Monkey Island (11 page)

Clay coughed.

“I see,” Henry Biddle said. He bent over, placed his big hands on Clay's waist, and lifted him straight up in the air. “You don't weigh much,” he remarked. “We'll fix that.” He held Clay close to him for an instant and set him down on his feet. Clay turned away to hide his smile. He felt there was a reason not to show how much he'd liked being lifted up and held, but he couldn't work out what it was.

“There's a letter from your sister,” Mrs. Biddle said to her husband as she came to the kitchen door, “and a rug-sale notice from Macy's, the phone bill, a request to help save the tortoises, seven catalogues, and a mail-o-gram that says you may have won a million dollars. Or was it ten million?”

“You open them and read them,” said Henry, hanging up his green storm jacket on a peg in the hall. “Then collect that million and save the tortoises.”

Mr. Biddle was a postal clerk and worked all day sorting mail at the post office. Clay could understand why he didn't care to look through mail when he came home.

Mrs. Biddle went back to the kitchen, and Mr. Biddle said, “I'll take a wash and be ready in a jiff.”

By then, Clay had seen everything in the apartment, which was on the sixth floor of a seven-storied yellow-brick building on the west side of the city near the river.

The letters were in a pile next to the telephone on a small table in a narrow hallway. Down a few steps and to the right was a living room with a plump sofa and two armchairs, and a round table covered with magazines and a pot of roses. Clay discovered the petals were made of cloth. On one wall hung photographs in silvery-looking frames of children of various ages. A small television set on a metal stand occupied the space between the two windows. On the wall behind the sofa was a large painting of a ship, an old-fashioned kind of ship with four masts and dozens of sails, sitting on a puddinglike blue sea furrowed with neat white-caps, behind it all a red sun sinking on the horizon. The floor throughout the apartment was covered with peach-colored carpeting. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom. One of the bedrooms was his. A wall shelf held games and toys, some of which he could tell had been broken and then repaired. On another shelf sat about twenty books, all of which appeared to have been handled and read by many people.

Mrs. Greg had explained to Clay that the Biddles were a foster-parent family. They didn't have children of their own, but they took in other people's children, boys and girls who had no place to live because their parents had died or had gotten too sick to take care of them or, as in his case, had disappeared. Mrs. Greg mentioned that there were other circumstances in which children needed temporary homes, but she didn't go into them. As far as Clay was concerned, she didn't have to. He remembered Tony, his thin, bony, small self huddled up against the hotel wall, his bruised face.

The questions he most wanted to ask but dared not ask yet were about time. Did children stay with the Biddles until they were grown-up? How long would he stay? Would he at some point be sent to another foster family? Would he, one morning, be put out on the sidewalk? He knew this last question was what Calvin would have called wild foolishness. He was connected now, through Mrs. Greg, to Social Services. The net was under him. Still, anything could happen.

They ate supper at a Formica table in the kitchen, where the walls were covered with small framed pictures, a shepherdess watering a sunflower, a rooster crowing on the roof of a barn, two birds holding a wreath in their beaks over the head of a little girl whose chubby hands were crossed in her lap on top of a flounced pink skirt. On several pieces of varnished tree bark were sayings written in such curly letters it was hard to decipher them.
Home Is Where the Heart Is
, Clay spelled out after staring at one while he ate warm meat loaf, peas, and a boiled potato.

He began to feel less strange sitting there. It was as if this real food filling him up so pleasantly was making his first meal with these two large friendly people ordinary as well as unusual. When a green glass bowl filled with tapioca was placed before him, he didn't make a face and growl the way he had when his mother used to urge it on him. Mrs. Biddle handed him a can of evaporated milk with a V-shaped opening and said the tapioca was twice as good with a bit of cream. The food in the hospital had been pale, as if all of it had been boiled for days.

Eating had taken up most of his attention, so he only half listened to the Biddles' conversation. It was mostly about Mr. Biddle's day in the post office, about people who tried to sneak ahead in the line to buy stamps, about his friend, a Mr. Nakashima, who'd found an open envelope addressed to a person and a street that didn't exist, and out of which had dropped an enormous dead spider.

When Clay finished everything, he glanced at the Biddles. They were both smiling at him.

“Good?” asked Mrs. Biddle.

Clay nodded.

“Nice to have you here, Clay,” said Henry.

He wanted to smile back at them, but a thought got in the way. Was his old life now blotted out? That was what he'd felt when he'd discovered new people living in the hotel room.

“Thank you,” he said.

The next morning, Mrs. Biddle told Clay she would wash the corduroy jacket and reline it. She could see that Clay had long outgrown it.

Clay imagined a boy somewhere in the city at the very moment of being lost, and set on a path that would lead him through hard days and nights to Edwina Biddle's apartment, where Clay's old jacket, spruced up, would be waiting for him in a closet.

They went to shop on Broadway. Mrs. Biddle bought him two pairs of shoes, sneakers and brown oxfords, blue jeans and two pairs of corduroy pants, a sweater, three shirts, socks and underwear, a navy blue down jacket and a wool hat, a toothbrush, and a canvas bag for schoolbooks.

“That's a nice belt for you,” she said, pointing to one curled on a counter, a silver eagle emblazoned on its buckle. He ran a finger over the eagle, feeling its taut wings stretched in flight.

“Would you like it?”

“Thank you. Yes, Mrs. Biddle.”

“Call me Edwina,” she said. “I'd love that.”

After supper, Henry cut his hair. When Clay went to look in the bathroom mirror, he didn't look familiar to himself. Of course, he was taller. It was odd to think he'd been growing all the time he'd lived with Buddy and Calvin in the park. His face was very thin. His brown eyes stared into their own reflection. Did he really look like his father, as his mother had often remarked? What did his father look like?

The school he was to attend was a ten-minute walk from the Biddle apartment. After he took reading and arithmetic tests, he was placed in one of the four sixth-grade classes. His homeroom teacher, Miss Moffa, called him Charles for several days. In the end, she got his name right but didn't pay much attention to him. He could see she had her hands full keeping the class quiet enough to give out assignments.

He was the thirty-third student in his class. His desk was next to a girl who, as soon as he sat down, gathered up her pen and pencils and a blue comb and moved them all away as though she knew he meant to grab them.

He had been worried the first day he'd entered the old gray stone building with its great dirty windows. A man in uniform had passed a device like a ray gun over him and the other children to make sure no one was carrying a concealed weapon.

But nobody bothered him much. During class changes, the corridors were packed. Some of the bigger boys and girls punched anyone they could reach with their jabbing fists. There was one who cursed and screeched with laughter whenever he landed a blow. His face was bone white, and bristles of hair stood up on his scalp like porcupine quills. Clay named him Son of Stump People.

In a week, he had made a friend. His name was Earl Thickens. His smile reminded Clay of Buddy's. They ate lunch at the same table in the school cafeteria. Whenever there was a free period, they sat together. Neither Earl nor he asked each other about their families.

“Don't let anyone see your belt with that eagle on it,” Earl advised him. “Somebody will take it off you.”

In the afternoons especially, the school was a crazy house of noise. There was fighting in the corridor, bells clanged, teachers shouted to try and bring about order. Clay set himself against it all. He discovered he wanted to read anything he could get his hands on, to learn everything.

When he couldn't hear the teachers' voices through the din, he watched their lips. In time, he got pretty good at guessing what they were saying. He wrote it all down and did his homework regularly. Sometimes he could escape into the library, which smelled of paste and dust and books, and where it was quiet like a cove you could row your boat into to get out of the gale wind.

In the long-ago days when he'd lived with his father and mother, a teacher had written on his home report that he daydreamed too much.

He didn't daydream anymore. He remembered.

One bitter afternoon in late January when the wind blew fiercely through the streets and rattled signs and doors, he went downtown with Earl to a store that sold old comic books. While Earl went through stacks of
Spider Man
comics, Clay stared through the store window at the street. It had begun to look familiar. His gaze fell upon the entrance to an alley that ran alongside a big apartment house.

It was where he and Buddy had found a hoard of bottles and cans to redeem. He realized with a shock that made his knees quake that he couldn't be more than a few minutes' walk from the park.

Earl shook his arm. “Hey! You going into a trance?”

“I was thinking about something.”

“Think on this,” Earl said, holding an open comic book in front of Clay's face. With one finger, he pointed to a vampire that seemed to have been drawn with black shoe polish except for her gruesome white fangs.

“Doesn't she remind you of Miss Moffa?” Earl asked. “Especially when it's teacher vampire hour at three
P.M.
?”

“She's prettier,” Clay said. Earl laughed.

Monkey Island
, Clay was hearing,
where the monkeys live
. In his mind's eye, he could see those bawling faces, those bodies hauling themselves along, coming toward the park, set on damage and hurting, worse than any shoe polish vampire or irritable teacher.

Earl was paying the clerk for the comic book. He made a little money on weekends putting fliers in mailboxes for a Chinese take-out restaurant. Edwina often asked Clay if he needed a dollar or two. But he didn't care much for comic books, and he couldn't think of what else he wanted. He did like the newspaper Henry brought home every evening. He read it all through, sometimes even the apartment ads.

“You want to do something?” Earl asked when they were out on the sidewalk. “Like go down to the river and those old warehouses? Or we could go to where they're putting up that new office building and look through the holes in the fence.”

“It's too cold for the river,” Clay said.

“Well—what
do
you want to do?” Earl asked a little crankily. “You're all wrapped up like a package today.”

“There's a place near here … if you want to come with me,” Clay said, not sure he really wanted Earl along.

Earl shrugged and thrust the comic book into a pocket. “Let's go,” he said.

There were a number of streets to choose from. Clay made several false starts until suddenly his memory shaped itself into an arrow. He headed down a broad avenue.

“Bird-dogging,” remarked Earl. “What's the mystery?”

Clay was unable to speak. Not much more than fifteen minutes from the comic-book store, the avenue split in two to fork around the triangular park.

For a second, Clay felt so dizzy he thought he would pitch forward to the street. He grabbed Earl's arm. There were no newspapers along the paths, no black plastic sacks. The cement drinking fountain had been removed. One bench, most of its slats broken, stood on its three remaining legs under a tree.

The park was only a pause in the streets, a small place surrounded by rusty iron rails where trees had trouble staying alive.

“What are we looking at?” asked Earl.

“I lived there for five weeks,” Clay said, letting go of Earl's arm. “In that park, over in that far corner, in a kind of crate house.”

He stared at the corner, seeing himself in the big sweater Buddy had found for him, sitting at the entrance to the crate, looking up to see what Buddy was going to take out of a pocket or a paper bag for them to eat.

“You were on the street,” Earl stated.

“Yes.”

Earl blew on his fingers, looking over them at Clay.

“My cousin, Lawrence, is on the street,” he said. “He sleeps over to the Port Authority except when the cops chase him away. We haven't got room for him. My mother takes him food when she can.”

Earl went far out of his way to walk Clay almost to the Biddle apartment. It was still hard for Clay to think of it as home, but on this dark, cold afternoon, after seeing the park, it wasn't possible at all.

He was silent at supper that night. He knew he was making the Biddles uncomfortable. Henry told jokes. Edwina piled food on his plate. He couldn't do what they wanted, laugh at Henry's stories or tell them about school, or about what Earl and he had done that day. It wasn't the first time he'd felt their disappointment.

He did the chores he was asked to do, made his bed, dried dishes, helped to clean the apartment on Saturday mornings, put his soiled clothes in the hamper for Edwina to take to the Laundromat down the block. But they wanted more from him, even though Edwina told him he was the easiest boy she had ever taken care of. As she spoke, there was a questioning note in her voice as if she hoped he would contradict her.

It flashed into his mind that she might be relieved if he acted up a little, balked at a chore for once, sulked and slammed shut his bedroom door.