The Schwa Was Here

The Schwa jumps down into the little enclosed patio filled with gravel, and more dog crap than you ever want to see in one place. A door is ajar so the dogs can come and go from the patio as they please. This is the door the Schwa slips into.

The place is dark. The lightbulbs are just twenty-five watts be­hind dark lamp shades, and no sunlight makes it through those thick curtains. The Schwa stands there in the living room, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. There are two dogs fighting over a piece of knotted rope across the room. They don't notice him. He does have a stealthy odorl Or the dogs are just too old to smell. He hears a TV on in another room somewhere far away in the huge apartment.

So where are the dog bowls?

He makes his way through the living room, across a formal dining room with a long table that hasn't seen a dinner party in a millennium, and then he strikes gold. Fourteen dog bowls are lined up nice and neat against a kitchen wall. Products of Pisher Plastics.

All he has to do is take one of the bowls and get out the way he came. That's all.

He bends down, grabs a bowl, and then he discovers something awful: All fourteen bowls are nailed to the ground.

And now he begins to think that maybe he's like a dog whistle after all, because there's an Afghan growling in his face .. .

Meanwhile, from outside, I saw all the dogs suddenly disap­pear from the windows. This was not a good sign. I heard all this barking, then a man yelling, although it was too muffled to hear what he yelled.

And Wendell Tiggor laughs. "So you lose," he says. "Pay up."

In the window I now saw the Schwa pressed up against the glass, hiding behind the curtains. I knew he couldn't last like that for long.

"Think the dogs'll eat him?" says one of the other kids.

I didn't have time for idiots. Instead I took off across the street, toward the building nearly becoming roadkill because I didn't look both ways like every kid's mother told them from the beginning of time. Narrowly surviving the busy avenue, I made it around back to the fire escape. I didn't know what to do, but I couldn't just leave the Schwa stranded like that. Leave no man behind—isn't that what they say in battle?

I scrambled to the roof, leaped into the little patio, and burst through the open door.

In a second the dogs were barreling toward me. I tensed up,

preparing to get bit. The dogs advanced, held their ground, and then backed away, not sure whether to protect their master, their home, or themselves. The smell of dog was everywhere. Dog food, dog fur, dog breath. The smell was overpowering, and the barking endless and loud. I didn't dare move—but I glanced to the curtains where I knew the Schwa was hiding. Any dogs that had been sniffing around there had come over toward me. With any luck, the Schwa would be able to slip out unnoticed. As for me, well, I suppose this was what I have to do to earn my 50 percent. Damage control.

"Get out of herel" said a voice much fuller, much stronger than I expected.

My eyes still hadn't adjusted to the dim light, so I wasn't sure what I was seeing at first. A low square shape moved at me through a doorway. Only when it pushed through the dogs could I see what it was. It was a wheelchair. Old Man Crawley was in a wheelchair.

"Don't move a muscle, or I'll have them tear you to shreds, if I don't do it myself."