The Bronze King (3 page)

I think mainly I was just paralyzed by the injustice of it. As if Lennie and I were carrying on a wild affair or something! Which sometimes worried me, too, because when was this stuff with boys going to start making sense to me—without turning me into a burbling idiot like Megan? I mean, I knew I'd have to get into all this stuff sometime in a real way, but I did not want to leave my brain behind the way Megan had, and the way sometimes it almost seemed my mom herself still did. Some of the men Mom brought around! It was all still very much a mess and a puzzle and fearsome to me, and I guess you could say this was not a particularly smooth time in my life.

Kim and her buddies didn't make it any better, is what I'm trying to say.

At any rate, I needed some decent company that day so I went home with Margie Acton, a girl who was okay but not somebody to spend a lot of time with. She was very timid and neurotic and she pushed too hard to have you like her, maybe because she was from the Midwest and people called her a hick and said dumb, outrageous things all the time to try to shock her. Her parents were a pair of pills which I guess she couldn't do much about, but it did make it hard to hang around at her place.

I couldn't tell her anything about what was going on. She'd have leaked it to her mother, and her mother would have called up my mother. Mrs. Acton was one of those mothers who thought it was her job to get involved in everybody's life. It just wasn't worth the hassle to talk to Margie about the disappearances. We put on her records and played Battleship all afternoon, and then I went home.

Margie lived in Peter Cooper Village. I had to take the subway.

Something happened.

It was just the kind of thing that Margie and her parents are terrified of about New York, but real New Yorkers get used to it early and hardly pay any attention. We know we can handle it.

Ha.

Three punky guys, about sixteen or seventeen I think, got on my subway car, looking for trouble. You could tell by the way they talked so loud and eyed everybody in that screw-you way that's meant to scare you.

The door near me, to the next car, was jammed. Some people in the car used the door at the other end to leave, but for me to get there, I would have to pass right by these creeps.

One of them turned around. He was wearing a gray nylon jacket with a black skull on it and the words PRINCE OF DARKNESS. They were all wearing gray nylon jackets.

The creeps started swinging on the holding bars like monkeys and kicking the seats. A man near them quit hiding behind his paper and got off at the next stop.

I should have too, but I only had one stop to go and I was late already and why should I get chased off my train and have to wait for another one just because some creeps got on? It was just a lousy coincidence. I thought that the one who had tried to grab my purse was the skinny one with the tattoo—a snake-mouth open wide with fangs sticking out—on his cheek. There was something about the way he stood, as if he was balanced on a surfboard. Probably, I told myself, he grabbed purses all the time; he wouldn't even remember me. I hugged my bag in my lap and sat tight. Mistake.

Between stations the train idled along and then stopped dead in the dark tunnel.

Nobody was in the car now but me and a sleeping drunk and these guys in their jackets and their chains looping down from their belts and their studded wrist straps and all the crap that guys like that like to wear. One of them had little enameled badges pinned all over the leather hat he was wearing, and he saw me looking and gave me a sideways grin. The third one chewed his gum and looked sleepy.

They started hassling the drunk, yelling in his ear and laughing and propping him up and sliding him down again on the seat. Pins-and-Grins went through the poor guy's pockets, making fun of finding nothing but holes and some pipe cleaners in there. The drunk was out of it, completely helpless, and the creeps were rough.

“Hey,” Pins-and-Grins said, looking straight at me, “we got a class act in here with us, not like this old bum. Look at the little princess visiting the common people. Long as she's on our turf, we should show her a good time, right?”

I was really scared now. Was it better to yell some put-down at them, if I could think of one, to make them think I wasn't afraid? Or just pretend I didn't hear what they said? If only the train would start at least! Having a transit patrolman or a conductor show up was too much to hope for.

The Chewer shifted his gum to his other cheek. “That's her,” he said.

“Sure it's her,” Tattoo said. “And she's got something for us, right?”

I was whizzing over in my head what there was in my pocketbook that they could take—a couple of dollars, my tortoiseshell comb from Uncle Tim, my key ring with the souvenir medal from Colossal Cave that I'd found in a gas station rest room in the country

They ambled down the car and stood over me. “Give it here,” Tattoo said.

I clutched my bag and glared at him with my eyes all hot. The last thing I wanted to do was cry in front of these creeps, but I was scared. The Chewer grabbed my wrist hard enough to hurt.

“I don't have anything you want,” I said.

“She don't have anything,” the Chewer said in this disgusted voice. “Man, a princess shouldn't tell lies. It'll grow hair on the palms of her hands. Let's see if it's happening already.”

He started to turn my hand over, and I knew he'd do something horrible, and Pins-and-Grins was reaching for my purse. And all of a sudden the jammed door next to me opened and a man stepped through, playing a violin.

It was the craziest thing—I mean, in the subway where you can hardly hear yourself think, here was this stranger fiddling like mad, some kind of jumping, gypsy sort of tune, full of throaty swoops and high, sweet curlicues that filled the whole car.

“What the hell?” yelped Tattoo, looking as if a flashbulb had gone off in his face.

“Well, come on,” the Chewer said impatiently, and he pulled me up off the seat and started to dance with me.

I mean really
dance
—a hopping, jumping, racing-along, three-beat gallop, with our elbows stuck out and lots of space between us. The weirdest part was not that the train suddenly started going, as if our dancing had moved it, but that I knew the steps. Or anyway my feet did the steps, though in my head I didn't know how to dance any better than I ever did.

We went cavorting up and down the subway car like a couple of loonies, him reeking of some supermacho musk and beer and staring off over my shoulder as if I wasn't there, and me with my purse banging me on the hip.

The other two stood and clapped their hands in time to the music, which sounded loud and clear over the rattle of the train.

I was completely zonked myself and bubbling inside with joy because I knew I was safe. The music promised me that. I heard Tattoo yell to his buddy, “What a crazy old fart, playing the fiddle in the subway!” But he kept on clapping, and we kept dancing, until the train pulled into my station. Then the fiddler quit playing and whipped the cap off his headful of curly gray hair and held it out for them to put money in.

The doors opened. The Chewer, panting hard from all that jumping around, let go of me and started patting his pockets for money.

The fiddler gave me a look, right past the three creeps. He stared at me from under these tufty gray eyebrows and jerked his chin the way you point when your hands aren't free:
Get going
.

I got.

Behind me the doors shut and the train roared away into the tunnel toward the next stop.

My knees were so wobbly I almost didn't make it up the stairs to the street.

 

3
The Fiddler in the Park

 

 

M
OM WAS ON THE WARPATH AGAIN,
so I didn't bother her with any of this. I probably wouldn't have anyway. I wouldn't have known how to tell her what had happened.

Anyway, there she was with her new lawyer in the fight against the landlord. They were going over our apartment, making lists of the missing stuff (which now included all the plugs off the ends of the electric cords). If it had been a movie, the lawyer would have been some handsome, upscale type for my mother to fall in love with. Then she'd get married, and all my weird problems would disappear because what I really needed was a father, right?

Actually the lawyer was this carroty-colored woman with an excitable voice. She and Mom were deep in that fast, bright kind of conversation that meant they were on the same wavelength and were going to be friends.

I went into my room and shut the door and walked around in circles, telling myself I was not crazy.

I kept seeing this subway violinist very clearly in my mind: thick gray curly hair and a squarish, calm sort of face, with nests of lines around his mouth and deep sprays of them at the outside corners of his eyes. Funny eyes, with an Oriental slant, but light-colored and bright and watchful, like a cat's. He hadn't looked grubby, like most beggars, but very neat in a rust brown corduroy jacket and pants and a light blue shirt without a tie.

And he had played and we had danced. It was the craziest thing.

But what was it that I had that the Princes of Darkness wanted?

I got very tired, and next thing I knew my mom was waking me up. She asked if I was all right because it was unlike me to sleep in the daytime, and here it was time for dinner.

At the table Mom started in with carefully casual remarks about this guy she'd been out with the night before. That meant I didn't have to listen yet. She wasn't nearly at the point of talking about how I should meet him, how I would like him, how we could all go to a movie together or whatever. At least this one was some kind of senior editor, not a shrink like the last one she'd brought around. (I knew a kid once whose stepfather was a child psychologist , which meant everything she did or said or 
didn't
 say got “translated” to her mother by this guy; and that's no way to live.)

So I put the conversation on automatic pilot and concentrated on my own problems. Mostly I decided that the subway dance had to have been a hallucination. Maybe Margie wasn't as cubed as she made out. Maybe she had slipped me something in that ginger ale I had at her place.

But I'd tried a couple of pills and things with Megan when she was raiding her mom's medicine cabinet, and I knew what that stuff felt like. Not like this. There never was a pill or anything else that could make me know how to dance.

Maybe I was getting a brain tumor like the boy in
Death Be Not Proud
, and I had imagined the dancing. Maybe I would never get to be introduced to Ralph or Howard or whatever the editor's name was, because I would be a vegetable by morning.

I fell asleep sweaty with terror and trying to find the headache I'd had the day before, to sort of get the feel of it and see if it felt like a tumor, if that's what a tumor feels like.

The next day I coasted through school as if there was a plate glass door between me and everybody else. I tried, once, to talk to Megan about what had happened. All she was interested in was what the three Princes had looked like. She made moronic jokes about how I'd have been better off with them than with some grubby old pervert, meaning I should watch out for the man with the violin, not the creeps. She even got a laugh out of me, calling him a “
mole
-ster.” I couldn't help it.

This was a joke from when we saw the words
child molester
once in the paper and were struck by the obvious pronunciation. Girls in New York have to get wise about sick-ohs pretty young. You either learn to see them coming a long way off and get out of the way fast or you give up ever going outside.

“I'm too old to be
mole
-sted,” I said, and Megan said, “You're never too old, thank goodness. Now, when Micky tries to
mole
-st me . . .”

Off she went again. I made a joke about “Micky
Mole
-ster,” and she got furious and stomped out of the room. There just wasn't any point in talking to Megan anymore.

My heart sort of lurched with joy when I heard faint violin music as I headed into the park to go home that afternoon. A little group of people were gathered around a man playing his fiddle on Jagiello's terrace.

As I hurried over he finished, and people dropped money into the open violin case on the ground and wandered off, all except a skinny boy in chinos and a checked shirt and a scarf around his neck, who was sitting on the rock by the lake. He wasn't from my school or my building. I didn't know him, but at least he didn't wear a gray nylon jacket. I felt safe in ignoring him. It was the violinist I needed to talk to.

He was squatting by the open violin case, fishing out the money. Boy, what would people have given him if they'd seen the Princes of Darkness dancing to his tune? I felt like that was my secret I shared with him (and the rotten Princes, of course, assuming they even knew what had happened), and that gave me the nerve to walk right up and talk to him.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello,” he said. He had a slow voice with a foreign touch to it, and he sounded surprised and pleased to see me. He carefully set the instrument and the bow into the case's blue velvet lining and draped a square of bright colored silk over them.

“Thanks for helping,” I said. “Yesterday. In the subway.”

“Good thing you got in touch,” he said. He definitely had an accent. “We knew there was something wrong, but we didn't know where.”

Now, the funny thing was I didn't have a clue as to what he was talking about, but I had this perfectly sure feeling that it would all make sense pretty soon. I also knew I was in something weird up to my neck, enough to make my hair prickle when I thought of the three Princes, and it made me feel a lot better to be here talking to this guy with the violin. Because he knew something. And he was going to tell me, as if I were another human being, not just a kid that you don't tell anything to until it's all over.