There was a phone booth at Hector and Marshall. I leafed through the directory. Sure enough there was only one listing in the phone book with that name: Pupko. 428 Swede Street. A three-minute ride.
I pulled up opposite the house. It was a twin. Porch front. Gray siding. Narrow side yard with a black wrought-iron fence. The front windows had venetian blinds. They were closed.
Even as I steadied myself against the warm hood of a parked car, I was beginning to lose my nerve. Minutes went by with no sign of a sister-looking person, orange hair or otherwise. I had pictured myself pounding on the door and the door would open and I would say…what, exactly?
I’m the warden’s daughter and Eloda Pupko cleans our house and I want to know what her crime was.
Why doesn’t she care about finding cigarette butts in my room?
Is she really hell on wheels?
Why is she always so grouchy?
A closed blind on the second floor suddenly opened like a stack of shocked eyelids. My courage vanished. I took off.
I rode around town. I thought I was aimlessly cruising, but my bike knew better. It was bringing me turn by turn back to Mogins Dip. Mill Street. Since that Sunday I had not stopped thinking about the little kid who “shot” me.
I paused at the top of the hill. I could see the sky-blue door, halfway down on the left.
I coasted down the redbrick canyon of row houses. Parked cars lined both sides. No garages, no driveways, no front yards here. This was not the North End.
A few kids were playing, laughing. Hopscotch. Jump rope. Suddenly something hit me—or rather my bike. Smacked into the spokes. I looked down. An apple core lay on the ground.
“Bull’s-eye!” A squealy voice came from somewhere. And out he popped from between two cars, the tiny brown gunslinger, charging and firing his cap pistol in my face: “Pow! Pow! Pow!”
Thrilled as I was to see him, Cannonball Cammie was too combative to gracefully absorb an attack on her bike—from anybody. My hair-trigger temper was about to combust when he holstered his gun and shouted, “Gimme a ride!”
He wasn’t asking.
His lips were twisting as he tried to wrench my hand from the handlebars. It took him both hands to pry up my index finger. I released my hold. He was trying to climb on in front of me but he was way too short. I hoisted him. My hands almost went around his body. I could feel his ribs. I sat him on the crossbar of my boy bike. His feet noogled between the downbar and my leg. His arm shot out. “Go!”
From somewhere behind my heart, a voice whispered, Not a good idea. But it had no chance, as the boy repeated: “Go!”
We went.
From the start he wanted to take over. He clamped his hands around the handlebars. He hunched forward till his face was practically over the front tire. “Rmmm…rmmm,” he kept growling. “Faster…faster.” He kept trying to aim the wheel, so I had to fight him on that. But it was easy; he was so little.
“Turn here!” he called as we approached Washington Street. I turned. Halfway up the block he called, “Stop! Stop!” I stopped in front of yet another brick row house. He cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled, “Yo, Herbie!” Within seconds Herbie, another tiny brown kid, came out. “Herbie—look at me!” Herbie had barely begun looking when my rider’s hand smacked me twice on the thigh, as if I were a horse. “Go! Go!” I went. “We gone to the park!” he called back. “Monkey Hill!” Leaving Herbie to stew in the green juices of envy.
Turning at the end of the block, I told him, “We are not going down Monkey Hill.” It was dawning on me that I had this little kid’s life on my crossbar. I had better start acting like it.
“Main Street!” he called.
“No,” I said. “Too crowded.”
“Ribber!”
So we went down to the river. It hadn’t rained for a month, and the Schuylkill was showing its bones—tree limbs and rocks that in higher water were submerged. I pulled over. I taught him waterside skills. How to pop stones from fringe-water mud to expose pale, darting crawfish. What shore rocks to find salamanders under. How to skip flat stones across the water. When a dead sunny came floating by, I had to stop him from wading out to get it. We had a contest. Who could throw a stone the farthest? I let him win.
We rode some more, all the way down River Road to Conshohocken, to the steel mill. It was a bustling place in those days. Clanging diesels. Trucks. Smoke. Fire. Endless lines of coal cars. He became quiet. He gaped in wonder up at the brand-new basic oxygen facility, which towered above us like a squared-off, clay-red mountain.
My own attention was drawn mostly to the little brown head with the side-flap ears in front of me.
And then he gave me a moment that I treasure still. He let go of the handlebars, hung his arms out in the breeze and leaned back into me. I felt his head against my chest, and my heart sang. I tried to keep the ride as smooth as possible, to preserve the moment, but he flapped his arms twice and leaned forward again into the handlebars.
For some reason only then did it occur to me to ask the question: “What’s your name?”
He said it so casually: “Andrew.”
Andrew.
A mother named him Andrew.
He did not ask me my name.
We headed back to town.
We were on a weedy stretch of road when he cried out: “Stop!” I slammed the brakes, afraid he was hurt. Before I could stop him, he had jumped down from the crossbar and dashed across the road. He picked something out of the dust. It was an empty soda bottle. In those days kids often earned candy money by turning empty bottles in to stores for a two-cent deposit per bottle. Little businessman, I thought as he climbed back aboard the bike. Farther along, the road dipped under a railroad overpass. Without warning he yelled, “Wahoo!” and hurled the bottle straight up. It shattered behind us against the concrete underside of the bridge.
I pulled over, braked to a stop, looked back. The shadow of the underpass was littered with glass. Already a car was coming. I grabbed him. My fingers overlapped his tiny upper arm. I shook him. I snapped: “Don’t you ever do that again! You don’t do that! What’s the matter with you?”
Only when I saw the look of horror on his face did I realize how I must have appeared to him. I probably mistook his paralysis for obstinacy. I shook him again. “Do you hear me?”
A peep came out of him that might have been “Yes.”
I mitted his chin in my hand as I would a baseball. “Do? You? Hear? Me?”
His face collapsed, and suddenly he was bawling into my chest. “I’m sorry…I won’t do it….I won’t do it….”
I held him, heaving, and turned to the door-blue sky. I took deep breaths. This was new territory for me. I had just met this kid an hour ago.
He was sobbing more quietly now, his little arms around me, clutching me. Gently I pulled him away. “All right now,” I told him. “It’s over.” I wiped his tears with my shirttail. “Okay?”
He nodded. He looked up at me with eyes I had never seen before, eyes I’d have thought only mothers could see.
“Okay, then…,” I said, looking down the road. “So how about…a Marcy’s?”
He threw up his arms, his face instantly transformed. “Yeah! Marcy’s!”
“All right, turn around, then. Grab the handlebars; hold on tight.”
He happily obeyed, and off we went to town to the beat of his chanting: “Marcy’s…Marcy’s…”
Marcy’s, home of the world’s best water ice. Andrew wanted root beer. Large, of course. I got it for him. And a medium lemon for me. I wasn’t going to drive one-handed with him on the crossbar, so we sat on the curb in front of Holy Savior Church. Andrew finished his large before I was halfway through my medium.
Back on the bike. Turn onto Mill Street. Down the hill, the house with the blue door stood out. A woman sat on the front steps. She snapped to her feet when she saw us. The dream vanished.
I coasted down the hill. She waited at the curb. She wore a checkered apron over a pale yellow dress. Her hair was hidden in a bright lemon-yellow wrap. Her arms were folded. She was not happy.
Andrew called: “Mommy! Look at me!” Mommy’s expression did not change.
I coasted to a stop. The woman’s glare nailed both Andrew and me. Not that Andrew noticed. “Mommy, we rided!” he gushed. “All over! We went to the ribber! I won! We had Marcy’s! I had a big!”
“Get down,” she said. I helped him down. He ran to her, wrapped his arms around her legs, buried his face in her apron.
But her eyes were only on me. “What’s going on?” she said.
What could I say? I just stood there on one leg and two bike tires, staring. Not because there were no answers, but because there were too many.
“What are you doing with my child?”
“He wanted a ride,” I replied lamely.
“He’s a baby.”
Andrew yanked her apron. “I’m not a baby. I’m five and a half.”
“Who are you?” she said.
Who are you?
It was probably the first time I’d ever been asked that question. In my experience, everybody in Two Mills knew who I was. If not by name, then by label. The Girl Who Lives in Jail. The Girl Who Survived the Milk Truck That Killed Her Mother. The Crankiest Kid in Town. The Tomboy. Cannonball.
“Your name,” she demanded.
Uh-oh. Dare I tell her my real name and reveal myself as top kid at the county prison?
I said, “Claire.”
“Claire what?”
“Claire…Jones.”
“Where you live?”
“Airy Street, ma’am.”
She stepped forward till she was all I could see. “You don’t just come along”—she was fighting to control herself; I thought she might hit me—“and take my child.” Her lips were clenched to a thin line. Angry breaths came through her nose. “He know you?” Her eyes never left me. “Andrew. You know her?”
“Yeah, Mommy. She’s my frenn. She buyed me a Marcy’s.”
“You don’t do it. Unless you ask.” She poked me in the chest. “Did you ask?”
“No, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
I felt my lip quiver. I prayed: Don’t cry.
“You don’t.” Softer now: her voice, her eyes. “Take a boy off the streets. Not ask.”
“I know, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
“I seed crawfishes, Mommy!” He was tugging at her. She stepped back.
“How old are you?”
“Twelve, ma’am. I’ll be thirteen.”
She took another step back. I felt myself breathe. She seemed to be studying me, thinking. “Andrew, inside,” she said sternly. Andrew flew up the marble steps and into the house. She followed him to the top step, but instead of going in, she just stood there, looking down at me. “You too,” she said at last.
I didn’t understand. I didn’t move.
“Now,” she said. “You’re letting flies in. I’m not done with you.”
I leaned my bike against the brick wall. I climbed the steps, imagining this was what a perp walker felt like. I entered the house. The blue door closed behind me.