The Short History of a Prince (35 page)

He didn’t pour his cereal. He sat with his hands folded in his lap, waiting to use his new might in the crisis. The siren would sound, not from the police station, but from some gadget in Mrs. Gamble’s apron pocket. His mother dried the pot and put it away and began to scour a frying pan, shining the copper to its original luster. Mold was overtaking the house, hairy green circles in the bread box, white patches on the oranges, a dark rot along the counter seams. The refrigerator smelled of decay, but Joyce wasn’t going to let any of her pots show the least sign of use. Years later Walter told Susan that the seven pieces in the Revere Ware collection, hanging on the rack by the stove, were Joyce’s own sweet way of wearing her heart on her sleeve.

He had planned to wait for as long as it took Mrs. Gamble to come, but after some time without any notice he got hungry. Better to eat some Cheerios, he figured, keep up his strength for the incarceration. He chewed, paused to listen, chewed. He expected a cry from the other house and the slap of footsteps down the back stairs and the brattle of the gate. She was going to pound on the McCloud door soon, of course she would. How could the neighborhood sorceress fail to sense the change over her own roof when she usually sniffed out marital problems and canine diseases before the husband had a clue, before the puppy had its first itch?

“Come over here, you little fucker,” Walter whispered to Duke when Joyce went into the bathroom. He spoke to the dog in a way that would have made Mitch laugh. “You say a word about the business to that dumb blond Sunshine next door and I’ll put you through the meat grinder.” Duke averted his eyes and curled up on the rug, his wet nose to his long, mousy hind feet. Walter could hear Mitch’s laughter in the room, and he reached across the table to touch the hand he could so easily conjure down to the pale hair between the joints and the knuckles.

When Walter walked to school that morning it was quiet all down the street. Either no one was watching or everyone was. It was hard to say. Through his first two classes he waited to be called down to the
office, to his dean, Mr. Wilson. After the accusation he would shake his head and say, “Mr. Wilson, I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It was more difficult to anticipate what he’d do when he saw Mitch, in third hour, in Geometry. How, for example, would they look at each other? Would Mitch smile coyly and pick up his pencil, and turn back once more for an affectionate glance before they had to plunge into their proofs? Should Walter go to his desk while all the students were taking their seats and squat there, and ask softly, intimately, How are you?

In World History, Walter had the horrifying thought that he’d imagined the kiss in the bushes. Was he the fool, dreaming that Mitch could love him? It had happened, he said to himself, it had! He looked at the photograph of doomed Nicholas and Alexandra in his textbook and he resolved that he would approach Mitch in math class. There was no need to waver, to be unsure. There had been frost on Walter’s upper lip the night before because of Mitch’s advances. Mitch had had the courage to make the move, and it was the least Walter could do to go to the desk and say,
The night was so cold and there was danger. Are you all right this morning?

When the bell rang at the end of second hour Walter couldn’t keep from running through the halls, running to that moment when he’d look, and he’d ask, and in return—in return wouldn’t there be a signal, unintelligible to everyone else in the room, a sign for Walter? Was it too much to hope that Mitch would hold his gaze?

Walter was still outside the class waiting when Miss Guest began the lesson. Mitch wasn’t very often late, but after yesterday, carrying the gallons of paint all those blocks, his arms would certainly be sore. He was probably standing at his locker, fumbling for the right book, readjusting his load. Miss Guest had to go to the door and ask Walter if he hadn’t heard the bell, if he didn’t realize that they had three difficult theorems to prove in thirty-five minutes.

We can’t start without Mitch, Walter wanted to say.

“Is there something the matter with you?” Miss Guest asked. “Are you unwell?”

“Am I unwell?” Walter said, tripping into the room behind her, making his way to his seat in the M section by following the usual smell of chlorine from Samantha Martin’s wet hair.

Five minutes passed and Mitch didn’t rush in with a tardy slip. Walter couldn’t find the right page, couldn’t remember what he’d done with his homework.
Where are you, Mitch?
Had the paint on Mitch’s sleeve given him away? He’d been interrogated by his mother, that was it. Walter’s pencil kept falling from his grip. Would Mitch squeal? Would he lie to save his friend? Ten minutes, fifteen, twenty, and the seat remained empty. Walter stared at a triangle Miss Guest put on the board. Good for Pythagoras out in the Italian countryside inventing his syncretistic philosophy. Music and math are related to everything under the sun. Susan plus Mitch plus Walter equals a triangle. Susan and Daniel and Mitch and Walter expands to a square. They could double-date. There would be harmony, surely what Pythagoras had in mind all along.
Where are you, Mitch?
What if Mrs. Gamble had zeroed in on Mitch, what if she’d gotten him? Walter imagined her yanking Mitch’s hair, trying to get the truth out of him. Mitch would capitulate in a minute. He would think he could withstand the torture, but Walter could tell anyone that the solid young man of Swedish-Irish extraction was sensitive, and had a low threshold for pain. He’d scream once and let everything out of the bag.

That first afternoon following the prank Walter skipped ballet class. It wasn’t only that he’d spent his el fare and his lunch money on party balloons and four gallons of paint. He could get by for a while on his birthday cash and he had a savings account at First Fidelity. He could forge Joyce’s signature on the withdrawal slip that required parental approval. It wasn’t for lack of funds that he stayed home. For one thing, he didn’t feel so good, and for another he was worried about his partner in crime. He needed to find a way to make contact, to see how the land, in all possible directions, lay. His father was at work, his brother was getting a transfusion with the girlfriend and the mother, and he must seize the day, make a plan, arrange for communication.

He wasn’t inside his own back door when the phone rang. “It’s you, it’s you, it’s you,” he whispered, running to the phone.

“Hi,” he said, breathlessly.

“What’s new?”

Mitch, Mitch, Mitch, Mitch! What was not new! He was new, Walter was new, the afternoon sunlight streaming in the kitchen was new, and so were the bushes, the hard ground and the gleamy stars.

“Any news?” Mitch persisted.

“You mean about
that?”

“No, I mean the Vietnam War. Is there still a fucking cease-fire? Is the peace holding?”

Their own signals. This was the way they would speak from now on, in code, and they’d understand each other. “All quiet,” Walter said.

“What do you mean?”

“Silent as the grave.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Kidding? Would I kid about—”

“I’ve got an earache.”

“So I thought,” Walter said. Came from not wearing a hat. He loved Mitch’s ears, loved the ridges along the top of his auricle and the fact that he had no lobes to speak of, that the pad of flesh attached so economically right to his head. “You know the old saw,” he said, ‘Always leave your campsite the way you found it’? I came home to check for bears, to air out the tent.”

Mitch hung up. The phone was dead, no good-byes, no secret sign-off. It didn’t matter. The message was delivered, the message received, it was understood, nothing further to discuss. Perfectly natural to keep it short, Walter said to himself. He’d go right to work to scrub away their tracks, get rid of the evidence. If Mitch was well he’d by all means be at Walter’s side working until the dust had settled, until the attic felt as untouched and still as it had the day before.

First he shook the hall rug over the back-porch railing, so that Mrs. Gamble could see, if she wanted, his painty fingernails, Exhibit A. He beat the rug to a slow, even nyah, nyah. No need for Mitch to have said anything else, not so much as a So long. Hang up and get on with the operation. In the attic he examined the floor, the window and the roof for splatters and spills. With some turpentine and a rag he was able to remove the handprints on the sash and the sill. They were his prints and Mitch’s prints, mixed up together on the wood, hand over hand.

The night before, he’d had a difficult time getting the paint off his fingers and sleeves in the downstairs powder room, and there’d been more trouble cleaning the sink. There was also the matter of the rag.
It seemed that the stain was going to transfer from object to object, damage after damage, Walter McCloud, the wily little perpetrator, like the Cat in the Hat. The paint under the blue rug in the attic was amazingly thick, as if it had not just spilled and dried but clotted. It was a significant amount of paint, but there wasn’t any reason Walter could think of for his parents to take up the carpet, not until they moved, when Robert retired, when Walter was long gone, off into life. He opened the window and aired the place while he sawed the large cardboard box into scores of jagged strips with a kitchen knife.

It got dark early and he quickened his pace as the light faded. He would have to make two trips to Oak Ridge’s brand-new recycling center, four blocks away, and he wanted to be done by the time the invalid and his entourage were home. The night was warmer than the last and the clouds hung low. It might snow, and he might leave tracks, coming and going and coming and going. Mrs. Gamble would have to investigate quickly as the snow got deeper and covered his traces; the double journey would make her wonder, would make her think through the logistics and the scope of their enterprise.

He sneaked out the side basement door, the only McCloud exit that commanded no view of the Gamble house. “You will heel,” Walter said to the dog. “Do you hear me?” He put the leash around his wrist and in each hand carried a shopping bag. If Mrs. Gamble let the dogs out and if she stormed at him, tried to grab him or inspect the debris in the bags, he’d give Duke orders. “You’d go for her tough neck, wouldn’t you, there’s a good pup. You’d do it for me, wouldn’t you, boy?” Walter asked kindly, as if Duke were his Old Yeller.

At the recycling center he pitched the half-empty paint cans and the strips of cardboard into a bin for glass. Misplacing the goods was probably an offense, too. But the work of a vandal had a wide range and very few limits. Walter pulled on Duke’s chain, dragging him away from a ragged grease-stained sack caught in the fence. “Do you know that I could get used to talking to you, Duke the Puke? Do you? Do you know that?” It took considerable strength to haul the dog from one end of the center to the gate, and Walter spoke to him the whole way to cheer himself on. “You’re actually my favorite one in the family now. That’s a remarkable statement, you Gorgonzola turd. You don’t even like me. You hate my guts, and I’m saying, You alone are
my special friend. But the thing is, we’re more alike than you might realize. You’re neutered and in a way I’m neutered, too. We’re both eunuchs, pal. You and me, we’re the last stop. You’re looking at a dead end, right here, buddy.”

He stopped, hearing his own terrible words in the empty lot, and he felt as if he, the loather, had crept up on regular old Walter, as if he’d bitten his own leg. He almost wished the dog had snapped at him or stood his ground, snarling at the ugly intruder. He wished he could purge himself, be sick on the asphalt or weep with great shudders. “It’s on to petty larceny,” Walter whispered to Duke. “Let’s go steal from Mommy’s purse.”

It wasn’t until the third morning, Saturday, that she came. He was in the hall upstairs, in a hurry to get to ballet class, looking through the dirty clothes for a pair of tights that were even moderately fresh. Joyce didn’t rinse out his clothes anymore, the way she used to in the old days. There were never clean things folded by category in his drawer. He used to deposit his underwear in the hamper, and a little while later he’d find a stack of briefs on his bed, the brown smears up the back gone without comment, the socks darned and mended. He belabored the point bitterly to himself as he burrowed through the hamper: his mother was going to join up with the angry, strident sisterhood, go on marches, canvass neighborhoods, take the bus to Washington to free womankind from household drudgery. The laundry was a thing of the past for Joyce McCloud. He could not find a clean shirt to save his life, the detergent barrel in the basement was empty, the lint in the dryer trap was thick as a quilt.

The Gambles’ front door clanged shut. Walter went cold, looking into the maw of the wicker basket. It was the Maplewood Avenue Medusa, her pin curls turned to snakes. She rarely used the front entrance, and he knew instinctively that the noise meant she was coming. She was on her way, to stare him down, turn him to stone. He put his hand to his throat and peered out the diamond-shaped window. If she had looked up to the second story, she might have noticed one brown eye in the blue glass of the leaded circle. Walter noted that she
was not making her way with her usual fierce stride, the one she used when she careened down the pavement cracking her bullwhip after the children in summer. She could have saved herself some time if she’d strolled across the carport and their lawn, but she was going the long route, cutting no corners in her turns. Could she be angry if she was taking such measured steps? There was a harsh wind, to judge from her bared teeth and the tilt of her body. She was not dressed to stand outside on the porch or inquire over the fence about Duke’s health. She had nothing on but a long green cardigan, her apron, her stretch pants, a man’s shirt that buttoned up to her neck and a knit cap that sat on the top of her head like a yarmulke.