“Here you go,” the old woman said, handing me a towel wrapped
around a large chunk of ice. “Take off your shoe and put your leg up
on this stool.”
I was sitting on a wooden chair that had to be as old as she was. The stool
looked to be even older, worn smooth by time and use, but I figured that meant
it would be free of splinters. The table was old too, though I could hardly
see its surface. The top was covered with an array of weird-looking parts,
including lots of pen points, pen barrels, clips, caps, and small rubber or
plastic things. There were also odd baggies made out of latex or stretchy
plastic. They looked like… I don’t know, they just looked strange.
The old woman stared at me as I shifted to get comfortable. Finally she
warned, “Stop wriggling! You’re just going to bang your ankle
again.” Of course, that’s exactly what I did, and the pain made
me gasp.
She shook her head. “Boys! You’re just as restless as your father
used to be.” She pursed her lips.
“
I’m nothing at all like my father,” I snapped at her and was immediately
sorry. She gave me a quizzical look, then smiled.
“
What’s so funny?” I demanded. “You’re lucky you’re
still alive. If I hadn’t lost my balance out there, I could have brained
you with my tire iron.”
She snorted. “If I hadn’t pulled you over, you mean. Using your
momentum against you was easy as pie.”
I glared at her, but she just laughed. So tell me, Rutherford,” she
began, but I interrupted loudly. “Buzz! I told you my name is Buzz!”
“
And I told you that Buzz is your nickname. If you prefer that I use it,
please ask me to do so in a civil manner.” She smiled, “Anyone
named Haynes who calls his son Rutherford either has a wicked sense of humor
or none at all. You must have taken a lot teasing. Was that why you named
yourself Buzz, to stop the teasing?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, and it worked, but when Dad started preaching, it
started again.”
She looked pained.
I smiled. “But it’s history. No one messes with me now.”
I realized I was talking too much. The old woman had gotten to me and I
resented it. The sharp pain in my ankle was now a steady throbbing, and I
wanted nothing more than to be out of there. I was already wondering how I
was going to get back to the Razors and what I was going to tell them when
I came back without any loot.
She interrupted my train of thought. “Tell me, Buzz, how are you going
to pay for the repair of my window? By breaking into someone else’s
home and stealing something you can sell?”
I made my expression as innocent as I could. “I wasn’t going to
steal anything,” I lied. “I just felt like breaking something.”
“
And you just happened to be in the neighborhood and have a tire iron handy,” she
said, sniffing disdainfully.
“
Well, yeah,” I said. “I found it at the dump. You know, sometimes
I get angry and just have to strike out at something. I figure a window or
a door is better than a person or an animal. This time it just happened to
be your window. Sorry about that.”
She looked amused. “So you expect me to believe that smashing my window
was not an attempted break-in.” Her look of amusement turned to a stern
glare. “And you also expect me to believe that your action had no connection
to the rash of burglaries in town during the past three months.”
I shrugged. “You don’t live in town. Or all that near town.”
“
So you’ve been branching out,” she said. “The police have
increased their patrols and you’ve had to venture further afield to
do your damage.”
I shook my head. “You have it all wrong.”
“
You claim,” she added, her stare growing accusing, “that you have
had nothing to do with any of the break-ins.”
I nodded, and I was telling the truth. This was my first job. Well, my
first attempt anyway. The fact that the Razors had been breaking into places
in town was irrelevant. They hadn’t been caught. I had.
I tried to look nonchalant as I said, “Believe what you like, but I’m
telling you the truth when I say I haven’t broken into anyplace in town
or out of town.”
“
Not counting here,” she said.
“
I didn’t break in,” I replied. “I only whacked the window
with a tire iron.”
“
Even if I believed that, you’re still guilty of vandalism,” she
countered.
I knew that was true, but I was also pretty sure that vandalism wasn’t
as serious a crime as breaking and entering.
“
I really ought to call the police and your father,” she said, fixing
me with that accusing stare again.
I shrugged and tried to look calm. “Do what you feel is right,” I
said. “Of course, if you call the police, that window won’t get
fixed.”
“
And your father?” she asked.
I smiled and shook my head. “He pinches a penny so tight that it screams.
He’d promise to fix it all right, but then he’d get some idiot
from that church of his to do the work and the window would end up in worse
shape than it’s in now.”
She sighed. “That may be true, Buzz, but you still have not addressed
the question of how you will pay for my window.”
She was right about that because I had no intention of paying for it. My
only thoughts were of escape. Somehow she could tell.
“
If you were to leave without making some arrangement for restitution in
which I can have reasonable confidence, my only recourse will be to contact
the police and make a report,” she said firmly.
That did it! I stood up suddenly and wobbled in the general direction of
the door. My ankle and foot throbbed like crazy, but I didn’t care.
She cleared her throat. “Sit down, Buzz!” she said, her voice
suddenly a lot kinder. “Running away is no solution.”
I shook my head and half-hopped, half-limped across the floor. “I’m
not running away, you old bat,” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m
just leaving, and you can’t stop me.”
I thought I heard her chuckle, but the sound may just have been a cough. “Aren’t
you going to take your shoe with you, Buzz?” she asked. Her tone was
innocent enough, but I knew she was laughing at me. I grunted and turned around.
She had picked up my shoe from the floor and held it out to me. I glared at
her. I knew I couldn’t get far without it and there was no way I could
get it onto my swollen foot.
“
I think you broke my ankle, you old hag,” I said, near tears.
She ignored the insult as she had the previous one. “Do you have your
car parked nearby?” she asked, her tone still innocent.
I shook my head. Of our group, only Sean McCabe had a car.
“
A scooter?” the old woman persisted. “A bike?”
I shook my head again.
“
So how are you planning to get home? And how did you get here in the first
place? It’s over an hour’s walk from town.”
“
Hitched,” I lied, looking at the door that seemed very far away at the
moment. “And I’ll hitch back.”
She ignored my explanation.
“
I suppose I can drop you off at home on my way to the police station to
make my report,” she offered. “I’m sure they’ll send
someone to pick you up and take you in to be booked.” I could feel her
staring at me, but I didn’t look at her.
“
Unless, of course, you want to reconsider,” she added almost as an afterthought.
She had me and she knew it. I knew it too, but I had to put up some kind
of resistance to keep my pride intact. “What did you have in mind?” I
asked, hobbling back to my chair.
“
Let me get more ice,” she said, “and then we can talk about it.”
I nodded.
“
He was going to hitchhike from the scene of a crime,” she said under
her breath but loudly enough so I could hear her. “I guess he really
wasn’t planning on stealing very much.”
She caught me off guard and before I realized what I was doing, I found
myself explaining that the point was to break in successfully and get away
with something good, something that would prove I’d really done it.
It wasn’t how much I could take, but what. I didn’t go into detail
on the digital camera, the antique coin collection, or the pocket watch the
others had taken as souvenirs from their recent break-ins.
“
I see,” she said, sounding thoughtful. “So it’s a bit like
counting coup.”
“
Huh?” I stared at her blankly.
“You don’t know what counting coup is? Did you sleep through your
American history classes?”
Still somewhat taken aback that I’d admitted I was trying to break in,
I told the truth again. “As a matter of fact, I did. Boring as hell that
stuff.”
She shook her head. “Only if it’s badly taught,” she replied
curtly. “But then anything can be boring if the teacher is bored.”
“
Not numbers,” I replied. “Even a moron like Mr. Mathison can’t
make math boring.”
She looked at me sternly and then chuckled. “So you like math, do you?” Her
chuckle grew mischievous. “Don’t you think it’s funny that
the math teacher is named Mathison?”
Maybe she was insane.
“
The one before him was Matthews,” she said, laughing harder.
I didn’t want to laugh, but I did anyway. That seemed to please her.
“
How old are you, Buzz? Fourteen?”
I nodded.
“
Freshman year, right?”
I nodded again.
“
And are you good at math or do you just find it less boring than other subjects?”
I cleared my throat, wondering where this was leading. “Uh, I’d say
I’m pretty good at it. So far we’ve had three tests and I’ve
aced all of them.”
She nodded. “You know, Buzz, I think I may see a way out of our dilemma.
Do you think you could teach sixth grade math to a ten year-old?”
I shrugged. “I suppose that depends on the ten year-old. I’ve never
tried to teach anyone anything, but I could try.” I almost shook myself,
wondering what I was talking about. I had no intention of teaching math.
“
Good answer,” she said, just as if she were standing in front of a class
instead of sitting across her kitchen table from me. For a minute I had no idea
what she was talking about, but the weird thing was that I felt unaccountably
proud of myself, as if I’d said something smart.
“
What I’m thinking, Buzz,” she continued, “is that tutoring
someone who needs help in math is a way you could earn money to pay for my cracked
window.”
I shrugged. “Could be. But I can’t promise I’d be any good.”
“
But you’d be willing to try,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“
Yeah, I guess,” I agreed. “It’s better than getting arrested.”
She laughed. “Good. I’ll drive you home.” She handed me my
shoe. “You take that,” she ordered. “And you can lean on me
on the way out.”
I looked around the kitchen, wondering how I was going to persuade her to let
me take something to bring back to the Razors. My eyes fell on her trash basket.
An empty ink bottle sat on top of a small pile of other junk.
“
Can I have that ink bottle?” I asked.
“Sure, if you want it. It’s in the trash because there’s a
crack running along its entire length behind the label. Otherwise I save and
reuse them.”
I didn’t care what she was rambling on about. The ink bottle wasn’t
much, but it might be enough to keep me from getting kicked out of the Razors.
I took it when she handed it to me, shoved it into the shoe I was carrying and
leaning on her shoulder, I hobbled out to her car.
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