Sagaria (7 page)

Sagandran climbed onto the bus with the feeling that he was shedding a great weight from his shoulders. The seats at the back were empty, so he went straight there and spread out his comics.

The bus’s big engine started throbbing somewhere underneath him. The driver reversed the vehicle out of the bay and turned it toward the road, then set it in gear with a screech.

Looking out the rear window, Sagandran waved at his mother, who was still waving when she became too small to see.

He was on his way to Eagle Lake.

Without realizing it, Sagandran must have dozed off. One moment he was reading about Strontium Man being chained up in a dungeon by the arch-villain Mentodurge the next the bus was jolting to a halt at Eagle Lake. He grabbed his things from where he’d strewn them on the back seat, and joined the line of passengers who were getting off here. There were a few other kids, but they were all dressed like their parents in brand new, brightly-colored, outdoorsy-type clothes that looked as if they cost a fortune and would be absolutely useless in the real outdoors. Sagandran was the only one who was dressed in a plain old T-shirt and jeans, and his jeans had a neat patch at the knee that Mom had sewn on during the night as he’d slept. He felt kind of scruffy for a moment, like a street pigeon that had somehow strayed into the parakeet cage at the zoo. Then he remembered what Grandpa Melwin, who was a real outdoors person (he’d been a ranger for forty years, hadn’t he?) always said about the summer tourists and their fashionable finery. The comments were among many of Grandpa’s that Sagandran had not repeated to Mom.

As he jumped off the last step, he saw Grandpa waiting for him. Tall and skinny, untidy white hair, arms folded, wearing a faded blue denim jacket and jeans to match, with a wry grin on his face, he leaned against a battered blue Oldsmobile called Brewster that looked as if it had more years on it than even Grandpa Melwin. Grandpa’s smile broadened when he spotted Sagandran, and he butted himself clear of the car and began ambling over. Sagandran ran toward him and into his arms. The next he knew, he was almost being lifted off the ground in Grandpa’s great big bear hug.

“Hi there, big fella,” said Grandpa. “You’ve grown a bit since I last saw you. Next thing I know, you’ll be too big for an old man like me to keep under control.”

Sagandran chuckled into Grandpa’s denim shoulder. It smelled of wood smoke and pipe smoke and all things good. For such a lanky man, Grandpa Melwin was astonishingly strong; he could have picked up three Sagandrans at once without breaking a sweat.

“Missed you, Grandpa,” he murmured.

“Missed you too, young lad,” said Grandpa, setting him back down again. “Course, there’s a good reason you missed me.” He paused for just a beat. “It’s 
because nobody else spoils you the way I do.” He patted his grandson on the shoulder and let out a guffaw.

Grandpa took Sagandran’s bags from the driver and gave the man a tip, then led the way across to put them into Brewster’s littered trunk. The car looked even worse close up than it did from a distance but Grandpa loved it, so Sagandran did as well. The inside of it smelled good: old leather upholstery, spilled beer, pipe smoke, happy journeys. When the family was going through one of its occasional marginally wealthier phases, Sagandran’s mom had once mooted the idea of buying Grandpa a second-hand car to take Brewster’s place, but Grandpa had shushed her crossly, telling her that talk like that did nothing but hurt Brewster’s feelings.

Still, as they bumped onto the rutted lane that led to Grandpa’s house, the Oldsmobile’s ancient shock absorbers absorbed none of the shock. As Sagandran’s spectacles kept being jolted askew on his nose, he reflected that Brewster’s feelings weren’t the only thing capable of being hurt. But Grandpa didn’t seem to notice, but just carried on chatting about the great adventures they were going to have this summer – all liberally spiced with those epithets that Sagandran sensed his mom wouldn’t like.

The lane was thickly lined on either side with hedges and trees, and coming along here, during the summer months, always made Sagandran think of crawling through a long, cool tunnel with the prospect of enticing mysteries at the end. It was as if Grandpa’s house by the lake wasn’t really a part of the everyday world, and when you were going through this green tunnel, you were leaving the world behind. Well, that was how it had been until a couple of years ago, when someone had built the big summer mansion up on the hill beyond Grandpa’s house. Shared with other people, the lane wasn’t a magical tunnel any longer; it was just a lane.

And now the O’Malley family had bought the summer house. Maybe that was why the ruts in the lane seemed to be bigger and the bumps had stopped being fun and started hurting.

As Grandpa’s house came into sight (now that he looked at it, Sagandran thought, maybe it really was a bit of a shack after all) they could also see the hated mansion perched above it. It looked from here as if the walls were made of white plastic, and the tall plastic security fence made your eyes constantly want to turn away and find something better to look at. In contrast, Grandpa’s cottage was tucked comfortably in among the trees, which ventured down to the edge of the water. It seemed to be a piece of the forest, not something that had been built at all. Sagandran had looked out its windows and seen deer and foxes and raccoons and groundhogs and heaven knew how many squirrels
and chipmunks. Every once in a while, a big black bear would come through, moving astonishingly gracefully despite its bulk. Posses of wild turkeys flew in sometimes too, and there were always woodpeckers, cardinals, crows, ducks and geese. The wild creatures seemed to regard Grandpa’s house and its yard as part of the natural landscape, as their own shared territory.

It was strange to think of his mom as a little girl, growing up here. Since then, she’d lost all connection she might have once had with the wilds; she was a townie through and through.

Brewster lurched to a stop in front of the cottage’s sagging door. The sign over it said “The Eagle’s Nest.” Sagandran had once asked Grandpa about the sign, and for once the old man had become somber and uncommunicative. Dad had later explained that Grandma put it up many years ago, before Sagandran was born and not long before she succumbed to the cancer that had stolen her life. Even though the name of the house was a bit fanciful for a woodsman like Grandpa Melwin, he’d left it that way for the sake of Grandma, whom he’d loved very dearly.

Once they’d taken Sagandran’s bags up to his room – which looked the same mess as it always did, like boys’ rooms should – Grandpa got the barbecue going and hot dogs were soon sizzling. Sagandran’s leftover peanut butter sandwiches from the bus, Grandpa declared solemnly, would be their dessert. Mugs of cold lemonade from the fridge completed the planned repast.

Sagandran sat on one of the big sawn-off tree trunks Grandpa used for chairs out here and watched the smoke from the barbecue spiraling up among the branches of the old pine trees. The sun seemed to be not so much shining down on the glade as gently washing it. The sky was the kind of blue no painter could ever capture. Everything seemed perfect in the world.

Then there was the sound of a car engine coming along the lane.

Unless Grandpa was expecting visitors, and a glance at the old man was enough to tell Sagandran that he wasn’t, there was only one other group of people it could be.

Suddenly, the sunshine wasn’t so friendly.

Webster O’Malley
.

Of all the other kids at the school whose parents could have bought the summer house, it had to be Webster, didn’t it? Just another of those dirty tricks life seemed so fond of playing on Sagandran.

“Something the matter, hero?” growled Grandpa, looking up from burning his fingers as he turned over a hot dog.

“It’s okay,” said Sagandran wearily.

The noise was coming much closer. When it emerged from the tunnel – no,
the lane, it was just a lane now – Sagandran could see the vehicle was a jeep, done in supposedly military-style camouflage green. The type of paint job that made bankers and lawyers think they looked pretty manly and grand, but made
real
soldiers – Dad had once told him – laugh out loud or wince. Why was Sagandran not surprised that the O’Malleys had a car like this for their holidays in the country?

It wasn’t just the jeep’s engine that he and Grandpa could hear now. Webster’s dad was shouting.

“… like driving along the sleepers of a railway track! We’ve got to get this road asphalted. Shut up your squalling, Webster, you horrible little brat. Hey, these trees are a road hazard. We have to get them chopped down. Mabel, can you phone someone in the morning? And what’s
this
dump? Oh, yes, that daft old coot Melwin. Smells like a cesspit. Tomorrow we’ve got to …”

The voice and engine noise receded as the jeep vanished round another bend, leaving only the smell of exhaust fumes behind – that and a fat cigar butt that Webster’s dad had tossed out of his window onto the edge of Grandpa’s yard.

“Friends of yours?” said Grandpa mildly as he went across to pick up the cigar butt.

“Nope,” Sagandran replied firmly, “not friends of mine.”

What stood out most clearly in his mind from Mr. O’Malley’s diatribe was the “horrible little brat” bit. That hadn’t been spoken in the tone of affectionate frustration Dad and Mom sometimes used when they were vexed with him. The words had been harsh, contemptuous, intended to hurt.

They maybe explain why Webster is the way he is
, thought Sagandran.

Then Grandpa was thrusting a mustard-slathered hot dog into his hands and he forgot all about Webster and his family.

After lunch was over, Grandpa had a few chores to do. Sagandran lay in the hammock with a book open on his chest, but he was not reading it. Instead he was looking up through the treetops at the oval of blue sky they framed. The intrusion of the O’Malleys seemed to be a long time ago and very far away, as if it had happened to someone else. For now, everything was just fine.

A branch snapped behind him. Curious, he sat up in the hammock, which slewed crazily beneath him. Clutching its side, he looked around.

No one was there.

Sagandran could hear Grandpa’s voice softly singing from inside the cottage as he pottered about doing his tasks, so it hadn’t been him.

Must have been a wild animal. Maybe a deer
.

Then he grinned.
I’d not put it past Grandpa to say it was one of the Little People, pausing at the edge of the woods to spy on me before carrying on his way. No wonder people sometimes say he’s a little addled in the pate. Puts food out for the fairy folk too. I know, I’ve seen him do it. “Always keep them happy,” Grandpa once said, his face perfectly serious, “and they’ll leave you alone – and maybe even help you when you least expect it.” Perhaps he was right. Who knows?

They went out fishing that afternoon on the lake in Grandpa’s beat-up old row boat. There weren’t many fish in Eagle Lake so they didn’t expect to catch anything, but they both held fishing rods anyway. It was congenial sitting out on the water, watching the birds and the ripples and chewing the fat, as Grandpa put it. Talking about the hundreds of inconsequentials of life that were too unimportant ever to mention until you actually did. A few ducks paddled around paying them no attention, sometimes bobbing their heads for insects. Occasionally, Grandpa would make a great show of moving the boat a little, as if that would increase their chance of getting a bite.