The Schwa Was Here

Crawley peered at me, but I just returned his unpleasant gaze. “Why not Greed?” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Avarice is Greed, right? That’s the way I learned the seven deadly sins. So why not just name the dog Greed?”

“Don’t you know anything?” Crawley growled. “Avarice is a much better name for a dog.”

He spun his wheelchair and rolled into the deeper recesses of his apartment. “Leashes are hanging in the kitchen.” And he was gone.

***

At first we tried to walk them two at a time, but they were so strong, so untrained, and so excited to be outside, they practi­cally pulled us into oncoming traffic. There were no shortcuts. We each could only handle one dog at a time. Walking dogs for no pay for two hours a day wasn’t exactly my idea of fun. But the Schwa and I did it. We could have gotten out of it. We could have just told our parents what we had done, and taken whatever punishment they dealt out. Even if Crawley went to the police, they wouldn’t do much about it—especially after we had shown what decent guys we were by volunteering to walk his dogs for those first few days. Still, we kept on doing it. Maybe it’s because there was a kind of a mystique to it, walking the infamous Old Man Crawley’s dogs. Everyone knew whose dogs they were—it’s not like the neighborhood is teeming with Afghans. Somehow it made us important. Or maybe we kept on doing it because we gave him our word. I can’t speak for the Schwa, but for me, my word had never really meant much of anything. I can’t count all the times I gave someone my word, then flaked out. This time was different, though, because if I didn’t keep my word, Crawley would be able to sit in his dark apartment and gloat. He’d see it as proof that I was at the shal­low end of the gene pool, and I wouldn’t give him that satisfac­tion, no matter how many barking sins I had to walk.

“Hey, Bonano,” said Wendell Tiggor from across the street while we walked Charity and Gluttony that first week. “So I like your new girlfriend,” he says, pointing to the dog. “She’s got real animal attraction.”

“We’d let you have one,” I told him, “but we don’t got one called Stupidity.” The Schwa and I high-fived as best we could with two dogs pulling us down the street.

Walking dogs also meant there was less time to hang out with my other friends. Namely, Howie and Ira. It’s not like they made any extra effort to see me anyway.

During our second week of canine slavery, however, Howie did join the Schwa and me for a few minutes one afternoon while we walked Hope and Lust.

“I can’t hang out long,” says Howie. “I gotta walk my little brother to tae kwan do.”

“Is he a sin or a virtue?” the Schwa asked, but it goes right over Howie’s head.

I thought he might offer to help us walk the dogs, at least for a minute, but his hands stayed firmly shoved in his pockets. “Is Crawley as crazy as they say?”

I tugged on the leash to keep Lust from going after a passing poodle. “Well, let’s put it this way: If he’s got bats in his belfry, he nails them to the wall to watch them wriggle.”

The Schwa laughed.

“He’s real mean, huh?” says Howie.

“He hates the world and the world hates him right back.” What I didn’t say was how much the nasty old guy was grow­ing on me. I actually looked forward to seeing him, just so I could irritate him.

Right about now Howie looks over his shoulder like the FBI might be reporting his activities to his parents, who have re­cently begun a policy of preemptive grounding. “Listen, I gotta go. So long, Antsy,” and he takes off.

It would have been all fine and good, except for one thing. He didn’t say good-bye to the Schwa. It seemed to slip his mind that the Schwa was even there. I could tell the Schwa didn’t like this, but he didn’t say anything about it—he just looked down at Hope, who was happily sniffing gum spots on the sidewalk.

We were heading back to Crawley’s for the next two dogs when the Schwa broke the silence. “They didn’t even notice it was orange?” he said.

“What?”

“The sombrero. Not a single person noticed it was orange? Not a single person even noticed it was a sombrero?”

It was the first time he had mentioned the experiments. When we were doing them, he seemed fine. He took a scientific interest in the results. It had never occurred to me that they might have bothered him.

“Not one.”

“Hmm,” he said, shaking his head. “Go figure.”

“Hey, it’s not a bad thing,” I told him. “This Schwa Effect. It’s a natural ability—you know, like those people who can memo­rize the phone book and stuff—?idiot savants.’” This was just getting worse by the minute. “Anyway, it’s a skill you oughta be proud of.”

“Yeah? Well, tell me how proud you feel when you don’t get a report card because the teacher forgot to make you one. Or when the bus doesn’t stop for you because the driver doesn’t notice you’re at the stop. Or when your own father makes din­ner for himself but not for you because it slipped his mind that you were there.”

“You’re making that up,” I finally said. “That doesn’t happen.”

“Oh yeah? Come to my house for dinner sometime.”

 ***

The Schwa hadn’t really meant it as an invitation, but I took it as one. I was curious. I had to know just what kind of home en­vironment could turn out an invisible-ish kid. That, and I wanted to know more about his mysteriously missing mother, but I didn’t dare tell him that. I figured his reluctance to talk about his home life must have been because he was embar­rassed about it—like maybe he lived in a broken-down shack, or something.

The Schwa lived at the edge of our neighborhood, on a street I never had been on before. When I arrived there, I have to say I was disappointed by what I saw. It was a row of small two-story homes, packed in tight, with driveways in between. His house wasn’t invisible. It wasn’t even unnoticeable. In fact, it stood out. All the other homes on the street had fake plastic siding. You know the stuff—plastic that’s supposed to look like aluminum that’s supposed to look like wood. While the rest of the homes were white, eggshell, or light blue, the Schwa’s house was canary yellow. I had to double-check the address to make sure I had the right place. The front yard was well cared for. There was even a little bubbling rock fountain in the corner that appeared to actually be made of rock and not Pisher Plastic. It was exemplary, to borrow a word I missed on my last vocabulary test: the perfect example of what a front yard should be.

There was a doormat that said: IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME RIGHT NOW, AND I’D HAVE NO MORTGAGE. I could hear music playing somewhere inside. Guitar. I rang the bell, and in a mo­ment the door opened and no one appeared to be standing there.

“Hi, Schwa.”

“Hi, Antsy.” The shadows fell just the right way to camouflage him against the rest of the room. I blinked a few times, and he came into focus. He didn’t sound particularly pleased that I was there. It was more like he was resigned to the fact. He showed me in and introduced me to his father.

They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but looking at the Schwa and his father, I would say the apple rolled clear into an orange grove. The man was about as un-Schwa-like as could be. He wore white overalls with paint stains all over them—the Schwa had said he was a housepainter. Right now he wasn’t painting, he was sitting in the living room playing a twelve-string guitar—I mean really playing, not just strum­ming. He had a ponytail with a few strands of gray, the same color as his guitar strings.

Not only was he visible, but he actually stood out.

“Are you sure you’re not adopted?” I asked. But I could tell there was enough of a resemblance to make DNA testing un­necessary.

“I look like him,” Schwa said, “but in most other ways I take after my mother.”

At the mention of his mother, I casually looked around for any sign of her, but there were no pictures, no feminine touches.

“Hey, Dad, this is my friend Antsy.”

Mr. Schwa continued to play, not noticing.

“Dad,” said the Schwa, a bit louder this time. Still he just played his guitar. The Schwa sighed.

“Mr. Schwa?” I said.