It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC (12 page)

“Now we’ll see how it works,” said the older boy, and raced away across the street down into the cover of creekside brush with Charlie at his heels. At the water’s edge he scooped sand into one hand and used it like soap, scrubbing both hands vigorously in the shallows. It was easy to see that the creek’s level was already dwindling. “You better get that stuff off your hands.”

Charlie hadn’t noticed his palms, which were stained as if he had been stacking old bricks, thanks to his struggle against the ancient wheel. “It’ll come off,” he said.

“Yeah? What if they ask what it is?” Moments later Gene forgot his own question as he spied something a few paces downstream. “Hot diggety, there’s one!” And he hopscotched across shallows to collect the first ball.

Charlie wondered who “they” might be. As those soft cries of new discoveries grew fainter, he squatted and began to scrub his hands thoughtfully. It was starting to look as if, for Gene, “they” meant anybody on the planet; and it seemed that this happy young outlaw ran wild not so much for treasure as just for the heck of it.

By draining away, the creek was becoming little more than a series of pools, some perhaps a foot deep, but much of it only wet sand and limestone. Charlie found his friend hunkered down near what clearly had been a broad pool, now mere inches deep. Gene was pointing. A half-dozen small dimpled spheres crowded together at a crevice in the stone bottom, like a clutch of hen eggs in a watery nest. “Wow, you were right,” said Charlie.

“Just made sense,” Gene said, and emptied several balls from his hand to Charlie’s so he could retrieve his latest find. “Boy, am I dumb. I shoulda thought to hide some old sacks near the dam.”

As he stood up, Charlie saw that his friend’s pockets were full of rounded lumps. He recalled a similar problem with coins from a lily pond but kept silent about it as he pocketed the new treasure. “I wouldn’t say dumb, guy,” he said.

“We haven’t come a city block and we’re almost full-up,” said Gene, to illustrate his own dumbness. “We’ll have to hide this bunch here and do it as many times as we have to and come back for ’em all later.”

“Yep. So don’t say dumb,” Charlie insisted. “You’re not dumb. What you are is scary.”

“Aw, hey,” said Gene, looking as though Charlie had just slapped him.

“It’s okay, Gene. You’re not mean, or clumsy or anything. Shoot, you’re not clumsy
enough
. I just don’t know what you’re up to until we’re in the middle of it, you know?”

“Well shoot, neither do I. That’s the fun of it,” Gene explained, with a combination frown-and-grin that said, “everybody knows that.”

“There’s another one,” Charlie said to change the subject, and hurried downstream after a small dimpled orb he caught peeking above the water’s surface. Darkness overtook them before they could survey the full length of the course, but by then they had hidden six piles of golf balls and headed for home.

In late dusk, Gene’s parents seemed pleased that their son had gone “no place much” and “just played” with young Charles Hardin, and they treated Charlie like visiting royalty at dinnertime. A big tiger-striped cat that Charlie hadn’t noticed before snaked around at Mrs. Carpenter’s feet in the kitchen but evaporated in a twinkling when Gene sought a pair of RC Colas from the refrigerator.

A portion of Charlie envied the way his friend was allowed small decisions without asking permission, while an equal portion of his mind argued that Gene might need a few more permissions now and then. Mr. Carpenter, a handsome older man of few words, erected an expensive camping tent in the backyard at Gene’s suggestion so the boys could toy with a flashlight and sleep like adventurers. Around midnight Charlie’s energy began to drain away, and after that, his sleep was deep as a coma. Evidently Gene was a sleepwalker because, sometime during the night, he imported two grocery bags of golf balls to the tent.

With morning’s first sparrow chirp the boys were up again, burying grocery bags in last year’s leaves behind the garage. That garage was full of little mysteries for Charlie, including a handsome bicycle locked with a chain. Gene was vague about the bike and Charlie decided to keep his guesses to himself. The croquet set looked almost new but all the heads had been removed from the mallets. The badminton racquets looked as if someone had pounded them with a hammer. “Not as good as a baseball bat,” Gene confided, and Charlie supposed they had been used to whale the tar out of a few golf balls.

By the time he was burping from a late breakfast that included bacon, eggs and butter, Charlie had seen how a boy might live, given the comforts of money and parents who denied him only one thing: supervision. Charlie took wartime rationing for granted the way all his other friends did, but he found that the Carpenters lived as though rationing did not exist. From this he learned a Great American Truth: the wealthy do not understand rationing, nor need to.

At midmorning the boys were looking through Gene’s enviable collection of Big Little Books, volumes smaller than paperbacks but with hard covers and pictures on alternating pages, when a telephone rang somewhere in the house. Presently Mrs. Carpenter came to Gene’s room with the news that Charles’s mother would pick him up within the hour. “And Eugene, your father is having more trouble taking the tent down than he expected. I know he could use your help,” she added.

Charlie followed his friend outside to find that Mr. Carpenter, though plainly surprised and pleased to find Gene offering aid, would not let a guest take part. Charlie basked in sunlight on flagstones, watching father and son puzzle at their work halfway across the yard, until the family’s striped cat ambled up to him and applied for a skull-massage, which Charlie was happy to give. By stages so subtle that Charlie did not notice them, the cat insinuated itself into his lap where finally it lay on his knees in a Sphinx position, eyes shut, accepting his fingernails between its ears in catly drowsiness.

Both boy and cat became sun-stunned, so near sleep that when at last the tent was stored, Gene stepped onto the flagstones before the cat came alert. A sizzle like grease on a hot skillet erupted from Charlie’s lap and the cat dematerialized in a stripy flash. “Ow, ow, durn you,” Charlie scolded after the departed animal. “Thanks a lot, Tiger,” he added, rubbing furiously at tiny wounds those claws had made through his trouser legs.

“Peeve, you mean,” said Gene, not at all surprised at the way the family feline had greeted him. “Her name’s ‘Peeve.’ ”

“New cat, huh,” said Charlie.

“Mother’s had her since I was, I dunno, five maybe.”

Some unspoken understanding passed between the boys. Then Charlie asked, “Why’d she name her pet ‘Peeve’?”

Gene grinned that impudent grin of his. “You just said. Her pet peeve, get it?”

Abruptly Charlie did get it, and slapped himself on the forehead with the heel of his hand. “Keen.”

“Hey, we don’t have much time before your mother comes,” Gene said abruptly. “Don’t you wanta see the creek?”

Charlie fired off a grin of his own. “If there was one.”

“I bet it’s still there behind the dam. And if we’re good guys we better turn it back on while we can.”

Scampering away down to the throat of the golf course, they hurried toward the ancient dam, staying hidden in greenery. The boys reached the graveled street together and saw through cyclone fencing at the same time. One of Gene’s special giggles burbled up at what they saw, but Charlie was silent with awe.

That merry little brook of the day before was nowhere to be seen—or rather, it was everywhere, but not as a brook anymore. Charlie marveled how a lazy little stream pouring twenty gallons a second through a ravine could produce a real swim-across-it, float-rafts-on-it, drown-in-it pond after being sealed off for twelve hours or so. In an instant the scene told Charlie more about multiplication tables than his teachers ever had. Wooden lawn chairs lazed across the lake surface.

“Must be six feet deep in the middle,” Gene marveled, and moved over to grip fencing nearest the hackberry branches. “C’mon, guy, time to open it back up!”

Charlie rushed to obey and was standing on Gene’s shoulders leaning toward the tree before he realized that somewhere far off across those fenced acres, men’s voices were calling back and forth. “Hurry, Charlie,” Gene insisted. “I don’t see anybody yet.”

The hackberry seemed to have developed claws that tore at his clothes as Charlie reached the trunk and slid down inside the property. He slipped and would have fallen headfirst into the pond near his feet if not for the rusted wheel, and as he gripped it with both hands he could hear one of those distant voices, now much closer. No telling what it said. It didn’t matter what it said.

It didn’t matter what Gene was saying either, because Gene was still safely outside the fence, now lying flat in the coarse tuft grass, a cheering section of one but not a loud one. “Turn it, turn it,” he chanted.

And Charlie turned it. And again, and again, and with every twist a sudden trickle became a deeper splash which begat a low-pitched rumble that created a thunderous rush so loud Charlie almost failed to hear the shout of a man in overalls ten yards away. The man was only a few paces from a capture, clinging to the fence as he approached with the obvious intention of grabbing the boy, when Charlie abandoned the wheel. Charlie leaped for the tree but knew he made an easy target, inchworming feverishly up that rough bark from a height any standing man could reach.

But not a man who suddenly lost his footing to turn sidelong and plunge backward with a despairing yell, full-length, into the lake.

As the man began to swim back toward him, Charlie shinnied as he had never shinnied before; like the boy who invented shinny. It seemed he could hear Gene Carpenter urging him on but faintly amid the Niagara roar below. Charlie’s feet were running as he hit the gravel shoulder and the only reason he did not run directly uphill toward the Carpenter home was that Gene grabbed him by the belt and guided him toward the ravine. “Parking lot over the hill,” was the terse explanation. “Big hedge behind it.”

Charlie needed all his breath for running, but he understood when he imagined men climbing that cyclone fence and giving chase. He understood a little more when he realized that Gene’s rhythmic panting carried a familiar giggle in it. And when they leaped the creek that was now visibly rising more every second, he suspected that Gene Carpenter had planned every stage of this craziness. A single glance behind him told Charlie that a solid wall of water was now hurtling from the conduit pipe like the coming of a Biblical flood as the boys sped uphill.

The hill was not high, and as soon as the boys topped it the ravine was out of sight. Charlie figured all of Gene’s giggling had stolen his breath, since Charlie reached the parking area ten paces ahead. He slowed to a walk hoping to become less interesting to a man who eyed him while hauling golf implements from a car. Gene fell in step blowing like a whale, steering their progress toward a high well-trimmed hedge that flanked the gravel drive.

Minutes later the boys reached the shoulder of a suburban street and headed for Gene’s neighborhood. “We’ll pass by our place the next alley down and then come back from the west,” said the planner, and paused to gawk at a group of men dressed as colorfully as circus clowns who stood on the golf course near a foolish little flag on a pole. “What’re they doing?”

The men were gesturing, laughing, all facing the ravine, their voices too distant to carry well. “We can see better a ways farther,” Gene replied, and trotted down the street’s gentle slope. A half-block away the golf course’s gentle curves yielded a better view into the ravine, and now Charlie saw a knot of tiny figures there near another flag. They were yelling and waving too, but did not seem to be enjoying it much. Gene glanced Charlie’s way and snickered. “Didn’t think of this part,” he confided.

Then Charlie saw that the unhappy golfers and their caddies all stood near the creek on a room-sized grassy patch completely surrounded by water. And the water seemed to be creeping higher on the patch. “Boyoboy, did we raise a ruckus. We gotta do this again next year,” Gene remarked, and set off down the street again venting those giggles that, by now, made Charlie feel uneasy.

By the time they neared the Carpenter place, Charlie could hear the forlorn blurt of a Plymouth’s horn, familiar little double toots that reminded Charlie of home as powerfully as the unmistakable sound of Lint’s bark. He broke into a trot, calling as he went, with Gene at his heels.

Finally in sight of his mother, Charlie saw her wave back and slowed to a walk. His companion fell in stride, saying, “You have fun like this at home, Charlie? Could we camp out at your place next time?”

A stab of uneasiness pierced Charlie’s vitals. “They pretty much make us stay inside,” Charlie lied. “I’ll have to ask my dad.”

“You can take some of my golf balls home. I can go get you a few.”

“That’s okay, you keep ’em for me. Just till I come next time,” Charlie added quickly, wondering whether a golf ball would still be of any use to him in a hundred years.

Gene perked up at Charlie’s reply. “We have all summer, guy,” he said, punching Charlie’s shoulder lightly with a fist. They were smiling together as they reached their mothers, and something in Mrs. Carpenter’s face said the arrivals of Eugene Carpenter were not always this tame.

As the Plymouth turned toward home, Gene ran alongside until he was called back, and then waved until he was left behind. After a single dutiful wave, Charlie settled low in his seat and released a sigh. He appeared to ignore the sodden man in torn overalls who limped along the edge of the golf course, scanning the ravine with sober intensity.

Smiling, Willa Hardin patted her son’s knee. “Did you have fun with your new friend, Charlie?”

“Yessum,” he said, not exactly a falsehood. Then, feeling the need to say more—much, much more—and not knowing where to start, he thrust it all away. “They have a cat,” he added, and after a pause: “It doesn’t like him.”

“Cats can be strange,” she said.

It was on the tip of his tongue to say, “Boys too,” but for Charlie it was enough to grunt a simple agreement. He knew all he needed to know about his new friend. He wouldn’t visit again; he would run off and join a circus, even a flea circus, sooner than invite Eugene Carpenter to the Hardin home; and he knew that the brightest, sunniest outside of a person can hide an inside as dark and twisty as a ball of black yarn. “I can’t hardly wait to see Lint and Aaron,” he said.