The Kind One (26 page)

She was counting the money in my wallet. Now she took out a few bills, and stuffed them in the pocket of her shorts. Then she put the wallet back in the drawer, and closed it.

She looked at me again, then tiptoed out of the room. I gave her enough time to get out of the house before I got up.

I remembered having a hundred fifty bucks or so in my wallet. Now I had about half that. I was glad for her to have the money if she felt like she needed it that bad, but I was sorry she hadn’t just asked me for it.

It felt like there was another shoe that needed to drop, and it did so that night. I was in the kitchen making a sandwich when I heard a woman yelling for help out in the courtyard.

I ran outside. Mrs. Dean was in front of Sophie’s bungalow.

“Fire!” she screamed. “Oh my Lord! Fire!”

The front door was closed and no lights were on inside, but I could see an orange flickering glow through the window, and smoke was drifting out.

“Where’s Sophie?” I said.

Mrs. Dean looked blankly at me, like I was a stranger. She screamed: “Fire!”

The door wasn’t locked. I stepped into the smoky dark and called for Sophie. No answer. The bungalow was laid out just like mine. I saw the fire was in the back, in the bedroom. The door was half open, and I pushed through it.

A ferocious fire was consuming the bed.

“Sophie! Are you in here?”

I fumbled for the light switch, turned on the overhead light. The air was thick with acrid smoke. I started to cough. My eyes were burning and watering and I could hardly see.

I was afraid she was in here someplace. Maybe lying on the floor, overcome by the smoke. Maybe cowering in the closet.

I stumbled around the room, coughing and calling for her. I opened the closet and thrust my arms into a thicket of clothes.

Someone grabbed my elbow.

“She’s not in there, old boy. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

Dulwich was holding a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. I let him pull me out of the house.

The usual crowd of bungalow dwellers had gathered around to gawk. Mrs. Dean was still going nuts. Tears were streaming out of the eyes of Dulwich and me. Suddenly five red-hatted firemen came running up the seven steps from the street. They dragged a big brown hose into the house and had the fire put out in short order.

Mrs. Dean, who I never knew was so religious, repeatedly thanked the Lord when she found out the fire hadn’t spread beyond the bed, and her bungalow, though smoky and scorched and waterlogged, was intact. The firemen were leaving as Lois and Jerry showed up. They were dressed up and drunk and seemed to be returning from a night on the town.

“Where’s Sophie?” yelled Lois when she figured out the center of all the excitement was her own home. “Where’s my little girl?”

But nobody knew. Mrs. Dean wanted to know how the fire had started. Had one of them been smoking in bed?

“We been gone for hours,” said Lois, “how could we have been smoking in bed?”

“When was the last time you saw Sophie?” I said.

“Well, it was when we left here, what time was that, Jerry, a little after six?”

“It was her that done it!” said Jerry. “The little brat!”

“Oh, Jerry, you don’t mean that—”

“The hell I don’t! And now she’s run away, to escape her proper punishment!”

“But why would she set the bed on fire?” said Dulwich.

Jerry glowered furiously at Dulwich, at the same time taking a step backwards.

“I’m not talking to you no more, Mr. Dulwich. Not after being the innocent victim of your fisticuffs. You caught me by surprise that time, Mr. Dulwich, but maybe next time you won’t be so lucky!”

“Jerry,” said Mrs. Dean, “I hope you understand that you and Lois will have to pay for the damages to my unit.”

Jerry looked taken aback. “But don’t you have insurance?”

“Not for this sort of thing.”

“That little monster don’t belong to me. I’m not responsible for what she does.”

“Don’t call her that! Don’t call my daughter a monster!” said Lois, and then she took a swing at Jerry. It popped him right on the ear.

He yowled in pain. “Jumping Jesus! I think you broke my goddamn eardrum!”

“Oh, I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t mean to,” and she reached for his ear, but he batted her hand away.

“I’ve had it, Lois! You and your little brat haven’t been nothing but trouble for me! I’m getting my stuff and I’m moving out! And don’t try and stop me!”

Jerry stormed toward the bungalow as Lois wailingly tried to stop him. Their neighbors looked on, slackjawed with satisfaction, as though this had all been an especially good episode of
The Shadow
or
Amos ’n’ Andy
.

I turned to Dulwich and said: “Where’s the nearest bus station?”

   THE GREYHOUND DEPOT was downtown, on South Los Angeles Street. A terrible beggar with some kind of shiny steel contraption in place of a lower jaw sat out front; he had a straw boater with a few pennies and nickels in it. Inside, in the waiting area, several sailors were sitting around chewing gum and drinking sodas and smoking cigarettes and reading magazines. A shabbily dressed woman in a Gilligan hat was stretched out on a bench asleep, using her suitcase as a hard pillow. A guy with thinning, slicked-back hair and a checkered vest was sitting with his legs stuck out and his fingers interlaced over a plump belly. He had a smug smile, and was gazing with beady, barely open eyes at Sophie, who was sitting directly across from him.

A little suitcase sat by her feet. She was reading a book. She looked up at me as I walked over. She seemed surprised.

“Hi, Sophie.”

“Hi.”

I gave the guy in the vest a hard look.

“I think your bus is about to leave.”

He kept the smug smile. He checked his watch, said: “You’re right, friend. Thanks,” then stood up and sauntered away, taking his sweet time about it, melodiously whistling “Beautiful Dreamer.”

“Can I sit down?”

She nodded.

“What are you reading?”

She showed me the cover of the book:
Kidnapped!
by Robert Louis Stevenson.

“Is it good?”

“Yeah. How’d you know I was here?”

“Lucky guess.”

“Well—I’m not going back.”

“Don’t you wanna know if your house burned down?”

She looked away. “I didn’t do it.”

“You scared me to death, Sophie. I thought you were in there. I couldn’t see anything because of the smoke.”

She looked back at me. “You ran into a burning house…just to look for me?”

“Dulwich did too. It didn’t burn down though. Just the bed.”

Sophie gave me a sniff. “So that’s what you smell like. Smoke.”

“You already got your ticket?”

“Yeah.”

“For New York?”

“Uh huh.”

“Where’d you get the money?”

“I been saving up for it.”

“I woke up today. When you were taking the money out of my wallet.”

She regarded me with a mixture of guilt and puzzlement. “Then why didn’t you stop me?”

I shrugged.

“Well, don’t worry, I’ll pay you back. When I get a job. Every penny.”

“Look. Here’s the deal. I can’t let you go off to New York. Not now. Not by yourself.”

“How you gonna stop me?”

“I’m bigger than you.”

“But I can run faster.”

“Sophie, you’re just too young. I have a friend, she ran away from home when she was about your age. She couldn’t protect herself. Horrible things happened to her on the road.”

“Horrible things happen to me at home.”

“I know. But Dulwich and me, we live right across the courtyard. From now on, anything happens, you just come to us. And anyway, Jerry said he’s moving out.”

“When did he say that?”

“Tonight. When he and your mom came home, and found out about the fire. They got in a big fight, and your mother punched him in the ear, then he said he was leaving.”

“He always says that. Any time they fight. But he never does.”

“Like I said. We’re just across the courtyard. So what do you say we try and get a refund on your ticket? Then we’ll see if we can find a drugstore that’s still open, and I’ll buy you a chocolate soda.”

Sudden angry tears filled Sophie’s eyes. “I’m not five years old! You think you can bribe me with a chocolate soda? Why should I go anywhere with you? You were so…
mean
. You made me feel…dirty. No good.”

“Sophie, listen, I’m sorry. You’re the last person in the world I’d ever want to hurt. I mean that.”

Sophie’s knuckles were pressed against her mouth, as she fought back tears and stared off bitterly at nothing.

I offered her my handkerchief. She wiped her nose with it, then handed it back to me. Then she stood up, and picked up her suitcase.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

The nice man at the ticket counter gave her back the thirty-two fifty with no problem. She made me put five bucks in the straw hat of the jawless beggar. As we walked to my car, a Greyhound bus moved past, its engine growling as it picked up speed, and I too felt the lure of leaving, of sitting in the rumbling dark with dozens of strangers, of venturing forth into the dreaming, star-lit nation, of breaking with the present and embracing the unknown—and then I felt Sophie’s hand slip into mine.

“I’m glad you found me,” she said.

“Yeah. Me too.”

   TURNED OUT SOPHIE was wrong about Jerry. The next day the population of our bungalow court was minus one unemployed plaid-sports-coated door-to-door salesman.

To celebrate, Dulwich and I took Sophie to Capezio’s and bought her some new tap-dancing shoes, then we wandered down Hollywood Boulevard. A store had signs in the window that said: “SOUVENIRS. PRACTICAL JOKES. LIVE BABY TURTLES.” We declined to get her a baby turtle, but we agreed to buy her green trick dice that only rolled sevens and a metal ashtray in the shape of the state of Louisiana.

When we returned to La Vista Lane, a pair of workmen were taking a mattress out of a truck under the scrutiny of the grim eyeglasses of Mrs. Dean. Matilda was in Sophie’s bungalow helping Sophie’s mother clean things up, and Sophie got recruited to help; she pitched in immediately with all the cheerful enthusiasm of a shanghaied sailor.

“How about a nice glass of plonk?” said Dulwich, and though I didn’t know what plonk was, I said sure. He took a bottle of French red wine out of the cupboard. We sat in his living room sipping the plonk, and Dulwich smoked some opium; then he said it was beastly hot in here and suggested we go outside.

It was late afternoon, and the courtyard was mostly in shadow. We sat cross-legged like Indians on the grass in front of his flower bed. Tinker sat with us. Dulwich absently scratched the back of her neck. Suddenly she began producing a strange clicky kind of sound in her throat.

Her tail twitched. Her emerald eyes were fixed on a flock of sparrows that had descended on Mrs. Dean’s birdseed.

“Careful, Miss Tink,” said Dulwich. “The redoubtable Mrs. Dean is about.”

“Have you finished your story yet?”

“No. I gave it up.”

“Why?”

“Because it wasn’t any good. I really need to face the simple fact that I am not a writer. I’m not much of anything, really. I’m fortunate enough to have a modest monthly income that lets me live a very pleasant, very little sort of life. I thought when I was young that I was destined for some kind of greatness. Obviously I was absurdly mistaken.”

I felt bad for Dulwich, but didn’t know what to say. We sat there silently for a while. A cooling breeze blew across the grass. Then Dulwich said softly:

“You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“A poem. By a soldier named Sassoon.” A pause, and then: “I was reminded of the war.”

I looked around the courtyard. “Reminded by what?”

“The sparrows. I used to watch flocks of sparrows and starlings feeding on the Turkish corpses hanging in the barbed wire. Outside the mud fort at Kut.”

“What’s Kut?”

“You don’t really want to hear a lot of old war stories, do you?”

“Sure I would. If you wouldn’t mind telling me.”

“No. I wouldn’t mind.”

He took a thoughtful sip of plonk.

“Kut was a dreary little mud town on the banks of the Tigris River in Mesopotamia. We had come to Mesopotamia because the Turks had seized the facilities of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company at the port of Basra. The British Navy was in dire need of that oil, we were told, and by George we were the ones that would get it back!

“Well, Danny, the Turks made such a poor show of it at Basra that our brilliant brass hats decided it would be a good idea to push inland and capture Baghdad. So an army of 10,000 went marching forth from Basra, and the cry was: ‘Baghdad by Christmas!’

“Mesopotamia was a featureless brown immensity, and we were 10,000 specks crawling across it, and it swallowed us up. We actually made it to within sight of the fabled city of Sinbad; I can see as though they were in front of me now its turquoise minarets shining in the sun. But then we were met by a force of 20,000 Turks, they had yellow uniforms and barbarically long bayonets, whereupon the brass hats decided it would be a good idea for the British Indian Expeditionary Force to retrace its steps.

“We fell back on Kut. There it was decided we would make a stand, and await reinforcements. We were swiftly encircled by the Turks.

“A mud fort was erected northeast of the town, to serve as an observation post for our guns. I was a lieutenant in the 17th Brigade, which was given the task of defending the fort.

“The Turks shelled the fort relentlessly day after day. And then at 8:30, on Christmas Eve morning, the biggest bombardment to date began. It lasted for three hours, then all became silent. Then we began to hear something outside the fort. We looked through the loopholes in the walls, we could see nothing through the smoke and dust, but we heard the thudding of boots, and then we saw the glint of the long bayonets through the smoke and then we could see clearly the Turkish infantry running toward us.