Orwell's Luck (5 page)

The change in the weather had melted the ice and freed the goldfish from their icy prison. They floated upside down on the surface of the water, stiff, swollen, and pale. Even worse were the dim, white shapes of leopard frogs drifting like ghostly blimps halfway to the bottom.

It was like the part in horror movies on TV where you hide your face behind your open fingers, peeking only to find out if it's over.

This one wasn't going to be over until my father and I had scooped out every last cold-blooded, foul-smelling soul. We used a fishing net, trying not to touch the bodies. I dug a grave in my mother's garden. The mud clung to my shoes and got on my hands.

Again and again, we turned the net upside down, plopping the victims one on top of the other. Using a circulating pump that had been purchased to create a waterfall, we attached a long black tube and drained the pond. A terrible smell spread across our yard.

Inside the house, the telephone rang and rang again. Wisely, I thought, my mother did not answer.

That night I woke several times from restless dreams, worried about Orwell. Once, shortly after four, as I lay face up on the pillow, frightened of the strange, vague shapes illuminated by the lighted numbers on my clock, I heard the telltale rumble of the newspaper truck. I listened to it slowing down, speeding up, and slowing down again each time it came near a subscriber's driveway. I heard the thuds and thumps and thwacks as the papers sometimes hit their concrete mark and sometimes landed in a yard. I listened and kept on listening until I heard the truck clatter around the corner. I listened even longer until I heard it drive away.

Nothing lasts. One day you get a smile face. The next day you're staring at a frown. This hardly seems fair. If the good times are just going to kiss you and move on, what can you count on?

While shooting baskets in the driveway that afternoon, I worked on putting two and two together. The subject under cranial review, of course, was Orwell.

Right after I had asked Orwell the question about how the horoscope messages were being customized, he had given the secret knock, something he had never done before.

It was possible that Orwell had learned the secret knock by listening to me give it day after day, and,
like a trained parrot, he had simply mimicked it. But my instincts told me that his response had a much bigger meaning.

I decided to confront him.

He was in his bathtub nonchalantly gnawing on the fat end of a carrot.

"I have to know," I told him. "If you're doing this, please tell me why. I'll look for your answer in tomorrow's newspaper."

Orwell rotated his ears in my direction, then alternately moved them back and forth, like upside-down legs walking through the air. I took this to mean, "OK."

The next morning I was up before sunrise and out on the lawn. In the hazy yellow light provided by the distant streetlamp, I opened the paper and flipped the pages toward the back, where the comics are. One by one I found the words for Scorpio. "Je" was the first word.
Probably initials,
I thought. Then came "vous."
Wait a minute,
I thought,
that's a French word.
It means "you." The next word was "explique." That was French, too, but I didn't know what it meant. Then, "pour" "que" "vous" "compreniez." The message was

JE VOUS EXPLIQUE POUR QUE VOUS COMPRENIEZ.

Holy smokes!
I thought.
What's going on here
? My entire horoscope was in French and I couldn't translate it!

"ORWELL!" I shouted. "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?"

Suddenly, up and down the street as far as I could see, light streamed out through bedroom windows as if connected by a single strand. Dogs began barking. Doors slammed. Across the street, a small child cried out for its mother, while its father called out to me, "PIPE DOWN!"

Ooops.

Thanks to a mysterious little bilingual rabbit, I had inadvertently awakened the whole neighborhood.

My school smells like broccoli cooking. The aroma hits you the moment you step inside. It's not exactly a bad smell, but if you were choosing smells to surround yourself with, it's not one you'd pick, either.

My school has smelled like this for a long time. I noticed it the first minute of the first day I set foot in the place. That afternoon, when my mother asked me, "How was school?" I told her that it was too big, lasted too long, and smelled like broccoli cooking.

"Oh, all junior high schools smell like that," she said. "Just wait until you get to high school! It smells like cauliflower!"

My French teacher is not really a French teacher.
She's really somebody's mother who volunteered to offer French instruction for a half-hour before the last bell two days a week. So I had to wait nearly all day inside that vegetable steamer that's my home away from home to get my horoscope message translated.

"Let me see," the French-speaking mother said, examining the phrase I had carefully copied from the newspaper.
^a
'Je vous explique pour que vous compreniez.'
Why, this is an exercise from next week's lesson. It means, 'I am explaining to you so you will understand.'"

Orwell! No doubt about it!

People always say a kid's life is easy. But I'm not so sure. What with teachers, parents, preachers, and now, it appeared, a rabbit hiding behind my horoscope like the great Oz behind the curtain, I had no shortage of people—and creatures—telling me what to do.

The first time Orwell sent me a message that might have made me rich, I had kept it to myself. The second time he did it, I nearly got him killed.

TRY FOUR NINETEEN TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO TWENTY-SEVEN TWELVE.

This is what my prophetic rabbit advised in my daily horoscope one bright February morning. Unlike the cryptic scores he'd sent me for the Super Bowl, I figured out this combination right away.

The lottery!

You'd think this one would have been a slam dunk. Something even a sixth-grader could have done. You know the number. You buy the ticket. You win the money.
Bingo!
You're rich and all your troubles are behind you. But maybe Orwell had something else up his sleeve.

I strapped Orwell into his stroller and the two of us set out for the Saturn-Mart as soon as school was out. In my pocket I carried a crisp dollar bill. The distance to my destination was little more than a mile, but as it turned out, I might as well have tried to travel to the moon.

It was, as I have said, a sunny day, and since the chilly morning, it had warmed up another twenty degrees or so, bringing out native and domesticated animals of every description.

Squirrels bounced across lawns, trying to recall last fall's hiding places. Geese descended from the skies to a sudden graceless landing on a nearby lake. Dogs paced behind fences like tigers in a zoo. A hidden, natural orchestra of caws and twitters and tweets accompanied my rabbit and me on fortune's journey down the sidewalk. Only the people, it seemed, chose to remain huddled indoors.

I was giddy with excitement. I was off to see the wizard! Or, more accurately, I had the wizard with me and was off to claim the loot. Whichever it was, it made me careless, and fortune does not favor the careless.

The first thing that happened was that I slid in some goose poop on the sidewalk. I am no expert in goose poop, but I can testify that it is extremely slippery stuff. As my feet flew out from under me, I grasped, as any falling person would do, for something to keep me aright. All that lay within my reach, of course, was Orwell's—formerly my sister's—stroller, but its fragile aluminum frame was meant to support a plastic doll, not a nearly grown rabbit and a full-size, crashing girl. As my feet flew up, so did it, and as it flew, so, too, did Orwell, his little plastic seat belt no more help than Scotch tape would have been.

I landed on the concrete, scraping my elbow and my knee. The crippled Orwell tumbled onto the grass, where, if events had somehow at that moment ceased, all might yet have been well.

But, no, one thing always leads to another.

I had seen the geese when they arrived. I had heard the dogs bark as we passed by. Nevertheless, when the big red Irish setter dashed across the lawn and scooped up Orwell into his drooling mouth, I was unprepared to act. Preoccupied with my injured joints that by now were seeping blood and sending sharp signals of pain to my inadequate brain, I had n't even time to rise to my feet before the copper-colored kidnapper was well out of sight.

"ORWELL!" I screamed, hobbling in the direction that the rabbit and the dog had gone. "Orwell, come back!"

Dogs are furtive creatures, more cautious than they are smart. If you give a dog a bone, he will take it a short distance away, where he thinks he is unseen, before beginning his methodical devouring of the prize. It was this dumb dog instinct, not my swift action, that spared Orwell's life this day.

I found the stupid setter sprawled behind a bush just around the corner of a house. As I burst into view breathing hard and breathing fire, he looked up with disappointment in his eyes, knowing that for now the jig was up.

"Drop him!" I commanded. "Or you die!"

The Orwell that I retrieved was a slobbery wet rag of a rabbit. His fur was matted. His ears stuck out in two directions. His heart was racing like a go-cart on a track. But, thankfully, nothing about his appearance indicated that he'd become an appetizer.

I felt as bad as it is possible for a kid to feel. This little rabbit trusted me with his life and I had let him down.

"C'mon, Orwell," I said glumly. "It's getting dark. Let's go home."

My mother cleaned my wounds, wrapped a big white bandage around my elbow, and put a patch on my knee. My father helped me dry Orwell and return him to his tub. That night, Orwell didn't touch his supper.

When my father asked me how it happened, I told him we had been on our way to buy a lottery ticket. I told him I'd had a hunch about the numbers that would win. I told him I was sure I was right.

"Oh, didn't you know?" he said. "Kids can't buy lottery tickets. It's gambling. For kids, gambling is against the law."

In a previous communication, my rabbit had advised

LEARN BY DOING THERE'S NO OTHER WAY.

According to Orwell, our mistakes are simply the price we must pay for our education.

But what a price it is! To learn to watch out for goose poop on the sidewalk cost me a whopping twenty-four million dollars! That's how much the winning lottery ticket would have paid, if anybody had held the winning lottery ticket, which, according to the next day's newspaper, they did not.

I could have been that winner.

Just as I'd expected, the numbers that Orwell sent me through my horoscope that morning were the very numbers that were drawn by lottery officials that evening. I shall never forget them. Four. Nineteen. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-seven. And twelve. These numbers will follow me for the rest of my days.

And to think, I came that close! What rotten luck!

I suspected that Orwell shared this view. Bearing an inconclusive half-light, half-dark moon, his latest message to me read

LUCK MARKET IS CLOSED
TRY AGAIN LATER.

The rabbit, it seemed, had had enough for now.

I tried to get my poor overwrought brain to change the channel. That's when I remembered that Valentine's Day was coming up soon.

Valentine's Day is a holiday whose purpose, like so many things, remains a mystery to me. At my old school, the kids all exchanged little printed messages of affection, usually with cartoons on them and frequently in rhyme, heartfelt stuff that they bought by the bagful. At my new school, it seems, it's more important to be cool. I was halfway thinking of giving a valentine to the tousle-haired boy who had spoken to me after class, but what if the entire episode turned out like the lottery?

How much disappointment can one kid stand?

There was no point in asking Orwell for advice. Clearly, he was off duty. I decided to ask my parents instead.

"Think low-key," my mother suggested after a moment of thought. "Seventh grade is an awkward time in a boy's life. He probably wants to be noticed, but he may not appreciate being noticed being noticed."

"Huh?" I said.

"Give him a valentine, but don't do it in front of other people," she explained.

"And make sure it's not too fancy," my father chimed in. "You've got to have deniability."

"Deniability?"

"You have to be able to claim that what you gave him was the same as you gave everybody else, even if you didn't give anybody else anything at all. Just in case what you gave him doesn't go over."

"Just in case," I repeated, nodding my head as if I understood.

And to think they call this a holiday!

No sailor would attempt to cross the sea without a compass. No farmer would plant his seeds without first consulting his almanac. No weatherman would set foot outside his door without consulting his gauges. But with Orwell off his feed, my horoscope messages were completely blank. I had entered the dark ages, condemned to face each day without a clue.

People say that life has its ups and downs, a popular point of view implying that if you just wait, bad luck, like bad weather, will eventually turn to good. But there's another less common homily that can also apply to fortune's erratic direction, namely, that things will go from bad to worse before the cycle repeats itself.

Outside my school are soccer fields that stretch from the parking lot to the subdivisions in the distance. Flat, treeless, and close-cropped like a lawn, the soccer fields are of little use for anything but band practice and that single, frantic imported sport for which they were created. No bird, no squirrel, no rabbit can inhabit this empty space.