I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia (27 page)

Forty-five minutes and similar nonstop thoughts later, I again turned the book business over to Charlie Pickles. He looked peeved, but then, he generally does. I said I had to leave for a call of nature. I did. A call of my nature.

Once in the hall, I reached into my shirt pocket and realized I had left my classroom keys at the book stall. I started back, then wondered what I’d tell Charlie Pickles. Besides, I didn’t need a second story panoramic view, only a glance.

The gym had high wire-meshed frosted windows, facing the alleyway. Across the hall the auditorium, which sided on the square, had clear but impossibly high windows. The only first floor lookout seemed the one from the principal’s office, guarded by the hound from Hell-ga.

I turned back toward the staircase, planning to try doors until I found an unlocked classroom, when I remembered the window backstage. I also remembered my stashed treasures: the wholesome and not-so-wholesome books, and Sasha’s cape. Two birds with one, etcetera.

I went up the stage steps and back behind the curtain. My memory hadn’t failed me. The cracked tan window shade was up. I peered out. The only person I saw across the way had dreadlocks and a red backpack, and the gray car had been replaced by a purple and white finned number. Lydia had given up on me. I could breathe easy for a while.

It felt so good not to be afraid, I laughed with relief and went in search of my goodies.

This is where I fell on Monday, I remembered idly.

So, for symmetry’s sake, that was where I fell on Friday, too. Down, splat, with a thunk and a clatter, bruising whatever places had been spared on my staircase flop and whatever sense of dignity I had left.

I was surrounded by moldering upholstery, heavy velvet curtains, and a partial backdrop of celestial blue with fluffy white clouds. Musty, maybe, but peaceful as can be. I climbed to my feet and looked around more closely, carefully retracing my steps. And then I saw the cane—a showy sort that Martha Thornton might use for a tap dance, red and silver candy-striped, and realized that I had done the thunking and splatting, but it had done the clattering. Which had to mean it had been propped up.

Like a trap. Like something else had been rigged Monday, had tripped me the same way Monday.

I stood very quietly. I would grab the books and the cape and be on my way. Except that the books had been moved, and were not on the chair but on a nearby table, as if a housekeeper had come in to tidy. The chair had been turned to face another chair. To make a bed, I thought. And Sasha’s cape was flung like a throw or blanket over one of them. At the other end, a small carpet was rolled into a pillow.

I thought I heard a shuffle, movement, but it was only my own heartbeat gone wild. I very carefully tiptoed to the end table and picked up the stack of books.

There were too many and the top one was unfamiliar.
Great American Plays: 1950-1960.
PROPERTY OF PHILLY PREP LIBRARY was stamped inside.

I tried to convince myself that it had been here all along, left by an absentminded player long ago. I looked around more carefully and realized the furniture arrangement was not quite as haphazard as I’d first thought. The two chairs together. The end table next to it.

And on the floor at its side, a carton removed from onstage. I knew that was so because this one still had a shipping tag addressed to Sasha Berg.

But its contents weren’t from Sasha anymore. Not the three white yogurt cups and lids, wrapping paper from various sandwiches, an empty pudding container, apple cores, banana peels, or the small plastic bag of uneaten celery sticks, which seriously annoyed me. You should have to eat everything you steal, including vegetables. Especially vegetables.

“The Phantom.” I didn’t think I had said it, let alone said it loudly, but the words flew up above the sets and expanded into the cavernous maze of ropes and supports. I belatedly clapped my hand over my mouth.

Wait till that silly commercial art teacher heard that her schnecken hadn’t been an inside job. Some poor but clever street person had figured it out, found a way to nest back here and forage at night.

And in the daytime? Like right now? I was suddenly in that nightmare where you have to flee but can’t. My feet grew and melded to the stage floor and had nothing at all to do with my brain or my needs.

Get out, I told myself. Get out, I told the intruder. Sad, but you can’t be here. I thought of the children. He could be dangerous. I thought of myself. “Help!” I cried. “Help!”

“No!” a voice thundered. Low, rumbling, frightening. I fought to catch my breath, squinted, looked and finally saw an enormous bulk halfway behind the flat.

I couldn’t tell who he was or if I knew him. I couldn’t tell much of anything.

He reached around the canvas backdrop. Now things were clearer, especially his hand silhouetted against a backdrop of cumulus clouds, and two other things.

First, that was a gun in his hand, and second, I was in deep trouble.

Twenty-Two

“DON’T SHOOT!” I SCREAMED.

I knew that was an incredibly stupid, not to mention useless, thing to say, no matter how loudly. Still, that idea held top priority in my mind, followed closely by a completely hysterical inner voice shrieking,
Gun! Gun!

There was no response. He kept all but his weapon and a small slice of himself behind the bilious sky and clouds. Every few seconds, he’d poke his head out, checking my whereabouts. He moved so quickly, head out and back in a flash, that I didn’t think he could see anything. I couldn’t make out much of him, except bulk, a black beard, a knit cap. The generic homeless man from the square, in out of the cold. And armed.

The stairs and a possible exit were too far. He’d shoot me if I bolted. Instead, I used the time between his bobblings to retreat inch by inch, until I was at the other edge of the backdrop. Only then did I consider how easily a bullet had zipped through the canvas hood of my car and wonder why I was behaving as if canvas painted to look like heaven was a magic shield. I stood still, hoping he hadn’t noticed the shift enough to activate his trigger finger.

We seemed stuck in a silly version of the classic standoff, and no posse would ever ride over the ridge of the footlights and end our impasse.

My call of nature had become a permanent summons.

The man at the other end of the backdrop was probably desperate. He had nothing left to lose, considering life on the streets in February, particularly after this warm haven with refrigerators full of yogurt and fruit. A cafeteria to invade at night. Furniture, indoor plumbing. This was not going to be a voluntary evacuation.

I looked around for a solution. Above my head, ropes looped and hung like twisted vines. I tried to imagine myself leaping up, grabbing one and swinging toward him, kicking my feet and—I failed. I couldn’t imagine it

Me not Tarzan. What I could imagine was a variety of humiliations—missing, tripping, losing hold, slamming into the backdrop next to me, enraging the man with the gun, and managing to get myself shot while simultaneously smashing my own face.

“Please,” I said. “There’s no reason for violence, for that gun. Put it down and come out and we can get you some help.”

“I didn’t do anything!” he bellowed. I never said he had. His response therefore worried me a lot.

“Leave me alone!” he shouted, which was ridiculous. He was found out, and he knew it. He was trapped, and he knew that, too.

And so was I, and I knew it, too. Only I didn’t have a gun, which didn’t bode well for my side of the trap unless I learned to dematerialize, and learned it quickly. I tried to move my thoughts beyond self-defense into active aggression.

One good, solid, everything-you’ve-got shove, I told myself. Backdrop to the gut, winding him.

Which is what I did. I pushed, hard, and heard a satisfying
whooof!
as the wooden frame tried to bisect him from the forehead down. He lost his balance and backed up, grabbed the set, fell.

And dropped the gun.

I raced around the wobbling, toppling backdrop and slammed my foot on it. He was disarmed and I was on the verge of breathing freely again.

I carefully picked it up and pointed it at him. “Okay, come with me,” I said in my gruffest law and order voice.

He straightened up, looked at me, and laughed.

Nobody did that to John Wayne. “Hey!” I said. “This isn’t a joke.”

“Miss Pepper! I can’t believe it’s you.” The bearded giant looked honestly happy, as if we had bumped into each other at a delicious party. “The fact is,” he said, “it’s not real.”

“What?”

“The gun’s a fake. A prop I found back here.”

Sure, sure. I’d seen those movies, where the dumb villain is duped into distraction. Only thing this bearded critter didn’t remember was that it was the bad guy who got fooled, and I was the good guy. “Come on,” I said. “I hate to do it, but you can’t keep living back here.”

There was a rush of peripheral movement as a flurry of blue whirred my way and grabbed my blouse.

“Don’t you touch him!” it screamed. “Leave him alone!”

“Mom!” the beard said. “Hey!”

He walked toward me—toward her, too—with such a complete lack of anxiety, I knew he was telling the truth about the gun. I looked at my weapon.

“Calm down,” he told the woman.

I aimed at the floor and pulled the trigger. There was a small bang and a familiar whiff. A very impressive cap pistol. I dropped the entire business in my skirt pocket and tried to hide how stupid I felt. Not particularly about the gun—all I know about guns is that I want to avoid them. But I like to think I know something about people. Especially when they tell me about their protective son who always and forever left his boarding schools to come home and save his mother. Especially when I knew the son had just come home and been told by his father never to come home again. Especially when
the mother
of that son keeps a vigil outside a school
her son had once attended, a school that for the same week since the son had been told to disappear had been missing all manner of small objects, mostly food.

So it had been Hugh. Poor Hugh. It should have felt better to have it not be Lydia, but having it be Hugh was no improvement. At least now I knew why she’d lied, insisted she never heard the shot or knew who was there. Knew why she felt guilty for not having killed Wynn, why she was willing to go to jail in her son’s place.

Lydia Teller breathed in hard, ragged gasps. “Oh, please,” she sobbed. “Let him come home, live in his own house again. Let him finally have a normal life. Please!”

“How normal will it be with his mother in jail for a crime she didn’t commit?”

Hugh Teller, so hairy and tall I would never have recognized him, looked surprised. “You didn’t?” he asked.

Even in the gloom, I saw her eyes widen. “How could you of all people say that?” She looked ready to cry.

“Mom,” Hugh said. “This is important. Tell me the truth.”

She spoke slowly, and breathed hard between phrases, as if each word were heavy and painful. “I heard the shot from upstairs. I was in…I ran into the bathroom after he…”

Hugh seemed as surprised as I was. “You were? You didn’t?”

“I thought he would kill me this time. Blaming everything happening to him on me, like he always did, but it was worse that night. The worst ever.” She sounded frightened even of the memory.

“I know that part, remember?” Hugh said. “I was the one who told you to get out, that we’d leave together, but you wouldn’t.” He shook his head as if still angry with her refusal.

“You were there?” I asked, but Hugh kept his attention on his mother.

“It wasn’t you?” Lydia whispered. “You really, truly, didn’t fire your great-great-grandfather’s gun?”

What a quaint way to put it, as if she couldn’t say what had happened directly even now.

Hugh shook his head.

It wasn’t you. It wasn’t Hugh. My mind played the stupid refrain back and forth. It wasn’t Hugh, who thought Lydia had done it, or goofy Neil, or Lydia, locked in the bathroom, thinking her son had fired the shot she heard.

“I went down later, when it was quiet,” she said. “You were gone, and he was…on the kitchen floor. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t even fix the back door because I’d have to walk over…” She shook her head. “I put on
Oklahoma
and I thought about what to say.” Her voice became dreamy, drugged-sounding. “I thought about you as Curly. I thought about you running away, safe, maybe all the way to the real Oklahoma where nobody would find you. It calmed me down, made there seem a point to it all. I was going to wait to call the police for a long, long time. Until you were far away and safe.”

“You should have known I would never have left without getting you out. I told you that. That’s why I didn’t leave Sunday like he said. That’s why I didn’t leave Wednesday.”

“I thought you had gotten me out by…firing that gun,” she said.

“I thought you had gotten yourself out.”

They viewed each other with amazement and relief. They’d protected each other, finally, even if it was for a crime neither had committed. It was the nicest thing I’d heard about that family so far.

“How did you wind up here?” I asked.

“I’ve always been fond of the stage,” he said.

“This is not the time for jokes, Hugh.”

“Seriously, every hiding place from my childhood was outside, and cold. I didn’t even have a car to sleep in—I had to do my big rescue efforts by public transportation, believe it or not. Plus I needed a place I could take her to, at least for maybe one night, until we could get away from him. And then I remembered a story. In fact, I remembered it from your ninth grade class.”

Nice to know that literature can be useful. I waited.

“Instead of looking for a place where nobody was,” he said, “I’d go where there were lots of people. So many, nobody would notice me.”

“Here? With that woodsman’s beard?” For some reason, nobody at school had chosen that particular hair aberration.

“I was going to shave it, but I couldn’t find a razor anywhere in the building.”