“Not bad at all, sir, but I’ve got to ask. What will you be playin’ with? Them fat old fellas got more in their pocket than you got on your whole person.”
He looked at her sharply, then back to the mirror. “I have enough to begin. After a few hands, zis will not be a problem.” He turned and looked to me as he was lighting a cigar. He said, “Zianno?”
I just said, “You look the part, Solomon.”
We took the wagon and mules to the address he had been given. The sky was dark, even though it was just after noon, and a hard wind was blowing. Ice still covered most of the streets and the mules were slower than usual.
Solomon wanted to be let off in the alley leading to the back room, probably so no one would see the mules and the wagon. As he stepped down and took his first few treacherous steps on the ice, I heard a voice, a boy’s voice from somewhere in the alley, say, “There he is. There’s Lemp.”
I looked around and saw no one but Solomon. The boy thought Solomon was the beer baron, loaded with money, arriving for his daily poker game. Solomon didn’t even look up. He was still concerned with the ice. Suddenly there were three of them, then five, then six. Half of them were about my size and age, but the others were bigger and older, maybe sixteen or seventeen. Before Solomon could do or say anything, they had him pinned against the brick wall of the saloon. They were yelling and shouting at him to stand still and when Solomon did try to speak, one of the older ones pulled out a baseball bat and swung it hard against Solomon’s legs. The smaller ones were tearing at his pockets, looking for money.
This all happened in half a minute. Then one of the older ones glanced back over his shoulder into the darkness of the alley and said, “Ray, he ain’t got but a few bucks. Should we do him, anyway?”
I knew what that meant and, without thinking, jumped out of the wagon. I was scared and mad. I didn’t know what to do. I reached in my trouser pocket and grabbed hold of Papa’s baseball. I pulled it out and held it up, ready to throw at the first boy that moved.
Then a strange and magical thing happened.
“Get away from him now,” I said. “Turn around and get away from him.”
Everything went silent, except for the wind, which was still howling around us. They all looked at me bewildered, entranced, as if some great clock had reached the hour and they were waiting for it to chime. But what clock? And for what reason? I didn’t have a clue. Then, without a word, they let go of Solomon, the one boy dropped his bat, and they turned and walked away, puzzled as to why they were even there in the first place.
I watched them leave. I was still filled with rage, but somehow calm. Solomon was slumped against the wall, moaning. I went over to him and asked if he was all right. Before he could speak, I heard something move in the darkness, back in the alley where the boy with the bat had glanced. At first, I couldn’t see anything, then a shape appeared. It was another boy, one who looked just like me or at least enough like me that we could have been somehow related. He walked over to me and stared in my eyes, searching for something. Then he looked at my hand holding Papa’s baseball.
“You are Meq,” he said.
I said, “What? Who are you? Why did they do that? Do you know who this is? This is Solomon J. Birnbaum, that’s who.”
The boy looked at Solomon, then back to me. He was listening, but not so much to what I said as to how I said it. He came a step closer.
“How long?” he said.
“How long what?”
I looked at Solomon. He was hurt, I could tell, but he wasn’t saying anything. He was just staring back and forth between the boy and me.
“You don’t know, do you?” the boy said.
“Look, I know you know those punks — you tell them they got the wrong man and they’d better. they’d better watch out.”
He laughed to himself, a strange laugh for a child, almost bitter. He took two or three steps backward, still looking at me until he was out of the alley and in front of the wagon and mules. Then he took off running. Fast. He literally ran like the wind; fluid, compact, graceful, like no boy I’d ever seen, and he was on ice.
Solomon finally spoke. He said, “Great Yahweh.”
I helped Solomon into the wagon and I grabbed the reins and drove us back to the boardinghouse. Solomon’s legs weren’t broken, but he was badly bruised. Mrs. Bennings and I helped him into bed and I could tell she had seen and touched the results of violence before. She was gentle and efficient and hardly spoke a word until later, when she asked me what had happened. I was confused, mad, even a little guilty for some reason, and I told her everything, even about the other boy, the one who looked like me.
“Well, don’t that beat the devil? I never heard such a thing. And them boys just walked away like that, peaceful and all?”
“Yes,” I said, “they did.”
“Well, then let’s just let it lie, eh, child? Best we tend to Mr. Birnbaum and get him standin’ on them long old legs of his.”
I agreed with her and tried to “let it lie,” but I couldn’t. I thought about it all that night and the rest of the week. Even my dreams were no refuge. They were filled with strange faces, animals, and voices. They all merged and separated, changing, dancing like images seen through a fire on the wall of a cave.
When Solomon began to recover and get his strength back, he came and woke me from one of my dreams. I was sweating and shaking and gripping Papa’s baseball so hard my fingernails had broken through the hide. He held me gently by the shoulders. He said, “Zianno, we go find that boy. You hear me? You must do zis. Tomorrow, we find that boy.”
But we didn’t have to find anything. He found us.
At breakfast, Mrs. Bennings asked why I had been up so early wandering the neighborhood. I told her I hadn’t been anywhere and Solomon and I exchanged glances.
“When did you last see him — or me, Mrs. Bennings?”
“Why, not ten minutes ago, child. And what do you mean ‘him’?”
I got up from the table and went to the door. I looked at Solomon. He wore an expression as serious as I’d seen since the train wreck.
He said, “Go with caution, Zianno. Remember what those others did.”
I walked out of the boardinghouse and down the hill to the nearest corner. It wasn’t more than a hundred yards. For some reason I knew he’d be there, and he was, leaning against a stone post. When I was no more than ten feet away, I could see how much we looked alike, but up close, in better light than there was in the alley, I could also see our differences. He had green eyes, where mine were almost black, and his lips were fuller, rounder than mine. He had no scars or blemishes that I could see, but neither did I.
I said, “How did you find us?”
He just shrugged and looked out over the houses around us. Then I thought how easy it would be to find us. I’d told him Solomon’s name. All he had to do was ask around.
He looked down at his feet. He kicked a loose rock and we both watched it arc and tumble down the hill. I waited for him to speak.
“You’re the first one I seen in a long time,” he said. “That’s all. And you got the power of the Stones. I thought that was somethin’ my old lady made up.”
“Look,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. All I know is that those boys hurt my friend bad and that one boy was asking you if he should do more.”
“Yeah, well, they’re Giza, that’s what I’m tellin’ you.”
“Giza?” I said and then I remembered. When my mama was trying to tell me something on the train, she said we were not like the Giza, the other people.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Ray, Ray Ytuarte. Yours?”
“Zianno Zezen. My mama and papa called me Z.”
“Called?” he said. Then he bent down and picked up another loose rock and threw it down the hill. He had a good arm. “Where are they now?”
“They’re dead. So what?”
