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I could hear sirens now, getting closer. I supposed Wendell and the Tiggorhoids had all deserted. No one in that crowd would risk their necks, or any other part of their anatomy, for us.
“Well, there they are,” said Crawley, hearing the sirens. “Tell me, is this your first arrest, or are you repeat offenders?”
As we weren’t actually arrested at the American Airlines terminal, I told him it was a first offense.
“It won’t be the last, I’m sure,” he said.
I cleared my throat. “Excuse me, sir, but I think it will be.”
“Will be what?”
“I think it will be the last time I’m arrested.”
“I find that hard to believe.” He leaned over, scratching one of his dogs behind the ears. “Can’t change breeding isn’t that right, Avarice?”
The dog purred.
Breeding? Now I was getting mad. “My breeding is fine,” I told him. The Schwa, who’s still mostly petrified, hits me to shut me up, but I don’t. “If you ask me, it’s your breeding that’s all screwed up.”
Crawley raised his eyebrows and gripped his poker. “Is that so.”
“It must take some pretty bad genes to turn someone into a miserable old man who’d send a couple of kids to jail just for trying to get a plastic dog bowl.”
He scowled at me for a long time. The sound of sirens peaked, then stopped right outside. Then he said, “Genes aren’t everything. You failed to take environment into account.”
“Well, so did you.”
There came an urgent knocking at the door, and all the dogs went ru
The old man gave the Schwa and me a twisted grin. “Destiny calls.” He rolled off toward the door, calling back to us, “Either of you try to escape and I’ll have you shot.”
I didn’t really believe that, but I also didn’t want to take any chances.
“This is bad. Antsy,” the Schwa said. “Real bad.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Crawley rolled back in about a minute. Amazingly, no police officers were with him. “I told them it was a false alarm.”
The sigh of relief rolled off the Schwa and me like a wave. “Thank you, Mr. Crawley.”
He ignored us. “The police will only give you a slap on the wrist, and since you’re not crying hysterically in terror right now, I assume your parents will not beat you. Therefore I will administer your punishment personally. You will return here tomorrow by the front door, at three o’clock sharp, and begin working off your transgression. If you fail to come, I will find out what your parents do for a living, and I will have them fired.”
“You can’t do that!”
“I’ve found I can do anything I please.”
I thought it was just an idle threat, but then I remembered the great egg shortage. A man like Crawley had more money than God in a good economy, as my father would say, and probably had friends in both high and low places. If he said he’d have my father fired, I figured I should believe it.
“What will you pay us?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“That’s slavery!”
“No,” said Crawley, with a grin so wide it stretched his wrinkles straight. “That’s community service.”
6. As If I Didn’t Already Have Enough A
I wasn’t too hungry at di
For the entire meal I just sort of moved my food around my plate. My parents didn’t notice, mainly because I wasn’t Frankie or Christina. If Christina doesn’t eat, right away they’re feeling her forehead to see if she’s got a fever. As for Frankie, not eating isn’t one of his problems. He’s more likely to get yelled at for taking all the food. Once I tried to take a huge plateful like Frankie does, just to see what my parents would do. While I wasn’t looking, Frankie moved some food from my plate to his, and my parents got on his case instead of mine. He always complains that I get away with everything. Well, there are two sides to that wooden nickel.
I was u
Mom and Dad had begun a conversation about what sort of carpeting to put down in our unfinished finished basement. You have to understand that my parents live to bicker. You could stick them at the beach and they’d argue whether the ocean was bluish green, or greenish blue.
They rarely argued over di
Like I said, it started as a discussion, and then it began heating up to the point where I would usually throw in some wisecrack. When I didn’t, the discussion suddenly evolved into an argument.
“We already agreed it should be Berber!” Mom says.
“I never agreed to anything! The carpet in the basement should match the rest of the house.” It’s escalating to the point where food is flying out of their mouths while they talk. Frankie just shakes his head, Christina’s reaching for her journal, and I start thinking about dog collars, maybe because dogs are on my mind after being at Crawley’s. When dogs bark too much, you can put on special collars, so each time the dog barks, it squirts out a funky smell. It doesn’t really teach dogs not to bark, but it distracts them long enough to make ’em forget they were barking.
I decided to let the carpet argument build just a bit more, then dropped my fork on my plate loudly. “Jeez! What’s the big deal? Put down a hardwood floor and each of you can buy a rug.”
“Watch that fork, you’ll break the plate!” Mom says.
“What? Are you go
“My friend’s got a wood closet to keep away bugs,” says Christina.
“That’s cedar,” Mom explains.
“We oughta build a cedar closet,” says Dad.
And that was that. The conversation lapsed into an endless stream of other topics, and I went back to pushing my food around my plate. They never noticed I had stopped the argument, just like they didn’t notice I wasn’t eating. Sometimes the Schwa had nothing on me.
“What do you think he’ll make us do?” the Schwa asked as we walked as slow as we dared from school to Crawley’s the next afternoon.
“I really don’t want to think about it.” Truth was, I spent most of the night thinking about it. I could barely get my homework done, which is not all that unusual, but this time it wasn’t because of TV, or video games, or my friends. It was because all I could think of were the many forms of torture Crawley could devise. I once had a teacher who said my imagination was about as developed as my appendix, but I don’t agree, because I came up with a whole bunch of possibilities of what Crawley could do. He could make us clean his dog-fouled patio with our toothbrushes—they do stuff like that in the army, I hear. He could send us on dangerous errands to Mafia types where we might get whacked, because anyone that rich in Brooklyn has gotta know a few of those guys. Or what if he wanted us to move the bodies he’s got locked up in a cellar beneath the restaurant? At three in the morning, when you’re tossing in bed, it sounds almost possible, proving that my imagination is alive and well, or, I guess I should say, alive and sick.
“I think we’re go
The restaurant only had a few customers at this hour of the afternoon. We identified ourselves to the maitre d’, who I guess doubled as Crawley’s doorman for what few visitors he got.