It's Up to Charlie Hardin Page 18

  The soonest way out of sight was to get behind the Ice House, and he made it in five bumbling steps, but he could hear a lot of loud commentary, including the dog who seemed to have a lot to say and not much of it approving. A few paces behind the little building lay a brush-covered slope leading to the creek with its trees and meadows, and tribes of boys had worn a path so clear not even a dolt like Bridger could miss it, though he was seeing double by now.

  But he could flounder into bushes several times on his way along the path, the last time losing one work shoe in the ankle-deep mud of Shoal Creek, so that he was obliged to stick the counterfeit bills in his mouth because he couldn’t find his pockets. Besides, he needed both hands to scramble toward that big, dark, broken storm sewer that he knew would lead him back to the familiar welcome of his Wawdeeos.

  The old storekeeper was no fool, and knew better than to charge off in pursuit of an arm-waving drunk when armed with only a broom. His two young customers seemed only shaken up, and their spirits improved when he gave them free soft drinks. The dog took more time to settle down. If his master had released him there might have been a chase ranging along the creek.

  “Dat man,” said the Dane, leaning on his broom, fixing the boys with a firm gaze as they sat nursing sodas, their feet off the porch as Charlie patted and soothed his terrier. “You boys know him?” He couldn’t bear to ask point-blank if one of them might be kin to the thief.

  The slender boy shrugged, then shook his head. The boy holding the dog muttered, “Nossir.” Then with a glance that included his friend he added, “You know, I bet he followed us all the way from the bank. Maybe that’s why Lint kept growling.”

  “Dat money, den,” the Dane probed. “Not from any bank, neh. Yours, or his?”

  As if they had practiced a duet, the boys looked at each other, blinked in a pantomime of considering something new, then said together, “I dunno.” The dogless one went on, “We found it, and we wanted to see what it’s worth.”

  “Maybe it was his after all,” said the doggy one. “Durn sure swiped it like he thought it was.”

  “And you try to see vat it vas vort’ in my store, hah?” The boys shared a longer glance, and finally the dog-boy nodded. “I tell you vat it’s vort’; long time in prison,” the old man thundered. The boys’ heads lowered between their shoulder blades; they looked toward their feet, but found no help there.

  After a long silence, the Dane went on more quietly: “I see him before. But today dat fellow act like a crazy man, boys.”

  “Yessir, and his breath stunk like rubbin’ alcohol,” said the dogless one. “Made my eyes water.”

  The Dane thought about that briefly. “Neh, drinker’s alcohol, you bet. But he knew vat he came for, and he took it. Yep, I tink he vas yust after your fake money.” Another pause before, “Vere you find dat stuff?”

  The dog-boy took a long time choosing his words: “Real close to a haunted bank.”

  The Dane knew that American kids used a lot of strange slang, but this soared miles above strange. “Haunted bank,” he said, trying the idea on for size.

  “Yeah, real close,” said the other. “We don’t actually know if the bank’s haunted. For rent, though. Says so on the sign.”

  The Dane moved back to the stool next to his cash register, drawing the boys through the doorway by personal osmosis. He was half-convinced that this whole incident had been some vast, childish practical joke of the kind that fun-loving Americans played on one another. Perhaps he should settle back on his stool and dismiss all this foolishness and stoke his long-stemmed pipe and enjoy the rest of his day. And yet . . .

  Yet the man had been falling-down drunk, in no mood for joking, and intent on his getaway the instant he had the counterfeit bills in his grasp. The Dane tried to imagine such a spectacular clown following two boys and a dog all the way from a downtown bank, but his imagination refused the assignment. And all the banks were downtown, and whoever heard of a bank with a “for rent” sign? “Boys, vat bank vas dis?”

  Two shrugs. After a second thought, Dogless said, “Ol’ empty house, couple of blocks away. We call it that ’cause it’s where they print the money.”

  The Dane sighed. “De haunted bank, hah? Only not haunted, and not a bank. Still, dey print money. You know de house number, boys?” Twin shrugs again. “I bet he see you find dat money. People vit money like dat go to prison.”

  “We went and knocked because we wanted to ask about it,” said Dogboy. “We even went twice. Then we came here because nobody was ever there.”

  “You stay avay from dere,” the Dane said sternly, maybe too sternly.

  Dogboy: “What d’you think he’d do?”

  Without a word, but with a maniac’s wide-eyed glare, the old man drew his forefinger across his throat. Slowly. The boys stared at each other. The next instant brought a two-boy-and-a-dog stampede, leaving the Dane alone with his thoughts.

  He served a few customers during the following hour, then filled his pipe with Prince Albert and hid his face in a wreath of smoke for a bit of contemplation. Every question he asked himself about the morning’s excitement led to an answer involving innocent—well, relatively innocent—kids and a guilty counterfeiter. A guilty and drunk counterfeiter. A guilty and drunk and possibly very dangerous counterfeiter, who upon sobering up would realize that a certain European-born storekeeper might figure out who and where and what was going on here. The lives of those boys might be in the same danger. With these facts in hand, any bright citizen would know enough to contact the police. And the old Dane was as smart as they come.

  But he was not a citizen. He had learned English in Canada before seeking warmer winters, back in a time when Texas officials did not ask a bushel of embarrassing questions of honest working men. Like many immigrants, he had made himself useful, even prosperous. For many years he seldom thought much about his citizenship, or rather his lack of it. This war had brought many disturbing changes, though, and a man without proper legal papers was wise to avoid the notice of lawmen. To make matters worse, when that drunken fool ran off, he took the evidence with him. The old Dane could do nothing more than plead his case, in broken English.

  He must contact the police.

  He must not contact the police.

  They had covered a quarter-mile of creekside trail far past the storm drain, with Aaron in the lead, before Charlie called, “Why are you running?”

  “Because you are,” Aaron called back.

  “But you’re ahead, guy. Only one chasing you is me.”

  Aaron risked a glance behind them, then slowed. “Durn.”

  Charlie fetched up beside him. “You want ’em to chase us?”

  “Nah. But look, now I’ve jiggled all the spunk out of my root beer.” Aaron peered into the bottle he had held all the way. His face was glum. “Here, you can have the rest.”

  “Worth two cents empty,” Charlie joked, and swigged the remaining ounce or so.

  “Uh-huh, and worth your throat cut to go back there if the crazy guy is watching.”

  Here the path wound through a tangle of briars and bunchgrass, the meadow stretching toward a line of decrepit fences intended to keep boys and other wild animals out of the untended backyards of the well-to-do. Winded from their long sprint, Charlie led the way to a shrubby hummock where they could sit in hiding without actually admitting it. “I’m kind of glad that crazy guy took our money,” he said after a moment.

  “I guess,” said Aaron. Lint, who had just begun to warm up during their run, stood around waiting for it to resume, but Aaron spoke again. “Maybe it sure-enough was his.”

  Silence, and one of their thoughtful eye-to-eye gazes. At last, “Then we know where he lives,” said Charlie. “He just wouldn’t come to the door.”

  “Good! I purely hope he never comes to our doors,” was the reply. Aaron followed this by crossing himself, the complicated hand-gesture that Charlie vaguely recalled seeing a Catholic boy make.

  “Why�
�d you do that?” Charlie asked.

  “For good luck, I think,” Aaron said, having asked that very question after observing the same boy. “My dad saw me do it once and laughed like the dickens. When I explained he said oh well, it couldn’t hurt so long as I don’t do it in Temple.”

  So Charlie did it too, getting it all wrong, but perhaps the Almighty was off catching a nap in some other corner of the universe because no heavenly lightning bolt punished either boy.

  After dissecting their Ice House experience at length, they concluded that a man who would furnish free sodas while lecturing them for their crimes was a man whose word was probably good. If he had decided not to herd them into the ice cooler for trying to hand him worthless bills, maybe they could apologize by bringing his bottle back—but maybe not today. And now that they knew the storm drain was actually a kind of informal back door to the gray bungalow, Charlie had no interest in further investigation.

  It was Aaron who brought up the need to tell parents, and how much to tell, and how to go about it. But it was Charlie who furnished answers neither boy could stand to consider. “One of us’ll get sent away,” Charlie mourned. “At least to another school. Or to juvie hall, if the Ice House guy tells on us, where they turn us into murderers and I don’t know what-all.”

  During this recital Aaron’s head began to rock back and forth, and Charlie was soon doing it until finally, forcing back tears, Aaron put up a hand, palm out, to stop him. With an effort, he sat up straight and stiffened his neck. “Then there’s only one hope, Charlie.”

  Charlie thought he had never seen his friend take on such a heroic look, and whatever idea Aaron had found, Charlie felt it couldn’t be worse than his own catalog of cruel fates. This time, it was fine that the decisions would be up to someone else. He became the obedient sergeant; he even saluted. “Cap’n Aaron, sir,” he said, “what do we do?”

  Aaron set his jaw. “We’re not gonna tell ’em,” he said.

  CHAPTER 18:

  TRAPPED

  After the boys agreed that the morning’s events would remain secret, their shared worries drove each of them toward solitude. For much of the afternoon Charlie sat near the family victory garden, basking in the sun like a lizard with Lint to help him do it. The dog soaked up more than his share of pats from a master thoroughly proud of the way his twenty-pound terrier had stood firm against a grown man.

  Reading through a mixed stack of Planet and Captain America comic books, Charlie reveled for a while in freedom from responsibility. Aaron had shouldered that heavy load, and Charlie knew well that Aaron would be feeling the weight of his decision. For the moment, Charlie’s own guilt was no more bothersome than a speck of gravel in his shoe.

  But gradually, that speck began to grow to the size of a marble, then a brick. When his mother sent Charlie off in midafternoon to buy groceries at the Checker Front store, he actually rejoiced to have the chore as a distraction. Lint, having judged that the gathering clouds might bring cold winds, wagged a farewell and crawled into his den.

  As he walked, Charlie reflected on how much more agreeable the world would be if a guy could just revise little pieces of reality here and there. He imagined other ways the storm drain discoveries might have happened, and was taking a shortcut down the grocer’s alley when Jackie Rhett called to him. Jackie was itching to show off his just-discovered skill in smoking a discarded cigarillo he had found in Checker Front’s garbage. The absolute prohibition against Charlie smoking, or even the pretense of it, was made more galling by the grand gestures Jackie made in his efforts to blow smoke rings at the sky. It was Jackie’s self-admiration as a young man of important skills that prodded Charlie to spin out his wishful version of the morning, in which Charlie was important too. After all, it wasn’t as if Charlie were telling what had really happened.

  And the part he told about the fearsome storm drain leading to the bowels of a bank fitted all too neatly into Jackie’s beliefs. For some weeks past, he had felt increasingly sure that Charlie and Aaron had somehow become capitalists.

  In late afternoon when Pinero moved down the basement stairs, he knew even before he heard his partner’s snores that something was amiss. For one thing, the place stank of that whoopee juice Bridger drank, though Pinero had warned him against it a dozen times. Also, when Bridger weaved up from his squat on an overturned bucket it was plain to see as well as to smell that he had wet his overalls, and a pair of those botched counterfeit bills lay in plain sight, flattened and torn on the press.

  “You were supposed to burn every piece of that bad paper,” said Pinero, wadding the bills together in contempt and tossing the wad at Bridger. “All of it. You think if you wrinkle it up enough you could pass it?” He wore an unpleasant grin, intending his question as sarcasm.

  To Bridger, whose brain churned with doubt about youthful invaders in the storm drain, this sounded as if someone had told Pinero about the scene at the Ice House. “It wasn’t me,” Bridger slurred. Anxious to point blame away from himself, he went on, “Those crooked kidsh.” But when he saw what passed across Pinero’s face, he wished he had held his tongue.

  Pinero sat down on the stair and looked at his partner for a long moment, the way a wolf might look at some kind of rabbit he had never thought much about before. Then—but casually—he said, “What wasn’t you, Cade? What crooked kids?”

  “Why, the ones that broke in from the storm drain,” Bridger stammered, realizing that his partner had not found out about the Ice House foolishness after all. But Pinero seemed very interested now: had the boys seen the press? Hard to tell, Bridger told him, but in any case he had driven the young thieves away before they could take anything.

  And when had all this happened? Bridger did not own a wristwatch and was not clear on the question, but he figured it had been about half a bottle ago. Further questions, with replies rooted half in fact and the other half in more of Bridger’s fantasies, left Pinero convinced that all his hard work would amount to nothing. But if the weather signs could be trusted, he might have a stormy night to work in, undisturbed.

  By now, from studying the look in Pinero’s eye, Bridger wanted his artfully decorated details to be true so much he half believed them. He mentioned a big dog, and a challenge near the creek where he had wrestled the bills from two youths the size of adults. This had the added feature of explaining how one foot was encased in mud he had forgotten to clean off. Because Pinero’s calm seemed so dangerously brittle it might shatter with further explanations, Bridger thought it better not to mention anything about the Ice House. Furnished with this balderdash, Pinero understood the day’s true events about as well as a snake understands a footrace.

  “Well, with their break-in to explain, they’re not likely to be yelling to the cops,” Pinero said at last. “If they had, you’d be behind bars already. All the same, they could be back up that pipe any time now, and they’ve seen our operation.” He fell silent for a moment, his mood dark.

  Bridger simply stood with arms at his sides, awaiting whatever fate held for him, weaving slightly as he blinked. If he had any remaining doubt about his partner’s mood it evaporated after he said, “So what do we do?”

  Pinero’s hand lashed out in an open-handed slap. It caught Bridger full across the cheek and sent him reeling against the nearest wall. Pinero took a step as if to follow this with heavier blows, then mastered his fury, his breaths long and hard as he watched Bridger stumble away. “What I do is try to do one little print run, to get something out of this mess. What you do is plug that pipe enough so we could still get out, but if your thieves tried to come back we’d hear them. Can you understand that much? And don’t pile things up where they could be seen from creekside. Plenty of concrete chunks around here.” This was true; when breaching the side of the pipe weeks before, Bridger had simply shoved broken hunks of concrete into corners of the basement.

  As Bridger hoisted pieces of concrete to the level of the pipe, he could hear occasional scurryings up t
here somewhere. He decided the sounds might have been a rat, or the trickling of rainwater punctuated by occasional mutters of distant thunder that echoed along the pipe from curb gratings. Pinero had never struck him before this but seemed ready to do it again. Bridger thought of escape, to stumble down the pipe and disappear into the twilight never to return, but the odor of ink and Pinero’s feverish haste to—finally!—create useable counterfeits overpowered the drunkard’s sensible fears. Panting, grunting, Bridger began to stack fragments of broken pipe in a way that would let water continue to trickle down toward the creek while preventing boys from climbing past without making an obvious clatter.

  Meanwhile, Pinero set his mind firmly on leaving this very night, now that their hideout had been discovered. He began arranging adequate light and cleaning his equipment so that he might print a stack of twenties before abandoning this entire operation. At worst, he might have to abandon the heavy, foot-operated old press. He had stolen one press and he could steal another. Far more important were the engraved Nazi plates, no heavier than metal bricks, the only things he could not replace.

  The summer rain took its time. Charlie arrived home before the first big spattering drops could do more than moisten his grocery bag. His mother chased him out of the kitchen with only an apple because, she said, it would be dinnertime in an hour. Soon he was lost again in the adventures of Captain America, but now in his own nook under the workbench in the garage with Lint curled like a parenthesis beside him. From time to time, brief freshets of rain drummed against the metal roof corrugations.