“Everyone thinks you’re dead anyway.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They found your jacket and shoes in the bay. They think you drowned. You oughta be grateful. I’m saving your life.”
“How’s that?”
“I’m gonna knock that cement shit away from you.” Larry smiles at his cohorts, who have to snap back from their own horror to appreciate his humor.
“Wanna help?”
Benny reluctantly takes the rod and taps once on the ceiling, safely away from the loose patch of cement.
“Here, jerkoff, not like that. You want it to fall on him?” Larry grabs the pole and slams it hard against the ceiling. Amazingly only dust falls, but the larger piece loosens, hanging at a forty-five degree angle from the ceiling. One more touch, one more train rumble, and it will certainly fall.
“Stop! Please!” Luke shouts, but Larry keeps slamming the rod against the cement. “What do you want from me?”
“Shut up. I told ya, I’m saving your fuckin’ life.”
“Please don’t keep knocking. It’s going to fall on me.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Goddamn it, of course it will!”
“Wanna bet?”
Luke doesn’t answer. He’s been stupid. He’s played into Larry’s hands. The kid wants to kill him and he won’t stop until he does. But he wants to do it with a lot of noise and Luke is helping.
That’s it, he decides. He’s not going to say another word. Luke braces himself, closing his eyes and keeping his head stretched as far out of the way as possible. The movement of his free arm is too limited for his hand to cover more than his ear. Not that it makes any difference. The cement is poised directly over his head and weighs at least four or five pounds. If it falls straight, the path of least resistance, from that height, it will kill him.
Summoning all the mental energy he has left, Luke tries to stop caring, to shut down the survival instinct and just commit suicide. He’s got every reason. Why is he fighting? Let him kill me, he thinks. One merciful blow and it will all be over. No more horrific struggles—not drowning, being eaten by rats, dying of thirst.
Now Luke prays for the cement to end his agony.
But as much as Larry pokes and pries, the slab stays at the same angle, its corner wedged tightly into a beam. After five minutes of fruitless effort, Larry tires of holding the rod up and lets it fall, crashing down just below Luke’s throat.
Luke yells out in pain.
“I gotta take a piss,” Dennis says. “Let’s go.”
“I got an idea,” Larry says. “Do it here. Right on Loki.”
The twins are so alarmed they start giggling.
“Let’s all do it. C’mon.” Larry starts to unzip his fly. The twins follow suit.
“I’m not getting close enough for him to grab my dick,” Benny says.
“Hey, me neither,” says his brother.
“You don’t have to get that close, butthead,” Larry says, taking his penis out of his pants. “All you do is hold it up like this and hold your finger on the end so that it shoots further. Like this.” With that, he pees in a long, hard line that arcs up and comes down right in Luke’s face. “Bull’s-eye!”
The twins stand on either side of Larry spraying their urine all over Luke’s head.
“Open your mouth, pisshead!” Larry shouts.
Luke lies stone still, expressionless, receiving the degradation with stoic dignity. This, the final humiliation, crushes him, replacing any trace of self-esteem with disgust.
The boys are screaming with laughter. “Yeah, pisshead!” Dennis shouts.
Benny is laughing so hard some of his urine spatters Larry’s sneakers.
Without letting go of his penis, Larry uses his other hand to shove Benny off his feet. The boy falls hard against the rough wall of the sewer, scraping his side as he goes down.
“Fuckin’ moron! I should make you lick it up,” Larry shouts.
Benny starts crying, from the fall and the fear, and the game is ruined.
“Let’s go,” Larry says. Meekly, the twins follow him out of the sewer.
Luke hasn’t moved.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
All the way home, Lucy keeps asking Charley what they’re going to do about the homeless man.
“We’ll tell Mom and Dad, right? You said.”
For a long time Charley won’t answer her. Finally, out of nowhere, like he just thought it up himself, he says, “We’ll tell Mom and Dad. We can say how we tried to get the stuff off him and we couldn’t, but we thought we could for a couple of days and that’s why we didn’t tell them before. And then we can say how we brought him food and all.”
“Are we going to tell about Larry and how he hit him?”
“No, stupid. We’re not going to say anything about Larry or the twins.”
“But what about how Larry was saying the man was our prisoner?”
“No way. You want Larry to pound your head like he did the homeless guy? Listen, you just shut up, and I’ll say everything.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?” Charley is always surprised when Lucy agrees with him.
Lucy nods her head, yes, and then she wants to know how come Larry is always so mean and no one does anything about it. Charley says how come she doesn’t notice that Larry is twice as big as everyone else and could beat the shit out of anyone who gives him trouble?
“So why don’t we tell Daddy? Larry couldn’t beat him up.”
“Yeah, so is Daddy gonna go to school with us every day? And then stick around after and on the weekends and make sure nobody cuts your tongue out?”
Lucy gasps.
“Now what are you going to say?”
“Nothing.”
“Good. Leave it to me. I’ll tell them about the homeless guy, and they’ll call the cops or whatever, and we never have to see him again.”
* * *
Mrs. Adler is in the kitchen chopping carrots for vegetable soup when the children return. She hears them close the door and calls out, “Charley! Lucy! In here, in the kitchen.”
With one last warning to keep quiet, Charley goes down the hallway, Lucy following.
The minute the children walk into the room they know their mother is annoyed.
“Where were you?” she directs her question at Charley.
“No place.”
“I hope no place was not that construction site at the beach. Sergeant Dasto told me he saw a whole bunch of you down there.”
“Not today,” Charley said.
“It doesn’t make any difference when. The point is, is that how you take care of your sister? Taking her to dangerous places? When I hear things like that, Charley, I feel like I’m making a mistake trusting you with important responsibilities. And frankly, I say to myself, maybe I should show you what a lack of responsibility means. Maybe you would understand it better if you had to miss the Fourth of July picnic. How about that?”
Before Charley can answer, Lucy speaks up.
“We were only going down there because the twins said a little kitten got lost from its mother and we should find it and bring it back … It was borned only three days ago and there was a big black dog looking for it and I made Charley take me because I thought if I could find it I could take care of it. Charley didn’t want to go.”
Charley looks with amazement at his sister. His sister who almost never cries has big blobs of tears running down her cheeks.
“But then when we got there …”
“Oh, honey.” Leddy Adler melts at her little girl’s tears. Drying her hands on her apron, she bends down and takes the sobbing child in her arms. “I’m so sorry.”
In a much kinder, more understanding voice, she says to Charley, “I still don’t want you to tak
e any chances with her. I know it’s a big responsibility for you. I’m sorry you have to do it, but it’s only a little longer and then maybe I can stay home more. Okay, sweetie?”
And she reaches out to her son, who moves uncomfortably toward her.
When Lucy calms down, her mother says she could use their help putting the gardening tools back in the garage. Grateful for the opportunity to escape their lies, both children run to the backyard. While Leddy watches from the window, they gather up the tools and bags of pull weeds and drag them to the garage.
“That was good what you did for me, Luce. Thanks.”
“Are we still going to tell them about the homeless man?”
“I don’t think so. Then it would be like you lied.”
“I did lie.”
“Yeah, but then I’m in trouble again. And you too. They’ll be so angry with the lie that we’ll all get punished. Even worse than not going to the picnic. We gotta find another way to get him help.”
“What about Daisy?”
“Hey, yeah. We could find her and tell her and she could get the ambulance. We could ask her not to tell that we told her.”
“She’s nice. She wouldn’t tell. Can we go now?”
The children run back into the house. Lucy leaves it to Charley. He says something about wanting to go over to Smilers to get some pencils, but Leddy says no. It’s Sunday; the stores close early. Besides, Dad will be home soon and maybe they’d do something special for the rest of the afternoon.
Lucy gets excited. “Could we go to the petting farm?”
There isn’t a trace of Luke left in her mind. Though there are times when Lucy seems almost wise, she’s only seven. Petting farms come before homeless strangers, no matter how desperate their situation is.
“I don’t know. Let’s wait to see what Daddy says.”
“I’ll put on my jeans just in case.” Lucy runs upstairs to change. Leddy Adler sighs. She hates the petting farm. She always makes the children wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts, and she still cringes every time they hug one of the filthy baby animals. She washes every piece of their clothing when they get home and insists they scrub themselves, hair and all, immediately.
Charley, who at ten has a more developed sense of priorities—and has outgrown petting farms—assumes his natural worry stance. He thinks they should find Daisy while it’s still afternoon. He hadn’t seen Luke, but he knows a person could bleed to death.
“I don’t want to go to the petting farm, Mom. Can I stay home?”
“Don’t worry about it, honey. We’ll find someplace else to go.” That exhausts Charley’s ideas for the moment. He’ll wait until his father gets home and, in the meantime, think of some other excuse to get away.
He’ll find Daisy and she’ll get the ambulance and fix everything.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The lies Luke told keep spinning through Daisy’s mind.
She’s hurt, the same hurt someone in love would feel if they had been betrayed. On top of that, she still feels a longing for Luke. She misses him, and it shames her. She has to do something radical to wipe out the sick feelings of disgust.
It’s a dazzling Sunday on the Fourth of July weekend. All of New York will have rushed out to the beaches on Long Island; if Daisy chooses, she can hop a train to New York and wander around a relatively empty city. No one will have any idea that she lives in ugly little Shorelane or works at a semi-drugstore; they wouldn’t know she’d been deceived by a man she was foolish enough to have fallen in love with in one day. No one would know how pliable, gullible, and weak she is. And the disguise of anonymity would give her strength.
She makes the 1:20 to Penn Station, and Daisy works on erasing her slimy, shivery feelings about what she allowed Luke to do to her emotionally. By the time she arrives in New York, she has all but finished flogging herself and feels strong enough to permit her heart a respite in the form of remembering Luke’s smile—a surprisingly shy smile that changed the self-assuredness of a handsome man into something sweet and gentle and touchable. As the train slides silently to a stop, she gives in to another vision: Luke’s face, his smooth tanned skin, his soft lips so close to hers.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Charley and Lucy are lucky. Ned Adler has come down with a terrible allergy headache and there will be no special plans. Maybe barbecue for dinner if he feels better. The kids are free to go find Daisy.
Finding anyone in Shorelane is pretty easy, even for kids without a car. Generally, people in a small blue-collar town like Shorelane don’t have an unlisted number; only celebrities have to guard their privacy and as far as anyone knows, there are none in Shorelane. All Charley has to do to find Daisy Rumkin’s address is look in the phone book. Turns out she lives on Maple Drive—the same street as the Duncan twins.
When Charley tells his mother he’s going to play with Benny and Dennis, she says fine, but she is surprised when he says Lucy is coming with him.
“You don’t have to take her,” Leddy tells him privately. “I’ll be home all afternoon.”
But Charley says it’s okay. Leddy is pleased. Ned’s wrong, she thinks. Charley really doesn’t mind having Lucy around.
“Be home by five in case we decide to go out to dinner,” she calls after the children.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Mrs. McDonnell is in her usual spot, crocheting on the front porch, when the children come up the steps. Even though she doesn’t know who they are, she’s happy to see them. She figures they’re neighborhood children come to sell cookies or ask some questions. A lonely woman whose only daughter had long ago moved to Colorado, she is always ready for a visit.
“Hello there.” She smiles. “Are you selling cookies? Raffles?”
“Uh-uh,” says Charley. “We’re looking for Daisy. Is she home?”
“Is Daisy a friend of yours?”
“Not exactly, but we have to ask her something.”
Hungry for the company, Mrs. McDonnell isn’t quick to let the children go. “Maybe I can help.”
“I don’t think so. Could we see Daisy?”
Now she has to tell them that Daisy isn’t home and probably won’t be back until tonight. “I think she went into the city.”
The children stare at her blankly.
“New York.”
“Oh, okay, thank you.” Charley pulls his sister’s arm, and they move away down the steps.
“Have you ever been to New York?” Mrs. McDonnell calls after them, but they are already far enough away to pretend they don’t hear her.
“What should we do? Should we go to the beach?” Lucy asks.
“Shh. I’m thinking.”
Lucy follows her brother home in silence. It’s nearly four thirty. Their dad’s headaches could last a few hours.
Finally, Charley tells her it’s too late to go to the beach.
“When you saw him, was the blood all over, like squirting down?” he asks.
“I didn’t see it squirting. It was covering his face.”
“But it wasn’t squirting, right? Remember that time I cut my lip on the edge of the bed? Was it squirting like that?”
“I guess not.”
“Then it’s probably not so bad. We’ll go tomorrow, early. We won’t say anything to Larry or anybody, not even Daisy, and we’ll make the guy promise not to tell anyone, and if he says yes, we’ll pull the stuff off him and he can go home by himself. Okay?”
“Okay. But …”
“But what?”
“He can’t. He’s homeless.”
“Forget it, butthead.”
And with that understanding, the ten-year-old and the seven-year-old comfortably decide Luke’s life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Monday, July 4
Fourth of July Monday starts out sunny. Not the deep yellow
sun that promises a perfect day, but a whiter, more uncertain color partially obscured by haze. Summer mornings often start with this kind of gauzy look, typically burning off before noon. A good enough day for the big picnic.
As promised, Charley and Lucy are down at the beach by eight o’clock. Charley knows that if his parents found out, he would be in terrible trouble. To say nothing of the fact that he let Lucy ride on the handlebars of his bike. But he did make her wear a helmet so maybe that would count for something.
Charley figures they would do what they have to do to free Luke, and then get right back home—maybe even in time for breakfast. The Adlers eat breakfasts late on holidays.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
By the morning of the fourth day, Luke has all but stopped trying. Like people on starvation diets who lose their appetites, his will to go on is quieting. He lies still, a lump of humanity, filthy from the stain of rat’s blood, the stink of urine, and days of neglect. His face is bruised blue-black from Larry’s beatings, staring dully at the piece of cement that still dangles above his head. The rats might have given rise to some fight but they haven’t come back. He hasn’t shouted for help in hours.
He’s uncomfortable but not in great physical pain. He’s still clenching and unclenching his toes to keep some circulation going in his legs. But there are no more tears. His mind has become suspended in an indistinct middle distance between clarity and obscurity. As long as everything remains calm, his thoughts stay numbed. He’s sad but not in an active sense, just the drip down of defeat.
Luke hears the children coming. He doesn’t want to see them.
“Hey, mister!” Charley and Lucy run into the sewer, then stop, horrified and disgusted at the sight and stench. Charley steps back but Lucy holds her ground. Neither child is afraid. Luke’s weakness is apparent even to the children.
Luke doesn’t turn his head.
Charley, using every bit of humanity he knows he should feel, moves to where his sister is standing. “It’s us, me and Lucy. We’re gonna get the stuff off you.”
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