The Seventeenth Swap

1. Jimmy-Day

2. The First Lists

3. Research

4. The Hobbyhorse Shop

5. The Big Swap

6. Gloomy Sunday

7. Tackling Mount Everest

8. Jigsaw Juggling

9. Tackling Angel

10. D-Day

11. The View from the Top

For Lynn who told me what I was trying to say

It was Wednesday, April 6, raining. Jimmy-day, Eric Greene reminded himself as he slammed his desk shut.

He found himself smiling as he wove his way through the noisy 3:30 stream of his contemporaries and out the big double doors of Iron Mountain Elementary School. He was beginning to like Wednesdays—and Mondays and Saturday mornings—just about as well as the days when he could do whatever he wanted to. He'd never have believed it.

The rain was the wet kind, not the sort you could just ignore for a five-block walk, unless you wanted to be pretty damp when you arrived. Eric pulled up the hood of his all-purpose-all-weather-all-seasons jacket and zipped the front of it over his ring binder and math book—with difficulty, since the jacket was two years old and strained to its limit just covering
him.
Unfortunately the hood gave him tunnel vision and prevented his spotting Angel Anthony before she spotted him.

“Eric! Hey, Eric, wait! I got something to show you!”

He had half-turned at the sound of his name and now couldn't pretend he hadn't heard her. Also, the green light ahead of him was changing to amber. Resignedly, he waited at the Lake Street corner for Angel to cover the half-block that separated them, pumping along in the short-legged, hard-breathing way that never seemed to get her anywhere. He wished for the umpteenth time that her route home didn't coincide with his—or that it was possible to get from the school to the central section of town some other way than straight down Rivershore—old Bottleneck Boulevard. It wasn't, unless you cared to make a seven-mile detour around the lake, through what Eric thought of as the Rich-and-Fancy residential district. As for what Angel had to show him, it was bound to be either an A on her Language Arts theme or a new cocktail pick for her collection. He'd long ago used up his vocabulary of reactions to either one.

“Look! Isn't this
great?
My Aunt Julie brought it to me from
New York.
A
hotel
in
New York
!” Angel arrived at last, struggling to extract her hand from her jacket pocket, dropping a book as she did so.

Cocktail pick. Eric retrieved the book, shook the water off it and gave it to her, accepting in exchange a small black plastic sword with a gilded plastic hand guard, at which he gazed fixedly as he tried to think of something new to say. He failed. “Wow, another sword,” he said as enthusiastically as possible. “How many does that make now?”

“Fourteen. Well, this one isn't really a
sword.
” The light changed and they started across the street. “It's more like a
cutlass.
See? It's curved. Like that
kind pirates used to carry. It's the only one I have like that. Here, give it to me and I'll put it back in my box. Can you hold my books a minute?”

Eric balanced her books on his palm like a waiter with a tray while she located a small, flat tin box in one of her pockets, carefully opened its hinged lid, and put the cocktail pick inside. The box had printing on it. “Hey, lemme see that box a minute,” Eric said. “Is that a cigar box? Hey, where'd you get it?”

Angel wasn't interested in letting him see it. “I don't know. Grampa's, I think.” She snapped the box shut. “Did you have your picture taken today?”

Eric had not; but since everybody else in sixth grade had, he didn't bother to answer, allowing Angel to assume what she liked. He was still trying to read the printing. “Listen, if I found you another box, could I have that one?” he asked her.

“No, I need it for my cocktail picks.” Angel stuffed the box into her pocket and took back her books.

“But I know somebody who collects cigar boxes. His name is Mr. Lee—he's the shoe repair man, down on—”

“Hey, Eric, how many pictures you going to order?”

Eric sighed. He never won conversations with Angel. “None. Who wants to spend money on dumb pictures?” Especially when there wasn't any money to spend.

“I'm going to order six wallet-sized ones, and one of the big ones to give my mom for her birthday.”

They had cut over to Market Street; only three more blocks now. Angel chattered on happily, about
her mother, her cocktail picks, her aunt from New York, her aunt from Idaho, her sister, her sister's best friend, the sister's best friend's boyfriend . . . Having no idea that bits of this monologue might later prove of crucial importance, Eric tuned her out, as he had learned long ago to tune out the succession of talkative women who had raised him—Aunt Myra in the dim past, cousin Anna Beth for a while after that, then for years and years Mrs. Wade, who used to arrive in the morning already talking, and finally the various high school girls who came in after school and made straight for the phone. His father had freed him from the last of them on the glorious day he turned nine. It had been blessedly silent around their apartment during the two years since.

He was just getting onto an interesting train of his own thoughts when Angel halted in the middle of the sidewalk and demanded impatiently, “Well, do you want to or not?”

Eric tried to play back her last few sentences as he glanced around for a clue. Oh, good. They were at Rose Lane, Angel's turnoff. “Want to?” he echoed cautiously.

“Want. To. Come. To. My house,” Angel enunciated. “And see my sister's new
perfume
bottle. That her
friend
gave her. I've just been
telling
you.”

“Oh. No. Thanks. I can't. I've got a job on Wednesdays.”

“A
job?
Really?” Angel's attention was actually diverted from her own affairs for an instant. “What kind of job?”

“Sitter. Regular—three times a week. ‘Bye, I
better go.” Eric hastily turned his tunnel vision toward home and started walking at his own pace, which covered a lot more ground than Angel's.

“Whereabouts?” Angel called after him, but he pretended not to hear. If he told her she might decide to come talk to him there.

She gave up and went her way, down one of the last of the old streets still lined with small single houses and big trees, and with an increasingly light step he went his, into the oldest section of all—an area left over from the days when Iron Mountain was merely a little town grown up around an iron-rich hill which happened to be near a lake. The ironworks was long gone; the town's present focus was the lake and the boat slips and the water-skiing lives of people who had houses around its edges and jobs in the city eight miles away. The old houses Eric now walked past had nearly all been remodeled into offices or photo studios, or replaced long ago by apartments which were now dim and aging too.

His own apartment at the very end of Fifth Street was one of the dimmest, backed up against the old-growth timber edging the wooded ravine, and flanked by a patch of weeds which fell away into the steep brambly slope down to the railroad tracks. He had been walking faster and faster, wondering what Jimmy might want him to do this afternoon—something surprising, he was sure of that. By the time he reached the building he was loping, and he took the cracked cement steps three at a time, humming under his breath. He'd never have thought he'd feel this way about a job, especially this one. He'd have thought
he'd hate having to stay cooped up indoors in one certain place for a certain length of time, having to be “company” for a little sick kid, having to give up his freedom, his treasured privacy, his treasured aloneness, which he'd spent a lot of his life achieving. Instead here he was looking forward to it.

There were things he had to do first—stop in the dingy little lobby to unlock mailbox 309, labeled “Greene” on a card worn almost to illegibility; collect the bills that were the only mail his dad ever got, and take them up two creaking flights of stairs with him; unlock the door of 309 to the familiar faint smell of damp towels and leftover coffee; dump his books and the mail, hang up his jacket, and walk through the living room into the kitchen to grab a couple of crackers and a glass of milk. After a detour via the back hall past both tiny bedrooms for a brief stop in the bathroom, he was free to leave again. With the apartment door dutifully locked behind him, he trotted back downstairs to the ground floor, followed the dim, musty-smelling hall to the extreme rear of the building and knocked on the door of 122, where the Nicholsons lived.

Jimmy's mother opened it at once—she had her coat on already, he noticed guiltily.

“It's all right, you're not late,” she said as if she could read his mind. “I'm early. Couple of errands to squeeze in before work. Here he is, Jimmy! Bye-bye!” With a smile and a wink at Eric she hurried away down the hall.

Eric went on into the living room, where Jimmy was waiting in his wheelchair by the window, his thin little face already alive with eagerness to tell something,
show something. Today it was an ad from last night's paper, of all things, the other pages of which lay scattered around him on the floor. Some kids' shoe store in the city was having a big close-out sale, starting today.
What do you care?
Eric almost said, but stopped himself in time.

“Here! Look at those cowboy boots!” Jimmy was exclaiming. “Wow!
Red
uppers, it says—with black designs on. And only seventeen ninety-nine, reduced from
twenty-five dollars!
Don't they usually cost lots more?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Eric said, though he didn't know much about it. He himself had never worn anything but tennis shoes from the chain store, one pair after another, differing only in their gradually increasing length. He studied the ad. “They must be made of something cheap. Yeah, all vinyl, it says.”

“So what? They're a
steal!
I'd give my right eye for 'em,” said Jimmy, who talked more like a man of thirty-odd than a boy of eight. His father, who was probably the only male he saw much of besides the doctor and Eric,
was
a man of thirty-odd.

“But what would you do without a right eye?” Eric teased idly. What he was thinking was: What would you do with the boots? Jimmy's legs, under the shabby afghan, were two pathetic little sticks that had never walked and never would. The warm socks he wore were the only footgear he'd ever need. Naturally Eric didn't say this, either. He changed the subject. “I found out how to make the airplanes.”

“Honest? Already?” Jimmy's eyes, dark in his colorless little face, widened with delight. “Can you show me right now?”

“Yep. Can I use some of this newspaper?”

“Oh, sure. Help yourself. Only save my picture of the cowboy boots. I want to keep that.”

“Hand me the scissors, then. I'll need them for the airplanes anyhow.”

Jimmy passed the scissors and expertly spun his chair a little closer. “Let's make a lot, okay? All different sizes! Can I do one in my lap, or do you have to have a desk or something? How'd you find out how to do it?”