Monkey Island (10 page)

“It's different for me,” Buddy said quickly.

It wasn't different, Clay thought. He closed his eyes. That thick, breathy sleepiness was coming back.

“I think you need to rest now,” Buddy said softly. “I'm going to go.”

“Will you come back?” asked Clay, opening his eyes with effort.

“If I can,” replied Buddy.

On Christmas morning, Buddy came for a brief visit.

“I see they untied you from that tube,” he said. “You must be able to walk all over the place.” He held out a paper bag. “Here's a present for you.”

Inside the bag, Clay found a paperback edition of
Robinson Crusoe
. How many cans had Buddy had to find to lug to a store to get money to buy the book? He could see Buddy was restless, his thoughts elsewhere. When Clay thanked him, he began to pace about the room like the tiger Clay had seen with his father, pacing in his cage.

“I'm getting Christmas dinner at the church,” he told Clay. “Remember? Where we had Thanksgiving? I'll be glad when this day is over. I've got things to do.”

“Are you still at the shelter?” Clay asked.

Buddy frowned. “Yeah. Nowhere else to be unless I want to freeze.”

“What are the things you have to do?”

“I'll tell you when I've done them,” Buddy said.

“How's Calvin?”

“He's in a coma. But, you know”—Buddy paused by the bed and shook his head slightly—“they trimmed his beard. I was surprised how young he looks.” He clenched his hands a moment. “Clay, I got to go.”

Without having to think about it, Clay knew it wasn't a time to plead with Buddy to stay longer, to tell him he'd be glad for his company on Christmas Day. Buddy probably already knew that. He was standing by the door, staring at Clay.

“Okay. See you,” Clay said, not quite looking at Buddy's face.

He was gone in an instant.

The ugly, agreeable nurse, Alicia, gave Clay a present too, a small model of a red English double-decker bus. Everything about it was perfect, the tiny spiral stairs, the steering wheel, the rows of seats inside. There were no passengers, no driver.

He held the bus in his hands. Against the thin white coverlet, in the colorless room, the bus was brilliant like a small red comet. One by one, he filled the seats with people—Buddy; Calvin; Mrs. Crary; Dimp Laughlin and his dog; Tony, the boy from the hotel; Gerald; the lady with the turban and the pie; the young man with earrings; Abdul, the news store owner; Mrs. Larkin and Jacob.

After lunch, which was turkey and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, he allowed his mother to go up the spiral stairs to the top deck of the bus.

He looked out the window for a while at the gray sky. He took
Robinson Crusoe
from the bedside table and began to read where it fell open in his hands. Then he dropped the book and picked up the bus.

In the front seat on the top deck, he imagined a figure whose coat collar stood up and hid his face. He imagined his mother beginning to hurry toward the figure, thinking it must be his father. Then he shook the bus and everyone fell out of it. Clay picked up the book and began to read at the beginning.

Two days after Christmas, Alicia said to Clay, “Mrs. Greg is coming to see you. You'll like her.”

Clay was standing with his back against the window. He wouldn't like Mrs. Greg. He didn't have to.

“And why are you not wearing your slippers?” Alicia asked, pointing to the paper slip-ons beneath the bed.

“They
are
slippers,” Clay replied. “They slip right off when I put them on.”

“Good point,” said Alicia. She pushed a small chair close to the bed and patted the coverlet. “Come on. You're going to be interviewed. It only hurts for a minute.” She rolled her eyes. Clay didn't laugh. He was afraid.

Mrs. Greg arrived a few minutes later. She carried a briefcase under one arm and was wearing a thick padded coat that made her look somewhat like a fire hydrant, especially because she was short and, Clay saw when she removed the coat, quite plump. Her eyebrows were two thick pencil strokes, and over her small lips was painted a big bright red mouth.

“Hello, Clay Garrity,” she said as she sat down in the chair.

“You're from Social Services,” he said.

“Well. So you know all about Social Services. I suppose you can spot one of us a mile away.”

“I know you have to sit in Social Services for a hundred years and a day, and then you get papers you fill out so you can come back and sit some more.”

Mrs. Greg looked serious. “You're right, Clay. But not entirely. There are so many people in trouble, and not enough money, and not enough really good ideas to make things better. We try to make a very tight net so people won't fall through the way you did. But now we've caught up with you, and you'll be all right.”

“What's all right?” he asked angrily, and wished he hadn't. But Mrs. Greg was busy with a notebook and a pencil and seemed not to have noticed his tone of voice. “I have to write things down,” she said with a smile. “I forget so easily.”

Was she trying to fool him? To show how nice and easy she was? This won't hurt, the doctor would say, or this will be a bit uncomfortable for a second. And then it
would
hurt like the devil.

“I'd like you to tell me about your life,” Mrs. Greg said, her pencil poised above the notebook. “That will help mend that net I was talking about.”

He hesitated. He had a superstitious feeling—he told himself it was superstitious—that the more he told her, the greater the distance would grow between himself and Buddy.

Last night, he had been working out how long he'd spent in the park, four weeks and three days. He'd never be able to figure out how many miles he'd walked, going back and forth between the park and the hotel, gathering cans and bottles with Buddy, wandering the streets.

He felt the cleanness of his skin and hair. His sores were healed. He thought of what it would be like to plunge through the net again, back to the iron-gray dirty pavements, the rusty-railed park, the newspapers smelling of urine, the itching and scratching, the gnawing in his belly, the awful grip of loneliness, of being outside of everything.

“My father lost his job,” he began. “That was maybe a year ago when his magazine folded. Ma learned to work computers and worked at night. She's having a baby. I guess it's born by now.” He glanced quickly at Mrs. Greg, wondering if she knew something he didn't.

Mrs. Greg was looking at him attentively, her head cocked slightly forward as though to catch every word.

“Well, my father went away. Missing Persons couldn't find him.”

“When do you think that was?” Mrs. Greg interrupted him.

“About seven months ago,” Clay replied. “Then Ma stopped working. Pretty soon we couldn't pay the rent. Then we went to the hotel—after Ma went to Social Services. That's where they put us—in that hotel. She went away too. She was gone when I woke up in the morning. I thought she'd come back. She didn't.”

“How long ago was that?” Mrs. Greg asked.

“How long have I been in the hospital?”

“Ten days,” Mrs. Greg said promptly.

He thought for a moment. “About six weeks and four days,” he said. “That's when she went away.”

“Someone took care of you in the park? A young black man?”

“Buddy,” he said. “And Calvin too. But Calvin drank too much and now he's in a hospital and isn't going to make it.”

Mrs. Greg stared at him for at least a minute. He didn't mind. He felt easy now. After all, he'd told her only the truth.

“Do you have relatives anywhere?” she asked at last.

“My father's mother, in Oregon. If she's alive,” he replied. “But she won't have anything to do with us.”

Mrs. Greg looked very interested.

“Why is that, do you think?” she asked.

“I know why. Because my mother is Italian. And my father's mother said that that ended the family. But my father said she's lost out on everything.”

For a second, Clay thought he might start yelling at the top of his lungs instead of speaking so calmly and coolly. Then he recalled what Calvin had said in his dry voice: “Families can let you down.” Maybe that was half-true. Calvin had a son he hadn't seen in years, and if Calvin died, the son wouldn't even know he'd left the world. Thinking of Calvin, how funny he could be even when he was sarcastic, made Clay feel less like yelling. “Life is like that,” Calvin would have said.

“You must feel you've been dropped from a cliff,” Mrs. Greg said softly.

Perhaps he did feel that way. But he didn't want to be told how he felt.

Mrs. Greg was leaning forward. Suddenly she reached out and took his hand. Not quite meaning to, he made a fist, but she kept on holding it.

“Those two men were good to you?” she asked. “They didn't mistreat you?”

“Yes,” he answered so loudly they both jumped. “They were so good to me!”

She let go of his hand and glanced down at her notebook. “Listen, Clay,” she began. “You're not going back to the streets. We have to do a few legal things, like making you a ward of the court. That's a formality. And we're going to find you a really nice home with nice people—and very shortly, not in a hundred years and a day. Meanwhile, we're going to look for your parents. I want you to write down your old address and your mother's and father's full names, and where you went to school and the name of the hotel. Also the name of anyone who came to see your mother, like someone from Social Services. All right?”

He thought of Miss You-can't-fool-me. But he wouldn't write
that
down.

“You may find it hard to believe, but your getting sick has a good side to it,” said Mrs. Greg. “You can think of this hospital as part of the net.”

She isn't so bad, he thought. She probably wouldn't look away from people lying on the sidewalk. She'd probably even worry about them. She had tried hard to understand what it was like for me, squinting her eyes to show me how much she wants to help.

“Okay,” he said. He felt older than the small plump woman who was looking at him with so much sympathy on her face. At least, part of him did.

9   The Biddles

Clay's clothes had been washed except for the corduroy jacket. Dirt had worked into it so deeply it was nearly all one color, an ashy brown. The lining hung from the collar in shreds. He held up a sleeve to his nose. He thought he could smell the streets he had walked on, the ground he had slept on, even the dust-thickened pieces of blanket and canvas he had wrapped himself up in. He bundled up the jacket and held it on his lap, not knowing what to do with it, yet worried at the thought of leaving it in the hospital.

“You look good, Clay,” the nurse, Alicia, said on her way to one of the other beds, where she took the temperature of a child with a broken arm, who explained, “My Christmas skates did it.”

Clay was sitting on the edge of his bed, waiting. There was a big hole in the sole of his right shoe, but a wad of newspaper Buddy had slipped into the shoe was gone.

He hadn't seen Buddy since Christmas morning. Today was January 2. A new year had begun. He wondered if he would ever see Buddy again. In a paper bag next to him was
Robinson Crusoe
and the English double-decker bus. It was only a toy. Real buses groaned and rumbled along streets, and the drivers in their high seats looked impatient and stony.

“Hello, Clay,” somebody said.

A tall, broad-shouldered woman was looking intently at him from just inside the door. She was wearing a thick, fuzzy gray coat. Little wisps of brown hair stuck straight out around her ears from under a black wool hat on her head. She was holding a pair of red mittens and a big black pocketbook in one hand. In the other, she gripped a black jacket.

“I'm Edwina Biddle,” the woman said. “I know Mrs. Greg explained to you I'd come to take you home with me today.”

She held out the black jacket.

“This is an old thing someone outgrew. But we'll get you a proper coat as soon as we can,” she said. “It's very cold outdoors today.”

“Thank you,” he said. His voice squeaked as though it needed oil.

Alicia smiled at him as she passed the woman on her way to the hall.

“I hope you're hungry. I made a meat loaf for supper, and there's tapioca pudding too.”

Clay felt tears spring to his eyes, wash down his cheeks, and touch the edges of his mouth. Edwina Biddle remained near the door. She said nothing but kept a steady gaze on his face. When his tears stopped as quickly as they'd begun, she came to the bed and held out her hands with all the things she was carrying hanging from them. He took hold of them and gave a jump so his shoes smacked the floor.

Later, he was glad she had not rushed over to him and hugged him, or said things like,
Don't cry
—
everything will be all right
. At that moment, he would not have liked to be hugged by someone he didn't know. He hadn't, after all, been crying because he felt terribly sad or frightened. His tears had come from the burst of relief he had felt at the word
home
.

“I hope you're not married, and I hope you don't smoke cigars,” Mr. Biddle said that evening when he arrived home from work. He was a big man, broad in the shoulders like his wife. In his dark brown hair, just over his forehead, grew a startling streak of white hair. Clay smiled politely. Mr. Biddle was a joker.

“Have some gum,” he said, holding out the yellow-wrapped stick to Clay. “And call me Henry.”

“Don't give him that before supper, Henry,” said Mrs. Biddle from the kitchen. “The sugar will take away his appetite.”

“Will it?” Henry asked Clay in a serious voice.

Clay shook his head and took the gum.

“You're the strong, silent type, are you?” Henry asked.