The Schwa Was Here

by Neal Shusterman

  I waited for more, but then he sat back, thought for a moment, and said, “No.” He stood and returned to his meat cutting.

  “What do you mean ‘no’? You can’t start and not finish.”

  He slammed the side of beef back down on the cutting table. “I tell this story only once. Your friend should be here when I do. Bring your friend and I will tell you both about that day.”

  Then he gave me four pork chops, cut thick like they used to in the days when meat was meat, and he sent me on my way.

  17. A Traumatic Experience I’ll Live to Regret, Assuming I Live

  Just as she had promised, Lexie sprung a top-secret trauma attack on her grandfather. It came without warning (without me being warned, that is) the morning after my visit to the Night Butcher. It was Saturday. A day I should have been able to sleep late. As I was tossing and turning all night with unpleasant dreams about meat, I was dead to the world when the phone rang. My mom practically had to use heart paddles to wake me up.

  “She says it’s important,” my mom said, shoving the phone into my hand. “I don’t know what could be so important at seven in the morning.”

  “Hewwo?” I said, sounding more like Elmer Fudd than I truly want to admit.

  “Today’s the day,” Lexie said excitedly on the end of the line. “Everything’s set for noon.”

  “Huh? What everything do you mean?” I croaked out.

  “Trauma therapy,” she whispered. “My grandfather—remember?”

  I groaned, and Lexie got all annoyed.

  “Well, if you don’t want to help, you don’t have to come. It’s not like you’re under any obligation.”

  “No, no,” I said. “I want to help,” which was true. Traumatizing Old Man Crawley was actually pretty high on my list of Things I’d Most Like to Do. “What do you need me to bring?”

  “Just yourself,” she said, “And Calvin. Tell him I want him to come, too.”

  “Why don’t you tell him?”

  Lexie hesitated. “I haven’t spoken to him since the day we all broke up.”

  After Lexie hung up, I dialed the Schwa. It rang once, and I hung up. My encounter with the Night Butcher was still fresh in my mind, and I knew if I talked to him, he’d hear something funny in my voice. I wanted to tell him about it, but a sensitive matter like this had to be handled carefully, at the right time and place.

  The phone rang, and figuring it was Lexie again, I picked it right up.

  “Hi, Antsy, it’s Calvin.”

  “Schwa?” He caught me completely off guard.

  “Yeah. You rang a second ago. So what’s up?”

  He had star-sixty-nined me. Curse telephone technology. “Uh . . . so whatcha up to today?”

  “I’ve got big plans,” he said. “The biggest! Of course I can’t tell you about it just yet.”

  He was so excited, I knew he was itching to talk about it as much as he wanted to keep it a secret. I should have asked him about it. That’s what friends do, right? They nag you until you tell them the secret they’re pretending they don’t want to tell. The Schwa needed that kind of friend now; one who would listen, and yell at him, “What, are you insane?” And maybe stop him from doing something he’d regret. I should have been that kind of friend.

  “Cool,” I said. “Guess I’ll see you on Monday.” And I hung up. I didn’t ask him what he was planning, I didn’t tell him about the Night Butcher, and I didn’t invite him to traumatize Crawley with us. You never realize when you make little choices how big those choices can be. I can’t really be held responsible for everything that happened next, but if I had made the right decision, things could have turned out differently.

  At noon I stood at Crawley’s door, taking a few deep breaths. Some dogs were already barking on the other side, sensing me there. One more breath and I pounded on the door over and over, until all the dogs were barking.

  “Mr. Crawley! Mr. Crawley! Hurry, open up!”

  I heard him cursing at the dogs, a few dead bolts slid, and the door cracked open just enough to reveal four chains stretched like iron cobwebs between me and Crawley’s scowling face.

  “What? What is it?”

  “It’s Lexie! She fell down the stairs. I think she broke something. Maybe a few things.”

  “I’ll call 911.”

  “No! No, she’s asking for you—you’ve gotta come!”

  He hesitated for a moment. The door closed, I heard the chains sliding open, and he pulled the door open again. Prudence and a few of the other dogs got out, but Crawley didn’t seem to care. He just stood there at the door.

  “Mr. Crawley, come on!”

  The look of fear on his face was like someone standing on the edge of a cliff instead of someone on the threshold of an apartment. “Aren’t there people helping her?”

  “Yeah, but she’s asking for you.”

  As if on cue, Lexie wailed from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Mr. Crawley—she’s your granddaughter! Are you just going to stand there?”

  He took the first step, and it seemed the next ones were a little bit easier. Then, when he got to the top of the stairs and saw her sprawled at the very bottom, he flew to her side like a man half his age.

  “Lexie, honey—it’ll be okay. Tell me where it hurts.” He looked at the gawking waiters and diners. “Didn’t any of you morons call an ambulance?”

  And with that, Lexie stood up. I grabbed Crawley’s left arm, Lexie’s harmonica-playing driver grabbed his right, and we whisked him through the kitchen and out the restaurant’s back door before anyone knew what was happening.

  It was a nasty trick, but there weren’t many things that would get Crawley down those stairs. Lexie had the easy part—lying there pretending to be hurt, but I was the one who had to get him to come out. I’m not much of an actor. In grade school, I usually got roles like “Third Boy,” or “Middle Broccoli,” or in one embarrassing year, “Rear End of Horse.” I had no confidence in my ability to pull this off, but the fact that I was so nervous had actually helped.

  By the time Crawley gathered up enough of his wits to realize this was a conspiracy, we already had him in the backseat of the Lincoln. When he tried to escape, I got in his way and closed the door—which was protected by child locks so it couldn’t be opened from the inside.

  I won’t repeat the words Crawley shouted at us. Some of them were words I didn’t even know—and I know quite a lot.

  “You’re not getting out of this,” I told him, “so you might as well cooperate.”

  He turned to Lexie. “What is this all about? Did he put you up to this?”

  “It’s my idea, Grandpa.”

  “This is kidnapping!” he squealed. “I’ll press charges.”

  “I can just see the headlines,” Lexie said.

  “Yeah,” I added. “‘Rich Kook Presses Charges on Poor Blind Granddaughter.’ The press will eat it up.”

  “You shut up!” he said. “By the time you get out of jail, you’ll have gray hair.”

  “Naah,” I said. “I’ll be bald, more likely. It runs in my family.”

  The fact that I didn’t seem to care made him even more furious.

  By the time we pulled out of the alley we had put a blindfold on him, and he didn’t resist because he didn’t 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. Its 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 Brooklyn, to a place they would have called the Edge of the Earth in the days before Columbus. This was an old part of Brooklyn, where the shore curved back toward Manhattan. It was full of docks that hadn’t been used since before my parents were born, and old warehouses ten stories high, with windows that were all broken, boarded up, or covered with fifty years of New York grime. People pass by this place all the time but never stop, because they’re on the Gowanus Expressway—the elevated highway that cuts right through this dead place. There’s a street that runs right underneath the elevated road. I figured it would be just as abandoned as the rest of the area, but today there was traffic like you couldn’t believe.

  “Could you tell me what we’re doing here?” I asked him on the bus ride.

  “Nope.” The Schwa was as serious as I’d ever seen him. “You’ll have to wait and see.”

  The bus made only three intersections in twenty minutes, riding beneath the girders that held up the expressway. Frustrated drivers leaned on their horns, li
ke the gridlock was the fault of the person in front of them.

  The Schwa stood up and looked out of the window. “C’mon, we’ll walk.”

  “Are you kidding me? The people around here look like extras from Night of the Living Dead—and those are just the people on the bus!” Across the aisle, a living-dead guy gave me a dirty look.

  “If you’re worried,” the Schwa said, “hide behind me. They won’t notice you if you’re behind me.”

  It was half past four in the afternoon when we got off the bus. It was already getting dark, and I was quaking at the thought of having to wait for a bus back from this rank corner of the world. I hoped the street ahead stayed crowded with cars so at least our bodies would be recovered quickly.

  We walked for four blocks underneath the Gowanus Expressway, passing identical warehouses, all of which had been condemned by the city, with big signs, like it was something the city was proud of. Then the Schwa went to one of the warehouse entrances and pushed open a door that almost snapped off its rusted hinges.

  “In there?” I asked. “What’s in there?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “You’re annoying.”

  “Not for much longer.”

  I stepped in, against my survival instinct. The building was no warmer than the street outside, and it smelled like something died in there from smelling something else that died in there. That mixed with some weird solvent fumes made me gag. I heard the scurry of rats, which I hoped were cats, and the flutter of bats, which I hoped were pigeons. I was just glad it was too dark to tell. The Schwa pressed a tiny flashlight on his key chain and led me up a staircase littered with wood chips and broken glass.

  “The elevator doesn’t work,” the Schwa said. “And even if it did, I wouldn’t trust it.”

  I tried to imagine what he could possibly be up to here, and none of it was good. I just let him lead me, hoping that I would eventually understand.

  He pushed open the seventh-floor door to reveal a huge concrete expanse with nothing breaking up the space except peeling pillars holding up the ceiling above. The rot-and-solvent smell was gone, but the mustiness of the place caught in the back of my throat, making my mouth taste bitter, like juice after toothpaste.