The following is an exerpt from a novel for young adults, Life in Caves, by Glenn Alan Cheney (Royal Fireworks Press, Unionville, NY, 1995, 158 pp. ISBN 0-88092-127-7) $5.00. Copyright: 1995 Royal Fireworks Publishing, Inc.
To order copies of Life in Caves, click here.
Click here for biographical information.
Click here for other titles by Glenn Cheney.
psychosomatic: (adj) [< Gk. psyche, breath, spirit, soul + somatikos, symptoms] 1. Designating or of a physical disorder of the body originating in or aggravated by the psychic or emotional processes of the individual 2. an individual exhibiting a psychosomatic disorder
I remember the first time I saw the kid. I noticed him because he sat at Puker's table, which nobody but a new kid would do. He ate with his elbows down on his knees, his chin just above the table while his two hands fed a stiff, grey-brown grilled cheese into his face. Puker, tapping his lime Jello with a spoon, paid no attention him. I thought maybe I should warn the kid about Puker, but I really didn't want to get involved. A new kid's always a risk. You never know what kind of jerk he might be. I did a favor once for a kid from Connecticut - I showed him how to open his locker by whacking the lock with the spine of a history book - and for the next three months he stuck to me like wet toilet paper. Then I caught him and another kid in the gym locker room using my jock as a slingshot. When I told them to knock it off, somehow it ended up with them laughing at me and my jock dangling from the branch of a maple in back of the gym.
Besides, this kid, the kid sitting with Puker, looked like he might have deep psychological problems. One sign: navy blue pants that had creases down the front and back of each leg. Another: his shoes, shiny black leather jobs with thick shoe laces and a rounded bumper of sole sticking out around the bottom. His shirt looked like the ones square dancers wear, plaid with fake turquoise buttons and fancy pointed flaps over the pockets. Something about the kid said, "Nebraska, born and raised" - nothing you'd want following you down the halls during the prime of your life. It's a reflection on your own lack of cool. I myself lacked enough cool already, and I knew it.
That was one of the two reasons I sat with Puker in the cafeteria. He didn't seem to mind it if I sat with him, and he was one of few kids I could ask for a pencil or something if I needed it. But he was the kind of kid nobody hung around with, especially at lunch, when he tended to need the little airplane puke sacks his father brought him from business trips. We sat at a four-seater ina corner where the janitor never swept. I often wondered what other kids thought when they saw me sitting there with Puker. They probably thought it was the most natural combination in the world. Either that or they didn't notice me at all.
I was chewing my fish sticks into a gummy wad when the kid from Nebraska did something so quick and so perfect I wasn't sure I really saw it. At first I thought he just brought a fist to his mouth to cover a cough. It even sounded like he coughed into it. But he had something in his hand, something as shiny as stainless steel and as long as a straw. An instant after the cough, I heard a sharp crack at the cafeteria clock, and in the next instant, Señora Wypychowski flinched. She was carrying a tray toward the table in back where the teachers sit when something seemed to hit her near the ear. She set her tray down and pawed at her hair until she found something. She held it between her thumb and forefinger. Somehow I knew it was a bean.
A kid coughs and a Spanish teacher pulls a frijole from her ear. Magic? Coincidence? I didn't believe it. By the time I looked back and forth between the kid and the target a couple of times, the kid had the grilled cheese up against his teeth again. But his eyes, still aimed at Señora Wypychowski, glimmered with secret amusement.
Something told me this kid and I shared common interests. Trying not to attract attention, I took up my tray, sauntered over to his table and slid in, smooth and low. Puker looked up from his Jello.
"You feeling all right, Puker?" I asked, ready to leap away. "You look great, you really do."
Puker had a weak stomach made worse by a patty of rancid butter a couple of years before, back in the sixth grade. But the nurse said the problem was psychosomatic, which I knew from my WordForce workbook, meant all up in his head. He vomited - by which she meant puked - because he thought he was going to vomit. After that, all he had to do was see a patty of butter. One kid found out we could set him off just by waving a softened patty near his nose. But that's the kind of joke that gets old fast. We saved it for emergencies.
He looked okay when I slid into the seat across from him, but not real okay. "Puker," I said. "Eat your Jello. It's good for the stomach. Very, very sooooooothing. I just had some. It's great. They did it right this time. No surprises inside."
Puker said nothing - he hardly ever said anything, except to burp - but lifted a wiggly green cube to his thin, pale lips and slurped it in. Then he took a slow breath and didn't puke.
I leaned close to the new kid and said, "What just happened over there?" With my chin I gestured toward Señora Wypychowski. She held the little brown bullet between her thumb and forefinger in front of Mr. Mundt, assistant principal in charge of pupil mutilation. But they'd never figure out where it came from. Out of the hundred-odd kids in the cafeteria, they'd never suspect the one who looked so scientifically interested in a petrified grilled cheese, the kid with bumper shoes. With the tip of his pinky the kid picked thoughtfully at the congealed cheese and said, "It was just a practice shot."
"That was practice?"
"Ricochets are tough, especially on a snap-shot like that. You never know where they're going to land. I was aiming for her spaghetti."
The kid spoke with a sort of western drawl, kind of slow, as if he talked off the back of his tongue. I said, "Where are you from?"
"Iowa."
"I was close. I figured Nebraska."
"You call that close? Nebraskans are weird. Completely different from Iowans."
"How come you moved to New Jersey?"
"It's a long story. Suffice it to say I'm Japanese."
Well that was the first corn-haired, freckle-faced Japanese I ever saw who was taller than me, and nobody every called me short. And his name, it turned out, was Rusty - surely another first for the Japanese empire. Middle name, just what you'd expect on a kid out of Iowa: Earl. And also Entwhistle. The two middle names together sounded more like something you'd get with a kid from California. But then came the weird part, the Japanese part. Matsunaga. Russell Earl Entwhistle Matsunaga.
I said, "Matsunaga?"
He looked me hard in the eye and said, "Want to make something of it?" By the way he held his grilled cheese I knew he could fit it up my nostrils if I so much as cracked a grin. Entwhistle Matsunaga's a hard name not to crack up over, but I prefer to eat sandwiches the old fashioned way. So I made my forehead wrinkle with deep concern and said, "My name's Mario. Mario McSweeney. I'm Irish. And Italian."
Then neither of us knew what to say, so I introduced Puker and gave a little of his background, the stuff he's famous for. Rusty put down his sandwich and leaned back in his chair. When his eyes shifted focus to look over the cafeteria crowd, I got the same idea he had. I wanted to see him shoot another bean.
"I got a lima bean --a cooked lima bean - into a teacher's spaghetti once," he said. "It was great. When she bit down on it, she must have figured it was a cockroach because she spit it out real fast, along with a mouthful of spaghetti and this incredible sauce they used to put on it. The meat was ground up dogs and cats. This kid I knew said he saw one of the cooks carry a dead schnauzer into the kitchen, and this wasn't a kid who told a lot of lies. I mean, it might have been a poodle mix or something, but for sure it was a dog from the side of the road somewhere. You could see the little bits of hair in the sauce. Sometimes you'd get a bone chip between your teeth."
"You shouldn't talk that way in front of Puker," I said. "And how do you shoot lima beans out a bean shooter? They're flat."
Keeping his eyes on the teacher's table, Rusty casually bent over and slipped two fingers into his sock. When he sat up, he kept his hand under the table but showed me what he had. Just like you'd expect a lima bean shooter to look, it was a flat tube, kind of oval shaped at the end. Not shiny like the other shooter, though. This one was just gray and crude-looking.
"A lima bean shooter," I said with total amazement. "Where'd you get that? "
"Made it in shop class. Back in Iowa."
"Too bad we haven't got any lima beans." Mrs. Wypychowski was talking so fast and hard at Mr. Mundt that I could see her teeth and tongue and half-chewed spaghetti from clear across the cafeteria. It wasn't a pretty sight, but it did make a tempting target.
Rusty said, "Lima beans? No sweat." From his shirt pocket pulled half a dozen beans, some brown, some black, some lima, even a few tiny lentils. "Limas are tough. They swoop around. Half the time they go the whole wrong way."
He lowered his chin to table level, slipped a lima bean into the six-inch tube, checked around for witnesses, and brought the tube to his mouth. With a quick, hushed toof, the bean took off. About halfway across, it sliced to the right like an F-16 showing off. It landed among some sixth graders who were giggling so hard they didn't notice. By the time I looked back at Rusty, he was coming back from his sock, hands empty.
I liked this kid. Very cool, very smooth. And he didn't have to talk about it, didn't have to make a big show out of being the best shot east of the Mississippi. Maybe west of the Mississippi, too, depending on whether every kid in Iowa could do what Rusty did so well.
Besides, I had this thing against Señora Wypychowski, who had some other thing against me. She hated me even more than she hated most of the rest of the English-speaking world. And not just the suckers who got stuck in her Spanish class. She refused to speak English with anybody. She'd talk to other teachers in Spanish. She talked to her dog in Spanish. When she passed me in the hall, she'd say, "Buenos dias, Mario. Como estás?" and smile with a wicked grin just daring me to come back with, "Oh, not bad, yourself?" She had fingernails, blood-red, grown long for kids who spoke English to her, and she had the kind of personality that could remove a kid's face with one swipe of her claws. Maybe that's what they put in spaghetti sauce in New Jersey. Kids' faces.
Not that she needed to go that far. She had us trained well enough. She had a way of making a kid feel like he'd had his face clawed off. Like if your dog ate your homework, she'd make you stand up and sing Silent Night. In Spanish. It was amazing how fast our dogs learned to stick to their kibble. We had to memorize dialogues, too - not for punishment but just for her majesty's pleasure. Thirty-odd lines of dull-witted discussion between teen-age Mexicans. Not that I have anything against Mexicans, but why do I have to know how to say, "Who's the toreador?" in Spanish? If Mexican kids never had to learn to say, "Who's pitching?" in English, it wouldn't bother me a bit.
I had that toreador line to say - that or "I love meatballs!" depending on who started the dialogue - right after lunch on the day Rusty Entwhistle Matsunaga winged Señora Wypychowski with a turtle bean. There I sat in a puddle of sweat - it was late April and already hot - right behind the only person in the world who loved her Spanish teacher: Fluorine Dalwani.
Fluorine knew her stuff, be it Silent Night in Spanish or the chemical formula for photosynthesis or the geometric proof that a triangle has three sides. She was in the honors track because she was born too smart. I landed in the same fast-track because our school has a computer with a sense of humor. It put me in with the smart kids so it could watch me score low. Ha, ha, ha. Maybe it's just so the others would look better.
Fluorine ranked last among the five-point-two billion people on earth who I wanted to recite dialogue with. It was plenty hard enough without having to face an overfed female nerd in saddle shoes and a granny dress. That's what she always wore. Always. For as long as I had known her, which was since about kindergarten, she'd worn saddle shoes and granny dresses. She probably slept in them. I can't imagine where her mother found shoes like that. They didn't get handed down from older sisters because she didn't have any. Nor could they come from friends; she didn't have any of those, either. The thrift shop over in Newton wouldn't have them. You'd have to go to an antique store, or maybe there was a special shop for weird people.
The señora always paired off her estudantes for our moment in the sun. Depending on how many kids were absent between me and the left end of the back row, where she started picking the lucky pairs, I might have to face Fluorine at the front of the class. Or, in complete contrast, I might get to stand up there with the most beautiful girl in the world, Emily Fetschrift. I don't know what it was about that girl, but I loved her deeply. Also secretly. No one could possible suspect because we had never exchange a word except in Spanish, which, of course, didn't count. Emily didn't have the kind of prettiness your normal person would call pretty. Basically she was a skinny chick with hair the color of dirt. But I liked the way one front tooth kind of leaned out around the one next to it, and the way her jaw was kind of wide in back but pointed a bit at the chin. And she had dimples - five, to be exact: one in each cheek, one in her chin, and two others you could see only when she wore a certain pair of white jeans. No other girl in the world had dimples like that and such a sassy tooth.
Fluorine and Emily both had eyes, but they did different things to me up there in front of the class. I'd be standing there, sweat running a trickle from armpits to waist, and my dialogue mate would flash glances at me. If it was Fluorine, the flashes were of disdain, impatience, and disgust. If it was Emily, the flashes hit me with quick sparks of sympathy. She wouldn't quite smile, but I'd see a flicker of dimples, a peek of her tooth, and I'd know she knew how I felt. I knew she knew because she, too, had damp stains under her arms.
With the cruel smile of a sadist who knew of my love of Emily, the mighty Mrs. Wypy said, "Señorita Flora Doreen, Señor Mario, por favor..." and gestured toward the front of the room and a map of Mexico pulled down for the occasion. Fluorine planted her saddle shoes in a spot that seemed perfect to her and gave me a grin I'd just love to drop into the cafeteria trash can. In the voice of a cheerful Mexican teenager who really cared, she rattled off the first line, a tongue-twister I happened to know meant "Good afternoon, Pedro. ¿Would you like to go to the bullfight with me? I have some excellent tickets in the shady section."
New Jersey state law required me to say "Yes. ¿Who's the toreador?" but no law in the world could make me look like I wanted to go or to give a flying hoot who got to stab the bull. For all I cared it could have been the president of the United States in star-spangled glow-in-the-dark, red, white and chartreuse tights. In fact if I had known how to say that in Spanish, I would have. Not that our beloved señora gave extra points for creativity. No way. She wanted the R's to rattle like machine guns, the U's to sound like a pigeon's coo, the E's to come from where the top of the throat meets the back of the tongue, a kind of flat squeak, like Mickey Mouse in need of Pepto Bismol.
Worst of all, she wanted us to look like we cared. She wanted to hear those upside-down exclamation points and italics. If she heard murder in your throat, she'd make you say it again, and then again, louder. And in a day or two, for some minor infraction, you'd find yourself singing Silent Night before an audience of smirks.
But I'm the kind of guy who'd rather sing Silent Night in public than go to a bullfight with the likes of Fluorine. It was one of those lousy situations one could easily solve with plastic explosives, or even a beanshooter. I imagined an impossibly beautiful lima bean shot ricocheting out the door, swooping down the hall, around the corner and through the little glass plate of the fire alarm. The room clears, the fire trucks come. Before it's all over, it's time for gym.
I had no beanshooter, though, let alone the marksmanship to pull off a shot like that. Fluorine stood waiting for her answer, and Señora Wypychowski stood drumming the fingers of one hand on the knuckles of the other. I could stall no more. Being too honest for my own good, being the type who cannot resist going for the laugh, knowing I wouldn't make it to the thirty-fourth line anyway, and especially not wanting to get to "I just love meatballs!", I just answered Fluorine with the truth. I said, "No way, José."
The room guffawed, and poor miffed Fluorine let out with a bitter "Tcht!" that could have cracked concrete.
What did I get for my moment of truth and joy? An F for my recital and a two-hour detention for being an inconsiderate wise-guy.
That's inflation for you. I remember the days when you could be an inconsiderate wise-guy for only one hour of detention. Two hours was too much. It meant waiting for the high school bus that took the baseball and track teams home after practice. I wouldn't get home until after dark, about the time my father left for work and my mother disappeared into her bedroom for the night. Not that either of them bothered me much. I worried more about a certain snapping turtle I had chained to a tree at the side of a swamp in the woods. I also wanted to shoot some serious beans.
What exquisite happiness, then, to walk into Mr. Mundt's windowless chamber of boredom and see something besides cement block walls and half a dozen desk-chairs. What infinite joy to find a fellow cell mate in there, a freckled, yellow-haired, inconsiderate wise-guy with half a smile on his face and a general look of deep, deep thought. Nothing about him at all seemed in the least way Japanese.
"Rusty," I said. "It's good to see you here."
sterile: (adj) [< L. sterilis < IE ster- barren] 1. incapable of producing others of its kind, barren 2. producing little or nothing, unfruitful [sterile soil, a sterile policy] 3. lacking in interest or vitality; not stimulating or effective [a sterile style] 4. free from living organisms
Rusty Earl Entwhistle Matsunaga had been sentenced to two hours of detention for a most exquisite crime: launching a wad of pink bubble gum so that it landed exactly on the corner of the desk where Mr. Mandia, crack health sciences teacher, tended to sit. Now Mr. Mandia had pink bubble gum in the center of his pinstriped pants, and Rusty had a running start on his Record. We could hear Mr. Mandia in Mr. Mundt's office arguing that the school should pay the dry cleaning bill. Mr. Mundt said school policy prohibited such expenses but that it was a valid tax deduction. Mr. Mandia said he didn't want a tax deduction, he wanted the gum removed from his pants. Mr. Mundt suggested squeezing it out of Mr. Matsunaga. That's when Mr. Mandia said, "I tried that. The idiot doesn't speak English."
When Rusty heard that he jumped up so hard he almost knocked his desk over. I grabbed his sleeve to keep him from busting down the door. Straining toward the invisible voices beyond the wall, he yelled, "That's my father you're talking about!"
"Easy boy," I said in a hard whisper. "Sticks and stones, right? They say that in Iowa, too, don't they?"
"We don't call people idiots," he said, "not for being foreign. What's wrong with being Japanese?"
I got him to sit back down, but he kept his eyes aimed through the wall into Mr. Mundt's office. "I'll get him," he said. "Gum's nothing."
"Looks to me like it did the trick. Listen to him!"
We crept to the wall and pressed our ears against the cement blocks. Mr. Mandia described the incident in detail. "Every kid in that room was laughing at me. It was the most humiliating experience of my life. It looked like I was pulling long pink tapeworms out of my butt. I felt like a clown at a two-bit circus. And it was slimy, like it had something on it."
I held my palm out. Rusty slapped it. "You're already even," I said. "He could call my father an idiot all he wanted if I got to watch him pull long, pink tapeworms out of his butt."
"We'll see."
"I got a question for you. How do you shoot gum out a beanshooter? Doesn't it get stuck?"
"You have to shape it like a little football and coat it with bacon grease. Then it slides right out. But for some weird reason, it sticks where it lands."
I shook my head with amazement. This kid knew his technology. I had a million questions for him. Where did he learn the bacon grease trick? From his grandfather! Was his grandfather Japanese? No, he was an Oakie, which does not mean from Okinawa but from Oklahoma, which is a whole different place from Iowa. Did everybody in Oklahoma coat their gum with bacon grease? Only when they had to. Where does one carry one's bacon grease? In one's socks. How did Rusty get a name like Matsunaga? He answered one syllable at a time, each as pointed as a dagger: "Be. Cause. My. Father's. Jap. Anese."
It sounded like on the one hand he didn't want to talk about it but on the other wanted the fact known. Or facts. Rusty had a story behind him, a good one. I couldn't resist. "Pray tell," I said, trying to sound funny, "wherever did you find a Japanese father?"
"He found me."
"What, were you floating down the Mississippi in a basket?"
Rusty, fiddling with a gum wrapper and not looking at me, tilted his head to one side. "Sort of," he said. "That's kind of what it felt like."
I waited a second before I said, kind of quiet, "What do you mean? You mean it was a raft or something?"
"I mean it was like being lost in a corn field, which is like drifting down a river in a basket. Ever been lost in a corn field?"
"Not really."
"It's about the scariest thing that can happen if you're five years old and the corn's twice as tall as you and you don't know which way to go and all you know is that there's a thresher out there and sooner or later it's going to bear down on you and you're going to get shucked, threshed, and blown out a pipe into a wagonload of corn. All you can see around you is stalks and leaves and the dirt under your feet and it's kind of dark. Home's one way and any other way is deeper into the field but you don't know which way's which. You can shout all you want, nobody's going to hear you, nobody's going to find you. So you start to run and run with all the corn leaves cutting at you but no matter how fast you run you're still in the field and everything looks the same. You can lie down and cry and cry and cry but nothing's going to happen and all the corn's just going to stand there."
For some reason I could imagine that pretty well. I could see how it was like floating down a big river in a little basket. Sort of.
Rusty was still looking down at something only he could see. I had a feeling he was going to start crying so I said, "And then along came a Japanese guy?"
"That was when I was little. Every kid gets lost in a corn field at least once. It teaches you something."
"Like what?"
"I don't know...kind of like there's no place like home."
I still didn't see what lost in a corn field had to do with a Japanese father. Rusty, looking like he had a sudden case of the sweats, pulled up out of his chair and flung himself back against one wall. "What do they have to lock us in a place like this for?" he said. "There ought to be a law against this."
I was feeling the same way, very closed-in, especially after imagining myself like Hansel lost in a forest of corn. I thought about my little lean-to out in the woods, how it was barely big enough to sit up in but somehow felt free and open. Tight, but open. Maybe it was because I could go there or leave there any time I wanted. Maybe it was because rain came in through the roof and wind swept in through the open sides. For a second I thought I might tell Rusty about the place. But in a second I decided no.
Then Rusty said, "This is what it's like in Japan," and held his arms away from his body, his palms pressed back against the wall. "Everything small, tight. You'd see a family of six living in an apartment this size."
"You've been there?"
"I saw a picture in National Geographic. A mother and father and three little nerds ate and lived and slept in one room. The kitchen was the size of a phone booth. Their dinner table was only six inches high. Can you imagine sharing your bedroom with your parents?"
The door opened and Mr. Mundt stuck his head in. "Russell," he said. "Could you step out here a moment?"
For a single hard second, Rusty didn't move from the wall. He looked kind of crucified there. But then he stepped to the door, opened it as wide as it would go, and walked into the late afternoon sun that filled the assistant principal's office. Mr. Mundt gave me a look of disgust before reaching way in to pull the door shut.
Alone in the concrete and linoleum cell, I thought about sharing a room with my parents. Actually it didn't sound too bad. They barely shared a bedroom with each other. They barely shared the same house. Dad worked all night and slept all day, seven days a week. Mom kept me outside until he woke up, around dinner time, which of course was his breakfast time. If you call meatloaf breakfast. So they barely saw each other and I barely saw both of them together. Sleeping in the same room with both, well, that didn't sound too bad, as long as they didn't fight, which of course they would,though of course maybe they wouldn't, being in the same bed and all.
For a while I wondered about being in the same bed with a girl, wondered how you could possibly get any sleep at all. I guess if the girl looked like my mother, or the guy like my father, you'd get plenty of sleep. Or you'd do like they did - use the bed in shifts.
Then I wondered again about sleeping in the same room with both of them. I imagined living in Japan, with the whole family of brothers and sisters and mother and father sitting around a table on the floor eating rice with chopsticks and then unrolling our straw-mat beds and going to sleep close enough to hear each other breathe. Having nothing else to think about, I threw in a little dog, imagined him curling up on my feet and snoring.
But then I wondered if Japanese had pet dogs. More likely they'd keep some kind of fancy bird with feathers that hung down to the floor. For all I knew, they ate dogs.
Rusty never came back into the detention room, not that day anyway. I later found out they took him home, presented him and Mr. Mandia's pants to his mother. She, poor thing, equipped with the courage and IQ of a squirrel, took ten minutes to figure out why they were pointing back and forth between a ten dollar bill and a sticky pink lump on a pair of pants. She thought they were offering her ten dollars to do Mr. Mandia's laundry. Rusty let her suffer for a while, then went to his bedroom and got a couple of tons of wrapped coins he'd saved up from left-over lunch money.
Rusty said she never figured out what it was all about. Blubbering out of control, she phoned Papa-san - they put san on the end of people's name, kind of like "mister" but nicer - and explained it all in a stream of Japanese that sounded, in Rusty's words, like a toilet flushing backwards. When the old man came home, he sent Mama-san to the bedroom and sat Rusty on the couch. Then he paced around while he flipped through a Japanese-English dictionary in search of a phrase to fit the occasion. Finally he put the book on the coffee table, held out both hands and said, "Hrdusty-san, why?"
Stuck with no possible answer, Rusty would only fall back on that old favorite: "I didn't do it."
To his utter amazement, Papa-san bought it. "Ah, no?" he said, pressing his palms together. "Oh, sodly, Dlusty, vedly sodly!" (That's how Rusty said he said it.) And Papa-san hurried off to tell his wife, who burst from the bedroom to give her son a tearful hug of apology. After a brief discussion, they pulled a neat wad of dollars from her purse, examined several of them, and forked over a pair of fives.
"It was too easy," Rusty told me later. "I didn't like it at all. Like taking candy from two babes in the woods. I felt sorry for them. I can't imagine what they must be paying for rent."
Of course I didn't know any of this on my way home. I had my own problems, namely the Activities Bus that carried all kids from the middle school and from Central High, in Newton, who stayed late. That meant it was full of all-American jocks whose main joy in life was to hold eighth graders upside down by their ankles and shake the change out of their pockets. Sitting near the front didn't help because Bob-the-bus-driver, a former jock who actually managed to hold down a job, had the same sick sense of humor.
I escaped by dashing off the bus about five miles before my stop, which normally is the last one because it's way outside of town, the only place they'd let us put a trailer home. But where I got off the bus this time wasn't too far from home as the crow flies. Or as the kid runs through the woods. The first mile or so cut through an arm of Piddle Nature Preserve, which was nice. The trees in these woods - oak, beech, black birch, maple - had been growing since the Civil War, when a guy named Piddle left his fields and went off to free the slaves. He never came back. The government got to keep his land - 1,843 acres - and in time his fields became a forest, which is basically all mine because nobody else goes there.
I know this from a library booklet called "Historical Pottsville." It's a pretty thin piece of literature. Not much history has happened around in here. In 1778, George Washington's army snuck through, but they didn't fight any battles. (Myth has it they only stopped long enough to take a leak and pick up a few cases of poison ivy.) Marion Francis, Swamp Fox, may have hid gun powder somewhere up on Potts Ridge. (Myth says it's still up there.) Isaac Piddle left here but didn't come back. (The myth: he bought a steamboat and called it the Piddle Paddler.) Henry Phillips, inventor of the Phillips screwdriver, may have been born here. (Or maybe it was milk of magnesia.)
Anyway, the Piddle Preserve woods had huge trees growing in it, stone walls running all over the place, and enough poison ivy to hide the entire Viet Cong army and all their friends. It rose up into the trees in thick hairy ropes and covered the ground like a shiny green mat. People stayed out of the place, except for a few trails. I knew my way around, though, and could get just about anywhere. Down below the ridge, behind a no-man's land of poison ivy and pricker-bushes, was a little swamp. On the side of it was my little hut, and down in the swamp was Hercules, my killer turtle - a snapper, anyway. I suppose he could kill you if you sat there and let him chew on you long enough. Mostly he lived on bits of hamburger I snuck out of the cafeteria, bacon from home, and bugs I caught here and there.
The poison ivy had already leafed out that spring, but during the winter I had cut a well hidden passage way around the end of the ridge and under the thorns to my hut. There I found Herc's chain drooping down through the water. All I had for him was some dead flies I'd caught during gym - nothing worth waking a turtle up for. So I left them in a pile on a rock near the edge of the water and sat back to smoke a Marlboro Light and do a little reading. My library consisted mostly of illustrated human physiology publications. That's what I heard a kid in the locker room call his. To anyone else they were just filthy magazines. Mine were especially filthy, having been stored for a couple of years in a tattered plastic bag in a hole under a rock. I was pretty tired of them. The ladies, while practically flesh and blood when I first slid my eyes over them, had aged with exposure to the elements. Wrinkled and water-stained, they had become mere paper, mere memories of what they had been. And none of them came close to the tight, petite, innocent beauty of Emily Fetschrift. I often tried to imagine her in the place of the girls in the magazines, but it didn't work. Emily wouldn't show those parts of her body, at least not the way those girls did. It was hard to believe she even had those parts or would know what to do with them if she did.
I forced down about half my smoke before flicking it into the swamp. Then I got up and did a little housekeeping. I hauled in a good length of dead tree for firewood and brought over some stones from one of Piddle's walls. I had this plan for building a stone foundation and laying logs across it and gradually building up a regular cabin. My lean-to was okay, but only in good weather. So far I had about twelve stones and a page from a Sears catalog that showed various chain saws I might mail away for if a couple hundred dollars fell out of the sky. I had certain technical questions about exactly how to assemble the whole thing, but I figured I'd know the answer when I had the logs.
I figured if I fixed the place up good enough, I could move right in. I could have a dog - a lot of dogs - and eat what I wanted for dinner and just hang out all day doing nothing. How to pay for it all? Easy. Frog legs. Right at my doorstep I had all the frogs you could eat. If I caught a dozen good-sized frogs a day, I'd have enough to keep myself in Spam and popcorn and of course dog food for my little family.
Little? Not so. I had plans to liberate the population of the Pottsville dog pound and bring them all here. Depending on how things went I thought I might go on to free dogs all over the state, a regular Bolivar of New Jersey. I could have ten thousand dogs living on Piddle's Preserve, all citizens of the Republic of Piddle. As long as nobody knew, we'd be safe from invasion.
Dumb idea? Maybe. But that's one of the nice things about being thirteen and having a hut in the woods. There you can think whatever you want. Nobody can stop you, nobody can laugh or call you dumb.
But you have to be out by dark. I crawled out through my perimeter of raspberry thorns and draping poison ivy vines and headed for home. Mother let me in as soon as I knocked but, as usual, didn't say a word. She had a sponge in one hand and ammonia in the other, which meant she was working on her spot.
Mother's spot was a spot only she could see. She'd been working on it, trying to scrub it out of existence, for as long a I could remember. It kept moving. One day she'd be on her knees on the kitchen floor trying to scrub it out of the linoleum. Then she'd find it on the refrigerator. Next thing you know, she's found it behind the toilet. If I happened to walk by, she'd grab me and point me at it and say, "Look at that!" Then she'd glare at me like it was my fault. It was only some time after the eighth grade that I figured out she wasn't telling me to look at the wet patch she'd made with her sponge. She wanted me to see a spot that wasn't there. In fact, there were no spots anywhere in the house. There was not a crumb on the counter, not a whisker on a sink, not a sock on a floor. At least not for long. Except for the few moments that some bit of Pop's dirtiness lingered out of place, the house was sterile.
That particular day, the day I met Rusty, Mother's spot seemed to appear on the back of my neck. Or a version of it, anyway. Just as I walked by her, she grabbed my collar and said, "Wait a minute, you little roach." She dropped her sponge and with her fingernails got ahold of a pimple on my neck. She squeezed it so hard it actually bled. Pain alarms went off in my head. She released me the way you release a used tissue and said, "If you washed yourself now and then that wouldn't happen."
Pop, just out of bed, was still stinking up the bathroom when she plunked three chicken pot pies on the table, and not for the first time that week. Or maybe it was turkey pot pies the last time. It didn't matter; they all tasted the same to me. I broke the crust with my spoon and let the steam swirl out for a while. Times like this a kid could use a good dog under the table. Or even a snapping turtle. But I dumped on enough salt to kill the taste and slurped it up like a good boy. By the time Pop came out in his green work clothes, she'd already rinsed out her little pie pan and crammed it into the garbage. She said nothing to him, and he said to me, as he always did, "Hey, buddy, how's it going?" and I said the usual "Okay," and he said, "That's good."
So much for conversation. Mother went to her bedroom (it was hers during the night), spraying lilac room deodorizer ahead of her as she went. The door closed behind her, shutting out me and the rest of the dirt of the world until morning. Pop slurped up his dinner like a good boy. I checked every channel on the TV twice and turned it off. Pop used his finger to wipe up the bottom of his pie dish clean before cramming it into the garbage. Then he put on his Mets cap and Mets jacket, and tucked his Mets lunch box under one arm. Snapping the thermostat down to three degrees below zero, he said "Hey buddy, have a nice day, hear?" and left for a night with a metal lathe.
I sat in front of the dead TV for a while and finally turned it back on. I don't remember which rerun I watched except that it was not the second or third time I'd sat through it. More like the fifteenth. It was one of those shows about a family that argued all the time but with jokes. Every time somebody said something nasty, it was funny, though of course none of them laughed. I couldn't watch the whole thing. I preferred to read pages forty-nine through fifty-one of my history book, a heart warming tale of how the Visigoths, Ostrogoths and plain old Goths did to the Roman Empire what the Vandals in New York City would do if all their parents happened to go away on the same weekend.
But history, even good stuff like that, puts me to sleep. Even though I faced a quiz in the morning, I couldn't hammer into my head the difference between a Visigoth and an Ostrogoth. I fell asleep on the couch - I love to take a quick nap before I go to bed - and didn't wake up until the light in Mother's room was out and the house was dark and cold.
sushi: (n) [Jap.] a Japanese dish consisting of thin strips of raw fish, whale, squid or seaweed wrapped about cakes of cold cooked rice
The next day, back at the cafeteria, back at the table with Puker, Rusty told me how Mr. Mandia had come to his home. Hearing the story of his parents' odd reaction, their amazing faith in their only son, I had to ask Rusty how he came to have Japanese parents. The answer was simple and predictable.
"I was adopted," he said.
"Just like that? Wham-bam and you're Japanese?"
"I'm not Japanese."
"Well, sort of, you are, aren't you? I mean, you did say that, didn't you?"
"I was kidding. I'm Iowan."
Even Puker was paying attention to this. For the first time in several years, he didn't look like he had his belly on his mind. He seemed to keep forgetting his spinach-noodle surprise halfway between his plate and his mouth. He'd dip his head toward the dripping spoon but then back off when Rusty dropped another bit of data, such as, "I think they bought me." Who could possibly stick spinach-noodle surprise into his mouth after hearing a line like that?
I said, "They bought you?"
"Well," he admitted. "I'm not sure. But how else can you explain it?"
"Explain what?"
"How people have to wait years and years to adopt a kid, but I'm an orphan for three weeks and presto, somebody's got me."
That didn't quite make sense to me, but before I could straighten it out, Rusty went on.
"My mother died of cancer, about five years ago. I was just a little kid then. I barely knew what was going on until it was too late. They never really told me she was going to die until my aunt came and said, 'Your mother's gone to heaven.' I can't imagine a dumber way to put it. Why didn't she say, 'Rusty, you're never going to see your mother again.'? What did she think, that I was just going to shrug my shoulders and say, "Heaven? That's nice. She deserves it. She was a good mother.'? The next thing I know they've got me all dressed up in my Sunday suit and a red bow tie and we're down at the cemetery cranking her coffin into a grave."
"Cranking?"
"Yeah. It sits on a couple of straps and they turn a crank and the straps lower it down into the ground. Then everybody tosses in some dirt and we all go home for snacks. It's great." His mouth curled with irony.
I couldn't help but say, "Snacks?" Rusty had a weird way of cracking a joke but looking nasty, even mad, at the same time. I couldn't tell if he was serious. Did they really serve snacks? Did he stuff his face?
"Yeah, snacks," he said. "What, you never knew anybody who died?"
Actually, I didn't, except for a grandmother who died in Florida. I think I met her only once. I was about seven when it happened. There wasn't a funeral or anything. No snacks.
So Rusty's mother died of cancer. I'm not proud to admit it, but at the time, at the age of thirteen, dying of cancer meant nothing to me. I just sort of assumed people died like they did on TV - a few last words, a deep breath, suddenly the head leans to one side, and that's the end of that. Time for a commercial. I was as touched by the death of a lady in Iowa as I was by the Ostrogoths sacking Rome. I'd probably be more touched if my turtle had a hangnail. I mention this to show how smart I was in the eighth grade.
Still, it made an awful good story. Puker kept turning his head every time Rusty trotted out a new fact. He had spinach-noodle surprise all over his chin.
"And your father," I said. "Did he die of cancer, too?" The words sounded perfectly stupid as they left my mouth. Rusty, I could tell, agreed. I think he answered just so Puker would get the next spoon of food into his mouth.
"He died in an accident," Rusty said. "Got run over by his own tractor. Nobody saw it happen, but they think it kicked into gear just as he was getting out."
I didn't know what to say. Rusty was trying to look unconcerned, like maybe he was really thinking about where to shoot a lima bean. But I could see the sadness behind his face. He wasn't going to cry, though. Somehow I knew that nothing would make Rusty cry. His crying department had already grown up.
Puker mopped up his spinach-noodle surprise and was poking through his tapioca by the time I got up enough guts to ask Rusty what happened next.
He told me how he got passed to a great aunt who smelled so bad of lilacs he could hardly breathe. Then a regular aunt and uncle got him, but the uncle's army reserve unit got called up and the aunt had to do jury duty so their six kids - Rusty's cousins - got passed around the remaining family. A social worker with a mustache said that was no way for a boy to live and besides, she had a couple of wonderful parents for him if he wanted to move to New Jersey. He said he didn't want to move to New Jersey or to anywhere else but she said oh yes he did, he'd be glad, and he had no choice anyway. So the day after Christmas they packed his bags, took him to the airport, and handed him over to a stewardess who looked like Marilyn Monroe. She hung a chain around his neck. On the chain hung a yellow tag. As the plane revved up and lumbered down the runway, Rusty read the tag. It said, in a combination of type and handwriting, "Hi! My name's Russell Earl Entwhistle. I'm going to Newark to meet my father, Yoshiyama Matsunaga, who lives at 49 Wagon Wheel Lane, Pottsville, NJ. If I need help, please contact Westward Ho! Airlines or your local police department."
Rusty turned his head to look out the cafeteria window. "Then the plane took off," he said. "At first we were so low you could see cars on the roads and the tractors in the fields. I saw my school for about three seconds before we flew into some fog and it all got misty. Then we went into some clouds and everything was white. All I could think was, 'There goes the whole world.'
"When we landed in Newark, the stewardess took me through this place that was like a tunnel and then into the lobby. The place was huge. But somehow we knew right away Mr. and Mrs. Matsunaga were the Japanese man and lady all dressed up in navy blue. You could tell they were waiting for a kid from Iowa to come along and call them Mom and Dad."
"And did you?"
"No way."
"But didn't you kind of have to?"
Before he could answer, the bell rang. While it rang - all of two seconds - nobody in the cafeteria moved. Just like always. Then, just like always, everybody made one single move to grab their trays and stand up and surround the garbage cans like a bunch of cattle to a salt lick. Thirty seconds later, we were in the hall, automatically sorting ourselves out into the rooms where we belonged. This always amazed me. It reminded me of a science movie I saw once where a whole bunch of mice found their way through a maze to different nooks and crannies where there was food waiting for them. But they learned this by getting electric shocks when they screwed up, and kernels of corn when they didn't. And all the scientists said, Wow, aren't they clever? Somehow that applied to two hundred middle school students. Eight times a day they automatically rushed to their nooks and crannies - their study halls and science classes and whatever - without getting a candy bar for doing it right or a boot in the butt for screwing up, unless you count detention.
In the hall, before we split up, I had to ask Rusty one more question. "Did you?" I asked.
"Did I what?"
"Call them Mom and Dad. Just like that?"
"No way."
For some reason that made me feel good. Relieved. But then Rusty said something that really surprised me. He said, "It was worse."
"Why? What happened?"
He looked up and down the hall twice before he could say it, and then it came out as a whisper. He said, "I bowed."
My jaw must have dropped halfway to the floor because an instant later his knuckles were lifting it shut - gently, but, still, definitely knuckles nonetheless. "You bowed?" I said.
"Shhh! It isn't that simple." He pulled me in close so no one could hear. The hall was just about empty. "They bowed first. Then I bowed. Even the stewardess bowed. It was like we couldn't help it, like somebody had jerked our strings and down we went."
"And then what happened?"
"I realized what I was doing and stood up straight, real fast. So fast it made my nose bleed."
Then the bell rang. If I didn't get to my social studies nook within five seconds, a scientist was going to educate me with a cattle prod. But I had to ask again, "Then what happened?"
Rusty looked nervously up and down the hall and said, "Let's get out of here."
"What do you mean out?"
"I mean where do you hide in this school? Where do you cut class?"
I'd never cut a class before. Some kids did, but I had no idea where they went. I'd never even thought about it. Now classroom doors were closing fast. The hall was empty except for us. I felt like a cockroach caught in the middle of a kitchen counter when somebody snaps on the light. My urge, of course, was to head for the woods. I grabbed Rusty's arm and said, "Come on."
With a gesture of his hand he slowed me down to a calm walk. Unnoticed, we strolled past the administration office, through the big front doors, down the steps, along the windowless gym wall and around the corner to the vast open space of the ball field. A hundred yards way, behind the backstop, stood the thicket of trees and brush I was aiming for.
I doubt anyone saw us make the crossing. If they had, we'd still be in detention. They would have chained us to the wall and donated the key to the Houdini museum. For generations to come they would have paraded sixth-graders past us as an example of what happens if you attempt the unthinkable. As we walked quickly, stiff-legged across the lawn I was so scared I was shaking. The wind blowing across the grass still had a bit of the chill of winter, but it seemed to have a whiff of spring mixed in.
The area behind the bushes showed signs of high school kids: beer cans, a semi-gutted car seat, cigarette butts, charred sticks, a shoe, a beech tree all scared up with the initials of nature-lovers. Feeling myself in the midst of filth, I squatted with my back against the beech; Rusty sat on rock.
"So?" I said.
"So I bowed."
"Right. And then what?
"Then I got a bloody nose. Right there in the lobby of the airport. And this lady - my mother, right? - starts squawking like her only son's bleeding to death. Dear old dad whips a snotrag out of his navy blue suit and lets her try to cram it up my nose. It ws all crispy so I pushed it away and tried to keep breathing in. Then the stewardess, who I'd let be my mother any day, pinched a nice fresh Kleenex over my nose and said to the poor lady, 'Would like me to call the infirmary?'
"Well of course for all this lady knows, the stewardess is saying, 'He's got thirty seconds to live. What shall I do with him?' so she has to wait for her husband to translate. There's tears coming out of her eyes. They have a big discussion about it, and by the time they're done, the bleeding stopped."
What a way to arrive in New Jersey. It must have seemed like the gates of hell itself. The kid's three minutes into his new family and he's already caused the biggest stir since Pearl Harbor. I myself, at that point, would have headed for the runway and thrown myself into the nearest propeller.
But Rusty was cool. When the stewardess produced a paper for Mr. Matsunaga to sign, Rusty showed him where to do it. The stewardess snapped out a yellow carbon of the form, whatever it was, and everybody shook hands. They all bowed, too - everybody but Rusty. Then the Matsunaga family got into a blue Buick and drove home.
On the way, Mrs. Matsunaga sat sideways in the front seat so she could watch her boy. She kept asking things in Japanese and making Mr.Matsunaga translate. "What you like?" he asked. Rusty said, "Corn-on-the-cob." "You like lice?" he asked. Rusty, having once gotten lice from another kid's baseball cap and not yet knowing that lice meant rice, said, "No. I hate lice." Mrs. Matsunaga's face collapsed like a tire losing air. She made the mister ask again, "What you like?" Rusty tried "Spaghetti," but that wasn't what Mr. Matsunaga wanted. "No," said Mr. Matsunaga. "Before, you say...what you say you like?" Rusty got it then and said, in his best Iowa slur, "Cornacob." His parents still didn't get it, so five minutes later they're in a Grand Union, Rusty leading the way to the fresh produce department.
They found corn, all right, but, as Rusty told me, "It was dead. Corn-on-the-corpse. All wrapped up in styrofoam and plastic wrap, like a body bag. We might give corn like that to the chickens, but we'd sure apologize for it."
But they bought it. All of it. Fourteen pounds of posthumous corn-on-the-cob. They they went back to the meat department and had a long discussion about a fish. By his mother's upturned nose, Rusty knew the fish had died of mercury poison long before it hit the bed of ice next door to the pork chops.
At home, Mrs. Matsunaga hurried the corn into the freezer - "Just what it needed," Rusty said - and introduced Rusty to his bedroom. Apparently it had just about everything a kid could ask for: a TV connected to a computer beside a rack of electronic games next to a complete stereo system. On the walls, one baseball poster, one football poster, one basketball poster, a poster of Bozo the Clown, and a poster of "a skinny Japanese chick in short-shorts playing electronic drums."
"What's wrong with that?" I asked, standing up to look across the lawn toward school. If somebody came out after us, I wanted a good head start into the woods. Rusty looking unconcerned, opened a penknife and whittled at a piece of vine.
"Nothing wrong with it at all," he said. "But there was one other thing, right there on my bed, lying across it at an angle like it was put there to have its picture taken."
"Not a teddy bear!"
"Worse."
The only thing I could think of worse than a teddy bear was navy blue pants and black bumper shoes. Rusty saw me looking at them and said, "Even worse."
I couldn't think of anything worse than that until Rusty said, "A violin."
A violin. Yes, indeed, that meant trouble. It meant double trouble when Mrs. Matsunaga took the suitcase from Rusty's hand and led him directly to the instrument of torture she had laid there with such care. She picked it up, placed Rusty's hand on it, and guided it to his shoulder.
"They both applauded." His knife sliced hard through the vine as he said it, lopping off a six-inch length. "I was just standing there holding the stupid thing while they clapped and smiled and bowed. It was like they were proud I could hold a fiddle on my shoulder. I didn't know what to do. I wanted to smash it against the wall and run out and keep running all the way to Iowa. But they looked so happy. So I just stood there."
Mrs. Matsunaga, it turned out, had been a music teacher in Japan. Stuck in the United States, she had no one to teach because she couldn't speak English. So she vented her frustration on poor Rusty. One-on-one, hour after hour, again and again: Twinkle,Twinkle Little Star. This was two days into the month-long Christmas break, so he couldn't go to school, didn't know anybody, didn't have anywhere to go.
"She wouldn't quit," he said. "She kept saying, 'Goooood! Goooood!' every time I did something. She kept adjusting my fingers for me, tucking my elbow down, straightening my back, lifting my chin. Once she got me in just the right position, she'd say, 'O.K. You go!' and I'd do it again. But every time it sounded like a barn door on rusty hinges."
I looked at my watch. We had seven minutes before the next class. Rusty went on whittling the section of vine like he had all day. He shaved at the stringy bark, gradually exposing the dull white wood beneath. I wanted to head back to school before we got into too much trouble. "So that's it," I said."That's how you got Japanese parents. We'd better get back."
"That's not the whole story," Rusty said, looking up from his knife. "It's even worse than that."
"Worse than playing the violin all day? What did they do?"
"You mean besides the raw fish?"
"Raw fish? You can't eat row fish. It'd kill you."
"It's a big thing in Japan. I forget what you call it. They cut it up and wrap it around a hunk of cold rice so it's about the size of a Tootsie-Roll, then dip it soy sauce and...down the hatch."
"A hunk of cold rice? I think I'd throw up."
"But that's not the worst part. The worst is that they're moving back to Japan in September."
"How come?"
"The old man's here just for a while, to help his company set up an office. Or something like that. I couldn't really understand. But he showed me the date on the calendar. September 1. He pointed to it with his skinny little finger and said, "Setembah fust, we go. Jah-pahn!" and gave me a great big smile."
Japan. Land of Many Contrasts. That's about all I remembered from our geography book. I remembered some pictures of a girl in a fancy robe and a very white face, a snow-capped volcano, and one of those houses with funny gutters. And I remembered what Rusty had told me about a whole family living in one room. I pictured myself with a sister like the girl with the white face living in a house with funny gutters and a dead volcano out back and everybody sleeping in the same room. All in all, it didn't sound too awful bad, depending on what the sister was like. Probably not much fun, but better than a turtle on a chain. I pictured the whole family rolling out their bed mats on the floor, and everybody saying good night to each other, and then hearing everybody breathing and sighing in their sleep.
"That wouldn't be too bad," I said to Rusty. "Except for the raw fish."
Rusty snapped his knife shut and smoothed the piece of vine with his fingers. "There's just one problem," he said.
"What's that?"
"I'm not going."
He didn't look at me as he spoke those words, and he said them with a smooth lightness that implied absolute seriousness. He wasn't going to Japan. Period, end of discussion. He seemed more concerned with this length of vine. He twirled it between his palms, rubbing off the last of its fuzzy bark, and held it out to admire how straight it was. Then he put one end to his mouth, closed his lips around it and blew. I could hear the air come out, thin and hard. With a little smile he looked at me through one eye and said, "Did you know these things are hollow?"
abscond: (vi) [< L. ab(s)-, from, away + concere, to hide] 1. to go away hastily and secretly; run away and hide, exp. to escape the law
So Rusty really had a problem. We did detention again, but this time it was me who got dragged out for a talking-to. Mr. Mundt, sitting behind his gray metal desk, said he noticed me in trouble twice in connection with this new kid, Matsunaga. He hoped I wasn't falling in with a bad crowd, wasn't going to besmirch - that's his word, not mine - my Record because it was going to stick with me for the rest of my life. He held a folder in his hands that seemed to contain my Record thus far. I didn't think it looked especially thick for a kid already more than halfway to college.
Behind me I could hear the occasional TICK-tick of a turtle bean ricocheting against two walls in the detention room. Rusty had one of those bendable straws with an accordion elbow and was trying to perfect a shot that landed behind him. He knew he'd never gain any great accuracy, but it would do for a diversion shot that seemed to come from nowhere.
Mr. Mundt went on about how shaky my future looked, how it was all up to me, how I should try to make my parents proud, how everything I did was a reflection on my mother.
My mother. All I could say for her, really, was that she didn't make me eat raw fish or play the violin. Not that I would say such a thing - no more than I would tell Mr Mundt about Rusty's problem, about him not going to Japan.
Finally Mr. Mundt said, "Now why don't you go back in there and have a seat and think about what you've done. And take my advice. Stay away from that Matsunaga. He's trouble."
If you ask me, assistant principals are trouble. What a waste of taxpayers' money. Sure Rusty was trouble. He didn't give a hoot for the rules and didn't mind getting punished. And after our second detention together, neither did I. Instead of seeing it as punishment, I saw it as something to do. It sure beat hanging around the yard waiting for Pop to wake up. Besides, Rusty really knew how to kill time. He used it to perfect his bean shooting. He showed me how to make a long, high lob that practically never missed the waste basket at the far side of the room. Then he let me use this incredible three-piece shooter. When he screwed it together, it was almost a yard long. He kept it in pieces strapped around his calf. He showed me how to brace it by putting my elbow on the desk and using the bone of my forearm as a post. The shooter rested between two knuckles of my fist. Bone, he explained, was steadier than muscle. I was getting pretty good at a short, two-wall ricochet into the basket by the time the minute hand creeped up to five o'clock.
We hardly talked on the bus. One reason was that Fluorine Dalwani sat in the seat ahead of us. She'd gone to cheerleader practice, which was a joke because the high school football team got to vote on which girls would get to cheer for them. Fluorine wouldn't stand a chance. Too dumpy and weird. You'd think she'd be too embarrassed to go out in public in a little yellow and red skirt that showed her fat butt when she jumped up in the air. But Fluorine wasn't the type to get embarrassed. She was the type to get up and do whatever she wanted no matter what people thought. So they thought she was weird. She was so weird that even the high school ath-a-letes in the back of the bus didn't bother her. She must have scared them off of me, too, because they kept to themselves, whooping it up in the back seats, growling dirty words, throwing hammer locks around each other, having a grand time which, thank God, didn't involve me.
Since Fluorine didn't seem to be paying attention to us, I whispered to Rusty, "So what are you going to do?"
He knew what I meant. All he had to say was, "Split."
Split! Just the sound of it filled me with a feeling of busting out, of escaping from everything - homework, washing dishes, the drudgery of school. But how could a kid of thirteen pull off something like that? How far could he get before they caught up with him and dragged him back? How long could he live without money? I'd thought of splitting before, but somehow I knew it was a good idea that wouldn't work - not unless you had a place to go and a big wad of money and nobody looking for you. Rusty, as far as I knew, didn't have any of that.
So I asked him, in a whisper Fluorine couldn't hear over the rattle and bump of the bus, "Where would you go?"
He answered so easily, so readily, that I knew he'd done a lot of thinking already. "West," he said without looking at me.
West! What a perfect direction. It brought to mind a wagon train, Indians, cattle drives, land so big you could just stake out what you wanted and call it yours. Not that I believed the west was still like that. But every kid's got west in his blood. It points you west the way magnetism points a compass north. Every once in a while I put a little thought into heading west, but I knew they had state cops out there the way they used to have Indians. A kid wouldn't stand a chance. I said to Rusty, "But they'd catch you. Wouldn't they?"
"Yep. That's why I'm still here. I haven't figured out just how to do it. But I will. And then I split."
Suddenly Fluorine turned around, eyed Rusty from head to waist, glanced at me with a quick flash of disgust, then looked back at Rusty. "Are you that new kid from Kansas?" she asked.
"Iowa."
"Pleased to meet you," she said. "I'm Flora." Her plump white hand snaked over the back of her seat.
Rusty, unsure of himself, gave the hand a little shake and said, "Rusty."
Pleased to meet you. Those words pretty much sum up the essence of Fluorine. She knew just what to say and wasn't afraid to say it. And she thought her name was Flora, which, as she was quick to mention, meant Flowers. But any parents who name their daughter Flora Doreen do so only because they know the hospital won't let them name her what they know everybody's going to call her. Fluorine's name was Fluorine and had been since kindergarten. I know because that's when I thought it up and spread it around.
Looking at Rusty, she said, "You should have seen your friend in Spanish class yesterday. Absolutely brilliant. Muy humoroso. He has a great future ahead of him. In Paraguay."
I've always tried not to talk to people like her. Anybody who thought Spanish class was for real obviously didn't see the world for what it was. If Fluorine wanted to insult me to my friends, it didn't bother me. And Rusty was cool. He just said, "I'll ask him about it."
"Before or after you split?"
It's a funny thing how girls can deliver a punch to the jaw with just a few select words. Fluorine's chosen few left Rusty and me stunned in the repercussion of what she'd overheard. Anything Fluorine knew, the world would know. If the world knew, then Rusty had to go to Japan, to live among nerds, eat raw fish and practice the violin till it came out his ears. And I, as accomplice, would spend the rest of my life in detention. They'd build a special room with my name on the door. I wouldn't see a sunset until I was forty years old.
Neither Rusty nor I had an answer for her, so we were glad to see the bus pull up to her stop. She said, "Toodle-oo," to Rusty and left without looking back.
"Fluorine," I said.
"She looks like a real brain."
"She is. But dumb."
We got a good giggle out of that. Then the bus came to Wagon Wheel Trail, which was a long cluster of raised ranch houses with neat lawns. Rusty slapped me five and said, "Catch you tomorrow, buddy."
Buddy. It never occurred to me before that moment, but I don't think anyone ever called me buddy before, except Pop, who didn't really mean it. No other kids lived within three miles of our house, and Mother wasn't one to haul me to cub scout meetings or baseball practice or anywhere else you'd find kids. I knew kids at school, but when the final bell rang, they all went home. Rusty did, too, of course, and as the bus pulled away from his stop, I watched him trudge up Wagon Wheel Trail. But he was going toward a home that wasn't his, a bedroom lorded over by the image of Bozo.
At least they opened the door to him, let him in. As I sat alone on the bus riding out to the far end of town, I thought about how life tends to balance out. Rusty had parents who doted over him but weren't really even in his family, and I had parents who barely talked to me but didn't make me practice violin.
If there's one good thing about double detention, it means less time hanging around the yard waiting for Pop to wake up. It was twilight when the bus pulled up at our trailer. Yellow light glowed in the living room and white fluorescent light glared from the kitchen. But Pop's bedroom and the bathroom were still dark. So I set my books on the back steps and sat on top of them to keep my butt off the cold concrete. The air was cold, too, but not as cold as it had been all winter. It was probably warm enough now to camp out without shivering all night. In fact, I thought, maybe I'd do that the very next day, which was Saturday. I'd pack up some smoked sausage for dinner, some bacon and eggs for breakfast, and some potato chips and Twinkies for the time in between.
I still had it in my head that maybe I should tell Rusty about my lean-to in the woods, take him up there, let him make himself at home. But I knew I could do that only once. After that, it wouldn't be a secret. He could show up any time, even hang out there when I wasn't around. That wouldn't necessarily be bad, but who knows how things might turn out? I'd never had a friend for more than a few months. Would Rusty be any different? And suppose he found other friends and started bringing them there? Then what would I do? Where would I go? It's a big move to tell somebody about your secret place, especially when it's as perfect as mine.
What I was thinking about, though, was that it might be the place Rusty could split to. He couldn't live there or anything. It leaked and the wind blew right through it. But as camouflage it worked, and nobody would ever, ever find their way through the walls of poison ivy that grew around it. A kid could hide out there for days. I knew because I had.
All this time I could hear the television from the house - not loud enough to understand the words, but I recognized the bursts of audience laughter and the shifts into the excitement of commercials. In the middle of it all, an odd sound pulled my ears to attention. It could have been a grunt of strain, or maybe a gasp of pain. I held my breath until I heard it again, almost the same but not quite. It definitely was not the television. People on TV didn't make noises like that. It was too real.
I peeked through the door window, which faced on the kitchen. Nothing unusual going on. Everything was as clean and orderly as ever.
But when I looked through the living room window, I saw my mother sitting at the dinner table. Her head rested on the back of one hand, her hair blocking my view of her face. She shuddered, and then I heard the sound again. She was crying. I couldn't see the tears, but I could almost feel them dripping onto her hand and trickling down her wrist. Her head rocked and then turned so her cheek rested in her hand. She was facing me, and for a second I thought she'd seen me. But I knew she couldn't see through the window into the dark so I kept watching. Her face, twisted in agony, was raw red. She used a paper napkin to wipe a dribble of spit from her mouth and a bubble of snot from her nose. Then she got up and went into the bathroom.
It's quite a thing to see your mother cry. I'd sure never seen it before. It scared me. I wondered what in the world would make a grown-up break down like that. It wasn't a soap opera sniffle or the kind of tears you get from onions. I couldn't think of anything I'd done wrong, and Pop was still asleep. Did she stub her toe or something? No, that didn't seem right.
What's a kid supposed to do in a situation like this? Run in and say, "What happened?" and give her a big hug? Maybe with Rusty's mother you could do that, but not mine. Tell Pop? Somehow I didn't think she'd want that either. Sit outside and wait to see what happened? I guessed so. Sitting back down on my books, facing the dark of the yard, I put my elbows on my knees and my head on my fists.
As it turned out, nothing happened. Nothing special, anyway. Pop got up and went to the bathroom, and Mother let me in. As usual, she didn't say anything. I heard the occasional sniffle from the kitchen as she put the finishing touches on a meatloaf and a jar of apple sauce, but I didn't go ask her what was wrong. She sniffled through dinner and kept her eyes on her plate. Then she went to bed. Pop left for work, I roamed through the channels, turned the dumb thing off and, with dread, opened my Spanish book to the next dialogue, in which Fluorine will say, all a'twitter with interest:
"Where were you this weekend, Pedro? We looked everywhere for you."
And I will confess to having taken a trip to northern Spain.
"Northern Spain? How exciting! What did you see there?"
To make a long story short, a cave.
"The cave at Altamira? The one with the many interesting paintings on the wall drawn by primitive people of ancient times?"
Bingo.
"Tell me! What did they look like?"
Basically, dead buffaloes.
"How exciting! What more?"
A hand print. A smudge on the wall where a primitive person of ancient times wiped his greasy paw after a succulent dinner of buffalo haunch.
"How fascinating! Were you impressed?"
Not in the least...except...
...except that I got an idea. Nodding off, slowly closing my lids on dialogue fourteen, I remembered something. A cave. I'd never been there, but I'd read about it in the "Historical Pottsville" booklet. In fact, the booklet had a crude, hand-drawn map of Pottsville, including Piddle's Ridge. The map had a big star on it. It probably covered several acres of the ridge, and somewhere under it was a cave once inhabited by a historical figure known as The Itinerant Tinker. A hundred years ago he had wandered all over New Jersey, fixing people's shoes and pots and clocks and such. That was before the days of Best Western motels, so he slept in barns and under bridges and in caves he somehow knew about. One of them was on Piddle's Ridge. Now it was vacant, grown over with poison ivy, up for grabs, just waiting for an Iowan refugee to move in and call it home.
Chapter Five
hermitage: (n) [ME. < OFr.: see -AGE] 1. the place where a mermit lives 2. a place where a person can live away from other people; secluded retreat
As soon as I had the idea in my head, nothing could stop me from finding the Itinerant Tinker's cave. Looking back, I can't imagine why I never thought of it before. Of course it wasn't in a very convenient place, but who ever heard of a cave across the street from a pizzeria? I was only thirteen but knew that life was not that kind to anyone. If you wanted a cave, you needed to take a long hike. In the case of a cave on Piddle's Ridge, it meant a long hike through a jungle of poison ivy.
So I prepared myself. I swiped one of my father's heavy-duty uniform work shirts from the laundry basket and got a pair of my mother's plastic dish-washing gloves from under the sink. Besides kieIbasa, eggs, bacon, marshmallows and potato chips, I packed a tube of stuff that claimed to stop rashes and itching. I got a scarf to wrap across my face and found a flashlight that worked. I even packed plastic work goggles to cover my eyes.
And off I went.
I didn't have much to go on. The map from the library, as I remembered it, wasn't much help. A big black star indicated the cave as a point of interest, but a footnote confessed that Piddle's Preserve was "undeveloped" and had no trails. The location of the star wasn't of much help, either. It was big enough to straddle several acres of the ridge. Obviously the map-maker, some little old Revolutionary War veteran at the Historical Society, had just made a safe bet that the cave (if any) was somewhere in that area.
Piddle's Preserve did have trails, but not official ones. I guess deer blazed them, and the occasional hiker followed them. I knew these narrow trails well, knew they tended to follow a wandering route toward nowhere. And none went up the tumbled boulders of the ridge. As I understood it, the ridge belonged to Canada until a glacier smuggled it on down to western New Jersey and dumped it in Pottsville. That's probably why Piddle gave up farming here and headed south, well out of reach of the next ice age. Our soil was rocky, and Piddle's Ridge was a forbidding mountain of gray rock. I'm sure that if a geologist ever took a chip of that rock to identify it, he'd say, "It's just rock."
Logic told me that if I stayed on the trails, I'd never find the cave, if indeed, it existed. If it was near the trail, everyone would know where it was. There'd be signs pointing the way. The big, black star on the map would be a tiny dot, and the footnote would list hours when it was open to the public. When you got there, you'd find it surrounded by velvet ropes strung up between shiny steel posts.
I rode my bike as far as my hut. From there I followed trails to the bottom of the ridge, then found the hardest place possible to forge into the venomous undergrowth. I must have looked like some kind of zombie weirdoid with my eyes peeking through goggles between the blue bandana across the lower part of my face and the ski cap pulled down over my forehead. Everything looked weird to me, too. My eyes sweated and fogged up the inside of the goggles. The shiny leaves of the poison ivy blurred as I eased past them or gingerly hacked through the hairy vines with my hatchet.
It was very creepy to walk in the midst of the worst of all possible deaths. As the glistening green leaves brushed my socks and pants and reached toward me from above, I imagined them the fingers of alien monsters whose touch left their victims writhing with terminal itch. All I needed to complete the scene was a heroine, a beautiful girl - Emily Fetschrift, say - to wrap herself around me as I led us through the deadly undergrowth and her clothes fell slowly away. We'd make it to the cave but be stuck there until late autumn, living off roots, berries and venison. I'd treat Emily's poison ivy wounds by blowing softly on the little blisters, sending her into writhing agonies of bliss.
It wouldn't be half as much fun taking Rusty through the woods, but some things a buddy must do. I certainly couldn't let the Matsunagas whisk him off to the Orient. What's a little poison ivy compared to that?
I didn't follow a map, path or compass as I wound through the woods. I just went where I could, walking along the tops of walls, balancing across fallen logs, hopping from rock to rock. I followed a brook upstream. When it narrowed enough for the ivy to grow across it, I waded through a tunnel of deadly green.
I felt myself quite the pioneer. How long had it been since a human being had last explored this territory? What would happen if I died in here? They'd never find me. Maybe they could send a man to the moon, but they' d never, ever, send a posse into poison ivy. Assuming they'd even bother to look for me, they'd rein in their bloodhounds at the first thick growth and say, "Naw. He wouldn't have gone in there. He wasn't that dumb."
All of which, of course, made Piddle's Ridge and the Coon Lady's cave a perfect little hermitage for a Japanese-Iowan to lay low in.
The ivy thinned out and disappeared as I approached the tumbled gray boulders and slate at the base of the ridge. Above me, scrubby oak and laurel grew where it could. I considered leaving my backpack behind but was afraid I might not find it. For that matter, I wasn't too sure I could find my way back home or to my lean-to except by heading east until I came to the state highway. That would put me ten miles from anywhere a person might want to be.
I didn't have to climb far before I knew that only an idiot or an itinerant tinker would set out to find a cave on this ridge. I had to climb one rock at a time, figuring out how to get around it or over it or whether to just go another way. And the cave, depending on how big its opening, could be behind or under any of them. In fact, I stumbled onto a lot of little caves in the jumble of boulders. I say cave but I don't mean the huge cavern kind with stalactites and such. These were spaces in among rocks. Some a kid could crouch in, maybe even fit in a medium-sized dog, too. For all I know that's all a tinker wouldneed to call home.
So how was I supposed to know whether I'd found the right place or passed it or should keep on looking? And how long would it be until I reached up over a rock and grabbed a copperhead? How long until I lost my grip on a rock and fell to my death? Or would I die wedged into a hole that looked like it might be a cave? Several such holes tempted me in a little too deep, then gripped me at the hips and shoulder. I managed to wiggle back out only by breathing shallow and fighting off the urge to panic.
I knew I was the wrong kid for the job when I finally hoisted my weary butt to the top of the ridge. From there I could see far to the west I could see the miles and miles of desolate pine barrens where no one but mosquitoes lived. To the east, I had a real swell view of Piddle's Preserve.
But if there was a cave down there somewhere, I wouldn't see it from up high. All that climbing for nothing. Maybe I should have hired a smart kid, a consultant, to think of these things for me. Of course that kid would have explained that I'd need to climb the ridge anyway if I wanted to search the western side. The kid would also explain that as long as I'd already climbed I might as well explore the other side right then. But I didn't need a smart kid to tell me that. After a good ten or twenty minutes of sitting there telling myself how stupid I was, I figured it out. But it wasn't till I got to bottom of the other side that I figured out I'd have to climb back up. Maybe I needed a smart kid after all. I wondered if Rusty would think of these things.
But in the end, it worked out. Too tired to climb back right away, I hiked along the lower edge of the ridge. I'd never been to the western side before. It seemed like another world, maybe because it faced slightly north so it lay in its own shadow during most of the day. The rocks had the greenish tint of moss and algae, and the trees were stubbier than their cousins on the southeastern side. The leaves on the ground were gray with a dampness that looked permanent. Logs had weird growths of orange and red fungus growing out of them like some kind of parasite from Uranus. The sun didn't hit that side of the ridge until late afternoon, when the rays came in low and sideways.
What better scene to find a cave in, and what better time than sundown. I probably would have walked right by the place if the sun hadn't set low enough to darken the bottom of the ridge while still casting a warm yellow-red light across the upper third. There, up high, I saw it as if a spotlight were pointing it out. It looked a lot like a picture I once saw in a book about primitive people. A huge flat boulder extended out from massive pile of rocks the size of cars. It looked like the visor of a baseball cap sticking out over a very ugly face. Underneath, several boulders formed a flat surface, and it looked like maybe the opening went back into the ridge. It didn't matter to me if this was the Tinker's old haunt or not. Night was coming and I was going to sleep in that cave.
It took me a good half an hour to climb up that far and then find a way up onto the expanse of flat boulder under the ledge. Rusty sure wasn't going to have to worry about attack by an army of fat people, which ruled out Hank Kjelstrom, the Pottsville cop. And Rusty's new father didn't sound like the type to scale a cliff and live to tell the tale. If anybody came to drag Rusty out of this cave, it would have to be the U.S. Marines.
I wasn't the first person to sleep there. Charred sticks littered the ground and a stain of smoke blackened the innermost corner. But that stuff could have been a hundred years old. I didn't see a single beer can or cigarette butt. Maybe I was the first person since the Indians to sit there and watch the sun set. Chewing on a hunk of raw kielbasa, I felt like quite the Neaderthal: Paleolithic kid feasting on the intestines of a tyranosaurus rex. As the sky turned red, orange and purple, with long, straight clouds shooting across at weird angles, I wondered the same thing the Indians and the cavemen probably did: who but a god could make the sky do tricks like that?
By the time the sky was easing from purple-blue to real black, I figured out one problem Rusty would face: firewood. The side of the ridge around the cave wasn't quite a cliff, but you couldn't call it a hillside, either. To move around, you had to look before you leapt. Here and there dead wood stuck out from the boulders, but it didn't take me long to collect what little was near the cave. If Rusty wanted a fire at night, he'd need to do some heavy-duty hauling from down below.
But I found enough for the night and was damned glad. A cave can be a weird place to sleep. You never know what kind of bears or snakes or wolves are going to wander in, and you've always got twenty million tons of rock right over your head just waiting for that slight breeze to come along and nudge it off the pebble that's been holding it up since the last ice age. Wolves in New Jersey? You never think it's a real problem until you're down to your last few sticks of firewood and your cave starts getting dark. Then you can smell wolf breath and hear the slither of mutant boa constrictors migrating up from the Amazon. Alligators on the side of a mountain of rock? Stranger things have happened. Blood-sucking bats? Sasquatch? Coon Ladies with battle axes and rabid gangs of forty-pound raccoons living off roots, berries and cub scouts? If you sit in a cave at night and the only TV you've got is shadows flickering on a wall of slimy rock, you know,for sure that nature can do with you as it pleases, that myths aren't purely the product of imagination. You wonder about the headlines in the sleazy newspapers at the supermarket check-out line and imagine a photograph of your sneakers on the floor of a cave, your ankle bones sticking up out of them, licked clean. Under the picture, a headline reads, "Loch Ness Monster Eats Eighth-Grader!" In the cold dark lonliness, you review your religious convictions and consider the possibility of a few extra gods, like maybe one for fire, the only thing standing between you and the jowls of death. You wonder if maybe Japan isn't so bad after all.
Cigarettes don't help in a situation like that. From what you see in the ads and movies, you'd think they'd bolster your courage or at least keep you warm. Or at the very least keep the bugs away. But they don't, unless, of course, there's some trick to smoking that I hadn't figured out. As far as I could tell, they just made your throat dry and your mouth taste bad. And if you mix a little tar and nicotine with a belly full of kielbasa and burnt marshmallows, pretty soon you've got a serious tummy situation.
During the night I started to itch. Before long I could feel the tiny bubbles swelling in an oval around my eyes where the edge of my goggles had been. My wrists and ankles itched, too. That certainly took my mind off wild animals. I spread calamine lotion on it but of course it didn't help. Quivering with itch, fighting the urge to dig at it with my fingernails, not knowing what was poison ivy, what was mosquito, I remembered a line from a poem in English class: "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper."
But I survived. I woke up in the morning with nothing more than a general itch and a bad case of cave-breath. To the west, the pine barrens lay under thick, low, blue-gray fog. The sky above had the blue and yellow of morning, but the cave, still dim and dank, wouldn't get sunlight until late afternoon. So I ate the last of the marshmallows, packed up my stuff, put on my goggles, mask and gloves and headed to the top of the ridge.
I wanted to stop by the lean-to to check on Herc and maybe do some thinking. From the top of the ridge, I could pretty much figure out how to get there from the cave. It would be a long hike through an area of the Preserve I didn't know much about, but part of the trip would pass not to far from the only trail that people ever used.
The poison ivy grew thick and high in that neck of the woods down below the ridge; some of the leaves were as wide as my hand. I walked very carefully, lifting away branches and vines of the stuff rather than hacking through it. When I came to a stand of tall, dense hemlock and pine, the ivy was only ankle deep, so I stayed in the deep evergreen shadow and hoped I'd intersect with the trail further along.
But I wasn't anywhere near the trail when I smelled something very strange. It was smoke, kind of woody-smelling, but not from a campfire. More like the smoke of something smoldering, something sweet and tart. It brought to mind the smell of an old trunk opened in the attic after a couple hundred years of sitting there. On the other hand, it could have been wolf-breath burped up after a heavy lunch of smoked raccoon.
But no, it was smoke. I could see it. A wide, twisted ribbon of translucent blue, lit from behind by the rising sun, hovered between the lowest pine branches and the carpet of needles below. I could actually go over to it and stick my nose of high and get a good whiff. It was the damndest smell I ever smelled. It had pine mixed in, probably from the forest itself. And it was floating in that clean, morning smell that fog leaves behind. But in amongst those smells was something vaguely familiar but as unexpected as something new.
I had to find where it was coming from, but I didn't want anybody to see me and start asking questions. So I slipped my pack off and snuck low along a waist-high wall, peeking through the stones, looking around behind me, carefully stepping over twigs and dry leaves. I stopped and ducked when I heard a faint sucking-gurgling sound that might have been an animal. Maneuvering my head, I looked through a gap in the wall until I caught sight of an overweight girl in a granny dress and saddle shoes.
Lying on her back on a bed of moss in a pool of sunlight, she was reading a book and, to my total amazement, puffing gently on a pipe. Intent on her book, she kept the pipe to her lips as curls of smoke rose across her face. She sipped as gently as another kid might chew gum in church.
A pipe. A girl smoking a pipe. Fluorine smoking a pipe. We'd caught her doing weird things before, like the time she wrote a poem that didn't even rhyme and then read it out loud, without shame, in front of our sixth-grade class. But smoking a pipe surpassed the merely weird. It was closer to exotic, like something a kid in Switzerland would do. While I spent my idle time conversing with a turtle and trying to feel pleasure in Marlboro Lights, Fluorine was reading a big fat book and partaking of fine tobacco.
Not only that, she did it for longer than I had the patience to sit there and watch. She just read and read and read, refilling her pipe without taking her eyes from the page. I can't imagine how much she must have learned in the amount of time I just sat there doing nothing. And she'd started before I got there, though she must have set out from home at dawn to get there so early. And for all I know, she stayed there until dark and finished the whole book.
If I'd caught her doing anything else, like just lying there or playing with dolls or whatever it is a girl might do in the middle of the woods, I probably would have lobbed a rock at her or at least spooked her with some wolf howls or something, and then just disappeared to go snicker in the bushes. I would have thought myself the cleverest kid in town to do something like that to someone like her and get away with it. It would have been a good time to have a crack shot with a beanshooter to help me. But I didn't do anything. I couldn't. I don't know why, but she somehow seemed above such things, that the dumber the trick I pulled, the dumber I'd look.
So I snuck off the way I'd snuck in and headed fast for the lean-to, wondering hard all the way. What would a person like her know that I didn't? There's just no telling. For one thing, she knew everything that was in that book. For another, she knew how to smoke a pipe. I wondered if smoking a pipe somehow made it easier to read a big fat book. I certainly never had much luck reading a big fat book without smoking a pipe. The two seemed to go together as naturally as corn flakes and milk.
When I got to my hut, Herc was up but looking glum the way only a turtle can. When I fed him some bacon off the end of a stick, though, he perked right up. He all but did back-flips. "I'm going to smoke a pipe," I said. "What do you think of that?" Clearly he nodded. So with no more to-do, I tossed my cigs into the swamp. Good riddance. They floated for a while, then sopped up the water and slowly, slowly sank in a halo of brown. Herc went in after them and didn't come up for the rest of the day.
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