“I’m incubating an egg,” she snarled.
He shrugged and went upstairs. She closed her eyes and smiled.
Next morning a little kid from three blocks away came knocking at the front door. His yo-yo string had a knot fat as a mushroom.
As Amanda watched Maniac tackle the knot, an idea slithered into her brain. When the little kid left with his string good as new, she said, “Jeffrey, if I knew some way that would make it okay for you to stay, would you?”
“What do you mean ‘okay’?” he said.
“I mean, that even if there’s one or two people who aren’t too wild about you now — and that’s all there really are — that even they would like you. And everybody else who already likes you, they’ll like you even more”
Purely out of curiosity, Maniac replied, “How’s all that supposed to happen?”
Amanda told him about Cobble’s Knot.
19
If the Wonders of the World hadn’t stopped at seven, Cobble’s Knot would have been number eight.
Nobody knew how it got there. As the story goes, the original Mr. Cobble wasn’t doing too well with the original Cobble’s Corner Grocery at the corner of Hector and Birch. In his first two weeks, all he sold was some Quaker Oats and penny candy.
Then one morning, as he unlocked the front door for business, he saw the Knot. It was dangling from the flagpole that hung over the big picture window, the one that said FROSTED FOODS in icy blue-and-white letters. He got out a pair of scissors and was about to snip it off, when he noticed what an unusual and incredible, knot it was.
And then he got an idea. He could offer a prize to anyone who untangled the Knot. Publicize it. Call the newspaper. Winner’s picture on the front page, Cobble’s Corner in the background. Business would boom.
Well, he went ahead and did it, and if business didn’t exactly boom, it must have at least peeped a little, because eons later, when Maniac Magee came to town, Cobble’s Corner was still there. Only now it sold pizza instead of groceries. And the prize was different. It had started out being sixty seconds alone with the candy counter; now it was one large pizza per week for a whole year.
Which, in time, made the Knot practically priceless. Which is why, after leaving it outside for a year, Mr. Cobble took it down and kept it in a secret place inside the store and brought it out only to meet a challenger.
If you look at old pictures in the Two Mills Times, you see that the Knot was about the size and shape of a lopsided volleyball. It was made of string, but it had more contortions, ins and outs, twists and turns and dips and doodles than the brain of Albert Einstein himself. It had defeated all comers for years, including JJ. Thorndike, who grew up to be a magician, and Fingers Halloway, who grew up to be a pickpocket.
Hardly a week went by without somebody taking a shot at the Knot, and losing. And each loser added to the glory that awaited someone who could untie it.
“So you see,” said Amanda, “if you go up there and untie Cobble’s Knot — which I know you can — you’ll get your picture in the paper and you’ll be the biggest hero ever around here and nooo-body’ll mess with you then.”
Maniac listened and thought about it and finally gave a little grin. “Maybe you’re just after the pizza, since you know I can’t eat it.”
Amanda screeched. “Jeff-freee! The pizza’s not the point.” She started to hit him. He laughed and grabbed her wrists. And he said okay, he’d give it a try.
20
They brought out the Knot and hung it from the flagpole. They brought out the official square wooden table for the challenger to stand on, and from the moment Maniac climbed up, you could tell the Knot was in big trouble.
To the ordinary person, Cobble’s Knot was about as friendly as a nest of yellowjackets. Besides the tangle itself, there was the weathering of that first year, when the Knot hung outside and became hard as a rock. You could barely make out the individual strands. It was grimy, moldy, crusted over. Here and there a loop stuck out, maybe big enough to stick your pinky finger through, pitiful testimony to the challengers who had tried and failed.
And there stood Maniac, turning the Knot, checking it out. Some say there was a faint grin on his face, kind of playful, as though the Knot wasn’t his enemy at all, but an old pal just playing a little trick on him. Others say his mouth was more grim than grin, that his eyes lit up like flashbulbs, because he knew he was finally facing a knot that would stand up and fight, a worthy opponent.
He lifted it in his hands to feel the weight of it. He touched it here and touched it there, gently, daintily. He scraped a patch of crust off with his fingernail. He laid his fingertips on it, as though feeling for a pulse.
Only a few people were watching at first, and half of them were Heck’s Angels, a roving tricycle gang of four- and five-year-olds. Most of them had had sneaker-lace or yo-yo knots untied by Maniac, and they expected this would only take a couple of seconds longer. When the seconds became minutes, they started to get antsy, and before ten minutes had passed, they were zooming off in search of somebody to terrorize.
The rest of the spectators watched Maniac poke and tug and pick at the knot. Never a big pull or yank, just his fingertips touching and grazing and peck-pecking away, like some little bird.
“What’s he doin?” somebody said.
“What’s taking so long?”
“He gonna do it or not?”
After an hour, except for a few more finger-size loops, all Maniac had to show for his trouble were the flakes of knot crust that covered the table.
“He ain’t even found the end of the string yet,” somebody grumbled, and almost everybody but Amanda took off.
Maniac never noticed. He just went on working.
By lunchtime they were all back, and more kept coming. Not only kids, but grownups, too, black and white, because Cobble’s Corner was on Hector, and word was racing through the neighborhoods on both the east and west sides of the street.
What people saw they didn’t believe.
The knot had grown, swelled, exploded. It was a frizzy globe — the newspaper the next day described it as a “gigantic hairball.” Now, except for a packed-in clump at the center, it was practically all loops. You could look through it and see Maniac calmly working on the other side.
“He found the end!” somebody gasped, and the corner burst into applause.
Meanwhile, inside, Cobble’s was selling pizza left and right, not to mention zeps (a Two Mills type of hoagie), steak sandwiches, strombolis, and gallons of soda. Mr. Cobble himself came out to offer Maniac some pizza, which Maniac of course politely turned down. He did accept an orange soda, though, and then a little kid, whose sneaker laces Maniac had untied many a time, handed up to him a three-pack of Tastykake butterscotch Krimpets.
After polishing off the Krimpets, Maniac did the last thing anybody expected: he lay down and took a nap right there on the table, the knot hanging above him like a small hairy planet, the mob buzzing all around him. Maniac knew what the rest of them didn’t: the hardest part was yet to come. He had to find the right routes to untangle the mess, or it would just close up again like a rock and probably stay that way forever. He would need the touch of a surgeon, the alertness of an owl, the cunning of three foxes, and the foresight of a grand master in chess. To accomplish that, he needed to clear his head, to flush away all distraction, especially the memory of the butterscotch Krimpets, which had already hooked him.
In exactly fifteen minutes, he woke up and started back in.
Like some fairytale tailor, he threaded the end through the maze, dipping and doodling through openings the way he squiggled a football through a defense. As the long August afternoon boiled along, the exploded knot-hairball would cave in here, cave in there. It got lumpy, out of shape, saggy. The Times photographer made starbursts with his camera. The people munched on Cobble’s pizza and spilled across Hector from sidewalk to sidewalk and said “Ouuuu!” and Ahhhh!”
And then, around dinnertime, a huge roar we
nt up, a volcano of cheers. Cobble’s Knot was dead. Undone. Gone. It was nothing but string.
21
Bugles, cap guns, sirens, firecrackers, war whoops .…Cobble’s Corner was a madhouse.
Traffic had to beep and inch through the mob. Kids cried for autographs. Scraps of paper fluttered down in a shower of homemade confetti.
A beaming Mr. Cobble handed up a certificate to Maniac for the year’s worth of large pizzas. Maniac accepted it and said his thanks. The undone knot lay in a coiled heap at Maniac’s feet. Mr. Cobble grabbed it. Already people were guessing how long it was.*
The yelling went on and on, the way yelling does if only to hear itself. But one person wasn’t yelling: Amanda Beale. She was holding one of the homemade confetti scraps, gaping at it. Then she was scrambling across the sidewalk, the street, shoving people’s legs
Maniac saw. He leaped from the table. He picked up a scrap. There was printing on it, about Africa. He picked up another; this one mentioned ants. Another: Aristotle.
The encyclopedia A!
He followed the scrap-paper trail up Hector and down Sycamore, all the way to the Beales’ front steps. The only thing left of the book was the blue-and-red cover. It looked something like an empty looseleaf binder. Amanda was hunched over, rocking, squeezing it to her chest. “It was my fault,” she sobbed. “I got careless. I left it in the living room. Anybody could look through the window and . …and …” She clenched her eyes so tightly it was a wonder the tears got out.
More than anything, Maniac wanted to hug Amanda and tell her it was okay. He wanted to go inside, be with his family, in his house, his room, behind his window. But that wasn’t the right thing. The right thing was to make sure the Beales didn’t get hurt anymore. He couldn’t keep letting them pay such a price for him.
He turned and headed back up Sycamore. Maybe the man with the can-of-worms voice was right: “Back to your own kind…back to your own kind …”
He never got farther west than the far curb of Hector Street, because McNab and the Cobras were there to meet him, grinning, leering, hissing, “Yo, baby, we hear ya got a little pizza prize there …come on back …we missed ya … we been waitin’ for ya…”
So he turned and started walking north on Hector, right down the middle of the street, right down the invisible chalk line that divided East End from West End. Cars beeped at him, drivers hollered, but he never flinched. The Cobras kept right along with him on their side of the street. So did a bunch of East Enders on their side. One of them was Mars Bar. Both sides were calling for him to come over. And then they were calling at each other, then yelling, then cursing. But nobody stepped off a curb, everybody kept moving north, an ugly, snarling black-and-white escort for the kid in the middle.
And that’s how it went. Between the curbs, smack-dab down the center, Maniac Magee walked — not ran — right on out of town.
PART II
22
If you were the baby buffalo at the Elm wood Park Zoo, maybe it would have gone something like this:
You wake up. You have breakfast, compliments of mother’s milk. You mosey on over to the lean-to. Surprise! A strange new animal in there. Bigger than you, but a lot smaller than Mom. Hair, but only on top of its head. Sitting in the straw, munching on a carrot, like Mom does.
Every morning, same thing. You get to expect it. Some mornings, you forget Mom’s milk and head right on over to the lean-to. The creature offers you a carrot, but all you know how to deal with is milk. You nuzzle the new, funny-smelling, hairy-headed animal. It nuzzles you back. Mom doesn’t seem to mind.
After the nuzzling, the stranger climbs over the fence and goes away, not to return until that night. Only, one morning the stranger falls from the fence and lies on the ground, on the other side. It doesn’t move. You try to poke your nose through the chain links, but you can’t reach, you can only watch …only watch …
The old man was bumping through the zoo in the park pickup when he spotted the body clumped outside the buffalo pen. He wheeled over, got out. “A kid!” At first he could only stare, at the body, then at the baby bison, whose large brown eye seemed to be watching them both. The mother came lumbering over, nodding, as if to confirm: “A kid.”
The kid looked terrible. His clothes were scraps, rags. Wherever his body showed through, it was bony and dirty and scratched. The two bison, staring, staring, seemed to say, “Well, do something.”
The old man gathered his own bones and muscles as best he could and managed to hoist the kid and get him into the pickup. He laid him on the seat, bent his legs so he could close the door.
He knew he should take the kid straight to the hospital, or a doctor, someplace official, someplace right. But the pickup just sort of steered itself back to the band shell, and there he was, lugging the kid into the baseball-equipment room.
The season was over by now, but the army-green burlap bags still stood ready for the next ump to call, “Play ball!” He yanked out a couple of chest protectors and laid the kid down, careful with his head. At least he was breathing.
Though it wasn’t cold, it seemed as if the kid ought to be covered, so the old man took his winter work jacket off the hook and laid that over him. Then he waited and watched. With trembling, dusty fingers, he touched the kid’s limp, scrawny hand. He had never held, never really touched a kid’s hand before …
“Hey.”
The kid’s voice was barely a squeak, but it threw him back. He dropped the hand.
“Where am I?”
The old man cleared his throat. “The band shell.”
“The band shell?”
“In the back. Equipment room.”
The kid’s eyes squinted, blinked. “And you?”
“What about me?”
“Who are you?”
“Grayson.”
“Grayson. Do I know you?”
He got up. “Guess you do now.” He went to his hot plate, heated up some water, and made some chicken noodle Cup-a-Soup. He gave it to the kid, who was sitting up now. “You want a spoon?”
He looked as though he could hardly lift the cup. He held it with both hands and gulped it down. “Huh?” he said.
“Never mind. You still hungry?”
The kid flopped back down. “A little.”
“Wait here,” said Grayson, and left.
Ten minutes later he was back with a zep, a large. It took the kid less time to polish it off than it had taken Grayson to get it. He told the kid not to eat so fast, he’d get sick. The kid nodded.
Grayson said, “Where’d you get them scratches?”
“Oh, some picker bush.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Hiding.”
“Hiding? Who from?”
“Some Wds.”
“Where?”
The kid pointed. “Somewhere out there. Some other town.” He crossed his legs Indian-style on the chest protector. “Can I ask you a favor?”
“Shoot.”
“Can we go somewhere and get some butterscotch Krimpets?”
Grayson squawked, “Krimpets! You still hungry?”
“For them, I am.”
Grayson threw the greasy zep wrapper into the wastebasket. “I don’t know. Maybe you oughta do something for me first.”
“Like what?”
“Like tell me your name.”
“It’s Jeffrey Magee.”
“And where you live.”
“Well, I did live on Sycamore Street. Seven twenty-eight.”
“Did?”
“I guess I don’t anymore.”
The old man stared. “You said Sycamore?”
“Yep.”
“Ain’t that the East End?”
“Yep.”
With his fingernail, he scraped a path of dirt off the kid’s forearm. He stared at it.
“What are you doing?” the kid asked.
“Seein’ if you was white under there.”
Neither spoke for awhile.
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At last the kid said, “Anything else you want to ask me?”
The old man shrugged. “Guess not.”
“Ah, come on. Don’t stop asking.”
“I’m asked out.”
“How about the zoo, huh? Don’t you want to know what I was doing at the zoo? At the buffalo pen?”
The old man sighed. “Okay, what?”
“I was living there.”
“With the buffaloes?”
“Yep, with the buffaloes.”
“You like buffaloes?”
“It was dark when I got there. I thought it was the deer pen.”
“They switched the deer and the buffaloes around last month.”
“Okay with me. I got along better with the buffaloes anyway.”
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing.” The old man sniffed. “You sure do smell like one.”
The kid laughed. They both laughed. When they finally calmed down, the kid said, “Any chance of those Krimpets now?”
Grayson reached for the pickup keys. “Let’s go.”
23
G rayson got the Krimpets all right. He bought a whole box of three-packs. With ten packs to a box, that was thirty butterscotch Krimpets. Maniac thought he must have climbed out of that buffalo pen right into Heaven.
Then Grayson took Maniac home. Home for the old man was the Two Mills YMCA. He lived in a room on the third floor. But he didn’t take Maniac up there. He took him downstairs to the locker room. He got him a towel and a cake of soap, told him to take off his rags, and pointed the way to the showers.
Maniac stayed in the shower for an hour. He hadn’t done this since his last bath with the little ones. He smiled at the thought of them shrieking and splashing. The shower needles stung his scratches, but it was a good, welcome-back-to-town stinging.
When Maniac finally forced himself from the shower, he found the old man waiting with clothes. Grayson’s clothes. “I called the U.S. Army in to haul them buffalo rags away,” he said. “They come in with gas masks on, and they used tongs to pick ’em up and put ’em in a steel box, and they, took the box away to bury it at the bottom of the first mine shaft they come to.”