Disappearing Acts (4 page)

 

Meat was back at the same table, but it seemed to him that the other two people, Mrs. Santa Claus and Barbie, had shifted their chairs away from him, as if he had something they didn't want to catch.

Under the table his knees had begun to tremble, and Meat was afraid this was just the beginning, that the trembling would move up his body like in the song “Dry Bones.”

“You really did see something in there, didn't you?” Mrs. Santa Claus asked finally.

Meat nodded.

“Well, that must have been a terrible shock.”

“Yes.” Meat gasped out the word. He glanced at the hallway. “I'm wondering if I should call the police. My best friend's dad is a detective with the police department. I could call him. Or nine-one-one! I didn't even think of that. I passed right by the phone.”

He made an effort to get to his feet, but his trembling knees wouldn't let him.

“Don't do anything until Mike gets back.” Mrs. Santa Claus glanced around. “What's keeping him?”

“When you find a dead body, it takes a lot out of you,” Meat said. “I'm speaking from experience.”

“Here he comes,” someone across the room said.

Mike appeared. He was smiling. “False alarm. There is nobody, dead or otherwise, in the men's room.”

Meat stared blankly at Mike.

Mrs. Santa Claus said, “But he really thinks he saw it. And I believe him.”

“I don't know what he saw or didn't see.”

A man in a backward baseball cap said, “Hey, maybe it's an April Fools' joke. It is April first, you know.”

“I think you're right,” Mike said quickly. “Yeah, there was a girl in my last class who would do something like this. What color hair did she have?”

“I don't know—brown.”

“Yes, that was probably her.” Mike came over and put his hand on Meat's shoulder. “I'm just sorry you had to be the victim.” He peered closely into Meat's face. “You all right?”

Meat nodded, though he had never been less all right in his life.

Mike turned back to the class. “You've already learned something, see? You've learned something that isn't funny. Now, where was I?”

The man in the backward baseball cap checked his notes. “We have to discover what's interesting and funny about us.”

“Yes, you've got to discover your character. Charlie Chaplin had the little tramp. Lily Tomlin had Ernestine; Flip Wilson, Geraldine. So that's your goal. To discover your character. You go onstage and you are the character.

“Now who wants to go first?”

Meat raised his hand.

“Great, Meat, I'm glad to see you've snapped back. Come on up here.”

“No, I wasn't raising my hand for that. I just feel like maybe I want to go home.”

“Now, boys and girls ...” This was Mush Mouth talking, but he grinned and went on in his own voice. “Of course you want to go home. We spend our whole lives wanting to go home. Our mothers program that into us. Even when we are home, we want to go home. We must fight the urge to go home. Will you please stay—just to prove that I am stronger than your mom?”

Meat nodded.

“Now, who's first?”

The man with the backward baseball cap got up, but Mrs. Santa Claus beat him out.

“Well, maybe this isn't so funny,” she said, “but everybody is always telling me I look like Mrs. Santa Claus.”

“I like it. I like it,” Mike said.

“So anyway. It's hard living with elves ...”

Meat's mind was not on elves. He couldn't even remember if there really was a Mrs. Santa Claus.

Meat's mind was on murder.

Meat stepped outside Funny Bonz and took a deep breath of cool night air. He needed it.

It was nine o‘clock. Meat had somehow managed to get through the two hours of comedy class, but he had not learned one thing about begin funny.

The rest of the class obviously had. They had stayed behind to chat. As Meat left the room, the man in the backward baseball cap was flapping his arms. “Do I look enough like a goose when I do this?” Next to him, Barbie was telling someone, “I wish I could find some Barbie jokes. I mean, there have to be a zillion of them—and Ken—he's such a nerd.”

It didn't surprise Meat that no one had urged him to stay. Not that he would have. Nothing—no one—could have held him there.

“Don't forget your assignment,” Mike called to Meat as he reached the door. Meat waved without looking around. He didn't know what the assignment was. He didn't care. He was never coming back.

Meat turned to the left and began walking home. He knew every store and building on this street, but tonight it was a street where the trees threw dead men's shadows on the white concrete, and no cars passed. No people either.

Where was everybody? Meat had undergone such an ordeal that maybe the rest of the world had, too. Maybe he and the stupid people at Funny Bonz were all that was left.

Meat paused at the curb. Then the thought that he had been holding off all through the miserable evening rose before him like an atomic cloud—and, to him, just as threatening.

He had seen a dead girl. He had. This was an indisputable fact.

And, he went on to himself, there's a big difference between a dead girl and somebody playing an April Fool joke.

No living person would press her face against that rest-room floor with the dirty paper towels and roaches and ... whatever. The very thought made him sick.

And nobody could hold still like that for that long.

Without even being aware of what he was doing, he crossed the street, arguing with himself the way he would like to have argued with those stupid people at Funny Bonz, especially Mike.

And, speaking of Mike, why had he stayed so long when he went to check the rest room? It would only take a minute to open the door and see that there was no dead body, wouldn't it? He wouldn't even have to click on the light.

And even if he had decided to check both bathrooms—just to be on the safe side—even if he had decided to use both bathrooms, it still wouldn't have taken that long.

The four blocks to Meat's house, which he had covered with such speed and hope two hours before, now seemed endless. He paused to check his surroundings, thinking perhaps he had missed his turn. He hadn't.

What if Mike had moved the body? That would account for the time he'd been gone. But why would he do that? That would be a crime. There was a name for it. What was it? What was it?

Meat said the words, “Accessory to murder,” but instead of feeling a sense of satisfaction at coming up with the right phrase, a sense of foreboding came over him, a chill on the back of his neck.

Someone was behind him.

He dared not look around. He couldn't hear anything, but that meant nothing. He seemed to be in a pocket of silence. He began to walk faster.

Now he heard it. A footstep.

He broke into a run. Now the footsteps were running too, closing the distance. Whoever it was was sure to catch him. He was the slowest runner he knew. And tonight he seemed to be running in molasses, his feet sticking to the pavement.

His street was just ahead. If he could reach that ... turn the corner ...

A terrible thought turned his blood to ice. He was the only person—other than the murderer—who had seen the body. And if the murderer caught him, killed him—and that's what killers did—then there would be nobody who had seen it.

As he rounded his corner, the thing that he had feared the most in the world happened. Fingers grabbed him by the arm.

He gave one desperate twist to free himself, but the fingers held, drew him into the shadows.

Meat opened his mouth.

And the scream that had been stuck in his throat all evening, the scream that he had thought would have to be surgically removed, came loose, flooding his mouth.

It burst from him, and it was a scream that went through every door, every window on the block.

It was a scream to be proud of, even if it was probably the last sound he would ever make.

If screaming were an Olympic event, Meat would have gotten a ten.

“Do you need help?”

“Is anything wrong out there?”

“Want me to call the police?”

Before Meat could scream, “YES!” to all three questions someone behind him called, “No, no. It's just us—Herculeah Jones and Meat.”

It was Herculeah's voice. Meat turned. He looked around in astonishment. It was Herculeah holding his arm. Herculeah!

“You're sure you're both all right?”

“Yes. Yes, we're fine!”

The doors closed. The dogs were hushed. The street grew silent again.

When Herculeah spoke, her voice had lost its cheerful, everything‘s-all-right, go-back-to-what-you-were-doing tone.

“What has happened, Meat?” she asked in a low voice.

Meat still didn't speak.

“You're shaking. What's going on?”

When Meat finally spoke, it was an accusation. “Why didn't you let me know it was you back there? Why didn't you call my name?”

“I did. I've been calling your name for two blocks!”

“Then why didn't I hear you?”

“I don't know. I finished taking my last pictures and decided to drop the film off at the camera shop, and Funny Bonz was on the way home, sort of, so I stopped in. They said you'd left, and I finally saw you and you walked like this and stopped like this and did that ...”

She paused to imitate his movement.

He was always offended by Herculeah's imitations. He said coldly, “Well, if you had just come across a dead body, perhaps you would be doing this and that, too.”

“A dead body!”

“Yes.”

“A dead body! Meat, for once in your life, be original.”

He fell back as if he had been struck a direct blow, which he had.

“I pulled that this afternoon,” Herculeah went on. “I found a dead body, remember? A squirrel. April Fool!”

“This was no squirrel, and I'm not the sadistic sort of person who does April Fool jokes. I am thankful to say I'm beyond that. When I say I found a dead body, I found a dead body!”

He turned and walked away. Herculeah watched for a moment and then followed.

“So where was the dead body?” she asked.

“What do you care?”

“I care. Where was it?”

“In the bathroom.”

She couldn't help herself. She snickered. Meat thought she would have been one of those fourth-graders who loved Mike's imitation of Mush Mouth.

“Never mind,” he said coldly.

“Oh, come on. Where was it?”

“In the bathroom!” He spoke these three words through his teeth to give them extra force. He could see the spit in the light from the streetlight.

“I went into the bathroom at Funny Bonz—the men's room. Guys. I could tell it from the girls' bathroom because that was Guy-ettes. I walked in. The light was out. I turned it on. There was a wallet on the floor. There was a lipstick beyond it, closer to a stall. Then there was a brush, then a purse. Then the stall door came open and there was a body!”

The way he said it left Herculeah with no doubt that he had lived it.

“Whose body was it?”

“A girl. That's all I know. I couldn't see her face—her ponytail fell forward and hid it.”

“Like Madame Rosa,” Herculeah said. “Remember when I found Madame Rosa's body, her hair was across her face? If I had lifted her hair and checked, then I would never have gotten in so much trouble.”

Meat wanted to say, “This is my murder, if you don't mind, not yours,” but before he could do that, Herculeah spoke again.

“Go on.”

“I came out. I told everybody I'd found a body. Mike—that's the teacher—said he'd check it out. In about a hundred hours he came back and said it was a false alarm. ‘No body, living or dead, in the rest rooms, so let's get on with the class.'”

“And then?”

“Then we got on with the class.”

“Did he give any explanation.”

“He claimed he had a student who liked to play practical jokes. There are people like that.”

Herculeah recognized this as an insult, but she didn't take offense.

“Maybe it was.”

He shook his head. “I forgot one very important thing. The rest room floor was so gross I didn't even want to walk on it. You'd have to be dead to press your face against it.”

“You're probably right.”

“In the middle of the class a guy wearing a backward baseball cap went to the rest room and when he came back, I looked at him, like I wanted to know if he'd seen a body, and he shook his head.”

“Could you have imagined it, Meat?”

“No! No! You're just like everybody else. You ...”

He stopped. He took in a breath. He put one hand to his back pocket.

“I didn't imagine it. I can prove it.”

“How?”

“I just remembered something.”

“What?”

“I picked up something off the floor.”

“What?”

Meat reached into his back pocket.

“This,” he said.

In his hand was a blue wallet.

“Open it, open it!” Herculean said.

“I will. Give me a chance.”