They Cage the Animals at Night Read online

  Suddenly I became aware of the laughter from the direction of the boys. I was afraid to look, but I did. To my surprise, they weren’t laughing at me. They were bouncing on and off the wire fence. The whole yard of kids was now bouncing.

  “Stop that! Stop that!” screamed a nun as she came running from the building. “Stop that!”

  The whole yard was in an uproar of laughter. As the nun approached, the kids began bouncing off the fence and running in all directions. The laughter continued as the nun chased us into the building.

  I sat on the curb of the playroom. I watched Butch ride the big purple bike and wondered how long he’d be in this place. I was hoping he’d go home or something so I could ride the bike. I spotted Stacy enter from the far side of the room. I crawled away from the curb and around to the back of one of the pillars. The last thing I wanted was for her to get talking to me again.

  “Hello. What are you doing back here? Are you playing a game or something?” Stacy looked around to see who I might be playing with.

  “No,” I said. “I was just thinking.”

  “About what?” she asked as she plopped down next to me.

  “Oh, gosh.”

  “There, you said it again. Why do you say, ‘Oh, gosh’?”

  “Uh…I like to say, ‘Oh, gosh.’”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, gosh!”

  “I think you’re embarrassed. Are you embarrassed?”

  I felt the redness approaching. “I’m not embarrassed,” I fibbed. “I’m just not used to talking to girls. That’s all.”

  “Is it different than talking to boys?”

  “Oh, gosh!” I got to my feet. “I’m tired now. I’m going to go to bed.” I began to back away from her toward the curb. “I’ll see ya.”

  “All right,” she said quietly.

  I dashed across the raceway and opened the door marked “Boys.” I looked back. She was still on the floor where I left her. There was disappointment on her face, almost a sadness. I saw in her what I felt in me when Mark told me he didn’t want to play with me. I closed the door. I took a deep breath and began to make my way around the room back to Stacy. I thought if I went the long way, I might gather some courage on the way. I reached her.

  “You came back!”

  I didn’t explain why, and she didn’t ask me. I let her do the talking. She was good at that. She told me she lived in Elmhurst, Queens. She said her real father left her mother when she was a little baby.

  “Mom’s new husband talked her into putting me in this place. I don’t think he likes me very much.”

  I was half-listening and half-watching out for anyone who might be watching me. Suddenly she leaned over and kissed me. She jumped to her feet, dashed across the floor, and slipped through the door marked “Girls.” I sat on the floor with my hand covering my cheek. The redness I expected to overcome me never came. I got to my feet. Slowly I retraced my steps the long way around the room.

  The dormitory was dark and empty. I took the things from the chest alongside bed twenty-seven and entered the bathroom. I felt as though I were in slow motion. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with me. I changed, washed only one half of my face, and then floated out of the bathroom.

  The dormitory was now lighted, and some of the kids were coming in. The line began forming at Sister Clair’s desk, and I joined it. I waited with the others as the line grew longer. Mark joined the line. I looked in his direction, but he was looking down at the floor. Sister Clair was late, and the line was getting long. Some of the bigger kids started coming into the room.

  “Look at the babies waiting for their dollies,” Butch shouted.

  His remark caused some of the kids to leave the line and their fuzzy friends. I didn’t; Mark didn’t.

  “Hey, fatso! I didn’t know you had enough room in your bed for a dolly,” Butch taunted someone behind me. It wasn’t hard for me to guess who it was.

  I turned my head. Mark ignored Butch as usual, but Butch wasn’t about to give up.

  “What’s the matter, four-eyes? Can’t you hear me talking to you?”

  Mark again looked down at the floor. Some of the kids began laughing, while others left the line. I stayed.

  “Hey, fatso! What are you looking down there for? Can’t you find your feet?”

  The room filled with mean laughter. I wanted to punch Butch in the nose, but I remembered what Mark had told me: “Just ignore him and he’ll go away.” I kept my eyes on Mark. He was hurting and I knew it. He wanted his little animal as much as I wanted mine. He stayed and took Butch’s insults.

  “Maybe, dumbo, if you got a really skinny dolly…”

  Butch didn’t have to finish his remark. He had won. In a roar of laughter, Mark left the line. I watched him make his way toward his bed, his head hung low.

  “Where are you going, four-eyes? The dollies are over here in this direction,” Butch continued, to the laughter of all the others.

  I leapt from my place onto Butch’s back, knocking him to the floor. My advantage of surprise lasted but a few seconds. I threw as many punches as I could before he grabbed my arm. In one motion he flipped me over his head and landed on my chest. He was the strongest kid in here. As my body slammed against the floor, he punched me in the eye. I saw stars. He was about to take a second shot when Sister Frances grabbed his arm and yanked him to his feet. She slapped her hand flush against his ear and dragged him to his bed. I was just getting to my feet when she returned for me. The blow to my ear was deafening. The next moment, I crashed into the top bars of bed twenty-seven.

  I untwisted my body, worked my way down under the blanket, and pulled it up over my head. I hurt. My eye and my ear were killing me. I lay beneath the covers for a long time. I wondered if I had made a mistake. I was in pain, Butch was going to kill me tomorrow, and worst of all, I didn’t get Doggie. But then again, friend or no friend, rule or no rule, I couldn’t let Mark be hurt like that and not do anything about it.

  Some time passed before I poked my head from beneath the covers. The room was quiet and dark. The gray light from the streetlamp made its way through the barred window across my bedcover. The ceiling was gone and I was alone.

  Suddenly there was a tug at my sleeve. I pulled my arm from the tug but recognized the hair sticking straight up from the top of Mark’s head.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Stop talking down there!” Sister Frances shouted from her desk.

  I whispered, “What are you doing here?”

  Mark’s head turned almost a full circle, checking for safety. He whispered, “I want to thank you…for sticking up for me.”

  “Ah! It’s nothing. That’s what friennns…” I gulped down the last words. “It’s nothing.”

  “No. You’re right. That’s what friends are for!”

  “But we’re not friends,” I said.

  “Says you!” He spoke louder, then slapped his hand over his mouth. “Says you,” he whispered. “Maybe it’s not the smartest thing to do. You know…have a friend in here. But I’d like to try it.”

  A tear began to sting my eye. I wiped it away.

  “Let’s shake on it.” He extended his hand to me.

  I brought my hand around to meet his, but it wasn’t there. He had replaced his hand with Doggie. I grabbed him up and hugged him.

  “How’d you get him?”

  “Well…I got him instead of Brownie. He’s my bear.”

  “But, Mark!”

  “But, nothing! Brownie’ll understand.” He paused. “That’s what friends are for.” He slipped down beneath the bed and was gone.

  I held Doggie close to my face. One minute I had had no friends, and the next minute I had two.

  For the next few days I wore my black eye proudly. Butch didn’t kill me after all. In fact, he didn’t say a single word to me. He still picked on as many kids as he could, but he seemed to leave Mark and me alone.

  Stacy wanted to kiss my eye when she saw it. “T
o make it better,” she said. But I didn’t want her to. First, I couldn’t let her keep on kissing me, and second, I didn’t want it to get better. I kind of liked having a black eye.

  I was in the playroom with Mark when I saw a kid get off the big purple bike.

  “I’m going to take a ride,” I said.

  “Oh, boy!” Mark quickly looked around the room for Butch.

  I didn’t tell Mark, but I had already done that. I climbed aboard the bike. It was beautiful. It rode smoothly and quickly. On the second turn around the floor, Butch came into the room. He spotted me on the bike and started toward me. My heart pounded. He reached the edge of the curb, then sat down. My relief forced me to smile. He smiled back.

  In the weeks that followed, Butch, Fuzzy, and Bryan—they were two of the boys who hung around with him—spent more and more time with Mark and me. We played games together, like punchball and tag. And when it rained we stayed inside and played Steal the Old Man’s Pack and Slap Jack. Butch stopped picking on almost all the kids, but kept on telling everyone how tough he was. We let him talk.

  Butch, Fuzzy, Mark, and I were in the dayroom one afternoon, playing Go Fish when the first snow started to fall.

  “Look, it’s snowing!” somebody yelled out.

  We were all excited. Mark told us about a snowman he had built one year. Fuzzy had to top him, and told us he built a bigger one. Butch said he made the biggest one, and that was the end of that. I told them about sliding down Teibout Avenue on a crushed-up cardboard box I got from the A&P. They listened intently. They were all lifers and had never slid down any kind of a hill. We watched the silence of the falling snow.

  “Jennings!” Sister Frances called out.

  My goose bumps faded by the time I reached her. She took me from the room and brought me to the same front hall I’d been in about a thousand years earlier, when my mother had left me here. Maybe she’d come back?

  “Is my mother here?”

  Sister Frances didn’t answer. My excitement grew. She opened the door next to the benches with the red cushions. Mom wasn’t there.

  In the far corner of the office behind a desk was a nun I had never seen before. Alongside her desk sat a man and a lady. The man had a pudgy little face, a mustache, and wore glasses. He was bald on top of his head but had curly brown hair on the sides. He wore a dark overcoat and a gray suit. He was holding his hat in his hands. Well, he wasn’t exactly holding it, he was more like crushing it. He was twirling it all around his fingers. The lady had brownish-gray hair and wore a giant black hat tilted to one side. There were large flowers all over it. It looked awful. Her face was pasty, with gobs of red stuff plopped on each cheek. She wore a dark green coat and a blue dress with large white polka dots all over it.

  “Jennings,” the nun at the desk said “This is Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter. They’re going to take you home with them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they like you. They want you to live with them for a while.” She smiled.

  “But…but…they don’t know me. How could they like me? I want to stay with Mark.”

  “You’re going!” She stood up. She wasn’t smiling anymore.

  “How will my mother know where I am?”

  “I’ll tell her!” she snapped. She nodded to Sister Frances, then turned to me. “Get your things!”

  Sister Frances took me into the dormitory and left me. She told me to hurry up and to meet her in the hall. I fought back the tears as I took all the things out of the cabinet alongside bed number twenty-seven. I stuffed them into the laundry bag. As I approached the doorway to the hall, I stopped. If I go out there, I won’t get a chance to say good-bye to Mark or Stacy or anyone. I left through the rear door.

  I burst into the dayroom. Mark was still by the glass doors watching the snow. Mark’s head turned as the door slammed into the wall. He saw me and knew. He turned back toward the snow.

  “I’m leaving,” I mumbled.

  “Yeah.”

  I extended my hand to his shoulder. He didn’t look up at me, but he took my hand. He shook it.

  “Are you going home?” he asked, as though he were talking to the glass doors and the snow.

  “No. I’m being lent out.” My lip quivered, as did my voice.

  Mark didn’t say anything, he just sat there watching the gently falling snow.

  “Will you say good-bye to Stacy and the others for me?”

  He nodded his head. I stood there wanting to say more, but I couldn’t. I slowly backed my way to the door and slipped out. Mark never looked back.

  Sister Frances took me to the front hall and the Carpenters. They led the way down the now snow-covered steps, and I followed.

  “Wait!” I shouted. I turned back toward Sister Frances. “Sister, I want Doggie! Can I have Doggie?”

  “No! He doesn’t belong to you.” She started in the door.

  “Oh, yes! He does! He does!” I grabbed her around the waist. “Oh, please, Sister, let me take him!” I cried.

  “No! He belongs to all the children.”

  “No, Sister, he doesn’t! He belongs to me. Nobody else wants him but me. Oh, please.”

  “No!” She pushed me away and slammed the door.

  Doggie was gone. I felt the worst pain I had ever known. It wouldn’t go away. The tears did not come to my eyes. I hurt too much.

  Mr. Carpenter put me in the backseat of the car and we drove off. They may or may not have spoken to me; I could hear nothing. My friend Doggie was gone, and I never even got a chance to say good-bye to him for keeps.

  3

  The windshield wipers squeaked and thumped, hissed and clicked. The strange collection of sounds lulled me into a sort of half-stare and half-sleep.

  “Here we are,” Mr. Carpenter said.

  I sat up as the car pulled to the curb. I tried looking through the fogged-up window, but I couldn’t see anything. I took a swipe at the window.

  “Keep your dirty hands off the glass!” Mrs. Carpenter snarled.

  “Oh, leave him alone. He isn’t hurting anything. Come on, Jenkins, let’s go.”

  The street was quiet. Everything in sight was covered by a pretty white blanket of snow. Even the garbage cans in front of all the houses along the street had little white hats on them. Mr. Carpenter opened a black metal gate and passed through it. Mrs. Carpenter followed him, and I followed her. We walked around to the back of the house, climbed the stairs, and went in through the kitchen.

  The room was warm and quiet. There was a small lamp lit over a large kitchen table. The room was sparkling clean.

  Mrs. Carpenter gave me some paper and a pencil and told me to sit at the small table.

  “My table” was a small wooden table with a chair to match. It was across the room from the large table with the lamp above it. She switched on the ceiling light and started fixing a pot of coffee. The clock above the stove said 5:45 p.m.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “No!” She was abrupt. “You’ll break something, and then where will my profits go?”

  I didn’t understand the profits part, but I did understand the “no.”

  When she finished she turned off the ceiling light and left the room. I could hear whispers through the closed door. I was sure they were talking about me.

  The room grew darker as the daylight faded. What I thought was a little light from the lamp above the big table wasn’t any light at all. It only lit the area of the table. The walls with sink, stove, and icebox were in the dark shadows. So was I.

  Mrs. Carpenter came back into the kitchen and turned on the ceiling light. She began to prepare dinner. Mr. Carpenter came in and sat at the big table. He unwrinkled a newspaper and started to read.

  “There’s a Bogart film at the King’s Park,” he told her. “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

  “You know I can’t go anywhere with this damn kid around.”

  “Well, who the hell asked you to take him?” He dropped his paper to the ta
ble.

  “You know we need the money,” she said. Then she added sarcastically, “You certainly don’t earn enough. And I can’t work…sickly as I am.”

  He grunted, then continued to read his paper. She served him a sandwich.

  “Isn’t he going to eat?” he asked.

  I perked up. I was hungry. I wouldn’t mind one of those sandwiches.

  “No. He told me he ate plenty before he left the home.”

  She lied, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t like this lady, I didn’t like her at all.

  After Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter left the kitchen, I drew a picture of Doggie. I put a hat and a scarf on him. I made all the dots for the snowflakes, and then drew some trees around him. It was the first time Doggie was ever away from his cage and out of the home. I kissed him.

  Light flooded the room. Mrs. Carpenter came in and yanked me from the chair. She dragged me through the dining room and a foyer, then pushed me into a bedroom.

  The room was small and bare. There was a bed with a brown blanket and no pillow, a chest like the one at the home, and a chair by the window. The window had no bars. I sat on the bed as Mrs. Carpenter switched off the light. I said good night to a closing door.

  I lay alone in the dark of the small room. It was the first time in my life I was ever alone in a bedroom. I was frightened. Not afraid of the dark or anything like that, just afraid. When I was at home with Mom and my brothers, Larry, Gene, and I slept in one bed, while George and Walter slept in another. We all slept in the same room. I remember how we used to lie in the dark and play alphabet games. Someone would pick a topic like cars or something, and we would all try to name things in that topic with the letters of the alphabet. Gene never played. He always fell asleep right away. I never got much past C or D myself, but it was fun. I sure wish my brothers were here now to play with me.

  “A. Let’s see, now…uh. Austin-Healy. B. Uh…uh…Buick! C…”

  In the morning, I dressed and left the bedroom for the kitchen. I passed a staircase in the hall, then stopped. With Mrs. Carpenter in the kitchen, I thought, this might be a good time to explore. I climbed the stairs.