Нил Шустерман - The Schwa Was Here

“She says it’s important,” my mom said, shoving the phone into my hand. “I don’t know what could be so important at seven in the morning.”

“Hewwo?” I said, sounding more like Elmer Fudd than I truly want to admit.

“Today’s the day,” Lexie said excitedly on the end of the line. “Everything’s set for noon.”

“Huh? What everything do you mean?” I croaked out.

“Trauma therapy,” she whispered. “My grandfather—remem­ber?”

I groaned, and Lexie got all annoyed.

“Well, if you don’t want to help, you don’t have to come. It’s not like you’re under any obligation.”

“No, no,” I said. “I want to help,” which was true. Traumatiz­ing Old Man Crawley was actually pretty high on my list of Things I’d Most Like to Do. “What do you need me to bring?”

“Just yourself,” she said, “And Calvin. Tell him I want him to come, too.”

“Why don’t you tell him?”

Lexie hesitated. “I haven’t spoken to him since the day we all broke up.”

After Lexie hung up, I dialed the Schwa. It rang once, and I hung up. My encounter with the Night Butcher was still fresh in my mind, and I knew if I talked to him, he’d hear something funny in my voice. I wanted to tell him about it, but a sensitive matter like this had to be handled carefully, at the right time and place.

The phone rang, and figuring it was Lexie again, I picked it right up.

“Hi, Antsy, it’s Calvin.”

“Schwa?” He caught me completely off guard.

“Yeah. You rang a second ago. So what’s up?”

He had star-sixty-nined me. Curse telephone technology. “Uh ... so whatcha up to today?”

“I’ve got big plans,” he said. “The biggest! Of course I can’t tell you about it just yet.”

He was so excited, I knew he was itching to talk about it as much as he wanted to keep it a secret. I should have asked him about it. That’s what friends do, right? They nag you until you tell them the secret they’re pretending they don’t want to tell. The Schwa needed that kind of friend now; one who would lis­ten, and yell at him, “What, are you insane?” And maybe stop him from doing something he’d regret. I should have been that kind of friend.

“Cool,” I said. “Guess I’ll see you on Monday.” And I hung up. I didn’t ask him what he was planning, I didn’t tell him about the Night Butcher, and I didn’t invite him to traumatize Crawley with us. You never realize when you make little choices how big those choices can be. I can’t really be held responsible for everything that happened next, but if I had made the right decision, things could have turned out differently.

At noon I stood at Crawley’s door, taking a few deep breaths. Some dogs were already barking on the other side, sensing me there. One more breath and I pounded on the door over and over, until all the dogs were barking.

“Mr. Crawley! Mr. Crawley! Hurry, open up!”

I heard him cursing at the dogs, a few dead bolts slid, and the door cracked open just enough to reveal four chains stretched like iron cobwebs between me and Crawley’s scowling face.

“What? What is it?”

“It’s Lexie! She fell down the stairs. I think she broke some­thing. Maybe a few things.”

“I’ll call 911.”

“No! No, she’s asking for you—you’ve gotta come!”

He hesitated for a moment. The door closed, I heard the chains sliding open, and he pulled the door open again. Pru­dence and a few of the other dogs got out, but Crawley didn’t seem to care. He just stood there at the door.

“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.