Crooked Read online

  “The lights. I don’t want her to see us.”

  The lights went off, and Amos edged back closer to the glass.

  “Don’t want who to see us?” Bruce said.

  “Her.” Amos stepped aside so Bruce could see, too.

  “It’s the Brainette,” Bruce said, “Clara Something, the goofy newspaper girl. The one with the nose. And her best friend, Spot.”

  They both watched as Clara finally came to life. She tossed the MacKenzies’ paper onto the porch—plop—and then she and her stout black dog walked on.

  “God, Amos,” Bruce said. “She was staring at your house. Do you think the Brainette wants to be your strumpet?”

  It took Amos a second to turn around. Then he said, “Oh, yeah. That’s likely.”

  In a girlish falsetto that grew breathier with each word, Bruce said, “Oh, Amos, Amos, sweetie, kiss me, kiss me, I know the capital of Sri Lanka.”

  Amos gave him a solid shoulder punch to snap him out of it. “Guess you forgot you’re running late.”

  Amos hid Mademoiselle Fifi in his shirt and followed Bruce up the stairs and out into the freezing night. The newspaper lay where Clara had thrown it, the small bundle of newsprint bound in a blue rubber band and ...

  An envelope.

  Amos stared at it, and Crook, sensing something, followed his gaze to the tidy white rectangle with the word AMOS on the front. They both grabbed for it at the same time, but Bruce had the angle. He plucked it neatly from its fastened place.

  “Oh, my, fans, we’ve received a note,” Bruce said, screening the envelope from Amos. He ripped it open, stared at its contents, and couldn’t contain himself. “Girl for rent! The Brainette does want to be your strumpet!”

  Amos, flushing, said, “What is it?”

  Bruce grinned and went back to his falsetto. “Why, it’s a special girl-for-rent note for you and only you, Amos, precious. It’s got your very own name in extra-special cave drawings.”

  Amos grabbed the paper from Bruce’s hands, and his eyes swam over the symbols and letters. He was stunned, embarrassed, and strangely pleased.

  Bruce was already through the gate, making a point of laughing like a hyena, when Amos said, “It’s not cave drawings, you moron. It’s hieroglyphics.”

  “Love,” Bruce sang back. “I call it love.”

  Amos stepped back into the house. Liz was frying hamburger meat and leaning into the living room, where Love Connection was on.

  “How come you’re cooking?” Amos asked. “Where’s Mom and Dad?”

  His sister didn’t take her eyes from the TV screen. “They called. They’re still at the clinic and are going to be late. You’re getting hamburger and mushroom gravy. Except we’re out of hamburger, so I’m using Tender Vittles.”

  “My sister, one of this nation’s truly gifted comedians,” Amos said, and moved on. He went into the backyard to check his pigeons’ food and water, then, back inside, climbed the stairs to his room. He pulled out the shoe box hidden in the antique radio cabinet behind his stacks of old comic books. He slipped the letter inside Mademoiselle Fifi and put the book into the shoe box, next to his signed Paul Molitor baseball, the Dr. Reuben sex book, the switchblade he’d found at Monument Park, and the condoms he’d bought at Pringle’s.

  5

  THE NAKED AMOS

  On Sunday morning, Clara was awakened by the telephone. She let it ring because her mother was always up first, but when she didn’t hear footsteps, she raced to the hallway and picked up the phone to hear an old woman ask for Clara Wilson.

  “This is she,” Clara said. In Civics, Mr. Duckworth made them answer roll call, This is he or This is she. But in real life, it sounded weird.

  “Hello, this is Sylvia Harper on Kensington Avenue, and I received your notice in my paper last night.”

  “Oh,” Clara said, picturing the old wrought-iron sign with two rusty squirrels, one holding up the address and the other holding up “Harper.” Clara had always guessed that Mrs. Harper, a widow, was lonely. She tended to watch through her curtains for the newspaper, and when Clara came around to collect the money, she always had ready a white envelope with PAPER written in ballpoint pen on the outside. When it was cold and Clara stepped inside to write a receipt, Mrs. Harper’s house smelled first like vanilla candles and then like the three yellow cats that sat staring at her from different chairs in the front room.

  Now Mrs. Harper said, “I might need you to do a job for me, but I’d like to talk to your mother first. Is she there?”

  “I think so,” Clara said. “Just a minute and I’ll bring her to the phone.”

  The bathroom was empty, though, and so was her mother’s room. “Mom?” Clara yelled, hoping that Mrs. Harper couldn’t hear. The need to explain her scheme fast enough to get permission made Clara feel slightly ill and excited, like when she’d auditioned for The Smiling Gumshoe.

  “Mom?” she tried again from the kitchen, and then she could see her mother through the pantry window, a blue-coated figure stepping carefully across the snow that had fallen all night. Clara knocked on the window, and her mother turned around. She frowned when Clara motioned her back to the house, holding up the black kitchen phone and pointing at it.

  Her mother stamped her feet on the mat, smelling of perfume and cold air. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, but her earrings made it clear that she was dressed for work beneath her parka. She was holding an old photo album. “Morning, sweetie. Is that Dad on the phone?”

  “No,” Clara said, “it’s Sylvia Harper. Our neighbor.”

  “I know who she is. But why is she on the phone?”

  Clara explained. “She wants to know if I’m responsible. Say I am, okay?”

  “You want me to lie?” her mother asked, raising one eyebrow in mock alarm.

  “Hurry, Mom, okay? She’s been waiting on the phone forever.”

  Clara’s mother unwound her scarf and picked up the phone. “Hello, Sylvia? Yes, this is Angie.”

  Mrs. Harper began to talk at length. Clara petted Ham, who’d found a tennis ball somewhere and was now panting at her and begging her to throw it.

  “Well,” her mother said at last, “Clara’s had her paper route for some time now with no complaints. I don’t know how much time she’s going to have when she starts rehearsals for the school play, but she’s very responsible and dependable.”

  Mrs. Harper’s voice started droning again, and Clara’s mother had an amused look on her face, as though she and Clara had decided to make some prank calls together and were enjoying an especially good one. Her mother began to study her fingernails, which were peach this week, and then she nodded. “That sounds fine, Sylvia. I’m happy you can use Clara’s help. I’ll put her on.”

  As it turned out, Mrs. Harper needed Clara to do two things. She needed Clara to shovel snow and then to buy her some things at the market. She wanted Clara to come over at nine o’clock, and it was a little after eight when Clara hung up. The old brown photo album that her mother had carried in was now sitting on the kitchen table. “What’s that album?” Clara asked her mother, who was adjusting the gas flame under a pan she’d greased with olive oil.

  “Want a cooked tomato and some toast?” her mother asked. When Clara nodded, she said, “Your dad stored his old things out in the shed when we first moved in. They should be moved to the attic, where they’ll stay dry.”

  To Clara, this had the feel of a half-truth instead of a whole truth, and she made a mental note to check out the album some time when no one was around. “Could we have hot chocolate with breakfast?” Clara asked.

  “If you run upstairs and get dressed first. You should put on some layers if you’re going to be shoveling and then running all over the place for Mrs. Harper. And I need you to do our driveway first. For free.”

  While Clara was standing in the upstairs hallway pulling a comb through wads of wet, snarled hair, the phone rang again. When the voice asking for Clara Wilson turned out to be male and young, a l
ittle vacuum opened up in her chest, a wide, sinking space that made it hard for her to say, in proper English, “This is she.”

  “Hello, this is Amos MacKenzie,” the voice said. “And I’m naked as a jaybird.”

  “What?” Clara asked.

  “Naked,” the voice said again.

  “That’s disgusting,” Clara said, and quickly replaced the phone.

  “What’s disgusting?” her mother asked. She’d come up the stairs with Ham and was looking through the linen cupboard. The linen cupboard was the one place in the house that had flourished in the past few years. The shelves overflowed with lacy bargains she brought home from Kaufmann’s, and every time her mother felt depressed about a failed scheme for a more exciting job, she would bring home a new piece of cloth and say, “Isn’t it splendid, Clara? It’s the one good thing about my job, so I’d better take advantage of it.”

  “I just got a prank phone call,” Clara said.

  “What did they say?”

  “It was just some kid at school. He called to say he was naked.”

  Her mother folded a burgundy plaid blanket into a tighter square. “Do you know who it was?”

  “No.” This was more or less the truth.

  “Are you sure it was a boy, not an adult?”

  “Yes,” Clara said. In the back of her mind, she hoped it wasn’t really Amos. She had no idea what his voice sounded like on the phone because she’d hardly spoken to him in person. It just didn’t seem like something he would do, not unless he thought the note she’d left him was dumb and this nasty phone call was his way of saying, “Grow up. I’m too old for silly notes from girls I hardly know.”

  “If he calls again, hang up immediately, then call me at work and I’ll call the phone company. Okay?”

  Clara nodded.

  “Okay, then. And when you get the groceries for Mrs. Harper, will you get some things for us?” her mother asked.

  “For dinner, you mean?” Clara asked. “I thought you were going to eat at work.”

  “Well, I changed my mind. Here’s some money and the list.”

  The list contained ingredients for the Thai supper, and Clara felt, as she read cellophane noodles and coconut milk, that she had never been so happy to see a list of foods she hated.

  By the time Clara was heading off to Sylvia Harper’s, her mother had brought a cup of coffee out to the living room, sat down on the couch, and begun turning through the black pages of the photo album, studying the pictures.

  Mrs. Harper was watching from her curtains when Clara approached the square white house with the glass porch. To Clara’s horror, Ham lifted his leg, aimed more or less at the front gatepost, and left a dizzy yellow pattern on the snow. In her mind, Clara said damn three times. Pulling Ham away from the snowdrift only widened the pattern he made, and beneath her heavy clothes, Clara felt herself begin to sweat. Mrs. Harper frowned through the curtains, but Clara finally managed to get Ham to follow her up the steps. A dusty Christmas wreath made of cinnamon sticks and pinecones was still on the door, and when Clara wiped off her feet, she could smell crushed cinnamon and cats.

  “You brought that dog with you” was the first thing Mrs. Harper said when she opened the door. “I hope he won’t chase my cats.”

  “He’s not interested in cats,” Clara said. She hoped this was true, and generally Ham did keep to himself. He was wagging his tail at Mrs. Harper now and looking anxiously around for something to present. He settled on a fake mouse in the corner and got it in his mouth.

  “Is he hungry?” Mrs. Harper asked.

  “No,” Clara asked. “He just wanted to give you a present.”

  “Well, how polite,” she said, and bent down to pat Ham on the head, prompting him to rear up and place both paws on her flowered dress.

  “Down, Ham, down!” Clara yelled, and Mrs. Harper was already stepping back into the house, as if Ham were not Ham at all but some rabid animal. She looked down at her green-flowered house dress, where the combination of wet snow and a dirty front porch had produced a smear of paw prints. “What a mortifying dog,” Mrs. Harper said—is that what she said?

  This was off to a bad start. “I’m sorry,” Clara said.

  “But I suspect that creature is not,” Mrs. Harper said, and it was true that instead of looking sorry, Ham looked like he wanted to jump up again and have his head properly stroked. Mrs. Harper stepped back, dug into the pocket of her dress, and brought out a folded envelope. “Here’s the shopping list,” she said, “and some money, and the shovel is right there.” She pointed to a new shovel leaning against the glass wall of the porch. The white paper envelope was marked STORE. “There are some lunch ingredients in there, so try to be back by eleven if you can,” she said, and after giving Ham another measured look, she went back in the house.

  Clara was sweating by the time she finished half the driveway, so she took off her gloves. She took off her hat and scarf when she started on the sidewalk, and her coat when she got to the mailbox, trying all the time not to think of Amos sitting naked by the phone. Of all the people in the world to think of naked by the telephone, he was probably the least repulsive, but the problem was she couldn’t think of a single person she’d like to see naked by a telephone. That was at least one of the important differences between males and females, she thought suddenly, because boys could probably name you ten girls in five seconds they would like to see naked by a telephone.

  Up and down the street, people were throwing shovelfuls of snow onto high drifts, and the busy scraping sound of metal on concrete was pleasant under a blue sky. Now and then, Clara could see the curtains in Mrs. Harper’s living room window ease back, and on those occasions, she made sure Ham was sticking close by. When she had just started pushing the shovel along the edge of the sidewalk to get a clean line, a car moved past her and she saw two boys in the back. Bruce Crookshank was one. Amos was the other. Bruce was pointing at her and holding Amos’s coat by the shoulder so he couldn’t slump down. “Hi, Clara!” Bruce shouted through the half-opened window. “Loved your note!” This was all that could be said before the car turned the corner and Clara was left, humiliated, on the wet sidewalk.

  So Amos had shown her ridiculous message to his friends. Maybe he had really called her, then. Bruce was probably listening the whole time, egging him on, and they would laugh all day while she shoveled sidewalks and climbed through drifts to get to the grocery store. Clara turned around to see Mrs. Harper watching her. She waved, held up the white envelope, and attached Ham’s leash for the suddenly tiresome walk to Dusty’s Oldtowne Market. Halfway there, from a phone booth at the Conoco station, she dialed Gerri’s number in hopes she was home by now, but she wasn’t.

  “Yo, it’s me, Gerri. Speak at the beep and maybe I won’t call back, but probably I will.”

  “It’s me,” Clara said a little forlornly. “Call me as soon as you get home, okay?”

  6

  A FRIEND LIKE CROOKSHANK

  Amos, slumped down in the back of Crook’s brother’s Pontiac Bonneville, wanted to turn around to see Clara’s face but didn’t want Crook to know he cared that much.

  Outside, all the tree limbs and fences and TV antennas were thick with snow. There were four of them in the car—Amos and Bruce in the back; Zeke, Bruce’s older brother, at the wheel; and Zeke’s friend Big Dave Pearse riding shotgun. They were heading up to the high school gym, where Zeke and Big Dave, because of their varsity status, were allowed to shoot around on weekends. Amos and Bruce were along because they hoped to find some pickup games in the warm gym afterward.

  Before Bruce called, Amos was at church, the last place he wanted to be. His mother had bribed him and Liz with blueberry waffles, had ironed all their good clothes, and had, at the last moment, put on a hat. “It’s not Easter, Mom,” Liz had said. His mother, turning the rearview mirror toward herself, said, “When I was a little girl, women covered their heads in church.”

  During the hymns and the sermon, Amos wo
ndered when his mother would get over this religion thing. He studied the backs of his hands, the leather of his shoes, the stained-glass windows, and the program. His mother had been religious before she got married, and she knew the words to all the songs without looking at the hymnal. She sang, she watched the reverend, she shut her eyes during the prayers, and—surprisingly—so did his father. He sang in a deep voice that sounded, Amos had to admit, pretty good. He also had to admit that his mother was the only woman in church wearing a hat.

  On the far side of the backseat of the Bonneville, Bruce was suddenly going through his pockets as if he’d lost something important.

  “What?” Amos said.

  But Bruce kept fumbling through pockets until at last he came up with a copy of Clara’s flyer. He tapped a telephone number on it and smirked.

  “I thought I owed it to you to verify that this was in fact the Brainette’s genuine number.”

  A bad feeling shot through Amos. “You called her up.”

  “That’s correct. This very A.M.”

  “And?”

  “And not much, really,” Bruce said. “I say, ‘Is this Clara Wilson?’ and she goes, ‘This is she,’ like she’s the receptionist at some kind of snooty office or something, and I say, ‘Well, this is Amos MacKenzie, and I’m naked as a jaybird,’ and then she said I was disgusting and hung up.”

  Up front, Zeke and Big Dave Pearse let out appreciative hoots.

  Amos looked at his friend. “Swear, Crook?”

  “On any book you like.”

  Amos stared out at the passing yards trying to decide whether Crook would’ve done something like that. The problem with a friend like Bruce was it was hard to imagine anything he wouldn’t do. Amos turned and looked at him seriously, drilling his eyes into him until Bruce had to turn and look back.

  “Question?” Bruce said.

  In a low voice he hoped couldn’t be heard up front, Amos said, “Did you really call her and say that?”

  Bruce tried to look as if he actually felt bad about it. “Yeah, I did. I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me.”