‘What can you see from this side?’
‘Three states, if the weather’s clear.’
They said nothing about paying him. ‘Is there any water?’ the boy asked. The kid hadn’t shaved for a day, and the stubble made a green shadow on his square chin.
Luke jutted a thumb back over his shoulder. ‘In there. There’s cold soda, root beer, too,’ he added. ‘If you want it.’
‘No,’ the boy said. ‘Water’s fine.’
The boards sounded hollow under their feet, creaking and echoing as they went inside to the water fountain. He’d have to get the money from them sooner or later. The sign inside said people without cars paid fifteen cents each. It was a new State regulation; they hadn’t charged for hikers before this year. Maybe the kids would try to get out of paying the fifty cent parking fee when they noticed that sign and see if they could get away with the thirty cents.
‘You both walk all the way up?’ Luke asked when they came out again, keeping his voice casual. The girl wiped the water drops from her chin with the back of her hand, leaving a small, triangular smear of dirt. She didn’t seem to be wearing any makeup, and her skin had a queer, indoor pallor. Little beads of sweat stood out on her forehead and upper lip.
‘Sure we walked,’ she said. ‘It’s a tough walk too. A lot of work.’
The boy didn’t say anything. He had draped the raincoat over the railing and was looking through the telescope.
‘Where’d you leave your car?’
‘Oh, down there.’ The girl waved vaguely toward the foot of the mountain where the State Park road started, sloping gradually up past a hay field and a chicken farm before beginning the steep climb. ‘At the bottom. Right inside the gate.’
‘You’ll have to pay for that,’ Luke said.
The girl looked at him. ‘But we walked up.’ She seemed to be confused about what he meant. ‘We walked up the whole way.’
Luke tried again. ‘Didn’t you see the sign down there?’
‘At the gate? Sure we saw. It says fifty cents for parking up here. But we left the car and walked up.’
‘You’ll have to pay anyway,’ Luke said. He’d have to get them to put that new bit about the fifteen cents on the old gate-sign down there, too, to make things plain. ‘Even if you parked just inside the gate.’
The boy came away from the telescope. ‘Well, where can you park the car free?’ He seemed a lot easier-going than the girl. ‘And just walk up?’
The girl bit her lip. With a sudden, quick jerk of her head, she looked away from Luke and the boy, out over the green treetops that sloped down toward the river.
‘Nowhere,’ Luke kept to his point. He couldn’t see the girl’s face. What some people wouldn’t do to save twenty cents: leave their cars hidden in the brush and walk up a little way. ‘Nowhere in park bounds.’
‘What about walking, though?’ The girl’s voice rose in an odd way as she turned to him. ‘What if we just walked up with no car anywhere at all?’
‘Look, lady,’ Luke said in a reasonable, even tone, ‘you yourself just now told me you parked your car inside the gate, and that sign in the lookout there says fifty cents for parking, regardless, and a dollar on Sundays….’
‘But I don’t mean parking. I mean if we walked.’
Luke sighed. ‘Walkers pay too, lady. That sign in there says fifteen cents for walkers, fifteen cents apiece.’ He felt she was somehow getting him off the track. ‘Only maybe you didn’t notice, maybe you want to see it?’
‘You go,’ she said to the boy.
Doggedly, the back of his neck flushed hot, Luke led the boy into the hotel lobby. The girl stayed out on the veranda.
*
‘It really does say fifteen cents,’ the boy told her when he came out again. ‘Fifteen cents for walking, for each person.’
‘I don’t care what it says.’ The girl hung onto the railing and kept her back to him. ‘It’s disgusting. Making money, that’s all they want. I mean, they ought to pay people who care enough to walk all the way up here.’
Luke waited just inside the door. She sounded as though she might fly off the handle any minute; her voice was getting shriller and shriller. He’d done his job. Most of it. He’d told them what was what. Now he just had to collect the money. Slowly he walked out toward them.
‘I can see the parking fee.’ The girl whirled on him so suddenly, he wondered did she have eyes in the back of her head. ‘Even for parking way down there at the gate.’ A fleck of saliva showed at the corner of her mouth. For a second Luke thought she actually meant to spit at him. ‘But to pay for walking!’
Luke shrugged. ‘State law, lady.’ Squinting off into the green distance, to the far hills that melded, one into the other, in the August haze, he jingled his pouch of silver coins. What was she blaming him for? What was thirty cents, fifty cents? ‘Besides,’ he added, spacing his words carefully, the way one explains a problem to a difficult child, ‘you pay parking, not walking, today. So what do you want to bother yourself about the price of walking for, lady?’
‘But we were going to walk….’ The girl broke off. Turning from him with surprising swiftness, she rounded the corner of the hotel to the west side of the veranda, out of sight, the boy followed her.
Luke cut through the inside of the hotel and out onto the back porch where he could see if they tried to get off down the south side of the mountain. You couldn’t tell what kids like that would try to do. If they didn’t want to pay, the way everybody paid, they’d probably want to get off scot-free.
The girl was standing on the top of the west staircase down to the parking lot with the boy facing her, his back to Luke. She was crying, of all things, crying and dabbing at her face with a white handkerchief. Then she glanced up and saw Luke. She bent her head; she seemed to be hunting for something she had lost through the spaced cracks of the floorboards. The boy reached out to touch her shoulder, but she dodged, in that quick way of hers, and started down the steps.
The boy let her go and came around the veranda to Luke, a battered brown leather wallet open in his hand. ‘How much is it, now?’ He sounded tired. Whatever he thought, he must be sorry—about the girl, making a scene like that. Over something nobody’s fault to begin with.
‘Fifty cents,’ Luke said, ‘if your car’s on the park grounds.’
The boy counted out a quarter, two dimes and a nickel into Luke’s broad palm and went round to pick up the raincoat from the north railing where he had left it.
Dropping the coins into his money pouch, Luke followed the boy. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
The boy didn’t answer, didn’t apologize for the girl or anything, just took off down the stairs after her on the double-quick, the raincoat flapping out behind him like a hurt bird.
‘Well,’ Luke said aloud, wonderingly, to nobody but himself. ‘Well, you’d think I was a gosh-darn criminal.’ Down on the bland surface of the river the toy-size speedboats were zigzagging still, skirting the unseen reefs. Luke stared at them blankly for a bit, and then went round to the south side of the veranda. The two figures were dwindling on the road below him—the girl a little ahead, and the boy gaining on her; but before the boy could overtake her, they were lost to sight where the road vanished into the densely-wooded mountainside. ‘A gosh-darn honest-to-Pete criminal,’ Luke said.
And then he gave it up, washed his hands of the whole affair, and went inside the sun-blistered lookout to treat himself to a cold soda.
The Shadow
The winter the war began I happened to fall in the bad graces of the neighborhood for biting Leroy Kelly on the leg. Even Mrs Abrams across the street, who had an only son in technical college and no children our age, and Mr Greenbloom, the corner grocer, chose sides: they were all for the Kellys. By rights, I should have been let off easy with a clear verdict of self-defense, yet this time, for some reason, the old Washington Street ideals of fairness and chivalry didn’t seem to count.
In spite of the neighborho
od pressure, I couldn’t see apologizing unless Leroy and his sister Maureen apologized too, since they started the whole thing. My father couldn’t see my apologizing at all, and mother lit into him about this. From my listening post in the hall I tried to catch the gist of it, but they were having hot words off the point, all about aggression and honor, and passive resistance. I waited a full fifteen minutes before I realized the problem of my apology was the last thing in their heads. Neither of them brought it up to me afterwards, so I guessed my father had won, the way he won about church.
Every Sunday, mother and I set out for the Methodist Church, passing the time of day, often as not, with the Kellys or the Sullivans, or both, on their way to eleven o’clock mass at St Brigid’s. Our whole neighborhood flocked to one church or another; if it wasn’t church, it was synagogue. But mother never could persuade my father to come with us. He pottered around at home, in the garden when the weather was fair, in his study when it wasn’t, smoking and correcting papers for his German classes. I imagined he had all the religion he needed and didn’t require weekly refills the way mother did.
Give or take, my mother couldn’t get enough of preaching. She was always after me to be meek, merciful, and pure in heart: a real peacemaker. Privately, I figured mother’s sermon about ‘winning’ but not fighting back worked only if you were a fast runner. If you were being sat on and pummeled, it served less purpose than a paper halo, as proved by my skirmish with Maureen and Leroy.
*
The Kellys lived next door to us in a turreted, yellow frame house with a sagging veranda and orange and purple panes in the window on the stair landing. For convenience, my mother classed Maureen as my best friend, although she was over a year younger than I and a grade behind me in school. Leroy, just my age, was a lot more interesting. He had built a whole railroad village in his room on top of a large plywood table, which left barely enough space for his bed and the crystal set he was working on. ‘Believe-It-Or-Not-By-Ripley’ clippings and drawings of green men with grasshopper antennae and ray guns, cut out of the several science fiction magazines he subscribed to, covered the walls. He had a lead on moon rockets. If Leroy could make a radio with earphones that tuned in on regular programs like ‘The Shadow’ and ‘Lights Out’, he might well be inventing moon rockets by the time he got to college, and I favored moon rockets a lot more than dolls with open-and-shut glass eyes who wah-wahed if you held them upside down.
Maureen Kelly was one for the dolls. Everybody called her cute as a button. Petite, even for a girl of seven, Maureen had soulful brown eyes and natural ringlets that Mrs Kelly coaxed around her fat, sausage finger every morning with a damp brush. Maureen also had a trick of making her eyes go suddenly teary and guileless, a studied imitation, no doubt, of the picture of St Theresa of the Child Jesus pinned up over her bed. When she didn’t get her way, she simply raised those brown eyes to heaven and yowled. ‘Sadie Shafer, what are you doing to poor Maureen?’ Somebody’s mother, toweling her hands, flour-whitened, or wet from the dishpan, would appear in a doorway or at a window, and not a hundred straight-talking Girl Scout witnesses from around the block could convince her I wasn’t plaguing Maureen above and beyond all human feeling. Just because I was big for my age, I came in for all the scoldings going. I didn’t think I deserved it; no more than I deserved the full weight of blame for biting Leroy.
The facts of the fight were clear enough. Mrs Kelly had gone down to Greenbloom’s to get some gelatin for one of those jiggly, plastic salads she was always making, and Maureen and I were sitting by ourselves on the couch in the Kelly’s den, cutting out the last of the wardrobe for her Bobbsey twin paperdolls.
‘Let me use the big scissors, now.’ Maureen gave a delicate put-upon sigh. ‘I’m tired of mine, they make such little snips.’
I didn’t look up from the sailor suit I was trimming for the boy Bobbsey. ‘Oh, you know your mother won’t let you use these,’ I said reasonably. ‘They’re her best sewing scissors, and she said you can’t use them until you’re bigger.’
It was then that Maureen put down her stub-ended Woolworth scissors and started to tickle me. Tickling made me have hysterics, and Maureen knew it.
‘Don’t be silly, Maureen!’ I stood up out of reach on the narrow scatter rug in front of the couch. Probably nothing more would have happened if Leroy hadn’t come in at that moment.
‘Tickle her! Tickle her!’ Maureen shouted, bouncing up and down on the couch. Why Leroy responded as he did I found out several days later. Before I could dart past him and through the door, he had whisked the scatter rug from under my feet and was sitting on my stomach while Maureen squatted beside me, tickling, craven pleasure written all over her face. I squirmed; I shrieked. As far as I could see there was no escape. Leroy had my arms pinioned and Maureen wasn’t anywhere in range of my wild kicks. So I did the one thing I was free to do. I twisted my head and sank my teeth in the bare space of skin just above Leroy’s left sock, which, I had time to notice, smelled of mice, and held on until he let go of me. He fell to one side, roaring. At that moment Mrs Kelly walked in the front door.
The Kellys told certain neighbors my bite drew blood, but Leroy confessed to me, after the excitement died down and we were speaking to each other again, that the only sign he had been bitten was a few purplish teeth marks, and these turned yellow and faded in a day or two. Leroy had learned the scatter rug trick from a Green Hornet comic book he later loaned me, pointing out the place where the Green Hornet, at bay, the spy’s gun a few feet from his nose, asks humbly to pick up a cigarette he has just dropped and please, may he enjoy his last smoke on earth. The spy, carried away by his certain triumph and neglecting to notice he is standing at the end of a narrow scatter rug, says with fatal smugness, ‘Off corse!’ A deep knee bend, a flick of the wrist, and the Green Hornet has the rug out from under the spy, the spy’s gun in his hand, and the spy flat on the floor, his word-balloon crammed with asterisks and exclamation points. Maybe I’d have done the same thing if I’d had Leroy’s chance. If the scatter rug hadn’t been under my feet, Leroy would have no doubt scorned Maureen’s silly screams and both of us coolly walked out on her. Still, however such a breakdown of cause and effect may illumine a sequence of events, it doesn’t alter the events.
*
That Christmas we did not get our annual fruit cake from Mrs Abrams; the Kellys got theirs. Even after Leroy and Maureen and I had come to terms, Mrs Kelly didn’t start up the Saturday morning coffee hours with my mother which she had broken off the week of our quarrel. I continued to go to Greenbloom’s for comics and candy, but there, too, the neighborhood cold front was apparent. ‘A little something to sharpen the teeth, eh?’ Mr Greenbloom lowered his voice although there was no one else in the shop. ‘Brazil nuts, almond rock, something tough?’ His sallow, square-joweled face with the purple-pouched black eyes didn’t crinkle up in the familiar smile but remained stiff and heavy, a creased, lugubrious mask. I had an impulse to burst out ‘It wasn’t my fault. What would you have done? What would you have had me do?’ as if he had challenged me directly about the Kellys, when, of course, he had done nothing of the sort. Rack on rack of the latest gaudily-covered comic books—Superman, Wonder Woman, Tom Mix and Mickey Mouse—swam in a rainbowed blur before my eyes. I fingered a thin dime, extorted as early allowance, in my jacket pocket, yet I didn’t have the heart to choose among them. ‘I—I think I’ll come back later.’ Why I felt compelled to explain my each move so apologetically I didn’t know.
From the first, I thought the issue of my quarrel with the Kellys a pure one, uncomplicated by any flow of emotion from sources outside it—whole and self-contained as those globed, red tomatoes my mother preserved at the end of every summer in airtight Mason jars. Though the neighbors’ slights seemed to me wrong, even strangely excessive—since they included my parents as well as myself—I never doubted that justice, sooner or later, would right the balance. Probably my favorite radio programs and comic strips had something t
o do with my seeing the picture so small, and in such elementary colors.
Not that I wasn’t aware of how mean people can be.
‘Who knows what Evil lurks in the hearts of men?’ the nasal, sardonic voice of the Shadow asked rhetorically every Sunday afternoon. ‘The Shadow knows, heh, heh, heh, heh.’ Each week Leroy and I studied our lesson: somewhere innocent victims were being turned into rats by a vicious, experimental drug, burned on their bare feet with candles, fed to an indoor pool of piranha fish. Gravely, in Leroy’s room or my own, behind shut doors, or in whispers at recess on some patch of the playground, we shared our accumulating evidence of the warped, brutish emotions current in the world beyond Washington Street and the precincts of the Hunnewell School.
‘You know what they do with prisoners in Japan,’ Leroy told me one Saturday morning soon after Pearl Harbor. ‘They tie them to these stakes on the ground over these bamboo seeds, and when it rains the bamboo shoot grows right up through their back and hits the heart.’
‘Oh, a little shoot couldn’t do that,’ I objected. ‘It wouldn’t be strong enough.’
‘You’ve seen the concrete sidewalk in front of Sullivans, haven’t you—all funny cracks in it, bigger and bigger every day? Just take a look what’s pushing up under there.’ Leroy widened his pale, owl eyes significantly. ‘Mushrooms! Little, soft-headed mushrooms!’
The sequel to the Shadow’s enlightening comment on evil was, of course, his farewell message: ‘The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Grime does not pay. On his program it never did; at least never for more than twenty-five minutes at a stretch. We had no cause to wonder: Will the good people win? Only: How?
*
Still, the radio programs and the comic books were a hardwon concession; I knew mother would put her foot down once and for all at my seeing a war movie (‘It’s not good to fill the child’s mind with that trash, things are bad enough’). When, without her knowledge, I saw a Japanese prison-camp film by the simple device of going to Betty Sullivan’s birthday party which included treating ten of us to a double feature and icecream, I had some second thoughts about mother’s wisdom. Night after night, as if my shut eyelids were a private movie screen, I saw the same scene come back, poisonous, sulphur-colored: the starving men in their cells, for days without water, reached, over and over again, through the bars toward the audibly trickling fountain in the center of the prison yard, a fountain at which the slant-eyed guards drank with sadistic frequency and loud slurps.