Trouble the Water

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  Wendell’s mother was the sort of person who liked to help out. She and the other women of Grace Baptist Church had a group where they got together and figured out who to help next. Wendell shuddered just to think of it. What if he broke his arm or got hit by a car and got put on their list one day? They’d be coming over and making a big fuss, probably spray a bunch of perfume around his room and fill it up with flowers. No sir, keep the Grace Baptist Church Women’s Club away from him.

  “I’ll just get some cereal,” Wendell told his mother, walking into the kitchen. “It’s too hot for eggs.”

  “I know what you mean,” his mother said, untying her apron and hanging it on a peg by the pantry door. “I’m thinking I might make a ham mousse for dinner tonight, something nice and cold.”

  “Is that the one you make with the gelatin?” Wendell asked, his stomach churning a little at the memory. “Where it wiggles on your plate?”

  “That’s the one!” His mother grabbed her handbag from the counter. “Now, your sisters are babysitting this morning—or I should say Rosemary is babysitting and Missy’s gone with her to help. I’m going to try to leave the office to come home for lunch, but Mr. Bertram says he has a pile of letters to do today, so I may have to spend my lunch hour typing. Leave me a note if you go anywhere. Might be a nice day to go to the new pool.”

  After his mother left, Wendell poured himself a bowl of cornflakes, flooded it with milk, and stood at the counter to eat his breakfast. Maybe he ought to find Ray Sanders and get him to help out. Ray seemed like the kind of boy who was up for an adventure. He sure got in trouble a lot at school, mostly because he couldn’t sit still for more than two minutes. Teachers were always telling him to get back in his seat. “That’s all we do in this school,” he’d complained once last year to their teacher, Mrs. Appleby. “We just sit at our desks and write stuff down!” Mrs. Appleby had stared at him like she didn’t understand what was wrong with that.

  Wendell didn’t know Ray all that well, but they’d played on the same baseball team last spring, and once after practice they’d ridden their bikes down to Bottomside Creek to cool off. The name Bottomside had made Ray snicker, but it had taken Wendell a second to get the joke, and he felt sort of stupid when he did. Now he’d have to think of people’s bottoms every time he went fishing down there.

  But that didn’t keep him from thinking Ray Sanders was probably all right, and it didn’t stop him now from heading over to where Ray lived, which was past Central Street, over where the mill managers had built housing for their workers. Dad wouldn’t live there, but then Dad wouldn’t live in any place he didn’t own. He said he didn’t like owing anybody, especially bosses.

  Wendell sort of knew where Ray lived, but when he got over to that part of town, he had to ride his bike up and down the streets because all the houses looked alike, red brick with white doors, no shutters, no front porches, just concrete steps. By sheer good luck, Ray’s mother was stepping out of a blue Packard just as Wendell was riding past his third time down the street. He knew Mrs. Sanders from baseball games, where she yelled the loudest of all the mothers.

  When she saw him, she waved and then turned toward the house and called, “Hey, Ray! Wendell’s here!” so loud that Wendell thought every Ray in the neighborhood would come running. A minute later Ray sauntered out of the house, chewing on an apple. When he saw Wendell, he tossed the core into the yard and called, “Wait right there—I’ll go get my bike.”

  For a while they rode around the neighborhood without talking. Ray had playing cards stuck to the spokes of his wheels with clothespins, which made a satisfying clicking noise as he pedaled. Wendell thought he might do that too when he got home, if he could find an old deck of cards. He bet King would like it, the click-click-click of it being similar to the sound Wendell made with his tongue against the roof of his mouth when he was calling King in from the yard for dinner.

  “Hey, Ray,” Wendell said after he’d gotten bored of riding aimlessly, with nothing to look at but the redbrick houses with their white doors and no shutters, one after another on into infinity. “You want to see this place I found yesterday in the woods near the river?”

  Ray slowed down, and the clicking sound slowed too. “What’d you find?”

  “Just this old cabin,” Wendell said with a shrug, playing it down in case Ray thought it was a stupid idea. “My dad and my uncles used to hang out there when they were kids. I was thinking we could turn it into a fisherman’s cabin, that sort of thing.”

  “Might as well,” Ray said, sounding less enthusiastic than Wendell would have wished for. “Nothing else to do.”

  The best way to the river was to ride down through the Bottom and then follow a path through the woods that Ray knew about. The Bottom was where the colored people lived, and Wendell had never spent much time there except to cut through it en route from one place to another. Now as he followed Ray down Marigold Lane, he thought about that girl Callie and wondered where her house was. He hoped they didn’t pass her. She might get suspicious and want to know where they were going. She might guess they were on their way to the cabin and try to stop them, or worse, ask to go with them. Not that she had to ask; it wasn’t like the cabin was Wendell’s, not really, though he thought that since his dad had been there as a boy, Wendell should have first dibs and get to decide what to do with it.

  “This old colored lady might yell at us when we ride through her yard,” Ray warned when they reached the place where the pavement puttered out, replaced by dirt and gravel. “Just ignore her.”

  Wendell thought maybe they ought not ride their bikes across somebody’s grass, but he wasn’t going to make a federal case out of it. Besides, nobody was around. He could tell, though, from the tomato plants encircled by neat rings of marigolds, that whoever lived here cared about their yard, and so he pedaled faster to get through it quicker.

  They had to walk their bikes when they got down to the river. “When we get to the woods, we ought to park them behind some trees,” Wendell told Ray. “Ain’t no point pushing ’em all the way up.”

  Bikes stowed away, they headed up the path. Wendell started getting excited as they got closer, but a little scared, too. He’d let himself forget the way that cabin had felt yesterday, how the cold air had wrapped itself around him like it was trying to hold him there. Maybe the cabin had been built over a sinkhole, Wendell thought. Maybe it was cave gas coming up through the ground that made it so cold. He found that a satisfying explanation, aside from the fact that cave gas could kill you if you breathed it too long.

  He thought it might be a problem they didn’t have King with them to lead the way to the hidden part of the route, but Wendell remembered where it was well enough. “Watch out for poison ivy,” he warned Ray as they turned right to go deeper into the woods. “It’s everywhere.”

  “Poison ivy don’t bother me none,” Ray claimed. “Never has. I’m the only one I know who’s that way.”

  “You’re lucky,” Wendell told him. “It eats me up alive.”

  They were closing in on the cabin when Ray gave a low whistle from behind Wendell and whispered, “You hear something?”

  Wendell stopped. He heard a squirrel rustling the tree branches and the tapping of a woodpecker off in the distance. He turned to Ray and shook his head.

  “I hear talking,” Ray told him. “Wish I’d brought my BB gun.”

  Wendell had to stop himself from laughing out loud. What the heck would a BB gun do in a dangerous situation? Poke a few holes in a person, maybe scare away a groundhog. He was just about to make a smart remark about it when he heard a boy’s voice say, “I think you’re overthinking this situation, Little Sis.”

  The voice sounded close and far away at the same time. But that “Little Sis” . . . Shoot! Wendell bet Callie was back and she’d brought someone with her.

  “I think I know who it might be,” he told Ray in a low voice. “At least, I think I know one of the people who might be there.”r />
  “We need to sneak up on ’em?” Ray asked. “Should we ambush ’em?”

  Wendell looked at Ray a second. What the heck was he thinking about? “I don’t think there’s anything to be afraid of.”

  “I didn’t say anything about being afraid,” Ray replied, sounding irritated.

  They continued toward the cabin, and a minute later they reached the clearing. “Callie? Anybody here?” Wendell called out. As if in response, a dog barked.

  He bet the old dog was back. He wondered if he’d ever left.

  The sound of footsteps crunched across the undergrowth, and then a tall, skinny colored kid appeared in the clearing. He gave Wendell a long look and said, “You look familiar to me. Why’s that?”

  “How should I know?” Wendell said, but as soon as he said it, he knew. It was the kid from the drugstore, the one who’d been reading comic books a couple of days ago.

  Ray stepped forward. “I think you’re the one who needs to explain yourself. What you doing out here, boy? This ain’t your property.”

  The kid smiled and shrugged. “Ain’t your property either, I reckon. Unless you own these woods. I expect you don’t.”

  Wendell stepped between them. “You kin to Callie? Is she out here?”

  The boy nodded in the direction of the cabin. “She’s over there, trying to make friends with that old dog. Acts like she in love with it.”

  Wendell could feel Ray behind him, could feel the way he was itching for a fight. “We just came out to take a look at that cabin.”

  “Us too. Callie wanted me to see it. Wanted me to take a look at that handwriting on the wall.”

  Wendell had forgotten about that. “What do you think?”

  “I think it says ‘Jim,’ just the way you think.”

  Wendell heard rustling behind him. When he turned around, Ray was holding a big stick and taking quick steps toward the colored boy.

  “I think it’s time for you and whoever else you got with you to move on,” Ray said, swinging the stick like a batter warming up in the batter’s box. “We won’t hurt you if you go right now.”

  “Are you crazy?” Wendell moved so he was blocking Ray from getting any closer to the boy. “Put that down.”

  “This is our cabin, and this boy here’s a trespasser.”

  Suddenly Wendell was wishing like crazy he’d gone ahead and asked George to come. Sure, George was lazy and he didn’t like to fish, but he’d never pull a stunt like this.

  The colored kid held up his hand. “Hold up now. Why you swinging that stick? This place don’t belong to you. Don’t belong to me, either. Far as I know, anybody and everybody’s got the right to be here.”

  “Carl Jr.! Where you at?”

  Wendell recognized Callie’s voice. Great, he thought. Let’s throw a little gasoline on this fire.

  “You stay put, Little Sis,” the boy called back. “Just having a neighborly discussion here.”

  “I ain’t your neighbor, Carl Jr.,” Ray said, pushing Wendell out of his way as he moved closer. “I’m your worst enemy.”

  “Cut it out, Ray,” Wendell said, his voice shaky. “This is stupid.”

  “Nothing stupid at all about dealing with trespassers. You got to—”

  But Ray didn’t have a chance to finish his sentence. Suddenly the old dog was right there, right at Ray’s feet, his teeth bared, his growl the kind that let you know he was serious.

  “Get your dog away from me,” Ray snarled at Carl Jr. “I’ll smack it upside the head if you don’t.”

  “Ain’t my dog, and I’d like to see you try.”

  The old dog lunged at Ray, his teeth snapping. “Down!” Ray yelled at him, kicking the dog in the chest and knocking him back a few feet. “Get off of me!”

  “Get away from that dog!” Now Callie was there, standing next to her brother. “Get away from him or I’ll kill you!”

  The dog lunged again, and Ray threw his stick at it. “Come on, Wendell, let’s get out of here!” he cried, already running toward the woods. “That dog’s crazy!”

  “You better get on out of here, both of you!” Callie yelled. “Or I’m gonna kill you, just like I said.”

  “Shut up about killing people,” Carl Jr. told her. “You ain’t killing nobody.”

  “I’ll kill that boy if he runs back this way.” She turned and pointed at Wendell. “What you just standing there for? Why ain’t you running off with your scaredy-pants friend?”

  Wendell felt frozen in place. He held up his hands and shrugged, like, I don’t know what just happened here.

  “Wendell, come on!” Ray’s voice called from the path, but Wendell didn’t move. If he followed him, then Callie and her brother would think he was like Ray, and it wasn’t that Wendell cared all that much what a couple of colored kids thought about him, but he guessed he cared enough. And, dumb as it sounded, he cared what that old dog thought too.

  “Go on, then!” Callie said. “This cabin don’t belong to you anyway. It’s more ours than yours.”

  That brought Wendell up short. “What do you mean? We were together when we found it. How could it be more yours than mine?”

  “I ain’t saying. But it’s true.”

  The old dog had trotted over to the start of the path, as if he was interested in whether or not Ray was coming back. Now he came over and stood next to Carl Jr., looking at Wendell with an expression that suggested he didn’t much trust him anymore.

  Carl Jr. reached down and scratched the old dog’s head. “This old place don’t belong to nobody except maybe the birds and the squirrels. But maybe you don’t agree. Maybe you think like that friend of yours, that me and Callie here are trespassers.”

  “I don’t think that,” Wendell said. He almost said he was sorry about Ray, that he didn’t know him all that well, and if he’d known he was going to act that way, Wendell wouldn’t have brought him here in the first place. But he didn’t want to seem like he was kowtowing.

  “Maybe you think since you white and Little Sis here’s colored, that gives you dibs,” Carl Jr. said with a shrug. “She says you keep trying to claim it for your own.”

  “That’s not exactly how I put it,” Callie said, sounding sheepish. “Said sometimes he act like that’s how he think.”

  Carl Jr. turned to his sister. “So this old Wendell Crow ain’t quite so bad as you say? He ain’t trying to steal this cabin out from under you?”

  Callie leaned down to scratch her knee. “I don’t know how bad he is. All I know is I don’t like his friends.”

  “I ain’t so crazy about ’em either,” Wendell mumbled, and Carl Jr. cracked a grin.

  “Yeah, I might trade that stick boy in for a new model,” he said. “He got some defects.”

  Then Carl Jr. gave Wendell a long look, like he was thinking hard about something. “Well, if you ain’t the devil in sneakers, then maybe we’ll let you in on some things we know. Little Sis has been doing some research.”

  Callie crossed her arms over her chest. “I ain’t telling him nothing.”

  Carl Jr. popped Callie in the shoulder. “Quit being so muleheaded. You ain’t giving away no family secrets here.”

  “Says you.”

  Carl Jr. leaned toward his sister and spoke in a low voice. “You don’t have to tell him every little thing you know. Just tell him about Jim.”

  Wendell could tell from Callie’s expression that she was dying to spill the beans, she was just too stubborn to do it.

  “You find something out about that name on the wall?” he asked, moving a few steps closer. “You figure out who Jim is?”

  Callie’s arms relaxed just a little bit. “Don’t know if there’s a connection or not, but I found out something about a boy who drowned.”

  “Little Sis just felt in her bones the two things were connected, didn’t you, girl?”

  Pride washed over Callie’s face. “Oh, yeah, I been knowing all along everything’s tied up together—this here dog and the cabin. Have
n’t figured everything out yet, but at least I know more than I did.”

  “So who was the boy that drowned?” Wendell felt a little shaky around the edges, like maybe he’d find out the boy was someone he knew.

  “He drowned right down there,” Callie said, pointing in the direction of the river. “Went in right at that point at the bottom of the path. They say the water was wild that day, and he got pulled in real fast. They never did find his body, even though folks from all over searched for it from here to Covington.”

  “You know anything about him—where he lived, what his name was?”

  Callie nodded. “I’ll tell you what his name was, all right. His name was Jim. And you know what else I know for a fact?”

  Wendell shook his head. “What?”

  Callie grinned, triumphant. “He had a dog. You’re looking at it right now.”

  14

  How Callie Learned What She Learned

  It had been a strange sight to see Mr. Renfrow at her front door the evening before. In his office Mr. Renfrow always seemed relaxed and easy. But standing on the Robinsons’ porch, he’d had a formal feeling to him. When Callie got down there, he was speaking with her mama, and she could see how nervous-making that was for him.

  “Why don’t you come in and sit down to dinner with us, Orin?” her mama was asking as Callie stepped out onto the porch. “It’s not anything fancy—crowder peas with ham and corn bread—but it’ll fill you up. You look like you could use yourself a good home-cooked meal.”

  “I thank you very much, Mrs. Robinson, but I fear the ladies at the Hop would get worried if I didn’t come in on chicken-potpie night. Sally makes extra just for me.”

  Callie’s mouth watered at the thought of the chicken potpie at the Hop Diner. The only time they ever got to eat over there was when Mama got one of her headaches and had to go to bed the minute she got home from work. Daddy would give Regina some money, and the three children would walk down to Lexington Street, feeling bad about Mama but good about what was about to go into their bellies.