Zebra Forest (18 page)

Rew began reading
Treasure Island
again, and once I knew he wasn’t going to rip it, I let him have it back, to keep in his room. He still liked Long John Silver lots, but he got interested in other characters, too, ones he’d never paid attention to, like Captain Smollett.

“The squire Trelawney’s just an idiot,” he said to me one afternoon in the Zebra. “He talks too much, and he hasn’t got sense enough to keep even a treasure map secret. But the captain — he smells a rat from the first. Plus he knows how to run a ship.”

I continued to make my case for the doctor, but I conceded the point. It was good, anyway, to get back to talking pirate slang. “Yup,” I said. “That squire, what does the captain tell him?”

Rew grabbed the book and flipped to the place. “‘Treasure is ticklish work,’” he read. “‘I don’t like treasure voyages on any account, and I don’t like them, above all, when they are secret, and when (begging your pardon, Mr. Trelawney) the secret has been told to the parrot.’”

I laughed out loud at that. “Blabbed, he means!”

“And by the squire!” Rew shouted. “See? An idiot!”

That fall, on Sundays, I started going round to see my father. Gran wouldn’t go. She couldn’t. But she let me talk about Andrew Snow. Sometimes she’d even ask about him. And after I told her, she didn’t go upstairs, but she’d give me a smile and say, “You want to hear the story of Princess Margaret, Annie B.? I have that magazine here somewhere.”

As for Rew, he didn’t talk about Andrew Snow for a long time. But one day in January, Rew and I went to Beth’s house together, to watch Walter Cronkite on her TV, showing the hostages come home after 444 days in captivity. They were skinny men, with big glasses, dressed in regular clothes and looking hungry. On our way home, I decided to ask Rew if he’d walk with me the next Sunday to see Andrew Snow. And he surprised me and said yes.

We walked through the Zebra Forest. In January, without the leaves, it’s wide open there, the snow sky pouring light down on everything, even the brown, sleeping plants. I told Rew about moss that dies away and comes back in summer. I even showed him some, or at least I think that’s what it was, soft brown smudges on the base of trees. He didn’t say much, but he listened.

To get to Enderfield, you have to come out of the Zebra onto the road, then circle most of the wall and go in through a high mesh gate. At the edge of the Zebra, Rew just stood for a while, arm round an oak tree, picking at the bark.

That bark doesn’t peel. I reminded him of that. He stopped.

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” I said. “You can wait here.”

So he did, standing in that spot under the bare trees until I came back, so we could walk home together. On the way, I told him how Indian scouts could read direction from the sun.

The next week, he was the one who did the talking. He told me a joke, and it was actually a good one.

“Two muffins were baking in an oven,” he said. “And one said to the other, ‘Boy, it’s hot in here!’ And you know what the other one said?”

“Nope.”

“It said, ‘Eek! A talking muffin!’”

I don’t know which one of us was more startled when I laughed.

Above us, the bare branches crisscrossed the sky, the white ones nearly disappearing against the clouds. I thought how much I liked winter in the Zebra, when you can see the intricate pattern of all those twigs and branches, and fat old crows sit at the very tops of the trees like dark winter buds. But then, I like all the seasons, and I like that they’ll come round next year, too. It’s nice to know, though, that some things really do change. Sometimes jokes can get funnier.

“Back there,” Rew said, “does anyone ever say anything funny? Anyone tell jokes?”

“I don’t know,” I said to him. “I never tried.”

He squinted up into a nearby tree, where a couple of withered leaves still hung on, fluttering like flags. “Well, you can tell him the one about the muffins if you want,” he said. “That’s my new favorite.”

And so the next week, I did. Andrew Snow laughed even harder than I had. I didn’t know you could laugh in prison.

But actually, you can.