The Indian in the Cupboard (2 page)

The Indian gave a fantastic leap into the air. His black hair flew and the fringes on his leggings fluttered. His knife, raised above his head, flashed. He gave a shout, which, even though it was a tiny shout to match his body, was nevertheless loud enough to make Omri jump. But not so much as he jumped when the little knife pierced his finger deeply enough to draw a drop of blood.

Omri stuck his finger in his mouth and sucked it and thought how gigantic he must look to the tiny Indian and how fantastically brave he had been to stab him. The Indian stood there, his feet, in moccasins, planted apart on the white-painted metal floor, his chest heaving, his knife held ready, and his black eyes quite wild. Omri thought he was magnificent.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said. “I only want to pick you up.”

The Indian opened his mouth and a stream of words, spoken in that loud-tiny voice, came out, not one of which Omri could understand.

“Don’t you speak English?” asked Omri. All the Indians in films spoke a sort of English; it would be terrible if his Indian couldn’t. How would they talk to each other?

The Indian lowered his knife a fraction.

“I speak,” he grunted.

Omri breathed deeply in relief. “Oh good! Listen, I don’t know how it happened that you came to life, but it must be something to do with this cupboard, or perhaps the key—anyway, here you are, and I think you’re great, I don’t mind that you stabbed me, only please can I pick you up? After all, you are my Indian,” he finished in a very reasonable tone.

He said all this very quickly while the Indian stared at him. The knife point went down a little farther, but he didn’t answer.

“Well? Can I? Say something!” urged Omri impatiently.

“I speak
slowly,”
grunted the miniature Indian at last.

“Oh.” Omri thought, and then said, very slowly, “Let—me—pick—you—up.”

The knife came up again in an instant, and the Indian’s knees bent into a crouch.

“No.”

“Oh
please.”

“You touch—I kill!” the Indian growled ferociously.

You might have expected Omri to laugh at this absurd threat from a tiny creature scarcely bigger than his middle finger, armed with only a pinpoint. But Omri didn’t laugh. He didn’t even feel like laughing. This Indian—
his
Indian—was behaving in every way like a real live Indian brave, and despite the vast difference in their sizes and strengths, Omri respected him and even, odd as it sounds, feared him at that moment.

“Oh okay, I won’t then. But there’s no need to get angry. I don’t want to hurt you.” Then, as the Indian looked baffled, he said, in what he supposed was Indian English, “Me—no—hurt—you.”

“You come near, I hurt
you”
said the Indian swiftly.

Omri had been half lying in bed all this time. Now, cautiously and slowly, he got up. His heart was thundering in his chest. He couldn’t be sure why he was being cautious. Was it so as not to frighten the Indian, or because he was frightened himself? He wished one of his brothers would come in, or better still, his father. … But no one came.

Standing in his bare feet he took the cupboard by its top corners and turned it till it faced the window. He did this very carefully but nevertheless the Indian was jolted, and, having nothing to hold on to, he fell down. But he was on his feet again in a second, and he had not let go of his knife.

“Sorry,” said Omri.

The Indian responded with a noise like a snarl.

There was no more conversation for the next few minutes. Omri looked at the Indian in the early sunlight. He was a splendid sight. He was just under three inches tall. His blue-black hair, done in a plait and pressed to his head by a colored headband, gleamed in the sun. So did the minuscule muscles of his tiny naked torso, and the skin of his arms. His legs were covered with buckskin leggings, which had some decoration on them too small to see properly. He wore a kind of bandolier across his chest and his belt seemed to be made of several strands of some shiny white beads. Best of all, somehow, were his moccasins. Omri found himself wondering (not for the first time recently) where his magnifying glass was. It was the only way he would ever be able to see and appreciate the intricate details of the Indian’s clothes.

Omri looked as closely as he dared at the Indian’s face. He expected to see paint on it, war paint, but there was none. The turkey feather that had been stuck in the headband had come out when the Indian fell and was now lying on the floor of the cupboard. It was about as big as the spike on a horse chestnut, but it was a real feather. Omri suddenly asked,

“Were you always this small?”

“I not small! You, big!” the Indian shouted angrily.

“No—” began Omri, but then he stopped.

He heard his mother beginning to move about next door.

The Indian heard it too. He froze. The door of the next room opened. Omri knew that at any moment his mother would come in to wake him for school. In a flash he had bent down and whispered, “Don’t worry! I’ll be back.” And he closed and locked the cupboard door and jumped back into bed.

“Come on, Omri. Time to get up.”

She bent down and kissed him, paying no attention to the cupboard, and went out again, leaving the door wide open.

O
mri got dressed in a state of such high excitement that he could scarcely control his fumbling fingers enough to do up buttons and tie his shoelaces. He’d thought he was excited yesterday, on his birthday, but it was nothing compared to how he felt now.

He was dying to open the cupboard door and have another look, but the landing outside his bedroom door was like a railway station at this hour of the morning—parents and brothers passing continually, and if he were to close his door for a moment’s privacy somebody would be sure to burst in. He’d nip up after breakfast and have a quick look when he was supposed to be cleaning his teeth. …

However, it didn’t work out. There was a stupid row at the breakfast table because Adiel took the last of the Rice
Krispies, and although there were plenty of cornflakes, not to mention Sugar Puffs, the other two fairly set upon Adiel and made such an awful fuss that their mother lost her temper, and the end of it was nobody got to clean their teeth at all.

They were all bundled out of the house at the last minute—Omri even forgot to take his swimming things although it was Thursday, the day his class went to the pool. He was an excellent swimmer and he was so annoyed when he remembered (halfway to school, too late to go back) that he turned on Adiel and shouted, “You made me forget my swimming stuff!” and bashed him. That naturally led to them all being late for school, and furthermore, arriving in a very grubby condition.

All this actually pushed the Indian right out of Omri’s mind. But the minute he set eyes on Patrick, he remembered. And not for one single second for the rest of the day was that Indian out of Omri’s thoughts.

You may imagine the temptation to tell Patrick what had happened. Several times Omri very nearly did tell him, and he couldn’t help dropping a number of tantalizing hints.

“Your present was the best thing I got.”

Patrick looked rather astonished. “I thought you got a skateboard?”

“Ye-es … but I like yours better.”

“Better than a skateboard? Are you kidding me?”

“Yours turned out to be more exciting.”

Patrick just stared at him. “Are you being sarcastic?”

“No.”

Later, after they’d had the spelling test and Omri had been marked three right out of ten, Patrick joked, “I bet the plastic Indian could have done better.”

Unwarily, Omri replied, “Oh I don’t think he can
write
English, he can only just speak—”

He stopped himself quickly, but Patrick was giving him a very odd look. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what did you say about him speaking?”

Omri wrestled with himself. He wanted to keep his secret; in any case Patrick wouldn’t believe him. Yet the need to talk about it was very strong. “He can speak,” he said slowly at last.

“Beard,” said Patrick, which was their school slang for “I don’t believe you.”

Instead of insisting, Omri said nothing more, and that led Patrick to ask, “Why did you say that, about him speaking?”

“He does.”

“Itchy
beard.” (Which of course means the same only more so.)

Omri refused to get involved in an argument. He was somehow scared that if he talked about the Indian, something bad would happen. In fact, as the day went on and he longed more and more to get home, he began to feel certain that the whole incredible happening—well, not that it hadn’t happened, but that something would go wrong. All his thoughts, all his dreams were centered on the miraculous, endless possibilities opened up by a real, live, miniature Indian of his very own. It would be too terrible if the whole thing turned out to be some sort of mistake.

After school Patrick wanted him to stay on the school grounds and skateboard. For
weeks
Omri had longed to do this, but had never had his own skateboard till now. So it was quite beyond Patrick’s understanding when Omri said, “I can’t, I have to get home. Anyway, I didn’t bring it.”

“Why not? Are you crazy? Why do you have to get home, anyway?”

“I want to play with the Indian.”

Patrick’s eyes narrowed in disbelief. “Can I come?”

Omri hesitated. But no, it wouldn’t do. He must get to know the Indian himself before he even thought of introducing him to anyone else, even Patrick.

Besides, the most awful thought had come to Omri during the last lesson, which had made it almost impossible for him to sit still. If the Indian
were
real, and not just—well, moving plastic, as Pinocchio had been moving wood, then he would need food and other things. And Omri had left him shut up in the dark all day with nothing. Perhaps—what if there were not enough air for him in that cupboard? The door fitted very tight. How much air would such a very small creature need? What if—what if the Indian were—what if he’d
died
, shut up there? What if Omri had killed him?

At the very best, the Indian must have passed a horrible day in that dark prison. Omri was appalled at the thought of it. Why had he allowed himself to be drawn into that silly row at breakfast instead of slipping away and making sure the Indian was all right? The mere thought that he might be dead was frightening Omri sick. He ran all the way home, burst through the back door, and raced up the stairs without even saying hello to his mother.

He shut the door of his bedroom and fell on his knees beside the bedside table. With a hand that shook, he turned the key in the lock and opened the cupboard door.

The Indian lay there on the floor of the cupboard, stiff and stark. Too stiff! That was not a dead body. Omri picked it up. It was an “it,” not a “he” anymore.

The Indian was made of plastic again.

Omri knelt there, appalled—too appalled to move. He
had
killed his Indian, or done something awful to him. At the same time he had killed his dream—all the wonderful, exciting, secret games that had filled his imagination all day. But
that was not the main horror. His Indian had been real—not a mere toy, but a person. And now here he lay in Omri’s hand—cold, stiff, lifeless. Somehow through Omri’s own fault.

How had it happened?

It never occurred to Omri now that he had imagined the whole incredible episode this morning. The Indian was in a completely different position from the one he had been in when Patrick gave him to Omri.
Then
he had been standing on one leg, as if doing a war dance—knees bent, one moccasined foot raised, both elbows bent, with one fist (with the knife in it) in the air. Now he lay flat, legs apart, arms at his sides. His eyes were closed. The knife was no longer a part of him. It lay separately on the floor of the cupboard.

Omri picked it up. The easiest way to do this, he found, was to wet his finger and press it down on the tiny knife, which stuck to it. It, too, was plastic, and could no more have pierced human skin than a twist of paper. Yet it had pierced Omri’s finger this morning—the little mark was still there. But this morning it had been a real knife.

Omri stroked the Indian with his finger. There was a painful thickness in the back of his throat. The pain of sadness, disappointment, and a strange sort of guilt burned inside him as if he had swallowed a very hot potato that wouldn’t cool down. He let the tears come, and just knelt there and cried for about ten minutes.

Then he put the Indian back in the cupboard and locked the door because he couldn’t bear to look at him any longer.

That night at supper he couldn’t eat anything, and he couldn’t talk. His father touched Omri’s face and said it felt very hot. His mother took him upstairs and put him to bed and oddly enough he didn’t object. He didn’t know if he was ill or not, but he felt so bad he was quite glad to be made a fuss of. Not that that improved the basic situation, but it was some comfort.

“What is it, Omri? Tell me,” coaxed his mother. She stroked his hair and looked at him tenderly and questioningly, and he nearly told her everything, but then he suddenly rolled over on his face.