6

Right after my discussion with Mr. Heinz of Plato’s Phaedra and its possible echoes in the Catholic existentialism of Gabriel Marcel, I wandered down to the East River walkway and sat on a bench just like any other kid who’s been cow-kicked by a monkey for the very first time, only maybe just a little on the downcast side and hoping hard that maybe Jane would walk by. Instead, who comes along and plops his lank down beside me with a long-toothed, jagged grin and rigged out in full Boy Scout uniform with merit badges splashed all over this sash that he wore but the leader of my Scout Troop, “Upright” Olsen, which is what we all called him on account of him being so tall and with this honest open face and him always quoting stuff from the Boy Scout Oath about having to be “upright” and “morally strong,” although anyone could see, just the same way I was looking at them now, these tiny numbers you could write on rice on both his thumbnails and all of his fingernails, which was how illegal “numbers takers” recorded their customers’ bets so that if challenged by a cop they could quickly erase them with saliva and a handkerchief, the only difference between Olsen and any other numbers taker being Olsen seemed to favor forest green ink.

“Hey, how’re they hangin’, El Bueno?” he said with this twisted smile and pin-lights for eyes like Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death when he cackles, “I hate squealers’ mothers,” having just pushed an old woman in a wheelchair down a long flight of stairs to her death.

“What’s up?” he went on. “You just takin’ the air?”

“Pretty much, Mr. Olsen.”

“Me too.”

Which was a joke, as I knew he was probably on his way to some more of his numbers clientele, including maybe a stop to collect protection money from some poor old immigrant shopkeeper he’d previously bamboozled into thinking that he was in the Mafia.

“Didn’t see you at the last three meetings. Sick or what?”

I didn’t tell him the real reason. Every troop in the city took a nickel in dues but Olsen had upped it to a dime. Pop had already been stuck with the cost of my spiffy Scout uniform that he bought from this ultraexpensive Boy Scout Trading Post on Park Avenue and 32nd where there was always a security guard and with the clerks and the customers tiptoeing around on this thick plush carpeting and talking in barely a notch above a whisper so at first you thought you must have blacked out and somehow wound up in a wing of the Museum of Natural History where in these lit-up thick cases made of glass instead of caveman tools there’d be these hatchets and compasses and knives with the Boy Scout logo on them. I’d sometimes go in there and moose around with my nasally whistling, avid, warm breath condensing on the tops of the glass display cases as I ogled stuff I knew I couldn’t ever buy. I did notice that neckerchiefs were very expensive.

“I had this bad cold,” I told Olsen.

“For six weeks?”

“It was severe.”

Olsen stared at me unblinking like some cobra at a mongoose who’s just told him, “Hey, let’s take a little break for a second, okay?” and then he finally said, “Right” in this quiet, dead tone and then stood up and lurched off down the walkway with a “See you next meeting.” As he loped like some tall, gimpy werewolf in his daytime form, I kept staring at his wide-brimmed Boy Scout hat and imagined the scene at his next “appointment,” where he’d be holding out the Scout hat upside down while collecting protection money from the same Chinese laundry guys we kids used to hassle, only this time with a minor variation inasmuch as when Olsen held up his hand with his fingers and thumb splaying out, now the gesture meant “Pay or Die on Friday.” I often wondered if after they’d paid him he gave them all merit badges in life-saving.

Spreading my arms out on the back of the bench, I looked out across the river, wishing Foley were with me as I thought about a lot of those balmy summer nights when he and I would be glued to one of these benches watching bobby socks and saddle shoes slowly drifting by, or we’d be going through this booklet Get Tough that we’d chipped in to buy and was filled with these highly educational and, to Foley, deeply inspiring photos and sketches of British commandos breaking somebody’s arm or his leg or maybe gouging out his eyes with their thumbs covered over in the same rubber caps that Miss Doyle always used when she’d be slowly turning pages in her ledger. We were acutely security conscious. Though we talked about other stuff too. Sometimes scary kinds of stuff. Like God. Like what if God hadn’t created the worlds and there was absolutely nothing in existence, which discussions were always pretty short, I’ll admit, since almost immediately at this thought our puny minds would short out and sort of gasp and want to throw up amid a shower of crackling electrical sparks like a couple of stymied headhunters happening on the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. Yet we still smelled the perfume when a really pretty girl walked by.

Pretty girls. There she was again. Right?

Jane Bent.

Head lowered, arms folded across my chest, I pondered the mystery enfolding Jane like an aura with ever-changing colors—on the one hand anxious for Monday to come when I’d be seeing her again and could get to the bottom of some things, and on the other already dreading the approaching end of the weekend and returning to the drabness of school, most especially with winter coming on when in the morning instead of walking five blocks in the freezing rain with cardboard in my shoes to plug the holes, I’d want to fake a bad cold so I could stay snug and warm in my bed while endlessly polishing my vast collection of secret decoder rings and badges and listening to grown-up radio serials like Pretty Kitty Kelly and The Romance of Helen Trent, although never The Romance of Consuelo Chavez, I noticed, or Pretty Sandra Shapiro. Only summer seemed livable to me then, and I even welcomed chubby old Sister Louise’s constant warnings of the dreaded June Regents exams in her husky, sandpaper voice, “In the merry of month of June you’ll be sweating,” a threat she invariably personalized by always turning to glare at Bill Choirelli and adding a heartfelt “You fat tub of guts!”—which today might bring a lawsuit and find Sister Louise in an orange hood and jumpsuit doing the perp walk into some courthouse croaking loudly, “On the merry Day of Judgment all you ACLU scumbags will be sweating!” This followed by Foley, Baloqui and a few other bystanders quietly applauding and murmuring, “Hear, now! Hear! Hear, hear!” Foley idolized Sister Louise. Her position on torture would have never been in doubt.

Now my thoughts swirled back to Jane, this time to the puzzle of her cryptic words: “It’s okay to love me, Joey. But don’t be in love with me.” What on earth could she possibly have meant? As I turned my head to the left and stared down the walkway with an ever-dwindling hope I’d see her walking toward me quickly with that moonrise smile and her arms held out to me, I saw someone quickly duck behind a group of strollers. It was Baloqui. Frimmled, I got up and started walking to the right, but when I turned and looked back I saw him stalking me again and then he jumped behind a tree to the left of the walkway. Grimfaced, I strode over to the tree and stood in front of it, arms akimbo as I growled, “You flaming refugee from a third-rate Toledo sword factory, why are you following me?”

“I’m not following,” I heard Baloqui’s voice answer hollowly.

“You were!” I said firmly.

“I was not. I was walking where you walked. Nothing more.”

“Come on out from behind there!”

“No, they know me here now.”

“You’re standing behind a sapling! I can see you!”

“Touché.”

Baloqui skulked around, looking grave.

“I am always your friend,” he said somberly, “your most loyal, truest friend. But you are right. I lied. I have been following you.”

“Why?”

“I guard.”

I guard?

I’d been getting these déjà vu feelings lately and, looking back, I was having an unusually strong one because of this spook movie called The Uninvited, where Ruth Hussey and Ray Milland smell the scent of mimosa whenever a ghost named Carmel comes around, though in the end the ghost’s good and she explains what she’s been doing all this time, which is just those two words: “I guard.”

But the movie wouldn’t be made for another three years!

That was then. This is now.

But which is which?

“What do you mean, ‘I guard,’” I said, and by now I was actually smelling mimosa as Baloqui said, “I seek to protect you,” and then added his brand-new favorite coda, his increasingly annoying “Nothing more.”

I looked over my shoulder as just for a second a suspicion sliced through my mind like a white-hot Damascus blade through Unguentine that Farragher and Connelly might be lurking in hiding and plotting to toss me into the river. I turned back and Baloqui put his hands on my shoulders, his intense black stare burning into mine as he said to me quietly and with emotion, “It doesn’t matter what our parents might do with one another. No, with us there is a friendship that is strong and can never be broken. And so I guard, my friend Joey. I protect you.”

“Protect me from what?” I blurted, exasperated.

“It’s that girl, Jane Bent,” he said. “Or whoever she really is.”

That did it, that “whoever she really is,” and I drew back and wrenched his hands off my shoulders. “What in freak are you talking about?!” I blustered, and then smoother than Evel Knievel sailing over a canyon on his favorite Harley with a sack full of gifts of appreciation for his longtime friends and contacts in the Las Vegas Hospital Emergency Room, Baloqui launched even higher into Bizarro Land with some lunatic story about Jane being spotted very late the night before standing next to a white limousine with the California license tag STARLET 1 and head-to-head in a “secret-looking, guarded conversation” with the Little Orphan Annie comic strip character and God-figure “Mr. Am!” Baloqui described him to a tee: “Very tall and with a pointy long white beard? Yellow cummerbund, black top hat and jacket? Come on, Joey! No question about it! It was him! And then that other guy, The Asp, he’s in the driver’s seat, okay? So they finish up talking, your girl and Mr. Am, and they get into the limo and drive off and what’s spooky is you can’t hear the sound of the engine. Now I’m not saying it really was them. Understand? I’m not saying it. If it really was them, then no problem: Mr. Am and the Asp, they’re good people. But it actually can’t be them, Joey! They’re friggin’ cartoons! So now what kind of people would pretend to be them? See what I’m saying? What kind of person would do that?”

Baloqui took a step back then, maybe to avoid a potential right cross, although actually I think it was more like in self satisfaction as he folded his arms across his chest and nodded, saying, “Just looking after you, Joey. I don’t know what they’re after, but this girl is in it deep, she’s in deep with bad people, plus it looks like they’re rich, so they could finance expensive crazy plots to do you in. Stay away from her, Joey! That’s the only thing I’m saying. Just look out!”

I blinked a few times to clear my head. I’d known Baloqui all the way from first grade and while he had a few crotchets—well, maybe more than a few—it wasn’t until lately that I’d ever had reason to think that his brain waves, shall we say, had been inappropriately altered, and a paranoia dynamite fuse began sizzling and snaking through my mind about the people with the limo being rich, which made me flash on how Jane had whisked that five-dollar bill from her pocket. Who knew how many more might have been there? You know? Then my eyes began to narrow.

“You saw this yourself?”

“Joey, everyone sees things.”

“True. But was it you who in fact saw this?”

“I have eyes.”

“Yes, I know you have eyes. So do I. What I’m asking is are you the eyewitness to this, or is it somebody else with the initials F.A.?”

“And if it’s me you won’t believe it?” he suddenly blurted and—swear before God!—with a tremor in his voice and I could see he was scrunching up his eyes in a ludicrous try at manufacturing tears, or at least some mist, though I admit this pathetic but engaging bit of theater was surely no harder to take than his legendary “Pensive Stork” maneuver, although what followed, which was a choked-up “Okay for you, Joey!” was as close to a crushing final word as the set that I ran with could possibly use. And with this he whipped around, and with his hands in his pockets and his head bent low, he slouched away with this limp he was faking in a pitiful attempt at drawing my sympathy, and in my mind I could see him as Richard III grumbling, “Now is the winter of our discontent made even worse by this heartless prick El Bueno.” I saw him suddenly stop and broadly smile as he seemed to have spotted something on the walkway’s grassy berm. He stooped down to recover a thin piece of wood, but then scowled and, tossing it away, gimped on.

He must have thought it was a “Lucky Stick.”