I Am the Cheese (18 page)

I could have gone to the police, of course. But I didn’t want to take any risks. I am so near Rutterburg now. Belton Falls and the motel are only a mile or two away and I can easily make it to Rutterburg in the morning and I don’t want to take a chance of the police asking questions and wondering what someone from Massachusetts is doing in the dark of night up in Vermont. All I want is to get my bike back and then find the motel and sleep, rest my weary bones and aching legs and then pedal into Rutterburg, Vermont, tomorrow morning in the sunshine.

The front door of the Varney house slams and I am alert again, holding my breath, tensing my body. A boy of about my own age comes out of the house and stands there for a moment, looking around, looking up and down the street, as if he senses he is being watched. I shrink and shrivel against the stone wall. He walks to the bike and runs his hands over the handlebar as if he is caressing it. While he’s inspecting
the bike, a woman comes out of the house and approaches him. They talk awhile and I can’t hear them. The woman places her hand on the boy’s shoulder and he wrenches away from her.

Suddenly, I miss my mother. I want to cry. I want to feel her hand on my shoulder. I watch the woman standing near the boy. She’s still talking and he doesn’t look at her, his back to her. I hate him. Not only for stealing my bike but for turning his back on his mother. He has a mother and he turns his back on her. I feel like dashing across the street to attack him, knock him down, feel the fracture of bone as my fist hits his jaw. But I stay there, breathing hard, waiting my chance, not wanting to think of my mother, holding off the anguish, the loneliness. Then the woman goes into the house and the boy stands there for a moment more. Then he takes the bike and wheels it to the steps, guides it down the three steps from the porch to the front walk, and begins to wheel it across the lawn. He turns the corner and is heading toward the back of the house.

That’s when I make my move. I can’t afford to let him out of my sight or allow him to disappear into the backyard because the yard is an unknown quantity and I don’t know the conditions there. So, I yell, “Hey, Junior Varney,” mustering all my vocal strength, and at the same time I run across the street, a passing car brushing me slightly as I burst into the roadway.

Junior Varney stops, dumbfounded. He draws the bike close to him as if it’s a shield. My heart pounds furiously as I approach him. In dismay, I see that he
is taller and heavier than I am. I sigh, sadly. It’s never easy, never easy.

“That’s my bike,” I say.

“What are you talking about?” he answers, belligerently. He is prepared to fight and I feel like crying again.

“The bike. It’s mine. You stole it on Main Street.”

“You’re crazy,” he says. “I bought this bike from a kid this afternoon. I paid him fifty bucks for it.”

“You’re lying.”

“
You’re
the liar. You’re the goddam liar. You better get out of here or you’ll get massacred.”

I am terrified but I reach out and grab the handlebars. I drop my father’s package and wrench at the bike. This is my bike and I am riding it into Rutterburg, Vermont, tomorrow morning and nothing is going to stop me. Nothing. I pull at the bike and Junior Varney and I are caught in a ridiculous tug-of-war and the air is filled with our breathing, no other sound, as if we are alone on the planet. Finally, he pushes against me and I lose my balance and fall. I hit the ground and roll over. He tries to run, holding on to the handlebars. I dive at him. I grab his feet. He trips, pitches forward, and lets go of the bike as he falls. He hits the pavement, his crunch sickening as he strikes the concrete. In that brief interval between the time he feels the impact and the time he begins to gather himself together, I take possession of the bike. It is mine. I swivel it around. I bend down and pick up the package. As he manages to get to his knees, I am running with the bike toward the street. I glance back and see him staggering to his feet, rubbing his
jaw in a daze, and I am on the bike now, sailing, sailing, down the street, on the wrong side of the street and with no lights on the bike, but I am going, going—I have the bike back, I am pedaling beautifully and I am on my way again to Rutterburg.

But how he had wanted to. During those first turbulent days when he was learning about the past and their present situation from his parents, Adam realized, almost guiltily, that a kind of adventure had taken hold of his life. He felt set apart from the other kids at school—but not the loneliness of isolation his
shyness had sometimes brought him. It was a different kind of aloneness, something exclusive, almost sweet. The agony of it all was the secrecy, knowing that he was pledged forever to tell no one—not even Amy. And this was the part that hurt, of course. He wanted to say to her: “We—my mother and father and me—are living through a Number that’s the biggest one of all.” One of the reasons why he avoided Amy in that period was that he was afraid he would tell her everything, that the secret would come tumbling out of him. He was afraid that he would be unable to resist dramatizing himself to her—“Look, Amy, I’m not just shy and awkward Adam Farmer, but a fugitive on the run, leading a double life. I am Paul Delmonte.”

So he avoided her, didn’t call her up, pretended he was busy or that his mother was ill. Thus, there also was a sadness in him in those days, a quiet sorrow deep within him that he did not allow to come to the surface.

“I’m sorry about all this,” his father said once, apparently sensing the sadness.

And Adam had not told him about Amy and his longing for her and the most dangerous longing of all—that he might brag to her of what had happened to make himself more attractive to her, to make him a kind of hero in her eyes.

The day the phone call came. The day his mother said she dreaded: a call that could change their lives again. Adam learned about the call when he arrived home late on a Saturday morning from the Number he and Amy Hertz had finally pulled in the church parking lot. But the Number had fizzled.

“Sorry, Ace,” Amy had said. “This is not one of my glorious moments.”

The concept was fine but the execution misfired, something that was beyond Amy’s control. They had lingered at the edges of the parking lot while the cars arrived sporadically during the half hour before the wedding was scheduled to begin. It was a ten o’clock wedding. He had felt sentimental watching the people arrive, everybody dressed up, families together, fathers and mothers holding the hands of small children as they made their way to the church.

As if reading his mind, Amy said, “Isn’t that nice, Adam? I think it would be nice to be married someday and have kids running all over the house.” She seldom called him Adam, only at tender moments.

He reached out and touched her hand, fumbling for it for a moment, and then held on to it. She smiled at him. He wanted to say, “I love you, Amy.” But couldn’t. She’d probably laugh and make a wisecrack and call him “Ace” again. He felt depressed suddenly. Would his secret keep him forever apart from other people, create a chasm between them? Could he never be intimate with anyone else again?

“So what’s the Number, Amy?” he said, the words coming out of his confusion and sadness.

“Well, okay,” she said reluctantly. She always withheld
information about the Numbers until the last possible moment, stretching out the drama. “I am a sucker for drama,” she always said.

“Look, Ace, there’s going to be about a hundred cars in the lot when the wedding starts inside. And you’ll notice most of them aren’t locked. I don’t know—there’s something about a church parking lot that makes people feel safe. Anyway, after everybody’s inside, we go to work.”

“And how do we go to work?” Adam asked. It was a beautiful morning, the wind kicking at the small blades of grass, the sun dancing on the car hoods and windshields as the cars drove into the lot.

“Simple. We each take half the cars in the lot, sneak into them—everybody’s in the church watching the bride so we don’t have to worry too much about that—and then we do two things. First, we snap on the radio and turn the volume to high. Second, we turn the windshield wipers to the ‘On’ position. And then we get out of the car and go to another one.”

“I don’t get it,” Adam said. “The motors are off—the radios won’t play and the windshield wipers won’t work.”

“That’s exactly right,” she said, voice patient. “Nothing will work until the drivers get into their cars—about a hundred of them—and start the motors. Then the radios will explode like mad in their ears and the windshield wipers will go into action. Can you imagine all of them sitting there, wondering what in the world happened?”