· 10 ·
ON THE DAY MRS. WILSON visits our classroom, even Mr. Mitchell sits up straight in his chair. It’s the twenty-fourth of February, and the black-haired no-nonsense principal of Wonderland Avenue School interrupts our math drills to make an announcement: “The sixth-graders are going on a field trip.”
Field trips are cool. Field trips give us a half day off from Mr. Mitchell’s prison. They give us a ride on the long kind of school bus, an excuse to sing “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer,” and a chance to bounce around in the back seats. Sometimes the buses take us to interesting places, too. We’ve been on a tour of the Los Angeles Times, where the news gets cast in rubber and mounted on a giant drum that looks like a ditto machine. We’ve been to the La Brea Tar Pits, where thousands of years ago woolly mammoths, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, and even a human—the La Brea Woman—were trapped in pools of oozing asphalt. We got to go whale watching once, but I took Dramamine and slept through the whole cruise.
Where will the sixty-seat Crown bus take us this time? The Descanso Gardens? The Huntington Library? The Los Angeles Zoo?
“You’ll be gone a whole week,” Mrs. Wilson says. “Saturday to Friday.” In every row eyes and mouths open wide. Heads spin around. Voices rumble through the room.
Mrs. Wilson raises her hand for silence. “There’s a science camp in the Angeles National Forest. Every week during the school year, two schools are selected for a weeklong visit to the Clear Creek Outdoor Education Center. This year it’s Wonderland’s turn.”
The class cheers. Mrs. Wilson’s hand comes up again for silence. She passes around a flyer and offers more details. “You’ll need to pack your own bedding, warm clothes, and toiletries. Your meals will be provided by the camp’s cafeteria. I expect you all, as ambassadors of our school, to be on your absolute best behavior.
“The bus will leave from Wonderland early Saturday morning and return the following Friday in time for the afternoon buses home,” Mrs. Wilson continues. “But I need to ask your help for something. The regular school buses don’t run on the weekends, and not all of our new families this year have cars. So we’re looking for volunteers to invite Otis and Armstrong, and also Alma and Dezzy from Mrs. Valentine’s class, to spend Friday night in your house before the field trip. That way they’ll already be here in the Canyon for the early Saturday departure. Ask your parents, please, if they might be able to accommodate a guest for a sleepover that night.”
The room is quiet. Armstrong and Otis look at their laps.
“Are there any questions?”
There are thousands. Can we bring cameras? What if we don’t like the food? Is it cold enough up there to see your breath in the mornings? Do the showers have doors? I still sleep with a stuffed animal; should I leave him at home?
What if nobody volunteers?
But no one asks these questions out loud.
At last, one hand goes up in back. “Mrs. Wilson?”
We all turn around and look at Alex Levinson as he says, “Otis is my friend. I’ll ask my mom if he can stay with us Friday night.”
“Thank you, Alex.”
She looks around the room. Is it for a second volunteer?
Shelley raises her hand. “Alma can sleep at my house.”
“Thank you, Shelley. Make sure it’s fine with your parents.”
Mrs. Wilson waits a little more. When no more hands go up, she quietly leaves the room.
“I don’t want to go on some school trip anyway,” I tell my family that night at dinner.
There’s a heavy rainstorm on. You can hear it doing a drum dance on the gutters.
“I’ll go for you,” Charmaine says.
“You can’t go. You’re a girl.”
“We’ve got practically the same face.”
“You going to cut your hair and start wearing my clothes? All for a stupid science camp?”
“He doesn’t want to go because none of the kids invited him to stay over on Friday night,” Lenai says.
“Is that right, Armstrong?” Mama asks.
I let my shoulder answer for me.
“Son,” my daddy says, like he’s all experienced in these matters, “just because nobody volunteered on the first day doesn’t mean they won’t on the second. You’ve got to give them a chance to go home and ask their families. That’s the proper way to do things.”
“Alex Levinson put his hand up for Otis.”
“Guess you shouldn’t have kicked that white boy’s ass, then,” Ebony says.
Whoever said girls can’t run faster than boys never got chased by Shelley Berman. She chases me around the schoolyard faster than a tetherball goes around a pole. The only thing that slows this girl down is the sign on the boys’ bathroom, which is where I’m hiding now, just to catch my breath.
Mrs. Gaines, on the other hand, barges right in.
“Charlie Ross, Principal Wilson would like to see you in her office. Before the morning bell.”
What could I have possibly done wrong now?
The office feels even scarier when the typewriter is quiet and the phone isn’t ringing. I knock on Mrs. Wilson’s closed door.
“Come in,” she says.
I go in. She tells me to sit. I sit.
“This trip we’re planning to Clear Creek is an opportunity that comes once every seven years. I’d like all my sixth-graders to benefit from it, Charlie. That includes Armstrong.”
Mrs. Wilson looks right at me over the top of her half-round glasses.
“I know you and he have had some conflict this year.”
Some? He took Ho Hos out of my lunch. He kicked my ass in front of the school!
“But out of every conflict comes an opportunity.”
She continues to look at me over the top of her glasses. “Armstrong will be staying at your house this Friday.”
My house? Are you insane? Where? He can’t sleep in Lily’s room. That’s her private space. Andy’s room is out of the question. And there’s no way he’s sharing a room with me.
“I don’t know, Mrs. Wilson,” I say. “Maybe I should ask my mom.”
“Actually,” she says, “it was her idea.”
Friday afternoon, instead of getting on the long Crown bus, I hop on the short square one with Charlie Ross.
My usual driver is Mr. Simms, who fits the exact description of Leroy Brown in that Jim Croce song. I’d rather meet a junkyard dog any day than mean old Mr. Simms.
The gentleman driver of Ross’s bus, by contrast, seems like he should be delivering milk to all the white people around here before he drives their kids to school. Got them short sleeves and a Bic pen in the pocket. Glasses so clean you can see right through to his blue eyes.
“Good afternoon, young fellow,” he says to me, all friendly and white. “Welcome to my bus.”
“Thank you, Mister . . .”
“Orr,” he says. “As in either-or, with an extra r.”
“I’ll remember how to spell it,” I say. And Ross and I find ourselves a seat halfway back.
You’d expect all the houses in one neighborhood to be more or less the same. But these homes don’t really fit together. Each is so different from the next, it’s what Mr. Khalil would call a hodgepodge of houses. There goes one like a French chateau with a stone lion in front. Across the street is a white cottage with a blue door. Here’s one with a red tile roof. Reminds me of Olvera Street, but it’s next door to a Brady Bunch house.
I hope the people who live in these houses get along with each other better than the houses seem to.
The bus chugs to the top of a hill. Out the window I see a girl standing on her skateboard, waiting for the bus to pass by. Soon as it does, she rides on.
“We get off here,” Ross says.
“Already? Might as well walk. You only got a five-minute ride.”
“It isn’t safe to walk. There are no sidewalks until halfway up Greenvalley Road.”
“You think this isn’t safe? You should see the walk home from my bus stop.”
We go on down the street. There’s a Mercedes-Benz parked in one driveway, a Corvette in another. Every house got a yard. Every yard got a fence. Most with barking dogs on the other side.
“Say, Ross, which one of these big houses is yours?”
“This one.”
We’re in front of a black and white two-story house with a steep roof and a chimney so tall I’m worried about hawks crashing. There’s a spread of grass and some flowers that look like rolled-up white flags standing on a hill.
The garage has a basketball hoop stuck to it. Now I see where Charlie Ross gets his outside shot.
Only way to describe the inside of his house is a big hug you weren’t expecting. The wood panels on the walls and the thick carpet on the floor make you want to kick off your shoes. Armchairs big enough for two and a leather couch that Wilt Chamberlain could stretch out on. The lamps and such are made out of brown wood your hand can’t help but stroke as you pass by. And there’s other things you’d like to touch but know you shouldn’t. Like the miniature painted houses all lined up on a shelf over the fireplace. I’ll bet Ross and his brother weren’t allowed to even hold a ball in here.
We go into the kitchen, where a brown lady peels carrots at the sink.
“Hola, Charlie,” she says. “Qué tal?”
“Hola, Lily,” Ross says.
Lily looks at me while Ross is searching for the Spanish word to say who I am.
“Este es mi . . . mi . . .”
“Amigo?” she says.
“Yeah, amigo, I guess. His name’s Armstrong.”
She gives me an hola too.
Now Charlie Ross opens up the cabinet and I see his hand reach for a box of Ho Hos. He glances at me and smiles, and then his hand moves over to the Flaky Flix. Thin chocolate cookies with bumpy rice flakes on the top. I’ve never tried those, so I’m glad he passed by the Ho Hos.
Ross pours out two glasses of milk and carries everything to the table. I see him dunk his Flaky Flix into the milk, so I try dunking mine too. It’s pretty good, but on the next cookie I don’t dunk because the milk takes away the crunch, and that’s the best part of a Flaky Flix.
There’s a yellow poster on the wall, showing a flower and black writing that says WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS.
“My daddy was in Korea,” I say.
“Mine was in World War Two.”
“He get hurt?”
“No. He was in the navy, clearing mines in the Pacific, but we dropped the bomb before he saw any action.”
“My dad saw some, in Korea.”
“Did he get hurt?”
I think about the ways my daddy got hurt by war. A leg blown off. Friends he saw die. The Flashbacks.
War is not healthy for children and other living things. That’s the truth.
But what I say to Charlie Ross is, “Yeah, but he can still kick my ass.”
He tells me his mom got the poster from her consciousness-raising group.
“What kind of group?”
“Consciousness-raising. It’s this group of moms in Laurel Canyon. They get together when the dads play gin. They try to raise their consciousness.”
“What’s that mean, Ross? How do you raise somebody’s consciousness?”
“By making them more aware, I guess.”
“What do they talk about?”
“I’m not allowed to listen in.”
I just look at him and wait. When a person’s got a loose grip on a secret they want to tell, all you have to do is give ’em a small stretch of quiet, and they’ll let go.
“Well,” Ross says, leaning in to whisper, “there’s this one lady whose husband is having an affair, but she won’t leave him because she doesn’t have money to live on her own. Another one has been drinking too much. They’re trying to help her quit.”
“And you’re not allowed to listen in.”
We’re about done with the Flaky Flix. I get up and start to clear my plate, but Ross says to just leave it on the table. “Lily will take care of it,” he says.
“You know something, Ross,” I say. “You need to have your consciousness raised.”
I carry my own plate to the sink. “Gracias, Armstrong,” Lily says.
Armstrong asks to see the rest of the house. Maybe I can show him just the downstairs. That way he won’t think it’s so big. But then, what’ll I do tonight when we have to go to sleep? My room is upstairs.
We head into the living room. He stops to look at Mom’s painting on the wall. It’s of the calla lilies that grow in our backyard. Andy used to cut them for her every Mother’s Day. He doesn’t just look at the painting. He leans forward and sniffs it.
“What are you doing?”
“Stopping to smell the lilies.”
“They’re not real.”
“Look real to me.”
He sniffs again. A voice calls to us from a corner of the room.
“Do you like it?”
It’s Mom. She’s usually still in her bathrobe when I get home. But today she’s in powder-blue jeans and an embroidered work shirt. It’s a no-bandanna day too, which means she washed her hair.
“I do. But I’m a little worried about it.”
“Why?” Mom raises an eyebrow.
“Because I’m allergic to flowers. Those yellow tubes with the pollen on ’em might make me sneeze.”
Mom smiles and waves him off. “Oh, go on.”
Then I say, “Mom, this is Armstrong. Armstrong, this is my mom.”
He steps toward her and puts out his hand. She puts out hers and they shake. Her hand looks small inside his.
“Those your initials in the corner, Mrs. Ross?”
“They are.”
“What else do you paint?”
“Not much. Not in a long time, anyway.”
“Well, you should start again. If I had a talent like that, I’d paint every day.”
Mom looks at Armstrong, and then she shrugs. Like it’s a good idea. Like maybe tomorrow. Or another day ahead.
“Are you going to take Armstrong upstairs, Charlie?”
I wish she hadn’t said that.
We go up, and Armstrong stops to look at our wall of family pictures. The higher up you look, the further back in time you go—all the way to my great-grandparents on both sides. Near the ceiling is a photo of my great-grandfather sitting on a bench in a Russian village. He has a long white beard and wears a long white robe.
“That your great-granddaddy?”
“Zayde Moishe, they called him.”
“Zay-dah who?”
“It’s Yiddish. Zayde for grandpa. Moishe for Moses.”
“Damn, he’s short. Legs don’t even touch the ground. But his beard does.”
“He was a rabbi,” I say. “Had seven daughters.”
“Seven! And look at him now, sitting on the top of the wall.”
Armstrong’s eyes move slowly down the pictures. “That must be your daddy in a sailor suit.” Near the bottom he finds me when I was just five. “And look, they put you in one to match.”
He looks back and forth between my young dad and me.
“You look a lot like him, Ross.”
Then he spots the picture of me and Andy when we were seven and eight. He looks at Andy with his gold-rimmed glasses, long hair, and freckles. He looks at a picture of my mom.
“Your brother, he looks a lot like your mom.”
Armstrong’s head turns toward the end of the hall, where a sign on a closed door says BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY.
“His bedroom?”
I nod.
“You don’t have to show me if you don’t want to.”
All of a sudden it feels okay to go in. Like I want to, almost. Or Andy wants me to. Not just me, either. Me and Armstrong.
I open the door.
“What’s that smell?” Armstrong asks.
“Andy had a darkroom.”
I walk over to the closet and pull open the door. The scent of developer and stop bath hits us in our throats. Armstrong leans back, then leans in for a closer look. The enlarger, trays, and supplies are all still there.
“What kind of pictures did he make?”
“Those,” I say, pointing back into the room.
We look at the wall over Andy’s bed. It’s filled with eight-by-tens of seagulls frozen in black and white. When he first got his camera, Andy was crazy for those birds. He’d ask Mom to drive him out to the Santa Monica Pier, where he’d shoot them swooping down on the beach. Later he wondered what it was like to be one, so he started taking pictures from places up high. On countertops. Up on the fire road. In our Thinking Tree.
I’m lost in all these pictures, all these birds, when I hear Armstrong say, “This the camera he used?”
He’s found Andy’s camera bag and pulled out the Minolta SR-101 that Mom bought him for his eleventh birthday. That’s no kid’s camera, she told him. A real thirty-five-millimeter single-lens reflex.
Armstrong looks through the viewfinder at me, then pans around the room. He stops at the wall of pictures. Like he’s going to take a picture of a picture.
“Um, Armstrong,” I say.
He guesses why. “I wasn’t going to shoot one. Just looking through.”
He glances at the frame counter on top of the camera. “What’s the eleven for?”
“It must still have film in it. The eleven means he shot ten pictures.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know.”
Armstrong starts to put the camera back into the bag but sees a sheet of paper at the bottom. He unfolds it, and together we look at a ditto from Mrs. Valentine’s class.
6th Grade Final Art Project: A Few of Your Favorite Things. Make a collage of your ten favorite things, from drawings you make, photos you take, or images you cut from a magazine. Give each a caption. Arrange them on a poster board. Due date: June 3, 1974.
“You think that’s what’s on this roll? His favorite things?”
“Could be.”
“You should develop it, Ross.”
“My mom will when she’s ready,” I say, putting the handout back into the bag and zipping it shut.
“Listen,” Armstrong says, “about that time you told me he died.”
“What about it?”
“I wasn’t really paying attention. I was just thinking about me.”
“That’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. It was wrong. And the thing is, I’m sorry for it.”
We look at each other for a minute. It’s so quiet we can hear Andy’s clock radio click from one minute to the next.
What do you say to someone who never apologizes when they finally do?
“Ever see a naked lady swimming in a pool?”
“Well, you know, Ross, the mind is a powerful place. That’s where I have seen such a sight. And in the occasional magazine.”
“How would you like to see one for real?”
“For real real?”
“My across-the-street neighbor is a movie producer. His house has a big wall in back. Behind that wall there’s a pool. And every Friday afternoon at four, girls go skinny-dipping there.”
Armstrong stares me down like he thinks I’m lying. Then he looks at his watch.
In the 7.1 San Fernando Earthquake four years ago, we got lucky. There was hardly any damage to our house. But there was some to our neighbor’s wall.
Andy found the crack—and waited a whole year before showing it to me.
“Why didn’t you show me sooner?” I asked him.
“You were too young for what’s on the other side of that wall.”
“And now?”
“Now you’re eleven, Charlie. That’s old enough.”
So, as a kind of birthday present, he showed me what I’m showing Armstrong. We’re in the hidden space between the row of cypress trees and the wall. Armstrong’s got his eye pressed tight to the hole.
“What are you talking about, naked ladies swimming in the pool? Nothing but empty rafts floating around in there.”
“Keep looking.”
“Ross, if you dragged me behind these scratchy bushes for a poor man’s peep show, and it comes out an empty peep, I am going to kick your ass.”
“Keep looking.”
“Every Friday at four. Already four-fifteen and the pool’s still empty. Kicking your ass won’t be enough. I will strip it naked and throw it clear over the top of this wall and into that—”
His mouth stops moving. His eyes go wide. Like everything else about Armstrong Le Rois, his watch is running fast.
“Oh,” he says.
“What do you see?”
“Wow!”
“Someone there?”
“That . . . is . . . something.”
I hoist myself up and try to nudge him aside. Armstrong shoves me into the branches of the tree.
“Wait your turn, Ross.”
He leans a little to the left.
“Oh, my!”
He leans a little to the right.
“Oh double my.”
I can hear something skimming through the water, then a splashing that sounds like applause. I try to push in front of Armstrong, but he straight-arms me away.
The applause turns to soft waves against the side of the pool. I hear the gloop gloop gloop of water going into the filter.
“Okay, Ross, your turn.”
Armstrong leans back. I push him out of the way and peer through the hole.
And what I see is . . . wet footprints leading to the house.