FOURTEEN

Helen was sitting in the living room next to Mom, watching a soap opera. “Hi, Helen,” I said. I was glad to see her. I was feeling pretty awful about everything, and I was glad to have somebody I could tell it to.

She gave me a scared look.

“I’m not sore at you,” I said. “I figured it wasn’t your fault.”

She looked relieved and got up and gave me a hug.

“My poor baby,” Mom said.

“Let’s go out back,” I said. So we went outside and sat on the back steps. “I’m glad you came back,” I said. “I didn’t have anybody to talk to.”

She got a tough look on her face. “I’m going to run away again as soon as I can. I’ve got six months probation, after that I can leave. I’ll be seventeen anyway.”

“Are you supposed to go to school?”

“Yes, but I’m not going to,” she said. “I’m not going to have all those dumb kids staring at me all day long. I’m not going anyplace where I have to see Charlie Fritz. I’m going to get a job over in Watertown. As a waitress in a luncheonette. Dad says he can fix it up. Dad says he’ll take me to the Watertown bus every morning.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew I shouldn’t ask whether she was really a prostitute, but I was pretty curious. “What was it like, Helen?”—which was a way of asking so she didn’t have to answer.

“It wasn’t so bad,” she said. “I didn’t mind it so much.”

“You didn’t?” I said.

Then she bent over, covered her face with her hands, and began to cry. “I hated it,” she said. “It was awful. But the other girls teased me for being proud.” She started sobbing so hard, she couldn’t speak for a minute, and I put my arm around her shoulder. Her sobbing eased up a little. “Then I found out that if I got high and drank some wine, it wasn’t so bad. That’s why I got all that coke. I was going to try to make money that way.” She stopped sobbing, wiped her eyes on her shirt, and sat there looking calm. “It was a dumb idea. If they’d caught me just for prostitution, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal. They wouldn’t have called up Dad.”

“Well,” I said. “I’m glad you’re back.”

“I was homesick,” she said. “I didn’t think I would be. How could anyone be homesick for this dump?”

“Mom missed you,” I said. “She kept saying ‘My poor baby‟ and stuff like that. She cried sometimes.”

Helen frowned. “I don’t care,” she said. “I’m going to leave again as soon as I can.”

“Even if it makes you homesick?”

“You get over being homesick,” she said. “The other women told me that. They said they were homesick, too, when they first came to New York, but they got over it in a few weeks.”

“Are you going back to New York?”

“No,” she said. “Not there. Someplace else. Someplace where nobody knows me and I can start over again from the beginning. Where nobody knows about our family and going to school dirty and Dad stealing, and—” Suddenly she stopped and looked at me. “I didn’t mean to say that,” she said.

“I already knew he stole,” I said. “I didn’t know you knew.”

“I found out years ago,” she said. “I didn’t want you to know.”

That surprised me. “How did you find out?”

“Remember that bike I had, the first one?” she said.

“The one you gave me?”

“Yes,” she said. “I knew the kid he stole it from. That’s why I had to paint it—so nobody would recognize it.”

“You knew it was stolen all along?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I couldn’t give it back. Dad would have thought I lost it.”

“He hit me—” I began, but then we heard the sound of the truck, and in a moment it came up the driveway. I stood up, feeling scared and nervous, not knowing what to expect. The truck pulled to a stop. For a moment Dad sat in the cab looking over to where we were sitting on the back steps. Then he got out of the truck. He was carrying my assignment notebook. He came slowly across the backyard toward me. When he got up to me, he said, “Come to the barn,” in a quiet voice.

“No,” I said.

“What?” he said. He came up so close to me that I could hear him breathing. “I said come up to the barn.”

“I’m not going to,” I said.

He stared at me, his face close to mine. “I thought I told you to forget about that carpet factory business.”

“I’m not going to do what you say anymore,” I said. “You’re a thief and a liar. You’re nothing but—”

He grabbed me by my shirtfront. I tried to twist away, but his grip was too tight. He slammed me across the face with his open hand. My head rang, and I heard Helen shriek. I felt dizzy, and I swung out, not knowing what I was aiming for, and caught him in the gut. He grunted and slammed me across the face again. I shook my head, trying to clear it, and swung at him again. This time I caught him in the chest. He swung back his arm. Helen shrieked again. Then she jumped on his back and began clawing his face with her fingernails. He gave me a sort of push, and I staggered backward, but I didn’t fall. He reached around behind him, grabbed hold of Helen by the arm, and jerked her loose from him. She fell down. I started toward him, but he didn’t move. Long red lines down his face were oozing blood. His mouth was twisted, and he was breathing hard. I stood there waiting to see what he would do. If he went for Helen, I was going to tackle him. I figured if I got him down, the two of us could do a pretty good job on him.

He touched his cheek and looked at his fingers to see the blood. “Get out of here,” he said. “The two of you pack and git. Now.”

Mom came out onto the back steps. “My God,” she said. “Oh, my God.” She put her hands over her face. “What have you done to them, Frank?”

“You shut up,” he said. Then he went in the house.

I stood there feeling dizzy. My head hurt, and my nose and mouth were bleeding. “Someday I’m going to kill him,” I said. “Someday.”

Mom came down the steps and took me by the arm. “Are you all right, Harry? What did he do to you?”

“I’m going to kill him,” I said. I spit out blood.

“Don’t say things like that,” Mom said.

“I got him good,” Helen said. “Next time I’ll use a knife.”

“Helen, don’t say things like that,” Mom cried.

We heard water running in the kitchen sink, and I knew Dad was washing his face where Helen had scratched him. Then he came out of the house. For a minute he stood there looking at us. Then he said, “I told the two of you to git. I don’t want to find you here when I get back.” Then he walked past us, got into the truck, and drove away.

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Mom said. “He’ll get over it. He’s just mad. He’ll get over it.”

She was right, I figured. If I stayed clear of him for a couple of days, and let him see that I wasn’t doing anything more about the carpet factory, he’d get over it. But I knew I wouldn’t get over it. I would never get over it. And I was going to get out of there as soon as I could—in a few days, a week, a month. As soon as I could work something out I was going to leave. I had an idea about where I might go too. I figured my grandpa and grandma might want to have me. They might let me live with them until I graduated. Maybe they would want to have Helen too. I would see.

And there was another thing. I was never going to worry about being trash again. That was for sure. I’d learned something. I hadn’t been able to do anything about the carpet factory polluting the Timber River, and I saw now that I would never be able to do anything about it. Even if I got somebody from Albany to come up, they wouldn’t find anything. The whole town would cover it up. The town council and the newspaper editor and Herbst and everybody would cover it up, and anyway, who was going to believe one fourteen-year-old kid whose whole family was trash?

There was one other thing I’d learned: It wasn’t me who was trash—they were. They lied and covered up and gave bribes and polluted the river so you couldn’t swim in it or eat the fish out of it. I wasn’t trash—they were. I would never forget that lesson.

“Harry,” Helen said. “Do you feel all right?”

“I’m all right,” I said.

“Do you feel like eating?” she said. “I’m going to make spaghetti and meat sauce.”

“It’s nice to have Helen around again, isn’t it, Harry?” Mom said.

THE END