I followed ten paces to the rear of Jack and his pals, working their wake, no plan even close to mind. They pushed ahead, out through the Boys doors and into the first warm day of spring. Tight as a posse, they were, The Magnificent Seven, and me, the unsung Eighth, hot on their trail as they skirted the girls’ side and scrambled up the knoll to the softball diamond.
I hung back by the new monkey bars, let the hyperactive cast of daredevils and crybabies serve as my diversion, should I not be as invisible to Jack as I’d concluded. A bouquet of flowers drooped from the uppermost rung alongside frayed ringlets of cord and brown stems from earlier bouquets.
The old monkey bars had been replaced the previous July after Jimmy Campbell, a kindergarten kid who’d yet to graduate to Dufferin, had pulled them down on himself and crushed his windpipe. Jimmy wasn’t heavy by most accounts, though this did not stop the grown-ups and the Record from blabbering on about diets for fatsos and playground safety for the better part of summer. The Great Monkey Bar Debate ended after tip-proof monkey bars were installed, steel and concrete anchors at each corner. On the twenty-second day of every month, Mrs. Campbell tied flowers to the monkey bars in memory of Jimmy. Mr. Malbasic, Dufferin’s principal, was said to have asked her to stay away during school hours, for fear she’d distress the children. She brushed him off. I watched for her whenever the twenty-second rolled around and let me tell you she was plenty spooky, lidless eyes Mole People buggy, her nose a foundry hook, skin as blotchy grey as Dead Jimmy’s must have been by then. The woman had a yoke at her neck, sadness in buckets at her side. She’d stare sometimes, like it should have been me in the grave instead of Jimmy. Any kid but Jimmy. I felt bad about it, too, had to fight the urge to tell her I was sorry it was not me.
Jack and his gang scattered across the playing field. Dougie Dunwood dug in at home plate. He was TV-kid good looking, curly haired and carrot-topped, with a megaphone mouth and muscles to back it. Dougie was also the town’s most famous Boy Scout. The Record had done a story on the merit badges he’d accumulated. Most ever for a kid his age. Pioneering. Paddling. Fellowship. First Aid. Crap like that. Only badge he hadn’t earned was the one he deserved most: Asshole. Everybody loved Dougie. Except me. I hated him for the pleasure of it. And watching him play ball effectively enriched my hate. Man, you should have seen the jerk swing a bat, blasting fungos and grounders and line drives till the recess bell cut the other way, and teachers hailed us back to class, whistles shrilling.
“You got a problem?”
I shifted my gaze a fraction right. A fine mist of Dougie Dunwood saliva lubricated my face. He drew a bead on my nose with the fat of his bat. “I catch you staring at me again, I’m gonna bash your teeth in, creep.”
“Mickey Mental,” I said, without meaning to. Not out loud, anyhow. Or maybe I did. A quick inventory would show I’ve uttered a lot of stupid shit over the years I would have been better off keeping to myself. The words you’re reading now, for instance.
“What did you call me?” He dribbled his bat to my chest, counted down my ribs. I had to admire the dick, his Eddie Haskell routine was more Eddie Haskell than Eddie Haskell.
Dougie was a year older and a haircut shorter. My size tended to protect me from bullies, most figuring I was older, tougher, and stronger than I was. But every now and then there’d be some canny asshole like Dougie who’d put the truth to the physical lie. “I asked you a question. What did you call me?”
I replied with the fawning enthusiasm of an autograph collector. “You got his swing. You know, Mickey Mantle? His swing.”
“Hey, Dumbwood,” Jack called as he trotted past, and Dougie took off. I was happy to award the guy a new badge: Short Attention Span.
Threats to my dental health aside, I declared my first foray into espionage a success. Recess was fifteen minutes start to finish, and Jack had remained in my sights for all but a few seconds of it. I shivered at the possibilities, possessed by an unaccustomed clarity and calling. I was Superman plying my X-ray vision, zeroing in on answers to questions I hadn’t thought to ask.
Again, the owl spoke to me. Marching up to Jack would not make us friends. I had to make Jack want us to be friends. Want us to be friends. Only then would he see me.
If I could catch him in the act of finding, I’d be set. By stealing his secrets, the tricks and tools of the finding trade, I’d be on the front page of the Record, too. Imagine what Mom would say then, how proud she’d be? Before you knew it, the great Jack Levin would be seeking me out. It’d be Jack watching me and my buddies at recess. And, boy, I’d have a ton. How could I not? Mickey Mental and me—who saw that coming?
I honed my craft, brought The Hardy Boys’ Detective Handbook into play, studied the chapter on surveillance till I could tail myself without detection. My mother, not so much.
“There’s something I need to ask you, sweetheart.”
“Yeah?”
“Last night, were you peeking into my bedroom?”
“What?”
“My bedroom, Leo. I saw you on your knees, peeking in through my door.”
“Wasn’t me.”
“Really, dear? I’m certain I saw—”
“I was in bed reading when you thought you saw me. Honest, Mom.”
“It’s normal to be curious about girls, sweetheart. Anything in particular you feel you need to know . . . it’s okay, you can talk to me. You don’t have to be shy. . . .”
“I didn’t do it. I swear. Wasn’t me.”
If there was a void in The Hardy Boys’ Detective Handbook, it was a section on plausible deniability.
Seven
Every kid’s responsibility
I couldn’t track Jack full time. I was—what?—eight, nine during the stretch. I had places to be, Mom to contend with, and no deputy to spell me on stakeouts. But I was on Jack every chance I got, you bet. In the process, I became the son of my mother’s dreams. “My goodness! What’s got into you?” I volunteered to pick up milk and bread from the A&P, aspirin and rubbing alcohol from Simmons Drugs, packages from the post office, and Mom’s dry cleaning from Old Man Blackhurst and his dreaded Sure Press—any errand that’d bring me downtown, allow me to detour by the Marquee to check up on Jack.
The Marquee Café was Jack’s family’s place, a local hangout next to the Odeon. No Jack story in the Record was complete without a mention of how he helped out at the diner, all the while maintaining his finding activities and good grades. Quotes from teachers trod similar pap: “Jack is an excellent student, well liked by all and a pleasure to have in my class.”
You know those optical illusions where if you stare at the picture one way, you see a tree, and then, if you blink, you see a face? Perhaps I wasn’t invisible to Jack, after all, and more an optical illusion, so when he looked my way he saw a tree or something and, given appropriate light and perspective, he might blink and there I’d be. More logical than selective invisibility, no?
Accordingly I took precautions, aimed for inconspicuous as the Hardy Boys instructed. Page 242, DOs AND DON’Ts.
Point 2:
“Act nonchalant. Most detectives are too
conscious of being suspected and there-
fore act suspicious.”
Point 9:
“Look around naturally. Never act furtive
or suspicious.”
I regularly spied on Jack through the Marquee’s windows, hovering nonchalant and un-furtive on the penny scale out front of the restaurant.
He was never up to much. At the cash register. At the sink. Clearing tables. Reading comics. Yakking with customers. (Always yakking with somebody, that kid.) None of it was anywhere near interesting, either, though clearly more interesting to Jack than the snoopy kid planted on the scale outside. And yet another theory occurred to me: Jack had lousy eyesight.
I shifted to his house on weekends.
The Levins lived on Queen in a red brick cottage with a screened-in porch, wicker chairs and tables, and a garden over
run with Triffids. St. Pete’s Church and schoolyard was across the street, with hedges, trees, and concrete corners tailor-made for surveillance.
Saturday mornings I’d catch Jack heading out with his mom or younger sisters, and not much else. My time was tight on Saturdays. The Odeon matinees got underway at 10, which was where Jack usually turned up anyhow.
Sunday spying was reserved for late afternoon. The highlight was the lowlight, Jack’s mom and dad yelling at each other from deep inside the house. I never did make out what was shouted, only that it wasn’t good, and imagined Jack and his sisters cowering in closets. Once, I saw Mr. Levin storm out and speed off in his car, Mrs. Levin staring after him from the doorway, posed and composed, like the possessed lady on the poster of Back from the Dead, except Mrs. Levin wasn’t wearing any flimsy nightgown or holding a fifteen-inch dagger at her hip. And for the first time ever, not having a dad didn’t seem to be such a bad thing. As for Jack and his finding expeditions, Sundays were a washout. I seldom saw the guy.
My suspicions ran the gamut.
Jack had access to a secret tunnel, his comings and goings undetected.
Jack was a master of disguise and had slipped by me in the likeness of his dad.
Jack was a shape-shifter with a propensity for stray dogs. Hell, Trenton was the puppy mill of the Baskervilles’ dreams. The town’s strays were mostly Labs, mostly black, mostly foaming at the mouth, and they’d come charging out of nowhere, chasing cars and bikes and any idiot who’d be idiot enough to run or not run. I couldn’t get through a stakeout without having my butt sniffed, my leg humped, my shoes drooled on. Who’s to say the strays weren’t Jack? Dogs were a natural for any dabbler in the therianthropic arts. I was up on Montague Summers and The Werewolf in Lore and Legend. The readable parts, anyhow. Therianthropes and therianthropy were as much a part of my vocabulary as to and be. Shape-shifters were at least as populous as mermaids, demons, and vampires. Suspect everyone.
Or what if all along it hadn’t been me, but Jack who had mastered invisibility? The slightest breeze, a movement of air, I freaked, groped the space about me, mimicked every dopey mime I’d seen on Ed Sullivan. “Is that you? Jack? You there? I won’t tell. Your secret’s safe with me.”
Far-fetched did not enter my thinking. Far-fetched is what the soon-to-be-dead assert when dismissing strange explosions on the surface of Mars. It was every kid’s responsibility to stay alert. Let the grown-ups deal with the commies. Kids were frontline against The Unknown. And whatever the hell The Unknown would ultimately prove to be, it had me by the short hairs and Trenton in the crosshairs.
Eight
Crazy shit you look back on in adulthood
and laugh your freaking head off over
It was Jimmie Dodd of The Mickey Mouse Club who’d said, “Get to the bottom of your fears, Mouseketeers, and you’ll come out on top of your fears.” I took him at his word. Especially on Fridays. My Sure Press Dry Cleaners day.
The dry cleaners had been creeping me out since self-awareness was a novelty, when Mom would lift me in my stroller through Mr. Blackhurst’s door, my wide watchful eyes and stupid whimper the enduring takeaways. Stupid because—c’mon!—this was no butcher shop, no nursery rhyme fricassee of tails and carving knives. This was Sure Press, where cleaning was alleged not to extend to skinning and quartering.
Little kids aren’t deceived by the rational. Little kids see what’s what, one foot in the world recently departed, one foot in the world currently deployed. Kids can sniff out shit years before it is.
I might have grown less wary of Sure Press over time had it been my nature to let things go. Bad things, anyhow. With Sure Press, the bad greeted you on the street outside.
Hercules had Cerberus, the three-headed dog at the gates of Hades. I had the Sewing Machine Witch of King Street.
Tailoring, Alterations & Repairs
Professional Seamstress
She toiled at her cubicle in the window, eyes habitually averted, mantis-like and slate-faced under bun and hairnet, tasked to spin hemlines into gold. “Gassed in the war, they say,” Mom often reminded, and tapped the hollow of her throat for emphasis. “Lost her voice box, poor soul.”
Compassion was not a trap I readily fell into. The fascination for me was the fried skin that ridged her hollow, four fingernail widths of corrugated red from shadow of jaw to scoop of collarbone. She didn’t need to utter a word for me to heed the rhyme she’d spew, her Vs and Ws transposed in verse and curse.
“Even a man who is pure in heart
And says his prayers by night
Can become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright.”
With nothing but proximity to go by, my mother presumed the woman to be both devoted wife and albatross of the long-suffering and insufferable Mr. Blackhurst. Mom never could see the treachery that incubated within the everyday, how the inscrutable duo catered to and fed my intuited anxieties.
The bell above the door didn’t jingle on entry so much as jing, the opening note of what I took to be the theme of my death scene. My every sense screamed funhouse, the floor never quite level, the right angles more and less than right.
Unseen and deep within the shop’s bowels vipers hissed. The steam press.
I kept my breathing to a minimum. Sure Press reeked of morgue, cadavers trashed on formaldehyde. Not that I’d been to a morgue. Closest I’d come had been Wilmot Family Funeral Home. And there was the one thing I liked about Sure Press: My father’s ghost could stop by at any time, reclaim the cleaning he’d left behind. I hoped I’d be there for it. Hoped he’d know me.
I slung the pillow case onto the counter, shook out Mom’s blouses and skirts, and settled in for the wait. Mr. Blackhurst would be in no hurry to show himself. “The British are a methodical people,” my mother had explained.
I bided my time, mulled the wisdom of a premature exit.
The Witch moistened a thread, crossed her eyes taking aim at a needle. She swivelled to her side table, sifting, shuffling. Spools. Tailors’ chalk. Tailors’ tape. Pincushions. A jumble of buttons in a White Owl cigar box.
I cleared my throat. “Is Mr. Blackhurst here?” She poked a thimble onto her finger. Maybe she was the Gatekeeper. Maybe the rules had changed and I needed a password. Maybe I was dead and had yet to be informed. The Dead would be the last to know they were dead. God was a smart guy. He’d likely ease you into the Afterlife. You know, start you off simple—trailers, cartoons, comedy short, newsreel—before the main attraction: Abbott & Costello & You Meet The Heavenly Father. Wouldn’t be the first time I questioned on which side of the firmament I stood.
“It’s my mom’s cleaning,” I said, like she’d switch it up, dance a jig at the news.
I opened and shut the door again, scuffed my heels. My mother disapproved of service bells, said they were disrespectful of hard-working people. But I was hard working, too. Jack could be in the midst of his biggest find ever right then, and I’d miss it all, stuck at the goddamn dry cleaners.
I strained for beseechingly polite. “Excuse me, Miss—” The Sewing Machine Witch accelerated the treadle, her Singer a rocket on the Bonneville Salt Flats.
I tapped the chrome service bell, my tinkle halfhearted. The steam press fell silent, and the trapdoor beneath my feet dropped open, and down I plummeted, spitting teeth, hitting rock and rock bottom. A slimy green luminescence emanated from the damp stone walls. Houdini’s Chinese Water Torture Cell is what it was, the chamber that big or small, minus latches and view. Bones lay strewn about the floor. Human. Rat. Fish. Bambi’s dad’s antlers. A shiny object beckoned from a corner. A bronze thimble. “Help! Help!” I hollered to an unseen audience, pleas falling short of my own ears. With a bicuspid, I etched a tearful goodbye in stone to Mom. With the thimble, I dug a tunnel, only to wedge myself immobile, joining the ranks of the inexplicably vanished to the eternal dismay of my poor mother.
So went the doomsday sequence inside my head. Th
e scenario would have suited me fine, too, in light of all that would transpire outside my head, the turns my actual script would take.
I tapped the chrome service bell, my tinkle halfhearted. The steam press fell silent. Voices trickled forth from the rear of the shop—Mr. Blackhurst and a woman. Hushed and indistinct. Like those whispers that erase your dreams.
“Patience, patience,” Mr. Blackhurst bellowed, no rush to show himself. The dry cleaner’s accent was high-tea mucoidal, Sheriff of Nottingham snooty, marshmallows for tonsils. Physically he was Little John tall, Friar Tuck wide, and Robin Hood tidy.
“Mr. Blackhurst is one of the good ones,” my mother would quietly observe, her glance precise and fleeting upon the man’s matrimonial millstone. (My millstone was Mom’s Pollyannaism. She thought she was watching out for me and all the while I was watching out for her.) Mr. Blackhurst never failed to be polite and kind to Mom, attentive to the faintest of stains, or to allow me a lollipop of choice, yet I felt vulnerable in his presence, unclear on where to stand, where to keep my hands, where to look. This was where he wanted me to be. Oddly, this was also where I wanted to be and why I willingly returned for more. Sure Press was a test. Of what I did not know, could not say.
He shuffled toward me, emerging through the disembodied flanks of men’s suits. My father’s herringbone swayed among them. My mother had left the suit unclaimed from the week before Dad’s accident, as though the woolen bait would one day precipitate his return to the Living. The claim slip remained where Dad had tacked it, to the cork board in our kitchen.
Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels Page 3