“I was waiting in case the police came back,” Oliver whispered. “What are you doing up?”
“Get dressed and meet me in the office,” Sam said.
“Now?” Oliver asked.
“Now,” Sam said. “Before it gets light.”
Sam had an eye for the look of things. The garage was done up, decorated, given the sense that someone, not a young boy certainly, had paid attention to the room. There were windows on three sides of the rectangular structure, built for the narrow cars of the twenties, two windows facing the house, one the alley, and a door which opened to the garden. Six of James McWilliams’s paintings—rugged Scottish shorelines of his childhood, the water more black than blue, the land scrubby with low brush and large rocks down to the edge of the sea—were hung next to windows as if they had been conceived with windows in mind, so the changing light of day glanced across their surface, altering the rich color as the earth moved around the sun.
The room was sort of Middle Eastern, with bright, worn rugs and soft, muted Indian cloth covering the old furniture: a couch, an overstuffed chair, a large desk in the center made from an ancient door. Sam’s office. It was the place where he wrote his lists and read his parents’ letters home, which had been written during their travels, as recent as the week before they died.
In the afternoons, the McWilliams children worked in the office. Work is what they called it, and since Charlotte and Oliver did well in school and Julia well enough, their grandparents assumed that the work was schoolwork. It didn’t matter. The place was theirs, and it was entirely satisfactory for Noli and William to know that the children were out back, in view of the kitchen window, whatever they might be doing.
“What’s going on?” Oliver asked, slipping in the door to the office, where Sam was already busy in the corner of the room, working by the light of a candle, since it was still too dark outside to see.
“I’m making a bomb shelter,” Sam said, reading the book of instructions by candlelight. Beside him the flashlight and lengths of pipe lay on the rug. “I wasn’t going to tell you until it was finished.”
Oliver folded his arms across his chest. He was small for his age and blond like his mother, ruddy-complexioned, long-legged, so he might grow, although the pediatrician had predicted a 5’ 8” cap of height, quite a lot smaller than Sam. He and Sam fought about it, as if height were a matter within their control.
Noli called Oliver “Chief Deep Water,” and at home, he was thoughtful and interior, similar in presence to Charlotte but with a turn of mind more philosophical, given to broad statements about mortality and life and God, whether His nature was benevolent or angry, whether He existed, whether He ate meals and slept at night and had conversations with other people in heaven. These pronouncements, uttered in a surprising bass voice, methodically and in full sentences, were funny and heartbreaking from a young boy with blond hair and bright cheeks. At home, he was the source of dinner-table laughter. School was another story. Gong, he was affectionately called, for his sonorous voice. He was popular, the first one picked when teams were chosen, president of the class, the spokesman, not too verbal or too intellectual or too sensitive to be a regular boy, right in the center of the pack. In fact, the pack itself. “Good” was written across his fifth-grade report card. Adaptable, Considerate, Responsible, Cooperative. The only hint of “Chief Deep Water” at school was with the girls, especially older girls, whom he loved deeply, to whom he confessed the inner workings of his heart, to whom he promised, each in her turn, lasting devotion and fidelity.
Oliver sat down on the couch.
“So you did take those things from Hechinger’s,” he said.
“I did,” Sam said.
“You stole them?”
“It wasn’t exactly stealing,” Sam said. “I’m going to pay for them.”
“You won’t be arrested, will you?”
“I won’t,” Sam said.
Oliver walked over to the window facing the alley and looked out for the police car.
“How come we need a bomb shelter?” he asked quietly.
“Just in case,” Sam said.
“In case of what?” Oliver asked.
“Of an emergency,” Sam said. “Would you like to see it?”
He moved the table off the rug and pulled the rug back, exposing a square of plywood, which he lifted, then handed Oliver the stolen flashlight.
“Look down there,” he said. “Or you can climb down the ladder. The pipes are for support so the dirt doesn’t collapse on us.”
Oliver leaned over the opening, pointing the flashlight into the hole.
“Creepy,” he said, sitting back on his haunches. “What is it?”
“It’s a tunnel.”
“Where does it go?”
“To a room, but I haven’t made it yet.”
The sun was beginning to fill the room of the garage, a gradual and pale light seeping through the windows, and Sam blew out the candle, leaned back against the wall.
Sam thought of the McWilliams family as a small country, a nation-state of which he was, by virtue of age and vision, the natural leader, and his particular vision was a result of remembering.
Even Charlotte had forgotten all of it: The Last Supper in Milan, the train to Rome, the bomb, the Danesi family. Their parents. His siblings didn’t understand the need for self-defense, and so Sam saw his responsibility as that of defender, in the oldest definition of the word. His sense of country was actual, not the rented clapboard house on Morrison Street, but tribal, a kind of mental landscape in which the country was themselves.
Sometime in elementary school in Grand Rapids, Sam’s science class had studied the defense system of animals, particularly mammals, and each of the students was asked to choose an animal and know its habits and imagine its defense system as personal. Sam chose a porcupine. At night he’d lie in bed and imagine dangerous moments, concentrating on his quills. He could actually feel himself grow larger, feel the prickly things bursting out of his porcupine skin.
“So what are we going to do with our bomb shelter?” Oliver asked.
“Live in it in case of trouble,” Sam said, replacing the makeshift plywood square, putting the rug back so it covered the floorboards, positioning the desk over the bomb shelter.
“I’m afraid of bombs,” Oliver said, crouching beside his brother.
“I’m afraid of them, too,” Sam said. “That’s why we need the shelter.”
The dusty sun fell through the garage window in a triangle of light across Oliver’s shoulders, and Sam reached over, boxing him gently in the chin, a gesture familiar to him as if it were one his father had used.
CHAPTER THREE
THE CAGE was on Nebraska Avenue. It had been built in the late nineteenth century as a private house on a dip of land just where Nebraska slipped off the map into a dark shadow of trees that marked the beginning of Rock Creek Park, a hollow in the damp, dank folds of vegetation where the creek ran. It was actually the Episcopal Home for Juvenile Delinquents, called the Cage by the boys who lived there, although they were free to come and go. It was a place for bad boys too young for prison terms, charged with misdemeanors, stealing mainly, occasionally drugs, breaking and entering, a history of misbehavior, middle-class boys with records.
Sam moved into a room on the third floor, in the back of the Cage, before Christmas, assigned there for six months by Judge Burns of the juvenile court of the District of Columbia, eligible with good behavior for reconsideration in June.
Noli had wanted him to lie.
“Just don’t bring up the bomb shelter, darling,” she had said, sitting across from him at the kitchen table the day before his court appearance in November. “Or mention the other times you needed to get something at Hechinger’s. The judge has no reason to know that.”
Sam had confessed to stealing the pipe and fl
ashlight, but he hadn’t mentioned to the police any of the other times he had shoplifted during the last eight months. The shovel, coils of rope, a trowel, several lengths of pipe, a metal bucket, nails, a good hammer. The wood he had taken from discards piled at the back of a construction site at Morrison and 32nd.
After the police came and he was charged with shoplifting the pipes and flashlight, Sam had loaded the back of his grandfather’s old car with all the stolen items. The manager of the store, an older man who must have been surprised by Sam’s simple decency, added up the cost of the stolen items—$326.75—which Sam paid him in cash.
“They’re yours,” the manager said when Sam turned to go, leaving the merchandise on the counter.
“I don’t need them anymore,” Sam said.
“You might,” the manager replied.
Sam shrugged. “Maybe,” he agreed, and reloaded the back of his grandfather’s car with his tools.
Nothing might have come of the incident if Noli, with her urgent need for story-making, especially with strangers, had not told the officer that they were from Grand Rapids. And somehow the officer, already suspicious of Sam, irritated at what his teachers thought of as arrogance, an intractable stubbornness, the sense Sam gave of living outside the law, had found out about the incident with Matthew Gray, and the situation escalated.
The way things actually turned out had a lot to do with Sam. Not what he had actually done, but what happened in his presence, the way his entering a room—like the juvenile courtroom or the lobby of the Second Precinct—unsettled the balance, laid bare the arrangement of posturing and conversations, caused a person generally concealed to reveal his ugliness.
He was an observer, not a participant—but the expectation people had of him was that he would do something, that he was dangerous to the status quo.
“Think of it this way, darling,” Noli said. “It’s not the business of the court that you were planning to make a bomb shelter.”
“I wasn’t planning, Noli,” Sam said patiently. “I made a bomb shelter from things I stole. That’s the truth.”
“I’d keep that information to yourself,” Noli said. “The manager at Hechinger’s liked you very much, and he’s certainly not going to tell the police.”
In a chair beside the kitchen window, William Lucas was drawing the tiny insides of a bisected segment of an egret. He looked up.
“We don’t know what the manager’s going to say, Noli,” he said quietly. “And Sam has a reputation.”
“But he didn’t do anything to Matthew Gray, if that’s what you mean,” Noli said.
“That’s true,” William said. “But people believe that he did.”
When Sam appeared before Judge Burns the following morning, he told the truth.
Certainly, he thought, the judge would understand why a boy in his situation would feel the need for a bomb shelter. A judge like Mr. Burns, full of decency and seriousness, personable as he seemed to be and warm, would know that essentially Sam was innocent, not of stealing, but of bad intentions.
But he was wrong.
In his final statement, Judge Burns concluded that Samuel McWilliams was a troubled boy, that he should be removed from the agreeable complacency of a home where nobody seemed to have control of him, that he was possibly a danger to society.
The judge recommended the Episcopal Home for Juvenile Delinquents for six months as soon as space was available and told Sam that he might be released earlier than the six-month period if he adjusted.
The word “adjusted” confused Sam. He was adjusted. For the past seven years, he had had the responsibility for his family. He was smart—that wasn’t hard to know in Alice Deal’s ninth grade—and he would have been doing well in school if he’d been able to sustain an interest in the subject matter and was willing to do the work. Of course he was adjusted. As Noli said, he could be dropped in the middle of the ocean and make it to shore; he could survive on his own anyplace. He needed no one, was entirely free of the usual adolescent dependencies, except—and this he knew was the clincher—the black beast of his psyche, on which a whole series of reversals could depend, Sam McWilliams’s Achilles’ heel. He required the presence of his brother and sisters as a constant—his lifeblood, his reason for being.
He had skipped childhood altogether, knowing the world in the particular way of children to whom the Angel of Fate has delivered his first terrible lesson before the fragile cells of faith have had a chance to multiply. He was certainly adjusted, because his X-ray eyes, born of disaster, could see straight to the center of things.
“What did the judge mean by adjusted?” he asked his grandfather the night after his court appearance.
“Well-adjusted is what I’m sure he means,” William said.
“Do you think I’m well-adjusted?” Sam asked.
“Of course I do, but in this case, I’m not the judge.”
William Lucas knew that Sam was more right than wrong, if such a thing as right and wrong existed. Sam’s problem, if it could be called one, was that he told the truth.
Sam arrived at the Cage on a Tuesday in early December. The occasion was not what he’d thought it would be; he’d imagined a policeman escorting him, perhaps in handcuffs, maybe even Judge Burns would be there. He’d expected a severe reception, an announcement of the seriousness of the place, a priest or guards or a tank of a woman with tools for child destruction in hand. But in its attitude, the Cage was more like summer camp, half a mile from his house.
Mr. Barringer met them at the door. He was short and broad-faced, with a monotony in his voice and bearing.
He turned to Sam. “Are you called Samuel?”
“Sam’s fine.” He folded his arms across his chest.
“So, Sam,” Mr. Barringer said. “We have rules, as you might imagine. No visitors. No visits home. Two telephone calls a week.” He motioned to William Lucas. “Time for you to be on your way. Say goodbye to your grandson.”
There was a nastiness to the way he spoke, which William Lucas ignored, nodding to Sam, following Mr. Barringer down the steps, across the vestibule, and out into the filtered sunlight of an early-December afternoon. He got into his old yellow Mercury station wagon without looking back, turned on the engine, and drove to the end of the driveway, stopping the car just before Nebraska Avenue. The day was changing to darkness just beyond where he had stopped; the trees, even leafless, seemed a heavy weight above him, the sky closing in. He turned the radio to the classical station, leaned his head against the steering wheel, and wept.
Sam had left a complicated list of instructions for his brother and sisters. He had arranged to have math tutoring on Tuesdays when Oliver had basketball practice in the gym at Alice Deal Junior High so they could meet afterwards. On Mondays and Thursdays, he planned to meet Julia and Charlotte on Fessenden Street at 38th near Mirch Elementary on his way back to his new home. And on Friday, when Oliver was out of school early, the plan was to meet at Gifford’s Ice Cream on Connecticut Avenue. His siblings believed the arrangement had to do with Sam’s anticipated homesickness. But Sam didn’t expect to be homesick. He was actually looking forward to the strangeness of a new life, of living alone in a house with people he would have no other occasion to know, of a chance to test himself in the world. He would miss his sisters and brother, but his real reason for daily communication was control.
His list of instructions included a section called WARNINGS:
Set your alarm for 3 a.m. and check the stove in case Noli has been cooking in the middle of the night and forgotten to turn off the oven.
Do not drive with Grandfather. Make up an excuse so you don’t make him angry. But, I repeat, DO NOT, under any circumstances, drive with W. W. Lucas, even to a doctor’s appointment.
DO NOT tell anyone at school that I’m at the Cage. They’ll think you’re creeps or criminals or that our family
is screwy. Say nothing about me.
If Noli decides to stay in her room, do not open the front door to strangers.
Cross at the lights. This is for you, Oliver.
If a package comes to the front door, remember the mailbomber I told you about and leave it on the porch.
Smell the milk before you pour it on your cereal. Noli has a habit of leaving it out all day.
Do not go on the metro. Somebody got pushed on the tracks last Thursday and is in D.C. General and will probably die.
Keep the door to the garage office locked, especially if you’re working in there. Around Thanksgiving I saw a suspicious man in the alley looking in the trash cans.
Do not climb out of the bedroom windows onto the roof over the kitchen in order to look into Sally Piscar’s bedroom. This is for you, Oliver. You could fall on the patio.
NOTES: Please read the daily newspapers, just the front section with the national and international news, to check for my terrorist collection. If you happen to see an article, buy the paper and clip the story for my file. Otherwise, don’t buy the paper. You can’t take it home anyway because of Grandfather.
In the box marked LETTERS J AND L in the hall closet are the letters between James and Lucy that Noli has saved. I’d like to read a few of them at a time, so bring a packet once a week and I’ll return the ones from the week before so Noli won’t know we’re reading them. I don’t know if she has ever read them—certainly Grandfather hasn’t—but she’s made a point of telling me that we shouldn’t, so I don’t want her to find out that we are.
More later ——— SLMcW
On the afternoon Sam moved to the Cage, Julia was kept after school. Charlotte was waiting on the front steps of Mirch Elementary, reading Madame Bovary, when Julia came out of the building, her bookbag full to bursting.
Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 5
