The Chalk Girl

smoked. You wouldn’t dare. Neither would I, not if Grace was my mother.’

‘Give it back!’ Humphrey’s sister was anxious, reaching for the lighter that was evidently precious to her.

Willy played a schoolyard game of keep-away, holding it high, tossing it from hand to hand, and then she took a closer look at her prize. It was heavy – solid gold. The scratches in the metal appeared to be damage at first glance. At second glance, she remembered where she had seen this lighter before. The surface scratches had been deeper then, and it had been easier to read them as a clear date – the year of her birth – though not the same month and day.

Smiling, Willy cadged a glance at Toby Wilder. It had to be his birth date scratched into the metal. Turning back to Phoebe, she held the gold lighter just out of reach. ‘I know where you got this. You found it in the Ramble. You went back for it.’

It was supposed to be found beside the wino’s dead body – this cigarette lighter dropped on the path by Toby Wilder – with his fingerprints on it. Planting the lighter had been Humphrey Bledsoe’s idea – that moron. He thought the police kept everyone’s fingerprints on file, even those of schoolboys.

‘I know who this belongs to.’ Oh, that look of sick fear was priceless – almost orgasmic, and Willy hungered for more. She rose from the table and turned around to face her old classmate on the other side of the room. ‘Hey, Toby!’ He looked in her direction. Behind her, she could hear the scrape of an edged- back chair and then Phoebe’s heavy footsteps running toward the door.

But Willy was the one who commanded Toby Wilder’s attention – at last – though he seemed only mildly curious. She flung the cigarette lighter across the room. He snatched it from the air, and stared at it. And now a closer look, head shaking, not believing his eyes. He held it up to the light of the window, the better to read the faint date scratched in gold. He turned back to her, rising from his table, but Willy was already at the door and passing through it, laughing, laughing. The chase was on.

Officer Chu was in a quandary. Willy Fallon’s protection might not be his chief concern today, but it was a cop’s job. However, she did not look like a woman in any danger. Every few running steps, she turned back to smile at the long-haired young man who chased her up MacDougal Street. Savvy Village residents hugged brick walls and storefront windows, but a few tourists went down like bowling pins. Arthur Chu followed the pair on the run into Washington Square Park, where they played a fast kids’ game of catch me if you can.

Grinning like a maniac, Willy ran around the fountain, and her pursuer cut across its wide basin, slogging through the pool and getting drenched by arcs of water from the rim and the bubbling tower at the center. On the other side, he was within grabbing distance of Willy. But now a helpful, though misguided, park visitor tripped the running man to end the chase, and the poor bastard went down on one knee, wincing as bone met concrete. Willy, the clear winner, and Officer Chu were gone before the loser of the race could get to his feet.

Rolland Mann waited on the sidewalk at the corner of Columbus Avenue and West Eighty-sixth Street, hardly a neighborhood that attracted paparazzi in search of celebrities, not that his own face was all that well known around town. Four southbound buses had passed by since his arrival at this meeting place.

Willy Fallon was that late.

Two other people stood beside him, both of them tourists. They gave themselves away by waiting on the sidewalk for their chance to legally walk across the intersection. Their sheep’s eyes were glued to the glowing red sign in the shape of a hand that commanded them not to move.

The real New Yorkers were standing in the street – screw the traffic light – waiting for the next break in the flow of passing cars. Poised three steps from the sidewalk, the locals liked this competitive edge on timid curbhuggers from out of town. And, in the ongoing war of pedestrian and driver, there were points to be scored if one could terrify the other with a near miss.

A teenage girl approached the corner, oblivious to her environs, hooked into music by earphones, and she stepped off the curb. She was pretty, else Rolland would not have noticed her. And now the southbound bus was also in his line of sight as it barreled down Columbus Avenue, ramming its way across the lanes of the intersection – as it had done every ten minutes or so during the long wait for Willy Fallon.

The teenager stepped in time to the music from her earphones and never saw the bus – as she walked into its path. A stunning moment. He knew she was going to die. The bus was bearing down on her. A millisecond more, and she would be smashed like bug soup on a windshield.

The bus was gigantic, filling out his field of vision. Closer, closer.

A middle-aged man in greasy coveralls reached out, grabbed the girl’s collar and yanked her back a step. The metal behemoth, brakes screaming, came within inches – inches – of the girl, and it failed to stop for six more yards beyond the point where she really should have died. A stench of burning rubber was in the air. There was time enough for the driver’s quick look in a rearview mirror, a sigh of relief, and then the bus rolled on. Three pedestrians stopped to applaud, as they would for any near-death experience; it was a theater town.

The show was over, and the audience dispersed. The teenage girl could only stand there, staring at the departing bus, eyes glazing over as shock set in. And now her savior, the man in coveralls, released his handful of her blouse, saying, ‘Jeese, I’m so sorry, kid. What was I thinking?’

The girl turned to face her rescuer. Huh?

The hero smacked his head in a mime of Dummy me. ‘If that bus had hit you, you’d be set for life.’ The girl, head shaking, uncomprehending, was still surprised to be there, upright and alive, when the man started across the street, waving goodbye to her, saying, ‘Sorry, kid.’

The Good Samaritan’s guilt was understandable. A lawsuit involving a city bus would have paid off in millions. But that girl would never have survived a direct hit by tons of rolling steel.

Though he had been instructed to wait on the corner, Rolland stepped off the curb, moved three more steps into the street, and there he waited for Willy Fallon.

THIRTY-EIGHT

The headmaster doesn’t know whether or not the bums of Potter’s Field are embalmed. I tell him this is important stuff, and I’ve already asked my teacher. She doesn’t know, either, and that’s why she sent me to him. Well, I tell him, the dead wino’s body will turn to soup without embalming. So this is my problem, I say. How can I picture this man in my head, day after day, if I don’t know how fast his body is decomposing?

The headmaster gets up and leaves his office. Hours later, at the end of the school day, his secretary finds me still sitting in there alone. She tells me to go home. I tell her I don’t think I can get there from here. The secretary calls my mother to come and get me.

As we walk home, I take Mom’s hand the way I did when I was six.

—Ernest Nadler

When Willy Fallon arrived at the designated corner, Rolland Mann appeared to have given up on her. He was standing in the street, waiting for a chance to cross or looking to hail a cab. She called to him from the sidewalk. ‘Hey!’ He glanced at her over one shoulder and then turned back to face the oncoming traffic.

‘Where are you going?’ She stepped off the curb to join him in the street. He smiled and placed an avuncular hand on her shoulder. And that set off the first alarm.

Creepy bastard.

She shook off his hand, squared her shoulders and faced him down, but his eyes were turned toward the approach of an oncoming bus – not a city bus, but a huge double-decker tour bus. Her first instinct was to step back before it could flatten both of them, and now Mann’s hand was lightly pressed to the small of her back.

Oh, shit! You prick! No way!

In the spirit of self-preservation, she reached down to squeeze his testicles, though she had planned to do that anyway. He doubled over in agony. They all did that. And now, with no trouble, only a kick in the pants, she