Authors: Harry; Mazer

Cave Under the City (12 page)

BOOK: Cave Under the City

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I bit my lip. I wasn't going to let myself cry.
No crying.
I held my breath. I started coughing and crying. My father got hold of me and I burrowed my head against him, dug in, held on to him. I was bawling and hitting my head against him and wiping my tears on his shirt.

“A good boy,” my father said. “A good boy.”

Later we got dressed and went out to eat. My father taped the soles of my shoes with adhesive. “Tomorrow we'll go to Thom McAn and buy you both shoes.”

In the cafeteria my father watched us eat. He went back and got us seconds. I worried that he didn't have enough money. “Eat. Let me worry about the money.”

On the way back to the house, my father told us about being away. He had found a little work in Washington, not a lot, not enough. “Things were no different from New York. It was worse than here because I was alone. I missed you. I wrote from Washington, and when I didn't get an answer, not one letter from Momma, I got worried and I called a friend. He called me back and said Momma was in the hospital. He didn't know where you were.”

“They wouldn't let us see her.” Bubber's face filled.

My father held Bubber in his lap and gave a long sigh. I felt something catch in my throat. “Momma's very sick,” he said. “They sent her away to a sanatorium.”

“Is she going to die?” Bubber said.

“In the mountains, Momma will have fresh air. She'll eat, she'll sleep, she'll get better.”

“Buba?” I said.

“She was in the hospital, too. Now she's home. Tomorrow the three of us will go see her.”

Bubber and I are back in school again. My mother isn't home yet. My father's working downtown. The city is renovating a bunch of theaters and music halls. Maybe you think that's crazy, spending money on shows when people are hungry, but it's giving a lot of people work. Carpenters, painters, electricians, and actors and musicians, too. My father says the job is going to last a year, at least. He's redoing the gold work and says it's a job for a fly. I went down to see him one day. The inside of the theater is like a church. My father was working on the ceiling. I didn't see him at first. Then my eyes went up the scaffolding, up, up, up, and there was my father, all the way on top.

Bubber still has trouble with his words, still reads things backward and sometimes writes them that way, too. He says he's okay, he's reading. What he's doing is faking it better, guessing and listening hard. At night, if my father's late coming home, Bubber and I go out and wait by the station.

I missed a whole civics unit. The teacher said I'd have to read the pages on my own and answer the questions because it was going to be on the final test. I had stuff to make up in algebra and spelling (I missed a lot of words), and I have to write a composition about an imaginary adventure. I thought I'd write about being hungry and finding food in garbage cans, except nobody would believe it. It's queer being here, at home and in school, and remembering how we lived under the burned-out restaurant. And then I think about the night we slept in a box, and I think of my grandmother, sick and all alone, and it makes me feel really bad.

Nobody knows about what happened to us or where we were. I don't talk about it. It didn't happen to them, and I don't want to hear people making stupid remarks like the only hungry people are too dumb or too lazy to work. I guess that's why I won't write about it, either.

My friends sort of guess something happened to me. Once we went by the restaurant and I said, “What if there was a secret room under there? Someplace you could live that nobody knew about.”

“Is that where you were?” George said.

“That's right.”

“That's right! Listen to him. I thought you said you were with your parents.”

“That's right, we were on vacation.”

“You change your story every minute. Where'd you go?”

“Florida. We traveled around a lot.”

Irv sort of knew, though. “You really lived down there? Why didn't you come to my house?”

What would they have done? Maybe let us stay. Maybe split us up. Maybe sent us to the shelter. There were too many things to explain, so I kept it to myself. Bubber and I talk sometimes about the way it was. He still misses King.

My father had a lot of questions, too. Why did I do this? Why did I do that? He didn't think I had to do things the way I did them. Mr. McKenzie would have taken care of us. I didn't answer my father. I didn't talk back, not out loud anyway. Before, I never even
thought
back to him. Whatever he said was the way it was. But to myself, now, I said:
You don't know, Pop. You weren't there, so how do you know what I should have done?

I'm delivering papers door to door in the mornings before school. I've got the money for Mr. Lazinski for the doughnuts. As soon as I get up the nerve to face him, I'm going to go down there and pay him back.

On my paper route, sometimes the only person I see that early in the morning is the milkman. We meet on the stairs, or going over the roof to the next building. He's friendly. He calls me Tolley and I call him Mike. I always give him a paper. He wants to pay me but I don't let him.

We went to see my mother in Tupper Lake. It's an all-day trip by train up to the Adirondacks, almost to Canada. Tupper Lake is in the mountains, but it's flat where the sanatorium is. The mountains are all around it. My mother took a walk with us. She held Bubber's hand the whole time. She held my hand, too.

I didn't like going away and leaving her again, leaving her in the mountains. I didn't like those cold white mountains. They say there are bears in the mountains, and wolves and mountain lions. I don't like to think about Bubber and me alone out there. I feel a lot safer in the city.

About the Author

Harry Mazer is the author of twenty-two novels for children and young adults. Best known for his acclaimed realistic teen fiction, Mazer has been recognized with the New York Library Association's Knickerbocker Award for Juvenile Literature and the ALAN Award for contributions to young adult literature, as well as several best-book designations from the American Library Association, among other honors.

After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, Mazer joined the US Army Air Force, serving in World War II from 1943 to 1945 as a sergeant. He received a Purple Heart and an Air Medal after his B-17 bomber was shot down in 1945. Mazer's wartime experiences later inspired several of his novels, including the Boy at War series.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Heidi North

ISBN: 978-1-5040-0995-9

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com