Squashed (14 page)

I was about to get a triple word score for “freezing”
with
a triple letter on the “z,” which would cinch my team’s win and destroy Dad’s earlier score with “quagmire” when Spider shrieked. Spider shrieking was nothing new, but this was a shriek followed by nothing, which didn’t figure, because Spider always shrieked in triplicate. I got up, and Richard pushed me down. Richard had finally found a place for “macho” on a double word with a double letter on the “c” and wasn’t feeling patient. “Freezing” was possibly one of the great Scrabble moves of all time, and I shoved it in Dad’s face as Aunt Peg groaned in bitter defeat.

Then I heard the sound. I dismissed it at first because Spider didn’t respond, but it was a low-pitched hum, like the chugging of an engine. I heard it again and went to the back window. Spider lay on the ground licking something, probably a smelly old slipper. Max sat sturdily in his patch. The noise had stopped. Strange. Richard was playing “macho” with great fanfare when I saw it. It was big and reddish and pushed by three hooded figures. It didn’t register at first what was really happening, but then everything came into focus as I watched the truck back into
my
patch and inch toward
my
squash!

Pumpkin thieves!

I screamed for Dad and Richard, grabbed a rolling pin, and pushed out the door. A ski-masked figure stood over Max with a huge knife, ready to cut his vine. I lunged toward him, screeching. He turned, shocked, and dropped his knife, but that wasn’t good enough.
Max’s automatic sprinkling system controls were at my feet. I cranked the dial to high and let the lashing water nail him good. He covered his face as the hard water hit and I raced toward him shaking my rolling pin, screaming like a soldier gunning down the enemy.

The rotten thieves were shouting to each other to get moving, get out of here, when the cavalry came on the scene. Dad tore past me, running after two of them. The driver went for the truck but was stopped short by a perfectly thrown baseball hitting him square on the shoulder. He fell to the ground as his buddies ran for the street, but they were no match for Dad. His long legs made up speed as the villains tripped over my compost mixture bags trying to escape. Dad grabbed one by the hood and hit another with a bag of pearlite and threw them on the ground. I shoved a hose at the drenched robber and caught him in the face.

“If you move,” I shouted, holding the rolling pin over him as Richard ran up beside me with his bat. I couldn’t think of anything more scary to say, so I glared at him with hate. Streams of water crashed around us, but I stayed tough. Spider was barking furiously now, finally getting the point.

“Bad man, Spider!” I shouted, pointing at Max’s enemy. Nana turned off the sprinkler and charged through the patch, shaking my best sauté pan over her head, shouting the law was coming and if anybody moved, she’d bang him good. Dad stood over his prisoners and didn’t have to say anything because he was 6’6”. Aunt Peg hobbled on the porch with her crutches and said Spears was on the way like it was the worst news of her life.

“Are you all right, Ellie?” Dad shouted.

“I’m okay, Dad.”

Richard told our prisoner that in Rock River they burned pumpkin thieves at the stake in the middle of town in broad daylight. I wiped the water from my face as my enemy shook with terror.

“You,” I spat, “are a rotten, moldy creep!” The thief sighed. I glared at Spider. “This,” I asked, “is the pumpkin thieves’ worst nightmare?”

Spider licked the thief’s hand. “I think you tamed him, Ellie,” Richard said. “See. You are a dog person.”

A siren ricocheted from the north up Bud DeWitt Memorial Drive, growing louder as Spider shrieked his warning. “Thank you, Spider,” I spat. “But I think they’re on our side.” Spears and the sheriff marched across the yard, guns ready. Spears grinned and waved at Aunt Peg, who hobbled quickly away.

“Take your ski mask off, son,” the sheriff directed my robber, but he didn’t move. “Off!” ordered the sheriff.

Slowly the robber stood on his feet. His hands pulled the mask to his nose. Then he threw it off and stared at the ground.

Nana said, “Oh, my.”

Richard said he couldn’t believe it and dropped his bat.

Spears gasped.

The sheriff shook his head sadly and pulled out his handcuffs.

Aunt Peg said she might take a nice walk around the neighborhood.

I looked at my enemy cold in the face and I guess I should have figured.

There in the mud and the slop stood Mrs. Lemming’s rotten grandson Ralphie! Ralphie, who had heard all my secrets, checked out my property, befriended
my dog, taken pictures of my good side! Ralphie turned to his uncle Spears and said, “Look, it’s not what you think.” Spider, noble guard dog, wagged his tail and pulled a bag of beef jerky from Ralphie’s wet pocket unashamed. Aunt Peg hobbled upstairs and locked herself in the guest room. Max seemed to shiver as a cold, wet wind blew in from the east.

I
t was up for grabs
as to which band had stolen more pumpkins, Dennis’s or Ralphie’s. No one was making any predictions, and Spears was staying quiet. Arresting a nephew wasn’t an experience every lawman gets to have, and Spears was taking it real hard, but not as hard as Mrs. Lemming, who had drawn her chintz curtains in disgrace and refused to come out of her house. Mannie Plummer said it was a dark day for the Lemming family and left a cranberry strudel on Mrs. Lemming’s screened-in porch so she’d know no one blamed her and so the sneaky raccoon that drove Mrs. Lemming crazy couldn’t get at it either.

Penny Penstrom, the sheriff’s secretary/dispatcher, called Nana to say that for the first time in history the jail was full. Spears, she said, couldn’t take Ralphie’s mournful wails, and the sheriff felt that eight robbers in two cells was pushing Fate. Ralphie’s father showed up at 3:00
A.M.
, paid his bail, and dragged Ralphie home by his nose hairs. Ralphie’s mother would
have come, but she collapsed in the driveway from shame and was helped to the couch by her only good son, Butchie. Three other robbers, all age eighteen, were moved to Circleville. Dennis’s father told the sheriff to keep him. Penny said
this
was a story that would make Rock River proud and that my incredible cool under pressure should be recognized. Dennis, she reported, was blaming all squash stealing on Ralphie, who was blaming all squash stealing on Dennis. The sheriff was treating himself to a two-hour breakfast at Kay’s Koffee Kup and thinking about running for mayor.

I had been up all night guarding Max, except for two hours when Richard wrapped himself in a blanket and sat in the patch with his bat. Richard was sleeping on the living-room couch, and I was fixing cornbread and Canadian bacon when Gordon Mott, publisher of the
Rock River Clarion
, an extremely important, big-deal newspaper, stuck his head in my kitchen and said, “You’re hot news, kid. Did you know that?”

I was about as shocked as a person could be but I pulled myself together, said, “Of course I know that,” flipped a piece of Canadian bacon, and missed the griddle.

Dad came down, and he and Gordon Mott sat on the back porch. Soon, Gordon Mott said, the whole state would know about me and Max and Ralphie’s despicable trick because mine was the kind of news story that people ate up. Gordon Mott knew these things because he used to be the managing editor of the
Chicago Tribune
before he had a beard and before he took early retirement at forty-six “due to five peptic ulcers and cringing, riveting anxiety.” He bought the
Rock River Clarion
two years ago and promised to keep his eyes on
world events but to print only news that was non-ulcer-producing.

“Your story’s got everything, kid,” he told me, shoving his photographer in Max’s direction. “Action, courage, love, death—”

“No one’s died, sir—”

“Death comes in many forms, kid. Trust me on this.”

Gordon Mott was rich and carefree, having done very well indeed in the stock market during what he called his “Chicago period,” when people called him “Gordo.” He now lived on the scenic banks of the Rock River in a fifteen-room house with his third wife, Laura, who was someday going to bake the world’s largest pumpkin pie and cinch the title in the
Guinness Book of World Records.
His only daughter, Marsha, collected puréed pumpkin for her mother, got straight A’s, and really missed Chicago.

“Okay, kid,” said Gordon Mott, positioning me behind Max and walking back and forth like a great guru seeking the meaning of life. “Tell me what happened last night.”

“We were playing Scrabble—”

Gordon Mott scrunched up his face and shook his head. “From the heart, kid. From the heart.” I told him from the heart. The agony, the terror, the desperation, the sprinkler.

“Nice touch with the sprinkler,” Gordon Mott offered. “Makes a great close.” He was glowing in the sunshine, a tough man who’d found a tender story. The photographer motioned me against the backdrop of the gathering storm clouds and told me to look into the wind.

“It gets me right here,” Gordon Mott said, indicating
his stomach. I nodded. Dad nodded. It got us there, too. He circled Max, his face lost in headlines. “It’s a story of America at its best,” he cried. “Tough and unrelenting—triumphant against the odds—a family pulling together.” He slapped his stomach: “That’s what sells papers. Those poor slobs in Chicago think all people want is bad news. I spent seventeen years behind a news desk. What’d I get? Inner peace? World vision? I got wars, famine, and heartbreak. I got ulcers enough to count. Bad news gives you ulcers. Trust me on this, kid.”

Mr. Mott said he was going to write a story such as the world had never seen and that when he got through, Rock River would be on the map and I would have put it there. “No pressure, kid, but what’re your chances of snagging this Weigh-In?” I told him about Cyril and Big Daddy. “If you’ve got any miracles to work on the vegetable,” he said, “I’d start now. Everybody loves a winner. America doesn’t do second place unless it’s absolutely unavoidable.” Then Gordon Mott climbed into his silver BMW and sped off in a cloud of dust.

I sat with Max in the field, considering our newfound fame. “We’re a hit, Max,” I said. “You think Cyril and Big Daddy could win the heart of the entire state? Not a chance, Max. They haven’t got it”—I patted my stomach—“here, where it counts. Trust me on this.”

Dad brought a plate of Canadian bacon and cornbread out to the patch on a tray like it was room service. “Well.” He beamed, smiling at Max.

He’d never smiled at Max before, and this was a grin so big it made me nervous. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

Old Abe patted Max’s vine and said, “That’s a fine vegetable you have there, Ellie.”

I said, “
Huh?
” as Old Abe, cool and pressed, now sat in the dirt like a regular guy. “You’re sitting in the dirt, Dad.”

“Yes, dear, I know.”

“You hate dirt.”

Dad smiled, ate a circle of bacon, and handed me one. “I think,” said Dad, “I’ve been very wrong about things.” I was quiet because Dad was never wrong, according to him. “It occurred to me,” Dad said, “that what you’ve done with Max here is most astonishing and everyone seems to know it except me.”

I checked Dad’s pupils. They were normal. He ran his fingers through the dirt like he was touching it for the first time. Spider chased a woodchuck behind the shed and gave up when he found an old slipper.

“My father,” Dad continued, “insisted I love farming. I couldn’t do it. Our relationship never survived. He told me I’d never leave Iowa. I told him he was dead wrong. I’d leave as soon as I could and only come back for Christmas dinner. He said I’d find the place in me where farming was supposed to be and let it grow.” Dad looked at the back porch for a long time. “It’s too late to tell him he was half right.”

Dad sat deeper in the dirt, and a quiet broke over his face that I hadn’t seen in years. “Watching you last night, Ellie, seeing the interest people have in what you’ve done, I seem to have found it.”

“I’m not sure what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying,” Dad explained, “that I’ve found farming again.”

My
father? A farmer?

“You start sneezing when you get near Nana’s barn,” I reminded him.

“That’s true.”

“You eat sushi.”

“I do.”

“You’re going to take Japanese lessons; you watch foreign films—”

“With subtitles,” Dad offered.

“Subtitles.” I winced. “Your fingernails are always clean.” I checked mine—grungy—and sat on my hands. “That’s a dead giveaway, you know, and what about that silk sport jacket from Chicago? You sleep late. You
can’t
be a farmer!”

“You’re absolutely right,” Dad said, standing and brushing off his trousers. “I can’t. But I’m going to help you be one, if that’s what you want for yourself.” Dad paused like he did on his tapes for a hard truth to sink in. I ate two pieces of cornbread without chewing. “It occurred to me, Ellie, that in fighting you I was fighting myself. Your grandmother’s been trying to get that through to me for years. This morning it finally sunk in.” He extended his hand. “I’m sorry, honey.”