The Summer We Lost Alice (3 page)

I hear Boo's footsteps in the hallway behind me. He's about to come this way, but then he turns around and goes to the bathroom door and sniffs. The door doesn't shut tight, which I hate because somebody might come in and see me pee. Boo nudges the door open and in a moment I hear him slurping loudly from the toilet bowl. Catherine yells at
him from the bathtub where she's been soaking in bubbles for the last three days. She spends one-third of her life in the bathtub, one-third on the telephone, and one-third out with Sammy.

Boo leaves the bathroom and I
glimpse Catherine in the bathtub. "Born in a barn!" she says to Boo as he leaves, oblivious to her. I turn away as her foot appears and shoves the door shut. It bangs and bounces open and I hear more cursing and the slap of wet feet on the floor. The door closes as much as it ever does.

I follow Boo downstairs
. I hear the kitchen screen door slam as he lets himself out. I watch from the kitchen as he trots out into the yard. Aunt Flo's back is to him as he digs furiously in the garden, spewing dirt and flowers between his legs. He digs one way and then the other. Aunt Flo doesn't see and Alice doesn't care. Finally he plops into the hole and lies there, panting. All of that work for a dirt hole to plop in.

Aunt Flo reaches for a bucket and sees Boo in the garden and the uprooted flowers lying every
which way on the grass. She erupts in fury. She flies at him, flapping her gardening apron and yelling, "Git! Git!" Boo maneuvers one big leg after the other into place and hauls himself to his feet. He walks over to a shady patch of yard and lies down, panting. I feel sorry for him for getting bawled out by Aunt Flo, but then I realize that he doesn't give a poop. That's his gift.

Aunt Flo asks Alice, "Why didn't you stop him?" Alice shrugs and murmurs some sounds that have the cadence of "I don't know." Aunt Flo scowls at her hard enough to stop her heart
. Alice says very clearly, "I'm sorry." Aunt Flo doesn't seem satisfied.

I decide to intervene. My impulse is to hide, but I can see that Alice is in trouble
. I figure that, maybe if I'm there, Aunt Flo won't be so hard on her. Already, I'm a little bit in love with Alice.

By the time I reach the backyard, Aunt Flo is busy with her gardening again and Alice is digging for night crawlers. We're going to go fishing later, come evening. Uncle Billy has promised to take us to the lake after dinner. He talks about fishing as if it's something magnificent. It seems to be a part of life out here as common and as spiritual as going to church.

"If your dad was here," Uncle Billy had said, "we'd go
fishing
." Funny to think that my dad has never taken me to a lake to fish, if fishing is all it's cracked up to be. Maybe he knows that I'll suck at it and he wants to spare me the humiliation. Or maybe he knows that I'll be bored and whiny. Alice is looking forward to fishing, too, but I don't know if I am or not. I don't know much, it seems, about life in Meddersville.

I'm tossing a baseball back and forth from one hand to another. I hold it under Boo's nose and say, "Get the ball, Boo! Fetch!" Alice whirls around. From the look on her face, you'd think I'd just offered
him a hand grenade. She yells out, "No!" but I've already thrown the ball and Boo is already running after it. He grabs it and turns around to face me.

"Bring me the ball, Boo," I say, patting my leg. He just stands there, his big chest heaving, staring at me dumbly. "Bring it here, bring it,
bring it here."

Alice slips up behind me, white and shaken. She walks slowly towards Boo, her hand outstretched like a beggar. She speaks calmly, like you'd talk to someone holding a gun to your head, but her voice quavers.

"Give me the ball, Boo," she says. "Give me the ball. Good dog. Good dog. Give me the ball. That's a good dog." When she's almost within reach, Boo whirls around and runs toward the back fence. He clears it easily and lands in the next door neighbor's yard. He doesn't even look back. He just keeps on going.

"Mom!"
Alice pleads and Aunt Flo glances up to see Boo running off. "It's my Skeeter Barnes!" Alice says. Aunt Flo sighs and then says, "Go!" and Alice takes off running. I take off after Alice.

I learn later, in bits and pieces as we
run, that the baseball is special because it's signed by Skeeter Barnes, who I've never heard of. He was playing with the Wichita Aeros in 1984, their last year in Kansas, when Uncle Billy went to a game and caught the ball. It wasn't a home run, it was a pop-up foul. He brought it back for Alice. She's convinced that Skeeter Barnes is going to be big and it'll be worth a fortune one day.

We follow Boo through one yard after another. Sometimes we have to climb over fences and crawl through hedges
. Sometimes people yell at us and Alice yells back, "Sorry, Mr. Hochshank!" or "Just passin' through, Mrs. Trent!" We lose sight of Boo pretty often but Alice knows where he's going, more or less, and he lollygags along the way, stopping to smell something or roll in something dead, and so we keep catching up with him. Whenever he catches sight of us, he grabs the ball in his big, wet mouth and starts running again.

We reach the edge of town and Boo just keeps on going. Soon we're running through the woods that circle the lake. I call them "woods" but these are
Kansas woods, which means the trees grow thick along gullies and such and where they've been planted to break the wind, and they turn to nothing in the spaces in between. You could get lost real easy out here, in these fields where everything looks the same. Some of the fields are planted with wheat and some are just long grass they call prairie grass.

My side aches and I can't breathe. I stop and massage the stitch in my side. Alice wants to keep on. She's more used to running than I am.

"I'll get you another ball," I say.

"Signed by
Skeeter Barnes?" she says. "Stay here. I'll be back." She runs after Boo who has been running alongside a stream lined with trees. He's just disappeared behind a cottonwood tree.

I watch the trees swallow her up. I don't stay there, of course. I'm no better at staying than Boo is. I make a mental note of where I saw her last and, as soon as I can breathe again, I run after her.

The next thing that happens is I step into a fairy tale. That's what it feels like. One minute I'm walking through a field and then more trees, kind of lost like an orphan on the run from wicked stepparents, and then I'm on the edge of a clearing spotted with gravestones—a cemetery in the middle of nowhere.

There's no fence around it like the cemeteries in Wichita. The headstones are scattered around
like they were dropped from a height. Some of the plots are outlined with rocks, some with wood, and all of them grow wild with weeds and grass. Crows perch on the headstones and strut around on the ground like it's their own private space. It's the most forsaken place I've ever seen.

A deep sadness wells up in my chest
. After a few seconds I realize why—I feel sorry for the people lying there under the ground, dead and buried and forgotten in this nowhere place. I don't even know them and that's part of the sadness, because I don't think anybody alive knows them, either. I don't know where these feelings come from, but this isn't the first time something like this has happened. Sometimes thoughts or feelings just blow into me from, I don't know, the North Pole or out of graves like these, and suddenly I'll be laughing or crying or, like now, staggering backward while cold hands squeeze all the air out of my aching lungs.

A big limestone house looms on the other side of the cemetery. The house is surrounded by long, dry grass that sways and ripples. A winding gravel drive leads up to it. Beyond it the hills stretch away, rich with
possibilities. Somewhere in those hills are Alice and Boo. I either have to go around the graveyard or go through it. I don't waste a second thinking about it. There is no way I'm setting foot in that cemetery. It isn't a restful place. It's like so many other things in Meddersville—it's wrong, even though I can't say exactly why, even though I can't put a face on the wrongness, or measure it, or tell you what color it is. It's wrong. I know it like I know my own name.

I'm going around.

Good thing, too, and good thing that I keep my eye on the graveyard and the old house as I circle the clearing, because a figure comes into view, someone kneeling in front of a gravestone. It's an old woman, older than Aunt Flo. I see that she's clipping pieces off a plant and putting them in a large bowl, not a bucket like Aunt Flo uses for weeds, but a bowl from the kitchen.

I hide behind a tree and steal peeks at the old woman. She scares me.
It's because I'm in a fairy tale, and in fairy tales old women are always bad news. If they aren't evil stepmothers, they're witches, and if they aren't witches, they're something worse.

"That's Mrs. Nichols," a voice behind my ear whispers
. My bones practically leap out of my skin. It's Alice, come out of nowhere. "She's a witch," she says. "Don't let her see you."

The witch raises her head and turns it one way and then the other. A grownup would say she was stretching a
kink out of her neck, but Alice and I know the truth. She's sniffing the air like a deer.

"She smells us," Alice says. "She hates children. She can smell them a mile away."

We're standing in the shadows where Mrs. Nichols cannot possibly see us, but she whips her face straight in our direction and smiles a smile that makes my chest shudder. We flatten ourselves behind a tree and keep it between us and Mrs. Nichols, as if she might zap us with a spell. We stay that way for a very long time, waiting for Mrs. Nichols to go inside the big stone house.

"Boo's gone," Alice whispers.
"Ran off to the hills. I lost him."

* * *

Alice doesn't seem that worried about Boo as we walk home.

"He'll come back. He always comes back. He's got a place in the hills somewhere, his own secret place. That's where he takes
everything. Man, if I could find that place, I'd get all kinds of stuff back."

I apologize about losing her
Skeeter Barnes ball.

"You didn't know," she says.

She's trying to shrug it off, but I know she's hurting. Some other kid would gripe at me about it and call me stupid, maybe even beat me up. But Alice is different. I think she's more worried about me beating
myself
up.

"Why does she live way out
here, that witch?" I ask.

"Oh, she runs the old folks' home. That was it, that big house. It used to belong to a railroad man but now it's the old folks' home. People go there to die."

"Is she really a witch?"

"I'm convinced of that, yes," she says. I don't know where she picks up these phrases, but I like them. The kids in Wichita never say things like
I'm convinced of that, yes.
"Did you see what she was doing?" Alice says. "Picking
witchgrass.
From a grave! If that isn't witchy, then I don't know what. We had a close call. Don't tell anybody. If she finds out it was us who was spying on her, she'll kill us for sure. Or worse."

I wonder what could be worse than getting killed, but I don't ask. I don't want to know.

IT'S EVENING. The sky outside is black and blue. Boo came back in time for dinner, without the ball, waltzing in like nobody's business, smelling like a dead squirrel. Alice and I gave him a tomato sauce bath in the backyard and he still smelled like tomato sauce even though we'd followed it with shampoo.

Alice checks the calendar in the kitchen. Uncle Billy sent her to see what phase the moon is in, to see if it's a good night to go fishing.

"First quarter!" she calls to the living room.

"That's good!" Uncle Billy calls back. "We'll get those quarter-moon fish out at the lake."

Aunt Flo shushes them both. She's on the phone.

"No," Aunt Flo says into the telephone, "I haven't seen her all day. Hold on." She cups her hand over the mouthpiece and calls to Catherine and Alice. She asks if either of them saw
Perla Ingram this afternoon, and they say they didn't. "I'm sorry," Aunt Flo says. "Of course I'll call if I hear anything."

She hangs up the phone but leaves her hand on the receiver. She's staring at something very close, like the twigs that float in your eyes, or something very far away.

"That was Dorrie Ingram," she says. She isn't looking at him, but I guess she's talking to Uncle Billy who's sitting in his recliner, reading a newspaper. Alice and I sit on the floor and play Uncle Wiggily. It's an old version that doesn't look like the one we have at home. The animals look strange and scary, not happy like my game in Wichita. It's a baby game but we're playing it anyway.

"
Perla didn't come home after her Girl Scout meeting," Aunt Flo says.

Billy says, "She'll turn up.
Dorrie'll find her." Billy winks over at us and says in a mock whisper, "Dorrie Ingram's got a nose like a bloodhound. Kinda looks like one, too." We giggle.

"Are you through with the phone?" Catherine says. She is already dialing a number she knows by heart.

"It isn't like Perla not to call her mother," Aunt Flo says. "She's so responsible. Some girls I know could take a lesson from Perla Ingram."