AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Pajama Lady!" Danny heard Max calling. "Pop!"
The cook had sat up in bed beside the drowsy Yi-Yiing. "Who's 'Pop,' do you suppose?" he asked her.
"I'm guessing that I'm the Pajama Lady," Yi-Yiing answered sleepily. "You must be Pop."
Quite a commotion ensued when Yi-Yiing and the cook learned that Joe had fallen off his bike and there'd been a car involved. Max would probably take to his grave the image of how fast the Pajama Lady ran barefoot to the scene of the accident, where Joe was now sitting up--rocking back and forth in his father's arms. The cook, with his limp, was slower to arrive; by then, Youn had interrupted her novel-in-progress to see what was the matter.
The elegantly dressed dame at the farthest end of the alley--her trash barrels had been knocked over by the vanishing blue Mustang--approached fearfully. She was elderly and frail, but she wanted to see if the boys on their bicycles were all right. Like Max, the regal old woman had seen the blue Mustang in the neighborhood before--but never the driver.
"What kind of blue?" Danny asked her.
"Not a common blue--it's too blue," the old dame said.
"It's a customized job, Mr. Angel--I told you," Max said.
"You're all right, you're all right," Yi-Yiing kept saying to Joe; she was feeling the boy all over. "You never hit your head, did you?" she asked him; he shook his head. Then she began to tickle him, maybe to relieve them both. Her Hong Kong pajamas this morning were an iridescent fish-scale green.
"Everything's fine, isn't it?" Youn asked Danny. The Korean divorcee probably wanted to get back to her writing.
No, everything isn't "fine," the writer Danny Angel was thinking--not with the driverless blue Mustang on the loose--but he smiled at her (Youn was also barefoot, wearing a T-shirt and jeans) and at his worried-looking father. The cook must have limped naked into the upstairs hall before he realized he lacked clothes, because he was wearing just a pair of Danny's running shorts; Danny had left them on the railing at the top of the stairs.
"Are you taking a run, Pop?" Danny asked his dad, the new word seeming strangely natural to them both--as if a bullet dodged marked a turning point, or a new beginning, in both their lives and young Joe's. Maybe it did.
COLBY WAS THE COP'S NAME. "Officer Colby," the cook kept calling him, in the kitchen of the Court Street house--perhaps in mock respect of that other, long-ago policeman in his life. Except for the bad haircut, the young Iowa City cop in no way resembled Carl. Colby was fair-skinned with Scandinavian-blue eyes and a neatly trimmed blond mustache; he apologized for not responding sooner to Danny's call about the dangerous driver, but those weekends when the Iowa football team played at home kept the local police busy. The policeman's demeanor was at once friendly and earnest--Danny liked him immediately. (The writer could not help but observe how observant the policeman was; Colby had an eye for small details, such as those beer stickers on the fridge.) Officer Colby told Danny and his dad that he'd received previous reports of a blue Mustang; as Max had said, the car was probably a customized job, but there were some inconsistencies in the various sightings.
The hood ornament was either the original mustang or--according to a hysterical housewife in the parking lot of a supermarket near Fairchild and Dodge--an obscene version of a centaur. Other witnesses identified a nonspecific but clearly out-of-state license plate, while a university student who'd been run off Dubuque Street on his motorcycle said that the blue Mustang definitely had Iowa plates. As Officer Colby told the cook and his writer son, there were no descriptions of the driver.
"The boys will be home from school any minute," Danny said to the cop, who'd politely glanced at his watch. "You can talk to them. I saw nothing but an unusual shade of blue."
"May I see your son's room?" the officer asked.
A curious request, Danny thought, but he saw no reason to object. It took only a minute, and Colby made no comment on the beer posters; the three men returned to the kitchen to wait for the kids. As for the back alley, where the blue Mustang had almost hit the boys on their bikes, Officer Colby pronounced it safe for bike-riding "under normal circumstances." However, the officer seemed to share Yi-Yiing's overall feelings about kids on bicycles in Iowa City. It was better for the kids to walk, or take the bus--certainly they should avoid riding their bike
s downtown. There were more and more students driving, many of them newcomers to the university town--not to mention the out-of-towners on the big sports weekends.
"Joe doesn't ride his bike downtown--only in this neighborhood--and he always walks his bike across the street," Danny told the policeman, who looked as if he doubted this. "No, really," the writer said. "I'm not so sure about Max, our neighbor's eight-year-old. I think Max's parents are more liberal--I mean concerning where Max can ride his bike."
"Here they are," the cook said; he'd been watching the back alley for Joe and Max to appear on their bicycles.
The eight-year-olds seemed surprised to see Officer Colby in the kitchen; like the third graders they were, and almost as if they were passing a secret message in class, they looked quickly at each other and then stared at the kitchen floor.
"The beer-truck boys," Colby said. "Maybe you boys should keep in mind that the blue Mustang has been seen all over town." The officer turned his attention to Danny and his dad. "They're good kids, but they like getting beer stickers and posters and those sew-on badges from the beer-truck drivers. I see these boys at the bars downtown. I just remind them that they can't go inside the bars, and I occasionally have to tell them not to follow the beer trucks from bar to bar--not on their bikes. Clinton and Burlington streets are particularly bad for bikes."
Joe couldn't look at his dad or grandfather. "The beer-truck boys," the cook repeated.
"I gotta go home," Max said; he was that quickly gone.
"When I see these boys in City Park," Colby went on, "I tell them I hope they're not riding their bikes on Dubuque Street. It's safer to take the footbridge behind the student union, and ride their bikes along the Hancher side of the river. But I suppose it takes you longer to get to the park or the zoo that way--doesn't it?" Officer Colby asked Joe. The boy just nodded his head; he knew he'd been busted.
Very early the next morning, when Youn was sound asleep and Yi-Yiing hadn't yet come home from her night shift at Mercy Hospital, Danny went into Joe's bedroom and observed the eight-year-old asleep in what amounted to a shrine to various brands of beer. "Wake up," he said to his son, shaking him gently.
"It's too early for school, isn't it?" Joe asked.
"Maybe you'll miss school this morning," his father said. "We'll just tell the school you're sick."
"But I feel fine," the boy said.
"Get up and get dressed, Joe--you're not fine," his dad told him. "You're dead--you've already died."
