“Don’t just put four of the same color,” I said. “It’s too easy.”
“Don’t tell me how to play. Now, look away while I do this.”
He set four pegs behind the shield and awaited my first guess.
Across the street from our school lived a man with a broken face. He hadn’t always lived there, but for the past three days, freed by the final bell, we’d walk past the yellow buses idling along the driveway and there he’d be, sitting in a window, an X of bandages across his nose, a gauze skullcap held in place by a chinstrap of medical tape. Just two eyes and some nose holes. A mummified king, silent and cryptic, scowling at everything beneath him.
Theories of his injury abounded.
“Race-car driver,” said Benny Silver, my best friend. “Formula One would be my guess. And that is the result of one hell of a crash. Multiple flips, no doubt.”
“What would a race-car driver be doing here,” I said, “in that dump?”
The man smoked a cigarette in the third-floor window, two stories above Val’s Barbershop and King Pizza, side-by-side establishments that shared the storefront at 1608 Chickering Road.
“He’s in that dump,” said Benny, “convalescing.”
Benny gathered and hoarded vocabulary words from his mother’s grad school textbooks, words he planned to deploy in a courtroom one day, when he became a hotshot attorney.
“No, I mean, wouldn’t a race-car driver rather convalesce,” I said, letting Benny know he hadn’t lost me, “in, like, an Italian villa, or a Back Bay brownstone, or a seaside mansion up in Newburyport? Those guys are loaded.”
“The car owners are loaded,” said Benny. “Drivers are like jockeys, hired help on the payroll.”
“Maybe he’s a boxer,” said Mike Walden, with his bowl cut and wristbands.
“Maybe he is pilot of fighter jet,” said Nader Al-Otabi, whose father had brought his family here from Saudi Arabia as part of some top-secret air force contract that Nader couldn’t seem to shut up about. “Maybe seat ejects but cockpit remains closed.”
“Again with the fighter pilots?” said Benny.
“Yeah, we get it, man,” I said. “You know jets.”
“And parachutes,” whispered Nader.
The mummy’s head swiveled toward us and we bolted like impalas spooked by a lion.
After school the next day Benny dragged me to Hanover Public Library. He’d seen something on the news the night before that demanded immediate follow-up. “I’ve had something of an intuition,” he said.
“You sure it was on the news? Sounds like you’ve been watching Dr. Who.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Dr. Who.”
“What’s at the library?” I said.
“Shh.” He put his finger to his lips. “Not until we get there.”
Benny’s sense of showmanship required a visual aid, and he said nothing further until we strode up the library’s front steps and requested several rolls of microfilm from the librarian and commandeered a viewing machine. Even then I had to wait for him to shuttle back and forth across two of them before he finally pointed at the screen and said, “There.”
The headline, dated July 22, 1982, read “Mickey Thutston Escapes from Walpole,” above a pair of mug shots of the notorious bank robber himself.
“That was like three months ago,” I said.
“Precisely,” said Benny.
“Precisely what?”
“Oh, Oliver. Don’t you see?”
I hated when he did this. We were in the same grade. We’d been friends since we were toddlers. But Benny was four months older than me, and whenever he found himself in the know he tended to treat me more like a nephew with a learning disability than a friend.
“See what?” I said, way too loud for the library’s hushed confines. An oil painting of one of Hanover’s founding fathers scowled at me from a gilt-edged frame. Any second the librarian’s head would peek around the corner to reprimand me.
“Plastic surgery,” whispered Benny.
I looked at the mug shot on the screen. Mickey Thurston was a handsome guy, there was no denying it. As in those old black-and-white photos of Paul Newman, Thurston’s eyes looked chiseled from diamonds, the kind of eyes that made a woman’s knees buckle. I’d heard stories about Mickey from both my father and my uncle Stan, who was a Hanover cop. Ladies’ man. Folk hero. Blue-collar guys loved him in a Robin Hood kind of way. He only stole from banks, and everybody, even the cops, knew that the banks were the real criminals. According to the article, Mickey Thurston robbed over forty of them, never used a gun, and was arrested, convicted, and locked up in the early seventies. Then, back in July, he and four other Walpole inmates crawled out of a hole in the ground at the end of a two-hundred-foot tunnel and made a break for it. Three of them had been recaptured by lunchtime the next day. A fourth by sundown. And that left Mickey, out there somewhere. Presumably out of the country. There were more rumors about Mickey Thurston’s whereabouts than theories about the broken man’s face.
“Why would he hide here? We’re only like fifty miles from Walpole,” I said.
“Fifty-two, to be precise.”
“Fine. I see you’ve done your research. Wouldn’t you want to get farther away from the prison you’d escaped from?”
“Unless that’s where everyone was looking for me. All I’m saying is that nobody would be looking for him this close to home.”
Could this be the man in the window across the street from the school, wrapped in gauze? The eyes might have told me, but we hadn’t gotten close enough.
“I don’t know, Benny. Maybe.”
“There’s something else,” he said. “They’re offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward for any information leading to his capture.”
That same fall, my mother began nursing school. The local community college offered a two-year RN program and she’d spent the summer reading anatomy and physiology textbooks in the same way my father read true crime and Stephen King in the living room recliner. Naturally, Benny considered her a medical expert worthy of consultation.
After she rubber-stamped Benny’s extra place setting for dinner, we began our homework at the kitchen table. With half of our math problems completed, Benny locked eyes with me and jerked his head toward my mother, preparing food at the counter. This, evidently, was my cue.
“So, um, how does plastic surgery work?” I asked her.
“What?” she said.
All Benny required was an opening. “What Ollie means is reconstructive surgery.”
I decided that I’d slap him in the mouth if he corrected me again.
She cocked an eyebrow. “Why?”
Though we hadn’t discussed it, Benny was prepared. “You know Mark Hamill?” he said.
My mother spun around and put a hand on her hip. “I’ve heard the name once or twice.”
“Well, between filming Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, Mark Hamill got in a car accident and needed reconstructive surgery. Hence, his altered appearance in Empire.”
“And this is why you’re interested in plastic surgery?”
“In a manner of speaking,” said Benny.
“Sorry, boys, but we’re still on the respiratory system. Trachea to bronchi to lungs, then on to matters of the heart. Tell me what you want to know and I’ll see if I can find it out.”
I pretended to pull the question out of my ass. “How long, say, would someone have to wear bandages after having plastic surgery on their face?”