Wanted . . . Mud Blossom

by Betsy Byars

  “Junior, you are responsible for that hamster.”

  “I know! I love being responsible for him! I didn’t know how much fun it would be to be responsible.”

  “That’s one of the reasons teachers do these things—to teach you responsibility.”

  “And it does, Pap. I’m—I don’t know—I’m more responsible than I ever thought I could be. I couldn’t be any more responsible if I tried.”

  “When you’re responsible for something, Junior, you don’t leave it unattended.”

  Pap had now straightened all the way and was looking down at Junior sternly from his full height.

  “It’s not unattended,” Junior said.

  “Who’s watching it? Vern and Michael?”

  “Nobody. That’s the beauty of it. It’s watching itself. I mean, it’s covered with boards—many, many boards. He can’t get out, Pap. This is the nicest little tunnel anybody ever made. He was so happy to get—Pap, wait for me!”

  Junior followed Pap through the living room.

  Something about the fast way Pap was moving made a feeling of dread creep into his happiness.

  Junior knew nothing had happened—nothing could have happened to a tunnel like his. It was absolutely escape-proof.

  Still, a small dark cloud had appeared directly over the tunnel. Junior needed to see his tunnel to send it away.

  On the porch, Junior passed Pap. He paused beside Mud who was scratching a flea behind his left ear.

  “Is that your tunnel yonder?” Pap asked, pointing toward the pines.

  Junior shielded his eyes with one hand.

  He didn’t answer. His arm began to tremble.

  A chill touched the back of his neck.

  For Junior saw the destruction. His hand dropped. Both hands closed, prayerlike, over his heart.

  Boards were everywhere. The boards he had laid with such care and pride. These boards had been tossed about as if by a tornadic force of nature. The exposed tunnel was a dark scar on the earth.

  “Pap!” Junior breathed the word with such horror that Pap put one hand on his shoulder.

  “Now, now, don’t get your tail in a knot until we see what’s happened.”

  “Pap!”

  They went down the steps and started across the yard together. Junior tried to break into a run, but his legs weren’t strong enough.

  “Now, now,” Pap said. “Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks.”

  But Junior knew it was worse.

  He ran, rubber-legged, and got to the trees first.

  He began picking up the boards, looking under each one.

  “Pap!” Each time he said the word, there was more horror in it.

  “Where is he, Pap? Where’s Scooty?”

  “It don’t look like he’s here.”

  “What happened? What happened?”

  Now Junior was clutching his chest the way Pap had clutched his when he had his heart attack.

  Pap scratched his head. “Well …”

  “But what could have happened? When I left—and that was just ten or fifteen minutes ago, Pap—when I left him, all the boards were in place. Everything was perfect. There was not one single, single crack in one single board …”

  Junior moved around the disaster area, examining overturned boards. Tears of misery began to roll unnoticed down his cheeks.

  “What happened?”

  “Junior, Junior, Junior,” Pap said. “You don’t put a hamster in a tunnel like that.”

  “Where is he? We’ve got to find him. Please, please help me find him.”

  Junior was flipping over boards he had flipped over two or three times before. He muttered with increasing apprehension, “Not here, not here. Where is he, Pap? Please help me find him. I’m responsible for this animal. If I don’t find him, Pap, I can never go to school again, never.”

  “You have to go to school, Junior.”

  “Not if I don’t find him. Help me, Pap!”

  Junior broke off and drew in his breath. He bent to inspect a piece of wood. “Pap, there’s dog pee on this board.”

  Pap braced one hand on his back and leaned over to take a look. As if he saw the direction Junior’s mind was taking he said, “Now, Junior, you don’t know that’s dog pee.”

  “And those are dog scratch marks!”

  “Junior,” Pap took his shoulder, “now don’t go jumping to conclusions.”

  Junior shook him off. “And, look, Pap. There is a paw print. Right there by the bedroom! And it’s a dog paw print. And it’s a big one. It’s Mud’s, not Dump’s.”

  Junior lifted his eyes from Scooty’s empty bedroom and looked at the porch. Mud lay at the edge of the steps in the afternoon sun, licking his leg.

  Junior’s eyes narrowed to slits. His heart turned to stone.

  He said one word, and that one word was a cold, hard, unforgiving accusation.

  “Mud.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Dirty Rotten Murderer

  “Dirty rotten murderer!”

  “Now, Junior …”

  “Dirty rotten murderer, come out from under there so I can murder you. See how it feels to be murdered! See how you like it!”

  At the first cry of “Dirty rotten murderer!” Mud had been on the porch. He stopped licking his leg and looked up, interested.

  At the second “Dirty rotten murderer!” he lowered his ears and watched Junior’s long staggering charge toward the porch.

  At the third “Dirty rotten murderer!” he did the only sensible thing for a dog to do. He slipped down the steps and disappeared under the porch.

  He had paused for a moment in the cool shadows of the steps to make sure the cry had been directed at him. When Junior’s face, distorted with anger, had appeared, he retreated behind an old truck tire.

  Junior tried to crawl in after Mud, but Pap held on to his ankles. “Now, now,” Pap said. “Hold on.”

  “Let go of me! Let go of me! I’m going to kill that dirty rotten murderer if it’s the last thing I do.”

  Mud decided to retreat farther. He moved behind the apple crate and lay down to see what was going to happen next.

  Mud’s vocabulary consisted of eight words—no, supper, go, bath, ride, possum, walk, and stay. He loved to hear supper, go (especially when it was preceded by let’s), ride, possum, and walk. He hated no, bath, and stay.

  But Mud also knew tone of voice. And the tone of voice in which “Dirty rotten murderer” had been thrown at him was not good.

  Mud, ears down, listened to the commotion at the edge of the house—Junior’s screams, Pap’s attempts to soothe.

  After a while, Mud got tired and he curled up behind the apple crate for a long wait.

  “Push us, Ralphie! Give us a push!”

  Ralphie’s brothers were calling from inside a Maytag cardboard box. The new washing machine had arrived that morning; and as soon as it had been unloaded, the brothers claimed the box.

  They were now poised at the top of the hill in the side yard, begging to be pushed over the top.

  “Mom’ll be home any minute,” Ralphie said, glancing at the street.

  “No! No! She won’t be back till after lunch!”

  His brothers’ voices, muted by cardboard, rose with enthusiasm.

  “You’re sure?”

  “We promise.”

  “Well, I won’t push you—”

  “P-LLLLEASE.”

  “I won’t push you, but I’ll get you right to the edge and you can do the rest. That way you’ll be pushing yourselves, all right?” Ralphie thought this might come in handy later, as an alibi, if the downhill plunge didn’t end happily.

  “All right!”

  Ralphie worked the Maytag box to the crest of the hill and stepped back. “Okay!” he shouted. “You can push yourselves if you want to. I can’t stop you.”

  The Maytag box came alive as the brothers worked to get it over the top of the hill. There was a long moment while the box paused in midair. The brothers screamed
with anticipation.

  Then the box went over.

  And as it plunged down the hill, end over end, Ralphie’s mother’s station wagon turned into the drive.

  Ralphie stepped back, holding up his hands to show he had had no part in the activity.

  The station wagon would have hit him if Ralphie had not jumped out of the way. “Mom!”

  Ralphie’s mother leaped out in her clown suit.

  “Ralphie, if your brothers are in that box, your life as a happy person is over!”

  “Dirty rotten …”

  Junior was still at it.

  “Junior … Junior.”

  So was Pap. Pap was stroking the top of Junior’s head in a soothing way, as if he were trying to peak his hair into a cap, but Junior didn’t even feel the pats.

  “Junior … Junior … Junior …” Pap said, but Junior was so far gone he couldn’t hear his own name.

  In a firmer tone Pap said, “Junior, stop yelling and listen to me.”

  Junior shook his head from side to side in silent, violent refusal.

  “Junior, now you don’t know he did it.”

  Maggie had come home from school by this time, and she was sitting on the steps eating a banana.

  “Oh, Pap,” Maggie said. “Face the facts. Your precious Mud ate Scooty. Mud had pine needles in his fur and dirt on his nose.”

  Pap didn’t answer.

  In the silence that followed, Junior threw back his head and wailed, “Sthcoo-oo-ooty.” He had been crying so long that his nose was stopped up, and he could no longer talk right.

  “Junior, stop howling,” Maggie said sensibly.

  “We’ll go to the mall tomorrow and get another hamster. All hamsters look alike.”

  “No, they d-dunt. They dunt!”

  “Oh, all right, they dunt,” Maggie said.

  Maggie threw her braids behind her shoulder and stretched out her legs.

  “I remember when I was in second grade we had a class guinea pig named Gimpy and Jimmy Lee Atkins took him home for the Christmas holidays and when Gimpy came back he was a different color.”

  “Don’t talk!” Junior said.

  Maggie went on calmly. “Jimmy Lee claimed he had used his Dad’s Grecian Formula comb on Gimpy by mistake, but—”

  “I asked you not to talk!”

  Junior couldn’t bear to hear ordinary conversation, as if nothing had happened, when his whole world had come to an end.

  “Junior, you have got to accept the fact that Scooty is gone, and that yelling at Mud is not going to bring him back.”

  At that, a wave of anguish washed over Junior so great that he banged his head against the side of the house.

  “Dirty (thunk) rotten (thunk) murderer (THUNK).”

  He never even felt any pain.

  “Stop that, Junior, you’re going to give yourself a headache,” Maggie said.

  Maggie was used to taking a motherly role with Junior. She’d been doing it since the day he was born.

  One time last year she’d seen a picture in her geography book—they were studying Asia—and the picture had been of real young girls carrying babies on their backs. She had looked at the picture and she had remembered the feel of Junior’s tiny hands around her neck because that was the exact way she had carried him.

  “Junior … Junior,” Pap said. He slid one hand to Junior’s forehead to protect it from future blows. “Junior, give it up.”

  “I won’t give it up! I’ll never give it up. Never! Never! Never!”

  CHAPTER 12

  Boys in a Box

  “No, Ralphie!”

  “Mom, please.”

  “I said NO!”

  “Mom, I’ve got to go to the Blossoms. I promised.”

  “You are going one place—to your room. You are grounded for the rest of the month.”

  “Why? What did I do?”

  “You almost killed your brothers. You pushed them off a cliff in a Maytag box.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I saw you.”

  “Mom, listen, you couldn’t have seen me push them because I didn’t do it. Ask them if you don’t believe me.”

  “Did I push you guys?” Ralphie called down the hill. “Tell the truth.”

  Ralphie didn’t wait for the truth. He lowered his voice confidentially. “Mom, they asked me to push them; they begged me. But I said ‘No.’ I said, ‘You’ll get hurt.’ Mom, they said, ‘We won’t get hurt. We promise.’ I still said ‘No.’

  “So they said, ‘Just move us to the edge, Ralphie. Just to the edge.’ I said, ‘What good would that do?’

  “They said, ‘If we have to move ourselves, we can’t see where we’re going and we might topple over before we’re ready. Then we really could get hurt.’

  “That made sense and, Mom, you know me—Mr. Nice Guy—I moved them very carefully to the edge. I said, ‘You’re sure you want to do this?’ They said, ‘We’re sure!’ I stepped back. I said, ‘Don’t blame me if you hurt yourselves.’ They said, ‘We won’t!’ and over they went. If anybody ought to be punished, it’s them!”

  His mom didn’t even look at him. Her eyes watched the brothers.

  “Also, Mom,” Ralphie continued, “I had absolutely no idea that a mere Maytag box could …”

  Ralphie trailed off. He had watched the Maytag box, containing his brothers, with real awe, and Ralphie was not easily awed. Ralphie hadn’t known it was possible for a Maytag box to actually exceed the speed limit.

  That box had gone eighty miles an hour. It could have won the Indy 500. If it hadn’t run into the Wilsons’ azaleas, it would still be going. It would be on the freeway, passing eighteen-wheelers.

  Ralphie had been so astonished that he had not noticed his mother drive up. When he finally did look, he immediately held up both hands to show he had had no part in the event. His mother was in her clown suit because she had just returned from a balloon delivery—but clown makeup could not hide her displeasure.

  She joined him in time to see the Maytag box come to rest against the azaleas. Then there was a long pause. Ralphie and his mother were frozen in place, neither wanting to go down the hill and find damaged bodies.

  The Maytag box came to life. It wiggled. It spoke.

  “Let’s do it again!”

  “Yeah!”

  Only then, after he was sure his brothers were safe—only then, to his credit—did he say, “Well, I’m going to the Blossoms.”

  Was his mom grateful for his good grace in waiting to see if his brothers were alive? No. Her displeasure worsened and turned to fury. If there was one thing worse than a displeased clown, it was an angry one.

  Ralphie was glad Maggie was not here to see his mom as a full-blown ogress or Maggie might have resented even more her label as ogrette.

  His brothers were halfway up the hill now, pulling the box behind them, ready for another run.

  “I want to do it by myself this time,” one was saying.

  “Then you can do it by yourself, all right?”

  “Then we BOTH—”

  Ralphie’s mother cut short their plans as she had cut short Ralphie’s.

  “Give me that box!”

  She took a few steps down the hill, reached the rest of the way, and tried to grab it from their hands.

  “What are you doing?” they cried, so startled they slipped back down the hill and out of reach.

  “And if I ever catch you in another Maytag box I’m going to Maytag you!”

  The brothers weren’t worried about being Maytaged.

  Their mom used a lot of brand names for threats. “When I find out which one of you ate the Krispy Kremes, I’m going to Krispy Kreme you!”

  She had, on different occasions, threatened to Rice Krispie them, Pepperidge Farm them, even Sara Lee them. They were worried about losing the box. Boxes this strong didn’t come along every day.

  “Mom, that’s not fair,” they said. “Dad told us we could have the box.”

  “I’
ll give you the box, all right.” She got her hands on the box and began to wrest it from them.

  In a mature voice, speaking as if it were the first time he had said this, Ralphie said, “Mother, I’ll be going to the Blossoms now.”

  “Ralphie!” She spoke through clenched teeth. She wouldn’t even look at him. “I do not want to hear one more word out of you. Is that clear?”

  Ralphie nodded.

  “Then answer me!”

  “Yes, it’s clear.”

  “Then go on. Get out of here.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. And don’t come back till dark. I’m sick of the sight of all of you.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  Ralphie got on his bike and pedaled for the Blossoms’ farm.

  Behind him, his mom gained possession of the box and the brothers and began swatting them. So, this time the threat had been carried out. She was Maytaging them.

  Ralphie pedaled faster.

  There was one thing on Ralphie’s mind—the flower. That flower. The flower he had put in Maggie’s braid.

  He didn’t know the botanical name for it—it could be an unnamed weed for all he knew—still, to Ralphie, it was the most important flower there had ever been in the world.

  Ralphie saw that flower as a symbol of his and Maggie’s whole relationship, their whole future relationship.

  What had Maggie done with that flower?

  If, his thinking went, she had thrown it in the trash can or down the toilet or down the disposal—that was one thing. But suppose, just suppose, she had kept it. Suppose that while she was combing her hair, getting ready for bed, just suppose that while she was doing this, she had taken the flower and put it on top of her jewelry box!

  The thought made Ralphie’s heart race. He had never been in her bedroom, had never seen her dresser. He didn’t even know if she had a jewelry box. But if she did have one and if there were a flower on top of it—that flower, THE flower—then she was as much in love with him as he was with her.

  So Ralphie wasn’t pedaling toward the Blossom farm. He was pedaling toward a flower and the answer to the most important question of his life.

  Mud lifted his head. The yard was silent. He got up, stretched, shook, and peered around the apple crate.

  As he started out, he paused to lift his leg on the old truck tire. He stretched again.