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Chapter 16
The following morning, Timothy left the house at the usual time. Except when he hit the corner of Wall Street, instead of heading toward school, he made a left toward the County Jail.
His neighbor Christy Vanderbeck happened to be walking to school at the same time.
“You’re going the wrong way!” she called out.
“I’m going to the eye doctor on North Front Street,” he called back.
Seemed a believable alibi, so long as the daisy chain of neighborhood chitchat didn’t wind its way back to his mom.
Purposely skipping school, even for an hour or so, was not something he’d dared do before. Somehow Crazy Carl managed to do it and lived to tell the tale. Then again, Crazy Carl had stayed back once. Or twice. Might be a connection there. Still, Timothy didn’t intend to make a habit of it.
To make himself look older and less like himself, Timothy donned his mom’s old reading glasses as a disguise. He also used an actual comb to part his hair over to one side and patted it down as flat as he could. He barely recognized himself.
He repeated his alibi to himself as he walked along, just in case anyone should stop him and ask where he was going:
“I’m going to the eye doctor on North Front Street. My mother is meeting me there. We do this type of thing all the time, she works, you know.”
Key Man, the guy from the Green Apartment Building with all the keys, walked right past him without saying anything. This was not a surprise since Key Man, to the best of Timothy’s knowledge, had never even noticed him.
Or maybe he had? Maybe Key Man had secretly given Timothy a similarly obvious nickname, like Long Hair Boy, and just went about his business? How would you ever know?
Timothy checked his Timex, which he’d given an extra long wind especially for the occasion. The transfer wasn’t until 9 and it was just about 8. Where to go?
Ducking to Green Street to get off Wall Street, Timothy caught sight of Tannery Brook behind one of the old stone houses. He realized he didn’t really know where the stream led in this direction either.
The old houses on this street were pretty much all converted to offices or apartments. One apartment building had a doublewide driveway that looked particularly safe to investigate, so he ducked down it. A window slammed open as he passed.
“I told you to stay outta my garbage!” a shirtless guy yelled at him with crazy eyes.
“Uh, I’m not going in your garbage,” Timothy said, “I’m just looking at the brook.”
“Yeah, well, just stay the hell outta my garbage!”
The guy slammed the window closed.
Uh, okay then…
If Timothy turned tail now, it would seem an admission of guilt that he had, in fact, intended to rummage through crazy guy’s garbage, so he eyed the brook quickly then stuck to the street after that. One close call was enough. He could more-or-less tell where the brook was going anyway, at least until Lucas Avenue, at which point it disappeared into a culvert.
With a bit of time left to kill, Timothy continued to follow what he imagined was the brook’s path to the shopping plaza. There, tucked away behind the loading docks at Sears, Timothy came upon the Esopus Creek.
He pocketed the reading glasses so he wouldn’t stumble into the creek as he descended its banks. It was here that he found a drainage pipe unceremoniously dumping the neighborhood brook into the creek like it was just excess rainwater after a storm.
It was here that he also found Crazy Carl, skipping stones into the Esopus.
Crazy Carl looked up, surprised to see Timothy.
“What’re you doing here?” he asked Timothy.
It’d be a lot cooler to say he was just skipping school, but a deviation might complicate matters, so he stuck with his alibi.
“I’m going to the eye doctor.”
“Oh,” Carl said, and didn’t ask any further questions.
“What’re you doing here? Timothy asked.
“This is my secret spot. Nobody bothers me here.”
Carl had a slight bruise on the side of his head, like someone had clocked him recently, but Timothy thought it best not to mention it.
Carl invited Timothy to sit on the log beside him, and Timothy took him up on it.
“If you look close, you can see the fish swimming in the creek,” Carl said.
“I think I see one right there,” Timothy said.
The two of them continued to sit there, listening to the creek, looking for fish.
“Sometimes I think about how this creek leads to the Hudson,” Carl said, “and the Hudson leads down to the ocean, and the ocean leads everywhere...”
Man, Crazy Carl was deeper than Timothy had thought. Timothy himself had been thinking about Tannery Brook a lot lately, but not how it connected to the whole world.
The Hudson was on Timothy’s mental map because he swam in it, and liked to pretend the triangular rocks he found at Kingston Point were Indian arrowheads. But he had never really contemplated the Esopus much, and here it was, just blocks from his house, hiding behind the shopping plaza.
It had a lazy quality to it, but a quiet strength. It was probably the forgotten lifeblood of the original colonial settlement, now that he thought about it.
Above the gurgle of the Esopus, the Tannery Brook continued to trickle constantly from its drainage pipe, presumably feeding benzene and Lord knows what else to the fish they were looking at.
It’s all connected, he thought.
After they’d sat there for a while, he checked his watch.
“Well, I guess I gotta go to that eye doctor appointment now.”
“Okay, see ya,” Carl said, exhibiting no intention whatsoever to motivate himself away from his log.
“See ya.”
Timothy backtracked up to Wall Street and the older buildings with their stores, banks, and offices.
The County Jail was a formidable building located behind the old Court House. Timothy had only dared walk close to the jail a few times. An old stone building with bars on the windows, you could actually hear the prisoners inside sometimes, or at least the sound of the AM radios they listened to to pass the time.
Going right up to the jail while skipping school seemed like going into the belly of the beast. The sheer audacity would bolster his story, like, who would skip school and walk right up to the County Jail?
There was a single oversized spot in the parking lot behind the jail, the same bus was always parked there. It was a small bus, like the ones the special kids rode to school, except this one was painted white instead of yellow, and there were cages on the windows.
Timothy figured this would be the bus that would be taking Luke Grafton off to the state prison.
Alongside the jail parking lot was a separate parking lot for the bank next door. The bank parking lot had a bench with an ashtray beside it, the bank had installed it there so its employees had a place to take breaks outdoors during the warmer months.
Perching himself on this bench, Timothy had a perfect view of the route between the exit door of the jail and the small white bus.
Taking the newspaper he’d brought in his knapsack for this purpose, he held it over his face and pretended to read it, which was paradoxically impossible because the reading glasses were actually blurring his vision.
Peering over the paper, he saw Greg Hathaway and a gaggle of other suited lawyers from Hathaway, Hathaway and Myers talking importantly as they made their way across the parking lot. Timothy quickly pulled the paper high over his face again until they disappeared inside the court house.
He was then momentarily startled when a bank teller plopped down next to him on the bench and lit up a cigarette.
“Just sitting here reading the paper, waiting for my eye doctor appointment,” Timothy offered by way of explanation before the guy even said anything.
“Sure,” the teller said disinterestedly, not really caring about anything beyond his five minutes of personal freedom.
Timothy watched the guy smoking the cigarette out of the corner of his eye to see if he could pick up any pointers. The first inhalation seemed to be of particular importance. It was savored momentarily in the lungs. Then, tilting back the head, the first exhale was a long and slow one, accompanied by a slight whooshing sound through the teeth, as if tension from life’s problems was leaving the body along with smoke.
The subsequent inhalations were less singular, more like punctuations of random glances made around the parking lot, looking at birds and passing cars and whatnot. The cigarette was held between index and middle fingers in general, expertly shifted to thumb and middle fingers occasionally so the index finger could be used to tap the ash into the tray.
The teller took one last definitive puff, stubbed out his freedom along with his cigarette, then went back into the bank.
Shortly after Timothy went back to pretending to read his blurry newspaper, the thick exit doors of the jail slowly opened, and out came two sheriff’s deputies leading a solitary prisoner with hands cuffed behind him. It was only 8:50, good thing he got here early. Timothy pushed the reading glasses down his nose so he could see clearly.
Based on his bold exchange with the FotoMat manager the day before, Timothy had thought perhaps he’d developed a magic ability to insert himself into other adult situations, that through sheer force of will he might be able to approach the scene and pop a quick question before Luke Grafton disappeared up the river.
But all it took was one look at the unyielding posture of these deputies, their sheer size, and the sidearms dangling from their holsters. There was no way Timothy was going anywhere near them. He shouldn’t even be here, but here he was, so he continued to watch.
From this vantage point, he could just about see Grafton’s face, which Timothy somehow had imagined would be bulging with a killer’s venomous rage, that Grafton would be yanking this way and that, trying to bust loose.
But this wasn’t what was happening at all.
The short parade was very quiet. Grafton’s face appeared, if anything, rather sad and resigned. He was quite a bit smaller than the deputies who were leading him. He didn’t pull at all, and neither did they.
As they unlocked the door of the little white bus, Grafton took one last look at the clear blue sky. Then they escorted him on.
The little bus started up, drove away, and that was that.
Whatever secrets Grafton held in his head would be locked away in a state prison 40 miles away. If Timothy and Charles were going to prove that he was somehow connected to IPM, they would have to find another way to do it.
The whole way back to school, Timothy repeated his slightly adjusted alibi in his head.
“I’m just coming back from the eye doctor, I’m just coming back from the eye doctor.”
But no one stopped him. It was almost too easy to cut school.
Savoring his own last moment of freedom at the edge of the schoolyard, he stopped to get out his forged late pass. The original had had the imprint of Mrs. Hagen’s writing on it, which he’d used as a model to meticulously fill out the bogus pass the night before, except for the time. Checking his watch, he now scribbled 9:15, then slipped in the side door and up the stairs to his classroom.
The room was quiet, devoid of students. Mrs. Brenner was alone at her desk, taking a little break, eating some kind of fruit cobbler she’d brought from home wrapped in tin foil. She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin as Timothy entered the room and approached her desk.
When he handed her the slip, she actually looked at it this time.
“Do you need glasses?” she asked.
“For what?”
“You just came from the eye doctor,” she said, holding up the slip.
“Oh, just a routine check-up,” Timothy said. She seemed to be buying it.
“You know,” she said, reaching forward to tap the bridge of Timothy’s nose, where his mother’s old reading glasses had left a slight imprint, “wearing glasses is nothing to be ashamed of, if it helps you see the blackboard. I’ve been wearing eyeglasses since I was your age.”
Timothy pictured a little Mrs. Brenner in 1940s clothing but with these same adult glasses she was now wearing as she looked at him.
“Okay,” he agreed, though he didn’t realize the glasses had made a temporary line on his nose and did not exactly know what she was talking about.
“Well, hurry downstairs now, you should still have twenty minutes of gym class,” she said, as if Timothy was in danger of missing the best part of the day.
But the best part of the day had come and gone already.
It just didn’t involve going to school.
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I love the whole glasses/eye doctor/seeing/not seeing … Great writing!
I suspected Crazy Carl had domestic issues. Poor guy. The meditation of skipping stones while skipping school... Great chapter overall. Although made me want to smoke a cigarette to slowly exhale my problems away... I just may have to do it. No river or lake near by to skip anything.