Crooked (6 page)

9

GOING

There were no more requests for deliveries when Clara came home with fifteen dollars in pay that afternoon. This just barely paid for the stationery, and she'd forgotten to clean their own driveway, a fact she realized when she saw that her mother had dug out the car, stuck the shovel into a drift by the driveway, and left. Probably she'd been late and would be mad when she came home. Clara checked for messages from Gerri—none—then went in to set the ingredients for Thai food on the counter. If they all had a nice dinner, maybe her mom wouldn't care about the shoveling.

First Clara set the table with their best tablecloth and the good china. The pale pink tablecloth, still tagged with a Kaufmann's label marked down three times, had to be ironed, and the china had been sitting so long in the cupboard that gnats had died in the cups.

When all the dishes lay gleaming on the table, Clara built a fire that went out, then another, and when that also failed, she took Ham and the electric heater up to her room, where she stashed her money and stared at her old copies of
Misty of
Chincoteague
and
Stormy: Misty's Foal,
horse books she'd read at least five times each. Clara didn't open them. In fact, her heart sunk a little just looking at them. When she'd first started at Melville, she'd brought these and similar books to school with her to read at free moments, but after a while, whenever she brought one of them out of her backpack, someone would make the low shuddery neighing sounds of a cartoon horse, which made everybody laugh. Then one afternoon, standing beside Clara's locker, Gerri nodded at her horse books and said, “Maybe you shouldn't bring those baby books to school anymore, you know?”

Clara fell asleep, and when she woke up to the heater whirring into bright orange again, it was nearly five. Wasn't her father supposed to be home by now? She went to the window and saw no car in the driveway, just wet pines and snow.

The phone rang repeatedly after that, and later, when she thought of that day, she remembered the empty china plates and the sound of the phone, the extended, ominous ring that it had when the house was closed up against darkness and cold. The first call was from her father at the airport, very cheerful, saying he'd be home within the hour. “Just called to see if I should bring anything from the store,” he said. “Is your mother home yet?”

“Not yet,” Clara said. “I bought everything for dinner, though. And the table's all set.”

“Good girl! We'll have a great time. Have you got your homework finished so we can go out for an ice cream afterward?”

“I was just about to start,” Clara said.

“Well, see how much you can do and I'll help you while I cook. How's that?”

Clara had done six algebra problems when the phone rang again.

“Clara?” a voice said. It was a boy, but Clara could tell, with a rise and then a plummet of hope, that it wasn't Amos calling to apologize.

“This is Bruce Crookshank,” he said. “Remember me?”

“Sure do,” Clara said. Then there was a silence.

“I'm calling on behalf of Amos MacKenzie,” Bruce said.

“Then forget it,” Clara said. “I'm busy.”

“Well, I've got to tell you something.”

“Does it involve nudity?”

“Nudity is something I—”

Clara cut him off by hanging up and was surprised at how pleased it made her feel. It was like getting the last word, only better. She got some Oreos out of the pantry and sat back down to her algebra. She was drawing lines and exponents,
x
's and division brackets when the telephone rang again.

“May I speak to Clara Wilson?” an adult voice asked.

“Speaking,” Clara said. Suddenly she was afraid that her father's cab had spun off the road, or that her mother had been in an accident.

“This is Butch MacKenzie, Amos's father,” the voice said, and when Clara, a little uncertain of the voice she was hearing, said nothing, he continued: “I wouldn't be calling except that there's been an accident and I believe you could be of help.”

“Accident?” Clara asked. She began to cough from swallowing an Oreo almost whole. “What kind of accident?”

“A quite serious accident,” the voice said so gravely that Clara pictured Mr. MacKenzie with a pipe in his hand.

“Was somebody hurt?” Clara asked. She had begun to feel like a movie character, and the question sounded false, almost eager, when in fact she felt a measure of panic, like she did whenever she heard an ambulance on the road.

“I'm afraid it's our boy, Amos,” the voice said.

“Amos?”

“He has been struck by a baseball bat.”

For some reason, this statement had a ring of truth that the voice didn't have. For all its drama and strangeness (Mr. MacKenzie wouldn't say “our boy,” would he?), the conversation began to seem urgent in some way.

“Who would do that?”

“We don't know yet. A vandal of some sort. The main thing is that we'd like you to visit him tomorrow if you can.”

“Me?”

“He
asked
for you, actually. He said your name and mumbled something.”

“Well,” Clara said, “I could come after school. Where is he?”

“St. Stephen's Hospital. Room 623. Let's say three-thirty sharp.”

Clara's father came home shortly thereafter, complaining about the roads, wondering about Clara's mother's whereabouts, and acting generally distracted. Clara usually felt proud of the way her father looked and dressed. He almost always wore nice leather deck shoes, khaki pants, and a solid Ivy League shirt in pale blue, pink, or yellow—Clara called it his uniform. But tonight her father looked rumpled and worn down.

To cheer him up, Clara told her father about Mrs. Harper, but he hardly listened. She didn't mention Amos MacKenzie. She thought her father might disapprove of her going to the hospital or think the whole thing was strange, which it was, but somehow it was hers, personally. “Mrs. Harper said she'd hire me again,” Clara said. “She paid me fifteen dollars.”

“That's good,” her father said, as if he were thinking about something else. He shuffled through the stack of mail on the kitchen table, then tied an apron over his blue shirt and diced vegetables while the rice slowly popped its lid up and down. The kitchen windows steamed over, the smells of coconut and garlic steeped sharply into everything, but her mother didn't come home.

Finally, when everything was not just ready but growing cold, her father called Kaufmann's. When he identified himself, he waited while he was transferred to someone else. Several minutes passed. Her father's body seemed to be slowly going limp. Then suddenly he snapped to. “Yes, this is Thurmond Wilson. I'm trying to find out if my wife, Angelica, is still at the store.”

What followed was short periods of her father listening and saying nothing except “What?” and, once, “Now wait a minute.” He was quiet for another few moments before he said, “And that was it? She didn't say anything to anyone?”

He glanced at Clara, who lowered her eyes.

Then her father stood listening for an even longer time, and when he next spoke, it was in a tired voice. “And you say she left the store at two this afternoon?” He waited, listened, and said, “Well, I appreciate your candor. And I understand”—her father hesitated, and Clara knew he was suddenly aware of her standing behind him, listening—“your position regarding her continued employment.”

After he hung up, there was a long, still moment before he turned to Clara. His face had changed. It looked gray and waxy, like Clara's grandfather had looked in his coffin. “She hasn't been at the store since two o'clock,” her father said. “Your mother just walked off.”

Clara glanced at the kitchen clock: 8:35. “Are you going to call the police?” she said. “Maybe there's been an accident.”

Her father, almost more to himself than to her, said, “I think I'll call her sister first.” But he didn't call from the kitchen. He went upstairs to his office and closed the door. Almost an hour passed before he came back down. He was still wearing the apron over his shirt, and his face still looked deathly gray.

“Your mother is going to stay at Aunt Marie's for a while,” he said.

A store of thoughts Clara didn't even know she had came flooding out of her. “So she's really going to do it. She's going to leave us here and run off to that teaching job in France.” She felt her face twisting up as if she were going to cry.

Her father stared at Clara closely. “What teaching job?”

Clara managed to clamp back the tears. She narrowed her eyes. “In France. Or Japan. Aunt Marie knows all about it. Mom talks about it with her all the time.”

Her father tried to act like this wasn't news to him, but Clara could tell it was. “Look, Clara, your mother's not running off to France or Japan or anywhere else. She's upset right now, but she isn't abandoning you.”

Clara expected him to add, “or me,” but he didn't.

As she was scraping the uneaten food down the disposal, Clara remembered her mother conversing with audiocassettes in the living room.
“Ça va?”
the tape said.
“Ça va,”
her mother replied cheerfully. This was, Clara knew, the French way of asking how things were with you, and it meant, in literal translation, “It goes.”

There was a gloomier phrase Clara wondered about. It was the French way of saying, “She went.”

10

DREAMLAND

Room 623 of St. Stephen's Hospital. Amos was twitching in his sleep. His eyes were swollen and yellowish black. Above his forehead, there was a long rectangle of shaved scalp where the doctors had stitched together a two-inch gash.

Amos was dreaming of Charles and Eddie Tripp. In this dream, Amos is strapped into a chair watching Eddie Tripp eating something that Charles hands him one at a time. The food looks like Tater Tots, except Amos knows they aren't. They are something else. Wooden-faced boys stand nearby and laugh each time Eddie licks his lips, pops one of the Tot-like objects into his mouth, and extends his hand toward Charles for another. While he watches, Amos's feet feel cold. Finally he looks down. His feet are bare and have only two toes. The others have been cut off. With a sickening sensation, he knows what Eddie Tripp has been eating.

“Amos?” Someone was tugging at his toes. “Amos? Are you off in dreamland?”

With difficulty, Amos opened his eyes. It was his nurse. It was always his nurse. The protocol was that the nurse would awaken him every two hours, ask him a few questions to make sure he was lucid, and then move on. “What city are you in?” she might ask. “What's seven times nine?” Today, after Amos had answered several such questions, she'd said, “A hundred percent! A+! Top marks!”

“I'm deeply relieved,” Amos said in a groggy voice, and the nurse departed.

Left to himself, Amos began again to think of the Tripp brothers. Amos hadn't told anyone that it was Charles Tripp who'd knocked him gaga with a baseball bat. He hadn't told the doctor, the police, or his parents. He knew in his heart he
should
say it was the Tripps, but he knew in his gut he wouldn't. If he did, the Tripps would eventually come looking for him. So he'd said it was too dark, he couldn't see faces. But somehow the police had suspected the Tripp brothers anyway. The investigator had shown him photographs of Charles Tripp, huge and smirking with his tongue poking his cheek out from inside his mouth, and little curly-headed Eddie, looking blank and almost confused. Amos had waited a long time—too long, he thought later—before saying, No, he couldn't be certain it was either of them.

Amos closed his eyes and was just beginning to slip back into sleep when Bruce popped through the door. “Big news,” he said. “Absolutely jumbo.”

“How jumbo?” Amos said in a slow, thick voice. He was so sleepy. He was so sleepy and so tired of being poked awake every two hours by nurses. He'd been here two days. He wanted to go home.

Bruce had visited Amos before. He'd seen the injuries. He called it Amos's slash-and-gash look. “Jumbo squared,” Bruce said. “Jumbo cubed.” He folded his big body into the chair near Amos's bed and sat for a moment savoring the information he was about to reveal. Then he leaned forward and said, “Jay Foley came to school with pictures of Anne Barrineau naked.”

Pictures of Anne Barrineau naked
were
big news, and Amos knew he ought to be more interested than he was. It was just that he was so sleepy.

“Foley got 'em with his telephoto Sunday afternoon through her bathroom window right out of the shower,” Bruce said. He sat back. “So, anyway, I figured I owed you one for me calling Clara and saying I was the naked you, so I explained to Foley that you'd acted heroically in defense of a snowman, and after some serious negotiation, I have brought you the photos in question.”

These words registered slowly. Amos turned in disbelief. From an interior pocket, Bruce withdrew a plastic bag containing a batch of photos, which he fanned out like a card hand, face sides down. “Pick a card, any card,” he said.

As Amos examined first one picture and then another, he began to feel funny about it. What had Anne Barrineau done to deserve Jay Foley taking pictures of her in her own bathroom and then showing them around at school?

“So whattaya think?” Bruce said. “Is it A. Barrineau au naturel or not?”

Amos handed them back and touched his closed right eyelid, which hurt so much that he felt a little sick. “Maybe. But you can't really see her face.”

Bruce set the photos in a row at the foot of Amos's bed and was studying them closely. Suddenly he slid them together. “It's her all right. I've got a very strong feeling about this.” He put the photos into the Ziploc bag and slipped the bag into the lining of his coat. He looked around the room. The boy with the ruptured spleen who'd been in the other bed yesterday was gone this afternoon. “Where's the spleenbuster?” Bruce asked, nodding toward the empty bed.

“Went home,” Amos said, and thought about it. “Lucky him.” He closed his eyes. “See you later, Crook. I'm asleep. I'm a sleeping boy.”

Amos thought he heard Bruce leaving but didn't open his eyes. He felt suddenly lazy and serene, and then he was actually asleep, dreaming first of Anne Barrineau coming to a window and staring out, and then of Clara Wilson coming forward and saying, “Amos, it's me, Clara.” In his dream, Amos was nodding. “Can you hear me, Amos?” she asked. “Amos, it's me, Clara,” she said again, and this time Amos felt himself reach out in his sleep to touch one of her breasts, at which point, to his complete surprise, he heard Clara Wilson scream.