The Schwa Was Here

want to see the outside world anyway. He was quiet for a minute, then he said, “What are you going to do to me?” He was truly frightened now. I almost felt sorry for him. The key word here is “almost.”

“I have no idea,” I told him, which was true—Lexie still hadn’t told me what she had planned. She said I’d chicken out if I knew, and so I didn’t press her, figuring she might be right. We rode to Brooklyn Heights—the part of Brooklyn that faced Manhattan right across the East River. Then we drove onto a pier. That’s when I figured out what Lexie had planned.

“Oh, wow,” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

“What!” shouted Crawley. “Kidding about what? What is it?” But he made no attempt to uncover his eyes.

“You can’t be serious,” I told Lexie. “It’ll kill him.”

The driver opened the door. “Sorry about this, Mr. Crawley,” said the driver in a heavy accent. “But Lexie say this for your own good.”

“Is it a boat?” Crawley asked, obviously smelling the stench of the river. “I hate boats!”

“No boat,” said the driver. He helped Lexie out. “Leave me hold Moxie. You go.”

No one, not even the driver, was willing to tell Crawley that his next mode of transportation was going to be a helicopter. He’d have to discover that for himself.

I led him down the pier to the heliport at the very end, and he didn’t fight me. He was broken now. Too scared to run, too scared to do anything but go where we led him. He stumbled a few times on the weed-cracked pavement, but I had a good hold on him. I wasn’t going to let him fall. “Big step up,” I told him.

“Up to where?”

I gave him no answer, but once he was seated and I had strapped him in, I think he figured it out.

He moaned the deep moan of the condemned. The pilot, who I guess was hired by Lexie for our little therapeutic flight, waited until we were all strapped in. Then he started the en­gine. Crawley whimpered. Okay, now I really did feel sorry for him. Lexie just said, “This is going to be fun, Grandpa.”

“You terrible, terrible girl.”

I began to wonder if Lexie had gone too far. She did tend to have a blind spot for others’ feelings, and that was one place Moxie couldn’t guide her. The helicopter powered up, the slow foom-foom- foom of the blades speeding into a steady whir. We wobbled for an instant, then went straight up, like an elevator with no cable. Through the large window I saw the strange sight of Lexie’s driver holding on to Moxie and waving good-bye.

“You can take off your blindfold now, Grandpa.”

“No, I won’t!” he said, like a child. “You can’t make me.” He clapped his hands tightly over his eyes, keeping the blind­fold firmly in place.

I had only been in an airplane to Disney World and back— and both times it was at night, so I didn’t get to see much. This flight wasn’t for my benefit, but still it sucked my breath right out of my chest—and I don’t think it was just the altitude. The Schwa would have loved this, I thought, then I pushed the thought away. Thinking of him now would only bring me down, and I didn’t want to be brought down.

We flew along the East River, Brooklyn to our right, the sky­scrapers of Manhattan to our left. All the while the old man groaned and refused to take his hands from his eyes.

“Anthony,” yelled Lexie, over the beating of the blades. “Can you describe it to me?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t use sight words.”

By now I’d become good at describing things for four senses instead of five. “Okay. We’re flying right over the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s a harp strung across the river, with a frame made of rough stone.”

The pilot took a left turn, and brought us right into the city.

“What else?” prompted Lexie.

“We’re passing downtown now. There’s uh, . . . the Woolworth Building, I think. It’s roof is a cold metal pyramid with a sharp point, but the sun’s hitting it, making it hot. Moving to­ward midtown now. There’s Broadway. It kind of slices a weird angle through all the rest of the streets, and there’s traffic jams where it hits all the other avenues. There’s little bumps of taxis everywhere, like hundreds of lemon candies filling the streets. You could read the streets like Braille.”

“Ooh, that’s good!” Lexie said.

I was on a roll. “Uh . . . Grand Central Station ahead of us. Like a Greek temple—lots of pillars and sculptures sticking out of the dry, musty old stonework. And above it, smack in the middle of Park Avenue, like it shouldn’t even be there, is the MetLife Building. This big old cheese grater, like eighty stories high.”

And then Crawley said “Used to be the Pan Am Building. Pan Am. Now there was a company!”

Lexie smiled, and I finally understood. The descriptions weren’t for Lexie—they were for her grandfather. “Keep going, Anthony.” Crawley’s hands were still over his face, but they weren’t pressed as tightly as before. I continued, but now I was talking to Crawley instead of to Lexie.

“The Chrysler Building. Sharp. Icy. The highest point of a Christmas tree star. Okay, the heart of midtown coming up. Rockefeller Center, smooth old granite, in the middle of all these steel-and-glass skyscrapers. Trump Tower. It’s like a jagged crystal that got shoved out of the ground.”

That did it. Crawley took his hands from his eyes, slipped off the blindfold, and took in the view.

“Oh ...!” was all he could say. He gripped his seat, like it might accidentally eject him, and he just stared at everything we passed. We flew over Central Park, then over the West Side, and headed downtown again, over the Hudson River.

Through all of this, Crawley said nothing. His face was pale, his lips were pursed. I thought for sure that he was completely lost in a state of shock, never to shout a foul word again, just staring forever, his mind an absolute blank.

We took a trip around the Statue of Liberty, and then we came back to where we started. The helicopter dropped us off on the pier, where Lexie’s driver was waiting, playing his har­monica. When we were safe in the Lincoln and on our way home, Crawley finally spoke.

“You will never be forgiven for this,” he said. “Neither of you. And you will pay.”

We rode the rest of the way in silence. 

18. Larger Than Life, in Your Face, Undeniable Schwa

I had made up my mind to tell the Schwa about the Night Butcher the very next day, but he was nowhere to be found. His father was no help—he suggested that he might be at school, and was once more baffled when I told him it was Sunday.

It was late that afternoon that my dad came to get me in my room. “Hey, Antsy, that kid is here,” he says. “The one who makes your mother nervous.” I knew exactly who he was talk­ing about. We had him over for dinner once, and the Schwa rubbed my mom the wrong way. First because he ate his pasta plain—no sauce, no butter, nothing. That alone made him a suspicious character. Then my mom kept whacking him in the face. Not because she meant to, but he always seemed to be standing right there, where she wasn’t expecting, and she talks with her hands.

“What are you doing right now?” the Schwa asked the sec­ond he saw me.

“The usual,” I said.

“Good. I’ve got something to show you.”

Right away I knew this was it. The visibility play.

“How long will it take?” I asked, “because I gotta go walk the sins and virtues . . . and besides, I’ve got something important to talk to you about, too.”

“Not long,” he said. “Go get your bus pass.” And then he added. “You’re going to love this!”

But I wasn’t so sure.

***

That chilly afternoon, we took a bus past Bensonhurst, past Bay Ridge, past all the civilized sections of