It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC (6 page)
Read It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC Online
Authors: Dean Ing
Tags: #juvenile fiction, #Action & Adventure, #General, #family
It was not his pal’s words that drew Aaron down on his belly so much as it was the earnest eye-roll that accompanied, “you won’t care.” For a few heartbeats, a tiny part of Aaron was afraid; not of Charlie, but of the unexplained, indeed, maybe the unexplainable. Then, reaching into the water so near Charlie’s shins that he could smell the scum on them, Aaron found the bottom. And not just the bottom, but what Charlie’s bare feet had shoved along ON the bottom, which explained everything.
Aaron giggled, thunderstruck. “Oboy,” he murmured, scrabbling about in the muck; “oboyo
boyo
boyoboy, Charlie, this is it! This is where all the pennies in the world go to die. It’s like the elephant’s graveyard.” As he began to scud a handful of coins up the cement wall he risked a glance around, wary of prying eyes.
Meanwhile Charlie, seeing that no one else had noticed two boys playing at the pond, slowly waded across to the pad with the nickel, then recovered the glider and its penny. There were fewer coins farther out, though the pond was no deeper there. Charlie knew he was losing some through sloppy footwork, but finally could feel that he was herding so many pennies, the sneaky little things were escaping around his toes. He became a more careful prospector now, leaving his new trove near the first one and leaving Aaron to deal with the spoils.
After ten minutes of this Charlie began to tire. Besides, he itched to slide his fingers into riches as Aaron was doing. “Now you,” he said, plopping his rump on the curb, setting the glider aside.
But wealth brings its own problems, and Aaron could not sit up without a struggle. He had filled his pockets lying full length, weighing himself down so much that his pants sagged dangerously below his waist as he scooted to a sitting position. “I can’t go out there. If I fall, I expect I’ll drown,” he said.
“Then get away. There’s more, isn’t there?”
“Lots,” said Aaron, taking a death grip on his pants. Soon, Charlie had taken Aaron’s place while Aaron waddled to the park bench and repositioned the contents of his pockets. Less tidy than his pal, Charlie spent less time rinsing bits of green guck from each palmful of coins with the result that what went into his pockets went in as colorful as a Disney cartoon.
Presently, in part because a few passersby seemed almost ready to ask questions, Charlie took careful note of cracks in the cement and managed to sit up, intending to return for further strip-mining. With a glance toward Aaron: “How you doing?”
“How do I look?” Aaron stood up, holding fast to his belt, and Charlie snickered. Aaron glared back. “Hey, you expect me to bury it someplace?”
“You look like a squirrel,” said Charlie.
“Try standing up and see how you like it,” Aaron countered, sitting down again.
This was easier said than done but, with lumps the size of oranges weighting pockets fore and aft, Charlie joined his pal on the bench. They waited until no spectators were in sight and then, walking like brittle-boned little old men, they made their way to shrubbery far from walkways.
It was Aaron who announced that one of them must empty his pockets and mount an expedition to find suitable containers. While Charlie thought about that, Aaron sighed, piled his coins on the ground between them, stood up to rearrange trousers showing patches of dampness, and said wistfully, “Could I have some of it?”
Charlie, in a gruff offhanded way: “Not much. Only half.”
“You’re keen,” Aaron replied, and set off in a loping shuffle.
Soon Charlie had added his coins to the pile, and discovered a surprising number of nickels, a few dimes, and from some blessed madman, a single authentic, unimpeachable half-dollar coin the size of a milk bottle stopper. Many of the coins had lain in state long enough that they were hard to identify. Still, Indian heads were big, and Lincoln’s was small. Charlie would spit on a penny and rub it until its disguise wore thin, then start with another.
He had hardly begun when Aaron returned with a discarded Dallas
Morning News
and a question. “We still going to the movie?”
“I guess,” Charlie shrugged, though he had forgotten such trivia in the excitement of sudden wealth.
“Then we can count this later.” As he spoke, Aaron was lining up sheets of newsprint, transferring the heavy coins to the center of the papers with cupped hands. Charlie watched, fascinated at this show of ingenuity, then noticed that Aaron was wrapping only half of the treasure as a wrinkled metal-filled tube. Without a word he chose several sheets of the remaining paper and copied Aaron’s work, twisting the ends like the wrapper of a colossal hard candy nugget.
With a fresh goal and mindful of the fact that
The Lone Ranger
waits for no boy, they sprinted from the capitol grounds, trotted the next few blocks down Congress Avenue carrying their assets like footballs, and finally trudged exhausted into the last-minute line of boys at the Queen Theater. Not until they were at the ticket booth did they realize that every cent, including their original coins, was now wrapped in Dallas newsprint. Aaron loosened one twisted end and paid for both tickets. The ticket lady, experienced in the ways boys carried cash, touched the damp coins only with a fingertip sheathed in red rubber and nodded them past without comment.
Inside, when Aaron turned toward the men’s room and Charlie asked him why, Aaron shamed him with a look, displaying palms that were a portrait of grime. “I’m gonna get popcorn and a Three Musketeers. Maybe go back again. But I’m not gonna touch any of it with these hands,” he promised.
So Charlie, too, washed his hands, and later wolfed down two bags of popcorn and three Baby Ruth bars, and that night at supper, wondered why he had no appetite.
CHAPTER 6:
SECRETS OF THE STORM DRAIN
On Sunday, the boys held a council of three—though Lint was not a voting member—in a favored refuge under the workbench in the Hardin garage. Counting the loot disabled their brains in different ways. “Half of forty-four dollars and sixty-three cents,” Aaron enthused, his eyes like brown moons as he gloated over coin stacks, “makes, uh—.”
“Plus the movie and the stuff we ate and the zoom plane,” Charlie itemized. “You remember what that came to?”
“Nope. Don’t ask me, Charlie, it makes my head hurt. Besides, you found it. If I kept more than twenty bucks of this it’d be like cheating you. I don’t even know how to explain this to my folks.”
“Me neither,” said Charlie. “So I’m not gonna. I found it fair and square.”
“Stole it, you mean.”
Charlie recoiled as if bitten. “I never! Who from?” Alerted by his master’s tone, Lint ceased sniffing at the coins. He knew that barking in such close quarters was rude so he contributed the faint growl this occasion seemed to call for.
“I don’t know who from,” said Aaron, mostly to the growler. “Whoever owns the pond.”
“For Pete’s sake, nobody owns it! No, wait a minute; everybody owns it, and some of it was right in plain sight for anybody, only nobody but us went and got it. So we earned it. I mean, it’s our durn state capitol, Aaron.”
Nervous with doubt, Aaron said, “Wonder what the governor would say.”
“You can find out. His house is right next to where we were flying the zoom plane.” This was true; the governor’s mansion faced the capitol building near Twelfth Street.
“Aw, he’d say it was his.”
“Then you go ask him, and we’ll do what he says.” The boys swapped stares. Charlie could see that his pal was giving the idea serious consideration, so, “We’d have to pay him back for all that stuff we ate,” he added quickly.
This complication was too much, and Aaron’s position crumbled.
“Then I guess it’s finders keepers,” he said, “but you told me there was lots more in the pond. Whose is that?”
“We’ll leave it for the governor,” Charlie offered, charitable in his new wealth.
So it was agreed that, while they had done nothing wrong, they’d better not do it again. This wisdom extended to avoiding any mention about their little expedition to an adult. Or to Sue Ann or Jackie or, in fact, anybody else on Planet Earth. “What we need is a bank,” Aaron said.
Banks were another full-blown mystery, with Charlie suspicious that a bank would ask exactly the kind of questions they hoped to avoid, and Aaron just as worried that a bank would demand payment for keeping track of such a huge sum as theirs. The simplest solution, Aaron said, was for Charlie to use up nickels and dimes in buying new clippers, and for Aaron to beg a few paper coin tubes each week from different grocers.
They had liberated a small flour sack to hold the coins, and neither boy wanted to risk hiding such riches where they might be discovered. Aaron was especially firm on the point since his mother had the habit of searching every corner of her house on washday looking for stray socks and such. “My mom’s a boogerbear on finding stuff. I can’t even hide a piece of taffy,” he complained.
“If we can’t hide it at home, we’ve gotta do it like pirates,” Charlie said after a dozen ideas had been argued to pieces. “They kept stuff forever.”
“Buried it,” Aaron nodded. “Yeah, but—nah, this stupid dog would just dig it up. Probably eat half of it. Remember those two cherry bombs we buried? Lint wasn’t even there when we hid ’em but he smelled ’em through the dirt. Chewed ’em to gumbo, too.”
Drawn into the conversation by hearing his name, Lint awarded a tongue-lolling smile to the boys until he recognized his owner’s sad headshake for what it was. “I was afraid to pet him for a week,” said Charlie, who had great respect for gunpowder. “But you know what? I bet we could hide it under a rock too big for him.”
“Or a hunk of concrete. There’s lots of it down at the storm pipe.” Years before, a ferocious downpour, channeled partly by several storm drains, had sent an epic flood down Shoal Creek, carrying entire trees to the river while the concrete drainpipe lay almost submerged. One of those leafy battering rams had struck the pipe sidelong, scant yards beyond the usual creekbed. After the creek returned to normal, occasional storms still poured from the drain’s broken mouth, but now hunks of concrete large and small lay scattered for half a block beside the creekbed.
Instantly persuaded by such an easy solution, Charlie pocketed more than enough coins for the clippers and forbade Lint to follow. Presently the boys made their way to the creek carrying the sack, judging this curve of concrete too large, or that fragment too small, finally choosing one the size of a sofa cushion half-hidden under runners of ivy. Lifting it was full employment for them both, and beneath it scuttled a civilization of bugs they should have expected. They kicked the insects aside, Charlie holding the curved slab on edge with wary glances around them while Aaron dug a football-shaped hole in the dark, pungent earth.
Some distance away, disappearing into a shallow embankment, the sinister dark throat of the big pipe drew Charlie’s attention as it never had before. He knew its mouth held a cool musty stink and once he had seen Lint, hackles raised, reject it as a thing to be avoided. This in itself was enough to give a boy ideas sooner or later. After Aaron bedded their sack in the cavity he had dug, together they lowered the slab and stood back to view the job. Aaron rearranged bits of ivy, then gave an expert’s nod of approval. “As safe a treasure as Captain Guy’s,” he said.
“You mean Captain Kidd’s,” Charlie corrected, glancing again at the drainpipe. “Ours is okay, but when we put those pennies in rolls we can find a better bank. I might have found one already.” He walked a few paces, then faced the pipe where it emerged from the embankment.
“But all the big pieces are down here along—” Aaron began, not seeing Charlie’s focus. But when he did, “Naw, drop it, forget it,” he said swiftly. “Nuthin’s in there that I want, Charlie Hardin, or you either.”
Charlie’s eyebrows asked the question without words.
“It’s haunted, is what, and you know it,” said Aaron. He saw Charlie’s pitying look, as he had expected, but he was ready for it. Alone on the creek, in moments of utter quiet, the boys had heard sounds from the old drain that would begin with a hiss, rise quickly to a faint moan, then fade into silence again, like the breathing of some unearthly thing asleep deep in the earth. Or—though neither boy had ever considered the possibility—like the sound of automobile tires several blocks away, passing very near one of the storm drain inlets installed along the streets.
“I don’t believe in ghosts anymore,” said Charlie, rubbing away the subtle prickling of hair on his forearms.
“Not much you don’t.” Aaron’s tone said,
durn right you do
.
“Well, there’s bad ghosts and good ghosts. You don’t know, maybe it’s the ghost of some poor old cat that crawled up there a hundred years ago and wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Maybe. Go keep him company, why don’t you?”
It wasn’t quite a dare, but Uncle Wes would not have backed down. “Maybe I will,” Charlie muttered. “But cats don’t need flashlights.”
“You’re rich. Buy one,” Aaron said, and this came closer to an outright dare.
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.