by Richard Peck
By now my eyes were staring at the back of my skull. “I have a message for a girl name of Heather that comes to her from the Great Beyond,” I moaned in a truly hideous voice. “This is your grandmother speaking, Heather, honey,” I continued, squeaking like an old lady.
“I am so sure,” Heather said to her group. “How could she know my family, she’s so scruff. Besides, Grandma isn’t in the Great Beyond. She’s down in Sun City, Arizona.”
“It is I, Heather, honey,” I squeaked hollowly, “Grandma, down here in—ah—Sun City. Just wanted to say hello and . . . stay as sweet as you are, precious.”
“Wig me out,” said Heather, scratching at her little golden curls with her wand. “If you’re so smart,” she said to me, “what’s my grandma’s name?”
I had her there.
“Why, Heather, honey,” I answered in a real far-off voice, “you know my name as well as your own. We were always one of the First Families of Bluff City. Silly child, I am the former LETTY SHAMBAUGH.”
Heather’s wand clattered to the floor. “Grandma!” she shrieked, both wigging and zeeking right out. Even her tutu collapsed in a quivering pink mass. As her group closed around her pale and trembling form, the pig girl rose up, shouting, “Somebody go for a guidance counselor for Heather!” The pig straightened her picture hat in a businesslike way, ready to assume command of the group.
I withdrew.
That was the only bright spot in a dismal morning. We moved from Halloween party to Halloween party, all at the taxpayers’ expense. After my run-in with Heather’s bunch nobody would come near me. Several whispered remarks, though, and pointed my way.
I noticed Jeremy wasn’t doing much better. In every class there was a bunch of boys in a tighter clump than the girls. But Jeremy was never one of them.
He sat forlorn and friendless at a desk while the others entertained themselves by pouring Halloween punch from paper cups on one another. Occasionally one of them would come over to drum on Jeremy’s bowl with a pencil. Otherwise, he seemed to be a perfect outcast.
I supposed Jeremy, being right smart, didn’t fit in. The dumb ones always make the best followers. Still, he was one lonesome kid. I know the feeling.
By noon I was up to here with Bluffleigh Heights Magnet Middle School. We all were following an evil cooking smell to a place called the cafeteria when I remarked to Jeremy, “How’s about you and me playing hooky?”
“Playing what?” he said, stumping along on his big silver legs.
“It’s a rotten shame to waste the day in a place like this,” I said. “Besides, I’ve got to start thinking about getting back you-know-where. Tonight’s the night I’m to report to Old Man Leverette when those boys are going to make a mess of his front porch. I just naturally have to be there to teach—”
“Oh, I don’t think you can get back that quick, Blossom.” He spoke in a rush, like he didn’t want me to go. “But we can cut out of school if you want to. How about checking out the mall? We could always cruise past Radio Shack and have a look at their components.”
It didn’t sound like my kind of place. We made a sharp turn just before the cafeteria and slipped outside through a fire door. A person couldn’t hear herself think in that school.
“Now where?” Jeremy wondered.
“Bluff City.” I spoke firmly. He reminded me of Daisy-Rae and Roderick. It was uphill work to get them into town, too. “There’s got to be something left of the town I knew, and I mean to find it, Jeremy. I know curiosity killed the cat. But satisfaction brought that cat back.”
“It’s a long way,” he said, “and this costume is pretty heavy.”
I thought he might slip back home and change into his regular clothes. I had no doubt he could pull this off, as his mama was not a noticing kind of woman. Besides, she’d be at her . . . designer sheet luncheon. But he pointed out that since I was going dressed as I was, he’d better stick to his costume.
Away we labored over the curving streets of Bluffleigh Heights on a brisk autumn afternoon seventy years hence.
Jeremy was a good companion, though mostly quiet inside his fogbound bowl. We walked for a quarter of an hour, and still I could see nothing familiar. It’s a sight how homesick a person can get this near home.
What looked like pastureland in Old Man Leverette’s south forty turned out to be something called the Little League field. When we came to where the old streetcar trestle spanned Snake Creek, there was only a wide highway bridge choked with automobiles speeding past a 7-Eleven store at the far end.
A lump was fast forming in my throat. Being a sensitive type, Jeremy noticed. His spectacles were steamed up, and his bowl was blurry; but he didn’t miss much. “Tell me what it was like, Blossom. The olden days, I mean.”
Since he seemed to know no history whatsoever, I told him various true stories.
One of them was how I happened to borrow a chicken from Old Man Leverette. That just naturally brought up the swimming hole in Leverette’s Woods and how I chanced to observe Alexander Armsworth and his cronies swimming and smoking in the altogether.
I went on to tell him about Mr. Ambrose Lacy, who had both Miss Spaulding and Miss Fuller on the string. I told him about Letty Shambaugh and her club and how Alexander took her to the moving pictures. And that brought up Daisy-Rae and Roderick. I worked in pretty nearly everybody.
I even mentioned how my mama’s occult Powers had warned her of the old abandoned Leverette farmhouse and its eerie Vibrations.
“She was plugging into my malfunctioning electronic impulses,” Jeremy observed. “There are people who can pick up shortwave radio on their hearing aids and false teeth. Your mom is probably a natural transistor.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” I said.
All this conversation carried us right into town. There beside a busy street was a sign that read:
WELCOME TO BLUFF CITY
68,002
“Sixty-eight thousand and two what?”
Jeremy blinked. “People.”
“Well, I’ll be a ring-tailed monkey!” I exclaimed.
On we went, deeper into this swollen Bluff City. Then, with minds of their own, my feet swerved away from the sidewalk. We took off across a vacant lot and down an alley.
Jeremy had to struggle along in his Galaxy boots over ruts and a number of objects labeled NO DEPOSIT, NO RETURN. “Where are we heading?” He peered anxiously at the backs of various buildings.
“I’m switched if I know,” I said. “It just feels right.”
It wasn’t a minute more before I saw a familiar sight against the sky. It was the roof and bell tower of Horace Mann School. The bell tower was boarded up, and there were missing shingles on the roof; but my eyes misted over at sight of the old place.
Dragging Jeremy along, I said, “Well, of course. It’s all crystal clear to me now. This route we’ve been following down back alleys was once the streetcar right-of-way. Many’s the time I’ve walked the rails along here.”
Grunting to keep up, Jeremy followed my skipping form into the old schoolyard.
“And here’s where we had our graduation day maypole dance last—”
A sign above the schoolhouse door caught my eye. It was a new one, and it read:
MAE SPAULDING MEMORIAL
MEDIA CENTER
Substance Abuse Counseling Available
I blinked. This was more information than I could . . . program. Instead, I grabbed Jeremy’s puffy sleeve. “And right across the road is Bluff City High—”
But across the paved street was no such thing. My old high school had been leveled. In its place was a large, rude structure topped by a gaudy sign:
INTOWN MOTEL
DAY RATES WATER BEDS CABLE TV
ICE MACHINES
My heart sank. They had erased my world.
14
A MOMENT PASSED before I felt Jeremy’s hand patting my arm.
“I’m sorry, Blossom.” He spoke in a small, kindly voice.<
br />
“What happened to my world? There’s nothing left. It just as well never have existed.”
“It’s a . . . rotten shame,” he said.
“I’m grossed out, Jeremy,” I whimpered.
But it’s always darkest before the dawn, as I’ve often said. I gathered up my courage, ready to scout out more hopeful landmarks than these.
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,”
I said to him.
“That’s a good attitude,” Jeremy remarked.
“It’s Hamlet. Act Two.”
On we went where the streetcar tracks had been until we came to a paved yard with rows of little mechanical hitching posts. A sign read:
METERED PARKING
I knew where we were now. Our path was crossing Fairview Avenue, the proud street lined with the all-brick homes of the well-to-do. “Letty Shambaugh lived in that very house.” I pointed to the large and tasteful residence.
But her porch had been hacked off. A shutter or two hung from a single hinge. The houses on either side were gone, like missing teeth. “Must have been a fire,” I remarked.
“Several,” Jeremy said. “This neighborhood hasn’t hit bottom yet, but it’s on the way down.”
Overshadowing the entire street was a tremendous building with blank sides and skylights in the roof. We detoured from our path to read a sign over the entrance:
FULLER MEMORIAL RECREATIONAL FACILITY
JOGGING TRACK HANDBALL COURTS SENSIBLE WEIGHT REDUCTION INTERPRETIVE DANCE
“Eureka!” I exclaimed, smacking my forehead. “Don’t you get it, Jeremy?”
He didn’t seem to.
“This here recreational facility is named in memory of Miss Fuller, the Girls’ Gym teacher. It’s bound to be!”
Jeremy rubbed the bowl near his chin.
“And that media center back yonder is named in memory of Miss Spaulding.”
Jeremy nodded.
“Miss Spaulding,” I explained, “and Miss Fuller. They kept their maiden names right to the grave!”
“And that was good?” he pondered.
“Shoot, yes. It means that neither one of them fell into the clutches of Mr. Ambrose Lacy and married that two-timing polecat.”
“Oh.”
“I bet you I had something to do with that.” I grinned evilly. “In fact, I ought to be getting back to 1914 this very minute, and—”
“Come on, Blossom.” Jeremy caught up my hand and pulled me along back toward the streetcar right-of-way. “Let’s see some more. This is interesting. Really.”
And of course it was. And about to get more so.
As we threaded our way along through the alleys, I knew we’d soon come to the place where me and Mama lived. Jeremy knew, too, as I’d told him how me and her occupied a property hard by the tracks right behind Alexander Armsworth’s barn.
As we trudged along, Jeremy said, “You won’t be too disappointed if—”
“Not me. Our place was fixing to fall down even back then. If Letty’s big house hasn’t held up, I can’t expect too much from our old dump.”
Which was just as well. When we came to the home of my youth, there was nothing there but smoothly mowed grass and a tremendous big horse tank with soft sides of a bright blue color. It was brimming with water, but not a horse in sight.
“Well, that’s where me and Mama lived,” I said, just lightly stroking her fur piece. “But what in the Sam Hill do you call that big soft horse tank?”
“That’s an aboveground swimming pool,” Jeremy said. “But look, Blossom, that barn you told me about is still here.”
And so it was. I chanced a look at it from the corner of my eye. The barn on the old Armsworth property stood where it always had, in good repair, too.
I shrank then and felt the chill winds of autumn around my heart. Oh, I didn’t fear that barn because it had once been haunted. It wasn’t the past that worried me. It was this future.
His globe glancing everywhere, Jeremy waddled to the far side of the barn while I remained rooted to the spot. He waved a padded arm for me to follow, but I wouldn’t. I still felt the chill.
Presently I saw his silver form returning around the corner of the bam. “It’s still there, Blossom,” he said, loud inside his bowl. “A great big old house with fancy porches and turrets and a lot of colored glass over the doors. It’s nice.”
“Well,” I said thoughtfully, “it was always one of the better addresses.”
“And guess what, Blossom. It’s still being lived in. They haven’t turned it into a media center or a recreational facility or a free clinic or anything. There are curtains at all the windows and pots of flowers on the sills. There’s a power mower on the lawn, and they’ve even got all their leaves bagged. There’s a Buick Century in the driveway. Come on, let’s check the place out. We can always pull the old trick-or-treat number on them.” Jeremy bounced in his space boots and reached for my hand.
But I drew it back.
I thought of the Armsworth mansion as I’d known it. I smelled bacon frying and thought of the Armsworths having their breakfast every morning as I made my way to school across their property. I thought of Alexander Armsworth. And not just as the kid I’d known. I thought of myself, too, as I was and as I would be.
“No, Jeremy,” I said. “I better not find out who those people are up in the house now. There’s some things about the future a person ought not to know. I think we should turn back now.”
“Back?” Jeremy said faintly. His hand was still out for mine.
“Back to Bluffleigh Heights, and then I think we better say our good-byes.”
There was a small lump in my throat, for many reasons, and a small lump in Jeremy’s, too. I noticed it just under the rim of his bowl.
15
WE HAD NO TROUBLE getting past Jeremy’s mama and back up to his room. It was just evening, and we had the shadowy upstairs to ourselves. Tiffany wasn’t home. The mall hadn’t closed.
The dark corners made the place more like the old abandoned Leverette farmhouse. Once in his room with the door closed behind us, Jeremy reached for the light switch, but I drew his hand away.
“I might get back better in the dark,” I said.
He turned away from me and eased the fishbowl off his head. “Oh, wow. I’m glad to get out of that thing. I guess this is about my last year for Halloween, the costume part at least.”
His head of hair was faintly red in the failing light. It stood up in peaks. He slipped off his hubcaps and massaged his knees. Then he took off his spectacles and breathed on them. He was only playing for time.
“I’ve had a real nice visit, Jeremy. Many thanks.”
“My pleasure,” he said politely. I reckon his voice was changing, for it cracked then. “Come back any . . . time.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “But I guess I can figure how I happened to pay this particular call.”
“There were the electrical storms,” he said, “one at my end and one at—”
“I doubt it was the weather, Jeremy. I figure maybe you needed a friend.”
He wasn’t sure. “Looks like you came a really long way just to spend a little time with me.”
“Well, there’s nothing more important than friendship,” I said. “I get a little lonesome now and again myself. Maybe I came for us both.”
“Seems like you just got here, and now you’re leaving.”
“Well, that’s me all over,” I told him. “Busy every minute. Tonight I’ll be at Old Man Leverette’s town residence, teaching Alexander’s bunch a lesson. Then tomorrow night I’ll be right here in this very house, telling fortunes.
“Did I tell you we of the freshman class are running your place as a Haunted House? We’re going to stretch Champ Ferguson out on the drainboard as a monster and run a crackerjack dungeon and model torture chamber in your cellar. We’re going to have ghosts in your corners and bats in your belfry. We’re going to charge
ten cents.”
“It sounds great,” Jeremy said with his head down. “Wish I could come along.”
But he couldn’t, and he knew it.
“You can be there in . . . spirit,” I said. “You can think of us tomorrow night seventy years ago. I could even tell my fortunes right here in your room. Shall I?”
He nodded. His eyes were glistening. Maybe mine were, too.
“Blossom, since you’ve got to be going, I guess I can tell you this.” Jeremy rubbed one of his padded legs with his big boot. “I haven’t had too much experience with knowing girls. But I really like you, a lot. Of course, you’re . . . different.”
“Oh, well, shoot,” I said, my face a little warm, “I’ve been called different even in my own time.”
Jeremy smiled a little and scratched his red thatch. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, if I was Alexander Armsworth, it wouldn’t be Letty Shambaugh I was taking to the . . . moving pictures.”
The last light left the room then. There was nobody to see, and with any luck I’d soon be gone. So I thought: Oh, well, shoot. Then I stepped forward and gave Jeremy a little kiss good-bye.
He took it real well. Then he said, “Blossom, when you’re gone, how will I know you were ever really here? I see you’re real now, but later I might wonder.”
“Like I was only a stage you were going through?” I asked him. “And later you outgrew it?”
“Like that,” he said, “basically.”
I chanced to glance down at my spelling medal then. It was hanging by a thread from Mama’s old ratty coat. I’d sworn to wear that medal till it fell off me. I gave it a little tug, and it came loose in my hand.
“Here.” I held it out to him. “I was the champion speller of Horace Mann School. This medal was at one time my most prized possession. Take it to remember me by. It will always remind you that you have a friend, a good old friend.”
Jeremy reached out and pulled back. “Tell you what, Blossom. Take it along with you on your trip and hide it somewhere in this house, somewhere I can find it later on if I begin to forget. Sometime when I’m lonesome again, like I was before you came.”
