On the Road to Mr. Mineo's (3 page)

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

“Give me one good reason.”

Gerald gave Stella three good reasons:

1. Mildred Perry had a big mangy dog that once ate his sister's purse.

2. Mildred Perry had a teenage son who smoked cigarettes and squealed the tires of his pickup truck in the middle of the night.

3. He didn't want to.

Stella looked a little surprised.

Gerald
felt
a little surprised. He never said no to Stella.

She plopped down on one of the lawn chairs and crossed her arms, glaring at him.

The sun was beginning to sink behind the trees. Lightning bugs flickered down in the yard below. Gerald's gray-faced dog whined at the back door.

And high above the rooftops of Meadville, a one-legged pigeon headed toward the outskirts of town.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

Little Brown Dog

On the far end of Main Street, where the shops ended and the cornfields and orchards began, was a farm with a small brick house and a big wooden barn. A little brown dog had been living in the big wooden barn.

Nobody fed the little brown dog.

Nobody played with the little brown dog.

Nobody loved the little brown dog.

Amos and Ethel Roper lived in the brick house and had no idea the little brown dog was living in the barn.

Amos and Ethel had no children to take care of. Theirs were all grown up and had flown the coop, as Amos often said.

“You spend half your life wiping their noses and buying them stuff they don't need and driving them to the emergency room for stitches and then they fly the coop,” he complained.

Amos and Ethel had no crops to take care of. The big fancy cannery down in Columbia had bought the Ropers' fields and sent big fancy machines to harvest the beans and the corn.

So Amos and Ethel had a lot of time to argue.

They argued about whether to fix that rotten railing on the back porch or just let the dang thing fall off.

They argued about whether to cut down the sweet gum tree that was shading their small tomato garden under the kitchen window or to move the tomatoes out by the clothesline.

And they argued about what kind of critter had been hanging around the place at night.

Something
had been getting into the garbage by the back door.

Something
had been scratching at the soft, rotting wood of the barn.

And
something
had been making holes in the dry red dirt under the old pig trough.

Amos was convinced it was a raccoon.

Ethel was convinced it was a skunk.

They argued and argued.

But when they were awakened in the middle of the night by the sharp, frantic barking of a dog out in the barn, they knew they had both been wrong.

“A dog!” Ethel said, padding to the window in her bare feet and her thin flowered nightgown.

“I told you it wasn't a skunk,” Amos said, pulling the sheet over his head.

The dog barked and barked and barked some more.

“What are we going to do?” Ethel said.

Zzzzzzz
.

Amos's snores swirled around the room and irritated Ethel. She took a flashlight out of the drawer of the nightstand and went to the back door.

The dog was still barking. She shined the flashlight across the yard. Everything seemed so still and spooky.

The clothesline.

The wheelbarrow.

The broken lawn mower.

The hose snaking from the faucet over to the tomato patch.

Ethel crept down the back steps and out into the yard. The tall grass was cool and damp beneath her bare feet. When she got closer to the barn and shined the flashlight in big sweeping arcs, the dog stopped barking.

Ethel shivered in the breezy night air. She should have grabbed her sweater from the coat rack by the back door. She tiptoed over the smooth, packed dirt of the path that led to the barn.

The dog barked again. One uncertain yip of a bark.

Ethel shined the flashlight into the half-open door of the barn.

There was a very faint rustle in the pile of old hay in the corner.

There was a very faint fluttering of wings up in the rafters.

There was a very faint pitter-patter of Ethel's heart under her thin flowered nightgown.

She shined the flashlight into the corner where she had heard the faint rustle. A little brown dog stood knee-deep in the hay, looking up into the rafters.

Ethel shined the flashlight into the hayloft above her. A pigeon sat nestled in a deserted barn-owl nest where the rafter met the roof.

“Who invited y'all into my barn?” Ethel called, stepping through the door.

The pigeon flapped and fluttered in the rafters overhead, then landed on the rotting floor of the hayloft and hopped frantically on one leg before swooping out of the large opening near the top of the barn roof.

The little brown dog dashed across the barn past Ethel, nearly knocking her off her feet as he scrambled out the door and disappeared into the darkness.

The faint pitter-patter of Ethel's heart turned into a
ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom
. She staggered backward, tripped over that ancient milk bucket she had told Amos to move about a million times, dropped the flashlight, and landed with an
oomph
on the dusty barn floor.

And while all the rustling and fluttering and dashing and swooping and oomphing was going on out in the barn, a loud, steady
zzzzz
drifted out of the Ropers' bedroom window, swirled over the path to the barn, and irritated Ethel.

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

Pigeon in the Moonlight

Fee fi fo fum

Fee fi fo fum

Fee fi fo fum

Stella whispered words through her bedroom window.

The words swirled around in the still night air and danced dreamily up Waxhaw Lane.

Across the street, in the big white house with blue-striped awnings, Gerald stared at the ceiling and worried.

He had never said no to Stella before.

He tiptoed to his window and peered out into the darkness. Somewhere in the distance a cat was yowling. The mournful sound echoed up the empty Main Street of Meadville.

While Stella whispered and Gerald worried and the cat yowled, a little brown dog trotted along the side of the road.

And high above the fields and road signs and telephone poles on the outskirts of town, a one-legged pigeon flew silently in the moonlight.

 

CHAPTER NINE

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Just beyond the Ropers' small brick house, there was a long dirt driveway. At the end of the driveway was a cluster of ramshackle houses. Living in each of the ramshackle houses was a family named Raynard.

Earl and Maude Raynard and their tiny baby, Earl Jr.

Jackson and Yolanda Raynard and their five kids, whose names all started with the letter
B
.

Emmaline Raynard and her three dogs and four cats and a ferret that smelled bad all the time.

And Alvin and Celia Raynard and their son, whose real name was Lawson but whom everyone called Mutt.

Mutt Raynard was a liar.

Everyone knew it.

Mutt lied about almost everything.

What he ate for breakfast.

Where he caught the catfish he brought home for dinner.

How he lost his shoes.

Almost everything.

Maude Raynard called him the Boy Who Cried Wolf. “Look, Mutt,” she told him. “Nobody's ever gonna believe one dang thing you say, even when you tell the truth. Like the Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

But that didn't seem to have much of an impact on Mutt.

Sometimes he told the truth.

And sometimes he lied.

And nobody knew which was which and nobody really cared anymore.

So when Mutt told everyone that a one-legged pigeon had landed on his head, nobody paid any attention.

The next day, when he told them it had happened again, nobody paid any attention.

“I
swear
,” he said. “A one-legged pigeon. He came swooping out of nowhere and landed right on my head.” He patted the top of his head. “Up yonder by the lake.” He threw his skinny arm out in the direction of the lake.

But nobody paid any attention.

So Mutt was going to go to the lake every day and wait for that pigeon to show up again. And when it did, he would catch it. He would put it in a cardboard box and take it to each of the Raynard houses and say, “See? I
told
you a one-legged pigeon landed on my head.”

 

CHAPTER TEN

Levi and His Scabby-Kneed, Germ-Infested Friends

As waves of steamy heat hovered above the asphalt on Waxhaw Lane, three boys sat in the shade of a carport, complaining.

It was too hot.

There was nothing to do.

They were hungry.

They were thirsty.

And one of them had poison ivy.

They wished they were at the lake.

They wished they were in the mountains.

They wished they were anywhere but under a carport in Meadville, South Carolina.

When they couldn't think of anything else to complain about, they took turns flipping bottle caps into the middle of an old tire.

The morning plodded along.

Minute after boring minute.

Across the street a sprinkler sputtered in circles in Gerald Baxter's yard, while his gray-faced dog snored in the sun on the sidewalk out front.

Somewhere up the street, kids were hollering “Not it!”

And then something strange happened.

A one-legged pigeon landed right beside the old tire under the carport.

The boys stared in disbelief.

One of the boys, Levi, whispered, “I'm going to catch him.”

The other two boys, C.J. and Jiggs, nodded.

Levi lunged for the pigeon. There was a swirl of flapping wings, and Levi landed on his stomach with a thud as the pigeon flew off, disappearing over the top of the Baxters' house.

Levi scrambled to his feet and called, “Come on!” as he raced across the street, with C.J. and Jiggs hurrying after him.

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Diddly-Squat

Stella and Gerald sat in the lawn chairs on the garage roof and ate waffles in silence, dipping them into syrup in a paper cup.

Stella had tried to stay mad at Gerald for not helping her with the pigeon trap.

That morning, instead of racing across the street and climbing the wooden ladder to the garage roof, she had sat inside the empty doghouse in her front yard and made a beaded necklace.

She wrote swear words with a stick in the dirt at the edge of the road and then rubbed them out with the toe of her sandal.

She made a jump rope out of clothesline and hopped on her right foot up the sidewalk and on her left foot down the sidewalk.

But then she got bored.

So she had sauntered across the street and climbed the wooden ladder to the garage roof. Gerald had been sitting there, eating waffles and looking forlorn.

He had offered her a waffle.

So here they sat, dipping and eating.

Dipping and eating.

And then something very unexpected happened.

The one-legged pigeon appeared out of nowhere, swooped down, and landed on Gerald's shoulder.

Stella couldn't believe her eyes.

“Be still,” she whispered.

The pigeon bobbed his head in that funny way that pigeons bob their heads.

Gerald sat in gape-mouthed shock.

The pigeon made a little cooing sound.

Stella loved his orange eyes. His sparkling green neck. His smooth gray feathers with two black stripes.

“I'm going to pick him up,” she whispered. She reached out slowly and lifted the pigeon off of Gerald's shoulder.

Stella had never held a pigeon before.

She could feel his little pigeon heart beating against her fingers.

“What are you going to do with him?” Gerald asked.

“Keep him.”

“Keep him?”

Stella clutched the pigeon gently against her chest and stroked his soft back with her finger. “Everybody has a pet but me,” she said.

“But you want a dog,” Gerald said.

“I used to want a dog.” Stella kissed the pigeon on the top of his head. “Now I want a pigeon.”

“But where are you going to keep him?” Gerald said.

Stella rolled her eyes. Gerald was so annoying sometimes.

“Right here.” She glanced around her at the shed and the chairs and the overturned trash can.

“Here?”

“Why not?”

If Stella had needed the perfect word to describe Gerald's expression, the word would most definitely have been
skeptical
.

“What're y'all doing?” Levi poked his head up over the edge of the roof.

The pigeon fluttered wildly in Stella's hands and she let go. It flew up into the branches overhead.

“Dang it, Levi,” Stella hollered.

Levi stepped onto the roof of the garage, followed by C.J. and Jiggs.

“Y'all can't come up here,” Stella said, stomping her foot.

Levi was not allowed on the roof of Gerald's garage. Gerald's father had showed up at Stella and Levi's house one day last fall and told their mother about Levi throwing acorns off the roof and leaving little dents in the aluminum siding on the back of their house.

Levi was not even allowed in Gerald's
yard
. Gerald's mother had seen him spitting in the camellias.

“You had that one-legged pigeon,” Levi said.

Stella glanced at Gerald, who slumped over in the lawn chair and stared at his sneakers.

“I did not,” Stella said.

“I just saw him,” Levi said.

“You did not!”

“I did too!”

The next few minutes were a blur of hollering and cussing and kicking and hitting.