Close to Famous (18 page)
Authors: Joan Bauer
Garland and I looked serious. I should have brought cupcakes.
“This prison has made promises to this town that it hasn't fulfilled!” Macon insisted.
“Step away from the gate,” the guard said.
Macon had memorized this next part, too. “I'm making this request as a citizen of Culpepper.”
The guard laughed. “How old are you?”
“Almost thirteen!”
“Step away from the gate, junior.”
Garland and I dragged Macon off, which was harder than you'd think. He was little, but all his issues had risen to the top.
“You've lied to this town!” Macon screamed.
“I just work here, little man. Get lost!”
“That's what we're doing, sir.” We dragged Macon down the road.
“I'm never going to get my movie made!”
Garland lifted him over a pothole. “I think it's good to practice and all, but maybe you should wait until you get your camera.”
“I want to film the big stories, you guys, and show people all the ways we're being lied to.” He looked miserable as a prison bus drove by.
“I think you're the perfect one to do that,” I told him.
He looked up hopefully. “You do?”
“It's like you're angry for all of us.”
His face changed to all-out happiness. “That's exactly what a doc filmmaker does, Foster. Be angry for the world. You're a genius!” His face was red. “I have to hold on to my anger.”
“I don't think that's going to be a problem, Macon.”
Lots of people in town were angry. The word was that Taco Terrific had offered Mr. Fish a lot of money for the church and he was going to sell it. Every time Perseverance Wilson saw Mr. Fish, she hollered he was “messing with sacred ground.”
Angry Wayne wore a shirt that had a taco with an X through it.
I wore a shirt with a cupcake on it, but that didn't mean I wasn't mad.
And then Mama dropped her bomb.
I was mashing bananas for banana cupcake batter when she did it. She walked through the door; the smile was out of her eyes.
“What's wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing.” She started cleaning up around the Bulletâwiping things down that looked clean to me. Mama does that when something's wrong.
“You still have the job at Fish Hardware?”
“Of course.”
“You feeling sick or something?”
“No.”
She didn't say much at dinner. She didn't say much as we were doing the dishes. We went outside and sat in the fold-up chairs. The strange glow from the prison filled the night sky.
“I've got to go away for a few days,” she said.
I didn't like the sound of that. “Where are you going? ”
She looked at her hands. “Back to Memphis. I've got to take care of a few things.”
Memphis! “I'll come with you.”
She took my hand. “You need to stay here with Kitty and Lester. They said it's okay. I'll only be gone for a couple of days.”
My mouth felt dry all of a sudden. “What have you got to do?”
“Well, we left pretty quick, you know. And there's the bank and some forms I've got to fill out.”
There's Huck
, I thought. “You think going alone is a good idea, Mama?”
, I thought. “You think going alone is a good idea, Mama?”
She looked up at the hard glow in the sky. “I need to do this myself.”
I didn't sleep too well. I kept tossing and turning and thinking about Mama driving alone. I thought about her seeing Huck and got a sick feeling. The more I thought about it, the sicker I felt.
When Mama put her suitcase in the car that morning, I handed her the good lunch I'd packed. “You're strong, Mama, and you're a fighter. Remember that.” I hugged her with a lot more courage than I had.
She got in the Chevy smiling brave. I watched her pull away and felt like I was getting left. There was nothing in my life that said Mama would up and leave meâI just felt a place of fear open up in my heart. She blew me a big kiss and honked as she drove off. I ran behind the car waving and shouting, “See you Sunday,” just in case she forgot.
I walked slowly to Kitty and Lester's house. It didn't seem as friendly as before. Nothing did. I figured if I didn't go up their steps, this whole thing didn't actually start.
I worried about fog rolling in and Mama being in the car by herself. I worried she'd run out of gas, or get lost again, or drive off a cliff. I checked my watch. Exactly three minutes had passed. By the time Sunday came, I was going to be a wreck.
Twenty-Five
MACON AND I were walking to the Bookmobile. I had to turn in Sonny's cookbook.
“I'm really glad you moved here, Foster.”
“Thanks.”
“How come you did?”
That was a loaded question.
“I've lived here half my life,” Macon said. “I came because my daddy ran off. Me and my mom moved in with my grandma.”
I waited for him to say more, but he didn't.
“Do you remember your dad?”
“Yes.” Macon's face looked hard, like he didn't have any good memories.
“Mama and I had to leave kind of fast,” I began.
“What happened?”
I told him a little about Huck, but just a little. “He wasn't the kind of person we should have in our lives,” was how I put it.
“My dad wasn't either.”
And there passed between us this kind of knowing. We didn't need to talk about it anymore. We walked up the gravel road.
“In addition to my reading stuff, I've got a fear of Elvises.”
He stopped and looked up at me, but he wasn't smirking or anything.
“I know it's unnatural,” I added.
“My uncle Chester is afraid of Democrats,” he said. “He starts shaking all over when he sees one.”
We kept walking, heading down the road, hearing the crunch of our shoes on the little stones. I got in step with him, swinging my arms like he was doing, setting my jaw.
I felt safe around this small, determined boy who didn't make fun of anything I told him.
This is how best friends are made.
I turned in Sonny's book, and Mrs. Worth said, “What can we get you now?”
I didn't want anything else, but Macon said, “Do you have any books on Elvis?”
Had he been listening at all?
Mrs. Worth did a little dance behind her desk and led us to the back section. “Mr. Elvis Presley with photographs,” she said, and handed the book to Macon.
Some friend.
Macon sat on the floor and opened the book. “I've been thinking, Foster, about how we need to face our fears.”
This was my fear, not his!
“You need to look at this,” Macon said. He opened the book to a two-page picture of Elvis in a shirt that looked like it had jewels on it, sweat dripping from his face.
“Macon, stop it! I don't want to think about Elvis.”
“But the thing is, Foster, Elvis is hard to avoid. He was so famous, there's probably no place you could go where there isn't a picture of him someplace. You're going to have to deal with it.”
I shook my head.
“It's hard in the beginning, but then it gets easier. Here's a picture of Elvis when he was just a boy.”
I looked.
“And here's another one when he had a famous TV moment on the
Ed Sullivan Show
long before we were born. See, it's just Elvis from the waist up.”
Ed Sullivan Show
long before we were born. See, it's just Elvis from the waist up.”
I looked a little longer at that one.
“You're doing fine,” Macon said.
I crossed my arms tight. “Huck made me call him Elvis when Mama wasn't around. It was weird. His voice would get low and he'd say he was the real Elvis come back from the dead.”
Macon thought about that. “Did Huck have big crowds around him when he sang?”
“Not really.”
“Then I can absolutely say, Foster, that Huck was lying. If Elvis had come back from the dead, the crowds would have been huge.”
I laughed. “I hadn't thought about that.”
“Here's something you should read about how much Elvis loved his mother.” Macon showed me the page.
“When Elvis was a boy he told his mother that someday he was going to buy her a fine house.”
I hated long sentences.
“I bet real soon you'll be reading paragraphs,” he told me.
“Short ones,” I said.
Mama had been gone for three days. I'd talked to her twice, but both times her voice sounded strained. There was no book that would help me get over my fear that she might go back to Huck.
My stomach hurt. I was sitting out in the blue chair when Lester walked up wearing a hat with hooks in it. He was carrying two long fishing poles.
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