The Secret Life of Owen Skye (4 page)

ONE DAY THAT WINTER
Uncle Lorne came to stay. He was Horace's unmarried brother. Margaret always used to say to Horace, “Look what would have happened to you if you hadn't married me!”

Uncle Lorne was as tall as the house practically and just barely skin and bones, because he'd been cooking for himself so long. He had a hard time finding clothes that fit, and didn't seem to care much anyway. His feet were huge, and his pants usually stopped several inches above his ankles. His shirt sleeves were often ripped and his ties always showed old dinner stains.

He was very shy, even with the kids. He'd be reading the newspaper in the kitchen after work, and when one of the boys came roaring around the corner, chasing Doom Monkey the Unpredictable, Uncle Lorne would rise up suddenly as if he'd been caught in the bathroom with his pants around his ankles. If someone said, “Hi, Uncle Lorne!” he'd turn away and go back to the little cot in the basement that Horace had set up for him. Margaret hated that cot and often asked Uncle Lorne to use the pull-out couch in the living room. But he preferred to stay down in the gloom despite the possibility of encountering the Bog Man. He rigged up a light and built stairs to the kitchen, put down some plywood on the floor, and said it felt like home.

No one knew when Doom Monkey the Unpredictable was going to appear. Right in the middle of almost anything there might be a sudden cry:
“This is a job for Doom Monkey!”
Then there would be a race into the bedroom to get Doom Monkey's Atrocious Hat. It was made of brown velvet with lots of stuffing. Whoever put it on became Doom Monkey the Unpredictable, the trickiest fighter in the Western Hemisphere.

One time Doom Monkey was desperately needed to stop an invasion of space lizards. Andy grabbed the Atrocious Hat first, so Owen and Leonard were lizards. They screamed at the top of their lungs and scampered around the house. Just as Andy was corralling them, he lost the Atrocious Hat and Owen became Doom Monkey.

At this point the lizards took over and Doom Monkey's mission was to somehow survive. He raced into the closet in the attic bedroom and brought down an avalanche of clothes on top of the pursuing lizards. Then he sped downstairs and across the living room and ducked behind the old green sofa. The lizards thought he was in the kitchen. He slipped out the front door, ran in his shoes through the snow to the coal chute and into the basement, which wasn't as scary as it used to be since Uncle Lorne had fixed it up a bit.

Owen crept under Uncle Lorne's cot.

There wasn't as much room there as Owen had thought there would be. The space was filled with magazines — thick, glossy ones full of pictures of old cars. There were gleaming Fords and Hudsons and little French racing cars that looked like torpedoes on wheels. Almost all the cars had beautiful women lying on top of them, or bending over to rub the headlights, or looking in the mirrors to check their lipstick. Owen had never seen so many pictures of beautiful women. The Atrocious Hat fell off him while he was huddled under the cot looking. It was hard to see in the shadows.

He was so engrossed in the pictures that he forgot about everything.

Suddenly the new basement light went on. Owen looked over and saw a huge pair of boots beside the cot. Then he screamed and scrambled out. He slipped on the magazines, ripping some of the pages. He ran straight into the little bedside bench and knocked over the water dish that held Uncle Lorne's spare set of false teeth.

“Hey!” Uncle Lorne said, and straightened up to grab for him, but bonked his head on a low beam and fell over.

Just then Andy and Leonard came down the stairs to the scene of disaster. The kids didn't know what to do with Uncle Lorne. He was knocked out, and the beam had left a big square bruise on his forehead. And he was too big to lift or even drag back to the cot. Andy poured the remaining false tooth water over Lorne's face.

That made Uncle Lorne sit up, sudden as a mummy, and the boys ran away. Lorne never said anything about it, and even the bruise on his forehead faded after awhile.

In secret, talking in low voices so that the boys had to be quiet to hear, Margaret and Horace would discuss what to do with Uncle Lorne. Horace said that his brother had always been shy and would probably be happy to live in the basement for the rest of his life. But Margaret thought that Lorne might be able to marry Mrs. Foster from the farm down the way and across the river.

Mrs. Foster was a widow with two little girls, Eleanor and Sadie. Owen and his brothers would have nothing to do with them. The girls came over carrying dolls who drank tea. And Eleanor, the eldest, was a Junior Scientist who didn't believe in Superheroes. Mrs. Foster would visit with Margaret and the two girls would play by themselves in the front room while the boys tore around the house being Doom Monkey.

Mrs. Foster had dusty hair and tired eyes, and didn't look at all beautiful to Owen. But Owen noticed that Uncle Lorne couldn't sit in the same room with her. His face got twitchy and flushed, and he started leaning forward in his seat and rubbing his legs over and over without realizing what he was doing. If she said anything to him he started in his chair and said, “Hahh!” suddenly, as if he'd been smacked. Then he'd get up and say something like, “Just got to… you know,” and retreat to his basement.

Uncle Lorne had been in the war and was still nervous, even though it had been over for many years. He'd spent a lot of his time fixing boilers down in the bellies of ships. Since the war Uncle Lorne had worked fixing boilers in buildings, and usually he smelled like a boiler. That's how he was most comfortable, oily and alone. Mrs. Foster brought over some ginger cookies one evening and Uncle Lorne dropped them on the kitchen floor, his hands were shaking so much. Then he stepped on the cookies by mistake, his feet were so big.

Owen knew he didn't want to end up like Uncle Lorne. So he steeled himself about getting used to girls. He didn't want to leave it too late. Every morning when he woke up he said to himself, “Today I will talk to Sylvia.” He repeated it while he was getting dressed for school. He would look in the mirror with his comb in his hand and say, “Hello, Sylvia, how are you today?”

It was easy in the mirror. When he was walking down the lane to school he'd look very closely at the weather and practice saying, “It's a pretty day, isn't it?” or, “Kind of cold, eh?” He would have about a mile to practice whichever phrase he thought was most appropriate. By then he would be in the village and close to the cross-street where Sylvia lived. She only had to walk about a hundred yards to the school.

One day Owen arrived at the corner at exactly the same time as Sylvia.

She wore a blazing orange ski jacket and red boots that made her look like fire against the snow banks. Owen fell into step with her. It became blazingly hot. Owen caught her eye and got ready to say, “I heard it was supposed to snow.” But when he opened his mouth odd blocks of noise came out — “
spoozzleo
” and then “
h-h-hurditsno
” — and he panicked. He sped up and pretended he hadn't said a thing to her. He was quickly several paces ahead, but then was facing a red light. He considered plunging into traffic. But his feet stopped for him, and then he was trapped, Sylvia beside him again. She did not look at him, and he did not look at her, and it took hours for the light to turn green.

Owen's heart pounded for the rest of the day. “Why was I so stupid?” he asked himself. “Was it so hard to just say one simple thing to her?” Impossible. He was as bad as Uncle Lorne, and would end up living alone in a basement reading car magazines.

On the walk home Owen raced ahead of Sylvia, hoping that maybe she'd be impressed by his speed at least. That night he gave himself a long lecture before going to sleep, and in the morning his mind was full again of the easy things he could say when he saw her.

But he kept missing her for the next several days. When he finally did get to walk beside her again he found himself blurting out,
“Nuttle-rug!”
Then he pretended to be clearing his throat and looked in the other direction.

Owen wanted to ask someone what to do, how to handle this impossible situation. But his brothers would have made fun of him, and his father would never have understood. It seemed, though, that Uncle Lorne might know about this sort of hopelessness.

One night Owen found himself drawn to the basement, where Lorne had retreated. Owen crept down the creaky stairs. Uncle Lorne seemed like a deer in the forest that you had to approach quietly. He looked up as soon as Owen's head appeared. He wasn't on his cot reading magazines, as Owen expected, but hunched over the old workbench.

“What do you want?” he demanded. He was using his body to shield part of the workbench from view.

“Nothing,” Owen said. He sat on the stairs. He was trying to think of how to ask his question, of what his question might be.

After awhile Uncle Lorne seemed to forget that he was there, and went back to work. He was using an old pocket knife to carve a block of wood. Owen couldn't imagine what it was supposed to be. But he sat transfixed, staring at the long, strong fingers, the worn, black, razor-sharp blade, the curls of wood shavings coming off the block and falling to the floor.

The next evening Owen came back. Lorne didn't seem to mind him watching from the stairs. Night after night something odd and beautiful began to emerge from the block of wood. It was a bowl of some sort, with intricate gargoyle faces peering over the rim. It had a rounded bottom now and strange grooves. Lorne carved and shaped, then sanded it smooth. Then he oiled and varnished and polished it, over and over. He muttered to himself sometimes, but rarely said a word to Owen. The silence became something that they seemed to share.

One afternoon Mrs. Foster visited. She brought some more ginger cookies and her hair looked less dusty than usual. Within a minute of entering the kitchen she asked Margaret whether Lorne was in.

Margaret said, “I don't know. He's so quiet that sometimes I have no idea if he's in or away.” She turned to Owen. “Go and see if your uncle's in.”

Owen went down the stairs. The gargoyle creation was gleaming on the workbench, stained a beautiful dark brown. Owen approached it carefully, looked at it in awe.

“What do you want?” Lorne asked, and Owen whirled around. There he was on the cot!

“Mrs. Foster's here,” Owen said quickly. “She wants to see you!”

“What?”
Lorne sat up with such a jolt that he nearly upended the cot. He ran a big dirty hand through his hair and blew out a hard breath, as if he had just been punched in the stomach.

“I'm not here,” he said.

When Owen told her, Mrs. Foster made a little noise,
“O.”
Then she and Margaret talked about knitting, and the boys ate ginger cookies.

Some minutes later Uncle Lorne suddenly appeared in the kitchen and thrust the carving at Mrs. Foster. She screamed and put her hand up, as if he was trying to hit her.

“I thought you weren't here?” she said. “What's this? ”

He seemed unable to speak.

“Thank you, Lorne,” she said. She recovered and took the thing from him gently. “It's an ashtray.”

“For your daughters,” he said, too loud.

“But they don't smoke!”

Owen could see from the knots in Lorne's eyebrows that he hadn't meant to say that at all, that he'd meant something completely different. But he was so confused, he probably thought he could never possibly explain himself now. So he said, “Hahh!” Then he grabbed back the ashtray and retreated down to the basement.

In the morning Owen found the ashtray in the garbage. He slipped it into his schoolbag. He couldn't bear to think of his uncle throwing out something he'd worked on so hard, something so strange and fascinating. But it also seemed to have interesting powers, like Doom Monkey's Atrocious Hat. The longer Owen carried it in his bag, the more confident he felt.

Then one morning, Sylvia reached the corner just as he was looking up.

“Not so chilly today,” Owen said, right in her direction.

Sylvia said, “What?” and he repeated the phrase perfectly. Then they walked together the complete hundred yards to school, without saying another word.

Some days later, when they met at the corner again, he was able to say, “It's very sunny,” without getting any of the words wrong. Then the next week he said, “Pretty windy today,” and she was able to understand every word.

They never said anything else after that, but it meant that he could walk beside her until the school door. Sometimes during the day she glanced across the room at him.

Then he got an invitation to her birthday party. It was a hand-made card of blue construction paper with a big picture of a cake on it, carefully colored. Inside it said Owen's name, the date and time of the party, and the address of her house.

He put the invitation in his schoolbag, looking in every so often to make sure it was still there. The glory of it burned inside him for days. Now at night instead of giving himself a stern lecture about being a coward, he said to himself, “I'm going to Sylvia's party!”

The party was the following Saturday, but he had to keep it a secret. When the day arrived he watched the clock closely. He knew that he had to leave by twenty to two if he was going to get there at two o'clock.

At one-thirty his mother told everybody to get their coats on because they were driving into town to buy new shoes.

“I don't need new shoes!” Owen said, but his mother said that he did.

“But I can't!” he blurted.

“Why not?”

Owen tried to think of a quick lie but nothing came to him. Soon the whole story was out.

“You're going to a
girl's
birthday party?” Andy asked, and without waiting he and Leonard ran around screaming,
“Girl's party! Girl's party! Girl's party!”