by Betsy Byars
“Not too much to take, if you ask me.”
In the crawl space Lennie lifted his head in surprise and almost hit the water pipe again. How little those policemen understood! Why, the objects in this house were as valuable as the contents of a museum—to him, anyway. He would give anything to have the contents of the drawers in the chest. To Lennie they would be like a mummy’s possessions, special chosen things to be saved for a later life. Lennie would settle happily for just the old marbles and the Parcheesi set and the worn dominos.
The policemen came down the front steps. “If it was me, I’d rather have a place over on Paradise Lake,” one said. They walked around the left side of the house. They were as perfectly in step as drilling soldiers. “That’s a real nice place. You can’t build a house at Paradise Lake that don’t have metal siding.”
They paused at the corner of the house. Lennie could see their legs perfectly now.
One of them said, “Look at that. The drain pipe’s busted. The steps’ll be rotten by summer.”
Then they walked, still in step, to the patrol car. They got in and the little cop started the engine. Slowly, as Lennie reclined against the smooth stones, the car pulled away from the drive and moved on down the road.
Chapter Nine
For a moment Lennie could not move. He was weak with relief. He had been spared, saved, let off the hook. A fish probably felt like this, Lennie thought, when he was caught by Marlin Perkins for Wild Kingdom and then was mercifully thrown back into the water because he was too little.
“Although some fish are too little, you are never too little to be insured by Mutual of Omaha,” Marlin Perkins would say later with a quiet smile.
Lennie thought of the rejected fish hitting the sparkling water, sinking, dropping down where the water was dark and cold, and lying there, taking himself for dead. Then Lennie thought of the fish realizing that life was still there and in a burst of power going straight up, breaking the surface of the water like one of those trick porpoises at Sea World.
Lennie rested a moment more because his legs felt weak. Fright took a lot out of a person, turned the legs to rope and the heart to a caged bird.
And also Lennie was waiting. The police car had moved on around the lake, but this could be a trick. At any moment the car could make a U-turn and come back. If the policemen were suspicious, that’s exactly what they would do. Lennie decided he would stay where he was for at least another fifteen minutes.
He rested against the stones. To pass the time he began to think of himself as part of TV shows. He could see the listings in TV Guide.
THE ROOKIES
The cops are called to investigate a breaking and entering at a lake house. Making his TV debut is Lennie in the role of the criminal.
MEDICAL CENTER
A young boy faces permanent injury when he is tear-gassed by the police in an attempt to get him out from under a lake house. Making his TV debut is Lennie in the role of the tear-gassed boy.
He smiled to himself. Now that his fear had lessened, now that he was sure everything was all right, the danger from the cops didn’t seem real. Actually his only real worry had been about his mom. If they’d caught him ... If they’d driven him to the Fairy Land Motel ... If they’d taken him into the office and said, “Ma’am, we just placed your son under arrest” ... That would have been terrible.
He remembered that, only the evening before, his mom had said she was proud of him. A family of four had driven into the motel at dusk and Lennie had taken two cots to their room. He had taken ice to the couple in 316, extra linen to 304, and he had made up 311 and 313 without being told. It was, he admitted, mostly to make up for the bad grade he had gotten on his Science test, but his mom hadn’t known that.
“I’m really proud of you,” she had said. “All that studying the other night on Science—it will pay off too, I know it will—and all the help you’re giving me tonight. We’re going to make it, Lennie, I know we are.”
For a moment Lennie lay there staring up at the cobwebs that had formed between the boards of the house. He was thinking about his mother.
Then out of the corner of his eyes he caught sight of movement. He straightened.
The police car was coming back. So silently Lennie hadn’t heard it, moving in that slow, first-gear way, the car came to the driveway of the stone house and turned in.
Chapter Ten
Lennie waited. When he did not hear the car door open, he slipped forward until he had a better view. The policemen were not getting out of the car. Perhaps they were sitting there having a smoke, Lennie thought. Maybe a late lunch. The big sagging cop was probably downing a couple of Twinkies. Lennie smiled. He imagined the cop taking a bite, looking at the other cop, saying, “Freshness never tasted so good.”
The smile faded. What were the cops doing? Anyway, Lennie thought, it was lucky that he had stayed under the house, that he hadn’t scrambled out right away. If he had, he would have been yanked up by the heels like a newborn baby. “Got you! All right, kid, tell us who your parents are.”
Lennie was lying on his side now. A cobweb beneath the flooring touched Lennie’s cheek, but Lennie didn’t even raise his hand to brush it away. He kept his eyes on the blue strip of the car. There was still no sound or movement.
“Come on, come on, leave!” Lennie begged beneath his breath. He crossed his fingers, then uncrossed them. “Leave!”
Then, abruptly, Lennie heard the engine start. He couldn’t believe it for a moment. The wheels spun a little in the dust of the drive and then the car backed up. It was moving fast.
The car backed onto the road, moved forward, and drove out of Lennie’s vision. It took the first curve in the road so rapidly that Lennie could hear the squeal of tires. He smelled dust. He did not move. He waited.
Five minutes later the car got to the highway and Lennie heard the high wail of the siren as the car headed for Bennetsville.
Now Lennie relaxed for the first time since he had seen the car. It really is over now, he thought. An emergency somewhere—an accident perhaps, a criminal on the loose—and police were called to duty.
He could crawl out in peace now. He turned onto his stomach and got set to scramble out. His left leg touched the pile of stones, and Lennie pushed himself forward.
The pushing started a small slide. The rocks shifted. A few tumbled to the ground and rolled away like balls. Mixed with the sound of the shifting, rolling stones was another sound. A rattle.
No sooner had Lennie heard it than he felt the sharp stab of fangs on his ankle.
He jerked his head around, and in the shadow of the crawl space he saw a snake. It was so nearly the color of the ground that it seemed for a moment to be the ground itself set in motion.
Instantly Lennie twisted away. He rolled over twice. When he stopped and glanced back, the snake was moving behind the tipped-over oil drum. It disappeared in the shadows.
Lennie drew his leg up to his chest and yanked up his pants. There was a yellow stain on his sock. Slowly, as carefully as if he were unwrapping something, Lennie pulled down the sock and looked at the two tiny holes in the inside of his ankle.
Drops of blood oozed out, and instinctively Lennie bent down and sucked the wound and spit out blood and venom. He did this a second time, a third, and then he drew back again and looked at the wound.
A cold chill went up his spine. He said to himself: The main thing I am not supposed to do is panic. He remembered that from when Little Joe got snake-bitten on the Ponderosa. But he knew he already had panicked. Just the sight of those two holes in his ankle had caused his heart to pound like a hammer. Blood rushed through his body with the force of Niagara Falls. His throat had tightened up. Suddenly he couldn’t see because tears were in his eyes.
It seemed to Lennie then that this was the secret of life—the thing man had always been afraid of. Even when man thought he was afraid of the Russians or the atom bomb or some new virus, what he really feared was that he would wi
nd up bitten by a snake—two holes in his ankle. Lennie tried to see the wound through his tears.
It was man’s first fear, Lennie seemed to remem ber, way back in the Bible, and the Bible knew how to scare a person. Lennie almost felt that this was the same snake. It had slithered down the tree in the Garden of Eden, tempted Adam, wound through deserts, around pyramids, stowed away on a banana boat, come to the United States, crossed ditches and parks and burning asphalt roads, and come here to wait for Lennie beneath the stone house.
Lennie blinked, and the two holes came into focus again. “I got to get out of here,” Lennie said.
Then, using the same side-to-side motions the snake had used going behind the oil drum, Lennie pulled himself out of the shadow of the crawl space. He slid into the sunlight. He sat up.
And there in the dappled sunlight, beneath trees that were solid gold, Lennie rolled up his pants leg and took off his shoe. He stripped off the stained sock. He looked again at the two small holes in the pale flesh of his ankle.
Chapter Eleven
Lennie’s ankle was bleeding freely now. The blood was streaming down his foot, dropping onto the dry, dusty earth. The pain had increased.
Lennie hunched over his foot. This sharp, stinging pain made him even more afraid. His heart started beating harder. His mouth got drier. He kept saying over and over, “I got to keep calm. I got to keep calm.” But this seemed only to make him more frightened.
He reached into his back pocket for his knife. It was there tangled in some string and a red bandana. When he got it loose, he tried to open it one-handed as he always did, but his fingers were trembling too much.
Fumbling, using both hands, he got the knife open. Then it dropped in the dust. In a panic Lennie wiped the dusty knife blade off on his pants. He knew what to do, but he hesitated a moment. He felt physically sick now. Then he bent quickly and cut little x’s over the fang marks.
He moaned. For the first time in his life he wanted to be in a hospital among people who knew what they were doing. Doctors and nurses had always frightened Lennie before, but now in his mind they took on the beauty of painted pictures.
He took three deep breaths. Then he bent down and began to draw out the blood. He spit it into the dust.
Suddenly he thought of a tourniquet, and he wrapped the bandana around his leg and tied it tight. He sucked hard at the snake bite, drawing a mouthful of blood. He spit it out.
His ankle really hurt now. It was a burning pain, sharp and stinging, as if his leg were being slashed by razor blades. He had to get help.
The telephone! Lennie thought. He got up and, hobbling on one foot, made his way around the house and up the steps. The key was gone, but Lennie went straight to the window by the sofa and pulled it up. Lucky he had known about that latch being broken.
Carefully he swung his leg over the sill. The telephone was on the far wall, and Lennie kept his eyes on it as he struggled across the room. Rainbow-like, it seemed to get farther and farther away.
Lennie held on to one piece of furniture after another—the overstuffed chair, the end table, the floor lamp. He had once thought this furniture must have come from at least twenty different people.
“Well, I can get along without this chair, I reckon,” someone had said.
“I got no more use for this table.”
“I was going to give this rug to the Sunday school, but if you can use it ...”
Lennie had liked that. At the time he had thought that if he ever had a house, that’s the way he would have wanted to furnish it—one piece of furniture from everybody he liked.
With a swimming motion, weaving through the furniture, he got to the phone at last. He lifted the receiver. Silence. He jiggled the piece up and down. Silence. He dialed 0. Silence. As he stood there on one foot, he seemed to get smaller in size. The phone had been disconnected for the winter.
Slowly Lennie let himself down into the first chair he came to. It was the brown overstuffed armchair, and he sank as slowly as an old rheumatic man. He didn’t think he would ever get up again. He lifted his leg as gently as he could and rested it on the green plastic footstool. His ankle was turning purple.
He had so wanted to hear the voice of the operator saying, “Number, please.” He had so wanted to reply, “Get me the Fairy Land Motel.”
He laid his head back against the chair. There was a picture hanging on the opposite wall. Lennie had never noticed it before. He would not have noticed it now except that the sunlight from the window was falling on it, lighting it up as if it were in a museum.
The picture was a barnyard scene painted by someone who had never been in a barnyard. No pigs were that pink. No rooster was that red. No cow went around with four golden straws in the side of her mouth.
Tears came to Lennie’s eyes. They spilled over onto his cheeks and rolled down his face. He caught the first one with his tongue. He tasted the salt. Then he gave up and let the tears flow.
It would take a miracle to save him now, he thought. He couldn’t walk. Any movement at all was terribly painful. The police wouldn’t come back. No one knew where he was. He needed a real miracle, a twitch from Samantha’s nose or a visit from the Flying Nun or a nod from Jeannie.
He had always loved those shows. When things went wrong—when Darren got changed into an elephant, Samantha would just twitch her nose and make him a man again. When Jeannie’s master was accidentally sent into space instead of a rhesus monkey, Jeannie would nod him back again. That kind of magic was what he needed.
Slowly he reached down, loosened the tourniquet, let the blood flow back into his leg for a moment. Then he tightened it again.
Suddenly he thought of his mother. He knew how sad she would look when she found out. All the trouble he had caused her—all the vaccinations and school lessons and tooth fillings. She had even signed him up for safety lessons one summer at a municipal pool. She had taken him with her through seven states—and all for what? To have him sink down into an overstuffed chair and die.
Wincing with pain, Lennie got to his feet. Outside, the sun went behind a cloud, and it got dark in the room. For a moment Lennie was terrified. He thought the end had come. He began to shuffle across the room. In a panic he grabbed the sofa, and as he reached for the table, the sun came out again. The room got bright.
By accident, as he leaned there, he saw his face in the mirror by the front door. It scared him. He looked as wild as a man marooned twenty years on a desert island.
Lennie swallowed. He took a deep breath. Then slowly, his shoulders hunched forward, his chest heaving with unspent sobs, he started for the door.
Chapter Twelve
Lennie struggled out onto the front porch. Every step killed him. He could not even touch his wounded leg to the floor now.
He moved so slowly and carefully it almost seemed that he was not moving at all. Inch by inch he made it across the warped floor boards and caught the porch railing. He hung there for a moment, bent forward, staring down into the ferns below.
He raised his head then and looked across the lake. The sun had gotten lower in the sky. Could it already be setting? How much time had passed, Lennie wondered. The lake was shining with the red sun and the reflection of the beech trees. Probably not more than a half hour since he had first felt that piercing sting on his ankle.
The redness of the lake seemed like a bad omen to him, a prediction of terrible things to come. It was like a prophecy. When the waters of the earth turn red ...
Someone he knew had believed in omens. Who was it? His Grandmother Madison probably. When the caterpillars were thick, a bad winter was coming. When an owl cried in the night, somebody was going to die. What would she say about this? When the waters of the earth turn red ...
Or maybe it was his Grandfather Madison. No, his Grandfather Madison had been an old man who ran motels and in his spare time worked at making concrete figures to adorn them.
The thing his Grandfather Madison believed in was not complaining
. One time when Lennie had broken his arm and was crying because the cast itched, his Grandfather Madison had told him that there was an old legend that said birds were created without wings. When their wings were put on their bodies as a punishment, the birds complained, but as soon as they stopped complaining, the wings grew to their bodies and lifted them into the air.
Lennie had been so puzzled about what this had to do with the cast on his arm that he had stopped crying at once. He still didn’t understand it.
Lennie’s leg jerked again. The pain was so sharp and sudden that Lennie threw back his head like an animal. He felt like howling, but instead he yelled, “Does anybody hear me?”
He waited, listened to the silence, and then tried again. “Will somebody please help me?” He paused. “I’m over here at the stone house!”
Nobody answered, and the silence frightened Lennie. It was a total silence. He couldn’t even hear any birds or crickets. The leaves had stopped turning in the trees.
It was as if he really were the last person on earth. Even Friend couldn’t help him. Remember, Friend had surrendered to the police. In a flash a picture came to Lennie of Friend sitting in a cell at the station, his batteries gradually getting weaker. (“Don’t forget, kids, to keep spare batteries handy so you’ll never be without a Friend.”) By the time the police got around to questioning him, his voice would be too faint to hear.
“Speak up, son, tell us your name in a good loud voice.”
Hmmmmmm
“I said for you to speak up! If you don’t, we’re going to have to take some action.”
Hmm
The silence continued. Even the water no longer lapped at the shore.
Lennie glanced down at his leg. It was swelling now, the skin tight and shiny, and as hot as if it were on fire. His leg twitched again, frog-like, and the pain almost made him faint.
His strength was leaving him rapidly. He was so weak now that he had to sit down or he would collapse. Moving his leg as little as possible, Lennie eased himself down on the top step. With a sigh, he reclined against the porch railing.
