The Seventeenth Swap (16 page)

“Okay but hurry
up!
” Eric, jogging in place in an agony of impatience, heard the chimes on the Episcopal church strike the quarter-hour. “Angel, hurry!”

“Well, you're making me so nervous—! There,
take
it, for heaven's sake!” Angel thrust the Between the Acts box at him and squinted down at her paper.

“The money! The money! The eight dollars, remember?”

“Oh, yeah. Just a second. I put it—no I didn't, I think I—here it is. Five dollars. Plus another is six, and one is seven. And twenty-five, fifty, sixty, sixty-five—” She finally made it to eight dollars, counting five last pennies into Eric's tense hand. Then her attention returned to her paper. “Now, how do I do about this portrait thing? When am I supposed to—”

Eric was already on his way. “That's up to you!” he yelled over his shoulder as he sprinted back toward Lake Street. Only two more calls . . . no, three. But at least they were fairly close together. First Mr. Lee—and he'd soon be halfway there—then only four blocks, short ones, across to Cholly's . . . well, call it four-and-a half . . .

A red-headed young man familiar from somewhere—Riverside Drug? Quiggly's Hardware?—was just leaving Mr. Lee's shop with his package under his arm as Eric shoved breathlessly in. They exchanged uncertain greetings—Eric's also unintelligible—then he was gone and Eric was half-falling onto the counter and triumphantly slapping the Between the Acts box down in front of Mr. Lee.

“Well, by gosh you finally got it for me!” Mr. Lee picked up the box to inspect it. “It's a dilly, too! Revenue stamp and all . . . Say, boy, you've been running too fast! Better have a drink of water and siddown a minute. Come on back here, and I'll—”

“Can't,” Eric panted. “Big hurry. Can I have that—paper?”

“Oh yeah. Time for that there promissory note—” Mr. Lee reached a stained, blunt-fingered hand toward his stack of work tags and found a pencil stub in the sagging pocket of his brown apron. Two bold black checks, one on each half, then he tore the tag on its perforation and handed the customer's half to Eric. “There y'are. That there ticket and eight dollars—”

“I've got the eight dollars now.” Eric undid his clenched hand and Angel's money, down to the last five pennies, dropped onto the counter in crumpled wads and little clinks. “Thanks a lot, Mr. Lee—gotta go now.” He heaved himself off the counter, caught sight of Mr. Lee's watch, and shot out the door without remembering to say goodbye. The watch had said 4:21.

He was at Cholly's by 4:24—and a half, according to Cholly's old clock, which, old or not, was usually right. Eric flung himself on the daybed, forgetting its concrete-like solidity, and gasped “Ouch!” before he could stop himself.

“Yep, it's a sturdy one, that one is,” said Cholly, rotating off his work stool and reaching for his teakettle with the same motion. “Chap I bought it off of garnteed them springs for twenty years, and it musta lasted thirty by now. What
you
need, son, is a cuppa. You're all wore out.”

“No, Cholly—thanks—no time. Look. Remember
yesterday? Our deal? The resoling job?” Eric hauled himself upright and handed the ticket over. “There 'tis. Mr. Lee said so. That's all you need.”

“No joke?” Cholly scratched his shaggy whiskers as he grinned from the tag to Eric. “And he'll gimme a whole resole job on these old boots?” He stuck out a foot and considered it. “Can't honestly say it's before time, can I?” He chuckled richly and stretched an arm up to the shelf above his worktable. “Here 'yar, then. I emptied it out ready last evenin'. And my best to Maggie.”

With an unsteady hand, almost reverently, Eric accepted Cholly's stoneware kerosene bottle that had once, long ago, held ginger beer and would fetch thirty dollars in Maggie's shop. It was a moment too rare for thanks. He transferred the bottle with tender care to his jacket pocket, then thrust out the hand again. Cholly enveloped it in a hard-calloused grasp, squeezed painfully, then let go. Eric took off for the street.

He was scarcely aware of running now. Maybe I've got my second wind, he thought. But it wasn't like that, it was as if he had suddenly learned to fly, like the girl in Robert Sparrow's drawing. He wanted to skip and hop and turn somersaults—something inside him was lighter than air and simply trying to rise. It was only his hundred-odd pounds of flesh and bone that kept him touching earth at all.

He was crossing First Avenue for the sixth time that day when the sight of a bus rumbling around the corner from Rivershore brought him down with a shock that jolted like Charlie's daybed. It couldn't be 4:30 . . . no, that bus was 40, which went southwest—not Number 37. Even so. Heart thumping from more than
speed now, Eric raced the final block and a half, glancing fearfully far up Lake Street for the first dreaded flash of yellow that would be Number 37 easing around the curve from Evergreen Drive. When he plunged into Long Alley it had still not appeared. The glass shop door shuddered and Maggie's “OPEN” sign swung wildly on its cord as he plunged into the shop.

There was nobody there except Maggie, whose voice he heard operatically shaking the rafters from the rear-most room. He yelled, “Maggie! Maggie!” and it broke off, changing to a non-operatic shriek: “Eric? Is it D-hour? Coming, coming, I'm on my way!”

He hurried across the room, crying, “I've got it! I've got the ginger beer bottle! Look, it's just the one you wanted, now can I have the eighteen dollars, and can you hurry please, because my bus—”

“Fifteen dollars,” Maggie panted, hurrying just as urgently from the other direction. They met in the middle of the second room. “Sorry, I was up on a ladder, took me a minute—”

“Eighteen, wasn't it?” said Eric uneasily, handing her the bottle, which produced her dazzling smile.

“Oh, what a beauty! Oh, what an absolutely—Eric, you're a pal and a half, I'll buy you a double-dip Baskin-Robbins whenever you say so, come on to the cash register, I'll give you fifteen smackers this minute, and—”

She whooshed past Eric, who stared after her, wide-eyed. She'd said it
twice
now: So was it her mistake, or had
he
got it wrong in the first place, or—“Maggie!” he quavered, running to catch up. “Maggie—
eighteen
dollars, didn't you tell me? Don't you mean eighteen dollars?—Please?”

Maggie halted and peered down at him. “No, fifteen's what I told you—
if
I was sure beforehand my customer'd take it for at least twenty-five. Got to make a living—I told you that too, remember?
You
told
me
you needed eighteen.”

Though nineteen would be better—that was what he'd said. Eric did remember. His heartbeat ran down like an old, tired clock.

Maggie added, “I assumed you'd find the last four bucks some other way.”

“Yeah,” whispered Eric. He did have the nineteenth dollar, the bus fare, put aside from the extra Jimmy-pay; it was in his jeans pocket right now. But after all he wouldn't be needing it. As he stood trying to get this through his head, trying to comprehend disaster, a distant familiar rumble made a faint chiming among the glass shelves in the case, and sent him dashing in panic to the door. He was just in time to see the Number 37 go by the foot of Long Alley, heading for Rivershore and the city. “It's
gone!
” he wailed. “I've
missed
it! It's too late, the whole thing's over, today was my last chance and I blew it, but I tried so hard and I ran so fast and—”

“Eric!” Maggie was beside him, gripping his shoulders, bright blue eyes staring into his face. “Eric, hush up and look at me.
Please
tell me what this is all about.”

Eric swallowed his despair—he had to keep swallowing—and told her in a few bare sentences about Jimmy and the boots and all his swaps. “But it didn't work,” he finished. “It just didn't. There wasn't quite enough time.”

Maggie let go his shoulders and slowly
straightened, her lips pursed, her gaze still absently on his face. Her thoughts, he could tell, had gone somewhere else. “Stand right there,” she said suddenly. “Don't move a muscle. I've got to make a phone call.”

“It's too late,” he said. He was so tired all at once that he had to sit down on the edge of one of the roped-across chairs. “Today's the last time I can go to town, and the bus is gone, and the sale ends tomorrow.”

“There's another bus, pal.” Maggie was striding toward the back room and the phone, still carrying the ginger beer bottle. “Number thirty-nine stops up there by the Safeway at four forty-five . . .”

Eric didn't hear the rest, if there was any, because she shut the door. He sat on his chair-edge, gradually tensing up again, wondering wildly if a bus at 4:45 would make it to town before the stores closed, and whether it might be 4:45 already, and who Maggie was talking to on the phone, and what kind of miracle she was trying to pull for him. Before he could wonder anything else she flung open the door and came striding back, looking at her watch and talking fast.

“Okay, we're all set. Mrs. Thing—I shouldn't call her that, nice lady, it's Mrs. MacGillicuddy or something—says she'll definitely take the bottle and what's more I soaked her thirty bucks. So I'm giving you eighteen of 'em right now—” There was a jingling
crash
as the cash register drawer flew open. “—and one more as commission, and you've got two minutes to get to Safeway and you
phone
me tonight to tell me how it all comes out . . .”

Eric was already out the door, jamming the money in his pocket, yelling back something over his shoulder, and crossing his fingers again as he ran. They were
going to grow that way pretty soon, what with one thing and another. He kept them crossed—except while paying his bus fare—all the long, rumbling, pokey, endless way into town. He tumbled out at last and took to his own flying feet again for the two-block sprint to the shoe store.

He got there seconds after the doors closed. The tall, handsome young black woman was still turning away inside, the bunch of keys in her hand, plainly visible through the glass. Eric flung himself against the door and knocked frantically with both fists, shouting, “Wait! Wait! Please wait, I've got to buy something!”

The woman glanced back, frowning, peered in a puzzled way at Eric, and as he redoubled his knocking and pleading, came back and unlocked the door. She opened it two inches and said, “Store's closed, babe. Gotta come back tomorrow.”

“I
can't
come back tomorrow! Oh, please, it'll only take a minute. I want that pair of cowboy boots you showed me once and I've got the money right here, all ready—see?” Eric dragged the crumpled bills out of his pocket and thrust them at the two-inch opening, right up under the black woman's nose. “It's awful important! At least—I mean . . .” A horrible thought hit Eric. “You've still got them, haven't you? They haven't been sold?”

The woman flapped a languid hand at Eric, shaking her beautiful head in a way that made her earrings swing and glimmer. “Now, how you expect me . . .
Which
cowboy boots? We got cowboy boots coming outa our ears around here. You better calm down, babe, you gonna bust something.”

“Well, couldn't I just come in a
second—”

“Okay, okay, come on, don't have a hissy.” The door opened six more inches. Eric was inside like an eel. It closed behind him, and the lock clunked into place with a jangling of keys and bracelets. “Now you gonna have to tell me—”

“They're red and black, one hundred percent vinyl, on sale for seventeen ninety-nine, whatever size is six and three-quarters inches long, or maybe seven—”

“Oh, yeah. Seven inches long—now I remember. It all come back to me.” To Eric's astonishment she threw back her head and laughed a long, rich, bubbling laugh, meanwhile heading for the stockroom. “Yeah, we still got 'em. I kinda hid 'em behind some others that day. I figured you be back.”

Thirty minutes later Eric was jolting homeward on the 6:10 Number 37, hopelessly late for dinner, hugging a box of red-and-black cowboy boots in a death grip against his chest.

It was Saturday morning, and life was back to normal. That is, as normal as you could call it when you felt ten times happier than usual, and ten times luckier, and maybe fourteen times more pleased with yourself than you ever had before. It was normal in that Eric was sitting in Jimmy's living room instead of sprinting full-tilt here and there or
planning
to sprint here and there, or only half-listening to Jimmy's excited chatter because of solving multiple jigsaw swapping puzzles in his head.

Today the chatter was twice as excited as usual, and Eric was listening wholly and with contentment. There was only one subject under discussion—the red-and-black one hundred percent vinyl cowboy boots, which were on Jimmy's feet and fit perfectly, and were everything either of them had hoped for. Fifteen swaps, it had taken—no,
sixteen,
counting that curtain-ring—but the end was worth it.

The surprise, too, had been exactly as Eric had visualized it—with only one disconcerting note: the reaction of Jimmy's mother when the box was opened. She had gaped at the boots, then at Eric, then had made
all sorts of intensely embarrassing faces in her efforts not to cry while trying to
take the boots away from Jimmy
and put them back in the box. “No, Eric, you
mustn't!
Your own money!” she kept saying.

Eric had stared at her aghast, then leaped to the rescue, wrestling the right boot out of her hand as politely as possible—Jimmy had already recaptured the left—and begging her just to
look
at Jimmy. She had looked, and let the other boot go, and said nothing more, though she hugged Eric hard enough to make him grunt before she left wordlessly for work.