Mr. Was (12 page)

Andie said, “Let's go. They're gone.”

We filed out of the theater and walked down the block toward the car.

“So is that how you make your money?” I asked.

“That and other stuff.”

“Scud's a hustler,” Andie said.

“I'm actually a businessman. I do deliveries, all kinds of stuff.”

He opened the car door. From up the street came the sound of a revving engine. A beat-up pickup truck pulled away from the curb and raced toward us. As it passed, an arm flew out the window and hurled a beer bottle at us. Scud ducked, the bottle missed his head by inches, bounced off the roof of the Ford, and shattered on the sidewalk. The pickup continued down the street.

“They seem pretty serious,” I said after a moment.

Scud had his arms around Andie, holding her tight. I thought she looked uncomfortable. Scud's face was hard and angry. “We'll see who's serious,” he said, climbing into the car. Andie and I got in, and we took off.

“You're not going after them, are you?” Andie said.

Scud shifted gears, leaning forward over the wheel. “Scud?”

“I just want to follow them. I want to see something.”

“What's to see?” Andie said. “Let's just go home, Scud. Please?”

“We are going home. This is the way we go to go home.”

“Well, don't drive so fast.”

“I'm not driving that fast. Besides, I want to show you something.”

“Whatever it is, I don't want to see it.”

“You'll like it.”

“No I won't. Slow down.”

I listened to them argue as the speed of the car increased. The speedometer needle stopped at sixty, but we kept picking up speed, racing down the twisted, narrow highway toward Memory. I didn't know what Scud had in mind, and I knew that Andie was probably right to be cautious, but at the same time I was excited.

The taillights of the pickup appeared in front of us. We got to about a hundred feet behind them, then Scud let up on the gas, matching their speed.

I felt Andie relax as we slowed.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Just watch,” Scud said. “Let's see what happens when their muffler gets good and hot.”

We stayed close behind the pickup, Scud leaning forward with his chin on the wheel, peering intently through the windshield.

“What did you do, Scudder?” Andie asked. “Did you do something to their truck?”

Scud said, “Who, me?”

Just then the underside of the pickup was lit up by three brilliant yellow flashes followed a split second later by a loud Ba-Ba-BOOM! The back of the pickup seemed to jump off the ground, leaving behind a twisted tailpipe and muffler, and the truck slewed toward the ditch. Andie screamed. Scud wrenched the wheel to the left, narrowly missing the tailpipe, then spun the wheel the other way, just barely staying on the roadway. He pulled over to the shoulder and stopped.

The pickup had rolled down into the ditch and up the other side, then come to a halt in a grove of sumac trees. Scud jockeyed the car around so his headlights shone on the truck.

Henry, Harry, and Hermie staggered out, pale and shaken, but apparently uninjured.

Scud stuck his head out the window. “You fellas okay?”

One of them, I think it was Henry, nodded, too stunned to care that it was Scud asking.

“You see what happened?” he whined. “What happened? We coulda got killed!”

One of the other Gleasons was inspecting the tires, a bewildered expression on his face. “Tires look fine,” he said. “Thought we blew every last one of 'em, but they're fine.”

Scud said, “That musta been one heck of a backfire. Your muffler and pipe are on the road back there.”

“Felt like a bomb went off under the truck,” Henry said.

“No kidding?” Scud was grinning so hard I thought he'd tear a cheek. “Maybe somebody shoved a few cherry bombs up your tailpipe.”

It took the Gleasons about five seconds to digest that, then their faces lit up and suddenly all three Gleasons were charging at us. Scud, laughing hysterically, revved up the engine. When they were about ten feet away he popped the clutch and the Ford jumped forward—

—and the engine died.

An instant later they'd wrenched open Scud's door and dragged him out. I saw Scud land a fist on one Gleason nose, then he disappeared under their heaving bodies. I tumbled out my door, ran around the car, and dove right in, my fists sinking deep into rolls of Gleason fat. I heard a couple of satisfying squeals before the first blow caught me in the side of my head. For a second I actually saw stars, then the stars turned into Henry Gleason's beady black eyes. I ducked just in time to avoid a second blow. Scud had regained his feet by that time and, elbows and fists whirling, was fighting off both twins at once. Henry, the older brother, had locked his sights on me. He grabbed my arm and swung me hard against the Ford. I bounced off the car door, fell to the ground, and scrambled away on my hands and knees, trying to get enough distance between us so that I could get my feet under me. I looked back in time to see the car door fly open, hitting Henry hard on the hip and knocking him into one of the twins. Then Andie came
boiling out of the car and jumped right on top of him, hammering his face with her sharp fists. Henry wrapped his arms over his head and curled up in a ball. I looked back at Scud. The twins had him down on the ground, one of them sitting on his head, the other kicking him hard in the gut. I rammed my shoulder into the kicker's side, and we went tumbling out onto the roadway. I landed a couple, I don't know where, and took an elbow in my right eye. We somehow got to our feet, and started trading punches. He was slow, but it didn't bother him to get hit.

I heard Andie scream.

Apparently, Henry had tired of being beaten up by a girl. He had his big arms wrapped around Andie's waist and was holding her up off the ground. Andie was hollering and kicking and flailing her arms—it looked to me like Henry was still taking the worst of it. I forgot about the twin and went running at him. He saw me coming and let go of Andie. That turned out to be a mistake, because as soon as he let go, she spun around and let him have it right between the legs. Henry howled and went down on his knees. He gave off a pitiful moan and crawled off into the ditch. She started after him, but I grabbed her and pointed back toward the car where Scud was getting pounded, one twin holding him from behind, the other hammering away at him.

Andie let out a yowl like an enraged mother cat and charged. The twins looked up when they heard her shriek and saw a wild woman, claws out, ready to rip
their eyes from their skulls. They dropped Scud and took off running down the road.

Scud climbed painfully to his feet. He wasn't looking so good. His nose was gushing blood, he had a nasty cut above his left eye, and he was hunched over, holding his belly like he was afraid his guts would come spilling out.

“You okay?” I asked.

Scud nodded and forced himself to stand up straight. “You see that muffler come flyin' of fa there?” He laughed, then coughed.

Andie said, “If you don't die, Franklin Scudder, I think I'm gonna kill you myself. I might as well just go beat my head up against the side of the barn as go out with the likes of you.”

Somehow, Scud managed to grin and wink at me. “Yeah,” he said. “But it's a lot more exciting.”

T
he next morning I was moving pretty slow. I felt as if every muscle in my body had been pummeled, which was exactly what had happened. Old man Murphy never said a word. He never commented about the bruise on my cheek or the cut on my chin. And he never mentioned Andie's torn dress, but the next time she wanted to go to the movies with Scud the old man just shook his head no.

He didn't care what I did, though, so long as I had my chores done, and the next time Scud stopped by, I climbed in his Ford and we drove down to Lake City to pick up a few bushels of apples from a farmer down there, and drove 'em back up to Memory to sell to the townsfolk. Scud made ten cents a bushel, and he gave me a nickel for helping.

I was getting to like him a lot. That might seem strange, since he'd got me in trouble more often than he'd got me out of it, but it was like he'd said that night he'd rolled the cherry bombs up the Gleasons' tailpipe—at least it was exciting. You never knew what he was going to do.

After the fight with the Gleasons, Scud and I were bonded like the two musketeers. It would've been three musketeers, except that Andie was grounded
and besides, there was that awkwardness when the three of us were together. Scud would stop by nearly every day. I think mostly it was to see Andie, but since she was forbidden to get in his car, it was me who went driving off with him if I had my chores done. Sometimes we'd do something constructive, but more often we would just drive around and talk.

Scud did most of the talking. He wanted to be rich, and he made you believe he was going to make it happen. There was no denying that he knew how to make a buck. Eighteen years old and he was making as much with his wheeling and dealing as anybody in Memory. One week, he told me, he made fifty dollars by selling a car that wasn't even his. What he'd done was, he found a used Chrysler that a guy up in Hastings was selling for two hundred twenty dollars. Scud took it for a test-drive, drove it all the way to Lake City, and sold it to another guy for two hundred fifty dollars. Then he hitchhiked back to Hastings and told the guy who was selling the car that his car had broke down five miles out of town and wasn't worth two hundred twenty dollars. The guy was pretty upset about that, and when offered a flat two hundred dollars, according to Scud, the guy was glad to take it.

Scud lived with his mother in a little white clapboard farmhouse on the south end of Memory. Mrs. Scudder was a hollow-eyed mouse of a woman who rarely left the house. She spent her days, as near as I could tell, sewing quilts to sell and spending all the
rest of her time cooking and cleaning. Their house was small, but it was the cleanest house I'd ever seen. I never asked Scud about where his father was because I didn't want to have to talk about
my
father, but one day while we were driving down toward Wabasha just to be driving someplace, he told me his dad was dead.

“That's too bad,” I said.

“No it's not,” Scud said. “He used to beat the hell out of me and my mom both. He was a creep. I'm glad he's dead.”

I could understand that, and hearing him say it I felt like we were closer than ever.

Scud said, “I killed him, y'know.” He looked at the expression on my face and gave out one of his wild, high-pitched laughs. “Naw, not really. He got drunk and took a snooze on the tracks. You couldn't tell him from a dead possum when they gathered up the parts.”

All I could think to say was, “Yuk.”

“I hated him,” Scud said. “He was a jerk.”

That same trip down to Wabasha, on the way back, Scud pulled out a folded-up sheet of newspaper from his pocket and handed it to me. “Whatdya know about this?” he asked.

I unfolded the sheet and looked it over. It was one of the financial pages from the St. Paul
Pioneer Press
—row after row of tiny writing didn't interest me a whole lot. It might just as well have been Chinese.

“What about it?” I asked.

“I found it in my car a few weeks back, just after you tried to pay off Mrs. Gleason with that phony coin.”

“So?”

“So look at the date.”

I looked. July 30, 1996.

As tight as Scud and I had gotten, I still hadn't told him anything about where I really came from. I hadn't told anybody, because I knew that one way or another it would get me in trouble. And as much as I liked hanging out with Scud, I didn't trust him one hundred percent. Or even ninety percent. I figured it would be a mistake to completely trust anyone who wanted to be rich as bad as Scud did.

“It must be a misprint or something,” I said, remembering that I had used a newspaper to wrap a peanut butter sandwich during my second trip through the door.

“Just like that phony money you had?”

“That's right.”

He took the sheet of newspaper back, folding it with one hand while he steered with the other. “You ever read a book called
The Time Machine?”

“I've seen the movie,” I said.

“Really? I didn't know they'd made a movie out of it. It never played in Red Wing, that's for sure.”

“I saw it on TV,” I said. I realized as soon as I'd said it that I'd made a mistake.

“Where's Teavy?” asked Scud.

“Um, it's down by Chicago.”

• • •

The thing was, even though Scud suspected I was from another time, the idea was so far-fetched that he didn't really believe it. If he'd really thought it was possible, he would have known it was true. As it was, he believed it the way you might believe in, say, vampires. You suspect that they might be out there, but you don't go rubbing garlic on your neck every night. I think what Scud liked then was the idea that I might be something special, but he didn't want to scratch too hard because he didn't want to be disappointed. A little like the way I'd felt about the door. Like I wasn't sure I wanted to know if it was real.

What was most real to me then was life on the Murphys' farm. The old man kept me shoveling and baling and cutting and chopping and whatever else he could think of, and I almost never got to spend a minute alone with Andie. If it wasn't for her, I think I'd have hit the road. I'd heard from Scud that a lot of defense jobs were opening up in the Twin Cities, and guys were making over forty cents an hour.

But I stuck around. I had half a century to kill, so I figured a few more months at the Murphy place would be just a drop in the bucket.

A week or so after Thanksgiving I was splitting wood out behind the barn, not thinking or anything, just working and enjoying the feel of it. Splitting was hard work, swinging that sixteen-pound splitting maul over and over again, driving the wedge into the big pieces, but it was work I liked—clean, hard, and
satisfying. I loved the way the maul felt in my hands when it hit hard and square, and the
ka-chunk
sound of a clean-split log. And it was a beautiful day, one of those rare late autumn days with plenty of sun, no wind, and the temperature up in the fifties. I'd been at it for nearly an hour, my flannel shirt moist with sweat, when Andie came around the side of the barn with a quart Mason jar full of cool apple cider and something wrapped in a red-checked kitchen towel. I stuck the maul in a block of oak, guzzled half the cider in one swallow, and wiped my mouth on my sleeve.