It's Up to Charlie Hardin

by Dean Ing

  “Your turn! You’re supposed to get it,” cried Aaron, who was no more a slouch than Charlie at dodging blame. Both boys set off together, the glider a tantalizing wisp that flew at a sprinter’s pace. As the model began to settle far beyond them, it crossed the street and bounced merrily at the curb, vulnerable to anything on wheels.

  Charlie and Aaron might have waited for traffic to clear but Aaron, thinking more about tactics than about Charlie’s safety, remembered a phrase that was only an inch from magic. “It’s up to you, Charlie,” he said, and saw the fire of the fanatic kindle in Charlie’s eyes.

  Charlie darted across one lane ahead of a sedan, adjusted his path to avoid being collected by a coupe in the second lane, then realized a car in the third lane was moving in the opposing direction. Charlie stopped dead on the center stripe but the driver of the approaching car, suddenly alerted, swerved into the adjoining lane as he skidded to a halt. Since that lane was occupied by another car, a brief symphony of squalling rubber, car horns and Word-laden yells serenaded Charlie as he sped to the far curb and snatched his balsa prize up, then continued on at top speed to the lawn of the state capitol grounds.

  Nor did he stop then, seeing two drivers exit cars that stood crosswise and immobile while other traffic began to clog the street behind them. The capitol grounds provided Charlie with several screens of shrubbery, and he used them to abandon the scene, finally taking refuge behind a young couple, both sightseeing in uniform, who took no notice of the boy.

  By the time Charlie took advantage of bushes to squat and look for pursuers, the street traffic was moving again though Aaron was nowhere to be seen. Charlie moved to the broad central walkway leading to the capitol building, a massive pile of rosy granite that dominated the skyline. He waited for strollers to clear the area near him, then gave Aaron’s balsa bird an easy toss knowing that it would be a beacon for Aaron the way a pigeon draws a hawk. A few more modest flights proved that he was right, when Aaron appeared from distant bushes and raced to compete with Charlie in chasing down his toy.

  Charlie won. Mindful of the outcome of Aaron’s last flight, he prepared to resume the game with a modest toss until Aaron, ready to be the retriever, teased, “Remember if it goes in the street, I’m not as big an idiot as you are.”

  Charlie paused, his expression darkening. Was it fair for a guy to endanger his own property, urge a buddy to risk his neck for a heroic recovery, and then call the hero an idiot? The perfect accuracy of Aaron’s wisecrack only made it worse. “Not in the street,” he said, “but this one’s up to you, smart guy.” And with this, he sprinted across the lawn toward the nearby lily pond.

  Aaron guessed his friend’s intention and gave chase two paces behind, panting, “No, nuh-uh, it’s a dime, a dime, a dime,” to no effect. He knew that if the glider became water-soaked it would be too heavy to fly again until it dried out. Charlie hurled the zoom plane straight across the broad, tree-shaded pond, narrowly avoided splashing into it over the low curb, and stopped to watch the result. The toy looped, seemed destined to settle on cement, but suddenly plopped down on one of the platter-sized lily pads that decorated the scummy pond like green doilies on a greener tablecloth. Weighing only an ounce, it might still be flown again and lay temptingly near, no more than ten feet from dry cement. “Your turn,” said Charlie, hiding his relief.

  A whiskery old idler on a nearby bench laughed. “Look out for sharks, sprat.”

  Aaron hugged himself, toes touching the curb, and sent a gloomy look toward his wayward property. With a headshake: “Might as well be in the river,” he said.

  “Aw, it’s okay,” Charlie said. “I dare you to roll up your pants and wade over there.”

  “Could be water moccasins,” Aaron rejoined, and folded his arms. “You did that on purpose. Dares go first.”

  This was a common challenge; a boy who issued a dare must be willing to take the same risk. Charlie hesitated, searching the pond surface for any sign of poisonous water snakes, wondering how deep the pond might be, because the stagnant water, smelling of green scum, was not appealing. Then he saw the penny on the lily pad with the zoom plane.

  Rarely has one cent brought more sweeping change. Twenty feet distant on a second pad lay another coin, one of the gray steel wartime pennies. And unless Charlie’s eye lied, a coin that might have been a buffalo nickel sat impudently on a pad, a silent dare more potent than anything Aaron could say. Visiting young servicemen were known to use such ponds as wishing wells, foolishly tossing small coins at lily pads to impress girls foolish enough to be impressed.

  Charlie’s feet were already bare and as he rolled his pants as high as they would go, he said nothing about coins. Instead, he muttered about the danger, the genuinely icky smell of the pond, the unknown depths—and then sat on the low cement curb and eased his feet down in search of firm bottom.

  The bottom was only knee-deep, and it was cement, and slimy. And as Charlie moved out toward his goal, gliding along slowly as if on skates to avoid sloshing or, worse, a headlong fall, he had a moment of skin-prickling, wonderful clarity. He realized that the pond had been visited not by a few coin-tossers but by hundreds of them, maybe thousands, maybe bazillions. And for every tosser whose coin had found a lily pad there had been countless others whose coins had dropped through murk to the bottom. And suddenly Charlie knew that he would have no trouble replacing his mother’s clippers. Because in the scummy slime under his toes lay more round metal discs than he could count, and each one was worth at least One Cent. He stopped, sweeping a foot experimentally to broom the coins together. But even if he managed to shove them to the edge of the pond, the man on the bench was chuckling his enjoyment. Who knew how the old codger might complicate this operation?

  Aaron, because Charlie had stopped: “Getting deeper?”

  Charlie: “Stinks. Real bad. I think I’m gonna throw up.” A pantomime of a dry heave thrust Charlie’s head forward. He turned, shuffling with both feet, and moved back to the low curb, seeming to ignore old Mr. Benchman while giving every sign that, at any moment, he might deposit his breakfast across the cement near the man’s feet.

  “I don’t need this,” said Benchman to nobody in particular, rising with a grunt, limping out of Charlie’s life exactly as Charlie had hoped.

  “It’s okay, Charlie, you tried,” said Aaron, reaching over to help his pal from the pond; and with this proof of his devotion he assured himself of riches.

  Until that moment Charlie had thought he might retrieve the glider and only the few visible coins, leaving all the rest in their drowned condition until much later, perhaps at dusk, but certainly alone. Now, still looking after the departing old fellow who was well out of earshot, Charlie grinned. “I’m okay. Aaron, have I ever lied to you?”

  “Lotsa times. But if you say you’re—”

  “Not just fibs. Big old lies, guy.” Charlie’s gaze was intense, with the imaginary heat of uncounted wealth underfoot.

  Aaron blinked and thought it over. “Well, there was that time in—”

  Exasperated, Charlie burst out, “D-Word it, Aaron, just trust me, okay?”

  Aaron allowed full force to Charlie’s use of this forbidden Word and grimaced as if pained. “Okay, okay! What did I do, Charlie?”

  “Nothin’. It’s what you’re gonna do. If you trust me, lie down here and reach past the curb as far down as you can. It’s yucky and kinda cold on the bottom. But Aaron, Aaron, ohhh man, honest—you won’t care.”

  It was not his pal’s words that drew Aaron down on his belly so much as it was the earnest eye-roll that accompanied, “you won’t care.” For a few heartbeats, a tiny part of Aaron was afraid; not of Charlie, but of the unexplained, indeed, maybe the unexplainable. Then, reaching into the water so near Charlie’s shins that he could smell the scum on them, Aaron found the bottom. And not just the bottom, but what Charlie’s bare feet had shoved along ON the bottom, which explained everything.

  Aaron giggled, thunderstruck. “Oboy,
” he murmured, scrabbling about in the muck. “Oboyoboyoboyoboy, Charlie, this is it! This is where all the pennies in the world go to die. It’s like the elephant’s graveyard.” As he began to scud a handful of coins up the cement wall he risked a glance around, wary of prying eyes.

  Meanwhile Charlie, seeing that no one else had noticed two boys playing at the pond, slowly waded across to the pad with the nickel, then recovered the glider and its penny. There were fewer coins farther out, though the pond was no deeper there. Charlie knew he was losing some through sloppy footwork, but finally could feel that he was herding so many pennies, the sneaky little things were escaping around his toes. He became a more careful prospector now, leaving his new trove near the first one and leaving Aaron to deal with the spoils.

  After ten minutes of this Charlie began to tire. Besides, he itched to slide his fingers into riches as Aaron was doing. “Now you,” he said, plopping his rump on the curb, setting the glider aside.

  But wealth brings its own problems, and Aaron could not sit up without a struggle. He had filled his pockets lying full length, weighing himself down so much that his pants sagged dangerously below his waist as he scooted to a sitting position. “I can’t go out there. If I fall, I expect I’ll drown,” he said.

  “Then get away. There’s more, isn’t there?”

  “Lots,” said Aaron, taking a death grip on his pants. Soon, Charlie had taken Aaron’s place while Aaron waddled to the park bench and repositioned the contents of his pockets. Less tidy than his pal, Charlie spent less time rinsing bits of green guck from each palmful of coins with the result that what went into his pockets went in as colorful as a Disney cartoon.

  Presently, in part because a few passersby seemed almost ready to ask questions, Charlie took careful note of cracks in the cement and managed to sit up, intending to return for further strip-mining. With a glance toward Aaron: “How you doing?”

  “How do I look?” Aaron stood up, holding fast to his belt, and Charlie snickered. Aaron glared back. “Hey, you expect me to bury it someplace?”

  “You look like a squirrel,” said Charlie.

  “Try standing up and see how you like it,” Aaron countered, sitting down again.

  This was easier said than done but, with lumps the size of oranges weighting pockets fore and aft, Charlie joined his pal on the bench. They waited until no spectators were in sight and then, walking like brittle-boned little old men, they made their way to shrubbery far from walkways.

  It was Aaron who announced that one of them must empty his pockets and mount an expedition to find suitable containers. While Charlie thought about that, Aaron sighed, piled his coins on the ground between them, stood up to rearrange trousers showing patches of dampness, and said wistfully, “Could I have some of it?”

  Charlie, in a gruff off-handed way: “Not much. Only half.”

  “You’re keen,” Aaron replied, and set off in a loping shuffle.

  Soon Charlie had added his coins to the pile, and discovered a surprising number of nickels, a few dimes, and from some blessed madman, a single authentic, unimpeachable half-dollar coin the size of a milk bottle stopper. Many of the coins had lain in state long enough that they were hard to identify. Still, Indian heads were big, and Lincoln’s was small. Charlie would spit on a penny and rub it until its disguise wore thin, then start with another.

  He had hardly begun when Aaron returned with a discarded Dallas Morning News and a question. “We still going to the movie?”

  “I guess,” Charlie shrugged, though he had forgotten such trivia in the excitement of sudden wealth.

  “Then we can count this later.” As he spoke, Aaron was lining up sheets of newsprint, transferring the heavy coins to the center of the papers with cupped hands. Charlie watched, fascinated at this show of ingenuity, then noticed that Aaron was wrapping only half of the treasure as a wrinkled metal-filled tube. Without a word he chose several sheets of the remaining paper and copied Aaron’s work, twisting the ends like the wrapper of a colossal hard candy nugget.

  With a fresh goal and mindful of the fact that The Lone Ranger waits for no boy, they sprinted from the capitol grounds, trotted the next few blocks down Congress Avenue carrying their assets like footballs, and finally trudged exhausted into the last-minute line of boys at the Queen Theater. Not until they were at the ticket booth did they realize that every cent, including their original coins, was now wrapped in Dallas newsprint. Aaron loosened one twisted end and paid for both tickets. The ticket lady, experienced in the ways boys carried cash, touched the damp coins only with a fingertip sheathed in red rubber and nodded them past without comment.

  Inside, when Aaron turned toward the men’s room and Charlie asked him why, Aaron shamed him with a look, displaying palms that were a portrait of grime. “I’m gonna get popcorn and a Three Musketeers. Maybe go back again. But I’m not gonna touch any of it with these hands,” he promised.

  So Charlie, too, washed his hands, and later wolfed down two bags of popcorn and three Baby Ruth bars, and that night at supper, wondered why he had no appetite.

  CHAPTER 6:

  SECRETS OF THE STORM DRAIN

  On Sunday, the boys held a council of three—though Lint was not a voting member—in a favored refuge under the workbench in the Hardin garage. Counting the loot disabled their brains in different ways. “Half of forty-four dollars and sixty-three cents,” Aaron enthused, his eyes like brown moons as he gloated over coin stacks, “makes, uh—”

  “Plus the movie and the stuff we ate and the zoom plane,” Charlie itemized. “You remember what that came to?”

  “Nope. Don’t ask me, Charlie, it makes my head hurt. Besides, you found it. If I kept more than twenty bucks of this it’d be like cheating you. I don’t even know how to explain this to my folks.”

  “Me neither,” said Charlie. “So I’m not gonna. I found it fair and square.”

  “Stole it, you mean.”

  Charlie recoiled as if bitten. “I never! Who from?” Alerted by his master’s tone, Lint ceased sniffing at the coins. He knew that barking in such close quarters was rude so he contributed the faint growl this occasion seemed to call for.

  “I don’t know who from,” said Aaron, mostly to the growler. “Whoever owns the pond.”

  “For Pete’s sake, nobody owns it! No, wait a minute; everybody owns it, and some of it was right in plain sight for anybody, only nobody but us went and got it. So we earned it. I mean, it’s our durn state capitol, Aaron.”

  Nervous with doubt, Aaron said, “Wonder what the governor would say.”

  “You can find out. His house is right next to where we were flying the zoom plane.” This was true; the governor’s mansion faced the capitol building near Twelfth Street.

  “Aw, he’d say it was his.”

  “Then you go ask him, and we’ll do what he says.” The boys swapped stares. Charlie could see that his pal was giving the idea serious consideration, so, “We’d have to pay him back for all that stuff we ate,” he added quickly.

  This complication was too much, and Aaron’s position crumbled.

  “Then I guess it’s finders keepers,” he said, “but you told me there was lots more in the pond. Whose is that?”

  “We’ll leave it for the governor,” Charlie offered, charitable in his new wealth.

  So it was agreed that, while they had done nothing wrong, they’d better not do it again. This wisdom extended to avoiding any mention about their little expedition to an adult. Or to Sue Ann or Jackie or, in fact, anybody else on Planet Earth. “What we need is a bank,” Aaron said.

  Banks were another full-blown mystery, with Charlie suspicious that a bank would ask exactly the kind of questions they hoped to avoid, and Aaron just as worried that a bank would demand payment for keeping track of such a huge sum as theirs. The simplest solution, Aaron said, was for Charlie to use up nickels and dimes in buying new clippers, and for Aaron to beg a few paper coin tubes each week from different grocers.

&nb
sp; They had liberated a small flour sack to hold the coins, and neither boy wanted to risk hiding such riches where they might be discovered. Aaron was especially firm on the point since his mother had the habit of searching every corner of her house on washday looking for stray socks and such. “My mom’s a boogerbear on finding stuff. I can’t even hide a piece of taffy,” he complained.

  “If we can’t hide it at home, we’ve gotta do it like pirates,” Charlie said after a dozen ideas had been argued to pieces. “They kept stuff forever.”

  “Buried it,” Aaron nodded. “Yeah, but—nah, this stupid dog would just dig it up. Probably eat half of it. Remember those two cherry bombs we buried? Lint wasn’t even there when we hid ’em but he smelled ’em through the dirt. Chewed ’em to gumbo, too.”

  Drawn into the conversation by hearing his name, Lint awarded a tongue-lolling smile to the boys until he recognized his owner’s sad headshake for what it was. “I was afraid to pet him for a week,” said Charlie, who had great respect for gunpowder. “But you know what? I bet we could hide it under a rock too big for him.”

  “Or a hunk of concrete. There’s lots of it down at the storm pipe.” Years before, a ferocious downpour, channeled partly by several storm drains, had sent an epic flood down Shoal Creek, carrying entire trees to the river while the concrete drainpipe lay almost submerged. One of those leafy battering rams had struck the pipe sidelong, scant yards beyond the usual creekbed. After the creek returned to normal, occasional storms still poured from the drain’s broken mouth, but now hunks of concrete large and small lay scattered for half a block beside the creekbed.

  Instantly persuaded by such an easy solution, Charlie pocketed more than enough coins for the clippers and forbade Lint to follow. Presently the boys made their way to the creek carrying the sack, judging this curve of concrete too large, or that fragment too small, finally choosing one the size of a sofa cushion half-hidden under runners of ivy. Lifting it was full employment for them both, and beneath it scuttled a civilization of bugs they should have expected. They kicked the insects aside, Charlie holding the curved slab on edge with wary glances around them while Aaron dug a football-shaped hole in the dark, pungent earth.