Crooked Read online

  Amos sat back in his seat and watched the stores pass: Pringle’s Drugstore, where Bruce Crookshank had dared him to buy a pack of condoms; Doug May Sporting Goods, where he’d used his yard money for a Rawlins John Olerud–model firstbaseman’s glove; Carat’s Clothes for Men, where just two months ago, Amos’s mother had taken him for a suit to be baptized in, which was the strangest of the numerous strange ideas his mother had been coming up with lately.

  Lately.

  What was lately? Lately, he decided, was ever since his father had been going to that doctor. But whatever the doctor had been doing or saying to his father was some kind of big-deal secret. If Amos was home with his mother when his father came back from the doctor, his father would give a thumbs-up sign and say, “Tip-top. A-okay.” And sometimes his mother and father would stop talking when Amos came into the room or make up new, cheery things to talk about, which got on Amos’s nerves. He wasn’t eight years old, he wasn’t their delicate retardate child, so why couldn’t they just keep on talking?

  When his father turned the rusted-out Econoline onto Adams Avenue and there was no longer much to look at, Amos still slouched down, staring out.

  “Pretty girl, don’t you think?” his father said in that over-gentle voice he used when he was trying to get Amos to say things he didn’t feel like saying.

  “Who?” Amos said.

  “Miss Wilson,” his father said.

  Amos didn’t say anything.

  “The girl who was flirting with you.”

  “Nobody was flirting with me,” Amos said in a sulky voice. “Maybe she was flirting with you,” he said.

  “Well, now,” his father said amiably. “That kind of shines a whole new light on things, doesn’t it? This pretty thirteen-year-old flirting with a forty-two-year-old bald man.”

  “She’s fourteen,” Amos said. His skin was prickly with sudden heat.

  “And how did you come by that information?” his father said, still smiling.

  “Because she’s in the ninth grade,” he said, and stared out the window. He realized with regret that he’d opened the door to even more questioning from his father, but none came. Finally Amos turned to look at him, and what he saw was startling. There was a strange, contorted look on his father’s face until he saw Amos looking, and then his father made a tightly constrained smile.

  “Tums time,” he said, and reached across Amos to the glove compartment, where, to Amos’s surprise, there was a big twenty-four-count box of Tums tubes. His father unwound the wrapping from four tablets and began to chew them. For five or six blocks his expression didn’t change, and then the strange distorted face relaxed and became his father’s face again. When finally his father talked, his voice was relaxed, too. “Guess I ate one too many flapjacks for breakfast,” he said.

  Amos nodded, but it wasn’t like his father had eaten a mountain of pancakes or anything. In fact, he hardly remembered his father eating anything at all.

  A pickup truck splashed by to their right, spattering Amos’s window with dirty water. “Moron,” Amos said under his breath to the other driver. He waited. Sometimes his father, when provoked, would use one of his favorite dopey words. Jackanapes, or something like that. But today it was like his father didn’t even notice. He just drove along in his own little world. Finally, about three blocks from home, he broke the silence.

  “Amos,” he said, “I want you to tell me something. If you could wish for one thing in the world, what would it be?”

  Amos didn’t know what to answer. He had the funny feeling he should give the answer that would have been true a few years ago, an answer that would be as comforting to his father as Tums. The truth was, Amos’s wishes were different now. Now he wished he could walk over to the lunch table where Clara always sat with her friend Gerri and make some excuse to sit down. He wished he had his own car. He wished he didn’t wish his father wasn’t a lowly milkman whose big outings were twice-a-week Moose Lodge meetings and Thursday night bowling, but he did.

  “To play first base for the Blue Jays,” Amos said, and then, refining a little, “and to hit for higher average than Olerud and more homers than Carter.”

  And Amos was right. His father smiled and relaxed again in his seat.

  3

  EGYPTIANS

  Clara’s house had an attic. By parting the clothes in the upstairs hall closet and climbing the rungs of a permanent vertical ladder, you came to the trapdoor, which when pushed open allowed entry into the long empty room. “The schizophrenic attic,” Clara’s mother called it, because one side was so unlike the other. All of the junk had been pushed into a disorderly heap in one half of the room. The other half was severely neat. It was here that her mother had set up a desk and tried to complete her master’s degree in something called Egyptology. All Clara knew about it was the strange flat eyes of Egyptian art, which faced toward you even though the faces were in profile.

  But that was before the money troubles. The company that employed Clara’s father sold top-of-the-line office furniture, but not much of it was selling right now. It had something to do with businesses failing and used furniture flooding the market—that’s what Clara got out of it, anyhow. So that was the end of Egyptology. Her mother had failed to find a teaching job and had finally taken a job at Kaufmann’s Department Store, folding towels and ringing up sheets.

  Clara thought Kaufmann’s was a nice place to work, and she thought her mother looked elegant leading customers through the rows of pillows and bright towels, but when her mother came home for dinner, she would complain to Clara’s father long-distance wherever he was and then talk to her sister— Clara’s aunt—in Dalton.

  Clara could always tell who her mother was talking to just by her tone of voice. With her father, her mother’s voice was flat and tired-sounding. “Fine,” she would say when asked about her day, and then they might talk about the latest storm front. “Well, that’s life in Jemison,” Clara’s mother would say in her weary voice, “where the weather changes all the time, but the people never do.” But with Clara’s aunt, her mother’s voice grew bright and alive with hopes and schemes. She talked about new possibilities for making money: catering, sewing, furniture refinishing, anything. Lately, the big new idea was teaching abroad. “There are jobs right now, as we speak, for someone with my credentials in Kyoto and Provence,” Clara heard her mother say one night to her aunt. Clara was good at geography. She knew Kyoto was in Japan and Provence was in France. Clara was amazed and a little afraid. Why would her mother look for a job there when her family lived here?

  Clara opened the gray box of Princess-of-Monaco stationery on her mother’s desk and considered her plan. If she was going to put advertising flyers in the newspapers, she needed to get people’s attention. She pulled out one of her mother’s books and after some practice made a drawing of an Egyptian girl pulling a huge square stone across the page. Under that, she wrote: Girl for rent! Let me do your errands on snowy days. I’m fourteen and I can get your groceries, your mail, or your hardware supplies, or walk your dog. Dependable and inexpensive! Call Clara at 543-4245. At the last minute, she found a copy of her mother’s résumé on the desk, so she added, References upon request.

  Clara liked the way her advertisement looked, and carefully made fifteen more, enough to give to all the elderly people on her route. Then she thought of Amos MacKenzie and had another idea. The MacKenzies were on her route, too. It had always been her favorite part, in fact—approaching the MacKenzie house and throwing something toward Amos’s front door. So maybe she would give them an advertisement, too, and add a note to Amos.

  She opened a book that translated the tiny pictures that stood for letters in the Egyptian alphabet. She found the Egyptian symbols for Amos’s name, and she drew them precisely at the very top of one of her advertisements: a forearm, then an owl, a quail chick, and a folded cloth. Amos, it spelled, but what it looked like was a pair of birds about to be caught and served for dinner. After looking at the sy
mbols for a while, she decided to write the letters of his name underneath, and before it, Hi! She folded the paper, slid it into its immaculate envelope, and wrote his name on the outside. She slipped the flyers under the rubber bands when she folded her papers in the late afternoon, and she put the letter with Amos’s name on it in the paper she would save for last.

  It wasn’t quite dark when she went outside with Ham sniffing and pulling on one hand and the canvas vest full of papers thudding against her chest. The canvas apron tended to push her bra sideways and up. She’d never expected a bra to pinch. She had assumed it would be like a shirt or underwear—something you never noticed you were wearing. And she hated to wear white shirts now because the bra was so distinct underneath, reminding everyone, she felt, how little she needed it.

  Carrying the paper for Amos MacKenzie made her walk faster. The whole evening seemed prettier and more mysterious, as though the lights in the windows were the lamps of happy people who were about to do exciting things. It was only much later that night, when she was lying on the couch near her mother and half listening to the TV and the low sounds of her father’s voice coming through the phone, that Clara began to wonder if she’d done the right thing. And, lightning quick, she knew she hadn’t. She’d done something stupid. Childish and stupid. She imagined people—especially Amos—dropping the expensive white paper into trash cans all through the neighborhood. He’d probably been totally repulsed by her runny nose. Her crooked runny nose.

  “So you’re coming home tomorrow for sure?” her mother said into the air above the telephone. She was doing a crossword puzzle, so she was using the speakerphone, which Clara knew her father disliked. He said he felt like he was doing a radio show.

  From what seemed a great distance, her father said, “The flight’s supposed to arrive at three-fifteen.”

  “I’ll still be at work then,” her mother said in her flat, distracted voice.

  “That’s fine,” her father said, and because his voice was so thin as it came through the phone, Clara couldn’t decide whether he really thought it was fine or not. “What time do you get off work?” he asked.

  “Six or so,” her mother said, filling in a long vertical word in her puzzle.

  “Perfect. Maybe Clara and I will cook something,” her father said. “We could have some Thai food ready when you get home.”

  Thai food was her mother’s favorite, something Clara always dreaded because she preferred plain rice with butter. But it seemed a very bad sign when her mother, putting down her pencil to pick up the receiver and cut off the speakerphone, said, “No, that’s okay. You and Clara go ahead. I’ll probably just have something before I leave the store.” Instead of the usual exchange about missing him, she said a quick and wooden “Good night.” And then, before going back to her crossword, her mother set the phone down so carefully she might have been putting a china cup on display at the store.

  4

  PRUSSIANS

  While Clara was making up her flyers, Amos was lounging around his basement reading a book and trying to ignore his buddy Bruce Crookshank. Amos was sprawled on one of the five old sofas that had collected against the concrete walls. Bruce stood in the middle of the big room, under a single bare lightbulb that hung down from an unpainted beam.

  Bruce was even taller than Amos, except he was already a little heavy in the middle, so that his body had a large, soft look to it. He wore a stretched-out sweatshirt, and his thick hair poked out at odd angles over his ears. Today Bruce was pretending, as he often did, to be pitching for the New York Yankees. He held a tennis ball in his mitt, stared at the imaginary catcher to get imaginary signals, then, winding up, went into the play-by-play. “Howe into his stretch...checks the runners...comes in with the fastball...strike three called! Oh, my! Did he paint the corner with that one, fans, and Molitor’s caught looking with the bases loaded.”

  “Fat chance,” Amos muttered.

  “That’s Molitor’s third straight K, fans, and hey, take a listen, the crowd is going wild!” Bruce made a muffled moaning sound of distant crowd noise.

  “Molitor’s hitting over .340 lifetime against Steve Howe,” Amos said matter-of-factly.

  “Not in this league,” Bruce said as he picked up a broomstick handle and took a couple of practice swings, then tapped at his shoe soles as if to knock mud from cleats. “Leading off the bottom of the ninth, the Yankee third baseman, Mike Pagliarulo, and let me tell ya, Pags is on a heckuva tear!” More crowd noise.

  Amos preferred the Blue Jays, and the fact that in Bruce’s imaginary league, the Yankees always came from behind to win in the bottom of the ninth got on his nerves.

  “A lazy fly ball to left,” Bruce was saying, “Carter settles under it and makes the ... no ... no ... I don’t believe it, fans, but I’m here to tell you! Carter drops the ball! The Yankees are still alive!”

  The book Amos was reading was called Mademoiselle Fifi, a worn paperback he’d seen with his father at Value Village and gone back alone to buy, along with two more innocent-looking books. No other woman in France would have yielded to his caresses! it said on the cover, just below the picture of a Prussian officer in black boots seated in a velvet chair with a beautiful, mostly undressed woman sitting in his lap. The writer was a Frenchman named Guy de Maupassant, but the book was pretty disappointing, as far as Amos was concerned. To begin with, it wasn’t a novel, it was a bunch of short stories. And although there was mention of an orgy, the author never said what exactly was going on at this orgy.

  Bruce, in a world of his own, said, “Ground ball sharply to second ... under Amaros’s glove! under Amaros’s glove! ... Oh, my! ... It went right through his legs, fans, and now the sacks are packed with pinstripes!”

  “Hey, Crook,” Amos said.

  Bruce, swaggering like Jose Tartabull, the Yankees’ cleanup hitter, took a few practice swings with his broomstick.

  “Hey, Crook, listen to this. C’mon.”

  “We talking sex?” Bruce said, stepping back out of the imaginary batter’s box.

  Amos said, “Yeah. Well, sort of, anyway.” He explained the situation. The Prussians in Mademoiselle Fifi had invaded France, and as the Prussian officers at the orgy got drunker and drunker, they made more and more insulting remarks to the French girls, who had been hired from something called a “house of public accommodation.” Finally the main officer set a glass of champagne on the head of the nicest French girl and said, “All the women in France belong to us!”

  “Any pictures?” Bruce asked.

  Amos ignored the question. “So then, after this insult, the girl gets her composure and says, ‘I? I am not a woman. I am only a strumpet, and that is all that Prussians want.’”

  Bruce looked at him blankly. “So?”

  “Isn’t that creepy? That she would have to say that about herself?”

  Bruce stared at him for a while. “Maybe you’re reading too much into it.”

  Amos kept thinking about it.

  “I like that strumpet word, though,” Bruce said. “Kind of sounds like a dessert for grownups.” Besides his photographic memory of sports trivia, Bruce Crookshank had one other highly prized talent. He could imitate almost anyone’s voice of either gender and any age. Now he threw his voice into the husky register of a male middle-aged New Yorker. “I’d like coffee, brandy, and a French strumpet, please.”

  Amos rolled his eyes. “Anyhow, the Prussian officer goes ballistic and slaps the woman, and, presto, she stabs him in the neck with a table knife.”

  “Now we’re talking,” Bruce said. “Read that part. Make it dramatic.”

  Upstairs the phone rang, and they could hear Amos’s big sister crossing the dining room to get it.

  Amos found his place. “‘Something that the officer was going to say was cut short in his throat, and he sat there with his mouth half-open and a terrible look in his eyes.’”

  When Amos looked up from the book, Bruce was slumped on the floor acting the part of the dea
d man.

  “If you’re dead, Crook, my prayers are answered.”

  A few seconds later, the door at the head of the basement stairs opened and Amos’s sister, Liz, poked her head in and said, “That was your brother, Crooky-poo. He says the Judge is on the prowl, and if you’re not home in fifteen minutes, your little dinger’s in the wringer. Or words to that effect.” She slammed the door before a rebuttal could be composed. The Judge was Bruce’s father.

  Bruce looked at Amos. “Guess your folks aren’t home for her to talk like that.”

  “They’re off at the doctor’s,” Amos said.

  Bruce turned and yelled up through the floorboards. “Gives me goose bumps, Elizabeth, when you talk dirty like that!”

  Amos tossed the book on the floor. “Hey, Crook, did I mention sighting the Elusive One walking on Banner Ave. today?”

  Bruce wheeled around. “You sighted Anne Barrineau?”

  Amos nodded. “The one and only.”

  “Specifics, please.”

  Amos smiled and stretched. Bruce, along with half the guys at Melville, spent a lot of idle moments fantasizing about Anne Barrineau. “Okay, let’s see,” Amos said. “Walking alone. Headed due west. Approximately three miles per hour.”

  Bruce took this in slowly. “What was she wearing?”

  “A sweater, tights, long coat, and, let’s see, two matching shoes. Also, I imagine, underwear.”

  “Yeah,” Bruce said, “I imagine, too.”

  Amos grinned. “Yeah, I imagine you do.”

  Amos stood, went over to the window, and stared out into the dusk. It was a view he liked, the window sunken into a light well at yard level so it was like you were lying on your stomach seeing things. He’d been staring out for a while before he realized that a girl was standing by the gate, very still and quiet, just staring up at the house. It was Clara Wilson. Amos instinctively stepped back. “Turn off the lights,” he said in a tight whisper to Bruce.

  “What?”