lucky number. Howie could not remember anyone ever calling him a friend, let alone a “faithful friend,” which was like something one of the three musketeers might say to another, or one soldier to another, like in the French Foreign Legion, and it was a positive sign that suggested Mr. Blackwood might rent from them.
Mr. Blackwood got to his feet, and for the first time Howie saw him standing. He knew that his friend must be tall, but Mr. Blackwood seemed gigantic, even though he wasn’t as tall as any professional basketball player. His thick and weirdly shaped shoulder blades were more prominent when he was standing, and his shirt stretched so tight across them that Howie thought it might rip; it seemed almost as if there were great wings folded on Mr. Blackwood’s upper back, under his shirt. His arms appeared longer, too, when he was standing, and his hands were like shovels.
As they crossed the roof, their shadows preceded them. Mr. Blackwood’s shadow was three times longer than Howie’s. The sight of their elongated silhouettes moving side by side made Howie feel small, but at the same time it also made him feel safe. No one would be crazy enough to mess with Mr. Blackwood. And if Howie was his friend, no one would mess with Howie, either. No one would
For the first time, he noticed a special detail of his friend’s black boots. The toes were capped with brushed steel, like boots that a mountain climber might wear. They were supercool.
As Howie switched on his flashlight, Mr. Blackwood opened the door to the shed at the head of the stairs. He put a hand on Howie’s shoulder—“Be careful, son, that first flight is steep”—and Howie was impressed that the man’s big hand seemed even bigger when it touched you.
“Where’s your flashlight?” Howie asked.
“I’ve got one with my gear downstairs. But the few windows are enough light for me. I see pretty good in the dark.”
At each floor, multipaned windows were set high in the walls, but not many, and they were opaque with dust. Howie figured that maybe being a dreamer and sleeping in daylight might save your eyesight and help you to see better in the dark. Maybe he would become a dreamer, too, and sleep by day.
On the ground floor, at the rear of the empty building, as Howie opened the deadbolt and put his hand on the lever-style doorknob, Mr. Blackwood said, “Come back in the morning, and we’ll have breakfast together. I’ll tell you all about this famous movie star who was my great-grandmother.”
“What movie star?” Howie asked, surprised that his friend had kept such an amazing secret even though they had talked most of the day, talked more than Howie had ever talked with anyone but his mom and Corrine.
“She was in silent movies a long time ago. You wouldn’t know her name, but it’s an amazing story. I love telling it.”
“Okay, sure, wow, that’ll be great,” he said, and he opened the door into the alleyway, blinking in the brighter light.
Before Howie could step across the threshold, Ron Bleeker rushed him, shoving him hard backward: “Butt- Ugly Dugley, you little creep, why’re you going in and out of here, what’re you up to, freak boy?”
Bleeker was four years older than Howie, fifteen and muscular. He wore sleeveless T-shirts sometimes so you could see his biceps better, and he knocked Howie off his feet.
The flashlight flew out of Howie’s hand, and Bleeker came through the door fast, dropped on top of him, grabbed Howie by his ears, by his good one and his ugly one, threatening to jerk his head off the floor and slam it down again to crack his skull. The wedge of daylight narrowed as the swinging door closed, and in the gathering darkness, Bleeker said, “You little puke-face shit, what’re you—”
His voice cut off with a wordless sound of surprise and pain, and in the same instant, as if Bleeker suddenly took flight, his weight lifted from Howie.
From the darkness, Mr. Blackwood said, “Get your flashlight, son.”
Howie crawled to the Eveready, which was the source of most of the light now that the door had closed. With the flashlight in hand, he thrust to his feet and turned in confusion, trying to locate his friend and his enemy.
They were together, and they were an amazing sight. One of Mr. Blackwood’s hands was tight around Ron Bleeker’s throat, and the other hand clutched the boy’s crotch. He held Bleeker off the floor, letting his feet dangle in empty air. Old Bleeker rolled his eyes in terror when the flashlight revealed his captor’s face.
“You try to take one punch at me,” Mr. Blackwood told Bleeker, “and I’ll crush everything I’m holding in my left hand, crush it and tear it off, and then you can wear girls’ clothes the rest of your life.”
Bleeker didn’t look like he had either the intention or the strength to take a punch at Mr. Blackwood. Tears rolled down his face, which was as white and greasy as the belly of a fish, and the most pathetic kittenlike whimpers escaped him.
“You go on home, son,” Mr. Blackwood said. “I want to have a few words with your friend here. I want to set him straight about a couple things.”
Howie stood transfixed, astonished at the sight of Bleeker, so long a figure of terror, abruptly reduced to helplessness, looking so small, like a half-broken doll.
“If that’s all right with you?” Mr. Blackwood said. “Is it all right with you if I just explain the new rules to this young fella?”
“Sure,” Howie said. “That’s okay. So I’ll just go now. I’ll go on home.” He went to the door and glanced back at them. “The new rules.” He opened the door, stepped outside, and glanced back once more. “In the morning, maybe you’ll tell me the new rules, too. I guess I’ll need to know them. So I can be sure everybody is, you know, living by them.” He pulled the door shut.
Dazed and amazed, he followed the alley through the afternoon light and shadows. He was most of the way across the cemetery beside St. Anthony’s when his half-trance, like a veil, slid off his mind and the full importance of what had just happened became clear to him. The rest of the way home, he couldn’t stop grinning.
4
PERHAPS HOWIE WAS BECOMING A DREAMER who would sleep by day and stay awake all night. In his room, in his bed, in the dark, he could not shut his mind off. He kept replaying the entire special morning and afternoon, and those memories were as vivid to him as any movie.
Because his mom got up early for work, she went to bed at nine-thirty. Corrine was already in her room, doing whatever girls did in their rooms; he had no idea.
All was quiet and dark when, at nine forty-five, Howie dressed and went silently downstairs. He damped the beam of his flashlight by pressing two fingers over the lens. The house smelled of furniture polish, faintly of lemon- scented air freshener, and here and there even more faintly of potpourri that his mom made herself from flowers she grew and from kitchen spices. Mr. Blackwood would like the quiet, good-smelling house if he agreed to come visit and look at the apartment. If he could wait until Saturday, when Mom was off work, maybe he could have dinner with them. Howie’s mother was a great cook, and being a dinner guest in the main house now and then was another advantage of renting the apartment.
Howie left the house by the back door, locked it behind him, and stuffed the key in a pocket of his jeans. He switched off the Eveready because the full moon frosted everything.
He walked rapidly toward St. Anthony’s graveyard, but he didn’t run. Running could get you killed because it fanned the flames. He wasn’t on fire, of course; but for a long time he had not been able to run also because of the skin grafts, which were delicate. Scars were tougher tissue than ordinary skin, and here and there, where scars and skin met, sudden extreme stretching, like what occurred when you ran flat-out, could cause dermal cracking and maybe a deadly infection.
Mr. Blackwood said he would probably sleep until nine o’clock. Howie didn’t want to risk waking him, so it was a few minutes before ten when, in the alley behind the old Boswell building, he knocked on the door through which Ron Bleeker had earlier attacked him. The first thing Howie would do was apologize for not being able to wait until breakfast. He was usually very patient. Having to recover from serious burns taught you patience. But if Mr. Blackwood had dreamed a decision about the apartment, Howie just
Mr. Blackwood didn’t respond to the knock, so Howie rapped his knuckles harder against the door and said, “It’s me, sir, it’s Howie Dugley.”
Maybe Mr. Blackwood was sleeping deeply. Maybe he had gone out for a walk or for a late dinner from some
