Catch You Later, Traitor

by Avi

  “Just tell the FBI you were stupid,” my brother cried. “Otherwise you’re going to ruin my life.”

  Ma turned to Bobby. “That’s a rather self-centered way of thinking about this.”

  “If Dad gets into trouble with the government, I’ll never get to go to that science camp. It’s run by the government.”

  “This is about all our lives, Bobby,” said Dad.

  Bobby got red in the face and jumped up. “This family is so stupid,” he said. He stormed off.

  After a moment, Dad said to me, “Just know I won’t get another teaching job. I’ll be blacklisted.”

  I said, “Like Dashiell Hammett.”

  “Right,” said Dad, standing. “Anyone want to listen to the radio? I need to relax.”

  I said, “Did you tell Bobby about the Commie stuff you told me?”

  “No. I assumed you did,” he said as he went toward the radio room. Ma went with him.

  I stayed at the table, thinking. What Bobby said was the proof I needed. He had been snooping, listening, and faking that he didn’t know about the FBI coming after Dad. Then I thought about what he had said, that the government could take him to the moon. The way I saw it, he’d do anything to go. Did he inform on Dad—make a deal with the government—so he could get to that camp?

  Awful, but it fit.

  I reminded myself—once again—that Dad told me not to talk about what was going on. But I couldn’t keep it locked up. It was too big. So on Thursday, when I went for my usual time with Mr. Ordson, soon as I sat down at the table, I said, “Want to know what happened this week?”

  “I should be pleased to listen.”

  “Kat’s parents sent her away. Because of me. And now the FBI is asking questions about Dad at his college. He might lose his job. The more I work on it, the surer I am it’s my brother who went to the FBI. He’s the informer.”

  He said, “That’s quite a lot of news for one week. I am terribly sorry about Kat. And your father. Now, Pete, do you truly believe your brother is working with the FBI against your father?”

  “Told you, he’s been snooping around, listening to conversations, looking in Dad’s files.”

  He said, “How very sad, if true. Pete, there’s an old saying: A brother who is a friend is the best of friends while a brother who is an enemy is the worst of enemies. Cain and Abel, alas. Can I tell you something as a friend, Pete?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Regarding your brother, you need more evidence.”

  “I thought of that,” I said. “Remember my telling you about an old friend of my father’s? That Depaco guy? If he’s the informer, I won’t have to worry about my brother.”

  “Then the sooner you see him, the better.”

  “That’s why I’m going on Saturday.”

  26

  Saturday morning, I told my parents I was going to the movie show. Instead, I headed for the subway, the directions to Depaco’s home in my pocket, Sam Spade in my head.

  Leaving the sunlight behind, Pete Collison walked into the BMT Borough Hall station. He popped a dime into the turnstile slot and went down to the platform. The only light there came from dim bulbs in metal cages on the ceiling. The air was damp and reeked of trash and carried sounds of dripping water, creaking beams, and the far-off rumblings of trains. On the platform, most people were standing still, not looking at one another. Others walked about aimlessly, as if wondering if they were ever going to get anywhere.

  Ten minutes later a train burst in like a rocket on wheels. Brakes shrieking, it lurched to a stop. Doors leaped open with a bang. People hurried off as if afraid they might be trapped. Pete jumped on and worked his way through the cars until he reached the first one. From behind the front window, he watched the tunnel whiz by like a movie about darkness, the train rocking and rumbling. Twenty minutes later, he got off at the Graham Avenue station and climbed to the street. The sun was still shining.

  Right off, I could tell that this part of Brooklyn was different from where I lived. It was much more crowded and the crowd was more colorful, people’s skin as well as their clothing. They were going in and out of small shops plastered with signs offering crayons to cabbage and everything in between. The air smelled of gas, trash, and food.

  I found my way to a narrow street lined with tightly parked cars and skinny trees. In small fenced-in front yards lay broken flowerpots, bikes, dented garbage cans, and busted baby carriages. One yard had an American flag. Another had a few yellow daffodils. Through an open window, I heard a kid crying while someone sang a song in a language I had never heard till then.

  The house with Depaco’s number was an old two-story yellow brick building in a row of yellow brick buildings. I waited until my heart stopped thumping, walked up the three cement steps, took a deep breath, and pushed the doorbell. The buzz inside sounded like a giant mosquito. Moments later, the door swung open.

  Standing there was a thin guy wearing a sleeveless white undershirt. His deep, dark eyes peered down at Pete from under eyebrows that lay across his forehead like an iron bar. His long, swarthy face needed a shave. A gold chain lay high on his hairy chest, probably marking the low boundary for his razor. His knobby-toed feet were bare and a lit cigarette was wedged into one corner of his mouth like a lollypop stick that had lost its sweet.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Sir, are you Alberto Depaco?”

  “What if I was?” His voice was thick, gravelly, and suspicious.

  “My father is Dennis Collison.”

  His eyes got big. A grin crept across his face. “Dennis Collison? You gotta be kidding. Who are you?”

  “His son. Pete Collison.”

  He snorted a horselaugh. “Holy moly. You look just like him. Jeez Louise! Dennis Collison. Son of a blue bucket. Been a billion years. He okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good old Dennis. What’s he doing? What you doing here?”

  “I wanted to ask you some things about my dad.”

  Beaming, Depaco pulled the door wide open. “Come on in. Pete, eh? Let me guess why he sent you,” he giggled. “He needs me ’cause he’s planning to rob another bank.”

  His words exploding in my ears, I managed to follow him into a room with a drooping couch, wide easy chair, and Philco TV. A shaggy gray rug lay on the floor. The walls were painted green, and one wall had a framed painting on velvet of a stag with big antlers standing in a forest. A low table had overflowing ashtrays shaped like yellow flowers. Flakes of gray cigarette ash dotted the table like sooty snow.

  “Go on, kid, sit yourself down.” He pointed to the couch. He dropped into the easy chair. Then he slapped both his knees and stared at me, his grin as big as a banana.

  “How about that. Dennis Collison.”

  “Yes, sir.” I kept staring at him, attempting to find a connection between him and my dad.

  “Tell me again why you’re here.”

  “Wanted to learn about my dad.”

  Depaco laughed. “You come to the right guy. Back in them days your dad and me, we was like this.” He held up a hand with crossed fingers. “Best of chums. Maybe because we were so different. Mutt and Jeff for real. Right here in Brooklyn.”

  Almost afraid to ask, I said, “Did . . . did he really rob a bank?”

  Depaco laughed as if that was the best joke on Can You Top This? “Naw. But, I’m telling you, we thought about it. So broke, we’d do anything. Hey, them days, you ran on empty but dreamed on full.”

  I just sat there, staring at him.

  “Sometimes, guess how we’d get food. Way past midnight, back behind restaurants, we’d go through garbage cans and boxes of trash. You wouldn’t believe what we found. Once, a live lobster.” He cracked up again. “What do you do with a live lobster? We put him in the East River. Probably still there.”

  The image of my father going through garbage was beyond me.

  “But Dennis—your father—he had dreams. Real ones. He was as smart as a starched col
lar.”

  I said, “Did you know him when he left home?”

  Depaco grinned. “Know him? Hey, him and me, we done it together.” He laughed again, as if that too was a joke. “Back then, with times so hard, better for your family if you left. Parents couldn’t feed you. So guys took off. To California. Hobo camps. Conservation Corps.

  “Me,” he said, “my parents asked me to leave. Nothing mean. My ma cried. So did my old man. Hey, me too. God bless ’em. I was helping by going.”

  “Do you know anything about my father’s father?”

  “That was the thing. See, when Tom disappeared, your dad’s ma and his Uncle Chris made your old man drop out of school and look for work, which there was none. Hey, his mother wouldn’t even let him keep no books.”

  I must have looked astonished.

  “It’s true,” he said. “Fact, Dennis used to give me his books so as to hide ’em from his family.”

  “Why?”

  “His ma said reading and school was snobby. For the rich. Didn’t want him to be no different from his family. She still alive?”

  I nodded.

  “Toughest turkey on the track. Oh, and your dad’s uncle was always giving Dennis head bonks. He was poison to Dennis. I always thought he was jealous of your dad for being so smart.

  “ ‘I’ll give you smarts,’ he’d say. And he’d belt your old man. Whack! Whack! I mean, mean. ‘Be like the rest of us,’ he kept telling your dad.”

  I remembered how Uncle Chris had been on the street, when I thought he was about to hit me.

  “Them two hated each other,” Depaco went on. “But see, with your dad’s pop gone, Chris was the big man on campus. So your dad and I run off.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Your old man and me, we put together a shack with wood and cardboard by the East River. It’s what people did. What else was they going to do? Made whole villages. Called ’em Hoovervilles. I’m telling you, we weren’t the only kids.

  “Your dad gets into some Manhattan high school. He gets a night job cleaning toilets in subway stations. Can’t get worse than that, but hey, he’s lucky to get it. Me, I was delivering messages around town for tips.

  “Hey, listen to this. Your father loved playing checkers. But we don’t have a board. One day he finds this bottle of aspirin in one of those stations. He takes the pills, smudges some with soot, draws lines on the floor of our shack for a checkerboard and we played. With aspirin pills! Course, he always beat me.”

  He laughed until a cigarette cough made him stop.

  I said, “What happened to my dad’s father?”

  “No idea. All Dennis told me is, his father found work somewhere.”

  “You don’t know where?”

  “Listen, guys was so desperate for work, they’d go anywhere. What’s your dad doing now?”

  “He’s a college professor.”

  “Jeez Louise.” Depaco laughed with delight. “Love it. Your dad was always saying, ‘I’m going to be different than my family.’ And he done it.

  “Good for him. Me—nothing like that. But I get along. Decent factory job. Union wages. Family. Couple of nice kids. Hey, your father know you were coming to see me?”

  I shook my head.

  “How’d you even find out about me?”

  “Uncle Chris.”

  “You kidding? It’s Chris that drove me and your dad apart. Okay, your dad and me was sharing that shack, a month, maybe two, scrambling. One night Chris shows up all nasty and mean, looking for Dennis with a belt in his hands. Good thing your dad was working.

  “Chris tells me he’s coming back to grab your dad. When Dennis comes home, I tell him. Your dad hears, he takes off. Gone like ‘Quick-Henry-the-Flit.’ I never saw him again.”

  “How old was Dad?”

  “Nineteen, twenty.”

  “Did my dad do political things?”

  “Like what?”

  “Join . . . Communist stuff.”

  “Hey, those days, we all talked wild. Understand? People used to say, ‘Got nothing, think anything.’ But nah, Dennis didn’t do nothing red I ever heard. All he wanted was to stay in school and get smarter.”

  “Did the FBI ever talk to you about him?”

  Depaco was startled. “FBI? Why should they? Hey, you telling me he did rob a bank?” He laughed again. “I’m guessing your dad didn’t tell you much about those times, right?”

  I shook my head.

  He shrugged. “Hey, who wants to remember what’s better to forget?”

  Depaco asked me questions about my father, if he had been in the war, what he taught, about my mother, about my family.

  But by then I was sure he wasn’t the informer. I stood up. “I have to go,” I said.

  “Sure, sure.” He shook my hand with two hands and walked me to the door. “Hey, tell Dennis I’d love to see him. If he wants to, is all. Maybe him being a college professor, he won’t. But, let me tell you, him and me, we could talk old times both ways backwards and upside down. Yeah, tell him to come around.”

  I went out the door and down his steps.

  Then, as I turned to wave good-bye, Depaco called, “Hey, Pete. Just remembered something. Back then, just before your dad took off, he found out what Frank was doing. Not that he told me, but what I’m thinking, maybe he went after him. Or the two of them went off. But it’s so long ago so I’m not sure I got that right.”

  “Frank?”

  “Yeah, you know. His brother, Frank.”

  Waving good-bye, he shut the door.

  Staggered, I walked away, my head spinning. What Depaco had described seemed like another universe. And now . . . a brother?

  At least I understood why Dad left home. But—where did he go after being with Depaco? What did he do? And I still didn’t know what happened to my grandfather.

  But Frank was the biggest thing. That name was on the picture. Did Dad really have a brother? Was he the kid in the photo? Why would Dad’s brother be a secret?

  Okay: Depaco wasn’t the informer. Which meant it had to be Bobby. My brother.

  It was a long ride back home. At one point, I could have sworn a man I had seen on the way to Depaco’s was also on my return train. Was I being followed again?

  I told myself not to be stupid. Stick with the facts.

  27

  That afternoon, Dad was in his office, writing. Ma was in the kitchen, slicing beets. I had no idea where Bobby was.

  I wandered into the kitchen, picked up an apple from a bowl. “Can I ask you something?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Grandma told me about Dad’s dad.”

  She stopped working. “Oh? What did she say?” She didn’t say it to me, but to the air in front of her.

  “Grandma said he vanished a long time ago. Dad said he died. Which was it?”

  Ma studied her hands, as if just noticing they were stained red by beets. “I didn’t know your father then.”

  “Did my grandfather die?”

  Speaking carefully, she said, “That’s my understanding.”

  “Grandma told me Dad ran away from home. How come? Where’d he go? What did he do?”

  Ma took a deep breath, turned toward me, and said, “You need to ask your father.”

  “He won’t tell me.”

  Ma stood there. I was sure she was trying to decide what to tell me. Finally, she said, “In his last year of high school he won a scholarship to Indiana University. That’s where I met him.”

  “I heard he ran away before he finished high school.”

  “Perhaps I don’t have my dates right. It was a long time ago.” She went back to the beets.

  Not believing her—she remembered every aunt’s and uncle’s and cousin’s birthday, on both sides of the family—I said: “What about Dad having a . . . brother?”

  She stood very still. “Who told you that?” she asked.

  “Is there a brother?”

  “Pete, you really need to as
k your dad these questions.”

  “I told you, he won’t answer.”

  Ma went back to working.

  “Ma . . .”

  “Please talk to him.”

  I could have asked Dad, but sure he would lie to me again, I tossed my apple core into the garbage can and walked away. I had to find another way to get answers from Dad. Took a few days, but I worked out a plan.

  On Wednesday, the Dodgers were in first place, Giants in sixth. When I got home after school, no one was there, as usual. I went to the kitchen and checked Dad’s work number, which was on the fridge door.

  He’d been staying late at his office Wednesday afternoons, because—he told us—he could talk to students who might drop in.

  Sure Dad wouldn’t answer direct questions, my plan was to call him at work, which I rarely did, and tell him I had something I needed to talk to him about when he got home. He’d ask what, I’d just say, “Your brother, Frank,” and hang up. That would give him time to work out an answer by the time he got home.

  I dialed his number. The office secretary picked up on the second ring.

  “History Department. May I help you?”

  “This is Pete Collison. My dad is Dennis Collison. Can I talk to him, please?”

  The woman said, “Oh, hi, Pete. Your father just left. It’s Wednesday. He’s at the gym.”

  “Gym?”

  “That’s where he goes on Wednesday afternoons.”

  “I thought he was seeing students.”

  “That’s Tuesday mornings. If he comes back, shall I have him call you?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  I put the phone down and tried to make sense of what I heard. Never, not once, did Dad say he was going to a gym. With his war arm, he didn’t do things like that.

  Where was he going?

  I was in my room when my mother came home and poked her head in. “Hi, honey. How was your day?”

  I said, “Hey, Ma, when I got home from school I called Dad. He wasn’t there.”

  She smiled. “He has so many meetings.”

  “The lady I spoke to said he always goes to a gym on Wednesday afternoons.”

  She took a moment to reply. “She must have confused him with someone else. Or maybe you misunderstood her.”