The Home for Wayward Clocks (16 page)

“Welcome to the Home for Wayward Clocks,” James said. He automatically smiled at the mother and daughter. The little girl hid behind her father’s legs. James collected their money and instructed them to walk freely around the house and look-but-don’t-touch and ask-if-you-have-any-questions, but to please-stay-away-fromclosed-doors. On his way back to the control center, he stopped for a moment by the waltzer, the newly repaired four-hundred day clock. Whispering, James told it and the others that everything was okay. There was a child in their midst again, but this was a little one, not even close to the surly black-clad teen that attacked the other day. He promised that he would watch the cameras and be vigilant. Then he went back to his post.

The tour seemed to be progressing as usual. The parents exclaimed over the clocks and stopped several times to wait for a particular one to go off. The little girl got over her shyness and began to wander around, but the mother seemed to always have a hand or a sharp word at the ready. Children really weren’t often a problem and they were usually the most excited over the clocks. But their quick movements made James nervous. Children jumped around and danced during the chimes, swinging their arms and doing odd can-can kicks. They shrieked and laughed and then the chimes seemed to get a little more raucous. James couldn’t decide if the wild chiming was due to fear of being broken or to sheer joy of being excitedly appreciated. Joy and fear both caused a clamoring in James’ body and he just didn’t know how to interpret the clocks when they were in a wild mood.

On that day, James saw the incident begin to happen. The parents stood under a birdcage clock, staring up at the face and waiting to hear the bird sing. The little girl moved off to the side and watched a blinking-eye clock, Felix the Cat. “Mama, lookit da kitty!” she called and the mother nodded and said, “Isn’t that cute?” But she never took her eyes from the bottom of the birdcage. That was the first warning and James scooted forward on his chair. An ignored child was a dangerous child. The little girl seemed fascinated, but she didn’t move from her place. The black and white cat’s tail was a pendulum, swinging back and forth beneath the body of the clock, and as the pendulum moved, so did the eyes, left, right, left, right, in direct opposition to the tail. There was a Cheshire grin on Felix’s face and the little girl laughed and swayed below him, as if she was a pendulum herself. James sat back again and tried to relax as he watched her. She was a miniature of her mother, both of them craning their necks to admire a clock, their arms crossed in front of their chests in anticipation.

Then the little girl looked over at her parents and the set of her eyebrows made James lean forward again. Second warning. Something was up. He could always see the gears working in kids’ heads, but most of the time, the ideas stayed there and the children just smiled and imagined and went on their way. James knew what a powerful tool imagination was, how it was often satisfying in itself to pretend, and so he waited, watching for the little mischievous smile to indicate the plan was over, carried out only in a daydream.

Her parents still stood, waiting for the birdcage. The little girl looked quickly around the room and then went to grab a small footstool tucked in a corner. James used it to wind the higher clocks. Before she even placed it under the grinning cat, he knew what she was going to do. He shot out of his seat and ran up the stairs. The family was in the back east bedroom.

He wasn’t even halfway down the hallway when he heard the crash, followed by the mother’s cry and the little girl’s shriek. When James flew into the room, he found the mother kneeling next to the little girl who held Felix’s disembodied tail. The rest of the clock was in pieces on the floor. The father was halfway to them, his head still turned toward the birdcage clock. The bird, along with the other clocks in the room, was shouting, calling for James, calling for help. Telling him he failed, a clock was hurt, it was hurt!

Not again, James thought, not again. He snatched the tail out of the girl’s hands. “What did you do?” he yelled. He had to yell, to be heard over the clocks. The girl fell into tears and the mother hugged her close. James watched her arms tighten and for a moment, his mind stumbled, trying to imagine the embrace, but then he remembered the scene in the monitor, the little girl’s sly glance at her parents before she turned to the cat clock, and anger seethed just under his skin.

“It was an accident,” the mother said. “She didn’t mean to—”

“The hell she didn’t!” James pointed at the footstool. “I watched through my monitors. She deliberately dragged that footstool over to climb up and grab this clock.”

“I just wanted to touch his tail!” the girl sobbed.

“You watched?” the father said, joining the group.

“I have a security system.” James nodded toward the camera hovering near the ceiling in a back corner. He lowered his voice now that the chiming was done, but he felt the clocks huddling close, holding their breath, waiting to see what he would do. James knew what they were thinking. He’d failed twice. Twice. Wasn’t he capable of doing his job anymore? He felt sobs rising from his core, echoing the little girl’s, but he choked them back. Not in front of the customers. Not in front of people. “I saw her look at you, then go get the footstool. She knew what she was up to. And this clock is…” He bent over the cat, its eyes still, staring straight up. “Dead.” He scooped it up, tried to reattach the tail so at least the body would be whole. “Dead, unless I can fix it.” The tail wouldn’t reconnect; there was something wrong with the pendulum wire.

The father picked the little girl up, cuddled her under his chin. “It’s okay, Sheila,” he said, and for a moment, James was struck dumb, looking at the two of them so close that way. The mother stood up too, put her hand on the little girl’s back. James stared at her fingers, so pink and soft against the girl’s dark blue sweatshirt. So pink and soft. He pictured this mother, cupping the little girl’s chin in those fingers, bringing her lips down, kissing her cheek, all as she tucked her into bed. A nightly routine. An every-night routine. Her fingers moved, stroking the little girl’s back, and James wanted to reach out and grab that hand, place it on his own back or under his own chin, offer his own cheek. Oh, to feel that.

Then the father said, “You should have told us this place is inappropriate for children. It’s not hands-on.”

James blinked. Hands-on? He forced himself to look away from the mother’s fingers to study the destroyed clock, his Felix. “I told you that you were to look, not touch.”

“This is a child, children touch,” the father said and he started to walk away. The mother moved with him, in sync, her touch on the girl unbroken. Sheila looked at James over her father’s shoulder. Tears rolled down both cheeks, but she looked at James. And smiled.

“Children can be controlled,” James said sharply, then instantly clenched his fists. Another part of the clock snapped. James remembered hearing those words. He remembered being told not to touch, not to play, not to make a mess, not to leave his room, not to sass. His mother said that.
Children can be controlled.
She said it through bared teeth. James remembered her hand and he shuddered.

The father stopped and turned around. The mother swiveled with him. James was glad to see the girl’s back again. He didn’t like her face, that smile and those tears, letting him know she had everything and he had nothing. “We’d like our money back,” the father said. The mother looked up at him. She was proud of him; James could tell by the tilt of her head, the set of her shoulders.

“No.” He said it as forcefully as he could, even as sweat dripped down the inside of his shirt and his knees trembled. He held out the battered clock. “It will take all you paid, plus more, to fix this.” His voice died, though he willed it to go on, to tell the man how much this clock would cost to fix, how much to replace, as he had the last father. But seeing them there, the two of them, mom and dad, wrapped around that child, took his tongue away. He couldn’t risk speaking, it would lead to tears, and his mother said tears were to be smacked away. It took everything he had to say this much in their presence. So silently, he just held out the cat clock, the bruised body in one hand, the amputated tail in the other.

The father started to say something, but the mother shook her head. She made a sound like, “Shhh.” The little girl lifted her head, twisted in her father’s arms. The smile was still there, faint so the parents couldn’t see it. The father sighed. “Christ, keep the money,” he said. “It’s just a stupid plastic cat clock.”

They all pivoted and left, walking as a unit. James stood there, looking at Felix, trying to keep the tears down, trying not to think of his mother’s hands, trying to swallow her words back down to a place so deep within himself, they would never emerge from his mouth again. As the family’s footsteps echoed, as they reached the landing by the stairs, James heard the mother’s soft voice, followed by the little girl’s strident whine. And then the father.

“You know better than to touch things that aren’t yours!”

A smack. A smack and a wail. Then the flurry of footsteps down the stairs.

She got hers. That was another thing James’ mother used to say. The words came flying back up unbidden and James was powerless to push them back down. He was horrified.
You’ll get yours.
Her hand drawn back like a pitcher ready to throw a fastball. James sat down on the closest chair and rested Felix on his lap. She got hers, that little girl. But his own cheek stung and he placed his fingers against his face and stroked.

James waited until the door chimed as it opened and slammed. Then he went to the control room, checked the monitors to make sure that no one walked in as the family walked out, and then went down the basement to the workroom.

He placed Felix on the bench. Taking inventory, he made his prognosis. Felix would run again, if he had the parts. Pieces of the broken body would have to be glued, which ruined the clock’s value, but he would run again and that was all that mattered. Clocks didn’t care if they had to limp along. Just so they lived.

One by one, James examined all of Felix’s broken parts, then dove into the skeleton boxes and found replacements. Lining them up, broken to whole, side by side on a soft towel, James made sure all were present and accounted for. All the whole parts had to be washed, prepared for the transplant. The broken would be placed on a piece of velvet and buried. The delicate wire that held the pendulum and attached it to the clock’s workings was stretched straight; it couldn’t be used again. One more search in the boxes and a new wire was found, the slim triangle at the bottom ready to grip Felix’s tail.

James stood there for a moment and eyeballed everything, connecting one piece to another in his mind. And he came up short. Again, he went over it, then one more time. There was definitely a gear missing. James looked inside Felix’s body to make sure it wasn’t rolling around loose, but he was empty. The missing gear was small, but important; all gears are important because they’re interdependent, but at least it was only one.

James returned to the back east bedroom. The gear couldn’t have gotten far. Its roundness would enable it to roll, so he got down on his hands and knees and crawled, trying to put his face as close to the carpet as possible.

And then he remembered Cooley, scooping up those two tiny old springs from her Baby Ben and tucking them into her pocket. The little girl wanted a part too, Felix’s tail, but maybe she kept his gear. Maybe she took it.

James kept crawling, pushing back the anger that threatened to erupt out of his blood. A piece of one of his clocks in a stranger’s pocket. He tried to control his breathing, blinked away the new set of tears that threatened to spill, tears of anger and frustration this time. But then he found it, threaded into a tiny pulled string in the carpet. Relief poured over him in a cold sweat and he cupped the gear in his hand and returned to the basement.

The clock was all there. Felix just had to be put back together. A feline Humpty Dumpty.

What could be replaced would be replaced. What was split would be glued. James sighed and lowered his head. It would be a full morning, gluing the clock, waiting for it to dry. The afternoon would be spent putting the movement back together and attaching the pendulum wire and gear. And then he’d have to hang Felix carefully on the wall, maybe a little higher this time. Out of the reach of little girls. Then the clock tower climb at six.

For the moment, even as James held the glue and the broken pieces of plastic in his hands, all he could see was the mother’s pink fingers. James knew, just looking at them, just remembering them, that those fingers were warm. Warm and soft, maybe just the slightest bit moist.

But not cold. No, not cold at all.

A
t six o’clock, James locked the front door of the Home. Lorraine, the lady who ran the bed and breakfast, Time To Sleep Inn, across the street was out on her porch, shaking out some rugs. She flapped one in James’ direction. “Hi, James!” she called.

He nodded and started walking. It would take about ten minutes to reach the clock tower. He carried a metal toolbox filled with his most often used tools and he took great pleasure in the banging sound as it hit against his thigh, the rattle as the tools shifted inside. It was a good sound, a going-to-work sound. It reminded James of the old metal lunchbox he used to carry to work when he was a janitor. The thermos inside always made a pleasant busy rolling-around sound. It always mashed the sandwiches, but he kept it anyway. The lunchbox made him feel good, like he was doing something important. Now, the toolbox made him feel the same way and his steps grew long and purposeful.

Downtown was quiet, which was typical for a Tuesday evening. Neal’s and Ione’s gift shop, It’s About Time, was closed up tight, but James stopped and looked in the window. Battery-powered clocks ticked away, their faces blank and dumb. When clocks didn’t run themselves, they didn’t have anything to do but sit there. That’s what these clocks did…they just sat on the bright green crushed velvet material Neal bought on overstock at the fabric store. James could see the shelves and counters, lined with more and more of the vacant clocks. One whole showcase carried the brass miniatures. Once, Neal showed James a replica of a grandfather clock. It was beautiful, James couldn’t deny that. Its brass was finely etched and the detail of the clock’s sun and moon movement above the face was perfect. But the plain white watchface and the battery-thin tick ruined it. It was pretty, but it had no personality. Neal offered to give it to James, to display at the Home alongside a business card for the gift shop, but James said no.