The Schwa Was Here

the Schwa could teleport. No one believed it, but it still damaged our credibility. “It’s like Las Vegas,” Ira said. “No matter how much you think you’re winning, the odds are stacked against you.”

I reminded him we had already scientifically proven that the odds were on our side. “We can still cut you in on the action,” I offered him—and then I had to add, “You can take your money and buy more clay.” Ira was not amused.

Still, no matter how much he and Howie frowned on our scheme, it didn’t faze the Schwa, so I tried not to let it faze me.

“You oughta go into business school, Antsy,” the Schwa told me as we scarfed down fries at Fuggettaburger. “You’ve got a real knack for it.”

“Naah,” I said. “I’m just leeching off of you.” But still, what he said struck a chord in me—and no minor chord either. It was the first time anyone ever accused me of having any real talent. I mean, my mother sometimes says I should go into astrophysics, but that’s just because I’m good at taking up time and space.

I don’t know what came over me then. Maybe I felt I knew the Schwa well enough—or maybe I was just talented at screw­ing up a good situation. Whatever the reason, I turned to him and asked: “So, Schwa—what really happened to your mother?”

I felt him go stiff. I mean I really felt it, like we were con­nected in some freaky way. He finished his fries, I finished mine. We left. Then, just as we hit the street, he said, “She dis­appeared when I was five.” And then he added, “Don’t ask me again, okay?”

*** 

As for what happened next, call it fate, call it luck, call it what­ever you want, but the next dare was the one that changed our lives. It could be that both of our lives were leading up to this moment. But I always wonder what would have happened if we didn’t take Wendell Tiggor’s dare.

I already told you about Old Man Crawley—the hermit who lived on the second floor of his massive restaurant that took up a whole block on the bay. I think every neighborhood in the world’s got a shut-in. There’s all these reasons for it, y’know, like outdooraphobia, or whatever they call it. They love to make movies about shut-ins, and it always turns out that it’s some lonely dude who’s just misunderstood. But that wasn’t the case with Charles J. Crawley. Nothing to misunderstand about him. He was old, he was rich, he was cranky, and although no one ever saw or actually spoke to him, he made it very clear he was not to be messed with.

There was this one Halloween, for instance, some of the neighborhood kids, including my brother, went on an egg pa­trol—and there are lots of windows to egg on that second floor of Crawley’s restaurant. We never did see Crawley himself look­ing out of the windows, but there were always Afghans poking their noses out. So, anyway, my brother and some of his friends, they go out on Halloween a few years back, toss a few eggs at Crawley’s upstairs windows, and run off. We heard nothing about it, except for one thing . . . from November 1 until New Year’s Day, not a single market in the neighborhood had eggs—not even the big supermarket chains. “It’s a local shortage,” peo­ple were told—but everyone knew that it was Old Man Crawley. He had pulled some strings and shut down the egg supply to the whole neighborhood. No one ever egged his windows again.

Which brings me to the biggest and potentially most profitable dare that our little invisibility enterprise with the Schwa took on. Like I said, it was Wendell Tiggor’s dare. It was a pretty clever one, which makes me think he didn’t actually come up with it, because Wendell Tiggor had about the intelli­gence of my mother’s meat loaf if you took out the onions. It was at the bus stop after school that Tiggor came up to me.

“So, I’ve been hearing about this Schwa kid.” (Tiggor begins every sentence with the word “so.”)

“Yeah?”

“So, I hear he goes invisible or something.”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” I say. “He’s standing right here.”

“Where?”

“Right in front of your face.”

“Hi,” said Schwa, who happened to be next to me and, I might add, directly in Tiggor’s line of sight.

“Oh.” Tiggor squinted his beady eyes and looked him over. “So, he doesn’t look invisible to me.”

“Then why didn’t you see him when you were staring straight at him?” Tiggor has to think about that one. You can almost hear rusty gears turning in his head, like one of those farm combines that sat out in the rain too long. I figured if I let those gears turn anymore, one might come flying out of his ear and kill some innocent bystander. “Never mind,” I say. “What can we do for you?” By now a few other kids have started to take notice of our conversation.

“So, I hear you do stuff,” he says to the Schwa.

“Talk to my manager,” says the Schwa. Tiggor’s lip curls in confusion.

“He means me. Is it a service you wish my client to provide? Because if it’s a service, you’ll have to clear it with the student officers, who have him on retainer. Government regulations. You know how it is. Of course if it’s a dare instead of a service, we can do that, no problem.” At the word “dare,” even more kids moved into listening range. Six or seven were clustered around us, and as everyone knows, when there’s a few kids in a group it draws more and more, like curiosity has its own gravity.

“It’s a dare,” says Tiggor.

“Dares come with a price, too; what do you want the Schwa to do?”

“You say he can do things and not be seen,” Tiggor says. “So let’s see if he can go into Old Man Crawley’s and bring some­thing back.” A bus came and went, but none of the kids got on. The public buses run every ten minutes, and this was worth ten minutes of everyone’s time.

“Let me consult with my client.”

I pull the Schwa aside, and he whispers, “I don’t know, Antsy.”

Tiggor laughs. “See, I told you,” he says to the other kids. “He’s a fake. Ain’t no such thing as an invisible boy.”

“Well, he did walk through the girls’ locker room without getting seen,” one kid says.

“So,” says Tiggor, “does he have the pictures to prove it?”

“Yeah,” I tell Tiggor, “you wish you had pictures.”

Tiggor looks at me and hooks his thumbs in his pockets like he’s a gunslinger ready to draw. “Twenty bucks says he can’t do it.”

“You’re on,” I said without a second thought—such is my faith in the Schwa. But the Schwa tugs my sleeve.

“Antsy...”

“What do you want him to bring back?”

“So, how about a dog bowl,” Tiggor says. Everybody agrees that’s the perfect item. There’s about twenty kids around us now.

“Anybody else care to take the wager?” I ask.

The kids who had seen the Schwa in action all looked down and shook their heads. Only those who were not yet believers would bet against the Schwa.

“I’m in for five bucks,” says one kid.

“Two bucks over here,” says another. And by the time the bet­ting frenzy’s over, fifty-four bucks are on the line.

 ***

We caught the next bus, and all the way home the Schwa was bouncing his knees up and down like he’s gotta go pee, but I know it’s because he’s all nervous,

“Come on, Schwa, take it easy. There are so many dogs in there, you’ll probably trip on a bowl on the way in.”

“And if I get caught?”

“If you get caught, I pay everyone fifty-four bucks out of my own pocket—no loss to you, except maybe loss of life—but that’s a real long shot.” I was only kidding but he took it seri­ously. I began to feel a bit lousy for rushing into the dare with­out checking out his feelings first.

“We can always back out,” I told him.

He didn’t like the sound of that either—it would make him look chicken. “It’s just that everyone’s heard how creepy Old Man Crawley is. There are all these rumors about him.”