Beholding Bee (6 page)

“You run slower than Cordelia,” he says after a while, patting my head in a way that feels more like a thumping, but I don’t really care because it is Bobby.

“You’re going to have to run faster than that if you’re going to look after that little dog.”

It is more words than I have ever heard him put together, and for some reason it makes me cry awful hard.

21

The next morning before the sun is hardly up, Peabody and I are out by the Little Pig Race, with Bobby holding up his watch. “If I can teach pigs to run, I can teach a girl.” I am not sure if I should take offense or not.

Training girls is different, though, because Bobby does not use corn. He uses his pocket watch, and the memory of those boys.

“Tie those tight,” he says, pointing at my work boots. I wind the laces around and around the top of each boot to keep them from dragging. I can’t do anything about the holes in the soles.

“See those woods and that hill and that pine tree at the top?”

I put my hand up to block the sun, just rising. There is a field that heads straight into woods that climb steeply. I will have to climb over at least one stone wall before I reach the trees. My legs still shake from last night. Bobby looks to see if I am paying attention. “Running in the woods will build stamina. And it will make you fast. Now, the trick is to remember those boys with every step you take. Slow down if you have to, but do not stop. You will find your second wind.”

He’s talking way more than I have ever heard him before. I look at the pine tree at the top. It is straight up. Peabody is grinning, he is so excited about what is going to happen.

“Ready?”

I want to shake my head, but I remember the boys. Bobby holds up his arm.

“Get set, go!” He drops his arm and I run out past him, my Jell-O legs trying to hold me up. Peabody is right beside me jumping and yipping and barking, he is so happy to be flying so fast over the parched grass.

My legs are sore from last night but they carry me out, out, out through the long grass toward the woods.

I spook a dozen mourning doves and they flap into the air. Peabody darts out after them, his stumpy tail waving in front of me. Already my legs are telling me to quit.

As soon as I enter the woods and start climbing, I am running through cement. My lungs are two sloshing buckets of water. When I reach the stone wall I inch myself up and over and then flop onto my side, I am so out of breath. Peabody lies down beside me and whines. I watch a beetle and a butterfly, and feel just like Cordelia.

I lie there a long time so my heart can get back to beating regular, and because my head feels awful dizzy. Peabody whines louder. I look up at the oak trees, so high overhead. “Oh, all right,” I say finally, pulling myself up because Bobby has his pocket watch and I am remembering the tall boy and how fast he can run.

It hardly takes a few steps uphill and the blood is pounding in my head again. I trip on a log hidden in old leaves. Peabody is already far ahead. He sits down and watches me run up the steep hill, my legs high-stepping boulders and logs like I am running through very deep snow. It is very hard to run in the woods and very hard to run uphill. I wonder what Bobby is thinking.

Finally, I reach the pine tree at the top and flop onto the ground, my chest heaving.

“That’s it,” I wheeze, “I am not a runner.”

After Peabody starts whining again like maybe it is time to get going, I pull myself to my feet and hobble back downhill to Bobby. Peabody yips all around my feet, like he is a sheepdog and I am an old ewe. I climb over the stone wall and then I limp all the way back to the Little Pig Race.

Bobby has stretched a string between the fence and an old fold-up chair and he wants me to run through, but I wilt on the ground before I get there.

“That’s twenty-two minutes,” he says, shaking his head, looking at me sprawled in the dirt, and tucking the watch back into his overalls. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

He walks off toward the pigs. Peabody runs off after him.

It takes a few minutes for my head to stop pounding and my pulse to quit racing. I pull off my work boots and peel down my socks. My feet are red and puffy and soft and slow and very sore. I am ashamed of them the way I am ashamed of my face.

22

A band of silver circles Pauline’s finger. It glitters in the sun. She waves it in front of me.

“Look, Bee.” She moves it slowly past my eyes, waving her hand so the light bounces off.

I know it is from Arthur. I do not mention I can see plain as day it is foil from a stick of gum. I bet even Peabody can tell. Nobody who’s serious about things gives a girl a gum-foil ring. Bobby would give her the real thing. Of that I am sure.

I take a hot dog off the grill and throw it to Peabody.

“You can’t do that,” says Pauline. “Ellis will kill us.”

“He’s not here, remember?” I pull three onions from the box and cut off their papery skins. While I am doing this I find reasons to give Pauline many disapproving looks. She is too busy frying up hot dogs to notice. Arthur comes by on his way to the john and tips his cowboy hat at Pauline. She giggles. I roll my eyes.

“Isn’t it a beautiful day, Bee?” she asks after he is past. “I just love days like this, with the sun all shining and everything so happy.”

I look at Peabody. He is lying beside me inside the hot dog cart. I fold my arms across my chest. “I didn’t notice.”

She looks at me a minute, then sighs and turns back to the grill.

“I haven’t had a boyfriend ever, Bee. Can’t you just be happy for me?”

Before I even have a chance to unfold my arms, Arthur is right beside us asking Pauline if she could help him with the merry-go-round. She looks at me and I keep my arms crossed and won’t take my eyes off the onions.

“Oh, Bee,” she says.

I look at Peabody. He is watching Pauline. Already she is untying her apron. I do not know what has gotten into her.

23

Arthur is a tidal wave washing over us, pulling Pauline out to sea and leaving me and Peabody all alone on the shore.

“I have to help Arthur again tomorrow,” Pauline is saying that night as she rushes around her side of our hauling truck, slipping a new dress over her head. “Ellis wants to put him in charge of the stay-put show he wants to set up in Poughkeepsie, so I have to teach him everything that goes on here.”

I curl up on my bedroll with Peabody against me. “But what about Bobby?” I whisper. “He likes you very much.”

“The pig man? He doesn’t like me like that, Bee.”

I look at her. “How can you not know he likes you so much?”

“I like Arthur, Bee.”

“But he’s rotten. It’s like he’s bewitched you, Pauline, and what about me? I know you would never go out all the time and leave me if you were thinking right. Why aren’t you thinking right?”

Pauline stops putting on her dress-up shoes from Woolworth’s and comes over and tries to squeeze me, but I turn away. When she loosens her hold, I rush out of the truck and Peabody follows right behind.

24

The next morning I am tucked tight in my bedroll when someone bangs on our hauling truck. Pauline jumps up. Peabody growls. I cover my face.

“Bee?”

It is Bobby.

“What’s he doing here?” whispers Pauline, pulling the covers close to her chin.

“He’s been teaching me to run.”

“Run? Why?”

“If you were here more, you’d know that, Pauline.” My legs are still wobbly from yesterday, but I get up and climb into my overalls. Peabody pushes his nose out the curtain.

“You think I’m doing this for my health?” Bobby asks when I get the curtain open. He is leaning against the truck with his pocket watch and his ready, set, go and his rules about starting slow and ending fast.

“I’m not running anymore.”

“Why not?”

I look back at Pauline, who is turned to us, listening.

“Because I hate it.”

Bobby spits off to the side. “How’s quitting going to keep those boys from stealing your dog? Or worse?”

Peabody tilts his head and looks at me.

“I’m terrible at it.”

“Well, I have some things I need to show you. Running
in the woods, jumping over stone walls and logs, running uphill and down, all this will make you fast. You’ll get better, I promise. You’re not a quitter, are you?”

Maybe I am. “I have to get ready to open the hot dog cart.”

“You’ve got time. Come on. Besides, we’ll be setting up outside of Nashua tomorrow and who knows if there will be a good place to run?”

I cross my arms in front of me and glare at him. Peabody whines.

Bobby crosses his arms, too. “Probably best if you remember those boys every time you feel like quitting.”

I look at him with his thick-rimmed glasses and his coal-dark hair shooting up in a hundred directions and I know that if Pauline gave him half a chance, things might go better for us.

25

Morning after morning, before anybody is up, me and Peabody are out past the Little Pig Race and Bobby has his pocket watch in the air.

It turns out there are plenty of woods outside of Nashua.

“You have to start out slow,” Bobby tells me for the hundredth time. “Then pick up speed as you go. That’s what went wrong. If you use up all your heart at the start, you’ll never find your second wind.”

He checks my laces. They are tied twice. “If you get tired, slow down before you fall down. Got it? And go straight uphill, climb rocks, jump over trees. Understand?”

I nod.

“At the top of the hill, turn around and fly down as fast as you can. And keep your arms at a forty-five-degree angle. Like this.” He bends my arms at the elbow. “Raise them and push back with each step so it’s like you’re pulling back a lever. Try it. And don’t stoop like that.”

He tells me so many things I can’t keep them in my head. Peabody wags his stumpy tail. Cordelia and LaVerne nose around the edge of their pen waiting to see somebody else race for a change.

“Ready?” says Bobby.

I nod.

“Set,
go
!”

And we are off.

I start off fast like a rabbit and then go slow like a turtle, straight into the woods, then fast like a rabbit and slow like a turtle.

“No, no, no!” Bobby is yelling, following me until I reach the woods.

I slow down until I am a turtle and I keep that pace until I am over a stone wall, have jumped a pile of logs, and have climbed a sheet of ledge. I try and come up with all the words I know for
turtle
and
tortoise: sluggish, slow, determined
. I plod forward until I reach the top of the hill and then head down again.

When I get out of the woods, I see Cordelia sticking her snout through the fence and the sight of her sets me on fire and I am a rabbit all the way back until I fall at Bobby’s feet.

“Not fast enough,” Bobby says when I am rolling in the dirt, choking as I try to suck air into my lungs. “Twice a day. We’ll do this morning and night.”

26

My muscles are aching. My shins feel like there is a knife slitting them, top to bottom. My face is burned from the sun and the sweat pours down my chest and the back of my neck.

“Eighteen minutes,” he says the next morning in Portland. “You’re still running like a girl.”

“I
am
a girl.” I glare at him.

He spits out across Peabody’s head toward me. It nearly hits me. I think maybe I am mad as a wet hen. I suck up spit and shoot it back. It lands in a soft wet drip on the top of my work boot.

He grins. “That all you got?”

My face is hot from already being mad at him and now even hotter from seeing the spit on my boot.

“There’s an art to spitting. Most girls don’t know how. Do you want to learn?”

“No, I do not want you to teach me to spit.”

I clomp off with the spit on my boot. I don’t wipe it off until I get to the truck.

27

“Okay, here’s how you do it.” Bobby sucks up spit in his mouth. I am out watching him feed the piglets the next morning and I am not so mad anymore. He scratches each of them behind the ears and talks all sweet to them and calls them Sweet Pea and Darling Dear and Honey Pie. When I am not so mad I think how they are lucky to have him.

“You have to get a lot of spit worked up in your mouth. Whoosh your mouth like this until you get a lot.” He swishes his mouth around. “Then gather the spit on the edge of your tongue and pucker your lips. Then blow as hard as you can.”

Bobby sends a wad of spit off toward the stone wall. He turns back to me. “Spitting is a good thing to know how to do. You never know when it will come in handy.”

I look at Peabody. I think about the tall boy and the round boy with the watermelon cheeks, and how much I would like to send a mouthful of spit straight at them. I swish my mouth trying to come up with enough saliva. I work at it for quite a while and then move the spit to the end of my tongue. This is not as easy as it looks. Finally, I open my mouth and blow as hard as I can. A very small gob of spit lands on Peabody’s head.

Peabody rushes over and hides behind the pig shed. Bobby grins and shakes his head. “What a girl.” Then he goes over and picks up Peabody and wipes the spit off his head with his bandanna. “Make sure you’re up fifteen
minutes earlier tomorrow morning. I want to get you running faster.”

I fume. Bobby goes by the pig shed. Peabody won’t look me in the eye. I tell him how I didn’t mean for it to happen and that I am sorry. He needs a lot of snuggling after that to get back to feeling good about things. Just like Cordelia.

28

Ellis comes back all fired up about setting up a show in Poughkeepsie. He makes us all go over by Eldora’s Museum of Mystery and sit in the waiting-for-your-fortune chairs and hear what he has to say: “There’s a big factory making Army tanks down there. Lots and lots of folks are working, folks who will have money to burn at night. You get my drift?”

Fat Man Sam and Pete the Alligator Man nod. “Yessiree,” says Silas Meany the Man Without a Stomach. I hold my hair over my face and hear Peabody start whining in the back of our hauling truck.