Through the Hidden Door Read Online Free PDF Page B

I don’t think Silks bothered to read it. He did not return it to me, nor did he do anything but grunt and look daggers at me when I showed up mornings to recite “If.”
    The night before Thanksgiving break I lay in bed, my mind full of skeletons, labeled in Latin, all drawn before the First World War, of wild boars and antelopes, gorillas and Shetland ponies.
    An idea circled my head like a fly. It had to do with Snowy’s bone, but it was fuzzy and I could not get hold of it. Was it only this, that because of a tiny unknowable little object my mind had begun to work beyond cheating rings, friends I hated? I let myself think of my father, when he and I had discovered an early Cézanne crammed in a dusty bassinet at the back of a San Luis Obispo thrift shop. Dad and I had celebrated that night, as if we’d been Balboa and son and had just discovered the Pacific Ocean. I meandered down the corridor to the john. Yes. That was just how I felt about the bone.
    We had to find out where the dog had dug the bone up. There my thoughts stopped.
    I threw myself back in bed, wondering how I could explain the bone to my dad.
    In my bed was a body. Before I could scream, big hands slid around my throat and over my mouth, cutting off my voice. Then, wildly laughing, Rudy leapt from the bed and left the room. “Didn’t want you to forget about me!” he whispered with an awful giggle.

Chapter Four
    B Y THANKSGIVING MORNING MY father had settled his rage enough to talk sensibly to me.
    Silks had written him every detail of my miserable record, from mushroom eating to cheating rings.
    Dad picked me up at the Denver airport. In the car he said I deserved to be belted within an inch of my life, but he didn’t believe in hitting. Maybe he should have whacked me when I was young. I might have turned out better. He called me a jackass, a fool, a moron. He asked me to explain each of the dumb things I had done.
    “Because I wanted them to like me, Dad,” was all I could answer to every question.
    “But why? Why them? Why choose the lowest scum of the earth to be your friends?”
    “Because they teased me when I first came. They made fun of my lisp. I knew it would go on like that for three years unless ... unless I somehow joined up with them.”
    From that point Dad went on about being an absent father. What would have happened if my mother had lived. He called himself worse names than he did me.
    At three thirty in the morning we decided to take a walk.
    “Sky’s so big out here,” I said. “You forget what it’s like when you’re in the East.”
    “Can you put this behind you, Barney?” Dad asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “I don’t like you going back to a place with a half-nutty prison warden like Silks in charge. I don’t like five linebackers twice your size prowling around till they wring your neck. I don’t like you being punished and not them, and it makes me puke to hear about Papa Damascus and his stinking swimming pool.”
    “Can’t do much about it, can we?” I said. “I mean, I can’t switch to another school midterm with my record. I can’t live home with Uncle Edward and go to Red Arrow High.”
    “Pit Bull High,” said my father.
    “What?”
    “They’ve changed the name. The football team’s now called the Red River Pit Bulls. They’re putting up a twelve-foot-high statue of a bullterrier between the cannons at the entrance. They wanted it on the roof, but that got voted down.”
    We watched the sun come up behind the mountains.
    “There’s a school in Monterey, California,” said Dad after a while. “I know the dean of students. He collects old glass. I could get you in there.”
    “I’ll stay, Dad. I’ll stay where I am and keep my nose clean and somehow go to Hotchkiss.”
    “You can be three thousand miles away from Silks and Sader and Damascus.”
    “I’ll think it over, Dad,” I said.
    We walked until dawn warmed our backs.
    I covered miles that weekend, through the still streets of Lantry