Anthony bit his lip. “Is Peg okay?”
I almost answered him, but then I set my face in as hard an expression as I could. “Bring some food. I’m starving.”
He came. Sometime in the evening my water-logged watch quit working, so I sat in the dark, getting bitten by mosquitoes and convincing myself that it hadn’t worked and midnight must have passed, and what was I going to do now? But he came.
I called to him when I heard him blundering through the undergrowth, and he turned on his flashlight. “All right, fine, here I am. I don’t know why I bothered.”
“Do you have a doorstop?”
He held out a long piece of string with a dessert spoon tied at each end.
I showed him where I had leaned the mirror against the bank of the creek. “Let’s set it,” I said. “I’m leaving it for John Wald so he has a way to come forward. Then I’ll tell you everything.”
I went in with him, just in case anybody was waiting on the other side, but the carriage house in 1947 was empty and still. We set each spoon in the lower corner of the mirror, figuring it would have a better chance of being unnoticed that way.
When we came back, we sat down on a fallen log and I explained everything. When I got to the part about Peggy going through to Lilly’s time, I took a glance at him, and I was pretty sure there were tears running down his cheeks.
“I really am done with it,” he said after a long while. “I’m sorry about where I put the mirror. That was rotten. But I don’t want to do it anymore.”
“Okay,” I said. I got up and slung my backpack onto my shoulder.
“You’re going?” said Anthony. “Don’t you wanna—I can probably get you into the little house for the night.”
I shook my head. “I spent the day doing nothing. It’s time I got going.”
“But where? What is there around here you can go to?”
I picked up the mirror. It wasn’t easy to carry by myself, but at least I didn’t have to worry about breaking it. “You said it yourself,” I said. “What else can a little hobo boy do? I’m going to find my dad.”
Part Four
The Little Hobo Boy,
August 1957
One
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 off?”
“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?”