It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC (13 page)

CHAPTER 13:

BETTER THAN SNOOZING

The rattling, buzzing chorus of locusts debating in nearby trees announced that the long sultry afternoons of summer had come. Adults sometimes called the thumb-sized insect a cicada, but boys knew it only as a “seventeen-year locust,” and invented scores of myths to explain why a bug would lie clasping a twig for minutes while its motor idled, then rouse its clatter to fever pitch for fifteen seconds or so before settling again to the kind of raspy drone that could drive a person to distraction.

Sitting under their fig tree near the creek, Charlie inspected Lint’s ears for ticks and described the strangeness of Gene Carpenter. Meanwhile, Aaron carefully untangled a fishing line that had small hooks tied every few feet along the “trotline” they used to threaten the sun perch of Shoal Creek. Aaron found something to disbelieve in Charlie’s tale with almost every sentence. “You mean he lugged both sacks home by himself in the middle of the night?”

“I guess,” said Charlie. “He never said, but they sure didn’t make it back by theirself.
SHUT UP!”
His shout was directed into the trees, and though Lint flinched, Aaron ignored it. For moments after a demand like this the nearest locusts ceased their clamor, but a bug’s memory was brief. Charlie went on. “The guy was trying to teach me how to be him, but he didn’t wake me up for the weirdest part. I think maybe he likes to do his night stuff alone.”

“What I think is maybe you better let him. Anyway, why would he wanta make somebody be like him?”

Charlie pondered the question. “’Cause nobody else is, I guess,” he said at last. “Around grown-ups he’s polite enough to charm your granny, almost sissified, but he’s like the last of the dinosaurs, and I bet he’s just plain lonesome. You pal around with Gene Carpenter once, and alligators couldn’t drag you to his house again.”

“Huh; no wonder,” said Aaron, who had overturned his can of fishing worms and hastened to set it upright again. “You better stay away from him, Charlie; he’s nutty as a fruitcake.”

“Their cat thinks so,” Charlie said, which concluded the topic. It was common knowledge among boys of that time that cats were superior judges of character.

Because whole weeks went by without neighborhood news worth sharing, Charlie was secretly a little disappointed to find that while he was gone the other boys had not needed him to entertain them. Jackie Rhett had been his replacement, but Jackie’s misfortune was really the core of it.

Playing in the nearby park in early evening when most boys were settled into radio programs and comic books, Jackie had interrupted a romancing couple—one of several—who lay in deep shadows. Furious at being chased away, Jackie had reflected on the unfairness of young men in uniform with unTexas accents who, every night in most seasons, took charge of every secluded nook in Austin to court local girls.

Still fuming, Jackie had stuffed the bowels of a ruined tire casing with newspaper and trundled it along the sidewalk all the way from home. While Charlie was having supper across town with the Carpenters, Jackie had sprinkled the paper with lighter fluid and set it afire before sending it down into the park, a circle of flame bounding across the slopes. But while Jackie paused to count the couples he had flushed like quail in the twilight, he had been caught in mid-jeer, according to him, by a giant in military uniform who wielded a doubled belt. Jackie had gone home a sadder, wiser boy.

“Wish I coulda seen it,” Charlie sighed, relishing the picture in his mind.

“You know Jackie, his giant coulda been a midget,” Aaron said, “but he’s got sure ’nough stripes on his hide to show for it.
PIPE DOWN!”
Again the cicadas paused. Lint sent an aggrieved look though Charlie remained unfazed.

“No midgets in the army,” said Charlie, without the least idea whether he was right. “Jackie’s tire burn anything down?”

“Nope, it fetched up against those stone benches at the water fountain. I helped him roll it home this morning, just a little melted and stunk up. Says he has other plans for it. I bet I know who he wants to have right in the middle of those plans, one way or another.” And Aaron rolled his eyes.

“Roy?”

“I meant us, but Roy’s pretty much Number One in the dumb department, so yeah, him ’specially.”

Lint issued a tiny growl and shook an ear loose from Charlie’s scrutiny, letting his master know there were limits to a dog’s patience. “I’m not gonna worry about Jackie’s plans,” Charlie said, with a get-on-with-you pat against the terrier’s rump. “We’ve let that momsie boss us around too long.”

Aaron knew better than to correct a boy who resisted correction, so he didn’t bother to challenge Charlie’s attempts at sounding Jewish. It was a kind of compliment, in fact. Besides, “momsie” had a nice belittling tone of its own, so Charlie was welcome to it. “Let’s go string our trotline before these bugs drive me batty,” Aaron suggested.

The boys felt confident that now in the endless afternoons of June in 1944 they were both too adult to be taken in by Jackie’s schemes and need not be concerned about him. This attitude made it practically certain that they would soon be involved with Jackie again. Not because Jackie was such a deceptive genius; Jackie was not that subtle. And not because Jackie had leadership qualities, though with his energy and self-confidence, he did have some of those qualities. Charlie and Aaron could not avoid that involvement because in a humid Austin summer, time lay heavy as manhole covers on their idleness, and being around Jackie was better than snoozing while six-inch fish stole bait.

Having assured themselves they would avoid what they daily proved they could not avoid, they turned to applying tender inch-long morsels of worm to hooks; morsels the perch always nibbled away without penalty.

Pinero found himself wishing he had linked himself to a man with only one leg, or cooties, or almost any disability other than the one Bridger had, which was a drunkard’s inability to stick to a plan for more than ten minutes.

Was special ink expensive? Then Bridger was sure to set it down where he would kick it over. Did the sturdy old printing press need careful treatment? Bridger could be depended on to fetch up against it while falling-down drunk, knocking the engraved images askew.

As for his toilet needs, Cade Bridger was seldom in that basement very long before—drunk or sober—he needed to empty the kidneys he abused with liquor that would have made better paint remover. “Look, ’migo, you have to learn to drain your lizard before you get here,” Pinero told him that sweltering afternoon and pulled an empty milk bottle from the cloth sack he had brought. “Do it in this when you have to, but put it where you won’t knock it over, and then take it out when we leave, okay?” He jerked, stiffened, then relaxed. “You hear that? Sounded like a woman screamed ‘shut up’ a ways off, out on the street,” he said.

Bridger gave a headshake and took the bottle without replying, and wished he had thought of the milk bottle idea himself. On this occasion he had resolved to stay sober so that he could absorb everything Pinero needed him to learn. He had the best possible reason for this: the hope that he could run off a few hundred of those twenty-dollar bills for himself some night, without Dom Pinero’s knowledge. Prices of Bridger’s favorite narcotic had taken a slight but sudden jump with the long-awaited invasion by Allied troops into France on the sixth of June. With the current price of tequila at sixty cents a bottle from Austin’s hard-working Mexican laborers, if he spent only one of those bills a month he could stay as cross-eyed drunk as a congressman for the rest of his life. Moments later Pinero glanced up again. “Crazy gringa’s still yelling,” he said, realizing Bridger hadn’t heard it.

“Wha’d she say?”

“Sounded like ‘wipe town,’” said Pinero and, seeing the puzzlement in Bridger’s face, added, “Not important. Now pay attention how I tighten this clamp.”

On this occasion the lesson went well, Pinero insisting on using ordinary paper for tests and using a small high-powered magnifier to study the counterfeits they produced. When Bridger asked about the poor quality of metallic glitter that small portions of new bills were supposed to have, his partner was almost pleased.

“That’s why we’ll take all the bills and tumble them in a tub of dirt,” Pinero said. “Look at any old genuine bill. You see after it’s used and wrinkled the shiny stuff mostly goes away. By then nobody thinks anything about it.”

Bridger thought it was silly to filthify new money until Pinero convinced him that in ordinary use most paper money was thrust into so many grimy hands, tainted pockets, mildewed mattresses, mouldy crevices, dusty drawers and other palaces of bacteria, it was little short of miraculous that people dared to keep the nasty stuff around. Bridger declared he was satisfied to live with it anyway. He gathered the copies they had made for Pinero to take away as trash of the most dangerous sort, trash to be burnt in Pinero’s fireplace and its ashes stirred for good measure.

But while his partner took these things to his car, Bridger found a pair of rejected bills fallen next to the rag bin. They had been printed only on one side but slightly off-center, and some trace of caution told Bridger not to leave this evidence out in the open. While emptying his milk bottle of its yellowish fluid through the escape hole he had bashed into the storm drain, he crumpled the useless bills up and discarded them in the storm drain’s rubble. He saw no point in letting Pinero know his first attempt to clean up the place had been sloppy. There would be plenty of time to remove the stuff another time.

Or maybe not . . .

“Pilot? You aren’t not neither.” It was the day after the latest trotline failure. And Charlie pronounced this ritual triple denial with scorn.

“Am so too,” said Roy, folding his arms to stiffen the firmness of his stand. “Jackie said.”

“Nobody pilots a tire,” said Charlie. “You guide it or drive it or push it or shove it if you’re big enough, which you’re not, so even if some people did, you couldn’t.”

“Betcha a million bucks,” Roy insisted. Then, seeing that this had no reality in their world: “A dollar, then.”

For a moment Charlie considered this, if only to call Roy’s bluff. But if Roy ever had a dollar, by now it would be in Jackie’s pocket, so Charlie ignored the offer. “Well, Mr. Tire Pilot, where’s Jackie gonna be while you get it going? Seems like he’d want to do the piloting himself.”

“I ast that too. Says it needs somebody big to stop it and take it back home with him. He’ll be down the hill across the street where he can catch it.”

Charlie pondered this. Jackie had drawn little Roy into his plans only that morning, while Charlie and Aaron were downtown at the hobby shop. Waiting for plans to mature was not one of Jackie’s strong points. If Roy could be believed, it was Jackie’s intention to let Roy guide the old tire casing as it gathered speed down the street beside the castle wall. This adventure would start at the top of Castle Hill (adults called it Eighth Street), and continue for a steep block downhill through the Nueces Street intersection, where Jackie would bring it to a stop as it began to climb a gentle rise.

This was all in theory, a theory none of them had ever tested. Though he could not have explained in so many words, Charlie understood that an experiment this complicated has more variables than a boy has excuses. And every thing that can vary in such a setting can do it in umpteen ways. Picking a complication at random, Charlie imagined an innocent bicyclist passing that intersection. If the cyclist believed traffic would obey a city stop sign, which was a pillow-sized iron pimple bolted to the macadam with the raised letters S T O P painted in red, that cyclist just might sail through the intersection to be collected by twenty pounds of rubber going in another direction at high speed. It was not to Charlie’s credit that his vision made him smile, but then, Charlie didn’t own a bicycle.

Roy hurried off to whatever fate held in store and Charlie ambled away until he was sure he could not be seen by Roy. Then Charlie ran the necessary few blocks as fast as he could toward the Fischer place. “Jackie’s tire—down Castle Hill,” he was panting, two minutes later.

Between Charlie’s gasping and Aaron’s translating, the boys were both hurrying back toward the Eighth-and-Nueces intersection before Aaron got it straight: Charlie hadn’t been chased down the hill by a flaming tire. Moreover, as for what was about to happen, perhaps no one on Earth had a decent guess. Anyone who wonders what boys were created for might be directed to situations like this.

At the intersection they found Jackie peering up the hill, cursing, hands on hips as he watched a small figure at the hilltop wrestle a slightly smaller object that seemed determined to escape. He turned to see the newcomers settle at curbside and grumbled, “If that dumb B-Word rolls it in the gutter once more I’ll let one of you guys do it.”

Aaron: “Awww. You’d do that just for me?”

Charlie: “Your lucky day, Aaron.” The sarcasm was elaborate.

Jackie could tell he would find no willing helper here. Always sensitive to teasing, he turned and glowered. “Or I could just pound your head up your A-Word if you get smart, Hardin.”

“Sure, after you chase me up that tree.” And Charlie took a few steps toward the same oak, fifty yards away, where Jackie had taken his lumps so recently.

Jackie calculated the distance to the oak and sprang forward with, “If you think I can’t . . .”

But Aaron interrupted with, “Here it comes, guys,” and the contest was instantly canceled. Judging by the slow wobbles and wavering atop the hill, no one could tell at first whether little Roy Kinney or the tire was controlling its descent, and Jackie stood transfixed, swaying from side to side as if hoping to steer them by example. A Packard sedan appeared on Nueces and cruised slowly past Jackie, the driver staring mystified at him without glancing higher to find the reason for the plump youth who seemed to be dancing a slow hula.

Charlie decided that no collision was likely with the car but, just in case, turned his face away hoping to remain anonymous. Aaron, carefully estimating the terrain in general, trotted backwards along the curb away from the intersection. If Jackie failed to corral the tire—now gathering speed at a frightening pace while Roy sprawled headfirst behind it—the job of stopping it might fall to Aaron.