Daddys Caliban | Page 6

rubbed some of the black off to find they were
copper.
And junk. Lots of junk.

This wasn't glory. This was shame. He'd fought in the long-ago wars of
our people, then laid down his arms to become a mill worker. What
kind of man did that?
As I went to chin myself back down, I noticed that right by the trap
door was a little pegboard with hooks. On one of the hooks hung
Daddy's work keys.
It was to the closet of glory that I led Cameron that Saturday afternoon.
*
"Gee, your house is so nice up here," Cameron said. He was whispering,
though.
"Don't track any dirt," I whispered back. At the door to Mommy and
Daddy's room, I put my hand up. "Wait here. I'll get the keys."
"I'm coming, butt crack," Cameron hissed, and pushed me into Mommy
and Daddy's room ahead of him.
Their bed was almost as high as my chest, with a quilt made from a lot
of strange-colored old scraps. It looked like autumn leaves to me
sometimes, and sometimes like bloodstains from a secret murder. Two
dressers, a lamp made from an old woman's shoe, and a little shelf with
a few books. Plus more of Mommy's weird things.
There was an oval mirror and two pictures on the wall. One picture
showed a desperate woman in a rowboat, a tapestry trailing into the
water over the side. I chose to take that as a sign that we were doing the
right thing in stealing Caliban's rowboat.
Borrowing, I corrected myself. We'd put it back when we were though.
The other picture showed a battle, men on horses with long spears and
banners flying, flowing over a wall to meet an army with guns and
cannon. We were losing. Even though it was only done in shades of
gray, by someone who wasn't an expert hand with a pencil, that picture

seemed to be a glimpse of a real moment in time.
Was that how Daddy's spear had broken?
It caught Cameron's eye, too, and he stopped to stare. I slipped open the
closet door while he was looking at the wall and fished for the catch to
the trapdoor. I didn't really want Cameron to know about Daddy's
closet of glory -- bad enough that my almost-brother was upstairs in the
first place.
Not bad with me, I meant, but bad with Mommy and Daddy. If
Cameron was okay, he wouldn't have been living in the basement.
I stopped, one hand brushing the edge of the opening above me. I'd
never thought of it that way before. When I was little, I figured
everybody had a brother in the basement. Later on, it was just the way
things were.
Why did he live down there? Like a big rat or something.
Then I hopped up to grip the edge with one hand and reached around
for the keys with the other. The effort made the muscles of my arm
shiver.
"What you got up there, Henry?" Cameron asked. He startled me and I
yelped, dropping to the ground to crush one of Mommy's hatboxes. The
keys came with me, but there was a cracking sound above.
"Bones of god," I cursed -- something I almost never did. Cameron was
the privy mouth of the two of us.
He jumped up and chinned himself into the closet of glory.
"Get out of there," I almost shouted, tears of frustration standing in my
eyes. There was no way I could hide that I'd been in the closet. Now I'd
have to think of a really good story to explain why, and I was afraid I
couldn't.
Cameron leaned over the opening to look down at me. His eyes and

teeth seemed to gleam in the shadows above, which made him a
monster version of me. "There's some cool crap up here. How come
you never told me about this?"
"Because Daddy would kill us both and tan our hides for seat leather.
We're already in deep doo-doo. Get back down here before you make it
worse."
He stuck his tongue out at me, then dropped in a cloud of attic grime
and his own special burnt stink of coal dust.
The closet was an unholy mess.
"We'd better clean up here," I said.
"Rowboat!" Cameron shouted, snatching Daddy's work keys out of my
hand and sprinting for the front door.
It took me a moment to figure out that Cameron with the keys was
worse trouble than the mess we'd already made, then I was after him.
*
Midsummer Avenue was the main street on the west side of town,
where we lived tucked up against the bluff. It petered out south of
Mabton to a gravel lane among orchards of hazelnuts, but