Not-Just-Anybody Family Page 6

  As the door opened, Mud ran around the pool. He whipped through the hedge and galloped across the lawn like a racehorse.

  Behind him a voice said kindly, “What’s wrong, Franklin? You all right, boy?”

  Franklin whined with pleasure.

  “Was some stray dog after your bone?”

  Mud hit the sidewalk and slowed. He lifted his leg on a bush at the Doberman’s driveway, then he took the time to scratch the grass vigorously with his back feet. A spray of fine zoysia grass flew into the night air.

  Then, without a backward glance, Mud ambled down the sidewalk, on his way to Pap.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Missing Harmonica

  Junior could not get to sleep. The lights in his room had been turned out. The hospital hall was as quiet as it ever got. Ralphie had gone to sleep with the little harmonica in his mouth, and every time he breathed out, he played a soft, soothing chord. Still Junior could not sleep.

  Usually the only time Junior had trouble sleeping was Christmas Eve. Even the times when his mother had the terrible Christmas Eve talks with them, warning in her quiet way that sometimes Santa couldn’t bring everything everybody wanted.

  Even when she looked directly at him during the terrible talk, and he knew, knew deep in his bones, that it was he who was not going to get the bicycle, he still could not sleep from excitement.

  This was different. It was the opposite of excitement. They did a lot of opposites in school. The teacher would say, “The opposite of day is—”

  “Night!” Junior would cry.

  “The opposite of lost is—”

  “Found!”

  Junior had never missed a single one. Sometimes he was a little bit slower than the rest of the class, but he had never missed one.

  This was impossible, though, he thought. He went over it again. “The opposite of excitement is—”

  There was only one answer: “Lying in the hospital with hurt legs.”

  And his legs did hurt. They had not hurt much during the day, and they had stopped hurting entirely when he had held Ralphie’s artificial leg and worked the knee. He had even for one brief moment wanted a leg exactly like the one on his lap.

  Now, however, his legs were making up for lost time. They hurt a lot.

  He realized suddenly how much he loved the sounds of his own house. He missed them. Mud drinking loudly out of the toilet, Pap grinding his teeth, the wind chimes they had given their mom for her birthday clicking musically on the porch below, the occasional chinaberry dropping on the tin roof.

  He felt so miserable that he reached for the buzzer beside his pillow. “Use this, Junior, if you need anything,” the nurse had told him, but he never had. Ralphie spent a lot of time ringing his buzzer, demanding Cokes and candy over the intercom as if he were the president of the hospital. When the nurses ignored him, he pressed the buzzer and made terrible gagging noises or pretended to be choking.

  Now Junior looked at his buzzer. He pressed the button. A voice on the intercom said, “Yes?”

  “It’s me—Junior,” he answered miserably.

  “Speak up, please.”

  “It’s me—Junior.”

  “What’s wrong, Junior?”

  “I don’t feel good.”

  “Do your legs hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll bring you an aspirin.”

  “Thank you,” he said politely. It was hard not to be polite to a voice coming from the wall.

  But when the nurse arrived with the paper cup and the pill, he was crying too hard to swallow. “I want Maggie,” he wailed. “I want Pap. I want Vern. I want my mommmmmmm!”

  “Will you shut him up?” Ralphie said, flipping over in disgust. “Where does he think he is—at a hog-calling contest?”

  The nurse wrapped her arms around Junior and hugged him. He tried to pretend they were has mom’s arms, but it didn’t work. Still, he was glad to have arms of any sort around him. “Tomorrow, you know what you’re going to do?” the nurse asked kindly.

  He shook his head against her.

  “You’re going to get up and sit in a wheelchair and you can go down to the TV room, and you can roll up and down the hall, and the play lady comes with games and books and you can pick anything you want.”

  “Is that true?” Junior asked.

  “Big deal,” Ralphie sneered.

  “Go to sleep, Ralphie. You—”

  Ralphie clutched his throat. “I swallowed my harmonica.”

  “Come on, Ralphie, it’s too late at night for that kind of foolishness.”

  “I swallowed my harmonica, I tell you! I’m not kidding! I really swallowed my harmonica! Where is it if I didn’t swallow it?”

  He began to pull at his pajamas, frantically searching the wrinkles. He tore his pajama top open and shook it. He lifted his pillow.

  The nurse crossed to Ralphie’s bed. “Let’s take a look. It probably fell down in your covers.” She pulled them back and searched among the wrinkled sheets. “Roll over.” She ran her hands under him.

  “He did have it in his mouth,” Junior said helpfully. “It blew a note every time he breathed out.”

  “Ralphie, it looks like you’d have better sense than to go to sleep with a harmonica in your mouth. If I have to send you down to X-ray, and there’s no harmonica inside you, I’m going to be—” She shook the top sheet so hard, it billowed and snapped. “—furious.”

  “If you swallow a harmonica, do they have to cut you open to get it out?” Junior asked.

  “Nobody’s cutting me open!” The words burst from Ralphie. His hands folded into fists. “I’m not going to let anybody cut me open. The doctor promised me this was the last time I would have to—”

  “There,” the nurse said, “is your harmonica.”

  “Where?”

  The nurse bent and picked something off the floor. She extended her hand. “There.”

  Ralphie looked at it suspiciously. “It doesn’t look like my harmonica. How do you know it’s mine?”

  “Because nobody else on this floor has an inch-long harmonica. Now, I’m putting this in my pocket, Ralphie, and you can have it when you leave the hospital.”

  “I don’t want it anymore.”

  “I do,” said Junior quickly.

  “Take it,” said Ralphie, turning away from them.

  “All right, you can have it when you leave the hospital,” the nurse said. “And do you want this pill or not?”

  “I don’t need it anymore,” Junior said truthfully. The thought of owning his own harmonica was painkiller enough.

  Before he went to sleep, Ralphie said, “I knew it was on the floor all the time. I just wanted to scare her.”

  “And you did,” Junior answered.

  CHAPTER 19

  Breaking In

  Pap was not asleep and he heard the noise of the board thumping into place against the vent over his head. He dared not hope it was the children, and yet he could feel his heart begin to race in his chest.

  He stood up. Pap had to stand up in stages. He stood up first in a stoop, and when his legs got used to that, he straightened the rest of the way up.

  Now he stood tall beside his bunk, his head straining painfully toward the window, his old neck twisted like a rooster’s. He heard nothing. With his head back, his Adam’s apple stuck out as far as his sagging chin.

  He said softly, “Kids?”

  No answer.

  “Kids?”

  He wanted to whistle, but the man in the next cell had threatened to kill him if he whistled like—the man did not know birdcalls—like a nuthatch one more time. Pap wasn’t afraid of the man, but he didn’t want a disturbance of any kind just now.

  He heard a new noise. He couldn’t place it. A soft silk-smooth sound overhead. He held his breath. He waited. He knew in his bones that the sound had something to do with him.

  Everybody else in the jail was asleep, snoring, snorting, groaning in their dreams. And they had gone t
o sleep instantly, because none of them were expecting anyone to drop in. Pap was, and so he alone waited alert in his lighted cell.

  Even though he still couldn’t place the thump, followed by the soft sliding sound, he knew it was his. His daddy used to have a saying long ago: “That piece of pie’s got my name on it,” and that was exactly the way Pap felt about the soft sliding noise overhead.

  He waited with his hands twitching at his sides, his fingers making little beckoning movements.

  The door opened, and a policeman came in for his hourly check. It was twelve o’clock.

  The policeman walked slowly down the room, looking in each cell. He paused at Pap’s cell. He looked Pap over from his shoes to his uncombed head. Pap’s heart stopped beating.

  “You better lie down, sir, get some sleep,” the policeman said.

  “I will. I will.”

  “You got a big day tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “Isn’t your hearing tomorrow?”

  “My what?”

  “Your hearing.”

  “Oh, my hearing.”

  Pap nodded. He slumped to his bunk to get rid of the policeman. He lay down. He pretended to close his eyes. Through a slit in his left eye he could see the policeman was still there.

  He couldn’t hear the soft sliding noises because the blood was pounding so hard in his head, it blocked out everything else.

  “You a baseball fan?”

  “What?” Pap’s eyes snapped open. He was so filled with hope and dread and pounding blood, he couldn’t even remember what baseball was. “Yes. No.”

  “Which is it?” The policeman smiled.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the Cards won. Braves won. Phillies lost.”

  “Oh.”

  Pap pulled back his lips in a smile. He swallowed so hard, his Adam’s apple bobbed up to his chin.

  Now at last, the policeman was moving back down the cells and into the office. The door closed.

  With a sigh of relief Pap started to get to his feet. He was at the first, bent-knee stage, when he heard the noises outside.

  There were three of them: a muffled scream, a soft thud against the side of the building, and then a long, loud clanging noise as something hit the sidewalk. It clattered, and then there was silence.

  Pap scrambled onto his bunk.

  “What’s happened?” he called to the vent, “What’s happened?”

  He waited with his mouth open, like a thirsty man waiting for raindrops.

  “What’s happened? Please, somebody tell me what’s happened!”

  His feet were digging into his thin mattress, his hands gripping the concrete wall. It looked exactly like he was climbing up the wall, except that he wasn’t getting any higher.

  “What’s happened?”

  There was a long pause. Minutes went by. Pap was so still, he could hear the ticking of his pocket watch. Then Pap saw the most beautiful sight of his life. A hand came through the vent and clutched the sill.

  “Vern,” he asked, still not daring to hope, “is that you?”

  “It’s me,” Vern answered.

  CHAPTER 20

  Maggie Alone

  Maggie was still waiting on the sidewalk, looking up at the lighted vent with her mouth open.

  If she lived to be a hundred, she would never forget Vern’s desperate leap for the building. He had flung himself through the air, his arms and legs churning like an Olympic jumper’s. Then he slammed into the wall, and his thin hands gripped the ledge. He had hung there for what seemed to Vern and Maggie to be the longest minute and a half in the history of recorded time.

  Maggie kept waiting for him to fall to the ground. Vern kept hanging there.

  Maggie glanced around. She wished she had something to put under him to break his fall.

  When Maggie saw the board, she got a brainstorm, the first of her life. “Hold on,” she yelled.

  She took the fallen board, upended it, shoved it up against the wall, and gave Vern’s dangling feet a boost. It was all Vern needed.

  One foot found a toehold. His other knee pushed his body out from the wall. He worked the toe of his shoe between the bricks, and he pulled himself up six inches. His toe moved up a brick.

  Vern inched his way up the rest of the wall, moving as carefully as a mountain climber, his tennis shoes digging into the wall, his hands reaching into the vent. It was a slow, superhuman, agonizing effort that Maggie watched from directly below.

  She watched Vern wiggle eel-like through the vent. He had to turn his head sideways, the vent was so small, and she turned her head sideways too. She had sucked in her breath as he, too, had done to get his chest through the vent. She pulled in her stomach as he went over the sill.

  For a few seconds there had been just his thin legs sticking out of the vent. Then they disappeared in a scissors kick, and Vern was in the city jail.

  The leap had been so exciting, and her part in it so spectacular, that Maggie had wanted to jump up and down and cheer. It had been like something out of the circus, the most exciting, successful moment of her entire life.

  Now, however, with the realization that Vern was inside with Pap and that she was outside with nobody, all she felt was lonely.

  “Vern!” she called softly.

  It had been ten minutes since Vern’s legs had disappeared.

  “Vern?”

  Tears came to her eyes and spilled onto her cheeks. Usually when Maggie cried, she wiped her tears away with the ends of her braids. It was the best part of having braids. That and crossing them under her nose and making a mustache. Those were the only two reasons she went to all the trouble of making the braids. Now she was too miserable to care.

  “Vern?”

  Far above her, in the light of the vent, Vern’s small, round face appeared. Maggie lifted her arms like a mother urging her child to jump.

  Vern said just one sentence before he slipped back into the jail and out of sight.

  “Junior’s in Alderson General Hospital.”

  In the jail Vern tumbled once again into Pap’s trembling arms, and the two of them sat down on the side of Pap’s bunk. The first few minutes of the reunion had been spent with Pap rubbing his hands over Vern, testing to make sure he was real, mumbling, “I knew you’d come. I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”

  The next minutes were spent realizing that now, instead of having one family member in jail, they had two. After that, they hadn’t said anything, just sat enjoying the comfort of each other’s presence.

  Finally Vern had broken the silence with “Maggie’s outside.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Pap said.

  Pap knew it wouldn’t be proper to bring a girl into the men’s half of city jail. Then, with a sudden lift of heart, he remembered Junior.

  Junior had been worrying Pap ever since the policeman had told him Junior was in the hospital. Now the heavy lines between Pap’s brows eased. Things were working out all right after all. Maggie could take care of Junior.

  “I’ll boost you up, and you yell out and tell her Junior’s in Alderson General Hospital.”

  “That’s all?”

  “She’ll know what to do.”

  Vern had climbed on Pap’s old sloping shoulders, turned his head sideways, poked it through the vent, and looked down at Maggie’s pale face far below.

  He called, “Junior’s in Alderson General Hospital.” Then he shimmied down Pap’s body as if it were a tree, and joined him on the bunk.

  No one in the jail had awakened.

  Pap, comforted at last, leaned back against the concrete block wall. Vern did too. Their eyes closed.

  Vern opened his eyes. “I forgot something. Boost me up again, Pap.”

  “Verrrrrrrrrn,” Maggie wailed. She stood with her head back like a howling dog. “What am I supposed to do nowwwwww?”

  She looked down at the board at her feet. Maybe she could get it up the tree and across the gap to the ledge so Vern could come back
across. She knew she couldn’t. It had taken all her strength to lift it up for that one short boost. Maybe she could do something terrible and get arrested. “Just put me in with my family,” she would tell the arresting officer, “—the Blossoms.” She would look so pitiful that—

  At that moment, with tears of pity welling in her eyes, Maggie heard the clink of a coin at her feet. She brushed her tears away with her braids.

  The clink was followed by another. Then money poured from the vent. It fell around her like rain—nickels, dimes, pennies, wadded-up dollar bills.

  Even before the last coin hit the sidewalk, Maggie was on her hands and knees, gathering it in.

  CHAPTER 21

  Rich and Special

  Maggie felt better. It was surprising how much more wonderful things looked when you were rich.

  The money was in her jeans pocket—nineteen dollars and forty-nine cents. She had wrapped it up like a package, securely, with the dollar bills folded around the coins.

  “Isn’t it late for you to be out by yourself ?” the bus driver asked.

  Maggie was sitting on the long sideways seat behind him. Now that she had money, everything seemed to be going her way.

  The bus had stopped. She had said, “By any chance do you go past Alderson Hospital?”

  The bus driver had said, “I sure do.”

  She said, “How much?”

  He said, “Fifty.”

  She said, “Just a minute.” She unwrapped her package of money, dropped the money in the slot, and here she was, on her way.

  Life sure was easy when you had money.

  “I asked,” the bus driver said again, “isn’t it late for you to be out by yourself?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, “it is.”

  “You got family in the hospital?”

  “My little brother.”

  “What’s wrong with him? Is he hurt, sick, or what?”

  “Hurt, I think.”

  The bus driver steered the bus around a corner, and Maggie leaned with the turn. She was the only passenger on the bus.