Not-Just-Anybody Family (9 page)

Pap’s laugh was Mud’s reward, that and a piece of fried fish later. Mud held these fish in his mouth so gently, there was never a tooth mark on them.

Mud crossed the street. The smell seemed to be coming from this house … from this porch. Mud went up the steps. From this dish on this railing. Mud stood up and looked into the dish.

Mud was a good stander. He could even take a few steps on his hind legs when it was necessary. Mostly he stood up so he could get a better look at something.

It worked. Mud could see that the dish contained a ring of dark food, sort of smashed down into the bottom. He propped one foot on the banister and took the dish in his teeth. He set it down on the floor without a sound.

Mud took one small bite of the fish stuff. The taste was nothing like Pap’s fish, and he stood looking at the dish with his brow drawn into wrinkles. He took a second bite.

This was the worst food Mud had ever had in his entire life. It was barely edible. If he hadn’t been absolutely starved …

Mud finished the cat food, went down the steps, and was once again on his way through the dark streets of Alderson.

Ralphie opened his eyes and saw Maggie sitting cross-legged on the foot of Junior’s bed. Her green eyes were shining; one of her braids lay on her tanned shoulder, she was chewing on the other in her excitement. Her cheeks were pink. She was grinning. She had one jagged tooth.

Even if she had not been telling the story of how she and Vern had busted into jail, Ralphie would have fallen in love with her. His heart was pumping hard, like the machines he’d seen occasionally through the doors of Intensive Care.

“You busted into jail?” Ralphie asked. He worked his way up in bed until he was sitting. He hadn’t even bothered to push the control and bring the head of the bed up with him.

Maggie had learned from the bus driver the shock value of her story. Already it was her favorite story in the world. She loved to tell it. Her eyes got brighter.

“It was the only thing we could do. We had to.”

“They had to,” Junior echoed in the same delighted voice. He held out his empty hands to show there was no alternative.

“Pardon me for being nosy,” Ralphie said, “but why didn’t you just go in the police station and ask to see your grandfather?”

Maggie looked at him as if he were crazy. He wished he hadn’t spoken. The tips of his ears turned red.

“Anybody could have done that,” she said.

“Yes, anybody,” piped Junior happily.

“We Blossoms,” Maggie said proudly, “have never been just ‘anybody.’ ”

Ralphie believed her. For the first time in his life he had nothing to say.

BOY BREAKS INTO CITY JAIL was the headline.

The story took up two columns on the front page.

BULLETIN:

Last night a local juvenile broke into city jail by way of an old air vent. Using a board, which he placed in an elm tree beside the jail, he crossed to the vent. The size of the vent was approximately seven inches by fourteen inches.

According to police, the boy entered city jail just before midnight and slept in the cell with his grandfather, Alexander “Pap” Blossom, Sr., who is in jail awaiting a hearing on a charge of maliciously disturbing the peace.

Officer Canfield, the policeman who found the boy during his five o’clock rounds, admitted that it had been quite a surprise. “I knew soon as I saw him that he wasn’t supposed to be there. I went out and got the sergeant and took him in, and the sergeant was surprised too. He shook both the boy and the grandfather awake to find out what was going on.”

When awakened, the grandfather asked one question, “What’s wrong?” The officer admitted that the boy was still in his grandfather’s cell but would be moved, he said, “as soon as we figure out what to do with him.”

“We let him out for breakfast, but he wanted to go right back in afterward, so we let him. We’re taking it one hour at a time.”

The grandfather’s hearing is scheduled for this afternoon.

There was a large picture of Pap and Vern sitting on the bunk, side by side. Their hands were on their knees, their heads turned stiffly to the photographer. It was like a photograph taken fifty years ago.

Neither one of them looked scared, unhappy, or regretful.

Under the picture was the caption; “Local policemen caught off-guard by unique jailbreak.”

“Hey, you weren’t kidding!” Ralphie said.

Ralphie had been walking up and down the hall on his new leg, mainly in the hope of impressing Maggie. At the desk he had seen the morning newspaper.

“I want to borrow this,” he said.

He hurried back to the room, hopping spryly on his new leg. “There.” He threw the paper, headline up, on Junior’s bed.

“That’s them!” Junior cried, drawing in his breath. “They’re famous!”

“Give me that,” Maggie said.

“What does it say?”

“This is what it says.” Maggie snapped the newspaper open. She read the story aloud, stumbling only on the words
juvenile
and
maliciously
. When she was through, she held the paper at arm’s length and looked at the picture critically.

Then she said, “That doesn’t look a thing like Vern, does it, Junior?”

“Not a thing.” Junior was so glad to have Maggie with him that he had become her echo.

“And they made Pap look like an old bum.”

“A real old bum,” Junior said.

Ralphie said, “Reporters try to take unflattering pictures. That’s part of their training. They throw the good pictures in the trash can.”

For the first time Maggie looked at him with interest.

“He tells lies,” Junior said quickly, seeing Maggie’s look. He did not want to share Maggie with anybody. “He told me he had watermelon seeds inside him and marbles in his head.”

Ralphie’s ears turned red.

“Maybe he lied about that,” Maggie admitted. She was beginning to like the boy with the artificial leg. “But he sure tells the truth about reporters.”

“Maybe,” Junior conceded.

Ralphie was so pleased with Maggie’s compliment that he hopped around the room on his artificial leg.

“Stop that, Ralphie!” the nurse called from the door. “You’re supposed to walk on the leg, not jump on it. You’re going to bust those stitches.”

“It doesn’t hurt at all,” Ralphie said, lying.

Mud did not know what to do about the Interstate. The only time he had been on I-85 before, he had been sitting beside Pap in the cab of the pickup, with wind that smelled of exhaust fumes whipping his ears back from his face.

He had come to I-85 today at the peak of the midday traffic. He had turned down the exit ramp because the air in that direction smelled more familiar than the air in any other direction. Now he faced more traffic than he had ever seen in his life.

He waited and watched. He knew he had to get across it—the air told him that—but he didn’t know how. The traffic was solid—a double line of trucks and cars and buses and vans, all exceeding the speed limit.

He walked nervously back and forth, pacing, his eyes on the steady stream of traffic coming through the underpass. He breathed air thick with exhaust fumes. He blinked every time a truck threw gravel in his direction.

Mud’s tongue was hanging out. His throat was dry. He had not had a drop of water for three hours, not since the cat-food snack. And the cat-food snack had left him thirsty.

An hour ago he had come across a dust hole. With Mud, there was nothing to do with a dust hole but get in it and roll around. Mud preferred the back method. He lay on his back and twisted from side to side. His eyes closed in bliss, he moaned with pleasure.

Afterward, refreshed, he got up and shook himself. A red cloud grew around him.

As he left the dust hole he felt better but looked worse. To see him loping along the side of the road, a person would think Mud had never had a bath in his life. The bandanna around his neck looked like a dust rag.

A small break came in the right lane. Mud started out, then darted back as a truck roared down the fast lane at seventy-five miles an hour. Mud crouched on the grass while fine gravel rained around him. He fell back to wait for another chance.

He was going to get across I-85 if it killed him.

“Well, I better be on my way,” Maggie said with studied casualness.

Maggie had been in the hospital for twelve hours, and she could not have been happier if she had been in the ritziest hotel in New York City. Everything she wanted, or would ever want, was right here.

She had just finished lunch. She had bought a pimento cheese sandwich from a vending machine, heated it miraculously in a small oven, and washed it down with an ice-cold Mello-Yello.

Before that she had napped in the waiting room, on a long plastic sofa, while watching
Let’s Make a Deal
. She got to see a man dressed like a hot dog win a Westinghouse refrigerator. This was living.

“Be on your way?” This was the worst news Ralphie had ever heard in his life. He was at her side in an instant.

“Where are you going?”

Maggie yawned. “To the courthouse, of course. My grandfather’s hearing is this afternoon.”

“You’re going to the hearing?” Junior wailed.

Junior was in a wheelchair for the first time, his legs propped in front of him. He rolled himself forward a few inches. “I want to go too.”

“You can’t.”

“I have to!”

“No.”

“I
have
to!”

Junior could not bear to be left again. He had not even started to recover from being left on the roof. That was the worst thing that had happened to him, worse even than the broken legs. Breaking legs he could stand; being left he couldn’t.

“I’m sorry, Junior, I would never be able to get you on the bus,” Maggie said sensibly. “I rode the bus last night and there was not one single wheelchair person on it. There are no ramps, no—”

“You can get me on. Please! I promise you can get me on,” Junior wailed.

“Junior, you have two broken legs. You’re in a wheelchair!”

“I’ll walk if you get me crutches. I promise I’ll walk. Please!” He would have gone down on his knees if he had been able to bend.

“No.”

“Then I’ll get my own crutches.”

Junior propelled himself toward the door, but this was his first time in the wheelchair. The chair swerved into the foot of his bed.

Junior hung his head in defeat. He began to cry. “I want to go! I want to go!”

Maggie was softened by his tears. “I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. I’ll remember every single thing that happens. It’ll be just like being there.”

Junior shook his head from side to side in a fit of rage and frustration too terrible to be expressed in any other way. “No! No! No! No—”

It was Ralphie who stopped the explosion of
no
’s. He took one step forward on his artificial leg.

“We,” he said. There was something in his quiet, take-charge voice that made Junior stop crying and look up. “We could take a cab,” Ralphie said.

Maggie looked at him and her face lit up with Junior’s. At that moment they looked like brother and sister.

Maggie threw her braids behind her back and grinned, showing her jagged tooth. “Why didn’t I think of that?” she said. “Of course! We’ll take a cab.”

“Gentleman to see you,” the policeman told Pap.

Pap threw up his hands to protect himself. “No more reporters. I’m not talking to no more reporters.” His old head wagged tiredly from side to side, begging for mercy.

“Me either,” said Vern who was sitting beside him.

“This is not a reporter. It’s a lawyer.”

Pap’s head snapped up. “Lawyer?”

“The best the town’s got—Henry Ward Bowman.”

“What’s he want with me?”

“He says he wants to defend you.”

“For how much?” Pap asked suspiciously.

“For free.”

Now Pap was even more suspicious. “Why?”

“You want my opinion?”

Pap nodded reluctantly. He hated to ask a policeman for anything.

“Mr. Bowman’s getting ready to make a run for the state senate, and I imagine he thinks it wouldn’t do him any harm to get you off and get himself some publicity doing it. You may not know this, but we’ve had more calls about you and the boy than about anything else that’s ever happened in the police department, even the Safeway robbery last year. People don’t like to see a grandfather being arrested for nothing more than defending a load of pop cans from some reckless teenagers. People don’t like to see a boy forced to bust into jail to be with him.”

Pap watched the policeman with sharp eyes, taking in every word.

The policeman shrugged. “That’s how the public sees this whole thing anyway.”

That was how Pap saw it too. He started stage one of getting to his feet—the crouch. Then he rose to his full height of six feet.

He tucked his shirttail into his pants. He fished in his hip pocket for a comb. He raked it through his tangled hair, then he swept the sides back like wings, the way he did on special occasions.

He slapped the comb against his palm to clear it of stray hairs. Then he slid it back in his pocket.

“Show Mr. Bowman in,” he said.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and Mud had started barking at the traffic. He had been trying to cross I-85 for thirty-five minutes, and the traffic wouldn’t let him.

Mud was tired, sore of foot, thirsty, and desperate. Most of all, he wanted Pap.

At two-ten someone threw a can out of a car window. It struck the concrete beside Mud and bounced into his side. Startled, Mud shied away, almost backing into traffic coming down the ramp.

It seemed to Mud then that he was surrounded by danger. There was no safety anywhere. In a panic he headed for the interstate.

The right lane was clear. A semi was barreling down the fast lane.

Ears back, tail down, Mud ran.

“I’ll do that,” Ralphie said. He took Junior’s wheelchair, unlocked two springs underneath, folded it in half, and snapped it shut with practiced skill.