The Greats

by Deborah Ellis

  “I’d rather sweep,” says Cora. “Sometimes the guards drop stuff. I found a pen once. All we get from this job is dust up our nose. What are you here for?”

  Jomon doesn’t see any reason not to tell her. “I broke a window.”

  “We have another window breaker here,” she says. She looks around the yard and points to a boy in a white shirt. “That’s Keith. He broke a school window.”

  “What did you do?” Jomon asks her. “You’re what — eight?”

  “Ten,” says Cora. “I won’t stay where I’m supposed to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I like to move around. The mat goes here,” she says, pointing to a railing.

  Jomon hangs the mat where he’s told. Cora hits it with the flat of her hand. Dirt flies out.

  Jomon hits the mat like Cora does. They get a rhythm going. Slowly, the bright red and white letters emerge from the dirt. The mat is made of thick, coarse stuff. It stamps an imprint of tiny pinpricks on their palms.

  They take a break to rub their hands. Jomon looks around for Angel and Hi. Cora wipes off the dirt that’s landed on her T-shirt.

  “One of your friends is with the sweepers,” she says. “The other is cleaning the guards’ toilet.”

  “You pay attention,” Jomon says.

  “I have to,” says Cora. “I’m one of the smallest. Knowing things is important. Everyone has something they want to hide from the guards. I find out what that is, let the person know that I know, and then I keep my mouth shut. Unless.”

  “Unless someone bothers you,” Jomon guesses.

  “You catch on quick.”

  “I’m not going to bother you.”

  “Good.”

  They get back to work. Cora fills him in on the other kids.

  “Zara, Gloria, Josephine and Esme are all runaways, like me. Most of the girls who come through here are runaways. Sometimes we get a girl thief, but not usually. You see that small boy sweeping by the fence? That’s Angus. He helped his uncle break into houses. Uncle got away. Angus is here. Lucky, the long, skinny one? He beat his father with a fence post. Came in here with his face all punched-up so I’m guessing his father deserved it.”

  She keeps up the chatter while they finish. Their work passes inspection. They are allowed to put the mat back down in front of the office door.

  They join the line of kids at the bottom of the staircase that leads to the schoolroom. Angel and Hi fall in behind them.

  “Jomon, I cleaned the outhouse,” says Hi. “But it was inside the house. If you press a handle, water rushes. Every time!”

  “He’s found an angle,” says Cora. “He’s acting weird, but funny weird, not scary weird. Kids will leave him alone because they’re not sure what he’ll do. He’ll have to keep up the act, though.”

  Jomon doesn’t think that will be a problem.

  “What are we doing now?” Hi asks.

  “School,” says the boy called Lucky, who still has a scar under his left eye. “And shut up. The guards keep us standing here until we’re all quiet.”

  “What do I do in there?” Jomon hears Hi whisper to Angel.

  “Do what I do,” Angel whispers back.

  It hits Jomon that Hi has never been to school.

  He files up the steps and into the classroom with the other young prisoners.

  It is the strangest classroom he has ever seen. Two long tables, end to end, take up most of the space, with only a few feet on each side to give the kids room to move. At one end of the room there is a small desk for the teacher and a few shelves, mostly empty. Jomon sees the copy of A Christmas Carol, a few old math books, A History of England, with the cover half-torn, a box of mixed pens and pencil stubs, another of crayon bits and some stacks of paper.

  The walls make up for the bare shelves. The yellow paint is almost completely covered with posters. Some are pictures cut out of magazines — dinosaurs, flowers, polar bears and the Taj Mahal.

  Some of the posters are the ones the government sends round to all schools, about healthy nutrition, avoiding malaria, and being safe on the streets.

  Most are hand-lettered signs with sayings like You Can Do It! and The president of Guyana was once a child like you. There are quotes by Nelson Mandela, Oprah Winfrey, Gandhi and Malala Yousafzai.

  Everywhere Jomon looks, there is something interesting to see.

  “Sit with me,” Cora says.

  He follows her around the table. He sits carefully. The seat is broken and he has to wriggle to keep from getting pinched. Sawdust spills out of the warped table onto his trousers.

  The chairs fill up. Jomon counts twenty-four other kids. Angel is at the far end of the room. Hi, across from Jomon, is looking all around, his eyes wide.

  “What does that say?” he asks, pointing at a sign behind Jomon.

  Jomon twists around. “You must do the thing you think you cannot do. Eleanor Roosevelt.”

  Hi is already pointing at another sign.

  “What about that one?”

  “Women hold up half the sky.”

  “And that one, beside it?”

  Jomon is about to read a quote from Helen Keller when the teacher walks into the classroom. Officer Grant is with him.

  “Good morning, young scholars,” he says. “We have a guest this morning.”

  Officer Grant waves hello. “Are you ready to do some learning today, young people? Your teacher tells me this is his smartest group ever.”

  The teacher probably says that about every group, Jomon thinks, but still, it’s a nice thing to say.

  “I’m here on a special delivery mission.” Officer Grant takes an envelope out of her uniform pocket. “Jomon, you’ve got a letter.”

  The room is silent as she hands Jomon the envelope.

  “I’ve never gotten a letter,” says Cora. Heads shake all around the table. No one has ever gotten a letter. “What does it say?”

  “It’s Jomon’s letter to share or not,” says Officer Grant. To Jomon she says, “I’ve got fifteen minutes before I leave. I can take your reply with me, so you’d better read your letter now and get busy writing back.”

  All eyes on him, Jomon opens the envelope with his name on it and takes out a handmade card. He reads the front silently to himself.

  For one thousand points, name three people who are wishing you well.

  He opens the card. He reads the inside:

  Brandon, Chandra and Reshma — teammates now and always.

  P.S. We’ll win again next year!

  “I guess you’re wrong about them not caring about you,” says Angel.

  “Yeah,” says Hi. “Maybe you’re wrong about other things, too.”

  The teacher passes a pen and a blank sheet of paper down to Jomon. Jomon picks up the pen but can’t begin to form any words. He doesn’t know how to respond to a message from his former life, a life that no longer belongs to him.

  Officer Grant goes around the room, talking with the students. She asks about their schoolwork. She plays a hand of cards. She has personal messages for many of them.

  “Your mother says to tell you she is feeling better,” she says to one of the girls Cora told Jomon is a runaway. To a boy, she says, “I’m sorry, but your court date has been postponed again. They’re looking at next week. I’ll let you know as soon as they decide.” To Angus, the small boy who helped his uncle break into houses, she says, “Your teacher tells me you memorized the names of all of Guyana’s administrative regions in just one hour. And you told me you can’t learn anything! You were fooling with me, weren’t you?”

  She kneels down beside Cora and says quietly, “It’s not going to work out with your aunt in Hopetown. We’ll have to think of something else.”

  “I told you they don’t want me,” says Cora. “I don’t want them,
either.”

  Officer Grant wipes a tear off Cora’s cheek.

  “You leave this with me,” she says. “Your job is to do your schoolwork. Get Jomon to help you. He’s good at answering questions.”

  At the end of fifteen minutes, she says to Jomon, “Time’s up. I have to get back to work. Is your letter done?”

  He looks from the police officer to the blank piece of paper and back to the officer again.

  “Words get stuck in the pen sometimes,” she says gently. “Is there anything you would like me to say to them?”

  Jomon’s first instinct is to shake his head, but he doesn’t. Instead, he says, “Please tell them thank you.”

  Officer Grant smiles at him and nods. “I’ll do that.”

  Jomon’s eyes flicker at the nearly empty bookshelves.

  “Something else?” Officer Grant asks him.

  “He wants you to ask his team about the book drive,” says Hi from the other end of the table. The girl beside him is showing him how to make a paper airplane.

  “He wants you to ask them if some of the books can come here,” adds Angel.

  Officer Grant looks at Angel and Hi and then at Jomon. “Is this true?”

  Jomon nods.

  “All right,” she says. “I’ll ask.”

  She says her goodbyes and leaves the schoolroom.

  “Can I have this?” asks Cora, holding up Jomon’s card. “I can pretend it belongs to me.”

  Jomon takes the card from her, puts it back in the envelope, crosses out his name and writes Cora’s name in its place.

  He hands it back to her and says, “Now it really does belong to you.”

  20

  “If you know something, you had better tell us,” the chief executive says to Mrs. Simson. “We don’t want to have to call the police.”

  They are all back in his office. He drags his desk chair out into the middle of the room and orders Mrs. Simson to sit down. He and the three other officials stand and look down at her.

  The chief executive can never remember if it is more intimidating to make someone sit while he stands, or to make them stand while he sits. He suspects he’s gotten it wrong this time. Mrs. Simson looks very comfortable in his high-backed, well-cushioned office chair.

  “You wrote that note,” accuses the security head. “Don’t try to deny it.”

  “I signed my name to it,” says Mrs. Simson. Aside from being angry, she is surprised how calm she feels. She is not afraid of these people.

  “No, indeed,” says the chief executive, wondering, as he talks, how he can get Mrs. Simson out of his chair. “We do not want to have to call the police. Here at the national museum we think of ourselves as family. We would prefer to keep this little incident a family secret. We hope you have not been gossiping about it.”

  “I think secrets are a problem,” says Mrs. Simson. She speaks slowly, wanting to say the right words in the right order. She has been thinking deeply about this since Gather’s disappearance. “We all need our privacy, of course, but that’s totally different from keeping secrets. What secrets? All our secrets are the same! We get lonely, we get sad, other people hurt us, we hurt other people. Those are everybody’s secrets! Why not talk about them? They might not seem quite as big if we talk about them.”

  In the quiet that follows her words, Mrs. Simson discovers that the chief executive’s chair swivels as well as rocks. She has a good time swaying from side to side.

  “My auntie always says, ‘A problem shared is a problem half-solved,’” says the marketing manager.

  “That’s a good one,” says the financial officer. “Mine says, ‘Two heads are better than one.’”

  “Unless one of those heads is a criminal,” injects the security head. He’s a bit miffed that this cleaner person is not intimidated by him. “Mrs. Simson, I think you are involved in this theft of property. Yes, I said theft! Are you trying to pad your cleaner’s salary? Are you holding the sloth for ransom?”

  Mrs. Simson goes on as if the security head hasn’t spoken.

  “I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard tell their secrets to Gather,” she says. “Old, young, police officers, well-dressed people, poorly dressed people. They don’t see me watching them. I’m just the cleaner. I can be mopping right beside them and they don’t notice. They pour out their troubles. They sense Gather can carry them.”

  “What is she talking about?” asks the chief executive.

  Mrs. Simson stops swiveling the chair. “Those same people who are showing their pain to a statue of a giant sloth will clam up and slap a smile on their face if a living person asks how they are.” Mrs. Simson knows this because she has seen it and because she has done it herself. “Then they go away feeling worse, not better. They have a one-way conversation with something that can’t respond to them any more than this metal desk.”

  As she speaks, Mrs. Simson admits to herself just how lonely she is.

  I have to make changes, she thinks. I cannot settle for this being my life.

  “Will someone please tell me what she is talking about?” the chief executive asks again.

  “I don’t have a clue,” says the head of security from behind his dark glasses.

  Mrs. Simson thinks about the giant sloth footprints in the dust. Gather has somehow come alive and gotten herself out into the world. Maybe she, Mrs. Simson, can get out into the world, too, and the first step is to find her friend and make sure she’s all right.

  Mrs. Simson reaches for the telephone and pushes it in the chief executive’s direction.

  “Call the police,” she says. “You should have done that already. Right now. Call them.”

  “We don’t answer to you,” says the chief executive.

  She decides to call the police herself.

  “I need to report a disappearance,” Mrs. Simson says into the phone. “No, not a theft. Not a missing person either, exactly … Runaway? Yes, I need to report a runaway. Who is in charge of runaways? Officer Olivia Grant? Then I would like to speak with her. She’s out? Then please have her come to the national museum as soon as she gets back.”

  Mrs. Simson puts the receiver back in its place.

  She cannot keep herself from smiling.

  21

  Lights out, and Jomon is on his cot in the dorm.

  He slaps at a mosquito. He rolls over onto his side, then back onto his back.

  It is way too early to be in bed.

  Supper — a bread roll with peanut butter — was not that long ago. Then shower time, then half an hour of free time in the dorm room before the guard flicked off the light and told them, “Not a sound.”

  The moon is bright enough that the boys can continue to play under its light. Jomon sits up and looks around.

  The smaller boys have stones from the yard that they have turned into cars. They are using the bed sheets to construct mountains and highways. Lucky and another one of the older boys grab the sheets, ball them up and toss them into a corner.

  The smaller boys don’t complain. They wait until the older boys have moved on, then retrieve the sheets and start again.

  Jomon sees Angel playing a game of pickup sticks with a few other boys, using twigs they have collected from the yard. There are whispered arguments from that group.

  “I saw it move!” “No, you didn’t.” “I saw it! My turn.”

  “Here’s how it works,” Lucky said to Jomon before lights out. “Someone makes a sound, the guard comes, someone goes to solitary. The guard doesn’t care who. If it’s me that goes, and you made the noise, you’d better be gone before I get out. You hear me?”

  Jomon heard.

  “Tell your brothers,” said Lucky.

  “They’re not —” But Lucky had already moved on.

  One of the boys has a deck of cards. The game they start
ed before bedtime continues in a beam of light from the full moon.

  Hi is in the middle of that group.

  “Six of clubs,” he whispers.

  “That’s a nine,” says a boy. “Are you cheating?”

  “Nine? Really?” asks Hi. “If you’re so smart, why are you in here?”

  “I killed a boy who was cheating at cards.”

  “No, you didn’t,” says a third boy. “You tried to sneak into the go-kart place.”

  “Hi’s having a good time,” says Angel, coming to sit on the foot of Jomon’s bed. “I don’t think he got much time to play when he was a kid.”

  “Nothing seems to bother him,” says Jomon, sitting up. “Was he always like that?”

  “I don’t know,” says Angel. “I got the drunk and sad Hi. I don’t know what he was like before my mother died.”

  Jomon slaps at another mosquito. “Are you still mad at him?”

  “I should be,” says Angel. “I planned out a whole speech I’d say to him if I ever saw him again, about how he was a terrible father and just brought misery to my life.”

  “And now?”

  “He’s still all that, but I don’t know what the point is in telling him. He won’t get it. He’s not like us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He had his father with him all his life. He can’t understand what it was like for me to not have him. I could give him my speech but then what? Probably nothing, and where would that leave me? No, I think I’ll forget about the speech. I would like one thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I want him to call me Angel.”

  “You going to tell him that?”

  Angel sighs. “What if I tell him and he still calls me Dev?”

  “I think it’s worth a try.” Jomon looks over at the card players. They’ve stopped the game and are now trying to make a tower with the cards. Hi adds one to the tower. Everything collapses. Hi’s smile is so broad it seems to take up his whole head.

  “I think he likes to be liked,” says Jomon. “I think he wants you to like him.”

  Angel thinks about it. “Maybe. What about you? It sounds like my grandson was a hard father to have. There must have been some good times, though?”