“You mean that robot stuff?”
Freak goes, “Sssssh! The Fair Gwen must not know of the plan. The very idea strikes fear into her heart.”
“Well it is pretty scary,” I say, “getting an operation to give you a whole new body.”
“I’m not scared,” Freak says. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“So when does it happen?”
Freak gets this faraway look and he says, “I’m not sure. Dr. Spivak, she’s my doctor, she says maybe a year or two.”
“But how come you need a new body?” I ask. “How come you can’t just stay like you are?”
Freak shakes his head, like he knows I’m not smart enough to understand. “No one stays like they are,” he says. “Everybody is always changing. My problem is, I’m growing on the inside but not on the outside.”
He doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, which is fine with me. And in another couple of days, everything is back to normal and we’re going to school like always, and everything is going real good until Christmas vacation when, if you’ll excuse the expression, all hell breaks loose.
I’m in the down under, trying to get the stupid wrapping paper to cover the stupid presents I got for Gram and Grim, when this shouting starts upstairs.
Understand, Grim never yells at Gram, not that I can ever remember, and Gram, well, the worst thing she ever does is cry when she’s mad. But somebody sure is yelling up there, and so I sneak up the stairs and I don’t even have to put my ear to the door, that’s how loud it is.
“Over my dead body you will!”
That’s Gram yelling, and her voice is big and full of tears. Grim’s voice isn’t nearly as loud, and I open the door a crack to hear whatever it is that’s made Gram so mad at him.
“I have an obligation,” he’s saying. “A man has to protect his family.”
“Not with a gun!” Gram yells. “Not in this house! I won’t have it! Oh, I can’t stand it. How could they do this to us? How could they!”
“He fooled ’em,” Grim is saying. “Just like he fooled Annie. Just like he fooled us once upon a time. Never again, though. That man tries to set foot in this house, I aim to shoot him.”
“No guns,” Gram says. “You don’t know about guns.”
“Of course I do. I was in the army, wasn’t I?”
“That was thirty years ago! I know what will happen, don’t you think I’ve dreamt about it for the last eight years? He’ll come in here and he’ll take that gun away from you, and then he’ll do the shooting.”
By now I’ve figured out who they’re talking about, and I guess you have, too. None other than Him. Killer Kane, my father.
“Maybe they won’t let him out,” Gram is saying. “If they do, they’ll give us protection.”
“Sure they will,” Grim says. “Just like they protected our Annie.”
Next thing, Gram is crying, and you can tell Grim is trying to make her feel better, going, “There, there, my dear. I know, I know. There, there.”
A while later, I hear the cellar stairs creaking. It’s Grim, and he knocks on my door.
“Come on in.”
Grim comes inside and for once he doesn’t tell me what a rat hole I’m living in, or how it smells like a locker room because I forgot to put my socks in the hamper. He sits on the edge of the bed and folds his hands together. I never think about how old he is because he never acts old, but tonight he’s all white and bent and his skin is saggy. He’s about a thousand years old, and he says, “I guess you heard the ruckus? Your gramma gets so upset, bless her heart. Can’t abide the idea of violence. Can’t say I blame her.”
“Did he escape?” I ask. “Is that what happened?”
Grim shakes his head. “He’s up for parole.”
“That’s dumb. That’s so dumb.”
Grim goes, “You hit the nail on the head, son. What I did do, just so you know, I went into court and made it so he won’t be allowed within a mile of this house. If he does try to come here, they’ll send him back to prison, the judge promised me that much.”
I say, “Maybe you should get a gun.”
Grim doesn’t say anything for quite a while, and then he goes, “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. I can’t tell your gramma about it, though, and it breaks my heart to lie to her. That’s one thing we’ve never done.”
“I won’t tell.”
Grim is quiet again, and then he stands up from my bed and in this real old, tired voice he says, “Everything is going to be okay, Max. I’ll make sure of it. But for the next few days I want you to stay in the house. Promise me you’ll do that?”
“Cross my heart,” I say. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
Christmas Eve is real quiet. Like Freak says, “You could hear a mouse fart.” Which, even if it is a stupid joke, makes Grim smile and shake his head.
Freak and the Fair Gwen have supper with us, and we’re all trying to pretend like everything is normal, and nobody says a word about Killer Kane getting out of prison. The Fair Gwen is wearing this dark red silky blouse and a long black skirt that almost touches the floor, and her waist is so small, she looks like one of those Christmas ornaments, the kind that makes a tingle-bell sound when the branches move.
Freak is all dressed up, too, he’s wearing this tweedy new suit jacket that has patches on the elbows and Grim says all he needs is a pipe and he’ll look like quite the professor.
“No tobacco,” Freak says. “Nicotine is a toxic waste of time.”
“Just the pipe,” Grim insists. “You don’t have to smoke it.”
“Don’t get him started on bad habits,” Gram says. “Maxwell, pass the mint sauce.”
Mint sauce is one of Gram’s specialties, and you’d be amazed how it improves everything, which is why I’ve been keeping it close by. Anyhow, the food is the best, you can’t beat Gram for Christmas or Thanksgiving or birthdays, and we all eat until we’re fit to bust, except the Fair Gwen makes sure Freak doesn’t eat too fast.
“You’d think I was starving him,” the Fair Gwen says.
“Please, sir, more gruel,” he says, holding up his plate and making a funny face where his tongue sticks out sideways, and Gram laughs so hard, she has a coughing fit, which makes us all shut up.
After supper we sit around like you do, admiring the tree and talking about how lucky we are not to be homeless, and Grim starts telling these old stories about when he was a kid and they got lumps of coal in their stockings.
“If we were lucky, we got an apple core,” he says, “or a few orange rinds.”
“Now, Arthur,” Gram says. “You never got a lump of coal in your life.”
“You’re right. We never even got a lump of coal, can you imagine? My father couldn’t afford coal, so he’d write the word ‘coal’ on a piece of paper and put it in our stockings and we’d pretend it was a lump of coal, that’s how poor we were.”
The Fair Gwen is laughing to herself and shaking her head.
Gram says, “How can you tell such lies on Christmas Eve?”
“I’m telling tales, my dear, not lies. Lies are mean things, and tales are meant to entertain.”
And so we all sit there acting polite and listening to Grim make up stuff no one would ever in a million years believe, and all of us have a cup of hot chocolate and a piece of Russell Stover candy right out of the box, and then it’s time to pass around a few of the presents.
Gram has this rule that you can open one on Christmas Eve and you save the rest for morning. Which can be tough, deciding what to open first. Grim always starts it off because, like he says, he’s really a kid at heart and he can’t stand to wait.
From Gram he gets this wooly sweater that buttons up the front and he acts surprised, even though he’s got about a hundred just like it already. Then Gram opens her present from me, which is a bracelet made of shells from beaches around the world, and she right away puts it on and says it’s just what she wanted. Which is so like Gram — if you gave her an old beer can she’d act p
leased and say it was just what she wanted.
Then Freak opens his present from me and even before he gets the paper all the way off, he gives me this thumbs-up and says, “Cool.” It’s a gizmo that looks like a jackknife, but really it’s a whole bunch of little screwdrivers and wrenches and even a little magnifying glass. I’m pretty sure Freak can invent stuff with it if he feels like it.
Gram gives the Fair Gwen this scarf that just happens to match her blouse, and everybody goes ooh and ahh, and then I finally decide what present to open. Right away you’d know it was something Freak did, because the box isn’t square, it’s pointed at the top like a pyramid, and instead of regular wrapping paper, he’s got Sunday comics taped all over it, and it’s driving me nuts trying to figure out what would fit inside a pyramid-shaped box.
Freak seems like he’s just as excited as me, even though he already knows what he put inside. “Take off all the paper first,” he says. “There’s a special way to open it.”
Real careful, I peel off all the paper, and the thing is, it’s not a pyramid-shaped box he bought somewhere, he made it. You can see where he cut out the pieces of cardboard and taped them all together, and written on the sides of the pyramid are these little signs and arrows.
“Follow the arrows,” he says.
The arrows point all over the place and I have to keep turning the pyramid around, until finally I get to this sign that says:
PRESS HERE AND BE AMAZED
“Go on,” Freak says. “It’s not an explosive device, silly — it won’t blow up in your face.”
I press the spot on the pyramid and all of a sudden, all four sides fold down at the same time and I’m looking inside the pyramid and, just like Freak promised, I’m amazed.
“The young man is a genius,” Grim is saying. “And I don’t use that word lightly.”
Grim is right about that, because Freak has the whole thing rigged with these elastic bands and paper clips, which is what made the sides unfold all at the same time, and inside is this little platform and on the platform is a book. Not a normal book, like you buy in the store, but a book he made himself, you can tell that right away. It looks so special, I’m afraid to pick it up or I might ruin it.
“What I did was take all my favorite words,” Freak says, “and put them in alphabetical order.”
“Like a dictionary?”
“Exactly,” Freak says, “but different, because this is my dictionary. Go on and look inside.”
I open up the book the way he asks, and the pages smell like a ballpoint pen. It starts with A, just like a regular dictionary, but as Freak said, it’s different.
A
AARDVARK, a silly-looking creature that eats ants
AARGH, what the aardvark says when it eats ants
ABACUS, a finger-powered computer
ABSCISSA, the horizontal truth
“You don’t have to read them all tonight,” Freak says. “Save some for tomorrow. I gotta tell you, though, you’re gonna flip when you see what I did with the Z’s.”
This is the best, getting Freak’s dictionary. Everything else is extra.
I figure it will take forever to fall asleep, because my head is full of stuff. Grim and his written-down lump of coal, the pyramid with the special book inside, and how fat, wet flakes of snow were falling when the Fair Gwen towed Freak home in his American Flyer wagon, and the way he was pretending to boss her by saying, “On Donner! On Dasher! On Guinevere!” and she’s telling him to shut up or she’ll leave him outside until he turns into a snowman.
Which must be why I’m dreaming about a little snowman who looks like Freak. The snowman keeps saying, “Cool. Cool.” And when I wake up, I can feel the cold coming into my bedroom. Which is weird, because it’s always warm in the down under, with the furnace right next door.
I think I hear the wind right there in the room.
Except it’s not the wind.
Someone breathing.
Someone who rises up darker than night, as big as the room, and puts a giant hand on my face and presses down.
“Don’t say a word, boy,” he whispers. “Not a sound.”
I try to move, try to shrink myself back into the bed, but the hand follows me down. The hand is so hard and strong I can’t move, and it feels like my heart has stopped beating, it’s waiting to see what will happen next.
“I came back,” he says. “Like I promised.”
Once on the TV this dude hypnotized a lobster. Maybe you saw it. He touches a lobster and it freezes, it can’t move. That’s sort of what happens to me when his hand clamps over my mouth. Like I’m paralyzed and my head is empty and all there is in the world is that big hand and this cool breath like the wind.
“So this is where the geezers stuck you, huh?” he whispers. “Down in the basement, out of sight, out of mind?”
I still can’t see his face, he’s this huge shape in the room.
“Everything changes now,” he says. “It’s time I got to know my own son, who had his mind poisoned against me.”
He makes me sit up and shushes me to make sure I won’t make any noise. Making noise is the last thing I want to do, because I don’t know whether or not Grim ever bought that gun he mentioned, or what might happen to him if he tried to use it. Gram’s bad dream about Grim getting shot with his own gun seems pretty real right now, and I don’t want to be the one to make it come true.
“I know what they told you,” he says. “It’s all a big lie, you understand? I never killed anybody, and that’s the truth, so help me God.”
By now I’m sitting up on the bed and he’s making me put on my clothes and the weird thing is, none of this is a surprise. Somehow I always knew this would happen, that he would come for me, in the night, that I would wake up to find him there, filling the room, and that I’d feel empty.
I’m so weak, I can hardly put my shoes on. Like when you wake up and your arm is still asleep and you can’t hardly make it move? That’s what I feel like all over — numb and prickly and as light as a balloon. Like my hands might float up in the air if I let them.
“This’ll be an adventure,” he says. “You’re going to have the time of your life, boy. Okay, we’re leaving, and not a peep out of you.”
The bulkhead door is open, and you can see the stars. Some people think the stars look close enough to touch, but Freak says the sky is like a photograph from a billion years ago, it’s just some old movie they’re showing up there and lots of those stars have switched off by now. They’re already dead, and what we’re seeing is the rerun. Which makes sense if you think about it. Someday the rerun will come to an end and you’ll see all the stars start to flick off, like a billion little flames blown out by the wind.
“This way,” he says. “Quiet as a mouse.”
There’s snow on the ground. Not a lot, enough to cover the ground. I can tell how cold the air is, but I can’t feel it, even without a jacket, which I didn’t have time to put on. The cold doesn’t matter. Nothing does, really, not Grim and Gram or the old stars in the sky, or Freak and the Fair Gwen. They’re all just make-believe, this dream I was having for a long time, and now I’m awake again and he’s still filling the room somehow, even though we’re outside.
The lights are out at Freak’s house, and I’m thinking: The stars clicked off and I don’t even know why I’m thinking that, it’s like a dead voice in my head or something.
We’re under a streetlight when he says, “Let me look at you.”
He’s got these big eyebrows that make it hard to see his eyes and that’s fine, I don’t want to see them, looking at those eyes is asking to have a bad dream.
“My, my,” he says, checking me out. “Will you look at this? It’s like I’m looking at an old picture of myself. You really are a chip off the old block, you know that?”
I don’t say anything, and he reaches out and touches my face real gentle, as if he’d never hurt a fly. “I say, boy, do you know that? Answer me now.”
“Yes, sir,” I say. “Everybody says so.”
“Christmas Eve,” he says. “You know how many Christmas Eves I’ve been deprived of my own blood kin? Now is that fair, to do that to a man? Lock him up for a crime he never did?”
He’s waiting for me to answer, and I say, “No, sir, not fair.”
“That’s over and done now,” he says. “We’re starting fresh. Just you and me, boy, that’s how it was meant to be.”
I’m standing there under the streetlight and it’s amazing how quiet it is. Like everybody went away or died. The quiet is almost as big as he is. He’s as tall as me, only wider everywhere, and for some reason, maybe because we’re not far from Freak’s house, I’m thinking this weird thought: He doesn’t need a suit of armor.
No, and he doesn’t need a horse, or a lance, or a pledge to the king, or the love of a fair lady. He doesn’t need anything except what he is. He’s everything all rolled into one, and no one can ever beat him, not even the brave Lancelot.
He’s squinting around, his eyebrows are furrowed shadows, and he says, “You know what I think of when I see a neighborhood like this? Hamsters, is what I think. That’s how these people live, like hamsters in cages. They have their little wheels to run on and that’s what they do for the whole of their lives, they run and get nowhere. They just spin.”
I stand there.
“They poisoned you against me, I know that,” he says. “Give it time, you’ll see the truth.”
He starts walking fast and I walk with him, like my feet already know where to go. We’re cutting through the side streets and heading down to the pond, all cold and white and frozen. Tomorrow morning a bunch of kids will take their new sleds and skates out there, and probably lose their new mittens and scarfs and get yelled at by their moms and dads, but tonight the pond is as empty as the moon, as empty as my head.
Once a car goes by real slow around the pond, and I’ve got this strange feeling there’s no one at the wheel.
He hooks his finger in my shirt collar and makes me duck down until the car goes by.