Not-Just-Anybody Family (6 page)

Tears stung Maggie’s eyes. She was tired. She wanted to be home in her bed instead of in front of the city jail.

“I want Mom.”

“You think I don’t?”

Vern’s thin shoulders sagged. He sighed. He jammed his hands deep in his pockets. He said, “All right, you might as well know the worst.”

“The worst?” Maggie swung her head around so fast, her braids whipped around her neck. “What worst could there be?”

“Here it is. I tried to call Mom three days ago and she wasn’t where she was supposed to be. The Paisano Motel had never heard of her. There’s no way in the world we can reach Mom now. Mom’s gone.”

As soon as Vern said “Mom’s gone” Maggie began to sob. She didn’t bother covering her eyes. She just threw back her head and bawled.

“Shut up, Maggie. Come on, shut up!” He decided yelling at her wasn’t going to work. He lowered his voice. “Please, Maggie, listen. Be quiet. They’ll hear you inside the station.”

He drew her down the sidewalk away from the door. She followed, her eyes blind with tears. They stopped beneath an elm tree.

“Maggie, please don’t cry. Please. You’ll make yourself sick. You won’t have to go in the jail if you don’t want to, and if I don’t think it’s going to work, if I’m not absolutely sure, I won’t go in either.”

Maggie kept crying. It was such a relief to be getting some sympathy that she couldn’t have stopped if she had wanted to.

“Maggie,” he said finally in one last desperate attempt, “I’ll buy you some cowboy boots if you stop.”

She blinked. “You don’t have any money.”

“I do.”

“With you?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-two dollars and seventy-seven cents.”

He remembered suddenly that he had spent three dollars and thirty cents on the incompleted phone call to their mother, but there was no need to mention that. “Pap gave it to me for helping collect pop cans.”

“Is that enough for boots?”

“Cheap boots.”

Maggie hesitated.

“But the cheap boots look nice, Maggie; even cowboys can’t tell them from the expensive ones.”

Maggie wiped her tears on her arm.

“Tell me what we’re going to do,” she said.

The Dairy Queen was closed. The lights were out. The parking lot was empty.

Still Mud lay where he had fallen, beneath the carryout window. He was like a character in a fairy tale who had been put under a wicked, hurtful spell. Around him were the dried offerings of strangers.

The only movement was an occasional twitching of his long, dusty legs. Mud was running in his dreams.

It was the silence that brought Mud to his senses. As long as people had been fussing over him, begging him to eat—“Come on, boy, it’s hamburger. See, hamburger!”—it had been easy to lie there, out of it, too unhappy to move. Even when a boy had lifted Mud’s lip and poked a piece of bacon cheeseburger inside, Mud had not reacted.

“Don’t do that!” the boy’s mother had cried, swatting at the boy and hitting Mud.

Mud did not flinch.

Another swat. This time the mother hit her mark, the back of the boy’s pants. “Didn’t I tell you not to fool with strange dogs? You want to get rabies?”

“Noooooooooooooo … ”

Now the parking lot was so quiet, Mud could have been the only living creature left in the world. He was awake, and he knew he was going to have to open his eyes.

He opened one. He rolled it up to the Dairy Queen, down to the streetlight.

Then he lifted his head and looked around. He saw nothing that looked familiar. He could not even remember lying down here.

He was not hungry, but it was easier to swallow the scrap of bacon cheeseburger that was already in his mouth than to spit it out. The scrap hit his empty stomach, causing real hunger.

Still he was selective. He ignored all bread that smelled of mayonnaise and all french fries. He separated pickles, onions, tomato, and lettuce from meat and made a discard pile before eating the meat. He ended the meal with a little chocolate shake which someone had thoughtfully poured in the lid of the cup. He licked the excess from his whiskers.

Mud shook himself, stretched, and lifted his leg in the direction of the Dairy Queen. Then he went to the curb and looked both ways. The street was deserted. He ambled to the corner.

There Mud hesitated. He stood with his nose high, smelling the evening air. He took a few steps to the right, then to the left, figuring out which smells came from which direction.

Mud reached a decision. He lifted his leg on the telephone pole, and then, with a sort of ambling gait, he set off in the direction of town.

Mud was a one-man dog. He could not even remember his pre-Pap days when he and Minnie had chased cars, when the farm girls down the road had dressed him and his brother up in doll clothes and played baby with them.

“How’s your baby today?”

“It’s sick.”

“Mine’s sick too.”

And he and his brother ate medicine made of grass until they could escape and run through the yard, tripping on their dresses.

Mud’s life began when Pap reached down in the ditch and took his shivering body in his gentle hands.

In all the years since Mud had recovered from the accident, Pap had taken him everywhere he went. If Pap went to the barn, Mud went to the barn. If Pap got in the truck, Mud got in. On the rare occasions when Pap said “Stay,” Mud waited in the back of the truck, curled up on a gunnysack, with his ears turning radarlike for the sound of Pap’s shuffling feet.

His job in life, as nearly as he could figure it out, was keeping Pap company.

Now his job was even clearer. He had to find Pap.

He crossed the deserted street, pausing on the yellow line to sniff the evening air.

All the things Junior wanted to invent had already been invented. It was the story of his life. He would say, “I’m going to invent shoes with little wheels on the bottom,” and before he could describe how people would roll around like magic on the wheeled shoes, Vern would sneer, “And what are you going to call them—roller skates?” Then Junior would remember where he had gotten the idea.

He had, at various times, wanted to invent motorbikes, pogo sticks, and the harmonica.

“I’m going to invent a tiny little musical instrument, like a sideways horn, that you blow in, and you can slide it up and down and get different notes.”

“Why don’t you call it a harmonica?” Another of Vern’s sneers.

That night, after supper, Junior remembered with tears in his eyes that he had once almost invented the harmonica. What made him remember was that Ralphie’s two little brothers came to see him and one of them brought Ralphie a tiny harmonica exactly one inch long. He had bought the harmonica in a joke store.

As soon as Ralphie began to wheeze out a tune on the harmonica, tears came to Junior’s eyes. It wasn’t only that some inventor had gotten the idea first and beat him to it. It was that no one had brought him a tiny harmonica. Nobody had brought him anything.

And he didn’t have any visitors. He was never going to have any. Maggie and Vern didn’t even know where he was. And if they did come, they wouldn’t think to bring him a tiny harmonica.

As he lay there, wiping his tears on his top sheet, listening to an off-key chorus of “Dixie” from the next bed, he suddenly wished he had told the policeman where to find Vern and Maggie.

He wished he had said to the policeman, “Look behind the house in the woods. They have a hideout by the ravine.” No, he wished he had told the policeman to go in the woods and give the whistle of a bobwhite, and when Vern and Maggie ran out, thinking it was him, the police could grab them.

He wished he had thought to say, “You better bring them here for identification.” He wanted to give them a hard, unforgiving look before they were led away to prison.

“What’s wrong with you?” one of Ralphie’s brothers asked. The brother had been lying in the empty bed across from Junior, pretending he had appendicitis. Now he was sitting up, cross-legged.

While Junior was deciding whether he could tell his story without starting to sob, Ralphie switched his harmonica into his cheek and chanted, “He fell off a roof. He was trying to fly. He hit the ground. He thought he would die. A poem, by Ralph Waldo Smith.” Then he blew one loud, piercing chord that used every hole on the harmonica.

After that, having had the whole thing turned into a poem, followed by what sounded like a musical raspberry, Junior didn’t feel like saying anything.

“You know what? Now nobody in your family will ever be allowed up on the roof again,” the brother said. “Ralphie fell off the riding lawn mower five years ago and cut off his leg and none of us have been allowed on the riding mower since. We can’t even sit on it when it’s in the garage. Just because h
e
was stupid enough to fall off,
we
have to be punished the rest of our lives.”

Junior wiped his tears on his sheet, this time because he wanted to get a closer look at Ralphie’s brother. “Is that what happened to him?” He nodded his head in the direction of Ralphie’s bed.

“Yes. What did he tell you—that a crocodile bit off his leg at Disneyland?”

“He didn’t tell me anything.”

“That’s what he usually tells people, but he’s never even been to Disneyland. He fell off a mower, and the mower cut off his leg.”

“And,” the other brother said, moving into the conversation, “he’s had five operations because his bone keeps poking through. He just had one, and now he’s getting a new leg. Every time he grows, he has to get a new leg. There’s his old one over in the corner. You want to see it?”

Junior nodded.

The brothers had a short tug-of-war with the leg to see who would have the honor of bringing it to Junior. The bigger brother won and ran over to Junior’s bed. He laid the leg on Junior’s lap and sat on the side of the bed, jiggling up and down.

Junior didn’t even feel the pain of having his legs bounced. On his lap was Ralphie’s leg. Ralphie’s leg!

“Big mouth,” sneered Ralphie from the next bed.

“When I get my new leg, the first thing I’m going to use it for is to kick your guts out.”

“Hand up the board.”

Vern was up in the crook of the elm tree by the jail. Maggie was below him, hiding a ten-foot board between her and the trunk of the tree.

“Someone’s coming,” she hissed.

“Look innocent,” he hissed back.

“I am innocent!”

The man walked slower as he saw Maggie flattened against the tree. When she saw he was going to stop, her eyes got as round as cartoon eyes.

“Oh, hello.” She pulled her lips up into a smile.

The man combed his hair with his hands. “Are you all right?”

“Of course.”

“It’s late, isn’t it, for you to be out by yourself?”

“Yes, but my dad’s a cop. He’ll be out in a minute. He told me to wait here. I’m not supposed to go inside because children aren’t allowed. My dad thinks criminals are a bad influence.”

“Do you want me to go in and tell your dad you’re out here?”

“He knows,” Maggie said quickly. Behind her the board began falling forward, and she stopped it with her head. She looked up at the man through her eyelashes.

The man watched Maggie and the board for a full thirty seconds. Maggie shoved the board back against the tree with her head and stared right back at him.

Overhead, in the tree, Vern waited without breathing. Ever since he had gotten the idea of breaking into jail, he had been gripped by a kind of excitement he had never felt before. He was amazed that his ordinary, everyday mind had thought of it. Breaking
into
jail!

It had come to him in a flash. One moment he had been standing there with Maggie, looking stupidly at the jail, wondering what to do, and the next moment the idea burst out of his brain like one of those fantastic Dr. Seuss trees, too wild and wonderful to be real.

He gazed down through the leaves where the man stood with Maggie. He could see the man’s bald spot. Vern took in a deep breath and closed his eyes in prayer.

Finally the man remembered when he and his gang used to steal lumber at night to build a clubhouse. With a smile, he shrugged and went on down the street.

Again Maggie got ready to pass the board up to Vern. “Here,” she said. When she felt him take the board, she put her hands on the bottom and boosted it the rest of the way.

“I got it,” Vern said. “Let go.”

Maggie moved back into the shadows by the jail and watched. The only sound was the rustling of elm leaves as Vern and the board made their way up the tree. The rustling stopped across from the open vent of the jail.

Slowly the board appeared from the side of the tree. Slowly it extended across the sidewalk. Slowly it waved up and down like one end of a seesaw.

“You’re too low,” Maggie called. “You’re going to miss it by a mile.”

The end of the board scraped against the side of the jail. It was about five feet below the vent. It rose shakily in the air. Then it wavered, trembled, turned sideways, and clattered down to the sidewalk.

“Verrrrn,” Maggie said.

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” he snapped from inside the tree.

“Well, that could have hit me.”

The only answer was the rustling of leaves as Vern made his way down.

Maggie got the board and dragged it back to the tree trunk. She waited for Vern’s “Hand it up.”

“Here.”

“I got it.”

“Be careful this time.”

Maggie was glad she had gotten in the last word. She went back and stood in the shadows, this time far out of the way of the elm tree.

Again she heard the rustling of leaves, again she saw the board coming out like a gangplank.

“Too high,” Maggie called.

Vern groaned and heaved and shoved, and by a miracle—that was how it seemed to Maggie—the board swept across the gap and landed on the ledge. It snapped into place as neatly as something from a Lego building set.

“Now,” Maggie called, “all you have to do is walk across.”

“That’s all,” Vern echoed.