It's Up to Charlie Hardin Page 17

  As Charlie turned to go Roy said, just to be sociable, “Aaron came by on his bike, ’way earlier. Headed to town.”

  Jackie looked up from his instrument of torture. “Big important business, I bet,” he said, his tone denying it.

  Roy had not grown old enough to know sarcasm when it surrounded him. “Yeah, maybe. In a big hurry,” he put in.

  Of all the things Charlie could do without this morning, a confusing and disagreeable conversation with Jackie ranked high on the list. Nor did Charlie think anything could be gained by revealing any of his recent discoveries so, “Reckon I’ll just go paste stamps,” he sighed, and turned toward home. This was intended to ward off attempts by either boy to tag along, and it worked. All the boys had experienced Charlie’s stamp collection and all shared a single opinion. Even Aaron had proclaimed this venture “the world’s boringest way to poison yourself” after helping lick dozens of tiny cellophane tapes that affixed stamps into a booklet. Roughly once a week, at times when he wanted to be by himself, Charlie vowed to go paste stamps. In truth, he hadn’t seen that collection in months and wasn’t sure where he had put it.

  Charlie intended to call to see if Aaron had returned home, since his own mother was in such a tolerant mood. The Hardin telephone was normally reserved for adults because in 1944 the telephone company had not yet added signals that let a user know, while he is talking, that someone else is trying to call. Charlie’s call proved unnecessary because, as he greeted Lint and angled toward the family driveway, both heard a squeal they knew as the voice of Aaron’s bike brake approaching from downtown. Bikeless, Charlie watched with a twinge of hope. Aaron had already developed a devil-may-care mastery when dismounting his steed on loose surfaces, and when he eventually bashed himself to shreds Charlie didn’t want to miss a second of it.

  Avoiding a spray of gravel, Charlie greeted his pal with, “Your mom send you downtown?”

  “Nah. Had a great idea,” Aaron replied, “and went and checked. A kid can just walk right into a bank alone! There’s even a little bitty cage off to itself with a guy with bars over his counter where they have bills I never saw before behind a glass case. Lots of different colors and names like peso and sol and stuff. I ask if they print all that different money downstairs and he laughs and says there’s banks all over the world. So the money we have isn’t the only kind there is. You ever hear of a bank of Scotland?”

  “Nope. Don’t care neither,” Charlie replied. “I can’t even speak Scotlandish. They print that in the basement too?”

  “I don’t know, a guy stopped me when I started downstairs to see where they print their money.”

  The boys moved into the garage to discuss it with their treasures close at hand. It was on the tip of Charlie’s tongue to describe his misadventure during the night, but decided the story wouldn’t shower him with respect. Instead, he took a listener’s role.

  Aaron hadn’t been allowed downstairs at the bank because, he said, “This guy told me I needed a safe deposit box. I said no I didn’t and he said that’s all they had down there. Well, I know that’s a lie, we saw a bank print shop yesterday.”

  “What’s a safe deposit box?”

  “Beats me. Anyhow, then he says do I have an account and I says on account of what and he looks at me squinch-eyed and says do I know what an account is and I’m not a big fan of being laughed at, or lied to, so I walk out intending to slam the door.”

  “What’d he do then?”

  “Nuthin’. You can’t slam a revolving door, Charlie.”

  After mentally chewing all this over, Charlie said, “I think maybe you wasted your time.”

  “Durn if I did. I found out there’s all kinds of money besides what we buy stuff with. For all we know, the bills we found are what they spend in Oklahoma. Maybe I’ll go to another bank and ask; I won’t go back to that one, for sure.”

  “I don’t blame you. Well, there’s one bank that’ll know about our bills: the one in the haunted house. If they print ’em, they’ve gotta know. We’ll just go bang on the door ’til somebody lets us in.” And with Lint capering beside them, they took a roundabout route that avoided Certain Other People frying ants down the street.

  Cade Bridger’s mother hadn’t raised him to be an undependable sot, so her brother must have done it; that is, Bridger’s uncle, who manufactured bathtub gin in the 1920s and paid his nephew to help. Once young Cade took to sneaking samples of their product, he developed a strong liking for the way alcohol teased him, made him see double, numbed the pain when it made him fall, and distanced him from his uncle’s curses. Because he hadn’t been blessed in the brains department, his family soon discovered his weakness for booze and managed to find him honest work where other members of the Bridger clan could keep tabs on him. And it had worked tolerably well until he met Pinero.

  Bridger hadn’t heard boys rapping on the front door of the gray bungalow the previous afternoon because it had been a workday, and he had been part of a city work crew filling in a ditch at the time. Today was also a workday, but not for Bridger, whose hangover had been fierce enough to drive him, about midmorning, onto nice cool dirt in a shadowy corner. He had been caught in midsnore by his boss’s boss. A smarter man might have taken his tongue-lashing gracefully, but a hangover tends to steer a man’s language into other shadowy corners. At ten-thirty that morning Bridger replied that the big boss was a four-eyed B-Word who could S-Word in his hat, and at ten thirty-one he was an ex-city employee.

  Now, as noon approached, he sat on a basement step under the bungalow, thinking and waiting for Pinero. And as he waited he took little sips from the stuff he had hidden down there weeks earlier for emergencies: a Nehi soda bottle full of Wawdeeos he had traded for a tamale. (Its one virtue was cheapness but after his first taste of it, Bridger asked Pinero what it was. Pinero took one sip, made a horrible face, and said, “Waughhh, Dios!” as he spat.) So Wawdeeos it was.

  Bridger had cause to ponder as he sipped, having saved from his city paychecks the same way a grasshopper saves for winter. He was deciding to tell Pinero how he had bravely quit his job to be more available as a printer, when young voices filtered down the basement stairwell, growing louder as footsteps sounded above. Something about safe deposit . . .

  Bridger stuffed the neck of his Nehi bottle with a rag and wondered if he could make it up the stairs and out the back way without being recognized. Meanwhile, he froze. He was still only half-foozled, able to realize that those voices were boyish. Perhaps he could force his way between them, or bluff them into retreat. But so far, freezing in place seemed to work. He continued to listen.

  Voices were clearer now, and the sudden rapping at the door reminded Bridger that the door was locked. He eased a few steps up the stairs and heard one boy say, “You think they might just take the money away from us?”

  But Boy Two said, “How come? It’s not theirs, money in a sewer pipe is finder’s keepers,” and with sudden understanding of that reply, a wee surge of weewee warmed Bridger’s shorts.

  More rapping at the door. “Oh shoot, nobody’s here. Maybe they only print the money once a week or something,” said Boy One. In fact, Pinero had hinted that they might run a few hundred bills this very evening, but if Bridger reported this discovery to him there might be no printing at all. Now the same boy added, “Or maybe once a month, ’cause it looks like nobody’s home today either.”

  “I got an idea,” said Boy Two. “What if we just go to the Ice House and see if we can spend one of these things on root beer and stuff?”

  Boy One scoffed, “Twenty bucks for root beer?” Hearing this exact number, Bridger knew the bill they spent would be one bearing his own fingerprints and let an almost silent groan escape him. Even with his brain sopping up more alcohol as his belly passed it on, he was still barely sober enough to know the bills he had discarded would never pass any adult inspection.

  The boys didn’t hear his groan, but other ears were more highly tuned, and a single sharp
bark squeezed out an extra teaspoonful of liquid downstairs.

  “Lint! Hush. Well then, root beers and Baby Ruths and some firecrackers if they kept some from New Year’s, and prob’ly a lot of change too. Coming here didn’t work out worth a durn, how else are we gonna find out if—”

  “Here, you take half the money,” said Boy One with more foot-scuffings, and Bridger heard imaginary police whistles trill in his mind when the boys walked off the porch. He tiptoed up the last few steps and risked one glance through the front window, as a dark-haired boy of twelve or so took wrinkled paper from a sturdier boy of the same height while a terrier trotted beside them. Only the dog looked back to see one bleary eye peeking from inside, then quickly picked up its pace to accompany the boys.

  Bridger said aloud to himself, “You ain’t gonna let those fool kids go tradin’ funny money around. You purely cain’t.” But neither could he chase them down and catch them and steal the bills back and beat some sense into them because they’d plainly said their goal was the Ice House, the little all-hours market only two blocks distant. And it was noon, not the best time to be whopping the tar out of kids no matter how much they deserved it, but something had to be done fast. Bridger stumbled up to the floor level and hurtled toward the back door without the slightest idea what that something might be.

  “If they do let us buy stuff with this,” said Aaron, “it pretty much answers our question.” Their pace on the sidewalk was moderate but Lint began to lag.

  “Yeah, but the bills don’t look the same, and you couldn’t carry twenty bucks’ worth, not even fireworks,” Charlie replied. After a pause he added, “I got it: I’ll try to buy somethin’ with one bill and you buy somethin’ else with the other one. Then we’ll both have a lot of change, or we’ll know which bill they don’t take.”

  Now each boy eyed his bill. “Come on, Lint,” Charlie said. The dog had stopped, looking back, and now Charlie saw a figure in work clothes a block behind them, crossing the street at a stumbling run, arms flailing for balance like a man on a tightrope. “Huh. That’s funny,” said Charlie, watching as the man abruptly straightened to dart off behind a hedge.

  “What’s funny?” said Aaron, only now looking back.

  “Nothing.” But Lint had a different opinion, growling until the boys sweet-talked him toward the Ice House with little kissing noises.

  CHAPTER 17:

  THE HAUNTED BANK

  The Ice House had grown as the town grew. Before Charlie’s time it had been a tiny office that clung to a windowless insulated shed crammed with nothing but blocks of ice; big blocks, little blocks, fill-your-car’s-trunk-sized blocks. The place reeked pleasantly with the smoky perfume of cork insulation. Buyers who could not yet afford a newfangled electric refrigerator during the 1920s hauled blocks of ice home to their oldfangled iceboxes, metal-lined wooden chests where perishables were cooled.

  Then, as war approached and income rose in the late 1930s, more refrigerator owners bought less ice. The storekeeper, an old Danish immigrant, began to sell a wider range of goods as well. The tiny office grew like a farm shack, bit by bit, and managed to compete against regular grocery stores by staying open until late, stocking small amounts of everything from hardware to fireworks and aspirin.

  Charlie’s earliest half-forgotten experiences included fumbling open the latch of the cork-lined Hardin icebox at age three to steal a gob of butter whenever he could toddle to the kitchen unwatched and plunge his fat little fist into the stuff for licking. By now the family icebox was long gone. He could not have explained why he loved shopping—and inhaling—in the Ice House, with its corky musk that would linger as long as the building stood.

  The old Dane storekeeper was not mutt-friendly, and Charlie knew it. Repeating “Sit!” the necessary three times that said he really, really meant it, Charlie pressed Lint’s rump down on the Ice House’s concrete porch for good measure and followed Aaron to the soft-drink cooler that squatted on the porch just outside the office. No one else was inside but the proprietor. Lint stayed in place, but stared back down the street muttering canine curses to himself. Aaron pulled a Hires root beer from the ice-filled cooler and entered the shop, then began to scan the shelf of candy bars with a barely audible hello to the owner. Charlie, keeping his pretense of not-shopping-with-the-other-kid, stepped inside the shop holding a bottle of Delaware Punch before he heard shoes scuffing on cement and heard Lint’s rising growl.

  A glance through small panes of the single window told Charlie that the runner in overalls now stood wavering on the cement porch, glaring down wild-eyed as he aimed kicks at something Charlie had never seen and scarcely imagined. It was an enraged Lint protecting the doorway, ears flattened, eyes slitted nearly shut, neck ruff standing on end as he dodged kicks; he bared his teeth at a stranger in ferocity that could not be misunderstood, and the message was plain: “This far but no farther, for I am not this man’s best friend.”

  With something between a snarl and a bark Lint dodged another kick while backing away a few inches. Charlie had no idea who the kicker was. He darted back to the doorway, horrified, with a cry of, “No, Lint! Hey, wait, he’s my dog,” making a dangerous mistake by dropping to his knees to hug the furious terrier. Many another dog in a mood sweeter than Lint’s might have bitten anyone, even his own lord and master, who fell over him at such a moment.

  Lint was not one of those dogs. Since leaving the gray bungalow, he had done everything but grab a piece of chalk in his teeth and draw little doggy diagrams to tell the boys they had alerted someone who was up to no good. His nose had told him when this man, while inside that house, had identified himself, without intending to, the way dogs do on purpose against a fireplug, and that same signature was on these overalls. A faint groan from inside the bungalow had given Lint’s ears a detail that human ears could not decode, and this man’s wheezing had made that groan, and Lint had heard the same wheeze following the boys from afar, all the way to this spot. Though Charlie might know many things that were beyond his dog, in this matter Lint was the expert. He flinched as Charlie grabbed him, but he did not bite.

  Aaron, surrendering his bottle of root beer to be opened while holding a candy bar, was about to ask the owner if he still carried those tiny one-cent packs of Yan Kee Boy firecrackers under the counter. In Aaron’s other hand was his travesty of a twenty-dollar bill, and the old Dane’s first glance at it told him that this would be absolutely, positively No Sale.

  When Charlie hurtled outside shouting, the commotion unnerved Aaron so much he dropped his candy bar and spun on his heel, bursting outside with the bill forgotten but still in his hand.

  The Dane had ruled his tiny kingdom for longer than Charlie’s years and knew perfectly well who these two kids were. Not by name, but by their familiarity. They sold him discarded bottles for honest pocket money; they argued and joked together while they shared candies; and they had never tried to shoplift so much as a blob of Fleer’s bubble gum. Now, to see one of them offer an obviously bogus bill of high value astonished him beyond words. He assumed the dog belonged with the boys, and ordinarily any dog in combat with a customer would be met with his broom. But through the window he recognized the man in overalls—one who apparently cut his hair with a lawnmower and combed it with a leaf-rake—as the one who occasionally bought a bag of Bull Durham tobacco for cigarettes and whose breath could stun bees in flight. In the Dane’s mature opinion, the dog was the better customer. With a wordless shout, he rushed to the doorway.

  Cade Bridger did not like dogs, because dogs did not like Cade Bridger. After running a few blocks in half-drunken panic without knowing what he intended to do when he arrived, Bridger did not like anyone of any species, least of all the terrier squinting at him as he reached the porch. When the dog growled, Bridger aimed a mighty kick to clear his way to the open door forgetting that a drunken sot needs both feet firmly beneath him. He would never quite understand how he managed the next few seconds.

  One of the boy
s appeared on the porch hovering on all-fours over the dog, shouting something, and abruptly a bad joke of a twenty-dollar bill fluttered from the boy’s hand to the cement, and then it was in Bridger’s hand as he squatted to snatch it in the doorway. Lurching to his feet, he confronted the second boy, who faced him so near Bridger could have embraced him, but the kid threw up a hand to ward him off—and that hand held the other counterfeit bill!

  In an eyeblink of time, blotto as he was, Bridger snatched that second accusing bill with a shout of, “Gimmethatthing!” and reeled away with a bill in each hand, missing the step from the porch to sprawl headlong on the sidewalk while the terrier began to bark furiously. Bridger couldn’t be certain his recovery of those bills had been noticed by the portly old fellow who appeared bellowing in the doorway, but he was certain he had no further business at the little store today; for that matter, maybe not ever again. With this scrap of good sense rattling around in his skull by itself, Bridger lurched to his feet again intending to get out of sight as soon as humanly, drunkenly possible.

  But alcohol works pretty much the same awful magic tricks on all men, including Bridger. Just five minutes before this he had been guzzling his favorite poison, and it takes a few minutes for alcohol to worm its way from a man’s stomach to his brain, which meant that with every moment Bridger was soused worse than he was the moment before. An amateur of alcohol, with this much of it in him, might have blundered into a hedge or pitched over to break his head on the sidewalk. But this was a man with years of experience in his condition, practically a specialist at it. Somehow Bridger managed to stagger upright.