Mr. Wicker's Window Part 1

Mr. Wicker's Window.

by Carley Dawson.

CHAPTER 1

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Christopher Mason felt numb. It seemed to him that he was as good as an orphan already, for his father, a Commander in the Navy, was far away at sea, and Chris's mother was in a hospital, not expected to live.

Chris scuffed along the brick pavements of Georgetown, but he did not, as he usually did, look about at its familiar houses. This friendly core of the growing city of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., today seemed to him almost hostile.

Georgetown, where Chris lived, is the oldest part of the capital city, built by early English settlers long years before Was.h.i.+ngton itself was even planned. Grouped at the head of the navigable part of the Potomac River, above Georgetown's bluffs, the Potomac foams and dashes over wild rocks and waterfalls, and across the river, the country starts.

Chris had just left his mother's sister, his Aunt Rachel. Aunt Rachel, white-faced, was preparing to go to the hospital to be with his mother and had asked him, "Don't you want to come too, Chris? For a little while?" But a cold-edged wing of fear had brushed the boy like a bat wing in the night. He had shaken his head, speechless, grabbed his sweater, and slammed the front door.

Now he hesitated on a corner, suddenly dismayed, not knowing quite where to go or what to do. The whole city with its white marble buildings and templed memorials, its elm-lined avenues, seemed all at once very empty.

He looked down to the Potomac, always, for Chris, just "the river,"

where it glinted distantly blue and silver at the end of the street.

Factories along the riverbank cut off all but the farthest stretches of water as the river moved under bridge after bridge beside the banks of Maryland and Virginia.

Chris made up his mind to see what might be in the Pep Boys' store, far down the hill and along traffic-filled M Street. Somehow the tawdry bustle of this street, with its many shops, appealed to the boy who carried misery inside him like a cold, heavy stone. Running, he started down the hill between the lines of old brick houses, left Rock Creek Park behind him, and turning to the right up M Street, reached the hardware glitter of The Pep Boys'.

And it was there, as he stood staring in at the chromium bicycle lamps, red gla.s.s tail lights, and wire baskets, that Mike Dugan found him.

CHAPTER 2

Mike was in his cla.s.s at public school, the eighth grade. Mike was all right. Chris liked him.

"Hya, Chris!"

"Hi, Mike!"

"Whatcha doin'?"

"Nothin' much. Just looking."

"Say--you know sumthin'?" Mike wiggled himself across part of the Pep Boys' window to gain Chris's attention. "Old Wicker's got a sign in his window--he needs a boy. For after school, I guess. Think he'd pay, huh? Whyncha try?"

Chris looked from a nickel-plated flashlight to a car jack and spark plug.

"Oh--I don't know."

Mike persisted. "Well, I'll tell you what. Know who needs a job bad?

That's Jakey Harris. His mother's sick, and he's got that bad foot.

Whyncha ask for him, huh? You sit next to him at school."

All Chris heard was "--needs a job bad--mother's sick."

"O.K.," he said. "Only why didn't you ask him yourself?"

Mike became uneasy and fished an elastic band out of his pocket, made a flick of paper and sent it soaring out into M Street.

"Well--" he admitted, "I did. Wicker's such a queer old guy. That ol'

antique shop is dark an' spooky, an'--Well, I went in, and there wasn't n.o.body there, on'y him and me."

Mike stopped, and after a pause Chris said, "So what?"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"So--" Mike swallowed. "So I said I was there about the job, an' do you know what he said? He said"--he went on without urging, but with a frown of perplexity ridging his forehead--"He said, 'Turn around and look out that window, son, and tell me what you see.'"

Mike stopped and looked at Chris with a comical expression. "Everybody knows what's outside his window!" he burst out. "Of all the silly things! But I turned around and looked, like he told me to, and of course there was the traffic goin' by, and trucks, and cabs, and people crossin' the street, and the freeway overhead, an'--_you_ know."

"So what did he say?" Chris asked, and for the first time that day the heavy weight he carried within him lifted and lightened a little.

Mike examined the toe of his worn shoe. "Oh, he just smiled, that funny little crackly smile, and said, 'I'm sorry, young man, you won't do.'"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

For a moment both boys stared into one another's eyes, each questioning, wondering, and neither being able to supply the answer.

At last, Chris broke the silence.

"Queerest thing I ever heard. Gee! Whaddaya suppose?"

Mike took heart, his experience believed and his bafflement shared. He spoke cheerfully. "It doesn't make sense, but old Wicker's so old he may be addled, don't you reckon? Who else would keep an antique store where n.o.body ever looks? All the other antique places are along Wisconsin Avenue where people go to shop."

"You reckon Jakey really could use the job?" Chris asked, his courage ebbing as he pictured to himself the dark little shop with its bow window of small panes, and Mr. Wicker, so thin and wizened he seemed only bones and wrinkles. "Think he really needs it?" he pursued.

But Mike was certain, or perhaps he needed a companion in this curious experiment.

"You bet he does! He tol' me at noon today he wished he could find something that would help bring some money in. His mother's sick," he repeated, "an' Jakey don' look so good himself."

"Well--" Chris said, half agreeing.

"I'll go with ya!" Mike announced, as if that finished the argument; which, as a matter of fact, it did.

Chris did not feel too happy about his mission and hung back a moment longer, looking in the Pep Boys' window at things he had already seen.

He would have liked to get the job for Jakey, who needed it, but somehow the task of facing Mr. Wicker, especially now that the light was going and dusk edging into the streets, was not what Chris had intended for ending the afternoon. Although he had not been quite certain how he had meant to spend the rest of the remaining daylight, Mike's plan did not seem to fit his present mood.

"Are you coming?" Mike challenged, with a hint of derision.