I Am the Cheese (15 page)

I emerge from the drugstore and walk to the parking meter and my bike is gone. The five o’clock crowd passes by on the sidewalk, hurrying home from the office or the factory, feet scurrying over the pavement. A bus halts with a hissing noise and its doorway exhales people. Traffic lights flash on and off and car horns sound. And I stand there isolated by myself on a small invisible island, and I look at the spot where my bike was. I shouldn’t have left it there unguarded. I have my father’s package in my hand and I hold it tightly, pressing it against my body, afraid that someone will rush by me and tear it from my grasp. I feel vulnerable, a headache beginning, a migraine maybe, a small spot of pain like a tumor throbbing in my forehead, above my eye. I touch the spot with my hand as if the pain is visible, touchable by my fingers. But mostly I stare dumbfounded at the spot where my bike was.

I look around to see if someone has played a trick on me, a prank, has hidden the bike somewhere nearby. The mouth of an alley looms between two stores
and I glance into the alley. Nothing but a few newspapers rolling in the wind, a rubbish barrel and a cat with arched back poised next to the barrel. The cat hisses and I turn away, glancing up and down the sidewalk. I encounter only strangers and no bike.

But the alley draws me again. If I had taken a bike, I’d have gotten out of there fast and the most likely route was the alley, a quick getaway, instead of the open exposure of the street where someone could yell “Stop, thief!”

I return to the alley. It’s narrow, barely room for a boy and a bike to pass through, but I enter anyway, running through the narrow passage, my shoulders brushing the rough brick exterior. The alley is so narrow that claustrophobia threatens me again and my palms turn wet with perspiration while drops of sweat gather in my armpits. I plunge onward, through the alley, bursting finally out of it, and find myself in a deserted area behind the Main Street buildings. Rubbish barrels; a derelict car, without wheels, sunk in the ground; boarded-up windows. Dusk hides whatever is in corners.

“Lose something, honey?”

I whirl around, surprised at the voice because there’s no one or nothing there.

“Up here,” the voice says, a faint southern accent softening the words.

He’s standing on the fire-escape landing, above me on the second floor. Squinting, I see that he is huge, a mountainous man, with a white shirt open at the chest although it’s cold in the New England dusk. As my eyes become accustomed to the twilight, I see that his
face is moist, his plump cheeks wet, his forehead soaked. He has a handkerchief and he dabs ineffectually at his forehead. He leans against the iron railing of the fire escape and the railing creaks in protest. Instinctively, I back away a step or two, afraid that the entire structure will collapse, come crashing down. Did he call me “honey”?

“Somebody stole my bike,” I say. “I left it in front of a store only for a minute or two and when I came out it was gone.”

“That’s right, honey, they’ll steal anything these days. There used to be a saying, ‘They’ll steal anything that’s not tied down,’ but these days they’ll steal anything, even if it is tied down.” The more he talks, the more pronounced his accent becomes.

I wonder if he can see my frown of distaste as I look at his monstrous body, all that sweat on a cold evening, and the way his lips pronounce the word
honey
. He repels me but I’m sure he knows something about the bike. Why did he ask whether I’d lost something when he saw me standing there?

“Did you see anybody come running through here with a bike?” I ask.

“You stay in one place long enough, you see a lot of things,” he says, his tone taunting now, as if he wants to play a game. “Know what’s hard? Being this way, stuck in a cage this way, and having to wait for everything to come to
you
, not being able to go after anything. See what I mean?”

I see what he means. The iron railings and banisters and rungs of the fire escape are cagelike and he is a prisoner in his weight and his bulk.

“You live up there?” I ask, not wanting to play games but not wanting to arouse his anger. He wouldn’t tell me anything if I turned him off too fast.

“In an apartment here. Four rooms. I look out the front windows at Main Street and I stand here on the fire escape and look at the back alleys.” He gestures behind him, at a wide door, the kind of door through which deliveries are made. “At least, the place has a good-enough door. So I sit and wait and look, or I stand and wait and look, and sooner or later, I see something.”

“I hope you saw my bike,” I say, “and whoever took it.”

“Folks lose things, they sometimes put an ad in the paper. You know, saying: ‘Lost, one bike, Main Street of Hookset. Reward.’ Reward, honey! That’s the key. You get something, you got to give a reward.” His voice drips with a heavy southern accent now and he pronounces
reward
as
ree-ward
. But there’s more than a southern accent in his voice, something else lingers there but I don’t want to recognize it.

“I’ll give a reward,” I say, almost imitating his accent. “I’ve got twenty-five dollars to give as a reward.”

“There’s all kinds of ree-wards, honey,” he says. “There’s ree-wards and ree-wards.” And now, in the dusk, he begins to scratch at himself, scratching his chest where his shirt is open and where curly hair glistens. He scratches with both hands, descending to his stomach. “All kinds …,” he says, his voice lingering in the twilight.

I am conscious again of the migraine, the throb in
my forehead. A wave of nausea crests in my stomach and I taste acid and bile.

“All I want is my bike,” I say, my lips trembling, and I’m sad and angry at the same time because I feel like a small boy again, still the coward I always was. There’s a whimper in my voice and I hate myself for the whimper and I hate the fat man up there on the fire escape for reducing me to this state. I also hate whoever took my bike and now I throb with more than a migraine’s pain but with hate and anger. I stand helpless before him, shaking and trembling in the chill of evening, and I feel tears of helplessness and rage cold on my cheeks. His huge figure wavers in the wetness of my tears, as if he is somehow underwater.

“Aw, tell him who’s got his bike,” another voice intrudes, a sharp voice with the flint of New England in the words.

I wipe the tears away.

The fat man sighs a huge sigh that’s like a wind able to topple trees.

“Go ahead, tell him.” The voice comes from inside the apartment, behind the fat man.

The huge folds of flesh form a pout on the man’s face. “Never can do what I want,” he says, himself a little boy now.

“Tell him, Arthur,” the voice says.

“The Varney boy—Junior—he took your bike,” the man says. “Come through the alley there ’bout fifteen minutes ago. He’s always stealing something, someday they’re going to put him away.”

“Where does he live?” I ask, sniffing, wondering how he can stand the cold.

“Upper Main Street next to the First Baptist Church. That’s a joke—Junior Varney, biggest thief in town, living next to a Baptist church.”

“You come in, Arthur, it’s getting cold out there,” the voice of the unseen man calls from inside, gently now, tenderly.

The big man looks down at me with a sadness in his eyes. Mournfully, he says, “I never get to do nothing.”

“Thanks,” I yell up, not at the big man but at whoever’s inside. For some reason, I look at the massive man and find myself saying, “I’m sorry.” I’m still sick to my stomach and my head throbs and I dread the prospect of tracking down Junior Varney and I am still repelled at the lewdness of the big man but he really looks caged as he turns slowly away on the fire escape, so I say, “I’m sorry,” again, and then I get the hell out of there.

Like a cloud, hanging in the distance, in his mind, something dark lurking there. And the edge of panic again, a shiver in his bones, deep in his marrow …

He remembered asking his father, tentatively, afraid that he was invading his privacy, how much it had hurt him to start life over, to give up his old life, his career, his friends. Adam thought how terrible it would be if he had to leave Monument now, to give up Amy and start again in a new town, a new section of the country.

“Of course it hurt, Adam,” his father said. “But it hurt your mother most of all. I didn’t mind leaving Blount—I had always figured that my career lay elsewhere. I had those dreams a young guy has, dreams of going to distant places, fame, all that stuff. But your mother loved Blount, the people especially. The hardest thing for me—and I still miss it—was giving up newspaper work. I still hope that the situation will change and I’ll be able to get back in the business someday. Grey figured it was too risky for me to continue in the same profession. Insurance didn’t appeal to me. But the Department always keeps its eyes out for legitimate businesses they can buy or take over that one of their witnesses can operate. The insurance agency was available for me at the time. We had to build a new life, Adam. It was hard, naturally. But when you think of the alternative, we were glad to have a chance. There’s always fear, though. Even today. Grey said our tracks are covered. Three bodies cremated ten years ago in Blount, New York. But who knows? Who really knows?”

“Why does Mr. Grey come here to Monument so often?”

“To keep in touch. He brings a special bonus of money twice a year. He also drops in to keep me up to date on developments. He also brings reassurances that we’re still safe. Once in a while, he probes my memory for some lost fact, some overlooked detail that subsequent developments have made important. And there’s another reason. He’s never mentioned this reason—I only suspect it. I think he’s keeping an eye on me.”

“But why?”

“I don’t really know. Maybe to see that I haven’t been reached by the other side.”

They were always on the move during these conversations, talking in snatches as they strolled the streets, visited the bazaar at St. Jude’s Church, exchanging information as Adam aimed the ball at three wooden bottles arranged in a pyramid. Once they went to a drive-in movie and his father turned down the speaker while they conversed. A John Wayne film was on the screen—Adam had forgotten the title. But he remembered asking his father why all these precautions with Mr. Grey were necessary ten years after the testimony and threats.