Small Steps

by Louis Sachar

  “You know her?” Armpit asked.

  “No.”

  Skin color was usually a reliable indicator as to which half of the house a visitor was heading for, but this woman was the exception to the rule. She checked her small notebook, then knocked on Armpit’s front door.

  “Maybe Kaira sent her,” said Ginny.

  He had been hoping the same thing. He went to the door. “May I help you?”

  The woman turned around. “I’m looking for Theodore Johnson.”

  “I’m Theodore.”

  The woman checked the address on the door.

  “You’re right. That’s were I live,” Armpit explained. “I’m just over here right now.”

  “Oh, then I guess you’re Ginny McDonald.”

  “Yes,” Ginny said, at Armpit’s side.

  The woman took a black wallet from her purse. “I’m Detective Debbie Newberg from the Austin Police Department.” She opened the wallet, showing them her badge. “I wanted to talk to you about the concert tickets.”

  Armpit struggled to keep his composure. “You want to talk to both of us, or just me?” he asked.

  “Were you with him when he bought the tickets?” she asked Ginny.

  “No.”

  “Then just you, if you don’t mind.”

  Armpit went out one door and in the other. He led Detective Newberg into the living room and offered her something to drink, but she declined. He sat at one end of the red and blue plaid couch, and she sat across from him on an ottoman, her knees close together and her notebook on her lap.

  She seemed too young and too pretty to be a police officer. She had bright brown eyes, and curly black hair very similar to Kaira’s. Her cheeks had a red glow to them, as if she was blushing.

  “So I understand you paid six hundred dollars for the tickets, is that correct?”

  He hated to start right out with a lie, but it was the path of least resistance. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Was that six hundred total, or six hundred per ticket?”

  “Total,” he said. “Three hundred per ticket.”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  He suddenly felt very conscious of the old and well-worn furniture. Everything in his house seemed shoddy and cheap.

  “Well, I wasn’t planning to pay that much,” he said. “It was supposed to be only a hundred and thirty-five a ticket, but then the guy kept changing his mind. First they were for sale. Then they weren’t. Then they were again. Three hundred’s not really that much for Kaira DeLeon tickets. They went for seven hundred and fifty in Philadelphia.”

  “Wow,” said Detective Newberg.

  He tried to relax. He wasn’t a suspect, he reminded himself. He was the victim. She was here to help him.

  “What do you mean they were only supposed to cost one hundred and thirty-five?”

  “There was an ad in the paper.”

  The second he said that, he knew it was a mistake. She could easily get ahold of last week’s newspapers and find the ad, along with X-Ray’s phone number.

  “What newspaper was that?” she asked.

  “It wasn’t really a newspaper. It was one of those free advertisements, you know, that they stick on your door.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “No, it got recycled.”

  “Do you remember what day it was placed on your door?”

  “No. It might have been two weeks ago. I just don’t remember.”

  “And the ad was for a hundred and thirty-five dollars?”

  “No, I don’t think it was that much.”

  “You just said—”

  “It was for ninety-five,” Armpit said firmly. “But that was two weeks ago. By the time I called the guy, he said the price had gone up to a hundred and thirty-five so I told him I had to think about it. Then when I called him back on the day of the concert, he said the tickets were no longer for sale. But then he called me back and said they were for sale again, but the price was now two hundred. But then when I tried to buy the tickets he said they weren’t for sale again.”

  “And that’s when you offered him three hundred?”

  Armpit nodded. “I was desperate. It was five-thirty. The concert was at eight. I’d already promised Ginny.”

  “Did he ever tell you his name?”

  He shook his head.

  “It wasn’t in the ad?”

  “No,” said Armpit. “Look, why— I mean, what’s the big deal? Ginny and I ended up getting to sit on the stage. You know—no harm, no foul?”

  “Well, our mayor seems to think there was quite a bit of harm. She saw what happened to Ginny, and to you, and she wants to get the guy.”

  “What will happen to him?” Armpit asked, trying to sound only mildly curious. “Will he have to go to jail?”

  “Oh, I doubt it. We’re just talking six hundred dollars.”

  He tried not to let his relief show on his face.

  “Unless he has a prior criminal record,” said Detective Newberg.

  Armpit sat up straight.

  “So your initial contact with him was by phone?”

  It took Armpit a moment to decipher the question. “Um, yes.”

  “I don’t suppose you remember his phone number?”

  “No.”

  She smiled. Her cheeks turned pink. “I wouldn’t expect you to. So then, where did you meet him?”

  “At H-E-B. In the parking lot.”

  “And how did you recognize each other?”

  “I didn’t. I never saw him before in my life.”

  Detective Newberg raised her eyebrows. “What I’m asking is, how did you find each other in the parking lot? How did you know he was the one selling the tickets?”

  “Oh.” Armpit noticed his Raincreek cap hanging on the back of the door. “I said I’d be wearing a red cap.”

  He got up and got the cap. It felt good to get up and move around.

  He showed her the cap, but she didn’t seem all that interested. He put the cap on his head. “So then he drove up beside me, and we bargained a little, like I said, and then I gave him the money, and he gave me the tickets.” He sat back down on the arm of the couch. He removed the cap and set it on the cushion beside him.

  “What kind of car was he driving?”

  “A white Suburban.”

  “And where were you standing?”

  “On the curb.”

  “In front of the H-E-B?”

  “No, a few stores over. I think it was in front of Copy King.”

  Why did he say that? Sometimes it felt like the words just jumped out of his mouth.

  “Was he the only one in the car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So he was driving on the wrong side of the road.”

  “He was?”

  “If the driver’s side was next to the curb.”

  “Oh, yeah, I guess so,” said Armpit. He realized he had to be more careful. “I didn’t notice because there weren’t any other cars around.”

  “At five-thirty?” asked Detective Newberg. “Man, I should start shopping there!” She smiled. “The H-E-B by me is jammed that time of day.”

  Armpit shrugged.

  “So what did he look like?”

  “I didn’t get a real good look.”

  “You were face to face, weren’t you, when he rolled down his window?”

  “I was thinking about the tickets, not what he looked like.”

  “Was he white? Black? Hispanic?”

  “Kind of black.”

  “Kind of black?”

  “I think he might have been Iranian.”

  Iranian? Where did that come from?

  “You think he was Iranian?”

  “Maybe part black, part Iranian,” Armpit said. “Now I remember. He said his name was Habib. That’s why I think he’s part Iranian.”

  Officer Newberg raised her eyebrows. “Habib?” She wrote the name in her little black notebook.

  “Did he speak with an accent?”


  “Um, yeah, kind of.”

  “An Iranian accent?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was he tall? Short? Thin? Fat?”

  “Kind of big,” Armpit said. “But it was hard to tell because he was sitting down in his car.”

  “How old?”

  “Maybe about your age.”

  “How old do you think I am?”

  He studied her face. “Twenty-three?”

  “I’m twenty-eight.” She smiled. “So we’ll say he’s in his twenties. Any distinguishing characteristics?”

  “No.”

  “Tattoos? Facial hair?”

  “Oh, yeah. He had a mustache.”

  “Nice of you to mention it.”

  “I didn’t think it was important. I mean, he probably shaved it off by now, don’t you think?”

  She shrugged. “Anything else come to mind?”

  He shook his head.

  “You sure?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Okay, well, this is a good start. I’m going to talk to some of the other people seated nearby at the concert. Maybe they also bought their tickets from Habib.”

  She gave him a card with her name and phone number on it and told him to call her if he remembered anything else.

  He shook her hand. It felt cool and soft.

  As he watched her drive away, he felt bad about having to lie to her. She was nice. She had a sweet smile. It was hard to imagine her out in the world, fighting criminals. He worried she might get hurt.

  21

  X-Ray paced back and forth by his car, which was parked in front of Armpit’s house. “We got nothing to worry about,” he said. “Nothing to worry about. The police have better things to do than to launch a big investigation over a couple of phony tickets.”

  Armpit had told him everything, including how he had met Kaira.

  “Man, I wish you had talked to me first,” X-Ray said. “I could have come up with something believable.”

  “I think she believed me,” said Armpit.

  “Habib?” X-Ray shook his head. “And you never should have mentioned the H-E-B.”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Well, that’s obvious. Look, if she interrogates you again, just remember one word: ‘kiss.’ K-I-S-S. Keep It Simple, Stupid!”

  “I think she believed me.”

  “You know we’re in this together. We split the money, fifty-fifty.”

  Yes, he realized that.

  “Not to worry,” X-Ray said. “The cops have better things to do. Man, it’s just my luck the mayor was at the concert! What kind of mayor goes to rock concerts?”

  “You’re lucky she was there,” Armpit pointed out.

  “Oh, yeah? How’s that?”

  “If the mayor wasn’t there, I woulda been sent to jail, Ginny woulda been taken to a hospital and had her stomach pumped, and you’d be dead.”

  X-Ray laughed. “You’re such a joker.”

  At school on Monday, Tatiana wanted to know all about the concert. “You still went, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, I had a great time. Too bad you missed it.”

  “Were you able to find someone to go with you?”

  “Yeah, that wasn’t a problem.”

  “A girl?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, good. I’m really glad you had such a good time!”

  “She wore this thing with long white fringe—”

  “You know what?” said Tatiana. “I really don’t care what your girlfriend was wearing.”

  “My girlfriend? No, you asked me to tell you what Kaira DeLeon had on.”

  “I don’t have time for this now,” Tatiana said, then walked away.

  In economics he gave Matt Kapok the dollar back.

  Matt seemed surprised. “Uh, thanks, Arm—” His white face turned even whiter. “I mean, I mean, I mean, Theodore. Thanks, Theodore.”

  “You really helped me out,” Armpit said. “I owe you one.”

  On the back of their souvenir T-shirts was a list of the fifty-four cities on the tour. Ginny and Armpit looked at them every day for the next week and a half and tried to predict where Kaira was.

  “Maybe she’ll call from Albuquerque,” said Ginny, studying the T-shirt. “Al-bu-quer-que,” she repeated. She liked saying that word.

  Armpit laughed. “She’s not going to call,” he said, as if he never gave it a thought, when in truth it was practically all he’d thought about since he’d last seen her. Every time the phone rang his body went to red alert. He hated leaving the house for school or work because he was afraid he might miss her call. But after a week and a half, that didn’t seem too likely anymore.

  “It’s like she says in her song,” he told Ginny. “She’ll get around to you, and then she’ll be on her way.”

  He just wished he could have held on a little bit longer.

  He had failed a quiz in economics earlier that day. He hadn’t read the last two chapters. He couldn’t concentrate.

  At work the day before he’d installed a sprinkler system in the front yard of a house. Jack Dunlevy had trusted him to do the entire job himself.

  Armpit had made sure the sprinkler heads were evenly distributed, so that the water would cover the entire lawn. He had carefully secured each connection.

  The problem was that it was all just attached to itself. The pipes formed one giant rectangle, with no way for any water to enter the system.

  He ended up having to work overtime, digging a new trench, cutting into the pipes, and attaching the main water line. “You don’t have to pay me for the extra time it took,” he told his boss. “I’m the one who screwed up.”

  “Unfortunately, I do,” said Jack Dunlevy. “It’s the law.”

  How could he explain it was all because a Kaira DeLeon song came on the radio?

  At least he hadn’t heard from Detective Newberg again. Maybe X-Ray was right. The Austin Police Department had better things to do than investigate who had sold counterfeit tickets to an African American teenager who lived on the wrong side of I-35.

  He wondered if she had checked his record and found out about his prior conviction. He didn’t want her to think badly of him.

  Cherry Lane called once, to ask how he was doing. His mother had answered the phone and was very impressed when she realized who she was talking to.

  Armpit was disappointed it wasn’t Kaira.

  “Why’d the mayor call you?” his mother asked him.

  “Remember, I told you I met her? I did some work at her house.”

  For the first time in a long while, his mother looked at him and saw someone who maybe wasn’t all bad.

  Now it was Thursday evening, eleven days since he saw Kaira, and he was trying to get through a chapter in economics. The final exam was in eight days.

  He’d thought about asking Matt Kapok if he might want to study together. They greeted each other every day in class. But he didn’t want to leave the house, just in case Kaira called, and he would have been embarrassed to invite Matt over here, where, who knows, his parents might accuse Matt of being a drug dealer.

  The speech final was also a week from Friday, but he wasn’t too worried about that. There were no more speeches due, and the stuff in the book was all obvious stuff, like how you should look your prospective employer in the eye at a job interview.

  He reread a paragraph in his econ book and studied the graph next to it. It was just beginning to make sense when the phone rang, shattering his thoughts.

  He waited nervously for a moment before returning to the graph.

  “Theodore, telephone!” his mother called.

  He tried to remain calm. Most likely it was just X-Ray. He took a deep breath, then went into the kitchen.

  His mother mouthed the words “a girl” as she handed him the phone.

  “Yeah, hi,” he said, trying to sound casual.

  “Hi, how’s it going?”

  He recognized the slightly nasal vo
ice of Detective Debbie Newberg. He walked back into his bedroom as he spoke to her.

  “Oh, uh, fine.”

  “You probably thought I’d forgotten about you.”

  “Uh, no, not really.”

  “How certain are you that the guy’s name was Habib?”

  “Not real certain.”

  “Could it have been Felix?”

  “Felix? No, I don’t think so.”

  “How about Moses?”

  “No. I’m pretty sure he said it was Habib.”

  “Maybe he had a nickname. Is that possible?”

  “I guess.”

  “Did he ever refer to himself as X-Ray?”

  He took a breath, then said he’d never heard that name before.

  “How about Armpit?”

  He almost dropped the phone.

  “Hello? Are you there?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m here.”

  “Does Armpit ring a bell?”

  “No, I think I would have remembered a name like that.”

  Debbie Newberg laughed. “I suppose so,” she said.

  Armpit looked at his economics book opened on his desk. He knew he could forget about studying tonight.

  22

  A letter came the next day. Armpit checked the mail when he got home from school. It was addressed to Theodore A. Johnson, and its return address was the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. His middle name was Thomas.

  The letter was written with a purple pen on hotel stationery in remarkably neat handwriting.

  Dear T (or should I say Dear A?),

  I hope you don’t mind a long and dopey letter. I know it’s going to be long and dopey, because every letter I’ve written to you has been long and dopey. They just keep getting longer and dopier! Of course, I don’t actually mail them, so I guess it doesn’t matter whether you mind or not.

  I always say all kinds of stupid things about how much I miss you, and wish you were here, and lame junk like that. Once I even used the L word! How dumb is that??? Nobody falls in L after a bowl of ice cream and a ten-minute walk! Now you know why I didn’t mail the letters. I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid!!!

  It’s just that you and Ginny are really my only friends. Is that pathetic or what? I don’t mean you and Ginny are pathetic. I’m the one who’s pathetic!