The Puzzle King Read Online Free Page A

drawing the pattern of the bow: different sized squares with different shadings that suggest a particular plaid. The house was lopsided. There was no sun, no grass, no trees.
    The picture of his mother showed her with a big bosom, soft smile, and hair knotted on top of her head. She was wearing a striped dress underneath an apron with roses, and she was holding a child, a stick figure, by the hand. Most of the picture was scribbled, except for the fingers of the mother and child, which were intricately drawn and tightly entwined. The two hands were darker than the rest of the picture, as if by bearing down on the charcoal, the young artist could make them indelible. Sometimes at night when he thought everyone was asleep, Simon would press his cheek against the wrinkled paper and stare into its charcoal folds, trying to draw out of them a new fact or forgotten moment. Then he would try to pray. It was so simple when his mother did it. She’d press her palms together, lower her eyelids, and talk to God as casually as if she were talking to a next-door neighbor. “Oh God, help me see my way clear to cleaning up this mess of ahouse.” “Dear God, save us from persecution and poverty.” She’d ask for the simple and miraculous with equal intimacy.
    As she did, Simon would close his eyes and press his palms together. He’d think about how he craved the noise of his six brothers and sisters and the way his mother smelled like mint and cloves. In the dark silence, he could hear their voices, each a different timbre, and in his brother Jurgis’s case, a slight lisp. He searched for words, but he had nothing to say to this God, this old friend of his mother’s. He didn’t have the words for the longing and fright that lived like worms in the pit of his stomach and startled him out of sleep each morning. It was as if the part of his brain that held language had room for only so much, and as the new words moved in, the old ones moved out. Until the transition was complete, he’d keep it all to himself.
    What the world saw was a boy as clean and shiny as a lacquered box. In daytime, in public, he learned how to keep the worms at bay. Each morning, before he left for his job as a newsboy, he’d spit-shine his shoes, slick down his hair with some coconut oil he’d found in the bathroom, and run the palm of his hand over his shirt and trousers to straighten any wrinkles.
    When he finished selling the newspapers, he’d walk to school. Often, he arrived there before the teachers. There, he’d hunch down in a corner of the schoolyard and pull out his sketchpad or his grammar book. At around seven-thirty, Mrs. O’Mara, his teacher, would show up. “Well, Mr. Early Bird, here you are again. You’d better come inside before you turn to ices, ay?” Every morning, it would be the same words. Something about the way she said
ices
made this the best part of his day.
    Mrs. O’Mara wore her red hair piled on top of her head with tiny curls escaping down the sides of her face. Her cheeks werepink with rouge and, possibly because she wore a corset, all the plumpness from the rest of her body was squished up into her soft round face, which was filled with anything but ices.
    She seemed tall and grand in her green gabardine coat and brown ankle-high boots. Simon always smiled up at her, though he never said anything back, afraid his English would come out muddled. He heard it all the time: twists of the tongue that sounded clumsy and ugly. Not him. Sometimes the class would sing “Yankee Doodle.” Afraid that he’d stumble over the word
Yankee
, Simon never sang along, even though he’d find himself humming it when he was alone. Only when Mrs. O’Mara had them stand up, face the flag, place their hands over their hearts, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance did he speak out loud. And then he took great care to enunciate his words, arcing the
r
s in “America” and coming down hard on “justice for all.”
    What he lacked in words,