The Seventh Most Important Thing (9 page)

T
hey kept eating lunch together. Arthur wasn't sure why. Partly he didn't want to hurt Squeak's feelings, and partly he felt like it might be bad luck to stop. He couldn't explain why Squeak and the foil were important, but he felt that somehow they were. If nothing else, Squeak's lunches saved him a lot of work on Saturdays. He didn't have to scrounge around in people's garbage cans looking for foil anymore.

One lunch period, he wrote out the list of the Seven Most Important Things while Squeak was finishing his usual foil-wrapped lineup of sandwich, apple, and cookies. If anybody could figure out what Mr. Hampton's list meant, Arthur thought, it would be Squeak—who was abnormally smart about everything. He took courses like Algebra I and chemistry that Arthur didn't even know seventh graders could take.

“Here. I've got something for you to look at,” Arthur said, passing the sheet of notebook paper across the table. “What do you think the things on this list mean?”

Squeak straightened his glasses and studied the page. “You mean, what do they have in common?”

“Sure. Yeah.”

“Do you want to know the spelling error you made too?”

Arthur scowled. “No.”

“Okay, just asking,” Squeak answered quickly. “I wasn't sure if it was an assignment for class or not.” He tilted his head from one side to the other, looking at the list silently. Then turned the paper upside down. And then right side up again. “Is this a trick question?” he asked finally.

“No.”

Squeak chewed on his lip and squinted at the paper. “I can see only a couple of things they have in common. First, from a scientific standpoint, they're all solids.”

Arthur gave a sarcastic snort. “So are your cookies. And this table.” He glanced toward the administrators standing nearby. “And Vice's brain.”

“You didn't ask me about Vice's brain,” Squeak retorted. “You asked me about your list.” After looking at the paper for a long time again, he continued, “Okay, this one is kind of vague. Cardboard boxes, coffee cans, bottles, foil—they all hold things.”

“Mirrors?”

“Your reflection.”

“Oh yeah,” said Arthur, thinking that was kind of a stretch.

“Third, everything except cardboard and wood is shiny or reflective.”

Great. Squeak was one of the smartest kids in the school, and that's the best he could come up with? He was collecting shiny solid stuff that held things—so what?

“What's the list from?” Squeak asked curiously.

Arthur took one of Squeak's vanilla creme cookies because he never ate all of them. “They're from my probation.”

Squeak looked confused. “Foil and cardboard are your probation?”

“Yeah,” Arthur said, shoving the cookie into his mouth. “I collect them for the guy I threw the brick at.”

Then he glanced uneasily at Squeak, wondering if maybe he didn't know the whole story—although that seemed impossible.
Everybody
at Byrd Junior High knew the whole story. “You know I threw a brick at a guy, right?”

Looking uncomfortable, Squeak nodded. “Yes, I heard that's what you did.”

“Well,” Arthur continued, “he was a homeless guy who used to go around my neighborhood collecting junk. Everybody called him the Junk Man. For my probation, I work for him every Saturday, collecting stuff off this list—”

“And that's why you take the foil from my lunch,” Squeak interrupted.

“Exactly.”

“Does the list ever change?”

Arthur shook his head. “No, it's always these same things. You can't substitute anything else. If you leave him a lamp instead of a lightbulb, he flips out. He collects wings too,” he added, thinking of his dad's hat. “And I used to see him picking up wine bottles and other junk when I was a kid.”

Squeak tilted his head, studying the list again. “Is it possible he uses them for building or making something? Or inventing something?”

“Old coffee cans and empty wine bottles?”

“I don't know.” Squeak folded up the list and passed it back to Arthur. “Of course, there's always the possibility he could be an enigma,” he added.

“Enigma?”

“Someone who doesn't make sense. Maybe you are collecting an enigmatic list for an enigmatic person,” Squeak replied in this superior tone that really ticked Arthur off sometimes. So the kid was a genius. Who cared? He was about to tell Squeak to stop being a jerk when the bell rang.

“I'll keep thinking,” Squeak said as he scooped up his lunch garbage. “Maybe I'll come up with something.”

“Don't bother,” Arthur called over his shoulder as he took off.

A
nd then, as if to prove Arthur wrong, the list changed.

It was the first Saturday in February. A sunny, almost-warm day. In a lot of places, you could spot some patches of almost-green grass showing.

When Arthur arrived at Hampton's garage, he expected to find the same cardboard note with the same list. It was his seventh Saturday of work, and nothing had changed so far. In fact, he almost didn't bother to read what was written on the sign attached to the grocery cart. Only a moron wouldn't have the seven most important things memorized by now.

Fortunately, he glanced at the sign and noticed that it was new, and it had only one item listed this time. In the same square printing as the other signs, it said:
ARTUR—FIND THRONE CHAIR.

What?
Arthur thought, rereading the note. Where in the world did Mr. Hampton think he would find a
throne
in this run-down neighborhood?

He looked around at the leaning telephone poles, the rusted chain-link fences, the crooked porches. Most of the houses didn't even have a decent chair on the front porch, let alone a throne.

Or was it a misspelling? Did he actually mean a
thrown-out
chair?

That seemed more likely, especially since Mr. Hampton still misspelled Arthur's name on every sign.

Surprisingly enough, chairs weren't that hard to find in the trash on Saturdays. People seemed to get rid of chairs a lot. Most weekends, you could usually find a couple of saggy sofas waiting by the curb too.

At least Mr. Hampton hadn't asked him to get a sofa. Arthur grinned. That would have been a real treat to get in a grocery cart.

It didn't take long for him to spot the first possible chair candidate, a few houses away from the garage. It was a metal desk chair with one broken armrest and rusted legs. Not great, but he thought it might work if he got desperate.

On the next street, he found a nice blue plaid armchair. It had some puffs of loose stuffing coming out of its cushions, but the rest of it seemed to be in good shape. The main problem for Arthur was how to get the big chair into the cart without killing himself.

After trying—and failing—to lift the thing, he decided he'd stop back for it later if he couldn't find anything else.

Toward the end of his four hours, he came upon the red-and-gold masterpiece.

It was sitting outside a rambling two-story Victorian house that looked like a decrepit museum. Arthur figured they must have been cleaning out the place, because there were rolls of carpet and rusty sinks and old light fixtures and lots of other trash piled by the curb. But what caught his eye was the big chair sitting on top of the haphazard pile.

Wow—a throne
was his first thought.

The chair was covered in red velvet fabric that was stained and worn in a lot of places, but you could tell it had probably been an expensive chair once. Its heavy wooden arms and wide back were carved with swirls and decorations that had been painted in thick layers of metallic gold. One of the front legs was missing and a lot of the paint was flaking, but if you squinted, it could definitely be a throne.

Without a doubt, Arthur knew this was the chair Mr. Hampton wanted.

The trick was how to get the thing onto the cart. It took him forever to figure out how to lift it and balance it on the top of the cart, and then he spent more than an hour slowly pushing it back to the garage. As he was crossing one street, a guy in a pickup truck offered Arthur ten bucks for the thing. “I'll take it off your hands,” he said.

Arthur shook his head and kept going.

Two other people stopped to ask if he needed help. One car full of high school jerks honked and yelled stuff at him. Arthur resisted the urge to make a rude gesture. He just kept staring straight ahead, pretending he'd seen nothing.

When he finally got back to the garage, he left the chair sitting right next to the side door so Hampton wouldn't miss it. He put the sign that said
ARTUR—FIND THRONE CHAIR
in the middle of the red velvet seat, as if to emphasize that this was it. He'd found the perfect one.

He couldn't wait to see what James Hampton thought of it.

O
n the following Saturday, February 8, it was raining. A steady, cold rain. And there were no messages from Mr. Hampton when Arthur arrived. Which was odd.

Arthur was so sure he had found the perfect chair—the perfect throne—for Mr. Hampton that he was kind of disappointed the guy hadn't left a single word to thank him. A little note would have been nice. Especially after all the hassle he'd gone through to haul the chair back to the garage. He thought he should have gotten a few hours deducted from his probation just for that.

Strangely, the shopping cart was missing too.

Arthur walked around outside, carefully stepping over the piles of old concrete blocks and junk, looking for the cart.

He wasn't sure what to do. Mr. Hampton had never forgotten to leave him an assignment before, no matter what the weather was—and he'd collected junk for the guy in a lot worse weather than this.

On his second walk around the building, Arthur happened to notice that the side door of the garage was slightly open. Just a small crack.

That was strange, he thought. It had never been open before. Had Mr. Hampton forgotten to lock it? Or did the open door mean he was supposed to go in?

Something about the open door made him nervous. There was no sign of anyone else around. He couldn't see any lights on inside. He couldn't hear anyone working.

He glanced toward Groovy Jim's shop, wondering if he should go and ask him for help. But Groovy Jim had a customer—a rare occurrence—and he didn't want to bother him. Plus, he thought it would sound kind of crazy if he interrupted someone's tattoo to say he was jumpy about a missing shopping cart and an open door. It was eleven o'clock on a Saturday morning, not midnight, for cripes' sake.

Arthur decided he would knock on the side door and call out for Mr. Hampton. If the guy wasn't there, or didn't answer, he'd go home and let Officer Billie know that nobody had been around. He hoped he'd still get credit for his four hours and hadn't slogged around in the pouring rain for nothing.

Taking a deep breath, Arthur rapped his knuckles on the doorframe and shouted through the dark opening, “Hey, Mr. Hampton, it's Arthur Owens out here. It's Saturday. Can I help you with anything today?”

He knew it sounded really dumb, but he didn't know what else to say. It was how his mom always answered the phone at the dentist's office when he called her.
Hello, this is Linda at Dr. Driscoll's office. Can I help you with anything today?

Honestly, he wasn't expecting a reply to his question. But right after he said “Can I help you with anything today?” there was a noise inside the garage. It sounded as if a can—or something metallic—had suddenly hit the floor.

Arthur backed away from the door. He could feel his heart speed up. Was there something in there?

He glanced around for an object to use as a weapon if he needed it. A plank of wood with a couple of rusty nails sticking out of it lay on the ground nearby. He picked it up gingerly and used it to push the door open a little wider, thinking maybe whatever was inside would come running out.

Nothing did.

There was an old paint can lid next to his feet, he noticed. Just to see what would happen, he picked it up and tossed it into the darkness. He could hear the lid rolling and spinning across what must have been a cement floor.

Again, nothing.

Arthur took another deep breath, telling himself he was thirteen years old and should have more guts. He had survived three weeks in juvie with Slash. He'd gone up against half of the varsity football team at his school to rescue Squeak from the trash can. It was ridiculous to be scared of a garage in the middle of the day.

Still holding the piece of nail-studded wood, Arthur eased cautiously through the doorway. His wet shoes squelched on the cement, which was the only sound—other than his heart pounding in his ears—he could hear at first.

Silently, he searched along the side of the doorframe for a light switch. He was sure there must be one nearby—especially if Mr. Hampton worked there late at night, which Groovy Jim said he did sometimes. The old guy wouldn't wander around blindly in the dark.

Arthur's fingers finally found the switch next to the door.

Instinctively, he squinted before pushing the switch upward, as if expecting it to be painfully bright, like suddenly going from a dark room into the blazing sunlight.

But he definitely wasn't prepared for the dazzling vision that awaited him.

A
ll Arthur saw at first was a wall of gold and silver. A stunned gasp escaped from him.

What the heck had he stumbled upon?

It looked like a shimmering shrine inside the garage, like something you'd see on a Hollywood movie set or in an Egyptian temple or something. There were glittering tables, silver pillars, gilt pedestals, and throne-like chairs. Arthur couldn't believe his eyes. Radiant gold-and-silver objects filled almost half of the room—the pieces piled so high they nearly touched the low ceiling lights.

It was
unreal.

Arthur wondered if he was having a hallucination or some kind of crazy dream. Was he really standing inside Mr. Hampton's garage in Washington, D.C.? He closed his eyes and opened them again just to check if everything was still there.

It was.

And that's when he noticed something else.

There were wings
everywhere.
They were attached to the sides of the tables, the backs of the chairs, the pedestals and pillars. Everything he could see had its own pair of sparkling wings.

Arthur remembered what Mr. Hampton had said about his dad's hat.
I took it for the wings.

Was this what he'd meant?

Still trying to grasp the unbelievable scene in front of him, Arthur stood motionless by the door. His leaky boots made two moist prints like wings on the cement. Where had Mr. Hampton found all of these things? And what was the mysterious creation supposed to be?

Arthur might have stayed frozen in the same spot forever, lost in the vision of the shimmering world, if it hadn't been for the sound.

From the opposite side of the garage, Arthur heard a low moan.

His eyes darted toward the far corner of the garage, where there didn't seem to be much light—only pools of darkness and shadow, and piles of stuff he couldn't really identify in the gloom. Except for one thing.

A man lying on the floor.

He wore a familiar tan coat. His shoes were still on his feet, and a pair of shattered glasses rested on the floor in front of his head.

Arthur's heart dropped.

James Hampton.