The Seventeenth Swap (5 page)

“That's what it does. You got something you want looked up?”

“Oh—I just wondered. Like, well, those wheat pennies. What're they worth?”

“Not much.” Frank flipped pages, ran a bony finger
down the columns, found an entry. “If you got a hun'erd of 'em, they'll fetch you a dollar ten.”

“Oh,” said Eric. That really
wasn't
much. Of course those weren't a bit rare. Now for the real question. “How about zinc pennies? The ones they only made back in—”

“I know. I know. Now, those'll be a good bit more.” The finger found another entry. “Here y'are. Zinc pennies. Ten cents apiece.”

“Ten
cents?
” Eric's faith in a possible coin bonanza collapsed into rubble.

“That's a thousand percent increase,” Frank pointed out. “ 'Course, if I had one, I wouldn't sell it.”

“If I ever find one, you can have it,” Eric told him, getting up to go. He had abruptly lost interest in coins.

“Keep a watch for the Indian Heads. That's my specialty,” Frank said. “Thanks for these others, kid. You tell Sis to slip you a candy bar on the way out.”

“Oh, that's okay. So long.” Eric pushed back through the curtains, glancing at the big clock over the cigar counter. Might as well go on home and stare at his lists as to keep on tramping around like this, accomplishing nothing. He was beginning to feel a strong need of advice, without the dimmest notion of where to go for it, or precisely what to ask for when he got there.

Mrs. Panek was standing below the high west window, stretched like the Statue of Liberty to reach the eyelet in the blind. It had lost its regular cord and she used some kind of little handled hook to pull it down. “Looks like the sun's gonna come out just in time to set,” she remarked as she captured the blind
and adjusted it. “And weatherman says more rain tomorrow.” She sighed and walked heavily back behind the counter. “Well, that's April for you. Here, don't forget your sixteen cents.”

Eric pocketed the substitute coins, paused outside the door to buy his dad's newspaper from the vending rack, and walked back to Mulvaney's to retrieve his schoolbooks. Heavy-laden, and wishing for the millionth time he had a bike of some sort—any sort—he plodded back across Lake Street and on down Cedar past the bakery and Jill's Fabric Shop where Jimmy's mother worked, and the ski-shop and Harry's Hair Parlor and the whole block of the new savings and loan building and another block of leftover old houses straggling toward the ravine, finally turning down Fifth Street toward home.

He hadn't chanced to walk this way in a week or two. It was when he was crossing Governor Street that a familiar huge maple caught his eye up ahead, towering over a ramshackle old vacant house now stranded between the new insurance building on the corner and the vet's clinic on beyond. Cholly! Eric suddenly knew where he might try for advice.

He followed the down-sloping path around the side of the house, which backed on the ravine, and found Cholly standing in the open basement doorway, a short, square, shaggy old man peering closely at the handle of a battered saucepan, where a patch of new solder caught the graying afternoon light.

“That should hold,” Cholly remarked with a bob of his head that made his forelock dip and spring up again. He never said hello when somebody joined him, just went on aloud with whatever conversation had
been going on in his head. “Old Missus Fawdiss, she thinks the world an' all 'o this pawt. Won't have nought t'do with the modren ones. Can't say's I blame her, lot of 'em's trash. Come on inside. Still turns kinda nippy this tima day.”

Charlie Merton—known to Eric as Cholly Mutton because that was how Cholly pronounced his name—had emigrated from Plymouth, England in some unimaginable long ago past, and since then, to judge from his rambling stories, had lived in every one of the fifty states. When Eric had first encountered him a couple of years back he had just taken up residence in this basement. Until somebody bought the house to remodel into something, Cholly lived in the lower regions rent-free in exchange for seeing that nobody actually burned it down. Fortunately, the sloping lot allowed some daylight to seep through one extremely dirty window. Cholly's tastes were not fussy, and he made do quite comfortably with a few sticks of furniture the last tenants had abandoned, plus his own pack-rat huddle of possessions. And as he had told Eric unanswerably, the price was right.

Eric followed him down the two crumbling cement steps into the dim little room he had created in the area nearest the window by ranging his bits of furniture in a sort of semi-circular fence, beyond which the cavernous reaches of the basement vanished into shadow, with only the looming shape of the furnace visible in the gloom. Dropping his books on the rock-hard old daybed and himself beside them, Eric wondered how much he should explain to Cholly about the boots, and why Jimmy wanted them so much, and why he himself had got so pig-headedly determined that Jimmy
would have them. He wasn't entirely sure he
could
explain it so anybody'd understand.

Meanwhile, Cholly was tidying his cluttered worktable, clearing away solder and soldering iron, rattling noisy bits of screws and things into the old coffee cans lined up on the shelf, and still rambling on about Mrs. Fordyce's pot. “ ‘Missus, that pawt's an antique,' I told her. ‘You could sell that thing for money!' but she won't hear of it, she's used to it and it's used to her. She's an antique herself, ahter all.” Cholly sat down on his carpet-covered piano stool in front of the worktable, clutched both knees with his gnarly hands, and grinned through his whiskers at Eric. “Wouldn't doubt she's older'n
I
am. And that's older'n God.”

“I thought antiques were fancy chairs and tables, and chinaware and things—not old mended pans,” Eric said.

“Depends on your pocketbook, son—and the year you was born. Why, this basement here, it's fulla antiques, way they think of 'em now. You take a look sometime in that Hobbyhorse Shop. 'Bout halfway down Long Alley, there behind the p'lice station. Tell Maggie Teggly you're a friend of mine—I've done odd jobs for her, she'll let you gawp around. Take my word, I've seen things in there with fancy price tags that were give away with movie tickets when I was young.”

“Given
away? With
movie tickets?
” Eric echoed.

“That's right! Used to be, a chap and his gal could collect a whole set of dishes just doin' their courting at the picture show. Hard to believe nowadays. Why, Maggie's got old pawts like this one in that shop! Old potato-smashers like the one I use meself. Old
telephones,
the kind with a crank, used to hang on
the wall. Old pop bottles! Old photos of nekked babies lying on their stomachs! You name it, Maggie Teggly's got it—and she sells 'em, too.”

Vivid pictures of Mrs. Panek's sitting room were dancing in Eric's mind. “Where does Maggie Teggly get all that stuff in the first place, Cholly?”

Cholly shrugged, leaned back with his elbows propped on the worktable. “Folks bring 'em in, let 'er sell 'em on commission. I've even known her offer to buy. See this here little tool-carrier I keep my screwdrivers in?” He half-turned, lifted a small wooden tray by the fingerholes in its central divider. “She's been ahter me to name my price for that ever since I carried it to her place once to put up some shelves. But I said, “No, Ma'am.” My pa made that for hisself before we ever come to this country. It'll be mine until I die. Care for a cuppa, son? I'm about to put me
antique
kettle on.”

“I'd like to—but I've got to get home,” Eric told him, hurriedly gathering up his books after a glance at Cholly's battered clock. “Maybe Saturday, if you're here?”

“Any time, no need for no engraved invitation. See you around, then.”

“See you, Cholly. And thanks!” Eric called back as he stepped outside. Cholly might not know it, but he'd given his usual valuable advice without hearing even a word about the boots.

After his homework was done that night Eric turned his ring binder upside down so that the first page was the back page, and studied his lists again.

They looked shorter than he remembered, even with the few items he had added so confidently at school, when he was just getting started on his research. Those were probably worthless. He somehow felt much less sanguine now about finding old license plates for Chris Donaldson's grandpa, or old radios and records for Melinda Jones's. He had no idea where one might come across such things. Reluctant but realistic, he drew a line through both items.

There remained that note he had scrawled about Ms. Larkin wishing she had a
Just-So Stories
like Dad's. He liked Ms. Larkin. She was such an enthusiastic sort of lady, and always had time to answer your questions. He'd often thought of mentioning to her that his dad used to be a librarian, too. But he'd never done it. She'd be bound to ask where Dad worked now, and what had happened, and how he could give up library work after
all that training, and a lot of other questions of whose answers Eric had never been quite sure.

Anyway he'd like her to have the kind of
Just-So Stories
she wanted. The question was, would Dad want to give his up? Eric wasn't sure he should even ask. Dad had owned that book since he was a little kid—somebody had written “Happy Eighth Birthday to Mitchie” in the front. He'd hung onto it all these years. On the other hand, he never read it now, and Eric could plainly hear Ms. Larkin saying, “Oh, what I'd give for a good copy of that edition!” What if she'd give five dollars? Even ten?

Eric jumped up from his desk, went into the living room to the makeshift bookshelves, and found the old gray book with its raveled, familiar spine, which he had helped wear out. Hesitantly he opened it and riffled through the pages, creating a little breeze on his face that smelled of ageing paper and memories. Then he stopped abruptly at the beginning of “The Elephant's Child”, which had once started, like all the other stories, with a huge, fancy capital letter enclosed in a decorative square. Now it started with a hole—a slightly ragged squarish hole cut right out of the page long ago by Dad himself. There were holes in half the other beginning pages—how could he have forgotten that? Dad had sheepishly confessed—warning Eric
never
to mutilate books—that he'd used the fancy initials in some school assignment that had seemed terribly important at the time. He'd had to recall for Eric—or invent—the square of missing words on the other side of those pages, until Eric knew the stories so well he could do it for himself. Eric returned the volume to the shelf, secretly relieved. He and Dad could keep their
favorite book. Ms. Larkin wanted a “good copy.” This wasn't it.

Back to his desk, and the now even shorter lists. A careful review of his day did little to lengthen them, and less to match them up. He wished Marvin had been acquainted with a rock hound instead of a campaign-button collector—then somebody would want Steve's thunderegg. As it was, he could only add, under

THINGS PEOPLE WANT:

Old campaign buttons (Mr. Forrester in meat dept.)

Indian Head pennies (Frank)

Antique Junk (Hobbyhorse Shop)

Under THINGS PEOPLE WILL SWAP, he wrote,

Re heeling job.

Then, after a good deal of pencil nibbling and mental wandering around Mrs. Panek's sitting room, he added,

Antique junk?

He stared at the lists with growing doubt. The final two items matched, but for all he knew, Mrs. Panek felt the same about her jumble of possessions as Missus Fawdiss did about her “pawt.” Sighing, he erased the heading of the second list and changed the “WILL” to “MIGHT.”

That seemed to be all he could do until he talked to Angel again, and had a look at that Hobbyhorse Shop, so he shut the ring binder and went to bed.

Leaping down the stairs next morning on his way to school, he saw Mr. Evans, the apartment manager,
just backing out of his first-floor doorway like some large, round-shouldered turtle withdrawing from its hole. And suddenly he realized that
he
knew a rock hound himself. At least, he supposed Mr. Evans would qualify, though the rocks Eric had occasionally seen—and stumbled over—in his dim little living room seemed more like what you'd find in a magpie's nest than a real “collection.” However. No harm in trying. Eric stopped at the foot of the stairs to say hello.

Slowly, the way he did everything, Mr. Evans turned himself about, taking several little shuffling steps to get all the way around to face Eric, then nodded amiably. “Howdy, howdy. Nite day,” he mumbled. He usually didn't wear his teeth except when you came to pay the rent, though he always kept them handy in his shirt pocket, for emergencies.

“Yeah, it is,” Eric agreed with a glance toward the two glass panels that flanked the front door. Sure enough, the sun was shining, though he'd been too preoccupied to notice. At the risk of being late to school, he seized the moment. “Mr. Evans, I was wondering—would you be interested in a thunderegg for your rock collection? Or have you already got one?”

“Hm? Mm. Shunderegg, eh? Mm. Gah a uncuh one. Nah wursh mush lesher cuh. You gah one you wanna geh riub?”

Translating this with some difficulty, Eric said, “Not to get
rid
of, exactly. And it's not mine yet—but I think I could get one from my friend, and it
is
a cut one. With the cut part polished. It's real pretty, I've seen it.”

“Hm! Whasher pren wan borit? Prolly doo mush. I gahno money shpare.”

“Well—maybe I could work out a swap. That is, if you had something . . .”