The Seventeenth Swap (2 page)

“I asked Willy Chung. He always knows stuff like that.” Eric snipped his way around the shoe-store ad and held it up. “Where shall I put your picture?”

“Pin it up there on the window curtain where I can see it, okay?”

Eric obliged, feeling uncomfortable, even a little cross—not at Jimmy but at the shoe-store people for showing him one more thing he couldn't have. “Easy to make things look good in a picture,” he told Jimmy carelessly. “At that price they'd probably wear out next week!”

Jimmy gave one of his sudden giggles. “Not if they were mine! They'd last forever if they were mine!”

Eric found nothing whatever to say to this, since it was true, but hardly a thing to giggle about—unless you were Jimmy, who seemed to regard his useless legs as some sort of bad joke that you either jeered at or ignored. Feeling rather shocked, and wishing he'd kept his mouth shut, Eric gathered the rest of the newspaper into a pile on the table and began on the first paper airplane.

“Is Willy Chung a friend of yours from school?” asked Jimmy, watching.

Eric caught a note of something—not quite envy, more like hunger—in Jimmy's voice, and didn't say, “My best friend,” but merely nodded. There were a lot of things it would be mean to say to Jimmy—whether Jimmy giggled at them or not. Eric blundered into a few more every time he came. He'd always thought he and his dad were poorer than anybody; they didn't have a car or a color television or a bike—even a lousy fourth-hand bike—or any spare money, ever. But Jimmy didn't even have a best friend. He couldn't even go to school and meet anybody, not until he got strong enough so he wouldn't catch every single bug anybody else had. Last fall, when they'd tried to mainstream him in, he'd caught three colds and a strep throat right in a row, and ended up in the hospital. So now the home teacher came every morning and taught him here—which was okay in a way, Eric supposed, but home teachers didn't know the kinds of things kids learned from each other. Like how to make paper airplanes, or play poker, or tie a slip knot.

The fact was, Eric hadn't known many of those himself, until Jimmy'd started using him as a sort of Private Investigator in Charge of Finding Stuff Out. But if this kept up he was going to be the school expert on how-to-do-everything. He hoped he could remember how to make these paper airplanes. “Okay, now look, Jimmy, the first thing you do is fold your rectangle right across
here.
Like that. Then you take it and—”

“Wait—wait—lemme get some paper too!”

They made paper airplanes until they'd used up all the newspaper and had them sailing all over the room, landing on top of lampshades and each other's heads or under the bookcase or nose-down in Jimmy's
empty orange-juice glass, and Jimmy was laughing so hard and getting so excited and so flushed over the cheekbones that Eric, who had his instructions from Jimmy's mother, thought it was time to call a halt. Besides, he was tired retrieving. He climbed on a chair to recover a last plane from the top of the window curtains, sailed it down into Jimmy's lap, and said, “Okay, let's ground 'em for refueling. How about refueling you? Want some more orange juice? Or you could have milk, if you're tired of juice.”

Jimmy didn't answer. He was gazing past Eric's legs at the pinned-up picture on the curtains the way Eric might have gazed at the biggest chocolate sundae in the world.

Eric looked at his face a minute, feeling cornered. Then he jumped down and walked briskly out to the kitchen and poured two glasses of milk and opened cupboard doors until he found the plate of cookies, and carried the tray back to the living room. “Here you are. Drink up,” he said.

Jimmy said, “Thanks,” absently, reached for his milk, then focused. “Hey! How did you know there were cookies?”

“Smelled 'em when I came in the door,” Eric confessed with a grin.

Jimmy grinned too. “I was supposed to tell you.” Then, as usual, he darted up this diverting sidepath. “You could smell them? Honest? You've got a good nose! Mom made them early this morning. Could you tell they were chocolate chip?”

“I dunno.” Eric tried to think back. “I don't think so. Your hall just smelled different. Maybe I just guessed it was cookies.”

“How does our hall smell usually? No, tell me!” he insisted as Eric made waving, don't-ask-me motions. “I can't smell it at all because I'm here all the time. Does it smell like my medicine?”

The FBI could have used Jimmy. He was great at extracting information you didn't even know you had. Eric sighed, walked into the little entry hall, sniffed in a deep, concentrated breath and tried to analyze it. “Rubbing alcohol. Burnt toast. Something sort of sharp and lemony—”

“That's the dish detergent.”

“And something else only I don't know how to say it. Something sort of brownish-purple.”

“That's my medicine!” Jimmy exclaimed in triumph. “It must smell just like it tastes. What does
your
apartment smell like?”

Eric told him as well as he could. Mostly, he realized, it smelled of being closed up since breakfast and nobody being there—a lonesome smell. It made him feel sort of sorry for their apartment, which was a silly thought even for
him.

“I'd like to collect smells,” Jimmy announced.

“Collect
them?”

“Sure. You could bring me some things to smell every Monday and Wednesday and Saturday, and Mom would bring me some others, and Dad could find things on his sales trips. Lots of people collect things, don't they? Even funny things, like old buttons. Mom told me.”

“Oh. Well, yeah, they do. Willy Chung collects stamps. That's more usual, I guess. But I know a girl who collects cocktail picks—little plastic things they put in grown-ups' drinks,” he explained before Jimmy
could ask him what they were. “That's pretty funny. And Mr. Lee at the shoe-repair place collects cigar boxes.” Then he wished he hadn't mentioned shoes, because Jimmy's eyes turned instantly to the picture of the cowboy boots.

“I'll bet those'd smell good,” Jimmy said. “New leather! Like Dad's belt.”

“New one hundred percent vinyl, you mean,” Eric reminded him. “Like that lamp cord.”

Jimmy only laughed as if he'd made a joke.

Eric began arranging the paper airplanes in rows on the table. “Anyway,” he said idly, “your mom might buy 'em for you for your birthday.”

Jimmy looked at him in astonishment, then laughed again. “Eighteen
dollars?
Then the doctor bill or gas bill or something wouldn't get paid again, and my dad'd want to know why, and they'd have another fight, and . . . oh,
you
know.”

Eric didn't know. He didn't know anything about a life in which doctor bills arrived as regularly as gas bills, and your parents had fights. It occurred to him that there might be
some
advantages in a one-parent household. And many more in one where nobody was sick.

“What are you going to do, then?” he asked Jimmy. “About the boots?”

Jimmy shrugged blankly and said, “Nothing,” as if it were obvious. Which of course it was.

Eric couldn't get it off his mind, though. By 5:45, when he climbed back upstairs to 309, a picture of those boots actually
on
Jimmy's feet had formed in his brain and lodged there, and wouldn't go away. Feeling all hollow and grumpy about it, he put the potatoes in to bake for dinner; by the time he shut the oven door he was wondering where he could get eighteen bucks.

Immediately the sum took on gigantic proportions.
Eighteen dollars?
Besides bus fare to get down to that shoe store and back? He seldom saw even eight dollars all at once, and when he did it was already earmarked for underwear or school supplies or something. Jimmy's folks ought to buy the boots. Could just $17.99 snarl up a whole month's budget?

He knew it could. Even $7.99 could—it depended on the budget. And the month. Look at Februarys and Septembers, when Dad had to send the child-support payments to Alice—the wife he'd divorced a long time before he married Eric's mother. Eric had never even seen Alice, or his half-sister Shirley—they lived clear across the country in Rhode Island. But he knew about
them, all right. And he'd cheer as loud as anybody—in fact louder—when Shirley finally graduated from college, if she ever did, and he and Dad could stop paying half her bills.

Doctor bills—for somebody like Jimmy Nicholson—were probably even worse than child-support payments. And they came
every
month.

Okay. So neither Jimmy's mother nor his dad could buy Jimmy any dumb, useless cowboy boots. It was a silly idea anyway. So forget it, Eric ordered himself.

But Jimmy
wanted
them so much.

Eric wandered into the living room and dropped down into Dad's big chair in front of the little black-and-white TV, but he didn't turn it on, just sat there scowling at it, thinking, “But they're useless!” “But he wants them!” And all at once he understood. Jimmy wanted the boots because they
were
useless. Or rather, because his feet were. Such feet were no good at all for walking or running or even standing on. But at least they might look good. Look like real
feet.
Like cowboy feet—extra-fancy, extra-gaudy, bright red with black designs on. Wow.

At that point, Eric stopped fighting it, and started figuring.

His job paid fifty cents an hour plus all the cookies he could eat when there were any. About three bucks a week. It wasn't the best job he'd ever had but it was the best available at this time of year before lawns needed mowing or there was anything ripe to pick. You had to have a bike for practically anything else people'd hire a sixth-grader for—it was a fact of life he'd had to learn to live with. Besides, three bucks a week was all Jimmy's mother could afford. Trouble
was, most of it had to go for notebook paper and stuff like that, because whenever he started earning, his allowance stopped. That had been his own idea. Dad hadn't said much—he never did—but he'd been surprised and grateful and proud of Eric, Eric could tell. There was no going back on the arrangement now. He could maybe save out a dollar a week. Big deal. The sale would be over and the boots on some other kid's feet long before he could save eighteen dollars that way.

So what else was there? How, Eric asked himself, did you get extra money when you needed a whole bunch, fast?

You sold something, came the answer as he glanced automatically toward the side wall where the big walnut bookcase used to stand. There were three narrow shelves there now, made of scrap lumber and cinder blocks, and a stack of leftover books on the table. There was a cheap digital clock on the table, too, instead of the big Seth Thomas that used to chime every fifteen minutes and bong the hour in a deep bass voice. It had been gone for years.

Eric got up and walked into his bedroom, wondering what he had to sell. His furniture was the kind made of pressed wood wherever it wouldn't show; the drawers stuck, the mattress and springs sagged in mismatched spots, and one leg of the desk was a chunk of dowel. He was used to it all and even fond of it, especially the desk, but probably nobody else would have it as a gift. Besides, it wasn't really his to sell—it belonged to Dad.

Except for his clothes and the checkers set and a few dilapidated little-kid books and toys, only three
things really belonged to him: his moss agate, his triangle stamp, and his mother's thimble. Eric worked open the bottom desk drawer and got out the little Chinesey box that held them. He supposed the box was really his, too—Mrs. Wade had brought him some peppermints in it one time and never asked for it back. It was worn red lacquer on the outside, with a dimming gold design in the middle of the lid and a small chip off one lower edge. The inside was black lacquer, shiny and good as new.

Eric took out the agate—he kept it wrapped in a scrap of tissue paper so it wouldn't roll—and set it aside. It was a good enough small agate, smoke-colored with a clear pattern of black moss in its depths, but he doubted if anybody would pay anything for it, or have the least interest in it. To him it was a priceless treasure. All he had to do was look at it and he was back on a white beach on a sunny, blowy day long ago—after his mother had died because he was maybe five years old, but before Dad lost the library job—running and running with a kite while Dad ran alongside shouting encouragement. Later he'd built a huge sand castle with a real moat around it and a handkerchief-flag on top, still later devoured slightly sandy hot dogs beside a driftwood fire, and finally walked slowly along a graveled road to the old station wagon, staring hard down into the gravel because Dad had said there were sometimes agates mixed in. And he had
found
one—this one. It was the totally magic end to a totally magic day, the only vacation he and Dad had ever taken. The station wagon had to be sold shortly after, when the library job went; as Dad said, they didn't really need a car.

He stuck his thumb into the box to take out the thimble—like Jack Horner pulling out the plum—and for a reluctant moment studied it. It really might be worth something—a few dollars anyway. Just above the wreath of little silver flowers around its edge, there were tiny flat squares that said “Sterling” and “Germany” when you looked at them through a magnifying glass. You could sell things made of sterling silver. The trouble was, this was the only thing he had left of his mother. Not that he remembered her; she had died before he was three years old. But sometimes—only sometimes—when he picked up this thimble, he suddenly saw thin, quick fingers and heard a certain delighted-sounding laugh. It hadn't happened when he picked it up today. He realized it happened very seldom now. Long ago—when the thimble came clear down to his knuckle, loose enough to twirl, instead of just perching on the end of his thumb like this—he could hear that laugh whenever he liked, just by staring at the silver flowers. He supposed he would soon quit hearing it at all. Then he supposed he could sell the thimble, and it wouldn't matter.