Edenville Owls

Chapter 17

We knew Miss Delaney lived on the second floor of a two-family on Water Street. The plan was to hang out near her house and watch and see what we could see. The man showed up there after a few nights, but he went straight in her door and we had no way to know what was going on. When he left, he got right in his car and drove away. We had no way to follow him.

“This is no good,” Nick said the next night. “We’re not doing Miss Delaney any good standing out here. We can’t see or hear anything. And if the guy shows up, he drives off when he’s through and we can’t follow him.”

“Maybe she screams,” Russell said, “and we hear her, we can all run in.”

“And what,” Billy said, “fight the guy? He’s a man, for cripe’s sake.”

“There’s five of us,” I said.

“And what?” Nick said. “You think you’re Robin the Boy Wonder? You’ve seen the guy. You think we can fight him?”

I shrugged. It was cold. We stood around in the dark on Water Street until we had to go home. Nobody showed up.

Nobody showed up the next night, or the next, and each night was cold.

On the fifth night when nothing happened Manny said, “This is a waste of time.”

Manny said so little that when he did say something, it always sounded kind of important.

“We’re not helping anybody,” Manny said.

“And we got a game tomorrow,” Russell pointed out. “We should be getting to bed early instead of standing around in the dark, like a bunch of dorks.”

“The Edenville Dorks,” Russell said.

Everybody laughed.

“The hell with this,” Nick said. “I’m going home.”

“Me too,” Billy said.

They began to drift away.

“You coming, Bobby?” Russell asked me.

“Nope.”

Russell stood still for a minute and then shook his head.

“See you tomorrow,” he said, and went after the other guys.

Standing alone in the dark on the empty street, I felt like a fool. My eyes teared a little. What a jerk, I thought. You thought it would be like the movies. Stake out the house and in two minutes the bad guys show up and the action starts. The movies didn’t show you the hero standing around in the cold hour after hour, needing to take a leak, wishing he had something to eat. Getting nowhere. Seeing nothing. Doing no good. And what about friendship? All those war movies where guys were heroically dying for each other. A little boredom. A little cold weather and the Owls flew away in the night. The hell with them. But I couldn’t say the hell with them. We had a game tomorrow. I looked at the blank ungrateful front of the two-family house where Miss Delaney lived. There were things you can’t do anything about. The thought scared me. It made me feel kind of helpless. But there it was. I turned and headed home.