Backward Glass (13 page)

Part Four

The Little Hobo Boy,
August 1957

O
ne

One Saturday in early August 1957, I got the opportunity to take part in a story I had been hearing all my life. Three older boys in a downtown neighborhood started in on a vagrant kid who had been staying in an abandoned house.

My grandmother still lived there in my time, so I remembered what she had told me about the old Tarkington place, whose shell-shocked war-vet owner had been moved into a home by his kids. A bunch of local kids had been going there to drink or make out for a couple of years. When I arrived on the street in the early hours of a Wednesday in late July after having walked more than ten miles, it was the natural place to hide out.

I spent two weeks there, avoiding other kids, spending my last bit of money. I was glad when I finally got jumped.

The kids who did it had worked up a sense of outrage at this stranger invading their neighborhood. Despite the fact that in the last couple of years they had tossed their share of rocks through the windows of the Tarkington house, they decided that I was going to have to pay for defiling the house of the local war hero. They caught me crawling out of a basement window on a sweltering August afternoon.

I wasn’t a pushover, though, the way you’d figure a skinny little fifteen-year-old would be when confronted with three older boys. I fought back like I had nothing to lose, and I guess also like I knew I’d be rescued, knew the whole script of how this fight would go. When Boyd Fenton broke my nose, I stepped back, pulled it as straight as I could, and asked if he was done yet.

“What the hell is going on here?” said Brian Maxwell, striding around the corner into the Tarkington backyard where they had taken the vagrant kid. “Fenton, what are you doing?”

“Hi, Brian,” said Fenton, straightening up from his fighting crouch. “You seen this little thief? He’s been breaking in and John saw him stealing from Tuck’s the other day. Little gypsy or something. We’re giving him the run-off.”

Brian examined me. “Kind of blue-eyed for a gypsy, Fenton. How’re you giving him the run-off if you don’t let him, you know … run of
f
?”

“Making sure he doesn’t want to come back,” said John Timson.

“And teaching him respect,” said the third kid. “He’s gotta learn he can’t just break into Mr. Tarkington’s house like that. Guy was a war hero.”

Brian shook his head. “Bines, two years ago, you said I could be the leader of your gang if I’d break in here and set up a clubhouse. I don’t think you’re the guy to teach respect. Find something else to do.”

“No,” said Fenton. “We found him first, Brian. We’ll let him go in a couple of minutes anyhow.”

“Good. So it’s a couple of minutes.”

Fenton squared his shoulders and thrust out his chest. “I didn’t say we were done yet.”

Brian Maxwell smiled. “Okay, you’re not done yet. But I think that’s enough of this three-on-one.” He strode forward into the triangle made by the three boys. “Hey, kid, what do you say? Timson’s the littlest one; kick him in the balls, I’ll give you fifty cents. I’ll take the other two.”

“Fine by me,” I said. “Make it a buck if I break his nose?”

“Deal.”

And that’s how I did it. I followed as close as I could to the letter of the story the way my grandmother told it. I did break John Timson’s nose, and my dad, Brian Maxwell, tore Boyd Fenton’s shirt so badly pulling it off his back that Mrs. Fenton actually came around a couple of days later asking my grandmother to pay for a new one.

Grandma declined.

Eventually, my dad’s best friend “Chuck” Charles came along. He didn’t interfere with the fight, saying that would have made it too lopsided, but he commented from the sidelines and gave me some pointers. In the end, I think it was his input that drove our enemies off. Fenton muttered something about us ganging up on them as they left.

It seems strange to keep calling a seventeen-year-old kid my dad, so I’ll call him Brian. Before our attackers were
around the corner of the little bungalow, he was on the ground laughing.

“Funny to you,” said Chuck, coming over and handing him a Coke. “But Emily’s sweet on Fenton. What if my sister goes and marries him and he becomes my brother-in-law? You think I wanna be hearing his version of this historic battle over Christmas dinner for the rest of my life?”

“She won’t marry Fenton,” I said. “She’ll marry a guy called Ben Goldstein.”

Chuck raised an eyebrow. “Goldstein? You saying my sister’s going to marry a Jew?”

“Do you care?”

He grinned. “Nah, but it don’t matter how welcome I am in the family, none of them better try cutting part of my pee-pee off.”

Brian laughed. “What about me, kid? Who’m I gonna marry?”

I took a long look, pretending to consider. My grandmother hadn’t said anything about the little hobo predicting the future, but I already knew nothing I did could alter things. Things turned out they way they would, the way they already had. “Mary Nelson,” I said.

His jaw dropped. “How—did someone put you up to that? How’d you know about her?”

This caught Chuck’s interest. “Mary Nelson,” he said. “How come I don’t know about any Mary Nelson, Bri? Holding out on me?”

Brian shook his head. “You just don’t remember. My aunt’s cottage last year. I went up for a couple of weeks. She was cute, but three years younger. What was I gonna do? I’m a gentleman. How you know about that, half-pint?”

“You’ll meet her again,” I said. “University. You’ll fall in love.”

“Hey, how about me?” said Chuck. “I mean, while we’re telling the future and all? Who’m I gonna fall in love with?”

I shook my head. “Lots of people.”

That got them both laughing. “He’s got you all right,” said Brian. “Come on, give the kid a Coke, Chuck, and let’s figure out what’s next.”

Just like that, I had become their problem. They agreed I couldn’t keep staying in the abandoned house. Either Fenton’s guys would tell an adult or they’d come back for me.

“I heard there was some kid hiding out in this house,” Brian said as he tried to straighten my nose.

“I heard that, too,” said Chuck. “Everybody says he’s an orphan whose dad died in the war. That true, kid?”

“A lot of kids’ dads died in the war,” I said.

Chuck looked quickly over at Brian. “You got that right, kid. So?”

I wanted to phrase what I said carefully. I was off-script now, since my grandmother’s stories had never filled me in on exactly what conversation had gone on between the vagrant boy and my dad, just general impressions Brian had picked up and later related to his mother. I didn’t want to lie, not exactly. “So some people picked themselves right up,” I said, not looking directly at my dad. “Some people’s mothers were real strong, and worked two or three jobs to keep it together. They took in washing from the richies up on the Bridle Path, and they got some crappy factory jobs, and they kept right on providing for the families they had.” I closed my eyes, not wanting to give anything away. Everything I had just said was true of his mother. Everything that came next was the short life story of the little orphan boy as told to me years from now. “And some people’s mothers just quit. Didn’t get no job, they didn’t take in no work. Just sat in the kitchen and drank until they keeled over one day when their kid was ten, long after the war was done.”

I knew I was a lousy actor, so I kept my head down when I said all this so they couldn’t see the lies written all over my face.

They didn’t say anything for the longest time, and even though I knew they were going to buy it because that was how my grandmother always said it happened, I started having doubts.

When I finally looked up, Brian was already standing. “I’ve got an idea,” he said.

“Uh-oh,” said Chuck. “That means trouble.”

T
w
o

Brian’s big idea was his coal cellar. He and Chuck drilled me on how to get in and out through the narrow chute that led in from the side of the house. The two of them had done it for years in war games and hide-and-seek, so they knew how to wedge yourself in the chute in order to reach up and close the hatch. It was a tight fit. I found myself thankful that it had been more than a month since I had been fed on anything more than table scraps.

I left the mirror in the Tarkington house, and visited whenever it was safe in order to check the 1967 mirror. As the Silverlands continued to expand, it was becoming impossible to ignore the other clouds of image-fragments to either side of our own. I got into the habit of checking carefully to the right and left as I went in, but though I thought once or twice that I might have heard someone’s distant voice, I never saw any other mirror kid. Just as well; I had enough trouble with my own set of mirrors without getting caught up in anyone else’s story.

With my doorstop left in, I figured any former mirror kid could come through from 1947, and if anyone did, I wanted to know about it, so I scattered flour, and checked often for footprints. No luck. Had Wald been arrested in connection with Peggy’s disappearance? No, she wouldn’t be reported missing until September. Had Prince Harming made trouble for him? It was hard to imagine that younger, overly friendly Beckett I had last seen in 1947 being any match for wily old John Wald.

Brian always made sure he was first up in the morning. He’d sneak down to where I’d been sleeping in the throat-clogging cellar, toss me a set of hand-me-downs, and two sandwiches wrapped in brown paper, then head off to wake his mother and sister. I was lucky, I figured, that my grandmother, like so many of those who had lived through the Great Depression, never threw anything away. A shelving unit in the garage held at least a decade’s worth of clothes her children had outgrown.

After the neighborhood had quieted down, I would sneak out and hop a few fences so as not to be coming out of the same yard every day, and head to the public library to wait until it opened. In a study carrel at the back, I’d take out the letters from Luka and my grandmother, and pore over them for answers.

Over a lunch eaten out on the library steps, I would chat with the librarian, Mr. Weston. He was a veteran of the first World War, a guy who had been a farmer before he went off to fight in a trench in France, and came back wanting to be a librarian. “They shoot bullets at you long enough,” he once told me, “you figure out what you want in life.” As far as he knew, I was a kid who had messed up in school last year and been assigned a couple of summer research projects. He showed me the newspaper archives in the basement, and left me there for two or three hours reading and looking.

Pretty soon, I trusted him enough to show the strange, large coin from Luka’s box. “I’m supposed to find out what happened to this guy,” I said, showing him the name “Clive Beckett” stamped into it.

“He’s dead is what happened to him,” said Mr. Weston.

“How do you know that?”

He took the outsized coin from my hand. “Dead Man’s Penny. They used to send these out to the families. More like a plaque really. Grim. People used to put them on the walls. My mother got one of these for my brother, Steven. Sure, I’ll help you look into it.”

In the mid-afternoon, I would pack everything up, drop my backpack down the coal chute, hop a few more fences to the Tarkington house, and check my scattered flour for footprints.

On a Friday near the end of August, I made a chilling discovery: two sets of footprints. They hadn’t even tried to cover their tracks. I could follow them all the way to the front door, and when I peeked out a window, I could even see a few white marks down the front path.

I felt I needed a wall at my back. Better yet, Luka. She wouldn’t be scared by this. Neither would I if I could only have her with me. I shivered. It was January all over again.
Someone had come through the mirror, two someones,
and I had no idea who. My heart hammering, I told myself to calm down. I went back to the living room where I had left the mirror and took a closer look at the footprints. One was definitely bigger than mine, the other about the same size. No patterns in the treads. There were a lot of scuffed prints, but that didn’t tell me anything. I too would have spent a little time shuffling my feet and looking around if I came out into this abandoned house.

Anthony’s doorstop, the string joining a spoon on this side to another in 1947, was still there.

Someone had come through the mirror.

The enormity of it stayed with me the rest of that day and all through the weekend.

On Sunday, as soon as everyone left for church, I slipped out, dusted myself off, slung my backpack onto my shoulder, and started hunting for an unobtrusive place to spend the morning. After some deliberation, I settled on the space between two of Brian’s across-the-street neighbors, both of whom were on vacation. An azalea bush shielded me from the street, but enough light got in that I was able to sit back and read some genealogy books Mr. Weston had recommended. I wasn’t satisfied with the story so far regarding the death of Clive Beckett in his teens during the first World War, and these books contained lists and diagrams with details about marriages, births, and deaths. Could Beckett have had a kid brother? He would have had to be a lot younger, but maybe it was possible.

Around eleven-thirty I started paying attention to who was coming and going on the street so as not to miss when Brian and his family returned home. I knew he planned on washing his beat-up old Chevy Fleetmaster that afternoon, and I wanted to be on the scene to give him a hand.

I kept a low profile when I saw Boyd Fenton coming down the street. It wasn’t that I was afraid of him, but I didn’t want him to have anything over me. I tried to go back to the genealogy charts, but a moment later, I looked up and saw him in conversation with a woman in a floral summer dress, maybe in her mid-twenties. She wore a pillbox hat with enough of her hair tucked under it that I couldn’t tell the color.

I couldn’t make out everything they were saying, and as he answered her questions, Boyd kept pointing to the Tarkington house.

The woman thanked him and moved on. I tried to get a better look at her. There was something familiar, like the feeling I’d had the week before when I went with Brian, Chuck, and a couple of their girls to see
The Curse of Frankenstein
. The guy playing the mad scientist was the same one who would one day play the creepy admiral in
Star Wars
, and I was the only person on the planet who knew.

Fifteen minutes later, when the Maxwell family returned from their weekly religious topping-up, the woman was still on the street. I saw her approach Brian and his mother and sister as they got out of the “sloppy jalopy” as he called his car. He took the photograph that I had seen her showing to several other people, but shook his head and turned away. A little too fast, I thought. Grandma and Aunt Judy also looked at the picture, but their head shakes seemed more genuine.

For half an hour more, the woman stayed, asking questions of all the church-returners, car-washers, and hedge-
trimmers on the street. When she finally wandered off, I hadn’t turned a single page in my book. I was sure that if I could see the soles of her shoes, I’d find a few grains of flour on them.

When Brian came out to wash his car, I cased the street for a while, then put my baseball cap on, brim low, and casually walked across to him.

He laughed as he saw me. “You’ll never make a spy, hobo boy,” he said, tossing me a sponge.

“Did she say who she was?”

He shook his head. “Nah. Kind of funny. Where’d you say that orphanage was you lit out o
f
?”

“Downtown.”

“What street?”

“I was only there a couple of months.”

Brian took a long look, but then he shrugged and gave me small squirt of the hose. “Whatever you say. Hey, she said your name’s Kenny.”

“Jimmy’s what my mom called me. My middle name is James.”

“Get washing, James. But maybe wash from here in the shade. We don’t want the neighbors getting a good look at you.”

Brian put his friends on alert, and a couple said they’d seen the woman as well. This made me more interesting, and by the time we all met that night in the baseball diamond to hang out, all the better hangouts being closed on a Sunday, Chuck had invented several stories to explain my identity. I was a Russian spy, Marilyn Monroe’s secret love child, a criminal mastermind, the runaway kid of a war criminal. He amused us trying to fit together a story that made every single one of those true.

I smiled, but couldn’t keep from wondering what he would have said if he’d known the much stranger truth, that I was the son of his best friend, that just three years from now he’d be best man at Brian’s wedding, and two years later, he’d become my godfather.

When we got back to Brian’s house, he told me to give him a few minutes to get some noise going in the house so there was no chance anyone would hear me sliding down the chute. “But don’t hang around long,” he said, eyeing the street, “unless you wanna get pinched.”

I didn’t want to get pinched, but nor did I want to go back to the coal cellar. What was I doing here, waiting until someone gave my dad a concussion the way my grandmother said it happened? The appearance of this woman and whoever she was with made things serious all over again.

Three fence hops brought me to the Tarkington house. I entered as quietly as I could and stood before the mirror. I pushed my hand inside and felt the downtime chill. If I took out that doorstop, I could possibly never go back. But at the same time, didn’t I know I was going back? I was going to meet Rose, wasn’t I? Luka was going further back.

I knelt and touched the spoon. If Luka and I got further back, that surely meant that Anthony helped us again. Either that or it meant that I wasn’t about to take the doorstop out.

Which would mean Luka couldn’t get back here.

I groaned aloud in frustration.

“What was that?” came a voice from upstairs.

“I don’t know,” said a quieter voice, a woman’s.

“Hello,” said the first voice. “Is there anyone there?”

I didn’t move.

“Hello,” said the man’s voice again. Then a little lower, “I’ll go check it out. Probably just some local kids. Don’t get your hopes up.”

“Kenny?” said the woman’s voice. “Is that you?”