The Bronze King (2 page)

“Jagiello's gone,” I said.

“That ugly old statue? So what? They probably took it down to clean it.”

“Then what are all these cops doing here?” I said.

What they were doing was measuring things and taking pictures and talking on their shoulder radios.

“Move along, please,” a cop with a megaphone said. “It's all over; we think the statue's been missing at least a day, so there's nothing to see and you're blocking the pedestrians.”

“We are pedestrians,” I said, but not loud. I'd seen the statue on Monday. So it was gone since sometime yesterday, I thought, like everything else that was missing. That it hadn't been officially noticed until today was just—well, New York.

Megan said, “Probably somebody forgot to pass along some stupid piece of paper telling everybody where the statue was being taken, that's all.”

“No,” I said, as we walked on. “Things are disappearing.”

“Sure,” she said. “Like you, when you're supposed to be waiting for me in the library. It's Wednesday, remember? What about the test tomorrow?”

I had completely forgotten the test. Megan had agreed to go over some math notes with me. But there was no way I could do that now, not once I'd started on the subject of the disappearances.

I told her about what was gone, including first thing this morning the medicine cabinet from the big bathroom. Mom was sure the landlord had sent Sam the handyman sneaking in at night to do this, like some demented burglar, to make us move out.

Now, this is not as crazy as it sounds if you keep up with the landlord-tenant wars in New York, as Megan pointed out. She reads the
Village Voice
religiously, and that paper is really hipped on this particular subject.

I wasn't worried about that, though I couldn't say exactly what it was I
was
worried about. I told her how Mom had tried to get hold of Sam to get the lowdown from him—he was friendly. Only Sam hadn't been around this morning either.

Megan said, “Oh, come on, a pair of sneakers, a handyman hiding from a pissed-off tenant. An apartment hassle, that's all you've got.”

“And Jagiello.”

“Look, I turned down a chance to go down to the arcades with Micky to come looking for you. You want to do some math today or not?”

Which meant Micky had left her behind, in his usual casual fashion, and I was about to get told all about it in an edited version as clear as glass. Which I could not stand, because Megan always ended up figuring out that I knew what was really going on and telling me anyway and crying. I just wasn't up to all that, and it made me mad to have her always set it up as if she were doing me a favor. All she was really doing was pinning me down so she could cry and swear about Micky to somebody.

“No,” I said. “I'm going on home, Megan. I've got a lot to think about.” And I wanted to see if anything else had disappeared while I'd been in school.

“Yourself, you mean,” Megan said, stopping dead in that stubborn way she had. “As usual. That's all you ever think about anymore. Well, go ahead, but don't expect me to walk with you. I've got lots of better things to do. And don't come moaning to me when you fail that test, either!” She turned and headed back toward school, where I guessed she would try to find out where Micky had gone and go trailing after him.

I went past the theater and started down the west side of the big hill, and a guy on a skateboard came grinding past and tried to grab my pocketbook.

I yelled, yanked back on the strap, and fell into some bushes. The guy put on more speed and went roaring down the hill, across the roadway, and right down to the bridle path, where he jumped off, stuck the board under his arm, and ran away out of the park.

I stood there, rubbing my knee and yelling after him. Of course the cops didn't come—they were all busy looking for Jagiello and what's a kid yelling, anyhow?

I'd torn my jeans and scraped my knee in falling. One more patch to sew on.

I headed home, but slowly. I didn't want to run into that guy again. It was funny how shaky I felt, considering all I had was a fall. It hadn't even been as bad as getting knocked down in a basketball game.

But I could still see that guy on his board, a skinny kid wearing a gray nylon jacket with a black skull and lettering on the back that read
PRINCE OF DARKNESS
, speeding away from me on his wheels, sort of graceful like somebody riding a surfboard, and not looking back.

 

2
Creeps

 

 

N
EXT MORNING, MOM LEFT ME A NOTE:
“We're out of paper towels, detergent, sugar, and coffee. Please use note as basis for shopping list. Also no jelly. Bread without jelly = morning without sunshine. Please fix. Mom. PS. You're on your own tonight, editorial conference.”

Which meant
a
, that she would be having dinner with one of the senior editors, which meant pretty soon she'd start bringing him home and I'd have to “relate” to him somehow or other; and
b
, that when she'd left for work, the linoleum was still on the kitchen floor, or she would have mentioned it. All I found there was this disgusting dried-up black glue to walk on. I mean, she would have hit the ceiling so hard you could hear it on the East Side.

So it's not surprising that I flunked the math test. All I could think about was the kitchen floor: that and what else might suddenly disappear. Suppose somebody decided to “take” the whole sixth floor of my building, and suppose I was home at the time?

Not that there was any sensible reason to take our apartment, but what was sensible about taking the linoleum from our kitchen floor?

School was a dull blur that day, except for that nightmare math test. I dawdled home through the park, thinking about the careers open to people who simply never got out of school as a result of being math imbeciles; and also about the fireworks there would be when Mom finally did find the kitchen floor in its current state. I thought about calling her up to warn her. If she turned up with Mr. Whoever and he saw the state of that floor, she'd be fit to be tied, and I couldn't blame her. I mean, I didn't much like her taste in men, but I hated to see her embarrassed.

I couldn't help wondering if the whole thing had something to do with Jagiello, but what?

Without him, the whole park felt different to me. It felt emptier, colder, with bigger spaces between one person and the next. Everybody I could see looked really alone out there.

There's wide open space up by the lake. You can see people a long way off. This time I kept my eyes open and I looked around behind me now and then, just to make sure nobody was sneaking up on me. Nobody was. Nobody was anywhere near me. I might have been in Death Valley.

I started to have this headache and this wobbly feeling inside like I was about to cry. Maybe I would end up crippled with migraines, the way my Granny Gran was sometimes. A thing like that could be hereditary, couldn't it? That thought really scared me.

Granny Gran was off in a rest home in New Jersey. Her name is really Grandmother Grahame, but she was Granny Gran the way I was Tina to my relatives and friends, rather than Valentine. She was no longer
compos mentis
all the time, and Mom couldn't stay home and take care of her or afford a nurse to do it. I loved Granny Gran a lot, but I didn't get to see her much anymore.

I walked to the edge of the lake in front of Jagiello's terrace, where some low black rocks stick out into the water. The lake was muddy brown and not very deep, so I could see the trash sunk in it—old paper cups and cigarette packs and some kind of twisted wire and so on. People are such slobs.

Boy, did my head hurt.

Make a wish, said something inside my head. Granny Gran used to say that: make a wish by running water and seal it with silver.

Well, the lake water ran from somewhere. You could stand above the pipes that fed it from the middle of the north shoreline.

“Jagiello,” I said, “come back and get things fixed the way they belong.”

I flipped a dime into the filthy water and waited for something to happen.

What happened was that a crazy guy came stumping past me, talking a mile a minute to himself and anybody else close enough to hear. He announced in a loud voice, “You know who comes here? Thieves and degenerates and prostitutes come here, that's who comes here, and you know why? Because this is where Eve sinned. I don't know the exact spot, but it was right around here someplace.”

That was all I needed. I headed home.

After I got some groceries at the store, I lay down in my room and read a book. I had an armload of books from the public library, mostly what they call “high fantasy,” like Tolkien's books—full of prophecies, dethroned kings, magical swords, treasures, and battles with huge evil forces. No wonder Megan laughed at me and my “disappearances.” And yes, the kitchen floor was just as I had found it that morning. Fortunately, my mom got home so late that night that she didn't notice at all.

I always know when she comes home. New York is a dangerous place, and just because the men she goes out with are usually connected in some way with the magazine she works for doesn't mean that they have to be particularly okay or responsible.

So I sort of sleep very lightly and don't really drop off until I hear her come in. It's a habit from when I was still little enough to need a baby sitter and I really thought sometimes Mom wouldn't ever come home.

At least this guy tonight brought her to the door, and in fact inside, and then things got very quiet, which I didn't like—it gave me the creeps, so I yanked the pillow around my head with both my elbows as clamps to keep out any sound, and I slept.

My mom and dad had had a very uncivilized divorce with lots of yelling and crying and doorslamming and everybody hugging the life out of me all the time and assuring me that it wasn't my fault, though I was pretty small and mostly didn't know what they were talking about.

Then he moved to Alaska and married a lady out there who had three kids of her own. The one time I visited was a disaster, so I didn't mind that I never went again. Their phone was always getting disconnected and they moved a lot, and he stopped writing after the third letter, so that was sort of that.

Mom and I hardly ever talked about him anymore, and to tell the truth I didn't think about him much. Mom still did, though, sometimes, judging from things she said. And she worried about me and boys.

I wonder what she would have said if she knew how I worried about her and men? I mean, staying up till she came home? It's not the kind of thing you can exactly talk about with your mom, so I never did.

 

* * *

 

If anything new was missing that Saturday morning, I didn't notice. I was tired and cranky and I spent most of the day hanging around in the corner store and browsing the magazines and the paperbacks, flipping through for the good parts. They knew me down there and they let me browse in exchange for my buying a chocolate malted, which they make very well. My metabolism handles any number of malteds without blinking. There are girls in school who would kill for my metabolism.

Sunday morning there wasn't a single Sunday
Times
outside the door of any apartment on our floor. I opened the door to get ours, and there was the Sneezer, our across-the-hall neighbor, with his head stuck out. He gave me this suspicious squint, as if I'd taken my paper and his, too.

We call him the Sneezer because he has allergies in the spring, and you can hear his thunderous sneezes three floors down in the elevator.

Then Mrs. Singh opened her door and glanced reproachfully out over her empty doormat at both of us, and I made a strategic withdrawal. Later I ran down to the corner store and got a
Times
for us, and Mom never knew anything about it. I made waffles for breakfast and read and brooded a lot.

The thing that struck me was that the magic in the stories I read was so—well, so
colorful.
Missing linoleum is not colorful. Only my mother's language on the subject was. I felt baffled and scared about whatever it was that was going on here. I couldn't think about it a whole lot at a time without getting really nervous.

Monday did not begin very well. I came in for some teasing by Kim Larkin and her pals which sometimes happened, probably because I was on my own a lot. I had had a couple of really good friends in the early grades in my school, but two had moved away and one had transferred to a parochial school and didn't keep in touch. Lately I'd sort of wandered out in left field someplace, what with Megan mooning over Micky all the time and Barbara avoiding me. Kim was the school clique-queen, if you know what I mean, and since Megan and Barbara had begun drifting off, Kim had started picking on me or sending her drones to do it for her. I guess that's how Kim's crowd reminded each other what hotshots they were.

They liked to tease me about my name, Valentine Marsh, saying things like, “Hey, Tina, how does Lennie like kissing mud?” Real heavy intellectual stuff.

Lennie was this very nice, big, lunky, shy boy I'd had a couple of dates with. We started out pretty badly. I got things mixed up and waited in the wrong place for him for a half hour, so instead of going to a movie with him I called up my mom crying to come and get me, which was pretty awful. Then Lennie and I went to a party and while we were dancing my glasses fell off and he stepped on them. We made a sort of mutual decision to call it a day, I guess, though I should have been grateful: it turned out I didn't need glasses anymore.

So anyway, Kim's crowd would make these stupid remarks which completely missed our real embarrassments, which nobody knew about because I would rather have died than tell (and I suppose the same was true of Lennie). I could never come up with anything smart to snap back, not until afterwards, naturally. Only once I said, “Go boil your head, maybe the freckles will come off,” to Madison, Kim's right-hand jerk, but it didn't get me anywhere.