It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC (10 page)

CHAPTER 11:

HOW WHEELS BRING CHANGES

As the time for final exams drew near, the boys sometimes put aside
Action
or
Planet
or
Captain Marvel
comics long enough to consult a textbook for a few minutes. Coleman Hardin, an honor student in his time, had once expected outstanding grades from six-year-old Charlie. By now, though, he had been driven to face cruel reality by his son’s consistent mixture of Bs, Cs, and a teacher’s scrawled “
Could apply himself much better.
” As always, Hardin reminded the boy that while a final grade of B was rewarded with a whole dollar, each A would bring the princely sum of two dollars. In the past, the very mention of such a payoff had quickened Charlie’s spirit in the same way that a cat might hope to catch a flashlight beam. But this year, for some reason, Charlie’s eyes did not gleam as much upon hearing that familiar announcement.

For Aaron Fischer, the issue was more complicated. The Fischers had come to expect borderline honor-roll grades, and this year they had chosen to stir the boy up with a bargain so tempting that he kept it secret even from his best friend. But to win his prize, he must earn no grade below a B. And Aaron had quickly agreed, and then spent the next month wishing he hadn’t.

The pact with his parents chewed at Aaron’s innards because whether he got all As and Bs or not, he foresaw hard consequences. This time, a single C on his report card would yield huge disappointment for weeks in the Fischer household. On the other hand, the honor roll would bring Aaron a

!!!!!BICYCLE!!!!!

In Aaron’s mind the prospect was wonderful and awful in equal proportions. Afoot, his travels were limited to a half-mile or so; on a bike he could wander for perhaps two miles, or possibly on special Saturdays even as far as the Texas Longhorn stadium across town.

But he would have to go without Charlie.

Both boys knew that for Charlie, the bike question was closed and locked and put away on a shelf by parental order until the day he graduated to Allan Junior High, more than a mile across town. Charlie was not left to wonder why; the reason was all too clear. On new roller skates a week after Christmas, he had streaked down the steep West Avenue sidewalk and, out of control, veered into a neighbor’s flowerbed to the ruination of rose bushes that defended themselves fiercely and put Charlie out of commission for days. On a bike, his father said, Charlie would have ended in the river. He put special emphasis on the word “ended” and decreed that Charlie’s Radio Flyer wagon would be his only wheeled vehicle until further notice.

For the next half-year, Charlie and Aaron had accepted this outcome as a fair decision, but Aaron was now aware of the hair-thin line between fairness and cruelty. Some boys would have shared the Fischer family bike pact with Charlie. Not Aaron, who knew that worry shared is not halved, but doubled. Some other boy might have purposely botched an exam for friendship’s sake. Not Aaron, whose allegiance to his parents was a friendship beyond measure. His decision was to do his best, and leave fate to absorb whatever blame might result.

The last day of school was a half-day, with time allotted for cleaning out lockers. Since they shared a home room and had adjoining lockers, Charlie glanced across during the hubbub of a dozen shouted conversations. He finished shoveling debris into his satchel while Aaron was still carefully loading his own. “I got four Bs,” he bragged, then noticed his pal’s expression. “Uh-oh. Don’t tell me,” he added, meaning
tellmetellme
.

“Let’s talk at the pipe,” Aaron replied, stone-faced. Later, after very few words from Aaron as they trotted single-file down the creekside trail, they sat down beneath a familiar fig tree, a few yards from the storm drain. Charlie elevated his nose and inhaled strongly. “I smell coal oil,” he said.

This comment was surpassed instantly by stunning news. “I’m getting a bike,” Aaron blurted.

Charlie’s eyes grew round. Then he had second thoughts and frowned. “Because of bad grades?”

“’Course not, you Nimrod. Because I made the honor roll,” said Aaron, as if admitting a felony. Understanding flooded Charlie as his pal explained and finished with, “And my dad already made me promise positively, absolutely no riding double.”

Several times Charlie framed a reply, then left it unsaid. “When we go places I could run alongside,” he said finally.

Aaron’s expression was pained. “Aw, guy, I’d purely hate that.”

“Well then, I could pedal and you could run along . . .”

But Aaron’s pain only increased. “I’d hate that a durn sight worse, Charlie,” he interrupted. “Where are your skates?”

“Um, parts of ’em are under my bed, I think.”

“That’s what I mean. If pieces of my bike wound up under your bed my dad would make me live in the basement.”

“You guys don’t have a basement,” said Charlie.

“He’d make me dig one,” Aaron rejoined. “Look, I’m sorry about this but it’s done, and we’ve gotta make the best of it. My folks expect me to use the bike to run errands and stuff and not lend it out or bust it, and I’ll go somewhere once or twice a month to make it look like I’m having fun with it. And come on, guy, wouldn’t you want me to enjoy it once in a while?”

Since the blunt truth was unspeakable, Charlie shrugged. “Once a month, huh?”

“Or twice. Times when we’re not doing stuff together. You wouldn’t even hardly notice, I bet. Hey, what do you care about those times?”

Put like this, it was hard for Charlie to mount an attack against a two-wheeled rival he hadn’t known about an hour earlier. He sensed unseen trouble hiding in the crevices of his mind but it was plain to see that Aaron was as unhappy as Charlie himself. Charlie stood up with a sigh. In some states far away, boys sharing such a problem might have shared a handshake, or even a hug, to reduce it, but this was Texas. Charlie’s comradely punch to Aaron’s upper arm was so gentle, even Roy Kinney would have called it sissified.

Aaron stood and returned the gesture. “It’ll be okay, Charlie. We’re still pals,” he said, then wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, somebody opened some coal oil somewhere,” he added. And for the moment, the odor was forgotten.

Like all creatures, humans pay more attention to things they learn from their sharpest senses. The subtle movement of air currents told the boys only that kerosene, labeled “coal oil” in those days and used as everything from cleaning fluid to quack medicine by farm wives, was present nearby. It would have told Lint, whose sense of smell had a college degree, that the fluid had been thrown away as trash by a man so lazy he could not be bothered to bundle his junk. Pinero had neglected to tell his partner to take the trash where it would not advertise furtive operations in a vacant house. A kerosene-drenched towel went into the storm drain after Cade Bridger mopped up most of a quart of the fluid he spilled near the printing press.

In a way, Pinero said, the spill was a good thing. One of the properties of kerosene is its ability to mask other odors. “Counterfeiting has its own set of stinks, amigo. Two kinds of alcohol, penetrating oil, several kinds of ink—sometimes mixed with the smells that casting metal and electric motors make, but not for this job. A cop walking past an open window could’ve spoiled everything for us. That cleaning fluid you spilled disguised it all.”

“All that stuff gives me headaches, Pinero. I don’t even have a fan to blow fresh air through here.” Bridger had a lot of complaints arising from the basic fact that he began with no knowledge of printing and found himself working as Pinero’s janitor. By now, janitorial work was his principal duty, and made him more servant than partner.

“Don’t need electricity for a letterpress powered by a treadle, and you can be glad I found this one. Foot power’s enough when you’re crankin’ out a brand new bill every couple of seconds. Click-clack, twenty bucks. Click-clack, twenty more, and four bits of each one to us.” While his rhythm imitated the muted mechanical clatter of the cast-iron press, his arm mocked the slow revolving of its flywheel. “Click-clack, stomp the treadle, click-clack, watch your fingers.” He winked. “When I get it adjusted, this ol’ antique will turn out stuff I could pass right here in town.”

Pinero was stretching the truth here; the plates with reversed images that he had received from Mexico, originally manufactured in Germany, had made better copies when new. He knew better than to risk the entire enterprise by showing inferior funny money to an Austin storekeeper.

Bridger had seen the press work, after a fashion. Standing almost as tall as a man, the old device had the iron tongue of its foot treadle sticking out at floor level, where the printer’s foot must pump it. A wooden feeding tray hung out at elbow height with its supply of very special paper. Every piece of that paper needed to be trimmed within a gnat’s eyelash of perfection, too. But the heart and soul of the press was only half visible, a reversed image of a twenty-dollar bill held rigidly in place by a metal frame. With the press in operation, the reversed image would be kissed by a mechanically inked roller before transferring that inky kiss to the paper, where the image would no longer be reversed. Every time the paper got kissed, it printed one side of a fake twenty-dollar bill.

Bridger knew the bill had to be printed on both sides. He knew that a tiny ink smear could ruin a bill at any point in the process. And he knew that Pinero intended to trade stacks of their false money to a man in El Paso for fifty real cents per fake bill. Beyond this, Cade Bridger knew so little about counterfeiting that his partner worried about his ignorance.

“No, we won’t try it out in Austin,” Pinero had sighed while Bridger held up their first trial bill and shared his thoughts aloud. “For sure, not this sorry piece of goods.” The printer took the bill back from Bridger. “That’s just my first try; gotta make adjustments. Even if you passed it at the liquor store, the first time a bank clerk saw it he’d send it to the Department of Whatever.”

“The which?”

“I forget. Department of Justice, Treasury, State—federal cops of some kind. I can’t keep track of all the badges, there’s so many here in the States. And every one of ’em can put you behind bars in a gummint hoosegow for a long, long time. That’s why we’ll take four bits on the bill for what we do and let somebody else take the risk of passing the stuff in Mexico.”

“We got Mex’cans here in town,” said Bridger, thinking about all that cheap tequila.

“You’re not listening, Cade. In this country, the day after you passed it, that bill would be in the hands of
federales
, gummint cops. People with badges would be checking out who buys our kinds of ink, our special paper, everything we need. Let’s do this my way. In Mexico it takes longer for the cops to get moving.”

“Then seems to me we could go across the border and pass a few pocketfuls our own self to the stupid greasers,” Bridger said with a snicker.

Pinero stiffened, then made himself relax. “I’m of Spanish extraction myself,
compadre
, in case you forgot. Try not to think ‘stupid,’ and think ‘not so familiar with American money.’ But if you got caught passing it south of the border to some poor Mexican, you’d never see an American jail. Or a cop. Or another sunrise. In a country where you can’t trust your cops, the cemetery fills faster than the jail.”

Bridger digested this news in silence, and set aside his plans to embezzle a few bills for himself. Understanding a tiny fragment of the international counterfeiting business, he imagined that he understood it all. Pinero had told him nothing about where those plates had come from, or that Nazi Germany had created and released many of them hoping to flood America with enough fake money to start a financial panic. Pinero knew a larger fragment of this plot; knew, and did not care.

Within a few days Charlie found the flaw in his pal’s promise that the bike would not bring important changes. The flaw was this: instead of Aaron being out of touch once in a while, that “once” became most times in every while. If Charlie sought a playmate, Aaron might be off with his bike on a shopping errand for his mother. When Aaron wanted to see the Austin High Maroons play a baseball game, he could pedal a mile to the ballpark while Charlie had to walk—both ways. And the time Aaron went to Austin’s sprawling Barton Springs resort to see a swimming competition, he rode there with another bike-owning boy. Charlie could not have walked several miles to the resort and, in any case, he was forbidden to cross the river.

Willa Hardin could not miss the signs of her son’s misery because he made them clear. Charlie told his mom that a boy who had graduated to the sixth grade should not be punished by remaining bikeless when “all the other guys” were wheeled.

“I hadn’t noticed, Charlie,” she said. “Does Roy have one?”

“He’s just a kid,” Charlie said.

“That Rhett boy; does he have one?”

“I dunno,” Charlie said, willing to stretch a fact because Jackie might have stolen one, or a dozen of them, during the past week.

“And Aaron Fischer?”

Charlie’s anguish in his “He’s got a new one” was almost a cry for help, and told his mother all she needed to know. She hugged him and skooshed up his hair as in earlier times, and kissed the top of his head and told him she would talk to his dad.

And she must have said something in Charlie’s behalf because that very night, after Charlie and his dad had laughed at the Fibber McGee radio program for its full half-hour, Coleman Hardin patted his own thigh and invited Charlie to take a seat there. It surprised him to note that Charlie would soon be too big to be sitting on his father’s knee. “I get the idea you miss your buddies this summer,” Hardin said. “Want to tell me about it?”

Charlie nodded, adopting his most serious mood. Having stored up such a pile of complaints, he needed a while to explain them all.

“Your mother and I can’t afford a Schwinn right now,” was his dad’s first wall of defense.

Charlie hurdled it with ease. “Western Auto has bikes for fourteen ninety-five.”

“That’s still a lot, son.”

Charlie took his time now, pursing his lips as if thinking about some brand-new, very large idea. Then: “What if I earned the money myself?”