The Seventh Most Important Thing (2 page)

J
udge Warner took a moment to study Arthur Owens when he reached the bench. It was his way of making the kids squirm.

As the judge glared at him, Arthur tried to decide what to do with his hands and feet, which suddenly seemed to be completely useless objects. He crossed and uncrossed his arms, shifted from one foot to the other, and did his best to ignore the sickening flip-flopping in his stomach. Sweat made his undershirt stick to his back.

The judge finally spoke after glancing down at a piece of paper handed to him by the bailiff. “You are Arthur Thomas Owens?”

“Yes,” Arthur thought he said.

“I didn't hear you, young man.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Arthur replied, slightly louder.

“Look up at me when you are speaking.”

Arthur swallowed. He hated looking at people when he was speaking. It made him feel like they could X-ray every thought in his head. Usually, he had his hair to hide behind, but that morning his mother had taken a pair of scissors to the front of it. “To make you look less guilty,” she'd told him.

Arthur didn't think his hair had anything to do with his guilt, but there was nothing left now but a jagged fringe high above his forehead. He tugged at it with his fingers.

“Okay,” he mumbled, glancing up at the judge's thick round glasses and oddly magnified eyes, then looking back down at his feet. There was a long pause, as if the judge was trying to decide if he was entitled to more respect than he was getting. The room was quiet, expectant.

When the judge's gaze finally returned to the paper in his hands, Arthur held back a loud sigh of relief.

“According to what I've read about your case, I understand you attacked a man named James Hampton in a vicious and unprovoked manner on November eighth. Is that correct, Mr. Owens?”

Arthur blinked, momentarily confused by the name.

James Hampton? Who was James Hampton?

It took him a minute to figure out the judge was talking about the old Junk Man. Arthur tried not to look surprised by the fact that the man had a real name.

Everybody had a name, of course, but he had to admit he'd never thought about the Junk Man having one. He couldn't recall anybody in the neighborhood ever using it—especially not a name as formal-sounding as James Hampton, which could have belonged to a school principal or somebody's grandfather.

It definitely didn't make Arthur feel any better about what he'd done.

It also didn't make him feel better to find out that the Junk Man—James Hampton—had come to court that day to watch what happened. He was seated in the crowd only a few rows back from where Arthur stood.

The judge pointed him out. A shocked breath caught in Arthur's throat.

He didn't even look like the same person.

The Junk Man's gray-white hair, usually disheveled, was now close-cut and carefully trimmed. He wasn't wearing his familiar raggedy clothes and foggy eyeglasses either. Instead, he had on a neatly pressed brown suit and striped orange tie. Somehow he appeared taller. And less crazy.

But you couldn't miss the heavy white cast covering one arm and the sling of fabric that formed a triangle, almost like the letter
A
for Arthur, across the old man's chest.

Arthur swallowed hard, staring at the cast, staring at what he'd done. The
A
seemed to get more visible, more accusing, the longer he stared at it.

“Mr. Owens, I'll repeat my question. Are you the one who attacked Mr. Hampton?”

“Yes, sir,” Arthur whispered.

“Then I want you to look at this innocent man you injured—and, quite frankly, could have killed,” the judge continued.

There was a murmur of outraged agreement in the courtroom.

“And I want you to tell me what was going through your mind that afternoon,” said the judge, his voice rising. He was proud of his intimidating, kid-shaking baritone. “I want to know exactly what could have compelled you to throw a brick at Mr. Hampton as he was minding his own business walking down the street.”

Arthur was silent. He looked at his feet. The too-long funeral pants made pools of black fabric over his polished shoes. He noticed how the orange carpet below them was nearly the same shade as the Junk Man's tie. He wondered if he'd be sentenced to jail for life if he refused to give a reason for what he'd done.

“Did you attack Mr. Hampton because he looked like a helpless old man—pardon my choice of words,” the judge added apologetically, glancing in the direction of the Junk Man. “Did he seem like an easy target to you?”

“No, sir,” Arthur heard himself answer reluctantly.

“Were you attempting to rob him?”

Arthur shook his head.
Robbing the Junk Man
would have been an almost-funny statement in any other place, but he didn't dare laugh, not even inside his own head.

“Was it his color that caused you to attack him?”

Color? Confused, Arthur turned to look at the Junk Man again, not sure what color the judge was referring to. Was he talking about the white cast? The orange tie?

The judge grew more impatient. “I am asking you, young man—and this is a very serious question—did you throw the brick at him because he is a black man?”

What?
Arthur's stomach gave a sickening lurch. This was a possibility he'd never thought about. Never in a million years considered. He could feel his heart thudding wildly, his mind racing. The Junk Man wasn't a color. He was just the Junk Man.

But the man's skin was light brown. That was a fact.

And Arthur's was peeled-onion white. That was a fact too.

He'd just never put those two facts together.

Arthur knew people's race wasn't something you messed around with. There were marches and protests about it on television all the time—and Arthur didn't even pay much attention to the news. Could the judge truly believe he'd been trying to stir up some kind of trouble by hitting the Junk Man?

Although he had sworn to himself that he would say nothing—that he would never talk about what had made him so angry on that November afternoon—Arthur had no choice. His father wouldn't have wanted him to stay silent and be accused of something far worse.

So Arthur licked his dry lips and spoke.

“Your Honor,” he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “It wasn't his color.”

The judge's reply was icy. “Then what was it?”

Arthur knew the answer would sound crazy to everyone in the room. He knew no one would understand, and it would probably earn him a permanent bunk in juvie with nothing but olive-green clothes and bad food and lukewarm showers for the rest of his life.

Looking down at the floor, Arthur said in a barely audible voice, “It was because of his hat, Your Honor.”

While this might have seemed like a smart-aleck answer to the judge, to the courtroom, and to anyone who heard it, it was, in fact, the truth. Arthur had thrown the brick because of a hat.

T
he hat in question had been missing from the hall closet, along with everything else that had belonged to his father, when Arthur got home from school that November day. It was November 8, just as the judge had said. A Friday.

Arthur remembered opening the closet to hang up his stuff. He'd just taken off his coat and tossed his shoes inside when he realized something was different. The closet was tidy and half empty. It smelled like Murphy's oil soap.

With his heart hammering in his chest, he began pushing through the coats that were left, searching for his father's old corduroy jacket. It was a big, faded coat that held the shape of his father's shoulders and smelled of stale cigarette smoke and beer and motor oil, as if he'd just taken it off after getting home from work. (Arthur still liked to imagine that he had.)

Nothing.

Arthur's eyes darted toward the row of hat pegs, looking for the motorcycle cap that had belonged to his father. It was one of those slick Harley-Davidson caps—black leather with a silver chain and the orange-winged logo on the brim.

If you wanted to find Tom Owens in a crowd, all you had to do was look for that cap, sitting slightly to one side—never straight, always jaunty. He was wearing it in nearly every picture the family had of him.

But except for the one with his little sister's pink knit hat, all of the pegs were empty.

Feeling more and more uneasy, Arthur pounded up the stairs to his parents' room, making the walls of the small house shake. He and his sister shared one room at the top of the stairs. His parents shared the other. Both rooms were shabby. Arthur's family had never had a lot of money.

The door to his parents' room stood open. Arthur saw that the old radio his dad used to listen to ball games on was missing. The wedding picture that had always been on his parents' wall was gone. Even the ashtray on the windowsill—the one he'd made for his dad in art class in third grade, a hideous green-and-blue swirl of clay—wasn't there.

Arthur had been afraid this was coming. It had been three months since his dad died, although it still felt like yesterday.

Arthur hadn't forgotten how upset his mom had been after the funeral, how she'd gone through the kitchen like a bulldozer when they got home.

“I don't want anything that reminds me of Tom left in this house! Nothing! Not one damn thing!” she'd shouted, half crying, half yelling, as she threw out everything she could find in the refrigerator and cupboards: His father's booze. Bags of corn chips. Packs of cigarettes. Cans of pork and beans. Anything that had belonged to him. Anything he'd liked.

Only Arthur's begging and his sister's tears had finally stopped her from clearing out even more that night.

And now the rest of his father's things were gone.

For the past couple of weeks, his mom had been hinting that it was time for them to move on. “We need to make a new start,” she'd been saying.

But he never thought she would do something like this without giving him some warning. Had she just packed up his dad's stuff and thrown everything out while he was at school?

Feeling sick, he pounded back down the stairs, yanked on his shoes, and ran outside to look.

Up and down the street, the curbs were lined with empty metal garbage cans. Some of the lids were already rolling away in the gusty November wind. Leftover bits of trash stuck to the city street.

Arthur began to sprint, careening madly down his block and around the corner, as if he could somehow catch the garbage truck and save his father.

That was when he noticed the old man who often came through the neighborhood on trash day with his grocery cart, looking for junk. “Got any shiny stuff for me today?” he'd holler if people were outside. “Anything valuable you don't want?”

Everybody called him the Junk Man. They knew he picked through their garbage whether they let him or not. He'd been collecting junk for years—as far back as Arthur could remember. Always pushing the same rusty cart down the street, and always wearing the same filthy tan coat, summer or winter.

Arthur had seen the guy take wine bottles out of the trash and put them straight into his coat pockets. Or sometimes he'd haul away people's discarded furniture—broken chairs, headboards, small tables—in a teetering pile in his cart. One person even spotted him sitting on a piano bench in their yard once, playing an invisible piano.

He was a crazy old drunk, people said.

Which was why, when Arthur saw his father's motorcycle cap perched crookedly on the Junk Man's head, he completely lost it. He knew the Junk Man had stolen it from them. He knew the worthless trash picker had gone through their garbage, piece by piece, and picked out the best things of his father's to take with him.

And in that moment, all of the fury that had been building inside Arthur since his father's death came exploding out.

It was bad enough that his mother had thrown away his father's things without even asking him. Bad enough that most people thought his father had thrown away his life and didn't deserve to be remembered. Bad enough that other kids had their fathers and his dad was dead.

But when Arthur saw the crazy Junk Man wearing the most important thing of all to his dad…that was the final straw. Did the old man think it was okay to steal things from dead people? Did he wander around the neighborhood waiting for people to die so he could run off with their favorite possessions? Was that what he did? Or was he mocking Arthur's dad by wearing his hat? Was it some kind of sick joke?

Arthur knew his mind wasn't thinking straight, but he couldn't control it. It was like a runaway train, racing faster and faster toward a wall.

He saw the pile of crumbled bricks next to a closed-down building on the street corner. He picked up one. It was the only thing he could think of doing. He would punish the old man for what he'd done. He would punish death for what it had done. He would punish everybody.

The brick felt cold and rough in his hand. It was a dangerous thing to be holding—he recognized that much. A small voice in the back of Arthur's mind tried to tell him to stop, to think about what he was doing.

Arthur told the voice to go to hell.

And then he raised his arm and threw.

I
f it had been up to the judge, he would have thrown the book at Arthur T. Owens. He didn't believe a word of the boy's story.

“So I think seeing him wearing my dad's hat was what made me, you know, do what I did,” Arthur said, finishing his stumbling explanation.

Right. The judge didn't buy it. In his opinion, the boy was just using his father's death as an excuse for causing trouble.

All you had to do was look at the facts in the kid's paperwork: Arthur had a father who'd dropped out of school, who'd been in jail a couple of times for minor crimes, and who'd died drunk. What were the chances his son would turn out any different? He was already heading down the same path.

“In my experience, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree,” the judge said to Arthur.

But James Hampton didn't see it that way.

After Arthur and the judge finished talking, Mr. Hampton stood up and asked the bailiff if he could have a quick word with the judge. The bailiff asked if it could wait, and James Hampton said as politely as an army soldier, “No, sir, with all due respect, it can't.”

Arthur was still having a hard time believing the Junk Man and James Hampton were the same person. He kept wondering if it was some kind of trick, if maybe the guy was an actor or something.

The two men—James Hampton and the judge—stepped out of the room, and the “quick word” stretched into an hour. The courtroom was dismissed for lunch.

Although he wasn't the least bit hungry, Arthur sat in the courthouse hallway with his mother and ate the baloney and cheese sandwich she had brought for him. It tasted like baloney-flavored cardboard, but he didn't want his mom to start crying again if he turned it down.

She looked like she'd been crying for a year. Usually, his mom's makeup was perfect, and her dark hair never changed. It was always styled with the same big, glossy waves held in place with the same white velvet headband.

But now her face was puffy and splotched with red. She kept twisting a pink tissue in her fingers, until it fell into shreds on the black dress she was wearing. Pretty soon, she looked as if she was covered in melting pink snowflakes.

Arthur wasn't sure why his mother had worn her funeral dress to court that day. Was she already expecting the worst? He'd had to wear his funeral suit because it was the only suit he owned.

“I'm sorry, Mom,” Arthur said for the thousandth time.

He'd said it every day she'd come to visit him in juvie. He'd put it at the bottom of every letter he'd written to her. He'd repeated it that morning when she'd brought the suit for him to wear.

“You should have let me know something was wrong,” his mother replied for the thousandth time. “Your sister lost a tooth and got an A in reading this week. Did I tell you that already?” she asked, her eyes spilling over with tears again. Sometimes when Arthur's mom was upset, she didn't make much sense.

“No, you didn't,” Arthur replied, even though she had already told him. Twice.

“Do you think they'll ever let you come home again?”

Arthur sighed. “I don't know, Mom.”

But he didn't think the chances were very good.

When court resumed after lunch, Arthur was called to the front. He figured he was doomed when the judge said, “This is a highly unconventional sentence, young man,” before he had reached the judge's bench.

Earlier that day, Arthur had seen kids who had stolen a few lousy bags of chips and candy get sent back to juvie for sixty days or more by Judge Warner. Everybody said he was one of the toughest judges around. So Arthur knew something “unconventional” had to be pretty bad.

“In other words,” the judge continued sternly, glaring at Arthur, “it is not the punishment I would have chosen for you.”

It wasn't hard to imagine the various punishments the judge might have chosen. Arthur had already pictured all of them.

The judge glanced toward the Junk Man, who had returned to his seat in the third row and was sitting with his hands folded in his lap. “However, Mr. Hampton has made it clear to me that he is not interested in retribution, but in redemption.” He looked at Arthur. “Do you know what
redemption
means?”

Arthur thought it might have something to do with church, but he was pretty sure the judge wasn't allowed to sentence people to go to church.

He shook his head.

“Well, you ought to know. Look it up later.
Re-demp-tion.
” The judge gestured impatiently at the courtroom. “I don't have time to be everybody's schoolteacher here. As you can see,” he continued, pointing toward the Junk Man, “you have left Mr. Hampton unable to do his work as a result of his injuries, so he has offered an unusual proposal for me to consider.”

The judge fixed his gaze on Arthur. “Instead of sentencing you to the Juvenile Detention Home for an
exceedingly
long time—which I won't hesitate to do if I ever see you in my courtroom again—Mr. Hampton has requested that you be assigned to work for him until his arm has healed.”

The courtroom behind Arthur buzzed with confusion. What had the judge just said? The brick-throwing kid was being sentenced to work for the guy
he'd tried to kill
? Had Judge Warner completely lost his mind?

Arthur stared at the judge, as confused and startled as everyone else. Work for the Junk Man? What could the judge possibly be thinking?

In spite of himself, Arthur spoke up. He made sure to use the Junk Man's real name, although it still seemed strangely unreal to him. “What sort of work does Mr. Hampton do, sir?”

The judge arched his eyebrows. “You don't know?”

“I'm not sure,” Arthur mumbled. He couldn't imagine any judge would knowingly sentence a kid to dig through people's garbage looking for wine bottles and busted-up furniture. Did the old man have another job nobody knew about?

The judge smiled in a rather smug way. “Well, I guess you'll soon find out, won't you, Mr. Owens?”

And with that, Arthur Owens was allowed to go home.