My One Square Inch of Alaska (9781101602850) (3 page)

Then I saw his books scattered down the porch steps. The scruffy heels of his shoes. His long legs in the pants that I’d ordered special from the Montgomery Ward catalog, that he hated because they were too big, that I’d told him he’d grow into. His arms at odd angles pointing away from his body. His head turned so that I couldn’t see his face.

I
rushed to Will’s side, falling on my knees beside him, checking him over. I didn’t see a scratch or bump on him, but he was out cold.

We needed help. I thought maybe I should go back in for Daddy…but then I saw his car parked at the curb, pointing the wrong direction, the driver’s side front tire up on our grass.

Across the street, the Bakers were out in their driveway, about to get in their car, but all three had stopped in their tracks to stare at us. I looked over at Miss Bettina’s house—
Come out, come out,
I willed Miss Bettina.

But then Will coughed. His eyes fluttered open. He stared up at me, blankly at first, and then with recognition, and he croaked, “Jeez, could you stop yelling?”

I realized I’d been hollering his name this whole time. I hushed and pulled him into my arms. He tried to push away, but I wouldn’t let go of him, and so we ended up lumped together.

“What happened?”

“I must have tripped.”

I almost believed him. I grabbed his chin, turned his
face toward me, put my other hand to his forehead. “Do you have a fever? Muscle weakness?”

Will swatted at my hand. “Oh, jeez, Donna, I don’t have polio.” He rolled his eyes.

But over the previous year, 1952, polio had fatally hit or paralyzed many children in Stackville, the neighborhood by Groverton Pulp & Paper, and in Tangy Town, across the river, and even three in our part of Groverton. We heard the reports when Daddy was home for dinner and watched the news on the television in our living room. Of course, he was watching for updates about his hero, Senator Joe McCarthy, and his search for communists—Reds, Daddy called them.

I took my hand from Will’s forehead. He wasn’t feverish; he felt cool and clammy.

“Fine. You don’t have polio. But you also didn’t trip. What happened?”

Suddenly, Will grinned impishly, grabbed his stomach, and said, “Oh, man, like you said—too many Marvel Puffs! My stomach exploded!” He pulled away from me and rolled on the ground, hollering, “Oh, the agony! Why didn’t I listen to you? Now my guts are spewing everywhere—”

“Is everything OK over here?”

I looked up to see Mrs. Baker looming over us. She was wearing a black dress and gloves and holding a casserole dish, so I figured she must be going to set up a funeral lunch over at the Groverton First Church of God.

I’ve heard people say that there are no stupid questions, but this one truly was. Of course everything was not OK. The tight little smile on Mrs. Baker’s pudgy face revealed she knew that.

I stood up and smoothed my dress. I couldn’t stand the smirk on her face. Mr. Baker—still a marketing manager at Groverton Pulp & Paper, while Daddy, who had once been his supervisor, barely held on to his job at Ace Hardware—shook his head and got in his perfectly parked car. And Howard gave a smug little grin, a match for his mother’s, as he watched from the driveway.

I focused on the rounded collar of Mrs. Baker’s plain, lumpy, too-tight black dress. The collar was so matronly; I thought it would look much better with piping—perhaps in goldenrod for contrast—instead of lace trim.

“Will here has a bit of a stomachache. So I believe we’re going to stay home today, call Dr. Emory to come to the house.”

She stepped back, hugging her casserole dish as if it could protect her from whatever dread disease the Lanes might be spreading. “I hope it’s nothing catching.”

“I think it’s just too many Marvel Puffs,” I said.

“Oh, I would never let my Howard eat that—not nutritious enough.”

No, you’d just buy the cereal and throw it away so the little brat could get his Alaska deed without—

“What? No! I can’t stay home!” Will jumped up. He gave me a panicked look.

“Now, Will,” I started.

“Good morning, Mrs. Baker.” Thank God for Miss Bettina, in her fresh blue-and-white-checked dress and pretty faux pearl necklace, a dollop of hope compared to the gloom of Mrs. Baker.

Miss Bettina looked at me. “What’s going on?” She knew better than to probe deeper.

“Will has a stomachache, is all, but just to be safe”—the image of Will, splayed flat on our scruffy lawn, made my heart clench—“I’m going to call Dr. Emory, and—”

“No!” Will shouted.

We all looked at him. Across the street, Mr. Baker tapped his car horn. Howard smirked.

“No, I’m fine, and I have to go to school, because, because—”

He stopped, and I watched his expression go from panicked to pleased. That always meant he had some mischievous idea. He grinned and said, “I have to get to school because of the science fair project I’m working on.”

I lifted an eyebrow at him. The kid was stealing my cover stories.

“What? The science fair isn’t until the spring,” Mrs. Baker said.

“Oh, I know, but I’m doing some work ahead of time…for extra credit.” He looked back at the porch and I followed his gaze, and saw that when I’d dropped everything, my book bag had spilled its contents, but somehow the Marvel Puffs box had landed neatly upright on the middle step, its soggy mix of toast and milk and cereal still inside.

Will leaped to the porch, grabbed the Marvel Puffs box, and scooped up his book bag and lunch pail. “I’m…testing the osmosis of various liquids on semipermeable surfaces…like, like milk in a Marvel Puffs box.”

And then he took off running down Elmwood, rounding the corner onto Maple, in the direction of the scrapyard. And my shortcut to Waterhouse and Sixth.
Maybe I can still meet Babs after all.

But first I’d have to catch up with Will. I couldn’t
shake the image of him from moments before, still, unresponsive.

Mrs. Baker said, “Well, I’m glad I could help.” She gave me a hard look. “Your grandmother will be glad to hear it.”

“Yes, thank you, Mrs. Baker,” I said. She turned and stomped back across the street toward her perfect family.

I put everything back in my book bag and started after Will, but Miss Bettina put her hand on my arm. “Donna.”

My eyes pricked and I wanted to hug her, to let her hug me, to tell her how desperately I wanted away from Groverton, to ask her if she ever felt that way…but then her eyes wandered from mine, and I saw she was looking behind me.

I glanced back. Daddy. He was standing on the porch, staring out at all of us, looking confused. He wore the same pants from the day before, and a stained undershirt. I felt a surge of resentment. I’d have to get that undershirt clean, somehow.

But I saw the look on Miss Bettina’s face. She never said it, but I could see it. For whatever reason, she was in love with my daddy.

“Porter.” She said his name like a sigh.

She went to him, while the Bakers drove off.

I walked down Elmwood until I got to the corner. Then I turned and started running toward Stedman’s Scrapyard. Away from all of them. Toward Will.

I
ran until I reached Stackville, gasping in great gulps of air vile with the rotten-egg mill smell from wood being boiled down to pulp to make paper. I put my hand to my mouth and nose, fighting back a gag, while running, running, until I finally saw Will.

He was kneeling by the barbed-wire fence surrounding Stedman’s Scrapyard. My relief at finding him gave way to a moment of annoyance—my armpits stuck to my dress and my pin curls drooped, a damp mess. So much for looking fresh and perfect for my trip with Babs and my secret job interview.

But just as quickly, my annoyance switched back to alarm.

Will looked fine now—physically. I watched as he stared past the scrapyard’s usual collection of tires and car parts and banged-up iceboxes—dumped as housewives got refrigerators and freezers—at the empty end of a chain attached to the hitch of an old teardrop camper with its door hanging open on one hinge. As he talked loudly to the empty chain, Will looked as unhinged as that camper door.

From Stedman’s, Groverton Pulp & Paper wasn’t visible, but its presence was palpable in the smell and the sight of the steam that plumed in endless white puffs from its smokestacks.
That morning, although the neighborhood of narrow, close houses was quiet, the very air seemed tense, or at least I told myself it did; I’d overheard talk at the diner of a possible mill strike. I felt a tremble of hope at the possibility of this—of anything—bringing excitement to Groverton.

The only resident in sight was an old woman who sat on the front porch of a well-kept wooden house across the street from the scrapyard. She peeled apples, leaning forward, her ankle-length skirt, taut between her knees, catching the long strand of apple skin. Her hands moved automatically and she didn’t keep an eye on her peeling—just on us, bemused by the sight of children who did not belong in her neighborhood.

Will’s voice rose in an adamant cadence, like Pastor Stebbins at Grandma’s church: “So tonight, Sergeant Striker and
his
Trusty are going to be on TV for the first time! Do you think they’ll catch a robber or a kidnapper? I think…kidnapper. It’s been a long time since the old gold miner’s great granddaughter got held for ransom. So Trusty…”

Will insisted on calling the scrapyard-dog-with-no-name Trusty because the dog was a husky—just like, Will said, Trusty from
Sergeant Striker and the Alaskan Wild
. Will shook the box of Marvel Puffs. Milk dripped from the bottom.

“I wish you could watch the show with me, but Dad doesn’t like dogs,” Will was saying, as if this was the biggest problem in our house. “But guess what? As of this morning, I’m just three away from ten box tops! I’m gonna send in for my deed to my own land in Alaska, and then we’ll go see it—”

“Will!” I went over to him, gently put my hand on his
arm. Dayton was as far as either of us had ever been out of Groverton. “Just leave the cereal for the dog—”

He jerked his arm from my grasp and went on, louder: “Did you know that Alaska has a flower even though it isn’t a state? The forget-me-not. Ever since 1917! Did you know…”

He still looked too pale, and his babbling to the nonexistent dog frightened me. I grabbed him and turned him toward me. “Stop it! I think we should get back home, call Dr. Emory after all, have him check you—”

Will glared at me, the familiar accusation in his blue eyes:
You take everything too seriously!
“I’m fine now.”

“Will, I’m sure the dog will eat the cereal if we just leave the box. Let’s get back home, call Dr. Emory—”

He shrugged free. “No. I’m feeding Trusty. Then I’m going to school.”

“What? You’d take any excuse to stay home from school.”

“I don’t like Dr. Emory. I’m—I’m just having, like Grandma says, growing pains.”

Ah…I finally got it. If Will was home sick, and I wasn’t home after school because of my “special project,” Daddy would call Grandma, who called the television “one of Porter’s indulgences for Rita,” along with the house and refrigerator and freezer and furniture and car and everything else Daddy had bought for Mama in 1946, before she got sick, before she left, before he lost himself and his job.

I studied Will.

“Come on, then,” I said. “We still have time to get to school early so I can, uh, go to the school library.”

“You go on. I’m not going until Trusty comes out.”

“Maybe the old lady across the street can tell us what happened to Trusty.”

“Her name is MayJune,” Will said. “She lives in Tangy Town.” Tangy Town was a small huddle of houses and businesses across the river, downstream and downwind of the mill—to the people of Groverton, even less desirable an address than Stackville. Nobody lived there unless they were desperately poor or black (although back in 1953, everyone used the term
Negro
). Tangy Town kids went to our school, tainted with the mill’s sour stench, usually dropping out by seventh or eighth grade.

It was also where Mama had grown up. But we never visited that neighborhood, or knew anything about Mama’s life there. All we knew was that, like Daddy, she was an only child, that her parents were dead by the time she’d married, that Grandma said she was luckier than a four-leaf clover to have met and married Daddy. My guess was she’d met him at the mill.

“Sometimes MayJune babysits her grandkids here,” Will said.

Will moved toward the gap in the chain-link fence, and I realized that he was going to wiggle through into the scrapyard to search for Trusty. I thought,
What if Trusty is in there after all and runs out and attacks Will? What if Mr. Stedman comes out with a shotgun?
I grabbed Will. He tried to twist from me, but I tightened my arms around his chest. “Will, it’s got to be a quarter to eight by now. If you want to go to school—”

“Let me go! I have to find Trusty!” he shouted. And then, suddenly, he stopped screaming and writhing and went so limp that I thought he’d passed out again, but then I saw the dog limping out of the camper door, this Trusty
surely nothing like the one that fans of
Sergeant Striker and the Alaskan Wild
would imagine.

This dog walked slowly, head down, to the gap in the fence. His right ear was ripped in half, the torn edges scabbed with dried blood. The dog’s back was gashed; I recognized strikes from a belt buckle. A bit of chain hung from his neck, but I couldn’t see the collar; it was lost in the dog’s matted and patchy fur.

Will fell to his knees by the gap in the fence, reached a hand through, and petted him, saying, “Trusty, don’t you worry. We’ll go to Alaska, take you back where you belong. I’m going to get my one square inch, and then more and more square inches, and you and I will live there.” The dog nuzzled his hand.

I grabbed Will’s shoulder. Even though I knew the dog couldn’t understand him, I was suddenly angry for Trusty. I shouted, “Will, stop it!” He was making promises that he couldn’t keep.

Will ignored me, picked up the dripping Marvel Puffs box, and eased it through the fence. He turned the box upside down and poured out the burned toast and cereal. Trusty gobbled up the food as it poured out, and then snagged the box from Will and started eating it, too.