“Yes,” said Harriet; but her voice sounded thin like it came from a long way off, or belonged to somebody else.
CHAPTER
4
——
The Mission
It was odd, thought Harriet, that she hadn’t come to hate Curtis despite what she now knew about his family. Far down the street—in the same spot she’d last run into him—he was stomping flat-footed and very purposefully along the curb. To and fro he swayed, his water pistol clenched in both fists and his roly-poly body swinging side to side.
From the ramshackle house he was guarding—low-rent apartments of some sort—a screen door banged. Two men stepped out onto the outside staircase, hefting between them a large box with a tarpaulin slung over it. The man facing Harriet was very young, and very awkward, and very shiny on the forehead; his hair stood on end and his eyes were round and shocked-looking as if he’d just stepped out of an explosion. The other, backing down first, fairly stumbled in his haste; and despite the weight of the box, and the narrowness of the stairs, and the precarious drape of the tarpaulin—which seemed liable to slide off and entangle them at any moment—they did not pause for even an instant but thumped down in an agonizing rush.
Curtis, with a mooing cry, wobbled and pointed the water pistol at them as they turned the box sideways, and edged with it to a pickup truck parked in the driveway. Another tarpaulin was draped across the truck’s bed. The older and heavier of the two men (white shirt, black trousers and open black vest) nudged it aside with his elbow, then lifted his end of the box over the side.
“Careful!” cried the young, wild-haired fellow as the crate toppled with a solid crash.
The other—his back still to Harriet—swiped his brow with a handkerchief. His gray hair was slicked back in an oily ducktail. Together, they replaced the tarpaulin and went back up the stairs again.
Harriet observed this mysterious toil without being very curious about it. Hely could entertain himself for hours by gawking at laborers on the street, and if he was really interested he went up and pestered them with questions but cargo, workmen, equipment—all this bored Harriet. What interested her was Curtis. If what Harriet had heard all her life was true, Curtis’s brothers weren’t good to him. Sometimes Curtis showed up at school with eerie red bruises on his arms and legs, bruises of a color peculiar to Curtis alone, the color of cranberry sauce. People said that he was just more delicate than he looked, and bruised easily, just like he caught cold more easily than other kids; but teachers sometimes sat him down all the same, and asked questions about the bruises—what exact questions, or Curtis’s exact answers, Harriet didn’t know; but among the children there was a vague but widespread belief that Curtis was mistreated at home. He had no parents, only the brothers and a tottery old grandmother who complained that she was too feeble to look out for him. Often he arrived at school with no jacket in winter, and no lunch money, and no lunch (or else some unwholesome lunch, like a jar of jelly, which had to be taken away from him). The grandmother’s chronic excuses about all this provoked incredulous glances among the teachers. Alexandria Academy, after all, was a private school. If Curtis’s family could afford the tuition—a thousand dollars a year—why couldn’t they afford lunch for him, and a coat?
Harriet felt sorry for Curtis—but from afar. Good-natured as he was, his broad, awkward movements made people nervous. Little kids were scared of him; girls wouldn’t sit by him on the school bus because he tried to touch their faces and clothes and hair. And though he had not yet spotted her, she dreaded to think what would happen if he did. Almost automatically, staring at the ground and feeling ashamed of herself even as she did it, she crossed to the other side of the street.
The screen door banged again and the two men came clattering back down the steps with another crate, just as a long, slick, pearl-gray Lincoln Continental swung around the corner. Mr. Dial, in profile, swept grandly past. To Harriet’s amazement, he turned into the driveway.
Having heaved the last box into the back of the truck, and pulled the tarp over it, the two men were climbing back up the stairs at a more creaky and comfortable pace. The car door opened:
The man with the gray ducktail had stiffened. When he turned Harriet saw—with a nightmarish jolt—the splashy red mark on his face, like a handprint in red paint.
“I sure am glad to run into you out here! You’re a tough man to get aholt of, Eugene,” said Mr. Dial, heading up the stairs after them uninvited. To the young, wiry man—whose eyes were rolling, as if he was about to bolt—he extended a hand. “Roy Dial, Dial Chevrolet.”
