It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC Read online

  On such a bright Sunday afternoon, the whole notion of weird hisses and cat spooks carried less weight in Charlie’s mind than the chance for him to make a show of bravery. “You’re rich too. You buy one, and I’ll take it in there clean to the end of your kite line.”

  With that, Charlie pointed dramatically into the drain. Three blocks away, a bald-tired taxi passed within inches of a gutter grating. The big concrete pipe heard it. A second later the boys heard it. Charlie, wishing his finger didn’t shake, locked eyes with Aaron and held his stance.

  “My kite line reaches to the moon,” Aaron said. “First thing after school tomorrow, we can go to the store together.”

  Charlie found an exact match for the clippers immediately on Monday, a day of damp breezes that brought towering masses of cloud by late afternoon. The boys visited several stores to find the least expensive flashlight. Aaron found a bargain at Kress’s, where they managed to resist the candy counter (candy corn 19 cents a pound) but not the new shipment of glass marbles, featuring the 100 Giant Pak, 100 for only 29 cents, that matched the gleams in their eyes with its own glimmers through a cheap net bag. Neither boy had ever owned so many marbles but neither had ever been wealthy until now. “We can split fifty-fifty. Jackie’s got most of mine,” Aaron said.

  “Never play keepsies with that guy,” Charlie replied, having made the same mistake with the same result. “We can keep most of them with you know what.”

  They dug into their pockets, feverish with desire. As the saleslady watched her hand fill with pennies and the occasional nickel, Aaron fed Charlie a warning squint. “If you can’t get everything back from your hifalutin old hideyhole, remember this was your idea,” he said.

  “Scaredy-cat,” Charlie said, hefting the marbles.

  “If it is just a cat,” Aaron retorted, which made Charlie shudder. For the joy of it as they left the store, Aaron followed his remark with, “’Course, it could be a real cat. A reeeal big one,” he added ominously, making claws of his fingers.

  Charlie refused to rise to this bait, but his silence prodded Aaron to continue his teasing expedition. Aaron had wrung most the juice out of it when they neared the turn that would bring them to the Hardin place. That was when Charlie whistled a shrill variation on the tootle-ee-oot that he and Aaron shared. Aaron turned but saw that his pal did not, and he quickly fell into stride again toward the creek. Neither boy was surprised a minute later when Lint, whose ears had doggysensory perception, loped up the sidewalk with a happy little bark and kissed his master on the hand.

  “Charlie, don’t be mad,” Aaron said sadly.

  “He thinks I’m mad,” Charlie said to the dog, and without stopping, planted a lavish headscratch on his tail-wagging worshipper. Then he fixed Aaron with a firm look. “You wanta make me happy, hand me that flashlight and go get your kite line. You know where to meet us.”

  Aaron surrendered the flashlight but stopped. “This is crazy. Nobody knows what’s up in there.”

  “Then I guess that’s up to Charlie Hardin,” said Charlie, not looking behind him.

  When Aaron raced back to the creek ten minutes later he had already felt a few stray raindrops of the three-to-the-dozen variety, drops so plump that each one made an audible splat as it struck the sidewalk. Protected by the big-leafed canopy of their favorite fig tree as he sat waiting, Charlie had felt no raindrops but he could hear them stutter among the leaves overhead. Moreover, he had heard low rumbles of distant thunder and identified bass notes from the nearby drainpipe as merely faithful echoes of those thunder peals. Meanwhile he had poured a dozen marbles through a hole he tore in the net bag, and now as Aaron handed him the kite line, Charlie traded him half of those marbles.

  No one needed to remind Aaron that those little glass orbs were as good as coins. To most boys, depending on how many marbles they had lost and how desperately they wanted back into a game, a marble might be worth more than a penny.

  Charlie pocketed the kite line. “I need help to lift the chunk,” he said, and waited for Aaron to grasp the concrete lid of their temporary bank. With the coin sack recovered, they lowered the lid again and took a few more coins for pocket change as befitted young men of great wealth. Turning toward the pipe, Charlie said, “You can come along and carry some of this stuff if you want to.”

  Aaron needed a few seconds to compose the right reply. “Somebody should stay out here with the end of the string, Charlie. We’ll wait for you.”

  “We? Just you.” It had not occurred to Charlie that Lint might have doubts about the adventure. “We’ll yell if we see your old cat.”

  “Bet your life you will,” said Aaron, still hoping Charlie would relent. When offered the loose end of the kite line near the mouth of the pipe, he tried one more time. “Any last words?”

  Every boy knew that American paratroopers leaped from airplanes shouting the name of a fearless Apache warrior. Feeling every inch a hero, Charlie said, “How about ‘Geronimo’?” With that, he hunched over enough to clear the pipe and stepped inside, bags on one arm, kite line in the other hand.

  Before he could take another step into that forbidding darkness, Charlie heard the penetrating whine of a friend in great distress. Lint knew that smelly hole as well as he wanted to from the outside, where all sensible dogs belonged, and had once given his opinion of the inside as clearly as he knew how. His suspicions had not involved the slightest possibility that his master was a lunatic, but now it seemed to be a fact. His protest was a plea for sanity.

  Aaron held a similar opinion. “I guess he’s not so stupid after all, Charlie. He’s smarter than you are.”

  Charlie looked back. “Lint.” Another whine. More sternly: “Here, Lint. Good dog. Come on, boy,” he urged, his voice holding the beginnings of an echo, and if ever a terrier sighed, Lint did. But he saw Charlie take another step into the unknown, and he was not a dog to abandon his master. Lint hopped into the pipe, nails scrabbling like tiny pickaxes on the cement, until he stood between Charlie’s feet and growled into blackness as they began to advance. The constant growl was not a challenge; Lint calculated that if he sounded fierce enough, whatever was waiting in that smelly hole would not gobble him up quite as quickly. And Lint had heard the boys say, “cat,” and understood it, and knew what size hole an ordinary cat needed. He was not filled with encouragement; this hole could house a pride of African lions.

  As Charlie’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he noticed more details of the pipe: gritty debris on the bottom, a circular joint in the pipe just ahead, discolorations of mold along the sides. The smell was no better but perhaps no worse as he moved farther up the pipe’s slight incline. Charlie placed the bags inside his shirt, the heavy coin bag against his left side so that he could use the flashlight, the bag of marbles giving his skin a shuddery chill on his right. When he patted Lint’s flank he could feel his small companion trembling.

  At first, whenever he looked back, Charlie could see Aaron and his surroundings plainly, but even with the flashbeam, the path ahead quickly became a blank nothingness. A rumbling echo raised hackles on boy and dog alike, but Charlie quickly realized it was only thunder somewhere ahead and spoke gently to Lint. Soon the mouth of the pipe was only an indistinct glow behind them, and presently he found a smaller pipe that entered from the left, one so small he would have to investigate on his knees or not at all. He could not have turned around in it, imagined trying to scoot out backward, and immediately chose the not-at-all option. He noticed that where the smaller pipe fed into the larger one, it ended with a thick circular ledge, and he deposited both the coin sack and the marbles atop the ledge.

  He had taken a few more steps up the main pipe when he heard a familiar voice, made spooky by the pipe, call, “Charrrr-leee.”

  It made him flinch, and in irritation he shouted, “WHAT?” completely unprepared for how loud a roar a boy can produce by accident when he has advanced the distance of a city block into a storm sewer. It made him jump, which made Lint
bark, which sounded like a hound too monstrous to fit in a storm drain. Lint did not repeat his experiment again and neither did Charlie, who felt something wet and warm trickle onto his sock. The flashbeam told him that Lint, with no fireplugs handy, had done what fearful dogs do, directly onto Charlie’s ankle. Charlie’s underpants told him that Lint was not the only one reacting to the uproar, even one they had made themselves.

  “You don’t tell, I won’t tell,” he whispered, patting his dog as he made the pact.

  But now he could hear Aaron who was speaking slowly to make himself understood despite the confusion of echoes. “Look—out—for—the—rain.”

  Charlie made no reply, fearing another ear-splitting bark. Instead he tried to decode some strange new sounds between increasing rolls of thunder that boomed down the pipe. Some of the noise seemed to come from nearby, and when he turned the flashbeam behind him he discovered that a tiny waterfall was beginning to trickle from the small pipe into his larger one. The sensible fragment of Charlie that he had thrust into a far corner of his mind began waving wildly for attention but now, too, his eyes detected a faint hint of light coming from ahead. He flicked off the flashbeam, heedless of the dear-lord-what-now whimper that erupted from Lint.

  Now he was sure he could see reflected light ahead, and hear almost continuous thunder from that direction, as well as a noise like muffled radio static. As much as he wanted to turn back, he yearned to see where the drainpipe led, so he promised that fragmentary inner Charlie that he would continue for only ten more steps.

  By this time Lint was whining a fair imitation of a dog with three broken legs. Charlie turned the flashlight on again, took one last step toward the light, and saw the dazzle of his beam on broken bottle glass. He knew that glass: bits of small milk bottles and a green chunk with “7-UP” on it. He had pushed it through a cast iron grating the day he dumped a wagonload of bottles in the street, which meant the daylight glow and a growing trickle of water came from that same street grating. And half-invisible in gray concrete, a few steps further beyond, lay rubble from a major break in the side of the drainpipe.

  Returning creekward as he tried to picture a map of the pipe and its path under the street, Charlie found that the faint light from the creek was enough without Aaron’s flashlight. He paused to place it with the bag of marbles, thinking about the staticky noise.

  But the radio static was no longer a riddle. It lay explained as the transformed echo of a light rain shower on a city street, little more than a sprinkle but continuing as water began to flow in the drainpipe. The inner Charlie supplied one brief moving picture of that water becoming a flood, and sent the rest of Charlie careening back toward the creek with Lint a split-second ahead of him.

  Aaron could hear the onrushing commotion and welcomed it because he was not encouraged by the trickle he had seen growing from the drainpipe. Still, he was not prepared for the refugees that shot out of darkness to sprawl into wet ivy.

  Aaron resisted an impulse to shout for relief, and remained seated under the fig trees. Instead he said, “Where’s my kite line?”

  “I dunno,” Charlie admitted sheepishly. “You can wind it up from this end, or I can do it. Your flashlight’s with our money,” he added, brushing himself off and crowding under their fig umbrella as Lint wedged himself between Charlie’s feet.

  “Where’s the money?”

  “With the marbles,” Charlie replied.

  “And where’s the marbles? Or have you decided you’re not gonna tell me?”

  For a moment Charlie sat and listened as the empty threat of rain began to pass beyond the neighborhood. Then he said, “I left the stuff on a ledge I found. High as your shin; you can’t miss it.”

  “Yes I can,” Aaron retorted. “’Cause I know a guy so dumb he’ll holler Geronimo and go get it for me.” Another pause. “What if this had been a sure ’nough knockdown-and-dragout gully-washer? You’re lucky it was just barely a shower, you know.”

  “Uh-huh. I know something else, too.”

  “Charlie, sometimes I wonder if you know anything at all,” Aaron burst out, aggravated past all patience. “But tell me anyhow.”

  Charlie gave his pal the kind of knowing squint that was intended to convey secret knowledge. “I know if you could wiggle down the hole in the gutter where we shoved those bottles we broke, you could end up right here.”

  Aaron tried to connect his memory of the bottle calamity to the notion of an underground path to the creek. Finally he said, “If you think I’m gonna wiggle down in broken bottles to get my money back, you can just have yourself another think.”

  “Tell you what else. There’s a big hole busted in the pipe, a few feet from the grating. It’s too high on the pipe for a little drizzle like this to leak into,” Charlie said, nodding toward the outflow that trickled from the pipe, “but somebody better fix it someday.”

  Aaron stood and began to wind up his kite line. “I guess you didn’t find any ol’ cat in there,” he said. At Charlie’s grin, he added, “But just ’cause something didn’t find you doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

  CHAPTER 7:

  BRIDGER AND PINERO

  Cade Bridger was a short slender man partial to overalls and snuff and the kind of whiskey that could melt the fillings in his teeth, and he could not have named Charlie or any of his pals. Yet in the past weeks Bridger had spied them all at one time or another from windows of the tree-shaded gray bungalow that the boys dubbed “spooky.” To a boy not yet in his teens, any house was haunted if its lawn was unkempt, no lights ever shone from its windows, and no one seemed to occupy the property. For men of a certain sort this was perfect camouflage.

  Bridger had leaned on shovels for a city paycheck, without making many permanent friends, since 1930. His social world widened the night he met lean, swarthy Dom Pinero at the illegal dogfights in East Austin. Both men won betting on the same dog and then made the same complaint, which was that the ink on ten-dollar bills should not appear even the tiniest bit smudged. Their arguments were not well received, and in a fistfight against the same enemies they became friends.

  Later, comparing bruises as they sat in Pinero’s old car and shared a bottle of tequila, Bridger would admit he might not have noticed that the money failed to reach the usual standards if he hadn’t heard Pinero complain. And Pinero, made talkative by booze, would say it was an outrage that anyone would try passing such shoddy materials to a man who had printed better stuff while drunk.

  Even with a pint of rotgut tequila in him, Bridger realized what that meant: Pinero himself could produce what gangsters called funny money. Pinero’s counterfeit bills had been Mexican money, but he said the principle was the same: you made good clear copies, you tumbled them for a while in a tub of dirt to give them a touch of realism, and you spent them where people were too dumb to take a close look. That’s how Bridger learned that his new pal was a printer with a powerful thirst and friends across the border. And when Pinero found that Bridger’s cousin worked for an agency in Austin’s roaring real estate market, it seemed to them that their partnership was bound for glory.

  Bridger knew things about his cousin that would have interested police, so that cousin could be made to do small favors. Working alone, Pinero had not found a nice quiet place to set up a small printing press; in fact, when he met Bridger he had not yet found a press he could steal. It did not take many days for them to go into business together. Because Bridger had no more patience than an average five-year-old, it was Pinero who explained that it takes time to develop a business.

  Their first step was to find a proper place to operate a printing press for illegal purposes, which meant they would have to wrestle a stolen machine weighing as much as two men into a dry place away from prying eyes. Electricity and lights would be ideal but even Bridger, with gallons of greed and half a pint of brains, knew that the city hooked up the lines and must be paid for services. In Mexico, said Pinero, people learned how to deal with such matters. They wo
uld not even need electricity because small hand-operated printing presses had been developed centuries before electric motors. Pinero patiently explained all this to Bridger. During wartime, Austin had more people than housing, so small houses were in great demand and the list of vacancies supplied by Bridger’s cousin was not long.

  They finally chose the gray stucco place near Shoal Creek, which had stayed unrented because it stank terribly of mildew, thanks to water damage. The water leak had been caused by a break in a storm drain adjoining the property, and one of the men who had gone through the basement and repaired the leak was Cade Bridger.

  When Pinero heard this, a less careful man might have said, “Cade, you idiot, you might have told me this earlier!” But Pinero needed his partner in crime, at least temporarily, so he was patient. He said, “So you figured a smart gent like you could dig us a secret tunnel out to that old drainpipe?”

  Bridger’s cousin lent them a key to be copied, and then falsified the records so that the house could still not be rented until “serious health hazards” were repaired. In this way, the scoundrels obtained a house without renting it. By the time Pinero had furnished the basement with necessary equipment, Bridger imagined that the tunnel was his own idea, to be used only as an escape route in case they were ever trapped while at work in that rancid basement.

  Soon after a suitable hole had been smashed in the concrete drainpipe, Pinero located a press that two men might haul away from its rightful owner in the trunk of a small panel van. Brave with booze late one Friday night, they cussed three hundred pounds of printing press from the van to its new basement home, and after such heroic labor a man needs his sleep.

  When Bridger awoke on his pallet with the usual pounding headache his hangovers brought, it was roughly noon on Saturday. In one corner of an unlighted basement and without a wristwatch, he had no idea of the time, so he staggered up rickety steps to the ground floor and, hearing what sounded like a miniature auto accident somewhere outside, he peered from a dining-room window. That was the moment when he saw Charlie Hardin in the gutter among a jumble of broken bottles, and was spotted for an instant by Aaron Fischer.