Monkey Island (5 page)

“I hope your mother will be there,” Calvin said to him when he returned with an armful of newspapers. “But if she isn't, you must come back to us. Don't wander around the streets. There are nightmares walking around looking somewhat human. But they aren't.”

As Clay passed the van, Gerald looked up. “I have an extra doughnut,” he said. “You can share it with your mother.”

Clay didn't tell him he was alone, that his mother wasn't there, that he didn't know where on earth she was, that his heart was beating with dread and hope. He took the doughnut and said thank you and was rewarded by Gerald's sunny smile.

4   Escaping Notice

The hotel was closer to the park than Clay had imagined. His journey last night had seemed so long, and he was surprised, after twenty-five minutes and two wrong turns, to emerge on the familiar street. As he looked down its length, he felt fear like a feather drawn lightly downward from his brow to his belly, as though he saw for the first time the place where he and his mother had come to live.

It was such a squat, ugly building, its window ledges crowded with jars and bottles and milk cartons, the dirty windows seeming to darken before his eyes as the early morning light strengthened. The lobby doors were wide open as if there was nothing inside to be kept safe and private.

Two women joggers wearing purple shorts moved like jumping jacks along the line of parked cars. They didn't notice Clay. They didn't appear to notice anything. The morning people hadn't yet begun to come out of the apartment building to go to work. A few cars sped along the street as though there were no more traffic lights in the city.

A few feet from the hotel entrance, Tony, a boy Clay had spoken to now and then in the corridors or the lobby, was curled up against the brick wall, asleep. Clay peered through the doors. No one was inside. Cigarette butts covered the stained brown carpet. When you walked on it, it gave off a swampy smell like damp cigarettes. In the hard gray dirt alongside the building where hedges might once have grown, he saw five used hypodermic needles. If he looked further, he knew he would find more.

The door to the stairs would probably be locked at this hour. He'd have to take the elevator—the poison box—to the fifth floor.

“Good morning,” said a thin, soft voice. He turned from the entrance. Tony was sitting on the sidewalk, gripping his knees with his arms, looking up at Clay.

Tony spoke like a grown-up; he had a kind of formality that he kept even when other children made fun of him or cursed him. He would regard them silently, a slight smile on his face, as if they were puzzling but not very interesting aliens from another planet.

“Good morning,” Clay replied.

“You've been out?” asked Tony.

Clay nodded.

“I've been out, too, all night,” said Tony.

There was a red bruise on his right cheek. It looked warm like a dying coal.

“I better get upstairs,” he said. “You going in?”

“We'll have to take the elevator,” Clay said. Tony shrugged as though that wouldn't matter.

Tony was thin as a stick. He wore a belt that went twice around his waist. Clay guessed it was his father's. All except the top button was missing from his green cotton shirt that looked like a girl's.

The only sound in the lobby was the elevator descending, until a car revved up loudly out on the street. The elevator door opened and closed like a trap—
snap!
You had to move fast getting in or out. There were new messages spray painted on the walls. One small neat one, written in red crayon, said
STOP
.

“The daily news,” Tony said, waving at the walls. Then, with no change in his voice, he said, “My father threw the television out the window last night. It didn't conk anybody, because it fell into the air shaft.”

“Why did he do that?” Clay asked, embarrassed.

“He got mad because he couldn't get the volume up,” Tony said. He added, “You never can tell.”

Tony's father was the terror of the seventh floor. People ran into their rooms when they heard his door open. Clay had frequently seen Tony's mother in the lobby with Tony and his two small sisters, a suitcase and some shopping bags at their feet, as though they were about to leave the hotel. So far they hadn't.

Clay tried not to stare at the bruise on Tony's cheek. He knew who had given it to him.

“Good-bye,” Tony said politely as Clay got off on the fifth floor.

For a moment, as he walked down the corridor, Clay thought of what Tony was going home to on the seventh floor.

But in the silent, dirty corridor, his heart began to pound loudly. He could feel it in his throat as though it had crawled up there out of fear. When he unlocked the door, his mother would be asleep in her bed, lying on her back, the bump of the new baby making a round mound like a soccer ball under the blanket. “Ma …” he whispered as he pushed the door open.

The room was washed gray by morning light. Everything was as he had left it, her rumpled brown coat on his cot, the soot-streaked windows, clothes pushed into a bunch on the rack. No one. Silence. Hadn't he known she wouldn't be there?

The only color in the room was a red crayon lying on a table where they ate and where his mother filled in forms for Social Services.

The red crayon was one he used to make his own mark on the elevator walls, the corridor walls, sometimes on a patch of sidewalk. The word he always wrote was
STOP
. He didn't think people would notice it, because they loved the sex and bathroom words so much, although he had noticed when he rode up in the elevator with Tony that his mark stood out. He didn't know what he meant by it, but when he glimpsed it as he went about his day, doing errands and going to school, it made him feel like a spy, his mark stronger than all the other words. There was something about it that amused him, too, in a secret way. He slid the crayon into his pocket.

In the book box, there was an envelope that held a few photographs. He might take one of his mother and father standing near the sailing pond in Central Park to show Calvin and Buddy. What an awful idea! A lie! Instead, he took his copy of
Robinson Crusoe
.

He ought to go. Mrs. Larkin might hear him moving around. He took some socks and underwear and a T-shirt from the suitcase and put them in a paper bag he found beneath the cooking table. A thought slid into his mind. Now
he
was running away, leaving the hotel. But he would keep a watch on it. He'd find places along the street so that if his mother came back, he'd spot her.

Ma had said his father couldn't bear it. Now she had gone. Had she, too, not been able to bear it? Was
it
him? He let himself sink into the question for a minute. He knew that wasn't so.

It
was because everything had fallen away—Daddy, the apartment, things like a television set, a refrigerator, cushions and frying pans, a private bathroom, a telephone, a place of one's own, a private place among millions of people.

But his mother shouldn't have gone and left him. It was terrible that she had done that.

He left the room. Radios were playing now. He could hear the rise and fall of many voices. He hurried to the stairway, hoping the first-floor door would be unlocked by this time.

There was dope stuff scattered on the stairs and a few chicken bones and lots of cellophane wrappers and crushed cigarette packs. “Ordure,” he said aloud, another kind than Calvin had meant. He thought of Buddy and Calvin. It didn't make him happy but he felt slightly less alone.

The first-floor door was locked. He'd have to wait until the security man unlocked it, and then he could get away.

He sat down on a step, suddenly very sleepy. If only his mother had left a note, a word, “I'll be back soon.…” or “I've gone to have the baby.…” What if something had happened to her? An accident? She'd been so blurry these last weeks, like an out-of-focus snapshot. For a long while, he'd missed her quick understanding glance that was nearly always on her face when he looked her way, that seemed to take in everything about him.

His head felt so heavy. He leaned against the railing and almost at once fell asleep.

When he woke up, he could hear the late morning noises beyond the heavy metal door. They were the sounds he heard every Saturday when he ran down the stairs to get out of the room. People spoke excitedly, sometimes in languages he didn't understand. There were always grumbling arguments that trailed off suddenly into silence, and shrieks of laughter that could suddenly turn into screams.

He stood up and tried the door. It was open. He wondered if anyone had passed him while he slept. There was a trail of coffee grounds on the stairs nearby. Someone must have lugged down a leaking garbage sack. He peeked through the door.

People were lined up at the telephone. He heard someone shout, “But I
been
waiting now two months!” A huge woman sat on a bench with two babies climbing up and tumbling down from her lap, both of them tied to her by long cords that stretched from their waists to her wrists.

Nobody looked at him. He was used to that. Still, he didn't count on it. Now and then a person would catch sight of him. He'd been chased all over the hotel, down corridors and up the stairs, once to the roof, where he had hid for hours behind a chimney pot. It was that sudden shift of attention he had to keep himself ready for. Watch out. Stay on your toes, his mother had said.

He slipped out through the lobby to the sidewalk.

He wouldn't be able to watch for his mother from under the awning of the apartment house across the street. If a kid from the hotel went near the entrance, the doorman, usually leaning up against the wall inside, would start up like a battery-run machine, his feet hitting the floor with great thumps, his elbows pumping, his mouth opening to shout, “Bums! Bums, get going!”

There were sparse hedges he could get behind, an entrance to a dentist's office, other entries to small stores, and the subway exit at the corner. He could take shelter there if a policeman came along.

There was another place, the news store, diagonally across the street from the hotel, where Abdul, the Arab owner, appeared to dream behind a counter covered with packs of cigarettes, candy, and little packages of cheese and peanut butter crackers. Abdul never seemed to mind his looking at magazine covers as long as he didn't pick them up. And from inside the store, he could see people as they went by.

But Abdul knew about school hours, though he looked as if he minded no one's business but his own as he made change, putting magazines in a thin paper bag if a customer asked for one, his eyes looking off somewhere into the distance. Clay knew Abdul recognized him by now, and even might ask him a dangerous question about school in his deep voice. Still, it was Saturday, and he would run in there if he saw a policeman.

For a long time, Clay stood near the subway exit until he felt so hungry he didn't even dare look toward Abdul's. He'd seen Tony pinch candy, doing it swiftly, loading up the pockets of his oversize pants. One day Abdul caught him at it, and now Tony wasn't allowed in the store.

Suddenly, Clay recollected the money he'd taken from beneath the doughnut box in the hotel room and that was now in his pocket. He went into the news store and bought two packages of cheese and peanut butter crackers, a soda, and a coconut bar. Abdul took the money Clay handed him and gave him change, silent and unquestioning as usual.

Clay walked along the sidewalk, eating. His father would not have liked that. “Animals eat on the run,” he had said once. But that was before, when the Garritys had a small, pleasant kitchen, and a table to eat on, and the outside world of streets and sidewalks was something you passed through to get to other inside places. Even his father might be eating on a street somewhere at this moment. When he finished the soda, he started to throw the can into a trash basket. Then he remembered Buddy's job and held on to it.

He must have been hanging around the hotel for hours by now. His legs ached. His fingers had stiffened around the can which was too big to fit into a pocket. What he had to do was to sit down, and the only place where he could do that without people noticing him was the little park. He could come back later to keep watch, perhaps after dark.

Calvin was sitting at the entrance to the crate, his legs stretched in front of him, a notebook on his lap. It was the same kind that Clay used in school, except that Calvin's notebook looked like it was about to fall apart. He was writing in it fiercely, pressing the stub of a pencil hard against a page. On the ground beside him were two small wrinkled apples.

Clay stood silently a moment. He felt timid in front of the old man with his long beard and his strange, cold glance. Buddy was so different, almost neat even when he had worn the raggedy coat over his blue jeans and T-shirt. His crinkly curls grew tight on his head like a black cap, his skin was smooth and dark brown, and he was quick to smile.

Calvin looked up. “You want one of my apples?” he asked. “They fell off a fruit cart.… They're a bit old, but sweet, I'd guess.” He held one out to Clay, who took it and ate it, more out of gratitude that Calvin had given him something than from hunger. He felt a little sick. The candy bar had been a mistake.

“Was she there?” Calvin asked as if he already knew the answer, which he went on to show he did. “Well, of course not. Or else you wouldn't be here.”

Clay said nothing.

“I haven't thought much about these matters,” Calvin continued. “I do not think about children anymore if I can help it. But I am sure you ought to take yourself off to the local police station. Someone may be looking for you. Don't look so frightened. You're not a criminal.”

“There are agencies,” Clay said hurriedly. “They would take me away to someplace for good. I won't be able to look for my mother anymore.” His voice had risen, though he had meant to try and speak calmly. He moved further away from Calvin. “What if she comes back and I'm gone?”