Little Klein (9 page)

LeRoy hung his head and followed Little Klein to the yard.

After that day, LeRoy’s doghouse felt unbearably small and cramped and devoid of aroma. He took up whining at the door whenever his family was inside. Perhaps they didn’t really need him after all.

“What has gotten into that dog?” Mother Klein mused.

Alone now in the big upstairs, Little Klein’s nightmares were unleashed. Wolves chased his trembling behind; boulders crushed his house while he slept; a big wind blew him away, and he couldn’t grab hold of passing trees. While the Bigs were gone, Little Klein’s nightmares played like horror marathon week at the Riverview Theater. He resisted bedtime because he didn’t want to go to sleep, yet he didn’t want to be the only one awake in the house, either. The room without the Bigs was a cavern.

Mother tried all her sleep remedies. She told him stories, sang him the spider song, fed him warm milk and buttered bread. She let him sleep in one of his father’s nightshirts because he liked the softness of it. But every night it was the same routine, Little Klein pestering her to stay awake so he could fall asleep.

“Why can’t LeRoy sleep with me?” he pleaded, but the answer never changed.

“What if something happens to Matthew?” he worried. “Or Mark? Or Luke? Or all of them? Who will protect me then? What if they don’t come home?”

Mother Klein dismissed his worries. “I don’t worry about your brothers,” she said, and sang through the hymnal by heart until he fell asleep. But the next night was the same. And the following.

“Would you read to me about cake?” called Little Klein from the bedroom one night. Mother Klein shrugged. “What do you mean?” she called back.

“I mean, will you read to me about cake? You know, crack an egg, one cup of flour, like that.”

Mother pondered.

Though he was small for his age, Little Klein had the appetite of one of the Bigs. He was transfixed by the magic with which water and heat turned crisp dry oats into warm mush for breakfast and the way an unappetizing lump of raw eggs and flour and cocoa could turn into a cake with the texture of a spring meadow. Even the power of butter to fuse two pieces of bread together delighted Little Klein.

“Well, excitement is in the mind of the beholder,” said Mother Klein. She pulled her worn cookbook off the shelf and opened it. “It’s worth a try.”

“What kind of cake?” she asked.

“Chocolate,” said Little Klein, snuggling down into his blanket.

“Here goes. ‘Best Chocolate Cake. Heat oven to three hundred and fifty degrees.’”

“No,” said Little Klein, “start with the ingredients.”

“What was I thinking? The ingredients: ‘Two cups all-purpose flour or cake flour, two cups sugar, one teaspoon soda —’”

“What’s soda?” Little Klein interrupted.

Mother Klein explained the ingredients as they went through the list. By the time she got to the happily ever after of “pour evenly into pan(s),” Little Klein was asleep, a peaceful smile on his face, a drop of drool edging out the side of his mouth.

Recipes worked for a few nights, first chocolate cake, then gingerbread, then anything with lots of ingredients and several steps. Soon, though, Little Klein’s anticipation of nightmares was worse than the nightmares themselves, and his bedtime demands got more complicated. Dessert was no longer enough. He needed a main dish first, then a salad course, and a song after dessert. When he asked Mother Klein one night to read him a breakfast, lunch, and dinner, she snapped shut her
Joy of Cooking
and stood up.

“Enough,” she said. “My bedtime services from now on will include one song and a prayer. Now, go get your dog. If there are any nightmares lurking, his smell will surely keep them at bay.”

By the time the Bigs returned from the farm, chipmunks had taken up residence in the doghouse and LeRoy, like Goldilocks, had tried out each of their beds, sleeping every night, though, with Little Klein.

Night after night LeRoy patrolled the long and narrow upstairs bedroom. Sometimes he needed the benefit of a tree so badly and his boys slept so soundly that he had to wake Mother Klein to be let out. But that was his only complaint.

One night after his tree run, LeRoy peeked over the edge of Little Klein’s bed to make sure he was asleep. Then he pattered between the other three beds, sniffing at still feet and damp hair, and under beds for remnants of sandwiches or crackers. He nearly woke Mark when he got into a chase with what turned out to be a bunny of dust, which, once caught, made him sneeze. These were now LeRoy’s nightly rounds, and he trotted proudly, then, paws up on the windowsill, looked out at the moon, a howl building in his belly. He gave it just a small hollow voice, though, lest he be sent outside for the rest of the night.

He crawled up on Little Klein’s feet and laid down his head. Now that LeRoy slept indoors, truth was he’d grown skittish about the outdoors after dark. It was a good thing Little Klein needed protection from bad dreams.

The next day toward evening, the boys walked to the town park for a game of baseball. There were lots of kids around, and LeRoy was not the only dog. The struggle to keep track of his boy in the crowd put LeRoy in an irascible mood, and when he found Little Klein hunched down petting some puff of a pup, he couldn’t help himself — he barked so loud the puppy wet the ground right there, and then LeRoy nipped him.

“LeROY!” Little Klein gasped.

“Why, I never!” exclaimed Mildred Gamble, hardware store maven, swooping the puppy into her arms.

“Fluffy, are you hurt?”

LeRoy barked again, but his bravado wavered when he saw the look on his boy’s face.

“You’re mighty lucky Fluffy isn’t hurt, young man,” Mildred continued. “I ought to call the pound.” She leaned down and gave LeRoy a swift slap on the snout. “Bad dog!”

LeRoy lunged to nip her, too, but an arm at his neck held him back and he watched the fluff ball disappear with Mildred Gamble while his boy talked soothingly into his ear. Then another brother was there holding out a piece of frankfurter, and LeRoy forgot all about being ornery. He pranced along between his boys the rest of the evening, running with them when the clouds turned suddenly dark and the rain started. When they got home, he barely paused at his doghouse, he’d grown so accustomed to slipping in the screen door behind his brood.

The rain kept LeRoy awake nearly till morning, and when he did finally sleep, his dreams rumbled with the terror of lost boys, of muted barks, of swimming after a floating Fluffy, who in dream’s translation was larger and fiercer than LeRoy.

The sky drained for days and by the time it paused, cabin fever was epidemic. An unbearable stillness hung over the town, a heat so soggy Little Klein’s socks lay still damp by his bed in the morning. Then LeRoy woke them up early with his feet, sniffing and licking.

Little moaned about getting the smallest bowl of oatmeal, and all three Bigs growled at him to Shut Up.

“That’s it,” declared Mother Klein, whapping the wooden spoon against the counter with a snap that broke it in two and made the boys jump. “It’s too hot in here for the five of us. I’ve been cooped up in this house too long with your bickering and wrestling and . . . and . . . et cetera. I want you all outside doing something constructive. Preferably out of my sight.”

Little Klein couldn’t believe she was including him in the decree. “Yes,” she added, “you, too. Clear your dishes and get.”

They stumbled out the back door and sat on the steps.

“Hey, make room for me,” complained Little Klein.

Luke pushed Mark off the end and scooted over. Just as Little sat, Mark got up and shoved back, bumping Luke into Little, who smashed into Matthew, who got up and raised his arm at the whole mess of them.

Mother Klein came to the door. “Either find a task or I’ll find one for you.” She tossed their shoes out after them.

Little Klein slouched over to LeRoy’s doghouse and picked at a loose shingle on the edge of the roof. Matthew swooped him up and tossed him over the doghouse to Luke.

“Hey! Stop that! Put me down!”

“Sure. Here you go,” and with that Little Klein was deposited on the roof of the doghouse. He slid down slanted boards to the ground. It was kind of fun.

“Hey, do it again!” Once again Luke hoisted his brother to the roof for a bumpy slide to the ground.

“My turn,” said Mark and Matthew at once, and they dived at the roof from opposite sides, colliding in a heap over the top.

“Make room!” shouted Luke, who piled on top of the other two. Little Klein tried to join the pileup by climbing the dangling legs.

“I’m suffocating under here,” called the bottom Klein, and when the pile shifted there was a slow crack, then a snap, and before the sounds registered in their brains as breaking boards, the sloped roof flattened, then collapsed, and four heads and torsos were trapped inside the buckling walls.

The Klein boys sorted out their limbs and rose slowly to their feet.

“Sliver!” Little Klein yanked at a small splinter of wood stuck in his hand.

“Look at all the nails,” Luke said. They stepped back gingerly and stood in shocked silence around the wreckage.

Mother Klein came to the door and sighed. Then she shook her head and went back inside, taking LeRoy with her.

Outside, Little Klein broke the silence. “Luke ruined LeRoy’s doghouse.”

“You started it, squirt.”

“Did not!”

“Did too!”

“Now what are we going to do?” asked Mark.

“You’re all a bunch of sissies,” Matthew scoffed.

Glares were passed around. Little Klein stepped forward and pulled a loose board off the side of the doghouse and laid it on the ground. He yanked off another and set it neatly next to the first one. “Now LeRoy’s got a window,” he said.

But soon the window turned into a door and then the wall was lost all together, the house now beyond saving as one loose board led to another. While his brothers took over the dismantling, Little Klein darted around them, picking up boards and sorting out the splintered ones from the good ones.

“Here,” he said, tossing a shingle to Matthew, who started a pile. Mark picked through the wreckage for nails. Luke walked around Little Klein’s boards.

“Look at this,” he said, pointing to the neat rows. “What do you see?”

They all stood up and stared. “What?”

“We have enough wood here to build a raft!”

“I was thinking about a tree house . . .” started Little Klein. But his voice was drowned out by the excitement of the Bigs, who were already planning a raft. Then Little Klein saw himself on the raft, floating along the middle of the river. He saw himself passing right over the den of The Minister and reaching down to scoop him up with a net. He abandoned his plans and joined his brothers. “Go look in the garage for rope,” commanded Matthew.

“And see if you can find a tarp in the basement,” added Luke.

Mother Klein brought out a basket with sandwiches and bottles of milk as they finished their raft.

“Have a picnic by the river,” she said. “And don’t take Wilson’s Fork.”

“We know, Ma.”

“Keep an eye on the sky. I don’t trust this hot, still air. And be back for dinner,” she added.

“We know.”