The Dragon in the Ghetto Caper Read online

  “I’ll pay on delivery,” Mrs. Yakots said. “Harry—he’s my husband—thought I needed to get out of the house. That’s why I tried swimming. It’s worth seven fifty, that’s for sure, but I’ll take it for five. And I went also to the Garden Circle. But it was worth it to meet someone in Foxmeadow who likes dragons. That’s why I take Sister Henderson on her errands every Thursday. Harry travels all week. That means he’s only home on the weekends. You know the weekend: Saturdays and Sundays. We are mostly married on the weekends.”

  “What are you the rest of the week?”

  “Edie,” she answered. “Edie and alone.”

  “Listen,” Andy said, “I just remembered. The art show is over tomorrow. I’ll bring you my painting after school tomorrow. Will you be here?”

  “If you say so,” Mrs. Yakots answered.

  Andy said good-bye and walked home. There were a lot of things that he had to sort out. Mrs. Yakots talked a smorgasbord. He had to choose one or two things he could digest. Pink pews and Sister Henderson. Dragons and Thursdays. Edie and alone. Edie and alone. It hadn’t occurred to him that there could be an Edie and alone. A pretty, nearsighted thing like her. A grown-up pretty person like her, for God’s sake.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Andy had told Mrs. Yakots that the art show would be over, so the next day he took his dragon down from the left wall of the media center. The other pictures could stay there the rest of the week, but the show would be over for him. In place of his picture he hung a card that he had prepared at home.

  He carried his painting on the bus, up the street and to the door. He didn’t even have to ring. She opened the door and said, “Call me Edie,” first thing. Then she took the painting from Andy and looked at it and said, “It is beautiful, Andrew.”

  Andy was more pleased than a cool, tough person ought to be. “It’s a girl, remember,” he said. Then he added, “You may call me Andy. A lot of people do.”

  Edie carried the dragon to the sofa and propped it against the wall, using the back of the sofa as a ledge. “She’s beautiful, Andy. Harry—he’s my husband—was married before, but I never was, so I’ve never bought a dragon or any painting before. But he has. With his first wife, but she never bought a dragon. She didn’t like or even understand them.” She turned from the dragon to Andy and asked, “Will you help me pick out a frame?”

  “I believe that I can find the time,” Andy replied. “Would tomorrow be too late?” Edie was looking at the (girl) dragon and smiling, showing all of her teeth. Andy cleared his throat. “As a matter of fact, I’m free tomorrow afternoon. We have half-day on Thursdays at Emerson. I could get a note from home to be excused from riding the bus.”

  “I wrote you a check already,” Edie said. “I don’t know if your parents would want you to get involved with carrying Sister Henderson. I always finish with Sister by three, and then we could get her framed. For five dollars,” she said, handing the check to Andy.

  “You happen to have a pretty handwriting,” Andy said. “I’m noticing handwritings. I notice everything I can. It’s not easy training to be a detective in Foxmeadow. I can’t find a sidekick among all the jocks who live here, and I haven’t seen even one murder yet. I begged my father to move into a high crime area, but he refused. He says I’ve got to be protected because he and Mom don’t have much time.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Edie said. “What is it? Cancer? Heart condition?”

  “No. Nothing like that. Golf, a busy law practice for my dad. With my mother, it’s tennis and clubs and my sister’s wedding. With my sister, it’s her wedding and her parties. She spends a lot of time in front of the mirror. She also shops a lot.”

  “Harry—he’s my husband—and I didn’t have any parties. We just got married to each other. His daughter was there and her two children. She has one of each: a boy and a girl. Harry—he’s my husband—is gone all week, and he wanted me safe, too. That’s why I’m protected here, too. Sometimes here you have to go out to find a dragon. That’s why I was so surprised at the Garden Circle to find one on the wall at Emerson. Do you want to help me carry Sister Henderson in the car? She lives in the northern part of town.”

  “Is that where the ghetto is?”

  “One of them,” Edie said.

  Andy said that he wouldn’t mind going. He told Edie to pick him up at Emerson C.D.S.

  Andy raced home and wrote a note, excusing himself from riding the bus. He wanted to go so badly that he wasn’t going to take no for an answer, so he decided not to ask. Since he had started his training, he had stopped asking his parents to sign his report cards. He always did his own. He was something of an artist at it. He decided to write the note in his father’s handwriting, which he figured he did seven and one-half percent better than his mother’s. It was more man to man.

  Mrs. Yakots was waiting for Andy the next day when school let out. But she was not waiting with the other ladies who were picking up children. The others were neatly lined up in the driveway; one by one they pulled up to the curb by the front door of Emerson. Their car doors opened, sometimes from within and sometimes from without, and one by one, the cars filled with kids, kindergarten through six, and then pulled away from the curb making room for the next in line. Mrs. Yakots didn’t do that. She had arrived twenty minutes early and had parked. She had gotten out of the car and stood waiting by the side of the building while her car stood blocking the end of the driveway.

  Andy came blinking out of the building and looked down the line of cars and saw the empty, parked one. He noticed all the other cars swinging around it, the drivers making faces and muttering. His heart sank. He knew whose car was creating the bottleneck. He knew. He started walking toward it when he felt a tap on his shoulder and heard Edie say, “Hi, there. Here am I, your sidekick, right behind your back.”

  Andy knew that every student, K through six, and every driver of every car had heard. “You’re not my sidekick, for God’s sake,” he snarled, walking rapidly toward the car.

  “Well, you said that you were having trouble with the jocks, and I’m no jock. You know that. You saw me swim.”

  “We’ll discuss it later,” Andy said. “But not here.” Andy walked as fast as he could through the postschool crowd, wishing that night would suddenly fall. He got to the car a few strides ahead of her, opened the back door, jumped in, slouched down, all the way to the floor and said, “Okay, Yakots, let’s move it, and don’t spare the treads.”

  Edie stepped on the gas and pulled away with a screech of rubber. Every teacher, K through six, looked up. Two of them took down the color and make of the car, and one made a note of the license plate number.

  “What’s the matter, Andy?” Andy didn’t answer. He had about 200 degrees to go through before he was cool. “What’s the matter, Andy?” she repeated.

  Andy poked his head over the rim of the front seat and answered, “Nothing. Nothing is the matter. I do this. It’s part of my training. I don’t look where I’m going or whether we’re turning right or left. That way, when I’m a famous detective, and murderers blindfold me, I’ll be able to know how far they’ve taken me and in which direction.”

  “Gee, Andy, that’s real smart. And I’m happy that by the time you become a famous detective, murderers won’t be knocking famous detectives unconscious on the head anymore, the way they do now.”

  “Well,” Andy said, “well,” he repeated. “Well, I don’t intend to become unconscious. I’m going to train myself to be conscious at all times.”

  “Sometimes they’re stuffed into a trunk, which is very hard to breathe in. It’s probably not the real detective though. It’s probably a dummy in the movies,” Edie added.

  Andy said nothing more. He climbed into the front seat and fastened his seat belt. He decided that if this was his big chance to see the ghetto, he ought to see the ghetto. Besides they were well away from Emerson now. No one would see him riding with a crazy lady, and he could observe.

  The ghetto was
streets with sidewalks and no trees. Foxmeadow was the opposite: trees and no sidewalks. The ghetto had the following: front porches with people sitting on them, a big hospital and clinic named St. Vincent’s and laundry hanging out to dry on clotheslines in backyards or strung between houses. (Andy had never seen a clothespin until he was in the fourth grade. The art teacher had given one to each member of his class to make a Christmas tree decoration. Andy had made a dragon out of his.)

  The houses on Sister Henderson’s street looked like dull aluminum foil except for the potted plants that lined some of the porches. Some old ladies on the front porches were darning. Andy had to ask Edie what they were doing, and she told him. That was the first he learned that darn was something besides being a substitute for damn. Edie knew a lot about the ghetto. She told Andy that she had been carrying Sister Henderson for four weeks already. This was her fifth.

  Sister Henderson was waiting on her porch when they arrived. She wore a hat and carried a large pocketbook and a brown paper bag. She climbed into the back seat of the car showing a rainbow display of girdle and garters, and sat with her purse and her package on her lap and her dignity all around her.

  Edie introduced them. Andy and Sister Henderson exchanged hellos, and then Sister Henderson told Edie that they ought to start with Sister Coolidge again today. They went up one ghetto street and down another until they came to Sister Coolidge’s house. Edie noticed that there were people out on the streets, some walking, others just loafing. He never remembered seeing anyone standing on the streets of Foxmeadow.

  When they arrived at Sister Coolidge’s house, Sister Henderson got out of the back seat with her pocketbook, her bag and her dignity and returned with her pocketbook, two bags and her dignity. She was not gone long. They made six more stops, and Sister Henderson ended up with an assortment of bags, brown paper to plastic from Lester’s, the shoe store.

  The last stop was at Brother Banks’s. He lived beyond the bus line; the road leading to his house was not paved; it was two sandy ruts, the size and width of car tires, with a hump of patchy grass between them. Huge bushes of oleanders lined both sides of it. They had to pull off to one side to make way for a car coming in the opposite direction. Sister Henderson waved to the driver of the other car. “Brother Maytag be early this week,” she said.

  Brother Banks’s house sat alone, squatting on its concrete block supports, like a giant grand piano on sawedoff legs. Sister Henderson stayed at Brother Banks’s longer than she did at the other stops.

  “What church are these donations for?” Andy asked.

  “Sister Henderson’s, I guess.”

  “Is Brother Banks their minister?”

  “Brother Banks is their Minister of Finance, I guess.”

  After they had finished and as Sister Henderson was disembarking in front of her own house, Andy turned to her and said, “It was very nice meeting you.” He spoke very loud and very slow. “Nice ghetto you’ve got here.”

  “It’s home t’ me,” Sister Henderson replied. “‘Bye, y’all come back now, y’heah?”

  “Uh, Andy,” Edie said after they were at the second red light past Sister’s house, “most people live in a house on a street.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s the way they think of themselves. Like Sister Henderson. She’d say that she lives on Rutgers. Like she would say that she lives on Rutgers Avenue. Like she’d say that she lives at 9819. Like she doesn’t think of her home as being in a ghetto.”

  “How can someone live in a ghetto and not think it? Look at the houses. They don’t have any paint, for God’s sake.”

  “Well, they know it, the way you know that you live in Foxmeadow. But they don’t expect to be told they live in a ghetto any more than you do.”

  “Any more than I do?” Andy replied. “Well, I see nothing wrong with calling a spade a spade or calling a ghetto a ghetto.”

  There followed a vacuum in the car. Edie said nothing, and Andy did not interrupt her. Finally, Andy broke the silence. As they passed a Carvel, he asked Edie if she would like a frozen custard. “I’ll treat,” he said.

  Edie allowed him to. They smiled at each other over twin peaks of vanilla covered with chocolate sprinkles. Then they drove to Century Arts and Crafts where they spent an hour and ten minutes selecting a frame. The man behind the counter, who saw at least sixty-five paintings a week (about three per week were uglies painted on velvet), admired Andy’s dragon before he said, “That’ll be twenty-six fifty-two with tax. Ready next Thursday morning. We open at nine.”

  “We can’t be here until after three,” Andy said.

  “Yes,” Edie agreed, “we have Sister stops before we ever get here.”

  And that was the cool way that Andy announced that he wanted to accompany Edie next week, and that was the sweet way she accepted.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Andy stopped at Edie’s every day after school except on Thursdays when she picked him up from Emerson. And except on Fridays when the weekend began, and she was mostly married. Andy spent as much time with Edie Yakots as he did with his family. It was the most concentrated friendship he had ever had. But she wasn’t a friend; she was his secret sidekick.

  Andy found that going places and doing things with Edie was fine as long as they were alone. It was even fun. But it was altogether embarrassing to go or to do with her in front of anyone else in Foxmeadow or in front of anyone from Emerson. She always did some part of it wrong. For example, he had trained her to drive around to the front of the school and to wait with the other cars on Thursday; she did that part just like a normal woman. But when she saw Andy, she waved like an antenna in a high wind. A cool, tough person doesn’t appreciate that. But Edie said that she was always so glad to see Andy that her enthusiasm overcame her training. And any cool, tough person has to be glad to hear that. Even if that cool, tough person doesn’t care to show that he is glad.

  Edie never cared if her enthusiasm showed. Hers wasn’t like the enthusiasm of the jocks of Foxmeadow. They screamed and cheered at football games and swimming meets, and their excitement was over when the action was. Edie could be enthusiastic about slow motion as well as fast. There isn’t much slower motion than plants growing in a garden, and Edie got excited about that. The subtropical climate of Gainesboro allowed two gardens a year, and she had started a winter garden the week they had met.

  On his first few visits Andy had not done any work in the garden. He would only watch and hand-to-her and get-for-her, but he soon found that he had an opinion about where the dwarf azaleas should go. Since he never held an opinion for longer than two minutes before expressing it, Andy told Edie where he thought the dwarf azaleas should go. She listened; she agreed; and Andy was soon helping her dig and fertilize, which was more suitable. Fetching and carrying was work for a sidekick.

  After their work was done, Edie would fix them both Cokes (she always used crushed ice and added a maraschino cherry and a swizzle stick) and tell Andy about her life before she had moved into Foxmeadow. Either her talking smoothed out or else Andy got professional at unscrambling her sentences; she became more interesting than confusing.

  She had had a lot of jobs. Not the ordinary Foxmeadow jobs like plastic surgeon or tax consultant or corporation president. Edie had had interesting jobs, and she had been fired from them. Not like the people of Foxmeadow who simply got promoted out of one job and into another. Edie had actually been fired.

  She had first chosen jobs where she wouldn’t have to make conversation. Once she became a vacuum cleaner demonstrator at a home show. While a salesman talked about how wonderful the vacuum cleaner was, Edie was supposed to smile and sweep. She thought she would look more glamorous without her eyeglasses, so she didn’t wear them. She accidentally sucked the hem of her skirt into the vacuum and burned out the motor. She got fired for nearsightedness and indecent exposure.

  She decided that if she had to do some talking, she could do it if she had a prepared speech. So next she g
ot a job making telephone calls for a real estate developer. She soon started getting obscene answers. When she called the telephone company to complain, they told her that they hardly knew what to do about obscene phone calls, but they had a very simple solution to obscene phone answers: don’t make the calls. When she told her boss, he agreed with the telephone company, and he fired her.

  Edie moved from one job to another until she got brave enough to become an airline stewardess. In that line of work she smiled more than she spoke, and she always immediately did what was asked so that she would have less to explain. She was getting good at saying things like “welcome aboard” and “please fasten your seat belts” when she spilled a whole stainless steel container of salad dressing (creamy Roquefort) over an important executive of the airlines. But he didn’t fire her. He married her. He was Harry Yakots.

  Sometimes Edie would make Andy laugh out loud. He figured that it was all right to allow that. A sidekick usually was an amusing fellow. Even though this amusing fellow was an amusing girl.

  Sometimes on his way home from her house Andy would wonder why Edie took so much time to tell him things about herself. Of course sidekicks often were talkative. He also reasoned that she talked a lot because they had more to catch up on with each other. The other kids, the jocks at Emerson, knew all about each other already. There was nothing to tell. They never held jobs. They were all so much alike that they could have interchangeable parts. Edie was different, bordering on strange, and it was perfectly all right for her to think she was his sidekick as long as they kept quiet.

  Valentine’s Day came on Tuesday, but Andy had finished his during Monday’s music lesson. He looked at what he had done and decided that his mother had a perfect right to think that dragons were inappropriate on valentines. On the other hand, he had a perfect right to think that they were not. He also decided that he would use some of his money to buy his mother a Hallmark. This year he would give his dragon valentine to Edie Yakots. He pressed his work between the pages of his social studies book. Besides being the only valentine at Emerson C.D.S. that had a dragon, his was the only one that had no cupids.