The Painted Ponies of Partequineus and The Summer of the Kittens (9 page)

I sit up there a lot, in the big old elm that's been there for maybe a couple hundred years. Dad hammered some boards into the trunk like a ladder so I could climb up. That was back when he still paid any attention to me. It's really huge, and about four metres off the ground there's this really thick branch, almost half as big as the trunk, that curves out before it goes up at a steep angle and makes a kind of seat like a horse's saddle, and I like to sit up there and watch what's happening. Except that nothing much ever does.

Anyway, the university had its graduation ceremonies over the weekend. My Dad's a professor. Every year he puts on his old black robe and that stupid square hat with the tassel and some sort of cape made of maroon velvet with a blue and white silk lining. He calls it a
hood
, only he doesn't wear it on his head, so I don't know why it's called that. If he
did
put it over his head, maybe it would cover up that dumb-looking hat. Then they all line up in front of the gym, him and all the other professors and the students who are graduating, and when somebody tells them to, they all walk across Main Street and go up the road to University Hall. You ever see that movie,
March of the Penguins
?

So with graduation over (“It's not
graduation
,” Dad keeps telling me, “it's
Convocation!
”), a whole bunch of the students clear out of the dormitories and apartments and go wherever it is they go during the summer. But since I don't live on a main road, they don't often come by here on their way home.

Only this time three of them did, in an old, beat-up car that was white with one faded red fender that must have been put on after some accident, and brown rust all around the wheels. There was a guy and two girls, and they had so many boxes and suitcases in the hatchback that they had it tied part way open, and some other stuff piled on the roof. Oh yeah, and a mountain bike mounted on the bumper. The car had an Ontario license plate. They turned off onto our street about three-thirty in the afternoon and just sort of coasted along as if they were looking for something.

Jimmy and I had been talking like we usually do after school, me in the tree and him down there in his wheelchair. He's my best friend, and I guess I'm his. Jimmy doesn't have many friends, 'cause he can't do stuff like the other kids do, only he never seems to mind. At least if he does, he doesn't let it show, 'cause he's always smiling like he's really happy. Mom says the sun follows Jimmy around like he owns it.

We argue a lot, but we never fight. I like him.

I was watching Mr. Harding, the old man who lives next door, behind the big fence that Jimmy can't see over, but I can from the tree. He was hunched over kind of double in a scratched-up old rocking chair on his front porch with his elbows on his knees, just sort of staring out at the woods across the street.

“He's there again,” I told Jimmy, as softly as I could so Mr. Harding wouldn't hear me talking about him.

“What's he doing?” Jimmy asked. Jimmy's curious about everything and everybody, only his world isn't as big as mine, so sometimes I have to be his eyes. 

“Just sitting,” I said, “like he does most days.”

Mr. Harding doesn't like kids. Dad says he doesn't like anybody, even himself. Especially himself. One day I accidentally rode my bike across one corner of his lawn when he was sitting out there, and he yelled at me something awful. I don't know what he was so upset about, his crumby old grass is mostly weeds anyway, but he called my Mom about it. She told me just to stay away from him, that he was an unhappy old man and there wasn't anything anybody could do to change that.

“I wonder what he's thinking about,” Jimmy said. He always seems to be super curious about Mr. Harding, because the man sits around so much, just like Jimmy, even though he doesn't have to, 'cause he can still walk, well, sort of limp I guess. He's got to be at least a hundred, don't you think? Jimmy figured that anyone who
could
walk ought to do it as much as possible.

“He's probably wishing it would rain or something,” I said. “That way we'd all be sad like him.”

“You think maybe he'd like that? For everybody to be as miserable as he is?”

“I'm just kidding. Who knows what he thinks about? He doesn't talk to anybody, and no one ever comes to visit him.”

“He must be lonely,” Jimmy said.

Jimmy knows a lot about loneliness, I guess.

“He probably likes it that way,” I said. “Otherwise he'd make some effort to get along with people, instead of being so disagreeable all the time.” I was tired of the topic. “How's the new airplane coming?”

“Almost finished. I just have to hook up the battery and the servos. Dad's gonna take me out to the field on Saturday to try it out. Wanna come?”

“Sure.”

Jimmy builds model airplanes. They're neat, with little engines that sound like miniature chain saws, and they go really fast. He's got this radio thing with a couple of joysticks on it and lots of switches, and he sits in his wheelchair and makes the planes take off and land and do loops and all kinds of things. He's pretty good at it.

Jimmy says he's going to fly some day. Himself, I mean, not just his models. He says they can put hand controls in airplanes, so it doesn't matter that he can't use his legs because of his spina bifida that he was born with. He says that the airplane will be his elm tree, and let him see the whole world.

He was describing how his new plane looked, blue and silver with flaps and a low wing and almost no dihedral, whatever that is, so it would go really fast and do lots of tricks, and a whole lot of other stuff I didn't really understand, when the car with the college kids drove past. Jimmy waved, and one of the girls, the one sitting in the back seat, saw him and smiled and waved back.

Most people will wave and smile at a cripple if they don't have to stop and say anything.

They drove past Mr. Harding's house, which is the last one on our street before the railroad tracks. On the other side of the tracks, the road turns to gravel and goes out over the old dykes that the Acadians built to keep the Bay of Fundy from washing away their crops a few hundred years ago. Only now there's a gate across the road and a big
No Trespassing
sign.

“Where are they going?” Jimmy said. “The gate's always locked, isn't it?”

The car coasted across the tracks and up to the gate and the guy who was driving put on the brakes. The right hand stop light was burned out, and blue smoke came out of the tail pipe. He got out and looked at the big chain and padlock that somebody put on the gate, and then got back in the car.

“I bet I know what they're up to,” I said. “Just watch.”

The car sat there for a few minutes. I saw the girl in the back turn around and look toward Jimmy. I guess she thought he was all by himself, since she couldn't see me way up in the tree. She looked kind of nervous, like she didn't want anybody to see what they were going to do. I wondered if she even saw Mr. Harding on his porch.

Then the car backed up and turned around and started toward us again, close to the curb on the other side. It stopped beside the vacant lot.  I was pretty sure what would happen next. It's just a big empty lot, it gets all overgrown with weeds every spring, and there's always somebody dumping trash there for somebody else like my Dad to have to cart away. The dumb college kids are the worst. They clean out their apartments at the end of the term and have a bunch of trash to get rid of, so they sneak around and dump it on any vacant lot they can find.

I could see them through the windshield pretty good. The two in the front seat, the guy and the other girl, were talking - arguing I guess, from the way they were going at it - and the guy was pointing at the vacant lot. He was talking fast, too soft for us to hear because of their noisy engine, even though the car windows were open, and the girl kept shaking her head.  He kind of shrugged and folded his arms in front of him, like
I'm not driving until you do what I want.

They just sat there for a few minutes, and then I saw Mr. Harding get up from his chair and climb down off his porch. He hobbled down the front path toward the street, past the end of the fence so Jimmy could see him too. I think he was mad, although it's hard to tell with Mr. Harding, 'cause his eyes are always all dark and angry, like the mean old crows that sometimes land on Mom's bird feeder and spill sunflower seeds all over the lawn. He reached the curb and stopped, his hands on his hips and his chin sort of thrust forward like the figurehead on a pirate ship.

The guy behind the wheel looked at him and then turned toward the girl again. I heard her say, much louder than before, “All
right!
” She opened the door and reached down on the floor in front of her. I couldn't see what she did next, but as soon as she shut the door again, the guy put the car in gear and took off really fast. They disappeared around the corner, going in the direction of the highway.

“What was that all about?” Jimmy said.

“I thought they were gonna dump some garbage,” I said, “but I guess they changed their minds when they saw Mr. Harding watching them.”

Mr. Harding was staring after the car.  Then he turned around and started to walk back up to his porch, but suddenly he stopped, as if something across the street had caught his eye.

“Son of a (you know, Diary)!” he said, really loud. He took three little steps back toward the street - it always bothered me to watch him walk, as if his legs hurt him real bad - and glared at the vacant lot. “Damned college kids.”

Sorry for the swear word, Diary, but that's what he said.

I couldn't see what he was so angry about. Jimmy pushed on the rims on his wheels and rolled himself forward, and Mr. Harding turned and attacked him with his eyes,
dared
him to come any closer. Jimmy eased up, and that was when I saw a cat sticking its head out from among the weeds at the edge of the vacant lot. It sort of slinked onto the sidewalk, low to the ground and with its ears bent back.

It was an ordinary tabby, striped grey and black with a little bit of white on its chest, and a faint kind of orange tinge to the tips of its long fur, and it looked like it was somebody's pet, not scruffy like a stray or skinny like cats get when all they have to eat is whatever they can catch, mice or birds or even bugs. It kept looking around as if it was scared, or confused maybe.

“Go home, boy,” Mr. Harding said to Jimmy. “And stay away from that cat.  I don't want it hanging around here.” He limped back up the path and disappeared inside his house, banging the door shut behind him.

Jimmy was looking at the cat. “Where'd that come from?”

“The car, I think,” I told him. I was already halfway down the tree, and lost my grip on one of the boards and sprawled on the ground.  Jimmy spun his chair around and rolled over to me.

“You okay?” He was staring at me, and I realized my skirt had scootched up when I fell out of the tree.

“Getting a good look?” I said, annoyed mostly at myself for being so clumsy.

“I thought maybe you were hurt.”

“Yeah, right!” I tried to sound angry, but I wasn't really. I stood up and smoothed my skirt down and brushed off the grass clippings that stuck to it. My mother had cut the lawn that morning. Dad used to do it, but he almost never does any more. Or much of anything else.

We have a great looking yard. Mom put in a big flower garden last year, right after she found out about Dad and that woman he was hanging around with at the university. It was like she was always looking for something to do, something that said the world was still a beautiful place, even though for her it wasn't. She planted roses and peonies and a whole bunch of other stuff I don't know the names of, and almost every day she's out raking and weeding and pruning and putting in new kinds of shrubs.

It was really warm and there was a lot of rain last night, so you could almost see the new leaves uncurl as they grew.

I looked across the street.  “Where's the cat?” I said.

Jimmy turned his chair and looked, too. “I guess it went back in the weeds.”

I saw movement down by the tracks. “No, there it is. It's gonna go out on the dykes. Let's go see if it's friendly.”

I took hold of the handgrips on the back of Jimmy's chair and started pushing him down the sidewalk, past Mr. Harding's house and onto the gravel where the asphalt ended. Jimmy doesn't like to be pushed, 'cause he says he has to do everything for himself, in case some day there's nobody around to help him. He used to talk like that a lot, about how when his Mom and Dad get old and die he'll be all on his own, and how that was okay, because he wasn't going to be a cripple forever. He was going to fly.

Only today he let me push him, because I can make his chair go faster than he can on his own, especially where the ground is bumpy. The cat was already across the tracks and heading for the gate, and we knew if it went under the fence we wouldn't be able to catch it.

Catch it? I guess that was what I was thinking about.

The gravel is kind of rough at the end of the street, more like big stones, and it was hard to push Jimmy's chair without bouncing him around a lot, so I had to slow down. Anyway, by the time we got to the gate the cat was gone, disappeared among all the weeds and bushes that were pretty well leafed out after all the rain we've had. We tried calling it, but I guess it was scared of us and wouldn't come out. I thought about climbing the fence - I've done it before, lots of times, even though I'm not supposed to - but since Jimmy couldn't come with me, I decided not to.