Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Susan Richards Shreve

  “You’re late,” Charlotte said.

  “I’m in trouble.” She handed her bookbag to Charlotte. “I’m always in trouble for something. Could you carry this?”

  Charlotte hoisted it up on her shoulders.

  “What are you carrying? This weighs a ton.”

  “Everything,” Julia said, falling in step with her sister. “I’m not planning to go to school tomorrow. Or for the rest of my life.”

  Julia McWilliams was small for her age, wiry, with the agility of a spider monkey, strong legs, a mass of black curly hair and blue eyes so striking in their color and size that people stared. She was going to be beautiful.

  At Mirch Elementary, she had the reputation for being impossible. She did her work when she wanted to do it and spoke her mind, full of outrage at injustices. Especially toward children. She was upset about something all the time, speaking out without regard to authority or appropriate behavior. But she had an unbearable sweetness. Lost souls sniffed their way to her, settling under her wing, a role she wanted, sought out, taking on the sorrows of others as her own.

  At the drugstore, Charlotte picked up a copy of The Washington Post.

  “Sam said not to pay unless there was something important,” Julia said as they walked along Connecticut Avenue past the movie theater to Morrison Street.

  “I can’t just read the paper and put it back,” Charlotte said.

  “Sam can.” Julia followed Charlotte up the alley between Broad Branch and Nevada, taking out her key to open the door to the garage/office.

  “Sam can do anything,” Charlotte said, dropping her books on the desk, Julia’s bookbag on the floor, opening The Washington Post. “He’s fearless.”

  “Scary,” Julia said, collapsing on the couch, watching Charlotte bend over the desk to read the front section of the paper. “Are there any explosions?”

  On the front page there was the usual political news about President Reagan and the Congress and the economy, a new appointment to the Supreme Court, a terrible accident on Route 495 in which a tractor-trailer jackknifed, a leak in the roof of the Kennedy Center, and a small article in the right-hand column, below the fold, of an IRA bombing of a market in Belfast in which an elderly woman carrying her groceries was injured and a policeman was in critical condition. Charlotte cut out the article without reading further, folded the newspaper, and put it in the trash bin behind the garage.

  Julia read out loud: “A young policeman critically injured with head and chest wounds at Queens Court Hospital. Elderly pensioner taken to hospital with superficial wounds and discharged.”

  “Don’t read out loud:” Charlotte said.

  “Are we supposed to save the stories if the person wasn’t killed?” Julia asked.

  “I think so,” Charlotte said, opening the small file drawer in which Sam kept his collection of newspaper articles, slipping the new one in the folder marked DO NOT READ.

  “It’s creepy what Sam does,” Julia said. “I get nightmares.”

  “You shouldn’t read the stories,” Charlotte said. “I don’t.”

  “Well, if you did, you’d know that most of the people in these stories get killed,” Julia said.

  Under Sam’s desk was an old black metal toolbox that had been in the garage in Grand Rapids. In a tray at the top of the box were hammers and screwdrivers and nails and picture hangers, tape, screws, washers, all old, all a little rusty. Underneath the tray was a large space where Sam kept important documents. That’s where the list of instructions was kept, with pictures of their parents, cards from all the presents they had given each other and received from Noli and their grandfather, a sketchbook that had belonged to James, mainly pencil sketches of the places they had lived—“Ashkelon, 73, Chicken House,” “Athens, January ’70, view from the window of our flat overlooking the old city,” “The entrance to Rhodes, holiday, ’69.” In the corner of each sketch was a tiny profile of a woman, just her head, her small straight nose, her wide-set eyes high on her face, a sort of mythological goddess with long, ropy hair that fell beyond the pages of the sketchbook.

  “That’s our mother,” Charlotte said to Julia, who was standing in the corner of the office looking at the sketchbook.

  “Honest?”

  “Of course it is.”

  In fact, Charlotte didn’t know. What she knew of their parents she had made up from small bits and letters and pictures, but she liked to think that the curly-haired goddess was their father’s image of Lucy, pleased with the marriage she had invented for them, certain of it.

  “He must have liked her if he gave her that amazing hair,” Julia said.

  “He was wild about her,” Charlotte said.

  After his grandfather left, Sam unpacked his few belongings—a packet of his parents’ letters, a small painting his father had done of a river in northern Scotland, his file on terrorism, an empty file marked Rebecca and Miriam Frankel, which he planned to fill with letters to Rebecca, a haunting, whitewashed picture he particularly liked of all of them on the steps of the Lucas house in Grand Rapids, taken into the sun.

  Then he wandered through the sparsely furnished rooms of the Cage, across the wood floors with inexpensive Oriental-look-alike rugs from Sears, plastic couches and oak tables and bookcases with hand-me-down Hardy Boys and Horatio Hornblowers and Tom Sawyer and Robinson Crusoe, books from the childhood of another generation. There were paintings of darkly colored landscapes, flat lands with cattle grazing or sheep, too small for the walls where they were hanging. No life to the place at all, no specificity, no sense that boys lived here. It was too clean. The dining room was dark-paneled, mahogany-colored, and formal, with long tables and benches, an unpleasant antiseptic smell.

  When Mr. Barringer walked in, Sam was standing with his back to the door.

  “Isn’t it time for you to leave for school?” Mr. Barringer asked.

  “I was looking around,” Sam said, putting his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

  “You better hurry or you’ll miss lunch,” Mr. Barringer said.

  “That’s fine,” Sam said. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Pick up the bus on Nebraska just outside the gates,” Mr. Barringer said. “I called Alice Deal. They’re expecting you.”

  He was unpleasant, as if his distaste for Sam was specific.

  “One more thing.” Mr. Barringer followed Sam to the front door. “Your file says you were responsible for seriously injuring a young boy when you lived in Grand Rapids.”

  “I wasn’t responsible for that,” Sam said.

  “Nevertheless, there’ll be no bullying here,” Mr. Barringer said. “I just want you to be clear about that.”

  Sam swung his bookbag over his shoulder, opened the front door, leaving it for Mr. Barringer to shut behind him.

  “I’m clear about it,” he said.

  When Sam was ten years old and living in Grand Rapids, a story developed that he had been seen beating up Matthew Gray behind the athletic shed in the back of the playing fields of the elementary school. Matthew, small for his age and fragile, born with a crooked spine and an atrophied left leg, tormented by some of the older boys, never by Sam, had made the accusation from his hospital bed at Grand Rapids Memorial, where he spent two weeks recovering from a ruptured spleen.

  Matthew hadn’t actually seen his assailant. In fact, initially he thought that several boys had come after him, but because he lost consciousness and his memory was unreliable, when Ranier Moore had said it was not several boys but one and that one was Sam McWilliams, Matthew told his mother, who told the school, which called the police.

  “I wasn’t even there,” Sam said, baffled by the turn of events.

  Sam wasn’t a part of the in crowd in the fifth grade and had no wish to belong to any group, but he wasn’t invisible either. Too large a presence to be ignored, too much of a force, a boulder o
f temperament. No one could get at him.

  “I don’t remember even being on the playground that day,” Sam had said to his grandfather.

  But Ranier reported that Sam was on the playground, and so did several others who gave their names to the police and to the principal—Tommy Northrop and Peter Damstra and Felix Ponds and Russ Zeidema and Ray Oates and Johnny Fontana—all claiming to have seen Samuel McWilliams beating up Matthew Gray behind the athletic shed. They signed a statement.

  At first no one believed Ranier, but accusation has a way of accumulating its own force. Eventually the children and their parents and the faculty at school and the Lucases’ neighbors began to believe that in fact Sam must have been responsible. Even those who had a positive opinion of his integrity assumed they had misjudged him and began to worry about him as a member of their community.

  “I didn’t do it,” Sam said to his family in the weeks that followed.

  He was perplexed that he could be so broadly misunderstood, having no inclination for fighting, no flicker of the bully in him. But he wasn’t outraged. He seemed impervious to the actual injustice, as if he expected it, perhaps, or more likely, as if nothing in his life could injure him after the first injustice delivered by the Fates.

  “I know you didn’t do it,” his grandfather said, “but you’ve been accused.”

  “Why do you think they blamed Sam?” Charlotte had asked her grandmother in June before the movers came.

  “It’s because Sam has a mirror in his brain,” Noli said in that serious way she had of making sense out of nonsense. “And when a person looks at him, a boy like Ranier Moore for example, what he sees in that invisible mirror is himself.” She took the pins out of her hair so it fell in a gray shawl around her shoulders, took hold of Charlotte’s wrist. “So, if the boy’s not a nice person, as certainly Ranier is not, he won’t like what he sees in Sam’s mirror.”

  Sam didn’t blame Matthew. After all, what did Matthew, who already had enough troubles, know at six years old, if older boys were telling him they knew everything?

  What Sam wondered was why. Certainly it must have been Ranier who did the beating—maybe others—and if they wanted to lay the blame elsewhere, as they could, because apparently no one had seen what happened, why choose Sam McWilliams?

  “You keep yourself a secret,” his grandfather had said when Sam asked him why he was a target for blame. “It must make your peers try to break down your defenses.”

  “And accuse me of something I didn’t do?” Sam asked.

  “It’s one way to get your attention,” his grandfather said.

  Sam knew he was a lightning rod for trouble. Perhaps, or so he imagined, this aspect of his chemistry had come of his proximity to the lunch car on the train to Rome. He’d been the last one to touch his father’s hand, the last child his mother had kissed, and sometimes he wondered if this accident of fate had created a kind of internal radar that other people sensed about him and wanted to destroy.

  The long driveway from the Cage was thick with scrubs, weighted with trees, especially evergreens, dark for noon, with a damp, mossy smell of southern winters, a silent path. Sam was not easily frightened, but he had an odd sense that he wasn’t alone, that the woods on either side were populated, that eyes took him into account.

  Halfway down the driveway, the sign for the Episcopal Home for Juvenile Delinquents just in view, Sam found his mind wandering to the mirror Noli had imagined in his brain. Was it a small reflector as Noli saw it? Did a person have to look directly at his forehead to see himself, or bend down or stand on tiptoe? Did a person instinctively know it was there, or was word passed around?

  And as he was thinking about the mirror, even feeling it on his forehead, a rectangular mirror that ran the length of his head, someone came out of nowhere and grabbed him around the neck. An arm, not a terribly strong arm, across his throat, pulling him into the bush along the side of the driveway. The boy, about sixteen or seventeen, with rancid breath and acne, was not alone. There were four boys in a small clearing surrounded by forest. Two of them Sam had seen at Alice Deal.

  “So, asshole,” said one. “What’s up with you today?”

  Sam shook free of his assailant and stepped back, oddly calm.

  “What do you guys want?” he asked.

  One of the boys he didn’t recognize was tall and very thin, with a fuzzy blond film of hair on his chin and a cleft. The other was young, small, with spiky red hair. He’d seen the boys from Alice Deal many times and usually together. The talkative one with a low, crackly voice and bad skin was Peebles. His sidekick, who had a look of permanent fright and the eyes of a trapped rabbit, was referred to by Peebles as Banana.

  “Dunno,” the tall, thin boy called Reggie, the one who had grabbed him initially, said.

  “That’s what we want to know,” the redhead called Bird said. “How come you’re at the Cage?”

  “I stole some things to build a bomb shelter,” Sam said. He put his hands in his pockets.

  “Were you figuring to blow things up?” Peebles asked.

  “I was building a shelter for protection, not a bomb.”

  “Protection against what?” the tall boy asked, kneeling down, trying to light a cigarette.

  “People blow things up all over the world.” Sam shrugged. “Read the papers.”

  “Like, where all over the world have you been?” Bird asked.

  “Everywhere.” Sam refused the offer of a cigarette. “My mother’s a doctor for places where there are no doctors.”

  “Yeah?” the boy with the cigarette said.

  “That’s not true,” Peebles said. “I know you. You’re Sam McWilliams and you go to Alice Deal and your parents are dead.”

  Sam folded his arms across his chest.

  “You have incorrect information,” he said. “My parents are fine.”

  “Weird,” Peebles said. “Everybody at Alice Deal thinks they’re dead.”

  Sam looked directly at Peebles without smiling. “Well, they’ve got it wrong.”

  “So tell us what it’s like in the jungle,” Banana asked, sensing Sam’s temper, wishing to change the subject quickly.

  Sam leaned against a tree. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything you can remember,” Banana said.

  “Yeah,” Bird said. “Everything.”

  And they sat around the clearing in the woods, while Sam talked about Botswana, as he knew it from James and Lucy’s letters home, about the hippos running over his tent, about a terribly sick child with blue scurvy who’d been saved by his mother, about protecting the revolutionaries in Zimbabwe and dancing naked at Victoria Falls.

  “Wild,” the redhead boy said. “I wish I could go to Africa. I hate my home.”

  “You could meet me in Botswana,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, maybe I could do that,” Bird said. “That’d surprise my father. He’d have to find a new punching bag. Bye, Pops, I’ll say to him. Off to Africa. See you in September.”

  “So we can walk around with nothing on and ride camels?” Banana asked.

  “Jeeps,” Sam said.

  “I can drive a jeep,” Banana said.

  “The women don’t wear anything up top, do they?” the tall, thin boy said.

  “Nothing but jewelry,” Sam said.

  “Big breasts?” Banana asked.

  “Some big, some little,” Sam said. “Same as the women we know.”

  “The only woman I’ve ever seen is my Aunt Marty, and her breasts got cut off and now she’s dead,” Bird said.

  “He’s got a lot of cancer in his family,” the tall boy said.

  “Everybody so far but my brother, who’s a dickhead, and me.”

  “So let’s say we all go to Africa this summer,” Banana said. “What do we do there?”

  “Ride around
in our jeep, look at women, kill some lions, drink,” Peebles said. “Right, Sam?”

  “Not exactly,” Sam said. “There’s a lot of work to do. My mother works all the time.”

  “We’ll be regular missionaries working with your mother. What d’ya think, Sam?” Peebles asked.

  “Think?” He shrugged, but he wasn’t thinking about them at all. He was thinking about his mother, a kind of joy taking over, almost elation. His mother was a doctor in Africa caring for terribly sick children. His father was with her. Sam could say that. He could make it happen in stories. And who could argue? Who would know?

  “I don’t know you guys well enough to think anything about you,” Sam said.

  “So ask,” Reggie said.

  “I’ll tell you why I’m at the Cage,” Peebles said. “A lot of reasons. I stole a car and broke into three houses and showed evidence of violence toward family members.”

  “Me, too,” Banana said.

  “No, Banana, you didn’t,” Peebles said. “Tell Sam the truth. You had a gun and you shot it and missed.”

  “I was shooting at the fence. I hit the fence, Counselor.”

  “You had a gun. That’s the point. That’s why you’re here.”

  “Assault,” Bird said.

  “You probably don’t believe it’s possible, small as he is,” the tall boy said, “but Bird’s telling the truth.”

  “He was a hunk,” Banana said.

  “He was a kid,” Bird said. “And it wasn’t really assault.”

  “I’m here because I’m emotionally disturbed,” the tall boy said, lighting another cigarette. “Sexually confused, with the addition of learning disabilities.”

  “So what are you doing here besides the bomb deal?” Bird asked.

  Sam was silent. He could feel the muscles in his face freezing, his eyes going cold.

  “Like, stealing?” Bird went on.

  “Lay off, Bird. He doesn’t want to talk,” Peebles said.

  “Yeah,” Reggie said.

  Bird backed away from Sam into the shadows.