11

In the morning the doorbell woke me. “Holtz?” a man called. “Tolman Holtz, are you in there?”

Then I heard Mrs. Chrissman. She was standing outside our door, too. “The older one told me he was going to his grandmother. If I thought they didn’t have anybody, believe me, I would have been the first to take them in.”

I signaled Bubber to be quiet.

“He gave us the wrong address,” the man said, “then he ran away. I was here yesterday, too, tracking him down.”

“Oh, that one, the big one, he’s trouble,” Mrs. Chrissman said. She banged on the door. “Tolley! Tolley! Are you in there? This is Mrs. Chrissman. Open up.”

“I’ll look around the neighborhood and come back,” the man said. “I’m not leaving without them. If you see them, though—”

“Don’t worry, I’ll hold them for you. They need somebody to control them. Their poor mother. Poor woman. They are a handful. Leave them alone, they’re like wild animals.”

I heard the man’s footsteps going downstairs; then I got up and stood at the window. A tall man in a red plaid jacket and a gray hat came out on the stoop. It was drizzling. He lit a cigarette, stood there for a couple of minutes, then walked away.

Bubber and I got dressed and climbed out on the fire escape. We went up the ladder to the roof and down another set of stairs into another part of the building.