“Thanky, sir.” Liza saluted, grabbing at the tub prow and spidering herself into the JennAir once it slid within her reach. “Brrr—it’s so cold. Cliff came by. He knew you’d be out here. Cliff can always predict what you and Brontie are up to.”
“No, he can’t,” Rock answered quickly. He didn’t like the idea of Cliff having some kind of magic eye trained on him. Liza smirked. She lifted the paddle and began to row with sure, long strokes, out to the middle of the pond.
“Don’t you wish it was always so quiet?” she asked with a sigh, once the JennAir was twirling in the middle of the water again. “I think it rots when the snobby summer people come and fill up the houses around our pond and Linwood Drive and Sheffield.” She paused and nodded in the general direction of the summer cottages tucked around the bank. “Look how empty. It belongs to us all year, and then for three months all those people—‘Hey, hon, can you tell me how to get to Masonfield, can you tell me how to get to the Fiddlehead Inn, duh, can you tell me where the farmers’ market is?’ ”
“Or how about, ‘Duh, you kids, don’t moor your boat on our dock, don’t pick those raspberries on our property.’ ”
“Yeah—‘Don’t put your beach towels over our fence, get off our land.’ They rot, summer snobs.” Liza set aside the paddle and braided her fingers together against her mouth, breathing warm air over them. “There was summer snobs in Skowhegan, but not this bad. It was more spread apart, up there.”
“Rich people fork out megadollars to have a summer place near water.”
“Water’s a good thing any time of the year.” Liza looked over the side of the JennAir, into the pond’s deep bruise-colored murk. “I bet there’s cave treasures down there,” she remarked, pushing at an ice chunk with the tip of her finger. “When I get older, I’m fixing to go cave diving, you just watch. If you get spooked when you’re cave diving, your feet kick up all the dirt and sediments on the bottom of the ocean, then you can’t see, and you die slow and painful. You gotta be pure calm, like James Bond. Ever hear of cave diving?”
“Yeah, sure,” Rock lied. How did Liza always hear about guy things before most guys did? He hoped she wouldn’t press him for any more information.
“Hey, Rock, you know, I’m thinking of cutting loose, maybe head to California.”
“Oh yeah?” Rock looked up sharply. He hadn’t expected those words. Liza nodded.
“All you guys thinking that? Of moving away?”
“Just me. Nobody else.”
“You think you’d be okay on your own?”
Liza looked down at the water and said that she did.
“Well.” Rock pinched his lips together. “You’d know best.” He took a breath and plunged ahead. “I don’t think it’s such a bad idea, maybe, if Timmy keeps you missing school like you do.” Even as he spoke, he felt a prickle of sweat break out in his armpits. He hoped his words didn’t get Liza all mad, or drive him out to somewhere in the conversation he didn’t want to be.
“Uh-huh.” Liza pushed out her mouth like a kiss, thinking. “Anyhow, Cliff says it’s a good idea, too.”
Cliff. Rock didn’t know why, but a fierce flame of anger suddenly lit up inside him. Liza was talking privately to Cliff. They’d spoken together about Timmy, about California. Important conversations had already happened, without Rock.
Oblivious, Liza continued, “Cliff says maybe there’s not enough room for me in Timmy’s family. Could be he’s right. Cliff says I probably remind Timmy about how Ma used to be together with my dad and not him.”
“Maybe your mom could talk to Timmy. Tell him to quit being so rough, you know?” Rock felt the pointlessness of his words, but it sounded like the mature thing to say. The whole plan made Rock feel slightly hot-tempered anyway—thinking of Cliff talking, Cliff observing, Cliff noticing stuff that Rock didn’t see. Cliff was always trying to be the big Superman, ever since that first time a couple years ago.
Cliff could never let that day go, even after they’d met under Cliff’s bed that night to hash through the details. Cliff scratched at that day like a permanent mosquito bite that even now could always twitch Rock into a bad mood.
That day, he and Rock had been hanging out at the Mobleys’, working at the table in the front room. Earlier, Arlene had made homemade Play-Doh for Trev, dyeing it red and yellow and blue with food coloring, but then Trev went down for a nap, so Cliff and Rock and Liza decided to surprise Trev by building him a giant Play-Doh spaceland for his Power Rangers. They were drinking iced tea and eating Chex mix and listening to the Casey Kasem Top 40, laughing over the dumb, lovesick long-distance dedications. It was just a regular, after-school day. Rock would probably have forgotten all about it if the next thing hadn’t happened.
Rock couldn’t remember if he’d even heard the grind of the truck on the gravel. Maybe first Arlene had looked out the window and said, “Timmy’s home,” or maybe they’d all listened to the stomp of his work boots on the welcome mat. What Rock did remember was his voice, words that had weighted Rock to his seat and run a chill through him, like the tip of a knife skimming from the base of his spine up to his neck.
“Who left my tools out in the rain?” The voice had paused, waiting, maybe, for an answer, then continued. “What dumb little bastard was trying to build some stupid piece of junk and left my tools out in the rain? Is there a dumb little bastard in this house who wants to come here and tell me why my hand saw and my hammer and my drill bit are rusting wet on this lawn?”
“Maybe you boys should go. It’s almost dinnertime,” Arlene said crisply. She began to pluck up bits of loose Play-Doh, mashing all the colors together into an empty margarine tub.
Liza kept working, rolling her Play-Doh into a tube that lengthened and thinned in the blur of movement between her hands. But Rock and Cliff were both stuck in their seats, their gazes fixed on the doorway, watching for the face that belonged to a voice so low and tough that it sounded only a little bit like Timmy’s.
But then Timmy appeared; suddenly just regular old Timmy was standing in the kitchen archway, wearing his same faded jeans and battered baseball cap, but under the shadow of the brim his face was hard.
“That you, Liza?” he said.
“What if it was?” she asked. In the silence that followed, the Play-Doh tube became a cigar, then a soda straw, then no thicker than a loop of red yarn that drooped over Liza’s hands. She didn’t look up.
Slowly Timmy clomped over the table and reached for Liza like he was lifting a pot of hot water—two-handed, a balanced and careful grip under her arms. He lifted her right up so that her face was level with his face and her eyes had to look into his eyes, and her legs in their gray sweatpants twisted and kicked at the air like an upside-down beetle.
And then he tossed her, just like that, straight across the room.
It almost looked graceful, the way it happened, a gasp of movement shared between two dancers. Liza’s whalebone body sprang up so high, vaulted so weightlessly across the space; if the door had been open, she might have sailed right out and flown into the sky like Peter Pan. But the door was closed and it stopped her. She hit the wood and dropped like a sack and made a funny noise as the breath popped out of her.
Cliff jumped up, banging the table. A glass of iced tea fell over with a bump and splash, its loose, liquid tentacles spreading wide. The tea made islands of the Play-Doh lumps, dribbling over the edge of the table and dripping onto the carpet.
“Hey Timmy, hey Timmy,” Cliff kept repeating. His voice was loud, confident like when he practiced reciting his Boy Scout vows. And Liza had been sort of laughing, Rock remembered. The stupid, insane cheeriness of the two of them.
“Aw, I’m not hurt.” Liza was laughing, but her laugh was stuck inside her; it was just a smile and a choking in her shoulders. Arlene kept perfectly silent. She’d dashed off to the closet when Cliff knocked the tea, bringing back a pile of dish towels, which she began stuffing everywhere, patting them over the rug, over the Pla
y-Doh—suddenly rags were everywhere to catch the drips.
“Hey Timmy, it was my fault. We were both making that go-cart and then this song came on Casey Kasem.” Cliff spoke with smiling intensity. He reminded Rock of a game-show player trying his jaunty best to guess the right answer for ten thousand dollars. “It came on and we forgot and we went inside, we forgot. I forgot.”
“What are you there, Cliffy, her boyfriend?”
“Don’t hurt.” Liza was still laughing, staggering to her feet. “No, suh.” Rock twisted a rag in his hands, trying to soak up the iced tea that streaked the edge of the table.
“Glad it don’t, seeing as I’m not through,” said Timmy.
“You boys get along home,” Arlene whispered.
“I’m not leaving,” Cliff shouted cheerfully.
“Yeah, you are. Get going.” Timmy clapped his hand around the back of Cliff’s neck. “And put my tools away, boyfriend, ’fore you leave.” With his free hand he opened the door, the one that had stopped Liza. Rock leaped out of his chair and dashed through it.
“Come on, Cliff,” he called from the lawn. “It’s late.” Cliff stumbled out a few moments later, as if he’d been pushed. He looked at Rock and then back over his shoulder.
“Come on,” Rock hissed.
“We can’t.” Cliff shook his head.
“We gotta.” And Rock said something he’d meant to be a comfort but had only seemed to tear Cliff up worse inside. “It isn’t our business anyway,” Rock said. “I mean, it’s not like those people are in our family.” Cliff turned on him.
“Liza,” he said. His eyes were wild with anger. “Liza’s not those people.” Then he’d pushed Rock hard, two-fisted, square in the small of his back, so that Rock didn’t have a choice except to sidestep him, taking a heated joy in watching Cliff stumble and fall on the damp grass.
“I know who Liza is,” Rock muttered, dropping to his knees beside his brother.
“Help me clean up the tools,” Cliff said.
They had gathered up the tools, carefully drying and replacing them in Timmy’s toolbox. Then Cliff had whispered that the toolbox was looking pretty junky, so they’d dumped everything out and replaced the screws and washers and bolts all in their correct compartments. Rock remembered how they’d lingered, casting sidelong glances at the windows, straining for a hint of sound or movement. But the house kept its secrets from them.
Except that the next day, Liza hadn’t been in school.
“How’re you feeling?” Rock now asked her abruptly. Nothing looked wrong with Liza now as she sat opposite him in the JennAir, her cheeks peppermint pink from the cold. But at his question, Liza’s smile emptied and she crossed her arms over her chest.
“Rock, I came out here for a reason, ’cause I wanna show you something, I wanna show you this, what I got here,” Liza said, patting the side of her parka. “So pay attention since this is important.” She groped at her jacket’s inside pocket and pulled out a greasy piece of paper, which she shook at Rock. “Look with your eyes, not with your hands.”
“Shut up.” Rock leaned over and squinted at the smudged pencil script.
Seamas Barnes
Manahasick road
Third house left side facing the dead end
Knock three times fast, two times slow
Ask for Seamus
“Seamus Barnes? Who’s that?” Rock pronounced the name “Seem-us.”
“No, it’s Shame-us. That’s how you say his name.”
“Well, I don’t know him. Who is he? He’s from Sheffield?”
“Uh-uh.” Liza smiled gravely. “He’s from …” She stretched her hands in front of Rock’s face and snapped her fingers, pop-pop-pop. “He’s from—remember the time a few months ago when I pretended like I got lost from our field trip? The time we went to the New Haven Cane and Hickory Museum?”
Rock nodded. He remembered.
“Well, that was the same day when I met Seamus. He was just hanging out in the train station. He’s a pretty cool guy, should be in high school, but he don’t go to school, he just hangs out and takes trains all around.”
“A bum,” Rock said. Liza frowned.
“Not a bum. Not like some geezer who sleeps on a grate and stinks. Seamus is cool, he has a cool tattoo of a chain-link fence around his ankle, and another one of a shamrock on his back, close to here, about.” Liza twisted to one side and tapped the small of her back. “We hung out a long time, he’s wicked mellow—he even bought me some French fries at the Burger King. And at the end of the day, he gave me this.” She waved the paper.
“He gave me it, and he told me if things ever got tough all around—that’s how he put it, tough all around—then I should come hang out with him and his friends at this house. Just kids live there. Cool ones. I had to promise, may I be hit by a truck if I reneged, that I’d never tell no one about the place, except for a kid who needed to go there. So technically, I already broke my promise. Except I know you won’t tell.”
Liza tipped her head to one side and slumped down so that her jacket walled up around her chin. She looked very small. Small and watchful, like a turtle.
“You never told us about that kid Seamus. You said you just hung out in the mall all day.” Rock felt resentful. He hated secrets being kept from him.
“I did—we did. But it felt like a hidden thing. Private. Which it still is,” Liza asserted quickly. “It’s a secret hideout, see. That’s what Seamus is talking about.”
“But now you want to go there. To New Haven?”
“Yep. Till I get my plan fixed. I’ll lay low awhile, try and get some money together. So that I’m in good shape financial-wise, when I pick a new spot to live.”
Rock began to mentally unfold this plan, trying to shake out its strangeness and daring.
“You’d leave without telling Arlene and Timmy, right?”
“I gotta.” Liza’s October eyes held his for long enough for him to know she meant what she said.
“And this house is a place for kids?”
“For kids like me. And I’m set on it. I’ll hang out there, for a while. So I need you and Cliff to help me out a little, to get me where I’m going. I asked Cliff already. He’s in, but now I thought I’d tell you, too. You’ll help me out, won’tcha, Rock? Huh?” Her words were light, but she sat motionless, waiting for his answer.
“Course.” Rock snapped his head up and down. “Course I’ll help.”
CHAPTER SIX
MIDNIGHT RIDE
THEY WERE TOO OLD to roll underneath Cliff’s bed for a secret meeting, but the late-night meeting would definitely happen, an event they scheduled without need for words.
“We have to go with her, of course,” Cliff whispered. They were in his room, wrapped in blankets and facing each other like two tribal chiefs. “In case this house is bogus. In case the place is full of gangs or junkies or something.”
“Out to New Haven? All of us?”
“It’s not like it’s California, meat-ax. It’s New Haven. I got money, if you need to borrow for the ticket.”
“Naw, I got my own money.” Which wasn’t true, but Rock would somehow manage to find some money for his own ticket. It would be lame for him to help Liza make her escape on a Cliff-funded ticket.
“I feel kinda sorry for Arlene,” Cliff commented. “Although I hope she feels cruddy after. Serves her right, being so chicken of Timmy.”
“Me, too.” Rock scowled. “I hope it’ll teach her a lesson.”
“Except you hear all that stuff, of what happens to kids who hit the road. How they turn into, you know, drug addicts and panhandlers and stuff. How it’s not, uh …” Cliff pressed his top teeth against his bottom lip, thinking. “How it’s not really the greatest life for a kid.”
“Liza’s tough,” Rock said. “She’ll be okay.”
“Shame she’s so puny.” Cliff spaced his thumb and finger about six inches apart. “She were like this much taller, she’d be more threatening against all
those thugs and scumbags.”
“She’ll be okay,” Rock repeated.
“We’ll get train schedules and maps and figure out finances tomorrow,” Cliff said, twisting around to scribble on his typing paper. “Now beat it, I’m tired. I got an oral report in English tomorrow.”
Later that night, Brontie wet the bed again. Rock woke up to the usual noises: thumping footsteps, his father’s voice, his mother’s “Shhh, shhh, shhh,” the incriminating squeak of the washing-machine door, and the distant spray of the bathroom shower.
“To discipline … Absolutely … Teach more about … How much older to get before you decide? … Is a problem, yes it is a problem.”
Rock listened to the shreds of his father’s sentences, dark and rebuking. His mother’s whisper was too high and wavery for him to pick up. The front door opened and slammed shut, and Rock heard the station wagon’s engine turn over and then slowly back out of the driveway. He smushed his pillow around his head, just in case he might overhear his mom sniffling down in the living room.
“Rock?”
“Bront?” Rock pulled himself up in the bed. The shadowy outline of his sister bobbled in the doorway. “You need something?”
“Cliffy’s asleep.” Brontie hopped deeper into the room. Rock patted the bed and his sister leaped the rest of the way, hoisting herself up and curling into a ball at his feet. Rock sat all the way up now. Brontie’s hair was wet and she wore a pair of Rock’s old footed pajamas; their mother most likely had dug them up from the back of the towel closet, to replace Brontie’s soiled nightgown.
“Bront, are you okay to sleep with wet hair?” Rock asked. “You might get sick, catch a cold.”
“Like from giraffe teeth?”
“No, from wet hair.” Giraffe teeth? Rock mulled this over. How did it come so easily to Cliff, slotting their sister’s words into an exact significance? Giraffe teeth, giraffe teeth. “You sure you want to sleep here?” he asked.
Sons of Liberty Page 6
