The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester (4 page)

“Go away,” Owen said.

“Yeah, go away,” Travis said.

Stumpy kicked at the dry red dirt of the yard, sending dust and pebbles in Viola’s direction.

Viola stood up and wiped dirt off her shorts. “Is that water from the pond?” she said, pointing at the tub where Tooley sat, his big yellow eyes staring up out of the dirty water.

Owen pushed his irritation down, down, down, trying hard not to let it come busting out like it wanted to. “Why is Earlene looking for me?” he said.

“You should put water from the pond in there.” Viola brushed past the boys and skipped toward the hedge. Then she turned around and said, “Earlene knows you took the wheelbarrow out of the barn and you left
the shed door open and who in the world told you you could have that chicken wire?”

Then she knelt down and crawled through the hole in the hedge, disappearing into her own backyard.

“Let’s go back and put the cage in the pond,” Owen said.

But just as the boys reached the edge of the yard, thunder rumbled. Rain began to fall in big, slow drops.

Plunk.

Plunk.

Plunk.

And then the sky turned dark, lightning flashed, and the rain poured down, drenching the boys and sending them scurrying for shelter.

That night at supper, Owen told his parents about the frog cage while Earlene fumed by the stove.

His father thought it was a great idea.

His mother worried that the boys would fall in the pond.

Earlene mumbled about the chicken wire belonging to his grandfather and that mangy stray cat getting in the shed when Owen left the door open.

After supper, Owen took Tooley up to his bedroom and set him in the middle of the bed.

Tooley did a little half jump, then settled down in the folds of the quilted bedspread.

Owen inspected Tooley’s froggy skin.

He rubbed his finger along Tooley’s yellow throat.

He examined Tooley’s big webbed feet.

He lifted Tooley and peered into his eyes.

Then he put the bullfrog into the tub in the closet and sat on the bed and worried.

Maybe Viola was right.

Maybe he should have used water from the pond in the tub instead of water from the hose.

Owen sat still and listened. The rain pattered against the window. Thunder rumbled in the distance. But inside the bedroom, it was quiet.

Owen sighed.

When he had first brought Tooley home, the frog had croaked all night long. That deep
r-u-u-u-m-m-m
sound that bullfrogs make.

But now he was quiet.

A flash of lightning lit up Owen’s room. The rain beat harder against the window.

Tomorrow, Owen thought . . .

Tomorrow he had to do two things:

1. Get the frog cage into the pond so Tooley could move in and be happy.
   
2. Find the thing that had fallen off the train.
   

“Y’all get out of my yard!” Joleen Berkus hollered through the screen door.

Owen cupped his hand over a grasshopper in the weeds and glared at her. Anybody who would tear down a perfectly good fort was deserving of a glare. Owen wondered what she had done with that trapdoor he had sawed into the wooden floor of his old bedroom or the ladder he and Travis and Stumpy had nailed to the back of the garage so they could climb up onto the roof.

“I said get out of my yard!” Joleen stormed out onto the porch and flapped a dish towel at the boys.

Travis yanked a small green cantaloupe off a tangled vine beside the birdbath and tossed it toward the porch. It landed on the walkway with a
thwump
.

Before Joleen could stomp down the steps, the boys
were clear across the street and around back of Stumpy’s house, laughing so hard they could barely catch their breath. Then they jumped on their bikes and raced over to Owen’s house.

As Owen pedaled, clutching a jar of grasshoppers in one hand, his stomach flipped and flopped with excitement. Today was the day they were going to put the cage in the pond.

They had made all kinds of plans for Tooley’s new house. It would be attached to the side of the dock, one end in the shallow water and one end in the deeper water. There would be a log to sit on and rocks to hunker down beside and leaves to sleep on.

Water bugs and crickets and flies could go right through the chicken wire so Tooley would always have something tasty to snack on.

And every once in a while, the boys could open the top of the cage and take Tooley out and play with him.

It would be great.

“Let’s go on down to the dock and start cutting the baling wire,” Owen said after dropping two grasshoppers into the tub for Tooley.

He retrieved the baling wire and wire cutters from the shed, put them in a plastic grocery bag, and carefully
closed the door behind him so Earlene wouldn’t have anything to yammer about. Then he started across the yard with Travis and Stumpy behind him. But just as they got to the edge of the woods, Viola crawled through the hedge and said, “You should catch crawfish.”

Owen sighed and rolled his eyes at Travis and Stumpy.

“Be quiet,” Travis said.

“Yeah, be quiet,” Stumpy said.

Viola eyed the grocery bag in Owen’s hand.

“What’s that?” she said.

“Nothing.” Owen jiggled the bag at Viola. “Your mother’s calling you,” he said.

“Bullfrogs love crawfish,” Viola said, pushing at her glasses. “I read it in the encyclopedia at my cousin’s house.”

Crawfish?

Really?

There were tons of crawfish in the creek beside Travis’s house. Owen had caught about a million of them last summer. The boys had even had crawfish races and made trophies for the winners.

“You think you know everything, but you don’t,” Travis said.

“I know that bullfrogs don’t want names and they don’t want to live in cages and they love to eat crawfish.” Viola lunged for the grocery bag in Owen’s hand, but he yanked it away before she could grab it.

“Go away,
Vi-o-la
!” Owen hollered. Then he motioned for Travis and Stumpy to follow him and started down the path through the woods. After a few feet, he whirled around to see if Viola was following them.

She wasn’t.

She was standing at the edge of the woods with that smug look on her smug face and sending irritation zipping down the path full steam ahead.

“She’s gonna follow us,” Stumpy said.

“Naw,” Owen said as he stomped down the path, swinging the grocery bag. “When she goes in the woods, she gets wheezy and itchy. Besides, she hates the pond. There’s too many gnats and too much mud and poison oak and all.”

Owen hoped he was right.

But with a girl like Viola, you never knew.

“There!” Owen stood up and grinned down at the cage.

The perfect cage.

The cage where Tooley would live and be happy.

“Let’s go get him!” he said, and raced up the path, through the woods, into the yard, and over to the back steps to the tub where Tooley sat, blinking up at the summer sky.

Pete and Leroy leaped off the porch, tails wagging, and trotted over to join the fun.

Owen lifted Tooley out of the tub.

The back door opened and Earlene stepped out of the house and glared down at him. Her eyes darted from him to Tooley to Travis to Stumpy and then to him again.

“You’re not going back yonder to those train tracks, are you?” she said.

“No, ma’am.”

She glared some more.

“You’re not going out on that rotten ole dock, are you?”

“We’re taking Tooley down to the pond.” Owen held Tooley up so his froggy legs dangled.

Owen was a master of evasion.

He could evade a question better than anybody he knew.

But Earlene was persistent.

“You’re not going out on that rotten ole dock, are you?” she asked again.

Owen’s mind raced. He was thinking that maybe he needed to sharpen his evasion skills.

“We put the cage in the pond for Tooley,” he said.

“You listen to me, Owen Jester,” Earlene said. “I’m in no mood to be fishing three drowned boys out of that snake-infested pond.”

Owen heard Travis and Stumpy shuffling in the dirt behind him.

Travis and Stumpy were scared of Earlene. They always left all of the evading to Owen.

“Yes, ma’am,” Owen said, because what else could he say?

Earlene made a
hmmpf
noise and pressed her lips together in a thin, hard line.

Owen waited.

Earlene went back in the house, letting the screen door slam shut behind her.

Owen and Travis and Stumpy and Pete and Leroy raced to the pond with Tooley.

Owen lay on his stomach on the dock and peered into the murky water. Tooley sat on the bottom of the pond inside the perfect cage.

Owen nudged him gently with a stick. Tooley swam to the other side of the cage and nestled back down into the squishy mud.

“He likes it!” Owen grinned up at Travis and Stumpy.

But inside Owen, something was niggling at him.

A teeny tiny niggle.

Barely noticeable.

But a niggle, nonetheless.

The niggle was caused by a thought.

The thought was this: Maybe, just
maybe
, Tooley should not be in that perfect cage.

Maybe he should be swimming freely around Graham Pond. Gliding gracefully through the water. Floating among the rotting oak leaves that had settled on the surface. Sunning lazily on the moss-covered logs along the edges.

Instead of in a cage. (Even if the cage was perfect.)

Owen pushed the niggle away.

Then he tossed the stick into the pond and said, “Now we can go look for the thing that fell off the train.”

Travis and Stumpy let out a whoop.

The three boys raced around the pond toward the train tracks.

“What’s that?” Travis said, pointing to a clump of weeds beside the tracks.

Something shiny and round was nestled in among the prickery vines.

Owen ran over and examined it. “A hubcap. Shoot!” he said, kicking at the weeds.

The boys walked glumly along the side of the tracks. Every now and then, one of them spotted something and would point and holler and they’d all race over to examine it. But it was never anything that seemed like
it might have fallen off the train and made the noise that Owen had heard.

The thud.

The crack of wood.

The tumble, tumble, tumble sound.

“Let’s go to my house and get lunch,” Stumpy said.

So the boys headed back up the path through the woods. But they hadn’t gotten far when Owen stopped.

He snapped his fingers.

“Wait a minute!” he said.

Travis and Stumpy waited.

“Tumble, tumble, tumble,” Owen said.

Travis and Stumpy waited some more.

“If something’s tumbling, that means it’s, like, rolling,” Owen said.

Travis and Stumpy waited some more.

“So that means that whatever was tumbling was probably going downhill, right?”

Travis and Stumpy looked at each other.

“Yeah,” they both said.

“So?” Travis said.

“So maybe whatever fell off the train isn’t up by the tracks where we’ve been looking, but more downhill from the tracks, like in the bushes and stuff,” Owen said.

Travis and Stumpy nodded and grinned and high-fived Owen and they all raced back to the tracks to search the bottom of the rocky, red-dirt slopes that ran along the sides.

They found a bicycle wheel with broken spokes.

They found a bullet-riddled stop sign.

They found the bent-up frame of an aluminum lawn chair.

They found a mildewed, mud-covered sofa cushion.

They found a grocery cart with two missing wheels.

They found cinder blocks and broken bottles and rusty cans.

“I’m sick of this,” Travis said.

“Yeah,” Stumpy said. “Me, too.”

Owen’s disappointment swirled around inside him and then settled with a heavy thunk in the pit of his stomach.

“Not me,” he lied.

“I’m going home,” Travis said.

“Me, too,” Stumpy said.

“Not me.” Owen jammed his hands into his pockets and strolled off, studying the ground, peering into the weeds and bushes, kicking at clods of dirt, pretending like he didn’t care that Travis and Stumpy were quitters.

He glanced over his shoulder to see the two boys trotting up the tracks toward the path in the woods.

“Quitters,” he muttered under his breath.

Owen climbed back up the slope and scanned the bottom of the ravine on the other side of the tracks.

It wasn’t nearly as much fun searching without Travis and Stumpy.

But Owen was not a quitter.

While he searched, he thought about Tooley, and the niggle he had had earlier that day came back. The more he thought, the bigger the niggle got. It grew and grew until it became a tangled-up mass of worry. And in the center of the tangled-up mass was the biggest worry of all:

Maybe Tooley really
was
sad.

And then, just as Owen’s stomach was beginning to ache, something caught his attention.

Something big.

Something red.

Down among the tangled bushes and scrub pines at the bottom of the ravine beside the tracks.

Owen hurried down the slope, slipping and sliding on the loose dirt and rocks, pushing through clumps of brush and weeds.

And then he stopped.

He stood in gape-mouthed wonder.

“Whoa!” he said out loud.

The tangle of niggling worry in his stomach disappeared.

Poof!

Because lying there before him was the thing that had fallen off the train.

Owen was sure of it.

Owen scrambled through the thick brush, ducking under low-hanging branches and climbing over rotting logs. Prickers scratched his legs and snagged his clothes as he made his way toward the thing.

The thing that had fallen off the train.

The thing that had made the
thud
.

It was big and red and made of metal.

But what was it?

Next to it, jammed between two scraggly oak trees, was part of an enormous wooden crate. Scattered here and there among the brush and weeds surrounding it were pieces of wood, splintered and broken.