I was so horrified by this, I couldn’t say a thing.
“All of my dogs are second generation,” he told me. “Some even third. All sins, all virtues. It’s the way I like it.”
“That’s wrong,” I said. It was twisted in some basic way—like those people who have their pets stuffed and stick them in front of the fireplace like a piece of furniture. They don’t even have real eyes anymore. How could you stand looking at a stuffed pet with marbles for eyes? And how could you treat pets and people like objects to be replaced? “More than wrong—it’s kind of sick.”
“Think what you want, but it’s the way the world works.”
“What do you know about the world? You’re not a part of it—you live outside of it, in your own weird little universe.”
He grabbed his cane, reached across the table, and poked me in the chest. “You’re nervy,” he said. “I used to like that about you, but now it’s rubbing me the wrong way.”
I stood up. Suddenly I didn’t feel like being in the same room with him. I didn’t feel like being on the same continent. “Now I know why you’re so afraid of dying,” I told him just before I left. “Because you know when the time comes, you won’t be rewarded for living your life ‛the improper way.’”
As I left, I thought about Lexie’s plan to traumatize him for his own good, and took a twisted kind of pleasure knowing that some sort of suffering was in store for him. I had a suspicion, though, that Crawley would be a hard egg to crack.
I knew I wasn’t going to sleep much that night, so I didn’t even try. If the Schwa Effect was hereditary, then the key to everything was finding out what happened to his mom. The thing is, if the whole problem revolved around not being noticed, how could we find an eyewitness? If the Schwa Effect led to being universally forgotten, how could I hope that anyone would remember?
Our little dowsing session with Ed Neebly and our conversation with the supermarket manager had been about as helpful as a New Jersey road sign, and if you’ve ever been there, you know the signs don’t tell you the exit you’re coming up to, they only point out the exits you’ve just missed. It puts parents in very foul moods—and since you’re probably there to visit relatives, their mood was pretty touch and go to begin with. As for my own parents, I’m sure they would have blown a gasket if they knew what I was about to do.
I had never been the kind of kid to sneak out late at night. I was more the kind of guy who would come home ridiculously late and suffer the consequences, but once I was home for the night, sneaking out was never an option. I’ve got this screen saver that I don’t use very much, on account of how lame it is. It’s a cartoon of a computer wearing a nightcap and snoring. But if you darken the screen so no one can see the picture, and you set the volume just right, you’d swear there was a real person sleeping in the room. The pillows I had shoved under my blanket weren’t very convincing, but add the snoring from my computer and suddenly it was like I had a roommate. I quietly slipped out, to catch a bus toward Canarsie.
The butcher had looked away.
At the time I was so involved with what Ed Neebly was doing I didn’t think much of it, but my mind kept coming back to that moment. The butcher hadn’t just turned to look at something else, he had purposely avoided my gaze. He knew something. The chances of me finding him at this hour of the night were slim, but then I wouldn’t have much luck during the day either, because of the manager. The manager had gotten so paranoid by the end of our questioning that he sent all the stock clerks to get rid of expired dairy products, in case we were taking notes for some major expose. He had banned Lexie and me from the store—even though Lexie threatened to sic the 4-S Club after him.
Waldbaum’s was a twenty-four-hour supermarket, I guess so if you had a sudden need for hair gel or Haagen-Dazs at three in the morning, relief was only minutes away. That also meant that I could avoid the manager during the off-hours—and chances were, if the butcher knew something about the Schwa’s mother, other people who worked there knew something, too.
It was almost midnight by the time I got there. I walked down the frozen-food aisle and turned left, heading toward the meat department. The little counter where the butcher took custom orders was unlit—but that didn’t necessarily mean no one was there. Supermarkets had whole back areas like they’ve got at airports, where employees hang out, rummaging through lost luggage and stuff. Not that lost luggage would be in a supermarket, but considering how airlines work, it wouldn’t surprise me to find socks from yesterday’s flight to Cleveland in with the veal chops.
In the dark display case, the unpackaged meat was arranged like perfect works of art. Pork chops were layered in a left-right alternating pattern. Rib-eye steaks were neatly pushed together like interlocking floor tiles. Someone had taken great care with this meat. It was weird to think that a butcher would care enough to be so particular. When you think about it, being a butcher has got to be one of the most unpleasant jobs in the world, except for maybe those ladies who cut toenails. I mean, who’d want to spend all day chopping and grinding animals into little pieces? But then, on the other hand, it probably gives guys that would otherwise be ax murderers a healthy outlet. As it turned out, this theory was about to be proven.
I heard a noise coming from one of those “employee-only” back rooms. It was a high-pitched whine, like a vacuum sucking helium. I followed that sound through a pair of floppy double doors and found myself in a white tile and stainless-steel room, full of meat-cutting equipment. The place had an unfriendly fermented smell, like an old refrigerator crossed with my brother Frankie’s feet. A guy in goggles and a stained white smock stood at the far end of the room at a stainless-steel table, cutting up a side of beef with what looked like a band saw. He did it with such concentration, you’d think it was brain surgery.
This was the last guy in the world you’d want to see near a sharp object. He was tall but hunched, his neck sticking forward at an angle that made my own neck hurt just watching him. His hair was thin and unkempt. I couldn’t tell if it was white or just very, very blond. I could see patches of red scalp through his hair.
“Excuse me,” I said, but he didn’t hear me. He just kept on cutting the meat. The machine let off a grating whine whenever it hit the bone.
“Excuse me,” I said again, a bit louder this time.
Without looking at me, he turned off the saw, and it buzzed itself silent. “You are not supposed to be here!”
He had a strange accent. Almost German, but not quite.
“I just want to ask you a few questions. You’re the butcher here, right?”
“I am the night butcher,” he said.
Okay, now here’s the part of the movie where a kid with any brains gets out of there, unless he wants to end up in neatly arranged portions in the display case, because no kid with any brains is gonna stand alone in a room full of knives, saws, and grinders with anyone who calls himself the “Night Butcher.”
“You come to taunt me more, eh?” he said, raising his voice. “You and your friends. Letting the air out of my tires, scribbling rude words on my windows. This I know! You think I don’t?”
“I can see it’s not a good time. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
I backed up, but missed the door and knocked over a broom. The handle hit the floor with a nasty thwok, and my heart ran to hide somewhere in my left shoe.
“No!” he said. “You have business with me, you tell me now. We settle this here!”
He came toward me. I could see that his neck was scaly, and red as raw meat.