Doleful sighs in the dark.
I fingered the pouch on the string. It was soft, worn, and sewn shut. There was something sharp inside, and it crackled where I was probing. Maybe it really was a piece of shell. Or a corn chip. My own movements felt sluggish, and my thoughts chased each other around in my head. I tried to assemble them into something halfway coherent, but I only ended up with some fuzzy snippets. Rip the pouch open . . . to see . . . Check Noble’s socks. Ask him why he didn’t want anyone to know about Moon River. At the same time I was conscious of the fact that tomorrow I wouldn’t remember much of what I was thinking tonight. Or much of anything really.
Lary woke up and began telling a story about the abominable snowman. I recognized his voice easily, even when drunk. His snowman was really made of snow. He was quickly shushed. Apparently Lary had been telling this same story for years now, and everyone except me already knew it by heart. Lary said that they were just afraid. That it was the scariest tale in the world and that not many people were able to listen to it.
Then the water arrived. The glass disappeared somewhere, so I was waiting for the bottle making the rounds to get to me, but someone upended it on the way, spilling water on the bed. Everyone started yelling and jumping about. I got hit with a book, then another book, and a pillow. I scrambled out from under them and immediately dove right back, blinded by the bright light.
Once I came to and could open my eyes, I emerged again and right away found the glass. It was lolling in the folds of the blanket, quietly bleeding the last drops of pine. Blind’s hand was on the wall switch. He was the only one not screwing his eyes desperately as he gleefully waited for the groans to die down. In the other hand he held three dripping bottles, his impossibly long fingers interwoven around their necks, so I figured that he was the one who’d offered to go get the water. The chain of command sure manifested itself in mysterious ways in the Fourth.
Half of the pack had already migrated down. Humpback and Alexander opened the windows and tossed mattresses on the floor. I tried to climb off the bed as well, something I couldn’t reliably manage without help even when sober. Black caught me just in time, turned me the right way up, and deposited me on the mattress. I thanked him effusively, if not quite coherently. The boombox went back on, the lights went back out. Alexander threw a blanket over Noble and me, then another one over those who were lying next to us. Blind distributed the bottles.
I lay there wrapped up in my corner of the blanket. I was content. I became a part of something big, something of many arms and legs, something warm and chatty. I was probably its tail or paw, or maybe even a bone. Any movement made my head spin, but still I couldn’t remember the last time when I’d felt so comfortable. If, that morning, someone had told me that I was going to be spending the night like this, mellow and happy, drinking and listening to stories, would I have believed it? Probably not. Stories. Fairy tales. In the dark, complete with harmless dragons, basilisks, and stupid, stupid snowmen . . .
I almost cried from all the empathy for my packmates that was now flooding me, but managed to stop myself. Those would have been the wrong tears, drunken and maudlin.
“I’m beautiful,” said one of the ugly ones and started crying.
“And I’m ugly,” said the other and started laughing . . .
And the night went on.
THE HOUSE
INTERLUDE
The House belonged to the seniors. The House was their home—counselors existed to maintain order in it, teachers to make sure seniors weren’t bored. Seniors could make fires in the dorms and grow magic mushrooms in bathtubs, there was no one to tell them off.
They would say things like “a spoke of my wheels,” or “the lurch is stale in the bones,” or “vigorously present body parts,” or “liturgically challenged.” They were shaggy and motley. They threw sharp elbows and icy stares.
They could marry and adopt each other at will. Their malicious energy made the windowpanes rattle, but the cats luxuriated in it, acquiring an arcing glow. No one could enter their world. They invented it themselves. The world, the war, and their places in it.
No one remembered how their war had started. But they were now divided into Moor people and Skull people, into red and black, like chess pieces. On the eve of their rumbles, the House froze and waited with bated breath. The juniors would be locked in their dorms, and that’s why for them the rumbles were always a burning, itching secret behind the two turns of the key. Something beautiful, something into which, someday, they would grow themselves. They waited for the battles to end, desperately scraping at the locks and pressing their ears to the doors. The ending was always the same. The seniors would forget to unlock them, and the squirts would remain prisoners of their dorms until morning, when the counselors returned. Once liberated, they would rush to the battlefield, sniffing around for the traces—of what, they didn’t know, for there never were any. They would learn the details later, from the overheard snippets of conversations. Then the Great Game entered into their little games in the backyard, teased and twisted until they grew tired of it.
Once he reaches the doors of the Fifteenth, Grasshopper tiptoes like an enemy infiltrator. There are voices coming out of the room. Suddenly they stop, and all he can hear is soft rasping. Grasshopper peeks into the half-opened door.
Purple Moor sits with his back to the door, not two steps away. Grasshopper is mesmerized by the sight of his neck. If someone were to be covered with myriad little tattoos, and then they all mingled and ran together, it would look like this neck. The ears seem tacked on above this strange neck. Moor is wheezing softly, and the prickly words bubble out of him with each jerk of his head. The small pink rat ears move out of sync, as if of their own volition. Grasshopper looks at Moor, at the back of his wheelchair, which sports an umbrella holder and also some kind of hook and many other strange protuberances and implements he’s never seen on other wheelchairs. He also tries to listen to the wheezing more closely but still cannot make it out. A bespectacled wheeler in pajamas talks back, respectfully holding a hand to his mouth. Then he notices Grasshopper and his eyes open wide; his lips form the word “Out!”
Moor’s curly-haired head starts turning. Grasshopper shrinks away from the door and flies down the hall like the wind. He is the only one among the walking juniors who is barred from Moor’s rooms. Numbers 15, 14, 13. Others can enter, but not he. In the Moor’s room one can serve—carrying this and that, boiling water, shining shoes, or washing dishes. Or slicing bologna for sandwiches that Purple One consumes in enormous quantities, one after another. This is the price of socializing with the seniors. For those who fail at their duties, Moor keeps a belt somewhere in his wheelchair. This belt features prominently in the juniors’ nightmares. Moor’s belt, Moor himself, and his voice—the rasping wheeze of Livid Monster. The boys curse Purple One when returning from his rooms and parade the welts his belt left on their hands.
Grasshopper secretly envies them. Their wounds, their stories, and their complaints—everything that unites them in their hatred of Moor. It’s their adventure, their experience. He’s not a part of it.
Grasshopper slows down. Now he’s crossing into Skull’s domain. These three rooms equalize Grasshopper with the rest of the boys—they are just as barred from here as he is. They also sneak through on their tiptoes. They’ve never been there, but they know everything about how the rooms look inside. They know that one doesn’t have any beds at all, just the mattresses that are stacked in two enormous piles every morning. Then the wheelers while away the hours playing checkers on top of those mountains. The floors are sticky in there, and the windowsills are crowded with rows and rows of empty bottles. Everyone sits on thin red straw mats. Skull lives in this room. The narrow-eyed predator, the owner of the soul-deadening nick, warrior, Leader, and living legend. The idol of each and every junior, the hero of all their games, the unattainable ideal.