by Richard Peck
And so we started off home, feeling like we’d gotten a little more than we’d bargained for out of that afternoon, but not being sure what. When I turned in at my house, Flip said, “Not a word about this—to anybody.” And I gave him my if-you-can’t-trust-me-you-can’t-trust-yourself look.
Then he went marching off down Oakthorpe Avenue with his camera swinging around his neck and the Nazi sword held out in front of him—heading home to feed the Nitwits.
Five
If they had their supper that night—the Nitwits, I mean—they got it on the table themselves with no supervision from Flip.
When I walked in the back door, my mom greeted me with, “You’re in big trouble. The Commercial called to say not one of your papers got delivered. No doubt you have a reasonable explanation.” I was saved from giving it to her because the phone was ringing, and of course it was Flip.
“That damn Elvan. Bugging out on the papers. I should’ve known better than to trust that fat-butt. Offered him a dollar twenty-five to do it too.”
“Not in advance, I hope.”
“Are you kidding. Come on. We’ll have to get them out. Those subscribers’ll have our heads for this.”
We delivered the Commercial after dark that night, and just about everybody was out to greet us with a few well-chosen words. About the mildest came from Mrs. Kitty Riordan, who said to me at the same minute I was handing her the paper, “Naughty boy, where is my paper?” It didn’t make any difference that it was right there in her hand. She had to give out with something.
But, of course, Old Man Sanderson was the real treat of the evening. There he stood on his top step, scowling out into the night. I was nominated to walk up and hand the paper to him. “Just four hours late!” Old Sanderson snarled. “That’s all. Just four hours. I’ve called the Commercial six times, I’ll have you know, and if I have anything to do with it, you two louts’ll lose the route.”
I kept trying to hand him the paper, and he kept raving. Then he jerked it out of my hand and hauled off like he was going to smack me across the face with it. I didn’t flinch, but Flip stepped up behind me and said, “Go ahead and hit him, Mr. Sanderson. And I’ll be down at the police station in ten minutes to tell them you knocked Brian all the way down the porch steps and probably concussed him.”
Old Man Sanderson looked at Flip like he couldn’t believe his ears. Then he turned back toward the door, muttering, “Damn brats. I got a good notion to call the Commercial.”
We headed off down Prairie Avenue, and Flip said, “You got to be meaner than they are or they walk all over you.”
What you learn from a paper route. It makes you dread turning into an adult. About the only house where we didn’t have to take some kind of sass was Old Lady Garrison’s. Her door was shut tight with only the little light on over the door bell that nobody ever rang. We figured she probably didn’t know whether it was daylight or dark.
“Wait,” Flip said. “Just wait till we get hold of Elvan Helligrew tomorrow. There isn’t an excuse in this world that’ll get him off. None.”
“Maybe he was rushed off to the hospital with the acute appendicitis,” I suggested, just to whip Flip up.
“I’ll take out his appendix for him,” Flip muttered, “and maybe a couple of his teeth.”
There never used to be anything specially strange about Elvan Helligrew—unless you’re not used to his name. He was always fat, though. Not puppy fat. Fat.
But you know how it is, there’s a fat kid in every class. Nobody gave him a hard time about it as far as I know. He wasn’t jolly, either, like round people are supposed to be. He wasn’t really much of anything when it came to personality.
Once, though, back in the spring of fifth grade when we were all kind of naive, he created a sensation in a way. It was just before school was out for vacation. We’d turned in our books and everything. The teacher, Mrs. Vogel, didn’t know what to do with us. So, we had Open Discussion. She asked if any of us had any special plans about how we were going to spend summer vacation.
Right off, Elvan put up his hand, and Mrs. Vogel looked kind of startled. In this funny, high voice he had, he said, “I’m going to a trim-down camp in the State of New York.”
That was a real conversation-stopper. Nobody knew what a trim-down camp was, including Mrs. Vogel. She was all set to say, well-that’s-nice-Elvan, but he started fumbling in his hip pocket for his wallet, which was wedged in back there pretty tight. He took out a newspaper clipping and carefully unfolded it. It was an advertisement for a camp for overweight boys.
This place promised to trim from fifteen to fifty pounds off any fat kid who went there. They have this entire staff of medical doctors, and star athletes, and a special diet table. There was even a picture of a kid in the ad. He was holding the waistband on a pair of pants way out from his belly to show how much weight he’d lost just from going to this camp.
Mrs. Vogel looked a little bewildered. But since that was the first rise she’d had out of Elvan all year, she said, “Well, I’m sure everybody wishes you good luck in this enterprise, don’t we, boys and girls?” And we all said we sure did.
Then on the first day of that next fall, we were in the sixth-grade room with a different teacher. But Mrs. Vogel came right into the room during class time and walked up to the new teacher who didn’t know any of us yet. And she said to him in a fairly loud whisper, “I wonder if I could take a look at Elvan Helligrew.”
But Elvan heard her, wiggled himself out of his desk, and said, “Here I am, Mrs. Vogel.”
“Why, Elvan,” she said, kind of embarrassed.
“I gained twelve pounds at that camp,” he said in sort of a proud voice.
But on the day after Elvan didn’t deliver the Commercial, I was a little worried about what Flip might do to him. I always thought I was a pacifist by nature. That’s what comes of being the tallest kid in the class, which I always have been, but not the toughest, which I never will be. But Flip had been known to be somewhat scrappy. I wasn’t worried that he’d do any real harm to Elvan exactly. It’s just that it seemed pretty useless when it’s too late to do any good. Why bother?
Flip caught up with Elvan in the lunch room that day. I knew he would. For once, I felt like not having lunch with or near Flip. After all, I had other friends, but I couldn’t think of any at the moment.
It may have been the other way around, though. I mean maybe Elvan caught up with Flip. Anyway, there they were standing in the middle of the cafeteria, face to face and tray to tray. Flip looking mad and Elvan looking enormous.
Along with everybody else, I heard Flip call him “an irresponsible fink.” And—here comes the bad part—Elvan was just nodding and saying, “I know it, Flip, old buddy. I know it. Whatever you call me is true, and I don’t have no excuse.” And with this sick grin on his face. Like a damn dog or something—a damn big dog that hangs around waiting for you to kick it.
You could tell this was having an effect on Flip. He was sensitive, even though maybe nobody knew it but me. It sort of took the wind out of his sails, though I’m not so sure Elvan meant it to. It was almost like Elvan wanted more punishment—and in front of the whole school for an audience at that. It made me lose my appetite.
“Well, let’s forget it,” Flip said, backing off. “I’ll know better next time. There won’t be any next time.”
But Elvan was edging toward him with his tray piled up with double orders of everything and two desserts. For one tight moment, I figured he was going to sit down at our table. But he just hung over it, waiting to hear anything more Flip might have to say. Then he waddled off down the aisle to the last table—like a duck.
“Feel any better?” I asked Flip as he slapped his tray down across from me.
“Can it,” he said and stabbed his Salisbury steak with an upside-down fork.
Six
Now when I look back, I can see everything or nearly everything. It was like we were hypnotizing ourselves. We wanted some bi
g, glorious mystery to liven up the ordinary routine a little. For awhile, we weren’t admitting that we wanted to think the dead man in the woods maybe met with “foul play” as the saying goes. But we were getting there. The Boy Detectives were yearning for adventure with a big A.
Besides, there was all that Nazi junk. Pure intrigue. Better than late-night TV. We were in for a few more experiences before the last one we had together. And we were ready for anything, we thought.
Our fame at Coolidge Middle School was wearing off. The Public doesn’t concentrate on any one point long, especially with Easter vacation and softball season coming on.
One afternoon, Flip and I were working the route as usual. I was delivering on the north side of Prairie Avenue, and he was delivering on the south. This was our quick-march plan for days when we wanted to finish up early and stop off at Walgreen’s fountain for a coke or something before heading home. Anyway, Flip gave out with his two-tone whistle which was always our private signal. He was standing halfway up Old Lady Garrison’s front walk, motioning for me to cross over.
And behind him, for the first time ever, Old Lady Garrison’s front door was open. I couldn’t believe it. Her chauffeur always paid us at the end of the week. So we’d always go around back to the garage to collect. The only times we’d ever laid eyes on the old lady herself were when she’d be out in her Lincoln Continental, being tooled very slowly around town. She’d sit up in the back seat like a dusty-looking statue, with a veil down covering up her face, looking straight ahead. You couldn’t tell if she was cracked or not. You couldn’t even tell if she was alive.
But she wasn’t standing in the front door. It was Bunratty filling up the space completely. Bunratty was our own name for Old Lady Garrison’s chauffeur. We didn’t know his real name, but we’d gotten Bunratty out of a book we’d read part of once, and it sounded like exactly the right name for a chauffeur. So, Bunratty standing there in the front door gave me a kind of a shock, even though we’d had dealings with him before.
He handled everything for the old lady. And he knew we had this love affair going with the Lincoln. He never chased us away from it or anything. I think he figured we were respectful enough about it not to do any damage. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist. He looked a lot like a bodyguard out of Chicago and possibly not too bright, but you wouldn’t want to tangle with him. He had one enlarged ear like he might have been a fighter at one time, but apart from that, not a mark on him you could see.
Flip and I walked up to the front door together. When we were in the little entryway, with Bunratty looming over us, he said, very quiet, “Leave your papers out here. Mrs. Garrison wants a word with you two.”
I was trying to give Flip a look to see if he knew what we were in for, but he was gazing around, dazed, as we went into the front hall. “Wait here,” Bunratty said and disappeared through a normal-sized door which was cut out of two gigantic sliding doors. That front hall was bigger than a regular living room. And instead of wooden floors, there were little fancy interlocking tiles—light green and pink. And a staircase wide enough for a small car, that went up, then made a turn, then went up some more.
“She mad about the late delivery last week?” I whispered to Flip.
“I don’t think so,” he whispered back. “This doesn’t make any sense to me, but remember, she might be . . .” Then he tapped his forehead, which didn’t put me at my ease any.
Then Bunratty came back, and Flip and I bunched together. “Okay,” he said, very low, “go in. But don’t sit down unless she tells you to.” We went through the little door in the big door, and I was hoping it would stay open behind us. But it didn’t. Big Bunratty closed it as soon as we were inside.
At first, we thought we were alone and that maybe there was another door we were to go through. It was a huge room, with a regular forest of furniture. A lot of high-backed chairs and funny lamps that were on because the drapes were pulled to. Instead of having one big shade apiece, the lamps had little branches on them and a separate little pink shade on top of each branch. It was an interesting room, with a lot of rugs. Some of them overlapping. There was too much in it to describe. But we couldn’t find Old Lady Garrison at first.
Then we heard one of the chairs say, “Over here, boys.” It had a hollow voice. And we came around the chair, and there was Old Lady Garrison sitting, looking into a fireplace with no fire.
Old lady doesn’t describe her. Oldest lady in the world does. She looked too old to get up. Even the crevices in her face had wrinkles inside them. She had almost no hair, but she was wearing a hair net. And some of her lunch was on the front of her dress. Except it was more like a robe that went down onto the floor. There was a red, fake flower pinned upside down on her shoulder.
She looked up at us, but I wasn’t sure at first she could really see us. She looked. We waited. She looked. We waited. Then in a very clear voice, she said, “Which of you lads is Philip Townsend of 134 Oakthorpe Avenue?”
Flip was struck dumb. He stared at her and kept swallowing. “Well,” she said, just as clear as before, “have you forgotten which of you is which?”
“Me, ma’am,” Flip said. It must have been his first use of the word ma’am. I never heard it from him before.
“And which of you is Brian Bishop of 243 Oakthorpe Avenue?”
“That’s who I am,” I said, slightly confused.
“Yes,” Old Lady Garrison agreed, “you’d have to be.”
Another long pause. Finally, Flip said, “If it’s anything about the service, about the delivery or anything . . .”
“It’s not,” she said. “You can sit down.” We looked around for a place, but all the other chairs seemed to be going the other way and looked too big to deal with. “You can sit on the floor,” she said. “You’re young.”
“Well,” Flip said, and his voice cracked up a couple of octaves, “we ought to be getting on with our deliveries.”
“You’ve delivered at Sandersons already, haven’t you?” Old Lady Garrison said. “Then you can let the rest wait awhile.”
Along in there, I decided she wasn’t completely cracked. Half, maybe.
“I understand you boys found a dead body behind Dreamland Lake.”
Silence.
“Well, did you or did you not?”
“Yes,” Flip and I said, like a duet.
“I thought you were the ones,” she said and nodded to herself. “What did he look like?”
“The dead man?” Flip said.
“That is the topic of this discussion,” Old Lady Garrison said.
“There wasn’t much of him left,” Flip said.
“It made me sick,” I told her. I don’t know why I said it. It wasn’t the kind of information I’d been volunteering during our famous period.
“Did it, indeed,” she said, showing interest. “When I was a girl, I went to Dreamland Park with some regularity, though not, of course, with my mother’s permission. I know the area well. How does it happen that two lads such as yourselves are interested in it?”
“We’re interested in history,” Flip said.
“History!” Mrs. Garrison shot back. “History! History involves the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and the Norman Conquest. We’re talking about Dreamland Lake!”
“Yes, ma’am,” Flip said, to cool her off.
“And you’ve been reading Estella Winkler Bates for your information, haven’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s the only book we’ve found.”
“That girl is an absolute fool and cannot write.”
“I didn’t know she was still alive,” I said, surprised.
“I didn’t say she was,” Mrs. Garrison replied. “I never rode the roller coaster,” she said, looking at Flip. “It would have blown my hair. And I was subject to bilious attacks—like you,” she nodded at me. “I was interested to read of you boys finding a dead body. Children are so sheltered nowadays. Even at funerals, you never get the full effect. I under
stand that closed-coffin services are fashionable now. How is one to understand death without seeing it?”
Silence.
“Exactly,” Mrs. Garrison said, nodding to herself again and beginning to finger the flower pinned on her shoulder. “Do you see this flower? Remember it. It figures in what I am about to tell you. You will be better men for having seen death. Some persons think they will live forever. They will not. This is ignorance. Get up and go over to the piano, one of you, and bring back the photograph you find there in a Lalique frame. No, not both of you, I said one of you.”
Flip went, and I stayed on the floor. But Mrs. Garrison just waited in silence. When he came back, carrying a picture, she reached out a claw and took it, holding it up so we could see it. It was a picture of a boy, sitting on a bench with one leg crossed under him. He was in short pants, maybe ten or eleven years old. “This is the best portrait of him that I have,” she explained. “Though he was into his first pair of long pants when I lost him. He was my son, Oliver Hatfield Garrison, the only child I had. If he had been spared to me, he would have been a Circuit Court Judge, possibly, a State Senator today.
“Don’t be restless,” she said, looking over the picture at us. “This story will not last as long as you may think. In a few minutes, you will be back outside again, none the worse for this experience.
“This house was quite new when my son was taken. At his play, he ran into the street and was struck down by a milk van of the Morning Glory Dairy Company. If he had been killed outright, it would have been preferable. He lay in an upstairs room, which is untouched from his time, for six weeks and four days. He had suffered extensive brain damage. And yet, his mind was often clear. His vision, on the other hand, was not. ‘Mother,’ he would say to me, ‘wear something bright; otherwise, I can’t see you, and I think I’m alone.’ And so I always did. I wore a bright flower pinned to my dress, though it was winter and nothing in the garden.”
