The Return of the Indian (2 page)

He sat up straight, his heart beating. “What’s up?”

“A letter came for you,” she said in an odd voice to match her goggle-eyed expression.

“A letter? For me? Who from?”

“I—I’m afraid I opened it.”

She came over to him and gave him a long envelope, torn open at the top. It had printing on it as well as his name and address in typing. Omri stared at it. It said, “Telecom—
Your
Communications Service.” He felt numb inside. It couldn’t be.
It couldn’t be.
He didn’t touch the letter, which lay on the table beside Kitsa. For once, his mother didn’t even seem to notice that she was there—normally she chased her off.

“Why did you open it?” Omri asked at last in a croaky voice.

“Darling, because I didn’t look at the name. You boys don’t get many letters.” She gave a short, rather hysterical laugh. Omri quite saw how it could happen. He just wished … he wished he could have been the first to know.

“Well, go on—read it!”

He picked up the envelope and took out the letter.

Omri kept his eyes on this letter long after he had finished reading it. Inside, he was jumping up from his
chair, running around and around the room, hugging his mother, shouting with triumph. But in reality he just sat there staring at the letter, a deep glow like hot coals in his chest, too happy and astonished to move or speak. He didn’t even notice that his free hand was stroking Kitsa from nose tip to tail tip again and again while she lay on the newspaper, purring with bliss.

His mother woke him from his trance.

“Darling? Do you realize? Isn’t it fantastic? And you never said a single word!”

At this moment his father came in from outdoors. He’d been working in the garden, as he often did, until it was actually too dark to see. Now he stamped the mud off his shoes in the open doorway, but, for once, Omri’s mother didn’t care about the mud, and fairly dragged him into the room.

“Oh, do come and hear the news! I’ve been bursting to tell you all day—Omri—tell him, tell him—”

Wordlessly, Omri handed his father the letter. There was a silence, then his father breathed reverently, “God in Heaven. Three hundred pounds!”

“It’s not the
money!”
cried his mother. “Look, look what they say about his
story!
He must be
brilliant
, and we never even knew he had writing talent!” She came to Omri and smothered him with hugs. “When can we read it? Oh, just wait till the boys hear about this—”

His brothers! Yes. That would be almost the sweetest thing of all. They always behaved as if he were too thick to do anything. And telling them at school. His English
teacher simply wouldn’t believe her senses. Perhaps Mr. Johnson, the headmaster, would get him up at Assembly and announce the news, and they would all applaud, and he would be asked to read the story aloud … Omri’s head began to spin with the incredible excitement of it. He jumped up.

“I’ll go and get my copy and you can read it,” he said.

“Oh, did you keep a copy?”

“Yes, that was in the rules.” He stopped in the door-way and turned. “I typed it on your typewriter when you were out,” he confessed.

“Did you, indeed! That must have been the time I found all the keys jumbled together.” But she wasn’t a bit annoyed.

“And I borrowed paper and carbon paper from Dad’s desk. And a big envelope to send it in.”

His mother and father looked at each other. They were both absolutely beaming with pride, as they had when Gillon had come home and announced he’d broken a swimming record at school, and when Adiel had passed ten O-level exams. Omri, looking at them, knew suddenly that he had never expected them to have that look because of him.

“Well,” said his father, very solemnly, “now you can pay me back. That will be eleven and a half pence you owe me.” His face broke into a great soppy grin.

Omri raced upstairs. His heart was pounding. He’d won. He’d actually won! He’d never dared to hope he would. Of course, he’d dreamed a bit. After all, he had
tried his very best, and it
was
a great story to begin with. “Imagination and invention,” eh? That was all they knew. The real work was in the way he’d written it, and rewritten it, and checked the spelling until just for once he could be confident that every word was right. He’d gotten Adiel to help with that part—without telling him, of course, what it was actually for.

“Stirrup? Maize? Iroquois?”

“Iroquois!”
Adiel had exclaimed.

“It’s the name of an Indian tribe,” said Omri. Fancy not knowing that! Omri had now read so many books about American Indians that he’d forgotten that not everyone was as knowledgeable on the subject as himself.

“Well, I haven’t a clue how to spell it. I-R-O-K-W-”

“No, it’s not—it’s like French. Never mind, I know that one, I just wanted to see if you did. Whiskey?”

Adiel spelt it, and then asked, “What on earth is this you’re writing? What a weird bunch of words!”

“It’s a story. I’ve got to get it as good as I can.”

“But what’s it about? Let me see it,” said Adiel, making a grab at the notebook.

Omri dodged. “Leave off! I’ll show you when it’s finished. Now. Bandage?” Adiel spelt this (actually Omri had it right) and then Omri hesitated before saying, “cupboard?”

Adiel’s eyes narrowed.

“You’re not telling about the time I hid your so-called secret cupboard after you’d nicked my football shorts—”

“I didn’t—”

“The time the key got lost and you made such an idiotic uproar? You’re not going to put
me
into any stupid school story.”

“I’m changing the names,” said Omri.

“You’d better. Any more words?”

Omri read on silently to the next longish word. “Magnanimous.”

“Wow,” said Adiel with heavy sarcasm. “Bet you don’t even know what it means.”

“Yes I do: generous.”

“Where’d you get it from?”

“‘The Iroquois were a tribe ferocious in war, stalwart in alliance, magnanimous in victory,’” quoted Omri.

“You sound like Winston Churchill,” said Adiel, but there was a trace of admiration in his voice this time. “Don’t make it too show-offy, will you? You’ll only lose marks if your teacher thinks you’ve copied it.”

“I haven’t
written
that,
you jerk,”
said Omri, “I’m just remembering what I’ve read in a book.” He was beginning to relish long words, though. Later, he went through his story yet again to make sure he hadn’t used too many. His teacher was forever saying, “Keep it simple. Stick to what you know.” Little would anyone guess how closely he had stuck to the truth this time!

And now … “Imagination and invention” …

He paused on the stairs. Had he cheated? It was supposed to be a made-up story. It said so in the rules. Or had it? “Creative writing” meant that, didn’t it? You couldn’t create something that had really happened …

All you could do was find the best way of writing it down. Of course he had had to make up bits of it; vivid as his memories of Little Bear and Boone were, he couldn’t remember every word they ever spoke. Omri frowned. He didn’t feel entirely easy in his mind, but on the other hand … Nobody had helped him. The way he’d written the story was all his own. Maybe it was okay. There wasn’t much he could do about it anyhow.

He continued more slowly up the stairs to his own room, at the very top of the house.

Omri was rather a private person. At least, he needed to be alone quite a bit of the time. So his room, which was right up under the eaves of the house, was perfect for him.

In the old house, his bedroom had been just one of several opening off the upstairs landing, and at certain times of the day had been like a railway station. His new room was off the beaten track. No one (in his opinion) had any reason to come up here, or even pass the door. There were times, now that he had it all arranged to suit himself, when he forgot about how awful it was living in Hovel Road, when it seemed worth anything to have a room like this.

It wasn’t a very large room, so his father had built a
shelf high up under the skylight for him to sleep on. This was great, because he could look up at the night sky. Under this bed shelf were his desk and more shelves for his collections of old bottles, key rings and wooden animals. The wall opposite the window was covered with his posters—a mixture of old and new, from Snoopy and an early Beatles, to the Police and a funny one about a flasher who gets caught in an elevator. In pride of place were two large photographs of Iroquois chieftains that he’d found in magazines. Neither of these Indians looked remotely like Little Bear, but they appealed to Omri just the same.

His clothes were stored on the landing, so his room wasn’t cluttered up with them. That left quite a lot of space for his beanbag seats, a low table (he’d sawed its legs to half their length after seeing a photo of a Japanese room), his cassette radio, and his most recent acquisition: an old chest.

He’d found this in the local market, coated with dirt and grease, bought it for £2 after bargaining, and borrowed a cart from a marketman to drag it around the corner to Hovel Road. He’d cleaned it with a scraper and some sandpaper out in the garden, before hauling it up to his room.

It had “come up a treat,” just as the man in the market had promised. The wood was oak, the hinges iron, and it had a brass plate on it with the name of its first owner. Omri had hardly been able to believe it when he had removed the layers of dirt from this plate and read the
name for the first time. It was L. Bear. L. Bear … Little Bear! Of course it was pure coincidence, but, as Omri thought, “If I were superstitious—!” He shined the brass every week. Somehow it, too, made him feel closer to Little Bear.

The chest was not only interesting and beautiful, but useful. Omri used it for storage. There was only one thing wrong with it. It had a lock, but no key. So he piled cushions and other objects on it and pretended it was a bench. That way, nobody who happened to be prying about in his room (it still happened occasionally, mothers cleaning and brothers poking about “borrowing”) would realize that it contained a number of interesting and private objects.

Omri knelt by the chest now and shifted to the floor a pile of cassettes, a Bullworker (he was bent on developing his muscles), some cushions and three copies of
Mad
magazine, among other bits of junk. Then he opened the lid of the chest. It, too, was untidy, but Omri knew where to burrow. On their way down the left-hand side in search of the folder containing his prize-winning story, Omri’s fingers touched metal, and paused. Then, carefully, he moved some other things which were in the way, and eased this metal object out.

It was a small white cabinet with a mirror in its door and a keyhole—an old-fashioned bathroom medicine cupboard in fact. He stood it on the Japanese table. The door swung open. Apart from a single shelf, it was quite empty—as empty as it had been when he’d first received
it, a rather odd birthday present from Gillon, just over a year ago.

Omri sat back on his heels staring at it.

How clearly it all came back! The cupboard. The strange little key, which had been his great-grandmother’s, and which had mysteriously fitted the commonplace lock and turned this ordinary little metal box into a time machine with a difference. Put any plastic object—an ax, an Indian tepee, a quiver of arrows—into it, close the door, turn the key … and those things became real—miniature but real. Real leather, real cloth, real steel. Put the plastic figures of human beings or animals inside, and in the time it took to lock them in, they, too, became real. Real and alive. And not just “living toys,” but people from another time, from their own lives, with their own personalities and needs and demands …

Oh, it hadn’t been all fun and games, as Omri had naively expected at first. Little Bear was no toy, to submit tamely to being played with. He was, for all his tiny stature, a ferocious savage, warlike and domineering.

Omri had soon realized that if any grown-ups found out about the cabinet’s magic properties, they would take it, and the Indian and everything else, away. So Omri had had to keep it secret, and look after, feed and protect his Indian as best he could. And when Patrick had found out the secret and sneaked a Texas cowboy into the cupboard so that he, too, could have a “little person,” the trouble really started.

Little Bear and Boone were natural enemies. They
came close to killing each other several times. Even their respective ponies had caused endless difficulties. And then Adiel had taken the cupboard one day, the key had fallen out of the lock and been lost, and Omri, Patrick and the two little men had been faced with the dire possibility that the magic was dead, that these minute and helpless people would have to remain in Omri’s time, his “giant” world, and in his care, forever …

It was this, the terrible fright they had all had from this notion, that had finally proved to Omri that he would have to give up his Indian friend (for friends they were by then, of a sort) and send the little people “back”—back to their own time, through the magic of the cupboard. When the key was found, that’s what they all agreed on. But it was so hard to part that Boone (who was shamingly softhearted for a cowboy) had cried openly, and even the boys’ eyes were wet … Omri seldom let himself think of those last moments, they upset him so much.

When they’d reopened the cupboard door, there were the two groups: Little Bear and the wife Omri had found him, Bright Stars, sitting on Little Bear’s pony, and “Boo-Hoo” Boone on his white horse—only now they were plastic again. Patrick had taken Boone and put him in his pocket. And Omri had kept the Indians. He had them still. He had packed them in a little wooden box which he kept safely at the very bottom of the chest. Actually it was a box within a box within a box. Each was tied tightly with string. There was a reason for all this. Omri had wanted to make them difficult to get at.