Chasing AllieCat (4 page)

Three

CCC

May 28, continued

Timmy moved into Stevie’s bedroom with glee. Stevie is nine, a year older than Timmy, so they were thrilled to death about the summer arrangements.

I wasn’t.

After Thomas and Janie and kids left, Aunt Susan turned to me. “You have a couple choices. You can move in with Megan.” Megan is only seven, not even half as old as me. “Or you can move into my sewing room. It’s sort of a mess, but you’d have privacy. I never have time to sew in the summer, so I don’t use the room. It’s up to you.”

I picked privacy, and Megan started to wail.

“Look, Megan,” I said. “I’ll see you every day anyway. But I like to read and stay up late, and it would be a pain to have me banging around in your room every single day. And you wouldn’t like my music.”

“Yes I would! I want to listen to your music.”

I sighed. “You can come listen to music with me sometimes. And”—I was afraid I’d regret this part—“and we can do other stuff together, maybe even go on bike rides.”

Her waterworks turned off instantly.
Little manipulator
.

The sewing room was really a closet in the basement. It used to be the root cellar a hundred years ago, but Scout put cinder blocks and cedar paneling down there to make a room for Susan. Susan had crafty stuff all over the house. Timmy said the house was “crowdy” with stuff Susan had made, and he was right. All the overflow “crowdy” stuff had been crammed into my bedroom closet. Shelves and shelves of cloth and styrofoam balls and yarn and fake wheat and silk flowers and stuff. Just great. I was going to live in Hobby Lobby. At least it smelled like cedar.

“Nice,” I said.

“It’s not
nice,
” she said. “And it’s a disaster, but it is
private
.”

“Thanks,” I said.

This is your bed,” she said, pulling out the fold-out couch and handing me sheets and one blanket. I’d brought my own pillow. “You can rearrange anything you like. Just please don’t throw anything out. I might want it sometime.”

I nodded, thinking that in a million years she couldn’t use all the crap in the room. But I just nodded like I agreed.

A reading lamp was perched on a tiny table at the end of the couch-bed, and the magazines on the table were this month’s. She’d lied about not using this room. This was her only hideout, away from the rest of the household, and she was giving it to me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“Taking your room. I could stay with Megan. Really. I just thought—”

“No,” she interrupted me. “A sixteen-year-old has no place sharing a room with a seven-year-old. Let me feel good about one thing, just one thing, this summer, okay?”

“Thanks.” I hugged her ’cause I thought I should, but her face sagged, and I could tell she was already sorry she had two extra bodies in her house for the summer.

I vacuumed and piled up some stuff that was on the floor. I even wiped down the walls with a rag because I discovered that they smell more like cedar if you rub them. I wondered if I could get high, smelling it. When the bed was folded open, I had two feet on each side of the room to move around. I figured I’d fold the bed up during the day. It was a closet, and there were no windows. At least I wouldn’t have to get out of bed if a tornado blasted through town. A bit of privacy was worth a ton of claustrophobia. I made a sign and put it on the door:

“Cedar Claustrophobia Central. Please knock before entering. Thanks. Signed, Sadie, Management, C.C.C.”

“Very funny,” Aunt Susan said.

Four

Jail

May 30

Wednesday, the big boys, Janie, and Susan went to court. I had to babysit everybody. It was mayhem, but we played croquet and I made frozen pizza for lunch. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

It got worse when the adults got home. They were stone quiet.

Janie and Thomas didn’t even say hi. They just picked up their kids, got in Thomas’s truck, and took off. Scout’s and Susan’s faces were so long I didn’t dare ask what happened. But Scout told me I could come in his study while he called Mom to give her the news.

“No jury trial,” he said. “Just a judge’s sentence. Reckless endangerment. Illegal discharge of firearms within city limits. Public drunkenness. Operating a motor vehicle under the influence … yeah … willful and careless destruction of property. Norton Roberts is one pissed-off dude. He’s ruthless, and his lawyer is a shark—the lawyer went on a rant. He said, ‘Nothing,
nothing
can restore Norton’s Norton.’ So guess what?”

I couldn’t hear Mom’s answer.

“Nope. Goin’ to jail.”

I sucked in my breath. I could almost hear Mom doing the same. “Tomorrow morning. Can’t believe it.”

Five

The Blue Ox

May 31

So the next morning, the big boys went to jail. Aunt Susan quit smiling entirely, and Timmy and I were stuck for the whole long summer in a house with a new total of six kids and one depressed aunt.

My first order of business was to get a job.

I asked Marley, Scout’s cook and manager, if I could work at Scout’s Last Chance, but they serve alcohol—that’s what a bar and grill
is
—so they couldn’t legally hire a sixteen-year-old, even to bus tables or wash dishes. Marley said, “Scout might hire you and just pay you cash, but I don’t feel okay doing that. I don’t want to get him in any more trouble than he already is.”

I wanted to work somewhere I could get tips. So I rode my bike across town to fill out an application at the Blue Ox, a greasy-spoon diner/truck stop/gas station that specialized in Paul-Bunyan-sized twenty-four-ounce steaks. A twelve-foot Babe the Blue Ox stood guard near the rustic hitching post between the parking lot and the door. I leaned my bike against Babe’s front leg and reached up and touched his nose for luck before I went in.

Barb, one of the owners, interviewed me. She could have been my grandma’s twin, but Barb was hard around the edges where Grandma was soft as cotton (except for the calluses where life had rubbed against too much hard work and too many people she loved who had died). Barb’s hard edges made me think everything that had rubbed against her life had hurt. Her voice sounded deep and thick from cigarette smoke.

I got the job. I had to wear a uniform: a bandana somewhere on my body (she gave me one red and one blue), a checkered shirt (she gave me one blue and one red), and jeans. I was supposed to start the next day for the breakfast shift. I had to be there at five o’clock a.m. for a half hour of training. Usually breakfast shift started at five thirty, but not on my first day.

Six

And a Wet Dog

June 1

It wasn’t really light enough to see, riding my bike across town, so I swiped a flashlight from the junk drawer. But there wasn’t much traffic to worry about.

I bussed tables, learned the shorthand for the kitchen, and only spilled coffee on one table.

The place sported red-checkered tablecloths. It was the first time in my life I felt like I blended in with the furniture. And it was the first time in my life I watched people eat mammoth steaks for
breakfast
. I couldn’t imagine. I watched fat men chew steak at six thirty a.m., and I debated becoming a vegetarian right then and there.

When I got home at eleven fifteen that morning, all the little kids were swarming around the house.

“How was it?” Susan asked without looking up.

“Okay,” I said.

Susan was wearing a faded green T-shirt that read Walk for Hope. Stooped over the sink, she reminded me of a hopeless stalk of wilted celery. She brushed hair out of her face with the back of her dishpan hand and asked, “Will you take Peapod for a walk? Scout always walks him in the morning. I don’t have time.”

I changed my clothes.

When I came back upstairs, Megan was waiting to pounce on me. “Can I go? Can I go?”

“Okay,” I said. “Peapod, come on!”

“Girls,” Aunt Susan said, “don’t go
anywhere
near that trailer court. Hear?”

Peapod bounced around, thrilled to death. Anybody who says dogs don’t smile is insane. He bounced his sleek golden self high enough to slurp my cheek and tore circles around us, waiting to find out which direction we were going.

“Let’s go to the river,” Megan said.

So we headed into the woods, toward the trails above the river. Peapod bounced ahead, out of sight, and then came bounding back to check on us.

The woods was full of birds and squirrels. I saw lady-slippers and jack-in-the pulpits. And I love the bright green of early summer. I breathed it in, like I always do, and was glad not to smell smoke this time. I couldn’t wait to get out on my bike. We came around a bend in the trail, and once again, the litter seemed to spring from the ground thicker than the wildflowers. Everywhere. Whiskey bottles, newspapers, broken plates, a smashed TV, a water heater, beer cases, carpeting, a swivel chair, and couch cushions. I could have stepped on junk like stepping-stones, all through the woods, if I’d concentrated on it. “The junk woods,” I said out loud.

“Yup,” Megan said. “Sometimes we find treasures.”

“I bet.”

We reached the steep slope down to the river. The water sparkled in the sun.

“Want to swim?” I asked Peapod.

He looked at me, ears cocked, and wagged.

“Want to go swim?” I said again.

He jumped straight in the air and took off down the rest of the steep path so fast I think his feet touched the ground four times in fifty feet. He disappeared around a corner, and we heard him splash into the water.

When Megan and I got down to the riverbank, Peapod grinned up at us over the rippling surface of the water and splashed some more. He fished in the shallows, stalking minnows or bullheads and pouncing on them, paws down, nose up. He didn’t catch anything, but Megan said, “He caught a crawdad once. He’s been a fisherdog ever since.”

Megan took my hand and we walked along the trail by the river. Peapod followed us in the water, pouncing at regular intervals. We stepped around bottles, a fender, chunks of Plexiglass, tires, and a ragged T-shirt among the weeds and scrubby fir trees. Another curve, and dead in front of us was a big tagboard sign, hand-written and nailed to a tree:

Whoever took my chain saw you better

bring it back or I will find you and

fuck you up Steve Olsen 386-0014

I stopped and stared at the thing. The magic-marker letters were crooked, and ran downhill on each line. And who with half a brain would write a note like that and sign his name? And leave a phone number?

“What does it say?” Megan asked. She started to read aloud, “Who-ever took my—what’s that?”

“Chain saw,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

“Wait! I want to read it.”

She finished aloud. “F—uck. Fuck!? It says
fuck
on a sign? That’s bad, bad word, Mommy says.”

“It’s a bad sign, Megan,” I said. “It gives me the creeps. Let’s get out of here. Peapod, come on.”

Peapod came bounding and shook dirty river water all over us.

“Ick!” Megan squealed. “Stop it, stupid Peapod!”

We followed Peapod uphill. Each wag of his tail sent arcs of dirty water at us. Again, he paused every now and then to check that we were right behind him, as well as to shake.

When we reached Scout’s, Megan said, “Daddy sprays him off when he’s been in the river.” So we hosed him down and toweled him off with shop rags from the garage. Peapod gave me happy slurps through the whole process.

“He misses Dad,” Megan said. “But he likes you lots.”

I nodded. If I was going to be Peapod’s substitute favorite human while Scout was in jail, that was okay with me.

We didn’t tell Aunt Susan about the chain-saw sign.