Here Lies Linc (5 page)

“Hey, look at this, Linc,” Mellecker said in my ear. “I got another one. Cuckoo clock.”

I didn’t answer. Beez had shoved his way closer to see the latest additions to Mellecker’s cartoon, and now Amy and a couple of other kids were drifting over to find out what was so interesting. I started to edge away from them. Our class had strayed off the paved walkway, and we were zigzagging around family plots and through rows of headstones. When I looked around to get my bearings, I realized with a jolt where we were headed. Lottie was taking us on a shortcut to Governor Lucas’s grave—a shortcut that happened to lead straight past our house.

Ours was the last one in a block of old bungalows that dead-ended at a side entrance to Oakland. There weren’t any important graves close by. So even with all my worrying the past few days, I hadn’t considered the fact that my entire class might be walking right past our run-down backyard, with its ugly stretch of C.B.’s digging holes and my old Big Wheel covered in vines and the vegetable patch I had tried to start that was too shady to grow anything besides weeds. It was all too close for comfort.

But up ahead, Lottie seemed to have completely lost track of her surroundings. She kept marching along, sweeping her
hands back and forth as she explained some point to Mr. Oliver and Sylvie and Delaney, the only ones in the group who appeared halfway interested in what she had to say.

I dropped a few steps behind Mellecker and his crew, keeping my gaze pinned on the ground. By now we were coming up on the stretch of graves that ran alongside my house. I could even smell the leaves from our maple thick on the ground and the mossy pile of tree house boards that Dad had stacked in the backyard before he died.

I held my breath as Lottie kept lecturing and moving along. We were almost past the woodpile, past our rusted barbecue grill, past my upstairs bedroom window.

Then I heard it. A yip rang out across the cemetery. I knew right away it was C.B. But what was he doing
outside
? I had left him asleep on his dog bed when I took off for school that morning. My stomach turned queasy as I realized what had happened. Sometimes during nice weather we left C.B. tied to the clothesline pole in the backyard. Lottie must have come home from the airport and put him outside before she rushed over to meet us.

I clenched my fists and plowed forward, praying C.B. wouldn’t notice me in the crowd. But the sound of his whimper obviously caught Lottie by surprise. She stopped and whipped around, her lecture about graves cut off midstream.

“Awww, look at the poor doggie!” Sylvie cried out. I stole a glance over my shoulder and got a quick glimpse of C.B. straining on his rope, leaping higher and higher as if his
stubby legs were mounted on pogo sticks. Lottie tried to shoot me a look of apology as I stalked past her, staring straight ahead.

“Come on, everybody!” she called, sounding just as frantic as C.B. “Mr. Oliver, we’ve got to keep the class moving if we want to stay on schedule!”

Then I heard Beez shout. “Hey, look! Pooch on the loose!”

I stopped and turned around just in time to see C.B. streak into the graveyard, trailing a long piece of frayed rope from his collar. He flung himself against Lottie’s legs, covering her purple skirt with muddy paw prints.

“Hey there, boy,” she said, bending down to bury her hands in his scraggly fur. “How’d you get loose, huh? C’mon, buddy, calm down.”

Everybody crowded around to watch the reunion. “Is that
your
dog?” Mr. Oliver asked.

“Yep,” Lottie said, and sighed, taking hold of his frayed rope and scratching his favorite spot under the collar. “It sure is.”

“Awww, he’s so cute,” Sylvie said. “What kind of dog
is
that?”

“Nobody’s quite sure,” Lottie told her. “Even the people at the animal shelter didn’t know what to call him. But we call him C.B. It’s short for Cerberus.”

“Cerb-rus?” Beez scoffed out of the side of his mouth. “What kind of a name for a dog is that?” Beez probably thought he was being quiet. He didn’t know my mother had ears like a bat.

She stood up in surprise. “You kids haven’t heard of Cerberus?” She swiveled around to face Mr. Oliver. “Don’t you-all teach Greek mythology in that school of yours?”

I squeezed my eyes shut. I knew what was coming.

Before Mr. Oliver could reply, Lottie was already rattling off an explanation of our dog’s unusual name. “So Hades was the god of the dead,” she said briskly. “Otherwise known as king of the underworld. And Cerberus was the three-headed dog that guarded Hades’s house on the River Styx.” She reached down to give C.B. another rub. “And since this guy absolutely
loves
to dig and bury things underground, especially dead stuff, we decided to call him Cerberus.”

Mellecker poked me in the ribs with his elbow. Somehow he had ended up standing next to me again. I felt a tight ball of anger growing red-hot in my chest. I wasn’t sure who made me madder—Mellecker with that smirk on his face or my mother for acting like she had just been let out of the psych ward on a day pass. All I knew was that I would explode if I had to stand in that spot, stuck between the two of them, for much longer. I decided to risk it. A tiny step backward.

Right away, C.B. started to squirm.

Lottie crouched down to soothe him. “Easy, boy. It’s okay!”

But she was too late. The rope slipped out of her hands, and in two seconds C.B. was all over me. Licking and panting and smearing gummy black dirt on my jeans. My notebook flopped to the ground as I hunched over, trying to decide whether I should pet C.B. or push him away.

“Hey, look, Linc. Devil Dog likes you,” Mellecker teased
in a whispery voice. “You and the professor must have a lot in common.”

I stood up to face him with that ball of anger turning to lava rising in my chest.

“That’s real funny,
Teddy Blair
,” I burst out, sending a shock wave across the small space between us. “Why don’t you go ahead and tell everybody? Go on. I don’t care anymore.” I whirled around, shouting the news to my entire class. “She’s my mother, okay?
She’s my mother!
”

A
FTER THAT, THERE WAS ONLY ONE THING TO DO
.

Run.

While everybody watched with their jaws hanging open, I shoved past Mellecker and tore across the hundred yards that separated the graveyard from my back door. I didn’t stop running until I’d made it upstairs to my room, where I dove for my bed like it was a foxhole. C.B. was right on my heels. He settled into his usual nest next to my hip while I buried my face in my pillow, waiting for the worst attacks of anger and embarrassment to pass. Finally, once I was certain no one was coming to try and coax me back down to the graveyard, I turned over and scowled up at the posters plastered across the walls and the ceiling above me.

It had taken me years to collect them. But now I had pictures of all Seven Summits—representing the highest mountains in the world, one from each continent. Mount Everest
towered over my head at night. Kilimanjaro and Mount McKinley reared up in the distance on either side of my window. The Carstensz Pyramid on the continent of Australia bordered my closet door. Dad used to marvel over the Seven Summits. My father had climbed a few impressive mountains during his time. But Mount Rainier was an anthill, he would tell me, compared to a killer peak like the Aconcagua in South America. I hung my first poster not too long after Dad died, promising myself to live out his dream and conquer a mountain like the ice-capped Elbrus in Russia someday. But who was I fooling? Here I was stuck on the plains of Iowa, hiding in my room like a scared rabbit in its hole. How did I think I could ever scale one of the Seven Summits when I couldn’t even keep up with my junior high cross-country team?

C.B. must have sensed I was feeling bad. He rested his chin on my stomach and watched me through his eyebrows. “This is all your fault, you old mutt,” I whispered. Then I lay there awhile longer, scratching his favorite spot on his neck, until the hands on my alarm clock scraped their way to two-thirty.

My class had to be on its way back to Plainview by now. But just to make sure, I swung my feet to the floor and crept over to the window to sneak a look down. Sure enough, the graveyard was completely quiet, all except for my noisy neighbors—Winslow, Dobbins, York & McNutt.

Okay, so they weren’t real neighbors, but it sure felt like it sometimes. Whenever I glanced out my bedroom window, there they were—those names etched in big, bold letters in
stone. Most likely the folks buried in the short row underneath my window never had a thing in common besides the fact that their tombstones were placed in an odd direction, facing south instead of west like most of the other graves in Oakland. But somehow, along the way, I had started to think of them as a club, a foursome of cranky old men who had been fishing buddies once or played poker together on Saturday nights or maybe worked as partners in a law office downtown.

I couldn’t help imagining they were watching me all the time, commenting to one another about my latest slew of troubles.

Look at that sorry excuse for a garden
, I’d hear Winslow say whenever I watered my yellow vegetable plants that summer.

Pitiful!
McNutt would agree.
That boy couldn’t grow mold on a piece of year-old bread!

The four of them must have had a field day watching me humiliate myself in front of my entire class.

Winslow:
Look at Mr. Tomato Head! Too bad the ones in his garden never managed to turn that nice red color. Hey, where does he think he’s going?

Dobbins:
Awww, he’s running home to hide. At least he’s taking that yappy pile of fur with him. Maybe now we can get some rest around here
.

York:
Isn’t his teacher going to stop him and make him go back to school like he’s supposed to? Times have changed, fellas. Can you imagine teachers in our day letting us get away with those kinds of shenanigans?

McNutt:
Not a chance. But wait till that wise guy Mellecker and his friends get ahold of him tomorrow
—

I jerked the cord by the window, and the metal blinds came rattling down. C.B. scrambled off my bed. At first I thought he was just startled by the noisy blinds, but then he sat in front of my closed bedroom door with his tail thumping the floorboards, and in the next instant I heard Lottie’s soft knock.

I sank down into my desk chair, feeling grateful for the shadowy light in the room as Lottie carefully entered. Once she had given C.B. a wan smile and he had gone
click
-clicking downstairs, she took a few steps closer and peered at me as if she were a scientist discovering something new under her microscope.

“What in the world happened out there?” she asked. “Why’d you run off like that?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “It was stupid.”

Lottie went over to sit on my rumpled bed. “That’s not much of an explanation.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head, not wanting to remember. “It was embarrassing, that’s all. All of it. That laughing fit of yours and walking past our backyard and C.B. getting loose and jumping all over me, and the way you kept …” My voice dwindled away.

Lottie blinked. “The way I kept what?”

“Well, you were acting kind of wacky, Lottie. Kind of … wound up.”

“What do you mean,
wound up
? You mean I’m not supposed to show that I’m excited about what I do?”

“That’s not it,” I told her with a sigh.

“Then what, Linc?
What?
First you want me to pretend I’m not your mother because you’re embarrassed about what I do, and I actually agree to play along even though I haven’t seen you for a whole week. Then, from what I could tell, things are going fine until for some unknown reason you start shouting at the other kids in your class. And the next thing I know, you disappear.”

“Things were not going fine, Mom,” I blurted out. “Mellecker was making fun of you! They all were!”

Even in the dim light I could see her flinch. “What do you mean making fun of me?” she asked in disbelief. “And who’s this Mellecker person? Is he the one who had never even heard of Cerberus before?” She gave a dismissive snort.

Typical
, I thought. Obviously Lottie didn’t have the faintest recollection of Blair Mellecker, even though I must have talked about him a lot back when I was eight.

“Listen, Lottie,” I said, scrubbing my hand across my face in exasperation. “It’s just that sometimes I wish you could act a little more like a regular mom.”

Lottie hugged her arms over her chest and lifted her chin. “And what does a regular mom act like, pray tell?” she snipped.

“Well, for one thing, a regular mom doesn’t forget to brush her hair in the morning,” I fired back. “Especially when she has to lead a bunch of kids on a field trip.”

I faltered for a second as Lottie reached up to touch her disheveled hair. I never talked this way to my mother. But suddenly I couldn’t help it. I had to let it out, every stupid
little thing that had been building up since school started. “Look, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Lottie,” I flung out, “but you need to know. Other moms, they do stuff like … like they make real dinners once in a while, you know? Like pot roast and mashed potatoes. And they make friends with other ladies and go out for coffee sometimes or the movies. Don’t you ever want to do that sort of stuff, Lottie? Go out for coffee instead of working on your cemetery research eighteen hours a day?”