Read The Hole in the Wall Online

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 (3 page)

BOOK: The Hole in the Wall
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“I really can’t say.”
What was that supposed to mean? Did Cluster not know, or did she know something she wasn’t allowed to tell? I’d have asked her if she didn’t already have one leg out the door. By now we had reached the Mildew School, and the only thing Cluster had on her mind was going online.
The Mildew School was my name for our branch of the Stanley T. Odum Education Center because of the way it turned gray no matter how often they repainted. The superintendent said the problem kept recurring because the building was situated over a high water table in the valley and had big shade trees growing around it. But I didn’t remember the school ever being gray before the strip mine. Everything in town turned gray no matter what. When it was wet, the mildew grew. When it was dry, the dust settled. Gray, gray, gray. Pa said everyone should just paint everything gray and stop whining about it.
I hopped to sixth grade homeroom on one foot pretending I was a stork, then quickly finished scribbling my math so I could get my sneaker back. I even felt pretty good about a couple of the answers. Not Ms. Byron. She shook her head sadly as she handed my page back, with a tiny red zero in the corner like a swatted gnat. I wondered if giving bad grades hurt Ms. Byron more than it hurt us.
“Sebastian, you’re obviously having some trouble with numbers. You did page 127 instead of 238. How about you and I stay after school and get you caught up?”
The class thought that was very funny. But Grum says there’s always a bright side, and there was. At least now I had a good excuse to walk home. It was only a mile if I cut across the gore, and I could go straight to the Hole in the Wall instead of having to slip through the clutches of Grum and Pa. They always had their own ideas about how I should spend my time.
That afternoon after doing page 238 (and 230, and all the pages in between) I zipped down the block to the IGA on Main Street. Behind the garbage dumpsters out back a big old tree had broken during an ice storm and left a branch leaning over the tall fence that surrounded the gore. That branch was how I got in A.O. on the town side. On the home side, I slipped between two gigantic boulders they hadn’t crammed together closely enough to stop me and my bike.
You wouldn’t use either the front or the back gates if you wanted to sneak around ORC, since both were guarded by goons with guns. The roads all had lampposts with surveillance cameras on top looking around like birds of prey, and they broadcast menacing
caw-caw-caw
noises to keep real birds from nesting there.
To me those caws translated to a challenge: “Dare you to sneak by! Dare! Dare!” How could I resist? Besides, I was getting bored snooping around Zensylvania. The most exciting thing I’d ever seen there was Marigold hanging diapers on the clothesline. No, wait, it was when I climbed one of their trees in the winter and could see in our kitchen window. I caught Grum waltzing with a mop.
Poking around inside the gore wasn’t anything like looking down on it from Kettle Ridge. It was still disgusting, in concept, but being in the middle of it was also very, very interesting. After two years of sneaking I knew the gore inside out. Well, everything that wasn’t inside the Onion, anyway. The inner compound was a lichen-green dome half buried in the middle of the triangle like a gigantic overripe onion. If you looked down on it from a plane, it would blend in with the ground so you wouldn’t even know it was there. To find it you’d have to practically bump into it, like I did the first year of the mining.
It had been a cold day in November, before the first snow. One second I was combing for rocks, and the next second I was staring through an electric fence that seemed to pop up out of nowhere. A big barking blur of black was coming at me. It was a hungry Doberman, and there were more where he came from. If not for the fence I’d have been Kibbles ’n Bits. Luckily my surge of terror adrenaline got me out of there before the goons could catch me.
After that I went back and found a slag pile where I could spy from a distance without getting the Dobermans stirred up from their underground kennels. Mornings when I didn’t have school I borrowed Grum’s binoculars and hid there. I saw how the goons scanned their hands in front of an electric eye to make the gate open, and then how they disappeared into a tunnel that led to some underground parking area. The compound had to be huge under there. I watched bulldozers, backhoes, and dump trucks go back and forth day after day, bringing big rock chunks back to the compound and hauling loads of dirt and gravel back out.
Why did they pulverize all those rocks? It really bothered me. Because I liked rocks. Loved rocks. I even collected ones that looked like something—a heart, a frog, the state of Maine. Called them my art rocks. What was ORC mining that they had to ruin all those rocks? And why hide their big secret underground?
I was dying to get inside that place and find out, so I decided it would be a good idea to make friends with the Dobermans. Maybe they’d let me sneak inside through their kennels. They were very skinny, and I thought they’d love to have some home cooking, even if it was Ma’s. But my plan had to wait for winter to end so I wouldn’t leave footprints in the snow.
The first spring night after a big thaw, I sneaked the leftovers out of the fridge and took them as close to the electric fence as I dared. We’d had hockey puckburgers for dinner. I flung them over the top, and sure enough, the dogs came running. You’d think they’d pounce on the hamburgers and wag their tails in thanks, but no. They didn’t even stop to sniff. They just stood at the fence barking their faces into froth. I knew from one time I’d seen the dogs bark at a lost skunk that a pack of goons would be running up out of the kennels in about ten seconds with guns cocked. I made dust out of there. I was Robin Hood escaping the Sheriff of Nottingham, just running without thinking of where I was going, scrambling up and down piles of slag.
And that was how I stumbled onto my secret place. Tripped over a tree root and when I stopped doing somersaults, I found myself looking up into a maple at a squirrel looking down at me. Birds were tweeting like an audience laughing.
Whoa! Trees! Animals! Sherwood Forest! And obviously straight from my imagination, because how could it possibly exist inside the big fat ugly pus-pool Odum had made out of the gore? But I found my way back the next day, and it was still there. A real oasis.
My
oasis. Nobody else in the world knew about it. If they did, the ORC goons would’ve mined the smithereens out of it like they had every other inch of the gore. It was located at the tip end of the triangle and partly hemmed in by slag piles.
At first I just went to my oasis on sunny days and lay in the deep bed of moss in the middle of the trees to read my comics. Sometimes I’d hold my finger up to trace the pattern of my favorite maple up and up, each branch stretching out into other branches almost but not exactly the same. Sometimes I’d draw it. Two squirrels often chased each other along the limbs. It amazed me, the way their fooling around could make the whole tree shiver. They’d skitter off balance, then save themselves by catching hold of a tiny twig as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
The problem was, I couldn’t go to the oasis on the days when I wanted to the most—the rainy ones. It drove me bonkers staying in that tight little house with Ma’s stinky cigarette smoke and Pa’s blaring TV and Grum’s ugly tangled yarn blob. Jed had let us hang out in his castle (formerly known as our playhouse), but Barbie was always out there reading and complaining if I breathed too loud.
Then one day while I was picking raspberries from the bushes that grew high at the back of the oasis, I discovered the cave. It was just tall enough to stand in at the center and deep enough to sleep in. Like a six-man tent. Roomier than my so-called room at home, a lot more private, and just as comfortable, too, by the time I got done remodeling.
First I made walls out of stones at the outside edges of the cave, fitting each rock just right, like Pa had taught me when we made the play castle. He could do any kind of handyman stuff, but masonry was his best thing. Ma kept a photo album of the rock walls and fireplaces he’d built in the gore. Now the pictures were the only things left of them.
Next I found a piece of warped plywood in Pa’s scrap heap and rigged it up as a drawbridge. Then I dug a moat around the entrance and lined it with clay to catch water and drain into the little brook that bubbled up from a spring nearby. Near where we used to fish. I liked to imagine we were back there, me and Jed and Pa.
Inside the cave I made shelves out of rocks and boards. I brought over some blankets, snacks, comics, and some of my rock collection (not the little pebbles I liked to hold in my hand to help me stop thinking at night and fall asleep).
It took me weeks, but when I was done I had myself a little palace. The Hole in the Wall.
After math detention that Thursday when strange things started happening in the henhouse, I saw another strange thing at my oasis. The water bubbling up from the spring was all colorful and foamy. Not a pretty sight. Well, the colors might have been pretty in a rainbow, say, or on a T-shirt. In spring water, not so much. I sure hoped the squirrels weren’t drinking it.
I grabbed a handful of raisins from the stash I kept inside and munched on them while I read my comics. The raisins had dried out so much I couldn’t chew them with my sore twelve-year-molars, so I just swallowed them whole. Normally I would have washed them down with a swig from the spring, but not today. That rainbow water scared me.
3
You’d think when a kid gets home from a long day of school torture, the first thing he should hear is, “Hiyuh! I missed ya! How was your day? Want some milk and cookies?” No. I get, “Hey, you boy. Didn’t you see the lawn mower?”
Yeah, Pa. I almost tripped over it on the way in. It was parked in front of the doorstep. Give me a break. I just walked five miles up and down Kettle Ridge for all you know, and now you expect me to mow those little tufts of moss poking out of the mud? The green stuff that grew in our yard A.O. couldn’t rightly be called a lawn, but we’d been having warm weather for March and whatever the green stuff was, it was growing.
“Can’t I at least have a snack first?” Without waiting for an answer I grabbed a handful of stale Oreos from the cupboard.
“Have some of Odum’s M&M’s,” the Shish called from upstairs. Where I’m sure she was already doing her homework.
Har-de-har-har. Odum’s M&M’s were the mold and mildew that crept up from the basement into all our walls, floors, and ceilings ever since the strip mining began in the gore. The winding gray curlicue patterns the stains left would have been kind of cool if you didn’t know what caused them. The basement of this old house had already been a little tilty, but now it seemed to be sinking like it was built on quicksand instead of solid rock. Every wall in the house had huge cracks, the tile had come off the bathroom floor, and the grout pulled away from the edges of the sink and bathtub so often that Ma just kept the grout squirter behind the toilet with the plunger and the scrub brush. During one long wet spell, mold even formed on coats hanging in the closet.
“It’s a wonder mold doesn’t grow on Pa,” was another thing Jed used to say.
No sooner had I stuffed the last Oreo in my cheek and started to mow the lawn than a pang of pain went through my toe. I’d stepped on a sharp rock again, right where my bones had worn through the bottoms of my sneakers. If Ma had a penny for every time she worried about money, she wouldn’t have anything to worry about. I’d decided to wait until my toes poked through the front to let her notice I needed new sneakers. Being broke rotted.
As if that weren’t bad enough, after the next step I took, the lawn mower went ZZZZING and conked out. “Worthless rocky land!” Which I learned from Pa. He used to swear all the time at those
blankety-blank
machine bustin’ rocks until one day he gave up trying to roto-till a garden plot for Ma and instead started digging up every fieldstone in sight. He laid them all out in the yard like a jigsaw puzzle to see what he could make out of them, and I helped. When we were done a few weeks later, we had our play castle and a smooth mowing lawn. Until the runoff from ORC started churning up rocks from China.
Back in the present, Pa’s voice came at me from the door: “Hey, youngster, I don’t hear any grass hitting the dust.” As I yanked the cord to restart the mower, I muttered all the curses I could think of and repeated the best ones.
The machine gave my hands a prickly feeling that wiggled all the way to my nose and ears. It brought back the aches and pains I’d suffered in the morning, only worse. I was in a hurry to finish and end the pain, so I didn’t even notice when the glossy black pickup truck with extralarge wheels pulled into the driveway. I only noticed it after I’d turned around and stopped short to avoid mowing a pair of pointy cowboy boots. Real leather. You could almost smell it mixed in with the mud and cut grass.
There was only one person who wore boots like that: none other than Mr. Stanley Odum. Behind his back some people even called him “Boots” because he wore the pointiest, clicketyclackiest, leatheriest cowboy boots on earth. People said you could smell those boots coming before you could hear them, and that was about three minutes before you could actually see them.
What was Boots Odum doing at our house? That made four strange things in one day. The sun was low and glaring right at me. I squinted to get a good look at him. I’d never seen him up close and personal before. I’d been spying on his secret compound the day he came around to taste our ultraviolet purified well water.
BOOK: The Hole in the Wall
11.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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