“She was in silent movies a long time ago. You wouldn’t know her name, but it’s an amazing story. I love telling it.”
“Okay, sure, wow, that’ll be great,” he said, and he opened the door into the alleyway, blinking in the brighter light.
Before Howie could step across the threshold, Ron Bleeker rushed him, shoving him hard backward: “Butt- Ugly Dugley, you little creep, why’re you going in and out of here, what’re you up to, freak boy?”
Bleeker was four years older than Howie, fifteen and muscular. He wore sleeveless T-shirts sometimes so you could see his biceps better, and he knocked Howie off his feet.
The flashlight flew out of Howie’s hand, and Bleeker came through the door fast, dropped on top of him, grabbed Howie by his ears, by his good one and his ugly one, threatening to jerk his head off the floor and slam it down again to crack his skull. The wedge of daylight narrowed as the swinging door closed, and in the gathering darkness, Bleeker said, “You little puke-face shit, what’re you—”
His voice cut off with a wordless sound of surprise and pain, and in the same instant, as if Bleeker suddenly took flight, his weight lifted from Howie.
From the darkness, Mr. Blackwood said, “Get your flashlight, son.”
Howie crawled to the Eveready, which was the source of most of the light now that the door had closed. With the flashlight in hand, he thrust to his feet and turned in confusion, trying to locate his friend and his enemy.
They were together, and they were an amazing sight. One of Mr. Blackwood’s hands was tight around Ron Bleeker’s throat, and the other hand clutched the boy’s crotch. He held Bleeker off the floor, letting his feet dangle in empty air. Old Bleeker rolled his eyes in terror when the flashlight revealed his captor’s face.
“You try to take one punch at me,” Mr. Blackwood told Bleeker, “and I’ll crush everything I’m holding in my left hand, crush it and tear it off, and then you can wear girls’ clothes the rest of your life.”
Bleeker didn’t look like he had either the intention or the strength to take a punch at Mr. Blackwood. Tears rolled down his face, which was as white and greasy as the belly of a fish, and the most pathetic kittenlike whimpers escaped him.
“You go on home, son,” Mr. Blackwood said. “I want to have a few words with your friend here. I want to set him straight about a couple things.”
Howie stood transfixed, astonished at the sight of Bleeker, so long a figure of terror, abruptly reduced to helplessness, looking so small, like a half-broken doll.
“If that’s all right with you?” Mr. Blackwood said. “Is it all right with you if I just explain the new rules to this young fella?”
“Sure,” Howie said. “That’s okay. So I’ll just go now. I’ll go on home.” He went to the door and glanced back at them. “The new rules.” He opened the door, stepped outside, and glanced back once more. “In the morning, maybe you’ll tell me the new rules, too. I guess I’ll need to know them. So I can be sure everybody is, you know, living by them.” He pulled the door shut.
Dazed and amazed, he followed the alley through the afternoon light and shadows. He was most of the way across the cemetery beside St. Anthony’s when his half-trance, like a veil, slid off his mind and the full importance of what had just happened became clear to him. The rest of the way home, he couldn’t stop grinning.
4
Perhaps Howie was becoming a dreamer who would sleep by day and stay awake all night. In his room, in his bed, in the dark, he could not shut his mind off. He kept replaying the entire special morning and afternoon, and those memories were as vivid to him as any movie.
Because his mom got up early for work, she went to bed at nine-thirty. Corrine was already in her room, doing whatever girls did in their rooms; he had no idea.
All was quiet and dark when, at nine forty-five, Howie dressed and went silently downstairs. He damped the beam of his flashlight by pressing two fingers over the lens. The house smelled of furniture polish, faintly of lemon- scented air freshener, and here and there even more faintly of potpourri that his mom made herself from flowers she grew and from kitchen spices. Mr. Blackwood would like the quiet, good-smelling house if he agreed to come visit and look at the apartment. If he could wait until Saturday, when Mom was off work, maybe he could have dinner with them. Howie’s mother was a great cook, and being a dinner guest in the main house now and then was another advantage of renting the apartment.
Howie left the house by the back door, locked it behind him, and stuffed the key in a pocket of his jeans. He switched off the Eveready because the full moon frosted everything.
He walked rapidly toward St. Anthony’s graveyard, but he didn’t run. Running could get you killed because it fanned the flames. He wasn’t on fire, of course; but for a long time he had not been able to run also because of the skin grafts, which were delicate. Scars were tougher tissue than ordinary skin, and here and there, where scars and skin met, sudden extreme stretching, like what occurred when you ran flat-out, could cause dermal cracking and maybe a deadly infection.
Mr. Blackwood said he would probably sleep until nine o’clock. Howie didn’t want to risk waking him, so it was a few minutes before ten when, in the alley behind the old Boswell building, he knocked on the door through which Ron Bleeker had earlier attacked him. The first thing Howie would do was apologize for not being able to wait until breakfast. He was usually very patient. Having to recover from serious burns taught you patience. But if Mr. Blackwood had dreamed a decision about the apartment, Howie just
Mr. Blackwood didn’t respond to the knock, so Howie rapped his knuckles harder against the door and said, “It’s me, sir, it’s Howie Dugley.”
Maybe Mr. Blackwood was sleeping deeply. Maybe he had gone out for a walk or for a late dinner from some take-out place.
Howie tried the door. It was locked.
He walked back and forth in the moon-washed alleyway, trying to decide what he should do next. Going into the building without an invitation from Mr. Blackwood didn’t seem right. On the other hand, it wasn’t Mr. Blackwood’s building, even if he was camping out there. Besides, that morning, Howie entered without an invitation and encountered his new friend on the roof; and that had gone well. Mr. Blackwood had been glad to see him.
The corroded piano hinge protested, but the basement window pushed inward, and Howie slid feetfirst into that darkness. He switched on the Eveready and made his way toward the stairs, calling out as he went, “Hello? Mr. Blackwood? Are you here? Hello? It’s me, it’s Howie.”
When he reached the ground floor, the large room with all its columns felt bigger at night than in the daytime, immense, vast, as though the darkness stretched on for miles in every direction. Even with the light of the full moon, the dust-covered high windows were barely visible, and looking up at their pale panes, Howie felt as if he were in a dungeon.
His small flashlight didn’t penetrate far into the pitch-black realm of the former department store. In fact it was less effective than usual because its batteries had lost some of their charge, which he had been too excited to notice until now. The beam was less white than yellow, no longer crisp but fuzzy.
“Mr. Blackwood? I’m sorry to bother you. It’s me, Howie.”
His voice wasn’t right, so changed that it almost might have been the voice of another boy. It seemed smaller now than earlier, thinner, and it echoed off the distant walls differently from the way that it sounded in this same space before.
Because Mr. Blackwood had said he kept his gear near the back door, Howie moved in that direction. He no longer called out to his friend because the smallness of his voice made him uneasy.
He found the gear a few steps to the right of the back door. A sleeping bag rolled tight and secured with straps. A backpack with the top-pocket flap unzipped and standing open. Two fat, half-melted candles were fixed to the floor in puddles of hardened yellow wax.
Beside the candles were the photographs that Howie had brought from home earlier in the day. The photo of the house and the one of the garage shaded by the ancient beech tree had each been torn into four pieces.
