It's Up to Charlie Hardin Read online

  “Still,” Charlie said.

  The father pondered that bulletin for a moment, gave his son a mock salute, and said, “I can fix that. Consider it a promise, Charlie.” He cocked his head and added, “And unless I’m very much mistaken, I’m smelling good things from the kitchen. What do you say we go and see?”

  AFTERWORD

  The briefest backward glance at Charlie’s herd convinced me that life was simpler for us all then, so we stumbled into World War II as simple folk. Coleman Hardin was an unbending juvenile officer who believed in the rights and virtues of our species, an exact replica of my father, who assured me that all bullies were cowards and that a truth will always defeat a lie. That taught me that nobody—nobody—is right all the time.

  My mother would have seen herself in Willa Hardin, a slender, pretty, farm-raised brownette who ruled her kitchen firmly, even though she gave a newspaper composing room forty hours a week and sang our church solos. Three older brothers taught her to be a perfect lady but failed to crush her flashes of whimsy.

  Lint was drawn from life, a two-tone fox terrier who learned why not to chase cars the first time he caught one. His shoulder mended but for the rest of his life, when under suspicion for some offense, he would suddenly remember to limp and snivel and avoid eye contact in a way that made you want to kick him. And then hug him.

  Gene Carpenter combines two boys who bamboozled adults with an amiable veneer to conceal the demon under the skin. The sociopath hid behind his merit badges and prospered. The jolly prankster flunked his last risk at high speed, and I’ll bet he was grinning.

  If Roy Kinney’s original had been my age he might have been our leader, but in our habitat little kids got no respect. He would spy on older boys and had a genius for copying only our most villainous habits. He would attach himself to you like a barnacle if you weren’t spry. You had to outrun him.

  Whoever first used the phrase “Nasty, brutish and short” had to be thinking of the kid who was almost Jackie Rhett, only smarter. After others learned that being Jackie’s companion involved bushels of self-sacrifice, his options narrowed down to Roy or nobody. Tough choice, so it varied. For most of us, the almost-Jackie was the key to extravagant parties thrown by the Kinneys, the point of which was to invite every kid in the neighborhood except the one Roy was mad at. Which was nearly always Jackie. Which was why we promoted discord between them. I live in abject fear that one of them will now read this.

  Although the Nazis did try to sabotage the U.S. economy with schemes to counterfeit our money, I don’t know if they did it with scoundrels like Bridger and Pinero. I had to invent them because I never knew anyone like them. After all, they were the kind of guy you meet only in a sewer.

  Aaron, it’s not my fault you’re only half-Jewish; it took two guys to steer Charlie between the ditches. Any kid with two pals this loyal, cautious, industrious and forgiving is rich beyond measure. If Charlie had much value to you it was probably as your hood ornament. Friendships of this grandeur do not fade; they’re only interrupted now and then. Because, as I’ve noted before, integrity is thicker than blood.

  As for Charlie himself, I may be the least qualified person to give a fair account of him. My middle name, by some immense coincidence, is Charles, and Tex-Mex schoolmates nicknamed me “Chollie Huevos.” I have no earthly idea what that implies. Charlie contains cupfuls of two cousins, a teaspoonful of my neighbor Jimmy, and a smidgin of a knowitall kid I loathed in class. Charlie was merry, and sturdy, and sly, and overconfident, and lazy, and deceptive, and sometimes a dimwit, and occasionally the opposite. Dad warned me that if I were ever arrested he would be obliged to penalize me more than others. This may account in part for the fact that officers never caught the youth they followed across Austin rooftops in what is known today as parkour.

  Only after I turned Charlie loose did I begin to realize how deeply World War II changed nearly all Americans, saving perhaps only the few insulated rich. At the time, battles in headlines were romantic distant adventures to boys—with startling exceptions. I met a sixteen-year-old combat veteran, honorably discharged after medics discovered this wounded Marine had managed to keep his youth a secret for a year. A few eighteen-year-old vets returned to finish high school, and to play football against fourteen-year-olds. The romance of war faded early for the vets, but eventually for the Charlies too. We all accumulated bruises of one kind or another, and for me, a few broken bones and teeth. This was Texas high-school football, remember.

  My dad, like many another, felt so guilty drawing a princely salary in an aircraft plant that he enlisted in the Army for a tenth of that sum, rising to the dizzy elevation of Private First Class. I won more stripes than that, but on my backside, from my mother. I could claim I didn’t earn them, but the facts would keep getting in my way. At work my mother commanded a huge machine of many small parts, a Mergenthaler Linotype, that composed newstype column by column. Women became welders, assemblers, riveters, and ferry pilots, and in the process feminists. Combat vets who returned expecting to find their wives unchanged, joked that they needed a treaty in the war between the sexes.

  Many things changed by just disappearing. Our big-little books, metal toys, and old tools went into scrap drives. Postwar replacements, when they came, were unrecognizable. Balsa was a war material, and the rubber-powered flying model hobby never recovered. And does anybody not know why I still grieve for my Action Comics #1, introducing Superman, that went into a scrap drive in 1943? A fine copy recently sold for over $2 million.

  But it wasn’t just things that, in changing, changed us as well. A new and more knowing (some would say “cynical”) set of attitudes crowded older ones aside. I was tempted to slather Charlie’s days with the special flavors of Southwest mythology, but much of it, today, would be met with glaze-eyed disbelief from my grandlarvae. A sample: before the war it was well-known to many of us that a single remedy was favored by Grandma for baldness, acne, poison ivy, sunburn and assorted bug bites. The remedy? A poultice of fresh cow patty. After the war, even little kids realized that the world is not quite what they were told it is.

  Of course, a few old myths lurch ahead into this century. Not always because they make sense, but because they’re still fun. I fondly recall how therapeutic it was to sneak up and burst a paper sack behind the head of a person in the throes of hiccups. If he hadn’t had hiccups, well, now he would. The time that head was my fearsome Uncle Fred’s, I escaped justice only by insisting I’d been almost certain he’d hiccupped.

  Or maybe that was Charlie.