The Seventeenth Swap (11 page)

That meant phoning Angel.

He sat by the phone a minute, putting it off, trying to convince himself it would be easier if he talked to her tomorrow, in person. He failed. If anything, she was less get-at-able in person than on the phone. He looked up the number and dialed.

Angel herself answered on the second ring. Before she could add anything to “hello,” Eric said rapidly, “Angel this is Eric Greene and I'm in a big hurry so don't interrupt me for just a minute because I have to know something about that little cigar box you keep your cocktail picks in—and what I have to know is: What would you take for it? I mean—well—swap.”

There was dead silence on the other end of the phone.

After a moment Eric said cautiously, “Angel?”

Angel said, “What.”

“You can interrupt me now. I mean answer.”

“I never interrupt people,” Angel said coldly. “I wait until they are finished.”

“Well, I'm—I've finished.”

“Then I'll answer the same as I answered all the millions and millions of other times you've asked the same question! I do not want to swap that box, I
need
it. Let your friend get one some other place!”

“Okay, okay, I didn't mean to make you mad,” said Eric hurriedly. “I just sort of wondered. I mean . . . just pretend for a minute you
did
want to swap it sometime—
then
what would you take for it?”

“O
HHHHHHHH
!” Angel exploded, drawing it out into a noise that sounded like a day-old tiger growling. “Eric Greene, I think you must have lost your mind! All right, I'll tell you what I'd take for it! A thousand
dollars! Or a ruby and diamond necklace! Or a—a—beautiful gorgeous jewel case, trimmed with solid gold! NOW will you let me alone about that box?”

“I guess I'll have to.” Eric sighed, and replaced the receiver. For a while anyway, he added to himself. Somehow with Angel he couldn't put a foot right, no matter how he went about it, but obviously making her mad was not the way. The trouble was, he never knew what was going to make her mad. Maybe the best thing was to wait till he had some substitute box to offer—something really good. Or some great, marvelous idea for her mother's birthday. Or maybe, after all, Mr. Lee would raise his price.

After gazing thoughtfully at the phone a minute, he looked up Mr. Lee's home number and dialed again, hoping people didn't mind being phoned on Sunday. Mr. Lee didn't mind that at all—“Of course not, pal! Call me any time you like!” But as he explained, he couldn't raise his price; the new heels alone cost him more than a Between the Acts box was worth, and he was already throwing in his labor. “Maybe this little girlfriend of yours would ruther have some fancy shoelaces?” he suggested. “I got some dandies—white with little flowers on.”

“She's already got some,” Eric said sadly. “Thanks anyway.”

Dead end. Neither of those two would give an inch. He'd just have to get the box some other way. Meanwhile he needed
something
to start things moving.

There was still his mother's thimble.

Eric went into his own room, found the Chinesey box, and opened it, trying not to miss the familiar, sky-blue presence of his triangle stamp. After all, he told
himself, he could go over to Willy's and visit that stamp whenever he wanted to. He stuck his thumb into the thimble and lifted it out, in the way he had always done it. And instantly he glimpsed the thin, quick fingers, and heard just an echo of that special, delighted laugh that wasn't like anybody else's. Slowly he put the thimble back in the box, drawing a long, unsteady breath. It always shook him up a little, having that happen. But as long as it did happen—could happen—he wasn't ready to give the thimble up.

He closed the box and started to return it to his drawer, then hesitated, considering it through narrowed eyes.
A beautiful gorgeous jewel case trimmed in solid gold.
If you deglamorized that by about half to allow for Angel's usual exaggeration . . . and maybe tried some soap and water . . .

He dumped the thimble and the tissue-wrapped agate onto the dresser top and took the box to the bathroom, where he washed it carefully with a cloth. That helped. But the outer, Chinese-red lacquer with its circular gold design still didn't shine like the black interior. Reluctantly Eric decided that he couldn't expect it to. People had handled this box—lots of people. It was old.

Old. So what was wrong with old? Everything in Maggie's shop was old. What you did was call it
antique.

A beautiful antique Chinese lacquer jewel box with a mysterious design in gold.

It sounded good.

He swallowed, thinking of Angel, wondering if it would sound good to her—if anything would. The very idea gave him a sort of stage-fright, made him want to turn around and walk quickly in another direction.
Well, you can't do that, he told himself crossly. You have to find some way to handle her.

That had a familiar ring. Hadn't he already thought of some new way to handle her? Yes, he had—the other day after she'd rudely rejected his Petoskey stone.
Show her something then pretend she can't have it.

Now
I remember it, he reflected disgustedly. And I've already phoned.

The sound of the canned Big Ben chimes that ended the
Meet the Author
program floated in from the living room. It was chopped off in the middle and replaced by his father's voice. “Hey, Eric. Want some lunch?”

“Oh. Lunch?” Could it possibly be noon? Eric's stomach growled in answer. He called, “Yeah, okay, I'll be right there.” Swiftly he returned the thimble and the tissue-wrapped agate to the Chinesey box, and the box to the drawer—for now. Until time to show it to Angel and try the new approach.

And if it works, he thought, I'll need a new box myself.

There was a little match box, nearly empty, that had been knocking around the living room ever since Dad had quit smoking three years ago. That would do—at least for the agate. As for the thimble . . . Eric shut the drawer and headed into the kitchen. He'd been getting a sort of notion about that thimble, and it seemed like a better notion than just selling it to somebody who'd sell it again to somebody else. He'd been thinking about giving it to Jimmy's mother—not quite yet but sometime soon. She needed a nice thimble—hers was only plastic. She would really
use
it, in her
sewing. And he could go visit it, even stick his thumb in it, whenever he wanted to—same as he could visit his triangle stamp.

Which reminded him he'd promised Willy he'd come over right after lunch, to look at all the stamps and do Language Arts and math besides. Good, thought Eric, getting the mustard out of the refrigerator for the wienies his dad was dropping into a pot of water. Math would at least keep his mind off Angel and the new approach. And after he got through at Willy's there'd still be time to walk down Diamond Street past the Garden Shop, and see if it was Robert Sparrow's sign on that yellow garage.

At four-fifteen he was standing in front of the yellow garage. It was set back from the street at the end of what had once been a driveway, but was now a paved courtyard bounded on one side by the Garden Shop yard, which was bright with blooming plants for sale, and on the other by a pinkish brick wall which looked the same age as the garage. Beyond the brick wall and a row of trees was the vast Safeway parking lot. It was a funny place to live, but Eric liked it.

He liked the sign even better. It was nailed to the siding beside the big overhead door, at the foot of a flight of wooden stairs that climbed the outside of the garage. It was made of one big weathered shingle, sort of frayed artistically at the thin edge. It not only said “Robert Sparrow” in scrawly yellow letters that looked like a signature, but also showed three little painted sparrows peering at the name. Eric just stood there grinning at it, his ring binder sliding off balance under his arm. He managed to catch that before it fell, but couldn't catch several papers that slithered out of it,
along with his math book, which slapped down on the cement walkway with a report as loud as a rifle shot in the Sunday afternoon quiet.

Eric gave an embarrassed glance around as he scrabbled for his belongings, but saw nobody except a couple of old ladies browsing in the cyclone-fenced Garden Shop yard. He hadn't thought to look
up;
therefore he jumped when a voice from somewhere above his head said, “Need some help?”

A young man with a toothbrushy blond moustache was peering down at him from a sort of roof-balcony at the top of the stairs. He held a coffee mug in one hand and his elbows rested on the wooden railing between two potted geraniums.

“No. Thanks. Sorry. I've got it all now.” Then, because the young man's face looked both friendly and un-busy, Eric added, “Are you Robert Sparrow?”

“That I am.”

“I like your sign—with the sparrows on it.”

“Do you? Well, I was just lucky to have a name like that—easy to draw pictures about. What's yours?”

Eric told him, feeling it to be terribly ordinary—though not, if you wanted to get literal, entirely colorless.

“You could draw pictures about that, too,” Robert Sparrow assured him. “It would make a fine signature for a painter—just a slash of green. Do you like paintings?”

“I don't know anything about them,” Eric confessed. “But my friend Cholly Mutton—I mean, Charlie Merton—”

“Ah! You're a friend of Cholly's!”

“Yeah. He told me you're an artist.”

Robert Sparrow considered this as he took a sip of coffee. “Well—I draw pictures,” he said carefully. “Sometimes it's not the same thing, you know.”

“I know,” said Eric, who sometimes drew pictures too.

The young man's grin was wide and sudden, and made his eyes narrow into slits. He didn't say what had amused him, but inquired, “Does this vertical conversation strike you as just the teeniest bit inconvenient?”

After an instant's startled pause, Eric rubbed his neck, which he'd been wanting to do for some minutes, and admitted that it was getting a little stiff.

“Then why don't you come up to my level—since I'll bet Cholly sent you to call on me.”

“He—he said you might show me those little scoot-arounds. Sometime. If you weren't a bit busy.”

“Well, I'm not a bit busy right now, so come right up.” Robert Sparrow poured the rest of his coffee into the nearest geranium pot, adding, “They like it, you know. Caffeine addicts, every one of them!” and turned away, out of sight.

Eric got a firm grip on his ring binder and climbed the stairs. Across the balcony, on his right, a door stood open; passing a window on his way to it, he glanced in, then stopped and stared. Hanging in the window was a sort of bulletin board, covered with drawings thumbtacked to the cork. They were portraits of children of all ages—just the heads, in full-face, profile, or three-quarter view—drawn in crisp black pencil with a few strokes here and there of clay-red. In the lower left corner of every one was outlined a tiny sparrow. They were very, very good, it seemed to Eric. A little awed, he walked on, through the open
door, across a space holding a closet and the bulletin-board window, to an inner door where Robert Sparrow stood hospitably waiting.

Hesitantly, Eric stepped in. The apartment was all one long, bright, airy room, smelling of paint the way a garden smells of plants and earth. There was almost no furniture, but plenty of space and lots of pictures. Pictures were hung or thumbtacked helter-skelter over every available wall space, propped on easels, taped to a big drawing board in the front of the room. Nearly all were pictures of children—not just heads, but full-length figures running, digging, sleeping, climbing, swinging, squatting to stare eye-to-eye with a dog or bird or squirrel or flower. One little girl was flying—just soaring on her own, arms outstretched, with tree-tops below her. She looked absolutely at her ease. Some of the pictures were colored, some drawn in pencil, some looked unfinished. All the finished ones had the tiny quick-sketched sparrow in the lower left hand corner, which Eric decided was the way Robert Sparrow signed his name.

The front wall of the room, above a big drawing board, was covered with entirely different pictures, which Eric didn't understand at all. He couldn't tell what they were pictures
of
—certainly not of children. Most of them were divided into a sort of grid of unequal spaces, with each space filled by an object or gadget or . . . some sort of little . . . well,
that
one looked a bit like the front end of a bus, a sort of fat bus with big headlight eyes. And could that one be a
cow?
Eric stepped closer to peer at it, and out of the corner of his eye saw Robert Sparrow grinning his sudden grin. He also finally noticed that every single object in every
space in every grid showed somewhere a big wind-up key.

“The little scoot-abouts!” he exclaimed. And now, as if some sort of mental gear had shifted, he could identify them easily—a donkey, a tractor, an outsized mouse, a circus wagon, a drummer—all full-faced to the viewer, all either squashed or expanded to fit their squares. Yet when you backed off, the whole picture looked like a complicated quilt or something, just patterns and shapes, with color flickering all over in the most fascinating way. Eric liked these pictures better than the children now—lots, lots better. He turned to Robert Sparrow, wanting to say so, and found he didn't need to. The artist was watching his face, half-smiling, and nodding as if he already understood.

However, all he said was, “You got it. The little scoot-abouts. Want to see the originals?”

“Yeah! You mean the toys? Yes, please.”

Robert Sparrow, who had been leaning in the doorway while Eric inspected his room, turned to a built-in cupboard behind him and opened it, releasing more painty smells and revealing shelves filled with bottles and crumpled paint tubes and bouquets of brushes and stacks of paper, and one whole shelf crowded with wind-up toys. Eric saw the cow right away, and the bright red bus, and what looked like a hundred others. Few of them appeared new. “Wow!” he whispered. “I never
saw
so many. Where'd you get 'em all?”