Monkey Island Read Free Page A

the magazine that had folded; Maggie, his mother’s rich friend; their next-door neighbors, a couple whom they hadn’t seen much of since his father had lost his job; and finally the man from Missing Persons, who came twice.
    His mother continued to go to work at night. She had to, she told Clay. You can’t live in a place like this without money, she said.
    She gave a key to the neighbor woman to look in on him during the night. Clay wondered if it was his father’s key. Most mornings she managed to get home in time to make him breakfast. In school, he thought of her sleeping in the broad daylight while the cars honked on the street below their windows.
    There was no word from his father. “Is he dead?” Clay asked one evening.
    â€œI think he’s looking for work,” his mother said. “I’m sure he’s going to find a job so he can take care of us and … the new baby.” She glanced at him. “You don’t look surprised,” she said.
    â€œI heard you one night,” he said. “I heard about the baby.”
    She looked away from him, her hands gripped in her lap. “I’m sorry you heard about it that way,” she said.
    Not more than a few weeks after that conversation, his mother had to stop work. The doctor said she might lose the baby if she kept on the way she was going, working too hard and not getting enough sleep. During the days she went out, “to get help,” she told Clay. That’s when he first heard about Social Services and aid for dependent mothers and minors. He was a minor because of his age.
    He thought of himself as another kind of miner, one who went deep into dark, airless passages beneath mountains, searching for something.
    Now he kept moving during daylight. He didn’t think about much except making himself invisible so that the security guard, the teenagers who hung out in the corridors and stairwell, and the people who gathered in clumps in the lobby during the afternoons and evenings wouldn’t notice him at all.
    On the fifth night that his mother didn’t return, he had just gotten the knot undone on Mrs. Larkin’s plastic bag when she suddenly opened the door. He gasped.
    â€œTake it easy,” Mrs. Larkin said. Clay glimpsed Jacob sitting on a bed, watching the screen of a small television set with the sound turned off, his feet turned out like a duck’s feet.
    â€œWhat’s going on here?” Mrs. Larkin asked. She reached out and grabbed Clay’s hand. “Where’s your mother?”
    He couldn’t answer. His throat had closed up.
    â€œI wondered who’d been going through my garbage,” she was saying. He realized from her voice that she wasn’t going to be angry.
    â€œShe went away to look for my father,” he managed to say, but his words ran together and he wasn’t sure, from watching her face, that she’d understood him. She was still holding his hand, but her grip loosened. He could have pulled away. For the moment, he didn’t want to.
    â€œCome on in,” she said. “I’m going to give you a bit of supper, late as it is, and you’re going to tell me what’s up.”
    Jacob slowly turned his head to look at Clay. He was a grown-up man, but Clay knew that his body and head were only a costume. He didn’t see or hear too well. He often moaned like a seal. But he could smile, and he smiled now at Clay and waved at him with one of his big lumpy hands that was like a work glove full of sand.
    â€œThat’s right, Jacob,” Mrs. Larkin said. “Wave to him so’s he’ll know he’s welcome.”
    There was a real stove in the room, although it was very small, like a toy stove, and Mrs. Larkin towered over it. Soon she had filled a bowl with pea soup and put it on a little table, along with a spoon and two pieces of dark bread covered with margarine. She took a chair to the table and said to Clay,