The Janitor's Boy

  Row after row after row of keys.

  Jack had found the key safe. Almost every big building has one. The cabinet held long rows of nails spaced far enough apart so keys could hang side by side and top to bottom without bumping. Each nail was tilted slightly upward so the keys would not fall off as the doors were opened and closed.

  Each nail held at least one key, and some held as many as ten or twelve in little brass-and-silver stacks. On top of each pile there was a small, round identification tag.

  Jack’s eyes roamed over the stacks of keys, reading the tags. RM. 227, RM. 228, and so on; BOYS LCKR. RM.; ART SUPPL. CLOSET; CAFT. FREEZER; MAIN OFFICE.

  Every classroom, every closet, every washroom, every office, every desk and cabinet and cupboard in the old high school had a lock, and every lock had a key, and every key was right there, staring Jack Rankin in the face.

  His mind was reeling, and it’s a credit to Jack’s character that he didn’t immediately begin to imagine some real crimes. It would have been so simple.

  Jack sensed this. It made him uneasy.

  He was about to close the doors, but then he thought, Hey, wait a second—I’m like a janitor now, right? And the janitor can have any keys he wants. I’ll just consider this a little present from Ackerby and dear old Dad.

  Stepping in closer, Jack looked over the key tags again. Down near the lower right-hand corner he saw two stacks of keys, side by side. One was labeled BELL TOWER. The other was labeled STEAM TUNNEL.

  For Jack these labels didn’t suggest the chance to steal something, the chance to look up answers in a teacher’s textbook, the chance to mess with the principal’s computer or goof up the clock and bell system.

  The attraction of these particular keys was much more powerful.

  These keys suggested adventure.

  BELL TOWER. No secret there. The tower on the high school ruled Huntington’s tiny skyline. And finding it would be easy—just keep going up.

  But STEAM TUNNEL? That was different. That was a mystery.

  Jack thought, What the heck is a steam tunnel anyway? And where would I look for one? And if I found it, where would it go?

  Carefully, suddenly alert to each small sound, Jack hooked the padlock onto the belt loop of his jeans. Then he used both hands to lift the stack of tower keys off its nail. There were seven keys in all, each one stamped with the number 501. Jack took the key from the bottom of the stack and then put the other six back on the board. He quickly repeated the process for the tunnel keys, taking the fifth one and replacing the remaining four. The tunnel keys were stamped with the number 73.

  Stepping back with the two keys in his hand, Jack scanned the rows in the cabinet. No one would be able to tell that two little keys were missing, not just by looking. It was like borrowing two pebbles from a beach. Borrowing, Jack said to himself, not stealing.

  Footsteps.

  On the metal stairs.

  Coming down into the shop.

  Jamming the keys into the front pocket of his jeans, Jack closed the cabinet quickly, trying not to make anything jangle. He pulled the padlock from his belt loop and set it back in place, almost shut, just like it had been.

  Grabbing a plastic bucket from the stack, he bumped into the metal pails on purpose. He tossed the can of OFFIT and the putty knife noisily into his bucket, grabbed the towels and gloves, and went out through the supply closet door just as Arnie reached the bottom of the stairs.

  “Hi, Arnie,” he said, smiling. His heart was pounding.

  “Hey, Jack. Heard that I’d be seeing you around. Got stuck with a little project, right?”

  Arnie was a big joker, and he found himself very easy to amuse. He was a heavyset guy, and going up or down stairs made Arnie’s face match his red hair and freckles. Laughing turned him a shade or two deeper. That much red made a striking contrast to the green collar of his work shirt.

  Jack laughed too, mostly from relief. He was glad it hadn’t been his dad coming to the shop. His dad might have noticed his uneasiness. Jack was not a good liar, and he felt like he was telling a lie by trying to act normal as he headed toward the stairs.

  “That’s a good one, Arnie. Yeah, I’m stuck all right. Well, got to get to work—see ya.”

  As Jack took the steps two at a time Arnie said, “Yup, time to double your pleasure—eh, Jackie?” But Jack was up the stairs and into the hallway, and Arnie was left laughing all by himself.

  Jack headed for the library, up on the second floor, but gum was the last thing on his mind.

  Swinging the bucket of supplies in his left hand, he reached into his pocket with the other one. Key number 501, key number 73.

  He wasn’t Jack the Gummer.

  He wasn’t Jack the janitor’s son.

  He was Jack the explorer.

  Today, the tower; tomorrow—who knows?

  Chapter 12

  ChewoLoGy

  Jack’s hour in the library was educational. When he knocked on her door at 2:35, Mrs. Stokely was bustling about behind the glass walls of her office. Smiling, she opened her door, looked him in the face, and immediately said, “You must be John’s boy—and you must hear that a lot.”

  Jack nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I hear that pretty often. My name is Jack. . . . I . . . I’m supposed to start cleaning the gum off the bottoms of the chairs and tables.”

  The librarian’s face darkened. Shaking her head, she said, “It burns me up, the way kids leave that stuff around.” Then, smiling at Jack again, she said, “Well, it’s sure nice of you to lend your dad a hand. If it weren’t for his help, I’d have never got this place ready for the opening of school. And I’ve still got plenty to do, believe you me!”

  Jack didn’t correct Mrs. Stokely’s misunderstanding about why he was working. Instead he nodded and said, “Well. . . better get busy.”

  The high school library was a big room. Fourteen large wooden tables ran in two rows down the center of the space. The old card catalog stood on massive cast-iron legs to the left of the circulation desk. There were three computer terminals on top of it now, their screens dark except for blinking cursors.

  Working first on the pair of tables nearest the circulation desk, Jack was tricked. He thought, This is going to be a breeze. There were only six or seven wads of gum per table, and most of them were not sticky at all. He didn’t even have to tip the tables on their sides, but was simply able to lean over and reach up with the putty knife. He only had to use the OFFIT two or three times.

  But as Jack worked his way toward the back of the deep room the volume of gum increased. Dramatically.

  Distance from the librarian = safer chewing = more gum.

  By the time he reached the seventh and eighth tables, Jack was digging and chipping his way through gum that was sometimes more than half an inch thick. He felt like an archaeologist performing an excavation, examining clues left by a vanished civilization—Minnesota Jack and the Temple of Goo.

  He began to count gum layers, like counting growth rings on a tree stump. He noticed the subtle difference in color between peppermint and spearmint gum, the sharp contrast in scent and texture between chewing gum and bubble gum.

  Examining the deposits from recent years, Jack found an extraordinary range of colors. There were blues of every shade and at least fifteen different pinks. There were deep reds, bright turquoises, and soft aquamarines. Brilliant oranges, glaring yellows, and muted greens of a dozen different hues rounded out the spectrum.

  Occasionally a group of gum wads would suggest an image to Jack’s wandering mind, like cloud formations on a summer afternoon. He saw a shape that reminded him of his grandfather’s face. He saw cars and houses, birds, and an elephant.

  Mrs. Stokely interrupted. She had her coat and hat on. Looking into the bucket where Jack had been dropping the scrapings, she said, “My goodness, I had no idea there could be that much gum in here, and you’re only a little more than half done!” Jack groaned inwardly at that. “Well, good night, and be sure
to pull the door shut when you go, Jack.”

  Jack looked up at the clock. He had another fifteen minutes.

  Back on task and thinking scientifically now, Jack noticed how the gum formed two crude, over-lapping semicircles on the bottom of the table above each chair. Four chairs, eight semicircles. Simple—one semicircle for the right-handed gum stickers, the other for lefties.

  The radius of each semicircle was about the length of a kid’s arm from the elbow to the fingertips. He observed that, overall, kids using fingers to jam gum onto the table outnumbered those using thumbs. Jack also noticed that kids using their left hand to off-load gum were twice as likely to use their thumb as the kids using their right hand.

  The fluorescent lights were not quite bright enough to create clear contrast, but on some of the wads he could see perfect fingerprints pressed into the gum. Jack thought, I wonder if Ackerby knows about this.

  By the end of his hour in the library Jack was ready to give a long and scholarly lecture:

  “A Very Sticky Decade”

  by Professor Jack Rankin

  Chairman, Department of Chewology

  Hurrying back to the empty shop, Jack put his stuff away in the supply closet. Then he had a thought.

  He got another plastic bucket from the stack and knocked the day’s gum scrapings into it. He estimated that it was about a half gallon of chewed gum of every color imaginable. Grinning, he set the bucket in the corner. Maybe a gallon or two of dead gum could be used for something. At the very least, it was . . . interesting—in a creepy, disgusting sort of way.

  Then Jack moved fast, hoping to be gone before anyone came. He pulled a piece of paper out of his backpack and wrote a hurried note.

  Dear Dad—

  I didn’t take the bus, so can I ride home with you? I’m going to find a quiet place and do homework. I’ll meet you back here at five, OK?

  Jack

  He left the note on his dad’s desk, weighed it down with a stapler, and turned on the lamp. His dad would be sure to see it.

  Then he grabbed his coat and backpack and headed for the stairs. He had almost an hour and a half.

  The tower was waiting.

  Chapter 13

  ALtituDe

  An empty school can be spooky. In a building that’s seventy-five years old it’s a feeling that’s hard to shake.

  Jack walked quietly up the east stairwell, every sense on alert. At the second-floor landing he stopped. He could hear Arnie shaking his dust mop just around the corner. Jack waited, holding his breath. When the heavy footsteps headed away, he rounded the corner and kept climbing.

  The thick slate treads on the stairs were worn smooth from countless thousands of trudging feet, but Jack’s shoes barely touched down as he headed up and up.

  The fourth floor was the end of the line. It was also where his dad had been fixing a toilet, and maybe he still was.

  Jack had been up on four only once or twice, and not at all this year. All of the fifth-grade classrooms were on the second floor, except for gym and music.

  The tower rose from the middle of the building, so Jack went to his right. He edged his way down the corridor. He passed a hallway that ran south toward the back of the school.

  He reached the exact center of the building, just where he thought there would have to be a door, but there was nothing. Frustrated, Jack stopped to think.

  Then it dawned on him. The door to the tower could be along either of the two hallways that ran back from the long front corridor. The question was, if his dad was still working up here, which of the two north-south halls was he in? A loud clank from his right answered that question. Jack headed back the way he had come, and when he got to the hallway he’d passed a minute before, turned right.

  There were classrooms and lockers on the left side of the hall. Jack was focused on the right. Lockers, three classrooms, a girls bathroom, and then . . . a door.

  There was no number on the door, no lettering.

  Digging into his front pocket, Jack pulled out a key.

  Number 73. Wrong one.

  Digging again, he pulled out key 501 and slid it into the lock. Holding his breath, he applied pressure and the key turned.

  He was in.

  The hinges creaked and Jack stopped. He tried inching the door open, but that made the creaking worse. Hoping that the distance would hide the sound from his dad, he gave the door a bold shove, got himself inside, pulled the key out of the lock, and shut the door behind him, holding the knob so the latch wouldn’t click.

  Darkness.

  It smelled musty, closed in.

  He groped around on the wall and found a light switch. He flipped it, and instead of bright fluorescence there was the shadowy glow of a single bare bulb.

  He was in a narrow passage, made narrower by things piled along the right-hand wall. Stacks of old books. A heap of broken chairs. A discolored state flag in an iron floor stand. There was a pile of torn roller maps and five or six dusty globes. Bookcases with jumbled shelves were stacked three high.

  It was an educational graveyard.

  Jack picked his way, careful not to let his backpack bump anything. Just past the bookcases there was another door. Its doorknob had no place for a key.

  With his heart racing, Jack turned the knob and pushed. Pale daylight filtered down from above, and ten feet in front of him lay the first flight of tower stairs. Walking in and peering up, he saw that there were five more flights, maybe six.

  At the first landing there was a narrow window, but the glass was so grimy Jack could hardly see through it. The window at the second landing was even worse.

  But at the third landing Jack sucked in a quick breath. This window was on the front of the tower, the side facing north toward the front lawn. The window was much cleaner, and a partial view of Huntington lay spread out before him.

  Someone had hauled one of the old wooden chairs up to the landing. Its broken rungs had been artfully spliced and then held in place with a few turns of twisted wire. Jack dragged the chair over to the window and stood on the seat to get a clearer view from the top panes.

  Craning his neck to look northwest, he could see where Randall Street crossed the railroad tracks. He counted six blocks north of the tracks—that was his street, Greenwood. The leafless trees didn’t hide much, and by counting off the brick bungalows from the corner, he thought he could see the roof of his own home.

  The bright October air was frosty and clear, and the flat land of the upper Midwest stretched on and on, dotted here and there with ponds and lakes. Northward on the distant horizon he thought he could see Minneapolis, just the hint of a skyline.

  Jack kept going up. The fourth and fifth landings each had windows, but Jack wanted to get to the top. He wanted to reach the summit.

  At the sixth landing Jack had to crouch. The concrete ceiling above it was only about four feet tall. And there was a metal hatch.

  He shrugged off his backpack and set it on the floor. Then Jack reached up, turned the handle on the hatch, put his shoulder against the steel, and straightened up.

  Forty or fifty pigeons took flight with such a sudden noise that Jack dropped back into the opening, terrified. Then, realizing what had made the sound, he quickly stood up again, his head and shoulders above the level of the bell platform.

  The fresh air was chilly, and the brightness made his eyes smart. He reached down for his backpack and swung it up, then pulled himself onto the platform. It was a square about twelve feet wide. Each side had two arches with a round limestone pillar that went to the floor between them. Chicken wire had been fastened across all the openings to keep the pigeons out, and for the most part, it had worked.

  In the middle of the space a pair of I beams about six feet tall were set into the concrete floor, and a third one was bolted between them. Three bronze bells hung from the cross beam. Each bell had a clapper in the center, along with some kind of black metal box that almost touched the outer rim, probably some kind of
electric bell ringer.

  The largest bell was about two feet across, and the smallest was only about a foot. Jack had the urge to grab the clapper of the biggest bell and start swinging. He resisted.

  Jack kept low to the floor under the bells in the center, partly to keep from being seen by anyone who might glance up, but mostly to keep from feeling like he was going to plunge to his death. The view was dizzying, spectacular, a true panorama. Westward toward the town center he could see the green copper roof of the public library, and a little farther on, the gold eagle on the town hall weather vane, up above the treetops.

  Turning in a slow circle, Jack picked out all the places he knew. It was like looking at a picture book of his life. The park near his house, the one with the tall swing set. His elementary school. The Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. Grampa Parkman’s house. Capitol Bank, where he had his savings account—almost three hundred dollars. Half a mile to the south he could see the metal framing and some brick walls of the new junior high. And off to the west the red roof of the gymnasium at the new high school caught the afternoon sun.

  It was all there—his past, his present, his future.

  And that made Jack feel good.

  Until he saw Grampa’s house again. Then he thought, Mom has lived here all her life—and so has Dad. It’s his town too. He grew up here. What if I’m growing up to be just like him?

  Out loud Jack said, “But I am not like him!” The fierceness in his own voice startled him, and another cloud of pigeons took off from the roof of the tower.

  Grabbing a pen, he flipped his notebook open to a blank page and wrote at the top,

  Ways I Am NOT Like My Dad

  I like to keep my room messy.

  I am not going to live in Huntington

  when I grow up.

  I do not like to clean things.

  I read more books.

  I am going to go to college.

  I am great at using computers.

  I like loud music.

  The list filled most of the page, and toward the end Jack even wrote, “I hate tomatoes.”