Sergeant Sam by Andrew Biliter

It started the night when I couldn’t go to sleep. The cracks in the paint on my ceiling look like faces, so I couldn’t sleep and then that’s when I heard Mommy crying. She cries very quiet in her room, but I hear it because I know what it sounds like. I tiptoed down the hall and saw her door was open just a little bit so I peeked inside. It was dark, but the computer made her face lighted up all blue. I came in and gave her a hug and she said you should be in bed but then she hugged me very tight and her tears felt wet on my cheek. Mommy said she got an email from Daddy, and that he wouldn’t be home in time for Thanksgiving like we’d thought, but he misses me and he’s thinking about me.

Then I sat on her lap and she read some of it out loud, the part that he wrote just to me. He said how’s Sergeant Sam doing? He said I’m gonna have to be in charge of the house a little longer. He said to be a brave soldier just like him and take care of Mommy and Janie, but also I should be a good boy so Mommy doesn’t have to worry.

I asked Mommy when he will be back and she said he’s for sure coming back but she doesn’t know when because they keep changing it. He’s been gone a long time. Sometimes I get worried because when I close my eyes and think about him real hard I can’t always remember what his face looks like. I don’t want Mommy to worry, but sometimes even though I’m Sergeant Sam I don’t know how I’m supposed to take care of her.

I can take care of Janie pretty okay. Janie is little. After school, I always hold her hand and make sure we get on the number two bus, cause if she did it her own self she’d maybe get on the number one bus and that one goes somewhere I don’t know where, but not to our house. Sometimes I look out the window and the houses look different so I worry we are on the wrong bus. But we aren’t, we’re just seeing the other side because everything looks turned around when you go the other way. I don’t tell Janie if I worry like that ‘cause I don’t want her to get confused.

Janie’s only five. I am seven and I go to the second grade. But I’m still not as big as a third grader. And I even know a fourth grader. But he doesn’t go to my school. His name is Randy and he lives on the other side of the woods with his granny. He has a real snake and I’ve seen him feed mice to it. And he told me he can chop a whole piece of wood with just his hand because he knows karate. I think it’s probably true. But I’ll tell about him later.

Mommy goes to her work every day at CVS. Not the one here, though. She takes the bus to Bridgewater and she doesn’t come home ‘til seven thirty. And since we get home from school at three thirty or a little before that, we are home with just ourselves for three whole hours. Grandma used to come take care of us after school, but she lives at the hospital now. Besides, Mommy says I’m a big boy and Daddy says I’m Sergeant Sam so I guess I can watch Janie and watch myself at the same time. We play outside for a while, but there aren’t really other kids around except for Randy. And he’s mean sometimes. So then we go inside. And I always know where the key is because Mommy hides it for me on the window ledge.

We can’t watch the TV after school though, because Mommy is taping her shows. So we get a snack from the frigerator and then usually we play checkers, but Janie’s pretty bad at checkers. She always wants to make them go sideways instead of diagonal, and sometimes I tell her no but other times I just give up and let her make up her own rules. Then it gets dark and I start looking at the clock and wishing Mommy would come home soon.

When it’s dark I don’t go in the living room because there are the big windows in there and bad people can see in, but we can’t see them. One time I saw Janie playing with her Barbie in the middle of the living room rug after it got dark. I guess she wasn’t as scared about the windows. Sometimes I think she’s maybe not that smart, but it’s probably just because she’s little. So I said what are you doing in here and she said playing with Barbie’s hair. And I said you should play with her hair in your room not this one and she asked me why. Well, then I was stuck so I had to tell her about the bad people in the windows. She didn’t know about it and she got scared and started to cry. So I feel kinda bad about telling.

Sometimes when Mommy’s not home I make Janie sit in the brown chair with the teared back. And I say sit real still and don’t touch your arms on the chair and don’t touch your feet on nothing and don’t make noise. Just still like that. And I hold my breath and we wait for the fast hand on the clock to go around all the way one time and then we can move again. If we move then Mommy won’t come home, not tonight or tomorrow, maybe never.

It gets real quiet when it’s dark but then I start hearing these loud noises like somebody stepping on a branch in the woods or trying to open the basement window. And I know it’s the robbers.

After a while I hear footsteps and the key in the front door and for a second I’m scared it’s someone else but then the door opens and it’s Mommy. I run up and give her a hug and she says there’s my Sammy! And even though she yells at me because I left my jacket on the floor or we ate puddings that were supposed to be for our school lunch, I am just so glad she is home.

But the day after the email from Daddy came and ever since then, she seems real tired. More tired than usual. She didn’t say there’s my Sammy the same way. She said she would make chicken but just made mac and cheese. And then when we sat on the couch with her and she watched her tape of General Hospital on TV, she forgot to ask about school and our day and stuff.

She didn’t even read a story to Janie. She used to read them every night. After I’d brushed my teeth, I’d come into Janie’s room and sit on the edge of the bed and listen. But I’m too big for those stories, so sometimes I would not listen. I’d just look at the red flowers on Janie’s blanket. They go in lines up and down and sideways. Red flowers standing straight like soldiers. Sometimes I pretend they really are soldiers. And there are lumps in the covers like the sand hills where Daddy is. Where Daddy is there’s a desert and they don’t have trees. Maybe I would like that just because the woods are so scary at night.

The night after that, I mean the night after I heard Mommy crying, I woke up and I couldn’t breathe. No big breaths, only little ones and not enough air. I kept thinking how there is something I need to do but I don’t know what it is, and I looked in the window and I knew there was going to be a face with orange eyes looking at me. Then I thought about what Daddy told me to do when that happens. He said don’t think about that stuff, just think about breathing and count very slow to ten. So that’s what I did and then I could breathe okay but I still know there is something coming to get us and Mommy doesn’t know about it.

And the next day after school I told Janie we’re going to start making traps for robbers outside. I said we have to, because they know we’re all alone and they know our Daddy’s gone so they think they can get us easy, but they won’t expect the traps. I saw how all the leaves had just fell and made different colors on the ground. And that there was a little hill that goes down into the forest from our backyard. So I got Janie to come with me and find straight, short little sticks with no nubs on them in the woods and we laid them out straight on the hillside so they’d roll down if a robber stepped on them. Half of Janie’s sticks were no good, but I broke them in two so they’d work better. Then I tested it out and tried to climb the hill and it worked almost as good as I planned. All the leaves made it like you couldn’t see the rollers until you’d already stepped on them.

So we kept making those until it got close to dark, and then we went inside and Janie played with dolls and I thought up more traps.

The next day we saw that nobody’d messed with the traps we’d already set, so we got big branches and started making little walls between the trees on the hill. That way, the robbers would have to run up the part where we’d put the rollers, and then they’d fall for sure.

That night I was still scared, but not as much scared, and I felt good because the house was probably a lot safer and Mommy didn’t even know it.

The next day was Saturday so there was no school and we had all day to make more robber traps. It was cold in the morning so we wore our coats and Janie wore her red hat with the pom pom, which Daddy used to say makes her head look like a fire hydrant. Anyways, we were out in the woods looking for more sticks and then Randy was there with some big boy I’d never seen before. Randy saw our sticks and he said what are you doing? And I was going to say we’re just looking for sticks but then Janie was all excited about it so she had to open her big mouth and say “Makin’ traps.” So then they wanted to see, of course. And I didn’t feel good about it, because they weren’t going to get what it was all about.

So we took them over and they saw the roller thing and Randy’s friend laughed and he said that’s not a trap. Nobody’s stupid enough to slip on that. And what’s this little thing supposed to be, a wall? I said yeah. Randy said he knew how to make a real trap if we wanted to make a real trap. He knew how from watching a R movie. You have to start by digging a hole. And I wasn’t too sure but Randy was real sure and he said we needed some shovels and did we have any? So I got the key and we went in Daddy’s shed and got the shovels.

They got us to start digging right there by where the rollers were. Janie had a little baby shovel for gardening and she was fine just digging a little bit and her pom-pom head bobbing around, but Randy and his friend got big metal ones from Randy’s house and they stepped on them real hard and threw the dirt real far. I’d dug little holes before, but this one was big, I mean real big. Sometimes there were roots and we had to break them with our shovels or dig around them because they were just too big. It took us all day and we only stopped to go get lunch and then Randy made us come right back and keep working.

When we were done, we took turns standing in the hole and it went all the way up to Janie’s shoulders. Randy made us run and get long, thin sticks and branches with needles. Randy’s friend covered over the top of the hole with them like a roof, and then we put lots of leaves and moss on top of that until it looked like regular ground. When we were done, it was getting cold and almost dark. Randy was telling us how good a trap it was when Mommy called us in. She asked us what we were doing, but I jumped in real quick and said just playing with Randy.

Everything was real quiet that night. I tried to see where the trap was out the window, but it was too dark to see anything. In the morning I felt tired and sore all over. Mommy poured us cereal. When we were eating it, I saw a little hummingbird fly to the feeder outside the window and start drinking the sugar. Janie loves to see the hummingbirds, but this time I was so tired that I didn’t say anything. I just let her eat her Cheerios while I watched the feeder. I was thinking how fast his little wings go. Hummingbirds must get tired sometimes, but they can’t slow down, they have to keep flapping their wings or they will fall. That’s what I was thinking, and I guess I wasn’t listening because Mommy was yelling something to Janie about how she lost something. Janie is always losing things, so that’s why I didn’t listen, I just kept looking at the shiny little hummingbird. A bigger hummingbird had just came by and they were chasing each other around the feeder in circles. But then I heard the screen door slam and I remembered. I realized what Mommy had said to Janie, she said hat. Hat was the word, and then in my head I could see the red fire hydrant hat from the day before. I could see her putting down her little shovel, taking off the hat and putting it on the brown leaves next to her. A red hat on brown leaves. I looked out the window past the hummingbird, and I could see it. The tiny red pom pom. Next to the trap.

I could see mommy in the window now. She had seen it, too. I knew it was too late to tell her, so I just watched what happened. It seemed like it happened very slowly. There was a cracking noise when the branches broke, but from inside the house, it sounded so quiet. I saw Mommy wobble a little, then she fell into the leaves. Her back was to me, but I heard her make a sound that was like a sad scream. That’s when I started to run out into the backyard. I could feel in my head my heart beating and I thought why didn’t I do something? Why didn’t I bang on the window? I came into the backyard and she yelled my name, she said “Samuel!” and that’s when I know she’s mad. But this was different because it was worse than all the other times she’d been mad. And she said did you dig this hole? There were leaves in her hair.

I said, yeah. And I thought she was going to yell at me, but she just made a little squeak noise and sat down on the ground. She started to cry. She rocked back and forth and cried and choked. I didn’t know what to say, so I asked her if she was okay. She said curse words at me. I wanted to hug her and tell her it was okay, but now I knew I couldn’t go anywhere near her. I just had to stand there. She looked up at me and said I did a stupid thing. Was that the kind of mean, stupid thing I liked to do? I was crying now, too. I said no, Mommy, it was a trap for the robbers, but she wouldn’t listen. After a while she stopped crying and said go inside and put your shoes on.

I didn’t say anything the whole time we rode to school in the car. Mommy just kept saying the same things over and over about how mean it was and she said I’ll bet you thought that was a pretty funny thing to do to your mom, didn’t you? I tried to say it wasn’t a trick on you mommy, it was for bad guys. She said she didn’t want to hear that crap anymore. Then she took us into school and made me explain to the teacher why we were late. But I couldn’t talk anymore, so she had to tell it. And I watched how his face turned red like it did when Max brought a pocket knife to school in his lunch bag. He told me I shouldn’t be playing silly tricks like that with my daddy having to be away and my mommy counting on me. I wanted to tell him what the traps were for, but I had a big lump down in my throat. It was so big that no words could get around it. I couldn’t even cry, I just stayed stiff. And I stayed like that at school and when I came home I stayed like that. Mommy will tell Daddy. I know that.

I am back in my bed now looking out the window and thinking about the face with orange eyes. I wonder if I am still Sergeant Sam.