The Gray House

Behind the wall, Stuffage was alive with voices and stomping feet. Wolf ran up to the windowsill and plopped onto it, paying no attention to the dust.

Grasshopper sat down beside him. Wolf was devouring the scene down in the yard. He had a proprietary look on his face. Grasshopper was used to seeing Blind look that way, but never Wolf. How are they going to get along? he thought apprehensively and looked back at Blind.

Blind was still sitting at the wall and listening. He wasn’t listening to the noises of Stuffage. He was listening to Wolf. Guardedly and inconspicuously.

Were it not for Wolf, he’d talk to me. Tell me what’s been happening while I was away. Show that he’s glad I came back. Like really show, not the way he did now—everything on the inside and nothing visible.

Grasshopper felt sad.

“Blind,” he said. “Do you know what it says on Whiner’s and Crybaby’s sweatshirts? Leave the Loner Alone. Both of them.”

Blind smiled.

Wolf snorted from the windowsill, “One loner and one loner make two loners. And ten more loners would make for an entire ocean of loneliness.”

“They called us sissies,” Grasshopper explained. “And said that there was no place for us there.”

“I heard,” Blind replied.

Grasshopper went to sit next to him. Elk’s shirt covered Blind down to his knees. The rolled sleeves looked like tubes around his wrists. The corners of his lips were covered in something white. He must have been eating plaster off the walls again. Grasshopper moved closer to Blind and inhaled the familiar scent of plaster and unwashed hair. He’d missed him, but he didn’t know how to express his happiness and how to make Blind feel it too. He could only sit next to him in silence. Blind remained still, but now he was listening to Grasshopper. Without turning his head he inhaled forcefully through his nose and then licked off the white residue.

I must have my own scent too, Grasshopper realized. Everything did. People, houses, rooms. Stuffage certainly had it. This room did not smell of anything yet. But that would soon change.

Grasshopper stretched his legs and closed his eyes. This is my home, he thought.

Right here. Where Wolf and Blind are going to wait for me and worry if I’m away for too long. This is what they call Gardens of Paradise.

The next morning, Wolf started working on the room. He dashed off to Elk and to seniors, then went down to the yard, returning each time with heaps of this and that and laying it out along the walls. Grasshopper never went out. He and Blind were guarding the room. Wolf procured paints, both liquid and spray, an old easel, a stepladder, and some fraying brushes. He also arranged empty paint cans and stacked old, yellowing newspapers on the floor. Grasshopper was getting tired of the commotion and of Wolf running around holding all these items, but then Wolf declared everything ready for the work to begin.

Grasshopper helped him spread out the newspapers. Wolf mounted the stepladder and started painting the wall white. The old portable radio was belting out slow blues, coughing and making unfunny jokes between the songs. Grasshopper walked over the newspapers, anticipating the multiple colors of the Gardens of Paradise and singing along softly whenever the tune turned out to be familiar. Blind was scrubbing the windowsill, grayish water flying everywhere.

The lunch bell came unexpectedly for all of them. Wolf stayed back while Grasshopper and Blind went to the canteen. Sportsman’s eyes were shooting daggers, Muffin made faces, blue-eyed Magician looked at them plaintively and forlornly. This was the first time Grasshopper was using his prosthetics in full view of others, and the embarrassment was making him eat very slowly.

“Sportsman is looking at us weird,” he whispered to Blind.

“He’d do better to look after his own.”

“Why?”

“Wolf has more cunning than he,” Blind replied cryptically.

He squeezed a piece of meat loaf between two slices of bread and shoved the resulting sandwich in Grasshopper’s pocket. Another sandwich just like that one weighed down the other pocket. On the way back they bestowed two greasy stains on Grasshopper’s jacket.