The Dead Caller from Chicago

Eighteen

Still, I decided on caution.

I waited until eleven o’clock, that hour when even the most nocturnal of the working folks in Leo’s neighborhood were sure to be asleep. I parked three blocks away and came up to the bungalow on the front sidewalk, slow and purposeful and out in the open, like someone with nothing to hide, just coming home late. I’d decided against the alleys because Leo and I had spent too many summer nights out on his front stoop, drinking his fine Czech Pilsner Urquell, talking about not much of anything at all, and laughing every time a marauding raccoon set off a backyard security light. Rivertown was too lousy with backyard security lights to come up the back way.

I’d just walked onto Leo’s block when headlamps switched on, farther down. A car pulled from the curb, sweeping its lights across the stacks of cement forms piled in front of the excavation. It was only as I bent down, as though to tie my shoe, that I realized I couldn’t hear the car’s motor. I turned my head just enough to be sure. It was a Prius passing by. I couldn’t see the driver, or be absolutely sure of the car’s color in the dark, but I knew it was green, the color of Jenny Galecki’s. I wondered what needed watching, that late at night.

I straightened up and ducked into the dark of the gangway next to Leo’s house. The back door was locked, as I’d left it. I slipped the bolt with my thin scraper and stepped inside, as quietly as I could. My shoes ground into the shells on the floor. I stood still for a moment. The house was silent, a tomb.

I didn’t need to be stealthy. I didn’t even need to slink in the dark. I could turn on the lights, dance around, sing show tunes. I knew who would be coming.

It was his game that was being played, though, not mine. I left the lights off and tiptoed silently through the darkness to the front room.

I’d decided on the triangular space behind the big-screen television. When he’d first brought it home, Leo had pushed it flat against one wall. But once Ma discovered what could be found on her new television, and in such glistening clarity, she insisted that the new set be angled in the corner, so that all her lady friends could come and behold the miracle of naughty pay-per-view.

Leo and I had laughed at that, too, on more than one of those summer nights, when the girls were over and we were relegated to the lawn chairs in the backyard, safely away from any moans that might slip through the front-room screens. “Can you believe it?” he’d ask. “Septuagenarians and octogenarians, primly munching bridge mix and prunes, cranking up their hearing aids to catch the softest of the grunts?”

“Every old lady should have a son like you to destroy her morals,” I’d said, more than once.

He’d shake his head at the absurdity of it all. Then we’d laugh again.

I slipped behind the television and settled on the floor. Soon I’d know what he was up to.

A car door slammed outside. Two voices sounded and then went away. Neighbors, coming home.

I relaxed against the wall, and my mind drifted to the last time I’d done late-night surveillance, and how Leo never let me forget it. It had been summer. I was perched in a vacant garage, watching a Dumpster behind a restaurant. I’d set up my long-lens camera carefully, at the ready to snap proof of a money drop. Then I’d fallen asleep. Leo loved that, and he rarely went a month without slipping some reference to my ace surveillance skills into a conversation.

This night, there would be no nodding off. Surely I’d be able to help, as soon as I understood what sent him into hiding.

The familiar tick of the banjo clock across the room, bingo booty Ma lugged home from church, brought back the times I’d spent in that house as a kid-the after-school hours, the dinners, the hundreds of unanticipated sleepovers when there’d been confusion, or perhaps it had just been indifference, about where I was supposed to be staying.

My mother, a high school sophomore, had taken off the day after my birth, never to be heard from again. My father, supposedly a Norwegian sailor named Elstrom, had moved on long before that. One of my aunts told me he hadn’t been around long enough to learn he was going to be a father.

My mother’s three sisters, all much older, agreed to raise me. Blood counted thick with them, though nurturing did not, at least not with two of them. A solution to keep me safe was reached… with exceptions. I spent a month with each of them on a rotating basis. By the time I got to kindergarten, I’d become an experienced traveler. I had a fiberboard suitcase and marching orders that required I move on at the first of every month.

Wires often got crossed. Vacations, doctor visits, and other things arose that sometimes resulted in locked doors. Often I slept outside, hugging my cardboard suitcase, rather than show up where I was not expected, or wanted.

That changed in seventh grade, when Leo Brumsky became my friend.

Ma Brumsky never said much to the boy Leo brought home, but she never said no. Many nights I spent in a spare sleeping bag on the floor of Leo’s bedroom. Many mornings I lugged my battered fiberboard suitcase to school, made slightly heavier by two thick sandwiches wrapped in Saran for that day’s lunch. There wasn’t a day, from seventh grade clear through the end of high school, that I didn’t wish I could spend the rest of my nights sleeping on a floor, any floor, in Ma Brumsky’s bungalow.

The click of a lock echoed loudly through the still house. The back door creaked slowly open. I moved lower behind the big wide TV, smug with relief. I’d been brilliant, and I was going to be brilliant some more. Whatever was going on, whatever the reason he felt he had to hide, I would fix it.

His footsteps crunched on the pistachio shells as he went into the kitchen. He needed to eat.

Glass rattled, but no light came on. I’d already noticed that he’d unscrewed the refrigerator bulb. He always thought of everything.

Cabinets opened; cabinets closed; minutes passed. There was no scrape of a chair; he was eating standing up. Then his footsteps sounded, and again the back door creaked. The lock clicked. He was gone.

It was as I’d expected, and now I’d hurry to learn where he was hiding. I pushed myself up.

Footfalls pounded up the basement stairs. I slipped back behind the television, struggling to think. No one else was supposed to be in the house. I’d come in; I’d hidden.

I’d never imagined someone else was already inside, hiding in the basement. Someone who hadn’t heard me come in.

The footsteps got to the back of the house. The door creaked open, fast. He crossed the back porch. Then he was outside, in the gangway, crunching the snow below my head.

It was wrong. There was only supposed to have been Leo, sneaking back to his house every night for food, playing a strange game I didn’t understand at all.

Instead, there’d been two-and I wasn’t sure which was which.

I ran to the back door.