The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester (3 page)

They found a coffee can full of mud.

They found a piece of PVC pipe with
PROPERTY OF MONROE COUNTY
stamped on the side.

And they found an old metal thing with a rusty bolt sticking out of it.

But none of those things seemed like something that would have fallen off the train and made the noise that Owen heard.

The thud.

The crack of wood.

The tumble, tumble, tumble sound.

“Are you sure the noise came from around here?” Travis said, tossing a handful of rocks into the pond.

“Sure, I’m sure,” Owen said.

“I mean, maybe it was farther up that way.” Travis nodded up the tracks. “Maybe it wasn’t near the pond.”

Owen shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Then you know what that means,” Stumpy said.

Owen and Travis looked at Stumpy and waited.

“That means it could be up yonder behind Viola’s house.” Stumpy set his mouth in a hard line and drew his eyebrows together.

A deep, dead, gloomy silence fell over them.

They stared at their shoes, their hands shoved in their pockets.

Suddenly Owen’s head shot up and he snapped his fingers. “Allergies!” he hollered, grinning.

Travis and Stumpy stared at Owen.

“Viola never goes back that far,” Owen said. “There’s weeds and stuff back there. She hates that. She sneezes and gets sick and all.” He shook his head. “Naw, Viola won’t be nosing around here.”

Owen looked up the tracks. He knew every inch of
them, how they curved slightly just beyond the pond, then continued on through the fields way in the back of Viola’s house. After that they went over the main highway, out of Carter and into Fort Valley.

Out of Fort Valley and into Byron.

Out of Byron and into Macon.

And on and on, clear on through the state of Georgia.

As the sun sank lower and the sky grew darker, the boys agreed to come back to the tracks and look some more, if they could ditch that nosy Viola.

Then they headed back toward Owen’s house to catch mosquitoes for Tooley.

“Here you go, Tooley,” Owen said. “These are yummy.” He opened the peanut butter jar and released three mosquitoes into the frog house in the closet. Then he spread a piece of newspaper over the top of the plastic tub to keep the mosquitoes from escaping.

He waited.

He listened, hoping to hear Tooley hopping around inside, catching the mosquitoes.

But it was quiet.

Owen lifted the corner of the newspaper and peeked inside. Tooley sat on the branch. The mosquitoes flitted around the plastic tub. One of them landed on the branch right beside Tooley, but the big green frog didn’t move.

Not even one little bit.

Owen sighed.

He reached into the tub and lifted the bullfrog out. He examined Tooley’s yellow throat, his webbed feet, his froggy face with the heart-shaped red spot between his eyes.

Owen got an icky feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Tooley
did
look a little sad.

Owen set the frog down on the floor beside his bed.

He waited.

Tooley didn’t jump.

Owen nudged him a little.

Tooley didn’t jump.

The first time Owen had set Tooley down on his bedroom floor, the frog had jumped clear across the room in one giant leap.

Owen sighed again.

He scooped Tooley up and put him back on the
branch in the frog house. He covered the frog house with the chicken wire and the brick, then went over to look out the window.

The moon cast a soft glow on the yard and the woods out back. The night was quiet for a few minutes, and then the faint clatter of the train drifted into the silence.

Louder, louder, louder.

Clatter, clatter, clatter.

The train roared by . . .

. . . and then was gone.

But this time, there was no thud.

No crack of wood.

No tumble, tumble, tumble sound.

Owen tried to imagine something in the bushes or the gully or the woods somewhere out there beside the tracks.

Something that had fallen off the train.

But what?

What had fallen off the train?

And where was it?

Owen was determined to find it.

But first, he and Travis and Stumpy were going to have to build that cage for Tooley. It would be the best
frog cage ever. It would be big enough for swimming and jumping. Half of it would be out of the water, with logs and leaves and squishy mud to sit in. The other half would be in the water, with room for Tooley to swim in big, big circles, kicking his froggy legs the livelong day. And a whole parade of water bugs and grasshoppers and crickets and flies would go right through the chicken-wire sides of the cage and Tooley would gobble them up.

And Tooley would not be sad.

Owen tucked the duct tape under his T-shirt, motioned for Pete and Leroy, and tried to open the screen door so it wouldn’t squeak.

He failed.

The screen door squeaked and Earlene’s harsh voice thundered from the front hallway.

“Where are you going?”

“Out yonder,” Owen called back.

Earlene stormed into the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron and shaking her ugly ole head. “You’re going nowhere till you sweep up every crumb of dirt and blade of grass you tracked in here last night. I don’t know why on God’s green earth you can’t take your shoes off like I’ve told you a million times and . . .”

She yammered on and on but all Owen heard was
blah, blah, blah
.

He let out a big, heaving sigh and trudged to the broom closet.

“What’s that under your shirt?” Earlene said, squinting over at him.

“Nothing.”

The duct tape fell out from under his shirt and rolled across the kitchen floor. Earlene snatched it up and shook it at Owen. “What’re you doing with this?”

“Nothing.”

Earlene’s face turned red as fire as she shoved the duct tape back into the junk drawer.

The whole time he was sweeping up dirt and grass, Earlene stood stiffly beside him, her fists jammed into her waist and the toe of her clunky shoe tap, tap, tapping on the floor while she yammered some more. Her voice swirled around the room like a horde of angry bees. Owen hummed to himself, very, very quietly so Earlene wouldn’t hear. His humming helped turn Earlene’s words into a steady buzz. But every now and then, a word tumbled out of the swirling buzz.

Frog.

Mud.

Disgusting.

Trouble.

Noise.

Owen hummed a little louder so he could shut out
all
of Earlene’s words and think.

He thought about meeting Travis and Stumpy out in the barn. He thought about putting all the chicken wire and tomato stakes and stuff into the wheelbarrow and taking it down to the pond. He thought about how to keep Viola from sticking her nosy nose into his business and ruining all his fun.

“Hurry up,” Owen called over his shoulder as he scurried down the path toward the pond, the hinges and baling wire banging and clanking as they bounced in the bottom of the wheelbarrow.

Travis and Stumpy huffed and puffed behind him, dragging a roll of chicken wire that left a trail in the pine needles scattered along the path.

When they got to the pond, they stopped, panting, wiping sweat off their brows.

“I was thinking we should attach the cage to the dock,” Owen said. “That way, we can reach it without getting in the water.”

Travis and Stumpy nodded in agreement.

So the boys dumped the stuff in the weeds beside the dock and set to work building a cage for Tooley.

But they didn’t have wire cutters to cut the wire.

They didn’t have a saw to cut the tomato stakes.

They didn’t have a plan.

“We need a plan,” Owen said.

“Yeah,” Travis said.

“Yeah,” Stumpy said.

Owen tossed the hinges into the wheelbarrow. “Let’s hide this stuff in the bushes and go to Stumpy’s and make a plan,” he said.

While Joleen Berkus glared over at them from her glider on the porch, Owen and Travis and Stumpy sat on the sidewalk in front of Stumpy’s house and made a plan for the frog cage on notebook paper.

First they made a list of the tools they would need, like wire cutters and a staple gun and a saw.

Then they drew a picture of the cage, showing the measurements for each of the sides and where the door would go.

They drew and wrote and drew and wrote and then . . .

. . . a short, fat shadow fell across the paper.

The boys looked up.

Viola stared down at them with her big fly-eyes through her thick glasses. “I know what you’re doing,” she said.

Owen looked back down at the notebook paper and pretended like he didn’t see her chubby white legs standing there beside him.

“Jarvis has a staple gun,” Viola said.

“Jarvis is a wormy-headed doofus,” Travis said.

Stumpy slapped his knee and snorted.

Jarvis was Viola’s brother, who sometimes went to high school and sometimes worked in a sign-painting shop over in Fort Valley.

He was pale and freckly and wore thick glasses that gave him fly-eyes, like Viola’s.

“You shouldn’t use hinges,” Viola said. “They’ll get too rusty.”

“Do you hear somebody talking?” Travis said to Owen.

“I don’t hear a thing,” Owen said. “How about you, Stumpy?”

“Not one dang little thing,” Stumpy said.

“Me neither,” Travis said. “Not even a bossy toad-brain
who thinks she knows everything there is to know about everything on the planet.”

The boys huddled over the drawings on the notebook paper on the sidewalk and didn’t look up.

Owen pretended like he wasn’t irritated as all get-out at Viola. And he pretended like it hadn’t suddenly occurred to him that Viola was right. Using hinges
wasn’t
a very good idea. Maybe it would be better to use the baling wire to attach the top of the cage so it could be opened and closed.

He gathered up the papers and motioned for Travis and Stumpy to follow him.

The three boys trotted off toward Owen’s grandfather’s house, leaving Viola behind.

The boys worked on the frog cage down by the pond all afternoon. Every now and then, Owen ran up to the house to check on Tooley, who sat motionless in the frog house under the back stairs. Every time Owen checked, Tooley was sitting in the same spot, on top of a soggy magnolia leaf.

Every time, Owen poked him with a finger.

Every time, Tooley blinked one long, slow blink, but didn’t move.

Owen tried to nudge Tooley so he would swim around the tub like he used to.

But Tooley wouldn’t swim.

So Owen raced back down to the pond to work on the cage some more.

If they could finish the cage today, they could put it in the water and Tooley could move right in and be happy.

And then . . .

. . . first thing tomorrow morning, he could meet Travis and Stumpy down by the tracks and they could look for the thing that had fallen off the train.

Owen stepped back and admired the cage.

It was perfect.

The boys had rolled out a piece of chicken wire and bent it into a large rectangle shape. Then they used the wire cutters that Travis had taken from his father’s toolbox to cut two pieces of chicken wire, for the top and bottom of the cage. Since they didn’t have a staple gun (and no way were they going to borrow one from Viola’s fly-eyed brother, Jarvis), they used baling wire to attach a tomato stake to each of the four corners.

Next, they attached the bottom securely all around the edges. They attached the top loosely on one end so that they could lift it up and down, open and closed. They made a latch out of bent wire to hold the top closed.

They tested it a few times, opening and closing the top. Hooking and unhooking the latch.

Owen had never seen a finer cage.

Tooley was going to love it.

“Tooley’s going to love it,” Owen said.

Travis and Stumpy nodded.

“Now all we have to do is put it in the water,” Owen said, and walked out onto the rickety dock and inspected the pond. He squinted into the murky water. “I wonder how deep it is here,” he said.

Stumpy tossed a rock into the pond.

Ploink.

It disappeared out of sight.

Owen pulled a tomato stake out of the wheelbarrow. He walked to the edge of the dock and put the stake into the water until he felt the squishy mud on the bottom of the pond. He inched along the edge of the dock, poking the stake into the water until he could no longer feel the bottom.

“This is where it starts getting deeper,” he said. “We should put the cage here.”

He poked the stick into the pond some more, stirring up the muddy bottom. “One end can be in the
shallow part so Tooley can get out of the water and one end can be in the deeper part so he can swim around.”

So the boys sat on the dock and planned how they would position the cage in the pond. They debated which side of the dock was best and how deep the cage should be in the water and whether or not they should attach it to the dock with wire.

But before they could start carrying out their plans, a voice interrupted the still summer air.

A dreaded voice.

Viola’s voice.

“O-o-o-o-o-o-wen!”

Owen looked at Travis and Travis looked at Stumpy and Stumpy looked at Owen.

“Dang!” Owen said.

“What’s
she
want?” Travis said.

“Let’s hide!” Stumpy said.

“O-o-o-o-o-o-wen!”
Viola’s voice drifted through the trees from up at Owen’s house.

“We better get up there and see what she wants or she’s liable to come down here,” Owen said.

“Nah,” Travis said. “She hates it here.”

But Owen wasn’t taking any chances. “Let’s go,” he said.

The boys raced up the path through the woods. When they got to Owen’s backyard, Viola was sitting under the stairs beside the frog house.

“What are
you
doing here?” Owen said.

“Earlene’s looking for you.” She pushed at her glasses and peered into the plastic tub beside her. “Your frog looks terrible,” she said.