Seven Deadly Pleasures (8 page)

1.

D
enny Sanborn was the type who was always in trouble and the grown-ups at school had tried everything on him. There were warnings he ignored and lectures he didn't understand. There were conferences set up with teachers and counselors, but Dad never showed up anyway.

Denny was a pistol. He busted farts in the auditorium during moments of silence and melted crayons on the radiators. He drew on his desk, clapped erasers in the cloak room, called out, made noises, laughed out loud during sustained silent reading, and often fell from his chair on purpose.

He also took the blame for stuff other kids did. Once, Kimmy Watson poured out ten McDonald's salt packs into a last row desk Mrs. Krill used to coach kids who were slow. When Denny fibbed that he was the one who did it he lost computers for a week, but in return Kimmy gave him a black plastic spider, half a soft pretzel, and a fake barf cushion she won at the St. Mary's church fair. Latif Johnson once dented a hall locker playing pushy-pushy with a fourth grader, and when Denny claimed responsibility for the damage, Latif awarded him with a glow in the dark skull and crossbones pinkie ring.

Everybody loved Denny. They greeted him with high fives and low-down double pump slap-slaps. They laughed at his foolishness. They followed him around at recess and always wanted to know what he was thinking. Denny was a hero, everyone's friend, the class clown, and always knee-deep in hot water.

But Denny didn't really know trouble. He hadn't even a clue what the word meant until that wintry evening two days before Christmas, a week after his tenth birthday precisely at 4:09 P.M. For that is when all hell broke loose.

And what would become this absolute, supernatural terror began with a babysitter, some charcoal sticks, an empty picture frame, and one innocent little ghost story.

With the last buzzer the dented back doors of George Washington Elementary School burst open and children made a scramble for buses. Benjamin Rahim slapped Bobby Nagle on the back of the head and knocked his hat onto the pavement by the 18th Street railing. Three girls squealed and began a game of keep-away. Someone bounced a blue superball into the air and a flock of hands poked up at the gray sky to claim it. A new kid with little white bumps on his forehead hunted on his knees for something while a fifth grader in ripped white stockings and a plaid skirt pulled the girl's hair in front of her. Old Mr. Martin, the school policeman, stood over by the west gate thumbing the handcuffs at his side and jerking his head back and forth for better views. The veins in his neck showed. His fat cheeks and overgrown chin gave him a severe case of puppet-mouth.

"I see you!" he shouted. "You're right in front of me, all of you! Have some respect, huh? You ain't foolin' no one. Now cut it out or you'll spend the rest of your waking lives in the accommodation room and that's a promise!"

"Yes, Mr. Martin," a few scattered voices said back. Feet tramped up the bus stair grids. Some children made faces in the windows while others fought for the better seats in back. The pavement was clear for all but some stragglers.

Back at the school, Denny pushed through the doors and strolled toward 19th Street. He shook the long blond hair out of his face, closed his eyes, rocked up on his toes, and paused a minute right there on the empty playground to savor the wind. It was one of those deep, early winter breaths that felt keen in the lungs and tasted like dripping icicles. Images of wet snow, misted store windows, soaked sneakers, and roaring bonfires swept through his mind, followed by a sweet kind of sadness. Grown-ups didn't slow down to drink up the breeze. They were too serious. Too busy. And even a fourth grader could not stay this young forever.

"Yo, Denny! You can't be running ahead like that, man."

It was Stevie Ramano, Denny's T.S.S. from the Connect Program sponsored by the school district. If you lived within a four block radius of George Washington and your folks couldn't pick you up at the end of the day, you were given an escort home. Romano was one of the better ones. He cocked his winter hat a bit to the side, pulled together the flaps of his coat, and jogged up next to Denny.

"At least let me get you to the corner of 19th so you ain't taking off in view of the windows," he said. Denny shrugged and walked the short distance in silence. His chaperon stuck in some ear buds and sang with his iPod tonelessly.

"See you," Denny said. He slipped through the playground's far gate and made for the cross-street.

"Be good!" Romano called back, and Denny was suddenly in a footrace with this old, mustard-crudded hot dog wrapper caught in some running gutter water. He passed the check cashing store and ran through the warm, perfumy smell of Goldberger's dry cleaners. A mud-spattered bus threw on its blinkers and a Yellow Cab made a wide sweep around it. Denny turned the corner and ran down Cherry Street. At first glance, one would have thought that this was a burst of joy, a race for the sheer fun of it as growing boys were so often known for. A closer view, however, would have shown a grim, determined frown on Denny's face, a scowl usually reserved for adults with complicated responsibilities, problems, and debts. It was an expression that had hardened over time, like old leather.

He raced through an abandoned parking lot and hop-scotched through some uprooted cement tire bumpers. Between the empty lot shanty and a Porta-Potty, he did a tippie-toe across a narrow board covering deep hole made by the Philadelphia Street Department. He climbed a dumpster, scaled an iron fence, and ran along the top of a brick wall. He jumped down and turned a corner.
The
corner.

His chest was heaving, and his stomach cramped up a bit. The arrival always felt horribly new even though he repeated this tradition every day of every week, and that was why he rushed into it so. It was like diving into cold water or ripping off a Band-Aid.

There was a rusted mailbox, a bent stop sign, and a graffiti-covered newspaper box at the curb where the two cross-streets met. A tool and die company sat in the background with its windows barred up, and the gum factory under the train trestle still poisoned the air with that distinct, high stink of burnt sugar and machine oil.

It was a smell that Denny both hated and was drawn to, a signal that lovingly and at the same time cruelly preserved the importance of this particular corner. For Front Lane and Barrington was the third to last stop for the northbound subway, it was a block from the Veterans Administration Building, it remained a hot spot for Greek and Asian street vendors, an unofficial taxi stand, and the very place where Denny Sanborn's mother had been killed seven years ago.

2.

It was all a crazy accident and Denny did not really remember it except for some bits and pieces. Dad had been pushing him in the stroller and Mom had been walking out front with their little two-wheeled grocery cart. They had been on their way to the Acme and she had been hit by a car, not one driven by some drunk or runaway robber, but a regular lady in a station wagon.

Denny had a foggy recollection of his mother negotiating the cart over a spalled patch of curb. He had a dreamlike memory of a station wagon leaning to one side and hurtling through the intersection, but then it went blank for awhile. There was a scratchy vision of his father with his face in his hands, a woman with a ponytail and a baseball cap saying, "I just took my eyes off the road for a second," and an African American woman with a purple feather in her hat blurting something like, "Someone comfort this child!" Everything else was just a blur of what Dad refused to talk about from that day forward.

Denny walked across the street toward the sewer grating on the far side. He usually loved stomping on sewer gratings, and sprinting across subway street gratings, and spitting down the vent gratings that blew steam up into the cold air. This one, however, he always approached with respect.

He stepped carefully on the diagonal groove-cuts and looked down. Old leaves and a gritty run of mud had formed a long wavelike pattern that curved in a mild S-shape. Rust-colored water flowed over in rills and bubbled off into the dark recesses of the cavern. There was a museum of bottles, both broken and not, gathered on the near side of a piece of wood with five nails sticking out of it. On the far side of the makeshift wooden divider was Denny's collection of trinkets, only tainted by a torn Burger King bag that had caught on the edge of the Buzz Lightyear shoulder-launch missile attachment he had tossed down there last Monday.

Denny had been making sacrifices down the drain for three years now. There were tiddlywinks, tennis balls, Lego pieces, and Livestrong wristbands. There were marbles, Chuck E. Cheese gum balls, jigsaw puzzle pieces, and candy-necklace strings. When he couldn't find anything good, he hooked a crayon from school. Once he had thrown in a rubber band he found in the street. He always gave something.

Denny reached into his front pocket and pulled out his Mike Schmidt rookie card. It was faded across the back where he had once tried to annihilate the statistics with a pen eraser, and the front right corner had been torn off. He slipped the card between the bars of the grate, watched it drop, and sighed. Mom's favorite '80s Phil had been Bowa, but Denny couldn't find his card anywhere. He hated substitutes.

Denny sulked away from the corner of Front Lane and Barrington and made his way toward 20th Street. He stared at his bouncing sneaker laces. His mother was buried in Plot #7 in the St. John's Cemetery in Pennsauken, New Jersey, next to her mother and a step-brother named Patrick that Denny had never met. The headstone was small and only said her name and the dates. Dad used to take him there every Sunday morning, but they hadn't been out there for years.

Denny jogged through the small grassy plot splitting Creek Drive, C Street, and Wyoming and suddenly thought how nice it would have been if he'd worn a hat. Briefly, he pictured the shelf in the hall closet at home, but only saw Dad's bowling ball, hard hat, and slush boots.

Denny broke into a run. Did he even own a winter hat that fit anymore? If he did, he could not place the thing in his mind. And Dad never seemed to have a clue (or a care) where to find Denny's hats or socks or book bags or underwear, at least not until the socks had holes or his ears had already gone cold. The man just never seem to remember in time.

Denny slowed to a walk. He approached 20th Street and his breath felt thick in his throat. On the corner an unshaven fat man wearing a Christmas hat with white trim-frost and a pom-pom on top muttered swear words to himself, hiked up his pants, and lifted a tray of soft pretzels off the warmer to pack them away. Denny skirted around him and noticed that a few people on his street had their holiday lights up. The stringed bulbs looked like cheap smiles in the growing dark. There was a mini-electric Santa doing the twist dance in a window, a fake snowman smoking a cigar, and a few wreaths hanging on door knockers. Suddenly, Denny had a strong urge to hook some of them, switch them around, and see if his neighbors would notice.

At the end of the day, Denny always found himself at war, half dreaming that he would hold so tight to the scattered memories that he could somehow bring Mom back, and half wishing for some magic non-stop thrill that would make him forget all about grocery carts, hurtling station wagons, purple feathers, and numb ears of the world. But magic was for nerds and wishes for babies. Weren't they?

Denny Sanborn was about to find out. For sometimes magic floated in the air just out of sight and other times wishes came true. They just didn't wind up exactly like the wisher pictured them to be.

It was 4:01 P.M.

The stranger was waiting for Denny on his front steps.

3.

"Hey there," she said. She moved her small purse to the other shoulder. "You Denny?"

He shrugged. The tall girl standing in front of him was about sixteen years old. She was African American, bone thin, and dressed in Catholic school clothes. Her teeth were slightly bucked, but it worked for her in a cartoon rabbit sort of a way. She chewed her gum hard. One hand was knuckled to her hip. She shrugged back at Denny and dug into her pocketbook.

"Here's my I.D., so you know I'm not some street freak or something."

Denny gave a glance to Josephine Thompson's temporary driver's license and shrugged again. Grandma Rosetta had been a much better babysitter, that was for sure. Grandma Rosetta always let him do what he wanted while she played with the downstairs remote and ate microwave popcorn all night, so any rules this Josephine Thompson was about to lay down were sure to be major league bummers.

But what could he do? Grandma was getting older by the minute, no, by the second, and had recently started calling Dad by the names of old relatives she had not seen in ten years. And though it was no secret that Bob Sanborn never much liked the Cleveland cousins to begin with, it became quickly clear that he liked even less a sitter (even family) who couldn't remember his first name, write down a phone message, or scrub a dish or two while she was at it. The whole thing had been building for weeks.

And so here stood the golden answer, chewing her gum and flashing I.D. like a pro. Josephine Thompson, daughter of Mr. Jarell Thompson, friend of Dad's from Core Cutters Concrete and Demolition for four years running, or so Denny had heard. Oh sure, if you worked the wreckers and dozers with Bob Sanborn on late shift you were the man. You were the bomb. And it gave your daughter full dibs to snag a house key, push Grandma out the door, and boss around a fourth grader all night.

"Well?" she said. "You got a key? It's cold out here."

Denny sniffed.

"What's a tampon?" he said. She didn't even blink.

"Every month a girl bleeds from her private place. A tampon's a sponge. Anything else?"