Not-Just-Anybody Family (7 page)

Up in the tree he eyed the narrow board, and his heart sank. Vern had never admitted it, but he had always been aware that he did not have the daring his brother and sister had. Junior wanted to be a stuntman, Maggie wanted to be a trick rider, and he wanted to do something no one in the family had ever done—work in an office.

He dreamed of sharp pencils and unlimited stacks of paper and paper clips and rulers. His happiest moments in school came when the teacher asked them to fill out forms. That, he felt, was the closest he had ever come to office work. He handed in the neatest forms of anyone in his class.

That’s why it was such a miracle that he had not only conceived this brilliant, ingenious plan but was putting it into effect.

He stepped on the board. He jiggled to make sure it was steady.

Maggie saw the shaking leaves and called, “Be careful. Don’t fall, whatever you do.”

Vern did not answer. He put his right foot in front of his left, heel to toe, then took one more step. He was holding on to the overhead branches, working on balance. He took another step. Another.

Then the branches stopped. Vern stood for a moment, holding the last two leaves, one in each hand. Then, with a sigh, he let go.

He held his arms out to the side. No circus tightrope walker had ever concentrated harder.

Vern kept his eyes on the vent. Heel to toe, toe to heel, he made his way across the board. His arms seesawed gently in the cool night air. He did not look down once.

Below, Maggie stood with her hands clasped. She appeared to be, and was, praying.

“We need Junior for this,” she said.

“Thanks,” Vern said through tight lips.

The board was beginning to sag. With every step it bent lower, buckling under his weight. Ahead he could see that the board was slipping closer to the end of the ledge. He took another heel-to-toe step.

The board sagged lower.

“Vern,” Maggie called. “Did you notice that the board’s starting to bend?”

Vern did not answer. He figured that one more step was all the board could take. One more step, and he and the board would crash to the pavement.

At that awful moment, with his arms waving at his sides, his heart pounding in his throat, the vent going in and out of focus before his tear-filled eyes, Vern made the decision of his life.

Vern jumped.

Mud was making his way through the finest section of town, Maple Leaf Manor, where the rich people lived. He loped along the smooth white sidewalks, taking his time, pausing now and then to lift his leg on a wrought-iron mailbox or a particularly fine piece of shrubbery.

An occasional car passed, lighting up his pale fur, giving a red look to his golden eyes. Mud paid the cars no attention.

He slowed. His sharp ears had picked up the sound of running water. It came from behind this house, and he turned onto the soft manicured lawn. He ambled around the house to the swimming pool, where a spray of water ran continuously down the silver sliding board.

He stretched out on the cool tiles around the pool, stuck his head over the side, and lapped the clear chlorinated water. It wasn’t as good as toilet water or creek water, which he was accustomed to, but Mud was thirsty.

When he had drunk all he wanted, he spent a few seconds licking stray drops from his legs and feet. He chewed a flea on his ankle.

Then Mud got to his feet. He stretched. He was getting ready to lift his leg in the direction of a lounge chair to mark the fact that he’d been there.

Suddenly, from the right, Mud heard a long, low
“Rrrrrrrr.”

The hair rose on Mud’s back. His sharp eyes looked in the shadows of a small walkway between the double garage and the house.

There Mud could see the high pointed ears of a Doberman. He could see the gleam of long white teeth.

The Doberman drew in enough breath to give another, longer
“Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr.”
An answering growl rose in Mud’s throat.

The Doberman leapt forward, throwing himself at Mud. He choked on his chain and fell back. He tried to attack again.

Mud hesitated. Mud had never started a fight in his life, but Mud had never run from a fight either.

Now he was ready for battle. His teeth were bared. His hair was up. His eyes were bright. If the Doberman got free, Mud would meet him more than halfway.

The Doberman was barking wildly, throwing himself in Mud’s direction, trying either to break his chain or to pull the whole house down. Between leaps the metal links rattled against the slate floor.

“Franklin!” a voice called from an upstairs window. “Be quiet down there.”

“Maybe it’s a burglar, Sam.”

“All right, already. I’ll take a look.”

Mud stood still, frozen at the edge of the pool. The patio lights went on. Mud lowered his tail. He heard sounds at the door: the unsnapping of the dead-bolt lock, the click of the doorknob. Franklin was barking wildly, knowing his owner was on the way. He was facing the door now, legs stiff with anticipation.

As the door opened, Mud ran around the pool. He whipped through the hedge and galloped across the lawn like a racehorse.

Behind him a voice said kindly, “What’s wrong, Franklin? You all right, boy?”

Franklin whined with pleasure.

“Was some stray dog after your bone?”

Mud hit the sidewalk and slowed. He lifted his leg on a bush at the Doberman’s driveway, then he took the time to scratch the grass vigorously with his back feet. A spray of fine zoysia grass flew into the night air.

Then, without a backward glance, Mud ambled down the sidewalk, on his way to Pap.

Junior could not get to sleep. The lights in his room had been turned out. The hospital hall was as quiet as it ever got. Ralphie had gone to sleep with the little harmonica in his mouth, and every time he breathed out, he played a soft, soothing chord. Still Junior could not sleep.

Usually the only time Junior had trouble sleeping was Christmas Eve. Even the times when his mother had the terrible Christmas Eve talks with them, warning in her quiet way that sometimes Santa couldn’t bring everything everybody wanted.

Even when she looked directly at him during the terrible talk, and he knew, knew deep in his bones, that it was he who was not going to get the bicycle, he still could not sleep from excitement.

This was different. It was the opposite of excitement. They did a lot of opposites in school. The teacher would say, “The opposite of day is—”

“Night!” Junior would cry.

“The opposite of lost is—”

“Found!”

Junior had never missed a single one. Sometimes he was a little bit slower than the rest of the class, but he had never missed one.

This was impossible, though, he thought. He went over it again. “The opposite of excitement is—”

There was only one answer: “Lying in the hospital with hurt legs.”

And his legs did hurt. They had not hurt much during the day, and they had stopped hurting entirely when he had held Ralphie’s artificial leg and worked the knee. He had even for one brief moment wanted a leg exactly like the one on his lap.

Now, however, his legs were making up for lost time. They hurt a lot.

He realized suddenly how much he loved the sounds of his own house. He missed them. Mud drinking loudly out of the toilet, Pap grinding his teeth, the wind chimes they had given their mom for her birthday clicking musically on the porch below, the occasional chinaberry dropping on the tin roof.

He felt so miserable that he reached for the buzzer beside his pillow. “Use this, Junior, if you need anything,” the nurse had told him, but he never had. Ralphie spent a lot of time ringing his buzzer, demanding Cokes and candy over the intercom as if he were the president of the hospital. When the nurses ignored him, he pressed the buzzer and made terrible gagging noises or pretended to be choking.

Now Junior looked at his buzzer. He pressed the button. A voice on the intercom said, “Yes?”

“It’s me—Junior,” he answered miserably.

“Speak up, please.”

“It’s me—Junior.”

“What’s wrong, Junior?”

“I don’t feel good.”

“Do your legs hurt?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll bring you an aspirin.”

“Thank you,” he said politely. It was hard not to be polite to a voice coming from the wall.

But when the nurse arrived with the paper cup and the pill, he was crying too hard to swallow. “I want Maggie,” he wailed. “I want Pap. I want Vern. I want my mommmmmmm!”

“Will you shut him up?” Ralphie said, flipping over in disgust. “Where does he think he is—at a hog-calling contest?”

The nurse wrapped her arms around Junior and hugged him. He tried to pretend they were has mom’s arms, but it didn’t work. Still, he was glad to have arms of any sort around him. “Tomorrow, you know what you’re going to do?” the nurse asked kindly.

He shook his head against her.

“You’re going to get up and sit in a wheelchair and you can go down to the TV room, and you can roll up and down the hall, and the play lady comes with games and books and you can pick anything you want.”

“Is that true?” Junior asked.

“Big deal,” Ralphie sneered.

“Go to sleep, Ralphie. You—”

Ralphie clutched his throat. “I swallowed my harmonica.”

“Come on, Ralphie, it’s too late at night for that kind of foolishness.”

“I swallowed my harmonica, I tell you! I’m not kidding! I really swallowed my harmonica! Where is it if I didn’t swallow it?”

He began to pull at his pajamas, frantically searching the wrinkles. He tore his pajama top open and shook it. He lifted his pillow.

The nurse crossed to Ralphie’s bed. “Let’s take a look. It probably fell down in your covers.” She pulled them back and searched among the wrinkled sheets. “Roll over.” She ran her hands under him.

“He did have it in his mouth,” Junior said helpfully. “It blew a note every time he breathed out.”

“Ralphie, it looks like you’d have better sense than to go to sleep with a harmonica in your mouth. If I have to send you down to X-ray, and there’s no harmonica inside you, I’m going to be—” She shook the top sheet so hard, it billowed and snapped. “—furious.”

“If you swallow a harmonica, do they have to cut you open to get it out?” Junior asked.

“Nobody’s cutting me open!” The words burst from Ralphie. His hands folded into fists. “I’m not going to let anybody cut me open. The doctor promised me this was the last time I would have to—”

“There,” the nurse said, “is your harmonica.”

“Where?”

The nurse bent and picked something off the floor. She extended her hand. “There.”

Ralphie looked at it suspiciously. “It doesn’t look like my harmonica. How do you know it’s mine?”

“Because nobody else on this floor has an inch-long harmonica. Now, I’m putting this in my pocket, Ralphie, and you can have it when you leave the hospital.”

“I don’t want it anymore.”

“I do,” said Junior quickly.

“Take it,” said Ralphie, turning away from them.

“All right, you can have it when you leave the hospital,” the nurse said. “And do you want this pill or not?”

“I don’t need it anymore,” Junior said truthfully. The thought of owning his own harmonica was painkiller enough.

Before he went to sleep, Ralphie said, “I knew it was on the floor all the time. I just wanted to scare her.”

“And you did,” Junior answered.

Pap was not asleep and he heard the noise of the board thumping into place against the vent over his head. He dared not hope it was the children, and yet he could feel his heart begin to race in his chest.

He stood up. Pap had to stand up in stages. He stood up first in a stoop, and when his legs got used to that, he straightened the rest of the way up.

Now he stood tall beside his bunk, his head straining painfully toward the window, his old neck twisted like a rooster’s. He heard nothing. With his head back, his Adam’s apple stuck out as far as his sagging chin.

He said softly, “Kids?”

No answer.

“Kids?”

He wanted to whistle, but the man in the next cell had threatened to kill him if he whistled like—the man did not know birdcalls—like a nuthatch one more time. Pap wasn’t afraid of the man, but he didn’t want a disturbance of any kind just now.

He heard a new noise. He couldn’t place it. A soft silk-smooth sound overhead. He held his breath. He waited. He knew in his bones that the sound had something to do with him.

Everybody else in the jail was asleep, snoring, snorting, groaning in their dreams. And they had gone to sleep instantly, because none of them were expecting anyone to drop in. Pap was, and so he alone waited alert in his lighted cell.

Even though he still couldn’t place the thump, followed by the soft sliding sound, he knew it was his. His daddy used to have a saying long ago: “That piece of pie’s got my name on it,” and that was exactly the way Pap felt about the soft sliding noise overhead.

He waited with his hands twitching at his sides, his fingers making little beckoning movements.

The door opened, and a policeman came in for his hourly check. It was twelve o’clock.

The policeman walked slowly down the room, looking in each cell. He paused at Pap’s cell. He looked Pap over from his shoes to his uncombed head. Pap’s heart stopped beating.

“You better lie down, sir, get some sleep,” the policeman said.

“I will. I will.”

“You got a big day tomorrow.”

“What?”

“Isn’t your hearing tomorrow?”

“My what?”

“Your hearing.”

“Oh, my hearing.”

Pap nodded. He slumped to his bunk to get rid of the policeman. He lay down. He pretended to close his eyes. Through a slit in his left eye he could see the policeman was still there.

He couldn’t hear the soft sliding noises because the blood was pounding so hard in his head, it blocked out everything else.

“You a baseball fan?”

“What?” Pap’s eyes snapped open. He was so filled with hope and dread and pounding blood, he couldn’t even remember what baseball was. “Yes. No.”