It's Up to Charlie Hardin Read online

Both boy and cat became sun-stunned, so near sleep that when at last the tent was stored, Gene stepped onto the flagstones before the cat came alert. A sizzle like grease on a hot skillet erupted from Charlie’s lap and the cat dematerialized in a stripy flash. “Ow, ow, durn you,” Charlie scolded after the departed animal. “Thanks a lot, Tiger,” he added, rubbing furiously at tiny wounds those claws had made through his trouser legs.

  “Peeve, you mean,” said Gene, not at all surprised at the way the family feline had greeted him. “Her name’s ‘Peeve.’”

  “New cat, huh,” said Charlie.

  “Mother’s had her since I was, I dunno, five maybe.”

  Some unspoken understanding passed between the boys. Then Charlie asked, “Why’d she name her pet ‘Peeve’?”

  Gene grinned that impudent grin of his. “You just said. Her pet peeve, get it?”

  Abruptly Charlie did get it, and slapped himself on the forehead with the heel of his hand. “Keen.”

  “Hey, we don’t have much time before your mother comes,” Gene said abruptly. “Don’t you wanta see the creek?”

  Charlie fired off a grin of his own. “If there was one.”

  “I bet it’s still there behind the dam. And if we’re good guys we better turn it back on while we can.”

  Scampering away down to the throat of the golf course, they hurried toward the ancient dam, staying hidden in greenery. The boys reached the graveled street together and saw through cyclone fencing at the same time. One of Gene’s special giggles burbled up at what they saw, but Charlie was silent with awe.

  That merry little brook of the day before was nowhere to be seen—or rather, it was everywhere, but not as a brook anymore. Charlie marveled how a lazy little stream pouring twenty gallons a second through a ravine could produce a real swim-across-it, float-rafts-on-it, drown-in-it pond after being sealed off for twelve hours or so. In an instant the scene told Charlie more about multiplication tables than his teachers ever had. Wooden lawn chairs lazed across the lake surface.

  “Must be six feet deep in the middle,” Gene marveled, and moved over to grip fencing nearest the hackberry branches. “C’mon, guy, time to open it back up!”

  Charlie rushed to obey and was standing on Gene’s shoulders leaning toward the tree before he realized that somewhere far off across those fenced acres, men’s voices were calling back and forth. “Hurry, Charlie,” Gene insisted. “I don’t see anybody yet.”

  The hackberry seemed to have developed claws that tore at his clothes as Charlie reached the trunk and slid down inside the property. He slipped and would have fallen headfirst into the pond near his feet if not for the rusted wheel, and as he gripped it with both hands he could hear one of those distant voices, now much closer. No telling what it said. It didn’t matter what it said.

  It didn’t matter what Gene was saying either, because Gene was still safely outside the fence, now lying flat in the coarse tuft grass, a cheering section of one but not a loud one. “Turn it, turn it,” he chanted.

  And Charlie turned it. And again, and again, and with every twist a sudden trickle became a deeper splash which begat a low-pitched rumble that created a thunderous rush so loud Charlie almost failed to hear the shout of a man in overalls ten yards away. The man was only a few paces from a capture, clinging to the fence as he approached with the obvious intention of grabbing the boy, when Charlie abandoned the wheel. Charlie leaped for the tree but knew he made an easy target, inchworming feverishly up that rough bark from a height any standing man could reach.

  But not a man who suddenly lost his footing to turn sidelong and plunge backward with a despairing yell, full-length, into the lake.

  As the man began to swim back toward him, Charlie shinnied as he had never shinnied before; like the boy who invented shinny. It seemed he could hear Gene Carpenter urging him on but faintly amid the Niagara roar below. Charlie’s feet were running as he hit the gravel shoulder and the only reason he did not run directly uphill toward the Carpenter home was that Gene grabbed him by the belt and guided him toward the ravine. “Parking lot over the hill,” was the terse explanation. “Big hedge behind it.”

  Charlie needed all his breath for running, but he understood when he imagined men climbing that cyclone fence and giving chase. He understood a little more when he realized that Gene’s rhythmic panting carried a familiar giggle in it. And when they leaped the creek that was now visibly rising more every second, he suspected that Gene Carpenter had planned every stage of this craziness. A single glance behind him told Charlie that a solid wall of water was now hurtling from the conduit pipe like the coming of a Biblical flood as the boys sped uphill.

  The hill was not high, and as soon as the boys topped it the ravine was out of sight. Charlie figured all of Gene’s giggling had stolen his breath, since Charlie reached the parking area ten paces ahead. He slowed to a walk hoping to become less interesting to a man who eyed him while hauling golf implements from a car. Gene fell in step blowing like a whale, steering their progress toward a high well-trimmed hedge that flanked the gravel drive.

  Minutes later the boys reached the shoulder of a suburban street and headed for Gene’s neighborhood. “We’ll pass by our place the next alley down and then come back from the west,” said the planner, and paused to gawk at a group of men dressed as colorfully as circus clowns who stood on the golf course near a foolish little flag on a pole.

  “What’re they doing?”

  The men were gesturing, laughing, all facing the ravine, their voices too distant to carry well. “We can see better a ways farther,” Gene replied, and trotted down the street’s gentle slope. A half-block away the golf course’s gentle curves yielded a better view into the ravine, and now Charlie saw a knot of tiny figures there near another flag. They were yelling and waving too, but did not seem to be enjoying it much. Gene glanced Charlie’s way and snickered. “Didn’t think of this part,” he confided.

  Then Charlie saw that the unhappy golfers and their caddies all stood near the creek on a room-sized grassy patch completely surrounded by water. And the water seemed to be creeping higher on the patch. “Boyoboy, did we raise a ruckus. We gotta do this again next year,” Gene remarked, and set off down the street again venting those giggles that, by now, made Charlie feel uneasy.

  By the time they neared the Carpenter place, Charlie could hear the forlorn blurt of a Plymouth’s horn, familiar little double toots that reminded Charlie of home as powerfully as the unmistakable sound of Lint’s bark. He broke into a trot, calling as he went, with Gene at his heels.

  Finally in sight of his mother, Charlie saw her wave back and slowed to a walk. His companion fell in stride, saying, “You have fun like this at home, Charlie? Could we camp out at your place next time?”

  A stab of uneasiness pierced Charlie’s vitals. “They pretty much make us stay inside,” Charlie lied. “I’ll have to ask my dad.”

  “You can take some of my golf balls home. I can go get you a few.”

  “That’s okay, you keep ’em for me. Just till I come next time,” Charlie added quickly, wondering whether a golf ball would still be of any use to him in a hundred years.

  Gene perked up at Charlie’s reply. “We have all summer, guy,” he said, punching Charlie’s shoulder lightly with a fist. They were smiling together as they reached their mothers, and something in Mrs. Carpenter’s face said the arrivals of Eugene Carpenter were not always this tame.

  As the Plymouth turned toward home, Gene ran alongside until he was called back, and then waved until he was left behind. After a single dutiful wave, Charlie settled low in his seat and released a sigh. He appeared to ignore the sodden man in torn overalls who limped along the edge of the golf course, scanning the ravine with sober intensity.

  Smiling, Willa Hardin patted her son’s knee. “Did you have fun with your new friend, Charlie?”

  “Yessum,” he said, not exactly a falsehood. Then, feeling the need to say more—much, much more—and not knowing wher
e to start, he thrust it all away. “They have a cat,” he added, and after a pause: “It doesn’t like him.”

  “Cats can be strange,” she said.

  It was on the tip of his tongue to say, “Boys too,” but for Charlie it was enough to grunt a simple agreement. He knew all he needed to know about his new friend. He wouldn’t visit again; he would run off and join a circus, even a flea circus, sooner than invite Eugene Carpenter to the Hardin home; and he knew that the brightest, sunniest outside of a person can hide an inside as dark and twisty as a ball of black yarn. “I can’t hardly wait to see Lint and Aaron,” he said.

  CHAPTER 13:

  BETTER THAN SNOOZING

  The rattling, buzzing chorus of locusts debating in nearby trees announced that the long sultry afternoons of summer had come. Adults sometimes called the thumb-sized insect a cicada, but boys knew it only as a “seventeen-year locust,” and invented scores of myths to explain why a bug would lie clasping a twig for minutes while its motor idled, then rouse its clatter to fever pitch for fifteen seconds or so before settling again to the kind of raspy drone that could drive a person to distraction.

  Sitting under their fig tree near the creek, Charlie inspected Lint’s ears for ticks and described the strangeness of Gene Carpenter. Meanwhile, Aaron carefully untangled a fishing line that had small hooks tied every few feet along the “trotline” they used to threaten the sun perch of Shoal Creek. Aaron found something to disbelieve in Charlie’s tale with almost every sentence. “You mean he lugged both sacks home by himself in the middle of the night?”

  “I guess,” said Charlie. “He never said, but they sure didn’t make it back by theirself. SHUT UP!” His shout was directed into the trees, and though Lint flinched, Aaron ignored it. For moments after a demand like this the nearest locusts ceased their clamor, but a bug’s memory was brief. Charlie went on. “The guy was trying to teach me how to be him, but he didn’t wake me up for the weirdest part. I think maybe he likes to do his night stuff alone.”

  “What I think is maybe you better let him. Anyway, why would he wanta make somebody be like him?”

  Charlie pondered the question. “’Cause nobody else is, I guess,” he said at last. “Around grown-ups he’s polite enough to charm your granny, almost sissified, but he’s like the last of the dinosaurs, and I bet he’s just plain lonesome. You pal around with Gene Carpenter once, and alligators couldn’t drag you to his house again.”

  “Huh; no wonder,” said Aaron, who had overturned his can of fishing worms and hastened to set it upright again. “You better stay away from him, Charlie; he’s nutty as a fruitcake.”

  “Their cat thinks so,” Charlie said, which concluded the topic. It was common knowledge among boys of that time that cats were superior judges of character.

  Because whole weeks went by without neighborhood news worth sharing, Charlie was secretly a little disappointed to find that while he was gone the other boys had not needed him to entertain them. Jackie Rhett had been his replacement, but Jackie’s misfortune was really the core of it.

  Playing in the nearby park in early evening when most boys were settled into radio programs and comic books, Jackie had interrupted a romancing couple—one of several—who lay in deep shadows. Furious at being chased away, Jackie had reflected on the unfairness of young men in uniform with unTexas accents who, every night in most seasons, took charge of every secluded nook in Austin to court local girls.

  Still fuming, Jackie had stuffed the bowels of a ruined tire casing with newspaper and trundled it along the sidewalk all the way from home. While Charlie was having supper across town with the Carpenters, Jackie had sprinkled the paper with lighter fluid and set it afire before sending it down into the park, a circle of flame bounding across the slopes. But while Jackie paused to count the couples he had flushed like quail in the twilight, he had been caught in mid-jeer, according to him, by a giant in military uniform who wielded a doubled belt. Jackie had gone home a sadder, wiser boy.

  “Wish I coulda seen it,” Charlie sighed, relishing the picture in his mind.

  “You know Jackie, his giant coulda been a midget,” Aaron said, “but he’s got sure ’nough stripes on his hide to show for it. PIPE DOWN!” Again the cicadas paused. Lint sent an aggrieved look though Charlie remained unfazed.

  “No midgets in the army,” said Charlie, without the least idea whether he was right. “Jackie’s tire burn anything down?”

  “Nope, it fetched up against those stone benches at the water fountain. I helped him roll it home this morning, just a little melted and stunk up. Says he has other plans for it. I bet I know who he wants to have right in the middle of those plans, one way or another.” And Aaron rolled his eyes.

  “Roy?”

  “I meant us, but Roy’s pretty much Number One in the dumb department, so yeah, him ’specially.”

  Lint issued a tiny growl and shook an ear loose from Charlie’s scrutiny, letting his master know there were limits to a dog’s patience. “I’m not gonna worry about Jackie’s plans,” Charlie said, with a get-on-with-you pat against the terrier’s rump. “We’ve let that momsie boss us around too long.”

  Aaron knew better than to correct a boy who resisted correction, so he didn’t bother to challenge Charlie’s attempts at sounding Jewish. It was a kind of compliment, in fact. Besides, “momsie” had a nice belittling tone of its own, so Charlie was welcome to it.

  “Let’s go string our trotline before these bugs drive me batty,” Aaron suggested.

  The boys felt confident that now in the endless afternoons of June in 1944 they were both too adult to be taken in by Jackie’s schemes and need not be concerned about him. This attitude made it practically certain that they would soon be involved with Jackie again. Not because Jackie was such a deceptive genius; Jackie was not that subtle. And not because Jackie had leadership qualities, though with his energy and self-confidence, he did have some of those qualities. Charlie and Aaron could not avoid that involvement because in a humid Austin summer, time lay heavy as manhole covers on their idleness, and being around Jackie was better than snoozing while six-inch fish stole bait.

  Having assured themselves they would avoid what they daily proved they could not avoid, they turned to applying tender inch-long morsels of worm to hooks; morsels the perch always nibbled away without penalty.

  Pinero found himself wishing he had linked himself to a man with only one leg, or cooties, or almost any disability other than the one Bridger had, which was a drunkard’s inability to stick to a plan for more than ten minutes.

  Was special ink expensive? Then Bridger was sure to set it down where he would kick it over. Did the sturdy old printing press need careful treatment? Bridger could be depended on to fetch up against it while falling-down drunk, knocking the engraved images askew.

  As for his toilet needs, Cade Bridger was seldom in that basement very long before—drunk or sober—he needed to empty the kidneys he abused with liquor that would have made better paint remover. “Look, ’migo, you have to learn to drain your lizard before you get here,” Pinero told him that sweltering afternoon and pulled an empty milk bottle from the cloth sack he had brought. “Do it in this when you have to, but put it where you won’t knock it over, and then take it out when we leave, okay?” He jerked, stiffened, then relaxed. “You hear that? Sounded like a woman screamed ‘shut up’ a ways off, out on the street,” he said.

  Bridger gave a headshake and took the bottle without replying, and wished he had thought of the milk bottle idea himself. On this occasion he had resolved to stay sober so that he could absorb everything Pinero needed him to learn. He had the best possible reason for this: the hope that he could run off a few hundred of those twenty-dollar bills for himself some night, without Dom Pinero’s knowledge. Prices of Bridger’s favorite narcotic had taken a slight but sudden jump with the long-awaited invasion by Allied troops into France on the sixth of June. With the current price of tequila at sixty cents a bottle from Austin’s h
ard-working Mexican laborers, if he spent only one of those bills a month he could stay as cross-eyed drunk as a congressman for the rest of his life. Moments later Pinero glanced up again. “Crazy gringa’s still yelling,” he said, realizing Bridger hadn’t heard it.

  “Wha’d she say?”

  “Sounded like ‘wipe town,’” said Pinero and, seeing the puzzlement in Bridger’s face, added, “Not important. Now pay attention how I tighten this clamp.”

  On this occasion the lesson went well, Pinero insisting on using ordinary paper for tests and using a small high-powered magnifier to study the counterfeits they produced. When Bridger asked about the poor quality of metallic glitter that small portions of new bills were supposed to have, his partner was almost pleased.

  “That’s why we’ll take all the bills and tumble them in a tub of dirt,” Pinero said. “Look at any old genuine bill. You see after it’s used and wrinkled the shiny stuff mostly goes away. By then nobody thinks anything about it.”

  Bridger thought it was silly to filthify new money until Pinero convinced him that in ordinary use most paper money was thrust into so many grimy hands, tainted pockets, mildewed mattresses, mouldy crevices, dusty drawers and other palaces of bacteria, it was little short of miraculous that people dared to keep the nasty stuff around. Bridger declared he was satisfied to live with it anyway. He gathered the copies they had made for Pinero to take away as trash of the most dangerous sort, trash to be burnt in Pinero’s fireplace and its ashes stirred for good measure.

  But while his partner took these things to his car, Bridger found a pair of rejected bills fallen next to the rag bin. They had been printed only on one side but slightly off-center, and some trace of caution told Bridger not to leave this evidence out in the open. While emptying his milk bottle of its yellowish fluid through the escape hole he had bashed into the storm drain, he crumpled the useless bills up and discarded them in the storm drain’s rubble. He saw no point in letting Pinero know his first attempt to clean up the place had been sloppy. There would be plenty of time to remove the stuff another time.