Нил Шустерман: The Schwa Was Here

At this point I was beginning to get nervous for him. “Lis­ten,” I say, “you might go unnoticed around people, but I don’t know about dogs. Our experiments didn’t include dogs. What if you’re like one of those whistles that people can’t hear, but dogs can—or what if they can smell you? We don’t know if you got a stealthy odor.”

He sniffed his armpit, then looked at me. “I smell stealthy to me. Want a whiff?”

“I’ll pass.”

“So what’s taking so long?” says Tiggor. “Are you gonna do it or not, because I ain’t got all day.”

“Hey, this is a delicate procedure,” I tell him. “The Schwa’s gotta get himself mentally prepared.”

Tiggor gave an apelike grunt. I took the Schwa aside. “Just remember, I’ll be right outside. If you need help, you signal to me and I’ll be there in a second.”

“I know you will, Antsy. Thanks.”

I swear, it felt like he was going off to war and not into some cranky old geezer’s place. The thing is, none of the other dares had the Schwa venturing into the unknown, unless you count the locker room. Crawley, even without ever being seen, was scary—and who knew if any of those Afghans were trained to kill.

I went around back with him, where a fire-escape ladder led up to the building’s second story. Old Man Crawley’s apartment was huge, filling the whole second floor—the only way in was through the restaurant itself—but by looking down from the roof of an apartment building a few blocks away, we had learned that there was a little courtyard patio in the middle of his apart­ment, open to the sky. That would be our point of entry.

The stench of yesterday’s lobster wafted out of the Dumpster behind the restaurant, smelling like a fish market on a hot day, or my aunt Mona (trust me, you don’t wanna know). Ignoring the smell, we hopped up to the lip of the Dumpster so we could reach the fire-escape ladder. I gently pulled it down, try­ing to keep it from squeaking. The Schwa climbed on.

“Stealth is wealth,” I said to him, which has been our little good-luck phrase ever since we started taking dares.

“Stealth is wealth,” he said back. We punched knuckles, and he climbed up, disappearing onto the roof. I crossed the street and waited at the edge of the bay with the others.

Tiggor looked at the windows of Crawley’s place, then looked at me. “So what do we do now?”

I shrugged. “We wait.”

Turns out we didn’t have to wait long. Although I wasn’t there to see what happened, it probably went something like this:

The Schwa jumps down into the little enclosed patio filled with gravel, and more dog crap than you ever want to see in one place. A door is ajar so the dogs can come and go from the patio as they please. This is the door the Schwa slips into.

The place is dark. The lightbulbs are just twenty-five watts be­hind dark lamp shades, and no sunlight makes it through those thick curtains. The Schwa stands there in the living room, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. There are two dogs fighting over a piece of knotted rope across the room. They don’t notice him. He does have a stealthy odor! Or the dogs are just too old to smell. He hears a TV on in another room somewhere far away in the huge apartment.

So where are the dog bowls?

He makes his way through the living room, across a formal dining room with a long table that hasn’t seen a dinner party in a millennium, and then he strikes gold. Fourteen dog bowls are lined up nice and neat against a kitchen wall. Products of Pisher Plastics.

All he has to do is take one of the bowls and get out the way he came. That’s all.

He bends down, grabs a bowl, and then he discovers something awful: All fourteen bowls are nailed to the ground.

And now he begins to think that maybe he’s like a dog whistle after all, because there’s an Afghan growling in his face ...

Meanwhile, from outside, I saw all the dogs suddenly disap­pear from the windows. This was not a good sign. I heard all this barking, then a man yelling, although it was too muffled to hear what he yelled.

And Wendell Tiggor laughs. “So you lose,” he says. “Pay up.”

In the window I now saw the Schwa pressed up against the glass, hiding behind the curtains. I knew he couldn’t last like that for long.

“Think the dogs’ll eat him?” says one of the other kids.

I didn’t have time for idiots. Instead I took off across the street, toward the building nearly becoming roadkill because I didn’t look both ways like every kid’s mother told them from the beginning of time. Narrowly surviving the busy avenue, I made it around back to the fire escape. I didn’t know what to do, but I couldn’t just leave the Schwa stranded like that. Leave no man behind —isn’t that what they say in battle?

I scrambled to the roof, leaped into the little patio, and burst through the open door.

In a second the dogs were barreling toward me. I tensed up, preparing to get bit. The dogs advanced, held their ground, and then backed away, not sure whether to protect their master, their home, or themselves. The smell of dog was everywhere. Dog food, dog fur, dog breath. The smell was overpowering, and the barking endless and loud. I didn’t dare move—but I glanced to the curtains where I knew the Schwa was hiding. Any dogs that had been sniffing around there had come over toward me. With any luck, the Schwa would be able to slip out unnoticed. As for me, well, I suppose this was what I have to do to earn my 50 percent. Damage control.

“Get out of here!” said a voice much fuller, much stronger than I expected.

My eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the dim light, so I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first. A low square shape moved at me through a doorway. Only when it pushed through the dogs could I see what it was. It was a wheelchair. Old Man Crawley was in a wheelchair.

“Don’t move a muscle, or I’ll have them tear you to shreds, if I don’t do it myself.”

He held a fireplace poker in the air as he rolled the chair for­ward with his other hand. His hair was gray and slicked back. His jaw was hard and square—it looked like he still had all his teeth, which is more than I can say for my own relatives that age. He wore a white shirt buttoned all the way to the neck, where loose skin flopped around like on a turkey—but mostly it was the poker that held my attention. The thing looked heavy, the thing looked sharp, and people in wheelchairs usually have lots of upper-body strength.

“Which do you want?” I said.

“What?”

“You said ‛get out of here,’ and ‛don’t move a muscle.’ I can’t do both.”

“You’re a wiseass.”

Not at all happy with their master’s tone of voice, the dogs were now baring their teeth at me, in addition to barking and growling.

“I can explain,” I said, which I really couldn’t, but don’t you always say that when you get caught doing something you shouldn’t be doing?

“I have already called the police. They will be here momen­tarily to arrest you, at which time you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Which was good, because it meant he didn’t plan to kill me with the poker, or with the dogs. “Please, Mr. Crawley, I didn’t mean anything. It was just a bet, see? On a dare to get a dog bowl. That’s all. I would have given it back. I swear.”

“The dog bowls are nailed down,” he informed me.

“My mistake.”

“How much did you bet?”

“Fifty-four dollars,” I told him.

“You just lost fifty-four dollars.”

“Yeah, I guess so. So can I go now? It’s punishment enough, right?”

“Fifty-four dollars is hardly a sufficient fine for breaking and entering attempted theft, and the assault of an elderly man—”