The Secret Life of Owen Skye

by Alan Cumyn

  “Just go!” Andy said.

  “I can’t,” said Owen.

  Then something snapped inside of Owen. Suddenly he roared out of the water yelling and splashing, and the girls were so surprised that they just sat there with the lump of wet clothes and got soaked themselves.

  Andy too went crazy with the moment and ran like a madman for Eleanor. Even though she was older and bigger, he just dipped his shoulder under her arm and swooped her up in a fireman’s lift, then dumped her in the water. Then he turned for Sadie, but she ran away screaming.

  “Come on!” Owen yelled to his brothers, and they all made Doom Monkey victory noises as they ran to where Eleanor and Sadie had parked their bicycles. Andy took Eleanor’s and Leonard took Sadie’s, and Owen ran beside them along the path through the woods, over the railroad tracks that Leonard hated to cross, then along the street back to the farmhouse.

  The boys knew all along that they were still naked, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. This was their moment of glory, capturing Eleanor and Sadie’s bikes and riding them home in victory, just as if they’d escaped from pirates in the pirates’ own boat!

  But of course they had no words for their mother when they showed up on the front lawn naked as God made them, mud-splattered and wet, screaming with laughter, with two stolen bicycles. They meant to explain every detail, but there was so much, and words couldn’t seem to capture the magic and the glory of it. Especially not after they saw the look of horror on their mother’s face that just got more twisted and frightful the more they tried to explain. Threw Eleanor in the water, Sadie ran away, they took our clothes!

  “I lost my glasses!” Leonard said finally, as if that could explain it. Then Eleanor arrived, soaked and shivering, with Sadie beside her, and the nakedness of the moment was like waking up from a bad dream, only to find that you’ve peed in your bed.

  A Thousand Years in a Dusty Tomb

  IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN the chill from the river water, or the naked run back to the farmhouse, or maybe, as Owen thought, it was the fumes they’d breathed in from the traces of squid scum. At any rate, only a few days after the great expedition, all three boys were sick. They showed the same mysterious spots: ragged red blotches that started on the soles of their feet, then crept between their toes and around their ankles. The spots were itchier than poison ivy, and soon the boys had them on their fingers and ears, noses and necks, and up their arms and down their backs. After awhile the spots turned crusty and broke, then spread to other spots. Then they were everywhere: on eyelids and nostrils and between fingers and inside the boys’ mouths.

  Margaret and Horace shut them in their bedroom and called Dr. Graves, who was old and bowed and thin as a dried stick. His hands shook even when they weren’t doing anything and turned the stethoscope into a silvery blur, cold as an ice cube against Owen’s itchy chest.

  “Not chicken pox,” said Dr. Graves, after he had listened to their coughs and poked their tongues and looked in their ears.

  “What is it, doctor?” Margaret asked.

  The doctor paused, sniffed, looked at the boys as if seeing them from a great distance. He started to put his instruments back in his black bag.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “Keep them warm and out of the sunlight. Plenty of rest and liquids. Should pass in a day or two. Call me if it gets worse.”

  Margaret flew into action. The drapes were drawn. The boys were confined to bed and made to drink a glass of warm water every half hour. The spots were so itchy that the brothers couldn’t stand it. They writhed and kicked, the agony of one setting off the other two.

  “Stop it! Stay still!” Margaret would yell, but it was impossible. Leonard would start to twitch and brush against Owen’s leg, which would then need scratching, which would make it itch even more. And Owen’s elbow would knock against Andy’s chest and he would start scratching, until the whole bed was a mass of wriggling, squirming, crying and complaining.

  “Stay still!” Margaret would yell, and they’d hold themselves rigid like soldiers on parade, but the longer they held, the harder it got. What do you do when everything itches, even your eyelids?

  At night they had terrible dreams, which they told one another in the morning in excruciating detail. Andy saw the giant squid oozing its way through a crack in the window, slowly drooling the room full of itchy poison ink. Leonard was chased by a runaway train. Everywhere he went the train followed — jumping the tracks, rattling down the road, climbing a tree, invading the basement, bursting into the closet when Leonard was huddled there, thinking he was safe.

  Owen dreamed about becoming the Bog Man. He could feel the splotches growing, joining up, eating away his skin the same way the radioactive bog minerals had turned the mild-mannered scientist into a hideous creature. In his dreams he was an outcast. He lived in the woods in the winter, huddled over a fire with a cup of cocoa and no marshmallows, with no friends and no comic books and no clothes, shivering and alone.

  In one dream Sylvia came to him in the woods. She shrieked when she saw him, then ran away when he held out his hand. “Sylvia!” he tried to say, but his voice, like the Bog Man’s, was a rasping mass of gurgles and hisses.

  Margaret made a burning poultice of baking soda, flaming herbs, cake flour, vinegar and cod liver oil. Three times a day she lathered the paste on each boy in turn, using a huge wooden spoon. They writhed and thrashed in fear but their mother had strong arms and an iron will and there was no escape. Within a couple of minutes this paste hardened into a kind of plaster so that the boys couldn’t move even if they wanted to. Hours later Margaret would come with a warm wet cloth and a scraper and work the plaster off, and they would lie free and comfortable for a moment before she scooped on a fresh batch.

  For a week they ate chicken soup and lay like mummies buried alive and watched the clock hands turn in their darkened room.

  The spots didn’t go away all at once. Instead, like winter, they started to go then came back then drifted off and came back again, on and on like that, until finally, one day, they weren’t there anymore.

  Owen felt like he’d been dug up from a thousand years of living in a dusty tomb and given another chance at glorious Life. He and his brothers ran wild, up trees and onto roofs, through the woods and back to the haunted house and over to the river and the bull’s field — all the great places where Life was and interesting things happened. They took Andy’s radio back to Dead Man’s Hill and scanned the river again to see if their arch-enemy the giant squid had left anymore evidence of its evil deeds.

  Free again, they did everything at twice the speed. Yet Owen knew that somehow things had changed. First there had been the broken finger, which he still had, and then a thousand years in a dusty tomb, and soon school would be starting again. He began to realize that the time up top, moving around, with sun on your face and the ground moving below your feet and air in your lungs — all that time is so short compared to when you’re cemented stiff and the clock won’t move and you just have to wait and wait and wait… for what? To be yourself again.

  What was it he really wanted to do more than anything else? Now that he had his feet back — his Life — what should he do as fast as possible before something tried to take it away again?

  Owen knew as clearly as he knew anything in this world. Time could be short. That’s why he couldn’t wait until he was grown up before he asked Sylvia to marry him.

  But first he needed a ring. He went down to the basement workshop where Uncle Lorne had spent those weeks making the gargoyle ashtray for Mrs. Foster. That was where he found the copper wire and where he carved down the top of the broom handle so that it was about the thickness of a finger. He wound the wire around the wooden finger, weaving the strands, trimming the edges, until he had a ring that any girl would love. True, it had no diamond. He pried one of the spurs off his cowboy boots but it wouldn’t stay on the ring, not even with ta
pe. Even so he realized it was a better ring without the diamond — simple and true, like his love, take it or leave it.

  As soon as he had the ring, he knew he had to ask her right away. He couldn’t wait until school started. So he began walking into the village to her house. As he walked he fingered the ring in his pocket, and he tried not to think of what words he would use. It would be better if it just happened, like all the great things in life.

  He was so busy trying not to rehearse what he wanted to say that he didn’t see the moving van until he almost walked into it. Sylvia’s mother and father were wrestling with a dresser that had no drawers in it and that still looked like it weighed more than both of them together. Sylvia was playing in the front yard with a purple ball.

  “Where are you going?” Owen asked. The moving van gaped open on the street while Sylvia’s mother and father strained the dresser up the ramp.

  “To Elgin,” Sylvia said. “My father’s company is moving him.” It looked to Owen like Sylvia’s mother and father were moving themselves, but he didn’t say anything. He fingered the ring in his pocket. Not having anything rehearsed, he had no words to fall back on when it turned out the situation was completely different from what he had expected.

  So he asked her if she would walk with him to the river.

  “We have a new house in Elgin,” Sylvia said when they were walking. “It’s a big white one with a swimming pool.”

  “A swimming pool!” It seemed impossible, such a luxury.

  “And a big tree with a swing and a fence so we can have a dog.”

  “Has it got a haunted house?” Owen asked, and she said she didn’t think so. There was no Dead Man’s Hill and no woods and no river, either.

  “But you’re going to come to the same school, right?” Owen said.

  “No. I’m going to a brand-new school with room for five hundred kids. And I get to go on a school bus. Every day,” she added.

  It wasn’t fair. A swimming pool and a school bus, and a different school where if a plane crashed into the classroom he’d never make it in time to save her.

  “You probably won’t have the Bog Man’s wife,” Owen said then.

  “Who?” she said. So he had to tell her the story, which had to start with the Bog Man and his problems with radioactive minerals. And when he finished telling how Leonard had spoken with the Bog Man’s wife in the haunted house and how Owen had spoken to her in the hospital, he had to tell her about listening on Andy’s crystal radio at midnight while a flying saucer flew straight over their snowfort on Dead Man’s Hill to steal Brinks’ cow. And he had to tell about Uncle Lorne and Mrs. Foster and how the wreckage looked the day that father saved his son from the train, and about the weird illness they’d caught from getting too close to the giant squid’s poison. And what it had felt like in the ditch when the fire was all around him.

  They walked along the ridge by the river, both of them eyeing the water in case the giant squid came to the surface. The river was brown and slow and peaceful. It was hard to imagine a terrifying beast lurking in that water.

  Owen worried the ring in his pocket and tried to think of how he could ask Sylvia to marry him. Because now that he really knew her — now that they were walking and talking together — he could tell that she was the only person in the world for him. It was all in how she smiled about Horace stuck in the roof, and wasn’t revolted when he explained about the itchy blotches that had been inside his mouth. It was how she hooked her hair behind her ear and then asked just the right question to get him started again. And how she had good stories, too, like when her father hurt his back picking up a tiddlywink and then went around on his hands and knees for the next two days.

  And especially, it was in how the time with her rushed by like water in a river swollen with rain. It was the opposite of being trapped in a dusty tomb for a thousand years, and just as good as sitting in the apple tree in the bull’s field flying a fighter jet with the fate of the Free World hanging on your shoulders.

  They sat down by a big fir near the river and Owen took out the copper wire ring. He handed it to her and she looked at him.

  He panicked. If only he’d thought of exactly what to say, then he could have said it, even though his heart was racing and his head was suddenly full of fog. He’d told her every story and every adventure that had ever happened to him. But now, when it most counted, he had a hard time getting even one word out.

  “Is this for me?” she asked. He nodded. How could he ask her to marry him when she was moving away?

  “It fits perfectly,” she said, sliding it on her thumb. It was too big for all her other fingers, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  “When you put it on,” he said finally, “you become invisible.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “Except to me,” he said. “I’m the only one.” What he meant to say was that he was the only one who saw her that night in the winter when he’d been walking back from hockey with Andy and she’d appeared in the window of the school, playing the piano, bathed in light.

  But he didn’t have time to say all that, because she turned suddenly and said, “Look!”

  There it was, out on the river in plain daylight. It was huge and black and moved with the speed of a shadow.

  Owen and Sylvia stood together and shielded their eyes with their hands. The sun was suddenly so bright directly where they were looking. There was a terrible disturbance on the water — they could tell by the flashing of the sunlight on the surface — and then just as suddenly as it had appeared, the black menace was gone.

  “What was that?” they both asked at exactly the same time, and they raced to the water’s edge together. Whatever it was ripped waves against the shore and turned the wind suddenly hot, then cool. It left the same kind of electric charge in the air as Owen had smelled that terrible day on the railroad tracks.

  “Was that the giant squid?” Sylvia asked.

  “I don’t know,” Owen said.

  They scanned the horizon together but the black menace had moved on, and then it was time for Sylvia to go. He walked her back to her house, where the moving van was full and her parents sat on the steps blank-eyed, their clothes dirty.

  “Are you ready to go, Sylvia?” her father said.

  “Almost,” Sylvia said.

  She went in the house for a moment and came back out with Uncle Lorne’s gargoyled ashtray.

  “I think I should give you back Doom Monkey’s Atrocious Hat. In case you need some special powers.”

  Owen accepted it, and then they both stood silent, not sure what to do next.

  Finally Owen said, “Have fun swimming,” and he turned and ran down the road, right past Sylvia’s parents, who were watching him. Past the moving van, past her house. He ran down the road and out by the river, his head erect, arms pumping, the tears streaming down his face.

  Finally, when he got to the spot where he and Sylvia had seen the giant squid, or whatever that was, he whirled like an Olympian and flung the Atrocious Hat into the main channel. It splashed and bobbed and floated and was picked up by the lazy current.

  Owen stood watching for a very long time as it drifted away, until it became as small as a speck, bobbing and spinning in the vastness of time, heading for the ocean.

  About the Publisher

  GROUNDWOOD BOOKS, established in 1978, is dedicated to the production of children’s books for all ages, including fiction, picture books and non-fiction. We publish in Canada, the United States and Latin America. Our books aim to be of the highest possible quality in both language and illustration. Our primary focus has been on works by Canadians, though we sometimes also buy outstanding books from other countries.

  Many of our books tell the stories of people whose voices are not always heard in this age of global publishing by media conglomerates. Books by the First Peoples of this hemisph
ere have always been a special interest, as have those of others who through circumstance have been marginalized and whose contribution to our society is not always visible. Since 1998 we have been publishing works by people of Latin American origin living in the Americas both in English and in Spanish under our Libros Tigrillo imprint.

  We believe that by reflecting intensely individual experiences, our books are of universal interest. The fact that our authors are published around the world attests to this and to their quality. Even more important, our books are read and loved by children all over the globe.