by Bova, Ben
When they stopped dancing and collapsed into the living room chairs, the same man started doing magic tricks. His name was Homer, and he had Danny really puzzled. He pulled cigarettes out of the air, picked cards out of a deck from across the room, changed a handkerchief into a flower.
Everyone applauded him.
“Boy, he’s great,” Danny said to John, who was sitting next to him on the sofa. “Is he on TV?”
John laughed. “He’s my high school principal. Magic’s just his hobby.”
Danny felt staggered. A principal? Homer couldn’t be. He was... well, he was too happy!
After a while, Danny went over to where Homer was sitting and they started talking. He even showed Danny a couple of card tricks.
“How’s Joe treating you at the Center?” Homer asked.
“Huh? Oh... pretty good.”
Homer smiled. “I don’t see where he gets all his energy. He’s at that Center almost twenty-four hours a day. You should have seen him when he was trying to get the Center started! He gave up his job at the State University and battled with the Governor and the State Legislature until I thought they were going to throw him out on his ear. He even went to Washington to get Congress to put up extra money to help with the Center.”
Squirming unhappily, Danny said, “I didn’t know that.”
“It’s true,” Homer said. “The Center is Joe’s baby. You boys are all his kids.”
“Yeah. He’s... he’s okay,” said Danny.
Chapter Eighteen
The party went on well past midnight. As people began to leave, Joe came over to Danny and said quietly, “Think you can sleep with John without any problems?”
Danny blinked. “You mean sleep here tonight? Not go back to the Center?”
Nodding, Joe said, “Don’t get any ideas. Monster’s a watch dog, you know, and he sleeps right outside John’s door every night. And I’m part Apache Indian. So you won’t be able to sneak out.”
In spite of himself, Danny smiled. “Okay, I’ll behave myself. I won’t even snore.”
“Good. Maybe tomorrow we can drive over to your old neighborhood and see your girlfriend.”
“Laurie!”
“Yes. I tried to get her to come here tonight, but I couldn’t reach her on the phone.”
Danny hardly slept at all. John’s snoring and tossing in the bed helped to keep him awake, but mainly he was excited about going back to his turf, going back to see Laurie. Would she be surprised!
But Joe couldn’t get her on the phone. Why not? Where was she? Had she moved out of her sister’s apartment? Wasn’t she working at the restaurant anymore? Danny thought back to Laurie’s last visit to the Center. It had been about a week ago. She hadn’t said anything about moving. Had she looked worried? Was something bothering her? Or somebody?
They got up late the next morning. By the time Joe put Danny and Monster into his car and started for the city, it was a little past noon. They drove in silence through the quiet streets. Monster huddled on the back seat, his wet nose snuffling gently behind Danny’s ear.
They got to the heart of the city and drove down narrow streets where the buildings cut off any hope of sunshine. Danny gave Joe directions for getting to his old neighborhood.
“Pull up over there,” he said, pointing. “By the cigar store.”
Nothing had changed much. As he got out of the car, Danny suddenly realized that it had been almost a year since he’d been around here.
Only a couple of young kids were in sight, sitting on the front steps of one of the houses halfway up the block. The street was just as dirty as ever, with old newspaper pages and other bits of trash laying crumpled against the buildings and in the gutters.
There were a few cars parked along the street. Danny remembered the first time he had driven a car. He had stolen it right here, from in front of the cigar store.
The store was closed. The windows were too dirty to look through. Funny, Danny thought to himself, I never thought about how crummy everything is.
“Where is everybody?” Joe asked. He was still inside the car, one elbow resting on the door where the window had been rolled down. Monster’s heavy gray head was sticking out the back window, tongue out, big teeth showing.
“Some of the guys might be up at the schoolyard. It’s about two blocks from here, around the corner.”
Joe said, “Okay. Hop in.”
Danny slammed the door shut and Joe gunned the motor.
“What’s the matter?” Joe asked.
Danny shrugged. “I don’t know... it looks kind of, well, different.”
“The neighborhood hasn’t changed, Danny. You have.”
“What d’you mean?”
Joe swung the car around the corner and headed up the street. “A writer once said, ‘You can’t go home again.’ After you’ve been away, when you come back home everything seems changed. But what’s changed is you. You’re different than you were when you left. You’ll never be able to come back to this neighborhood, Danny. In time, I don’t think you’ll want to.”
Danny stared at Joe. Silently, he thought, He must be nutty! Not want to come back to my own turf? Crazy!
They got to the schoolyard and, sure enough, there were a few kids there shooting a scruffed-up basketball at a bare metal hoop that was set into the blank stone wall of the school.
Joe stayed in the car with Monster. The kids didn’t recognize Danny as he got out of the car. They stopped shooting the ball and stared at him as he walked up, watching him silently. Then:
“Hey... holy cripes, it’s Danny!”
“Danny!”
He broke into a big grin as they ran toward him.
“Hi, Mario. Hello, Sal. Eddie....”
“Danny! Geez... you look like a million bucks!”
“Where did you get them clothes?”
“Hey, you break loose? How’d you do it?”
Laughing, Danny put up his hands. “Hey guys, I can’t talk to all of you at once. No, I didn’t break out. I sort of got the weekend off. The guy in the Cadillac back there... he’s from the Center.”
“Wow! Lookit the dog!”
“Yeah,” Danny said, still grinning. “His name’s Monster.”
“You got to believe it.”
“So how’re they treating ya?” Mario asked. “You look good. Getting fat, ain’t you?”
“I been eatin’ good,” Danny said. “The Center’s okay, I guess. Tough to get out of. I tried a couple shots at it.... They got a computer running everything. And special alarms, better than they got in banks. Trickier. Can’t even sneeze without ‘em knowin’ about it.”
They talked for a few minutes, then Danny said, “Hey, I’m goin’ over to Laurie’s sister’s place. She still livin’ in the same apartment?”
The boys’ grins disappeared. They became serious. Finally Mario answered, “Uh, yeah, she still lives there. But... uh... Laurie moved out. ‘Bout two weeks ago. She don’t live around here no more.”
Danny felt the same flash of fear and anger that he had known when Joe pulled him down from the fence.
“What? What d’you mean?”
Shrugging inside his jacket, Mario said, “She just moved out. Didn’t tell nobody where. Maybe her sister knows. We don’t.”
Danny grabbed him. “What happened? Why’d she move?”
Mario tried to back away. “Hey, Danny, it ain’t my fault! A couple guys tried to make time with her, but we bounced ‘em off. We been watchin’ her for you.”
“Yeah, you been watchin’ her so good you don’t even know where she is.” Danny let go of him.
He sprinted back to the car. Sliding into the front seat beside Joe he said, “Let’s go over to Laurie’s sister’s place... back where we were a couple minutes ago.”
“What’s the matter?”
Danny told him as he started the car.
Laurie’s sister had no time for Joe and Danny. She was trying to take care of three babies—the oldest was
barely four—and do a day’s cooking at the same time.
She was trying to pin a diaper on the youngest baby, who was doing his best to wriggle away from her. She had him lying on the kitchen table, within arm’s reach of the stove.
“I told you,” she said sharply, “that she’s okay. She’s working uptown now, and she’s got her own apartment, with two other girls. She promised she’d visit you every week, just like she’s been doing all year. So if she wants to tell you where she’s living, let her do it. I’m not going to.”
Danny left the apartment with his fists clenched.
Joe tried to cool him down: “Look, she’s been coming to see you every week, hasn’t she?”
Danny nodded. His chest was feeling tight again, and he was angry enough to pound his fists into the grimy walls of the apartment building’s stairway. But he didn’t do that. He just nodded.
They walked out to the car and got into it. Joe started the motor and headed back toward the Center.
“You know,” he said, “I might have had something to do with this.”
“You?”
Joe nodded. “Last month Laurie and I had a talk, before I called you to the visiting room. She wanted to know what I thought about her working in the restaurant. She knew you didn’t like the idea.
“I told her there are lots of schools in town that’ll train her to be a secretary. Or anything else she wants to be. I gave her the name of a couple of friends of mine who could help her to get a better job and pick out a good night school.”
Danny couldn’t answer. So it was Joe Tenny. All the time he was pretending to be Danny’s friend, he was really trying to get Laurie away. You can’t trust anybody, Danny shouted to himself silently. Nobody! Especially not Joe Tenny!
Chapter Nineteen
Monday morning, at breakfast in the cafeteria, Danny looked for Ralph Malzone.
“Hey listen,” he said, sitting beside Ralph at a small table. “We got to get out of here.”
“Sure,” said Ralph through a mouth full of cereal. “Build me some wings an’ I’ll fly out.”
“I’m not kidding! Trouble is, guys have been trying to break out one at a time. What we got to do is get a bunch of guys to work together. That’s the only way.”
Ralph shook his head. “Been tried before. SPECS an’ all those alarms and automatic locks and everything... you couldn’t get out o’ here with an army.”
“Oh yeah? I know how to fix SPECS and everything else.”
Ralph laughed.
“I ain’t kidding!” Danny snapped. “You listen to me and we’ll be out of here in a couple months. Maybe sooner.”
Ralph put his spoon down. “How you goin’ to do it?”
“That’s my secret,” said Danny. “You just do what I tell you, and you’ll be out in time for the opening game of the baseball season. But we’ll need five or six other guys. Can you get ‘em?”
“I’ll get ‘em,” said Ralph.
Christmas morning Danny spent in his room, talking to SPECS.
“Where’s the electricity in the Center come from?” he asked.
SPECS’ calm, unhurried voice answered, “THE CENTER HAS ITS OWN POWER STATION, LOCATED IN BUILDING SEVENTEEN.”
“Where’s that?”
The TV screen showed a map of the Center. There was a red circle around building seventeen. Danny saw it was one of the smaller buildings, near the administration building. It was the only building on the campus with a smokestack.
“Suppose something happened to the power station, where would the electricity come from then?”
“THERE IS AN EMERGENCY POWER SYSTEM, ALSO LOCATED IN BUILDING SEVENTEEN.”
“And suppose something happened to the emergency system, so it didn’t work either?”
“ALL ELECTRICAL POWER IN THE CENTER WOULD BE SHUT OFF.”
Danny thought a moment, then said, “If all the electrical power was shut off, what systems would stop?”
SPECS’ calm, unhurried voice answered, “THE CENTRAL HEATING AND AIR-CONDITIONING SYSTEMS, ALL ALARM SYSTEMS, THE SPECIAL COMPUTER SYSTEM....”
“Wait a minute. What about the phones?”
“THE TELEPHONE SYSTEM IS POWERED SEPARATELY, FROM OUTSIDE THE CENTER.”
“Show me how it works.”
A drawing appeared on the TV screen, showing how the telephone system was linked by a cable to the main power line of the telephone company. Danny saw that the power line ran underground along the highway, and the cable connecting into the Center came to the administration building through a tunnel. Cut that one cable, and all the phones are dead.
It was well after lunchtime when Danny finally said, “Thanks SPECS. That’s all I want to know. For now.”
The TV screen went dark. Danny sat at his desk, not hungry, too excited to eat, thinking about how to knock out the power station, the emergency system, and the phone line.
The screen glowed again, “MR. ROMANO.”
“What?”
“YOU HAVE A VISITOR. MISS MURILLO.”
Danny shot out of his chair and to the door without stopping to get his coat.
He sprinted across the campus to the administration building, through the wintry windy day. There were lots of visitors today: parents mostly, grownups trying to look happy when they were really miserable that their kids had to spend Christmas in the Center.
But Danny didn’t see it that way. He saw adults faking it, laughing too loud, bringing presents to their kids that they never got when the kids had been at home. Danny wondered what his father would have been like, if he would have lived. His mother was still alive, probably, wherever she was.
He found Laurie in one of the small visitors’ rooms. She was wearing a new dress, a dark green one. And her hair was different. It was all swept back and smoothly arranged.
He blinked at her. “Hey, you look different... like, all grown up.”
“Do you like the way I look?” Laurie was smiling and trying her hardest to look as pretty as she could.
Danny said slowly, “Yeah... I guess so, I... never saw you looking so... well, so fancy.”
She stepped up to him and kissed him. “Thank you. And Merry Christmas.”
“Merry... Hey! I almost forgot! What’s all this about you moving to someplace uptown? What’s goin’ on?”
Holding his hand, Laurie brought Danny to the sofa by the tiny room’s only window. They sat down.
“I’ve got a new job and a new apartment,” she said happily. “I’m sharing the place with two other girls. We all work in the same building. I’m a clerk in an insurance company. They’re teaching me the job as I go along. It pays a lot better. And I’m going to school at night to learn how to be a secretary.”
Danny frowned. “But why? What for?”
“For me,” Laurie said. “Danny, try to understand. I love you, honey, I really do. But I can’t just sit in my sister’s place and work in the restaurant for years and years.”
“It won’t be years....”
“Shush,” she said, putting a finger to his lips. “Listen for a minute. Dr. Tenny told me that he’s trying to make you into the best person you can be. That’s what the Center’s for. Well, I’m trying to make myself the best person I can be.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Don’t you see? When you get out, Danny, I want to be something more than a skinny kid with a dirty apron. I want to be a person, somebody who can do things. Somebody who can help you, not drag you down.”
Danny remembered something. “You been going out with other guys.”
She nodded. “Only on double dates, or with a gang of people. Nothing serious, honest, Danny.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Laurie’s eyes widened. “Danny, honest...”
“I been sittin’ here and you’ve been goin’ out with other guys. Movin’ uptown, getting big ideas. Joe Tenny’s put you up to this! He’s tryin’ to get you away from me!”
“Danny, that’s crazy
....”
“Oh yeah? Well, you’ll see how crazy it is!”
He got up and stormed to the door.
“Wait,” Laurie called. “I got you a Christmas present....”
“Give it to your new boyfriend!” Danny slammed the door shut behind him.
Chapter Twenty
There were no classes between Christmas and New Year’s. Danny spent every morning in his room, studying the layout of the power station, learning every inch of the building.
“Hey SPECS, it looks like most of the time the power station runs itself.”
“THE POWER STATION RUNS AUTOMATICALLY. I WATCH IT AND CONTROL IT.”
“Don’t they have a guard or somebody in there?”
“A GUARD STAYS INSIDE THE STATION AT NIGHT.”
“Are the doors locked at night?”
“YES.”
“What about the day time?”
“A MEMBER OF THE MAINTENANCE CREW IS ON DUTY AT THE POWER STATION AT ALL TIMES DURING THE WORKING DAY. HE HAS NOTHING TO DO, HOWEVER, SINCE I AM IN FULL CONTROL.”
Danny laughed. “You mean he goofs off?”
“I DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOUR WORDS.”
“He don’t stay on the job. He goes to sleep or takes a walk outside or something like that.”
“HE OFTEN LEAVES THE STATION FOR HALF AN HOUR OR SO. BUT HE ALWAYS LEAVES A STUDENT AT THE STATION, SO THAT SOMEONE IS PRESENT AT ALL TIMES.”
“A student... one of us kids?”
“YES.”
On New Year’s Day, Danny invited Ralph up to his room, and asked him to bring the five boys he could trust.
They were an odd-looking gang. Ralph introduced them as they came in and sat on Danny’s bed and chairs.
Hambone was even bigger than Ralph, but where Ralph looked mean, Hambone looked brainless. He wore a silly grin all the time. Like a happy gorilla, Danny thought.
“He don’t look it,” Ralph said, “but old Hambone is a fighter when he gets mad. Took a squad of cops to bring him down.”
