by Clark Howard
Suddenly the cot turned completely over, like a playing card being flipped, and dropped Richie out. He fell through the blackness, screaming . . . .
“Wake up! Stop that yelling! What’s the matter with you?”
Shaken awake, feeling fingers pressing hard into his shoulders, Richie opened his eyes to see Mrs. Hubbard bending over him. Richie sat bolt upright. “I was. . . falling . . . ,” he gasped. “From the sky . . . .”
“Lovely. They’ve given us a kid who has nightmares,” Mr. Hubbard said. He was standing behind his wife, looking over her shoulder.
“Does this happen to you every night?” Mrs. Hubbard demanded, giving Richie an extra shake for alertness.
“No,” Richie said, “it was that hissing. It made my bed go up—”
“Hissing? What hissing?”
“I don’t know—just hissing . . . .”
Mrs. Hubbard pushed him back down on the cot. “Go back to sleep,” she said sternly, pointing a finger in his face. “No more out of you, understand?”
“Can I go to the bathroom?”
“Go—back—to—sleep!”
The light was turned off and the Hubbards returned to their bedroom. Richie did not know whether he had awakened any of the other boys, or Junior, or not; he had not seen any of them in the hall. Lying very still, eyes wide, staring up at the dark ceiling, he relived the dream several times, remembering the terror of it. His breath was still coming abnormally fast, his heart pumping hard in his chest. After several minutes, he got tired of thinking about the dream and his mind moved to other matters. He wondered where his mother was, wondered if Stan had discovered yet that he was gone, wondered if he was going to be able to hold going to the bathroom until morning. Gradually his heartbeat and breathing slowed and his eyelids began to get heavy and lower. He felt himself drifting into a warm, cozy sleep.
Then the hissing began again.
He had the same dream a second time.
Mrs. Hubbard became so angry at being awakened again that she sat him up in bed and shook him sporadically for five minutes. “What—is—the—matter—with—you?” she demanded.
“That hissing—” Richie managed to say, tongue thick, throat constricted, head bobbing as the irate woman jarred him back and forth.
“What hissing?” she shrieked. “I don’t hear any hissing! It’s part of your dream!”
“No, it makes the dream . . . start. . . .”
She shook him until her arms ached, all the while her husband, pasty hands in his bathrobe pockets, glared at him from behind her. When at last she threw him back down and turned off the light again, Richie lay there trembling like an exhausted runner. It was the hissing, his mind repeated over and over. It was the hissing . . . .
It started again an hour later. The dream repeated itself.
This time Mrs. Hubbard was infuriated. Grabbing Richie by the hair and undershirt, she dragged him out of bed and walked him up and down the hall like a drunk man. “You—cannot—keep—waking—us—up—like—this!” she bellowed.
“Put him in a tub of cold water,” Mr. Hubbard suggested.
“No! I’m going to get him so tired he won’t have the strength to dream!”
She pushed him, dragged him, pulled him, jerked him, back and forth, up and down, side to side, until it felt as if his brain were spinning like a top. He began to feel dizzy, then queasy, then downright nauseated. A dread fear rose in him: What if he puked on her? She would kill him, he knew. Grimly he tried to staunch the spreading sickness, but there was no way he could do it.
“All right! All right!” he finally promised in desperation. “I won’t do it no more! I promise! I won’t!”
Mrs. Hubbard let go of him and he catapulted onto the cot. Bending over him, chest heaving, a line of sweat across her upper lip, she glowered like some villainous fiend in one of the Saturday serials. “You had better not do it again!” she threatened. “Or else!”
His entire being jarred and unsettled, Richie worked his way back under the covers and lay on his back, with his arms outside the covers, and closed his eyes. He remained perfectly still until he heard the click of the light switch and the sound of the Hubbards’ voices retreating once more to their bedroom. Then, when it was again dark and quiet in the hall, he sat up. Pulling the blanket up over him like a tent, leaving just his face exposed, he drew up his knees and rested his chin on them, determined not to go to sleep again.
He sat like that for the rest of the night.
The hissing occurred every night. The nightmare occurred every night. Richie fell through the black sky and woke up screaming—every night.
Mrs. Hubbard dedicated herself tenaciously to stopping the dreams. The second night Richie woke up the household, she had her husband get out the Ping-Pong paddle and punish him on the spot, without benefit of ceremony or witnesses. One lick the first time, two the second, three the third—until finally Richie, his buttocks burning with pain, forced himself to sit up and stay awake again.
The third night, Mrs. Hubbard tried a preventive solution. “It’s his digestion,” she declared. “His system can’t take decent meals. I’m going to try a little experiment.”
The little experiment was to give Richie only two slices of bread and a glass of milk for supper. He went to bed hungry, but it did not work. The hissing and the nightmare happened twice. The second time, after a severe paddling, Richie was made to stand in a corner, a blanket around his shoulders, for the rest of the night.
It was while he was in the corner that he discovered where the hissing sound originated. He heard it begin as he stood there. It seemed to be coming from the radiator at the foot of his cot in the alcove. Grimly, Richie left the corner and followed the sound. Turning on the light in the alcove, not caring if the Hubbards woke up, he peered down along the concealed side of the radiator. There was a safety valve there that permitted small amounts of steam to escape periodically. A thin, barely visible line of steam was streaming out at that moment—hissing quietly.
Goddamn dirty son of a bitch, Richie thought. At the other end of the radiator, Richie quietly twisted the control knob all the way down and turned off the radiator entirely.
The next morning, Mr. Hubbard discovered what he had done and gave him a sustained jerking about, tugging back and forth on one of Richie’s arms with both his pasty little hands. “Are you a crazy boy or what?” he inquired. “Do you expect the rest of us to sleep in a cold house simply because you cannot control your screaming in the middle of the night?”
“I can’t help it if I dream!” Richie pleaded.
“It’s not the dreaming that wakes everyone up; it’s the screaming. Now you expect us to freeze in order to keep you quiet? That’s ridiculous. You get the paddle tonight. And I forbid you to touch that radiator control again!”
Junior complained constantly about Richie. “I’m so tired, Mother. I couldn’t get back to sleep again last night. When are you going to make that new boy behave?”
“Very soon, my little love,” his mother promised, stroking his bullet-head. “In the meantime, to make up for you being unhappy, Mother will give you an extra dime to spend in the show on Saturday.”
Junior had other ways of causing trouble too, seeming to delight in thinking up new and more creative methods of getting the wards into difficulty with his parents. He would forget to wipe his shoes on the doormat and track dirt into the house, or leave a mess at the kitchen sink after washing his hands, then simply deny his own responsibility, therefore imputing blame to someone else. Other times it was premeditated, such as when he stole a cookie from the carefully monitored jar, secure in the knowledge that his mother would not even ask whether he had done it; or when he became angry with one of the wards over some real or imagined slight and falsely accused the boy of hitting him. Junior could, it seemed, cry at will, and was a more accomplished liar than even Richie himself.
Richie did not understand Junior. He had met more than his share of schoolyard bullies w
ho pushed other kids around for the admiration and praise that it brought them. And he had, in various schools, known the occasional tattletale or squealer who could not be trusted with grave secrets, such as who threw the eraser at the clock. But never before had Richie encountered a person who seemed to take such diabolic pleasure in causing severe punishment to others.
“How come you get us in Dutch all the time like you do?” Richie finally asked him one day, not resentfully but curiously, confused by the maliciousness of the yourger boy.
“This is my house,” Junior replied defensively. “I didn’t ask you to come live here.”
“None of us asked to come live here either,” Richie countered. “We didn’t have no say in it.”
“I don’t like having you here,” Junior informed him coldly. “I don’t like always having other kids around. I want to be the only one.”
“Tell your old man and your old lady that,” Richie naively advised.
Junior did. He told his parents that Richie had referred to them as “old man” and “old lady.” Richie got extra licks that night.
Life became totally cheerless. Along with the other wards, he attended King Elementary School, the four of them going there each morning after first walking five blocks out of their way to escort Junior to the private Catholic school where he was enrolled. King, like all the rest, was a place of torment for Richie; he faced new bullies who singled him out for daily abuse and humiliation. The other wards did not “take up for him,” as Stan had once done in friendship, and Ham had done for pay; they had their own battles to fight. Richie either avoided the new bullies who sought him out, or he endured their mistreatment; he was afraid to try any other course, such as fighting back. Sometimes he wished he were dead. There was, it seemed, no reason to live. The future offered him nothing except more of the same: the dreaded schoolyard, the oppressive household, the terrifying nights.
As it got colder, the radiator in the alcove where he slept was turned up higher. The intensity of his nightmares increased as the hissing became louder. Richie begged to be allowed to sleep elsewhere, to trade places with another ward, to sleep on the floor somewhere.
“No, no, no,” Mrs. Hubbard would reply automatically, and then offer some absurd excuse for the denial. “We have everything set up in an orderly fashion here and we simply cannot go about making changes to suit one individual. Suppose Lloyd didn’t want to sleep in the kitchen because he didn’t like the stove? Or Gerry in the front hall for some other silly reason? Can you see the problems it would cause? You sleep in the alcove, that’s that.”
Richie’s buttocks began to carry permanent bruises. His punishment was nightly; there was no way he could avoid it—he could not stop dreaming. He stayed awake as much as he could during the night, but eventually he had to drift off. Sometimes he was able to stifle all or part of the scream that the dream generated, but not often enough; at least once a night he went through the misery of being shaken, slapped, and shoved about the alcove for having awakened the Hubbards and Junior.
After a month, Richie decided he could endure it no longer. Early one morning, just as gray daylight was seeping into the apartment, he got up and crept to the end of the hall to the bureau used by the wards for their clothes. Quietly opening his drawer, he took out a pair of corduroy trousers, his warmest shirt, and a set of underwear and socks. He would hide them under the thin mattress of his cot; then, after Mrs. Hubbard had distributed their clothes to them to get dressed, as she did every morning, he would put on two sets. When he left that day, he would not come back. He just hoped that Mrs. Hubbard would not notice that clothes were missing from his drawer.
As he slipped back toward his cot with the clothes, Richie heard the toilet flush in the hall bathroom. Heart pounding, he flattened himself against the wall and held his breath. Junior came out of the bathroom and walked sleepily back into his bedroom. Unlike the wards, Junior was allowed to relieve himself during the night. He never wet the bed, a fact which Mrs. Hubbard proudly pointed out to them. “He is at least two years younger than all of you, and look what a good boy he is. Not like you, Maxie, who still wets your bed at least once a week.” To Mrs. Hubbard it was entirely irrelevant that Junior was allowed to get out of bed and go to the bathroom during the night and Maxie was not. When Maxie protested as much to her, she scoffed at him. “No, no, no, that means nothing. Junior is simply a better boy than you, Maxie. More disciplined, more controlled. You should try to be more like him, even if he is younger.” When Maxie wet his bed, as punishment he had to strip the sheets off and wash them, hang them and his mattress on the back porch to dry, be sent to school without breakfast, and be paddled at bedtime.
Richie had seen Maxie punished five times for wetting his bed, and Gerry once. Remembering that now, he stood silently in the hall and listened to Junior get back into bed. Junior seemed to fall asleep again almost at once. Richie moved over to the open door and listened. All was quiet; the whole apartment was still. Carefully putting down the clothes, Richie tiptoed into the room and stood next to Junior’s bed. It was a real bed, with box springs and a real mattress, not like the folding cots with sagging bedsprings and thin blue-striped, lumpy pads that served as their mattresses. Those thin pads and the springs that could be felt through them were all the worse after a boy had been blistered by Mr. Hubbard’s paddle. Richie thought of how many times he had taken it, how many Maxie had taken it, and the others. And how many of those times had been caused by Junior.
Carefully, Richie lifted back the blanket and sheet under which Junior lay. He was curled up in a ball, in warm flannel pajamas, while Richie and the wards slept in their underwear. Leaning forward, Richie took out his penis and, as slowly as he could, urinated all over Junior’s groin area. Junior did not even move while Richie was doing it. Directing his stream back and forth, Richie wet his legs down to the knees, his pajama top all over the stomach.
When he finished, he covered Junior back up and hurried from the room, smiling for the first time since he had come to live with the Hubbards.
The household that morning was oddly quiet. The wards could hear Junior sniffling in his bedroom, and his mother whispering urgently to him. When Mrs. Hubbard emerged and handed out the clothes each boy was to wear, her expression was cross, her manner more brusque than usual. To Richie’s relief, she gave him his clothes in cursory fashion, paying no attention to what was left in the drawer. Her hasty attitude made Richie wish he had taken another shirt, but it was too late then; the wards were sent off to their respective sleeping areas to get dressed and make their cots for folding and rolling away. Mrs. Hubbard went back into Junior’s room where the grave whispering immediately began again.
“Jeez, wonder what’s going on?” Maxie asked quietly as they filed down the hall.
“Maybe the little prick died in his sleep,” Gerry said hopefully.
As the four boys walked Junior to school that morning, he was as uncommonly quiet as the household had been. Usually his mouth never rested; he taunted and badgered and baited the wards about anything that he thought would annoy them, anything that would remind them of the grim, sour existence they led compared to his much more privileged life. But on this morning, Junior was glumly silent.
“What’s the matter, Junior?” asked Gerry. “You break your Shirley Temple doll or something?”
“I don’t have a Shirley Temple doll!” Junior said angrily. “I don’t play with dolls!”
“Yeah, I forget,” said Gerry, “you only play with yourself.”
“That’s a lie and I’m telling!” Junior threatened.
“Why don’t you shut up,” Lloyd said to Gerry. “You’re only gonna get you ass whacked.”
“I know what’s wrong with him,” Richie said.
“You do not!” Junior flared, turning red.
“Oh, yeah? What?” asked Gerry.
“You don’t know nothing!” Junior yelled. His eyes began to water. Richie grinned at him.
“He pisse
d the bed last night,” Richie told them. “Pissed it from top to bottom.”
Gerry and Maxie burst out laughing; even dour Lloyd had to smile. Junior, overcome with humiliation, began to bawl and scream and run away from them, all at the same time. “You wait!” he yelled, hurrying ahead of them toward the nuns standing outside his school. “Just wait! I’m telling on all of you! I’m gonna say you all hit me on the way to school!”
The four wards stopped and watched him run up to one of the nuns. Turning back, they started toward their own school.
“We’ll get it tonight,” Lloyd predicted. “All of us.”
All but one, Richie thought, trudging along in his two sets of clothes.
29
Seeing Richie huddled in the basement doorway, Stan first stared incredulously, then asked indignantly, “Where the hell you been?”
Richie told him the whole story: about George Zangara, the baby his mother was going to have, the welfare woman coming to get him at school, being taken to the Hubbard home.
“Jeez,” said Stan. “I wondered why they come and took you to the principal’s office that day. Where’s your old lady?”
“I don’t know,” Richie said, shrugging. “Someplace where women wait to have babies, she told me.”
“What you gonna do now?” Stan asked, and immediately suggested, “You could sleep in the basement here.”
“Think so?”
“Hell, yeah, why not. My old lady’s got a extra blanket under her bed; I’ll cop it for you.”
“Can you get me something to eat too? I ain’t had nothing since supper last night.”
“Jeez. Didn’t they give you no breakfast in that place?”
