Upstairs, the doorbell rang. Jamie heard his mom’s footsteps on the boards overhead as she went to answer it. Then he saw the thin black crack in the plywood and the grubby marks of the repair guy’s fingers. He worked the panel loose and started to crawl inside.
It was more difficult than he’d thought. The surface of the furnace inside the hatch was covered in valves and pipes and stuff sticking out at crazy angles. It was tough to wriggle in between them, feet first, unable to see where he was going. The real problem, though, was replacing the panel from the inside. There was nothing to hold on to, and in the darkness it was tough to line up the metal tabs and slots which held it in place, particularly with your body twisted like a stick of licorice. He’d only managed to get one fastener in place when he heard the creak on the stairs.
He crouched there in the darkness, pressed up against the pipes and ducts of the furnace, waiting for his mom’s call. Probably it was some friend of Kevin’s, either that or Ronnie Ho’s dad was here to take him home. But instead of a voice he heard the shriller squeal of the other loose step. His mom must have realized they wouldn’t hear her calling over the music. It was kind of weird, though. Normally she would have phoned down. Mom didn’t set foot in the basement that much any more. It was their territory, now that Dad had gone. As long as they stayed out of her hair, she left them to their own devices.
Jamie worked his left hand down to the wrist of his right, which was holding the free catch of the plywood panel, and pressed the light button on his watch: 11:36. Almost four minutes since he made the bet with Kevin. Why hadn’t they come looking for him? They must have lost track of time, boxed in with the music, curtains pulled and the light on. Well, that was fine with him. A deal was a deal. Another ten minutes and the dollar was his. He started to think about what he would get with it. Candy was out. He’d put it toward the collection of baseball cards he was amassing. A dollar would buy another six, including hopefully that one of Barry Bonds he’d been after for months, and which no one wanted to trade.
Then he felt a familiar sick feeling, the humiliating sense of having been outwitted yet again. Maybe they’d never meant to find him. Maybe a dollar was the price Kevin was prepared to pay to get his little squirt of a brother out of the loop for fifteen minutes without screwing things up with Mom. He’d split it with Ronnie, who got a big allowance from his parents. That’s what they’d been whispering about together upstairs. Fifty cents each for a quarter of an hour’s peace, they’d pay that. It got them off the hook, and put Jamie in his place, someone who could be bought for a buck.
But just then there was a sudden surge in the music as the door to Kevin’s room opened. He and Ronnie must have decided to get up off their butts and start looking for him, finally. Jamie gripped the metal tab on the hatch as hard as he could. If they noticed any gap or irregularity, they would be on to him immediately. He listened intently for their voices, trying to pick up some clue about where they thought he might be hiding, where they were going to look for him first. All he could hear was the metallic synthesized crashes and explosions of the funk rap, and then even that was drowned by a dull whump and a loud roaring as the furnace started up.
Jamie started to panic. It had never occurred to him that the thing might light while he was in there. Would the pipes he was lying on start to heat up? He was already wedged tight between them. If they expanded and turned red-hot, he would be trapped and scalded to death! No one would hear his screams. The darkness grew dense and choking, an unbreathable mass in which he lay suffocating like that guy they’d buried alive in the video he and Kevin had rented from Blockbuster while their mom was out with that creep from work.
He had to get out, had to. The time must be almost up anyway. He was afraid to check his watch again because his fingers were sweaty and ached from keeping hold of that little sliver of metal. If only he could hear them going upstairs, he could crawl out and go hide in Kevin’s room, under the bed or something. They’d never come looking for him there, not when they’d been in the room the whole time.
A widening glimmer of light appeared as he began to lose his grip on the metal fastener. The panel dropped down about half an inch on one side. Jamie desperately clenched his fingers tight again, ignoring the pain, and managed to stop the hatch slipping any further. He couldn’t get it back in position, though. He didn’t have enough of a grip on the thing to lift it up and pull it in. If he tried, he’d lose it altogether. He just hoped that the triangular crack at the top of the hatch didn’t show too much from the outside. But was there anyone there? Surely Kevin and Ronnie must have searched the basement by now and gone upstairs. That’s if they were looking for him at all. Maybe they’d just gone to grab a snack or something.
All he could see through the gap between the hatch and the paneling was a patch of bare concrete floor and a strip of unpainted baseboard. He felt as though he’d been trapped in there for hours, not minutes, and although the pipes beneath him weren’t getting any hotter, the air was. Jamie remembered something he’d seen on TV about some guy who’d died from working on his car in the garage with the engine running. There was this poisonous stuff, silent and invisible and deadly. You never even knew what was happening until it was too late. Creepy.
He tensed up. There was a flicker of movement in the triangular sliver of light above the hatch. Even when it came to rest, it took Jamie a moment to figure out that he was looking at the leg of a pair of faded blue jeans, a patch of white sport sock and a shoe.
And what a shoe! A Nike Air Jordan! Jamie recognized it right away, black all over with the silhouette of the basketball star Michael Jordan picked out in bright red on the side of a sole as thick as a Big Mac. A shoe to kill for! $125 a pair! No one he knew had stuff like that, not even Jamal Davis, who’d once told Mr. Olson not to dis him, right there in front of the whole class.
Jamie shut his eyes tight and counted to ten. When he opened them again, all he could see through the crack was the patch of floor, the strip of baseboard. The shoe was gone. He must have imagined it. No one in the house had shoes like that, and none of Kevin’s friends either. Maybe the fumes were getting to him, warping his brain, making him see things and act strange, like Dad when he’d been drinking.
Something close by started beeping, a high-pitched electronic sound. Jamie cursed as he remembered setting the alarm on his watch. Even if the time was up, he didn’t want to reveal his hiding place. He might want to use it again. He stabbed frantically at the button with one free finger of his right hand. As he did so, the metal fastener slipped from his tired fingers and the hatch clattered to the concrete flooring.
With a sigh, the furnace turned off. Jamie lay there without moving, as though his cramped, painful stillness could somehow cancel the noise of the falling cover, erase it so that no one would hear. But he knew it was pointless. If Kevin and Ronnie came to investigate, they’d see the hatch lying on the ground and find him right away. But maybe they were upstairs, out of hearing. The music seemed to have stopped, and he couldn’t hear anyone around.
There was a creak on the stairs, then another. Someone was coming down. Footsteps scuffed on the concrete floor.
“Just a piece of wood fell off the …”
It was a voice Jamie had never heard before. A man. He was just inches away, on the other side of the plywood paneling.
“What?”
Another strange voice, this time upstairs. There was no reply, only the scuffle of footsteps close by.
“Russ?” the second man called again.
There was a pause, then the creak of the stairs. Going up this time, the fifth step and then the second.
“C’mon, let’s go.”
The first voice. There was no reply, no further sound of any kind. Jamie huddled up between the pipes. The dark, confined space which had oppressed him just a moment earlier had become a haven, a refuge. It was the open hatchway which scared him now. He expected a face to appear there at any moment, a strange face, smiling a strange smile. He wished he could reach out and replace the panel, but he was afraid to move a muscle. Play dead, he told himself. Play dead.
When he dared move a hand to check his watch again, he found that time had speeded up. Five and a half minutes had gone by. The house was completely still, but Jamie made no move. Even the dull pain of the pipes digging into his back and shoulder seemed a kind of comfort. But in the end the throbbing of his cramped muscles became unendurable. Taking as much care as he could not to make any noise, Jamie started to struggle out of his hiding place. It was even harder getting out than getting in. His ankle had got wedged between two pipes, and there seemed no way to wrench it loose. He remembered the kid in seventh grade who’d gone into the wrecking yard over on 33rd and got trapped when a parted-out car collapsed on him. A surge of panic almost made him cry out for help, but he bit his lip and forced himself to calm down.
Eventually he found the trick to free himself, by pushing his foot into the cleft and twisting it. After that, it was just a matter of squeezing through the narrow opening and lowering himself on his hands, carefully avoiding the loose hatch cover. He crouched on the concrete floor, taking up no more space than he had inside the paneling, listening intently. Silence lay on the house like a fall of snow. The only sound was the whine of the freezer in the corner and a car engine revving up outside in the street. Jamie recognized the deep, throaty roar of Mr. Valdez’s Pontiac.
The thought that normal life was going on close at hand gave him the courage to stand up and look around. Everything looked the same as it had when he came down to hide. Jamie stepped cautiously, on tiptoe, to the door of Kevin’s room. He turned the handle and opened the door a crack. His brother lay stretched out on the bed as though asleep. Jamie opened the door wider, and sniffed. There was a funny smell, kind of nice, like fireworks or something. Then he saw Ronnie Ho lying face down on the floor. Jamie’s fear abruptly left him.
“C’mon guys!” he said in the edgy tone he knew Kevin hated. “Pay-up time.”
Neither of them moved. Jamie began to feel irritated. They were playing one of their stupid games, ignoring what he said, acting like he wasn’t there.
“You owe me a dollar, Kevin!” he said, taking a step into the room.
Still there was no response. The stress and strain of the past twenty minutes had left Jamie’s nerves ragged. Being treated like a dumb younger brother was the last straw. He picked up a social studies textbook lying on the chest of drawers and spun it across the room like a frisbee. It was a heavy book, and the corner struck Kevin just below the ear. Realizing that he’d gone too far, Jamie sprinted quickly across the basement and upstairs before Kevin could catch up and give him hell.
In the hall at the top of the stairs, he paused. There was no sound of pursuit. In fact there was no sound at all. Even the Accident had stopped whining for attention. Jamie was still standing there uncertainly when the phone began to ring, doubled by the electronic warble of the portable. He waited for his mom to answer, but the phone kept right on ringing. Jamie walked through to the living room. The portable was still lying on the sofa where his mom had thrown it. He picked it up and pushed the button.
“Hello?”
“Hi! Is this Jamie? This is Kelly Shelden. Your mom left a message on my voice mail. Can I speak to her?”
“Hold on.”
He lowered the phone.
“Mom!”
There was no reply. Jamie wandered down the room toward the dining area.
“Mom!”
He stumbled on something and grabbed the back of the sofa to stop himself falling. The portable went flying. Jamie looked at the thing he had tripped over. It was wrapped in shiny blue fabric, with pieces of crinkly white appearing here and there.
Mrs. Shelden was hollering something in a squeaky voice. Stepping carefully over the obstacle on the floor, Jamie reached down and picked up the portable.
“Hello?” he said.
“Jamie? Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“What’s going on?”
“I dropped the phone.”
“Oh, OK. Did you find your mom?”
“Yeah.”
“OK.”
Jamie turned and looked down again.
“Hello?” said Kelly Shelden.
“I’m here,” said Jamie.
“Well, are you going to put your mom on or what?”
“I can’t.”
“How come? Is she in the bathroom or something?”
He did not answer.
“Jamie? What the heck are you playing at?”
“Could you get over here, Mrs. Shelden? Like now?”
“Oh boy, you must be kidding! I’ve got a zillion things to do. Listen, I’ll call back in ten minutes. Will she be able to talk then?”
“I think she’s dead.”
“Well, have her call me when she’s free. I’ll be home till four, then I have to bring Ryan to baseball practice, but I should be back by-”
“You’ve gotta come!” Jamie shouted. “I’m only a kid!”
Kelly Shelden’s voice softened into concern.
“Why, Jamie! What’s the matter, honey?”
Jamie broke into sobs.
“I’m feeling weirded out. Like totally.”
The time I remember best is the night we ended up down at the Commercial, and all that happened afterward. It would be nice and neat to be able to say that that’s where the whole thing started, but there must have been a lot more behind it, a slow shifting of psychological fault lines under the pressure of life events about which I know nothing, about which maybe no one ever knew anything, and never will now.
Minneapolis is not exactly notorious for its seedy lowlife, but there is-or was, back in the seventies-a part of downtown, a couple of blocks either side of the railroad tracks, which got reasonably lively after dark. The Commercial Hotel was right in the middle of it. They knocked it down later and built a mall with fountains and escalators and shops selling things which no reasonable person could need, but I don’t recall anyone circulating a petition to save the place. The Commercial was one of those oppressively huge hotels which went up all over the country around the turn of the century near major railroad depots.Its fortunes exactly mirrored those of the transportation system it was built to serve, and during its last decade the rooms were used only by prostitutes, winos and other down-and-outs. What kept the place in business was its liquor license. The bar was the biggest and rowdiest in town and they had pretty tight bands on the weekends, but for us the main attraction was the atmosphere of sleaze and failure. It appealed to our sense of living on the edge.
