Zebra Forest (3 page)

T
he stories about Grandpa Snow’s days as a pirate lasted us weeks, the year Rew turned seven. But the stories I made up about the great pirate Morgan were nothing compared to the ones I told about his son, Andrew. Our father.

Because it turned out that once I started, I couldn’t stop telling Rew things about people that were only sort of real. And of all the people we wanted to hear about, both of us, Andrew Snow was top on the list.

By the time I was halfway through sixth grade, I had taken my father through at least three careers, not even counting the one about him being the son of a pirate. Andrew Snow had been a pilot, breaking the sound barrier somewhere near Hawaii. (I liked that location especially after I’d seen a picture of it in one of the ancient encyclopedias Gran kept under a side table in the front room.) He’d been a miner, too, surviving a cave-in deep in the hills of Kentucky by digging himself out with his hands. One year he’d been a hurdler in the Olympics, missing the gold medal only because he hit the final hurdle as he leaped it, losing a fraction of a second. Things like that count in the Olympics.

Most recently he was a secret agent, working to free those hostages in Iran. Rew loved to imagine the Middle Eastern desert, sandstorms and mullahs and veiled ladies, and our father somewhere among them, bartering for hostages in a dusty marketplace or smoking a hookah with a sheik. I knew, of course, that the hostage takers wore regular clothes and carried machine guns. I’d seen that at Beth’s house, on ABC. But I also knew Rew wouldn’t believe in any bad guys who wore slacks and V-neck sweaters. So the way I told it, Secret Agent Snow had sword fights with wild-bearded men in long robes. I threw in the occasional sand viper, too, because I’d read about them in an old
National Geographic
I’d found wedged behind the tank in the bathroom.

I began our summer story on the fifth day of vacation, after watching Beth’s bus leave for camp. We’d already put school away, which in our house meant throwing our books into a pile. In my bedroom, my second-grade notebooks formed the base of a tower as high as my bed, right beside some of Gran’s old newspapers, a lot of which had migrated in from the hall. I did often think of clearing out that space, imagining my room clean and airy like Beth’s, instead of dark and smelling of old paper. But something usually distracted me before I actually did anything about it.

Besides, the Zebra was clear, and that’s where we told our stories, anyway.

“It’s day two hundred thirty-three,” I began, taking my cue from ABC. “Agent Andrew Snow is riding by camel to a distant village, just on the edge of the desert.”

Rew took great pride in my father’s full name, since of course it was his name, too, Rew being short for Andrew. Because of that, and because we’d never known our father in person, we never spoke of him as Dad or Pop or any of those names kids call their fathers. Besides, it didn’t seem to me someone called Dad would enter the space program or ride bareback across the Sierra Nevada.

“When he arrives, he looks out over all that sand, and he squints, like this.”

I showed him Andrew Snow’s trademark squint, left eye closed, right eye open.

“Like a pirate!” Rew said.

“Yeah, like a pirate,” I told him. I explained that Andrew Snow had a bit of a weakness in his left eye, having hurt it during that cave-in in Kentucky.

Rew thought about that. “Gran does it, too,” he said. “I’ve seen her, when she’s looking close at something.”

“Well, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe
she
was the pirate, and not old Morgan,” I said. “Do you want me to go on, or not?”

Rew quieted down.

I continued. “Andrew Snow squinted out at the desert, shielding his eyes from the sand whipping up at him. Like this.” Again, I closed my left eye and shaded my right. “Can’t get sand in that good eye,” I said. “And he laughed — one loud bark of a laugh, like this.” I laughed, loud, and the sound of it echoed off the nearest trees.

“Why did he laugh?” Rew wanted to know.

“Because he knew something those Iranians didn’t know,” I said. “He knew there was a secret path into the embassy, and that’s what he could see, looking out in the desert.”

“A secret path through the desert?” Rew asked. “Isn’t it all just sandy and flat, filled with sand vipers and scorpions?”

“Well, yeah, but not all of it,” I said. “There was an oasis out there, and Andrew Snow knew it. One thing about Andrew Snow, he always comes prepared. He makes plans.”

“Except in Kentucky,” Rew reminded me.

“You can’t plan a cave-in,” I said. Sometimes it was hard to tell Rew stories; he was so particular. “But he got out, didn’t he?”

Rew nodded. “He did. That’s true.”

I sighed. “Any more questions, or should I keep going?”

This was our routine. I’d begin a story, and Rew would take apart every piece of it, check it to make sure it made sense, drive me crazy, then let me go on.

“Keep going,” he said. “Of course keep going.”

“Okay. So Andrew Snow had looked into everything, even before he went,” I told him. “That old desert was just riddled with tunnels and underground caves — like the kind in
Ali Baba
and
Aladdin.
And there were ancient maps of some of them, which Andrew Snow knew how to get. So he knew there was one that went right to the embassy, all the way back in the capital. And that’s how he was going to get at those hostages.”

As I described Andrew Snow’s sunburned face and his amazing mastery of Farsi — his skill in languages having been passed down to him by his father, the old pirate Morgan, who had learned ancient scripts so he could read treasure maps — I wondered whether my father had known any languages, or what kind of job he’d really done. Because actually I knew next to nothing about Andrew Snow, hurdler, test pilot, secret agent. I didn’t because I lied earlier, when I said I couldn’t remember any other rules in our house besides not going into the Zebra during a storm. There was one, and though we never spoke of it, we knew it better than any other.

That was that we didn’t talk about our father, not in the house. Gran had told me one story about him, a long time ago, when I was too young to know what not to ask. The telling of it had sent her to her room for days, nearly a week, during which time the milk went sour and Rew and I were reduced to eating nothing but dry cereal and raw macaroni, since we didn’t yet know how to use the stove.

The story was of the night my father died. On that night, Andrew Snow had met an angry man, who picked a fight, then beat him. My father died and the other man was sent away, and that was all. The end. The story of my father was a short one.

And so I knew these things about Andrew Snow. I knew he had had two good ideas: Rew and me. And I knew that someone angry had killed him.

W
henever
Gran had a good spell, life got a lot more interesting. That summer, Gran had a long stretch of good days — nearly two weeks — in which she stocked up on groceries, set the table with good china, and even taught us how to play gin rummy, with eleven cards, the hard way.

“The seven-card game is for people who can’t manage their cards, Annie B.,” she told me. “You can do eleven just fine.”

Up until that point, Gran’s favorite card game had been blackjack, which she could play for a full day, until Rew and I were practically wild with boredom. But gin rummy had a little more give to it, what with the different ways you could match the cards. What I liked especially about it was that right from the start, I kept winning.

Rew hated it. “It’s a stupid game,” he whispered to me when Gran, during one particularly long gin-rummy binge, excused herself to go to the bathroom. “It’s nothing but luck.”

“Not true,” I said. “You’ve got to think about which cards to throw out and which to keep. You’ve got to take your chances on that.”

He snorted. I knew right away why Rew was no good at gin rummy. He held on to his cards too long. If he made up his mind to collect jacks, he wouldn’t give over, even when I had held one or two in my hand so long, we’d have to turn the pile over and start again. He kept hoping I’d give them to him.

“Chances, right,” he said. “Like I said, it’s just luck. At least in chess, if you think hard enough, you win.”

Since I couldn’t think hard enough to beat him at chess, I didn’t contradict him. But I still took some satisfaction in my success at cards. And besides, Rew didn’t stay mad too long. He couldn’t, what with Gran so cheerful.

One morning, she sat on the floor, sifting through her magazines, and pulled out one of our mutual favorites,
Life,
1949, the October 31st issue. Pretty Princess Margaret posed on the front of that one, looking sadly off into the distance.

Gran studied her face, though we’d both seen the picture at least a million times. “Sad life,” she said. “Unhappy lady.”

I’d heard the story of Princess Margaret any number of times, but it was one of Gran’s favorites, and when she was in a good mood, I always liked the sound of her voice. So I asked, “How come?”

“She was a royal lady, and she fell in love with a captain in the Royal Air Force. Very handsome. They wanted to get married, but they couldn’t.”

“Why not?” I prompted.

“He was a divorced man, and in those days, when you might be queen, you couldn’t marry somebody like that.”

I’d thought a lot about Princess Margaret since the first time Gran showed me her picture. So I said, “If it were me, I’d have married him anyway.”

Gran sighed. “Well,” she said, “Princess Margaret felt responsible to her people, being in line for the throne, you know. She gave him up for duty. But then, of course, some say her sister made her do it.”

“She sounds like a bad lady,” I said to Gran.

“Maybe,” she said. “Some people are too much about responsibility. But then, some people are too little.”

I thought she must mean me, so I said, “Well, did Margaret ever get to be queen, after all that?”

Gran shrugged and tucked the magazine back into the pile, where it stayed, somewhere between the edition on Joe DiMaggio and the one on Judy Garland. “No,” she said. “I don’t think she ever did.”

That night we had a dinner party with the good china, pretending we were royal and dining in the palace. Even though Gran had taken to washing the dishes that week, this time, she laughed and said the footmen would clear.

E
ven on her best days, Gran went to bed when it turned dark. She didn’t like how the windows reflected our faces back, as if we were outside, looking in. So that night, after our happy dinner, when Gran went upstairs, I gave in to Rew and sat on the floor with the chessboard, getting beaten again and again.

Finally I gave up. We left the board on the floor, and Rew sat over it, arranging and rearranging the pieces, moving his queen back and forth. I settled myself on the couch, lying on my stomach, chin on my hands, and fell asleep watching him.

I woke to a noise. The lights were still on, and Rew was asleep on the floor, head between a couple of stray pawns.

Someone was rattling the back door, in the kitchen. We never locked it, but it stuck, and if you rattled it once or twice, it opened. I got up, stepping on Rew in the process, and made my way to the kitchen just as the back door opened, and a man stepped in.

I blinked, trying to make sense of him. Behind him, I could see the white lines of the Zebra Forest shimmering in the moonlight. My heart started to shake inside my chest. I heard Rew come from the front room.

The man stood very still, looking at us, trying to focus his eyes in the sudden light. The first things I noticed about him were his red hair and the mud on his face. In fact, he was caked in mud, as if he’d fallen in it. He wore a torn beige shirt, thick slacks, and heavy shoes.

Before I could think what to do, the man turned, locked the kitchen door, and pocketed the key we always kept in the back of the knob.

“Just stay quiet and I won’t hurt anybody,” he said. “I’ll stay only as long as I need. Just stay quiet and you’ll be fine.”

I couldn’t think what he meant. But Rew, always quick, understood immediately. Behind me, I heard him dash into the front room and grab the phone.