It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC Page 3

  For a few moments their strategy worked, Charlie sticking his bare feet forward beyond the wagon like bumpers, Aaron bent double with both hands gripping the wagon’s tail, Lint trotting at Aaron’s heels barking encouragement.

  And then those few moments passed, and the strategy began to fail when Lint, goaded by Aaron’s trouser cuffs flapping so temptingly near, began to growl and nip at them in a friendly way. By now gravity was exerting its influence, Aaron moving as fast as he could with his head down, rump high in the air, trying to kick the dog—in a friendly way. Small grooves across the sidewalk were not much help to Charlie, who still managed to control what had now become a squealing, jouncing juggernaut. The time for braking was at hand, and Charlie lowered his heels to the sidewalk as he did when wearing shoes.

  But Charlie was sitting on his shoes. His bare heels were thick as boot leather but, thanks to friction, grew hot as a skillet within seconds. “Brakes,” he called, lifting his feet again. “Braaakes!”

  And Aaron tried, the only way he could. Still gripping the wagon, he stretched out full length, facing the cement, dragged cruelly downhill by a wagonful of bottles plus eighty pounds of nitwit. Aaron could feel his belt buckle scraping over grooves, shirt buttons grinding against cement, until his chin hit the sidewalk and he lost his grip on the wagon.

  Aaron shouted the only counsel he knew, which was “Slow down,” good advice though fruitless, and Lint galloped happily alongside Charlie barking expert advice as his master looked ahead with a desperate calculation in mind.

  A driveway loomed ahead, the only place where cement led smoothly to the street, and Charlie leaned far to the side as he steered into a steep right-angle turn. He might have succeeded if not for Lint, who was not expecting this maneuver and crashed headlong into the wagon as it teetered on two wheels.

  Wagon, boy, bottles and dog went tumbling, clangs and yelps competing as the load cascaded along the curb for the next twenty feet toward a nearby storm grating. Lint was first to recover, rushing to Charlie as the boy came to a sitting position, helping inspect heels and elbows with medicinal licks.

  Aaron brushed himself off as he approached the crash site and retrieved one of Charlie’s shoes from the gutter. Shards of glass were strewn below the curb, though half the bottles remained unbroken and, as Charlie tied his shoes, Aaron placed their surviving loot in the wagon after one darting glance toward a gray stucco bungalow nearest them. “I think we better clean this stuff up.” He began to shove the larger chunks of glass toward the grating of the storm drain.

  “No time,” said Charlie, getting to his feet, wiping spit into one elbow.

  “Yes there is, if you don’t want us both in trouble,” Aaron insisted. “Don’t look now but I think I saw a face watching us from the spook house. I said don’t look,” he protested, and sighed because Charlie had immediately looked toward the gray bungalow. Another time, they might have given further thought to Aaron’s claim, but by now no face could be seen and the boys were busier than two ants on a junebug.

  Grumbling, they spent precious minutes using their shoes to guide splinters of bottle into the iron grating next to the street. Charlie’s injuries proved slight, an angry scrape on one elbow and a trickle of blood from a finger. He worried more about Lint, who kept growling into the storm drain and limped until Charlie removed a needle of glass from a paw.

  Aaron watched, plainly impatient, as Charlie performed the surgery and Lint thanked his master with saliva. “They’re not gonna hold the movie while that pooch drowns you, Charlie,” he said. The little troupe left the scene in a run, and ransomed their surviving bottles minutes later for all of thirty-seven cents.

  Charlie left his Radio Flyer behind the Ice House. Disposing of the dog was even simpler with the magic incantation, “Home, Lint.” Then the boys loped off toward the Queen Theater, with enough spare pennies to share a tiny bag of candy corn from Woolworth’s department store. They gave no more thought that day to the storm drain or to the face Aaron might have seen framed by gray stucco.

  CHAPTER 3:

  THE REMAINS OF EASTER

  On the Friday before Easter in Charlie’s world, most people might claim without reflection that they took the holiday seriously. In practice, if you were Charlie’s age, Good Friday was merely the first of two Saturdays in one week, with an added neighborhood tradition the boys never mentioned though it could linger for ten days.

  Charlie’s mother did her part, donating a dozen fresh eggs to what she thought was merely an Easter egg hunt and supplying a ten-cent packet of aspirin-sized dye tablets. Roy Kinney’s parents allowed his friends to use a dirt-floored storage space under their house and grandly called the place a playroom. They also supplied another dozen eggs. Sue Ann Kinney, a long-haired blonde colt of fourteen, was old enough to oversee the boiling of eggs in their kitchen, yet young enough to accept the dangers implied by several boys meddling with liquid dye. It was Mrs. Kinney’s belief that no harm could arise from this.

  Sue Ann supervised the boiling process and carried the steaming, vinegar-scented potful of eggs outside before entering the storage room where four boys waited on wooden crates, having set up a plank as a table between storage boxes. A half-dozen old cups, each with a dye tablet, awaited hot vinegar water from the pot.

  “You busted one of Charlie’s and one of Roy’s,” said Jackie Rhett as he watched eggs being dipped out with a wooden spoon.

  “How can you tell?” Sue Ann said, unmoved. “They might both be yours.”

  “Yeah, eggs is eggs,” Roy added.

  “Alla my eggs better be perfect,” Jackie grumbled.

  Aaron said, stressing the first word, “Whose eggs?”

  Jackie glared a reply but said nothing because Sue Ann represented adult supervision. Aaron knew, because Jackie bragged about such things, that all six of the eggs Jackie supplied had been obtained by stealth in Jackie’s pockets from the big Checker Front Grocery.

  Aaron had brought no eggs, claiming that Easter was a topic his mother preferred not to explore, so the boys were soon pushing thirty hardboiled eggs around on the plank while Sue Ann slowly half-filled the cups with water still hot from the pot. “Not yet,” she said, as Roy isolated an egg. “Wait for the fizz to stop.” And with this she began to stir the brilliantly colored, briskly foaming stuff in the cups with her spoon handle. “Charlie, can you roll the cracked eggs onto that old cup towel? I can make egg salad for lunch and there’ll be seven eggs for each of you. Okay, Jackie?”

  A quick nod from Jackie and three sighs from the others; Sue Ann was a born diplomat. Charlie pushed the two damaged items aside and knelt beside the girl, their heads nearly touching, and while the other boys foraged in corners for small sticks they had brought in during earlier projects, Charlie was content to kneel there, inhaling a scent more mysterious than vinegar. It disturbed and intrigued and ensnared him, and reminded him of another encounter with Sue Ann the previous October.

  * * *

  It had been the day Roy broke a favorite Kinney vase and promptly disappeared, and Sue Ann had enlisted Charlie in a search. Because the girl seldom seemed to give much attention to Roy’s friends, and Charlie was teasing a tiny horned lizard with a twig at the time, he had said, “Why me?”

  And she had tossed that yellow mop of hair from her face, and batted her eyes, and smiled. He later decided her power was the smile, or maybe the faint hint of lilac he had never noticed before. “Because you’re nice. And smart. I bet you know everywhere Roy would hide. I bet you know just about everything, Charlie.” And because Charlie did not know that half of diplomacy is allure, something in him had glowed like a lightning bug.

  Horned lizards were common enough and Charlie abandoned his task, especially with the stirring of something new in his breast. Soon, at his suggestion, they arrived at a historic local mansion, a stone pile set on a steep slope and known to all as “the castle.” Charlie peered into bushes that surrounded the high ancient stone wall, knowing those
bushes were favorite hideouts for Roy. Sue Ann had stopped at the wrought iron bars of a gate that had once admitted horse-drawn carriages to the grassy courtyard inside, a space dominated by an enormous live oak. “I don’t know if he could squeeze between these bars,” she said.

  “He can, but he’d better not,” said Charlie. “Sometimes they yell at you from the castle.” He had paused to gaze at the vast stone structure that squatted uphill from above the courtyard. “I don’t think he’s here.”

  “Just us.” For a moment they had stood at the massive gate in silence that, for Charlie, seemed perfect. Then: “Charlie, there’s something I need to know. I think it’s bad but I can’t ask my mom; I think she’d have a hissy fit.”

  “Moms will do that.”

  “And Daddy? Worse.”

  “Uh-huh. What’s it about?”

  “A word. Just a word a boy asked me about after class. He acted like I was supposed to know. Charlie, I didn’t know what to do. If a person asked you—I mean, would you ever tell they had asked?” Charlie had shaken his head. “Ever, ever? Cross your heart?”

  This time his headshake had been more firm, with a forefinger tracing an X on his breastbone. After a timeless moment he said, “Am I supposed to guess?”

  “If you were me, what would you do if a boy said—” and then she pronounced the whole Word right out loud, and stunned him with all the force of a lightning bolt between his ears.

  Charlie had heard it enough, but never from a girl. It was a Word so potent, so full of adult mystery, that Charlie had only a vague notion of its exact meaning because it wasn’t in the dictionary, and he would not even refer to it by its letter. He was more comfortable thinking of it as the Word after an E Word but before a G Word.

  His tongue had clung to the roof of his mouth as if glued there. He sensed that Sue Ann, though taller and older, was asking something heroic of him; not heroic in deeds but in wisdom.

  “Charlie, what should I have done?”

  At least he knew what always worked for him when faced by life’s great unknowables—such as that very moment. “Run,” he blurted, and took to his heels.

  Sue Ann was as fleet-footed as Charlie, but caught by surprise, she was left two paces behind all the way home. On the way her mood changed from uncertainty to suspicion and by the time Charlie swerved toward home he could tell by Sue Ann’s tone that he had failed to cover himself with glory.

  “Better not tell, you little scutter,” she had called, reluctant to cross the Hardin property line. “You just better not, is all.” There had been tears in her voice, and since that day they had treated each other with the reserve of near-strangers.

  Today, Charlie sensed that he was finally forgiven for the crime of being a boy unequal to the needs of a girl—that is to say, any boy. Sue Ann produced a pencil stub and let him print a “C” on one end of each of his seven eggs, then guided Roy through initialing his eggs with the understanding that any mix-up in those identical eggs would be a disaster equal to a Biblical flood. While the others followed suit, Roy became first to baptize his property by the simple tactic of whining to his sister about being the youngest and therefore always the most carelessly mistreated. When Roy saw Charlie preparing to dunk an egg, he insisted on having first turn at all six colors, with the result that Roy had one egg of each color with one left over while the other boys were forced to wait.

  Aaron had more exotic tastes. He had brought a tiny birthday-cake candle and used it like a pencil to draw invisible designs, marks that became visible when the dye failed to tint the egg through that tracery of candlewax. If Sue Ann wondered why Aaron’s designs featured block letters and words like “never miss” and “bam,” she chose not to ask questions.

  Charlie suspended eggs so that bands of different colors would decorate an egg. With the eventual fate of his eggs in mind, Jackie tinted every one of his a bright orange; he had noticed the previous year that a flying object of that color is easiest to track.

  It took the whole group some time to discover why Roy was now sobbing. With one egg still white, he had resolved to dye it in a manner as multicolored and spectacular as any of the others. But some choices ruled out others, and Roy did not realize this until he had dyed all his fingers and smeared the colors and achieved Jackie’s ridicule in the bargain.

  “Bee oh emm’s not a word,” Jackie said.

  “Sure it is,” Roy replied. “A bomb, like you drop from a plane.”

  “Nope, you needed another ‘b’ on the end,” Aaron said, and spelled it out. This was by now an impossibility on an egg that looked as if it had been decorated with ugliness in mind.

  “That’s crazy. It’d be ‘bombuh,’” Roy insisted, tuning up his eyewash equipment.

  “I’m sorry, bubba; Aaron’s right,” said Sue Ann, forgetting that taking sides against her little brother absolutely guaranteed tears. Roy flung the hated egg away into distant shadows and folded his arms over his face with a barrage of boohoos while Sue Ann sought ways to comfort him. Meanwhile: “Somebody find that egg,” she said to no one in particular. “If it starts to stink my mom will skin us alive.”

  Jackie took no notice of this mission, content to enjoy Roy’s troubles, but Charlie and Aaron began searching hidden crannies of the place. Charlie wasn’t surprised to see that his pal had managed to carry a cup into the shadows with him.

  “You said yellow,” Aaron muttered, and set the cup down.

  “Yeah, but—” Charlie began, but stopped when he saw Aaron carefully draw a pair of undyed eggs from a jacket pocket. “Oh boy,” he finished with a grin, and turned away to resume hunting Roy’s errant egg. It seemed that Aaron had, by prior agreement, brought a couple of eggs with him after all.

  Presently Charlie discovered the lost egg, now severely cracked and flattened, and by now Sue Ann had persuaded Roy to glorify one of the cracked eggs she had set aside. Charlie showed his trophy to Aaron, who was blowing two bright yellow eggs dry. He pocketed one and gave the other to Charlie. “And guess what I found,” Charlie said, holding up his other hand. Dangling from his forefinger was a fat one-gallon glass jug, roughly a third full of some dark pulpy mass. “Our jam. We forgot all about it last summer.”

  Aaron frowned, remembering. Several boys had spent an entire afternoon collecting dewberries along the creek, mixing them with stolen sugar and tap water, shaking them into an awful mush in that jug, then finding it was easier to get a berry into that narrow neck than to get it out again. Aaron made an upchuck face. “Wow, don’t drop it. Talk about stink,” he said, and made a worse face. In Aaron’s experience, anything forgotten in a cellar for six months was not going to smell of incense.

  “Let’s see if it does,” said Charlie, and began to unscrew the metal cap. The first hiss that emerged was so loud Charlie nearly dropped the jug, but when he inhaled, Aaron’s fearful grimace quickly turned inside out. The two boys gazed at each other in delight, then looked into the jug again. A mass of foam now nearly filled the container, and an odd sweet tang filled the air.

  “What’re you guys doing?” called the girl.

  “Nothing,” Charlie called, tightening the cap again, pushing the jug behind a box. “But I found that ol’ egg.” And he made his way back to surrender his find.

  Sue Ann promised to refrigerate the eggs until Easter and, before leaving them, told the boys to put everything back as they found it. This did not fit any plans of Jackie, who claimed his gram expected him at home. Moments later, with Jackie and Sue Ann gone, the other three boys sat listening to a screen door slam upstairs.

  Roy began to smile because he saw the others doing it, then reconsidered. “Why are we smiling?”

  “’Cause Jackie didn’t wanta help,” said Aaron.

  “So he scooted,” Charlie added, “so he won’t get any jam.”

  Roy’s eyebrows shot up. His lips formed a silent “jam.” His smile was instantly reborn. “You brung some?”

  “We all did,” said Aaron, climbing back o
ver storage boxes, grunting as he snagged something from the shadows. “Last summer, remember?” Aaron could not know how near he—all of them, in fact—had been to an explosion, thanks to the six-month buildup of pressure inside the glass jug. Charlie’s accidental release of some pressure had spared the boys some serious grief.

  “Gol-leee, dog,” said Roy. He studied the foamy half-liquid gunk through the glass. “I got dibs,” he announced.

  “Oh, I just bet you do,” said Charlie, dripping scorn. “I found it, and Aaron’s next.” And he unscrewed the cap again. The hiss was not so fierce this time, but it produced a glance between the older boys that said, “This may not taste like it smells.” Now bubbles of foam filled the jug and popped at its mouth.

  But the smell had them all salivating; sweet and wild and tangy and—something undefinable. “It’s my house,” said Roy.

  “And my sugar,” Charlie countered.

  “And if I don’t get first dibs, I tell.”

  Aaron took a turn at the scorn business. “That you hid it away? So what?”

  “So I tell Jackie,” said Roy.

  “Aw, let him go first,” said Charlie, who had intended this from the moment he first wondered about the taste of the stuff.

  One glance at each of the older boys was enough to make Roy wonder if he had won this privilege too easily, but when Aaron growled, “Here, gimme that thing,” Roy snatched up the jug and licked at its mouth. Then he licked again. Next he tipped the jug up and took one small sip. Followed by a very large one.

  The others grabbed at the jug together when Roy was seized with a spasm of coughs, and while Charlie took an experimental sip, Aaron watched purple stuff spray from Roy’s nose. Coughing, sneezing, Roy groveled in the dirt while the older boys ignored him and sampled their lumpy fluid.