Keeper

by Kathi Appelt

  tease…

  BD, whose chasing switch was tripped, which

  stirred up…

  all sorts of…

  MAYHEM!!!

  Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!

  All at once, it was BD in full chase mode, heading straight after Sinbad while Captain cheered from the sidelines, “C’mon, c’mon!” Keeper saw Sinbad crouch between Mr. Beauchamp’s pots of fragile roses and the exotic night-blooming cyrus. Maybe BD wouldn’t see him. Maybe she could catch him in time.

  MaybeMaybeMaybe…

  But BD was too fast. He raced right by her, raced right up the porch steps, raced right through the fragile roses and the scraggly cyrus, the flowers that Mr. Beauchamp loved, placed precariously close to the edge of the porch, which sat ten feet off the ground, too high for flowering plants to survive tipping over.

  Still, Keeper yelled, “No, BD. Nooooo!!!!”

  CRASH! BANG! SMASH!

  Keeper froze at the bottom of the porch, a whole barrelful of “oh no’s” filling up her throat and lungs and chest. Pot by pot, Mr. Beauchamp’s beautiful flowers, his enchanted night-bloomers, his orange and pink antique roses, crashed onto the oyster shell driveway. Keeper didn’t wait for them to finish falling before she ran onto the porch, two steps at a time, and grabbed BD’s collar. His tail wagged, his tongue hung out. His fur stood straight up on his head.

  She could swear he was smiling.

  On the porch rail Sinbad calmly licked his paws.

  Keeper tugged on BD’s collar. She needed to get him off of the porch before… but too late.

  Mr. Beauchamp opened the door. Keeper froze again. Two seconds later she heard Mr. Beauchamp cry out, “Ohh…!”

  With a yank, Keeper pulled BD down the steps, Mr. Beauchamp close behind. And there, at the bottom, the beloved plants lay scattered, shattered. She couldn’t move. BD leaned against her. She wanted to let go of the dog and hug Mr. Beauchamp, so like a grandfather only not her grandfather, but she felt stuck, glued to the ground.

  All she could do was hold on to BD and watch as Mr. Beauchamp knelt down over his prized flowers.

  And then, out of nowhere, Signe appeared, her face a storm cloud, her white hair blinding in the morning heat. And for some reason, Mr. Beauchamp pointed right at her, right at Signe, as if it were all Signe’s fault, when it wasn’t Signe’s fault at all. Signe had told her, “Keep an eye on the dog.” Six simple words.

  Keeper watched as Signe walked right past her and reached for Mr. Beauchamp, bent over and shaking, watched as Signe helped him slowly walk back up the stairs, where she sat next to him on the porch, watched as Mr. Beauchamp leaned back in his old rocking chair, his face a map of sorrow.

  Then she heard the old sailor, so much like a grandfather, tell Signe, in the saddest voice imaginable, “Stop waiting, mon amie, stop waiting.” Tears streamed down both of their faces.

  33

  Waiting. It was so hard to do. Keeper had written the word “wait” on Step D: Wait for the tide to rise. But she had no idea the waiting would be this long. Now, as she sat in The Scamper, she considered screaming at the moon to make it hurry up. But that would just wake up Signe, which was not at all in the plan. See Step A.

  Keeper did not think she could bear to see Signe’s mad face again so soon. Or Signe’s sad face, either. Signe crying. Was there anything worse?

  Well, yes.

  Yes, as a matter of fact, there was. Signe yelling. That seemed a lot worse. But then again, Signe crying…

  And then there was Dogie’s face…

  Keeper covered her own face with both of her hands. Dogie’s face had been more than sad. It was crushed… like the flowers… like the…

  At the exact moment that Mr. Beauchamp had pointed at Signe, Keeper had taken off. She had run and run and run, straight to the Bus, BD right at her side.

  “Here’s my g-g-g-girl,” Dogie had said as she and BD came in for a landing. Dogie’s cheerfulness felt strange in the midst of so much chaos. Keeper looked down. She needed to tell him. She took a deep breath, but she was afraid that if she uttered a sound, she would start to cry, so she just nodded.

  Dogie reached into the ice chest and pulled out a bottle of Dr Pepper and handed it to her. Without looking into his face, Keeper took the icy cold bottle in one hand and, with the other, pushed her hair behind her ear.

  Then she watched as Dogie lifted both arms like an orchestra conductor and said to the dogs, “B-b-be off, b-b-beasts!” And with that, BD and Too took off down the beach in a streak, with Captain flying just above them.

  Keeper swallowed a big swig of the icy drink. It burnt as it slid down her throat, and she wished now that she had eaten a bowl of cereal instead of releasing the crabs.

  Crabs.

  And roses.

  And night-blooming cyrus.

  And Signe’s broken bowl.

  And Mr. Beauchamp, bent over and trembling.

  Signe crying.

  She needed to tell Dogie about all of this.

  She took another long drink of Dr Pepper, postponing everything as long as she could. But before she even finished swallowing, Dogie pulled out his ukulele and began to sing. “Marry me, marry me.” He grinned at her conspiratorially.

  His smile was as broad as the sun, which was now fully engaged with the blue sky. Keeper had heard him singing the song all summer, practicing to sing those two words to Signe on this, the date of the blue moon, for this very day, this very night. It was right there on the calendar, the one that hung just above the driver’s seat on the Bus.

  How could she tell Dogie that everything was completely messed up?

  Her legs started to itch. She felt an enormous need to go, to run and run and run and put the crabs and the roses behind her. Just past Dogie, past the ringing ukulele, past the breaking waves just in front of her, just offshore, she could see the sandbar, barely popping up above the water. De Vaca’s Rock. The jammed-up apology made her feel nauseous. The Dr Pepper sloshed in her stomach.

  She needed to tell Dogie now. About the crabs. And the gumbo. And everything. She opened her mouth to let the knot of words unravel. But just as she was about to blurt it all out, she heard a familiar voice: “C’mon, c’mon!” Captain, followed by BD and Too, bolted by, heading in the opposite direction. Without even thinking, she took off.

  34

  Dogie watched them go, the two dogs, the seagull, and the girl. He could tell that something was bothering Keeper by the way she had not looked up at him. He had never seen her stare at the ground for such a long time. Something was definitely on her mind.

  He rolled his shoulders. She would tell him when she was ready. He knew what it was like to have a jumble of words get stuck in your mouth.

  Dogie. He was not from Oyster Ridge Road. He wasn’t even from Texas. In fact, he grew up in New Jersey. But right before he finished high school, a very convincing army recruiter had sat down with him at lunch, and as he tossed his four-cornered hat into the sky at the end of the graduation ceremony, before it fell back into his hand, he found himself in the army’s boot camp. Three months later he was tramping through the hills of a distant country, packing a gun, teeth chattering, bombs exploding. By the time it was all over and he came home, back to New Jersey, he couldn’t stop shaking. His hands shook. His knees shook. He couldn’t eat or sleep. Even his head shook.

  While he sat on his mother’s sofa, he felt like he was going to rattle himself to pieces, like his bones would fly apart and scatter his body around the room if he didn’t stop shaking. Finally, his mother sat down close to him one day on that sofa and simply wrapped her arms around him and told him that he was done now.

  “Dogie,” she said, “it’s all right.” And maybe it was her hugs. Maybe he just needed someone to say so. He wasn’t sure. But all at once, the shaking stopped. Everything except his voice.

  The doctor at the army hospital told him that he might stutter for the rest of his life, but he might not.

  It didn’t
matter to Dogie. He could live with the stutter, especially since the rest of him had stopped shaking.

  Then he took all the money he had saved during the war and bought a big, yellow school bus. His mother told him, “Go find your true heart, honey.” He had no idea where that could be, only that it wasn’t in New Jersey. He hated to leave his mother, but he had to find a quiet place. He flipped a coin. “Heads, I’ll g-g-go to the m-m-mountains. T-t-tails, I’ll go to the sea.” It was a shiny new quarter that he tossed into the air. When it smacked down into his broad palm, it was tails.

  You might have thought that he’d go to the Jersey shore, but that was too busy for him. Or the rocky coast of California? But that water, he knew, was too cold. He wanted water he could wade into, even in the winter. So he pointed his bus toward Texas.

  He drove for three days and three nights, and when he got to Houston, he turned south, not to Galveston, where he knew it would be like the Jersey shore, full of tourists, and not to Corpus Christi, same thing. Instead, he just ambled along until he got to a small place called Tater, which had only a handful of citizens and sat right at the entrance to a Texas state park. He drove past the gate, and while he drove, he eventually came to a road, or what looked like a road, made of oyster shells. Sure enough, it was Oyster Ridge Road, and even though the park was on either side, this particular road had been in private hands for nearly a hundred years. Three houses had stood there for generations.

  One of them was the house in which Mr. Beau-champ lived. The other was newly taken over by the granddaughter of the original owner, along with her roommate. And the third belonged to a man in Tater who kept the place as a weekend fishing cottage but who lost his interest in fishing long ago. It was for rent.

  Dogie signed the lease that day, then he got a permit from the Parks Department to open up a surfboard stand on the beach. He drove the yellow bus to the end of Oyster Ridge Road and parked it there, where it’s stood for the past ten years, except for those days or nights when a storm blew in and he drove it to higher ground to keep it from washing away in the surf.

  Every morning he rolled out the awning on the side of the Bus and got ready for the day. In fact, he was standing underneath the same awning when he laid eyes on Signe for the very first time.

  Dogie remembered perfectly.

  He was hanging up his bulletin board so that he could use it to tack up posters and T-shirts for sale, when a tall woman walked right by, her belly huge. She walked as fast as she could right into the surf, right into the waves, followed by a teenaged girl with shocking white hair calling, “Wait, wait! You can’t do this here.” But the taller one paid her no heed. They walked out past the shallow breakers, out to where the water was above their waists. He could see them bobbing in the waves.

  Then Dogie heard them both start screaming. The two—one tall and dark; one shorter, with the whitest hair he’d ever seen.

  At first Dogie dismissed their screams. Most people screamed when they first went in the water, screamed at the cold, screamed at the first wave that splashed in their faces. Then he set down his hammer and listened. He could tell that these screams were different.

  He recognized the scream from the taller one. A scream of pain.

  The scream from the shorter one, a scream of fear.

  War will let a person in to what a scream means.

  Shaking off his flip-flops, he ran into the water, throwing himself in and swimming as fast as he could, their screams drowning out the roar of the tumbling waves.

  And as he got nearer, he realized what had happened. There, in the arms of the shorter woman, a baby. And on the face of the taller one, tears.

  Where was Meggie Marie now? he wondered. She could be anywhere, probably São Paulo or Singapore or San Francisco. Who knew?

  He didn’t miss Meggie Marie. This quiet place along the coast had always been too small for her. He wasn’t surprised when she left.

  But he was grateful to her nonetheless. Grateful for two big reasons. First, she had brought Signe with her to Oyster Ridge Road. And second, she had given birth to Keeper.

  Both of those reasons were significant.

  Because of them, Dogie had found his true heart.

  He strummed the ukulele and smiled. Then he sang his two-word song at the top of his lungs. Ten years. He’d waited ten years to sing this song for Signe, but he had loved her since the moment he met her.

  35

  Keeper was a fast runner. Her long legs powered her down the beach, but she was no match for the two dogs and the seagull. Soon enough, she pulled up and let them race ahead of her. She slowed down to a walk, her breath coming in large gulps. When she came directly in front of the sandbar, she paused and looked out.

  A pair of brown pelicans perched on top of it. From where she stood, it looked like the two birds were standing on the water.

  Anyone who has ever stood at the edge of a sandy beach, with the waves washing over his or her feet, knows the pull of the sea. Standing there, Keeper felt for the millionth time that firm tug, that beckoning pull from the water.

  Keeper looked out at the sandbar. She had been out there before. She remembered the spray in her face, remembered how cold it felt. She could feel the sting of the salt in her eyes. It was the last place she had seen her mermaid mother.

  But Keeper had not gone out there since. Signe had told her, “Don’t ever do that again,” and she hadn’t. It was a solemn promise that she had made when she was three years old.

  But that didn’t keep her from wanting to go out there. From her spot on the beach, it looked so close. It looked like she could make it in just a few dozen strong strokes.

  She took a step into the water, but as she did, the two pelicans lifted off of the sandbar and soared into the sky. Their raucous calls snapped her out of her reverie.

  Her sneakers were soaking wet. Signe would be mad. Madder! Keeper turned away from the water. It was time to tell Dogie what had happened. She pulled her wet shoes off and gave them a shake. Then she crossed her fingers and hoped that Dogie would understand.

  36

  Dogie watched Keeper and the beasts come back toward him, first BD, then Too, and he stepped aside as Captain grabbed a wooden arm of his canvas deck chair.

  “Easy th-th-th-there, b-b-b-birdman,” said Dogie. Captain steadied himself on the arm of the chair and then fluffed his feathers up as if to say, It’s all good. Dogie laughed and handed him a cheese cracker. Captain preferred watermelon, but cheese crackers were all Dogie had on hand at that particular moment. The bird snatched it out of his fingers.

  Both of the dogs stretched out in the cool sand under the Bus, panting from their run. Dogie looked under there and could see their two pink tongues hanging out of their mouths. He filled a bowl with water from his Thermos and set it in the shade. “Yep, yep, yep!” barked Too, as if he approved.

  “C’mon, c’mon!” The seagull fluffed his feathers again. Dogie held out another cheese cracker. Captain took it in his mouth, hopped onto the ground, and headed under the Bus to join the dogs.

  From the corner of his eye, Dogie watched Keeper make her way toward the Bus. He was certain now, from the way she dragged her feet in the sand and held her head, that something was wrong. He picked up his ukulele, but then he set it down again on the chair, next to the box of cheese crackers, and walked toward Keeper. As he got closer, she looked right up at him, tall and thin, full of the wind and sun and sand and the whole beautiful day. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, with no warning at all, she ran into his arms and burst into an explosion of “sorry’s.” Dogie knelt down and wrapped his arms around her. So many “sorry’s.” He couldn’t count them all.

  37

  Once Captain hopped underneath the Bus, he set his cheese cracker down on the sand in front of him and began to peck at it. As he did, the aroma of cheese cracker wafted into the noses of Too and BD.

  “Yep, yep, yep!” yipped Too. He wanted a cheese cracker.

  Mrrrurrrff, whined BD.
He wanted a cheese cracker.

  While Captain pecked, the two dogs stood up and began to sniff at Captain’s cheese cracker. A dog’s nose is tender. A seagull’s beak is hard. Just as BD nudged his tender nose toward Captain’s cheese cracker, pop! Captain pecked him, right in the most tender spot.

  “Owwww!!!” BD howled.

  And even though Too had stayed away from the fray, he also began to howl. All of this howling completely undid Captain. He hadn’t meant to hurt BD. BD was, after all, his very best friend in the whole world.

  And now what had he done? He had just pecked that same best friend on the most tender part of his nose and made him yelp! All because of a cheese cracker! Stupid cheese cracker. He didn’t even like cheese crackers that much. Certainly not enough to hurt BD. He hadn’t meant it. He wished he’d never even heard of cheese crackers! Cheese crackers. Bad.

  But just as he was sinking into the lowest level of self-denouncement, he watched as BD grabbed the rest of the half-eaten cheese cracker and snarfed it right down. Wait! That was his cheese cracker! He started to peck BD again, but then he remembered.

  Cheese crackers! He knew where there were plenty of cheese crackers. He hopped out from under the Bus. There on the chair, right where Dogie had set it, was the whole box. Cheese crackers for everyone!

  “C’mon, c’mon!” he cried. He looked over his shoulder. He saw two dog noses poke out from under the Bus. “C’mon, c’mon!” He flapped his wings. Here they came. Tails wagging. Noses sniffing. Captain did a little hop on the arm of the chair. Here they are, he tried to say, pointing to the box on the chair.

  BD’s ears pointed forward. Too’s ears pointed forward.

  Ccchhhhheeeeeeesssseeee crrrrraaaaacccckkkeeerssss!

  Both of the dogs charged, right at the box of crackers. Captain hopped off the arm of the canvas deck chair just before the dogs hit it with all eight paws. Crash! Crunch! Smash! Chair and crackers went everywhere. “Yep, yep, yep!” Too ran around in circles, a cheese cracker hanging from his mouth. BD was munching away, his tail wagging like crazy.