Authors: Lisa Rowe Fraustino

Tags: #Technology & Engineering, #Mining, #Family, #Action & Adventure, #Environmental Science, #Mines and mineral resources, #Juvenile Fiction, #Family life, #Mysteries & Detective Stories, #General, #Supernatural, #Science, #Twins, #Fiction, #Soil pollution, #Brothers and sisters

The Hole in the Wall (2 page)

BOOK: The Hole in the Wall

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I made a face and shrugged. I didn’t recall encountering any other eggs in the hospital.

“Well, pick that egg up for me, please, then go back out and finish your chores. While you’re at it, send up a prayer for Jesus to lift the burdens from those hens.” She started humming a hymn, and I was out of there.

I used to love every minute with Grum, when she had her own place across the road in Kokadjo Gore and I could visit her whenever I wanted. But after she moved in with us it was too much of a good thing. Worst of all, she took the room I used to share with Jed, so I had to move into the upstairs foyer with Barbie. Jed moved into the stone playhouse us guys had built in the backyard. That was back in the days when Pa got up at 6 AM and had a charming personality. When I used to follow him around and “help” him be a fixer-man.

Finishing my chores in the henhouse turned out to be impossible. I kept looking and looking, but I didn’t find enough eggs to refill a carton for the Dogstars, our regular Thursday customers. Finally I realized the reason was that the eggs just weren’t there. And neither were some of the chickens. They must have gotten out when Jed’s Stupid Cat let himself in. I certainly would never have left the door open after all the times Ma reminded me.

I’d have to look for the escaped hens outside, but not now. I barely had enough time to get ready for school.

As I ate my cereal, I stared at the eggs in the basket, wondering if they were hard like the one that went BUMP. I didn’t dare try the drop test, for obvious reasons. While I was staring, my arm started aching again with those twitching pains along the bones. I screamed and grabbed my elbow.

“Oh, puh-leeze, Sebby. Cut the melodrama. Just give me your dirty rotten dish so I can wash it before we miss the bus.” It was Barbie pulling on my cereal bowl, which was still attached to my arm.

Grum hushed us again and said, “Your sister’s right, boy.”

I moaned sincerely to prove my pain. It hardly had anything to do with the fact that I didn’t have my homework. Signed. “But, Grum, I honestly don’t feel good. I ache all over. Even in my teeth.”

“That so?”

I nodded.

“Well, open your mouth and say
ah
.”

I did a real good job of that while Grum shone a flashlight down my throat. “Hm, I wonder . . .” She stuck a finger in my mouth and probed my gums in the back.

“Ow!” (She’d definitely hit a sore spot.) “Ow! Ow! Ow! See? I’m in agony, Grum. I can’t possibly go to school today.”

She removed her finger, put down the flashlight, and pronounced, “You’re getting your twelve-year-molars is all. You’ll be fine. Congratulations.” She patted my cheek.

“What? That can’t be! We’re only eleven!” Barbie grabbed the flashlight and ran into the bathroom to look for molars in the mirror.

Ha! It killed her that I’d finally gotten ahead of her at something. But this was no time to gloat. I still had a mission. “Grum, what about the rest of my aching body?”

She lifted her head and eyed me under her glasses this time, stopping at my ankles with an
Aha!
smile. They stuck out under my frayed jeans like white bed knobs beneath a short bedspread.

“You’re an inch taller today than yesterday. They’re just growing pains. Now go change into your school clothes, young man.”

But it was too late for that. The Rust Bus already sat at the end of our driveway, flashers blinking. I grabbed my bag and raced Barbie for the good seat.

B.O., or Before Odum took over Kokadjo Gore, a regular big yellow school bus used to take us to school with a bunch of kids from there. Now that all those families had moved, we rode in a rusty blue Ford Escort with a yellow sign in the back window that said SCHOOL CHILDREN ABOARD. The driver lady, Miss Rosalie, worked as a cashier at WalMart and picked us up in her own car on her way to and from work.

“Hey, now, Sebastian, quit mauling your sister and let her in the car,” Miss Rosalie greeted me fondly. “You rode shotgun yesterday. Plunk yourself down back there in the middle to save room for Cluster. And fasten your seatbelt.”

So I gave Barbie a shove into the good seat and grumbled my way into the back next to the car seat that held Miss Rosalie’s drooling baby. He grinned and bonked me on the head with his rattle.

Little Rico wasn’t the problem with the back, though. I sat next to him gladly on the way home in the afternoon. The problem was the ugly view out the window on the left side of the car when we drove across Kettle Ridge in the morning. From that high up, the strip mine looked like a skeleton with scabs and tumors. The graveled backbone road was nicknamed “The Gash” because that’s what it looked like in the scarred land. Rib roads ran down between slag piles and stagnant water holes.

One time Jed brought home some girl he’d met at a rally for peace or the environment or the protection of animals or something. She asked us what strangers to these parts always ask: “Kokadjo
Gore
? What kind of a name is that?” And Grum answered as always: “A gore is a triangular piece of land that got left out somehow when the towns around here were surveyed, back in the Colonial Days.”

From Kettle Ridge you could actually see the triangle shape, like a giant wedge had been cut into the earth. The ridge rose straight up at the widest end, with the stripped land gradually narrowing to a tip a couple of miles away. The Gash cut across the wedge diagonally from near our house to the center of town. If you knew where to look, you could make out a camouflaged bump in the middle of the triangle. That was the ORC compound.

The sight of Odum’s triangle of wasteland made a crappy start to the school day. Much better to look out the right side where ORC hadn’t turned nature into an ashtray. Off to the right, the land looked the way the gore used to—rolling hills with big old trees and boulders wherever the land hadn’t been cleared for gardens or homes. Pretty. Lots of wildlife. Turkeys had often wandered through Grum’s backyard with their heads bobbing. They made me laugh. And Pa did, too, when he used to take me and Jed trout fishing in the brook out behind Grum’s, telling us the adventures he and little Stanley Odum had while growing up in the gore.

No fish in that brook now.

As soon as I strapped myself in next to Rico, I knocked three times on Barbie’s head. “Hello, can I borrow a pencil?”

“Quit it! Only if you aren’t going to ask me to forge Ma’s signature.”

“I can’t believe you’d even think that. Can I borrow your math?”

“Do your own math.”

“What if I pay you?”

“You don’t have anything I want.”

Oh, didn’t I! Wouldn’t she love to know about my hideout, the Hole in the Wall. Barbie would have to give me her math and sign Ma’s signature every day for a year to make it worth sharing my best secret with her. I went there every chance I could sneak away from the house.

“You know the deal,” she said. “You give me your shoe, I give you my pencil.” This was so I’d remember to give her the pencil back. Usually when I stepped in a mud puddle. Which was often. We got a lot of rain in Kokadjo.

“Aw, c’mon, do I have to?”

“You’d lose your own belly button if it wasn’t tucked in. Your shoe or no pencil.”

No choice. I threw my holey sneaker into her lap.

As Barbie dug for a pencil I leaned over Rico and let him pull on my curls so I could watch for Cluster Dogstar to emerge from the woods on the right. It was better than looking the other way and getting all depressed.

Cluster Dogstar, the new kid in eighth grade, was the only one besides me and Barbie who rode the Rust Bus. Her parents used to homeschool her until Cluster crossed her arms and said, “I’m never going to read another word or multiply another number or speak to you ever again unless you put me in a school with other kids, and you can’t make me change my mind.” Then she clamped her lips shut and waited for September. On her first day of school she discovered computers, and she didn’t want to go home.

The Dogstars all had weird names. Blue Moon was Cluster’s unexpected baby brother, Marigold was her mother, and Goldenrod was her father. Marigold had changed her name from Mary Jane, and Goldenrod had changed his name from Rodney, but Cluster and Blue Moon were the kids’ real names.

Cluster walked like a deer, picking her steps carefully. Which made her more fun to watch than doing fractions. Maybe she just did that because the path she walked had actually been made by deer. There wasn’t a driveway to her house. I’d never been inside, but everyone knew that the log cabin where the Dogstars lived didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing. At least I had a television to watch, even if Pa hogged it, and I could brush my teeth over the sink when Grum wasn’t in the bathroom. Sebastian wasn’t a great name, but it wasn’t Blue Moon.

“Peace, my friends.” Here she was, floating into the Rust Bus like an apple blossom in the wind. Cluster always talked like a grown-up flower child, and she always seemed to be floating like some kind of petal.

“My goodness, Sebastian, you are looking upright this morning,” Cluster said.

“Yeah, it must be all that cold milk I drink,” I said. “What’s new with you?”

“We already had a visitor at the Love Shack this morning.” Cluster called their house the Love Shack. People in town called their place Zensylvania or just “the commune.” Pa called them whacked-out yippie-hippie-doo-da-dopeheads and told me and Barbie to stay away from there.

I hoped the visitor was someone interesting. Like the longhair with sandals who had started hiking from British Columbia to join the commune thirty years ago and just showed up last August. For the most part, though, more people left than arrived at Zensylvania (especially A.O., After Odum). Now it was pretty much down to the Dogstars, that longhair guy, and a bunch of goats.

Not surprisingly, Cluster said, “A representative from Odum Research Corporation came to test our water again.”

The Dogstars got their water from a pure spring, and they bottled and sold their Zenwater to health food stores. Last fall, their dog Red Dwarf had suddenly gotten sick and died. The veterinarian said the cause was something Red Dwarf ate or drank. Cluster’s parents went to town and knocked on Mr. Stanley Odum’s door. Nobody except them knew what was said, but the next day Cluster told us some of Odum’s goons showed up to put a fancy water purification system into their spring. (Well, she actually said some “representatives” showed up. At our house, we called those people “Odum’s Goons.”)

While they were at it, the goons brought one for our well too.

“Wasn’t that generous of my old buddy Stan to give us that high falutin’ H
₂O gadget for free?” said Pa. Like most people in town, he gushed over Stanley Odum like he was some kind of hero when he opened up the Stanley T. Odum Zoo and the Boys of Summer Stadium.

“So generous that he doesn’t want us to get sick off his polluted runoff and sue him,” Jed said.

Those two had a difference of opinion over everything. If Pa said sneakers, Jed said sandals. If Jed said blue, Pa said red. And arguments over Odum could go on for hours.

“Of course Stan doesn’t want us to sue him,” Pa said. “He doesn’t want
anyone
to sue him, ergo he does the right thing. That’s how the free market is supposed to work. It’s the American way.”

“Yep,” Jed said, “that’s the Corporate States of American way, all right. Put your childhood buddy out of business and then refuse him a job as a lousy janitor in your stinking rich company. Good guy, that Odum.”

Jed was talking about the time Pa went to apply for a maintenance job at ORC and couldn’t get past the front gate because he flunked the employment test. Actually he couldn’t even take the test because it was digital. And Pa wasn’t.

“Teenagers. You think you know it all when you have no idea what you’re talking about. Stan’s not a bad guy. He’d have hired me if he could. It’s not his fault I don’t know how to use all that technocrapola he’s got over there.”

“There is such a thing as retraining, Pa. Education. If your generous benefactor didn’t see fit to provide that for all the schmucks who did things the old-fashioned way before he took over the town, then at least you could get yourself back to school and learn how to function in the world we’re actually living in today.”

With arguments like that overflowing in our little house, I didn’t know what to think about Odum. Good guy, bad guy, which was he?

“Oh, Mr. Odum is neither one nor the other. He’s human. He’s both good and bad.”

I snapped my head toward the voice beside me. Cluster Dogstar in the Rust Bus. Yikes, had I been talking out loud? I thought I was just thinking to myself! Or had Cluster read my mind? I wouldn’t put that past her. I snapped my head the other direction to look for clues on Rico’s face. He had his toe in his mouth.

“So how did the water test turn out?” I asked Cluster.

She shrugged. “They just took a sample. We’ll find out the results later today.”

“Do you think there’s a reason they keep checking? Something they know is wrong?” Jed would think that.

BOOK: The Hole in the Wall

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