Blossoms Meet the Vulture Lady (8 page)

There was a pause. Mist was still lying low on the ground, but overhead it had started to burn off. Beyond, patches of bright blue sky were beginning to show through.

Ralphie raised his hand.

The policeman said, “Yes?”

“This isn’t exactly a question,” Ralphie said, “but my uncle hunts a lot and one time he almost shot Mad Mary on Owl Hill. It was deer season and she was wearing something brown. Anyway, he said he thinks she lives somewhere around there. She scooted off toward the north.”

“That’s good information. Your uncle couldn’t be here today?”

“He works the early shift, but he may come later.”

“Fine. We can use him. No more questions? Then let’s get going. We’ll pair off at the coyote trap.”

And in a body they crossed the yard and headed into the dripping trees.

As soon as Ralphie heard that they would be pairing off, he decided two things. One, he would get rid of his little brothers, and two, he would be the one to pair off with Maggie Blossom.

He had had his eye on Maggie ever since his mom had dropped off the three of them early that morning. “Ralphie, you look after your brothers,” his mother had said.

“Mom, I’m here to search for Junior, not be a babysitter.”

“Remember what I said. The only way I’d let you come is if your brothers came too.”

“I know.”

“Well, you aren’t acting like it.” She looked at the brothers. “You stick with Ralphie.”

“We will,” they chimed.

About a half hour after his mom had driven off, Ralphie decided to lay the groundwork for getting rid of his brothers. “See that girl,” he said, “the one on the porch?”

They said, “Yes.”

Maggie was still standing on the porch steps. She only had one braid this morning, and she had been chewing on the end of it—out of nervousness, Ralphie figured—when he and his brothers had arrived. The moment she had seen him get out of the car, though, she had flung the braid back over her shoulder and looked down at the ground. She had not even waved, and she had not looked up one single time. Now she was staring at her foot, swinging it over the lower step.

“See the girl I’m talking about?”

The brothers nodded.

“Well, don’t get close to her.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to tell you. You’ll get scared and want to home.”

“No we won’t.”

“Promise?”

They nodded solemnly.

“Well, she hates little boys, and if you get close to her she’ll bite your ears off.”

“No she won’t.”

“She’s got a whole belt made out of them.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes it is too. She was a counselor at a boys’ camp, and nobody noticed till they were getting on the bus to go home that none of the little boys had any ears left.”

“That is not true.”

“Yes it is. The policeman over there told me. You saw me talking to him, didn’t you? Well, that was what we were talking about. He asked me to keep an eye on her and to make sure she didn’t get close to you. So you go with someone else.”

“No. Anyway, I don’t believe you. I’m going to ask her if she has a belt made out of boys’ ears.”

“Oh, never mind. Come on back.” Color flushed Ralphie’s ears. “Come back! Listen, I was just kidding.”

But before Ralphie could stop him, the little brother was at the porch. “Do you have a belt made out of little boys’ ears?”

Maggie looked down at him. Maggie had noticed Ralphie as soon as he’d arrived. She had been so glad to see him it had made her feel bad. Nobody should feel happy when their brother is lost. She was trying to make herself feel better by explaining to herself that the reason she was so glad to see him was that if anybody could find Junior, he could. She was saying to herself, Remember how he took over last summer and made everything come out all right? when Ralphie’s brother asked about the belt. “What?” she said.

“Do you have a belt made out of little boys’ ears? My brother said you do, but I don’t believe him.”

“Out of what?”

“Little boys’ ears.” He took his ears in his hands and wiggled them.

“Oh, ears.” Maggie nodded. “Yes.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it, then?”

“Hanging up in my closet.”

The little brother came running back across the yard. “She says yes. She says she does. She says it’s in her closet.”

Maggie looked right at Ralphie, the first time she had looked at him since he’d arrived. Then she grinned. Ralphie’s heart almost turned a flip in his chest. She still had her lovely chipped tooth.

The face wasn’t quite as bad as Junior had remembered. He had taken his hands off his eyes as soon as Mad Mary had said, “Is there something wrong with your eyes. Let me see.”

“No,” he had cried, dropping his hands instantly. “They’re fine!”

He removed his hands—they were stiff at his sides now—but he didn’t look at her face. He couldn’t. He looked at her boots. He recalled with a slight shudder the way he had clutched one the night before.

The boots were coming closer. He swallowed aloud. Closer. Now she was there, directly in front of him, and she said, “Who locked you up in that cage?”

The question surprised him so much that he looked directly up at her face. That was when he saw that it wasn’t as bad as he had thought. “I wasn’t in any cage.”

“What was it, then?”

“A trap.”

“Then who locked you in the trap?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody?”

“It locked itself.”

“What are you telling me?”

“I made the trap. I was going to catch that coyote everybody’s been talking about and get the reward, one hundred dollars. I had it all figured out. I made the trap just perfect—you saw it. Every part of it was perfect. Only, while I was setting the trap, the hamburger meat got stuck on my hand, and the trap sprang and the door slammed down and I couldn’t get out.”

“Oh, dear,” Mad Mary said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh, dear.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

Mad Mary’s look sharpened. “Who are you?”

“Junior. Junior Blossom.”

“Are you kin to Alec Blossom?”

“That’s Pap, my grandfather. Why?”

“Because I hope he comes looking for you instead of the police.”

“Why?”

“Because over the years, Junior, the police have not been kind to Mary.”

Mud lay curled in a ball of misery.

Since dawn he had been watching the clearing without hope. The only living thing he had seen was blue jays and squirrels.

All Mud’s life he had hated squirrels. He hated them so much that a couple of times he had run headlong into trees trying to catch one. This morning he did not care. He would not have felt like chasing a squirrel, even if he could have.

Sometimes, in happier days, he had chased blue jays, too, but only when someone like Pap said, “Mud! What’s that bird doing stealing our worms?” He had never actually caught anything.

The gnats had found Mud and hovered over him, drawn by the wet heat. His fur steamed in the early-morning sunshine. Mud usually snapped at gnats and flies and occasionally caught them. Now he didn’t care about gnats either.

Mud whined in and out, with every breath. The sound was as constant as the drone of a bee. Mud didn’t even know he was whining.

The mist was off the clearing now, and the sun slanted down through the trees.

Mud heard a new noise. He had heard a hundred noises since dawn—a limb falling from a tree, a twig snapping, birds flying, squirrels leaping from tree to tree; so Mud didn’t leap up at just one more sound.

Still, there was something different about this sound. He didn’t raise his head from his paws, but he lifted one ear, raised one eye.

The noise came again.

Mud lifted his head. Both ears went up, both eyes. Mud got to his feet.

There was another noise. Voices.

Mud’s tail had been curled between his legs in despair, and now it straightened. It wagged once.

It was not just voices. It was Pap’s voice.

Mud shook himself, threw back his head, and began to bark.

“Can I ask you something?” Junior said.

Mad Mary nodded.

Junior and Mad Mary were eating breakfast—leftover varmint stew. At first Junior wasn’t sure he was hungry, when he saw and heard what it was, but now he was enjoying the stew as much as Mary was. He swallowed and took a drink of water from a Coke bottle.

“Well, I didn’t know that witch—” He swallowed the rest of the word and corrected it carefully: “—that people who live in caves read books.”

Mad Mary’s face almost cracked into a smile. “What else would we read?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I was asking.”

“Yes, I read books. The ones I like best are the ones where people end up living in caves. My favorite’s
Riders of the Purple Sage
.”

“That doesn’t sound like a cave book to me.”

“Why, that’s one of the best cave books ever written. Venters—that’s the cowboy—and Bess—that’s the rustler girl—live in a cave for months. It’s one of the best caves I ever read of. I wish I had one just like it. When the storms used to hit, that cave would gong like a bell. My cave whistles a little, but it never gongs. And rooms—Oh, that cave had more rooms than a mansion.”

She wiped her hands on her skirt and smoothed it over her bony knees. “Anyway. That’s what I read—books. I don’t care for magazines and I don’t read newspapers. People who end up living in caves generally don’t.”

“We don’t read newspapers much either, except for the one we were in. Last summer we were news, and I do read that newspaper. I’ve still got it. Two things happened to us last summer.” Junior lifted his hand so he could count them off. “One, we got in the news, and two, we got a telephone.”

To this day Junior didn’t know which was the most amazing, the fame or the telephone. The installation of the telephone had left Junior with the feeling that he was at last hooked up to the rest of the world, plugged in like everybody else. He loved that telephone.

Sometimes he called strangers on it. “Hello, this is Junior. Have you got time to talk?” he would say. Nobody had so far, but Junior didn’t mind. “I’ll try you later,” he’d say. “So long.”

“Over the last ten years,” Mad Mary said, looking thoughtful, “I’ve wanted to call somebody up maybe three times.”

“You can use our phone anytime you want to,” Junior said generously. “Just come on over.”

Mad Mary shook her head. She didn’t wear her hat in the cave, and her long gray hair hung down her back. Without her hat, she didn’t look so old to Junior. In fact, she was getting younger and younger somehow as the morning progressed.

“My mom wouldn’t mind, really.”

“Those people I wanted to call up are all dead.” Mad Mary looked at her stew. “You know, I wouldn’t mind them being dead so much if I could just call them up on the telephone every now and then.”

Junior’s mouth dropped open. His own stew was forgotten. He drew in a deep shuddering breath. “If I could call my father …” he said. “If I could just call my father …”

He couldn’t finish. The words hadn’t been created to express how much he would benefit from talking to his father for three minutes.

“I don’t have a living relative left on this earth,” Mad Mary went on. She started eating again. “And Cantrells don’t die of old age. My brother died in the war. My mother got thrown by a horse. My father set himself on fire with his pipe and burned himself and the whole house down.” She smoothed her skirt again, but slowly this time.

“I may have a cousin living somewhere, but my cousins were accident-prone too. My cousin La Rue scalped herself on an electric fan. Anyway, they’re dead to me.”

“If I could just talk to my father …”

Junior trailed off again. The thought somehow was too big for his brain.

“The last time I wanted to call my daddy was when they widened the road and put the Seven-eleven right where our front porch used to be. My daddy was the only person I could think of that would be as mad as I was. I wanted to hear that old man roar one more time.”

Junior appeared to hear Mad Mary for the first time.

“I wouldn’t want to hear my father roar. I’d just want to hear him say ‘Junior, Junior, Junior. What are we going to do with you?’ He used to say that a lot.”

Mad Mary looked down at him. She closed her weak eye to bring his features in focus. Then she reached over and tapped his hand. “Your stew’s getting cold.”

“Oh, yes.”

“You won’t have stew like that very often.”

“I know.”

“So take advantage of it. Eat. Eat!”

“I will in a minute.” He squinted at her as if he wanted to see better too. “What did your dad die of?”

“I told you. He burned himself up and the house too.”

“Mine got gored by a bull.”

She nodded slightly, but Junior felt the understanding behind that nod. “Now eat.”

Junior ate.

“Will you please give me a break and do your searching somewhere else?”

“No way. Mom told us to stay together and not get lost.”

“And that’s what we’re going to do too. And, anyway, Maggie told us she does not bite little boys’ ears off. So there!”

All morning Ralphie had been trying to get rid of his little brothers and be alone with Maggie. Ralphie was in love with Maggie.

He had fallen in love with her exactly one year ago when he had awakened in the hospital one morning. There she had been, sitting on the foot of her brother’s bed, grinning, telling about how she and her other brother had busted into city jail.

Even today, a whole year later, the memory of how wonderful she had been and how stupid he had been could turn the tips of his ears red with embarrassment. “Excuse me for being nosy”—this was one of the stupid things he had said—“but why didn’t you just go in the jail and ask to see your grandfather like anybody else?”

“We Blossoms,” she had answered, “have never been just anybody.”

Well, that was the truth.

“All right,” Ralphie said to his brothers, “I’ll pay you to leave me alone.” He was desperate.