Charlie's Key (7 page)

She pulls a hand across her face, like yesterday, to get her hair outta her eyes. A finger gets caught in some that’s blown in between her lips. They’re open in just a bit of a smile—a tiny smile like one you might smile on a Sunday, thinking about something fun you did on a Saturday.

She loops the hair behind her ear and puts her hands in her back pockets.

“But you’re not, are you?” she says. “Blind?”

“No. I just thought maybe you were waving to somebody else.”

“To your friend?”

“Yeah. To Frankie.”

“Frankie,” she says, like she’s been wondering what his name was. “Frankie looks like a tough guy.”

“Pretty tough.”

“But I guess most of you guys over there are pretty tough.”

“Pretty tough,” I say. Again.

“Are you pretty tough?”

“Tough enough.”

“Well, Tough Enough, I’m Estelle.”

“That’s a nice name.”

“It is. That’s why I tell people it’s my name sometimes— just to hear it. But it’s not really my name. I’m really Clare.”

“That’s nice too.”

“I hate it,” she says, and all of a sudden that little smile goes away.

“Anyway,” Clare says, “what do they call you?”

“Charlie.”

“Well, Charlie,” she says, taking a hand outta her back pocket and putting three fingers through the chain link. “Nice to meet you.”

I reach out and give them a quick shake. They’re about the warmest thing I ever felt. I want to hold on longer but pull back, because it’s hurting.

“Sore fingers?” she asks, seeing me wince.

“Yeah,” I say. “Jammed ’em in a door.”

“That hurts,” she says. She’s not looking at me anymore— instead she’s looking off behind me, off to nowheres.

“Not as much as a burn hurts though,” she says after a bit. “You ever have a burn?” she asks, looking back at me.

“Sure,” I say. “I been burned a bunch of times.” I say it to sound tough, but as soon as I say it, I figure it makes me sound stupid more than anything.

“Ever get one on purpose?” she asks.

“On purpose?”

I let out a little laugh at that, which, as soon as I do, I wish I hadn’t.

“No. By accident.”

“Some girls do it on purpose here. With cigarettes. Or they cut themselves.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything.

“You ever do that? Cut yourself?”

“Not on purpose. That what you mean?”

“That’s what I mean. I don’t either—it’s just some of the girls here do. That’s why some of them are here. But not me.”

She wraps her arms around herself like she’s cold, which she could be since the wind is blowing.

“What are you in for?” she says.

“I’m not really in.”

She gives a laugh this time. “You’re just visiting?”

“Sorta. I’m just staying here for a little bit.”

“Because you’re just a little bit bad?”

“’Cause I’m waiting for a foster home, and there’s nowhere else to put me.”

Clare gets ready to say something to that when a woman calls out from up the hill.

“Clare,” she calls. “Clare Dalton. You know the rules.”

Clare looks at me and gives her eyes a big roll. They’re green, like the ocean some days.

“We’re not supposed to talk to the boys,” she says, turning round to walk up the hill to where the woman’s standing. She stops after a couple of steps and looks back at me.

“But I do,” she says, then turns back up the hill.

I watch Clare Dalton go till she’s gone.

TEN

The test is easy—just some story about a fireman who puts out a fire. Then there are ten questions with multiple-choice answers. Stuff like, Who is the “I” in this story: A) the man whose house burns down, B) the fireman, or C) the firehouse dog. Pretty simple. I mean, how stupid would you have to be to pick C? But I guess if you couldn’t read, maybe you’d just pick any old thing. Anyway, I could have done the whole thing in about one minute, except I had to concentrate on making my writing look like Frankie’s. But that didn’t take much time since I only had to write in his name and one little sentence at the end where it asks you to write about how you think the fireman feels after he puts out the fire. I said he felt happy, but then I thought maybe he wouldn’t feel happy exactly, since the guy whose house burnt down lost a lot of his stuff, and it’s probably not right to feel happy about something bad happening to someone else—even if you’re helping them. So I erased
happy
and wrote in
good
, which maybe is the same thing. I don’t know. Is it?

Then I remembered I shouldn’t get all the questions right, so I had to make a couple of them wrong, and that took more time than you might think. In the end I put down six right answers, left one blank and got three wrong, though I might only get two wrong, since number nine about who is the bravest guy in the story is a bit ambiguous. I figure the right answer is the fireman, but it could also be the guy who owns the house, since he doesn’t cry or freak out or anything when his house is burning down, and he gets his wife and kids out okay before the fire truck even shows up. So he’s pretty brave, I think. And the fireman is only doing what he gets paid to do.

I like that word,
ambiguous
. It’s Latin, like a lot of words are.
Ambi
—that’s the root—it means “both ways.” I read that in a dictionary, which is something I like to read every once in a while. Really, I do. First time I read one was at school with Robert, and I only read it because he told me it had swear words in it. I didn’t believe him until he showed me
fuck
, right there between
fuchsite
and
fucoid
. So right away Robert wanted to look up a bunch of other words, like
prick
and
tits
, and they were there, too, right there in this big old
Shorter Oxford Dictionary
—which isn’t very short—sitting in the middle of the library at school, looking all respectable and heavy and full of words you’d get expelled for saying in class. Robert kept wanting to look up more dirty words, but I wanted to look up
fuchsite
, which is a green chromium-containing variety of muscovite. But who knows what muscovite is? So I look that up, and it’s a potassium-containing mica, which I also had to look up. That’s how it is with a dictionary—once you start looking up one word, you gotta look up another one and another one—like eating chips, but with your mind.

Only trouble was, after Robert told everybody about the words in there, a couple of kids started saying them to the teachers, and when the teachers got mad, the kids would say, “I learned ’em in the dictionary.” One kid even said it to the principal.

Not long after that, the big old dictionary turned up gone, and a new one took its place. It had a picture of a jet on the front and no dirty words inside. Some note got sent home to parents about it. And my dad, he went out and bought me a big dictionary for myself, even though it wasn’t my birthday or anything.

“You look up whatever words you want,” he told me. “It’s good to know what things mean. Makes it tougher for people to trick you.”

Truth is, I’ll read about anything—even stuff I won’t ever do, like how to gap a spark plug or how to make Rice Krispies squares. I just like reading. So this test of Frankie’s would have only taken me two minutes except for all the stuff I had to think about. Anyway, I got it finished and shoved it back inside the tube just before lights-out. Then I thought about Clare for a bit, how her fingers felt when I touched them, how she asked about my hand. Then I fell asleep.

This morning at breakfast everything went like Frankie said. I left the roll on my tray and Frankie got it without anybody noticing. I didn’t see him again until lunch, out at the Catwalk. Soon as he saw me come round the corner, he held out the test, a big smile on his face.

“Six outta ten,” he says, slapping me on the back. “This is my ticket outta here, thanks to you.”

I take the test from him and look at number nine, about the hero. I chose the guy whose house burned down, which is marked wrong.

“We’re even now?” I say, handing it back.

“Even.”

“So…,” I say.

“So I owes you one,” says Frankie. “Ask away.”

“It’s not that big a favor. It’s just I’m wondering if you know anything about my family—my dad and his brother.”

“You don’t know nothing about Nick Sykes?” says Frankie. He’s squinting at me, and not because there’s smoke in his eyes.

“I didn’t even know my dad had a brother till last week.”

“Like shit.”

“It’s true. He never told me about his brother, or his mom and dad, or anybody. Honest.”

Frankie looks at me a good long while.

“So how’d you know about ’em now?”

“From some guy with Child Services. Dez somebody—”

“Dezzy boy,” says Frankie. “And what did Dezzy boy have to say about Nick Sykes? Nothing good, I’m guessing.”

“Nothing good or bad. Just that he couldn’t look after me right now, but that maybe some old aunt might be able to.”

“I don’t know nothing about any old aunt,” says Frankie. “But I guess he’s right about Nick not being able to take you in.”

“How come?”

“’Cause he’s inside. Locked up.”

“In prison?”

Frankie nods.

“What’d he do?”

Frankie puts his face in his hands to light up a smoke.

“Murder,” he says in a puff.

“He killed somebody?”

“Two somebodies.”

“My uncle? Killed two people?”

“That they know about,” says Frankie. “It was a long time ago—’fore I were born. I only knows about it ’cause the old man used to talk about the Sykes when he were drinking— telling stories about how they was the baddest family on the island, how everything that got stole from St. John’s to Corner Brook went through them ’fore it got shipped off to the mainland. Cops could never catch ’em, he said, ’cause they had these secret hideaways and bank accounts all over the place where they stashed their loot. But it weren’t the cops what got ’em in the end anyways.”

“What was it?”

“Fire,” says Frankie. “One night. Winter. Burned down a whole row of places up on Cook Street. Three or four people killed, ’cluding Dick and Doreen Sykes.”

“My grandparents,” I say.

“After that, your old man and his brother—Mikey and Nick—they got shipped off up to Cliffside.”

“Cliffside?”

“The orphanage—run by the Brothers. You never heard a that neither?”

I shake my head.

“Jesus, Cowboy,” says Frankie. “For a smart kid, you don’t know so much.”

“How I am supposed to know about some orphanage in Newfoundland, all the way out in Alberta?”

“Sure, it was all over the news—’bout how them pervert brothers abused the orphans, felt ’em up, screwed ’em, all that shit. You never heard about any of that?”

“I heard about stuff and the Indians, ’bout when they put them in those schools.”

“This was kind of like that, only worse,” says Frankie, “’cause them little bastards up at Cliffside didn’t have no one to even tell about it.”

“And my dad was in that place?”

“Yeah,” says Frankie. “I don’t know no details—just what the old man told me when he was cursing out the church. I know, for sure, though, that Nick was in there, ’cause that’s where he killed the Brother.”

“He killed a priest?”

“Them queers weren’t priests, exactly. They called ’em Brothers—kind of like monks, not allowed to get married and stuff. And Nicky killed one of ’em—some guy who was messin’ with him.”

I’m breathing fast now, little breaths that don’t go down into my lungs. I sit on the ground.

“Jesus, Cowboy,” says Frankie. “Don’t go fainting on me. This is old stuff happened, like, twenty years ago.”

“And my dad,” I say, looking up at Frankie. “Did he…?”

Frankie shakes his head. “He never killed nobody— nobody I ever heard about. I don’t really know. It’s all just drunk talk from my old man.”

I put my head between my knees and take a couple a deep breaths to make things stop spinning.

“I gotta find out,” I say.

“Find out what?”

“’Bout my dad—my uncle—what happened at that place.”

A thought hits me. “Is it still open?”

“What?”

“The orphanage—Cliffside—is it still open?”

I’m shouting loud enough that Frankie holds out his hand, waving me to be quiet.

“Jesus, Cowboy. Stop freaking out, will ya? It’s been closed for years, b’y.”

Then his face gets soft and he bends down to look at me.

“They can’t put you in there, Cowboy,” he says, quiet like. “It’s tore down, crushed up and hauled away. You ain’t going there.”

I’m crying but I can’t help it—I don’t care if Frankie sees me. It’s like something’s pulling at me, in a part of my chest I never knew I had. Frankie lets me cry for a bit, then pulls out another smoke.

“Want one now?”

“No,” I say. I take a big snort in and wipe my cheeks off.

“I didn’t mean to get you crying,” says Frankie.

“It’s okay.”

I take another big snort.

“Do you think…?”

I want to ask a question—another question I’m not sure if I want to know the answer to. But this one, I gotta ask.

“Do you think those Brothers—do you think they did anything to my dad?”

“I don’t know, Cowboy.”

“Maybe your dad—maybe he might know.”

Frankie shakes his head.

“Naw. You don’t want to be asking my dad about nothing. Trust me.”

“But I gotta know.”

“Guess you could google it—do one a them searches on your old man and Nicky.”

“Maybe,” I say.

“’Cept you can’t do one here—they yanked the computers last winter. Too much por-no-gra-phy.”

He gives me that sly smile.

“But the girls still got them, on the other side. Maybe you could get your girlfriend to help you—the one you was talking to yesterday.”

He gives a nod up the hill, toward the gate, and there’s Clare standing behind it.

“Worth a try,” he says and starts walking round the front. But not before he takes a good long look up at Clare, with that sly smile on his face the whole time. Right then, I don’t like him, and I don’t like him even more ’cause I can’t do anything about it.