Then Hester went clomping into the closet, stumbling over the shoes, and we heard her rustling among the clothes, and the hangers squeaking on the metal rods, and what sounded like the hatboxes sliding over the overhead shelves—once she said, “Shit!” And another time, “What’s that?” By the time the noises quieted down, we had Simon completely dazed under the flashlight’s close-up glare; Simon was eager to be first, and by the time we shoved him into the closet, he was certifiably blind—even if he’d been trying to walk around in the daylight. No sooner was Simon inside the closet, and we’d closed the door behind him, than we heard Hester attack him; she must have grabbed his “doink” harder than she’d meant to, because he howled with more pain than surprise, and there were tears in his eyes, and he was still doubled over and holding fast to his private parts when he tumbled out of the closet and rolled upon the attic floor.
“Jesus, Hester!” Noah said. “What did you do to him?”
“I didn’t mean to,” came her voice from the dark closet.
“No fair pulling the doink and the balls!” Simon cried, still doubled up on the floor.
“I didn’t mean to,” she repeated sweetly.
“You bitch!” Simon said.
“You’re always rough with me, Simon,” Hester said.
“You can’t be rough with balls and doinks!” Noah said.
But Hester was not talking; we could hear her positioning herself for her next attack, and Noah whispered to Owen and me that since there were two doors to the closet, we should surprise Hester by entering from the other door.
“WHO IS WE?” Owen whispered.
Noah pointed to him, silently, and I shone the flashlight into Owen’s wide and darting eyes, which gave his face the sudden anxiety of a cornered mouse.
“No fair grabbing so hard, Hester!” Noah called, but Hester didn’t answer.
“SHE’S JUST TRYING TO CONCEAL HER HIDING PLACE,” Owen whispered—to reassure himself.
Then Noah and I flung Owen into the closet through the other door: the closet was L-shaped, and by Owen’s entering on the short arm of the L, Noah and I figured that he would not encounter Hester before the first corner—and only then if Hester managed to move, because her hiding place would surely be nearer the top of the L.
“No fair using the other door!” Hester promptly called, which Noah and I felt was further to Owen’s advantage, since she must have given away her position in the closet—at least, to some general degree. Then there was silence. I knew what Owen was doing: he was hoping that his eyes would grow used to the dark before Hester found him, and he wasn’t going to begin to move—to try to find her—until he could see a little.
“What in hell’s going on in there?” Simon asked, but there was no sound.
Then we detected the occasional bumping of one of Grandfather’s hundreds of shoes. Then silence. Then another slight movement of shoes. As I learned later, Owen was crawling on all fours, because he most feared—and expected—an attack from one of the large, overhead shelves. He had no way of knowing that Hester had stretched herself out on the floor of the closet, and
that she had covered herself with one of Grandfather’s topcoats, over which she’d positioned the usual number of shoes. She lay motionless, and—except for her head and her hands—invisible. But her head was pointed the wrong way; that is, she had to roll her eyes up into the top of her head and watch Owen Meany approaching her by staring at him upside down, looking over her own forehead and her considerable head of hair. What Owen touched first, as he approached her on all fours, was that live and kinky tangle of Hester’s hair, which suddenly moved under his little hand—and Hester’s arms reached up over her head, seizing Owen around his waist.
To her credit, Hester never had any intention of grabbing Owen’s “doink”; but finding it so easy to hold Owen around the waist, Hester decided to run her hands up his ribs and tickle him. Owen looked extremely susceptible to tickling, which he was, and Hester’s gesture was of the friendliest of intentions—especially for Hester—but the combination of putting his hand on live hair, in the dark, coupled with being tickled by a girl who, Owen thought, was merely tickling him en route to grabbing his doink, was too much for him; he wet his pants.
The instant recognition of Owen’s accident surprised Hester so much that she dropped him. He fell on top of her—and he wriggled free of her, and out of the closet, and through the trapdoor and down the stairs. Owen ran through the house so fast and noiselessly that even my grandmother failed to notice him; and if my mother hadn’t happened to be looking out the kitchen window, she would not have seen him—with his jacket unzipped, and his boots unlaced, and his hat on crooked—mounting his bicycle with some difficulty in the icy wind.
“Jesus, Hester!” Noah said. “What did you do to him?”
“I know what she did to him!” Simon said.
“It wasn’t that,” Hester said simply. “I just tickled him, and he wet his pants.” She did not report this to mock Owen, and—as a testimony to my cousins’ basically decent natures—the news was not greeted with their usual rowdiness, which I associated with Sawyer Depot as firmly as various forms of skiing and collision.
“The poor little guy!” Simon said.
“I didn’t mean to,” Hester said.
My mother called to me and I had to go tell her what had happened to Owen, whereupon she made me put on my outdoor clothes while she started the car. I thought I knew the route Owen would take home, but he must have been pedaling very hard because we did not overtake him by the Gas Works on Water Street, and when we passed Dewey Street without sighting him—and there was no sign of him at Salem Street, either—I began to think he had taken the Swasey Parkway out of town. And so we doubled back, along the Squamscott, but he wasn’t there.
We finally found him, already out of town, laboring up Maiden Hill; we slowed down when we saw his red-and-black wool hunter’s jacket and the matching checkered cap with the earflaps protruding, and by the time we pulled alongside him, he had run out of steam and had gotten off to walk his bicycle. He knew it was us without looking at us but he wouldn’t stop walking—so my mother drove slowly beside him, and I rolled down the window.
“IT WAS AN ACCIDENT, I JUST GOT TOO EXCITED, I HAD TOO MUCH ORANGE JUICE FOR BREAKFAST—AND YOU KNOW I CAN’T STAND BEING TICKLED,” Owen said. “NOBODY SAID ANYTHING ABOUT TICKLING.”
“Please don’t go home, Owen,” my mother said.
“Everything’s all right,” I told him. “My cousins are very sorry.”