by Betsy Byars
Mouse said, “Did you hear me? Some boys are going to—”
Suddenly he heard a shout behind him. He stopped walking, turned and saw Ezzie running toward him. Ezzie was waving his hands in the air, shouting, “Hammerman! Hammerman!”
Mouse said, “Wait a minute, Mr. Casino,” in a voice so low it seemed to come from the bottom of a well. He said louder, “Wait! Stop, Mr. Casino.” Mr. Casino walked a few more steps and then stopped. Mouse ran back toward Ezzie, and then Ezzie grabbed his arm and swung them both around with his momentum.
“Hammerman’s coming,” Ezzie gasped.
“What?”
Ezzie pointed behind him. “Hammerman’s coming,” he said. He panted for breath and tried to swallow air into his lungs. “He’s in front of the newsstand, he and the black sweat shirt. I saw them—they were coming this way—and I had to run all the way around to—” He gave up trying to speak, hung his head and gasped.
It seemed to Mouse that while Ezzie was having the most terrible trouble getting breath, he, Mouse, had stopped breathing altogether. Actually, the whole world seemed to have stopped. It had ground down like an enormous, overworked machine. “In front of Hogan’s newsstand?” he asked.
“Yeah.” Ezzie pointed, jabbing his finger in the air. “Right there.”
Mouse said in a rush, “Look, Ez, could you take Mr. Casino home for me. Just walk with him—that’s all you have to do—because if I run I can probably get home before Hammerman sees me.”
“I can’t, Mouse, I got to get home myself.” Now Ezzie seemed to have stopped breathing too.
“Ezzie, listen—”
“My dad will kill me, Mouse, you know that.” Ezzie was not as afraid of his father as he pretended, but he was afraid of Mr. Casino. He had once come upon Mr. Casino unexpectedly on the landing outside Mouse’s apartment. In that dark spot, Mr. Casino had seemed with his huge body and sunken eyes a terrifying figure. Ezzie had gasped and stood there, flattened against the wall, too frightened to raise his voice above a squeak. Even when Mouse had come out and said, “Oh, that’s just Mr. Casino,” Ezzie had still been frightened. “Oh, yeah,” he had said, “just Mr. Casino,” and he had done a Frankenstein-like imitation of him to cover up his fear.
Now he said, “I got to go. Hurry, and you’ll get home, Mouse. You can make it.”
Mouse said, “Wait a minute, Ezzie. Look, if you’ll—”
Ezzie was already running, pointing to his imaginary watch. “I got to go.”
“Ezzie—”
“I got to.”
Ezzie ran backward for a few steps, and then he turned and crossed the street. He waited for a car to pass, then ran faster. Mouse could see from the way Ezzie was running that he was not going to change his mind.
“Come on, Mr. Casino,” he said quickly. He hesitated for a moment, torn between whether he should try to return to Margy’s or get home. He put one arm around Mr. Casino’s huge waist and pushed him forward. “Let’s go home.” Slowly Mr. Casino began his rocking steps.
Mouse glanced over his shoulder. The sidewalk was empty. “Let’s go, Mr. Casino.” He turned and looked back again. “Let’s go.”
His head was pounding with fear. He could not even swallow. He expected his legs to fold up at any moment like the legs of an old card table.
The street was deserted now. That was another thing that frightened him. There was no one who could help him. He glanced back over his shoulder again. And then abruptly he felt that he could not bear the suspense any longer. He knew that Hammerman would be coming around the corner at any second—it was the instinct that comes to the hunted occasionally. He knew that Marv Hammerman was at this moment ready to round the corner of Fourth Street and catch sight of him and Mr. Casino making their endless way home. Then he would be lost. Mr. Casino, too.
He said, “Come in here, Mr. Casino. Quick!” Mouse went in the first door he came to and found himself in the dark entrance hall of an apartment. He put Mr. Casino back against the wall where the mailboxes were. He said, “Stand there.” Then he opened the door a crack and looked out.
The street was still empty. Mouse waited at the door with his hands in his jacket pockets. He said without looking around, “We’ll go in just a minute, Mr. Casino. This won’t take but a minute.” He opened the door again. There was no one in sight, and he opened the door wider. He stuck his head out this time, and at that moment Marv Hammerman and the boy in the black sweat shirt came around the corner.
Mouse drew back quickly against Mr. Casino, clutching Mr. Casino’s coat. He felt Mr. Casino’s huge body stirring beneath the cloth and he took his hand. “We’ll go in a minute.” He wondered if Hammerman had seen him glance out the door. If so, all was lost.
Mouse reached around Mr. Casino and tried the door that led to the apartments. As he had feared, it was locked. He and Mr. Casino were trapped in this musty smelly entrance hall. A person could be beaten and left for dead in a hall like this, Mouse thought. No one would even come out of his apartment to see what all the yelling was about.
Mr. Casino took a step toward the front door and Mouse said, “No, no, Mr. Casino. Wait a minute.” He held Mr. Casino’s arm with both hands and drew him back against the mailboxes. Mr. Casino remained beside him for a moment and then made a movement toward the door again.
“Just a minute, Mr. Casino.” Mouse dared not lean forward and look out the door for fear Marv Hammerman would be glancing at the door at the same moment. “We’ll be all right, Mr. Casino. Don’t worry. We’re just going to wait here a minute.”
Mr. Casino’s overcoat smelled of dry tobacco even though he had not smoked his pipe for years. It was a smell that Mouse associated with his own father. He lost the smell suddenly in the musty odor of the cold hall and he put his face against the overcoat.
Mr. Casino started toward the door again. Mouse said, “Not yet, Mr. Casino, please.” He held his arm, trying to draw him back. This time Mr. Casino was determined and there was no stopping him. “Mr. Casino, please.” Mouse tugged his arm. “Please!” He remembered Mrs. Casino telling about a time during their courtship when ten men had tried to keep Mr. Casino from entering a dance hall where she was doing the polka with another man, and Mr. Casino had toppled all ten men as easily as if they had been bowling pins.
Mr. Casino pushed open the door and started out. Mouse hesitated. He remained against the wall. He was sick. He thought that he shouldn’t have eaten those beans for supper. Even four lima beans could be a terrible burden for a stomach under conditions like these.
He swallowed and waited a minute more in the dark hall. He pressed his face against the cold metal mailboxes to see if that would keep him from being sick. Then in a rush he tore himself away from the wall and went out the door after Mr. Casino.
As he came through the door, he had a moment of dizziness. It was as if he had just stepped off one of those rides at the amusement park that Ezzie was so fond of and that made Mouse sick. “You want to get your money’s worth, don’t you?” Ezzie would say. Mouse wished that Ezzie was there to stumble around with him, moaning with pleasure at his dizziness. “Where am I, Mouse, where am I?”
The world was spinning so rapidly that for a minute Mouse couldn’t see anything. Marv Hammerman could have been right in front of him, and Mouse wouldn’t have been able to see him.
He held onto the banister, leaning on it, and then suddenly everything cleared. Mouse looked up the street and there was Garbage Dog coming toward him with an old Lorna Doone cookie box in his mouth. He looked the other way and there was Mr. Casino making his way back to Margy’s. In the distance were two strange boys walking along with a basketball, bouncing it back and forth between them.
Marv Hammerman was nowhere in sight. With an almost sickening sense of relief, Mouse knew that Hammerman had not seen him and had gone on across the street and up Fourth to where he lived.
“Wait a minute, that’s the wrong way, Mr. Casino,” he called quickly. “Wait, Mr. Casino.”
He ran after Mr. Casino and caught up with him just as the two boys stopped bouncing the ball. The boys were looking curiously at Mr. Casino in his long dark overcoat. “This way,” Mouse said. He turned him around, and with the same slow rocking steps they started for home. “We’ll be all right now.”
MOUSE ENTERED THE APARTMENT and went directly into the hall and sank down on his bed. In the living room his mother was still going through her cosmetic orders. She called, “Did you get Mr. Casino home all right?”
He said, “Yes.” He waited, but she did not say anything else. He turned over on his bed and looked at the wall. His heart was still beating so loudly he could hear it. It seemed to him that he had passed through the most dangerous moment of his life. He wanted to call out, “I was just almost killed in case you are interested,” but he did not. He knew the loud strange way his voice sounded when he was frightened, and he knew that his mother would not be concerned, but only tired, a little disgusted. “Don’t start on that again,” she would say. She never seemed to take danger seriously.
He thought of taking out a pencil, writing on the wall ALIVE AND WELL BY A MIRACLE and drawing an arrow to his collapsed body, but he didn’t have the strength to look for a pencil. He lay without moving.
He recalled the time he had had his tonsils out, how lightly his mother had treated that. She had said, “Look, it’s just your tonsils—those little things on the back of your throat. Don’t make a big deal out of it.”
But it had been a big deal to him. He could still remember the feeling of being in the hospital, of lying in a strange bed. The only reason he had been able to survive that night at all was because, at the last minute, his father had gone down to the car and brought up his flashlight. It was a big, heavy metal flashlight that his father kept in the car in case of an emergency on the road. His father had brought the flashlight out from under his jacket and quickly poked it under the covers. “There, now you’ll be all right.”
The flashlight had made Mouse feel better. The cold metal against his leg had calmed him. And when all the other children had gone to sleep and he alone had lain there awake, he had turned on the flashlight and shone it on the faces of the other children in the ward. He could remember right now the way their faces had looked in the pale circle of light. He thought that if he saw one of those children on the street right now today, he would recognize him and go up and say, “Hey, weren’t you in the hospital one time?”
Marv Hammerman came back into his mind and Mouse shifted onto his other side. He tried to think of something else.
Emergency Nine—Approach of Mad Elephants. When a herd of mad elephants is stampeding in your direction, quickly climb the nearest tall tree and wait. According to Ezzie there was nothing as pleasant as lying coolly on the limb of a huge tree while a herd of mad elephants passed beneath you like a noisy, dusty river.
“Do you have any homework?” his mother called from the living room.
“No.”
“Well, there’s a horror movie on channel fifty-three.”
“I might be in in a minute,” he said. He unzipped his jacket and stared up at the ceiling.
Emergency Ten—If attacked by a vampire, make the sign of the cross.
Emergency Eleven—If attacked by a werewolf, draw a six-pointed star and get in it.
The phone rang, and his mother answered it. She came into the hall where he was lying on the day bed. There had been a lot of talk at one time of moving into a larger apartment where he could have a bedroom of his own, but Mouse thought he would feel funny in a bedroom now. The hall with the day bed and the bookcase at the end for his things suited him just fine.
“Your dad wants to talk to you.”
Mouse got up quickly because his father’s understanding about the flashlight was still in his mind. Mouse’s father had been driving a truck for the last two years, and Mouse hardly ever got to see him. He ran to the phone. “Hello.” He looked down at the table. On the cover of the telephone book he had written ALL THE NUMBERS IN HERE ARE TO BE DIALED ON THIS, and then had drawn an arrow to the telephone. “Hello,” he said again, louder.
“Benjie?”
“Yes, this is me.”
“Well, how are you, son?”
“Fine.” He paused and added with a loud laugh, “For now anyway.” It was his scared voice, but his father did not recognize it over the telephone. Mouse waited for his father to say sympathetically, “Oh, is there something wrong?”
Suddenly he wanted this more than anything. He began to twist his finger into the telephone cord. He wanted his father to beg. “Tell me, Benjie,” he wanted his father say. “Whatever the trouble is, I want to know. I demand to know. Tell me.”
“Oh, all right,” he would then answer as casually as possible. “Three boys are going to kill me—Marv Hammerman, Tony Lionni, and a boy in a black sweat shirt.”
His father said, “I’m in Kentucky and, boy, is it raining. How is it there?”
“Well, the weather’s all right.”
“Fine, listen, I was just thinking maybe we might do something next weekend. It looks like I’m going to be in town after all.”
Mouse hesitated, holding the phone against his cheek. His mother was not looking at her orders now, but was sitting up straight listening to his conversation. She said, “Speak up, Benjie, talk to your father. This is long distance.”
“I know, Mom.”
“Well, how about it, Benjie? You want to do something next weekend?”
“Sure,” Mouse said, “that would be fine.” Then he laughed again and said, “If I’m still able to do something.”
“Don’t start on that, Benjie,” his mother said in a low voice.
“How does the baseball game sound?” his father said.
“What?”
“The baseball game.”
“Fine, that sounds fine,” Mouse said, looking at his mother.
“Sound excited,” his mother suggested from the sofa. “He’s making a special effort to do this.”
“Yeah, that sounds very fine,” he said. He gave up on his father. One by one, the people who could help him were falling away, leaving him to face his trouble alone. It was like one of those western movies.
“And now let me speak to your mom for a minute,” his father was saying.
“Sure.” He held out the phone. “He wants to speak to you.” His mother came over quickly, and Mouse went back and lay on the day bed. He heard his mother saying in a low voice, “No, no, there’s nothing wrong with him. No, nothing.” There was a pause. Her voice got lower. “He’s just got the idea that some boys are after him, that’s all. It’s nothing.”
He waited, thinking he might be called back to the telephone. Then he heard his mother say, “No, we can have supper here. You have to eat out too much. No!” She laughed. “Besides I’ve got a new recipe I want to try—a lady served it at one of my parties.” There was a silence. Then she laughed and said, “Napoleon’s hot dogs.”
Mouse turned over. The covers were twisting beneath him like a rope. He looked at the wall and he remembered another dangerous thing that had happened to him, a second crisis survived, like the tonsils.
In September he had got the idea that he would like to climb up the cliff behind the new shopping center at Hunter’s Square. There was a large rock on top with a button-like rock in the center, and Mouse wanted to climb up, write PRESS FOR SERVICE and draw an arrow to the button. The idea, once it had entered his mind, would not leave; and finally he had persuaded Ezzie to go over to the shopping center with him.
Ezzie had not been enthusiastic. As Mouse was purchasing a can of spray paint in the dime store, Ezzie had stood there saying, “What do you want to do this for, Mouse? That’s forty-nine good cents you’re wasting!” Ezzie never had any money. His father pretended to be deaf when the word allowance was mentioned.
“It’s not a waste.”
“We could buy pretzels with that money. You get three pretzels for th
irty-nine cents which would leave a dime for—”
“Ez, I’m going to do it.”
There was a deep sigh from Ezzie at this persistence. He followed Mouse out of the store and spoke only when they were facing the solid wall of the cliff. “Where is it you’re going to write this, Mouse?” he asked scornfully. He already knew because Mouse had told him a dozen times.
“There.”
They looked up together. Mouse was squinting into the sun, but Ezzie’s face had a flat look. He said, “Why can’t you just write your name over there under the peace sign like any normal person. That’s what I’d do.”
“No.”
“Sometimes you’re stupid, Mouse.” Ezzie sat down on the ground. “Well, go on, get it over with.”
Mouse hated for Ezzie to be disgusted with him. He was the only good friend Mouse had ever had. He looked at Ezzie who was staring at his feet. “All right, Ezzie, I’m going to start now if you want to watch.”
“I’ve seen disasters before,” Ezzie said in a bored voice.
“Here I go anyway.” Climbing up the cliff was easy at first. A lot of boys had climbed and left footholds, but Mouse went slowly anyway. The can of spray paint was tucked in his belt pressing against his stomach.
The higher he climbed, the harder it got. By the time he reached the halfway mark he was winded, and his arms and legs had started to ache. Every minute began to seem like ten.
“I’m still going,” he called to Ezzie, but Ezzie did not answer. Mouse wanted to look down, but he had had to stop doing that a long time ago because of dizziness. “I’m still going, Ez.”
He had to find little ways to climb now because there did not seem to be any footholds at all. He used roots and crevices and toeholds, and finally he was there. Gasping from exertion and nervousness he panted out, “I made it, Ez.” Ezzie did not answer.
