But the ball never quite reached Hands. Just as he was about to cradle it in his big brown loving mitts, it vanished. By the time he recovered from the shock, a little kid was weaving upfield through the varsity football players. Nobody laid a paw on him. When the kid got down to the soccer field, he turned and punted the ball. It sailed back over the up-looking gym-classers, spiraling more perfectly than anything Brian Denehy had ever thrown, and landed in the outstretched hands of still stunned Hands Down. Then the kid ran off.
There was one other thing, something that all of them saw but no one believed until they compared notes after school that day: up until the punt, the kid had done everything with one hand. He had to, because in his other hand was a book.
5
Later on that first day, there was a commotion in the West End. At 803 Oriole Street, to be exact. At the backyard of 803 Oriole, to be exacter.
This, of course, was the infamous address of Finsterwald. Kids stayed away from Finsterwald’s the way old people stay away from Saturday afternoon matinees at a two-dollar movie. And what would happen to a kid who didn’t stay away? That was a question best left unanswered. Suffice it to say that occasionally, even today, if some poor, raggedy, nicotine-stained wretch is seen shuffling through town, word will spread that this once was a bright, happy, normal child who had the misfortune of blundering onto Finsterwald’s property.
That’s why, if you valued your life, you never chased a ball into Finsterwald’s backyard. Finsterwald’s backyard was a graveyard of tennis balls and baseballs and footballs and Frisbees and model airplanes and oneway boomerangs.
That’s why his front steps were the only un-sat-on front steps in town.
And why no paperkid would ever deliver there.
And why no kid on a snow day would ever shovel that sidewalk, not for a zillion dollars.
So, it was late afternoon, and screams were coming from Finsterwald’s.
Who? What? Why?
The screamer was a boy whose name is lost to us, for after this day he disappears from the pages of history. We believe he was about ten years old. Let’s call him Arnold Jones.
Arnold Jones was being hoisted in the air above Finsterwald’s backyard fence. The hoisters were three or four high school kids. This was one of the things they did for fun. Arnold Jones had apparently forgotten one of the cardinal rules of survival in the West End: Never let yourself be near Finsterwald’s and high school kids at the same time.
So, there’s Arnold Jones, held up by all these hands, flopping and kicking and shrieking like some poor Aztec human sacrifice about to be tossed off a pyramid. “No! No! Please!” he pleads. “Pleeeeeeeeeeeeese!”
So of course, they do it. The high-schoolers dump him into the yard. And now they back off, no longer laughing, just watching, watching the back door of the house, the windows, the dark green shades.
As for Arnold Jones, he clams up the instant he hits the ground. He’s on his knees now, all hunched and puckered. His eyes goggle at the back door, at the door knob. He’s paralyzed, a mouse in front of the yawning maw of a python.
Now, after a minute or two of breathless silence, one of the high-schoolers thinks he hears something. He whispers: “Listen.” Another one hears it. A faint, tiny noise. A rattling. A chittering. A chattering. And getting louder—yes—chattering teeth. Arnold Jones’s teeth. They’re chattering like snare drums. And now, as if his mouth isn’t big enough to hold the chatter, the rest of his body joins in. First it’s a buzz-like trembling, then the shakes, and finally it’s as if every bone inside him is clamoring to get out. A high-schooler squawks: “He’s got the finsterwallies!”*
“Yeah! Yeah!” they yell, and they stand there cheering and clapping.
Years later, the high-schoolers’ accounts differ. One says the kid from nowhere hopped the fence, hopped it without ever laying a hand on it to boost himself over. Another says the kid just opened the back gate and strolled on in. Another swears it was a mirage, some sort of hallucination, possibly caused by evil emanations surrounding 803 Oriole Street.
Real or not, they all saw the same kid: not much bigger than Arnold Jones, raggedy, flap-soled sneakers, book in one hand. They saw him walk right up to Arnold, and they saw Arnold look up at him and faint dead away. Such a bad case of the finsterwallies did Arnold have that his body kept shaking for half a minute after he conked out.
The phantom Samaritan stuck the book between his teeth, crouched down, hoisted Arnold Jones’s limp carcass over his shoulder, and hauled him out of there like a sack of flour. Unfortunately, he chose to put Arnold down at the one spot in town as bad as Finsterwald’s backyard—namely, Finsterwald’s front steps. When Arnold came to and discovered this, he took off like a horsefly from a swatter.
As the stupefied high-schoolers were leaving the scene, they looked back. They saw the kid, cool times ten, stretch out on the forbidden steps and open his book to read.
6
About an hour later Mrs. Valerie Pickwell twanged open her back screen door, stood on the step, and whistled.
As whistles go, Mrs. Pickwell’s was one of the all-time greats. It reeled in every Pickwell kid for dinner every night. Never was a Pickwell kid ever late for dinner. It’s a record that will probably stand forever. The whistle wasn’t loud. It wasn’t screechy. It was a simple two-note job—one high note, one low. To an outsider, it wouldn’t sound all that special. But to the ears of a Pickwell kid, it was magic. Somehow it had the ability to slip through the slush of five o’clock noises to reach its targets.
So, from the dump, from the creek, from the tracks, from Red Hill—in ran the Pickwell kids for dinner, all ten of them. Add to that the parents, baby Didi, Grandmother and Grandfather Pickwell, Great-grandfather Pickwell, and a down-and-out taxi driver whom Mr. Pickwell was helping out (the Pickwells were always helping out somebody)—all that, and you had what Mrs. Pickwell called her “small nation.”
Only a Ping-Pong table was big enough to seat them all, and that’s what they ate around. Dinner was spaghetti. In fact, every third night dinner was spaghetti.
When dinner was over and they were all bringing their dirty dishes to the kitchen, Dominic Pickwell said to Duke Pickwell, “Who’s that kid?”
“What kid?” said Duke.
“The kid next to you at the table.”
“I don’t know. I thought Donald knew him.”
“I don’t know him,” said Donald. “I thought Dion knew him.”
“Never saw him,” said Dion. “I figured he was Deirdre’s new boyfriend.”
Deirdre kicked Dion in the shins. Duke checked back in the dining room. “He’s gone!”
The Pickwell kids dashed out the back door to the top of Rako Hill. They scanned the railroad tracks. There he was, passing Red Hill, a book in his hand. He was running, passing the spear field now, and the Pickwell kids had to blink and squint and shade their eyes to make sure they were seeing right—because the kid wasn’t running the cinders alongside the tracks, or the wooden ties. No, he was running—running—where the Pickwells themselves, where every other kid, had only ever walked—on the steel rail itself!
Keep reading for a sneak peek of SPACE STATION SEVENTH GRADE
FOOD
ONE BY ONE MY STEPFATHER TOOK THE CHICKEN BONES OUT OF the bag and laid them on the kitchen table. He laid them down real neat. In a row. Five of them. Two leg bones, two wing bones, one thigh bone.
And bones is all they were. There wasn’t a speck of meat on them.
Was this really happening? Did my stepfather really drag me out of bed at seven o’clock in the morning on my summer vacation so I could stand in the kitchen in my underpants and stare down at a row of chicken bones?
“Look familiar?” I heard him say.
“Huh?” I said. I wasn’t even sure he was talking to me. I wanted to go back to sleep.
He said it again. “Look familiar?”
“What?”
He swept his hand over the bones. “These
?”
“What about them?”
“Ever see them before?”
“See what?”
“The bones.”
“What bones?”
“These bones!” he sort of yelled.
He picked up a leg bone and drummed it in front of my eyes. “I know you did it, Jason.”
“Did what?”
He stuck the bone under my nose. I could smell it. “Jason. I know you did it.”
I called out, “Mom. I’m tired.”
My mother sang in from the dining room, “Don’t call me-ee—” like I was some stranger.
My stepfather said, “Know how I know it was you, Jason?”
“Me what?” I said.
“You who ate the chicken. My chicken. For my lunch.”
“No.”
“I’ll tell you then.” He counted on his fingers. “One: because it wasn’t Mary. She hates chicken.” (Mary is my cootyhead sister.) “Two: it wasn’t Timmy. He doesn’t steal. Yet, anyway.” (Timmy is my little brother. He does too steal. My dinosaurs.) “And three and four: it wasn’t your mother, and it sure as heck wasn’t yours truly.”
“Who’s that?” I yawned.
He yelled again. “ME!”
“Hon-ey!” My mother’s voice came floating in all sing-songy. “Neigh-bors.”
Was this really happening?
He toned it down again. He pulled the bone away from my nose. He stared at it. He smiled at it. He kissed it. “I would have loved you,” he whispered.
I wasn’t surprised that my stepfather talked to a bone. Not only is he a teacher at the community college, but he also does amateur acting. So you never know when he’s serious. His name is just right: Ham. It’s short for Hamilton, and it describes the way he acts pretty good too.
He went on whispering to the bone: “I would have taken you to lunch today. It would have been beautiful. Delicious. But Jason—ah—Jason did not want us to be together. He did not want me taking you away from home. He wants me to get a fast pickup at the cafeteria, not to mention a nice case of heartburn.”
“Can I go back to bed?” I said.
He didn’t seem to hear me. He said, “Am I that mean to you?” Silence. “Jason?”
“What?” I said.
“Answer my question, please?”
“I thought you were talking to the bone.”
“Answer, please.”
“What was the question?”
“Am I that mean to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Am I a cruel stepfather?” I waited, on purpose. “Well?”
“Nah,” I said. “Not really.”
“Okay, so”—he put the bone down, put his hands on my shoulders—“what do you think’s going to happen if you tell the truth?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Think about it. Seriously.” He was being the teacher now. “I’d like to know what’s inside your head. Do you think I would string you up against the rafters in the cellar?” I tried to twist away but my shoulders wouldn’t move. “Come on, seriously. Is that what you think?”
“Nah, I guess not.”
“You guess not?”
“Nah. Just kiddin’.”
“Well then, do you think I’m going to beat you?”
“I guess not. Nah.”
“Okay. So far so good. Do you think I would—uh—throw boiling water in your face?”
“Nah.”
“Put your head in the washing machine and turn it on?”
“Nah.” I laughed.
“Run you over with the car? Chop your arms off? Force your mouth open and dump a thousand Brussels sprouts down your throat? Make you kiss Mary? Is that what you think?”
“I thought we were supposed to be serious,” I said.
“Right. Okay—okay—now. Serious again. Just what is it you are afraid might happen if you tell me the truth? Exactly what?”
I shrugged. “Nothin’. I guess.”
“Aha!” He clapped his hands. “That’s right! You are absolutely right. Nothing at all is going to happen to you. Not a thing.” He put the bones back into the bag. “Okay, look: we won’t even talk about these anymore. Just don’t do it again, okay?”
I shrugged and started to walk away. “Okay,” I yawned, “but I didn’t do it.”
All of a sudden the top of me stopped. Then the rest of me. He was palming my head. I was stuck there facing my mother in the dining room. She was misting a fern.
Finally the hand went away. I heard the refrigerator door open. I felt the cold. I wished I had more than underpants on. I heard a strange sound. Sort of like an animal or something. Croaky. It was his voice. It turned into words.
“… I hid it. See? There. I hid it right there… good as I could. I figured, I said to myself, ‘Put the chicken in the bag and hide it there… in the crisper… under the cucumbers… and nobody will find it. Nobody. Nobody looks under the cucumbers. Nah. Who would look there? And then, then when you come down in the morning, there it’ll be: your lunch.’ But I came down”—his voice was whispery amazed—“and they were gone. I took out the cucumbers—”
I heard something plop onto the kitchen floor, I didn’t have to look; I just knew it was a cucumber. Then the others came plopping, one by one. My mother was poking her head into the fern, misting like mad. I could tell she was cracking up.
“—sure enough: gone. And then I saw the bones.” The refrigerator door closed. “Somebody… had eaten my chicken. But nobody did it. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” He laughed. I pulled in my toes. “A contradiction in terms. A logical impossibility. How can something be eaten and there not be an eater? To be consumed without a consumer. Impossible, you say. Aha—but no! It has happened here. Right here in this kitchen. Sometime during the night a miracle took place. The chicken was consumed but there was no consumer.” The back door twanged open. He called out. “A miracle!”
He actually did it, yelled to the whole neighborhood. Mom started pulling little brown leaves from the fern. They fluttered to the floor. The back door closed.
His voice was softer now. He just kept saying the same stuff over and over. “A miracle… a miracle… right here in this house… this kitchen… a big fat mother of a miracle… right here…”
My mother flicked her head for me to go. Her eyes were teary from laughing. The last thing I heard on my way upstairs was Ham saying, “… it’s just sad, honey. Cruel really…” And my mother saying, “No, not cruel…”
So after I finally got a little sleep I heard Richie calling in the driveway.
I looked out the window. “What do you want?”
“Let’s go baggin’.”
We went to the A&P. We go there when we need money. Pretty soon we’re going to start saving it all up, so by the time we’re old enough to drive we can buy a custom van and go to California—if there’s still gas.
Bagging was slow. Not many people were buying food that day. And the ones that were, were mostly men and mothers. You never get anything off them. They see you coming and they right away snatch up a bag and start doing their own. By lunch we had a measly 90¢ between us.
“What we need here,” said Richie “is a flock of old ladies.”
So we were splitting a soda and some chocolate cupcakes (as usual there was nothing left over for the van) when all of a sudden Richie yells “old lady!” and the soda goes spilling and the both of us go racing up to the counter where this old lady is just starting to get rung up. It’s a good thing the cashier didn’t turn around, because we were laughing and choking and spitting out cupcake like a couple of chocolate geysers.
The old lady didn’t seem to mind. She just kept smiling away at us. I never saw her before, but I had a feeling right from the start that she was rich. You could just tell. She had this big pin like an egg on her dress. It looked like a diamond. And she had this animal slung around her neck. Dead, of course, but it still had its face and feet. The rest was brown and furry.
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“Look, Rich!” I whispered. “A mink stole!”
He squinted at it. “Looks more like a fox to me.”
“No, no, I’m telling you, it’s a mink. I’m telling you—she’s rich!”
I was even surer she was rich when I saw the lamb chops. I had a lamb chop once, and it was about the best thing I ever ate. Ham and my mother ruined theirs by putting mint jelly on them. Sometimes parents’ tastes are so weird. I put good old grape jelly on mine, and that was fine. I asked Ham why we didn’t have lamb chops more, and he said what he always says about everything: “Inflation.” Well, the old lady had four of them. The rest of the stuff was mostly dog food, bottled water, and prune juice. Ugh!
After paying the bill the old lady just kept grinning and nodding away. I started thinking I might be wrong and that she might be from the state nuthouse, which is only a mile away. Then the cashier leaned over. “Why don’t you guys carry her things home.” He leaned over more. “She can’t hear.”
So Richie and me each took a bag and we almost went dancing down the street after her. Richie started saying “hey” louder and louder, but she never turned around. Then he screamed right into the back of her head: “BOO!” She didn’t flinch.
“Yahoo!” I yelled. “Diamonds—lamb chops—mink! We got ourselves a millionaire!”
“What do you think we’ll get?” Richie yelled.
“Millions!” I yelled. “Jillions!”
The mink face kept staring at us from the old lady’s shoulder. With its black eyes all round and wide, it looked as impressed as we were. Then we saw her house. It was a row house, scrunched in between all these other skinny brick houses on this dumpy little side street.
Richie kicked me. “She ain’t no millionaire.” He started to put his bag right down there on the sidewalk and walk away.