Playing With Matches by Carolyn Wall Page A

things, then I’d know.”
    “I ’spect he had his mama’s cord wrapped around his neck.”
    “Neck’s scrawny as a chicken’s,” I said. “Wouldn’t take much to cut off his wind.”
    “Hell, he prob’ly don’t even know what we’re saying.”
    I reached my hand inside the bars. “Come here, boy. There’s a shed over there, Finn. See if there’s a saw.”
    Finn came back with a funny look on his face. “There’s not one, and anyway, you can’t saw through those bars.”
    “What’s the matter with you? Walk around and see if you can find another way.”
    “Clea, you been reading in that shed yonder, haven’t you? That’s how you found him.”
    I made a face. I never lied to Finn. “I have. It was already a good spot, a hole dug out with blankets and all.”
    “Clea, you see that chain fastened to the wall?”
    I had not.
    “I think they kept the kid in there, too,” he said. “Probably at first. There’s a hammer in there, but listen. Things ain’t right here. If we don’t get him out fast, I’m goin’.”
    “Not me,” I said. “I’m not going without him.”
    “Well, other side of the house, there’s a crawl-through. It’s nailed over with plywood,” Finn said. “Maybe we can break in there.” He went to the shed that had once been my reading place but which now turned my stomach.
    He came back with a claw hammer and we both looked at the eighteen-inch piece of board. “I don’t know,” he said.
    “We can free this boy. Did I tell you my birthday’s coming, Finn? I’m going to be twelve. And I can do anything I want.”
    What I wanted was to beat the wood with that hammer till I got that kid out. So that’s what I did, Finn holding his breath, lest the old man come running. At first the boy didn’t want to be loose, so I had to flatten myself out on the ground and go in after him, which was bad because the place stunk so.
    He could hardly stand up, and he was wheezing something awful. I took his hand and led him home. Finn carried the hammer in case , he said, he had to fight off the Oatys .
    If Auntie was surprised to see the boy we called Wheezer, she never let on. This one took the cake. He was filthy. He froze up, clutching himself, when Auntie tried to take off his clothes, so she filled a dishpan with water and wiped him down the best she could.
    In his filthy rags, he sat at our table while Auntie, as an early birthday present for me, stirred up a pan of fudge clotted with walnuts.
    Turned out Wheezer loved fudge, but Auntie, who wanted tospoon-feed him oatmeal with milk, said Not too much, it could make him sick .
    He stayed the afternoon and through dinner. When Auntie had him full of mashed potatoes and gravy and chopped-up roast beef, she had no choice but to call Social Services and report the Oatys.
    Before dark, the children’s superintendent, Miss Pilcher, came in her county station wagon. She parked in front of Auntie’s house. Miss Pilcher was tall and high yellow and flabby of jaw. She had fatty eyes that trusted nobody and nothing, and no one liked her in return. She asked who had found “the boy.”
    I said I did, as Finn had eaten his dinner on the back porch step, where we all had joined him, and he’d long since gone up to his tree.
    Miss Pilcher gave me a look and said she could not let a minor sign the papers and stuck them under my auntie’s nose. But Auntie said she’d had nothing to do with the freeing of the young man who’d lived under that house.
    Miss Pilcher said Then what did Auntie expect her to do with “the boy,” and we all looked at each other while she flapped her chins and talked on about the foster care system being grossly overloaded. In the end she packed Wheezer, like freight, in the back end of her station wagon and took him away. He knelt with his face to the window and lifted one hand to me.
    I worried that with no one to take him in, Wheezer might soon be living under a bridge in Mobile or in a rough park in