The door opposite Mr. Contreras’s opened and the woman making the important presentation stormed out in sweat clothes. “Did you buy this stairwell to use as your living room?” she demanded. “If not, could you entertain upstairs so that people like me who work for a living can get some rest?”
Behind Mr. Contreras’s door, Mitch took exception to our neighbor’s hostility and let out a sharp bark.
“Think you can manage the stairs?” I said to Robbie. “If this woman gets any more excited she’ll have a stroke, and then we’ll be up all night carting her to the hospital and you’ll never be able to tell me why you came or how you got here.”
“I’m only asking you to show some consideration,” the woman said.
I didn’t think Robbie needed the added stress of me getting into a fight, so I bit back the various remarks that sprang to mind and concentrated on helping him up the stairs. When I turned my back on her, the woman gasped and ran back inside her apartment. It was only when we reached the second landing that I realized she must have seen my gun. I laughed a little to myself: that might be the last time she pissed to me about noise in the building.
We went slowly; by the time we reached my door Mr. Contreras was huffing up behind us with a tray and three cups of cocoa. The old man is at his best in dealing with the halt and lame. I left him roughly coaxing Robbie to drink some cocoa while I took my gun back to my bedroom.
“You must think I’m pretty weird, coming here like this and fainting and everything,” he said when I came back.
I pulled the piano bench next to the armchair. “I don’t think anything about you, but I’m about to burst with curiosity. Your sister said you’d run away. How did you get to Wrigleyville?”
“Is that where we are? By Wrigley Field? I’ve been here with my dad.” Some of the strain eased out of his face—if I lived in known territory it couldn’t be as scary as he’d been thinking. “I came how Nicola used to—I took my bike to the bus and rode the bus to the train. But then I got lost trying to find you and I didn’t have enough money for a cab or anything, so I’ve been walking and walking, I bet I’ve walked five miles. That would make BB and Eleanor delirious with joy if they knew I got that much exercise in one afternoon.”
“Who are BB and Eleanor?” Mr. Contreras asked.
“Parents,” I explained briefly. “Baladine’s nickname at Annapolis was BB–gun Baladine.”
“He loves it,” Robbie said. “He’s such a he–man, it proves it when people call him that. Only—only I’m not. He hates that. Or hates me; he wishes Madison and Utah had been the boys and me the girl, he said if I was a girl he could dress me in—in pink ruff—ruffles.”
His teeth began to chatter. I moved over to the arm of the chair and forced some cocoa into him, giving Mr. Contreras a warning sign to keep quiet. I was afraid even a man as benign as my neighbor might appear threatening to this very tired child.
“You’re exhausted,” I said in a matter–of–fact voice. “You’re probably dehydrated too, from walking so much. That’s why your body is acting up on you. Everybody’s does when they’re overtired and then have to deal with a strange situation: it happens to me, which is how I know. Finish this cocoa before you try to say anything else.”
“Really?” He looked at me hopefully. “I thought—thought it was only because I was a—all the names he calls me.”
I supposed Baladine stood over him and called him a faggot or queer or other names that pass for insults with someone like him. “Name–calling is a horrible kind of torture, especially when it comes from your parents. It leaves you without any defenses.”
He gulped the drink and kept a death grip on the cup as the best way to hold on to his wayward feelings. When he seemed calm enough to speak, I asked why he’d come to me.
“That was probably the stupidest thing of all, me coming to you, because what can you do? Only, when I saw he was going to send me to—to boot camp, I thought I couldn’t take another time like that, like when they made me go to the camp for fat kids, that was horrible enough, but at least everyone else was overweight too, but boot camp, that’s like when all the other kids get to haze you for being queer or different somehow. Like my cousins, when I have to go spend a month with them, they play football, they’re supposed to toughen me up.”