The Midnight Fox Read online

  What I was going to miss most, though, were just everyday things that weren’t planned at all. Like one time Petie and I found this awful-looking Kewpie doll’s head, and Petie pretended to throw it away, only when I got ready for bed that night and turned down the covers, there was the Kewpie doll’s head on my pillow staring up at me. So then, without saying a word, I took the Kewpie doll’s head and secretly hid it in Petie’s underwear drawer. Then he hung it on a string in my closet, so that it hit me in the face when I opened the door. And all the weeks we were hiding that Kewpie head, we never once mentioned it to each other. That’s the kind of fun that doesn’t sound like much when you tell it, but I would miss it on the farm.

  Three

  Abandoned

  We left for the farm the next morning after breakfast. No one had much to say, so my mom turned on the radio and we listened to a disc jockey play hit songs from the past. About noon we stopped for a picnic lunch by a place that advertised candy, fireworks, toys, real arrowheads, flags, coins, and souvenirs from all fifty states. I used to like to spend hours looking at that kind of stuff, but that day I didn’t even feel like going inside. Finally, after we ate, my dad said, ‘Come on, sport, I’ll buy you something,’ so we went in and I selected a little totem pole that had been made in Japan, and then he made me get this fake plastic ice cube which had a fake fly in it and we went out and put it in Mom’s cup for a joke. It was a very dismal morning.

  The rest of the way I just sat in the back seat with my eyes closed. I started thinking about a movie I saw once where some farm people sent to the orphanage for a boy, because they wanted someone to help with the hard work on the farm. Instead of the boy, the orphanage sent them a puny girl, and there was tremendous disappointment. I thought now that perhaps Aunt Millie and Uncle Fred were letting me come because they thought I was a great athlete with muscles like potatoes who could toss hay into the loft without spilling a straw. They would be very excited, of course, at the thought of this wonderful summer helper, and as our car drove up, they would be standing in the yard saying things like ‘Now we have someone to break the wild horses for us,’ and ‘Now we have someone to get the boulders out of the north forty.’ Then I would step out and they would cry, ‘But where’s the big boy?’ and I would say, ‘I’m the only boy there is.’ They would try to hide their disappointment, but finally Aunt Millie would start crying and run into the house.

  I then went on to imagine a wonderful ending, where I turned out to be such a merry boy that I brightened the entire household, bringing fun to a dark house, but this didn’t cheer me up, because it seemed to me that any farm people would rather have a sullen muscular worker than a skinny one, no matter how merry.

  While I was thinking about this, we turned off on to the dirt road that led to the farm. My dad started blowing the horn to announce our arrival. When we got to the house, where the drive made a big circle and was all neatly edged with whitewashed stones, he called out, ‘Anybody home?’

  Right away Aunt Millie came running out of the house, drying her hands on her apron and shouting, ‘Fred! Fred! They’re here.’

  I got out of the car – I never felt less muscular in my whole life except in gym class – but she was so busy hugging Mom that she didn’t notice me.

  ‘It’s been so long!’ she was saying.

  My mom started crying and said, ‘Oh, Millie, it is so good to see you. You are exactly the same, and this farm is exactly the same!’ and then she cried some more.

  ‘Now, Fran,’ my dad said.

  ‘And this is Tom,’ Aunt Millie said, turning to me. She was not really my aunt but my second cousin, but I called her Aunt Millie, so I said, ‘Hello, Aunt Millie. It’s nice to see you.’

  ‘Well, it’s nice to see you. I’m so glad to have a boy around this place again. All my boys have grown up and gone, and it’s lonesome.’ She patted my shoulder, and then she turned back to Mom and said, ‘Hazeline went riding with her boyfriend, but I told her to be back in time to see you. I said, “Hazeline, Fran has not seen you in years and you be home.”’

  ‘I still remember how fat and sweet she was when she was a baby,’ Mom said.

  ‘I guess you do. Why, you were her mamma that summer. Me flat on my back and you – she thought you were her mamma.’

  My father had gotten my suitcase out while they were talking, and now we all went into the house and had lemonade and cake with Uncle Fred.

  We talked some more about Hazeline, and Uncle Fred told about this prize pig of his, and Dad told some basketball stories, and then – it seemed like we had just been in the house about one second – my dad said, ‘Fran, we are going to have to get started if we want to get home tonight.’

  ‘You’re not leaving!’ Aunt Millie said. My feelings exactly.

  ‘We have to.’

  ‘But we wanted you at least to stay the night.’

  ‘We can’t. That’s what we wanted to do,’ Mom said, ‘but the couple we’re riding to New York with want to leave first thing in the morning. Tom says he doesn’t mind, but I feel awful just dropping him and running.’

  ‘Oh, now, Tom is going to get along fine, aren’t you, Tom?’

  ‘Sure.’

  We walked out on the porch without saying anything, but at the steps Mom said, ‘Now you be a real good boy, Tom, and do what Aunt Millie tells you.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘We’ll get on just fine,’ Aunt Millie said, patting my shoulder again.

  ‘I know.’ Mom hugged Aunt Millie and said, ‘This is the nicest thing that anyone has ever done for me.’ Then she hugged me real hard, got into the car, and turned her face away.

  My dad said, ‘Well, so long, sport,’ and socked me on the arm.

  I said, ‘Have a nice trip.’ I was pleased that my nose wasn’t running or anything, because I felt terrible.

  My dad started the car and they drove off. Mom kept her head turned, but Dad waved and honked the horn all the way to the highway.

  ‘Now, you watch,’ Aunt Millie said. ‘Hazeline and her boyfriend will come driving up in about ten minutes all full of apologies. I told her to be here. That girl! You want to come on back in the house and have some more lemonade?’

  ‘No, I’ll just walk around a little bit,’ I said.

  ‘Sure.’

  She went back into the house and I sat on the steps. My dad was always talking about control. He said control was the most important thing there was to an athlete, and he was always telling me I should have more of it. I couldn’t imagine anyone having more control than it took to sit quietly on the steps, nose and eyes dry, while being abandoned.

  Sometimes my dad would get real disgusted with me because I didn’t control myself too well. I used to cry pretty easily if I got hurt or if something was worrying me.

  I remembered one time when Petie Burkis came over to my house and told me that he knew a way that you could figure out when you were going to die – the very day! He learned this from a sitter he’d had the night before. It was all according to the wrinkles in your hand – you counted them a certain way. Well, we sat right down and counted the wrinkles in my hand. It took over an hour, and it came out that I was going to die in my seventy-ninth year, on either the eighty-second or eighty-third day. Petie said probably I would fall terribly ill on the eighty-second and last until just after midnight on the eighty-third.

  Then we started counting the wrinkles in Petie’s hand. He had a peculiar hand, and it came out that he was going to die on the two hundred and seventy-ninth day of his ninth year. Well, Petie was nine years old right then, so he said, ‘Get a calendar, quick, get a calendar,’ and he looked like he was already getting sick.

  We looked all over the house before we finally found a wallet-sized insurance calendar, and then we got down on our stomachs and began to count the days. We were saying the numbers together – two hundred and seventy-six, two hundred and seventy-seven, two hundred and seventy-eight – and I can still hear the terrible wa
y it sounded when we both said, ‘two hundred and seventy-nine.’ It was like the last sound in the world, because it turned out that Petie was going to die the next Saturday.

  I said, ‘Let’s do it again.’

  We did it again, very slowly and carefully this time, but it still came out the same – two hundred and seventy-nine, next Saturday.

  Petie felt awful, I could see that, and I felt even worse, and if there had been any way in the world I could give him nineteen or twenty of my seventy-nine years, I would have done it in a minute. He said, ‘I better get home,’ like he meant, ‘before something happens,’ and then he left and I was too upset to try and stop him. I went into the house and my mom said, ‘What’s wrong now?’

  I said what was wrong was that Petie was going to die on Saturday, and right away she started laughing. I said, ‘Well, I certainly wouldn’t think it was so hilarious if your best friend was going to die this Saturday,’ and I went out of the room.

  She caught up with me in the hall and hugged me, and then she sat down on the telephone stool and made me look at her, and said, ‘Tommy, Petie is not going to die this Saturday.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just know, Tom.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, look at him. He is in perfect health. He is absolutely the healthiest boy I know.’

  ‘Healthy people are hit by cars every day, or fall down wells. You don’t have to be sick to die.’

  ‘This is some fool thing you and Petie have cooked up. I think you enjoy getting all worked up about nothing.’

  ‘We do not.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you absolutely, positively that Petie is not going to die on Saturday.’

  ‘All right, then, can he come over and spend the day and night with me?’ My mom was very particular about people not getting hurt in our yard. Like she would say, ‘I hope those little kids are not going to get hurt riding their bikes in our driveway,’ as if it would be perfectly all right if they were hurt just out of our drive, in the street somewhere.

  ‘Yes, you may have him over.’

  This made me feel a little better, but as soon as my dad got home, he came in and talked to me for over an hour about self-control and not letting myself get worked up over foolish things. He seemed to think I enjoyed getting worked up and upset over my friend’s death. I didn’t want to worry about things. I wanted to be peaceful and calm like everyone else, only sometimes I couldn’t.

  Anyway, Petie came over on Saturday and we were careful all day. We didn’t even go to bed until it was twelve o’clock. Then, before we got in bed, we went out into the hall, and in the dark we found the telephone and dialled the time to make sure. When the operator said, ‘The time is twelve-o-two,’ Petie started jumping up and down and saying, ‘I’m spared, I’m spared.’

  My dad said, ‘Be quiet out there.’

  We went in and lay down on the bed, and for about an hour all we said were things like, ‘Whew!’ and ‘What a relief!’ and ‘I really, honestly thought I was going to die, Tom, didn’t you?’

  I thought about that, and how now that I was controlling myself perfectly, now that there could not be one single complaint of any kind about my absolutely perfect control, there was no one around to see it.

  Four

  Stranger

  After supper Aunt Millie said, ‘Well, I imagine you would like to get unpacked. I never even thought about that until this minute. Come on.’

  We went upstairs and Aunt Millie walked to a room down at the end of the hall and said, ‘There! I thought you would like to stay in Bubba’s old room because it is just like it was when he left. I keep saying that I’m going to clean out this room and throw away all the junk, but I never do.’

  I went into the room slowly and put my suitcase down on the rug. I knew right away what kind of boy Bubba had been by looking at that room. There was not a person in the world who could have thought the room was mine. Just one glance at me and anyone would know that I had never shouldered the shotgun on the rack, that I had never stuffed the squirrel on the bookcase, that I had never collected all those different bird eggs and nests in the bookcase.

  Aunt Millie was saying, ‘I have been after Fred for weeks to hammer those screens in. I know how boys love to climb out their windows at night. Come here.’

  I went over, and she pointed to the huge tree beside the window. ‘Look, there. See those smooth spots on the branches? Just like steps? Well, that’s how often my boys came up and down that old tree – their feet wore down the bark. They wouldn’t use the stairs for anything. And I said, “Fred, I am through worrying about boys falling out of trees. You hammer the screens into those upstairs windows.”’

  ‘I won’t climb out,’ I assured her.

  ‘Oh, go along with you. I know boys.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid of heights.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. You’ll be out there first chance you get. I know! Only, like Fred says, if you want to climb out, there’s not a screen in the world could stop you, so I guess it doesn’t matter.’ She crossed to the chest and pulled out two drawers. ‘Now I cleared out these drawers for you. Put your things right in here.’ She patted the bottom of the drawer so I wouldn’t make any mistake.

  ‘Now, I’ll be downstairs if you want anything.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Well, if you do, I’ll be downstairs.’

  She went out, and I opened my suitcase and put my clothes in the drawers, and then I opened the other drawers and looked at all the things in them. There were different kinds of rocks in shoeboxes, and bullets, and an old card box with coins in it, and a big stack of 4-H project books, and in the bottom drawer were some old hunting clothes and bathing suits with life-saving emblems on them.

  I closed the drawers and sat down on the edge of the bed. I had not been able to eat any supper at all. Aunt Millie had been watching me the whole time and she had said over and over, ‘Don’t you like the supper?’ Finally I had managed to hide some food in my pocket so she would think I had eaten something. Now I reached into my pocket and took out the crumpled-up sandwich and two broken peanut-butter crackers.

  The only time I ever really enjoyed eating was one time over at Petie’s house. Petie was a great eater, and he got an idea for a new food invention. It was called The Petie Burkis Special. He got his mom to make up some dough, and then on top of this dough, Petie cut up dozens of hot sausages and luncheon meats and different kinds of cheese and pickles. Then he rolled it up and baked it, and when it came out of the oven it looked like a great golden football.

  Petie sliced it right down the middle with a big knife and pushed half over to me. Wonderful-smelling steam poured up into my face. We started eating and our mouths were on fire and cheese and sausage juice was dripping down our chins. Petie was just moaning with happiness and I ate until my stomach hurt. It was the only time in my life that my stomach had hurt from being too full.

  I sat there holding the crumpled sandwich in my hand. It was pimento-cheese, which Aunt Millie had made specially, since they were her boys’ favourites. She told me that one time on a picnic Bubba and Fred Jr together had eaten twenty-three halves of her pimento-cheese sandwiches. When I heard that, I had tried harder than ever to get one down, but I just couldn’t. The only thing in all the world I could have eaten right then was a Petie Burkis Special, and then only if Petie himself had come running in with it.

  Five

  The Black Fox

  The first three days on the farm were the longest, slowest days of my life. It seemed to me in those days that nothing was moving at all, not air, not time. Even the bees, the biggest fattest bees that I had ever seen, just seemed to hang in the air. The problem, or one of them, was that I was not an enormously adaptable person and I did not fit into new situations well.

  I did a lot of just standing around those first days. I would be standing in the kitchen and Aunt Millie would turn around, stirring something, and bump into me and say, ‘Oh,
my goodness! You gave me a scare. I didn’t even hear you come in. When did you come in?’

  ‘Just a minute ago.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t hear you. You are so quiet.’

  Or Uncle Fred would come out of the barn wiping his hands on a rag and there I’d be, just standing, and he’d say, ‘Well, boy, how’s it going?’

  ‘Fine, Uncle Fred.’

  ‘Good! Good! Don’t get in any mischief now.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  I spent a lot of time at the pond and walking down the road and back. I spent about an hour one afternoon hitting the end of an old rope swing that was hanging from a tree in the front yard. I made my two models, and then I took some of the spare plastic strips and rigged up a harness, so that the horse was pulling the car, and Aunt Millie got very excited over this bit of real nothing and said it was the cleverest thing she had ever seen.

  I wrote a long letter to Petie. I went down to the stream and made boats of twigs and leaves and watched them float out of sight. I looked through about a hundred farm magazines. I weeded Aunt Millie’s flowers while she stood over me saying, ‘Not that, not that, that’s a zinnia. Get the chickweed – see? Right here.’ And she would snatch it up for me. I had none of the difficult chores that I had expected because the farm was so well run that everything was already planned without me. In all my life I have never spent longer, more miserable days, and I had to keep saying, ‘I’m fine, just fine,’ because people were asking how I was all the time.

  The one highlight of my day was to go down to the mailbox for the mail. This was the only thing I did all day that was of any use. Then, too, the honking of the mail truck would give me the feeling that there was a letter of great importance waiting for me in the box. I could hardly hurry down the road fast enough. Anyone watching me from behind would probably have seen only a cloud of dust, my feet would pound so fast. So far, the only mail I had received was a postcard from my mom with a picture of the statue of Liberty on it telling me how excited and happy she was.