The Innocents. Laura Lippman

       Summer 1978

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      “Don’t touch my guitar, little boy.”

      The voice was as grimy as the hand, low and guttural and flecked with debris, but matter-of-fact, not particularly harsh or threatening. Although we had all yelped when the hand shot out—even Tim and Sean, although they later denied it—we felt strangely calm. Except, perhaps, Go-Go, who writhed in the hand’s grip but could not free himself. Go-Go was terrified.

      The man sat up, releasing Go-Go, although Go-Go continued to twist and turn as if held by invisible hands. The man was not really grimy, we saw, but extremely dark-skinned, black as ink, although with large patches of pink-white skin. His forehead, the area around his right eye, his right cheek, and chin were all ghostly, without pigmentation. Later, we managed to find a way to ask Gwen’s father about this without revealing why we were asking. He explained that a person with this skin condition wasn’t a burn victim, as some of us thought, or diseased in any way. But before that explanation was offered, we speculated at length on his appearance. Leprosy, Sean said. A horrible accident, Gwen said. Burned himself up smoking in bed, Tim said. Go-Go said he was a monster, and Mickey said he was just born that way, and she was closest to right.

      “What are you children doing in my house?” the man asked us, although the word sounded like chillrun in his mouth. We would come to understand that his words were as soft and mushy as the food required by his rotting teeth, which made his breath fearsome. He didn’t seem angry. He didn’t even seem particularly curious. And, unlike most adults who asked that question, he apparently wanted an answer, a real one. He wasn’t quizzing us as a pretext for scolding us, or setting us up, testing to see if we would lie to him. He honestly thought we might have a good reason for being there.

      “We didn’t know it was anyone’s house,” Mickey said.

      “We didn’t know it was anyone’s house,” Sean repeated, a little louder. Sean had a way of saying what someone else had already said, yet making the words his own.

      “You knew it was somebody’s,” the man said. His voice was mild, though. “Laundry on the line. Chickens. Didn’t you see my chickens?”

      He made a clucking sound, and the chickens crossed the threshold, almost as if in a parade. They gave us a wide berth, cutting as large a circle as possible in the small house. He picked up the one in the front, stroking it and cooing to it as if it were something much more cuddly, a kitten or a puppy.

      “Do you eat them?” Go-Go asked, and the rest of us wanted to shush him. But the man didn’t seem to mind Go-Go’s question. He didn’t seem to mind Go-Go, which was unusual in an adult. Go-Go got on grown-ups’ nerves quickly, very quickly.

      “Sure,” he said. “What else is chickens for?”

      “Eggs,” Tim said.

      “That’s true,” the man said. “And I eat eggs, too. But I got to make do with what I have. My garden, my chickens, things that folks bring me.”

      “What do you do when the cold weather comes?” Mickey asked, bold as ever.

      “Build a fire in the stove. Put an extra blanket on the bed. Keep the door shut.”

      “And the chickens?”

      He had grown tired of the conversation, or tired of us. He bent down and pulled the guitar out from under the bed. We were kids then, all adults were old to us, but Chicken George, as we would come to call him, was especially confounding. You could have told us he was fifty, not that much older than Tim is now, or you could have told us ninety, and we wouldn’t have argued. He was old, someone who had seen a lot and knew a lot.

      He began to play the guitar and sing. His voice was awful and he didn’t know the words to whatever song he was trying to play, so there were a lot of uh-huhs and moans. If Mick Jagger had been standing there, he probably would have been in ecstasy at this raw display of old-fashioned blues playing and singing, but we were callow kids. We listened to Billy Joel. Some of us still do, even if we don’t admit it.

      “It is customary,” he said when he finished, “to reward a man if you like his song.”

      He held out his palm, which was amazingly pink, pink as the pads on a newborn kitten’s feet. It was creased and craggy, a hardworking hand, yet rosy pink. We stared at his hand, not gleaning what he wanted. Sean, at last, put a quarter in it, and the man actually bit the coin. But then he smiled, letting us know he was in on the joke, that he knew biting a coin was something people did with gold pieces in a movie, not with a quarter from Sean’s pocket.

      “Well, I guess you weren’t expecting a show, so that’s okay that you don’t have more,” he said. “Tell me your names.”

      Mickey took the lead.

      “I’m Leia,” she said.

      “Han,” said Sean, always quick.

      “Luke,” said Tim.

      “Carrie,” said Gwen, who couldn’t think of another girl’s name from Star Wars, clearly begrudging Mickey’s decision to crown herself as the princess.

      “Go-Go,” said Go-Go, not getting it. Even if he had, he probably would have said R2-D2 or Obi-Wan. It was funny about Go-Go. He lied. He lied a lot, trying to avoid punishment for his various misdeeds. But he was bad at it. He couldn’t tell a lie to save his life. And his honesty often came out at just the wrong time.

      “Where y’all live?”

      “Franklintown Road,” Mickey said. There probably weren’t four or five houses along Franklintown, but it was nearby and a credible place for us to be from. If we mentioned Dickeyville, we would give ourselves away. Should the man ever come up that way, determined to find the five children who had come into his house and tried to take his guitar—not that we would have taken it, but that’s probably what he thought—he would find us all too easily. All he would have to say is: blond girl, brunette girl, three boys with their hair cut way short, and everyone would say, Oh, the Halloran boys, fat Gwen, and that dark-haired girl they play with.

      “And you came all the way down here. Huh. You going to come visit me again?”

      It sounded more like a request than a question. Why would we come here again? What was the point of visiting this strange old man, who smelled bad and couldn’t sing?

      “Sure,” said Sean, our spokesman.

      “I need some canned goods,” he said. “Beans, soup. And I wouldn’t mind some new shirts. I like them flannel shirts, but I need T-shirts, too.”

      “Sure.”

      Why not agree? We were never going to return here. It was a far walk, something to do on a summer’s day when you had all the time in the world. Come Labor Day and school, we wouldn’t have the time. What was the harm in promising that Leia, Han, Luke, Carrie, and Go-Go would return?

      We were back within the week, with all the things he requested.

      We