long time to get around to it. By that time we’ll be outa here. Besides, they’re sure not gonna start searching for us, not in this neighborhood.”
But Eliot knew they’d be looking for him, all right. And they’d know that he and Alvin were together. So that when Alvin’s dad called the detention center…
Eliot couldn’t deal with this tonight. He’d think about it in the morning. Worry about it in the morning.
Alvin had led them to a small park, a square block of rolling grass and clusters of trees, and they had crawled on hands and knees underneath the lowest branches, which swept the ground, hauling the knapsack and the plastic grocery bags after them. They spread the sleeping bag out on the damp ground, which was covered with brown needles. They emptied the plastic bags onto the sleeping bag and Alvin trained the weak, trembling beam of the flashlight on it.
They selected packets of cheese and crackers, and peanut butter and crackers that came with little plastic knives, and wolfed down the food and gulped a couple of cartons of juice.
Then Alvin lay down on the sleeping bag, curled up with his back to Eliot, and almost right away he was asleep.
Eliot put their supplies away in the bags and put the bags in a hollow between two trees and sat with his back against the trunk of one of them, his arms around his knees.
It was very sheltered in there. He could just barely see out through the branches that draped themselves down around them. He had to wiggle over a little bit so that one of them wouldn’t poke him in the eye. He figured that if it didn’t rain too hard they wouldn’t get very wet: the ground was barely damp, the layers of branches too thick to let many raindrops through. And they wouldn’t feel much of a wind, either. Still, he’d rather be inside somewhere, lying on a bed. It was much better to be warm and completely dry, if you had to stay awake.
After a while he lay down on the sleeping bag, in the corner opposite to Alvin. Now and then he closed his eyes, but never for very long. Alvin had told him before he went to sleep that there were animals in the neighborhood. Not just cats and dogs but wild animals, squirrels, and raccoons, and Alvin said he’d even seen a big old waddly skunk once when he was creeping along the alley behind his house at four in the morning. Eliot had been skeptical. But now, lying awake in the shelter of a bunch of low-slung trees, listening to the occasional pit-pat of rain, a hollow twangy sound as it struck the needles and then slid right off, and the breeze hissing around them, it was easy to start imagining creatures hiding nearby, studying them in secret with eyes like shiny black buttons. Once or twice he thought he heard something rummaging around in the plastic bags, and he thought they should have hung them in the tree like people did when they went camping in the woods, so bears couldn’t get at their supplies. But maybe raccoons and skunks climbed trees. He didn’t know a damn thing about raccoons or skunks. He made himself sit up and turn on the flashlight but didn’t see anything poking at the plastic bags.
Now, lying on his back with his hands behind his head, Eliot saw that the darkness was fading away. He squinte
d at his watch, but it still wasn’t light enough to tell the time. His stomach was rumbling. Above them a bird called out, and Eliot wondered if it was having a dream.
Alvin suddenly emitted a great snort of a snore. “I gotta take a squirt,” he said, in a loud whisper.
Eliot didn’t hear him move, though. “Go behind a tree,” said Eliot.
“It’s too dark,” said Alvin. “I gotta wait for daylight.”
Eliot got to his feet, stretched, and sat down again, scratching his back against a tree trunk—there was a big itch there right between his shoulder blades. Then he settled back to wait out the rest of the night, sharing it with the medicinal scent of the trees and the dim shape of Alvin and an occasional scurrying sound that might have been a smidgen of wind trying to get underneath the tree branches or else maybe it was mice.
Gradually the darkness faded into the gray of early morning, like a Polaroid photograph, and Alvin scrambled up and pushed through the tree branches.
Eliot felt better now that day was definitely coming. He stood up and brushed off his jeans and decided that he wouldn’t consider the future until after he’d eaten.
A few minutes later he and Alvin once more dumped the contents of the plastic bags onto the sleeping bag. “We better eat up the cottage cheese,” he said.
“Yeah. We can use those little stick things from the cheese and crackers,” said Alvin.
“There’s an important thing missing here,” said Eliot, gazing at their supplies.
“What? What?” said Alvin, digging around in the bag they’d put their garbage in the night before, looking for the little sticks.
“A can opener.”
“That’ll be today’s project,” said Alvin.
“There’s no way I’m living on the street.” Eliot made this announcement after they’d eaten. Alvin was taking regular peeks through the curtain of tree branches. Eliot observed him irritably. “I thought you said nobody’d be coming after us?”
“They won’t,” said Alvin. “But people come here, you know, with their dogs and stuff, with their kids.”