Past Perfect, Present Tense

by Richard Peck

  Fluffy the Gangbuster

  Every day after school, they all made a beeline for Aunt Agnes’s house.

  Guthrie (a boy) seemed to leave school by the north door, but doubled back to a restroom with two entrances. He’d go in one and out the other and had his secret escape plan from there.

  Blair (a girl), who was the quickest of them all, left school by the south door. She’d hunker down between two Saturns in the teachers’ parking lot. Then make a break for it.

  Wyatt (a boy) left school through an air duct he knew about in the heating plant. Being small, he could fit in anywhere, and he too was quick.

  Roxie (a girl) wasn’t. She’d leave by the front door in a crowd of people and saunter across Roosevelt Road with them. Then she’d merge with a snowball bush near that corner, and it was only a half block from there through alleys to Aunt Agnes’s.

  Each by a different route, they all turned up at her house daily unless somebody had a dental appointment.

  “Anybody see us?” they’d ask when they were assembled on the porch. It was screened by spirea bushes and considered safe.

  By “anybody,” they meant Taylor Trumble and Taylor’s gang, “Trumble’s Troublemakers.” As everybody knows, gangs are starting earlier these days. Taylor was big as a ninth grader and mean as a snake and had the Troublemakers organized as early as kindergarten. They’d been shaking people down for years. There was a rumor that they were packing boxcutters now, and nobody wanted to find out if it was true.

  The Troublemakers went after everybody, but they were really out to get Guthrie, Blair, Wyatt, and Roxie because they were close friends. Taylor worried about people who hung out together just because they were friends and didn’t even seem to have a leader to boss them. They all carried their lunch money in their socks, and Wyatt could show you a chipped tooth.

  When they were sure they hadn’t been followed, they’d troop through the screen door into the living room where the card table was set up and waiting. So was Fluffy. Fluffy was Aunt Agnes’s indoor/outdoor cat, and Fluffy was a problem. As even Aunt Agnes said, “It’s hard to make a good Christian out of a cat.”

  For a cat her size, she was an excellent jumper and spent nap time on top of the refrigerator in a turkey platter. But she always knew when the kids were due. She’d drift into the living room where the Monopoly board was set up. Leaping on the table, she’d scatter the Monopoly money, gnaw the corners of the board, shed on everything, make trouble. But when she heard the kids hit the porch, she’d vanish, though she never went far. If you checked out the room, you’d see a pair of wicked amber eyes trained on you from behind the piano. Or there’d be a lump in the curtains halfway up, and that would be Fluffy.

  Aunt Agnes was like her house, which had a big front porch and was real old. She was the last cookie baker in any of their lives, and her kitchen smelled partly of fresh-baked brownies and partly of Fluffy. The Monopoly set had been Aunt Agnes’s when she was a girl, so it was ancient. Because she was Guthrie’s great-aunt, he was always the banker. He wore a green visor he’d seen in a movie about Las Vegas and shook the dice high above his head.

  Miraculously, all the original tokens were still there. Guthrie always picked the little racing car. Blair went for the cannon. Wyatt chose the top hat, and Roxie took the purse. Partly thanks to Fluffy, none of the original Monopoly money had survived. It had been replaced by construction-paper counterfeit currency. Most of the Community Chest and Chance cards were still there, though chewed. Unfortunately, all thirty-two houses and twelve hotels were missing. Aunt Agnes said she hadn’t seen them since the war, and she didn’t say which war.

  So she replaced them with a little dish of candies, the kind with chocolate on the inside that melts in your mouth, not in your hand. She’d count out thirty-two green candies for the houses and twelve red for the hotels. These the foursome used when they were buying real estate for their properties. They weren’t for eating and were covered in cat hair, but they led to trouble every time.

  Each afternoon was the same. Though they stretched the regulation rules and somebody was always coming up with a new one, they started the right way. Beginning with Guthrie, each player threw the dice, and the player with the highest total started the play. The only unbreakable rule was the Aunt Agnes Law, which stated that whoever was ahead at five-thirty was declared winner and everybody went home.

  Wyatt was the historian of the group and knew all there was to know about the beginnings of Monopoly. “It’s a little-known fact,” he’d say, “that Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania, the inventor of Monopoly, struck a deal with Parker Brothers in 1935 to produce twenty thousand Monopoly sets per week.

  “Equally amazing, Monopoly has appeared in nineteen separate languages.

  “It is also interesting to note that place names for the game all come from locations in Atlantic City, New Jersey.”

  “It’s a well-known fact and not interesting to note,” Roxie would say, “that you’ve already told us this a thousand times.” Roxie had the shortest attention span in the group. It got shorter if she landed on Park Place when it was loaded with four chocolate houses and a chocolate hotel and cost her two thousand dollars.

  “And bear in mind,” Wyatt would point out, “we’re talking Depression-era money, when two thousand dollars wasn’t chicken feed or chump change.”

  And so it went, every afternoon from school till five-thirty. Everybody always understood when Roxie tried to palm a Go To Jail card back into the pile. Everybody was braced for Blair’s piercing shriek when she drew the Community Chest card authorizing her to collect fifty dollars from each player. And everybody helped Banker Guthrie count out the money because he was only at grade level in his math skills. They were the four citizens of their private Monopoly board world, a tiny Atlantic City, fraying at the edges. They strolled its streets together, from Mediterranean Avenue to Boardwalk, rolling the dice as they went.

  Roxie, who could get antsy, sometimes said, “This isn’t a board game. It’s a bored game,” and she’d spell out the difference. But nobody ever wanted it to end.

  “Let’s still be playing this in high school,” Blair would say. “Okay?”

  And five-thirty always came too soon. They left Aunt Agnes’s pretty much the way they left school. They knew Trumble’s Troublemakers had found out where they were every afternoon. Taylor Trumble’s spies were everywhere, and there was a beeper on Taylor’s belt.

  Usually by five-thirty the Troublemakers were working the mall, but you couldn’t be too careful. Roxie left quietly over the front porch railing, dropping down behind the spirea bushes, then working her way left some days, right the others. Guthrie went out the back and then between two garages because he lived in that direction. Blair sometimes used the front door, sometimes the back, sprinted to the fence line between Aunt Agnes’s property and the Clevelands’ and followed it back to the alley. From there she went home at an angle through people’s backyards.

  Wyatt didn’t trust doors. At five-thirty he’d excuse himself to go upstairs to the bathroom. Then he’d climb out the bathroom window, shinny down a drainpipe, and he was out of there. Though Aunt Agnes was aware of all this exiting, she just thought it was the sort of weird things kids do.

  But they never broke up without an argument. The longer the game went on, the fewer green chocolate houses and red chocolate hotels there were. They seemed to melt away. By the end of the game, there were never more than twenty-eight of the houses and never more than nine hotels. They had to send out to the kitchen for more. “Who’s eating the real estate?” Guthrie would say in his position as banker.

  You couldn’t blame Roxie or she’d throw a fit. When suspicion fell on Blair, she’d say, “I’m dieting. I didn’t even have a brownie. Taylor Trumble took my lunch money today because I wasn’t wearing socks, and I didn’t even care.” Wyatt was quick enough to eat all of Atlantic City before you knew it was gone, but he looked as innocent as a choirboy. Of co
urse it could be Guthrie himself. Nobody knew.

  “You can’t blame Fluffy for this,” he said. “Cats don’t process chocolate. Ask a vet.” Then five-thirty crept up on them, and they quit quibbling, declared a winner, returned the dish with the remaining chocolates to the kitchen, and made their ways home.

  The living room fell silent after they left, with only the distant sound of Aunt Agnes out in the kitchen, banging pans. It was quiet time for Fluffy, who by then was on the windowsill, still as a sphinx.

  There was much they didn’t know about Fluffy, or in fact about any cat. Humans simply don’t know that cats understand every word they hear spoken. After all, they’ve lived thousands of years with people, and there’s nothing wrong with their hearing. Now, you take a dog. A dog understands simple words and commands and is all too willing to obey. But cats don’t like to obey, so they act like you’re talking gibberish. And don’t think they can’t recognize their names, because they can. But Fluffy didn’t like hers. She’d have preferred something more Egyptian because she had ancestors who’d been worshiped in Egypt.

  Fluffy wasn’t your ordinary cat. If there was cat school, she’d be in the Gifted program. Of course she’d occasionally come out of hiding to climb around under the card table like any common cat, throwing her tail and butting ankles. It was a cat thing. And that business of messing up the Monopoly board before they got there was just to let them know whose turf they were on. But there was more to Fluffy than that.

  She’d grown as fond of Guthrie, Blair, Wyatt, and Roxie as a cat can. She wasn’t a real people-cat. She wasn’t about to sit on your lap. But the daily Monopoly game gave her something to look forward to. She liked listening to the conversation, though they bickered and quibbled too much. She slept through some of it.

  From the windowsill, or up on the curtain when she was sharpening her claws, Fluffy could watch the room with one amber eye and the yard with the other. It came to her attention that there was often another group of kids lurking outside, darting under bushes, moving from tree to tree, that sort of thing. They weren’t there every day, but when they were, she knew.

  They were the Troublemakers gang, of course, about whom she’d heard so much from the Monopoly players. And the big ugly one with the nose ring was Taylor Trumble, who was trouble indeed. Fluffy kept her eye on them. She knew that Trumble’s Troublemakers were the enemy. And if there’s one thing a cat understands, it’s an enemy.

  She knew Guthrie, Blair, Wyatt, and Roxie were scared to death of Trumble’s Troublemakers. Cats can smell fear, and she smelled enough fear to make her amber eyes water. Fluffy supposed she was simply going to have to do something. It would take higher-level thinking, but Fluffy rather suspected herself of being a genius.

  Over many days—weeks, really—Fluffy thought about the Cleveland family, who lived next door across the fence. Then she examined her claws. She hadn’t done much digging lately. You can’t call scratching around in the litter box real digging. Then she thought about the chocolate candies the kids used in place of houses and hotels for the Monopoly board. She thought long, and she thought hard. And Fluffy came up with a plan.

  That’s where the missing red and green chocolate candies went. Fluffy took them, a few at a time. There was plenty of opportunity. In the middle of the game the players all trooped out to the kitchen, where the Agnes person fed them cookies and milk. There was all the time in the world for Fluffy to spring off the windowsill, creep on little cat feet across the rug, soar like a gazelle onto the table, and step carefully across the board to the candy dish. With a small sandpaper tongue she’d scoop up a few candies and carry them away in her mouth. Often she had time to make several trips.

  Her storehouse was behind the piano, a cool, dark place too narrow to dust. There in time a mound of candy grew. Once she found a bug back there, scuttling toward Candy Mountain on many legs. She ate it.

  Guthrie had been right about one thing. Cats can’t process chocolate. It’s the sugar. Fluffy carried the candies in a dry mouth, never tempted. She wouldn’t have dreamed of eating chocolate. But she knew somebody who would.

  She pursued the other part of her plan by night. She often went out at night, through the cat flap. And yes, a cat can see in the dark. Crossing the side yard, she began her plan by walking beside the fence, back and forth, speaking quietly, seemingly to herself.

  A dog lived on the other side. That’s what the board fence was for. The Cleveland family raised it to keep their dog, Grover, penned up when they saw he’d be no good at guarding the house. Fluffy had long watched Grover from the sill of an upstairs window. She’d wondered many times if she’d ever have a use for him.

  He was a young dog—about eighth grade in human terms—with big stumbling paws and a big sloppy mouth with tall teeth inside. He looked fierce, and Fluffy wondered if he might have some pit bull in him. But she’d noticed how completely he’d flunked out as a guard dog. The Clevelands had put up the fence to protect him. He was exactly the kind of dog who’ll get out in the traffic. And of course Grover was always hungry. Dogs have no self-control. You could hear him day and night rattling his dog dish on the porch with his great wet tongue.

  When it penetrated Grover’s brain that a cat was stalking the far side of his fence, he began to throw himself against his side.

  “That’s right, that’s right,” Fluffy hissed softly. “I’m scared. See me tremble. What a big mean dog. I’m puss shaking in my boots.”

  Thus she taunted him. Cats have their own language, spoken everywhere. It comes from an ancient Egyptian tongue, and it’s called cat patois. Dogs have their own language too. Yes, all that barking has a grammatical construction. And they have come to know enough cat patois to get by. Dogs have developed a respect for cats because brains beat brawn every time.

  It took several nights to settle Grover down. Finally he was just patrolling his side of the fence as Fluffy patrolled hers. They fell into conversation, though she had to keep it simple.

  “Hungry?” she inquired.

  “Like all the time,” Grover replied. Through the fence she could hear him panting and imagined him drooling down his chops.

  “Well, you wouldn’t want to eat me. I’m all bones that would stick in your throat. Care for chocolate?”

  “Yeah, but, you know, it’s not allowed.”

  Fluffy pretended surprise, even shock. “You mean the Clevelands won’t give you any chocolate, even when you’ve been a good boy? But chocolate is absolutely delicious. I mean it’s like good. You’d like it.”

  Grover whined his yearning. “I like it, but it’s bad for me.”

  That was the difference between dogs and cats, as Fluffy knew. A cat wouldn’t want anything bad for her. “I have some chocolate for you,” she said sweetly.

  Fluffy heard Grover stop dead. Was he sitting up, begging?

  “If you were a cat, you could climb the fence and leap over. Then you could have some chocolate. But you’re only a dog.”

  Grover whined. He’d be barking in a minute.

  “But you can start digging under the fence. I can dig on this side. Then I can give you some chocolate.”

  At once she heard the big thorny nails on Grover’s paws begin scraping away at the dirt.

  “Are you in a flower bed?” she asked.

  “Yard,” he said.

  You brainless mutt, she thought. “Well, walk along to a flower bed and dig there. The Clevelands will notice if you’re tearing up their lawn.”

  She listened to him lope farther along the fence and start digging again. She began digging on her side too, her hindquarters high, her exquisite bottle-brush tail tall in the darkness.

  A night or two later, after much work, their paws and then their noses met, under the fence. Fluffy was ready. She’d carried out four chocolate candies in her mouth. Three houses and a hotel, not that it matters. She dropped a candy just under Grover’s jaw. His tongue plastered her whiskers against her snout as he lapped it up. His brea
th was unspeakably foul.

  “Good?” she murmured.

  “Real good,” Grover panted.

  “Melts in your mouth, not in your paw, right?” Fluffy said. “And there’s more where that came from. Keep digging.”

  Every night she brought him more, though never more than four. Her nose nudged them under the fence onto his tongue. It wasn’t pleasant for her, but it was part of the plan. Soon Grover had dug a hole big enough for his entire head. “Keep digging,” Fluffy said.

  Presently he was head and shoulders onto Aunt Agnes’s side of the fence. A little more digging on both sides, and Grover would be at large. “Now here’s the deal,” Fluffy told him. “Listen up and try to remember. There’s a candy mountain waiting for you if you can just get this right.”

  * * *

  It was an ordinary afternoon with Guthrie, Blair, Wyatt, and Roxie around the Monopoly board and Fluffy at her post on the windowsill, screened by the snagged curtain. As it was late in the school year, Trumble’s Troublemakers had been especially busy, conducting extra shakedowns before school closed for summer vacation.

  One of Fluffy’s amber eyes was on the Monopoly players, the other noticed when Trumble’s Troublemakers began to infiltrate the yard outside. They flickered like shadows along the fence. The spirea bushes quivered above Troublemakers hugging the house. Taylor Trumble, beeper on belt, was moving the troops to cover front door, back door, drainpipe. After many rehearsals, this looked like the real thing to Fluffy, a mass mugging in the making.

  Unnoticed, she dropped from the windowsill and darted upstairs. Nosing open the bathroom door, she made for the bathtub. She did a little balancing act on the edge of the tub and jumped from there to the high windowsill to peer out. The side yard seethed with Troublemakers. She looked for Grover on the Clevelands’ side of the fence.

  There he was, standing around in his own yard, not looking alert. Fluffy meowed out in a register high enough for only a dog to hear. It seemed to reach him. Grover’s ears rose, and he looked around to find the hole under the fence. He appeared to be drooling.