The Scavengers (2 page)

Inside the coop, I wait a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dimness, then reach into the nesting boxes one by one. The eggs are still warm, and I like the way each one feels in my palm. Solid and delicate at the same time. Some of the eggs are white, some of the eggs are brown, and some are pale green. They all look the same in the frying pan. I am placing the last egg in the basket when I hear a noise behind me. Just as I turn to check it out, a figure leaps from the darkest corner of the coop and into my face.

“FLABBA-SHAMMY!”

The eggs go everywhere. My heart is flopping like an electrocuted fish.

“DOOKIE!” I yell, but the little creature has already scooted out the door and is running off to Ma, flapping his arms like chicken wings.

Dookie. My little snot flicker of a brother. He drives me nuts. Always popping up here and there, scaring the bejeebers out of me. Grabbing one of the unbroken eggs, I sidearm it out the door and it smacks him—
pop-shmush!
—on the back of his head.

“ZABBA-ZOO!” he hollers, and leaps into Ma’s arms.

“MAGGIE!” Now it’s Ma hollering. She’s holding Dookie and he’s looking up at her with his sad pony eyes. Dookie has never been able to speak with his mouth, but he figured out how to talk with those eyes a long time ago.

“Ma, he . . .”

“Enough!” says Ma. Right about then she runs her hand through his hair and discovers the egg goop.

“For shame! Both of you!” She sets Dookie down and now he’s looking at me and his eyes have changed from sad pony to sneaky weasel.

While I gather up the remaining eggs, Ma goes back to cooking the bacon, and Dookie goes spinning off in circles, humming to himself.

Dookie has never been right. I love him, but I love him the way you always love stinky little brothers: a little bit goes a long way. I know it bothers Ma that he can’t talk the way he should, but there’s nothing to be done, and he seems happy enough as long as he gets to drive his sister up a tree now and then. I hand Ma the surviving eggs. As she cracks them into the pan, I turn to get the dishes from the shack and meet the fourth member of our family—Dad—coming out the door. He blinks as he steps into the open, then rubs his eyes slowly. Dad was always an early riser, but lately he sleeps in more often. Sometimes when he comes out of the shack he looks like he didn’t sleep at all. Ma gives him a worried look she thinks I don’t see. Dad hugs her. Dookie leaps out of the bushes and hugs them both.

“Mornin’, Dad,” I say.

“Oh, mornin’,” says Dad, like he just noticed me.

When the eggs are done, Ma serves Dookie first. He takes a mouthful, stands up, spins in a circle, then sits down and does the same thing again. This is not unusual. This is just your basic breakfast with Dookie. We’re used to it.

Before Ma hands Dad his plate, she chops up a wild garlic plant and sprinkles it over the eggs. I wrinkle my nose. Dad eats garlic on everything. He says it helps him stay healthy. I say it just makes him smell funny. But by the time he’s halfway through his eggs, he does seem better.

“You ready to hunt for gold?” he asks me, smiling in his lopsided way.

3

I ONCE LIVED IN A REGULAR HOUSE WITH REGULAR PEOPLE IN A REGULAR
place. I remember cars and television screens and telephones and green grass and at least one birthday cake. Most of my memories from those days are gone or blurry. But one memory I carry as clearly as if it happened yesterday. I am standing in a field with my father. He is holding a red balloon. There is a white bandage on his cheek. He kneels down to hand me the balloon but he lets go too quickly and the string slips through my fingers. The balloon rises, sliding sideways across the sky, higher and higher until it is a colorless dot that I can’t see anyway because I am crying. Dad takes me into the house and blows up another red balloon, but when he lets go of this one it doesn’t float, it just drops to the floor with a soft bounce and sits there. I stomp on it and make it pop.

And then I remember we got into a car that smelled brand-new and drove into the country. Dad said we were going camping, and I was excited but Ma was crying. Dookie was just a little bundle in his car seat. We drove for almost a whole day. I remember the radio was on, and right when it was starting to get dark I heard a man on the radio talking about a red balloon, which made me grumpy again. And then right after that Dad stopped the car and said it was time to start the camping trip.

It wasn’t a very good camping trip. Mostly I remember rain and walking. And walking. And walking. Day after day. I remember being cold and damp in the mornings and hot and hungry in the afternoons. I remember bug bites and scrapes and itching and blisters and the sound of howling solar bears. I remember Dad’s white bandage turning brown from dust and sweat. I remember eating cold beans from cans. And then one day I remember Dad telling me we would be camping for a very long time. I remember yelling at Dad and running to Ma, and both of us crying while she held me. I remember Dad standing there with a pack on his back and Dookie strapped on his front, and I remember Dad had tears in his eyes too. Dookie just blew bubbles through his drool.

In the beginning, at least we had a tent. But one night in an awful storm a tree branch blew down, ripping through the tent and stabbing the ground right beside my head. The next day Dad found an old tarp snagged in the brush beside a flooded stream, and that became our shelter. By then we were out of canned food and scrounging for whatever we could find, like cattail roots and green apples, and Dad’s precious wild garlic. Sometimes Dad was able to kill a rabbit or a squirrel and we fried the meat over a fire. And we were always searching for water. I remember begging Dad to take us back home. He just very quietly said,
We can’t do that, Maggie
, and when I begged Ma, she said the same thing, even more quietly. When I asked why, they looked at each other and then Dad said someday I would understand. And so we stayed hidden in the woods, rolling up that tarp and moving every few days. The days became weeks. The weeks became months.

Ma did everything she could to give me little moments of a normal life. We played games like tic-tac-toe and connect the dots. She sang songs to Dookie. She read to me from a book called
Little House on the Prairie
. Ma said no matter how we were living she couldn’t imagine her daughter being in a world without books, so she had slipped it in her pack at the last minute. We read that book over and over, until I had every chapter memorized. Every time I heard about the hardships little Laura Ingalls and her family went through it helped me a little bit with understanding ours. Ma said I should learn to read too, and she began teaching me the alphabet. We didn’t have a blackboard or pencils and paper, so she’d clear away the leaves and I’d draw letters in the dirt with a stick, or use a piece of charcoal on the smooth side of some birch bark. Other times she’d have me study tree branches and find
V
s and
W
s, or press an acorn cap into mud to show me the shape of an
O
. Then she had me pick out words in
Little House on the Prairie
, and then whole sentences. Pretty soon I could read the book on my own, although I still liked it best when Ma read to me.

I remember plenty of scary times, too, like when lightning split a tree right beside our shelter and the thunder was so loud I felt it in my teeth. Sometimes the scariest things were the ones you couldn’t see, like wild hogs snuffling through the camp in the middle of the night, or solar bear howls in the distance. One day I happened upon the skull of a hog that had been killed by solar bears. I pried out the tusks, wedged them in one end of a split stick, and wrapped the split tight with woven runner vines. I called it my ToothClub, and practiced swinging it at imaginary solar bears. Even though I knew it wouldn’t do me any good if a real solar bear truly wanted to eat me, carrying that ToothClub made me feel a little better.

I don’t know how long we wandered. Maybe Dad and Ma kept track, but for me it just seemed like it was the only life we’d ever known, and that those other fuzzy memories belonged to another girl. Ma was growing skinnier. There were dark circles under her eyes. Back then, she was the sickly one and Dad was strong and tough. Once he twisted his ankle on a rock and it swelled up and we didn’t know if it was broken. By the next morning it was back to its normal shape and he could walk fine. Dad was weird that way. He was really healthy, and he healed really fast. Maybe the garlic really did work. He never got a cough or a cold, and if he got a scratch on his arm in the afternoon, by the next morning you could hardly see where it was. I asked Ma about it once, and she just said, “Your father has a remarkable constitution.” I asked her what
constitution
meant, and by the time she got done explaining that one, I had forgotten what I asked in the first place.

We wandered for a couple of years. We moved a lot and scrounged our food from the woods. My hair grew long and tangled. I outgrew my clothes and Ma had to patch them together with pieces torn from one of Dad’s old T-shirts. Sometimes we would stay in one place for a few months, then we’d pack everything up and move again. One day after we had been wandering again we were scouring the hills for wintergreen berries and windfall apples—and still more wild garlic—when we came to a sharp cut in the earth. Dad walked to the edge, peered over, and hollered, “It’s a gold mine!”

I ran to his side to look. And there below me I saw piles and piles of . . . junk. Bedsprings. Rotting lumber. Cracked rubber tires. Rusty soup cans and empty oil cans. Broken bottles. Pipes and chunks of iron and gears from old machines. A cracked cast iron stove. This wasn’t even fresh junk. It was old junk, half-buried, with trees and brush growing out of it.

Dad clambered over the edge and started tugging at the piles like a man who’d just discovered a pile of loose money. “We don’t have to
scrounge
anymore!” he said. Now we can
scavenge
!” I remember thinking,
Is there a difference?
Neither one sounded very thrilling.

Ma was kinda hanging back. But down there in the junk Dad was scampering around like a little kid. “Hey!” he said, bending down. When he stood up he was holding a window frame high above his head. It had all the little squares, but the glass panes were missing. “A window! For your mother!” Ma was always saying that of all the things she missed from her old life, most of all she missed drinking tea while reading a good book beside a window.

Dad scrambled back up to where Ma was standing and surveyed the scene one more time.

“Goldmine Gully!” he declared. Then he hugged Ma. “Marlene, we’re stayin’ put!”

For the first time since I don’t know when, Ma smiled. Then a darker look came over her face. “But, John . . . can we? Dare we?”

“We don’t really have a choice now,” said Dad, his face turning serious too. Then he noticed how closely I was watching him, and he switched quickly back to a smile. “And what better place?” he said, nodding toward the ravine and switching quickly back to a smile. He raised the glassless window so the sun passed through it and fell in squares at Ma’s feet. “I’ll build you a cabin! With a window, for reading! And a bookshelf!” Of course he had no idea how he would do this, especially since he had no tools. And Dad wasn’t even very good at rigging up a simple shelter with our tarp. But I could tell he was more excited than I had ever seen him, and Ma’s smile returned.

“It’ll be just like
Little House on the Prairie
,” said Dad.

“You mean
Little House Perched Over the Junkpile
,” said Ma, but she was still smiling.

“We’re staying put, kids!” said Dad, gathering us into his arms.

Over the next few weeks we dragged enough lumber and tin out of Goldmine Gully to build a sleeping shelter. It wasn’t very sturdy. Everything was just propped up and tied together with vines and woven grass and old rusty wire, and the roof was the same old tarp we’d been sleeping under when we were moving camp every day. The window Dad found was still leaned against a tree with not a pane of glass in it. Ma had gone back to looking as tired as ever. We were always hungry. Dad would dig in the junk for a few days straight and tinker on the shelter, but then he would seem to lose interest and wander off into the woods for the rest of the day. Sometimes he didn’t come back until late at night. The next morning, he was always grinning his goofy lopsided grin and was ready to scavenge again.

One day when Dad had walked off yet again and I could see the worry in Ma’s eyes, I went for a walk of my own to think things over.

I was angry. Angry with my father for wandering off. Angry with Ma for not standing up to him. Angry with both of them for making us live like wilderness hobos and not telling me why. Part of me wanted to run away, and part of me knew I had a responsibility to help my family. I guess I was learning you can love your Ma and Dad and still get angry with them sometimes. I didn’t want to leave, but I wanted to be alone. I stomped off downhill from Goldmine Gully, not sure where I was headed. I didn’t make it very far when I came upon that old Ford Falcon. It was half-hidden behind a clump of brush and sunk into the dirt, but when I tried a door it opened. The car smelled funky inside, but it was in pretty good shape and not all chewed up like I thought it would be. The middle seat was folded down, and there was plenty of room for me to stretch out. Looking back up the hill I could still see our shelter. At that moment I realized that this old car would let me hide out but still be where I belonged, and that’s when I stood up on the hood and declared myself Ford Falcon forevermore.

And then I saw the old man standing in the trees.

4

HE WAS SUPER SKINNY. LIKE A PIECE OF BEEF JERKY WITH LEGS.
His narrow face was tan and wrinkly, and his eyes were bright as a bucket of sparks.

“Eetings-gray!”

I just looked at him, confused.

“Ig-pay atin-lay!” he said, as if that explained everything. His voice was half yell, half laughter.