I’d made her bring one. I wished I’d done the same.
“You want my extra shirt?” Brenda asked, stepping into the tunnel beside me.
I clicked on my flashlight and shined it left and right. Light from Claude’s basement created a creamy circle on the dirt-pack floor, but beyond that, the world dropped off in each direction.
“Then you’ll be cold,” I said.
She snapped on her own flashlight and then held it between her knees, cold yellow glow bobbing, as she untied the green shirt around her waist. It was her brother Jerry’s army fatigues, the patch over the chest reading TAFT.
“Here,” she said. “You know I run hot. Hotter than you.” She winked.
I took the shirt. It smelled sharp, like the Era detergent her mom used. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me,” she said, tapping the top of my head. “It means you’re ‘it.’”
Claude hooted. He closed the door behind him, grabbed Junie’s hand, and ran in one direction while Brenda took off in the other.
“Losers!” I yelled, laughing.
Down here, you didn’t have to close your eyes to count. You simply had to turn off your flashlight and drop into infinite darkness, so that’s what I did. “One, two, three . . .”
I leaned against the Ziegler door as I counted, feeling the strength of the wood on my back, smelling the tang of the spareribs and sauerkraut Mrs. Ziegler had cooked for dinner inserting itself into the musk of the tunnels. As eerie as the tunnels were, something about them encouraged you to spread out your imagination, stretch it in directions you couldn’t aboveground, not with the sun watching.
“。 . . four, five, six, seven . . .”
Brenda was lucky to have a brother in the military, to get her hands on his uniform. Most girls had to be dating a guy to wear his fatigues.
“。 . . eight, nine . . .”
I got all the way to thirty, feeling the thrill of the chase crawl up my skin, delighting in the unease of the dark. I could probably navigate this section of the tunnels—my block—without a flashlight, but the thought of bumping into someone in the inky pitch gave me goose bumps. We’d run into other kids down here lots of times, and even adults, but a stranger only once.
It had happened last summer. We’d strayed to the farthest edge of the Pantown tunnels, the end opposite the factory. Someone had started the rumor that that particular section was haunted. All we knew was that no one down there had kids, ergo it felt even spookier than the rest of the tunnels. On a dare, though—one from Ant on his last trip belowground with us; he loved dares almost as much as he loved doing his John Belushi imitations, I’m a killer bee give me your pollen, welcome to Hotel Samurai, smash smash—he, Maureen, Brenda, Claude, and me had terror-sprinted all the way to the haunted end. It looked like the rest of the tunnels, doors and alcoves and dead-end offshoots, but our fear made it special. We touched the farthest corner and were running back for our bragging rights, laughing, feeling safe and together.
That’s when Claude stumbled over the bum.
At first, we thought he was a bundle of rags.
Then he moved.
We flew to the nearest familiar door, that of a fourth grader who went to our church, screaming for help. The parents called the police. Sheriff Nillson—that was before he was Dad’s colleague—took the vagrant out through his own door, we were told. It had to be through someone’s door, because there was no street entrance to the tunnels, no public way to access them.
That’s what had particularly weirded us out about the bum’s presence: How had he gotten in?
“Ready or not, here I come!” I hollered, and then clicked on my flashlight.
CHAPTER 8
It was a no-brainer to run in the direction Claude and Junie had gone. Two for the price of one. Probably three, actually. Other than a couple branches that dead-ended well beyond Pantown, the tunnels mirrored the six square blocks of the neighborhood, more or less, which meant that they looped back in on themselves.
“Fi, fi, fo, fum!” I boomed, tapping the beat against my thigh.
Anyone on the other side of the doors would hear me and know exactly what we were up to. I expected to catch some flak for it at Saint Patrick’s this coming Sunday given my age—too old to play most tunnel games.
“You can run, but you can’t hide!” I hollered after my friends.
I took a left, heading in the direction of Maureen’s. I was willing to bet she was partying with Ricky tonight, or even worse, with Ed. He might turn out to be a nice guy, but I doubted it, given how stoned Ricky usually was since he’d started hanging around the guy and how Maureen talked about him. Sexy as hell.