Monkey Island by Paula Fox Read Free Book Online

lined up at the telephone. He heard someone shout, “But I been waiting now two months!” A huge woman sat on a bench with two babies climbing up and tumbling down from her lap, both of them tied to her by long cords that stretched from their waists to her wrists.
    Nobody looked at him. He was used to that. Still, he didn’t count on it. Now and then a person would catch sight of him. He’d been chased all over the hotel, down corridors and up the stairs, once to the roof, where he had hid for hours behind a chimney pot. It was that sudden shift of attention he had to keep himself ready for. Watch out. Stay on your toes, his mother had said.
    He slipped out through the lobby to the sidewalk.
    He wouldn’t be able to watch for his mother from under the awning of the apartment house across the street. If a kid from the hotel went near the entrance, the doorman, usually leaning up against the wall inside, would start up like a battery-run machine, his feet hitting the floor with great thumps, his elbows pumping, his mouth opening to shout, “Bums! Bums, get going!”
    There were sparse hedges he could get behind, an entrance to a dentist’s office, other entries to small stores, and the subway exit at the corner. He could take shelter there if a policeman came along.
    There was another place, the news store, diagonally across the street from the hotel, where Abdul, the Arab owner, appeared to dream behind a counter covered with packs of cigarettes, candy, and little packages of cheese and peanut butter crackers. Abdul never seemed to mind his looking at magazine covers as long as he didn’t pick them up. And from inside the store, he could see people as they went by.
    But Abdul knew about school hours, though he looked as if he minded no one’s business but his own as he made change, putting magazines in a thin paper bag if a customer asked for one, his eyes looking off somewhere into the distance. Clay knew Abdul recognized him by now, and even might ask him a dangerous question about school in his deep voice. Still, it was Saturday, and he would run in there if he saw a policeman.
    For a long time, Clay stood near the subway exit until he felt so hungry he didn’t even dare look toward Abdul’s. He’d seen Tony pinch candy, doing it swiftly, loading up the pockets of his oversize pants. One day Abdul caught him at it, and now Tony wasn’t allowed in the store.
    Suddenly, Clay recollected the money he’d taken from beneath the doughnut box in the hotel room and that was now in his pocket. He went into the news store and bought two packages of cheese and peanut butter crackers, a soda, and a coconut bar. Abdul took the money Clay handed him and gave him change, silent and unquestioning as usual.
    Clay walked along the sidewalk, eating. His father would not have liked that. “Animals eat on the run,” he had said once. But that was before, when the Garritys had a small, pleasant kitchen, and a table to eat on, and the outside world of streets and sidewalks was something you passed through to get to other inside places. Even his father might be eating on a street somewhere at this moment. When he finished the soda, he started to throw the can into a trash basket. Then he remembered Buddy’s job and held on to it.
    He must have been hanging around the hotel for hours by now. His legs ached. His fingers had stiffened around the can which was too big to fit into a pocket. What he had to do was to sit down, and the only place where he could do that without people noticing him was the little park. He could come back later to keep watch, perhaps after dark.
    Calvin was sitting at the entrance to the crate, his legs stretched in front of him, a notebook on his lap. It was the same kind that Clay used in school, except that Calvin’s notebook looked like it was about to fall apart. He was writing in it fiercely, pressing the stub of a pencil hard against a page. On