Read Online The Grievers by Marc Schuster - Free Book Online Page B

stumped.
    “What do you think he wants?” Neil asked as we motored toward the highway.
    “Ennis? What do you think he wants? More money.”
    “Yeah, but why us? We’ve already proven that we’re no good at this kind of thing.”
    “What can I say? Maybe the guy believes in second chances.”
    “Guilt is more like it,” Neil said. “We failed him once, so now we’ll need to prove ourselves.”
    “What? Redemption?”
    “It worked at the Academy.”
    “Yeah, but we’re adults now.”
    Neil glanced at my boots and then at the balloons in his rearview mirror, but he didn’t say a word. Elvis Costello was singing on the radio. Neil cranked the volume and lowered his windows. As the world flew by at sixty miles per hour, we became children again—or pretended to, at any rate—belting out song lyrics with the wind whipping all around us. It wasn’t freedom, exactly, but a small part of me wondered what would happen if Neil laid a heavy foot on the gas and kept going—past the Academy, through the city, over the Delaware, and straight out to the Jersey shore. Could we have a do-over, I wondered? Could we win back the infinite possibility of childhood? If we drove fast enough and played our music loud enough, could we ever outrun the ghost of Billy Chin?
    But the sky was already turning gray, the music proving just a little too loud. By the time we were bouncing along the narrow, broken streets that led to the Academy, Neil had raised the windows and turned down his stereo as if suddenly remembering that he was an adult now and that adults had to at least pretend to prefer the staid to the stimulating, prudence to risk, comfort to danger.

    B ACK WHEN I was a junior, I fell asleep on the bus one morning, and by the time I woke up, the Academy was six stops behind me. It was as far into the neighborhood as I’d ever been, and when I got off the bus, a little girl started chasing me, singing white, white, white, white, white, white honky as I ran to school. Less than a block from my destination, I crashed into a homeless man’s grocery cart, spilling its contents across the sidewalk and eliciting a string of expletives from its owner.
    Apologizing profusely as the little girl laughed at me from across the street, I offered the man my last five dollars, which he took, but not without wrapping his hand around mine and refusing to let go. He was touched by God, he said, and he had the power to heal me. The man was bald, his hands were sticky, and the rattle in his chest sounded like a Geiger counter. The only way to make him let go of me was to promise to repent, so I did, then ran the last fifty yards to school where I rolled up my sleeves and scrubbed the length of my forearm over the sink in the men’s room. I was still scrubbing when I heard a toilet flush and saw Frank Dearborn appear in the mirror behind me.
    “Fooling around with the natives, Schwartz?”
    “Oh,” I said, trying to laugh it off. “You saw that.”
    “The kid was a little young for you, don’t you think?” Frank checked himself out in the mirror next to mine. “And somehow I doubt she’s one of the chosen. What would your mother say if you brought home a goy ?”
    “I told you before, Frank—”
    “And a child, no less,” he said, aping Jackie Mason. “And not just a child, but a—what’s the word I’m looking for Schwartz? The word your people use for—you know—African Americans?”
    I knew the answer but didn’t want to say it.
    “Wait a second,” Frank said, snapping his fingers. “It’s on the tip of my tongue.”
    “ Schwartzer ,” I said to myself as he spoke the word aloud.
    “Well, that explains a lot,” Frank said. “And, really, who am I to judge? If that kind of thing makes you happy, Schwartz, then mazel tov , I say.”
    He slapped me on the back and left me to my scrubbing.
    I told Neil all of this if only to bridge the silence between us as the Academy came into view—a massive, walled-in fortress