The Ears of Louis (3 page)

“In view of our conversation the other day,” Mrs. Beeble said, “I know you won't take umbrage when I say the minute I saw it, it reminded me of you.”

She tied a long piece of string through the loop at the top of the talisman and slipped it over Louis' head.

“This is a good luck charm,” Mrs. Beeble said. “It will have a powerful influence on you.”

“It will?” Louis looked down at his amulet, which hung almost to his bellybutton.

“We'll have to take a reef in that sail,” Mrs. Beeble said firmly. She cut a piece off the string and retied it around his neck.

Louis got a lump in his throat, just thinking about what they'd say when they saw him wearing a necklace.

“Tuck it inside your shirt,” she told him. “That way, it's a secret, yours and mine. Don't expect miracles, though. You've got to believe in its powers but miracles are harder. You have to work for them. This will ward off evil, if you let it.” She shuffled the cards. “Got time for a hand or two?” she said.

“Sure.” Louis followed Mrs. Beeble into the kitchen. “Do you wear an amulet?” he asked.

“There's been a lot of water over the dam since the time when a good luck charm would do me any good,” she said. “No sense crying over spilt milk, I always say. But when I was young, you wouldn't catch me without one.” Rapidly, she dealt the cards.

“Oh, ho ho,” she chortled as she picked up her hand. “You got that lucky charm just in time. You're going to need it today.”

Mrs. Beeble won the first hand, then Louis won three in a row. He had a big pile of pink and white mints in front of him. She had only four.

“First bet!” Louis cried. It was his turn to deal. He had all hearts.

“From now on,” Mrs. Beeble said glumly after Louis had won still another hand, “you're going to have to take that off and put it on the table. That way, you don't have the advantage.”

Absent-mindedly, Mrs. Beeble popped two pink mints in her mouth.

Louis tapped her on the arm.

“I won that last hand,” he said.

“You don't have to get sore about it,” Mrs. Beeble said. “Anyway, it's.…”

“Yeah, I know. Time for supper.”

“How'd you know?” Mrs. Beeble asked.

Louis was almost home before he remembered his manners. He ran back to thank Mrs. Beeble again for his amulet. She was sitting at the kitchen table playing solitaire. Her face was old and sad and looked different from the way it looked when she and Louis played poker. He thought of knocking on the door and calling out. Then he changed his mind. Somehow, he didn't think she'd want anyone looking at her when she was like that. He tiptoed down the steps and went home.

The light was on in the kitchen so Louis pressed his nose against the window and peered in, pretending he was a lonely traveler crossing the moors, looking for a place to lay his head. He saw his mother talking on the telephone and spooning cereal into his baby sister's mouth. Tom was watching TV and sucking his thumb.

Louis howled like a werewolf. No one paid any attention except Wilma, who got up and began pacing back and forth, back and forth. Wilma, Louis' father said, was a dog with a persecution complex. She always thought somebody or something was out to get her. Wilma was very tense and nervous at times. The way she was pacing, Louis knew this was one of those times.

He hung up his hat and jacket and watched TV. Click, click, Tom's thumb said against the roof of his mouth. Tom had a giant callous where his teeth hit his thumb every time he put it in his mouth. The callous was shiny and hard and yellow and seemed almost to have a life of its own. As far as Louis was concerned, that callous was the only good thing about thumb sucking. It would be kind of neat to have a callous like that.

“You want to go out, Wilma?” Louis said. Wilma smelled bad. That meant she'd been in somebody's garbage can. She turned her big brown eyes on Louis, asking for sympathy. Click, click, her toenails beat a tattoo on the floor.

Tom took his thumb out of his mouth.

“I'm going to be a hero when I grow up,” he said.

“Har de har har,” Louis said, very scornful. “Whoever heard of a hero who sucks his thumb? Some hero you'll make.”

“Heroes never die,” Tom said.

“John Wayne dies,” Louis said.

“No he doesn't.” Tom put his thumb back in his mouth.

“I bet he got killed at least four times,” Louis said.

Tom shook his head.

Louis thought hard. He couldn't remember when John Wayne got killed. His mind was like a big flat stretch of desert with no footprints on it.

The cartoon ended and a commercial came on about a lady who called up her friend from the drug store because she didn't know what to do about occasional irregularity.

“Try prunes!” Louis shouted, and began to feel better.

6

“You smell like Wilma when she gets in the neighbors' garbage cans,” Louis told Matthew next day.

“I caught a skunk in my Havaheart trap,” Matthew said, “and when I let him out, he sprayed me. He was scared.” Matthew made excuses for the skunk. “My mother gave me a bath in tomato juice. It's supposed to kill the smell but I guess it didn't do a very good job.” Matthew was pink around the edges. His hair was pink too.

“She didn't want me home today. She said of all days I had to get sprayed by a skunk. She's having her bridge club over so she poured a giant can of tomato juice over me and sent me to school.”

Calvin Leffert stood up and said in a loud voice, “I smell skunk.” Maybe Calvin wasn't too smart but there wasn't anything wrong with his nose.

“Sit down, Calvin,” Miss Carmichael said. She opened the door to the supply closet and looked around. Then she went to the coat room and peered inside a few jackets and an old sneaker somebody had left a long time ago.

“Whoever is responsible for that odor please come forward,” Miss Carmichael said.

Louis drew a picture of a giant genie coming out of a tiny bottle. Amy Adams minced up to Miss Carmichael's desk. “I brought in some more of my poems for the newspaper,” Amy said.

Louis wondered what would happen if, all of a sudden, he punched Amy in the nose.

“I know skunk when I smell skunk,” Calvin said even louder. “Some smart aleck caught it good.”

“If any one of you is hiding an animal in here, I shall have to send that person to Mr. Anderson's office. He will deal with the matter.”

“It's me, Miss Carmichael,” Matthew said, standing up, looking round and pink and sad. “I got sprayed by a skunk before I came to school when I let him out of my Havaheart trap and my mother poured a can of tomato juice over me but it didn't do any good.”

Amy put her hand over her mouth and giggled.

Calvin pounded his fist on his forehead. “I knew it,” he shouted. “I knew it.”

Mr. Anderson came into the room unannounced.

“Well, now,” he said, smiling and stroking his mustache, “how is the fifth grade getting on today?”

“Oh dear,” Miss Carmichael said, putting a handkerchief over her nose. “We seem to be having a little problem. One of our students was sprayed by a skunk and there is a rather strong odor …”

Mr. Anderson backed slowly out the door. “I do detect something,” he said. “Pardon me.…” And he disappeared as suddenly as he'd come.

“I'll call your mother, Matthew, and ask her to come get you,” Miss Carmichael said.

“She's having her bridge club and she's making sandwiches and my father took the car to the station so she can't come get me,” Matthew said.

“Well then,” Miss Carmichael gave an exasperated sigh, “I'll give you some work to take out in the hall. You can sit on the bench and do it there.”

When the lunch bell rang, Louis and John and Matthew sat together in a corner of the lunchroom. “I don't care how bad you smell,” Louis said.

John didn't say anything. He held his nose with his left hand and ate his sandwich with his right.

“I'm glad I have two friends anyway,” Matthew said dolefully. “How's about trading half a peanut butter and bacon for half whatever you've got?”

“Hey kid,” the sixth grader conducting the survey said to Louis, “you ready with an answer for me yet? Do you hear better with those huge ears than these two creeps,” he pointed at Matthew and John, “with their tiny ones?”

Under his red turtleneck, Louis felt the weight of his amulet and saw the bulge it made in the middle of his chest. He hadn't told anyone at school, not even Matthew and John, about Mrs. Beeble's present.

Get to work, Louis said to his charm. Ward off this evil.

“This is a very important survey I'm conducting. I don't want to have to get tough,” the kid said. “Cough up an answer.”

Louis held his lunch bag to his mouth and coughed elaborately into it. Then he handed the bag to the boy and said, “Look inside and you'll find it.”

“Wise guy,” the kid said disgustedly. He threw the empty bag onto the floor and walked away.

“Nice work,” John said, still holding his nose. He sounded as if he had a terrible cold. “I'm proud of you, Louis. A big guy like that might've let you have it right between the eyes. What's he mean anyway? Your ears aren't huge, they're only big. I remember when you first were my friend in second grade, in Miss Johnson's class, I thought you had giant-sized ears but then, after a while I didn't even think about your ears at all.”

Louis smiled. He liked that.

The three of them sat chewing thoughtfully.

“I think what I'll do next time,” Matthew said, peering between the slices of bread to make sure he wasn't eating anything he didn't like, “is, I'll only use old doughnuts for bait.”

“What'd you use to catch the skunk?” Louis asked.

“Fish heads. I went to the fish market and the guy was just putting out the garbage and I found a whole mess of fish heads. Skunks love fish heads.”

“How'd you know that?” Louis asked.

“My grandmother, she has about ten cats and she told me skunks were always jumping into her garbage and dragging out the empty cat food cans,” Matthew said. “It figures if they like cat food, they'd like fish heads, right?”

John nodded vigorously.

Louis said, “Cat food's expensive and fish heads are free. I bet you thought of that too.”

Matthew smiled. “I'm thinking every minute,” he said.

“No wonder you smell like Wilma,” Louis said. He put on his football helmet and jogged out to the playground. A game was already in progress. Louis ran back and forth on the sidelines.

“Hey, pass it here. Let's have that ball. Toss it to me,” they shouted. Once somebody made a touchdown. The cheers were deafening. Louis shouted as hard as anyone on the team. He tried to imagine what it would be like to have all those people cheering for him.

“Yeah, Louis. Yeah, Louis,” they would shout. They'd clap him on the back, arms would go around his shoulders, and they'd hoist him up in the air and carry him off the field in triumph.

“Hey there, Elephant Ears!” The familiar words brought Louis back to the world he lived in. “How come you're not out in Disneyland? They sure could use you out there, I bet.” It was a friend of Ernie's, a boy with little eyes set close to his nose.

This time Louis couldn't think of a single comeback. When the bell rang, he loped back into his room, pretending he hadn't heard.

7

On Saturday Louis helped his father rake leaves for a while. Not for very long. He'd rake a huge pile, then jump smack in the middle and lie still, looking at the sky, thinking about things.

“Listen, Louis,” his father finally said. “I appreciate your efforts on my behalf but in the long run I think I can finish up faster by myself.”

Louis hopped up and said “O.K., Dad.” He'd seen a sign for a garage sale yesterday on his way home from school. There was nothing Louis liked better than a garage sale. They were right up his alley. They were full of things like old bicycles, old ice skates, a table that might be perfect for keeping his rock collection on or an old book with “To Ezra, with love from Grandmother, Christmas, 1906” written in it in a fine, spidery handwriting. Probably Ezra would much rather have had a train or a stuffed snake or something really good. But Louis had noticed grandmothers liked to give kids books. They thought books improved kids' minds. Louis wasn't absolutely sure this was always true.

He followed the signs until he came to a house badly in need of paint. There were several card tables set up in the front yard. Louis looked around but he couldn't see any garage.

“Hey there, sonny,” said an old man guarding the merchandise.

“How come you call it a garage sale when there's no garage?” Louis asked.

The old man said, “What's the use of having a garage when we don't have any car?”

Louis didn't have any answer to that.

“You're just in time for bargains,” the old man said, winking. “Business isn't all that good. Just had a lady with the biggest shopping bag this side of Texas. You got to watch them with the shopping bags. In the flick of an eye they can load up and make off without paying a cent if you don't keep a close eye out.”

Louis was glad he didn't have a shopping bag with him. A plastic owl (25¢), a set of chipped mugs that said World's Fair, 1939 (50¢), and an old pipe (30¢) were all desirable items. Louis had learned to take his time choosing. It didn't pay to rush into buying anything. A couple of spotted ties (25¢ each) might do for Christmas presents for his father.

The old man looked carefully over his shoulder toward the house. “You can have your pick of the lot for less than they're marked,” he whispered, although there was no one but him and Louis to hear. “She just went inside to catch one of those giveaway shows on TV. She doesn't like to miss one.”