The Scavengers (6 page)

But this is for sure: when I get back, I’m going to have a look around that root cellar. Maybe dig through those carrots.

And then—if I have to—I’m going to dig a little deeper.

11

WE ARE HIKING TO HOOT HOLLER. MY PACK IS BACK-ACHINGLY
heavy with treasures discovered in Goldmine Gully: a dented tin cup, a broken-handled screwdriver for which I carved a new handle, two screwtop bottles (with their tops, which makes them twice as valuable), a cracked cast iron ladle, and a cloth bag filled with rusted nuts and bolts that can be melted down and used by Freda the blacksmith. But a lot of the weight is made up of VARIOUS AND DIVERS WHIRLIGIGS. I’m not yelling, I’m just saying it how Daniel C. Beard wrote it on page 359 of
The American Boy’s Handy Book
. “Whirligigs” are toys that move, usually powered by nothing fancier than a length of string. I make spinning rainbow whirligigs from whittled wood and scraps of colored cardboard (Arlinda has thousands of old folded cereal boxes in her basement), and paradoxical whirligigs that look like they’re spinning when they’re not, and the parts for a toy Daniel Beard calls a “potato mill,” which makes a potato spin like a top. One pocket of my pack is filled with a dozen “block bird singers,” which I make by carving two pieces of wood in a flat C shape. You place a blade of grass between the two pieces, squeeze them in your teeth, and blow, and bird sounds come out. I’m also packing several wooden shingles I pried from a caved-in, half-rotted doghouse we found in Goldmine Gully. I’ll use Toad’s old hand drill to put a hole in one end of each shingle, then tie a long string through the hole. Then if you swing the shingle in a circle it makes a loud buzzing noise. Daniel Beard called this “the hummer.”

I test most of these toys out on Dookie. If he likes them, I make more, because that means they’ll sell well in town. Nobody really needs any of these things, but anything that can provide a child with some amusement is welcome, and they always earn me a few extra BarterBucks when I go trading with Toad.

But the most valuable object in my pack today? Riding way down at the bottom, carefully wrapped in rags?

Porky Pig.

Whenever we visit Toad and Arlinda we try to find something along the way to add for the meal. Depending on the weather and the season, we gather morels, dandelion greens, wild mustard, cattail root, apples, and watercress. I like wood sorrel; it has a rhubarby tang. Sometimes we can pick a whole salad by the time we make our way down the ridge.

Today we’re collecting fiddlehead ferns. Ferns don’t sprout straight up like corn. Instead they poke out of the ground coiled tight as the knob at the far end of a fiddle. I guess that’s why they call them fiddleheads. If you pick the coils before they uncurl, you can boil and eat them, but I think they taste like damp dirt and dead leaves. Ma and I do the picking and Dad follows behind us, holding the front of his shirt out to make a basket. Dookie isn’t helping at all. He scampers and darts around us like a zigzagging rabbit. Five minutes ago I found him playing patty-cake with a pine tree. He’s more likely to pet a fern than pick it. I’m always calling Dookie names, so often that I run out of names. So now I try a new one: “Hey, fiddlehead!”

“
Shazoodle!
” says Dookie, ducking behind a tree to pick his nose.

“Stop picking your nose, Dookie!”

“
Blardy dot!
” hollers Dookie, which is his way of saying “I’m not!” but by the stuffy-nose sound of his voice I’m pretty sure he’s at least two knuckles deep. On second thought, I’m glad Dookie isn’t helping with the fiddleheads.

We’re about halfway down the ridge now, following a trail along one side of the valley that leads to Hoot Holler. From here we can see more of the Hopper homestead, which is surrounded by a tall fortresslike fence of wood and steel. Toad had to put the fence up years ago after people began building houses right in the middle of some of the best farm fields surrounding his farm. These new people didn’t want to sit in their new houses looking at junkyards, so they put up a stink and the local officials made Toad put up a fence. In the end the joke was on them, because when the government proclaimed
arrogant ptomaine
, not only did they take Toad’s fields, they also plowed all those houses flat and planted corn right over the top of them.

Toad still grumbles about the fence, but now with all the GreyDevils around, he’s glad it’s there. If they could get to his junkyard, they’d trade it for a whole lake filled with PartsWash. But the fence is tall and solid and Toad is always adding barbwire and broken glass and pretty much anything jabby and sharp along the top. It’s not BarbaZap, but it does the job.

The only space between the Sustainability Reserve and Toad’s fence is a narrow strip of blacktop used by the truckers who haul the URCorn during harvest. We call it Cornvoy Road, because when a bunch of trucks are running together, it’s called a “convoy,” and when a bunch of trucks loaded with corn are running together, well, that’s a cornvoy. When the government was making Cornvoy Road, one of the bulldozers backed through Toad’s fence and bumped his silo. The silo teetered and leaned, but it didn’t fall. Toad tried to get both the government and CornVivia to repair it, but they never did, and to this day it leans out over the road at a crazy angle. Toad calls it the Leaning Tower of Pisa. On one of my first visits, I was reaching for the door to peek inside and Toad hollered at me in a way he never had before and never has since. “Don’t
ever
go in there!” he said. “That thing could flopperize at any time.”

I can see Toad now, far below us. He is out behind the house, collecting firewood. I finger whistle—three long and three short—and sure enough, Toad straightens up and waves.

As we walk, we keep gathering fiddleheads. Ferns mostly sprout in batches of seven, and Arlinda says you should never pick more than three from the same group. Ma and I snip the fiddleheads and toss them into Dad’s shirt-basket like teensy organic Frisbees. Sometimes I holler, “Bank!” and bounce them off his chest first. Dad smiles his crooked smile and just keeps plodding along.

Suddenly Dookie jumps out in front of us, his eyes wide and serious, his hands fluttering.

“Shibby-shibby-shibby!”

We all freeze.

Dookie speaks mostly nonsense, but when he flutters his hands and says “
shibby-shibby-shibby
” we pay attention, because that is what he does when he senses trouble, and Dookie has a sixth sense for trouble.

I am reaching over my shoulder for my SpitStick when I hear a twig snap behind me. Spinning on my heel, I snatch a pepper-bomb from my satchel with my right hand and even as I am turning I am raising it into throwing position. Drawing the ToothClub from my belt with my left hand (the ToothClub is better than the SpitStick for fighting in close), I raise the weapon and spin toward the sound.

The solar bear is only partially visible, just a face and one front paw sticking out from behind a tree trunk. But the dark black eyes are locked on us and the animal is standing still as a stone, which is a bad sign, because about the only time a solar bear freezes is when it sees something it would like to eat.

With a flick of my wrist I send the pepper-bomb flying. All that practice of throwing eggs at Dookie’s head pays off, because the pepper-bomb smacks the solar bear square in the snoot. There is a dusty red
poof
as the ground pepper is released, and the bear falls backward right onto its butt, where it howls and paws at its nose and eyes before giving an especially loud howl and crashing off into the brush at a run. We stand very still ourselves now, listening until the howling and crashing fade away.

Then everyone looks at me.

And I raise my fist and say, “Ford
Falcon
!”

“Yes, Maggie,” says Ma, pointing behind me, “you missed a fiddlehead.”

As we walk the last part of the trail, I look down the valley again. Toad’s one-eyed dog, Monocle, is chasing Tripod, the three-legged cat, around the barn. They’re faking it, because in reality they are the best of friends. Toad is back outside. He flails one arm. At first I think he’s waving again, but then I realize he’s throwing something. Then he runs across the yard, picks the object up, and flails again, and now I realize he’s practicing throwing his homemade boomerang, which he built using the instructions on page 192 of
The American Boy’s Handy Book
. Toad has been throwing that boomerang as long as I’ve known him, but he can never get it to return.

The smoke from the chimney has gone thin. This doesn’t mean the fire is out. It means Arlinda has it burning hot and pure and is cooking up a feast. Stopping to itch one of the scabs left over from my last visit with Hatchet, I close my eyes and pray Arlinda is making rooster soup.

“Cock-a-doodle . . .
aaack-kack-kack-kack
!”

Sigh. I close my eyes again and imagine Hatchet neck deep in noodles.

12

“SNOOKY HOLER-TABLES!”

Toad’s voice is floating over the tall security gate as we wait for him to let us in. When the heavy gate swings open, he is rubbing his head and hopping up and down like a puppet on rubber bands. Monocle has stopped chasing Tripod and is peeking nervously around the corner of the barn. On Toad’s forehead there is a bump like a big red egg.

“Snooky holer-tables!” hollers Toad again, gently probing the egg with his fingertips.

“Snooky holer-tables!” is Toad’s way of cussing without really cussing. What he’s really saying is “Holy snooker tables!” Dad told me snooker is a game where you try to shoot balls into the holes in a table. Toad has never played; he just likes the goofy sound of it. Twist it with a spoonerism, and you’ve got your very own Toad Hopper cuss word.

“But, Toad,” I said, the first time I heard him use it, “that doesn’t even make sense.”

“It’s a nonsensical epaulet!” said Toad.

“Um, Toad,” I said, “I think you mean
epithet
. An
epithet
is a curse word. An
epaulet
is a fringed shoulder pad on a soldier’s uniform.” Emily Dickinson used the word in one of her poems and Ma had to explain it to me. That’s how I knew.

“
Epaulet!
” said Toad. “A woo nerd! How le-dightful!”

It really is hard to keep up with him.

At first I think the big red egg over Toad’s eyebrow means he finally got his boomerang to return, but when I congratulate him, he says what happened is it ricocheted off the barn eaves and he tried to catch it. It’s lucky all he got was a knock to the noggin. In his book, Daniel Beard writes, “A boomerang cast by a beginner is very dangerous . . . when it does come down it sometimes comes with force enough to cut a small dog almost in two.”

No wonder Monocle ran off to hide behind the barn.

The screen door opens and Arlinda steps out onto the porch. Her cheeks are red from working over the stove and her bun is frazzled, but she smiles like she’s been waiting all week to see us.

Dad climbs the porch steps and says, “Hold out your apron, Arlinda.” She gathers it up to form a miniature hammock, and Dad dumps in the fiddleheads. The green coils remind me of snake fetuses, but Arlinda looks at them like they are chocolate-frosted bacon. “Ooooh!” she says. “I’ll boil these right up!”

She twirls and returns to the kitchen, and Ma follows. Then Arlinda hollers out the window.

“Mr. Hopper! Before you go to work, I need some fish.”

Before Toad can answer, I say, “I’ll do it!”

A mile past the Hoppers’ farm, where the road curves past BeaverSlap Creek, lives a gigantic man we call Tilapia Tom. From the story Toad tells, he showed up not too long before Declaration Day, standing outside the security gate holding the hand of a small boy. “I need some lumber,” he said, in a voice so low and rumbly Toad checked the sky for thunderclouds. “And water pipes.”

“Whaddya got to trade?” asked Toad. Money was already not worth much.

“Fish.”

The man told Toad he had lived in the roughest part of a big city, where he taught people how to grow their own gardens on top of water tanks filled with fish. It sounded crazy, and everyone told him it would never work, but it did. But then, in preparation for the Bubbling, the government claimed his part of the city. When the man got to this part of the story, Toad waved his fist in the air and hollered, “
Arrogant ptomaine!
” The man just looked at him quietly, then continued. In the final days, when the bulldozers were closing in, the man strapped a water tank to his truck, loaded as many fish into the tank as he could, and then drove until he was about to run out of gas, which was near the abandoned farm beside BeaverSlap Creek, where fresh water was in good supply. Now he needed to build new fish tanks. So they worked a trade: Toad gave him lumber and pipes, and once the man finished his fish tanks, he built one for Toad and stocked it with fish. He told Toad the fish were called tilapia, and from that day forward he was known as Tilapia Tom.

When I say fish tank, we are not talking goldfish aquarium. I mean, a tank. Made of wood slats wrapped in ropes and big enough around you can swim laps in it if you don’t mind the slimy fish-fin swish against your kneecaps or the sandpaper tickle when a tilapia nibbles your toe, or their skitterish tail-splats when they spook at shadows. Sometimes the slats leak and we have to plug the holes. On page 83 of
The American Boy’s Handy Book
, you will find a section titled “How to Make a Wooden Water-Telescope,” so Toad and I followed the directions and made one so we can inspect the inside of the tilapia tanks and plug the holes without having to drain all the water. But Dookie uses the water-telescope more than we do. He just likes to watch the fish.

Toad and Arlinda feed those fish by hand and give a few of them names like Squirtfirgle and Phineas Phantail, but when it’s time for fillets or fish sticks, Toad and Arlinda don’t mess around. Out comes the pan, in goes Phineas. When you live OutBubble, food is not necessarily scarce, but neither is it easy. If you have fish, you eat fish. On page 188 of Daniel Beard’s book, you will find a section titled “How to Make a Fish Spear.” I made one of those too. It hangs next to the water-telescope on a set of hooks beside the tank ladder. I grab them both now, climb the ladder, and, peering through the water-telescope, choose a nice chubby tilapia. A quick jab of the spear, and the fish is flopping in a bucket. A few more jabs, and we have our main course. I hang the water-telescope and spear back on their hooks, run the bucket of fish in to Arlinda, and then follow Toad and Dad out to the barn.