“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said again. “I get bored. There’s nothing to do!”
It was Grandpa’s turn to be silent.
“Are you mad at me?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “I’m mad at myself. Connor was right. You need to meet other kids. You have to start going to school.”
“School?”
“I was a fool to think otherwise,” said Grandpa. “The county would probably get after me soon anyway. This isn’t the old days anymore. You can’t just do what you want. You have to go to school.”
A sick feeling blossomed in the pit of my stomach. Before that day, I’d spent my entire life doing exactly what I pleased, whenever it pleased me. Grandpa read to me and I read to him, and he taught me what I needed to know whenever the opportunity presented itself. If the Galaxie was in need of repair, we repaired it together, and I learned in that way how to work on cars. If the roof needed shingling, I learned how to shingle a roof. When Grandpa told me to bring half the books that were in the second floor library to the basement and put the other half on the shelves neatly, I learned to count and divide large numbers. I thought I was learning plenty from Grandpa. I didn’t see any reason to go to school.
“I don’t want to,” I said.
“We’ll talk about it more later,” said Grandpa. “Don’t worry about it for now.”
“Okay,” I said. But I worried.
The ambulance pulled into the driveway of the Mannville General Hospital. Mannville was really too small to warrant its own hospital, but my great-great-grandfather had built one anyway, to cure the sick and injured of the giant metropolis he was convinced Mannville would someday become. It was an imposing four-story red brick structure with three main wings to it, one of them especially for children. The backdoor of the ambulance swung open and the attendants appeared.
“How you doing, Mr. Mann?” asked one of them. “Ride all right?”
The attendant was black. I stared at him unabashedly, wondering if he’d ever had to drink out of a separate drinking fountain.
“I’m fine,” said Grandpa. “Who’s going to look after the boy?”
“Come on down, son,” said the attendant. He took my hands and helped me jump out of the ambulance. “Mind you don’t slip on that ice, now. Oooweee! Look at that lip! You busted it clear down to your chin, looks like!”
“I fell down three times,” I said.
“Three times! My, my. That’s a mighty lot o’ fallin’ down!”
The attendants unloaded Grandpa’s stretcher and wheeled it through the swinging doors of the emergency room. I followed them. They stopped beside a woman in a skirt suit. She had a pinched, distasteful expression, and she carried a briefcase.
“Get the boy stitched up. He’s coming with me,” she said to the attendants.
“Yes, ma’am,” they said together. The other attendant was white.
“Mr. Mann,” she said to Grandpa, “I’m Elsa Wheeler, from the county children’s services office. I understand you’re the sole guardian of this boy?”
“Yeah,” said Grandpa. “Why?”
“We’re going to look after your grandson while you’re recuperating.”
Grandpa had done a lot of talking in the ambulance, induced by the painkillers the paramedics had given him, and now he was fading out. His eyes fluttered like the papery wings of an insect.
“Take care of my boy,” he whispered.
Elsa Wheeler reached down and grabbed my hand. Her hand was thin and bony and cold. I struggled to pull free from her grasp but she only held on tighter.
“Hold still,” she said sharply. “I don’t have time to go chasing you all over the place.”
“I don’t want to go to school,” I said, because I was sure that was where she was taking me.
“You’re not going to school today,” she said. “You’re going to stay with one of our foster families until your grandfather is better. But you’re going to school soon.”
“The hell I am!”
Her hand flew loose from mine, swung around in a wide arc, and smacked me on the bottom. The sound of it caused the black ambulance attendant, who was by this time down the hall with my grandfather, to turn around and give Elsa Wheeler a long look. I was dumbfounded. In the course of my playing I’d been hurt far worse than her spanking, but it was the first time in my life I’d been struck by another human being.
“You just watch your little filthy mouth, mister,” she hissed, “or you’ll get another one of those, and you’ll like it even less.”
I knew I was going to cry now, and there was no helping it. My wails filled the emergency room lobby. I saw Grandpa lift his head up briefly from the bed and search for me before he collapsed weakly against the pillow again. The black attendant leaned down and said something to him. Grandpa shook his head.
Elsa Wheeler lost patience with me altogether. She dragged me by the arm into a large white room, where a doctor was waiting for me.
“Now, then,” said the doctor. “You’re Billy Mann, and I’ve heard all about you. You’re a very brave little boy.”
I stopped crying somewhat.
“Brave boys don’t cry, do they?” said the doctor, and he stuck a needle in my lip and proceeded to sew it back together again. He didn’t do a very neat job. That’s why I grew a beard as soon as I was able, to hide the jagged white line that ran from my lower lip to my chin. It was always a physical reminder of the worst day of my life. I was eager to hide it from the sight of the world, so people would stop asking me where it came from and so I wouldn’t have to remember the day I was taken, if only temporarily, from my grandfather.
4
My Seventh Year Continued; I Go to the Shumachers’; I Encounter Trevor and Adam
I awoke early the next morning in a strange bed. The sun was not yet up and the room was predawn gray; I couldn’t see where I was, only amorphous shapes of furniture that in the semidarkness seemed to levitate, as if they had wills of their own. Then I noticed what had awakened me. A large figure loomed over the bed, breathing in deep cavernous gulps. Petrified, I watched it move closer until it hovered directly over me. I caught a faint whiff of manure and milk, and also of tobacco; these, at least, were odors with which I was familiar. I clenched my eyes shut and pretended I was asleep, meanwhile leafing through my mental catalog of smells. Now who did I know who smelled like that? Someone, I knew. Oh yes. Now I remembered where I was. Relief flooded through me—I was at the Shumachers’, and the Shumachers were nice.
The bed was damp. I remembered a dream, in which I’d been at home and had gotten up to pee in the bathroom. I wasn’t at home, however. Apparently I hadn’t made it to the bathroom after all. And it was only Mr. Shumacher standing over me.
Mr. Shumacher was a large, beefy man, and as he clicked on the lamp next to my bed I saw he was holding a newspaper inches from my nose. It was a copy of the Mannville Megaphone, the local paper from which I read to Grandpa every morning. My eyes focused first on the headline. It read BLOOD OF WAR HERO RUNS IN SON’S VEINS.
I looked next at the picture under it. It was a picture of me.
“Look! You famous boy!” said Mr. Shumacher. “Mutti!” he shouted over his shoulder. “We have a famous boy in our house!” He spoke with a heavy German accent. It sounded like he was saying, “Ve heff a famous poy!”
“Yah,” said a woman from the doorway. “Famous Amos, we could call him.”
“We could, if his name was Amos, like mine,” said the man.
“I peed in the bed,” I said. I got up. “Amos is my middle name,” I added.
“Yah, time to get up,” said Mrs. Shumacher, as if she hadn’t heard me. She had an accent too, heavier than her husband’s, and she wore an apron over her housedress. She disappeared from the doorway and I heard her clumping down the stairs.
“You go pee now too, yah? In the potty this time,” said Mr. Shumacher kindly. He led me to the bathroom.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I’d never wet my bed before and I was deeply ashamed.
“Shah, shah,” said Mr. Shumacher. “Tomorrow night I’ll wake you up so you can pee in the right place. We have a rubber sheet on that mattress anyway.”
I peed again in the toilet. Mr. Shumacher filled the tub and Mrs. Shumacher reappeared to scrub me down thoroughly while I stood in it. I’d never taken a bath standing up before, nor had I ever been bathed by a woman. Her hands were swift and sure, the hands of a practiced mother, and I surrendered myself to her expertise. Mrs. Shumacher seemed to have bathed a thousand children, and she was much better at it than Grandpa. She gave me a professional scrubbing all over, even digging into my ears with the washcloth, until my skin glowed pink and raw and I begged her to stop.
“There,” she said, with evident satisfaction. “Clean.”
Then she dressed me in strange new clothes that didn’t quite fit and I went downstairs with her to breakfast.
The Shumachers were a large and buoyant tribe of Pennsylvania Dutchmen, and they already had so many children one more could hardly be noticed. I learned later that they’d been taking in children for over two decades, most of them victims of some tragedy or other, like me. That was why they were hardly surprised when I wet the bed. Disturbed children often pee in their sleep. They knew that from experience, and were ready for it.
Besides the father and mother there were six Shumacher children, most of them teenagers, and one other child who was not theirs. The Shumachers were loud and Teutonic and vibrantly healthy, and they greeted me with happy shouts as they came in from their early morning work about the farm and sat down to an unbelievably large breakfast. There were platters of bacon, sausage, fried potatoes, pancakes, bowls full of scrambled eggs mixed with sweet peppers and onions, pitchers of ice-cold fresh milk and orange juice with beads of condensation standing out on them like sweat. Mr. Shumacher drank two cups of steaming black coffee without flinching before he even began to eat. I watched in amazement as his throat worked furiously. He set down his cup with a deeply satisfied “Ahhhh,” and wiped his impressive mustache with a napkin; here was a man who appreciated small pleasures in a big way. When he saw me looking at him, he poured a small amount of coffee into a mug, filled the mug the rest of the way with milk, and sprinkled in some sugar. He set this in front of me.
“Drink that, boy,” he said. “It makes you strong like me.”
“It makes you fart like him too,” said one of the Shumacher boys, and the table instantly erupted with laughter, Mr. Shumacher included. He picked up a sausage and pointed it like a gun at the boy. “I’ve had enough of you,” he said, and this seemed to be the funniest thing the family had ever heard. They laughed until tears poured freely down their cheeks. Then Mrs. Shumacher clapped her hands once, and the joking was put aside. Only an occasional residual giggle now interfered with the serious business of consumption.
I, however, didn’t laugh. Instead I sat in silence, overwhelmed by the attention and the sheer volume of food. Grandpa and I ate like birds compared to the Shumachers; also, there were only two of us, and the kitchen seemed empty even when we were both in it. I’d never been around this many people before. I couldn’t bring myself to look up or to speak. Nor did I see what was so funny—in fact, I was beginning to feel lonely. The horror of the previous day was slowly revisiting me. I remembered Grandpa lying on the ground, old and soft and helpless on the hard ice that had nearly killed him. I remembered the half-man in the back of the Simpson house and the way Annie’s eyes looked when her father yelled at her. The Scarum was reaching for me again, and I, still young and inexperienced in the ways of the world, had no idea how to escape his clutches.
Then the eldest of the children, also named Amos, who was in his early twenties and seemed to me very old, reached over and tickled me. I shrieked. More laughter. This time I joined in. Suddenly the Scarum was banished; I could almost hear his nails clicking on the linoleum floor as he dragged himself off to a corner, sulking. After that everything was fine, and I ripped into breakfast as though I’d never eaten before. I was, I discovered, very hungry.
That was how easygoing the Shumachers were. If they didn’t know you, they tickled you, and then they knew you.
The other child who was not a Shumacher was named Trevor. He also wore ill-fitting clothes, the universal legacy of foster children. Amos tickled him too, but he didn’t laugh. He ate little and stared down at his plate without taking part in the conversation, most of which was in German anyway. I didn’t speak German, of course—I didn’t even know enough to call it that—but it had a familiar, easy sound. I chattered along with them in English, laughing at jokes I didn’t understand, which made them laugh at me, which made me laugh harder.
“You stay with us until your grandfatti gets better,” said Mrs. Shumacher.
“Where is he?”
“In the hospital.”
“When is he getting out?”
“Soon,” said Mr. Shumacher. “Don’t worry about him.”
“How do you know?”
“We know your grandfatti,” said Mrs. Shumacher. “He said you should stay with us while his hip gets better.”
“He did?”
“Yah.”
That was all I needed to be reassured.
After breakfast, Trevor and I were sent outside to play. Trevor spoke rarely, and when he did it was from the corner of his mouth, hardly seeming to move his lips at all. To me that was impressive. I decided to follow him around.
The world was still encased in ice. I tried to interest Trevor in my sliding game, but he didn’t even bother to comment on it. I could tell he thought it was a child’s game and that he was above such things. Instead we walked through the woods, breaking off frozen tree limbs and whacking them against the trunks until they shattered. We kept this up for a while. Then I trailed him to the back of the barn, where we sat on a pile of old lumber with our backs against the weathered wooden wall.
“How many homes you been in?” Trevor asked me.
I was confused. It was an odd question. “One, I guess.”
“Liar. You wasn’t born here, right?”
“No.”
“So how many then?”
“Two.”
“Huh. That’s nothin’. I been in eight.”
“Eight?”
“You deaf?”
“No.”
“Parents dead?”
“My dad is. I don’t know if my mom is or not.”
“She must be, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“She might not be.”
“She is,” said Trevor decisively, and that settled that for him. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket and lit one. I was shocked into silence. I’d never seen a kid smoke before. “What happened to your mouth? Cops do that to you?”
“I fell down three times,” I said proudly. The doctor at Mannville General had given me seven stitches.
“Cops busted open my real dad’s mouth one time.”
“What’d he do?”
“Nuttin’.”
“Did he go to jail?”
“Shut up,” said Trevor.
“I was just asking!”
“None of your business. Got it?”
“Yeah.”
“You ever smoked?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Want to?”
“No,” I said.
“Yes you do,” said Trevor. “You got them cravin’s all right.” He took a cigarette out and handed it to me. “Put it in your mouth,” he said. I lit it; it was the first time I had ever handled matches without Grandpa watching me, and I knew I could get in big trouble. I was thrilled. But the smoke burned my eyes, and drawing on the cigarette sent hot rivulets of pain down my stitched-together lip. I held it carefully away from me. It was the most miserable thing I’d ever tasted.
“Like it?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Smoking’s good. Relaxes you.”
“Uh-huh.” I thought I was going to throw up.
“You just gonna hold it?”
“I don’t want it.”
“You have to have it now. I ain’t wasting a whole cigarette on you.”
“I can’t.”
“Jesus,” Trevor said. “Gimme it back.” I handed him the still-burning cigarette. “You got blood on it,” he said disgustedly, and he threw it down in the snow. “That’s one cigarette you owe me.”
“All right,” I said. I sat down. My stomach subsided somewhat.
“How long you gonna be here?”
“Just a few weeks.”
“Huh. You’re wrong if you think that. You’re stuck here.”
“No I’m not. I’m just staying here until my Grandpa gets out of the hospital.”
“They pulled that one on me a few times too,” said Trevor.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see. They always come up with somethin’ when there’s somethin’ happenin’ they don’t want to tell you about. I get moved around all the time. They always lie about it. That’s how I know it’s comin’.”
“How come?”
“How come what?”
“How come you get moved around?”
“I break things,” Trevor said.
“What things?”
“You name it. Glasses, dishes, windows, everything. Once I even wrecked a car.”
“You did?”
“Yup. Guy I was staying with was passed out drunk and I took his keys. Drove it into a tree.”
“How come?”
“I told you. So I get moved around.”
“You wanted to get moved?”
“That time, yeah.”
“Why?”
“That guy was a fag.”
“A what?”
“A fag. A gay.”
“What’s that?”
Trevor eyed me suspiciously. “You kiddin’?”
I said nothing, hoping he would see I was not.
“A fag,” said Trevor, “is a guy that likes to stick his dick in other guys’ buttholes.”
I absorbed this information in silence. I had no idea what a dick was, or why anyone would want to stick one in some other guy’s butthole.
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