Not-Just-Anybody Family

by Betsy Byars

  Ralphie leaned around the policeman. “Under the law,” he said, “you aren’t required to tell him—one—single—thing.”

  “Thank you,” said Junior.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Jailbird

  Maggie was at the bus stop, sitting on the bench that had been put there by the Parkinson Funeral Home. She was swinging her legs back and forth.

  She wished, as she usually did, that she had on a pair of cowboy boots. Her mom had bought her lots of boots when she was little—Maggie even had a picture of herself coming home from the hospital with a pair of tiny cowboy boots sticking out from under the blanket.

  But this year her mom had said, “Maggie, your feet are growing so fast, it would just be wasting money.”

  “I can’t go around without boots,” Maggie had said. It was like going around undressed.

  “They’d be too little in six months.”

  “Then buy me a big pair. I’ll grow into them. Buy me a cheap pair at Shoe Mart.”

  “I don’t even have the money for that, shug.” Her mom’s voice when she said the word shug always sounded so sad, so regretful, that Maggie could never keep on begging.

  Maggie imagined how much better she would look if she had boots on now instead of worn green flip-flops. Cowboy boots made any outfit look classy, even a worn T-shirt and cut-off jeans.

  Across the street her brother Vern was walking slowly up and down in front of the city jail, pausing every now and then to give the secret birdcall. Bobwhite. Bobwhite. Four more steps. Bobwhite.

  Vern was listening for an answering whistle from inside the jail. This was the only way he could think of to find out if Pap was inside.

  He whistled again and waited. His head was cocked to one side, like a bird’s, listening.

  Maggie thought Vern looked so suspicious, he would probably end up getting arrested himself. No one in his right mind stood in front of the city jail whistling like a bobwhite.

  She had said, “Well, it sounds stupid to me.” And then because she couldn’t think of anything better, she had added, “But go ahead and try it if you don’t mind making a fool of yourself.”

  A bus came by, and the bus driver opened the door for her. “I’m not going anywhere,” she called. As the door closed she added, “I wish I was.”

  The bus passed, and Maggie could see Vern again, at the last window now. She wished that she would look down in the gutter and spot a five-dollar bill. Then she’d go straight to a pay phone.

  “Mom,” she would say. “We have an emergency.”

  Bobwhite! Bobwhite!

  Maggie was going to be a trick rider like her mom when she grew up. Her dad had been in the rodeo too. He had been World’s Champion Single Steer Roper in 1973. He had won $6,259 that year, and they had thought they were on easy street.

  The next year he had been killed by a steer in Ogallala, Nebraska, in a rodeo that Maggie could never remember. “Don’t you remember us waiting for Mom to get back from the hospital?” Vern sometimes asked in amazement. “We hid under the bleachers.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you remember driving home with Mom crying so bad, she drove off the road every few miles?”

  “No.”

  The truth was, Maggie didn’t really want to remember. She scratched a mosquito bite on the back of her leg. Then she sat forward, watching her brother with new interest.

  Vern was listening to something. He was standing there with one ear turned up to the last high window on the side of the jail.

  “Do you hear something?” Maggie called.

  She waited until two cars passed, and she ran across the street to join him.

  “Do you hear something or are you just acting like you do?”

  Vern held up one hand to quiet her.

  “I have a right to know if you heard something,” she began, but then she stopped. She turned her head, ear up, to the window too.

  From inside the jail came the answering call of a bobwhite.

  “He’s in there!” Maggie said. She was as delighted as if she’d discovered he was in the movies. She grabbed Vern’s arms and tried to swing him around. He was unyielding.

  Bobwhite!

  “He’s in there, all right,” Vern said.

  “Well, let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “To see him.”

  “Are you stupid or what? We can’t go walking in the police station?”

  Bobwhite! Bobwhite! The bobwhite was getting excited now.

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s exactly what they expect us to do. That’s why they didn’t bother setting a trap for us at the farm. They knew we’d have to come down here. We walk in and—bam—they get us too.”

  Bobwhite! Bobwhite!

  “Why would they want us, though? That’s what I don’t understand.”

  “All I know is that they do. They wouldn’t have come to the farm, would they, if they hadn’t wanted us? They wouldn’t have taken Junior away, would they, if they didn’t want him? What we got to find out is why.”

  “How are we going to do that?”

  He held up his dynamited finger. “One. We got to find out what Pap’s in jail for.” He held up another finger. “Two. We got to find out where Junior is. Three. We got to get them both out.”

  “How, Vern, how?”

  “I’m thinking.” And as Vern scratched his head with his dynamited finger, inside the jail the bobwhite kept whistling and whistling and whistling.

  With her flip-flop Maggie rubbed the mosquito bite on the back of her leg. “You better answer Pap. He’s going to whistle his head off if you don’t. … ”

  Maggie trailed off as she looked up at Vern. He was watching her with such intensity that she swallowed. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “I just figured it out.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “We,” he said, “are going to have to break into city jail.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Pap’s Place

  Pap was standing on his bunk. His face was turned to the patch of light overhead, his window. With shaking fingers he was trying to reach the chain that opened the vent.

  “What you trying to do, pops?” someone in the next cell asked. “Don’t open the vent ’cause hot air’ll come in. The good thing about this jail is the AC.”

  “The only good thing,” someone said down the way.

  Pap’s fingers trembled an inch below the chain. He stretched higher. Now he was a half inch away. His fingers made scissors movements under the chain.

  Bobwhite! The call came again from the sidewalk below. Pap stopped stretching his old bones long enough to put his hand on his chest and answer.

  Bobwhite!

  “He think he a bird. Man, he think he gone fly out the window,” another man said.

  “Byyyyye-bye, blackbird,” someone sang.

  There was amused laughter. Everyone but Pap was a regular and knew one another. Two of them had been arrested together on a drunk and disorderly charge and were playing cards. Another was playing his Japanese transistor radio. Pap was not even aware they were in the same jail with him.

  “Gin!” a cardplayer cried.

  Up until the moment Pap had heard the call of the bobwhite, he had been in the deepest, blackest despair of his life. If he could have stopped him - self from breathing, he would have. He would just have let all the air out of his lungs and not taken any more in. It would have been a relief to everybody and everything—to his worn-out lungs, the police, his disgraced family. Good riddance was the expression.

  Then came the whistle. He had taught the kids that himself. “Here’s what my brothers and me used to do when we wanted to call to each other, like one would be in school and we’d want him to sneak out and go fishing with us and we’d do this: Bobwhite! Bobwhite!”

  Vern had caught on right away and was now as good as Pap. Maggie was passable, and Junior was, as Pap put it, “g
etting there.”

  Hearing that whistle today had made tears come to his eyes, and he hadn’t cried in the four years since his son Cotton had died in Ogallala, Nebraska.

  Hearing that whistle had been like hearing something from his past and something from his future at the same time. It was the first glimmer of hope Pap had felt since the jail door clanked shut behind him.

  In his excitement Pap had not bothered to wipe his tears away, and they were now making small paths down his dusty cheeks, falling easily into the wrinkles like raindrops into a gulley.

  Pap’s fingers reached again for the elusive chain. He actually touched the metal this time.

  “What’s he gone do when he gets up there? Ain’t nobody skinny enough to get through that little bitty window.”

  Someone said, “Let him try. Maybe he like Rubber Man, in the funny papers.”

  Laughter.

  “I wish I was the Invisible Man. You wouldn’t see me around this place no more.”

  More laughter.

  Pap looked around, not at the man who had spoken but at the man in the next cell who had his radio tuned to Rock 101. With all that racket it was a miracle he had heard the kid’s whistle at all. And worse, the loud music might have prevented the kids from hearing his answering whistle.

  “Turn that off,” Pap said.

  “I like it onnnnn.” The man with the radio did not bother to open his eyes.

  Pap looked up at the window again, then back to the man, then back to the window, bewildered about what to do next.

  He heard nothing. Maybe they’d given up. Maybe at this moment they were walking home.

  The rock song ended, and in the relative quiet of a commercial Pap heard a bobwhite whistle. It sounded fainter, as if the kids were moving away.

  In a desperate move Pap yanked up his mattress. He rolled it into a wad and stood on it. His high-top shoes dug into the filling.

  Now he could reach the chain. He pulled it open. Warm air rushed into his face, along with the sounds of a bobwhite. Pap threw back his head and gave the answering whistle ten times without stopping.

  “He crazy,” one of the cardplayers said.

  And no one in city jail bothered to argue with the cardplayer.

  CHAPTER 12

  Ralphie Goes to Therapy

  Junior was sleepy, but every time his eyes closed he snapped them open. He had to stay awake. He didn’t want to miss it when Ralphie went to therapy. Finding out what was wrong with Ralphie was the only thing he had to look forward to.

  And yet, like everything in this whole hospital, in this whole world, it would probably be a disappointment. Like lunch. The memory brought tears to Junior’s eyes.

  All morning long Junior had been looking forward to lunch. When the nurse put his tray down and rolled up his bed and he saw a huge hamburger, he could have jumped up and down with joy—if, of course, it had not been for the broken legs.

  He had just picked up the hamburger, which he intended to devour in exactly four bites. A boy in his school was famous for eating a whole hamburger in one bite—Junior had seen him do it. Then the boy would drink his whole milk in one pull on the straw, put his cookies—however many—in his mouth, and go out to recess.

  Junior wasn’t that good yet. Four bites was his record. He was just getting ready for the first bite when Ralphie said, “You aren’t going to eat that stuff without testing it first, are you?”

  Junior stopped with the hamburger at his lips. The smell of the bun had made his mouth water. “Why would I test it?”

  “Stupid, to make sure they haven’t put medicine in it.”

  “Medicine.” Junior looked down at his hamburger. He closed his mouth.

  “Yeah, drugs, you know, to keep you groggy, so they can do things to you.”

  “Do they really do that?”

  “You better believe it.”

  Junior wasn’t as hungry as he thought he was. “Maybe I’ll just drink my milk.”

  “Is it chocolate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then be double careful.”

  “Why?” Junior put his milk carton back on his tray, exactly in the little wet square where it had been.

  “That’s usually their first target. They figure, see, that the kid’s going to go for chocolate milk. He probably doesn’t get that at home. ‘Wow, chocolate milk!’ And down the hatch without half tasting it. Either that or the ice cream. Why do you think you get ice cream every single meal?”

  Junior didn’t know they did. He folded his hands over his chest.

  He looked at the items on his tray. It was a nice tray, better than at the school cafeteria. Getting a tray this nice had given him a special feeling.

  At school Junior had always had to bring his lunch in a paper bag, and he envied the kids that went through the line and got trays. Now he had thought he was part of that happy privileged group at last.

  “What do these drugs taste like?” he asked.

  He glanced over at Ralphie. He saw Ralphie was eating his hamburger.

  “If it’s poison—” Junior began.

  “I didn’t say poison,” Ralphie corrected through a mouthful of hamburger. “I said drugs.”

  To Junior it was the same thing. “If it’s got drugs in it, then why are you eating it?”

  “I’m an addict. I need it. It’s my fix.”

  After a long moment Junior picked up one potato chip. He figured it would be hard to get drugs into a potato chip. He progressed slowly, though, nibbling the edges. Maybe it did taste funny.

  The nurse came in. She said, “I thought you were so hungry, Junior.”

  “Not really.”

  He wondered if he should swallow the funny-tasting potato chip or spit it out.

  Ralphie said, “He’s scared there’s drugs in the food.”

  “I wonder who could have put that idea in his head,” the nurse said. “Junior, your food is not drugged.”

  “Of course she’d say that,” Ralphie said.

  “Would you like me to take a bite of your hamburger?”

  Junior nodded.

  She broke off a piece and ate it. “Anything else?”

  “The milk.”

  “Well, let me get a straw. Honestly, Ralphie, we’re going to have to put you in isolation. You get meaner by the day.” She took a sip of milk. “Now do you think you can eat something?”

  Junior nodded.

  “I’ll be back for your trays later.”

  As she went from the room, Ralphie said, “Sure, she tasted the hamburger and the milk, but she didn’t taste the ice cream. You better hand that over to me.”

  “No way!”

  Now, as he lay waiting for Ralphie to go to therapy, he wondered if he had made a serious mistake in eating the ice cream. It had not tasted the way he remembered ice cream tasting.

  And he did feel drugged. His eyelids were so heavy, he could not keep them from dropping over his eyes. And he couldn’t think straight.

  “What time do you go?” he asked drowsily.

  “Where?”

  “Therapy.”

  “I’ve already been, stupid! I’m back.”

  Junior didn’t know whether it was true or not. He couldn’t open his eyes to find out.

  Junior slept.

  CHAPTER 13

  Jailbreak

  “Break into jail!” Maggie yelled.

  “Shut up! You want the police to hear you?”

  Maggie lowered her voice, “Break into jail? Are you out of your mind? We cannot break into jail.”

  “Yes, we can. Look, it’s not like breaking into a bank. The police expect people to break into banks. They have alarms set for people breaking into banks.”

  “They have alarms in jail too.”

  “They have alarms for breaking out of jail. There’s a big difference. Nobody is expecting anybody to break into jail. That would be stupid.”

  “Exactly!”

  “Maggie, listen—we have to. There’s no other
way we can talk to Pap.”

  “Why don’t we call him on the phone?”

  “Now you’re the one who’s out of her mind. You think they let prisoners take phone calls?”

  “They let them have one. I saw it on TV.”

  “Make one. They let them make one—to their lawyer. There’s a big difference.”

  “No way,” Maggie said. “I am not breaking into jail.”

  “All right, you don’t have to go. If you’re scared, you can wait here. That might be better. Then if I get caught, you’ll still be free to help us.”

  “Vern, couldn’t we write him a letter?”

  “A letter! Don’t you think they open every single letter that comes in the jail? What’s your next idea, Maggie—that we bake him a cake with a file in it?”

  Tears stung Maggie’s eyes. She was tired. She wanted to be home in her bed instead of in front of the city jail.

  “I want Mom.”

  “You think I don’t?”

  Vern’s thin shoulders sagged. He sighed. He jammed his hands deep in his pockets. He said, “All right, you might as well know the worst.”

  “The worst?” Maggie swung her head around so fast, her braids whipped around her neck. “What worst could there be?”

  “Here it is. I tried to call Mom three days ago and she wasn’t where she was supposed to be. The Paisano Motel had never heard of her. There’s no way in the world we can reach Mom now. Mom’s gone.”

  As soon as Vern said “Mom’s gone” Maggie began to sob. She didn’t bother covering her eyes. She just threw back her head and bawled.

  “Shut up, Maggie. Come on, shut up!” He decided yelling at her wasn’t going to work. He lowered his voice. “Please, Maggie, listen. Be quiet. They’ll hear you inside the station.”

  He drew her down the sidewalk away from the door. She followed, her eyes blind with tears. They stopped beneath an elm tree.

  “Maggie, please don’t cry. Please. You’ll make yourself sick. You won’t have to go in the jail if you don’t want to, and if I don’t think it’s going to work, if I’m not absolutely sure, I won’t go in either.”

  Maggie kept crying. It was such a relief to be getting some sympathy that she couldn’t have stopped if she had wanted to.