The Way to Schenectady (11 page)

“Remember what Dad said,” I told him.

“What?” he called over his shoulder, without looking back. “What business is it of yours. Miss Bossy?”

“Bill, you’re going to get in trouble for nothing.” I clenched my fists in frustration. We were falling behind schedule. Everything was being pushed back – Schenectady, the Berkshires,
The Music Man.

“Nothing?” said Bill. “Communication with aliens is not nothing.”

“Climbing a stupid fence is nothing. Dad is already upset about Marty. Come on, Bill. Don’t make it harder on him.”

He pulled himself up higher. Now his head was level with the top of the fence. “He’s not upset with
me
about Marty,” he said.

“Why,” Bernie asked, his big eyes on me, his throat sliding up and down as he swallowed a jelly bean, “is Dad upset about Marty?”

Bill stuck his foot into a twisted clump of wire, and pulled himself up to the top of the fence. “Moooooo,” he called.

“Marty is a stowaway. Remember? Do you know what a stowaway is?”

Bernie frowned. “Is it a vegetable?”

“No. It’s someone who hides in your van, and you don’t know he’s there.”

Bernie nodded to himself.

Bill’s foot was caught in the tangle of wire. He wiggled his foot, but it wouldn’t come free. He couldn’t climb up, and he couldn’t climb down.

“Hey, Jane,” said Bill.

“Yes?”

“Uh. Help.” He wiggled his foot harder.

“Help with what?”

“Come on, Jane. Get me down.”

I like Bill. I really do. But I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t move.

“Jane, please!” Bill hung on with one hand while he tried to free his foot with the other. He sounded scared. I figured enough was enough, and moved forward to help him.

“BILL! BILL PEELER! GET DOWN!”

“Oh, shoot,” he said.

“GET DOWN FROM THAT FENCE!” Dad roared.

“Hang on, Bill.” I pulled the shoe off his foot, which, of course, he hadn’t thought to try to do. With his foot free he climbed down easily, but the shoe remained stuck at eye level. I set about untying it. I’ve always been pretty good at knots.

Dad came bounding toward us, still roaring. He sounded like a hungry lion. Bill bowed his head, a one-sandaled Christian resigned to his fate.

“What did I say?” Dad shouted. “What did I tell you not to do?”

“Climb the fence,” Bill mumbled.

“And what did you do?”

“Climb the fence.”

“That’s the second time in two days! What am I going to do with you?”

What do they call those questions where you aren’t supposed to answer? Not categorical, but something like that. Stupid is what they are, but there’s another
word. Anyway, Dad’s question was one of those. Bill knew better than to try and answer it. Silently, I handed him his shoe, and he bent down to put it on.

“I can’t send you to your room because we’re in the van. I can’t yell at you for the next hour because I’d get hoarse. What am I going to do?”

Another trick question. Bill didn’t look up. Bernie was frowning.

Dad sighed. “Let’s get back to the van.”

We trooped back. I offered Bill the bag of jelly beans. He shook his head.

Marty was sitting on the step of the van. He looked tired. He took a whole handful of jelly beans.

“I have discovered the trouble,” he said.

“What is it?” said Dad. Standing beside the little old man, he looked like a giant.

“I wonder,” said Marty, looking around, “if there is
any water around here? Did you see any water when you were up by the field, Jane?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s too bad,” said Marty.

“There is water,” said Bill. “A little stream on the other side of the fence. It’s hidden from the road. The cows told me about it,” he added, in a low voice.

“Ah, ha!” Marty stood up. “There is a stream beyond the fence,” he said. It sounded like one of those phrases I had to learn in French class.
It y a un ruisseau au delà de la clôture.
The hairs of my aunt are shorter than those of my mama. My car has a pain in the gas tank.

I wondered what Marty was getting at. He looked earnest, like he was trying to be helpful, but what he said didn’t sound helpful.

Dad frowned. “Thank you. There is a stream beyond the fence. And there are clouds in the sky. In the nearby copse, a lonesome red-winged blackbird sings its song of love. Thank you for the nature lesson. Now could you tell us what’s wrong with the van?”

“There is water in the stream,” continued Marty.

“And a bump on the log, and the green grass grows all around all around. Come on, Marty.” Dad was getting impatient. I think he was upset that he couldn’t fix the car, even if it was something simple.

“I wonder if there is a can in the car,” said Marty. “An empty can. Or a bottle. Or a hat.”

“A hat?” I asked.

“A hat for water.”

“What’s a hat for water?” Was it another obscure figure of speech, like the one about the cow and the eggs?

Marty made a gesture with his hands. “You put the water from the stream into the radiator of the car.”

“Oh,” said Dad.

“And the radiator would cool down the car. Now the radiator is not working, and the car is too hot.”

“Oh,” said Dad again. “And we could carry the water in a can. If we had a can. Or a bottle. If we had a bottle.”

“Yes. Or a hat,” I said.

“If we had a hat,” said Bill.

Dad and Bill went back up the hill to find the stream. Grandma lit a cigarette. Bernie and I got down on our hands and knees to root around the floor of the van and through our vacation luggage. Bernie found an old waxed paper cup, which used to have a milkshake inside it, and now had a dried butterscotch crust. I found five baseball caps, with holes all over them for ventilation, and a couple of twist ties. Bernie found a pen and a peppermint lifesaver. I found thirteen cents.

Dad came around to the side door. “The stream is there all right. We’ll be able to get all the water we need. What did you guys find?” We showed the results of our search. His face fell. “That’s it? That’s all you found? Did you check our beach stuff? What about plastic buckets?”

“We have shovels,” said Bernie. “And rakes.”

“No buckets?”

“No buckets.”

Dad took the dixie cup from Bernie’s hand. Stared at it doubtfully.

It was a glorious day, if a little buggy, on our secluded little patch of highway. Dad stared from the cup to the farmer’s fence. Bill stood on the other side of it, wagging his finger up and down in front of a cow’s face, as if he was arguing with the animal. Grandma was butting out her cigarette.

“Are we going to wait here all day?” she said.

You can’t carry a lot of water in a dixie cup with a hole in the bottom. You can’t carry any water at all in a well-ventilated baseball cap. Marty suggested using plastic bags, which we should have thought of. Everyone has plastic bags in their car. Bernie and I went back and rummaged around. The first plastic bag we found had a big hole in it. So did the second plastic bag. The third bag had three holes. After that he stopped looking. I kept at it, and found a fluff-covered mint, a whole bunch of twist ties, and another seven cents.

“This is going to be a long, slow process,” said Dad, after running with the dripping plastic bag in one hand, and the dripping dixie cup in the other, and finally pouring about three teaspoonfuls of water into the steaming radiator.

“A raindrop does not fill a bucket,” said Marty, “but enough raindrops will fill an ocean.”

The expression on Dad’s face was hilarious, but I didn’t feel like laughing.

Marty gestured into the engine. “There is, I think, another problem.”

That’s when we saw the approaching car. Ahead of us was a straight stretch of road. Dad ran into the oncoming lane and started waving his arms, stopping just in time to jump out of the way as the car sped past.

Then, from around the bend behind us, we heard the sound of another vehicle. A noisier vehicle by far – a rackety-banging, slow-moving, backfiring vehicle. The noise stopped and started and came on again, and then we saw the rusty pickup truck chugging toward us. You know how you always seem to see the same cars over and over again when you’re traveling? This was the truck we’d had so much trouble passing. Blue smoke bellied out of its exhaust pipe.

Dad was careful to stay on the side of the road. He made a half-wave at the driver, who grinned a wide yellow-toothed grin. The truck crawled slowly past us, backfiring. It didn’t stop. The tailgate flapped up and down, like a waving hand. When the truck hit a pothole, down the road from us, the tailgate opened and something bounced out of the truck. It fell onto the road, bounced again, and rolled. A clear bright flashing thing. The bottle – that’s what it was – came to rest on the gravel edge of the road. The truck lurched slowly away into the distance, belching smelly smoke and sudden spurts of flame.

I ran to get the bottle. “It’s not broken,” I said, holding it up to the sun.

Marty shuddered when he saw it. “Whiskey,” he said.

“Not now,” said Dad.

Marty looked away.

Dad took the bottle from me, ran to the fence, passed the bottle to Bill, and came back a minute later with a bottle full of water. He poured carefully. I stood on tiptoe to watch.

Marty was on his knees at the side of the van. “Are you okay?” Grandma asked him. “Marty, are you okay?”

He nodded. Dad ran back to the fence for another bottle of water. And another. Bill came back with him the last time.

“Funny, isn’t it,” I said. I was thinking back to the man trying not to let us pass him, and then laughing at us as he went past us. “That mean old guy in the truck didn’t like us, but the bottle fell out of his truck, and it helped us.”

“Funny,” Dad agreed.

“How come that is?” I asked.

“Good comes from evil sometimes,” said Dad. “I don’t know why. But I’m sure Marty has a saying about it.”

Marty climbed to his feet, dusting off the knees of his pants. His face was as empty as Dad’s bottle. “There is still a problem with the hose,” he said.

“Oh,” said Dad.

Marty explained. “The hose comes out of the radiator. There should be a clamp.” He made a circle with his thumb and first finger. “To hold the hose. Only now there is no clamp. And the water drains out of the radiator.” He pointed underneath the front of the van. A small puddle of water was forming.

“What do we do?”

“Many people carry spare clamps in their tool kits,” said Marty.

Dad shook his head. “Not us. We don’t even carry a tool kit.”

“Then,” said Marty, “we have a problem.”

“Tchah,” said Grandma.

Dad sighed. “Anyone want a mint?” he called. The boys jumped to their feet. I got the candy from the front seat. I caught sight of my hair in the driving mirror. It was starting to look less chestnut and more pumpkin. I pushed it behind my ears, to show off the heart earrings.

“If there was only a way to tie off the hose,” said Marty.

“Like what?”

“Thin wire might work. It’d be a temporary job, but it should last for a couple of hours. Not a coat hanger, thinner than that …”

Dad frowned, shaking his head. By accident I bit into my mint and, like a jolt of flavor, an idea came into my head. I ran back to the van and collected the twist ties I’d found on the floor.

“Could you use these?” I asked.

Fifteen minutes later, we were ready to get back on the road.

“Thank you, Marty,” we all said, one after the other. He looked away. His hands, I noticed, were trembling.

“Now, is there anything we can do for you in return?” Dad asked. “Anything you might need …” He stopped. Marty was climbing into the van.

“Yes,” said Dad, to himself. “I suppose we could do that.”

Marty sat in the backseat beside Grandma, eating jelly beans.

“Are you old enough to eat the black ones?” Bernie asked, seriously.

“I don’t really know,” Marty said.

Bernie nodded. “I am almost three,” he said.

Bill, in the front seat, turned around to stare at Marty. “You don’t know how old you are?” he said with surprise. A grown-up who didn’t know his age.

“Well, I’m older than my brother. Two years … I think … or three. I used to carry around a piece of paper with my date of birth on it,” said Marty. He ran the words together, like he’d heard them a lot and thought of them as one word: date-of-birth. “But I lost it a while ago.”

“You could ask your mom and dad,” said Bernie.

Marty smiled sadly and shook his head. “No, I can’t.”

“Or your brothers and sisters. They would know.”

Marty shook his head again. “I have no brothers,” he said. “Not anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Bernie,” I said. “Shush now.”

Dad drove in silence. The morning was wearing away gently, like the edge of a cliff with water at the bottom. Imperceptibly, the sun was getting higher; the day was getting older; the cliff was receding.

Dad didn’t seem as angry anymore. He had forgiven Bill for climbing the fence against his express orders. Marty had said something about forbidden actions breaking the boundaries of knowledge. Bernie had said, “You know …” and then stopped.