100 Cupboards (4 page)

Henry sat quietly for a moment. “I don't know yet,” he admitted.

“Yes, but what do you think?”

Henry searched his mind for anything that could be kept behind small, hidden doors.

“Somebody's old things, maybe,” he said. “Socks or a pair of shoes. Some old fountain pens would be cool.”

“Oh,” Henrietta said. “I was thinking there might be a map or a book explaining how to get to a secret city. Keys to a forgotten door or something. Maybe diamonds.”

“Well,” Henry said, “I think I should start trying to get it open. I'm going to start backward. I'll put this arrow on the last letter and then try it with all of the Roman numerals. Then I'll do the next letter with all the Roman numerals, until I've done all 418.”

“Okay,” said Henrietta, and she plopped back onto the bed to watch as Henry began turning the knobs and pulling on them. “I hope it's a map,” she added.

Henry had finished three and a half letters before she interrupted him for the first time.

“How many are left, Henry?”

Henry stopped and thought. “I've done 76. I can't subtract 76 from 418 in my head, but there are more than 300 left.”

He was done with five letters when she interrupted again.

“Henry, what are those other marks on the knobs?”

“What marks?” he asked.

“Those ones,” Henrietta said, and she sat up on her knees and licked her thumbs. Henry moved out of her way and watched her rub the knobs clean. The large arrows he had been using stuck out of the knobs. When Henrietta sat back down, Henry could see three more arrows on each knob. Much smaller and on the surface of the skirts only, they divided the knobs into quarters.

“They look like compasses,” Henrietta said. “See? The big arrow is how they do north on maps, and then there's south, east, and west. I bet there is a map in there. What else would be behind compass knobs?”

Henry didn't answer. He slumped.

“What's wrong?” Henrietta asked.

Henry flopped all the way back on the bed and clicked his teeth. “We'll never get it open.”

“We won't? Why not?” she asked. “Stop grinding your teeth. There can't be that many left.”

“There's way more. I don't even know how to find out how many more. With four pointers on each knob, there could be thousands of combinations.”

“Oh,” she said. “Maybe we should go to bed. We can figure it out tomorrow.”

“Yeah. We should go to bed.” He looked at his blanket. “But first I should clean this up.”

Henrietta stood and stretched. “Just take it downstairs and shake it outside.”

Henry pulled his blanket up by its four corners and slung it over his shoulder like a sack. Then the two of them left his room and crept carefully down the stairs. They reached the girls' room, whispered good night, and Henrietta hurried to her bunk. Henry continued downstairs to the mudroom. Stepping outside, he decided to go a little ways from the house so nobody would see plaster on the lawn. His bare feet were swallowed by the cool grass, but he didn't notice. He was staring up at an enormous sky, heavily dusted with stars. A glaring two-thirds of a moon sat just above the horizon. He made his way down to the barn, went around the side, shook out his blanket, and sat down.

Henry had never heard of such a thing as a forgotten door. Back at school, he never would have believed such things existed. But here was different. There was something strange about here. He felt just like he had when he'd found out that kids his age don't ride in car seats and that boys pee standing up. He remembered unpacking his bags at boarding school while his roommate watched. His roommate had asked him what the helmet was for, and Henry had suddenly had the suspicious sensation that he had been kept in the dark, that the world was off behaving in one way while he, Henry, wore a helmet. He had barely prevented himself from answering his roommate honestly. The words “It's a helmet my mom bought me to wear in PE” were replaced with “It's for racing. I don't think I'll need it here.”

Whatever was going on inside the wall in his room was much bigger than finding out that other boys didn't have to wear helmets. If there really were forgotten doors and secret cities, and maps and books to tell you how to find them, then he needed to know. He looked around at the tall, dew-chilly grass and for a moment didn't see grass. Instead, he saw millions of slender green blades made of sunlight and air, thick on the ground and gently blowing, tickling his now-damp feet, and all the while silently pulling life up out of the earth. Each was another kid without a helmet, a kid who knew how things were actually done.

Above him, the stars twinkled with laughter. Galaxies looked. Nudged each other. Chuckled.

“He didn't know about secret cities,” Orion said. “His mother never told him.”

The Great Bear smiled. “Did his dad tell him about forgotten doors?”

“Never.”

“Journals?”

“Only having to do with science projects or bicycle trips.”

“Maps?”

“Mostly topographic, or the kind that shade countries in different colors based on gross national product or primary exports.”

“Nothing with ‘Here be dragons' on the edges?”

“Never. He found a hidden cupboard with compass locks, and do you know what he thought was in it?”

“A unicorn's horn?”

“Socks.”

“Socks?”

“Or pens.”

“Pens?”

Henry sighed. “I don't even know how to work compass locks,” he said. He stood and started back to the house with a familiar feeling, the feeling of
Now I know
. The feeling that means tonight you will sneak down to the dormitory Dumpster with your helmet, a stack of nightgowns, and your therapeutic bear. The feeling of
Tomorrow I will have changed.

Henry walked into the kitchen and saw his knife on the counter. He picked it up and flipped it open. The blade's proud new edge smiled at him. Pinning it open with his thumb, he climbed through the house to his room.

 

The wind scratched its back along the side of the barn. The stars swung slowly across the roof of this world, and the grass swayed and grew, content to be the world's carpet but still desiring to be taller.

Henry knelt on his bed upstairs and pried plaster off the wall with his knife. His thumb ached.

CHAPTER FOUR

When
day came to Kansas, its light crept in the round attic window and slid over the swamp cooler, stretching out across the old floor and some of the wall. At the end of the attic, one of Henry's doors was open, and the light reached into the shadows and rested on a single bare foot. Once again, Henry had fallen asleep with his light on. Only this time it wasn't so much falling asleep as it was collapsing across his bed as sleep dragged him down.

You're falling, the light whispered to the foot.

Henry jerked, kicked the other door open, and sat up. He squinted at the daylight and then looked at the wall behind him. Plaster still hung in the corners near the ceiling, and behind his bed by the floor. But in a circle surrounding the compass locks the wall was clear. All of it was made up of small cupboard doors.

Henry stood up and headed for the stairs. He was probably in trouble. Plaster rubble was all over his room and clung to his hands and arms. He could taste it in his mouth, his sinuses felt packed with the stuff, and his eyes itched. And it was already morning. Everyone was probably up, and it would be impossible for him to hide what he'd been doing when he walked downstairs looking like something fossilized in plaster and dust.

Standing at the top of his stairs, Henry could hear the dining room clock ticking, but nothing else. He stepped onto the top stair. It whined, but not too loudly. Breathing out, he took another step. He was expecting a slow creak, a pop, or even a crackle. He was not expecting a sharp piece of plaster.

As Henry jumped back, his heel caught the stair. His other foot slipped. He landed on his shoulder blades, hitting his head and sliding to the bottom in a cloud of gray dust. He gasped, sure he was dead or at least paralyzed, but he could feel his toes throbbing. He jumped up and ran straight into the bathroom.

Henrietta and Aunt Dotty, the only two who were roused by Henry's rumbling descent, stepped out of their rooms and into the thin cloud of dust still floating down the attic stairs and settling on the green carpet. The shower turned on.

“Back to bed, Henrietta,” Dotty said. “Your cousin needs a clock.” She yawned, and the two shuffled back to their rooms.

Henry stood in the shower and watched a sandbar form below him. He kicked at it and smeared it with his feet until he'd forced it down the drain. When he was done, he scurried back up to the attic in a towel, his arms full of his filthy clothes.

He stood in his doorway and assessed his room. His bed was almost completely hidden beneath chunks of plaster, big and small, while the floor looked like a cross between a beach and a gravel driveway. Dust was everywhere—all over his lamp, the walls, the inside of his doors, and even the floor a few feet outside his bedroom doors. He really had no idea how he was going to clean the mess up, but at the moment he didn't care. He was staring at his wall.

At the very first, when he had only just found the second door, he'd assumed the wall was some sort of built-in cabinet. But the second door was a very pale wood, almost white, completely different from the first door. He didn't know what kind of wood it was, but then, nobody in Kansas would have. There were only two people alive who would recognize the wood in that door. One was a man living in a run-down apartment in a bad part of Orlando. He would have recognized it and then tried to find something strong to drink, because he very much wanted to believe that most of his childhood had not actually happened.

The other was an old woman in France. Her husband had returned from the First World War with some very strange stories and a small sapling in a tin cup. He had told her its name then, and the name of the man who had given it to him, and she had never forgotten either. The tree is in her backyard garden now, squat and strong, and before her husband died, years ago, he made her a jewelry box out of one of its limbs that had been torn off in a storm.

Henry did not know these people. He had looked at the small wooden door with its pale grain and silver-lined keyhole, and he had dragged his fingers across it, unable to read the story the wood told. “What are you?” he'd asked out loud.

Henry had continued chipping plaster and uncovering doors until he could count thirty-five in all, and he had no doubt there were more. Most of them were wood, but of all different sizes, grains, and colors. The shapes varied as well as the designs. Some were plain, and some had surfaces so intricately carved that getting the plaster out of all the curves and crannies had been impossible. Some had knobs, some small handles, some slides or things Henry had never seen. There was one with nothing at all. He had pushed and pulled and lightly thumped on every single one, but without effect. And then, always, he had gone back to chipping plaster, making his newly sharpened knife dull and duller. A large blister now crowned his thumb from pushing on the blade to keep it open, and the knuckles on both of his hands were missing skin.

Henry tiptoed through the rubble and dug some clothes out of the crammed drawers in his dresser. He pulled them on and then went down to the kitchen to find the broom and dustpan. He also saw the clock in the dining room and realized why nobody was up. He swept all the dust and gravel off his floor and the floor of the attic and once again dumped it onto his blanket. He cleaned off his walls, his lamp, his dresser, and his nightstand. No matter how much he swept, there was some dust so fine that it only scurried away from the broom and drifted into the air.

Eventually he gave up on the finer stuff, moved his antique Kansas basketball poster to cover part of what he had done to the wall, wondered where he could get more posters, and grabbed the corners of his blanket to carry it out to the side of the barn.

He dragged the makeshift sack to the stairs and began lugging it down, one stair at a time. He had not realized how heavy it would be. By the time he had reached the fourth stair, he was sweating, and every time he moved his blanket, dust swirled out and clung to his skin. When he reached the bottom of the second flight of stairs, he was in pain. In the mudroom, he sat down to catch his breath and put on his shoes.

When Henry finally reached the barn, he turned to look back at the house. He had plowed an obvious trail through the tall grass with his sack of plaster, but there was nothing he could do about it now. He looked at the small pile of plaster he had dumped the night before and compared it to the size of his new sack. He was going to have to go farther from the house.

Rather than drag his sack through the even-taller grass and weeds that led to the fields behind the barn, he buckled down, hoisted the blanket over his shoulder, and staggered off. He didn't know how far he should take it, but he figured he wouldn't be able to carry it for very long and would dump it when he stopped.

The grass beyond the barn rubbed against his elbows as he moved through it. Then the tall grass ended, and there, at his feet, was an old irrigation ditch. Henry dropped the blanket, grabbed two of the corners, and watched his demolition work slide down the bank into the still water. Then he sat. He was sweating, and now that he wasn't moving anymore, his sweat made him cold in the slight morning breeze. He lay back into the tall grass, ducking under the moving air, and was warm. The sun played around in the tops of the weeds, pointing out the seeds they carried high and, in them, a villainous intent to fill the Earth.

Exhaustion crawled out of Henry's bones, and he slept.

If water bugs could see more than a yard, then several of them would have noticed the bottoms of Henry's feet and the legs of his pants. Such far-sighted bugs would have had a much better view of Uncle Frank. He was sitting next to Henry's knees with his legs stretched down the bank into the ditch. In his right hand he held a wooden baseball bat, and with his left he searched the bank for pieces of plaster. When he found them, he tossed them gently into the air, where he either hit them across the ditch with the bat or missed and watched them hop down the bank and into the water. Occasionally he looked at Henry's face. Dotty had told him how early Henry had been up and how he'd begun his day on the stairs. Frank's job had been to find Henry, and now he had.

Frank Willis was a thoughtful man, even if he didn't always look it. As he sat and tossed bits of plaster, he was thinking. Most people from Henry, Kansas, the ones who thought he was thin, would have assumed his thoughts were limited to the things directly in front of him. They would have assumed he was thinking about his nephew, a filthy blanket, and bits of plaster scattered down the bank and gathered in the water at the bottom of the ditch.

Frank had noticed these things, but they only made him think of another summer, the summer when he first tumbled into Henry, Kansas—when he had tumbled in and never tumbled out. Only a year or two older than his nephew was now, he had propped himself up beside this same irrigation ditch beside this same barn. He had looked out over the sprawling landscape and smooth sky and wondered where exactly he was supposed to be.

Henry twisted in his sleep, and his foot slid down toward the still water.

“Henry,” Frank said. “Wake up, boy.” He reached over and shook him by the shoulder.

Henry woke up with a twitch and blinked at his uncle. Uncle Frank held up a piece of plaster between his finger and thumb, smiled, tossed the plaster in the air, and missed it with the bat.

“Bad dream, Henry?” he asked. “You didn't seem to be enjoying it too much, so I roused you.”

Henry watched Uncle Frank pick up another chunk of plaster. This time he hit it well into the field on the other side of the ditch.

“Yeah,” Henry said. “Not so much a bad dream. More a weird one.”

“You like it out here by the fields?” Frank asked.

Henry nodded.

“So do I,” Frank said. “Helps me think.” Frank looked over at him. “You know, Henry, I've gained some worldly wisdom since we last spoke of tumblin' weeds.” He raised his eyebrows. “I used to think a Japanese businessman and his money were soon parted. Now I've learned different. It's only true if you're from Texas.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, just an hour or two after the auction closed on my tumbleweed, some guy piles on there sellin'

‘Genuine Texas Tumbleweed.' He throws in a certificate of authenticity and a little framed photo of the weed where he found it. My buyers backed out and bought his stuff.”

“Oh, I'm sorry, Uncle Frank.” Henry glanced at the blanket and the plaster and then looked quickly back at his uncle. “What're you going to do with all the tumbleweed in the barn?”

“Set it free.” Frank sighed. “It's wild stuff anyway. Wasn't meant to live in captivity. My heart breaks to see it in a cage and all that.” Three straight plaster chunks floated into the air. Frank only missed the last one.

“Do we have to take it back?” Henry asked. “Back to the culverts?”

“Nope. I'll just throw it in the yard. The wind'll do what it always does, and the weeds will tumble until the world does what it does and they all drop into another culvert.”