Outside Looking In

by James Lincoln Collier

  TWO

  AFTER THE TROUBLE we had over Ooma trying to steal the Walkman, J. P. got afraid word would get around that part of New Jersey, and shopping-mall security people would be on the lookout for us. So, the next morning J. P. decided we should head for New York City.

  There was good money to be made in New York, J. P. always said. The place was full of tourists who were short on brains and had plenty of money to spend.

  “How do you know they’re short on brains?” I said.

  “They wouldn’t be in New York if they had any,” J. P. said.

  “How come they have so much money if they don’t have brains?” I said.

  “Fergy, in the United States of America it takes brains to avoid having money.”

  “Then how come there are so many poor people you’re always talking about?”

  “That’s the point,” J. P. said. “In a materialistic society where everybody is scrambling for money, some people are bound to get left out. It’s like musical chairs—there isn’t any point in the game if there’s a chair for everybody, is there? The idea is not for everybody to have enough money, but for some people to have more money than others so you can tell who won and who lost.”

  The whole subject confused me. The truth was, I wished we had more money instead of being broke all the time. I wished we had at least enough money to buy a big motor home, with a kitchen and bunks and so forth. When we would stay at federal campsites, which were cheap, we would see these terrific motor homes. Some of them even had television sets and toilets in them. I would have liked having a toilet. We were always having to find gas stations so we could go to the bathroom, and at night, when we were sleeping in the van, we had to get up and go outside. J. P. was right about materialism; I could see that. But I still wished we had more money. I couldn’t help it; that was just the way I felt.

  We headed for New York. I sat by the rear window of the van. It was around eight o’clock in the morning, and every once in a while we would go through some suburban town and pass a school. The kids were all going along the sidewalk in bunches, talking and fooling around and punching each other. They were dressed up nice, too—nice sweaters or jackets, good jeans, and new shoes. What did it feel like to be one of them, I wondered. It seemed to me that it must be a whole lot of fun to be going along like that with a bunch of other kids, just fooling around. Once we passed some kids from some kind of private school. They were wearing shirts and ties and jackets with emblems on their breast pockets. Oh, how I wished I had a jacket with an emblem on the breast pocket.

  Then I realized that Ooma was scratching herself. “Ooma’s scratching again,” I said.

  “I am not,” she said. “I’m just itching.”

  “Yes, you are,” I said. “She’s going to get that skin disease again.”

  Gussie was sitting up in the front seat next to J. P. “Come here, Ooma,” she said. Ooma crawled up to the front. Gussie lifted up Ooma’s shirt and looked. “I don’t see anything,” she said.

  “You worry about things too much, Fergy,” J. P. said. “You’ve got to go with the flow more.”

  I wished he wouldn’t say things like that. Ooma was always getting some kind of skin disease, and then she’d scratch all night and keep everybody awake. “She’s dirty,” I said. “She needs a bath.”

  “Mind your own damn business, Fergy,” Ooma said.

  “A little dirt never hurt anybody,” J. P. said. “From earth we come, to earth we go. Dirt is mankind’s natural element.”

  “Well, she’s going to get that skin disease again if she doesn’t have a bath.”

  “Stop worrying about it, Fergy,” J. P. said.

  But Gussie said, “There’s no point in taking a chance. We’ll go to a Y when we get to New York and all have showers.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like a camp director, Gussie,” J. P. said.

  “You’re not the final authority on everything, J. P.,” Gussie said. “I know a few things.”

  J. P. gave her a quick look and then turned back to the road. “You’ve been getting pretty snappish recently,” he said.

  Gussie looked straight ahead out the windshield down the road. “Maybe it’s about time I started doing a little thinking for myself,” she said.

  “Maybe it’s about time you got yourself into a better frame of mind,” J. P. said.

  Now she looked at him. “Maybe it’s your frame of mind that needs improving,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything and they dropped it. The whole thing kind of surprised me. It wasn’t like Gussie to contradict J. P. He was supposed to be the great man and know everything about everything. I gave Ooma a little look to see what she thought of it. She was kind of staring at Gussie with her thumb in her mouth. I could tell she was surprised by it, too.

  At about ten o’clock, we drove across the George Washington Bridge into New York City. I always liked that part. The bridge was way up high, and as you drove across it you could see little boats down below—sailboats, tugboats pulling barges, sometimes big ocean cruisers. And way downriver you could see the towers of the World Trade Center and a whole lot of other tall buildings I didn’t know the names of. It was a nice view, and I liked looking at it.

  Then we came off the bridge and headed down the West Side Highway. You weren’t supposed to drive on the West Side Highway in a van, but J. P. didn’t worry too much about obeying laws. He drove wherever he wanted to and parked wherever he wanted to, and he threw away the parking tickets he got. About every six months we changed the registration to a different state—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Missouri—wherever we happened to be. We moved around an awful lot and it was pretty hard for them to catch up with us.

  So we went down the West Side Highway, on across to SoHo, and parked the vans in an illegal place on a side street, just off West Broadway. SoHo was a part of New York where they had a lot of painters and sculptors and writers. The buildings weren’t much to look at—just dirty brick buildings mostly five or six stories high, with old, iron fire escapes along the fronts. But in the bottom floors of most of them were art galleries filled with weird paintings, fancy restaurants with trees in the middle of them, and shops selling used blue jeans for a hundred dollars a pair. “There’s plenty of money in SoHo,” J. P. always said. “Besides, it’s full of tourists.”

  We carried the folding table around the corner onto West Broadway and set it up. In New York, they mostly didn’t bother you about selling things on the street; the place was full of street sellers. But it was different from working a shopping mall, where there was always a lot of room to set up. On West Broadway, we had to put the folding table as close to the wall as we could, so there’d be room for a good-sized crowd on the sidewalk in front of it. The Wiz and I set the table up, and the others began bringing out boxes of amulets and honey.

  The Wiz was a tall, skinny black guy who wore glasses. They called him the Wiz because he had been to about six different colleges and had studied everything there was to study and was very philosophical about everything. He was especially hot on a writer called Henry David Thoreau, who had gone off to live all alone in a hut by a lake and think deep thoughts. The Wiz had all of Henry Thoreau’s books in a little book rack on the wall of the other van, where he lived with a woman named Trotsky. The Wiz believed in civil disobedience and liked breaking laws he disagreed with and getting thrown in jail for it. “Well, Fergy,” he said as we were setting up the folding table, “here we are among the manswarm again.” The Wiz could never say it was pretty crowded or there were a lot of people around. He had to say it was the “manswarm” or something philosophical like that.

  “I wish I could study philosophy,” I said.

  “Perhaps someday that will be a feasible course of action, Fergy.”

  I shook my head. “If I can’t even do long division, how can I study philosophy?”

  He looked at me. “J. P.’s correct, Fergy. The public school system is there primarily to inculcate material
istic values in order that the wealthy may stay wealthy and the impoverished stay poor.”

  I didn’t want to hear any more of that for a while, so I dropped the subject. Ooma and I got out our guitars and went into our usual routine to collect a crowd. J. P. had worked the routine out to include a little of everything, so as to attract the widest possible crowd. First, we did some new disco hit and then a Beatles tune like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”—the crowd always thought it was cute when Ooma pranced around and sang that, while I played the guitar. Then we would do a folk song like “On Top of Old Smokey” for the folk-music fans, and a jazz tune like “When the Saints Go Marching In” for the jazz fans, and finally I would do a little bit of a Bach cantata that J. P. had made me learn, for the classical music fans. The whole show took about fifteen minutes, and by the time we finished we usually had a pretty good-sized crowd—thirty, forty people—and J. P. would go into his sales talk.

  So we did our routine, and J. P. started talking, and I blanked my mind out and started daydreaming about going to college like the Wiz and studying so hard, day and night, that I became the smartest man in the world. I’d just got around to the part where the president was calling me down to Washington to ask my advice on the economic situation when I noticed that Ooma was gone. I looked over at the folding table. J. P. was holding up a jar of honey and saying, “Don’t take my word for it, ask your doctor.” Gussie and Trotsky were selling things and making change, and the Wiz was going through the crowd handing out copies of “Extracts from the Journals of J. P. Wheeler.” None of them had noticed that Ooma was gone. I took a quick look up the street. There was a restaurant there, and beyond that an art gallery. I didn’t figure Ooma would go into either of those. Across West Broadway was another art gallery, a fancy dress store, and a store that sold quilts and dolls and stuff. It didn’t figure that Ooma would go into any of those, either. So I darted on up the street, stopping to look into each store through the window, just in case. I didn’t see Ooma anywhere. I crossed West Broadway and came down that side, still looking in stores. But I didn’t see her.

  Then I heard the sound of a cop siren, sort of low. I looked down the street. A cop car was pulling up to the curb, its lights flashing, the siren making a dying hum. I ran on down there, ducking and dodging around the people and praying it wouldn’t be Ooma they were after. I came up to the cop car. The cops were just getting out, and a few people had stopped on the sidewalk to watch. Then the cops marched into a kind of fancy food store that had in the window pastries and jellies and meat loaves with sausages in them. I dashed up to the window and looked in. A woman in a white apron had hold of Ooma by the back of her shirt. Ooma was wriggling around, but when she saw the cops come marching in, she stopped wriggling and looked plenty scared. I was pretty scared, too: If all she’d stolen was a few cookies or something, they probably wouldn’t have called the cops.

  One of the cops crouched down in front of her and started to talk to her. She stuck her thumb in her mouth and stood there nodding and shaking her head to the cop’s questions. Then the cop stood up and patted her on the shoulder, and they came on out of there, first one cop, then Ooma, and then the other cop. Were they going to let her go? It was going to be one more terrible mess if they didn’t, and I knew I’d get the blame for it.

  Out they came onto the sidewalk. They marched Ooma up to the cop car, opened the back door, and put her in. Then they went around to their own doors.

  What should I do? I knew it wasn’t smart for us to mess around with cops—cops were always trouble for us. But I couldn’t let my own sister be hauled off that way. I ran up to the cop car and looked in the window. “That’s my sister,” I said. “She doesn’t mean to be bad. She can’t help herself.”

  The cop gave me a squinty look. “Your sister? Where do you live?”

  There wasn’t any good answer to that. J. P. sure wouldn’t want me bringing cops around, because about half of what we did was illegal one way or another—sleeping in vans was illegal because you didn’t have toilets and running water; selling stuff on the streets was illegal, even though everybody did it; and besides, our vans were illegally parked. “I’ll go get J—my dad,” I said.

  I started off, but the cop grabbed my arm before I could take more than a step. “No, you don’t, sonny,” he said. “You hop in back and we’ll help you find him.”

  There wasn’t anything to do, so I got in the back with Ooma. “What did you do this time?” I whispered.

  “None of your damn business,” she whispered.

  I shut my mouth, and the cops drove up West Broadway. I pointed out the place where Gussie and J. P. and the rest were selling amulets and honey and giving away J. P.’s pamphlets. “That’s them,” I said.

  “It figures,” one of the cops said. They stopped the car. We all got out, and the cops sort of pushed us ahead of them through the crowd. When we came out to the front, J. P. was saying, “Five centuries ago the Indians living right on this spot, Manhattan Island, discovered a talisman that could bring the bearer good luck. Today—” Then he saw us.

  The cops pushed us up to the folding table. “These your brats?”

  J. P. looked down at us. I could tell that he was thinking of saying he’d never seen us before. But he knew Gussie wouldn’t have allowed that. “What’s this all about, Fergy?” he said. “I thought I could trust you, at least.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said. “Ooma did something. I was looking for her so I could stop her.”

  The cop pointed to Ooma. “The girl stole a hundred bucks out of a cash register in a store down the block. The other kid was waiting outside for her to come out.”

  I was pretty shocked. A hundred bucks was an awful lot. “I wasn’t in on it,” I said. “I just went looking for her.”

  The cop who was doing the talking didn’t pay any attention to me. “Where do you folks live?” The crowd was hanging around to watch. I felt embarrassed.

  “We’re a religious organization,” J. P. said. He grabbed up a pamphlet. “Here,” he said, handing it to the cop. “It contains our spiritual message. We have a mission to bring a message of understanding to the world.”

  The cop turned the pamphlet over in his hand, but he didn’t open it up to look at the spiritual message.

  “Okay, you’re a religious organization. Where do you live?”

  J. P. was beginning to sweat on his forehead. He pulled at one end of his mustache. “We live upstate,” he said.

  “In New York City—where are you staying in New York City?”

  J. P. wiped a little sweat off his forehead. “Officer, I admit I’m nonplussed. I can’t imagine my little girl stealing anything, let alone a large sum of money. She has her faults, but stealing is not one of them. Of course, she’s high-spirited, and sometimes she gets up to mischief—”

  “I asked you where you’re staying.”

  “Oh, we won’t be staying. We’re leaving soon.”

  “You may be staying longer than you think. How do you cart this stuff around—got a truck or something?”

  There wasn’t any way out of it. “We’ve got a couple of vans,” J. P. said.

  “Where?”

  J. P. pointed. “Around the corner.”

  The cop jerked his head in that direction. “Frank, go have a look,” he said.

  The other cop went around the corner. In about two minutes he was back. “They’re gypsies,” he said. “They got a camp stove in there, a big plastic orange cooler, and sleeping bags.” He looked at J. P. “You’re illegal about six different ways,” he said. He turned to the other cop. “What do you want to do with them?”

  “The woman in the store said she doesn’t want to press charges since she got her money back,” said the first cop. He turned to J. P. “Okay, buddy,” he said. “You just pile your religious organization into those vans and head on out of this city. The next time, we’re going to take you in.”

  THREE

  THERE WASN’T ANYTHING to
do but drive back out to New Jersey. We crossed over the George Washington Bridge again, and I sat looking out the rear window at the river far below and the huge buildings down at the bottom end of Manhattan, looming up in the sunlight, solid as steel and big as mountains.

  J. P. was furious at Ooma. “Don’t you have any sense, Ooma?” he shouted at her.

  “Don’t blame me,” she said. “I didn’t think they were looking.”

  “You’ve caused the family a lot of trouble in the past few days, Ooma,” he shouted.

  Ooma stuck out her lip. “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t think they were looking.”

  “Well, you better be sure next time,” J. P. shouted.

  Tears began to roll out of Ooma’s eyes and down her cheeks, leaving white tracks in the dirt. “Don’t keep blaming me,” she said.

  Suddenly Gussie said, “Leave her alone, J. P.”

  J. P. swung his head around to give Gussie a quick look. “What?” he said.

  “Stop shouting at her,” Gussie said. “Where do you think she picks up those ideas?”

  “You stay out of this, Gussie,” J. P. snapped.

  She gave him a look. “No, I won’t stay out of it. She’s my child, too.”

  J. P. frowned. He wasn’t used to Gussie standing up to him this way, and he didn’t know what to make of it. “Let’s save this for later, Gussie,” he said. “I’m dealing with Ooma right now.”

  I was sick of the whole thing and decided to tune out my brain so I wouldn’t hear the argument. More and more, I was beginning to think that I didn’t belong with the rest of them. I didn’t fit in. They had their beliefs and that was fine, for they were entitled to them: J. P. was a great man and had wonderful ideas, and one day his journals would be famous. But I was having an awful lot of trouble believing in his ideas. I knew it was my fault. Probably if I tried harder I could get myself to believe in them. Lots of times, maybe when I was trying to go to sleep, I’d go over his ideas, like there shouldn’t be any power in the world, and everybody should be equal, and governments should be abolished, and all the rest of it. They sounded like good ideas: What could be wrong with ideas like that? But all the time I was trying to believe in them, contrary ideas kept creeping into my mind, like would people really be good by their own natural selves if there wasn’t any government? I mean, look at Ooma. She was allowed to do anything she wanted, and instead of being good and kind she was just as wild as she could be. Were we really entitled to reclaim anything we wanted because the system had stolen it from us in the first place? Take that Walkman Ooma tried to steal from that stroller. Did it really belong to the system or to that woman?