It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC (16 page)

CHAPTER 16:

A WAY TO PASS THE BUCKS

It was Charlie’s habit in summertime to be up and buzzing before the cicadas, so his mother worried when she had to rouse him at midmorning. “I swear, sleepyhead, you’d think this was a school day,” she said fondly, and laid her palm across his forehead to check him for fever.

Charlie managed a grunt but not much else, eyes still closed as he relished the cool of his mother’s fingers. His ankle hurt a little and his neck was stiff as rawhide, but even half-asleep he knew better than to complain about either. During the school year he would have made a life or death issue of his stiff neck, and Willa Hardin would have just as surely evicted him from bed, with a splash of cold water down his back if the situation required. Summer ailments were another matter. She valued a school-year pain at one-tenth its value to Charlie, and a summer pain at ten times its Charlie-value. So he yawned and blinked with no sign of discomfort as those soothing fingers touseled his hair.

When the fingers withdrew, they held something that made Charlie’s blood freeze like a popsicle. It was an oak twig, a pair of tiny leaves spread winglike from it. “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,” his mother said softly, sitting down on his bed, “what are we going to do about you?”

Three Charlies in a row made it serious. Because it would hurt his neck to shrug, he murmured, “I dunno,” and waited to be slathered in guilt for sneaking out and accidentally spending the night in a tree. His dad tended to aim thunder and lightning in his direction but spiced the mix with sarcasm. His mother’s punishments submerged him in a syrup of loving disappointment that was worse.

“We try to keep track of your needs, we really do,” she said, idly untwisting ends of the sheet that had coiled around his feet. “Your father is a good provider. You don’t lack for clean sturdy clothes. Coleman insisted that you have a room of your own, and I try to see that your meals match the appetite of a growing boy.”

She turned a sorrowing gaze on him and Charlie gazed back, in full agreement with all she said, more ashamed of his failings with every passing moment. He waited to hear her reveal her deduction that he had been adventuring while she slept. “We take an interest in your schooling; we don’t ignore the kinds of playmates you choose. You even have an allowance.”

Now he saw the moisture in her eyes and forgave her for the skull-rattling blunder she had made so recently by setting him loose in the care of a seemingly presentable outlaw genius like Eugene Carpenter. This was not the moment to bring up such things, and he could only nod. At that instant his feet appeared from his bedding and seeing them in the full Technicolor of dirt, grass stains, street tar, tree sap and shreds of bark between his toes, she gasped in dismay, still holding the oak twig in her free hand. “But this is how I let you go to bed, like a wild Indian waif without a parent in this world,” she finished, leaning down to take him in her embrace. “Forgive me, Charlie.” And she began to sniffle.

Charlie needed a few seconds while understanding flooded into his noggin. He had been prepared for this catalogue of parenting virtues to be followed by a list of the ways that he had failed them. Instead, his mother had ended with—could it be?—a confession of
her
imaginary sin!

Charlie patted her shoulder. “Aw, Mom,” he said, pulling an offending foot back under the sheet.

But she was not to be denied. “Donald Charles Hardin, don’t you hide my flaws under that sheet for another second,” she said, abruptly recovering now that she had hit on a remedy. “You’re going to take that hot bath I should have made you take last night. Be sure to get the shrubs out of your hair when you wash it. Meanwhile your lazy mother will change your bedding and fix you a decent breakfast.”

She pulled away the covers, noticing the scratches on his hide, accepting them as reproaches to her mothering. Charlie scrambled from his bed before she could count all his new blemishes, hurrying to the bathroom with what might have been suspicious speed in a boy who wasn’t overly fond of hot baths.

His long soak in hot water did wonders for his neck. Afterward, while mouth-watering fragrances floated out from the kitchen, he found a fresh pair of knee-length khaki pants and a hated short-sleeved shirt of the ironed-for-Sunday variety laid out on his bed, and something told him that on this one day he would be wise to wear whatever his mom had chosen for him.

Sure enough, a single place-setting waited for him in the breakfast nook and the ruins of three oranges in the sink promised freshly squeezed juice, a treat he had last enjoyed at his birthday breakfast. Two fried eggs and a stack of miniature pancakes shared his plate with fingers of pork sausage—his favorites, and a rarity. He used too much butter and far too much molasses and knew his mom watched him do it without protest, and he considered asking for a quarter to spend on a toy but relented out of a sense of fair play. It was likely, after all, that he had recently accumulated more wealth than her purse held.

He cleared the table himself to prove his gratitude, sealed it with a kiss on her cheek, and took its twin in return. By this time Charlie felt like the rascal he was, brimful of breakfast and topped off with guilt. He hurried off with the disclosure that he “might see Aaron at the playground,” to leave the impression that the schoolground was his goal. In his mind this wasn’t perjury; Charlie was sure to see Aaron, and almost every other boy he knew, at the school playground—sometime during the next few months, anyway.

His first thought was to seek Aaron at home but found out, en route, that Jackie had already made peace with Roy. The two knelt down the street by a curb in full view of the giant oak that had held Charlie prisoner, and they were entertaining red ants with a magnifying glass. Charlie declined the older boy’s offer to take the glass and “touch one up” because Jackie declared it was worth a nickel to see one of the hated half-inch stinging demons shrivel to a cinder in the glass’s bright pinpoint of sunlight. When that bid failed, Jackie floated the idea that Charlie might at least pay a penny to watch someone else punish the ants. Yet he saw something in Charlie’s eye—or heard it in his refusal—that he often met in older boys. It was a mix of patience and scorn, and it sent Jackie back to the big sandy circle the ants had cleared of all vegetation. A circle of utterly bare dirt as wide as a truck tire, with a pencil-sized hole in its center, was the signature of an active red-ant bed.

As Charlie turned to go Roy said, just to be sociable, “Aaron came by on his bike, ’way earlier. Headed to town.”

Jackie looked up from his instrument of torture. “Big important business, I bet,” he said, his tone denying it.

Roy had not grown old enough to know sarcasm when it surrounded him. “Yeah, maybe. In a big hurry,” he put in.

Of all the things Charlie could do without this morning, a confusing and disagreeable conversation with Jackie ranked high on the list. Nor did Charlie think anything could be gained by revealing any of his recent discoveries so, “reckon I’ll just go paste stamps,” he sighed, and turned toward home. This was intended to ward off attempts by either boy to tag along, and it worked. All the boys had experienced Charlie’s stamp collection and all shared a single opinion. Even Aaron had proclaimed this venture “the world’s boringest way to poison yourself” after helping lick dozens of tiny cellophane tapes that affixed stamps into a booklet. Roughly once a week, at times when he wanted to be by himself, Charlie vowed to go paste stamps. In truth, he hadn’t seen that collection in months and wasn’t sure where he had put it.

Charlie intended to call to see if Aaron had returned home, since his own mother was in such a tolerant mood. The Hardin telephone was normally reserved for adults because in 1944 the telephone company had not yet added signals that let a user know, while he is talking, that someone else is trying to call. Charlie’s call proved unnecessary because, as he greeted Lint and angled toward the family driveway, both heard a squeal they knew as the voice of Aaron’s bike brake approaching from downtown. Bikeless, Charlie watched with a twinge of hope. Aaron had already developed a devil-may-care mastery when dismounting his steed on loose surfaces, and when he eventually bashed himself to shreds Charlie didn’t want to miss a second of it.

Avoiding a spray of gravel, Charlie greeted his pal with, “Your mom send you downtown?”

“Nah. Had a great idea,” Aaron replied, “and went and checked. A kid can just walk right into a bank alone! There’s even a little bitty cage off to itself with a guy with bars over his counter where they have bills I never saw before behind a glass case. Lots of different colors and names like peso and sol and stuff. I ask if they print all that different money downstairs and he laughs and says there’s banks all over the world. So the money we have isn’t the only kind there is. You ever hear of a bank of Scotland?”

“Nope. Don’t care neither,” Charlie replied. “I can’t even speak Scotlandish. They print that in the basement too?”

“I don’t know, a guy stopped me when I started downstairs to see where they print their money.”

The boys moved into the garage to discuss it with their treasures close at hand. It was on the tip of Charlie’s tongue to describe his misadventure during the night, but decided the story wouldn’t shower him with respect. Instead, he took a listener’s role.

Aaron hadn’t been allowed downstairs at the bank because, he said, “This guy told me I needed a safe deposit box. I said no I didn’t and he said that’s all they had down there. Well, I know that’s a lie, we saw a bank print shop yesterday.”

“What’s a safe deposit box?”

“Beats me. Anyhow, then he says do I have an account and I says on account of what and he looks at me squinch-eyed and says do I know what an account is and I’m not a big fan of being laughed at, or lied to, so I walk out intending to slam the door.”

“What’d he do then?”

“Nuthin’. You can’t slam a revolving door, Charlie.”

After mentally chewing all this over, Charlie said, “I think maybe you wasted your time.”

“Durn if I did. I found out there’s all kinds of money besides what we buy stuff with. For all we know, the bills we found are what they spend in Oklahoma. Maybe I’ll go to another bank and ask; I won’t go back to that one, for sure.”

“I don’t blame you. Well, there’s one bank that’ll know about our bills: the one in the haunted house. If they print ’em, they’ve gotta know. We’ll just go bang on the door ’til somebody lets us in.” And with Lint capering beside them, they took a roundabout route that avoided Certain Other People frying ants down the street.

Cade Bridger’s mother hadn’t raised him to be an undependable sot, so her brother must have done it; that is, Bridger’s uncle, who manufactured bathtub gin in the 1920s and paid his nephew to help. Once young Cade took to sneaking samples of their product, he developed a strong liking for the way alcohol teased him, made him see double, numbed the pain when it made him fall, and distanced him from his uncle’s curses. Because he hadn’t been blessed in the brains department, his family soon discovered his weakness for booze and managed to find him honest work where other members of the Bridger clan could keep tabs on him. And it had worked tolerably well until he met Pinero.

Bridger hadn’t heard boys rapping on the front door of the gray bungalow the previous afternoon because it had been a workday, and he had been part of a city work crew filling in a ditch at the time. Today was also a workday, but not for Bridger, whose hangover had been fierce enough to drive him, about midmorning, onto nice cool dirt in a shadowy corner. He had been caught in mid-snore by his boss’s boss. A smarter man might have taken his tongue-lashing gracefully, but a hangover tends to steer a man’s language into other shadowy corners. At ten-thirty that morning Bridger replied that the big boss was a four-eyed B-Word who could S-Word in his hat, and at ten thirty-one he was an ex-city employee.

Now, as noon approached, he sat on a basement step under the bungalow, thinking and waiting for Pinero. And as he waited he took little sips from the stuff he had hidden down there weeks earlier for emergencies: a Nehi soda bottle full of Wawdeeos he had traded for a tamale. (Its one virtue was cheapness but after his first taste of it, Bridger asked Pinero what it was. Pinero took one sip, made a horrible face, and said, “Waughhh, Dios!” as he spat.) So Wawdeeos it was.

Bridger had cause to ponder as he sipped, having saved from his city paychecks the same way a grasshopper saves for winter. He was deciding to tell Pinero how he had bravely quit his job to be more available as a printer, when young voices filtered down the basement stairwell, growing louder as footsteps sounded above. Something about safe deposit . . .

Bridger stuffed the neck of his Nehi bottle with a rag and wondered if he could make it up the stairs and out the back way without being recognized. Meanwhile, he froze. He was still only half-foozled, able to realize that those voices were boyish. Perhaps he could force his way between them, or bluff them into retreat. But so far, freezing in place seemed to work. He continued to listen.

Voices were clearer now, and the sudden rapping at the door reminded Bridger that the door was locked. He eased a few steps up the stairs and heard one boy say, “You think they might just take the money away from us?”

But Boy Two said, “How come? It’s not theirs, money in a sewer pipe is finder’s keepers,” and with sudden understanding of that reply, a wee surge of weewee warmed Bridger’s shorts.

More rapping at the door. “Oh shoot, nobody’s here. Maybe they only print the money once a week or something,” said Boy One. In fact, Pinero had hinted that they might run a few hundred bills this very evening, but if Bridger reported this discovery to him there might be no printing at all. Now the same boy added, “Or maybe once a month, ’cause it looks like nobody’s home today either.”

“I got an idea,” said Boy Two. “What if we just go to the Ice House and see if we can spend one of these things on root beer and stuff?”

Boy One scoffed, “Twenty bucks for root beer?” Hearing this exact number, Bridger knew the bill they spent would be one bearing his own fingerprints and let an almost silent groan escape him. Even with his brain sopping up more alcohol as his belly passed it on, he was still barely sober enough to know the bills he had discarded would never pass any adult inspection.