Through the Hidden Door (2 page)

“Oh, God, save me,” I whispered for the seven-hundredth time.
Why should God save you?
answered the voice of my conscience.
You didn’t lift a finger to save that suffering dog.

High over my perspiring scalp was a ceilingful of names. Inscribed on the vaulted apse of the great hall, in silver script, were all the brave, dead Winchester boys who, unlike me, had grown to manhood and then died in the service of their country. The list went back to the War Between the States. I supposed that if I were ever drafted into the Army, I’d end up court-martialed for cowardice under fire. The toast I’d packed into my mouth churned like cement in a dishwasher. Were the Finneys having a private funeral in their backyard? I excused myself and ran to the boys’ room.

I was sick as a dog, head over the toilet bowl. The word
dog
again. Was she fighting for life in some vet’s operating room? The Finneys had no children of their own. They doted on Bonnie. And where in hell was Snowy Cobb?

Evenings, senior boys on honors are free to roam anywhere on campus until lights out. I was a senior boy on honors. My last night of it, I was positive.

Snowy Cobb was a sixth grader, two years behind us. I figured he’d be in required study hall. I glided past the study hall door like a ghost and looked in through the small wired pane. No Snowy. No Snowy in the library either.
Of course he isn’t there, you geek,
I told myself.
He broke his glasses. The lenses are half an inch thick. They’ll probably have to send out to a special ophthalmologist in Miami or Toronto or wherever he lives to get another pair. The poor kid will miss a week of work and then have to study double to catch up.

I headed into another bathroom and threw up into another toilet.
God, why can’t You turn me into somebody else forever?
I asked.
I’ll take a body with a handicap. Be a street beggar in Turkey. Somebody from a Communist country.

In the hallway I ran into Rudy. “Hey, Barney!” he said, whacking my backside. “What’s goin’ on?”

“I’m looking for Snowy, Rudy,” I said.

“Yeah? Why?”

“Rudy, we could be out of here by tomorrow night. Suspended! Expelled! Don’t you realize that? We’ve got to find out what happened to that dog.”

The next thing I knew, Rudy’s massive tanned arm hugged me close around the shoulders.

“Hey, cut it out!” I said. “I’m serious.”

“Yeah? Well,
you
cut it out, fool!” he said. “You even open your face in front of Snowy about the dog and he’ll know for damn sure who was there. You want us all to hang, you bimbo?”

“Okay, okay, Rudy!” I sputtered.

“Got it, Blothum?” Rudy teased me, not yet letting go of my collar.

“Cut out the nicknames, Rudy. And let go of me. I’m thinking of our future, for crying out loud. You want to go to a football-free high school?”

Rudy unhanded me with a warning smile. “Nobody’s gonna know,” he said. “Nobody’s gonna find out. Snowy can’t see his own dick without his glasses. We were all down at football practice at three this afternoon. Okay?”

“But how are we going to prove that, Rudy? There’s other boys. They’ll say we weren’t there. How about the coach? Mr. Redfearn won’t lie, he—”

“Look, Barney,” Rudy said like a rug salesman, “no sweat. Redfearn’s in my pocket, okay? Something happens to me and the boys? There goes his season and the conference championship. Redfearn needs me, man. No sweat.”

“I hope you’re right, Rudy.”

“Believe me, Blothum!” whispered Rudy in my ear.

Danny Damascus slipped into my room at about midnight. Naturally I hadn’t been able to sleep. I lay in a cocoon of moist sheets, a piece of fluff up my nose. My tongue felt like a wool mitten, and I was beginning a sty on my upper left lid.

“Hey, man!” said Danny cheerfully.

“I can’t thleep, Danny!” The words bubbled out of me. “I have to know what happened to the dog.”

“Barney, the dog’s okay. God’s truth. Just a few scratches. I checked it out.”

“How’d you check it out?”

“Went out the kitchen entrance. Biked downtown. Looked in Finney’s front window. Dog’s curled up in front of the fireplace. Sleeping like a baby,” said Danny. “Not even a Band-Aid on him.”

“Her!” I corrected him. “Danny, are you telling me the truth?”

“Truth! Saw it with my own eyes. So sleep, kid. Okay? And kill that goddamn speech defect before Silks yanks you in for a round of his gravel therapy!”

I thought of how much I had shared with these boys, of how close I’d been to them and all their rottenness.

I twisted around in my twisted covers. “But even so, Danny. If they find out who did it—”

“No one’s gonna listen to poor blind Snowy,” said Danny. “And the rest of the boys—they know better than to rat on us. They might get hurt. I’m a nose tackle, baby. I can hurt a lot of people, and no one’s gonna be quick enough to see. Accident. Easy. The boys know.”

Easy was how Danny drifted out of my room. I slipped to the floor in my sheet cocoon and fell asleep there.

I dreamed, oddly, of an earthquake that measured twenty on the Richter scale, in the middle of Greenfield, Massachusetts.

Not only did the whole school crumble upon itself, ivied walls and stained glass windows shattering, but it went down in a shower of flying Right Guard deodorant, video cassettes, Frequent Flyer coupons, and PC jr.’s. Top-Siders spun through the air, forever parted from their mates. J. Press blazers blazed. Navy blue rep ties with the school crest knotted themselves around the branches of our two-hundred-year-old elms, and the molten sinuses of the earth filled like candy dishes with Binaca breath spray, graphite squash racquets, and Yale sweat shirts with the sleeves carefully ripped off at the shoulder.

I woke at five, halfway under my bed. Senior boys on honors are allowed private rooms. I had one. Tomorrow, if I were still at Winchester, I’d be rooming with a lower former or maybe three of them.

I dressed in track sweats and crept downstairs. Then I trotted across the common and three miles into Greenfield, down Hancock Street to the Finneys’ house. Only an orange cat, flicking his tail from a fence top, took notice of me.

Four times I circled the house, each time trying to peer in without seeming to. Finally I hid in some juniper shrubs under the living room window, popped up, and looked in for one and a half seconds.

No collie slept by the fireplace. Nor in the familiar chintz-covered wing chairs. I’d had formal Sunday tea in that living room a dozen times with Finney and Dr. Dorothy. The collie usually growled at us boys from behind a gateleg Hitchcock table. But the collie wasn’t there either. I sprinted out of the bush and back toward campus. Since I detested jogging and only did it when the coaches forced me to, I knew I’d live on aspirin for a week.

“I’ll jog all year if it’ll make you happy, God,” I gasped, my breath steaming, tears welling in my eyes. “Please, God, let that dog live. I’ll do anything if you let that son-of-a-bitch collie live unharmed. If you help me, God, I’ll give my year’s allowance to the ASPCA. I’ll save the whales when I grow up. If there’s a next life, I’ll volunteer for a hitch as a Tibetan yak herder. Somebody has to do it and it will be me (pant), Barney Pennimen (huff), and I’ll give my yaks (puff) expensive food! I swear to God, God.”

I
NLAID MAHOGANY BOOKSHELVES LINED
Mr. Finney’s office, floor to ceiling. Scattered among the calfskin-bound volumes were Indian pots and a couple of model clipper ships. The rug was a purplish Sarouk, worth a mint, and the chairs dark squeaky leather, ancient, British, grand. In one of them sat Mr. Finney, full bellied, white eyebrowed, and smoking a pipe that had gone out. In the other, Mr. Silks, hair in place, diddled with the finial on a silver humidor.

“Sit down, Pennimen,” said Finney, pointing to an uncomfortable straight-backed chair, from which he promptly removed both his feet. The feet dropped with a thud. One leg was said to be wooden.

I tried to shut off the trembling in my hands by exchanging glances with an Indian mask with a horsehair moustache. If the mask was real, I priced it at about five hundred bucks.

“Talked to your father, Pennimen,” said Finney, emptying a dollop of black gook out of his pipe and stuffing it with long shreds of tobacco. “He hopes we can straighten this out.” Finney’s gentle blue eyes lit on mine like lasers. What awful things had he told my dad?

“So now,” Finney said, “exactly what happened yesterday afternoon, Pennimen? Think hard. One lie and you will not only be scratched from Hotchkiss next year, you’ll be out of Winchester tomorrow. Back to where the deer and the antelope play.”

I began to cry.

“Stop that!” shouted Silks. “Immediately!”

“Leave him alone, Martin,” said Finney, striking a kitchen match on the sole of his shoe. “Cry away, Pennimen. It’s emetic.”

“What’s emetic?” I managed to sob out.

“If you were to swallow a cigar butt,” he explained, “I would give you syrup of swills. Then you would be good and sick. The cigar butt would be thrown from your system, and you’d feel much, much better. Syrup of swills is an emetic. So is crying. Now. Tell me what happened without shilly-shallying around. Who threw the first stone at my dog?”

“I did. I was the only one who did,” I answered as grittily as I could, tears beginning to run down my cheeks and snot dripping from my nose.

“Come on, Pennimen. I’ll only kick you out for a good lie.” He pulled heartily on his pipe and blew out four perfect smoke rings. They would have been bull’s-eyes around my nose if we’d been playing horseshoes. “We’ve spoken to Clarence Cobb, Pennimen. His vision isn’t particularly good, and his glasses busted before he could see who the boys were, but he did tell us one thing. There were five or six boys. One of them was trying to stop the others apparently.”

Clarence,
I thought distractedly. So that’s what his real name was. “How could he tell if he had no glasses?” I asked in a sudden tenor voice. “Snowy’s as blind as a bat.”

“So he is. He is legally blind without his glasses, as a matter of fact. But his hearing’s awfully good. He told us one boy was jumping up and down yelling at the others, ‘Thtop! Thtop or we’ll get Thaturday detention!’ This boy was not throwing any stones at all. He had some good intentions. This boy could only be you, Pennimen. Who were the other boys?”

“I don’t know who they were,” I droned like a microwaved Nathan Hale.

“Pennimen, what did I say about lies?”

I wondered if he and Silks could smell me. “One lie and I’m out of here, sir.”

“That’s right. This is your last chance. Give me your right hand.”

“My hand?”

“Your hand. Put it right flat on mine. That’s it. Now look at me. That’s right. Now we’ll start off slowly. Okay?”

My God,
I thought.
The man’s a human lie detector.
But my eyes didn’t dare waver from his.

“Your name is Barney Pennimen?”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirteen and one month, sir.”

“Who are your friends here?”

My hand discharged a pint of sweat into his. “Rudy, I guess. Danny Damascus. Matt, Shawn, Brett MacRea.”

“Good. Keep your hand there on the table.” Finney wiped his palm on his pants and slapped it back under mine. “Is it true, Pennimen, that two years ago you poured a quart of vodka into your housemaster Mr. Greeves’s vaporizer while he was asleep?”

I breathed very deeply and shut my eyes. “Yes, Mr. Finney.”

“I thought so. Was that your idea?”

I wondered if the statute of limitations had run out. My hand felt like a freshly caught mackerel. “No,” I answered.

“I see. Was it true, Pennimen, that a year ago you stole the March of Dimes donation card off the counter at the Liggett drugstore and spent the money in the video game machines at the movie theater?”

“Yes, Mr. Finney, but I returned it by mail with five dollars extra put in.”

“Was stealing it your idea? Open your eyes and look at me, Pennimen.”

“No,” I answered.

“Is it true, Pennimen, that you have been seen pulling all kinds of wild mushrooms out of the ground and eating them willy-nilly because Rudy and his friends dared you to?”

Visions of past emergency-room nightmares ran by me. “Yes.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you could kill yourself eating wild fungus?”

“Yes, Mr. Finney.”

“Then why did you do it?”

I began to cry again. “I don’t know.”

“Have you ever cheated in an exam, boy?”

“No. Yes. Well. I’ve never cheated myself, but I let other boys make cheat sheets from my notes.”

“Why did you do that?”

“So they’d like me.” I began to gag. I stopped it by driving my fingernails into my palms.
You’re a human banana,
I told myself.

“By doing that, even if you don’t cheat yourself, you are robbing honest boys of top grades. Do you know that?”

“I ... I didn’t think of it that way.”

“Answer this question.”

“Yes?” I swiped at my streaming eyes and nose with my left sleeve.

“Did you throw any stones at my dog?”

“No, sir.”

“Who did?”

Sobs from me.

Finney peppered his next words one by one, like darts. “Do you think it was cruel, beastly, disgusting, Pennimen, to torture a helpless animal like that?”

I could not speak. I nodded vigorously.

“Name them, Pennimen!”

The strangling collie appeared in my mind’s eye. My stomach turned and I threw up again, right on the priceless Sarouk. Finney didn’t seem to notice. Silks’s body began to twitch like a rabbit’s nose. “Sader,” I said softly, gulping. “Damascus. Hines, Swoboda, MacRea.”

“Who threw the first stone?”

“Rudy.”

“Clean up your mess or I’ll fry your ears, Pennimen,” said Silks.

“Mr. Silks, it’ll take an hour and alcohol-based cleaning fluids. This rug is worth thirty thousand bucks,” I said.

“What are you talking about, you cheating, lying little devil?” Silks asked, standing. When Mr. Silks got angry, his face reddened from the bottom up, like a jar being filled with cherry juice.