The Schwa Was Here

by Neal Shusterman

  “Ya, the day.” Gunther glanced at the door, to make sure no one would come in to disturb us. “The other butcher who worked here during the day—Oscar was his name—he hated his job. He was a third-generation butcher. In three generations the blood can thin. No passion. No love for the work.”

  “He couldn’t stand the daily grind,” said Lexie. I snickered, but quickly shut myself up.

  “I never trusted him,” Gunther continued. “He was unpredictable. How do you say . . . impulsive. He would say such things! He said he would someday slam a cleaver in the manager’s desk, and walk out. Or he would threaten to cut the meat into strange, unnatural shapes, just to confuse the customers. I would have to talk him out of such things. He spoke to me of travels he never took to places he wished to go. Alaska, the Florida Keys. Visit the Hopi Indians, kayak the Colorado River. All talk. He never went. Oscar spent his vacations at home alone, and the pressure, it would just build. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know when, but I knew it was only a matter of time until he snapped. Maybe, I thought, the cleaver would wind up in the manager’s head instead of his desk. Or maybe . . . maybe something worse.”

  “What does this have to do with my mother?” the Schwa asked impatiently.

  “Very much to do with your mother,” Gunther said. “Because your mother was there when he finally snapped.” Gunther leaned forward, looking directly at the Schwa. It was like me and Lexie were no longer in the room.

  “Actually,” Gunther said, “it was your mother who snapped first. I was right here in the back room when I heard it. This woman crying. Crying like someone had died. Crying like the world had come to an end. I don’t do well with crying women. I stayed back. Oscar was the emotional butcher—he was best with the emotional customers, so I let him talk to her.

  “First he talked to her over the counter, trying to calm her down. Then he took her behind the counter and sat her down. I had to take over special orders while they talked. I could hear some of what they said. She felt like she was watching her own life from the outside, as if through a spyglass. So did he. Many times she thought she might end it all. So did he. But she never did . . . because more than anything, she was afraid that no one would notice that she was gone.”

  I could almost see the blood draining from the Schwa’s face. He was so pale now I thought he might pass out.

  “I go back to fill a special order for lamb shanks. It was the Passover, you know. Never enough lamb shanks at the Passover. When I come back, Oscar has taken off his apron, and he hands it to me. ‘I’m going,’ he says. ‘But Oscar, still you have half an hour of duty,’ I tell him. ‘Busiest time. And the Passover!’ But he doesn’t care. ‘Tell the manager the beef stops here,’ he says. Then he takes your mother’s hand, pulls her out of the chair—maybe that same chair you sit in now. He pulls her up, and now she’s laughing instead of crying, and then they run out the back way, like two cuckoos in love. That’s the last anyone has ever seen of them.”

  The Schwa stared at him, slack-jawed.

  “There you have it,” Gunther said, crossing his legs in satisfaction. “Do you want me to tell it again?”

  The Schwa’s head began to shake, but not in the normal controlled way. It kind of moved like one of those bobble-head dolls. “My mother ran away with the butcher?”

  “It is more correct to say that he ran away with her . . . but yes, this is what happened.”

  His head kept on bobbling. “My mother ran away with the BUTCHER?”

  Gunther looked at me, as if I should explain why the Schwa kept repeating the question.

  The Schwa was borderline ballistic. “What kind of sick person runs off with a butcher, and leaves her five-year-old kid in the frozen-food section?”

  “These are questions I cannot answer,” Gunther said.

  “The important thing,” I told him, “is that she didn’t disappear.”

  “THIS IS WORSE!” he screamed so suddenly it made Gunther jump. “THIS IS WAY WORSE! THE BUTCHER?”

  He stood up and his chair flew out behind him, hitting a stainless-steel table that rang out like a bell. “I hate her! I hate her guts! I hate her hate her hate her!”

  Gunther stood and backed away. “Maybe I go finish cleaning.” Since emotional customers weren’t his thing, he disappeared into the meat locker to hide.

  Now it wasn’t just the Schwa’s head that was shaking, it was his whole body. His fists were clenched and quivering, turning white as his face turned red.

  “She left me there, and I thought . . . I thought it was my fault.”

  “Calvin, it’s all right!” said Lexie.

  “No, it’s not! It’s never going to be all right! How could it ever be? How could you even say that?”

  And suddenly I began to wonder if maybe knowing the truth was the worst thing for him. Maybe I had made the mother of all mistakes, letting him find out. Which is worse, the friend who keeps the truth secret, or the friend that spills the beans? As Gunther would say, “These are questions I cannot answer.” Anyway, I didn’t want to think about those questions just then. I knew I’d think about them after I got home, and stay up all night thinking about what a moron I was, and maybe I oughta be made of Pisher Plastic myself, for all the sense I have.

  Lexie clasped the Schwa’s hands, trying to comfort him, and he just broke down like the five-year-old he once was in that shopping cart. “I hate her,” he wailed, but his wails were growing softer. “I hate her . . .”

  I put my hand on his shoulder, and squeezed until I felt his shaking begin to fade. “Welcome to the visible world,” I told him, gently. “I’m really glad you’re here.”

  We barely spoke once we got back into the car, and although the silence was miserable and uncomfortable, breaking it was harder than you might think. We had the driver drop the Schwa off first, then Lexie, then me, leaving me lots of quality time with myself in the backseat to feel lousy about the whole thing. How could I live with myself if I totally ruined the Schwa’s life? What kind of person did that make me? Why did I have to put myself smack in the middle of all of this?

  My parents, whose favorite line whenever I showed up late was, “We were about to call the police,” had called the police. When Lexie’s driver pulled up to my house, there was an NYPD cruiser out front, its lights spinning, sending kaleidoscope flashes around the street, where neighbors all peered out from behind their blinds. Great, I thought. The perfect way to end this night. I thanked the driver, then took a deep breath and strode into the house, hoping to come up with something clever to say. But no brilliance introduced itself at the time, so I just walked in, playing clueless, and said, “What’s going on?”

  The look of despair on my parents’ faces was not replaced by fury when they saw me. I wondered why. A cop stood with them between the foyer and the living room. The cop didn’t start to wrap everything up when he saw me, either. I wondered about this, too, and began to get that vague, uneasy feeling that maybe they hadn’t called the police. Maybe the police came on their own. Then it began to dawn on me that maybe this had nothing to do with me. Suddenly I started to feel my throat begin to tighten, and my skin begin to get hot and squirmy.

  “It’s Frankie . . .” Mom said.

  I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to know. Suddenly I was seeing all the things my mother imagines when one of us is late. I saw Frankie lying in a ditch, I saw him splattered over Nostrand Avenue, I saw him stabbed in an alley. But my parents weren’t offering information, so I had to ask.

  “What happened to Frankie?”

  My parents just looked to each other rather than telling me, so the policeman spoke up instead. “Your brother’s been arrested for drunk driving.”

  I let out a gust of air, just then realizing that I hadn’t been breathing.

  “He wasn’t actually driving,” added Mom, talking more to the cop than to me. “He backed the car into a duck pond.”

  “That’s driving,” the cop reminded her.

  I wa
nted to tell them that it was impossible—that Frankie didn’t drink—I mean, he was the good brother, the A student, the perfect son. That’s what I wanted to say, but my brain got locked on “stupid,” and I said, “Where’s there a duck pond in Brooklyn?”

  “Is he going to prison?” Christina asked. “Do we have to talk to him through glass?”

  “It’s his first offense,” Dad said. “He’ll lose his license for a year, and have to do community service. That’s what they gave me when I was his age.”

  I did a major double take. “You? You mean you got arrested for drunk driving? You never drink and drive!”

  “Exactly,” Dad said.

  Then my mother looked at me, suddenly realizing something. “Where were you? Why are you coming home so late?”

  So they hadn’t even noticed I was gone. But that was okay. I could live without being the center of attention. I didn’t need my face on a billboard, or on a mug shot. And it occurred to me that going unnoticed sometimes meant that you were trusted to do the right thing.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told them. “You go take care of Frankie.”

  20. The Weird Things Kids Do Don’t Even Come Close to the Weird Things Parents Do

  The way I see it, truth only looks good when you’re looking at it from far away. It’s kind of like that beautiful girl you see on the street when you’re riding past in the bus, because beautiful people never ride the bus—at least not when I’m on it. Usually I get the people with so much hair in their nose, it looks like they’re growing sea urchins in there—or those women with gray hair all teased out so you can see their scalp underneath, making me wonder if I blew on their hair, would it all fly away like dandelion seeds? So you’re sitting on the bus and you look out through the dandelion heads, and there she is, this amazing girl walking by on the street, and you think if you could only get off this stupid bus and introduce yourself to her, your life would change.

  The thing is, she’s not as perfect as you think, and if you ever got off the bus to introduce yourself, you’d find out she’s got a fake tooth that’s turning a little bit green, breath like a racehorse, and a zit on her forehead that keeps drawing your eyes toward it like a black hole. This girl is truth. She’s not so pretty, not so nice. But then, once you get to know her, all that stuff doesn’t seem to matter. Except maybe for the breath, but that’s why there’s Altoids.

  The Schwa wanted to know the truth more than anything else in his life. So now he was looking at bad teeth, bad skin, and a funky smell.

  I know what happened in my house that night, but what happened in the Schwa’s house after he got home I can only imagine. All I know is what happened after. The radioactive fallout, you might say. But I’ve had plenty of time to imagine it, and I’m pretty sure it went something like this:

  The Schwa gets home to find his father sitting up, feeling helpless. He’s too much of a wreck even to play guitar, because for once, he’s actually noticed that his son wasn’t home. Maybe he’s even been crying, because the Schwa is more like the father, and he’s more like the kid.

  The Schwa comes in, sees him there, and offers no explanation. He waits for his father to talk first.

  “Where were you, do you have any idea how worried, blah blah blah—”

  He lets his dad rant, and when his dad is done, the Schwa, still keeping his hands calmly in his pockets, asks, “Where’s Mom?”

  His father is thrown. He hesitates, then says, “Never mind that, where were you?”

  “Where are Mom’s pictures?” the Schwa asks. “I know there must have been pictures. Where are they?”

  Now his father’s getting scared. Not the same kind of fear he had as he waited for the Schwa to get home, but in its own way just as bad. The Schwa’s afraid, too. It’s the fear you feel when you’re off the bus, standing in front of that beautiful/horrible girl.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t remember,” the Schwa says. “Tell me why there aren’t any pictures.”

  “There are pictures,” his father finally says. “They’re just put away, that’s all.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she left us!” he yells.

  “She left you!” the Schwa screams back.

  “No,” his father says, more softly this time. “She left us.”

  And Calvin, no matter how much he tightens his jaw, he can’t deny the ugly green-toothed truth. She left him, too.

  They look at each other for a moment. The Schwa knows if it goes on too long, it will end right here. His father will clam up, and everything would go back to the way it was. But Mr. Schwa, to his credit, doesn’t wait long enough for that to happen. “Come on,” he says, and he leads his son out to the garage.

  In the corner of the garage, hidden beneath other junk, is a suitcase. He pulls it out, opens it up, and takes out a shoe box, handing it to the Schwa.

  The Schwa is almost afraid to open it, but in the end he does. He has to. Inside he finds envelopes—at least fifty of them. Every one of them is addressed in the same feminine handwriting. None of them have been opened, and all are addressed to the same person.

  “These were written to me,” he says.

  “If she wanted to talk to you, she could have come herself. I told her that.”

  “You spoke to her?”

  “She used to call.”

  “And you never told me?”

  His father’s face gets hard. “If she wanted to talk to you,” he says again, “she could have come herself.”

  The Schwa doesn’t know which is worse—what his mother did, or what his father had done. She left, yes, but he made her disappear.

  “When did the letters start coming?” the Schwa asks.

  His father doesn’t hold back anything anymore. He couldn’t if he tried. “A few weeks after she left.”

  “And when did the last one come?”

  His father doesn’t answer right away. It’s hard for him to say. Finally he tells him, “I can’t remember.”

  He can’t look his son in the face, but the Schwa, he can stare straight at his father, right through him. “I spent our savings to rent a billboard,” he tells his father. “A big picture of my face.”

  The man doesn’t understand. “Why?”

  “To prove I’m not invisible.”

  The Schwa does not cry—he is past tears—but his father isn’t. The tears roll down the man’s face. “You’re not invisible, Calvin.”

  “I wish I had known sooner.”

  Then the Schwa goes into his room, closes the door, and goes through the letters one by one. Some have return addresses, some don’t, but it doesn’t matter because the return address is never the same. It’s the postmark that tells the best story. Fifty letters at least . . . and almost every postmark is from a different state.

  21. Why I Started Vandalizing Brooklyn

  The Schwa came to school on Monday with the shoe box of letters. He showed it to me as I stood at my locker before class, but I couldn’t read his emotions. He seemed changed in a basic way. You know—it’s like how when an egg is boiled it looks the same on the outside, but it’s different on the inside. I didn’t know what I was looking at now—Schwa, or hard-boiled Schwa.

  “Can I read the letters?” I asked.

  He held them back. “They were written to me.”

  “Well, will you at least tell me what she said?”

  He thought about the question and shrugged, without looking at me. “Mostly she writes about the places she’s been. ‘Wish you were here’ kind of stuff.”

  “But . . . did she say why she did it? Why she left?”

  The Schwa did that weird not-looking-at-me shrug again. “She talked about it in her early letters. Said she was sorry a lot, and that it had nothing to do with me.” But he didn’t explain any further. Then he held out an envelope. “This is the most recent one. It’s about six months old.” I looked at it. The envelope had no return address. “It’s from Key West, Florida—see the postmark?”
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  I tried to peek at the letter, but he pulled it away from me. “I’m going to write back.”

  “How can you without an address?”

  The Schwa shrugged yet again. “Key West isn’t all that big. Maybe the post office knows her. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll find her some other way.”

  I could have argued how unlikely that was, but who was I to shoot down his dream? If he was able to get himself a paper clip from the Titanic, and get his face slapped up on a billboard, maybe he could find his mother. The Schwa was tenacious—a word that I, for once, got right on my vocabulary test.

  He took a long look at the handwriting on the letter. “Someday I want to tell her to her face what a lousy thing she did. And I want her to tell me to my face that she’s sorry.”

  I closed my locker and spun the lock. “Good luck, Schwa. I really hope you find her.” But when I looked at where he was standing, he had already vanished.

  When I got home that afternoon, the house was empty. Or so I thought. I passed by my father twice in the living room without even noticing he was there. On the third pass, I noticed him sitting in an armchair, blending into the shadows of the room, staring kind of blankly into space.

  “Dad?”

  “Hi, Antsy,” he said quietly.

  “You’re home early.”

  He didn’t answer for a while. “Yeah, well, thought I’d take some time off.”

  There was something off about this. “Work okay?” I asked. “Are you building a better Bullpucky? Manny, I mean.”

  “Work couldn’t be better,” he said. “I got fired today.”

  I chuckled at first, thinking he was making some kind of joke, but he didn’t laugh.

  “What? You can’t be serious!”

  “They called it an ‘executive offload.’”

  “They fired a bunch of you?” I still couldn’t believe it. Dad had worked for Pisher since before I could remember.

  He shook his head. “Just me.”

  “Those creeps.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “They gave me a nice parachute, though.”