The Scavengers (3 page)

“Dow y’hooin’?”

“D’wha?” I said.

He was grinning ear to ear. “Spit’s an oonerism! A flop-flip! A verbal mishmash in honor of the Reverend William Archibald Spooner, door as a deadnail for bass-not-tenor a penny-ury or embroider, but still a-lip in our lives!”

Now my mouth just hung open.

Suddenly the man stepped forward and extended his hand and, in a completely normal voice, said, “Greetings. Name’s Toad. Toad Hopper. Real name, Thomas. But I was born legs first and Daddy said I was kickin’ like a toad, and, well, the name stuck. For seventy-eight years now.”

I reached down from the hood of the car and shook his hand. It was like grabbing a fistful of wire wrapped in leather. “My name is Mag . . .
Ford
!” I said. “Ford Falcon.”

“So I hear,” said Toad, and although I had felt a little silly saying my new name, and even sillier knowing he’d just watched me talking to myself on the hood of a car, he didn’t act like it was a silly name at all.

“I’m yer neighbor,” said Toad, pointing back over one shoulder with his thumb. “Live on the other side of the ridge. Down there in Hoot Holler.”

“Hoot? Holler?”

“Yah, folks used to call it Owl Hollow, but that’s hard to say. Like y’got ball bearings in yer yapper. Mainly though, I figured Hoot Holler was a lot funnier.” At this point he giggled like a little kid. Later I learned that he came up with the name Skullduggery Ridge, too, because in all the cowboy books he read when he was a boy, the bad guys (“skullduggerers” Toad called them) always snuck in over a ridge. Arlinda told me once that she still catches Toad sometimes trying to hitch his pants and squint like a gunslinging cowpuncher.

“You own a rooster?” I thought I might as well ask.

“Hatchet!” he said. “Named him that ’cause his crows are all hacked off!”

“That would be the one,” I said.

He giggled again. Then his face turned serious.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on you and your family since you arrived. Smelled your campfire smoke one day and tracked you up here. I figure you’re good people. And I figure . . .”

Here he paused and looked up toward our ragged tarp-shack.

“ . . . I figure you could use some help.”

I just looked at him.

“I figure,” he said, “you could use a
neighbor
.”

I led the old man uphill to meet Ma and Dad. Ma was cooking over a smoky fire, but Dad didn’t show up for a minute or two, and when he did, he came out from behind a tree and I thought he looked pale and nervous. But in five minutes Toad had them chattering like old friends. Toad had that way about him. And I think they were relieved to talk to a grown-up for a change. Later I heard Dad talking quietly to Ma, and Ma said, “If he was trouble, there’d have already been trouble.”

Toad told Ma and Dad that back when he was a boy, the spot we were living on was located where the property lines of four farms came together. In those days, he said, before garbage trucks and landfills, every farm had its own “back forty” junk dump, and since ours had served four families for several generations, we’d find plenty of good stuff in there if we kept digging.

He also said he made regular trading trips to a nearby village named Nobbern, and if we scavenged up any iron or other useful items in Goldmine Gully he could trade them for nails, or flour, or sugar, or other things we might need. Later, when we learned that Toad had an entire junkyard of his own full of things to trade, we realized he certainly didn’t need to lug ours to town. But at a time when we barely had two sticks to rub together, it was a big deal.

Over the next few months, Toad changed our lives completely. He lent us tools and gave us lumber and helped us build a real shack, dragging everything up the long ridge behind his twin oxen Frank and Spank. He gave us rain barrels so we didn’t have to carry water or collect it in slimy plastic jugs, he brought up some cast iron pots and pans, he gave us an ax for splitting firewood, and after helping us build a coop, he gave us half a dozen chickens.

He also introduced us to his wife, Arlinda. She taught Ma and me about foraging for herbs and edible plants, and helped get us started with a garden. She even gave us garlic bulbs, so Dad would never run out. And about every other week she gave us one of her homemade pies, which are so big you could use one for a pillow.

Before long it seemed like we’d always known Toad and Arlinda. Like they were part of the family. One or two days a week I hiked down to help Toad—sometimes we’d sort junk and old steel for his trips to Nobbern; sometimes I’d help him clean his pigpens and chicken coop, or use an old scythe to cut and gather hay from the small meadow tucked up in Hoot Holler. In return, he and Arlinda gave us some of the ham and bacon they smoked, or seeds for our garden. Working with Toad was like going to school—he taught me all kinds of things, like how to use tools and repair leather, how to butcher pigs and chickens, and how to weave a rope from grass.

I even got to where I could understand more and more of Toad’s silly talk.

Pig latin, he taught me, is where you move the first letter or couple of letters to the back of the word and then add
-ay
—as in “ig-pay atin-lay.” And Reverend William Archibald Spooner was a preacher who lived in the 1800s and was known for flipping the front end of his words around in a way that wound up making them funnier, like the time he called a “well-oiled bicycle” a “well-boiled icicle.”

And then sometimes Toad just invents his own rules. Like saying “flop-flip” instead of “flip-flop.” Or describing Reverend Spooner as “door as a deadnail for bass-not-tenor a penny-ury or embroider but still a-lip in our lives!” If you study it out, you will see he is using “bass-not-tenor” instead of “low,” which sounds the same as “lo,” or “
penny
-ury” instead of “
cent
ury” and “a-lip in our lives” instead of “alive in our lips.” Oh, and “embroider” is a synonym for “sew,” which is a homonym for “so.” In other (normal) words: “The Reverend William Archibald Spooner, dead as a doornail for lo, a century or so, but still alive in our lips!”

“Mr. Toad,” I said, one day when I got to know him better, “you talk weird.”

“I just lang love-uage!” said Toad, grinning like Christmas.

“Hmmm,” I said. “Wouldn’t know it the way you treat it.”

He laughed and laughed.

5

“COCK-A-DOODLE . . .
AAACK-KACK-KACK-KACK
!”

Breakfast is finished. Dad and I are down in Goldmine Gully, digging in the damp, mossy earth. Hatchet is still at it.

“Admit it, you miss that bird,” says Dad.

I roll my eyes, and Dad grins. Hatchet the Rooster and I do not get along. The last time I went down to help Toad clean his pig shed,
that bird
came after me like I’d been dipped in lard and rolled in seeds. Those peck marks on my kneecaps? Hatchet. The claw scratches on my forearms? Hatchet.

I pat the SpitStick slung over my shoulder. “The only way I’d miss that rooster is if I didn’t aim straight,” I say. Dad chuckles and goes back to digging. After his slow start, Dad is having a good day. It’s good when Dad’s happy, and I’ve learned to enjoy it, because I know eventually he’ll get hollow-eyed and cranky, and then he’ll disappear again.

I asked him about it once. “Now and then I just need some time alone,” he said. And then he turned and walked away, like he didn’t want to talk about it.

Like he needed some time alone.

Today though, the sun is shining and it matches our mood. Even though we’re basically digging through trash, it still feels like a treasure hunt. You never know what you’ll find. Mostly it’s pretty unexciting—rotten wood, rusty soup cans, worthless plastic. But sometimes you find a pail with only a tiny hole in it, or a spoon that isn’t bent, or maybe a chunk of iron Toad can trade for bags of oatmeal and brown sugar. One time I unearthed a cast iron wheel still attached to its axle. Toad said it was from an old hay stacker. Rather than trade it in Nobbern, Toad used it to rig up a device that allows Ma to adjust the heat on her cooking cauldron by turning the wheel to raise and lower it over the fire. Another time I discovered a faded red plastic dinner plate that was rounded on the bottom and wouldn’t really sit flat. Dad saw me puzzling over it and grinned. “Go stand up by the shack,” he said, taking it from my hand. Then he flipped it over and sailed it through the air right into my hands, and that was the day I learned to play Frisbee.

The first thing I dug up today was some clear plastic sheeting. It’s still carefully folded, in its original wrapper. This is a big discovery because we can use the plastic to build miniature greenhouses—we call them hoop houses—for the garden. We don’t get winter like we used to, but there are enough snap-blizzards and freeze-blasts to put the earth through herky-jerky seasons that can catch us by surprise, so much of the garden has to be kept under plastic. Also, until Dad finds more windowpanes, our shack windows are made of plastic sheeting just like this. They’re nothing like glass, but they keep out most of the rain and let in some of the light.

We could survive without scavenging in Goldmine Gully, but we would be a lot skinnier and a lot more miserable. The things we dig up help us fill the gaps when we trade them for things we can’t grow or make ourselves . . . and sometimes, for things just to put a little brightness in our lives.

“Hey!” says Dad. He’s been working very carefully, scraping at the dirt and brushing it away with an old paintbrush, like he’s an archaeologist looking for fossils.

His careful work has paid off, because there before him is a complete pane of glass—dirty, but without a single chip or crack. We find a lot of glass, but most of it is broken. In fact, as a scavenger, you learn pretty early never just to paw around in the dirt. Besides broken glass, we uncover a lot of sharp tin and old nails. One careless move and you’re missing half a finger. And you can’t just trot off to a hospital to get it fixed.

That glass pane would be valuable in Nobbern. But I know Dad won’t give it up. He’s been collecting them ever since we started digging, all in hopes of giving Ma her reading window. “Only six more to go!” he says, with a big lopsided smile. Dad carefully wraps the pane in some rags and tucks it into his work pack. He’s still smiling as I turn back to dig again.

But just as I’m reaching out with my digging stick I spy what looks like a tiny pink mouse ear protruding from the hillside. I brush the dirt away, and there looking right back at me is a small, round pig face. His eyes are wide and his mouth is open, and I can see the pale blue bill of a cap set back on his round head, which is about the size of a crab apple. “Oh!” I say, like a kid who sees a pretty rock, and forgetting everything I’ve learned, drive my hand straight into the dirt. Immediately a sharp pain shoots up the side of one finger. Sure enough, I’ve sliced it on a splinter of glass. I flex my finger quickly to make sure it still works, and it does, but it’s bleeding pretty good. Now just to be safe I’ll have to go back to the shack to wash it out and wrap some of Ma’s poultice strips around it. First though—more carefully now, and using my digging stick instead of my fingers—I pry the pig free and hold it up so Dad can see it.

“Wow!” says Dad. “Porky Pig!”

I just look at him. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

“From the cartoons!” he says. Sometimes Dad forgets I wasn’t raised in his world. The last time I saw a cartoon I was tiny, and I certainly don’t remember this pig being in any of them. I hand him the statue. He grabs it carefully because some of my blood has dripped on it, then brushes away some of the dirt and turns the pig faceup again. “Porky changed a lot over the years. This version looks like the Porky who was popular when my parents were children. You’ll get a pretty penny for this in Nobbern. And speaking of pennies, look here.” Dad points to a slot in the back of the pig’s head. “It’s a piggy bank. Some little child used to put coins in here.” He shakes the pig, but there is no jingle.

“Guess this account’s closed. Still, the pig will be worth more than any old money.”

Dad’s right. There is a man in Nobbern named Mad Mike who buys old things and odd things, but he especially loves old, odd things. Once Dad dug up an old toy truck with steel wheels, and when Toad and I took it to Mad Mike his eyes got wide and he gave us enough BarterBucks to buy flour for a year plus a new jackknife and a box of chocolate bars. When I asked Mad Mike who in the world would want an old toy dump truck that had been buried in dirt, he grinned and winked and said, “If I told you that, I’d be out of business!”

As we walk back to the shack, Ma stands up from weeding the garden. Dad unwraps the pane of glass and holds it up like it’s treasure from an Egyptian pyramid. “One pane closer to your reading window, Marlene,” he says.

Ma starts to smile, but then she sees my bloody hand. “Maggie! What happened?”

“Oh, I was digging up this pig . . .” I hold up the bloody Porky with my good hand, but Ma ignores the painted piggy, instead taking up my injured hand. “We need to get this cleaned up,” she says, and marches me into the shack.

6

AFTER THE CUT IS CLEANED AND BANDAGED, AND WE HAVE EATEN
lunch, I take Porky Pig out beneath the Shelter Tree. The Shelter Tree is a gigantic twisted oak with a trunk so massive, Dad, Ma, Dookie, and I can join hands and we still can’t make a complete circle around it. Every year the rains work a little more dirt loose from the roots, and the ones that hang out in the open look like crazy knotted fingers. They make a nice footrest when I sit with my back against the trunk to begin cleaning up Porky Pig.

Using a rag and some water, I dab at the dirt and my own bloody fingerprints. I dab rather than scrub, because I don’t want to rub off any of the paint, which is already chipped in places. Mad Mike taught me a long time ago that some old things lose their value if you clean them up too much. Still, I figure nobody wants a pig covered in my blood, so I pat away as much of it as I can. As the blood and dirt come away, I discover that the pig is made of two halves held together by a screw in Porky’s back. If there ever was any money in him, someone unscrewed those halves and removed it long ago. Some of the blood seeped into the coin slot and dried in the seam where the two halves of the pig screw together. I pick at it with my fingernail and a twig, but a little piece of paint comes away, so I give the pig a final wipe with the rag and call it good. I’ll let Mad Mike decide how much he wants to polish this pig.