Wish (4 page)

*   *   *

Things at school seemed to get worse every day.

My homework papers came back all marked up by Mrs. Willibey in red pencil, with notes like “See me” and “Try again.”

Sometimes I didn't even do my homework. It seemed like a waste of time since I wasn't going to be there much longer. Once in a while Bertha asked me if I had homework, and I was pretty good at just shrugging and changing the subject.

Besides, I was used to getting marked-up papers like that 'cause back in Raleigh, I wasn't exactly Student of the Year. Jackie was the only one who ever fussed at me for not going to school or not doing my homework, but I reminded her that she was not my mother so she should leave me alone. When my teacher called the house to tell Mama how bad I'd done on my math test or ask why I hadn't turned in my book report, Mama would holler and carry on for about five minutes and then she'd throw up her skinny arms and heave a big sigh before she said, “What's the use?” Then she'd shuffle out of the room in her bedroom slippers, muttering about how she didn't deserve that aggravation.

At least in Raleigh, I had friends at school, but here, when I sat at a table in the cafeteria, girls made faces like they smelled something bad and slid their trays away from me. Most days, I pretended like I had a stomachache and spent the afternoon in the nurse's office drawing more stars and hearts on my arm with a marker.

At recess, Howard followed me around, reminding me he was my Backpack Buddy and asking questions a mile a minute.

“Did you ever visit your daddy in jail?”

“Why ain't your sister here, too?”

“You want some of my Bible bucks?”

Sometimes I answered him and sometimes I didn't.

The thing about Howard was, everything just rolled right off him. It seemed like nothing bothered him one little bit. It was clear that nobody at school wanted much to do with him, but he didn't seem to mind. His brother Dwight was always surrounded by cussing, punching, ball-tossing, fist-bumping boys, but Howard never joined them. A couple of times when I rode into town with Gus and Bertha, I'd see his older brothers, Burl and Lenny, tossing a football or shooting hoops with their friends, but Howard would be sitting on the steps scribbling in a notebook or over by the garage fiddling with his bicycle.

Bertha had commented about him one day when we drove by. “That poor boy is too much of a loner,” she said.

“Nothing wrong with that,” Gus said.

Bertha shook her head. “Not for a child. Children need friends.” Bertha sighed. “I don't get it. He's just as sweet as he can be.”

“I bet it's 'cause of his up-down walk,” I said.

“Well, that's mean,” she said. She turned around to face me. “You're going to make so many new friends here in Colby, Charlie. I just know it.”

I stared out the window and pretended like I wasn't even listening to her go on about all the things I could do. Like Girl Scouts and 4-H. She told me about her friend Jonelle who lived in Fairview and had a daughter my age. We could visit them some Saturday if I wanted to or maybe we could go to the mall down in Asheville. On and on she went, talking as if my life in Colby was going to be like living in Disney World.

“You're gonna talk that girl's head plum off, Bertie,” Gus said.

Bertha laughed and slapped him playfully on the arm.

“Where do you think that dog is?” I asked Gus.

“Could be anywhere,” he said. “That mutt gets around.”

I'd been looking everywhere for that stray dog. I'd seen him twice since that day he'd come to Gus and Bertha's, but both times he darted off into the woods when he saw me.

“He sure loves my meat loaf, I can tell you that,” Bertha said. “He licks that pan clean and then hightails it outta there so fast I hardly get so much as a glimpse of him.”

I leaned back against the seat and sighed. I bet I was never gonna catch that dog. And what if I did? Could I really keep him? Mama would probably have a hissy fit. But I bet Scrappy would call from jail and tell her to stop her yammering and let me have a dog if I wanted one.

Then, as we were turning onto the main road into town, I saw a black horse out in a field, eating grass and swishing its tail at flies. I shook my fist at it three times and made my wish. That was the rule for black-horse wishing. If you see a white horse, just make a wish. But for a black horse you have to shake your fist at it three times. I'd learned that one from Scrappy, which made me a little skeptical, but I did it anyway.

Shook my fist and made my wish.

 

Six

A few days later, Mrs. Willibey called Bertha about my bad attitude. That day in school, she had asked me if I had two-thirds of a piece of pie and I wanted to give half to my sister, then how much of the whole pie would that be? I told her I wouldn't give my sister any of my pie. Everybody had laughed except Mrs. Willibey. She had turned red and pressed her lips together and made her eyes into little slits when she looked at me.

When she called Bertha that afternoon, I was stretched out in Gus's easy chair watching TV. The fat orange cat named Flora was curled in my lap.

I heard Bertha say “She did?” and “Oh, dear.” Then she lowered her voice and I could only make out bits and pieces drifting through the kitchen door.

“… a rough time…”

“… missing her family…”

“… been hard on her…”

Then she hung up and I kept my eyes on the TV when she came in and sat on the couch.

“That was Mrs. Willibey,” she said.

A fast-talking guy on TV was pouring chocolate syrup on the floor and mopping it up with a Miracle Mop.

“She told me you've been a little rude in school,” Bertha said.

Now the man on TV was showing the set of knives that came free with the Miracle Mop.

Then Bertha started going on about how she knows how upset I must be about my family being all broken like it is. Well, she didn't use the word
broken
, but she might as well have. She said she knew how it must be scary to see Mama like she was. How I must be worried sick about Scrappy. How I must miss Jackie so much.

I kept my eyes on the mopping man and in my head I said,
Pineapple. Pineapple. Pineapple
. But Howard's stupid idea didn't work because the next thing I knew I was hollering at Bertha. Mean words about minding her own business and who cared about my broken-up, sorry excuse for a family. Not me, that was for sure. The words kept spewing and got louder and faster. How I hated Colby and all those hillbilly kids and this nasty old house hanging off the side of the mountain and those canning jars in my room and especially those Cinderella pillowcases.

Then I stalked outside, letting the screen door slam behind me and trying not to think about Bertha sitting there on the couch looking like she'd been stabbed in the heart.

A couple of cats leaped out of my way as I stormed across the yard and up the driveway toward the road. I kicked at dirt and yanked on leaves and hurled gravel into the woods. When I got to the road, I didn't even care that the asphalt was burning hot under my bare feet. The mad was swirling inside me, making my ears ring and my stomach churn. But then, the next thing I knew, I was sitting in the dirt on the side of the road crying so hard I couldn't hardly breathe.

What was wrong with me? Why had I said those mean things to Bertha? Why was I acting so hateful at school? And then, while I was sitting there wallowing in my pity, somebody said, “What's the matter, Charlie?”

I looked up to see Howard standing by his bicycle in front of me.

I put my head on my knees and mumbled, “Nothing.”

“Must be something,” he said.

“Go away.”

“Naw.” He laid his bicycle in the weeds by the road and sat next to me. “You have to tell me what's the matter.”

This boy beat all. He sure had a lot of gumption for a little ole redheaded up-down boy.

“I don't have to tell you anything,” I said.

“Then you have to tell
somebody
.” He pushed at his glasses.

“Why?”

“My mama says you should never keep your troubles to yourself. She says if you share 'em with somebody, they get smaller.”

“Go away,” I said.

“Did you kick somebody again?”

I shook my head.

“Poke 'em with a pencil?”

“No!” I hollered.

“Mama made this needlepoint sign that says, ‘If all our troubles were hung on a line, you'd choose yours and I'd choose mine.'”

I lifted my head and stared at him. “What's that supposed to mean?” I asked him.

“It means everybody's got troubles and some of 'em are worse than yours.” He yanked at a blade of grass and tossed it into the road. “Or something like that,” he added.

Ha! That was a good one. I couldn't think of anybody with worse troubles than me. Then I looked at Howard with his eyebrows knitted together and a look of pure worry on his face and before I knew it, I was spilling those troubles out to him. I told him how I wished Scrappy wasn't in jail. How he and I used to play poker and watch
Wheel of Fortune
and eat macaroni and cheese for breakfast. I told him how scared I was when I saw my mama crying into her pillow in her dark bedroom, not even caring one little bit whether I had clean clothes or even went to school. I told him how Mama and Scrappy would holler at each other the livelong day while me and Jackie sat on her bed with the radio turned up loud so we didn't have to hear them. I told him about all those times I watched from the bedroom window when Scrappy drove off with his tires screeching and gravel flying while Mama yelled “Good riddance to bad rubbish” from the front porch. I told him how much I missed Jackie, who knew all the words to nearly every song on the radio and would french braid my hair and share her nail polish with me. And then I told him those mean things I'd said to Bertha.

When I was done, the silence settled over us, still and soft, like a veil. The sun had gotten lower in the sky, sitting on top of the mountains in the distance, and the air had grown cooler.

For a minute, I thought maybe Howard was embarrassed by all that stuff I'd told him and didn't know what to say. I was starting to wish I had never shared my troubles with him like that. But then he looked right at me and said, “Want my advice?”

“Um, sure, I guess,” I said.

“You can't do nothing about Scrappy and them back in Raleigh,” he said. “The only thing you can fix is what you done to Bertha.”

I guess he was right. I couldn't fix my mess of a family, but I could try to make things right with Bertha. I stood up and brushed the dirt off the back of my shorts. And then I couldn't hardly believe my eyes. Right there at the edge of the woods was that brown-and-black, floppy-eared dog!

I put my finger to my lips and went, “Shhhh.”

The dog was watching me with his head cocked to the side.

“Don't move,” I whispered to Howard.

I took one slow step toward the dog and guess what? He wagged his tail! Two tiny little wags. That dog liked me.

“Hey, fella,” I said, taking another step.

Then, wouldn't you know it, a car came roaring up the road and whizzed past us and that dog darted off into the woods.

I stamped my foot. “Dang it!”

I'd almost forgotten Howard was there when he said, “I've seen that dog before.”

“He's mine,” I said.

“Really?”

“Well, he's gonna be.”

“I bet he's full of ticks,” he said. “And he might have the mange. Stray dogs have the mange.”

“So what?” I said. “His name is Wishbone.” The minute I said that, it felt right. Wishbone. That was the perfect name for my dog.

“I'm going to catch him,” I said. “Then I'll bathe him and get the ticks off him and teach him tricks and let him sleep in the bed with me.”

“I'll help you catch him,” Howard said, picking his bike up out of the weeds.

“You will?”

“Sure.”

Suddenly Howard seemed different. He didn't seem so much like a nosy up-down boy, nagging me half to death about being my Backpack Buddy. He seemed more like somebody being nice to me. Somebody I had shared my troubles with.

I watched him get on his bike and pedal off toward his house. Then I called “Bye, Wishbone” into the woods before I hurried up the road to make things right with Bertha.

 

Seven

By the time I got home, it was getting dark. Gus's old rattletrap of a car was in the driveway and the smell of spaghetti sauce drifted through the screen door.

My feet felt like cinder blocks as I made my way across the yard toward the house. More than anything, I wanted to just go on back to my room and pretend like this day had never happened.

But I didn't.

I put one cinder-block foot in front of the other until I was on the back porch, where Gus and Bertha sat gazing out at the mountain view.

“Hey,” I said, and my voice sounded like a sniveling baby. I kept my eyes on the leaf-covered floorboards of the porch.

“Hey, there,” Gus said.

I couldn't look at Bertha, but her silence smacked me hard. I sat down and studied the fading hearts and stars I'd drawn on my arm. From somewhere way down in the woods, a bullfrog croaked, sending his deep-throated call echoing out into the cool evening air.

I counted to three in my head and then I said it. “I'm sorry, Bertha.”

Then I did what I'd told myself I most definitely would not do.

I cried.

And, I swear, I could not stop no matter how much I wanted to.

The worst part was that I couldn't get myself to tell Bertha those things I'd practiced in my head. Like how I didn't mean to holler at her. How I don't hate this house perched on the mountainside with Pegasus up there shining over the porch. How those canning jars don't bother me one little bit. And most of all, how I love Cinderella, because who doesn't?