Downtown

by Norma Fox Mazer

  “So they bombed a laboratory?”

  “Yes. Because it was doing germ warfare research.”

  “A bomb—but that’s so dangerous. Why did they have to do that? Who told them to do it?”

  “Nobody told them. They’re part of a group, a little group of people … Like I told you, all the other stuff wasn’t doing any good—”

  “Wait, wait!” Cary put up her hand. “Stop. Just stop for a moment. Your parents are wanted people? Like the Ten Most Wanted List? This is not true, is it? It’s a sick joke, a put-on.” A smile waited at the edge of her mouth.

  “Cary,” I said as forcefully as possible. “It’s the truth. I’ve told you something no one else knows.”

  Her mouth quivered, then suddenly she said, “What time is it?” She stood up and looked around. “I’d better take Kim home.”

  “Cary, wait—”

  “What?”

  You’re right! It’s a send-up. Black humor, a cosmic joke. Forget everything I said. “I—why do you have to go now?”

  “Kim!” she called. She took the child by the arm, swung her over the edge of the sandbox, and walked away.

  “Cary!”

  She didn’t answer, she didn’t turn back.

  Twenty-four

  “Pete?” Cary said. “Can you talk for a while?”

  “I thought you weren’t allowed to phone boys.”

  “I’m not at home. I’m baby-sitting. Anyway, this is special—I really have to talk to you.” She started whispering. “It’s about your parents, what you told me.”

  “Look, Cary, I shouldn’t have said anything!”

  “But you did. And it is the truth, isn’t it? I know it is. You’re not like other boys, I knew that right away, now I know why. But in the park—I got scared. All I could think was, I can’t get mixed up with something like this! I have too many plans and goals! I want to go to college. I want to be someone. I don’t want to know criminals.”

  “You want to end this conversation right now?” I said tensely.

  “Pete, I’m just trying to tell you what I thought then! I’m ashamed of the way I acted. I know it must have been hard for you to say those things about your parents. You trusted me—it was like you gave me something, a gift, and I threw it away. I’ve had a lot of things happen to me, and I was always proud that I didn’t act like a coward. But Sunday I was afraid, just plain scared.”

  “So what are you saying, Cary?”

  “I’m sorry, that’s all, I don’t like the way I acted. And I want to go back to the way things were.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  In the Nut Shoppe, I gave Cary a smile. The bell rang, two women came in, then a man, then a bunch of kids. The man couldn’t find what he wanted, the kids argued. “Pistachios!” “I hate those little green things.” “Frosted walnuts.” “Pistachios!” “Sugared almonds.” “Pistachios!”

  Finally they all left. Cary and I held hands for a moment across the counter. “Pete,” she said, “I’ve just been thinking so much about what you told me.”

  “We don’t have to talk about it, Cary.” I glanced out the window.

  “No, it’s not that. I have things I don’t tell anyone either. My secrets. Remember the first day, when we went biking? And I told you how my mother was this sick but beautiful person who left me all these beautiful memories?”

  “I remember.”

  “I lied to you. My mother was sick all right, but it wasn’t anything like TB or cancer.” Her voice was so low I had to lean toward her. “She was a dopehead. Heroin and other stuff too. They took me away from her. They took my sisters away from her. That part was true, and that they put us in different places. And about all my foster parents.”

  “Cary, you don’t have to tell me.”

  “I want to. This is my truth, Pete. I don’t even know when my mother died. I can’t remember anyone telling me. Just—one day in second grade, I was sitting at my desk and all of a sudden I knew she was dead. I wanted to cry and I couldn’t. I used to pretend she was away getting herself all fixed up and healthy so she could come back for me and my sisters. I don’t remember her at all, and I don’t want to remember my father.”

  “Was he that awful?”

  “Is. He’s still alive.”

  “I thought you told me your foster parents were going to adopt you for your birthday.”

  “No problem. My father gave anybody permission to adopt me a long time ago. Only nobody’s ever wanted to.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He’s an alcoholic, and don’t tell me it’s a sickness. He’s a bum. Don’t I have a nice family, Pete? Don’t I have a wonderful heritage? My father never even came to see me until I was twelve. Then he came to my foster parents’ house. He was drunk, dirty … he smelled. He wanted money. That’s the only reason he came to see me. Pete, I hit him. And another time when I was visiting my sister Amy, he came by. He said he wanted to see Amy’s baby.”

  “Maybe he did.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’re hard on him.”

  “Wouldn’t you be? … I’m so ashamed of them … so ashamed …” She started crying.

  I didn’t know what to do. “Cary, don’t … it’s not that bad.” I stroked her arm.

  “What’s going on here?” Neither of us had heard the door open. A short stout man stood over us.

  “Mr. Blutter!”

  “Get your stuff together, Cary, you’re fired.” He pointed at me with a fat hand. “You. Out.”

  “Sir, can I just say—”

  “No. Whatever you two kids were doing, I don’t want to hear about it. You go do it in the backseat of a car, not in my store.”

  My face burned. I couldn’t speak. Just when I needed it, my famous maniac impersonation failed me. I waited outside for Cary, kicking myself around for being a coward. When she came out, she looked pretty grim. “I feel terrible that you lost your job, Cary. For whatever it’s worth, I blame myself.”

  “Forget it, Pete.”

  “Come on, Cary, you want to hit me? I mean it. At least yell at me.”

  She almost smiled. “Look on the bright side. Mr. Blutter just did me a favor. Now I have no excuse not to look for another job. I’ll find something, I always do. I’ve been working since I was eleven years old. Something always turns up.”

  “I thought you hated job hunting.”

  “I do, but so what? Don’t you ever do things you hate?”

  “Sometimes.”

  She got that grim look on her face again. “I’ve done plenty of things I hate.” She fell silent.

  “You told me Blutter was a beast.”

  “I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “Dead on the mark.” I stepped over a torn boot lying on the sidewalk.

  Cary shuddered. “Every time I see a shoe or a boot lying on the road like that, I think of my father. I saw him once downtown, barefoot, lying in the street on his back, like a dog.”

  We walked close to each other. “Alcoholism is a disease,” I said. “They really have proved that. Anyway, I don’t think people are all one way or another. All good or all bad.”

  “What about Mr. Blutter?”

  “Exception to the rule. Your parents had you, you know, so they must have been good underneath.”

  “Pete, if I turn out to be anyone, it’s not going to be any credit to them.”

  “What do you mean, if—you’re someone already.”

  “Am I?” She looked up at me. “Who? Who’s that person called Cary Longstreet? Do you know?”

  “I think so,” I said uncertainly.

  “Yes … sometimes I think so too. Those are the best times. But other times it seems to me that my whole life is unreal, that I’m just acting, pretending to be someone real, pretending to be that person people call Cary Longstreet. The worst times are when I know I’m not what they think. Then it’s like I’m in a play and there are lines I have to learn if I want to stay there—and I do, I do!—but I�
��m scared so much that I won’t learn those lines in time.”

  Twenty-five

  “Did you hear what happened in the game with Tupperville?” Drew said as we left school. The door banged shut behind us. “We were counting on Big Bob and his hitting was off. We barely pulled it out.”

  “Tough,” I said automatically. I was thinking about Cary. Since we’d told each other about our parents, something had changed between us. Not on the surface, but underneath there was something that hadn’t been there before: a tension and, at the same time, a new kind of tenderness for each other.

  “Drew!” Joanie Casson came running up. She and Drew had been going together again for the past week. “Drew, I’ve been waiting for you by the office. You were supposed to meet me so we could go down to the museum and check out my stuff. Hi, Pete,” she added. Joanie had taken Best of Show in the All-County Student Art Exhibition.

  “We didn’t say we were going today,” Drew said.

  “Drew, today is the last day. You promised me. The other day you said definitely you’d go with me.”

  A blue car pulled up on the road below the slope of the lawn. A man got out and looked around, shading his eyes. It was Frank Miner. I wanted to run, anywhere, any way, any direction, but I kept on walking down the path, straight toward him.

  “I told Mom I’d help her out in the store this afternoon,” Drew was saying. “I’m sorry, Joanie, the other thing must have slipped my mind—”

  “The other thing? You know what, Drew? You’re a real hypocrite. You want me to come to all your games and jump around and cheer for my hero, but when it comes to me—to something that’s important to me—it slips your mind. You keep telling me you love me and then you do things that really hurt. She pulled his ring off her finger. “Here. Take it! I’m not even going to bother throwing it at you this time. And don’t think it’s just because of the museum. I heard about you being over to Kathy Ransome’s house Sunday night. I guess that slipped your mind too.”

  “We just, we just, we didn’t do that much—”

  She pushed the ring into his pocket. “Oh, I know, Drew. I’ve heard it before. We keep having this same conversation, and I’m really bored with it.” She walked away.

  Drew stood still for a moment, then went after her. And as if that were his cue, Frank Miner hailed me. “Pete.” He strolled toward me, his hand out. “Got a minute? This won’t take long.” He gripped my arm and we walked back to the car.

  Jay Beckman was behind the wheel. “Get in, we want to talk to you.”

  “What do you want? I don’t know anything.”

  “Look, don’t give us a hard time.”

  “I’m not getting in the car.”

  Beckman’s eyes went over me. “You really are a little pain in the—”

  “Drop it, Jay,” Frank Miner said.

  “This kid gets on my nerves, Frank. We’ve been waiting for him. He knew we were here, he saw us, and he just took his sweet A time. Is this going to be just like the first time? No cooperation? Connors, get in.”

  “Jay, I’m telling you—leave the boy alone.”

  The dialogue between the two of them was as neat as a TV show. Good cop, bad cop. I knew it, but I was unable to curb a rush of gratitude toward Frank Miner for defending me. “Pete,” he said, “I just want to ask you a few questions.” He looked directly into my eyes. “Have you heard from the folks recently?”

  “No.”

  “So it’s been a pretty long stretch this time?”

  “I don’t hear from them.”

  “No, don’t tell me that. They keep in touch. Sure they do. Their own son? What do you do, go out to get their phone calls?”

  “They don’t call me.” I rubbed my lips. Numb.

  “Aw, come on. They phone you and they write to you too. They love you, you’re their only son.”

  “I told you,” Beckman exclaimed, tapping the steering wheel, “you crap around with this kid and—”

  Frank Miner pressed my arm. “Look, Pete, I want to propose something important to you. We want to talk to your people, just speak to them for a while. None of us was born yesterday. I’m not coming around here asking for the impossible. I’m thinking of a phone conversation between me and your pop or your mom. Just a chat, nothing else. What do you think? Can you set it up for us? No strings. You tell them I guarantee that, just a conversation. We’ve got a proposal to make to them. We’ve got something to say that should interest them—and you too. You’d like to see your parents home, wouldn’t you?”

  I tightened my lips and looked past his shoulder.

  “Well, think about it,” he said. “It sounds like a good deal to me. You can help your parents and us and yourself. Three birds with one stone. After we talk to them, talk some business, I have a hunch they might just decide what the hell, why not come back? It’s time.”

  He lit a cigarette. “No, really, Pete, I’d like to think I had a hand in bringing you and your parents together again. That would give me total satisfaction. Because I like you, I really admire you. I’ve been thinking about how hard these years must have been for you. No parents. Not using your right name. Nobody knowing about you, who you really are—I mean, that is tough. Really, really tough.”

  Beckman rolled up the window, then rolled it down. “Are you through crapping around with this kid yet, Frank?”

  The other man threw me an apologetic glance. “Okay, okay, we can talk about this next time. Let me give you a ride home, anyway. No, don’t shake your head, Pete. It’s just a ride, we’re not going to kidnap you!” He smiled. “I won’t even talk business, okay?”

  It was not okay, but, unresistingly, I climbed into the back of the car. Frank Miner got in next to me. “Home, James.” He winked conspiratorially at me. We rode almost all the way in silence. Only once, he said, “Is that straight, that you don’t get phone calls from your folks?”

  “Yes. Turn here.”

  “I know where your house is,” Jay Beckman said.

  The next day I met Cary at her school and we walked downtown together. She had some shopping to do. Somehow, we got on the subject of my uncle. “I like your uncle a lot,” Cary said. “A whole lot. He’s a special person.”

  “You only met him once, how would you know that?”

  “I told you, I make up my mind about people really fast.”

  “Mmm.” My mind was on the agents. Why hadn’t I told Gene? I felt vague, as if there was a curtain between me and the world. I was here, walking along with Cary, but I wasn’t really here, at all.

  “Do you think he’ll ever get married?”

  “What?”

  “Your uncle, Pete! Do you think he’ll ever get married?”

  “I don’t know, Cary.”

  “He’s very good-looking for an older man. Doesn’t his girlfriend want to get married?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’d like to get married someday and have children, but it worries me that I might not be a good mother.”

  “Sure you’d be a good mother,” I said automatically.

  “What if not loving your kids is hereditary?”

  “You mean your mother? She was a sick person.”

  “A druggie! You’re always making things sound nicer.”

  I blew out my breath, sighed, then heard myself sighing, big dramatic, Gene-type sighs, but I couldn’t stop. “Are we fighting, Cary? I don’t want to fight with you.” Maybe I sounded desperate. I had a feeling of everything falling apart, falling in, caving in. “I don’t want to fight with you!”

  “Pete.” She peered into my face. “Hey, what’s the matter?”

  “Sorry, I just—”

  “I don’t want to fight with you either. It’s awful when friends fight.”

  We held hands and it was okay again.

  Later, we stopped in to see Martha. “What a neat surprise,” Martha said. “This has been a dog of a day, I needed a surprise. Would you believe, not one customer all day?”

&
nbsp; “What are all these hats for?” Cary said, examining Martha’s wooden tree.

  “I’m never sure if it’s because I love hats or because it really does make a more interesting picture to put a hat on someone.” She put a wide straw hat on Cary’s head. “Look in that mirror and you’ll see what I mean.”

  Cary tipped the hat back a little. It had a broad red ribbon hanging down in back.

  “Sit down, let me do you just like that,” Martha said.

  “I don’t know,” Cary said hesitantly. “How much is it?”

  “No, no, nothing.” Martha picked up her charcoal stick.

  Cary looked scared. “Hey, relax,” I said, “it’s not like going to the dentist.”

  “I just never—nobody ever painted me before.” She sat down on the stool.

  “It’s not a painting, hon,” Martha said. “Just a little character sketch.” She sat down in front of her easel. “I love your forehead … yes, stay just like that, that look—that graveness—”

  Cary sat with her hands folded in her lap. I stood to one side of Martha while she worked, watching her magic, watching Cary appearing between the charcoal and the paper.

  That night, I waited up for Gene to come home from play rehearsal. I must have fallen asleep at the dining room table. I dreamed about the two agents. In the dream, they were themselves, but they were also squat bulldogs, snapping and nipping at my legs. I woke up with a start, groggy, my stomach lurching.

  It was almost midnight before Gene came in. “Pete!” His face was flushed. He threw his tattered playscript down on the table. “Listen to this. I’m going to play Lord Fancourt. Harvey Lewis has missed the last three rehearsals.”

  I pushed the playscript away. “Gene, those two guys showed up again. Yesterday, right after school. I was with Drew—”

  “The agents?” My uncle sat down abruptly. “What did they want this time? Drew was with you? That’s not so good.”

  “He didn’t notice anything. He’s got crazies with his girl friend. They’re after me to set up a phone call with Laura or Hal. Gene, I got in their car. What’s the matter with me?” I pounded my fist on the table. “They want me to help put my mother and father in jail and I let them drive me home.” I jumped up and ran into the kitchen. Gene followed me.