The Bronze King Read Online Free

thing I wanted to do was cry in front of these creeps, but I was scared. The Chewer grabbed my wrist hard enough to hurt.
    â€œI don’t have anything you want,” I said.
    â€œShe don’t have anything,” the Chewer said in this disgusted voice. “Man, a princess shouldn’t tell lies. It’ll grow hair on the palms of her hands. Let’s see if it’s happening already.”
    He started to turn my hand over, and I knew he’d do something horrible, and Pins-and-Grins was reaching for my purse. And all of a sudden the jammed door next to me opened and a man stepped through, playing a violin.
    It was the craziest thing—I mean, in the subway where you can hardly hear yourself think, here was this stranger fiddling like mad, some kind of jumping, gypsy sort of tune, full of throaty swoops and high, sweet curlicues that filled the whole car.
    â€œWhat the hell?” yelped Tattoo, looking as if a flashbulb had gone off in his face.
    â€œWell, come on,” the Chewer said impatiently, and he pulled me up off the seat and started to dance with me.
    I mean really dance —a hopping, jumping, racing-along, three-beat gallop, with our elbows stuck out and lots of space between us. The weirdest part was not that the train suddenly started going, as if our dancing had moved it, but that I knew the steps. Or anyway my feet did the steps, though in my head I didn’t know how to dance any better than I ever did.
    We went cavorting up and down the subway car like a couple of loonies, him reeking of some supermacho musk and beer and staring off over my shoulder as if I wasn’t there, and me with my purse banging me on the hip.
    The other two stood and clapped their hands in time to the music, which sounded loud and clear over the rattle of the train.
    I was completely zonked myself and bubbling inside with joy because I knew I was safe. The music promised me that. I heard Tattoo yell to his buddy, “What a crazy old fart, playing the fiddle in the subway!” But he kept on clapping, and we kept dancing, until the train pulled into my station. Then the fiddler quit playing and whipped the cap off his headful of curly gray hair and held it out for them to put money in.
    The doors opened. The Chewer, panting hard from all that jumping around, let go of me and started patting his pockets for money.
    The fiddler gave me a look, right past the three creeps. He stared at me from under these tufty gray eyebrows and jerked his chin the way you point when your hands aren’t free: Get going .
    I got.
    Behind me the doors shut and the train roared away into the tunnel toward the next stop.
    My knees were so wobbly I almost didn’t make it up the stairs to the street.

 
    3
The Fiddler in the Park
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    M OM WAS ON THE WARPATH AGAIN, so I didn’t bother her with any of this. I probably wouldn’t have anyway. I wouldn’t have known how to tell her what had happened.
    Anyway, there she was with her new lawyer in the fight against the landlord. They were going over our apartment, making lists of the missing stuff (which now included all the plugs off the ends of the electric cords). If it had been a movie, the lawyer would have been some handsome, upscale type for my mother to fall in love with. Then she’d get married, and all my weird problems would disappear because what I really needed was a father, right?
    Actually the lawyer was this carroty-colored woman with an excitable voice. She and Mom were deep in that fast, bright kind of conversation that meant they were on the same wavelength and were going to be friends.
    I went into my room and shut the door and walked around in circles, telling myself I was not crazy.
    I kept seeing this subway violinist very clearly in my mind: thick gray curly hair and a squarish, calm sort of face, with nests of lines around his mouth and deep sprays of them at the outside corners of his eyes. Funny eyes, with an