“Mr. Crawley, come on!”
The look of fear on his face was like someone standing on the edge of a cliff instead of someone on the threshold of an apartment. “Aren’t there people helping her?”
“Yeah, but she’s asking for you.”
As if on cue, Lexie wailed from the bottom of the stairs.
“Mr. Crawley—she’s your granddaughter! Are you just going to stand there?”
He took the first step, and it seemed the next ones were a little bit easier. Then, when he got to the top of the stairs and saw her sprawled at the very bottom, he flew to her side like a man half his age.
“Lexie, honey—it’ll be okay. Tell me where it hurts.” He looked at the gawking waiters and diners. “Didn’t any of you morons call an ambulance?”
And with that, Lexie stood up. I grabbed Crawley’s left arm, Lexie’s harmonica-playing driver grabbed his right, and we whisked him through the kitchen and out the restaurant’s back door before anyone knew what was happening.
It was a nasty trick, but there weren’t many things that would get Crawley down those stairs. Lexie had the easy part—lying there pretending to be hurt, but I was the one who had to get him to come out. I’m not much of an actor. In grade school, I usually got roles like “Third Boy”, or “Middle Broccoli,” or in one embarrassing year, “Rear End of Horse.” I had no confidence in my ability to pull this off, but the fact that I was so nervous had actually helped.
By the time Crawley gathered up enough of his wits to realize this was a conspiracy, we already had him in the backseat of the Lincoln. When he tried to escape, I got in his way and closed the door—which was protected by child locks so it couldn’t be opened from the inside.
I won’t repeat the words Crawley shouted at us. Some of them were words I didn’t even know—and I know quite a lot.
“You’re not getting out of this,” I told him, “so you might as well cooperate.”
He turned to Lexie. “What is this all about? Did he put you up to this?”
“It’s my idea, Grandpa.”
“This is kidnapping!” he squealed. “I’ll press charges.”
“I can just see the headlines,” Lexie said.
“Yeah,” I added. “‛Rich Kook Presses Charges on Poor Blind Granddaughter.’ The press will eat it up.”
“You shut up!” he said. “By the time you get out of jail, you’ll have gray hair.”
“Naah,” I said. “I’ll be bald, more likely. It runs in my family.”
The fact that I didn’t seem to care made him even more furious.
By the time we pulled out of the alley we had put a blindfold on him, and he didn’t resist because he didn’t want to see the outside world anyway. He was quiet for a minute, then he said, “What are you going to do to me?” He was truly frightened now. I almost felt sorry for him. The key word here is “almost.”
“I have no idea,” I told him, which was true—Lexie still hadn’t told me what she had planned. She said I’d chicken out if I knew, and so I didn’t press her, figuring she might be right. We rode to Brooklyn Heights—the part of Brooklyn that faced Manhattan right across the East River. Then we drove onto a pier. That’s when I figured out what Lexie had planned.
“Oh, wow,” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding!”
“What!” shouted Crawley. “Kidding about what? What is it?” But he made no attempt to uncover his eyes.
“You can’t be serious,” I told Lexie. “It’ll kill him.”
The driver opened the door. “Sorry about this, Mr. Crawley,” said the driver in a heavy accent. “But Lexie say this for your own good.”
“Is it a boat?” Crawley asked, obviously smelling the stench of the river. “I hate boats!”
“No boat,” said the driver. He helped Lexie out. “Leave me hold Moxie. You go.”
No one, not even the driver, was willing to tell Crawley that his next mode of transportation was going to be a helicopter. He’d have to discover that for himself.
I led him down the pier to the heliport at the very end, and he didn’t fight me. He was broken now. Too scared to run, too scared to do anything but go where we led him. He stumbled a few times on the weed-cracked pavement, but I had a good hold on him. I wasn’t going to let him fall. “Big step up,” I told him.
“Up to where?”
I gave him no answer, but once he was seated and I had strapped him in, I think he figured it out.
He moaned the deep moan of the condemned. The pilot, who I guess was hired by Lexie for our little therapeutic flight, waited until we were all strapped in. Then he started the engine. Crawley whimpered. Okay, now I really did feel sorry for him. Lexie just said, “This is going to be fun, Grandpa.”
“You terrible, terrible girl.”
I began to wonder if Lexie had gone too far. She did tend to have a blind spot for others’ feelings, and that was one place Moxie couldn’t guide her. The helicopter powered up, the slow foom-foom-foom of the blades speeding into a steady whir. We wobbled for an instant, then went straight up, like an elevator with no cable. Through the large window I saw the strange sight of Lexie’s driver holding on to Moxie and waving good-bye.
“You can take off your blindfold now, Grandpa.”
“No, I won’t!” he said, like a child. “You can’t make me.” He clapped his hands tightly over his eyes, keeping the blindfold firmly in place.
I had only been in an airplane to Disney World and back— and both times it was at night, so I didn’t get to see much. This flight wasn’t for my benefit, but still it sucked my breath right out of my chest—and I don’t think it was just the altitude. The Schwa would have loved this, I thought, then I pushed the thought away. Thinking of him now would only bring me down, and I didn’t want to be brought down.
We flew along the East River, Brooklyn to our right, the skyscrapers of Manhattan to our left. All the while the old man groaned and refused to take his hands from his eyes.
“Anthony,” yelled Lexie, over the beating of the blades. “Can you describe it to me?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t use sight words.”
By now I’d become good at describing things for four senses instead of five. “Okay. We’re flying right over the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s a harp strung across the river, with a frame made of rough stone.”
The pilot took a left turn, and brought us right into the city.
“What else?” prompted Lexie.
“We’re passing downtown now. There’s uh, . . . the Woolworth Building, I think. It’s roof is a cold metal pyramid with a sharp point, but the sun’s hitting it, making it hot. Moving toward midtown now. There’s Broadway. It kind of slices a weird angle through all the rest of the streets, and there’s traffic jams where it hits all the other avenues. There’s little bumps of taxis everywhere, like hundreds of lemon candies filling the streets. You could read the streets like Braille.”
“Ooh, that’s good!” Lexie said.
I was on a roll. “Uh . . . Grand Central Station ahead of us. Like a Greek temple—lots of pillars and sculptures sticking out of the dry, musty old stonework. And above it, smack in the middle of Park Avenue, like it shouldn’t even be there, is the MetLife Building. This big old cheese grater, like eighty stories high.”
And then Crawley said “Used to be the Pan Am Building. Pan Am. Now there was a company!”
Lexie smiled, and I finally understood. The descriptions weren’t for Lexie—they were for her grandfather. “Keep going, Anthony.” Crawley’s hands were still over his face, but they weren’t pressed as tightly as before. I continued, but now I was talking to Crawley instead of to Lexie.
“The Chrysler Building. Sharp. Icy. The highest point of a Christmas tree star. Okay, the heart of midtown coming up. Rockefeller Center, smooth old granite, in the middle of all these steel-and-glass skyscrapers. Trump Tower. It’s like a jagged crystal that got shoved out of the ground.”