Through the Hidden Door (4 page)

“Could have been a pet,” said Snowy. “Mr. Finney says it might have been brought by a sailor who got it in Africa in the old days. It might have been an organ-grinder’s monkey.”

“Mr. Finney! Where is Mr. Finney?”

“In town. I visit them nearly every night after supper.”

“But I thought ... They said he was sick!”

“He’s not sick. He resigned in a big huff. There was a meeting with the school trustees after he expelled Rudy and Danny and the gang. At the end of the meeting Mr. Finney ripped off his necktie, the one with the school crest, and threw it on the floor in front of all the trustees and stamped out of the room. I heard the whole thing.”

“How? Where?” I asked.

“You know the boys’ lavatory in the old building, next to the common room?”

“Yes.”

“The north wall of the boys’ room backs up on the wall of the common room. First they made me come and talk to the trustees. Bunch of old men in pinstripe suits. They asked me questions for a while. About what I saw when the dog was attacked. Then they told me to leave. I went out and stood on a john in the boys’ room and listened to the whole rest of the meeting right through the wall with a water glass over my ear.”

“Well ... go on.”

“When I was in the meeting, before I listened through the wall, I told the trustees what happened, same as I told Mr. Finney before. I told them five boys I could not see well enough to recognize were torturing the dog to death. I told them a sixth boy with a lisp was trying to stop the others. That’s all. Silks said that there were no boys here at Winchester who lisped. The men decided it was five words against one. Mine. They also said throwing a few stones at a dog was a boyish prank and not worth two cents compared to selling dope or something serious. Finney protested that he ran the school. He was headmaster and the boys had been expelled and that was that. The trustees said Finney was going to wreck Winchester’s chances of winning a conference championship in football, hockey, and baseball if Rudy and his friends weren’t on the teams. They also said that Mr. Damascus had just made the kind offer of an indoor swimming pool for Winchester. They’ve been trying to raise money for the pool for a long time. That’s when Finney stamped out of the meeting.

“When it was over, I went back in the common room. I found Finney’s tie on the floor. I know it was his because his Navy tie clip was still on it.”

I didn’t see Snowy for a week after that, although I waited for him every afternoon and evening in the library. My interest in tidal waves and volcanoes had flagged to the point of no work at all. Instead I began going through the fat volumes of Snowy’s Latin encyclopedia of natural history. Nowhere in any part of any skeleton did I find a bone even close to Snowy’s.

I next saw Snowy just before an English class. I asked him where he’d been. “Mr. Finney took the bone,” he said, “and sent it off to a friend of his at the University of Massachusetts. They have something called a carbon dating department there.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

He scrunched his nose under the bridge of his glasses. “It’s a way of finding out how old something that was once alive is. U. Mass. sent it back. They did the test as a special favor for Mr. Finney. According to the guy at U. Mass. they get a thousand and one bones sent in from all over the world every month. People find things in their backyards that they think are prehistoric saber-toothed-tiger skulls and they turn out to be groundhog’s jaws.”

“Well, go on,” I said impatiently, but I was beginning to learn that Snowy could not be rushed.

“It’s old, all right,” said Snowy. “Maybe even a hundred thousand years. They don’t really know. Their test goes back only fifty thousand years. The test could have been wrecked by the dog’s blood and saliva that soaked into the bone.”

“A hundred thousand years! Wow! What kind of bone is it?”

“Well, that’s the thing of it. The guy said it looked like a primate. Since there were no monkeys or anything ever found here in Massachusetts, it must have come from somewhere else. Been dropped, like Mr. Finney said.”

“But an organ-grinder’s monkey doesn’t have hundred-thousand-year-old leg bones,” I argued.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Snowy. “Somewhere out in California they found eighty-thousand-year-old bone knives and arrowheads. The bones are Stone Age all right, but they were only carved up by Indians many, many centuries later. The Indians just found some ancient bones lying around and whittled them. The guy at U. Mass. looked at the marks on my bone and said it had pretty likely been carved. Maybe a hundred years ago by Massachusetts Indians here, copying a human skeleton. Mr. Finney says probably some early Indian tribe used to carve human skeletons as part of a religious burial ceremony. Or maybe a sailor traded for it in China in 1850. Massachusetts had a lot of ships coming in from all over the world. Or maybe South Yemenis carved it after a monkey skeleton and a traveler brought it to Greenfield five years ago. Maybe someone else did.

“Anyway, all the stuff they’ve dug up in Africa looking for the missing link and all that junk? Well, it was discovered pretty recently, but it was there in the earth forever. This could have been buried in Australia or Lapland or Japan, then carved to look like a leg bone and brought here.”

“So we’ll never know,” I said sadly.

Snowy didn’t answer this. He held the bone up between his thumb and index finger. “It could have been carved,” he said. “But then, it got some rough sawing inside the collie’s mouth, and that could have made the scratches.”

“U. Mass. doesn’t sound very interested,” I grumbled.

Snowy dropped the bone in his shirt pocket. “Since they figured it was brought here from somewhere else and the dog could have picked it up anywhere, they said there was no sense in going around looking for the whole skeleton. Mr. Finney talked to them on the phone. They don’t have the money to study every single bone. I’m late for class,” he added, and dashed away down the hall.

For the next week and a half, until it was nearly Thanksgiving, Snowy disappeared again, but wherever he was, I guessed it had something to do with the bone. The funny little bone had me by the short hairs too, and I knew if I were to have any time at all to spend on it, I had better finish up my disaster paper. I did. I made it one hundred and nineteen pages. I don’t think Silks bothered to read it. He did not return it to me, nor did he do anything but grunt and look daggers at me when I showed up mornings to recite “If.”

The night before Thanksgiving break I lay in bed, my mind full of skeletons, labeled in Latin, all drawn before the First World War, of wild boars and antelopes, gorillas and Shetland ponies.

An idea circled my head like a fly. It had to do with Snowy’s bone, but it was fuzzy and I could not get hold of it. Was it only this, that because of a tiny unknowable little object my mind had begun to work beyond cheating rings, friends I hated? I let myself think of my father, when he and I had discovered an early Cézanne crammed in a dusty bassinet at the back of a San Luis Obispo thrift shop. Dad and I had celebrated that night, as if we’d been Balboa and son and had just discovered the Pacific Ocean. I meandered down the corridor to the john. Yes. That was just how I felt about the bone.

We had to find out where the dog had dug the bone up. There my thoughts stopped.

I threw myself back in bed, wondering how I could explain the bone to my dad.

In my bed was a body. Before I could scream, big hands slid around my throat and over my mouth, cutting off my voice. Then, wildly laughing, Rudy leapt from the bed and left the room. “Didn’t want you to forget about me!” he whispered with an awful giggle.

B
Y THANKSGIVING MORNING MY
father had settled his rage enough to talk sensibly to me.

Silks had written him every detail of my miserable record, from mushroom eating to cheating rings.

Dad picked me up at the Denver airport. In the car he said I deserved to be belted within an inch of my life, but he didn’t believe in hitting. Maybe he should have whacked me when I was young. I might have turned out better. He called me a jackass, a fool, a moron. He asked me to explain each of the dumb things I had done.

“Because I wanted them to like me, Dad,” was all I could answer to every question.

“But why? Why
them?
Why choose the lowest scum of the earth to be your friends?”

“Because they teased me when I first came. They made fun of my lisp. I knew it would go on like that for three years unless ... unless I somehow joined up with them.”

From that point Dad went on about being an absent father. What would have happened if my mother had lived. He called himself worse names than he did me.

At three thirty in the morning we decided to take a walk.

“Sky’s so big out here,” I said. “You forget what it’s like when you’re in the East.”

“Can you put this behind you, Barney?” Dad asked.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t like you going back to a place with a half-nutty prison warden like Silks in charge. I don’t like five linebackers twice your size prowling around till they wring your neck. I don’t like you being punished and not them, and it makes me puke to hear about Papa Damascus and his stinking swimming pool.”

“Can’t do much about it, can we?” I said. “I mean, I can’t switch to another school midterm with my record. I can’t live home with Uncle Edward and go to Red Arrow High.”

“Pit Bull High,” said my father.

“What?”

“They’ve changed the name. The football team’s now called the Red River Pit Bulls. They’re putting up a twelve-foot-high statue of a bullterrier between the cannons at the entrance. They wanted it on the roof, but that got voted down.”

We watched the sun come up behind the mountains.

“There’s a school in Monterey, California,” said Dad after a while. “I know the dean of students. He collects old glass. I could get you in there.”

“I’ll stay, Dad. I’ll stay where I am and keep my nose clean and somehow go to Hotchkiss.”

“You can be three thousand miles away from Silks and Sader and Damascus.”

“I’ll think it over, Dad,” I said.

We walked until dawn warmed our backs.

I covered miles that weekend, through the still streets of Lantry in jeans and an old poncho. I took a horse out and rode in the mountains. I had been far from Colorado for a long time and wasn’t completely at home there anymore.

Boarding school is where your center is, and once you’re part of it, you can only get halfway home again. Home is still where your family is. Home is still where your bedroom is. But that bedroom is changed once you leave. I’ve seen it in my house and in other boys’ houses when I’ve spent weekends. Things in our rooms are thrown away the minute we leave home. There are no month-old septic Pepsi cans lying on the desk. Piles of mildewed underwear vanish like spring snow. What our parents think are disgusting and violent posters are removed from the wall. Beds are freshly made and tucked in, and a permanent month-of-March smell pervades everything, just the way it does in a guest room. Home becomes school and school becomes home.

As I sunk my teeth into a leftover drumstick Saturday night I knew I would go back to Winchester.

Dad sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the fire. He lit a cheroot. “You won’t consider Monterey?” he asked.

I shook my head and gnawed on the turkey leg. “Monterey’s for rich basket cases who couldn’t pull a D average at Winchester,” I said. “I looked it up in the town library in Peterson’s
Secondary School Guide.”

“So does Peterson’s tell you flat out it’s for rich basket cases?”

“No, but it lists the SSAT scores for Winchester boys. Average is high six hundreds. Monterey’s average is low three hundreds. Monterey goes through grade twelve. They got only one kid out of two-hundred-and-fifty graduates into an Ivy League school last year. It’s the pits, Dad. They don’t offer Latin, and they give credits for surfing and bird watching. It’s all there in black and white, Dad. In Monterey you major in braiding lanyards.”

“God, Barney, what a snob you’ve become!”

I shrugged, selected a turkey wing, and muttered, “Once you get on the roller coaster, you stay for the whole ride, I guess.”

“It’s my stupid fault, Barney,” my dad said. “I’ve brought you up to think you have to go to Winchester, Hotchkiss, Harvard. Just because I did. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want. Maybe you’ll want to be a beach bum someday. Or a carpenter. Or even work, God forbid, nine to five for IBM.”

“I want to go back East.”

“Only because I’ve drummed it into your head for thirteen years.”

I finished the turkey wing. I found myself looking at it critically. It made me think of the little leg bone back in Massachusetts, sitting in Snowy’s locker. “Yup,” I answered him. “But it’s too late now, Dad. I’m a twenty-four-carat Yankee prep. Ice water in my veins and I sleep in button-down Oxford-cloth pajamas from L.L. Bean.”

“Those boys might try to break your kneecaps, Barney. I’m serious. I’m afraid they may kill you. These things happen.”

“I like Winchester,” I said.

“Then you’re as nutty as a fruitcake.” Dad stood. “C’mon,” he said, and led the way to his huge studio at the back of the house, where he kept and catalogued his finds.

He showed me a pair of elephant tusks that had once framed the doorway of a raja’s palace in India. There was a gold pocket watch inscribed to King Edward VII from Queen Alexandra on their wedding day in 1863. On his latest trip Dad had picked up a number of Malaga cabinets, over three hundred years old, from Spain, which he was just unpacking and inspecting. But the best he saved for last.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s what they used to call a lady’s pistol,” he told me. He put it in my hand. The butt was no bigger than my palm, and the barrel did not reach beyond my index finger. “Sterling silver veneer,” Dad added. “Found it in a collection of Victorian hats, of all things. It was sitting in the bottom of a hatbox. Got it for three pounds. Worth about eight hundred.”

The silver had been tooled with flourishes and the design of a peacock on either side of the handle. The peacock’s eye looked to be a tiny jewel.