by Dean Ing
As evening approached and Coleman Hardin set his parking brake in the driveway, he smiled at the sight of his son, who stood waving a welcome in sprinkling rain even though he stayed fully dry, which suggested that Charlie had been elsewhere seconds earlier. It was almost, he thought, as if the boy had some kind of radar. In fact, this is exactly what Charlie did have—in his dog. A hundred cars a day might move downhill toward the Hardin residence without drawing the least show of interest from Lint. Brakes squealed, or whined, or did a half-dozen other animal imitations down that hill, but the Hardin sedan’s faint screech was a whispery song that Lint distinguished from any other. That song was too faint for any human ears but whatever the dog might be doing, when those floppy ears came to attention Charlie knew which Plymouth, of all the vehicles on earth, was about to enter their driveway.
The weather often chose which dinner Willa Hardin would prepare. Today the signs of her choice had hung in the air like delicious dust: chicken and dumplings, a Hardin favorite on evenings like this, when storm clouds hung in blankets over the city.
Charlie and his dad were ravaging their dessert of oatmeal cookies when the telephone rang. Coleman Hardin sighed and stood up because, while his wife answered the hallway phone—their only phone—as all good wives were expected to, calls were almost always for men. But Willa Hardin announced with a hint of “la-de-daa” in her tone that the call was for Charlie.
People of Charlie’s age were encouraged in those days, and for no very good reason, to leave telephones to adults, as though electrons were very expensive things not to be spent by children. A faint pang of alarm sounded between Charlie’s ears to share space with the guilt he had nearly forgotten, but he moved into the hall with a show of nonchalance.
Charlie’s inner alarm rang louder when he heard Aaron’s warning. “Listen, guy, I’ve been thinking about Roy,” said Aaron.
“Then I reckon you don’t have a whole lot on your mind,” Charlie retorted.
“I wouldn’t, if you didn’t live across the street from him,” Aaron said, in no mood for banter.
“Is that all the reason you called?”
Aaron pressed on. “I guess you remember how Roy likes to tattle. It bothers me to think what a pesty little cuss he is. If you had anything you really, really didn’t want other folks to know, Roy’s the last person a smart guy would tell about it. Just wanted you to be careful.”
“Why sure, anybody would know that much,” said Charlie. “Even if Roy wouldn’t have the gumption to go check up on whatever I told him, which I won’t, Sue Ann might,” he joked.
Aaron, without amusement and just to prove his point, said, “Or Jackie.” After a moment he added, “Charlie? You there?”
“Uh-huh. Listen, I gotta go. You know how my mom is.”
“Yeah, mine too.” But now Aaron was talking to a dial tone.
Ordinarily, Jackie would have hidden the stub of his cigarillo and hurried home as the storm approached, knowing how his gram feared lightning. Furthermore, she had a carved-in-granite rule that whatever villainy he was up to in the afternoon, he must be home by five o’clock without fail. Gram was a real boogerbear about that.
But it was still only the dregs of afternoon, and Jackie felt sure he could beat Gram’s deadline. Besides, the prospect of a fast run to the creek and a foray up that old storm drain, a dare he had never considered until a lesser boy claimed it on this very day, was a risk Jackie could not resist. It should take only a few minutes to learn, one way or the other, how much of Charlie Hardin’s tale might be true.
Jackie was rain-soaked enough to feel a chill wind before he climbed up into the mouth of the drain pipe and hunkered down to catch his breath. The gooseflesh on his arms and scalp owed less to the weather than to the stench and the deep forbidding blackness ahead, but hadn’t Charlie Hardin done it? At least he’d said he had. Charlie had made no mention of candles or flashlights, but the pack of paper matches in Jackie’s pocket was nearly complete. And later he could always claim he hadn’t had any matches, just to gold-plate his boast. Jackie lit a match and scuttled forward shielding his source of light from a faint musty air current.
Very soon he bunged his toe a nasty wallop against a D-Word smaller pipe, fetched it a mighty curse, and had to fumble for another match in a darkness that was not quite so deep when he turned around to face the creek. After two more matches he noticed that the blackness was less profound as he moved forward, and this made him bold enough to continue despite a soft rasping that got louder with every step. He recognized what it was, finally, because Gram made noises like that when sleeping off her wine sozzlings. Funny that Charlie hadn’t mentioned snoring but in Jackie’s experience, when a person snored like that you had to wake her with a Chinese gong.
When Jackie reached the pipe’s broken sidewall, he saw that a kerosene lamp several feet below the break provided soft light that streamed from an ordinary basement, and that the raspy snores came from a man in muddy overalls who squatted on an inverted bucket wearing only one shoe, arms crossed over his knees, head on his forearms. Until this moment Jackie would have bet heavily on a whopper of a lie by Master Charles Hardin. And then he saw what looked like money lying atop some kind of big metal thingamajig, and in that millisecond Jackie’s curiosity became greed. Was there more money in those boxes? Was money stored at the top of those stairs in the shadows? If somebody filled his pockets with it, would the sleeper ever miss it? And if he did, would Jackie give a hoot?
With a man sleeping so near that Jackie could have hawked a loogie on his shoe, this was no time to take another step without thinking it over. The several minutes Jackie spent studying stairs, supplies, even the stinks of the place, seemed like hours but his first cautious step across the pipe caused a tiny landslide that produced whispery sound effects on the basement floor. A snort escaped the sleeper and Jackie froze for a thirty-second eternity. Then gradually the snoring resumed, and Jackie slow-crept past the break in the pipe to observe the scene from a slightly higher perspective.
Jackie’s spirits were not helped by sounds from further up the pipe, where a tiny but growing waterfall trickled from somewhere near to become part of the brook between his feet. He heard a familiar medley of noises and recognized the squish of water between pavement and automobile tires. Creeping up the gentle slope of the pipe, Jackie soon discovered a complicated molding of concrete that fed water down into the storm drain from an iron grating. Moreover, he could feel a rough disk the size of a barrel top set into the uppermost part of the molded concrete, and knew it must be a manhole cover. He pushed against it; pushed again, harder. It did not give him even a shadow of a hint that it might budge. He put the crown of his head against it and shoved until it made him grunt, and only then did it move ever so slightly. He would have needed a second Jackie to do more.
He knew roughly where he was now, though he could not quite see the occasional cars that passed. In early dusk made more gloomy by the approaching cloudburst that had threatened all afternoon, he could see flashes of lightning that terrified his gram so much. It was time for him to be home with her, or even without her. He turned and waddled down the pipe, rainwater running between his shoes, intending to continue to the creek.
That is, he did until he heard that stairwell creak under footsteps a few yards away and heard someone with a Latino accent growl, “You were supposed to burn every piece of that bad paper.”
Jackie heard every word that followed, leaning toward the pipe crevice barely enough so that he could watch the men through one eye. Jackie heard that someone—Charlie, no doubt—had broken into the place, and not alone. He learned many other things too, including a strong likelihood that the sleeper in overalls had a gift for embroidering his exaggerations. Either that, or Charlie and Aaron had turned ferocious and Lint had grown big enough for a man to ride. After the Latino’s vicious slap, Jackie also learned that the water level was rising steadily in the pipe and that if he had the brains of a dandelion he would m
ake a dash for the creek this very second. Or the next, or the one after that, as soon as his courage returned.
But courage was still in short supply when the drunkard began to raise hunks of concrete to the drain pipe crevice, and the big Latino turned to his task at the strange machine before him. And if the man in overalls had only turned to stare up the pipe he would have seen, twenty feet away, an overweight schoolboy with eyes like saucers, his shoes awash in a stream. Above Jackie’s level the thunderstorm flashed and boomed and threatened to expel anything hiding in the drain system. A few yards below Jackie’s level, fumbling to build a pointless dam in a growing torrent, a poor fool struggled to obey the orders of a bigger fool. And mere yards away, petrified with fear and more waterlogged by the second, crouched Jackie Rhett.
Trapped.
CHAPTER 19:
PROBABLY A RUNAWAY
Given his druthers, Charlie would have listened to favorite radio programs in his room all evening, but the approaching storm had contrary ideas. Radio waves of that time could be turned to hash by nature’s big static discharges. When mighty lightnings flickered across Texas in 1944, constant outbursts of static snarling out of a radio speaker made every program sound like a fight between two cats yowling in a gunnysack. Charlie shrugged and turned to the pages of Boy’s Life.
But later, because he read quietly, Charlie heard his dad answer the telephone. The conversation was brief and businesslike. Then husband and wife spoke hurriedly in low tones. Though Charlie did not usually overhear details of a juvenile officer’s work, he knew his mother was sometimes told.
The discussion became clearer as it moved to the kitchen. “Boy’s grandmother called the station,” said Coleman Hardin between hurried rustlings of his raincoat. “Redmon gave me the address, it’s not far. She insisted the boy never stays out this late without telling her. It’s an even bet we’ll find him at the Greyhound terminal.”
Charlie missed his mom’s next words but not his dad’s reply. “Because I know his family situation, if you can call it that, and he’s probably a runaway. That old lady’s no lady.”
Moments later the back door banged and the Plymouth thrummed off into the dusk leaving Charlie to wonder at the mysteries of his father’s work. But the mystery and the wondering fled when he left his room and saw the hall light fall on the telephone note pad. Imprints of familiar handwriting had left shadows on the blank page, and Charlie knew that surname, and his mind leaped to connect the day’s events. In an instant he knew that his father lacked some important facts.
When he announced that he was going “out back,” Charlie knew his mother expected that he would be continuing some project in the garage, which was nowhere near as “out back” as he really intended to go. To support her impression he turned the workbench light on before he left at a run without a jacket, forbidding Lint to follow.
He tootle-de-ooted from the eaves outside Aaron’s bedroom until he was dizzy, but at length his pal raised the window a few inches. As the patter of rain increased they did not need to speak in whispers. The last piece of Charlie’s bulletin was, “And you know he’d never hide from his gram; shoot, Aaron, she’s the one that hides him. You know why he swipes things. He’s like he is ’cause he’s like she is.”
“And you had to go blab everything to him, like a dummy,” said Aaron, disgusted.
“Not everything. In fact, I left a lot out.”
“I know you, guy, and it’s just like you to stick a barrel of made-up stuff in, like a dummy.”
“Will you quit saying that?” Charlie begged.
“I will when you quit doing it,” was the reply. “Does your mom know you’re here?”
“I’m supposed to be in our garage. And I bet I know where Jackie is, and it’s in a nice dry basement next to a sewer pipe. But I’m not going in there again.” Charlie shivered, though the stormy breeze was not chill. During the past few seconds a distant clamor had drawn nearer from up the street, loud enough now to compete with a heavy sprinkle of rain. Charlie put up a hand for silence. “Hey. You hear that?”
Both boys listened with gazes locked while the siren of a speeding police car told them, as clearly as if in words, what it was doing. It slowed through that block and stopped not far beyond, as the whine of its siren subsided to a gurgle.
The distance from Aaron’s home to the Ice House was exactly one and a half blocks. “Uh-oh,” said the boys in unison.
Jackie’s gram had wondered out loud why a juvenile officer was lallygagging around on her porch when he should be combing the city, and she said so, in colorful language. Coleman Hardin thanked her and drove to his office at the police station, then sent a pair of plainclothes officers to check the rail and bus stations.
Moments later he learned that his friend, police lieutenant “Cotton” Redmon, had taken a call only minutes before from a Mr. Yansen concerning boys and a drunken counterfeiter. Police radios fared little better than commercial programs in such troublesome weather, but the police dispatcher had Yansen’s address. Hardin could see at a glance that all this sudden muddle of police business was not far from his own neighborhood. Was it possible that young Jackie Rhett was involved? He could settle it one way or the other if he followed Cotton Redmon.
The old Dane had finally mustered his courage enough to call the authorities, but found himself tongue-tied when a uniformed police lieutenant showed up with siren wailing. The combination of his Danish accent, the growing fireworks of the storm, and the old fellow’s case of nervous hesitation when facing a uniform, stole most of his English and tested the officer’s patience to the limit. When Coleman Hardin arrived a few minutes later in a business suit under his raincoat, Mr. Yansen recognized him as a customer and then the facts practically tumbled out. In truth, the facts poured forth in such a heap they needed sorting out like soiled laundry.
Before disappearing from home Jackie had paused long enough to promise Mrs. Rhett a considerable sum of “new money.” Now, Hardin asked whether it was, perhaps, counterfeit money? Yansen could not vouch for any names, but he recognized the description of Jackie. Neh, he said, not dat thieving scamp. But he declared that the bills he had glimpsed were false beyond any possible doubt; practically parodies of money.
The two boys, said Yansen, were often together, sometimes with a small dog of forgettable features. At this, Redmon glanced at his companion. “Coleman, doesn’t your boy have a dog?”
“A joke of a dog,” Hardin replied, smiling. “Not a snarl in him. The one that stood fast against a reeling drunkard sounds more like a bull terrier. I expect Lint is at home hiding from all this thunder about now.”
Yansen had been sitting thoughtfully, drawing now and then on his pipe, but now he perked up. “Lint? Yah, de only name I heard.”
As the men exchanged blinks, lightning struck so near that its blast of thunder began with the air-ripping flutter of an artillery shell.
Redmon spoke first: “The house can’t be far off, but we’ll need more men for a search.”
Hardin sighed. “That radio in your car might as well be a tin can and a string, Cotton. Mr. Yansen, can we use your phone?”
Aaron needed ten seconds to solve the immediate problem, sliding out his window and leading Charlie to the Fischer garage. He located his old Cub Scout tent, a rectangle of canvas that would barely cover two boys, and helped Charlie drag it up to branches of the backyard hackberry tree. In the long ago of second grade, high up that tree, they had fashioned their crow’s nest. Its one virtue was that a boy perched higher than any neighborhood roof could see halfway to Mars—or at any rate, well beyond the Ice House. The little store was near enough that patrons might be identified from that rickety perch. But short lengths of two-by-fours nailed to branches by children had not served them for more than a season, and no one had monkeyed up that flint-barked tree for years.
Aaron struggled up inside the canvas next to Charlie and took a death-grip on a branch the thickness of his thumb. He would have refused
to plant his rump on this flexible swaying contraption now except for one fact: the hackberry was on Fischer property, sort of. Aaron could honestly face his parents and claim he had not left home at night in such weather. Also, he could not deny that this demented notion had been his own idea.
As a Plymouth sedan pulled up beside the distant police car, Aaron stiffened. “Charlie, is that your dad?”
“Shut up,” Charlie advised. “I’m thinking.”
“Better late than never,” said Aaron.
“You’re hogging the tent,” said Charlie.
“You want me to get wet?”
“Poor you, and tell me who thunk this up. Listen, they’re gonna find us drowned up here anyway,” was the reply. “So if you’re so durn smart, what are we supposed to do up here?”
“Watch, I guess.”
“You mean watch which one of us gets blown down from here first?” The storm’s answer was a thunderclap.
Aaron’s was almost as loud. “Maybe! I believe I remember somebody all out of ideas, two minutes ago, sneaking up outside my window and hoo-hooing for help.”
“Yeah, so you brung me out here up a tree in a cloudburst. Closer to the lightning. Thanks a bunch, guy,” Charlie shouted back.
“You’re free to leave any time, Charlie Hardin.”
“Not ’til you let go of my belt,” Charlie said.
Doing his best to sit erect high in a wet swaying tree, Aaron saw in lightning flashes that the most secure thing for him to hang onto was Charlie. He found another branch to grasp but Charlie remained firmly planted. After a moment Aaron said, “I have to go.”
Charlie, scornful: “What; you have homework or something?”
