Get in Trouble: Stories (3 page)

There was fresh orange juice, and Ophelia had poured it into a stoneware jug. Fran decided not to tell her that her daddy used it as a sometime spittoon.

“Can I ask you some more about them?” Ophelia said. “You know, the summer people?”

“I don’t reckon I can answer every question,” Fran said. “But go on.”

“When I first got there,” Ophelia said, “when I went inside, at first I decided that it must be a shut-in. One of those hoarders. I’ve watched that show, and sometimes they even keep their own poop. And dead cats. It’s just horrible.

“Then it just kept on getting stranger. But I wasn’t ever scared. It felt like there was somebody there, but they were happy to see me.”

“They don’t get much in the way of company,” Fran said.

“Yeah, well, why do they collect all that stuff? Where does it come from?”

“Some of it’s from catalogs. I have to go down to the post office and collect it for them. Sometimes they go away and bring things back. Sometimes they tell me they want something and I get it for them. Mostly it’s stuff from the Salvation Army. Once I had to buy a hunnert pounds of copper piping.”

“Why?” Ophelia said. “I mean, what do they do with it?”

“They make things,” Fran said. “That’s what Ma called them, makers. I don’t know what they do with it all. They give away things. Like the toys. They like children. When you do things for them, they’re beholden to you.”

“Have you seen them?” Ophelia said.

“Now and then,” Fran said. “Not so often. Not since I was much younger. They’re shy.”

Ophelia was practically bouncing on her chair. “You get to look after them? That’s the best thing ever! Have they always been here?”

Fran hesitated. “I don’t know where they come from. They aren’t always there. Sometimes they’re…somewhere else. Ma said she felt sorry for them. She thought maybe they couldn’t go home, that they’d been sent off, like the Cherokee, I guess. They live a lot longer, maybe forever, I don’t know. I expect time works different where they come from. Sometimes they’re gone for years. But they always come back. They’re summer people. That’s just the way it is with summer people.”

“Like how we used to come and go,” Ophelia said. “That’s how you used to think of me. Like that. Now I live here.”

“You can still go away, though,” Fran said, not caring how she sounded. “I can’t. It’s part of the bargain. Whoever takes care of them has to stay here. You can’t leave. They don’t let you.”

“You mean, you can’t leave, ever?”

“No,” Fran said. “Not ever. Ma was stuck here until she had me. And then when I was old enough, I took over. She went away.”

“Where did she go?”

“I’m not the one to answer that,” Fran said. “They gave my ma a tent folds up no bigger than a kerchief. It sets up the size of a two-man tent, but on the inside, it’s teetotally different, a cottage with two brass beds and a chifferobe to hang your things up in, and a table, and windows with glass in them. When you look out one of the windows, you see wherever you are, and when you look out the other window, you see them two apple trees, the ones in front of the house with the moss path between them?”

Ophelia nodded.

“Well, my ma used to bring out that tent for me and her when my daddy had been drinking. Then Ma passed the summer people on to me, and on a morning after we spent the night in that tent, I woke up and saw her climb out that window. The one that shouldn’t ought to be there. She disappeared down that path. Mebbe I should’ve followed on after her, but I stayed put.”

“Where did she go?” Ophelia said.

“Well, she ain’t here,” Fran said. “That’s what I know. So I have to stay here in her place. I don’t expect she’ll be back, neither.”

“She shouldn’t have left you behind,” Ophelia said. “That was wrong, Fran.”

“I wish I could get away for just a little while,” Fran said. “Maybe go out to San Francisco and see the Golden Gate Bridge. Stick my toes in the Pacific. I’d like to buy me a guitar and play some of them old ballads on the streets. Just stay a little while, then come back and take up my burden again.”

“I’d sure like to go out to California,” Ophelia said.

They sat in silence for a minute.

“I wish I could help out,” Ophelia said. “You know, with that house and the summer people. You shouldn’t have to do everything, not all of the time.”

“I already owe you,” Fran said, “for helping with the Robertses’ house. For looking in on me when I was ill. For what you did when you went up to fetch me help.”

“I know what it’s like when you’re all alone,” Ophelia said. “When you can’t talk about stuff. And I mean it, Fran. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

“I can tell you mean it,” Fran said. “But I don’t think you
know what it is you’re saying. If you want, you can go up there again one more time. You did me a favor, and I don’t know how else to pay you back. There’s a bedroom up in that house and if you sleep in it, you see your heart’s desire. I could take you back tonight and show you that room. And anyhow, I think you lost a thing up there.”

“I did?” Ophelia said. “What was it?” She reached down in her pockets. “Oh, hell. My iPod. How did you know?”

Fran shrugged. “Not like anybody up there is going to steal it. Expect they’d be happy to have you back up again. If they didn’t like you, you’d know it already.”

Fran was straightening up her and her daddy’s mess when the summer people let her know they needed a few things. “Can’t I have just a minute to myself?” she grumbled.

They told her that she’d had a good four days. “And I surely do appreciate it,” she said, “considering I was laid so low.” But she put the skillet down in the sink to soak and wrote down what they wanted.

She tidied away all of the toys, not quite sure what had come over her to take them out. Except that when she was sick, she always thought of Ma. There was nothing wrong with that.

When Ophelia came back at five, she had her hair in a ponytail and a flashlight and a thermos in her pocket, like she thought she was Nancy Drew.

“It gets dark up here so early,” Ophelia said. “I feel like it’s Halloween or something. Like you’re taking me to the haunted house.”

“They ain’t haints,” Fran said. “Nor demons nor any such
thing. They don’t do no harm unless you get on the wrong side of ’em. They’ll play a prank on you then, and count it good fun.”

“Like what?” Ophelia said.

“Once I did the warshing up and broke a teacup,” Fran said. “They’ll sneak up and pinch you.” She still had marks on her arms, though she hadn’t broken a plate in years. “Lately, they been doing what all the people up here like to do, that reenacting. They set up their battlefield in the big room downstairs. It’s not the War Between the States. It’s one of theirs, I guess. They built themselves airships and submersibles and mechanical dragons and knights and all manner of wee toys to fight with. Sometimes, when they get bored, they get me up to be their audience, only they ain’t always careful where they go pointing their cannons.”

She looked at Ophelia and saw she’d said too much. “Well, they’re used to me. They know I don’t have no choice but to put up with their ways.”

That afternoon, she’d had to drive over to Chattanooga to visit a particular thrift store. They’d sent her for a used DVD player, riding gear, and all the bathing suits she could buy up. Between that and paying for gas, she’d gone through seventy dollars. And the service light had been on the whole way. At least it wasn’t a school day. Hard to explain you were cutting out because voices in your head were telling you they needed a saddle.

She’d gone on ahead and brought it all up to the house after. No need to bother Ophelia with any of it. The iPod had been lying right in front of the door.

“Here,” she said. “I brought this back down.”

“My iPod!” Ophelia said. She turned it over. “They did this?”

The iPod was heavier now. It had a little walnut case instead of pink silicone, and there was a figure inlaid in ebony and gilt.

“A dragonfly,” Ophelia said.

“A snake doctor,” Fran said. “That’s what my daddy calls them.”

“They did this for me?”

“They’d embellish a bedazzled jean jacket if you left it there,” Fran said. “No lie. They can’t stand to leave a thing alone.”

“Cool,” Ophelia said. “Although my mom is never going to believe me when I say I bought it at the mall.”

“Just don’t take up anything metal,” Fran said. “No earrings, not even your car keys. Or you’ll wake up and they’ll have smelted them down and turned them into doll armor or who knows what all.”

They took off their shoes when they got to where the road crossed the drain. The water was cold with the last of the snowmelt. Ophelia said, “I feel like I ought to have brought a hostess gift.”

“You could pick them a bunch of wildflowers,” Fran said. “But they’d be just as happy with a bit of kyarn.”

“Yarn?” Ophelia said.

“Roadkill,” Fran said. “But yarn’s okay.”

Ophelia thumbed the wheel of her iPod. “There’s songs on here that weren’t here before.”

“They like music, too,” Fran said.

“What you were saying about going out to San Francisco to busk,” Ophelia said. “I can’t imagine doing that.”

“Well,” Fran said, “I won’t ever do it, but I think I can imagine it okay.”

When they got up to the house, deer were grazing on the green lawn. The living tree and the dead were touched with the last of the daylight. Chinese lanterns hung in rows from the rafters of the porch.

“You need to come at the house from between the trees,” Fran said. “Right on the path. Otherwise, you don’t get nowhere near it. And I don’t ever use but the back door.”

She knocked at the back door. B
E BOLD, BE BOLD
. “It’s me again,” she said. “And Ophelia. The one who left the iPod.”

She saw Ophelia open her mouth and went on hastily, “Don’t. They don’t like it when you thank them. It’s poison to them. Come on in.
Mi casa es su casa.
I’ll give you the grand tour.”

They stepped over the threshold, Fran first.

“There’s the pump room out back where I do the wash,” she said. “There’s a big ole stone oven for baking in, and a pig pit, though why I don’t know. They don’t eat meat. But you prob’ly don’t care about that.”

“What’s in this room?” Ophelia said.

“Hunh,” Fran said. “Well, first, it’s a lot of junk. They just like to accumulate junk. Way back in there, though, is what I expect is a queen.”

“A queen?”

“Well, that’s what I call her. You know how in a beehive, way down in the combs, you have the queen and all the worker bees attend on her?

“Far as I can tell, that’s what’s in there. She’s real big and not real pretty, and they are always running in and out of there with food for her. I don’t think she’s teetotally growed up yet. For a while now I’ve been thinking on what Ma said, about how maybe these summer people got sent off. Bees do that, too, right? Go off and make a new hive when there are too many queens?”

“I think so,” Ophelia said.

“The queen’s where my daddy gets his liquor, and she don’t bother him none. They have some kind of still set up in there, and every once in a while when he ain’t feeling too religious, he goes in and skims off a little bitty bit. It’s awful sweet stuff.”

“Are they, uh, are they listening to us right now?”

In response came a series of clicks from the War Room.

Ophelia jumped. “What’s that?” she said.

“Remember I told you ’bout the reenactor stuff?” Fran said. “Don’t get spooked. It’s pretty cool.”

She gave Ophelia a little push into the War Room.

Of all the rooms in the house, this one was Fran’s favorite, even if they dive-bombed her sometimes with the airships, or fired off the cannons without much thought for where she was standing. The walls were beaten tin and copper, scrap metal held down with twopenny nails. Molded forms lay on the floor representing scaled-down mountains, forests, and plains where miniature armies fought desperate battles. There was a kiddy pool over by the big picture window with a machine in it that made waves. There were little ships and submersibles, and occasionally one of the ships sank, and bodies would go floating over to the edges. There was a sea serpent made of tubing and metal rings that swam endlessly in a circle. There was a sluggish river, too, closer to the door, that ran red and stank and stained the banks.
The summer people were always setting up miniature bridges over it, then blowing the bridges up.

Overhead were the fantastic shapes of the dirigibles, and the dragons that were hung on string and swam perpetually through the air above your head. There was a misty globe, too, suspended in some way that Fran could not figure, and lit by some unknown source. It stayed up near the painted ceiling for days at a time and then sunk down behind the plastic sea according to some schedule of the summer people’s.

“I went to a house once,” Ophelia said. “Some friend of my father’s. An anesthesiologist? He had a train set down in his basement and it was crazy complicated. He would die if he saw this.”

“Over there is a queen, I think,” Fran said. “All surrounded by her knights. And here’s another one, much smaller. I wonder who won, in the end.”

“Maybe it’s not been fought yet,” Ophelia said. “Or maybe it’s being fought right now.”

“Could be,” Fran said. “I wish there was a book told you everything that went on. Come on. I’ll show you the room you can sleep in.”

They went up the stairs. B
E BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD
. The moss carpet on the second floor was already looking a little worse for wear. “Last week I spent a whole day scrubbing these boards on my hands and knees. So of course next thing they go and pile up a bunch of dirt and stuff. They won’t be the ones have to pitch in and clean it up.”

“I could help,” Ophelia said. “If you want.”

“I wasn’t asking for help. But if you offer, I’ll accept. The first door is the washroom,” Fran said. “Nothing queer about the
toilet. I don’t know about the bathtub, though. Never felt the need to sit in it.”

She opened the second door.

“Here’s where you sleep.”