The sliding glass door flew open. “Smells good in here!”
My father worked at an electroplating shop. The chemical process, he explained to me, was a galvanic cell — in other words, a battery — in reverse, where the cathode of the circuit was the part to be plated and the anode was the metal to be plated upon it. Through the door he carried with him the odor of thousand-gallon vats of acid lining the plating shop floor beneath clouds of vapor that threatened all passersby with a fatal sickness. He crossed the kitchen and kissed my mother and opened the refrigerator to fetch a beer. Over a greedy first sip he surveyed Benny and me sitting there, pencils and graph paper and math textbooks scattered on the table. Which was when he noticed the fourth place setting.
“Whoa, hold on. Master Silver will be dining with us? You do realize,” he said in his best old-money accent, “that we will be serving a mere chicken this evening. A most pedestrian bird, I’m afraid, but the butcher was plum out of pheasant, duck, and partridge.”
One of my father’s chief enjoyments in life was mocking Benny’s improbably sophisticated adolescent palate, loudly and at great length. Over at the Silvers’ apartment, Benny reveled in a paradise of exotic foods: cheeses pungent as gym socks; spicy brown mustards full of cracked seeds that stung your sinuses; venison and goose and even mutton on special occasions. My father threw a dishtowel over his forearm and pranced around in parody of a fancy restaurant’s bow-tied waiter. “Mayhaps the master would like to see a dessert menu?”
“Moving on,” said Benny, “the reason we’re curious about facelift recovery periods is that Shoemaker’s is selling a picture of Mark Hamill with his head wrapped in gauze, taken, they claim, in August of 1977, even though the accident occurred way back in January. If I can call the photo’s date into dispute I might be able to haggle them down on the price.”
Benny really had thought this through. Shoemaker’s Hobby Shop was a killer toy-slash-comic bookstore where he and I spent pretty much all our allowance money. I couldn’t be sure if this picture of Mark Hamill indeed existed, of what portion — if any — of Benny’s story could be corroborated later by my mother or father, though it seemed unlikely that they would cross Shoemaker’s threshold of their own volition.
Either way, Benny’s deflection worked. At the mention of anything Star Wars — related my father’s eyes glazed over. “I’m gonna go change out of these clothes.” He left the kitchen, beer in hand, trailing fumes.
“I’ll see what I can find out from my professor,” said my mother.
Standing by the window of Ms. Hannum’s English classroom and grinding a No. 2 pencil in the sharpener bolted to the sill gave you a clear view across Chickering Road to our fugitive’s hideout. Benny and I spent the entire class breaking lead and alternating visits to the sharpener to see if he’d make an appearance. We’d each made three trips to the window and seen nobody, and I knew we were pushing our luck. The last time I got up Ms. Hannum said, “Mr. Zinn, you’re not carving the words, merely inscribing them onto paper.” I nodded and smiled, feigning embarrassment, knowing that the next time Benny or I got up she would lose her shit.
But then — the snap of graphite behind me.
“Yes, Mr. Al-Otabi?” said Ms. Hannum.
“My pencil has broken,” said Nader. “I request permission to make pointed the tip.”
“What sort of bargain-basement stationer is supplying you children with writing instruments?” she said. “Make it brief.”
Nader tiptoed across the room and Ms. Hannum continued a lecture on Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” that had endured far too many interruptions already.
“The first word of this story is...”
Without raising his hand, Benny said, “True.”
“Very good, Mr. Silver. What do you make of this? Someone else.”
While she scanned the room, Benny whispered to Nader on his way past.
“Psst. While you’re at the—”
At full volume Nader said, “Benjamin, you must not distract me from my errand!”
“That’s it! That’s it! That’s it!” cried Ms. Hannum. “What in blazes is so interesting by the pencil sharpener?” She crossed the room to see for herself.
Benny shrugged and Nader held up his broken pencil.
She turned to me. “What about you, Mr. Zinn? Anything to say?”
“Well, you see, there’s this—”
Benny cut me off again. “Ms. Hannum, as long as you’re over there, you see that building across the street? The one with the pizza place and barbershop? Do you by any chance see somebody over there?”
If he finished another one of my sentences I would lay him out cold.
“Mister Silver, the town of Hanover does not pay me to conduct surveillance at the behest of my students. With your permission, I would like to finish with Mr. Poe’s story.”
Despite her reprimand, Ms. Hannum harbored a soft spot for Benny. Back on the first day of school he’d marched in the room and alerted her to the fact that his interest in law school demanded a comprehensive vocabulary and literary wherewithal, and he’d be damned if he’d settle for anything less than a straight A. I got the sense, ever since, that she considered him a scoundrel of the best possible sort, that if Benny were only thirty-five years older, she’d be all over his jock. On her way back to the chalkboard, she said, “For your information, Mr. Silver, there is no one in that building but a poor man recuperating from some grave injury, his head wrapped in gauze, smoking a cigarette in a lonely third-floor window.”
Benny turned to me, wide-eyed, and held up six fingers. If our calculations were correct, the bandages would come off tomorrow.
One of my mother’s professors had sketched a loose timeline for us: bandages for a full week, face swollen for another two, the bruised eye sockets of a raccoon for another month. On Saturday, with the whole afternoon at our disposal, Benny and I sat on a bench in front of the middle school, directly across the street from the fugitive’s apartment, shooting the shit. Benny owned Atari and my parents had bought me Intellivision, and we argued about their various merits and drawbacks. Benny conceded that Intellivision’s graphics boasted better resolution but maintained that the volume of Atari’s game cartridge library far outweighed the crisper picture.
“It’s about having fun, Ollie, not simulating anything real.”
“I guess.”
“If we were after realism, then we might as well—”
Benny froze and clutched my knee. Across the street a city bus pulled from the curb to reveal our fugitive, minus the bandages. I slapped his hand away.
“Try to act cool,” I said.
“So,” Benny said, way too loud, “like I was saying...”
“Keep it together, man.”
Benny shouted, “Graphics are a thing, but variety, I think, naturally is the thing...”
Unable to conduct surveillance while speaking cogently, Benny tossed a word salad while our fugitive lit a cigarette and paced in front of Val’s and King Pizza. It was our guy, no doubt about it. Bruises rimmed eyes that were like glittering gems, as if he’d snatched the mask clean off the Cheeseburglar’s face. He looked up Chickering Road, awaiting something’s arrival, and then he flicked his cigarette butt into the street and went inside the building.
“You know what this means?” said Benny.
“This’ll be good,” I said. “And you can stop yelling. He can’t hear you anymore.”
“Someone’s coming to get him,” he whispered. “If we’re going to collect that reward, we need to act fast. He’ll be in the wind before you know it.”