“And teaching him respect,” said the third kid. “He’s gotta learn he can’t just break into Mr. Tarkington’s house like that. Guy was a war hero.”
Brian shook his head. “Bines, two years ago, you said I could be the leader of your gang if I’d break in here and set up a clubhouse. I don’t think you’re the guy to teach respect. Find something else to do.”
“No,” said Fenton. “We found him first, Brian. We’ll let him go in a couple of minutes anyhow.”
“Good. So it’s a couple of minutes.”
Fenton squared his shoulders and thrust out his chest. “I didn’t say we were done yet.”
Brian Maxwell smiled. “Okay, you’re not done yet. But I think that’s enough of this three-on-one.” He strode forward into the triangle made by the three boys. “Hey, kid, what do you say? Timson’s the littlest one; kick him in the balls, I’ll give you fifty cents. I’ll take the other two.”
“Fine by me,” I said. “Make it a buck if I break his nose?”
“Deal.”
And that’s how I did it. I followed as close as I could to the letter of the story the way my grandmother told it. I did break John Timson’s nose, and my dad, Brian Maxwell, tore Boyd Fenton’s shirt so badly pulling it off his back that Mrs. Fenton actually came around a couple of days later asking my grandmother to pay for a new one.
Grandma declined.
Eventually, my dad’s best friend “Chuck” Charles came along. He didn’t interfere with the fight, saying that would have made it too lopsided, but he commented from the sidelines and gave me some pointers. In the end, I think it was his input that drove our enemies off. Fenton muttered something about us ganging up on them as they left.
It seems strange to keep calling a seventeen-year-old kid my dad, so I’ll call him Brian. Before our attackers were around the corner of the little bungalow, he was on the ground laughing.
“Funny to you,” said Chuck, coming over and handing him a Coke. “But Emily’s sweet on Fenton. What if my sister goes and marries him and he becomes my brother-in-law? You think I wanna be hearing his version of this historic battle over Christmas dinner for the rest of my life?”
“She won’t marry Fenton,” I said. “She’ll marry a guy called Ben Goldstein.”
Chuck raised an eyebrow. “Goldstein? You saying my sister’s going to marry a Jew?”
“Do you care?”
He grinned. “Nah, but it don’t matter how welcome I am in the family, none of them better try cutting part of my pee-pee off.”
Brian laughed. “What about me, kid? Who’m I gonna marry?”
I took a long look, pretending to consider. My grandmother hadn’t said anything about the little hobo predicting the future, but I already knew nothing I did could alter things. Things turned out they way they would, the way they already had. “Mary Nelson,” I said.
His jaw dropped. “How—did someone put you up to that? How’d you know about her?”
This caught Chuck’s interest. “Mary Nelson,” he said. “How come I don’t know about any Mary Nelson, Bri? Holding out on me?”
Brian shook his head. “You just don’t remember. My aunt’s cottage last year. I went up for a couple of weeks. She was cute, but three years younger. What was I gonna do? I’m a gentleman. How you know about that, half-pint?”
“You’ll meet her again,” I said. “University. You’ll fall in love.”
“Hey, how about me?” said Chuck. “I mean, while we’re telling the future and all? Who’m I gonna fall in love with?”
I shook my head. “Lots of people.”
That got them both laughing. “He’s got you all right,” said Brian. “Come on, give the kid a Coke, Chuck, and let’s figure out what’s next.”
Just like that, I had become their problem. They agreed I couldn’t keep staying in the abandoned house. Either Fenton’s guys would tell an adult or they’d come back for me.
“I heard there was some kid hiding out in this house,” Brian said as he tried to straighten my nose.
“I heard that, too,” said Chuck. “Everybody says he’s an orphan whose dad died in the war. That true, kid?”
“A lot of kids’ dads died in the war,” I said.
Chuck looked quickly over at Brian. “You got that right, kid. So?”
I wanted to phrase what I said carefully. I was off-script now, since my grandmother’s stories had never filled me in on exactly what conversation had gone on between the vagrant boy and my dad, just general impressions Brian had picked up and later related to his mother. I didn’t want to lie, not exactly. “So some people picked themselves right up,” I said, not looking directly at my dad. “Some people’s mothers were real strong, and worked two or three jobs to keep it together. They took in washing from the richies up on the Bridle Path, and they got some crappy factory jobs, and they kept right on providing for the families they had.” I closed my eyes, not wanting to give anything away. Everything I had just said was true of his mother. Everything that came next was the short life story of the little orphan boy as told to me years from now. “And some people’s mothers just quit. Didn’t get no job, they didn’t take in no work. Just sat in the kitchen and drank until they keeled over one day when their kid was ten, long after the war was done.”
I knew I was a lousy actor, so I kept my head down when I said all this so they couldn’t see the lies written all over my face.
They didn’t say anything for the longest time, and even though I knew they were going to buy it because that was how my grandmother always said it happened, I started having doubts.
When I finally looked up, Brian was already standing. “I’ve got an idea,” he said.
“Uh-oh,” said Chuck. “That means trouble.”
Two
Brian’s big idea was his coal cellar. He and Chuck drilled me on how to get in and out through the narrow chute that led in from the side of the house. The two of them had done it for years in war games and hide-and- seek, so they knew how to wedge yourself in the chute in order to reach up and close the hatch. It was a tight fit. I found myself thankful that it had been more than a month since I had been fed on anything more than table scraps.
I left the mirror in the Tarkington house, and visited whenever it was safe in order to check the 1967 mirror. As the Silverlands continued to expand, it was becoming impossible to ignore the other clouds of image- fragments to either side of our own. I got into the habit of checking carefully to the right and left as I went in, but though I thought once or twice that I might have heard someone’s distant voice, I never saw any other mirror kid. Just as well; I had enough trouble with my own set of mirrors without getting caught up in anyone else’s story.
With my doorstop left in, I figured any former mirror kid could come through from 1947, and if anyone did, I wanted to know about it, so I scattered flour, and checked often for footprints. No luck. Had Wald been arrested in connection with Peggy’s disappearance? No, she wouldn’t be reported missing until September. Had Prince Harming made trouble for him? It was hard to imagine that younger, overly friendly Beckett I had last seen in 1947 being any match for wily old John Wald.
Brian always made sure he was first up in the morning. He’d sneak down to where I’d been sleeping in the throat-clogging cellar, toss me a set of hand-me-downs, and two sandwiches wrapped in brown paper, then head off to wake his mother and sister. I was lucky, I figured, that my grandmother, like so many of those who had lived through the Great Depression, never threw anything away. A shelving unit in the garage held at least a decade’s worth of clothes her children had outgrown.
After the neighborhood had quieted down, I would sneak out and hop a few fences so as not to be coming out of the same yard every day, and head to the public library to wait until it opened. In a study carrel at the back, I’d take out the letters from Luka and my grandmother, and pore over them for answers.
