You’ve—you’ve got his back?” Martha said. She looked like her red hair was about to ignite into flames. “You know that some people have started thinking he’s been kidnapped or killed or something, right? And you know that people are taking it out on the Parkinses, right? But you’re watching out for Eddie?”
“Look, it ain’t exactly—”
“Don’t start,” she said. “How long have you known he wasn’t in danger?”
“The whole time, I guess, but you got to understand, I took an oath.”
She rolled her eyes.
“What you mean is that you did some bullheaded boy promise that you’d take care of him, and now your pride won’t let you do the right thing because you’re worried it’ll make you look like less of a man.”
“No,” I said, though it was hard not to see how she might have been right. “I’m just doing this ’cause it’s the right thing to do.”
“This is the right thing to do?” she said. “Helping a juvenile delinquent is the right thing, but helping your best friend when he’s in real trouble, that’s totally optional?”
I groaned.
“You’re painting it all wrong.”
“I’m not painting anything, I’m taking a photograph,” she said. “And you just don’t like looking at your picture.”
“You’re only seeing one side of this whole thing.”
She shook her head and backed away from me.
“I was wrong when I called you a pig,” she said. “You’re a snake.”
Dang, that hurt. I started to follow after her.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “I don’t want to be with you right now.”
“But it ain’t safe down here at Snake Pond. Let me walk you out.”
“What did I tell you? I don’t need you to protect me. I don’t want you to protect me. I don’t even want to look at you again, ever.”
She kept walking toward the woods that was around Snake Pond. Away from the road.
“But you ain’t going the right way.”
“And if we were still friends, I would be listening to you right now.” She kept on walking.
“But you’re probably gonna get bit by a snake!”
“I already did.” She disappeared around the trees.
Tommy once told me that there ain’t no worser place to be than on the receiving end of a girl’s anger, ’cause they’ll say things they don’t mean. Then when you don’t listen and do what they really need, they’ll get real mad at you for it. But if you do listen, they’ll get mad at you for not doing what they really wanted in the first place. It was like the opposite of having your cake and eating it too. It was getting punched in the face and kicked in the gunnysack at the same time.
But, you know what, maybe the reason girls kept on doing stupid stuff like that was ’cause boys was always swooping in to help them. Like, maybe Lois Lane would be a little more careful up on them building ledges if Superman made her sew her own parachute first. Though I ain’t so sure she knows how to sew, but still. It’s the principle.
Besides, Martha’d find her way around eventually. And snakes only bit you if you was getting in on their dens. And, anyway, you’d have to be pretty dadgum stupid to get bit by a snake.
I headed to the road. If she wanted me to let her alone, then I’d let her the heck alone. That’d teach her.
I got out to where I’d put the bike and saw that the boy bike was parked next to the one with tassels. Martha must have ridden it out there. Explained a lot. One thing everyone in Cullman could agree on was that stuff always went wrong when girls tried to act like boys.
I hopped on the boy bike and left the girl one behind for her. It was my way of bringing balance back to the world. Then I headed on over to the Parkinses’ house, ’cause I wanted to see if what Martha’d said was true.
When I got there, Willie and his ma and his sister was scrubbing a whole mess of busted eggs off their front porch. Yeah, I reckoned it was true.
I didn’t say nothing, just grabbed a rag and started wiping up.
“Where’s your pa?” I asked.
“Went into town to find Bob,” Willie said. “Wants to make sure he knows he didn’t mean what it seemed like he meant with that letter.”
“I’ll bet that’s going to go real well,” I said.
Mrs. Parkins threw her rag into the bucket of soapy water and went inside. Willie sighed.
“Anyway, I talked to Short-Guy about the cipher,” he said.
Dang, he was still working on my mess. I wondered if that was ’cause he was a better friend than me or if focusing on my stuff helped him take his mind off his own. Either way, I reckoned I’d let him.
“What’d you figure out?” I asked.
“He told me it seems like the code needs a key to solve it. Like a code word.”
“What you mean, like ‘abracadabra’ or something?”
“No, that wouldn’t work, there’s too many repeated letters.”
I blinked a few times, hoping my brain’s vision would clear up and I wouldn’t seem so stupid. Didn’t work. He could tell.
“It’s like this,” he said. “Whoever is writing the message and whoever is getting the message will both agree on a code word.”
“Me and Tommy never agreed on no code words.”
“That’s beside the point. The code word has to be a word or a phrase or something that don’t repeat no letters. Like ‘Quick as brown’ or something. So you put that down on paper, then you put the rest of the letters of the alphabet that don’t fit after it. You do all that on one line, then on the next line you put the alphabet down like normal. And that’s how you figure out how to substitute the letters.”
I nodded like I understood, but he knew me well enough to know I didn’t. He set down his rag and pulled a paper out of his pocket.
“Here, look. I did it using ‘bread’ as the code word.” He pointed to the line on the paper.
“So, to tell somebody to run for their lives, I’d make a message that instead had these letters.” He scrunched up his forehead and started figuring it out. “Um, let’s see, Q. U, oh, that’s funny, ’cause it’s the same. Then O. C—”
He kept on going, but it was just getting more and more confusing for me.
“So you reckon ‘bread’ is the code word?”
“No, that ain’t what I’m saying,” he said. “But maybe he gave clues to the code word to you, or maybe to Sora or something.”
Mrs. Parkins came back out with a fresh bucket of water.
“Why don’t we go ask her?” I asked. He nodded and tossed his rag into the new bucket. It splashed up onto Mrs. Parkins.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.
“Got to go check on something at Johnny’s,” he said. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
Before she could start hollering at him, we hurried off as fast as we could what with him and his bum leg. Which wasn’t too terribly fast, but still. She wasn’t too quick on the hollering that day.
We got up there and busted into the living room ’cause we was both so eager to talk to Sora, but it turned out somebody else had gotten to her first. Mrs. Macker. They was drinking together, but not tea like you see women doing in the movies. They was both drinking bottles of beer. And Mrs. Macker didn’t look too good.
“So how old is she?” Sora said.
“She’s a nineteen-year-old sweater-buster, a sophomore at Auburn,” Mrs. Macker said. “And he says she makes him happy.” She wiped at her eyes.
Me and Willie both looked at each other. This was not the kind of talking that we was meant to hear.
“So that’s why he hasn’t come home,” Sora said. Mrs. Macker nodded.
“He’s been living in her apartment.” She sobbed a little. “I don’t know what I’m going to tell Martha.”
I cleared my throat.
“Where is Martha, anyhow?” I asked.
Mrs. Macker wiped her eyes again and looked at me. Her face wa
s a little puffy.
“She’s supposed to be with you and Willie,” she said.
“I ain’t seen her at all,” Willie said. “We’ve been working on cleaning our house.”
My stomach started to feel sick. “She ran off from me a little bit ago,” I said. “I was hoping she’d found her way to you.”
“She’s not a dog, Johnny,” Mrs. Macker said, then she winced. “I’m sorry, you didn’t deserve that. Where did you leave her?”
I swallowed real hard. “Snake Pond,” I said.
She jumped up. “You left her there?”
“She asked me to.”
She grabbed her purse and started toward the door. “I have to go get her.”
Willie elbowed me in the stomach.
“We’ll come with you,” he said. “It’ll be easier to find her if we all go.”
We ran out and got in her car and she drove us on down the hill. I told her where to park, which just so happened to be where that girlie bike was still laying in the tall grass. We ran through the woods to where Rudy’s campsite had been and we fanned out, me and Willie going around Snake Pond one way and Mrs. Macker going the other. Every three steps or so, we’d holler out for Martha.
“Why was she down here?” Willie said, and he kicked a beer can into the water. “Martha! Martha! What got in her head to go off on her own like this?”
“She got mad at me and stormed off,” I said. “Martha! Martha!”
“Got mad at you? Martha! Martha! What was she mad about?”
“On account that she found out I was sort of helping Eddie hide out from his pa,” I said. I stepped over an old car tire. “Martha!”
Willie stopped right were he was at. I thought for a second he’d seen a snake wiggle through a gas can or something.
“Wait, Eddie wasn’t kidnapped or nothing? And you’re helping him?” he asked. “I don’t—”
“Now ain’t exactly the time,” I said.
He stared at me for a bit, then he shook his head and went on ahead of me.
We worked our way all around Snake Pond and met Mrs. Macker on the other side, but none of us had no luck.
“Maybe she found her own way home,” Willie said.
“The bike is still by the road,” I said. We all three got quiet. Too quiet.
“Dadgummit!” I yelled. “Why’d she have to take off like that?”
“Can’t say I blame her,” Willie said.
Mrs. Macker was fit to be tied.
“She might have come out farther down the road,” she said. “We should drive down a bit and see if we find her.”
I nodded, but I was still so frustrated, I didn’t feel like I could leave the pond just yet. I picked up a rock and threw it down the water’s edge a bit.
It didn’t splash.
I walked over to where I’d thrown it, into a patch of real tall grass, just for the heck of it.
Just barely peeking out of the grass was a foot wearing a white leather oxford that was getting real waterlogged ’cause there was about four inches of water around it.
My heart started pounding in my chest as I ran over and pulled the grass apart to see what it was hiding.
Dadgummit. I found Martha.
“She’s here!” I yelled to Willie and Mrs. Macker. They ran to me as fast as they could. Meanwhile, I tried to pull Martha out of the grass. She was facedown, her hair floating in the water around her head.
I got her to dry ground just as soon as they got to me. I rolled her over, and then I froze. Her face was as pale as a ghost and she wasn’t moving none at all. Her eyes had started to get dark circles around them. Her mouth was open, but she wasn’t breathing for nothing.
As soon as Mrs. Macker got to me, she shoved me away.
“Move!” she said.
She pounced down onto Martha and turned her head to the side, then brought it back normal. She opened up the mouth, fished out some mud and such, pinched Martha’s nose, and started breathing into Martha’s mouth. She breathed real hard about four times, then she checked Martha’s neck for a pulse.
Then she cussed.
“No pulse,” she said. “And her throat is swollen up.” She put her hands on Martha’s chest and started shoving down on it, real hard. I was afraid she was going to break her bones or something.
Then I noticed something on Martha’s arms. Two little holes. Bite marks.
Snake Pond.
“I think—” I started to say, but Willie beat me to it.
“She got bit!” he said.
Mrs. Macker looked at the bite and cussed again. She tried to breathe into Martha’s nose. She checked her pulse again.
“We need to get her to a hospital,” I said.
She started pumping her chest again. “Of course we do, but she’ll die on the way if we don’t get her breathing.”
All the blood and all the smarts and everything else I had inside of me felt like it died on its own, right then. I didn’t know what to do, or what to say, or nothing.
“There’s got to be something we can do,” I said.
She tried breathing in Martha’s nose again. Four big breaths, then back to pumping her chest.
“Try to find a tube, or a hose, or something, and something to pump with,” she said. “Now, go!”
I didn’t bother asking her what she was going to do. Instead, I took off running.
’Cause I finally had an idea.
I found it, sure enough, hanging out over in the mud, an old bicycle pump. I brought it back to her.
“Dadgummit, Johnny,” Willie said. “That ain’t what she—”
“That’s perfect,” she said. “Willie, start doing what I’m doing.”
He nodded and got down and started pressing on Martha’s chest. She grabbed the bicycle pump from me.
“Do you have a knife?”
Of course I did. I gave her my pocketknife. She cut off the end of the tube.
“Okay, Johnny, I need you to hold her head steady and her neck straight, got it?”
She tilted Martha’s head back, opened up her mouth, and then she got set to put the tube of the bicycle pump in her mouth.
“Can you get the mud off?” I asked.
She wiped the tube off on her shirt. She put the tube in Martha’s mouth while I held her head just like she’d told me.
“You might want to turn your head,” she said. I didn’t want to.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and then she pushed that bicycle pump tube down Martha’s throat. It took her a couple of tries, but she finally got it down a couple of inches, and then she began pushing on the pump handle, not a whole lot, but about halfway up and down. And then, I’ll be darned, Martha’s chest started moving.
“Has she got a pulse yet?” she asked.
Willie felt for it, then he shook his head.
“Not yet.”
“Let’s go,” she said. She nodded for me to pick up Martha and we moved as fast as possible back around the pond to the truck. She kept on pumping air into Martha’s lungs the whole way.
I put Martha into the backseat of her car. Mrs. Macker got in there with her, still pumping the bicycle pump.
“Willie, get back to the chest compressions,” she said. He got in there with her and Martha and went back to saving her life. “Johnny, you drive.”
I broke probably a billion speeding laws as I got us down the hill and into Cullman. Just in case, I opened the window and made the sound of an ambulance siren. I figured the sheriff would know what I meant.
I pulled us up right outside the hospital and the nurses came out to meet us. I reckon they could tell that it was an emergency.
“She got snake-bit,” I said as I got out. They was already getting her onto one of them rolling beds. “And she fell into the water and she ain’t breathing.”
One of the nurses took over breaking her chest from Willie. Another tried to push Mrs. Macker out of the way. But she wasn’t moving.
“Get your defibrillator
ready. Now!” Mrs. Macker said. The nurse ran inside.
A doctor ran up to us and grabbed hold of the bed.
“We need to get this thing out of her so we can intubate,” he said, and tried to move Mrs. Macker again. Me and Willie followed them inside. Mrs. Macker wasn’t about to leave Martha’s side.
“Do you have your intubation kit ready?” she asked. “Show it to me and I’ll move.”
“Please trust me,” he said. “We know what we’re doing.”
“Show me.”
They stared each other down for a bit, and finally he ran off and grabbed a kit that had a tube and a balloon and a couple of other things in it. Once she saw it, she let go and let him take over. He pushed Martha over to a room, and a nurse was standing with some fancy handles that had wires connected to them. They went to rip open Martha’s blouse, so I turned my head.
“Clear!” one of them said. Then there was a popping sound.
“Again!” they said. Then another popping sound. “We got a pulse. Get the tube in.”
I could finally breathe better. I went over to Mrs. Macker. She stood in the center of the floor, folks buzzing around her, and she had her fists clenched, her eyes glued on her daughter getting worked on in the room. As I looked at her, I got the feeling that this might have been the closest I’d ever gotten to a real live superhero.
“You saved her,” I said. “You’re a real hero.”
“No,” she said. “I’m a mother.”
As I kept on watching her, I started to realize that there wasn’t much of a difference.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHERE THERE’S SMOKE
Willie wouldn’t look at me. We was sitting outside the hospital room Martha was in. There was three wooden chairs which was being occupied by me, him, and Pa, and Willie stared straight ahead at the wall. He had been for the last twenty minutes, ever since Martha’d woke up and asked Mrs. Macker where her pa was. That’s when Mrs. Macker sent us out into the hallway.
“The devil is attacking this town,” Pa said. “First he got you to get drunk, then Eddie went missing, and now this.”
Willie shot me a look, but I wasn’t ready to start giving out the truth about all that. Pa hadn’t believed me when I tried that before, why would he start now?
The Struggles of Johnny Cannon Page 16
