It's Up to Charlie Hardin Read online

  Charlie stepped forward as Aaron looked again at the jumble of stuff in the pipe. “I’m sure glad I made you come up here,” Charlie prodded, hoping for a reply, only to be disappointed. By now Charlie was growing impatient for conversation and made a comment he thought might provoke a response, the way a boy might set off a Baby Giant firecracker in an antbed. “I reckon you’re real lucky you have a buddy good as me to look out for you, guy. If it wasn’t for me—”

  “If it wasn’t for you I’d be out in the sun flying a kite,” Aaron burst out, and his flick of a switch put them into near-perfect blackness. “I wouldn’t be in a hole in the ground that stinks like dead stuff! I’d be just fine outside by myself, or across town on my bike with some other guy who’s not so pea-brained dangerous his dad won’t let him loose on wheels without a babysitter!”

  The fact that Charlie was in darkness getting shouted at into his face so near he could feel the spray of spit on his cheeks made this explosion more flabbergasting. Then the flabbergaster flicked the light switch on to see the flabbergastee’s reaction. Charlie stood slack-jawed, in need of time to fully realize how far his good intentions had gone astray. Could this loud, furious accuser be even distant kin to the quiet, calm Aaron he knew so well? Had Charlie in fact just possibly said or done some eensy teensy little thing to light Aaron’s fuse? Charlie hung his head and thought about this. And then he focused on the debris at his feet and his thoughts expanded.

  Aaron half-expected his pal to shout back. The other half of his expectation was that, after hearing a few things about himself that Aaron had kept in a shadowed corner of his soul, Charlie would turn all remorseful and beg his pardon for being such a blossoming bumptious inflated strutting common Christian jackass.

  But Charlie did neither of these things. Instead, he kept his gaze down, moving his lips slightly as he sometimes did when his thoughts were most creative. Or when, as Aaron had seen many times, his friend was trying not to laugh but close to doing it anyway. Well, he’d better not be about to laugh now. If he was, he’d get a bloody nose for it. He’d wind up here by himself in the dark with—“Charlie Hardin, you better not laugh. I’ll pound you one in your piehole if you snicker at me,” Aaron said, near angry tears.

  “You’re not even looking,” Charlie replied, and bent down. “Here’s a dollar, right here next to us and you don’t see it. Neither did I. How long you think it’s been here, guy?” And with that, he pulled a small green piece of paper from a scatter of dirt-flecked trash.

  “That’s not ours,” Aaron whispered. “It looks new, even if it’s crinkly.” Charlie gasped as he stretched the wrinkles from what appeared to be a twenty-dollar bill, then found another similar scrap of paper. Both bills went into Charlie’s pocket immediately. “Forty bucks, Charlie?” The change in Aaron’s voice was sudden. “Aw, I get it. Play money.” His sigh had an echo. “This is why you brung me, to see junk you put here before. Caught you, didn’t I?” His anger faded on deciding that he had outfoxed his trickster.

  “Shine the light over to the side again,” Charlie said, in tones that suggested he wasn’t listening. “No, over here,” he insisted, and put a hand over Aaron’s. “Yeah. I thought I saw something funny through the hole.”

  The flashbeam shone partly on concrete but also beyond it, through the man-sized hole that someone had bashed in the pipe. Both boys now knelt and peered through loose earth into what seemed to be an ordinary basement with an ordinary door through which they saw part of an ordinary staircase in the distance. “Golll-leee, this must be somebody’s bank,” said Aaron, awed by the idea.

  “It was ours first,” Charlie said firmly. “People can’t just go put stuff in a guy’s hideyhole without asking. It’s no fair.”

  “I dunno. You ever been in a real bank, like those buildings downtown where it says ‘Bank’ across the front?” To this Charlie could only grunt. “Well I have, with my dad a long time ago, and we weren’t the only ones there. And you were supposed to go up to people behind cages like they were in a zoo.”

  “Like the circus wild man from Borneo?” said Charlie. “That’s weird.”

  “No, there was a big hole with a shelf in front of the cage so I think the bank guys coulda crawled out if they wanted to. They talked to you when you went up to a cage. My dad doesn’t talk Borneose so I guess they talk like us. I don’t remember, I wasn’t tall enough to see in the cage. Besides, other folks were doing stuff at other cages. I think they give their money to the cage guys.”

  “I still don’t think it’s fair,” said Charlie.

  “My dad agrees,” Aaron replied. “Banks aren’t fair. They lost a lot of his money back when I was a baby. But he still goes there, I think. I don’t understand why. It’s kinda confusing.”

  While engaged in this talk of high finance, they continued to peer into the basement as Aaron let the flashbeam wander. They could see shelves with boxes, rags, and jugs of fluids as well as a large metal gadget standing tall on legs that threw fitful shadows against a wall. Finally Charlie said, “What if this is the cellar of a bank where they make the money? I mean, it’s gotta be made someplace. They keep money in banks; I figure they probably make it there. Why don’t we go in there and see?” And with this, Charlie took a careful forward step.

  But with that, the flashbeam was no more. “Nope. This is some big bohunkus trick of yours with play money, and you’re gonna get us both in trouble, only I’m not gonna let you.”

  “Durn if you’re not. Gimme the flashlight.”

  “No. That’s how I know you’re not gonna.” Aaron had moved back now, only a dim shape amid deeper blackness. “It’ll be black as the inside of a cow in there. If that’s a bank, with you stumbling around knocking stuff over, they’re gonna hear you. There’s two kinds of guys down in the bottom of a bank: bankers and robbers. If you’re not one of the bankers . . .”

  To keep from having to hear the rest of this prediction, Charlie burst out, “You’re not the boss of me. I’m gonna get me a flashlight,”

  “Not right now you’re not,” said Aaron.

  “Well I just bet I will too,” Charlie said, and lurched sideways to grab the nearest portion of Aaron. But all portions jumped away instantly, so that Charlie slipped in the pipe debris. His quarry was as quick as Charlie himself, and though still bent over, Aaron managed a staggering trot toward the distant dazzle of the outdoors. He ran safely ahead of Charlie whose threats only made Aaron run faster.

  In only a moment Charlie could tell that his attempt to snatch the flashlight was hopeless, and he was reminded of his marbles and coins in the simplest way: he banged his ankle against the lip of the smaller pipe they lay on and then fell on his stomach.

  The Charlie who hobbled out of the drainpipe a minute later moved a lot slower than the Charlie who had tried to grab the flashlight, and once he was out of the musty cool dark he had to admit to himself that an adventure into the basement of somebody else’s bank was perhaps not the most brilliant idea of his career. He sat down under the fig tree to inspect his offended ankle and felt a bit better when he saw the trickle of crimson there. Anything that stung so much, he felt, had better bleed a little. Too bad Aaron had sped off like a rabbit; there was always a measure of manliness in blood.

  “Bunged yourself up, huh?” said a familiar voice. “I wondered why it took you so long.”

  Now Charlie saw his pal peering from behind the trunk of a towering pecan tree fifty feet away. “I had to get my stuff, didn’t I,” he called, and held up the marble bag with one hand. With the other he used a fingertip to smear blood around on his foot in an arrangement he thought might add a dramatic touch.

  Aaron moved away from concealment with the wariness of a boy who wasn’t quite sure the chase was over. “Cut yourself in those busted bottles?”

  “Nah. Just a scratch,” said Charlie, telling the truth as if it were a huge understatement. Yet something in Aaron’s tone suggested that he wasn’t as impressed as a wounded hero might wis
h. To prove he was still capable of adventure Charlie pulled some of the stuff from a pocket, studied the contents, and said, “Trade you my roll of nickels for that ol’ flashlight.”

  Aaron turned his back to check on his goods. A moment later: “Shoot, Charlie, it cost me more’n that.”

  A pang of irritation shot through Charlie, seeing that Aaron would take his dare as far as this. “Okay, twenty bucks. Right here,” he said, holding up a bill.

  Aaron moved forward, drawn as if magnetized by money. “You’re not going in there, guy.”

  “You see if I don’t,” was the retort. Charlie hadn’t intended to actually follow up on his foolish impulse, but Aaron’s resistance had lit a fire under that impulse.

  Aaron moved still nearer, holding the flashlight. As Charlie stood up, Aaron said, “Just drop the money down in the gravel there and I’ll toss you the light.” Instead, Charlie limped down to the storm drain’s dry watercourse and placed the bill on the gravel. Aaron motioned him back, then tossed the flashlight across and knelt down to grasp the bill while watching his old friend for any false move.

  Charlie caught the flashlight and watched Aaron. “Think you’re so durn smart,” he said, starting to convince himself that yes, D-Word it, he would go back in there and show that cowardly Aaron what’s what and who’s who.

  But Aaron had backed away again to a safe distance. “I’m smart enough for the honor roll. And a bike. Not like some guys I know,” he said.

  “But not smart enough to know plain ol’ play money when you see it,” Charlie said, with a teasing singsong cadence. And waited for Aaron’s fury.

  Which seemed almost to develop, until overtaken by laughter that would be hard for Aaron to fake. Aaron held the bill with both hands, turning it over again and again, and then waved Charlie off. “Go ahead, I dare you,” he said, still laughing. “I’ll wait. Double dare. Triple,” he added as Charlie limped to the drainpipe.

  Charlie glowered at this. A guy’s best pal, even one you’re mad at, wasn’t supposed to issue a challenge that potent. Goaded to this extreme, he set off hobbling into the pipe. Ten seconds later he emerged again, keeping his face as free of aggravation as he could. He thumbed the flashlight switch back and forth several times without result, confirming what he had just discovered in the pipe. “What’d you do, Aaron?”

  Aaron held up a single dry-cell battery between thumb and forefinger. “Took this out. It needs two. Trade you this one for the rest of your coins,” he said, in a singsong that imitated Charlie’s much too well. In an attempt to simmer down, Charlie took several deep breaths, standing wordless, hurling mighty frowns in his pal’s direction, then dropped the flashlight on the ground and began to study the contents of his pockets.

  “Awww, Charlie.” Aaron’s tone shifted into some near neighbor of begging. “I don’t want your money. Don’t do this, guy. I wouldn’t trade you this lousy ol’ battery now for everything in the world.”

  Charlie’s question was equally passionate. “Why not?”

  “’Cause I don’t want you to get in trouble, so I did what I had to do.”

  “You pulled a dirty trick on me, is what you did.”

  “We pulled dirty tricks on each other at the same time, and no matter how bad you want this battery, bunged up like you are right now you can’t catch me and you know it, and there’s something we need to think about that might be a lot more important than which one of us gets his way. Everybody knows you’re the crown prince of stubborn, okay? You win. You’re the stubbornest cuss I know.”

  Gradually, Charlie’s face went through subtle changes of shape and of color too, as his inner juices ceased bubbling to the point where he could say, “Wellll, at least we got that settled,” as if satisfied that he’d won a major point in their contest. Then he took his place below the fig tree again, smoothing out the paper from his pocket. “It’s about what to do with this play money, right?”

  CHAPTER 15:

  FINDERS KEEPERS

  The greatest arguments fester around the grubbiest details. Charlie’s first impression of those bills was that they were real, and worth what the numbers said, so he held fast to that position. But Aaron, instantly favoring the idea that Charlie had placed the bills there, maintained that they must be worthless play money, part of some infernal plot of Charlie’s.

  The discussion was soon marked by claims so loud they vibrated in the storm drain. “Even if it’s like Monopoly money, somebody else put it there,” Charlie said at last. “And it looks real. Half-real, anyhow.” He turned the better of the two bills over to study its blank side, then made a hopeful guess. “Maybe it’s worth half of what it says. Ten bucks, prob’ly.”

  By this time they sat side by side, loud arguments being preferable to wrestling around in the shrubbery. “How about this one, then?” Aaron said, squinting at the other bill. Most of it looked genuine but perhaps a fourth of it was badly smeared.

  “One end’s just crud. I wouldn’t give you more’n five or six bucks for that sorry excuse for money,” said Charlie.

  “You wouldn’t give me a penny for it,” Aaron countered, “’cause you know it’s not real.”

  “Wait a minute.” When Charlie shifted down to a studious tone it suggested a new line of reasoning. “My mom found some money in my dad’s pants once in the washing. And when she dried it out it was still good. Play money would, I dunno, fade or rub out or get all gooshy or something. Wouldn’t it?”

  “How would I know, you’re the play-money expert. Why not try wetting it in the creek?” Aaron began to doubt his plot theory the moment Charlie nodded and limped down to the ankle-deep stream that was Shoal Creek. Aaron followed, reflecting that Charlie’s willingness to test the bills might mean he was not scheming but truly curious.

  After squatting to dunk the bill, Charlie rubbed it and eyed it closely. Next he repeated the experiment, rubbed some more, then glanced up to his pal with a vexed expression. “It doesn’t run or fade, but it kinda peels a little. Real money’s more like cloth, I think.”

  “I thought so. Play money,” said Aaron. “Where’d you get it, anyhow?”

  “For the last time,” Charlie began, standing up, his face stormy.

  Aaron waved his hands before him, discarding the last of his theory. “Okay, I take it back; they weren’t yours. So they’ve gotta be from whoever owns that bank you were gonna rob.”

  “I never!”

  “Well, you woulda gone down in there if I hadn’t stopped you,” Aaron amended, stepping away to prepare an escape.

  But Charlie stubbornly continued to use logic. He limped back to their cozy bower under the fig. “Going down there, yeah. That’s a durn sight different.” Aaron’s tiny snort conveyed more argument, so Charlie demanded, “Is taking a look the same as robbing? Is your bike the same as a Greyhound bus? Nuh-uh. If I robbed an actual bank my dad would skin me.”

  “You mean, after you got outta the jail he put you in,” Aaron reminded him, settling his rump, forearms resting on knees.

  They stared gloomily at the wrinkled mysteries on display at their feet, so deep in thought that the buzz of locusts went unnoticed. Finally Charlie said, “Banks are supposed to look like banks, right? But if you stand in the street outside and look across the front yard from the curb, you don’t see a bank. It’s just that ol’ gray haunted house nobody lives in with the sign in the yard. Who would have a secret bank?”

  “We would, that’s who,” said Aaron. “Maybe some banker downtown makes all their money here.”

  Charlie considered this. “He sure makes some trashy stuff,” he said, then brightened. “I bet that’s it. When he bakes up a bad batch, the guy just throws it away. Like this.”

  “They don’t bake it,” said Aaron, and saw the urge to argue rise in his pal again. “Awright, maybe they do. And if a person found their trash and spent it, like a special sale, why would they care?”

  “Yeah. They’re rich,” Charlie said. “It’s not like it was costing t
hem anything.” A pause, as their eyes met. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Yep, if you’re thinking we didn’t go into their basement so we didn’t do anything wrong. If it’s not on their property, you said yourself, finders keepers.”

  The boys were nodding in unison now. Charlie smoothed out the two bills, folded and pocketed them. “Only thing is, we need to find out if this is worth something. My dad would prob’ly know. Or yours.”

  “Oh, suuuure.” The reply was rich with sarcasm. “And then you get to explain where we got it, and you and me get to hang out with each other once a year. C’mon, guy, the only way we get to play at the creek is because everybody thinks we’re someplace else. If my mom had any idea you bullied me into that sewer pipe, dad would have to coax her down off the roof. And I don’t fib and neither do you, exactly.” Aaron’s “exactly” admitted the way they tiptoed around falsehoods, making sure they never made a foray along the creek without going elsewhere as well so that, if asked, they could always name another location.

  “Well, we could just go downtown and ask a bank,” Charlie said.

  This new point had to be thrashed to splinters in the usual way, until Aaron hit on a variation both simple and direct. “Okay, why not ask the bank people in the haunted house? I don’t give a rip what the sign in the front says, we know somebody’s there.”

  To Charlie this idea had charm because it could be tested in moments. Its drawback was that somebody else had thought of it, but Charlie was prepared to be generous. “We have to make ’em promise not to tell our folks,” he said.

  So it was agreed, and in another five minutes they had followed one of several footpaths worn up to the street by generations of boys.

  Whoever first labeled the old stucco-clad house as haunted had done the owner a favor. Boys playing “tag” or “kick the can” tended to stay beyond its grounds while claiming a total lack of fear. On this late afternoon in a dazzle of sunlight, the place did not seem forbidding for the two boys. Together they marched up to the front porch past an untended yard where weeds fought for survival. A few of last year’s faded newspapers lay unclaimed near the door. Charlie sought a doorbell in vain, then knocked.