“Hi, Mrs. Currah,” I said when Anthony’s mother opened the door. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I really need to see Anthony.”
She gave me a
I found it difficult to be disrespectful to someone’s parent, but I had to. “I know he’s upset about his girlfriend,” I said, loud enough that I hoped Anthony would hear. “But I’m sure he doesn’t want to let down his friends.”
Surprise, annoyance, and maybe a little suspicion crossed Mrs. Currah’s face before it lapsed into an impassive expression. “I think you must be mistaken, dear,” she said. “Anthony doesn’t have a girlfriend. Maybe— are you thinking Anthony Chuff over on Bennett? I’ve never seen you before.”
“No, I mean Anthony Currah,” I said, getting even louder. “He’s got a girlfriend, all right. I could tell you all about her if you like. We’re good friends.”
Before I could say anything else, Anthony shoved his mother aside, burst through the door, and grabbed my arm.
“I’ll take care of this, Ma,” he said. “Kenny’s a kid from school is all.”
“Anthony, what’s all this about?”
“It’s okay, Ma,” he said, guiding me away from the house as he spoke. “Kenny and me, we like to joke around, don’t we, Ken?”
“I don’t know about joking,” I said. “Sometimes your friends really count on you, and they end up getting covered in mud, you know? Hey, do you think your mom knows about those magazines under your mattress?”
My voice was still loud, but his was a hiss. “Hey, cool it, man. That’s against the code. You don’t talk about girls to a guy’s mom.”
“Oh?” I said. I let him drag me off. “And is trying to drown someone in mud cool with the code? Is leaving John Wald stuck in the past cool with the code?”
“I told you I was done,” said Anthony. “I wanted that thing out of my house.”
But I wasn’t finished. “Is leaving us by ourselves when Prince Harming comes back cool with the code?”
“What?” he said. “Prince Harming came back?” All the anger drained out of him in an instant.
“Not through the mirror. I don’t think so, anyway. It was a younger him. He wasn’t the same, but he was. Look, I’ll tell you everything. Sneak out tonight and meet me by the cave.”
“No,” he said. “I’m done. I’m not coming back. This is crazy, and if we don’t stop, you won’t be the only one who can’t get back home. We’re lucky it hasn’t happened lots of times before now.”
“You’re not done,” I said. “You can do whatever you like after tonight, but you’re going in one last time, to put a doorstop in for John. I’ll even take the mirror away. You’ll never see it again.”
Anthony bit his lip. “Is Peg okay?”
I almost answered him, but then I set my face in as hard an expression as I could. “Bring some food. I’m starving.”
He came. Sometime in the evening my water-logged watch quit working, so I sat in the dark, getting bitten by mosquitoes and convincing myself that it hadn’t worked and midnight must have passed, and what was I going to do now? But he came.
I called to him when I heard him blundering through the undergrowth, and he turned on his flashlight. “All right, fine, here I am. I don’t know why I bothered.”
“Do you have a doorstop?”
He held out a long piece of string with a dessert spoon tied at each end.
I showed him where I had leaned the mirror against the bank of the creek. “Let’s set it,” I said. “I’m leaving it for John Wald so he has a way to come forward. Then I’ll tell you everything.”
I went in with him, just in case anybody was waiting on the other side, but the carriage house in 1947 was empty and still. We set each spoon in the lower corner of the mirror, figuring it would have a better chance of being unnoticed that way.
When we came back, we sat down on a fallen log and I explained everything. When I got to the part about Peggy going through to Lilly’s time, I took a glance at him, and I was pretty sure there were tears running down his cheeks.
“I really am done with it,” he said after a long while. “I’m sorry about where I put the mirror. That was rotten. But I don’t want to do it anymore.”
“Okay,” I said. I got up and slung my backpack onto my shoulder.
“You’re going?” said Anthony. “Don’t you wanna—I can probably get you into the little house for the night.”
I shook my head. “I spent the day doing nothing. It’s time I got going.”
“But where? What is there around here you can go to?”
I picked up the mirror. It wasn’t easy to carry by myself, but at least I didn’t have to worry about breaking it. “You said it yourself,” I said. “What else can a little hobo boy do? I’m going to find my dad.”
Part Four
One
One Saturday in early August 1957, I got the opportunity to take part in a story I had been hearing all my life. Three older boys in a downtown neighborhood started in on a vagrant kid who had been staying in an abandoned house.
My grandmother still lived there in my time, so I remembered what she had told me about the old Tarkington place, whose shell-shocked war-vet owner had been moved into a home by his kids. A bunch of local kids had been going there to drink or make out for a couple of years. When I arrived on the street in the early hours of a Wednesday in late July after having walked more than ten miles, it was the natural place to hide out.
I spent two weeks there, avoiding other kids, spending my last bit of money. I was glad when I finally got jumped.
The kids who did it had worked up a sense of outrage at this stranger invading their neighborhood. Despite the fact that in the last couple of years they had tossed their share of rocks through the windows of the Tarkington house, they decided that I was going to have to pay for defiling the house of the local war hero. They caught me crawling out of a basement window on a sweltering August afternoon.
I wasn’t a pushover, though, the way you’d figure a skinny little fifteen-year-old would be when confronted with three older boys. I fought back like I had nothing to lose, and I guess also like I knew I’d be rescued, knew the whole script of how this fight would go. When Boyd Fenton broke my nose, I stepped back, pulled it as straight as I could, and asked if he was done yet.
“What the hell is going on here?” said Brian Maxwell, striding around the corner into the Tarkington backyard where they had taken the vagrant kid. “Fenton, what are you doing?”
“Hi, Brian,” said Fenton, straightening up from his fighting crouch. “You seen this little thief? He’s been breaking in and John saw him stealing from Tuck’s the other day. Little gypsy or something. We’re giving him the run-off.”
Brian examined me. “Kind of blue-eyed for a gypsy, Fenton. How’re you giving him the run-off if you don’t let him, you know … run off?”
“Making sure he doesn’t want to come back,” said John Timson.
