Mister Boots (6 page)

“There used to be some brandy,” our father says. “Trust your mother to have poured it on the grapevines.”

“No,
I
did that,” I say, and giggle.

My sister doesn't know what to make of me. I cross my eyes at her, but
I
don't know what to make of me either. She sits down next to Mister Boots. She pats his shoulder as if to calm him. The way his hair hangs over his forehead, half to one side and half to the other . . . I've seen the exact same thing with horses. It always gives them a mild, sweet look. Even so, right now, he doesn't look so mild. “Easy, easy,” my sister says, exactly as you say to a horse. She turns to our father. “You came back because Mother's dead. We're fine.”

(Does she mean even with no mother and no money?)

Our father takes out a partly smoked cigar, lights it, and puffs out a smelly cloud. Mister Boots moves to the far end of the couch and blows a blustery horse blow.

“You need me. I would never leave you children out here by yourselves.”

“Need you!” My sister turns around and pulls up her blouse to show her bare back. She has some of those exact same scars. No wonder she doesn't like men. So then what about Mother? If Mother has them, the undertaker will know all about it. But it won't be the first time he's seen that. I've seen scars on those wranglers next door when I watch them wash up in the cow pond. Not just on the black men, but the white men, too, though not quite as bad. (They don't care about me watching. They all think I'm a boy.)

Mister Boots looks at my sister's back and then he turns and stares at our father. I know that stare, that lowered head, but our father doesn't get the message. I've never seen Boots look like this. His face is as impassive as a horse's always is to humans, but I can almost see Moonlight Blue with his ears plastered back. Can't our father see that?

Our father doesn't seem to care that my sister's back looks terrible. He shakes his head as if to say, Yes, yes, I know all that. And I guess he does. “Well,” he says, “if no brandy, how about some coffee then?”

My sister says she's already served him often enough when she was six years old and even younger, and she isn't going to do it anymore.

But I think, How about pouring boiling hot coffee on our father's head, and then how about we all jump him and hold him and maybe whip him so he'll have the same marks all over him that we have on us? Except he probably has them already.

“I'll get it,” I say, but my sister shouts,
“Don't!”

Mister Boots hasn't moved from his ready-to-attack position. Or is it ready-to-run? That's what horses always do first.

But nobody is
doing
anything. I'm beginning to suspect it might be all up to me. Besides, I'm the only one with any luck.

“I'm going to get the coffee,” I say. I need for something to be happening. I start to jump—jump and jump and jump toward the kitchen. It's not easy. Why in the world am I doing this? The good thing about it is, everybody is looking at me and wondering about me. I want to go on acting crazy. Or maybe I want to go slowly so my sister can stop me just in case I'm doing the wrong thing, and she does get up to do that.

Our father says, “Good boy.” He gets up, faster than you'd think a fat man would, and grabs my sister's arm and twists it up behind her so she gasps and has to lean way down as if she has a stomachache.

Then I remember. I've had this dream, over and over, my arm twisted exactly like that. I'll bet I didn't fly like my sister said I did. I'll bet our father broke my elbow just this way. If I was only three years old, it probably wouldn't have taken much twisting to do it.

I keep on jumping and jumping, and when I'm in the kitchen, I stop. I stir the fire in the stove and throw on kindling, and then I stand still and listen. I hear my sister gasp again. I feel bad for her, and I feel bad that I'm not strong enough to rescue her.

And then—but I didn't see any of it. I hear a clatter that sounds like hooves on our wood floor. I hear our father make a funny noise. I go back in and everybody is sitting exactly as before, except not a single person looks the same. My sister is next to Mister Boots on the couch holding Boots's wrist. Boots is staring at his bandaged feet. Our father is in the chair, again lounging back, except it doesn't look like lounging anymore. It looks . . . Well, he's kind of shriveled.

Boots couldn't have, could he? I mean he couldn't change just for half a minute—just time enough to stamp around—and then change back again so fast?

Our father looks at me and says, “I thought you went for coffee.” His voice sounds as if he's suddenly caught a cold. He's staring down at that little round rug Mother hooked that has birds all over it and is so pretty. We always keep it in front of that big chair. There's not much around here Mother didn't make.

I say, “Oh,” and go back to get the coffee. This time I walk like a normal person. I still don't know if I'll pour the whole pot of boiling coffee on our father's head or not.

I'm beginning to remember all those things I used to do when I was little and everybody said I was a handful. I
did
mess things up, but it must have been only when our father was here.

Anyway, my very own father doesn't know how old I am and that I'm not a boy! Maybe my mother and my sister tried to fool him. Maybe he wouldn't have wanted me if I wasn't a boy. All the babies in the graveyard are boys and he already had my sister so maybe he didn't want any more like her.

I bring the coffee, all very normal, on a tray and with oat cookies my sister made for Mister Boots. (Boots doesn't like coffee, so I brought him tea. I brought myself cider but in a cup so it looks like coffee, so my sister will be mad at me.

Nobody says anything; we all just eat and sip. And pretty soon my sister gets up to get supper, which is nothing but beans. We don't have any money for really good food. This is the best we have. I used to think everybody in the world ate mostly beans, but by now I know beans are a dead giveaway to how poor a person is. It'll especially be a dead giveaway when we have beans again tomorrow.

(I never saw a person eat so much so fast as our father. We could have had three more meals on his just one.)

We have this little table in our little kitchen. Hardly room enough for four. We don't have a dining room. We have a sitting room and then the little kitchen with worn-out linoleum, which I never noticed how worn-out till right now. But we have a nice big window over the sink with very nice curtains Mother made. They have ducks on them.

We've been eating without any talking when all of sudden my sister asks our father if he knows where any money might be. I wish she hadn't said anything. If she wanted to ask things, she should have come to me and discussed it first, because if our father knows where any money might be, he'll just take it for himself. I'll bet that's why he came back.

And then he practically says it—at least that he did it before. “Why, I took the money with me.” Then he smiles around at each of us. “I was off all the way to New York. To make money for the family. I knew you'd get along. Even then your mother was knitting away so fast you wouldn't believe it.”

New York! That's a long way from us here in California.

Our father eats his last few bites standing up, washes everything down with coffee, and then goes (of course) into that never-used room.

(We hadn't even thought of putting Mister Boots in there. I guess both my sister and I wanted him handy in the living room, not shut away down the hall in that back bedroom. Besides, it's a terrible mess; you can't even get to the bed, partly because we've been looking for the money in there and then because my sister has been rummaging around in the clothes to find things for Mister Boots. Not a single one of us ever cleaned up in there. We just kept the door shut.)

Our father looks shocked the minute he steps in. I start to giggle even before he opens the door, and I can't stop. I have to go outside or else I'll burst.

I sit on our front step, my hand over my mouth. Mister Boots ought to be out here—all his talk of breezes on cheeks and skies that go on forever. I'd help him to come out, but I have to get rid of my giggles first. I keep giggling until suddenly I start to cry—for no reason whatsoever. For a while, it's either cry or giggle. Finally it stops.

 

 

When I go back and check that room again, it looks as if our father has had a fit in there. Even what was hanging in the closet is on the floor. I hear a lot of thumping and scraping, and I see right away where the secret hiding place is. There's a trapdoor in the ceiling of the closet. Our father is up there cursing. I've heard the wranglers next door say lots of things. I was hoping to learn more words, but our father doesn't say anything I haven't heard already.

Of course my first thought is to close the hatch and lock him up up there, but the hatch is on the closet floor and I can't figure out how to do it.

My second thought is that Mother would never have gone up there, so
our
money can't be up there. I mean, Mother never even went in that room that I know of. If she had, she'd have cleaned it up a long time ago.

Our father throws down an oblong box. Dust flies up when it hits the floor, and it gets even more broken than it already is. You can see where it used to be red with gold designs, but the colors are almost all worn off. The lid is just barely hanging on, and there's something odd about the bottom, as if there's two bottoms. Then he jumps down, carrying a smaller, square box as worn out as the bigger one, and it looks to have two bottoms, too, and one's a mirror. The money has got to be someplace like that, a secret extra bottom.

“So where is it?” our father says. He's dusty and sweaty and streaked with dirt.

“Well, it's not up there.”

“I know that.” He looks at me like he knows I'm guilty—like it's
always
got to be me. So then
I
start thinking it's got to be me, too. I'm the one who does all the bad things around here. Except I don't know where anything is, money or brandy or anything. The trouble is I say I know. “Buried in the yard,” I say, “in the nice soft dirt of the vegetable garden. Seventh carrot.”

Our father gets his face up real close to mine. He smells of fat-man sweat and cigars. I turn away because of that, so then his hot sloppy whisper gets right inside my ear. “And you're the one who's going to dig it up.”

I twist away and run. I get to the field next door, grab a fence post, vault the barbed wire, jump on Rusty, and gallop off.

Our father's horse is right there by the door, all cinched up and ready. I'm just riding a pony. He's going to catch me, and we're going to be out here all alone. But I keep on, and when I get to my tree, I don't get off, I just reach up and grab the first branch as we gallop by and start climbing. I'm thinking how good I am at things like this and how no fat man can get me. But our father does exactly the same thing. I thought he was too big and soft for that. Then I think if I get high enough, the branches will be small and our father will fall.

“Where there's a will there's a way,” our father says.

Oh, for heaven's sake, I've heard Mother say the same thing, too often, though mostly she said, “Well begun is half done,” and of course most of all, “A stitch in time . . .” I've heard Mister Boots say the same sorts of things, except Boots's were odder, as if a horse had made them up all by himself. Like, “When we want enough, we get a little.” I'm sick of
all
those things.

I thought my tree would save me by breaking itself. It's not easy getting water way out here. I thought it would do something for me for a change. I know this is exactly the kind of thinking Mother didn't want me to do when she told me to be scientific, but I thought it anyway.

Some branches do break, but not enough. Our father grabs me by the ankle in no time and pulls me down to him. Even before we're on the ground, he twists my arm up behind me.

“I'll let go when you say you'll come down quietly like a good boy for once in your life and go dig up the money.”

I say, “Why not?”

“Promise.”

I don't want to promise anything I won't keep. I just say, “Of course.” That's not really a promise. I didn't say, of course
what
.

Rusty has run off to a nice grassy spot, but our father's horse is still there, obediently ground-tied.

I ride behind our father. It's good I'm small. The poor horse has enough to do with our father on him.

We pace. Nice and smooth and fast. I thought so. I knew this horse was a harness racer from the bit our father used. You're not supposed to ride those.

I ask what the horse's name is, but our father just grunts a whole batch of angry grunts. I wonder what he'll think when I dig up the doctor's fancy clothes instead of money.

When we get back, our father keeps a good hold on me and starts me digging.

I see my sister staring out the kitchen window at us. She was washing the dishes and saw us right away. Our father sees her, too, so I feel a little bit safer.

The doctor's clothes aren't hard to dig up. I just heeled them in until I'd have time to take them to a better spot. I think to run the minute a little bit of them shows, but our father has his eye on me. I just go on digging until the clothes are completely out. I pick them up and shake the dirt off so he can see they're not bags of money.

He gets this funny look. Then he slaps my cheek. Says, “What's going on? Why are these buried? Where's the body?” Things like that. But the way he's bouncing me around, I couldn't answer if I wanted to.