“Jane who?” he hissed back at me.
“Bent! Jane Bent! Pretty girl with pigtails? Came over and shook your hand and said, ‘Nice’ when you’d finished up a fight in the yard?”
“Who told you that?” he hissed.
I gurgled, “You!”
Sister Louise looked up, half amazed and half not gruntled. “What is it, El Bueno?” she husked in her gravelly Lionel Stander voice.
“Nothing, Sister. Some kind of bug just landed on my neck.”
“So instead of slapping at it you decided just to accuse it?”
I hadn’t thought fast enough. She’d been as likely to swallow my story as to take off her hood and then fill it with drugged Brazil nuts to feed to the pigeons camping out on our window ledges, cooing and strutting around like they thought they were really special and the white stuff all over the ledges was tributes from subservient finches, but she hadn’t found her weapon as yet, so she lowered her glare to her briefcase in what I would describe as extreme slow motion, maybe thirty-six frames per second, and possibly wishing that she were the Medusa. She ended it all with a “Hmph!”
At mid-morning recess I landed on Farragher again until at least he said maybe he remembered Jane. “Yeah, some girl shook my hand,” he allowed, but then he had to add “Maybe,” explaining that his windmill defense could at times cause “some dizziness” in the “aftermath of battle.”
“Where’d you learn that word?” I said, my blood running hot.
“What word?”
“The word ‘aftermath,’ you moron!”
Many hands at last disengaged mine from his throat.
For now.
At recess I collared Baloqui, grabbing him forcefully by the front of his sweater and pulling him close to ask, my eyes wide, my nostrils flaring, “Listen, tell me, is there really a Jane Bent at this school?” And after his usual trademark frowns and glares of intently probing paranoid suspicion, not to mention his infuriating quietly uttered demand to know, “Why is this important to you?” he confirmed to me that Jane was enrolled at St. Stephen’s and confided in a whisper behind his hand that the boys in eighth grade were just having me on. But then what did that mean inasmuch as he had previously confirmed the existence of the Asp and Mr. Am, and, if pressed, would have sworn that not only was Nancy Drew a real person but she would “probably be coming to Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Come on in, El Bueno. Take a seat.”
There was no other way.
Miss Doyle motioned to a chair beside her desk where she was probably bringing my tardy record up to date by inscribing an infinity symbol in the box headed “Number of Times.”
“Be with you in a minute,” she said.
I sat down. Through the glass partition of the file room I saw Sister Veronica’s hood bobbing up and down and out of sight a few times very quickly in succession like some huge cloistered blackbird high on amphetamines and thinking that worms could be found in file drawers. On Doyle’s desk I saw a Glidden’s Paint color chart with the odds pretty even she was making a selection for either her apartment kitchen or her hair. I was also surprised to see a little framed photo of Clark Gable on her desk behind a clutch of white daisies in a water glass half filled with water. I was strangely touched. I could hear Judy Garland singing “You Made Me Love You” and wondered whether Doyle wrote “Dear Mr. Gable” letters in her mind. Finally, she lifted her pen from the ledger, and as she swiveled around to warily appraise me, the humongous cross that always dangled at her chest made a soft bumping sound against the edge of the desk. “So what’s up, El Bueno?” she asked me. “You got a new mask to show off or am I looking at it right now?”
I said, “No, ma’am. No mask. I’m all me.”
This didn’t seem to relax her.
“And then?” she said.
“And then what, please, ma’am?”
Doyle squinted suspiciously. “What do you want?”
I want nothing but the best for all of mankind, came to mind as a way of sort of easing into things, but in the presence of Miss Doyle’s overwhelming emanations of greatness, all I could think of was to blurt out, “My dad would really really like to meet you.”
She looked at me blankly for a moment, then said, “Why?”
Oh, well, what to say now for cripessakes! “I don’t know” was a total loser, and “Because he thinks you’re crazy,” I imagined, doubtless worse. But then my basic feral cunning returned to coat my honeyed, lying tongue with moonbeams:
“Oh, I talk about you almost all the time!” I gushed.
“You do?”
“Oh, yes, truly, Miss Doyle! I do!”
Her eyes narrowed.
Looking back, I think the error was the “truly.”
“Okay, let’s have it, El Bueno. What’s really on your mind?”
“Jane Bent, ma’am.”
“Who?”
“Ah, come on. Jane Bent. You see, her birthday’s coming up next week and I wanted to send her a birthday card and maybe a couple of”—my eyes flicked to the daisies on the desk and then back—“well, daisies. Just a random choice. But I don’t know her address and she hasn’t been in class all week so I…”
“Okay, hold it, kid, hold it,” Doyle told me as she lifted up a hand palm outward. “You say her name’s Jane B-e-n-t, Bent?”
“Yes, that’s right,” I said. “The one in eighth grade—I mean, just in case there’s two of them.”
“Just in case there’s two of them,” Doyle echoed dully.
She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms.
“Is this another of your put-ons, El Bueno?”
“Put-ons?”
I was frowning in puzzlement, my expression more pious than Frank Morgan’s as the Old Pirate in Tortilla Flat when he asks his dogs about a vision of St. Francis of Assisi in the woods: “Did you see him, boys? Did you see him?”
“Yeah, put-ons. Like the time you called a limousine service to come pick up Sister Veronica and take her to a prom at the Hotel Edison.”
“You’re seriously telling me I did that?”
Inclining her head a little, Doyle seemed to be appraising me with a distant, guarded fondness.
It was as if she were discerning a kindred spirit.
“Is your father anything like you?” she asked me.
“Ma’am?”
She didn’t answer. She just swiveled around, picked up her pen and went back to work. “Someone else would kick your butt for this, El Bueno. Of course we both know that there’s no Jane Bent at this school, much less two of them, for God’s sake!” She shook her head. “Why do you do these things, would you tell me?” Then she sighed and murmured something very softly.
It sounded like, “It must be in your blood.”
9
Maybe there’s more to the eye than meets it. Were Jane and Nurse Bloor and the universe real, or was I trapped in a virtual reality video game being played by some snaggle-toothed, teenaged alien being with acne, vast powers and a history of extended bouts of narcoleptic blackouts? So one second I’m sitting in Doyle’s office and the next it’s roughly seven months later with me on the Cyclone, a roller-coaster ride at Coney Island, as we’re starting down the first big vertical drop with my stomach going weightless and me yelling my head off in the middle of May. I’m not saying that I “time tripped,” you know, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five, although it also wasn’t Rip Van Winkle being wakened from a sleep of two hundred years by the roar of a 747 flying low overhead and him shaking his fist at the sky while cursing Mendel and “every other lame-brained, dipshit geneticist” who might have collaborated in the breeding of mosquitoes to such a titanic size and shouting hoarsely at the jet plane’s contrails, “What’s the goddamn good of it, man, would you tell me?” I not only knew that time had passed but also how it had passed: that it was almost summer, and that the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor and Jane was still vanished from the face of the earth. Yes, I knew these things, but not as I wo
uld have if I’d actually lived them.
It was more like a movie I’d seen.
The mighty Cyclone clattered to a gradual stop. I got off and started glancing all around me furtively and probably with big white eyeballs rolling around like Peter Lorre being hunted by the mob in M, which of course was not exactly my situation, although the way I used to look at things then it was close. It seems Sister Louise, in her bountiful view that even morons and future wanted criminals like us should have some modicum of mercy and reward against the chance that, as the dreaded statewide Regents Exams approached, we might suddenly rebel and start nailing heretical and scurrilous theses to the massive St. Stephen’s Church’s doors reading:
Who Is to Say When a Sin Is Mortal?
So a few weeks before, and in her usual froggy voice, the good sister had decreed for us a “stately pleasure dome” by which she could have meant a cool and quiet pond with giant lily pads floating on its glassy surface, although in fact she meant our class would have a school day spent instead at Coney Island, which was great, but then each of us boys was to pair off with one of the girls for the day and pay their way for all the rides. Yes. Getting to Know Me. We got paired up in a raffle of sorts, picking numbers out of a box, but instead of a regular number, instead I got the dreaded Treasure Island “black spot,” the notoriously gloomy Vera Virago. But never mind. No biggie. Okay? And I was totally with the program until we got to Coney and I sniffed that sea air and the sweet smell of taffy enfolded in that rich, wet aroma of those crinkled and salted potato fries and grilled hot dogs with mustard and relish from Nathan’s, which is when Satan swooped down and grabbed me, then took me to the top of the Parachute Jump, where he sweepingly gestured at the goodies below while at the same time cupping his hand against my ear as he whispered, “All these and lots more do I offer you, Joey! Dump Virago and double your well-deserved pleasure! Didn’t you toil and slave toting bags for old ladies for that dollar and eighty cents that you’ve saved, sometimes pissing in your corduroy knickers from depression at even having to talk to them, to answer their dithering questions while your urinary tract was close to bursting and requiring every bit of concentration on your part to prevent you from soiling? No, Joey, there is no free lunch, none at all, and most especially for Vera Virago. Remember how mockingly she laughed when you fell playing touch tag in the school yard, badly skinning both your knees on the pavement? There was blood, a lot of blood, I recall. You know, I doubted my eyes when I saw—or at least I think I saw—well, on top of your hurt she was flipping you ‘The Bird.’ Look, I shouldn’t have said that. Okay? Just forget it. I mean, who knows what I actually saw. Matter of fact I’ve got an eye exam coming up soon for new reading glasses, so there’s at least a five, maybe ten percent chance I was mistaken. She could even have been signaling someone; you know, someone in her club, perhaps some secret sign of friendship between them. And then who knows what ‘The Bird’ sign means in Albania, Joey, or to the Huaorani tribes of the Amazon. Okay? Let’s not buy trouble. Oh, well, yes, yes, I know; I know her whole pathetic story: how she’s suffered from severe depression and is so deeply and neurotically insecure that if it isn’t taken care of by the time she’s twenty-one she’ll go to bars and then slip herself a date-rape drug. Is that really your concern, Joey? Really? I don’t think so. Meantime, look, Joey! Look! Look down at Nathan’s! Fresh fries are coming out, all ready for Total Catsup Immersion! Think how many you could eat without having to share with that totally vicious, unscrupulous bitch who only yesterday…No. No, forget it. I’m sorry. No, really. I mean it. I misspoke. I misspoke and that’s the end of it. It would have been overkill and totally unnecessary—you have reason enough to owe the girl nothing without even going into what she said about your father.”
At Luna Park Virago’s blouse got all wet from the Splash Ride, not to mention a dime now already down the drain, and she had to make a stop at a restroom. You see? Have patience and your chance comes on little rat feet, because the second Virago was out of sight I made my break from Camp Chivalry, running as fast as I could to Steeplechase Park, where I plunked down my nickel admission, was forced to take the metal racehorse ride with the danger of its full visibility, and then skulked through the total, safe darkness of the Spook House, where I stumbled along through twists and turns, passing monster and vampire heads jumping out with these keening shrieks, which were the only sounds I heard for a while, it being a Thursday when school wasn’t out yet except for us mackerel snappers who were constantly threatening to take over the government if only some imbeciles in Congress were to sunder the wall between church and state by giving St. Stephen’s fifty dollars for books, whereupon we would immediately reinstate burnings at the stake and all the fun we once had with Torquemada, in whose memory we would rename the White House the “Spanish House,” all of this, of course, in our “First One Hundred Days.” Meantime, turning a corner in the darkness I made a sudden stop and then took a step backward. Someone facing me was blocking my path. I said, “Hey!” I got back silence, and I took another quiet step back. So did he. Or it. Or whatever. I said, “Hey, there! What’s up? What’s going on?” Still no answer. I was nervous, even starting to be scared. “Come on, who are you?” I hollowly uttered, once again maturely assuming the initiative. Then after another little waiting silence and deciding that I’d had quite enough, I loudly called out, “Brux!” which was a word I’d made up and often used to dispel evil spirits most years of my life, and as none to this date had successfully attacked me, the preponderance of the evidence seemed to say that it worked. Okay, fine, so I admit I took another step backward, which is when this stupid phantom stepped back as well, whereupon I, the El Bueno—the staggering genius who, years before, had discovered and announced to his dumbfounded second-grade classmates that “duty” had a meaning unrelated to bowel movements—suddenly realized I’d been talking to a full-length mirror! “Are you just my reflection, you embarrassing, naturally perfected asshole?” I erupted. “My God, I feel sorry for you! Really! I feel so sorry I’m going to puke!” And then from somewhere up ahead of me—from around another corner, really—I heard somebody sniffling and weeping in the darkness. A child. And then came the frightened cry of a sobbing little girl: “It’s too dark in here!”
Well, I fumbled and groped my way through the blackness until finally I got to her. She was huddled on the floor in a corner quietly sobbing into her hands, her little elbows propped on dimpled knees. Dim amber light from a vampire bust on the wall just above her showed her to be maybe about five years old and wearing a light blue calico dress and shiny black patent leather shoes. Obviously a Catholic. “Hey, where are your folks?” I asked her very quietly, afraid of scaring her even more. But at the sound of my voice she abruptly quit crying and looked up at me with a grin. I couldn’t quite make out her face but there were pigtails.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Did my mom send you to get me?”
I said, “No. But I’ll bet anything she’s right outside. Come on, let’s find her.”
I reached down and she took my hand and I pulled her to her feet. She was lighter than a sackful of White Castle burgers. She said, “Thank you,” and together, hand in hand, we cautiously groped our way out into sunlight and the far cry of gulls and “I’m fucking soaked!” from some girl on the Splash Ride at Luna Park. I quickly scanned the area, but no parent, no big brother or sister was waiting. I looked down at her face. Redheaded and freckled, she was smiling up at me. “Your mom should be along pretty soon,” I told her. I walked her to a bench and we’d just sat down when a sudden thought unnerved me. What if Vera Virago were to exit the Spook House? Double dog damn it! But if someone were to come for the kid, I reasoned, it would have to be here. So we stayed. I kept my eyes on the Spook House exit.
Where was my Barney Google mask when I needed it?
“Don’t worry,” I heard the kid say.
When I turned my head and looked down at her, she was smiling up at me and softly giggled.
“Don’t worry?” I said. “Don’t worry?”
“No one’s coming,” she said, looking mirthful. Then she added: “At least not soon.”
I now decided to employ that expressionless but subtly accusatory tone that I’d learned from watching all of those Charlie Chan movies. “Ah, so!” I said.
Her little hand flew to her mouth to suppress another giggle. I just stared until her smile went away and she looked solemn. And so what weirdness was this, I was wondering, flummoxed because I wasn’t about to ask some four- or five- or six-year-old girl if she read minds for a living or only for her friends, and then…“Only for my friends,” she piped up. “Special friends.”