by John Sanford
“Poor Alice she gave away two hundred dolars worth before she found out she could sell it.”
“What’re you doing?” a voice said.
Alongside Danny stood an older boy, his jacket unbuttoned to display, pinned to a point of his vest, the black-and-red enamel of a Dotey Squad badge.
“I’m reading what it says on the wall,” Danny said.
“Stand up when you’re talking to the Squad,” the monitor said.
The neighborhood became an island of quiet: a dozen boys had stopped eating, stopped talking, and stopped moving.
“I’m not standing up just because you tell me to,” Danny said. “If you want to talk to me, you can sit down, but I’m eating, and you have no right to inarup me.”
“Point out what you were reading.”
Danny gestured with his scalloped slabs of bread. “That thing there,” he said.
“‘Poor Alice,’” the monitor read, “‘she gave away two hundred.…’ That’s smutty.”
“What’s that mean—smutty?”
“If you read the posters on the bulletin-boards, you’d know there was an Anti-Smut Campaign going on. A smutty thing is a dirty thing. It’s smutty.”
“Instead of getting up all those posters,” Danny said, “they ought to wash the walls.”
“You admit, then, that what you read was smutty.”
“Sure, but I had to read it first to find out.”
“You should’ve known it was smutty before you read it. It was written on a wall, and anything on a wall is smutty.”
“How about the things written on the bulletin-board?” Danny said. “That’s on a wall.”
“You’re a wise guy,” the monitor said.
“I was born in Wiseville.”
“Well, wise guy, I’m running you in!”
“You don’t say. When’re you going to do that?”
“Right now, and I don’t want any more argument!”
“You can’t run me in right now,” Danny said.
“I can’t!” the monitor said. “Why can’t I?”
“Because I didn’t finish my lunch.”
From nearby tables, a laugh went aloft. The monitor whirled, but the laughter was dead and gone, and mouths innocent and guilty were chewing again—some on food and some (the guilty) on air.
“That’s tough—you didn’t finish your lunch!” the monitor said. “Come on down the Squad Room!”
“I’m finishing my lunch!” Danny said.
“You’re not finishing your lunch!”
“Oh, no?” Danny said. “What’s this, then?” He snatched up his second sandwich and the bottle of milk, and he bit and sucked, bit and sucked, until his face bulged and sprang a leak.
“Say, you’re finishing your lunch!” the monitor said.
Danny gulped, and the mouthful started on its way, and then he gulped again, kicking the food when it was down, and it stayed down. “That’s what I told you,” he said, and he continued eating.
He ate the last discoverable crumb, and he drank from the straw until the bottle was empty of milk and full of derision. He folded his sandwich-wrappers down to the smallest possible square, and, ambling, deposited them in a distant trash-basket. He made a second trip with the milk-bottle and a third with the straw. Then he re-strapped his books, tightened his tie, and, while he peeled the tinfoil from the chocolate bar, looked about for forgotten nothings.
He faced the monitor now, saying, “What’re we waiting for?” and he nipped off a piece of candy.
* * *
Tried, convicted, and denied an appeal, Danny had been sentenced to ten hours in the Squad Room, to be served in equal daily instalments immediately after dismissal from school. This was the fifth and final day of his confinement, and he was listening for the bell that would make him once more a free man.
In the corridor, a clock wound up and pitched five strikes, and the fifth touched off the gong. The door opened at once, and the Squad Master, Aaron Dotey, entered the room. “Johnson,” he said, “your time is up.” The boy rose. “I haven’t dismissed you yet.” The boy sat down. “Your time is up, and your offense has been paid for. But the Dotey Squad is never interested in punishment as such; it is concerned with reform. No boy ever leaves here without being asked the question that I ask you now: ‘What have you learned from your experience?’”
[You weren’t hurting anybody. You were just sitting there and eating your lunch, and then accidently you went and read that Alice thing on the wall, but nobody would listen to you when you tried to explain, and you got punished just like you were the one that wrote it. What could you learn from that?]
“I’m waiting,” the Squad Master said.
[Talk about justice. Where was the justice in convicting you for starting to read something and not knowing how it was going to turnout? Justice! If that was the kind of justice people got in the court, no wonder they needed lawyers like Julie Pollard.]
“Johnson,” the Squad Master said, “I asked you what you’ve learned from your experience!”
“I learned a lot,” Danny said.
“That’s fine. That’s just what we like to hear.”
“Only you didn’t teach it to me.”
Some Day You’ll Teach Him
Rain fell lightly, as if sprayed, and it fell fine, filling the crevices of clothes and smearing, when palmed, into a pellicle of water. Mounds of shopworn snow melted under the persistent fall, and the curbs along the gutters were awash. With his hands buried in his pockets and his books held in a headlock, Danny walked east on 59th Street, stooping slightly before the westbound wind. He passed the College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Roosevelt Hospital, and reaching Ninth Avenue, where the trolley-cracks were creeks, he paused to hunt for a ford. A truck went by with a bone in its teeth, and the boy was splashed with slush from his knees down. A woman standing near him was splashed too, and Danny tipped his cap when he saw that she was Miss Forrest, his section-officer at De Witt Clinton. [Miss Juno Forrest!’]
“Hello, Johnson,” she said.
“Hello, Miss Forrest.”
“Do you live in this part of town?”
“No, ma’am. I’m going over to Madison Avenue and take the uptown car.”
“You’ll be soaked by the time you get home.”
“I never get wet in this mackinaw. Except my pants.”
“Here’s a chance to cross,” the teacher said.
“Could I help you?” Danny said. “You might slip and fall down.”
The woman smiled. “May I take your arm?”
[Miss Juno Forrest!]
Guiding her from high point to high point over the uneven cobblestones, Danny was twice forced to wade deep in the gray waterice underfoot.
“Thank you,” the teacher said when they reached the sidewalk. “You ought to be wearing rubbers.”
“I oil my shoes every winter,” Danny said. “Could I carry your books?”
“You have your own.”
“I could easily carry yours too.”
“Thanks, but I’ll manage.”
“Do you live near here, Miss Forrest?”
“I have a flat on 58th Street.”
“We live in a flat too.”
“Everybody lives in a flat.”
“Only some people call it an apartment. My father says it’s an apartment if the house has an elevator, and it’s a flat if it’s a walk-up. Ours is a flat.”
“What does your father do, Daniel?”
“He drives a cab.”
“Are you going to follow in his footsteps?”
“I can’t,” the boy said, and he laughed. “He never walks.”
They rounded Columbus Circle and continued east along Central Park South. There were still a few sooty dabs of snow on the park lawns, and over the soft ground grackle rocked like little hobbyhorses, while sparrows feinted at sparrows among the leafless trees. Winter had gone, and rain was spring-cleaning the earth.
“How old are you?”
the teacher said.
“Going on fifteen,” Danny said, and he gave her a brief glance.
“Say it,” she said.
“How old are you?”
“Going on thirty-five.”
“How many children have you and Mr. Forrest got?”
“None—and I haven’t got a Mr. Forrest.”
“Oh,” Danny said.
“Why do you say, ‘Oh’?”
“I don’t know. I just said it.”
“I’m what you call an old maid.”
“I don’t call you that,” Danny said. [Miss Forrest, you called her, Miss Juno Forrest!]
“People don’t call an old maid an old maid. They think it.”
“I don’t even think it.” [ You thought of a forest with one ‘r’, and you thought of the sound of it, and you thought how the sound was like the word: the sound a forest made was forest, forest.]
At the Seventh Avenue corner, the teacher said, “I live down the street. Would you like to visit with me and have a cup of tea?”
“Yes,” Danny said.
The doors of the house were plate-glass set in iron frames, and from the dim day the teacher and the boy entered a dimmer hall. The elevator-operator wore braid and letter-carrier gray.
In the car, Danny removed his cap. “I thought you lived in a flat,” he said.
“That’s what it is,” the woman said. “Wait and see.”
* * *
A few tea-leaves, tea-logged and cold, lay stranded on sugar sand. The boy, his elbow on the window-sill, sat looking out at the dwindle of Central Park, an oblong spinning out to nothing in the creeping barrage of dark. The teacher was in profile to the last light, her face half silver and half blue.
“… I don’t know why I tell you all this,” she was saying. “Maybe it’s because I want you to know that teachers are human beings too. You see us for six hours a day, but there are eighteen more to the twenty-four, and we don’t stop breathing when you’re dismissed. You leave school and go home, and after a certain number of hours, you return—and there’s your teacher, your old-maid teacher, sitting just where she was when you left her, and she looks the same, and she’s dressed the same (a different shirtwaist, a different brooch, but no matter), and it’s as if she hadn’t moved, hadn’t lived, since the day before. But she had moved, and she had lived! When the door closed on the last of you, she’d turned to the window and stared out at the rain, listening to the sounds of the school dying down for the day, and then she too had gone home (a three room flat, a three-room apartment, three cubic holes in a hole called a house), and there, sitting, standing, or wandering from hole to hole, she’d passed the afternoon, and now it was evening, and now it was night, and there’d been nothing to take her mind off a clock ticking away another day lost, and now it was time for sleep, and taking a few pins from her hair, she’d begun to brush it, to brush it.…”
[The sound a forest makes is forest, forest.]
The boy rose. “I have to go home now,” he said.
The woman rose too, and she stood near him in the dark, and he thought of Miss Morey, and he remembered the scent of sandal wood, of sun-dried cloth, of hair so fragrant that it flavored the air, and he remembered a kiss that over the years was still so flavored, and he heard Miss Forrest say, “Will you come and visit with me again some time?”
And he said, “Yes, I will, Miss Forrest.”
Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers
Walking home from school on a spring afternoon, Danny entered Central Park at the Maine Monument, turned north to The Green, and crossed the grass on a diagonal toward The Mall. Here and there on the broad flow of lawn, there were pairs and larger conspiracies of children, some huddled, some in athletic formation, and some pursued and in pursuit. A short distance ahead of Danny, and moving in the same direction, a man strolled over the sward, idly cranking a cane as he went. At length, hanging the cane from the V of his vest, he drew a handkerchief from his hip-pocket, and as he did so, a wallet fell to the ground. Unaware of the loss, he polished his glasses, replaced the handkerchief, and continued on his way. Danny picked up the wallet and followed him. [A loser was somebody that lost something, and a finder was somebody that found it—but how could you be a finder if you knew who the loser was?] The cane became a golf-club, and just before reaching The Mall, the man drove a dandelion off its own tee, and then, lighting a cigar, he headed for the East Drive along a winding walk. [Wasn’t a finder supposed to help a loser?] The man paused (giving Danny pause) at a patent-leather perambulator. He peered under the hood, said something to the nursemaid (who looked quickly away, smoothing her starched skirt), and shrugged, and hooking his neck with the crook of his cane, he led himself off. [Supposed. Why was anybody supposed to help anybody else? If he couldn’t look out for himself, why should you do his work? Who the hell was he?] Scratching the small of his back with the curve of the cane, the man went downhill to the Boat Pond and stopped to watch toys in a water-waltz. Two sloops, one leading the other by the length of a bowsprit, were running head-on for the stone embankment, and as the man fended them off with the cane, a pair of boys raced up, came to a spraddle-legged halt, and stood glaring at him. One of them said, “Whatsy idea rooning our race for the Inanational Cup Race?” [You heard a lot about honesty being the best policy, but they didn’t tell you for who. If the man that had the Pierce-A would’ve told Pop the transmission was filled with sawdust, honesty would’ve been the best policy for Pop, all right, but how about the man with the Pierce-A? It was the same with the wallet. If you gave it back, honesty would be the best policy for the guy with the cane, but it would be the rottenest policy in the world for you, because he’d have the wallet, and you wouldn’t. What was the matter with honesty? Why was it only good for one side?] At the far end of the pond, the man turned unexpectedly to make a purchase from a candy-hawker—a nickel’s worth of jelly-beans—and Danny was abreast of him before he could slacken speed. He leaned over the candy-stand, hunting for merchandise that was not on display: time. Would the man pay for the jelly-beans with a coin, or would he reach for his hip-pocket? The man paid with a coin. Flipping one of the colored beads into the air, he caught it in his mouth and moved away up a path climbing out of the pond-basin. Danny bought a marshmallow banana and dogged him. [If you were honest, they told you, you’d have a clean conscience, and you’d be able to sleep at night, but when Pop went around to get his money back on the Pierce-A, they said the man couldn’t be disturbed, and if he couldn’t be disturbed, it stood to reason he was sleeping—so it looked like you could sleep with a dirty conscience too.] They passed Cleopatra’s Needle and the Metropolitan Museum. They crossed Transverse No. 3, where a boy on skates collided with the man, spun off, teetered, slithered, skittered, lost his balance, and fell. They entered upon the gravel walk rimming the Reservoir. [Oh, you’d sleep if you kept the wallet, never fear, and the chances were you’d sleep better than if you gave it back: you wouldn’t be worried about whether you’d been dumb.] A flock of mallards rode at anchor near the water’s edge. The man plunked a pebble among them, and three ducks turned up their skirts and dove. When they popped to the surface again, they had their hands on their hips, and they were abusive. [The man with the cane might be Rock D. Johnefeller, and everybody knew that he never went out of the house with less than ten thousand dollars. If you gave him back the wallet, you’d have a nice clean conscience, and you! d sleep fine—till you started dreaming about the ten-cent reward!] The man placed one hand behind his back, and with the other, the one holding the cane, he ran nobody through the body. He carefully wiped no blood from the blade, flirted his dry fingers to dry them, and then, making a scabbard of his fist, he sheathed the weapon. It became a cane again almost at once. [If you brought the wallet home, Mom would crack you in the jaw, and if you gave it back, Pop would do the same, so it was a crackin the jaw either way—except that one way you’d have the wallet. But that was a load of crap, and you knew it. Pop was as honest as Mom, and he�
��d crack you for keeping the wallet just like she would—only he wouldn’t crack you for holding onto it between 67th Street and 90th, and she damn well would!] The man balanced the cane on a fingertip. The man twirled the cane as he led a Fife & Drum Corps. The man speared imaginary scraps of paper and thrust them into an imaginary sack. The man was a polo-player whipping a mallet, a sniper sighting along a carbine, a batsman falling away from a duster, and a man walking with a cane. [The guys’d laugh till they split. “Danny, the little tin Jesus of Harlem!” “Danny, the Alger-boy!”“Danny, the rail-splitter!”“Danny, the Wanny, the Wick-Stick-Stanny!”“Danny, you could’ve bought a million ice-cream combs!”] Near the northern end of the Reservoir, the man was not fired on from ambush, but the cane became a crutch, and leaving no trail of blood behind him, he limped off the gravel path and made his painlessly painful way toward the 96th Street gate.
“Hey, mister,” Danny said. [“Danny! Danny! Oh, you damn Danny Merriwell!”] The man stopped limping and stopped. “Here, this belongs to you.”
The man patted the back of his pants. “I’ll be jugged!” he said, and the wallet changed hands. “You’re an honest kid.”
“Oh, not so very.”
“What do you mean—not so very?”
“All I did was give back your wallet.”
“And that’s not so very?”
Danny said, “Are you Rock D. Johnefeller?”
“Never heard of the bum,” the man said, “but I’m going to give you a buck for being not so very.”
“I don’t want your buck, mister.”
“You sound like you belong to the Boy Shouts.”
