It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC (7 page)
Read It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC Online
Authors: Dean Ing
Tags: #juvenile fiction, #Action & Adventure, #General, #family
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 would 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.
Bridger was not in the habit of taking blame for things and saw no reason to tell Pinero he might have been seen by some neighborhood kid. The boys went off down the street, so Bridger went back to sleep off his hangover. In the weeks since then, everyone concerned had made great progress toward the calamity that would follow.
CHAPTER 8:
THE DOGAPULT
One of the few German words that wartime brought to Austin was “ersatz,” meaning imitation. Materials needed to fight a war were suddenly hard to find at home, and familiar things were replaced by new ones, often of poor quality. With good natural rubber going into tires of fighter planes, the new synthetic rubber for civilians was like that: ersatz.
A small box of prewar natural rubber bands, found after years of storage in a cool dark place, could still be used to spin a model propeller. Aaron had linked a dozen bands together to power his model until the rubber looked dangerously weathered and likely to break during the windup. This would be certain death for the model. At that point Mr. Fischer had discovered Aaron’s discovery and claimed the entire box, and bought his son a box of synthetic rubber bands in a spasm of fairness.
Aaron’s first attempt to use his ersatz rubber ended in the worst possible way. While Charlie held the model Aaron had built from balsa strips and lovingly covered with tissue, Aaron began to wind its propeller expecting the rubber to twist the usual three hundred times. He had counted to a hundred and forty when, with a report no louder than the clapping of a toddler’s hands, the rubber snapped.
When a twisted loop of rubber snaps, it does not simply fall limp; nothing that genteel. Both halves instantly become demon knots, destructive furies that leap away from each other becoming shorter, thicker knots, coiling like snakes as they retreat. Faster than an eyeblink they become little rotating flails tearing furiously at the balsa and tissue from the inside. In a split-second the model’s fuselage becomes an unrecognizable, utterly unrepairable mess crushed as if by some tiny invisible fiend. After the necessary yelling argument with each boy blaming the other, Aaron experimented and found the rubber to blame. For a time afterward, they set aside hopes of using rubber for their projects.
It was Jackie Rhett who put them back in business. Jackie had a special knack for “finding” things—often before other people lost them. Democratic about the property of others, Jackie did not discriminate against adults or, for that matter, any creature that might be said to own property. A dog with the slimiest tennis ball for a chew-toy soon learned that if that ball landed in the hands of the pudgy kid, it might not be seen again.
Jackie never said where he found his excellent prewar inner tube of natural rubber, but it was the genuine good old stretchy stuff. Some of that rubber soon became strips for his slingshot; some he used as ammunition for an evil device called a rubbergun that was forbidden to other boys and shot a big rubber loop faster than the eye could follow. More important, it would sting like the devil from many yards away.
Such was Jackie’s view of the world that he would then demand the loop back because it was clearly his; he had inked his name on it. Some of the remaining tube he sold to Aaron, who now carefully scissored it into thin strips for models.
“You’re making a slingshot,” Jackie accused, squinting as Aaron wielded scissors borrowed from home.
“Not either,” said Charlie, sitting on the workbench of the Hardin garage as he watched Aaron’s progress. Because Aaron’s tongue was caught between his teeth as he worked, Charlie unconsciously did the same until he unlimbered his tongue to add, “Couldn’t even shoot an acorn with strips this thin.”
“He could bunch ’em up,” Jackie growled, fearful that Aaron might develop such a weapon after promising not to, because it was exactly what Jackie himself would have done. “And he promised not to, or I wouldn’ta gave him the stuff.”
“Sold it to me, you mean.” Aaron did not pause in his task but now proved he was listening. His glance caught Charlie’s, then flickered away.
Jackie did not miss the look. “Yeah, and I got more,” he teased. “I bet I got nearly as much money tied up in rubber as you guys got in quarters.”
No reply from either boy.
“How about it, Charlie? You can buy some, maybe a little more, for only two bits. Same as Aaron bought. Maybe more.”
It would have been a simple thing for Charlie and Aaron to utter flat denials but somewhere in their unwritten personal contracts was a casual policy against outright lies, so long as a question could be deflected. Charlie said, “So who’s got two bits?”
“He does. Did. And he’s got a lot more,” said Jackie, nodding toward the scissors-user. Nor did Jackie miss the faint headshake Aaron sent to Charlie, but that might have meant several things. A year before, these two had been as transparent as window glass to Jackie’s cleverness. Eventually though, they had learned that what you told Jackie was likely to be used against you. For Jackie, discoveries like this by the boys were like the problem of slaves learning to read and Jackie, as a member of a noble class, felt this was No Fair. Jackie knew in his bones that Aaron Fischer had paid a whole quarter for that rubber with much too brief a trade debate for a kid who earned only a quarter a week, when a movie cost twelve cents. A burning desire to know more about this was Jackie’s only reason to be on Hardin property, a place where he knew he was not welcome.
“You got a lot more money, Aaron? Maybe you could loan me a buncha quarters,” said Charlie, making it sound highly unlikely.
“Soon as Jackie leaves,” was the reply, with equal sarcasm. “Too bad you don’t have rich friends like mine.”
“I know you got money too,” Jackie said to Charlie, and followed this with a knowing wink. “I seen you after school.”
“Well, that settles it,” said Aaron. “Anybody you see after school must be made of solid gold.” He crossed his eyes and let his tongue loll from the side of his mouth: Aaron Fischer, village idiot.
“He was eatin’ a Baby Ruth,” Jackie persisted. For a moment no one responded. This was different; serious evidence of wealth that, in the past, Charlie had lacked.
This time, the silent look between Charlie and Aaron was longer, and not entirely friendly. Both boys had fiercely sworn to avoid any evidence of their mining venture on the Capitol grounds. Of course each had wasted no time cashing small bits of it, sinning a penny or a nickel at a time, in the hope that no one would notice.
Aaron, who had committed the same sin a day earlier but having the good sense to eat his Butterfinger in secret, realized he could get two revenges for the price of one, on different boys and for different reasons. “Well, he got it the same way you do,” said Aaron, just to stir the others up.
Jackie had boasted about his light-fingered ways at candy counters too freely to bother denying it. But Charlie, whose own dad was a juvenile officer? “I bet he didn’t,” Jackie said darkly.
“You weren’t gonna tell, Aaron,” said Charlie, unbothered by such a whopper and able to modify his policy about lies where Jackie was concerned. He was fully engaged in this swindle on a moment’s notice. “Besides, the owners said it was okay because I always tell them when I know”—and here he deliberately glanced in Jackie’s direction—“who else is doin’ it.”
“You better not, you B-Word,” Jackie snarled, but suddenly pale with the fear of the amateur shoplifter.
“How do you know he means you?” said Aaron.
Before Jackie could reply, Charlie made his head snap around with, “Did the police come to your house yet?”
Fearing his voice might crack, Jackie could only shake his head.
“Then I didn’t mean you, did I?” Charlie said. “Not yet, anyhow.”
Jackie trembled with relief. “B-Word,” he said again.
Charlie did not take the insult with helpless anger. “Maybe you’ll just flat give me the rest of that rubber, Jackie,” he said. “If I can’t buy it, maybe you’ll purely have to give it to me. Or else.”
“Else what?” Even though Jackie knew exactly what.
But Charlie told him anyway. “I tell.”
A three-way silence enveloped the shed. Then Jackie said, in a voice tinged with awe, “Blackmail.”
Charlie cocked his head as if to consider this charge until, “Yeah, Charlie, it is,” Aaron said softly. “If he gives you the rubber and you don’t tell, you’re a blackmailer. If he doesn’t and you do tell, you’re a snitch. If he gives it to you and you tell anyhow, he can tell the police on you, so you go to jail with him.”
Fascinated by all the possibilities, Charlie said, “But what if he doesn’t give me the rubber and I stay mum anyhow?”
After a dramatic moment, Aaron shrugged and began to use the scissors again. “Then I think you’re a dummy.”
Charlie nodded. But, “Blackmailer is worse,” Jackie muttered.
“Dummy’s worse,” said Charlie.
“Blackmail.”
“Dummy.”
Louder now: “Blackmail. You calling me a liar?” This was a fighting word, and against a younger boy Jackie was always ready.
Aaron managed to cloud the issue nicely with, “Nobody knows which one he is yet, Jackie. We’ll have to wait and see. You can make him either one you want to; depends on what you do.”
This kind of debate put Jackie into a state of confusion that he dealt with by stalking stiff-legged to the door. “I don’t have to put up with this,” he said with wounded dignity.
“Put up with what?” Aaron said, pretending innocence. But Jackie had already sped away. After a moment’s silence, Aaron smiled. “Get him mixed up enough and I bet he’d bust himself square in the mouth.”
“Why’d you let that scutter know you had so much money?”
“’Cause I need the rubber. Why’d you let him see you with a candy bar?”
Charlie shrugged. “Aw, I just didn’t think. This isn’t over, guy, he knows we’re rich. We’ll have to be extra careful.”
They hooked pinkie fingers together for a moment in the gesture that sealed agreements, and presently Aaron finished his task. As Charlie stopped in the yard to snap the lock on the garage side door, Aaron began to laugh.
Charlie looked around. “What?”
“Maybe I better not come over here anymore, Charlie. My dad won’t let me play with blackmailers,” said Aaron, and pointed to the walkway near their feet.
Coiled in a tight cylinder and bound with wire, with no explanation needed, lay a roll of gray rubber the size of a coffee cup. Charlie claimed it immediately. “At least now we know what Jackie wants me to be,” he said, with a headshake. “I wasn’t gonna snitch on him.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
Both boys snickered. Charlie said, “I didn’t hear him sneak back here. You?”
“Nope. Loud as he is, that’s how quiet he can be,” Aaron replied, stretching experimentally at the rubber. “This is the real stuff all right, five times as much as he sold me. I reckon you’re about the biggest, worst blackmailer on the planet. Sell me a quarter’s worth?”
“Naw. I’ll keep it ’til you need it bad and charge you double,” Charlie replied with a grin.
In Charlie the urge to compete was plain enough that it might have been painted on his forehead. Days later in the Fischer home, as his ally was cementing tiny sticks to the fuselage of a new model, Charlie rummaged into Aaron’s plans from older models. “If I can buy whole sheets of balsa I bet I could build this pretty quick,” he said, holding up a plan that showed a graceful sketch. “If you’d help.”
“Don’t you know there’s a war on?” Aaron spoke America’s commonest phrase, and applied a razor blade to a tiny stick. “Balsa makes life rafts. So bust up an apple box; the wood’s free.”
“Way too heavy though, right?”
Aaron paused to consider. “Not much, if you sanded the heck out of it. You have enough rubber to catapult it to Mars, but the only way it’d fly is fast.”
“Fast is good,” Charlie ruled. “And you’ll help?”
“For some of that rubber, sure. Hey, where’re you going?”
“There’s always old wood crates in the Ice House trash,” said Charlie, and promptly disappeared. Since Aaron lived near the Ice House, the seeker was back within minutes with pieces of three thin pine slats, only one of them badly splintered. Soon the boys had used a pencil to draw outlines of wings, a single graceful long oval for tail surfaces, and a fuselage whose rear end swooped up in a rudder like a shark’s tailfin. Now, the only way Aaron could resume his own task was to send Charlie home to work. Aaron filled him to the brim with instructions, some of which Charlie might even follow.
By dinnertime, Charlie had used his dad’s coping saw to cut all the pieces out following those pencil lines. He might have advanced to the whittling stage by then but for his habit of testing the pieces of pine after he cut them from the slats. His test method with each piece was the same: squint hard, imagine that this piece was finished and connected to all the others, then throw it across the shed, startling Lint with his special “
Neeerrrowr”
sound effect that in his mind represented a powerful engine. It was always necessary to pretend that the piece did not flutter to the dirt floor like a dying sparrow.
“Looks like your durn dog chewed it out,” was Aaron’s judgment when he saw Charlie’s handiwork the next day. So saying, he found enough tools in the Hardin shed to neaten Charlie’s work, and used sandpaper to begin forming the wing surfaces. Presently he put the piece down. “I did one side,” he said, shaking sawdust from his hair. “Gotta go; I’ve got homework and so do you. I showed you how to sand a wing, and you can do the rest.”
Plainly hoping his pal would relent and do the whole thing for him, Charlie said, “But it won’t be as good.”
“It would if you’d watched what I’ve been doing instead of playing with that pooch,” was the retort, with an apologetic glance downward and, “Sorry, Lint,” to soften the criticism. A moment later Aaron hurried off.
Anger lent force to Charlie’s hands as he copied his friend’s work, or thought he did. Any fly on the wall might have noticed in Aaron a careful eye for detail, but a gift for action in Charlie. It followed that if Charlie sanded a pine slat twice as briskly as Aaron, his finished product would be somewhat thinner. He put his experimental sound effects to work, adding the
kakakakakak
of a machine gun for good measure, before smearing furniture glue on all surfaces that seemed to need it. The result would not have satisfied a pessimist, but Charlie’s eye was the eye of an optimist. He left his pine missile to dry and went to his room to do homework for an endless ten minutes.