Guard

by Corby

The boy watched as his feet dangled two inches above the brown linoleum floor. They curved in towards each other, as if seeking solace in the other's touch, and the boy frowned. He straightened first one, then the other, willing them to independence, to strength; but with the first relaxation of his calves they lolled together again like lazy children at the back of the class. He gave a small sigh and rolled his shoulders as if in sympathy.

Dad had explained about flat feet and weak ankles when they took away his weather worn and much loved sandals - the ones Mom bought in the bazaar at El Uxor - and pushed his browned feet into the boots he'd loathed on sight. They were high necked and stiff, with laces that wound across each other for endless minutes when he wanted to be outside and doing. And his clumsiness in learning how to tie them only added to his dislike. He couldn't understand how fingers that worked so well for him as he carefully picked away at aeons old mud could suddenly become so wayward that the knots on his boots (hated, hateful boots) became something that his father declared Gordian.

He wasn't wearing the dreaded boots today. Today, in honour of the first exhibition his parents had ever produced at the New York Museum, his mother had given him a pair of bright red sneakers. They were high-necked, like the boots; but unlike them, the sneakers had colour and flexibility, and when he first jumped down from the hotel bed and stood on tiptoes, he felt as though he could jump to the ceiling. Where the boots were concrete lumps - or so he'd told his resolutely unsympathetic mother - these were balls of rubber, designed to propel him from one side of the room to the other. Which they did, at calamitous speed, until his mother had firmly grasped him by the arm and informed him that jet-rocket boys did not belong in a museum but could instead stay quietly in their hotel room under the watchful eye of the concierge.

The boy straightened his legs before him, holding them parallel to the ground until his knees began to burn, then dropped them to bang against the railing on the chair. He ran one half of his jacket zipper up and down on its track. He had been in this office for a long, long time.

When he had first been deposited in the big chair by a woman who had marched him by his shoulders - something he hated - the late afternoon sun had trailed through the basement window to press golden bars of light against the back of the door. It had picked out the overcoat haphazardly hung there, the umbrella hooked around the handle. The boy had counted the bars of light, thinking of the patterns made by the sun in India, in Jaipur, in the Palace of the Winds. A hundred windows, Pandit Lal had told him, to catch the breezes for the maharaja's women, and each one delicately carved into curves and swirls to tempt the breezes to stay. The women too? the boy had asked, and Pandit Lal had roared with laughter. The women too, he'd agreed, and they'd stood together in the dusty road, ignoring the traffic that poured about them as they gazed up at the pink palace so beautiful it could seduce the weather.

America, the boy thought, was a place of straight lines and hard angles. No breeze would be ambushed by this office in summer, and now, in late fall, the sun could barely glance inwards without shuddering away as soon as it could. The gold had gone, and the office was becoming murky. Above his head, at street level, he had watched the feet tramp past. The window was too dingy to allow detail through, so all he saw was a parade of quick, hard shapes as the Americans marched to their endless battles. Even the women here were different, the boy thought, and an image of a cheap and crudely made doll he'd won at a fair in Cairo came to mind. The colours had been bright, but the thing was hard and brittle, and he'd hastily given it to a little girl who had watched him throughout the day with eyes so much prettier than the plastic ones. American women reminded him of that doll; there was none of the grace and gentle strength he knew from the Arabic women, and their short tight skirts looked like children's clothes when compared to the brilliance of the swaying Hindi saris.

The boy's shoulders dropped a little as the darkness grew. The pane of glass in the door, oddly bubbled to deny clear viewing (why make a window you can't see through? the boy wondered), had lit up an hour before with the harsh fluorescence he found so distracting. Sometimes more shapes had flickered past, as blurred and indistinct as the distant world could be without his glasses. It bothered him that these people were so close yet so hard to see.

The woman who left him here - another hard American doll-child, short skirted and seemingly angry - had pushed a small jar of black and coloured blocks towards him before she left. "Allsorts," she'd said, as if that made everything clear, and then had almost run from the room. He had watched her go, bemused, craning to follow her progress out the door until it was closed behind her. Then he had turned to inspect the heralded allsorts with the sort of gravity he saved for all serious investigations. Carefully he removed the top and sniffed. The smell was awful, and confused him even more. Was this, then, a punishment? Had the catastrophe in the exhibition hall been his fault after all? He had prodded at one block; it gave a little, leaving a faint smear of blackness on his finger, and he tentatively sniffed, then licked at it. Awful. Bloody awful, he had thought, deliberately using his father's favourite but forbidden word of approbation.

The investigation of the allsorts had taken place when the bars of light had been at their brightest. Now it was so dark in the tiny office that the boy wondered whether his parents had forgotten him. It would be understandable; the exhibit had collapsed, and his mother and father had been underneath when it happened. He'd heard them scream, and he'd screamed himself, in sudden fright; but then the burst of feeling that had made his heart hammer so hard in his chest and throat was gone, leaving a strange sort of floating sensation throughout his body, and he'd sat himself down calmly and quietly to wait for his parents to climb out from beneath the mess. That his father would be angry, he had no doubt. He'd witnessed disasters on digs before, and had learned to follow his mother's example of quiet stillness whilst his father raged. Dad would be fuming over this one. So he'd backed over to the wall and hunched up into as small a shape as possible, his red sneakers poking out like small signals of distress whilst the grown-ups had yelled and cried and run about with great and terrible urgency.

A hand had poked out from one corner of the cover-stone, white in a pool of bright scarlet. It looked like his mom's, and his stomach had tightened with the thought of slings and plaster. His mom would hate that. She was always so busy writing, or researching, or drawing. A broken arm would be such an inconvenience, and even as the thought came to him he vowed he would help out where he could. Maybe she would let him do more of the digging now?

Footsteps sounded again in the corridor, but this time something made him sit up in readiness. Not his dad, he knew that straight away, but someone coming for him, perhaps? To take him to Mom and Dad? His instinct was good; the door handle rattled, and a man gusted in, switching the light on as he did so.

"Jesus H. Christ! What the hell - ? What are you doing here, kid?"

The boy jumped in the chair. He couldn't help it; the transition from a quiet haven of semi-darkness and apparent oversight to noise, light and accusation was too sudden.

The man was big, with dark hair and eyes, and smelled of tobacco and leather polish. The boy knew those smells; he'd met soldiers before, and he knew this man was one. He recognised the mouth, the shoulders; he knew those eyes, hard and worried at the same time. No, not worried, he told himself, remembering how Mom insisted on accuracy in language; the man's eyes were intense. They had flickered to every corner of the room after registering his presence. Now they relaxed a little as he realised everything else was the same as he'd left it.

"Woo. Gave me a start there, kid. But you shouldn't be here. Mom with a tour group, huh?" The boy noted that this man was one of those grown-ups (no, adults) who asked questions without expecting an answer. "Okay. So how about you beat it back upstairs and I won't say nothin' about you bein' here. Okay?"

The boy blinked at him. The man was smiling now, but it was the kind of smile that would change very quickly if the wearer did not get what he wanted. Soldiers used these kinds of smiles.

"So scram. Get outta here. Got work to do, kid."

The boy cleared his throat. He was really very thirsty, and some time in this strange day his mouth had dried to feel like a battaniyya was shoved inside it. No, Daniel, he could hear his mother chide, gently; English when we're in America. English. A language so full of words and so incapable of subtlety, Pandit Lal had told him, and though the full meaning had escaped him, he understood that Hindi and Urdu and Pushtu and Arabic contained beauties undreamt of in the harsh Anglo-Saxon tongue.

Blanket. I am tasting blanket in my mouth and why is this rude man staring at me?

"I have to wait here," he explained as politely as he could. The man looked as startled as if he'd kicked him with his brand new sneakers.

"What the hell for?"

The boy shrugged slightly. "I'm waiting for my mom and dad. They'll be along soon."

"Great. But I got news, kid - this ain't a creche. This is security; I'm the night watch. Means I gotta get out on my rounds in ten, and that means you can't sit here in the dark." The thought seemed to remind him of the state the office had been in when he first arrived, and he frowned with genuine annoyance at the small boy before him. "Say - who left you here like this? No light or nothing."

The boy tipped his head mutely towards the jar of allsorts.

"Oh, they leave you with that, huh?" An unexpected twinkle suddenly lit the man's face. "Oh, well, you know you gotta love them allsorts. You been sitting here chewin' all afternoon, I bet."

The boy frowned in turn. "Not really. I - "

But the man had turned and was yelling down the corridor. "Hey, Lorraine! Lorraine! You hear me? I got a kid in here, says he's - "

There was a series of sharp taps on the linoleum, and the doll-woman was there, casting a frightened glance at the boy before reaching past the man and ushering him into the corridor with her as she shut the door. Their voices were as distorted as their bodies through the strange glass, and the boy listened hard, as something cold and heavy thumped in his stomach. Some words skirted the bumps and twitches in the glass and made themselves known to him. Jesus! and why's he in my office? and Jesus! and no way, Lorraine, I can't - I ain't gonna - sonofabitch…

The door rattled open again and the man returned, scowling, embarrassed, ashamed, and suddenly the boy was very, very afraid.

"Okay, kid, looks like you need to wait here a while. Got a call to make." The man sat heavily at his desk, his eyes twisting to meet the boy's then flinching away as if he had seen something dreadful. "Won't be long and we can - Yeah, Ray, I got that kid here with me… Jackson, huh? First name David. That your name, kid?" This to the boy who shook his head and mouthed 'Daniel'. "Says his name's Daniel…. yeah, that's right… ah, no, hell, Ray, don't put me on hol - sonofabitch! Uh - sorry, kid," he added, one hand across the mouthpiece. "Sorry, Daniel - call you Dan, okay? I'm just not good with kids." He gave a short, barked laugh that felt sad, even to the boy who was now so scared he was shivering. "Even my own. He's thirteen, I never know the hell what to say to him. He's so full of airforce this and army that. Like his old man's NYPD wasn't good enough for - yeah, Ray, I'm holding - Jesus…" The man began fumbling in his shirt pocket, bringing out a crumpled packet and tapping free a cigarette. He went to offer the boy one, then stopped, shaking his head.

"See what I mean? So, anyway, Danny - I'm real sorry about your folks. And you've been real good, sittin' here so quiet and all. You want I should get you a - what? A soda or something?"

A soda. Daniel desperately wanted something to drink. But he needed to go to the bathroom, too, and the boy who had fearlessly ranged across continents alongside his parents now shrank from the thought of exploring a single building under these harsh lights, amongst these frightened people.

"I'd like to see my parents, please," he said, remembering to sit straight, recalling the lessons about America that told him not to praise the man's father and grandfather and wish health and many sons to his household for six generations to come before hinting his request. So straightforward, these Americans. So afraid and tense.

The man's mouth twisted up, and Daniel knew he wasn't pleased. Perhaps his mother had got it wrong? Maybe Americans did need to hear their family praised first?

"Come on, Danny. You're a big boy, right? You know you gotta be grown up now." (Adult, thought Daniel). The man's mouth was twisting and twisting as he worked the cigarette from one side to the other. "Your mom and dad didn't make it, kid. Lorraine said you saw it?" He paused to shift the phone to his other shoulder. "So I'm on the phone right now tryin' to find out who's gonna look after you tonight, okay? Now, don't you worry - someone's gonna come down here and take you someplace nice where they got TV and jelly and ice cream, I bet. You like TV? 'Course you do. What's your favourite show? - Yeah, Ray, come on, I'm dyin' here… okay. Got it. And she'll be over in…? Great. Thanks, pal… Yeah. Huh. Tell me about it. Rough break… nah, real quiet, real polite. Figure them foreign schools, you know?… Oh, Charlie? Airforce academy now. You believe it? Kids!… Yeah, Ray, Friday game… See ya."

The phone clattered back onto its frame and the man grimaced and worked his shoulder, as though the conversation had hurt him somehow. Daniel sat very still.

"So. Okay. Here's what we got. There's a Mrs Wallinsky comin' over in an hour or so to take you to that place I was talking about. She's gotta be okay, I mean, good Polish name and all. Like mine, see?" The man pulled out the front of his shirt, bringing the nametag forward, and sounded out the name as if to a small child. "Ka - wal - sky. Good Polish name."

"A derivation of Kovacs," Daniel agreed quietly. "Similar to Lefevre in French, and meaning 'smith'."

"Yeah," the man, Kawalsky, muttered, staring at Daniel. "What I said. Say, you're real smart, right?"

"What did you mean?" Daniel asked, in that same quiet voice. He didn't want to startle any terrible truth into the open. Quietness, calmness, and all would be well. "What didn't my parents make?"

Kawalsky's mouth folded over on itself, making a thin hard line, and Daniel thought He's angry with me. But then the word dead came into his mind, dead, and the voice was no one's he'd ever heard before. Not his parents, not his tutors, not this man Kawalsky's - it was a deep, sonorous, impenetrable voice that only ever spoke the truth, which resonated through his body like the tolling of some giant bell. Dead. Dead. Dead.

Daniel knew of death. He had made friends with a boy who later succumbed to dysentery and whose face he could still see clearly as it was on his deathbed. The mouth partly open, the face grey and closed off, as if nothing good had ever glowed from within. His mother could never be like that, so finished. And there was other death, too, in the bodies beside the road during the time of cholera. They were even more frightening, with their teeth bared at the sky as if in defiance of the fate that left them covered in the dust they would soon be making. His father would never be that helpless.

"Dan - Danny, you know your parents got killed here today, right?" Kawalsky's voice was softer, sadder, and he didn't look like a soldier any more. He looked old, and somehow smaller. Daniel found he wanted to look down at his hands in his lap to spare the man the pain of talking to him. He wished he had his coat. It was so cold.

The man Kawalsky sighed. "So - how 'bout that soda?"

Daniel shook his head, slightly. His fingers latched onto either side of his light jacket and brought the zippered front together, fumbling as they tried to click the edges into place. This was a trick zipper, and you had to do it just right or it would never go. Mom had been meaning to get him a new jacket for the coming winter, but she'd bought the sneakers instead, and Daniel was glad of it. Those sneakers were going to take him places, that's for sure. That's what the salesman had said.

"Oh, hey, Dan, you cold?" Kawalsky was getting up and coming around to squat in front of Daniel's chair, and the movement made Daniel's fingers freeze in their awkward quest. "Here, let me help."

"No, thank you," Daniel said, shrinking, but the man had already grabbed the zipper edges and was pushing his thick fingers between the material and the zipper tag. Daniel could smell the tobacco more strongly now, and some other scent he couldn't recognise.

Shame, that deep voice told him, he's ashamed because he's kind and he can't help you.

"I got it - these can be real sonsofbitches some days - oh, sorry, kid." Kawalsky jerked at the zipper roughly, then muttered under his breath before straining again. "I know, I know, gotta watch my mouth. My wife, Darlene, she's always nagging me about it. Not in front of the kid, she says, and Jesus, I know she's right, but some days she just doesn't st - ah, hell!"

The last tug had wrenched the zipper to the top, but half the teeth were left behind, unknitted and lost.

"Dammit, kid! I'm sorry! Look, I'll - I'll get you a new one, okay?"

"It doesn't matter," the boy said, as much for the man's sake as his own. "My mom can fix anything."

The man stilled, then got up, hastily.

"It's true," Daniel continued, thinking Kawalsky's sudden withdrawal was due to disbelief. "She has to. When we're on a dig there's a lot of times when she needs to improvise. She says it's her one great gift. Dad says that is why he married her, and she says that's right, she was improvising then." The little family joke sounded strange in this lonely office, and Daniel thought back through the day and knew there'd simply been a bump sometime in the afternoon, like the scratch on Dad's record of Puccini. Something had bumped his family's needle, and the day had leapt out of its groove. But once someone (Mom, Dad) came back and picked up the needle again, the melody of their life together would return as sweet as ever.

The man was standing over him again, holding three safety pins.

"Here you go, kid. Just, ah - you want I should - ?"

Daniel quickly took the pins and began attaching them, threading first one side, then the other, on either side of the zipper tracks. When at last he snapped the third pin home and dropped his hands, the gaps sagged open, as he somehow knew they would. There was a trick to this, too. So many tricks he'd yet to learn, that Mom and Dad had yet to teach.

Kawalsky seemed to sag, too, as he realised the pins were not going to help.

"Jesus, Dan, I'm sorry. Guess you got stuck here with a screw up. You know that? Why I'm a security guard and not a sergeant somewhere uptown. You've had a hell of a day, kid, and it ain't right you gotta deal with me on top of it all."

Daniel looked up at the man who had been so big when he first came into the office. It didn't seem right to him that his own strange day should have upset this sad soldier. He wondered briefly what it would be like to go home with Mr Kawalsky - to nagging Darlene, and Charlie who dreamed of the airforce. Would they watch television and eat ice cream, as the man had said? What would their favourite shows be? It seemed important to have one.

And suddenly Daniel saw exactly how this man would enter his home, how his shoulders would hunch a little more each day, how the kindness would eat at him while he struggled to find words to talk to his son.

"Mr Kawalsky? It's all right about the zipper. Do you think I could have that soda?"

Kawalsky's head came up.

"You want a soda? Sure, Dan, I can get you a soda." And Daniel marvelled as the mundane task drew a shadowy smile back to the man's face. "What flavour? Any flavour you like, you just ask."

Daniel considered. "Any flavour?"

"Any flavour you want. You want it, you got it." And Kawalsky threw out his arm, an extravagant and ridiculous gesture that made Daniel smile.

"I don't know the flavours…"

"You don't know? Danny, Dan, where you been? Kid gotta know sodas." Kawalsky rattled the change in his pocket. "Machine's right down the hall. Let's see - we got coke, and orange, we got raspberry, we got lime, we got cream soda, we got cherry - "

"Cream soda? Has that got cream?"

Kawalsky grinned at him, glad to be doing something that brought a note of interest to Daniel's voice.

"Tell you what. I'll get a raspberry and a cream soda, you can try 'em both. Be back before you know it," and he was gone, hurrying to bring back a treat for a boy who had no bed for the night as yet.

The faint smile faded, and Daniel looked down at the useless, broken zipper. He was so cold. And the pins made wonderful holes to lure the winter breezes inside his shirt and trap them next to his body. His mom could fix zippers, but with her arm in a sling…?

He sighed, and shuddered. Well, there was no point in complaining. Only one thing to do now, to keep those breezes out.

Carefully, he reached down and pulled one side of his jacket over the other, pulling it as far as the pins would allow. Then he wrapped one arm under the other, crossed his second arm over the first, and squeezed it all together as tightly as he could. Surely he could manage to keep himself and his jacket in one piece until he warmed up a little.

It would just have to do until his mom got back.

Feel free to contact the author... e-mail to: thepossum_au@yahoo.com.au

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Within the context and limitations of the site Disclaimer, Any and All original characters, situations, story line, dialogue and narrative © August 20th, 2001, the author