The Schwa Was Here

6. As If I Didn’t Already Have Enough Annoying Things to Do Every Day, Now I Gotta Do This

I wasn’t too hungry at dinner that night. Sure, I was no stranger to failed schemes, but never had one backfired so badly. The fifty-four bucks were the least of my worries, now that Crawley was pulling our strings. It was enough to kill any appetite.

For the entire meal I just sort of moved my food around my plate. My parents didn’t notice, mainly because I wasn’t Frankie or Christina. If Christina doesn’t eat, right away they’re feeling her forehead to see if she’s got a fever. As for Frankie, not eating isn’t one of his problems. He’s more likely to get yelled at for taking all the food. Once I tried to take a huge plateful like Frankie does, just to see what my parents would do. While I wasn’t looking, Frankie moved some food from my plate to his, and my parents got on his case instead of mine. He always complains that I get away with everything. Well, there are two sides to that wooden nickel.

I was unnaturally quiet for most of the meal, which was probably a mistake, because it threw off the entire family equi­librium.

Mom and Dad had begun a conversation about what sort of carpeting to put down in our unfinished finished basement. You have to understand that my parents live to bicker. You could stick them at the beach and they’d argue whether the ocean was bluish green, or greenish blue.

They rarely argued over dinner, though, I think because when you eat, your blood rushes from your brain to your stom­ach, putting you at a strategic disadvantage, because how are you going to come up with the real zingers when your brain isn’t at full power?

Like I said, it started as a discussion, and then it began heat­ing up to the point where I would usually throw in some wise­crack. When I didn’t, the discussion suddenly evolved into an argument.

“We already agreed it should be Berber!” Mom says.

“I never agreed to anything! The carpet in the basement should match the rest of the house.” It’s escalating to the point where food is flying out of their mouths while they talk. Frankie just shakes his head, Christina’s reaching for her journal, and I start thinking about dog collars, maybe because dogs are on my mind after being at Crawley’s. When dogs bark too much, you can put on special collars, so each time the dog barks, it squirts out a funky smell. It doesn’t really teach dogs not to bark, but it distracts them long enough to make ’em forget they were bark­ing.

I decided to let the carpet argument build just a bit more, then dropped my fork on my plate loudly. “Jeez! What’s the big deal? Put down a hardwood floor and each of you can buy a rug.”

“Watch that fork, you’ll break the plate!” Mom says.

“What? Are you gonna pay for a wood floor?” Dad grumbles.

“My friend’s got a wood closet to keep away bugs,” says Christina.

“That’s cedar,” Mom explains.

“We oughta build a cedar closet,” says Dad.

And that was that. The conversation lapsed into an endless stream of other topics, and I went back to pushing my food around my plate. They never noticed I had stopped the argu­ment, just like they didn’t notice I wasn’t eating. Sometimes the Schwa had nothing on me.

“What do you think he’ll make us do?” the Schwa asked as we walked as slow as we dared from school to Crawley’s the next afternoon.

“I really don’t want to think about it.” Truth was, I spent most of the night thinking about it. I could barely get my homework done, which is not all that unusual, but this time it wasn’t because of TV, or video games, or my friends. It was be­cause all I could think of were the many forms of torture Craw­ley could devise. I once had a teacher who said my imagination was about as developed as my appendix, but I don’t agree, be­cause I came up with a whole bunch of possibilities of what Crawley could do. He could make us clean his dog-fouled patio with our toothbrushes—they do stuff like that in the army, I hear. He could send us on dangerous errands to Mafia types where we might get whacked, because anyone that rich in Brooklyn has gotta know a few of those guys. Or what if he wanted us to move the bodies he’s got locked up in a cellar be­neath the restaurant? At three in the morning, when you’re tossing in bed, it sounds almost possible, proving that my imag­ination is alive and well, or, I guess I should say, alive and sick.

“I think we’re gonna wish we were arrested,” I told the Schwa.

The restaurant only had a few customers at this hour of the afternoon. We identified ourselves to the maitre d’, who I guess doubled as Crawley’s doorman for what few visitors he got.

“Ah,” said the maitre d’oorman, “Mr. Crawley is expecting you. Follow me.”

He glided up the grand staircase real smooth, like it was a fast escalator and not stairs, then he took us through an unused part of the restaurant stacked with dusty old tables and broken chairs. We went down a hallway that led to the door of Mr. Crawley’s private residence.

“Mr. Crawley, those boys are here,” the maitre d’oorman said as he knocked. Barking and the pounding of paws followed. Then I could hear all the bolts sliding open on the other side, and Crawley pulled open the door while blocking the escape of the dogs with his wheelchair.

“You’re five minutes early,” he said, the tone in his voice like we were half an hour late.

We stepped in, he pushed the door closed behind us, a dog yelped because his nose got caught in the door for an instant, and there we were.

Crawley reached into the pocket of his fancy robe—a dinner jacket, I think it’s called. The kind of thing Professor Plum would wear before killing Colonel Mustard in the ballroom with the candlestick. From the pocket he pulled a few doggie treats and hurled them over his shoulder so the dogs would leave us alone.

“I’ve decided to sentence the two of you to twelve weeks of community service,” he said. “Mr. Bonano, from this day for­ward, you shall be responsible for the sins. You, Mr. Schwa, shall be responsible for the virtues. Take all the time you need each day, but by no means are you to complete the task any earlier than five P.M. Now get to it.”

I looked at the Schwa, the Schwa looked at me. I felt like I had just been called up to the board to explain an Einstein the­ory, but I don’t think Einstein could figure this one out, even if he was alive.

“Why are you staring like imbeciles? Didn’t you hear me?”

“Yeah, we heard you,” I said. “Sins and virtues. Now would you mind speaking in English that people who aren’t, like, ninety years old can understand?”

He scowled at us. He was really good at that. Then he spoke, very slowly, as if to morons. “The seven virtues, and the seven deadly sins. Comprendo?”

“Oigo,” I said, “pero no comprendo.” I hear, but I don’t under­stand. At last my two years of Spanish had paid off! It was worth it for the surprised look on Crawley’s face—to see that, as Howie would put it, I was only half the moron he thought I was.

“Great,” mumbled the Schwa. “Now he’s really gonna be pissed off.”

But instead of saying anything, Crawley put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. All the dogs came running.

As they crowded around him, jockeying for position, he touched each of them on the head and announced: “Prudence, Temperance, Justice, Fortitude, Faith, Hope, and Charity.” He took a breath, then continued: “Envy, Sloth, Anger, Lust, Gluttony, Pride, and Avarice. Do you understand now, or shall I get you a translator?”

“You want each of us to walk seven dogs each, every day.”

“Gold star for you.”

Crawley peered at me, but I just returned his unpleasant gaze. “Why not Greed?” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Avarice is Greed, right? That’s the way I learned the seven deadly sins. So why not just name the dog Greed?”

“Don’t you know anything?” Crawley growled. “Avarice is a much better name for a dog.”

He spun his wheelchair and rolled into the deeper recesses of his apartment. “Leashes are hanging in the kitchen.” And he was gone.

At first we tried to walk them two at a time, but they were so strong, so untrained, and so excited to be outside, they practi­cally pulled us into oncoming traffic. There were no shortcuts. We each could only handle one dog at a time. Walking dogs for no pay for two hours a day wasn’t exactly my idea of fun. But the Schwa and I did it. We could have gotten out of it. We could have just told our parents what we had done, and taken whatever punishment they dealt out. Even if Crawley went to the police, they wouldn’t do much about it—especially after we had shown what decent guys we were by volunteering to walk his dogs for those first few days. Still, we kept on doing it. Maybe it’s because there was a kind of a mystique to it, walking the infamous Old Man Crawley’s dogs. Everyone knew whose dogs they were—it’s not like the neighborhood is teeming with Afghans. Somehow it made us important. Or maybe we kept on doing it because we gave him our word. I can’t speak for the Schwa, but for me, my word had never really meant much of anything. I can’t count all the times I gave someone my word, then flaked out. This time was different, though, because if I didn’t keep my word, Crawley would be able to sit in his dark apartment and gloat. He’d see it as proof that I was at the shal­low end of the gene pool, and I wouldn’t give him that satisfac­tion, no matter how many barking sins I had to walk.

“Hey, Bonano,” said Wendell Tiggor from across the street while we walked Charity and Gluttony that first week. “So I like your new girlfriend,” he says, pointing to the dog. “She’s got real animal attraction.”

“We’d let you have one,” I told him, “but we don’t got one called Stupidity.” The Schwa and I high-fived as best we could with two dogs pulling us down the street.

Walking dogs also meant there was less time to hang out with my other friends. Namely, Howie and Ira. It’s not like they made any extra effort to see me anyway.

During our second week of canine slavery, however, Howie did join the Schwa and me for a few minutes one afternoon while we walked Hope and Lust.

“I can’t hang out long,” says Howie. “I gotta walk my little brother to tae kwan do.”

“Is he a sin or a virtue?” the Schwa asked, but it goes right over Howie’s head.

I thought he might offer to help us walk the dogs, at least for a minute, but his hands stayed firmly shoved in his pockets. “Is Crawley as crazy as they say?”

I tugged on the leash to keep Lust from going after a passing poodle. “Well, let’s put it this way: If he’s got bats in his belfry, he nails them to the wall to watch them wriggle.”

The Schwa laughed.

“He’s real mean, huh?” says Howie.

“He hates the world and the world hates him right back.” What I didn’t say was how much the nasty old guy was grow­ing on me. I actually looked forward to seeing him, just so I could irritate him.

Right about now Howie looks over his shoulder like the FBI might be reporting his activities to his parents, who have re­cently begun a policy of preemptive grounding. “Listen, I gotta go. So long, Antsy,” and he takes off.

It would have been all fine and good, except for one thing. He didn’t say good-bye to the Schwa. It seemed to slip his mind that the Schwa was even there. I could tell the Schwa didn’t like this, but he didn’t say anything about it—he just looked down at Hope, who was happily sniffing gum spots on the sidewalk.

We were heading back to Crawley’s for the next two dogs when the Schwa broke the silence. “They didn’t even notice it was orange?” he said.

“What?”

“The sombrero. Not a single person noticed it was orange? Not a single person even noticed it was a sombrero?”

It was the first time he had mentioned the experiments. When we were doing them, he seemed fine. He took a scientific interest in the results. It had never occurred to me that they might have bothered him.

“Not one.”

“Hmm,” he said, shaking his head. “Go figure.”

“Hey, it’s not a bad thing,” I told him. “This Schwa Effect. It’s a natural ability—you know, like those people who can memo­rize the phone book and stuff—‛idiot savants.’” This was just getting worse by the minute. “Anyway, it’s a skill you oughta be proud of.”

“Yeah? Well, tell me how proud you feel when you don’t get a report card because the teacher forgot to make you one. Or when the bus doesn’t stop for you because the driver doesn’t notice you’re at the stop. Or when your own father makes din­ner for himself but not for you because it slipped his mind that you were there.”

“You’re making that up,” I finally said. “That doesn’t happen.”

“Oh yeah? Come to my house for dinner sometime.”

The Schwa hadn’t really meant it as an invitation, but I took it as one. I was curious. I had to know just what kind of home en­vironment could turn out an invisible-ish kid. That, and I wanted to know more about his mysteriously missing mother, but I didn’t dare tell him that. I figured his reluctance to talk about his home life must have been because he was embar­rassed about it—like maybe he lived in a broken-down shack, or something.

The Schwa lived at the edge of our neighborhood, on a street I never had been on before. When I arrived there, I have to say I was disappointed by what I saw. It was a row of small two-story homes, packed in tight, with driveways in between. His house wasn’t invisible. It wasn’t even unnoticeable. In fact, it stood out. All the other homes on the street had fake plastic siding. You know the stuff—plastic that’s supposed to look like aluminum that’s supposed to look like wood. While the rest of the homes were white, eggshell, or light blue, the Schwa’s house was canary yellow. I had to double-check the address to make sure I had the right place. The front yard was well cared for. There was even a little bubbling rock fountain in the corner that appeared to actually be made of rock and not Pisher Plastic. It was exemplary, to borrow a word I missed on my last vocabulary test: the perfect example of what a front yard should be.

There was a doormat that said: IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME RIGHT NOW, AND I’D HAVE NO MORTGAGE. I could hear music playing somewhere inside. Guitar. I rang the bell, and in a mo­ment the door opened and no one appeared to be standing there.

“Hi, Schwa.”

“Hi, Antsy.” The shadows fell just the right way to camouflage him against the rest of the room. I blinked a few times, and he came into focus. He didn’t sound particularly pleased that I was there. It was more like he was resigned to the fact. He showed me in and introduced me to his father.

They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but looking at the Schwa and his father, I would say the apple rolled clear into an orange grove. The man was about as un-Schwa-like as could be. He wore white overalls with paint stains all over them—the Schwa had said he was a housepainter. Right now he wasn’t painting, he was sitting in the living room playing a twelve-string guitar—I mean really playing, not just strum­ming. He had a ponytail with a few strands of gray, the same color as his guitar strings.

Not only was he visible, but he actually stood out.

“Are you sure you’re not adopted?” I asked. But I could tell there was enough of a resemblance to make DNA testing un­necessary.

“I look like him,” Schwa said, “but in most other ways I take after my mother.”

At the mention of his mother, I casually looked around for any sign of her, but there were no pictures, no feminine touches.

“Hey, Dad, this is my friend Antsy.”

Mr. Schwa continued to play, not noticing.

“Dad,” said the Schwa, a bit louder this time. Still he just played his guitar. The Schwa sighed.

“Mr. Schwa?” I said.

He stopped playing immediately and looked around, a bit bewildered. “Oh—you must be Calvin’s friend,” he said. “I’ll go get him.”

“I’m right here, Dad.”

“Did you offer your friend something to drink?”

“You want something to drink?” the Schwa asked.

“No.”

“He says no.”

“Is your friend staying for dinner?”

“Yeah,” I said, then whispered to the Schwa, “I thought you told him I was coming.”

“I did,” said the Schwa. “Twice.”

It turns out the Schwa’s father was terminally absentminded. There were little notes everywhere to remind him of things. The refrigerator was so full of yellow Post-it notes, it looked like Big Bird. The notes were all written by the Schwa. Half day at school on Wednesday, one said. Back-to-School night on Fri­day, said another, FRIEND COMING OVER FOR DINNER TONIGHT, said one in big bold letters.

“Was he always like that, or was it, like, from breathing paint fumes?” I asked after Mr. Schwa went back to playing guitar.

“He fell off a ladder a few years ago, and suffered head trauma. He’s okay now, but he’s like a little kid in some ways.”

“Wow,” I said. “So who takes care of who?”

“Exactly,” says the Schwa. “But it’s not so bad. And my aunt Peggy comes over a few times a week to help out.”

Apparently this wasn’t one of Aunt Peggy’s nights. There was a raw chicken in a big pan on top of the oven. I poked the chicken. It was room temperature. Who knew how long it had been sitting out.

“Maybe we should call in for pizza.”

“Naah,” said the Schwa, turning on the oven to preheat. “Cooking it should kill any deadly bacteria.”

The Schwa took me on the grand tour. The walls of the house were white, except one wall in each room was painted a differ­ent color. The effect was actually pretty cool. There was one forest green wall in the living room, a red wall in the kitchen, a blue wall in the dining room. The colored wall in the Schwa’s room was beige. I wasn’t surprised.

“So,” I asked about as delicately as I could, “how long have you and your father been ... on your own?”

“Since I was five,” he said. “You wanna see my paper-clip col­lection?”

I replayed in my mind what he had said, certain I had some­how heard it wrong. “You’re ... kidding me, right?”

Then he reached under his bed and pulled out a box. Inside were little plastic zipper bags—at least a hundred of them— and in each one there was . . . yes, you guessed it, a paper clip.

Little ones, big ones, those fat black ones that hold whole stacks of paper together.

“Pretty cool, huh?”

I just stared, dumbfounded. “Exactly when did they release you from the nuthouse, Schwa?”

He reached into the box and pulled out a little baggie that held a silver clip. “This clip held together pages of the Nuclear Arms Treaty signed by Reagan and Gorbachew.”

“No way.”

I looked at it closely. It looked just like an ordinary paper clip.

He pulled out another one. It was tarnished bronze. “This one held together the original lyric sheets of ’Hey Jude.’” He pulled out another one with a blue plastic coating. “This one was clipped to a mission manual for the space shuttle.”

“You mean it’s been in space?”

The Schwa nodded.

“Wow!”

He showed me clip after clip, each one more exciting than the the last.

“Where did you get them?”

“I wrote to famous people, asking them for a paper clip from something important. You’d be amazed how many of them wrote back.”

It was genius! Most of the time people are looking for the letters and documents and people that make history, but no one thinks about the little things that hold history together. Leave it to the Schwa to think of such a thing. It was, at the same time, the dullest and most interesting collection I had ever seen in my life.

Dinner wasn’t ready until after nine, and it was the second worst chicken I’d ever tasted, beaten only by a dish at a friend’s birthday party that tasted more like it was made from the pinata. Even so, I was glad I had dinner with the Schwa and his father, who continued to play guitar during the meal, greasy chicken fingers and all.

“It’s like he doesn’t have a care in the world,” I commented to the Schwa while his dad did the dishes.

“Yeah, brain damage’ll do that to you,” the Schwa said as he went to rewash the dishes his father didn’t quite get clean. “But I wouldn’t advise it.”

The next night I ended up alone with my own father for dinner. Mom was off shopping with Christina, and Frankie was off with his friends, doing whatever it was honor students did on their higher plane of existence. I couldn’t help but think about the Schwa, and how he came home every day to a father who might or might not feed him. That wasn’t my dad. I might go unnoticed, but never unfed. And I never had to be the one tak­ing care of him.

Dad secretly loved when Mom wasn’t around for dinner, be­cause he got the kitchen all to himself—and although none of us kids would admit it out loud, Dad was the better cook. Tonight Dad whipped up Fettucine al Bonano—his own spe­cial dish that magically transformed whatever leftovers were in the fridge into a killer pasta dish. The problem today wasn’t in the cooking, it was in the eating. Dad and I never have prob­lems talking to each other when there are other people around, but when it’s just the two of us, it’s like we’re together on a stage and we’ve forgotten our lines.

“Did you break Manny yet?” he asked after a few silent min­utes into the meal.

I shrugged, fettucine dangling down to my chin. “I’m not sure. His body survived detonation, but his head is missing. It could be in orbit for all we know.”

“If he really turns out to be unbreakable, your old man gets a raise and a promotion.”

I nodded and sucked in some more fettucine. The silence re­turned. I like being with my dad, but sitting across from him with nothing but food between us makes me uncomfortable. I guess I’m so used to being semivisible at home I don’t know how to handle being the only available focus of attention. And now as I sat with Dad, avoiding eye contact, it hit me that maybe he felt the same way.

“They won’t do both,” I told him.

“What?”

“They give you a promotion so they don’t have to give you a raise. They give you a raise just so they don’t have to give you a promotion. They don’t do both.”

He looked at me, grinning and nodding like I just quoted Shakespeare. “You’re right,” he said. “How do you know that?”

I shrugged and thought about what the Schwa had once said about me having business savvy. “I don’t know. It just makes sense.” And then I added, “I probably heard it on TV or some­thing.”

We chowed down more food, barely looking at each other.

“Mom tells me you’re walking dogs for that old guy who owns Crawley’s.”

“Yeah,” I told him. “I’m being a good Philistine.”

“Samaritan,” he said. “I didn’t even know you liked dogs.”

“Neither did I.”

I toyed with telling him about Old Man Crawley’s threat to get him fired if I didn’t walk the dogs . . . but didn’t. Crawley and his dogs were my problem.

I finished up my fettucine and began thinking about what the Schwa’s dinner was like tonight. Did he have to cook it him­self? Did he cook for himself and his dad? Or was this one of the lucky nights when the Schwa could relax and Aunt Peggy did the cooking? Then I wondered if Aunt Peggy ever forgot to set a plate for him, like his dad.

“Listen, I was thinking about having a friend over for dinner.”

“Someone new, or the usual suspects?”

“New.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No such luck.”

“Who?”

“They call him the Schwa.”

My dad piled some more fettucine onto his plate. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Does something have to be wrong with him for him to be my friend? Is that what you mean?”

“Take it easy. I just thought I heard something funny in your voice.”

I didn’t think my dad had it in him to tune into someone’s tone. He never seemed to be able to tell when Mom was about to get mad at him, and he usually needed one of us kids to tell him what brainless, insensitive thing he had done. But this time he called it right.

I decided to be direct. “He’s invisible,” I said.

To my dad’s credit, he took this in stride, although he did stop chewing for a few seconds. “Does he become visible again when he takes off his ring?” Dad asked. “Does he hang out with elves and dwarfs?”

It took me a few seconds, then I got it, and laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “He’s got hairy feet, too.”

“Well, make sure he wipes them on the doormat, or your mother will brain him.”