Hurt Go Happy (7 page)

“I have to … too much homework.”

Though she did lots of homework just to keep up, Joey had never claimed to have too much to go to the beach. A V of suspicion formed between her mother's brows.

“What kind of homework?”

For a moment Joey couldn't think of anything. “General stuff,” she said, then remembered that she had chosen a mushroom project for her midterm science paper, similar to what her mother had done in her college mushroom class. “I'm going to start my science project,” she added, leaving out that it wasn't due for a month and a half.

“What kind of project?”

“I want to make spore prints like you did,” she said, “and use them to identify mushroom families.”

Her mother looked pleased. She finished breaking eggs into the pan, added Tabasco and a little milk, then began to scramble them. “Do you have the paper ---------- them on and ---------- preserve them ----------?”

Joey missed part of the question but got the gist because she already knew she'd need small squares of paper with half-black, half-white circles, and squares of clear plastic to cover the powdery prints once the spores dropped. “I was hoping you had all that stuff somewhere, or I could make the circles with a Magic Marker.”

“I may have. I'll check in a minute,” her mother said, dividing the eggs between three large plates and a small one. She shouted for Ray, then handed a plate to Joey, but didn't let go. “I forgot to ask, did you want eggs?”

“Sure,” Joey said, a little too eagerly. But before her mother had time to realize that her enthusiasm for eggs was just relief that her fibbing seemed to have worked, she grabbed a clean fork from the drain-board and headed for the table.

*   *   *

Lugging mushroom-hunting paraphernalia and her backpack full of fruit, cookies, and raisins, Joey climbed the steps to Charlie's deck and knocked on the sliding glass door. Sukari's face appeared at the lower edge of the drapes. When she saw Joey, she grinned and signed, I-SEE-YOU. She began to twirl around, rolling herself up tightly in the curtains like a sausage.

“I hope now's okay,” Joey said, when Charlie opened the door to let her in.

His hands flashed in welcome. FINE, FINE. “Now is fine. Come in.”

Charlie had picked Sukari up, drapery and all, before opening the door. “Ready?” he asked, before unfurling her.

Joey put her stuff on the floor and nodded.

Sukari came rolling out and scrambled into Joey's arms. HUG, HURRY, HUG, she signed.

Charlie indicated with a raised finger that he'd be right back, then folded his three middle fingers into his palm and held his thumb to his ear and his pinky to his mouth. “I'm on the phone,” he said and went into his library, where he picked the receiver off the desk. The house had a pleasant musty smell, as if the old books in the floor-to-ceiling case that lined the wall were baking in the overheated house. More books rose in stacks on the floor. Papers were scattered everywhere, as if all the doors and windows had been left open during the last storm.

Sukari leaned back so Joey could see her hands and signed something, practically brushing Joey's nose.

SORRY, Joey signed. “I don't know WHAT you're saying.”

Sukari signed again, then descended to the floor and swaggered into the office looking a lot like Luke as Mr. Bear. When she pulled on Charlie's pants leg and signed, BOOK, he clamped the receiver between his left cheek and his shoulder, freeing his hands to sift through a pile of papers on his desk, where he found a book and handed it to her. Sukari scampered back, took Joey's hand, and led her to the sofa.

She climbed into Joey's lap and opened her animal alphabet book. “A” was an alligator. Sukari signed, TEETH BAD, and covered her eyes with her hands. She did, COW, then, DRINK GOOD, before scooting off the sofa and running to the refrigerator. She tugged at the handle, reached up, and pulled on the padlock. She turned and signed something Joey couldn't interpret, then, WANT DRINK. Sukari suddenly looked past Joey, who turned around to see Charlie standing in the office doorway, the phone still clamped between his ear and his shoulder. SUKARI BAD, FRIEND GO, he signed.

Sukari slinked back to the couch and climbed up to sit beside Joey again. She turned a page and signed, DOG, then, BITE SUKARI, and covered the picture with both hands and glanced at Charlie. He had turned back to his desk. She flipped the pages to “T” and poked the picture of a turtle. “What is that?” Joey asked, just as she did when reading to Luke.

Sukari made a fist with her thumb on top then draped the cupped palm of her right hand over the fist, leaving her thumb to protrude like the head of a turtle. When Joey made the same sign, Sukari signed, GOOD GIRL, then jumped off the sofa and ran down the hall. A moment later she was back. COME HURRY, she signed and grabbed Joey's hand to pull her along.

Sukari's room made Luke's look orderly. Fat hemp ropes, probably scavenged from the harbor, crisscrossed it at various heights and angles and gave the place a slightly fishy smell. Toys littered the floor: balls of different sizes and colors, a dozen stuffed animals, a tricycle, a red wagon, a set of drums, a horn, a xylophone with color-coded keys, and a playpen turned upside down. A plastic chair swung on a chain from the ceiling. Her bed was a mattress with a pillow and blanket on a platform built near the ceiling.

Sukari scrambled through the debris and climbed onto a chair beside the large aquarium beneath her window. She pointed at the abalone shell on the gravel bottom of the tank and signed, TURTLE.

“That's not a turtle, silly,” Joey said. “That's a seashell.”

Sukari drew her lips back and shook her arms. TURTLE HIDE, she signed.

Joey grinned. “If that's a turtle, where are its head and legs?”

Sukari jumped up and down.

“Okay, okay.” Joey lifted the abalone shell. Beneath it was Sukari's tortoise in a hibernating torpor. I-SEE-TURTLE, Joey signed.

From across the room came a flash of light. Joey looked up. Charlie had taken their picture with a Polaroid. He pulled the print from the front of the camera, glanced at his watch, then weaved through the chaos with his notepad on which he'd already written,
Shall we go for a walk now? It's supposed to rain later.

“Sure.” Joey grinned at him. “I signed a sentence.”

“I saw that.”

Charlie held off Sukari's attempts to grab the picture. “Behave,” he snapped, before pulling the developed print from its backing.

He had caught Sukari standing on the chair, her hands forming the sign for “turtle,” her lips pursed as if blowing out candles, and Joey beside her holding the abalone shell in the air and smiling. Joey stared at the picture. How could she have imagined this moment? Would Roxy or anyone else believe her if she told them that she had a sign-language-using chimpanzee for a friend? “It's wonderful,” she said, and moved to hand it back to Charlie.

He pushed it back. “It's for you.”

Joey wanted to keep it more than anything, but where? It was too valuable to hide in her damp hollow tree, and her mother would find it anyplace else. “Could you keep it for me for a while?”

Charlie's brow creased, then his eyebrows bobbed. “Did you tell your mother about meeting us?”

Joey missed everything but “tell” and “mother,” all she really needed to see.

She nodded her head. “She knows I met you; she asked about the letter, but I didn't tell her about Sukari.” She stopped there and hoped that he'd let it go. Her mother
was
silly about animals, but it had dawned on Joey that if she found out Sukari signed, it would give her just the ammunition she needed. Ruth had convinced herself that sign language was shorthand for real language. If she knew a chimpanzee used it, that would seal it for Joey.

As if he'd read her mind,
Still, secrets aren't good,
he wrote.
They just make people think there is something to hide even if there isn't.

Joey picked Sukari up. “I know. I'll tell her,” she said, hugging the little chimp. “Do you want to see where I live?” Joey asked Sukari.

When Charlie signed, GO WALK. SEE FRIEND HER HOUSE, Sukari squirmed out of Joey's arms, ran to the front door, signed, HURRY, HURRY, then climbed the coat rack and tried to put her coat on without taking it off the hanger.

Joey led the way along a fairly level Jug Handle State Park trail so that Charlie didn't have to climb any slopes. Sukari rode draped over Joey's head, a foot on each shoulder, her arms locked under Joey's chin. Before they left, Charlie had asked her if she enjoyed birds, and when she said she did but didn't know the different kinds, he'd loaned her a pair of binoculars and brought along a field guide to western birds.

Joey's sharpened senses let her spot the telltale movements of birds before Sukari or Charlie saw them. She'd point them out and he'd find them for her in the field guide: two Stellar's jays, a Varied thrush, a half-dozen Chestnut-backed chickadees, Oregon juncos, and an Acorn woodpecker. When they flushed a covey of quail, which flew into trees like a barrel load of bowling balls, Sukari screamed and jumped from Joey's shoulders onto Charlie's back.

BIRD BIRD. “You big sissy.” Charlie clicked her under the chin.

Joey took Sukari back from Charlie so that he was free to write. Something about having him for a friend made her feel like a baby bird teetering on the edge of its nest, craving flight. She took Sukari's hands in hers, spread their arms, and swooped down a small hill, around a tree, and back up to join Charlie.

They walked a bit farther until Charlie stopped and put a finger to his lips, then smiled to himself. “A Winter wren.” He showed her its picture. “It's this big.” He held his thumb and index finger about four inches apart.
Tiny
, he wrote,
with a big, beautiful song.

“When I could hear I didn't pay attention to bird songs; now I wish I had.”

Jays are noisy, but they can mimic other birds, especially hawks, and there's a secretive little bird called a Wrentit in the forests here that sounds like a ping pong ball bouncing away. Once, on a trip to New Zealand, I heard the dawn chorus of the Bellbirds. They sounded exactly like hundreds of bells ringing high in the treetops. That's my favorite memory of a sound. Do you have one?

The note was so long that they stopped in a patch of sunlight while he finished it. Joey looked up at the redwood leaves moving silently against a patch of blue in a slowly graying sky. She thought first of the wind in pines, but when she opened her mouth to answer, that's not what she said. “We always seemed to live near railroad tracks. The places were ugly, but I loved the wail of a train coming. I suppose that isn't a pretty sound to have as a favorite one.”

Trains affect a lot of people that way.

She could feel him watching her read. When she handed the pad back, he wrote,
The wail is so lonesome-sounding and the tracks so straight, maybe trains offer a way out of places people don't want to be anymore.

A chill ran through Joey. She looked at him. “That's it, isn't it? One of the trailers we lived in was the nearest in the park to the tracks. From my room, it seemed like I could see for miles in both directions. I remember wishing Mom and I could slip out one night and just start walking, one way or the other.”

Charlie looked at her, thoughtfully, and it seemed as if he wasn't going to let what she'd said end there, but something Sukari was doing got his attention. She sat with her back to them, probing the rotting end of a log with a stick. “What are you doing?” he asked.

Sukari turned and pulled her lips back. A sow bug crawled out from between her teeth and dropped to the ground. Charlie rolled his eyes and shook his head.
She likes how they crunch.

Joey laughed. “No more kisses for you,” she said.

Is there a sound you've never heard that you'd like to?
he'd written when she turned again.

“The ocean.” Then something else occurred to her: “And my own voice.”

He nodded understandingly. “You have a nice voice.”

“That's what my mother says, but I must sound funny to people because sometimes they don't understand all of what I say, and I get teased at school. They mimic me by talking through their noses. I can tell by the way their nostrils spread.”

Do you go to a speech therapist?

Joey nodded. “On Wednesdays.”

Didn't your therapist explain?

“Yeah, but not so I understood. She doesn't like to write to me. She makes me practice reading lips and hers are hard to read.”

Charlie shook his head, then walked to Sukari's log and sat down.
Why don't you use hearing aids?

“They're pretty expensive, and since I haven't quit growing yet, we're waiting to get permanent ones. I have an FM system I use at school. That helps, except I hate wearing the earphones.”

You should wear them as often as you can. We learn words by imitating their sounds. To pronounce new words correctly, you need to hear them and have them spelled phonetically. That's why people miss some of what you say. It's easy to mispronounce new words. My mother never learned to speak. My father tried but no one could understand a thing he said but me. Thank heavens for sign language.

“But hardly any hearing people know sign language, so even if I learned, who would I talk to?”

Charlie grinned and scribbled,
Well, this runt of a chimp and me, for two.

“That's true. I'm sorry.”

He took the pad back and wrote,
How do you do in school?

“Okay, I guess.” Joey shrugged. “I mostly try to get by with lip-reading ‘cause I get called bug-head when I wear the headphones.”