Through the Hidden Door (12 page)

“Greeves knows they were drinking,” said Snowy.

“What?”

Snowy leaned on his shovel handle to rest. “Finney and Dr. Dorothy were talking about it at breakfast,” he said.

“Well, what happened?” Using my shirt as a sling, I stuffed my left hand inside between two of the buttons and let it rest. That noon the same doctor who’d diagnosed my back spasm had encased my middle finger in a big metal and tape device. The finger throbbed like a toothache. The knuckle had been dislocated.

“After Danny let you go, some boy went running down to Greeves to get iodine and bandages, of all things.”

“I know. He knocked on the door. Matt Hines told him to bring iodine. Just to lose him while they got rid of me and the rum.”

“Yeah. Well, the boy went to Greeves, and Greeves came upstairs. First time he’s climbed the stairs all year. He smelled the rum. Rudy tried to fake Greeves out that he’d cut himself and needed a bandage. Greeves wasn’t fooled. Greeves called Silks, and Silks blew up.” Snowy began to shovel the road again.

“Why didn’t Silks throw them out? It’s right in the handbook you get expelled if you’re caught drinking.”

“That’s the thing of it. You see? Silks is already under the gun because he allowed Greeves to proctor an exam where five boys were caught cheating. That looks bad on his record as headmaster in his first year.”

“I know. Finney told me that.”

“Well, if it gets out that the boys were drinking on campus, it’ll hit the local papers. It’ll cause a big mess for Silks. The board of trustees will have a clean sweep and get rid of Silks, Greeves, everybody. Winchester’s always had this super image of being a clean school. They want to keep that image. They don’t want stuff in the papers. Next thing they’ll be scared someone will find cocaine or pot in somebody’s gym locker, and the whole thing’ll get into
The New York Times.
This happened to some other big deal prep school a couple of years ago, and enrollment went down, contributions stopped, parents went nuts, Finney says. Silks will do anything to keep Winchester quiet. He can shut up Greeves. No one’ll listen to Mr. Greeves anyway because he’s deaf and old and can’t remember what year it is. The thing of it is, Silks can’t shut you up.”

“What?”

“That’s what Finney says. You give Silks nightmares. He thinks you’ll report the boys for drinking. This time, next time, it doesn’t matter. He thinks you’ll do the boys, his job, and the school in. He wants you out of here.”

“But how did he know I was even in Rudy’s room? No one saw me.”

“Barney,” said Snowy, “all he had to do was look at your finger.”

We dug on. The road wound, curved, but otherwise never changed. Snowy was unusually quiet. Finally, when we took a chocolate-bar break, he hung his head and, emptying sand from his socks, said, “So I guess you’ll be leaving?”

I didn’t answer.

“I guess you have to, don’t you? I mean your dad’ll make you do it.” Snowy had gotten sand in his chocolate and took a new one out of his pocket, unwrapping the foil slowly. “Besides, if you stay, they’ll get you. Next time it’ll be your neck instead of your finger.”

“Snowy?”

“What?”

“Did you follow me home last night and throw the stones at Rudy’s window?”

Snowy munched carefully on his chocolate. He didn’t like the nuts in it and bit around them carefully. Then he tossed the nuts over his shoulder.

“Snowy, you did, didn’t you?”

“I figured they’d be waiting for you in the bushes,” he said. “I never thought you’d be jerk enough to go up to Rudy’s room.”

“Thanks, Snowy. You saved me.”

He brushed his hands on his pants and began to dig again.

“Did they see you out the window?” I asked him.

Snowy shrugged, and I knew they had, “Barney,” he said, “look at the sand. Look at the color of the sand.”

“I
S THIS AN UNTAPPED
line?”

“Dad, I’m calling from Mr. Finney’s house. Of course it’s untapped!”

“That tinhorn Silks isn’t listening in?”

“No, Dad.”

“Well, I’m flying into Boston day after tomorrow. Get your things together. There’s a train from Greenfield at eleven in the morning. I’ll meet it at North Station.”

“Dad,” I said, voice cracking, “I’m not ... I’m not leaving Winchester.”

“Barney, don’t even open your mouth to me about—”

“I’m going to stay on. I will not leave.”

“Yes, you will, Barney. Oh, yes, you will. I say you’ll leave, and you have no choice. If you think for one minute—”

“Dad,” I interrupted. I knew exactly where my father was sitting. On the kitchen counter, boots dangling against the lower cupboard where we kept rice and cereal. I could see the veins sticking out in his neck and pumping away in his temples. I could hear his face get hot and red. “Dad, listen—”

“You listen, Barney. You listen up and listen hard. I have paid good money, over ten thousand bucks a year, to be exact, to give you a decent education. There is no way you can come back here to Lantry and go to high school twenty miles away in Red Arrow. Even if you did, I have to travel all year long. Where are you going to live? With your Uncle Edward? Huh? You want to live with Uncle Edward and worry about his hernia all night long for him? Number three. Your former friend Rudy and his gang are going to take care of you but good. I will not let you spend one more day on a campus with five weasel-brained lumpkins who want to break your neck. Silks said he would not be responsible for any accidents.

“That brings me to Martin Silks. He is the lowest, most disgusting worm I’ve ever run into. But he’s offered us an out. He says he’ll give you a twenty-four-carat-gold ticket into any school in the country if you’ll leave now. You’re going to St. Andrews, Barney. You have been entered and accepted. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Do you know what St. Andrew’s is?”

“A big deal preppy school in Rhode Island,” I answered.

“Yes, Barney. One of the best schools in the United States. You can finish out eighth grade there and continue in their upper school if you want. Or you can transfer to Hotchkiss from St. Andrew’s in September. You will under no circumstances come back here or stay on at Winchester. The decision has been made, Barney.”

“Dad, I won’t go.”

“You do not have that option, son.”

“Dad, it’s my life. And I won’t go.”

“Barney, why are you acting like a moron? A flea-brain?”

“If you’ll listen, I’ll tell you, Dad.”

“I will listen to nothing, son, because I am thirty years older than you are. You are going to listen to me. You are going to meet me at North Station in Boston in forty-eight hours. I am taking you to Rhode Island myself.”

“I won’t show up, Dad.”

“Then I will come to Winchester.”

“You won’t find me, Dad.”

I heard Dad sigh at the other end of the line. I wished he were in the room. I wanted to hug him tight around his legs, around his rough old jeans, and climb up into his lap as I’d done when I was a little boy. “You give me one good reason, son. And it better be very, very good.”

“I don’t know if it’s good. But it’s why, anyway.”

“Get it out of your system.”

I swallowed my insides, which had bobbed up to mouth level. “Dad, I’ve done some pretty stupid, rotten things my first years here.”

“Okay. Now you have to pay for it. You’re getting off cheap.”

“No, Dad. I haven’t done anything wrong to cause all this mess. Mr. Silks is trying to punish me when I’m innocent.”

“That’s why you’re getting away from that son of a—”

“No, Dad. That’s why I’m staying.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“Mr. Silks is trying to bribe me with St. Andrew’s, Dad. It’s dirty. I won’t buy it.”

A long, long silence answered this. Could I actually hear the mountain wind booming two thousand miles away in the telephone wire? After a while my father cleared his throat. He said, “Of all the reasons in heaven and earth, Barney, why did you have to pick that one?”

“You’re shaking,” said Finney.

“I guess I am.”

“You handled that well, Pennimen.”

“Thank you, Mr. Finney.”

“You’re going to stay on, then? Here at Winchester?”

“I’m going to try.”

“Pennimen,
why did you go to Rudy Sader’s room?”

The logs in the fireplace had fallen down on themselves. I made a neat new pile on top of them and poked them till they burned nicely.

“Why,
Pennimen?”

“I don’t know,” I said, throwing the tongs on the bricks of the hearth. “I’m an idiot. That’s why. I guess it ripped me up to hear him cry out.”

Finney uncrossed his legs, lifting the trouser off the lower good one with both hands. On his lap were my drawings of what we had found in the cave that afternoon. His eyes buttoned on mine. “Is it the cave, Pennimen, that’s keeping you here? If Silks writes his letter destroying your record for Hotchkiss, that’s a big price to pay. The only place that’ll take you is military school. Silks will see to that. You could get out of this mess tomorrow and never have to look back.”

“I would look back.”

“At the cave?”

“At Snowy.”

“Snowy?”

“Rudy and Danny’ll go after Snowy now,” I said. “If I left Winchester, I wouldn’t sleep at night thinking of what they might do to him.”

Finney inclined his head to the side. He smiled to himself, not to me. I tried to see through his eyes into his mind, but whatever was going on there was very private. He grasped his pants crease and relifted the bad leg over the good one. “Tell me again about this afternoon,” he said, looking at the drawings in his lap. “These things, what you called splash holes, lining the road? They look like patterns from a psychological test. What are they?”

“Well, I don’t know what to call them. They’re about as big around as ... as an ink bottle. It’s as if someone threw red-hot liquid metal on the ground and it splashed and burned through in a blobby pattern. But there’s nothing inside them.”

Finney frowned. “Hollow?” he asked.

“Yes, as if something was in them once.”

“Cobb! Get in here!” Finney brayed suddenly.

It took Snowy his usual long time to do anything he was asked. Finally he shuffled in and sat down at Finney’s feet. Cuddled in Snowy’s hands was Rosie, eyes bright, little nose quivering. He fed Rosie a cherry tomato.

“Cobb,” said Finney brightly, “will you do us the honor of talking about these little black holes in the ground in that very private cave of yours?”

“Let Barney talk about them,” Snowy answered, sniffing.

Finney shook his head. “Okay.” He held up both hands. “You’re afraid of the curse of the tomb of the cave people.”

“It’s not funny,” said Snowy. “Every single person who dug up King Tut’s tomb in Egypt died soon after.”

Oh, no, I thought. I’d read that story in one of Snowy’s
Soldier of Fortunes
three weeks before. It was entitled “Poisoned in the Pyramids,” and it was all jazzed up with a French Foreign Legion squadron that inhaled four-thousand-year-old mustard gas.

“This isn’t a tomb,” said Finney. “It’s something else. And for your information, Cobb, the fellow who discovered Troy lived to a ripe old age. So did the people who dug up ancient Assyria, who found Easter Island and the cave paintings at Lascaux. So there.”

“It’s my cave,” said Snowy.

“Yes, I know, Cobb. And I am going to ask you to do something special in your cave, all right?”

“What?”

“What you boys call splash holes. I want you to fill a couple of them with plaster of paris. Let it dry. Dig up the whole thing. Bring it back to me.”

Snowy gave his glasses a shove up his nose and didn’t answer.

“I will tell you something, Cobb,” Finney went on. “Every single thing I’ve seen in Pennimen’s pictures could have been made up. Could have been just your imaginations. Except for these.” Finney stood, wobbling, and reached for a book. He opened it to a picture of what looked like a Roman courtyard. “This is Pompeii,” he said. “This is a garden two thousand years old, boys. Pear trees, lindens, and crab apples used to grow there. You know how they found that out?”

But Finney didn’t have to go any further. On the page were photographs of black holes identical to ours except much larger. “They filled these holes with wax,” he explained. “When the wax hardened inside, they dug it up and from the mold of the root were able to identify every tree that grew in that garden It’s possible that something once alive grew in these little holes of yours. Try plaster of paris in them. Now, tell me about this so-called fire pit you found this afternoon, Pennimen.”

Snowy picked up Rosie and left the room.

“We put the boathook down twenty times. All over the place. Half of the probes hit ash and charcoal on the bottom. The pit’s at least twice as big as the ground floor of this house.”

“And you dug on the side nearest the road and found handfuls of crumbled baked clay and half a pot, which you’ve drawn for me here but will not bring out of the cave to show me?”

“You know Snowy won’t let me.”

“I know. But I’d like to see some of the stuff you find.” Finney’s voice was wistful. “Tell it as it happened.”