“Look, that’s not the point. We can’t just climb down into the sewer.”
“Why?”
“Because …” Albert thought for a moment. “Because it isn’t allowed.” He took the crowbar from Fred. “And you should ask me before you play around with something like that. You could hurt yourself.”
“But you told me I have to show you where the gold comes from!”
“From down there?”
Frenzied nodding of the head. “Can I have the crowbar?”
Albert pointed to the manhole cover. “Seriously — down there?”
“I need the crowbar now,” said Fred.
“Isn’t there any other way?”
With a single motion Fred was up on his feet, towering over Albert, grabbing the hand in which he held the bar. At first, Albert didn’t feel anything, he tried to pull his hand away, but it was held fast, and he struggled in vain to loosen Fred’s grip with the other. “Let. Go.” The pressure increased, it felt as if Fred were driving Albert’s fingers right into the crowbar’s iron. Fred’s hat had slid forward, hiding his eyes, his lips silently opened and closed. The pain fused with a numbness that wandered up along Albert’s arm. Just before it reached his elbow, he pushed himself backward with all his strength. “Fred, stop it!” he shouted, and Fred finally let go. Albert stumbled backward. The crowbar landed next to his feet.
Albert picked up his tote bag and walked away.
Beside Gertrude’s fence he examined his now dark-red hand, wiggling one finger after another. They didn’t seem to be broken. “The joke of it,” he shouted to the foal, “is that I worry about his health.”
Gertrude actually neighed.
At age six, Albert had once called Fred a retard because he’d broken his He-Man figure while attempting to turn him back into Prince Adam. In response, Fred had aimed a kick at Albert and broken two of the latter’s toes. While pretending to box, Fred had inadvertently given him plenty of shiners. Albert’s body was long accustomed to little wounds and bruises.
Gertrude snuffled in the direction of his hand, which he was extending over the fence.
“What now?”
A glider was circling in the sky above them, making the usual glider noises, sounding like summer. Albert glanced around to see if Fred was following him. With his undamaged hand he lit a cigarette. Gertrude cropped with her teeth at a tuft of grass. Albert was hot — he pulled off the raincoat, tangling himself up in the process. The plastic didn’t want to let him go. He tossed it away into one of the plots. For a while he stood doubtful in the street, trembling. He knew that, left on his own, Fred wouldn’t budge from the spot. Once he’d spent two whole days sitting in the BMW without any food because of some fight that Albert could no longer remember the reason for, and who knows how long he would have kept waiting if Albert hadn’t eventually given in. Fred was at least as stubborn as Albert, and precisely because he knew he had to go back and get him, he didn’t want to. He flicked his cigarette to the curb.
Now Fred had managed to make Albert feel like a child.
The asphalt’s heat drilled up through the soles of his shoes.
Albert sat down in the shadow of Gertrude’s fence, closed his eyes, and imagined that Fred would come for him, just this once, that Fred would come and apologize, that they’d talk everything out, and laugh about it, and clap each other on the shoulders.
He was nineteen years old now, but as far as his wishes were concerned he still felt just like the three-year-old who’d stood on the steps of Saint Helena, arms defiantly crossed, refusing to set foot in his new home. Who’d countered all of Sister Alfonsa’s rigorous pleading with “Bert won’t.” Whose granny — fully half of his known family — had just died. A stubborn child who’d spent his first night at the orphanage in front of the orphanage, curled up on a doormat stamped with the word AMEN. Who’d been woken early in the morning by the tolling of the bells, and had immediately realized that Sister Alfonsa had spent the whole night there with him, just behind the door in the entrance hall. Who’d suddenly felt a tremendous hunger, and followed this new ersatz family member into the kitchen, where he’d been allowed to dunk a few rock-hard dinner rolls from the previous day into honeyed milk. A child who stopped calling himself Bert only when Sister Alfonsa threatened him with five hundred shoe tyings. A child whose mental capacities had not only earned him chess lessons but also allowed him to write, at age four and a half, in one of Fred’s encyclopedias, when the latter, during a picnic, was weeping over Anni’s death: Downt be saad. Who, while playing cops-and-robbers in the woods, for which purpose the orphans armed themselves with darts that they’d fling every which way with no restraint whatsoever, had incurred a scar the length of a matchstick at the left-hand corner of his mouth, a scar that could transform itself in the blink of an eye into a laugh line. And the only child in Saint Helena with a father who couldn’t be a father, in contrast to the many parents who didn’t want to be.
Thumper
When Albert came back, Fred was standing in exactly the same spot where he’d left him. Beside him was Tobi, a man of Albert’s age, who was seldom seen standing still. One couldn’t call what he did moving, exactly — it was more of a wriggling mated with a shuffling. The reeling of a land rat who suddenly finds himself shipboard.
Albert hid himself by the curb behind a Dumpster, which reeked sourly of discarded wine bottles.
Tobi was a well-known figure in the village, huge and vigorous, with an arrogant peasant haughtiness; he gave a quick, wheezy laugh, yet all he said was “Freddie.” He said it eagerly, as if sure it would fluster its target. But Fred didn’t move. Tobi’s disappointment showed itself in a shuffling of the feet; they wanted to move on, no rest for them, that’s what they were famous for. Whenever he was on the road in his milk truck, making his rounds from farm to farm in order to suck up the fresh milk with a hose like an elephant’s trunk and deliver it to the creameries in the uplands, his feet jammed the pedal all the way to the floor. These impatient feet of his had made him the quickest, most cost-effective driver in eleven towns; their distaste for the brake pedal meant that the milk didn’t slosh around, keeping it from going bad on the way. Today, however, Tobi’s truck was nowhere to be seen.
His second “Freddie” had the same effect as the first, which is to say, none whatsoever. Tobi circled Fred, ran his hand across his freckled face, scratched his neck. The heat was getting to him. His feet writhed in their loafers as he stepped closer to Fred, clapped one hand to his pursed lips, and let out an ululation—“U-U-U!”—waited a moment, then repeated the whole operation: “U-U-U!”
Albert knew it was time for him to step in, he ought to go over and send Tobi home, clearly, directly, no two ways about it. “Go sleep it off, fella,” something like that, and then, once Tobi had absented himself, Albert would take Fred by the hand, no, in his arms, and say he was sorry for leaving him alone so long and, most important, offer him some sort of reward for all the strain he’d suffered — for example, pancakes with raspberry jam.
And just at that moment, Fred raised his hand to his mouth, and went, “U-U-U!” Tobi nodded, his feet formed themselves into an arrow aimed in Fred’s direction, and he replied, “U-U-U!” Now they took turns, and Albert closed his eyes and clutched the makeup compact in his pocket. To Albert, Fred’s voice sounded euphoric, like that of a child who’s unexpectedly come across a playmate.