The Scavengers

by Michael Perry

  I remember plenty of scary times, too, like when lightning split a tree right beside our shelter and the thunder was so loud I felt it in my teeth. Sometimes the scariest things were the ones you couldn’t see, like wild hogs snuffling through the camp in the middle of the night, or solar bear howls in the distance. One day I happened upon the skull of a hog that had been killed by solar bears. I pried out the tusks, wedged them in one end of a split stick, and wrapped the split tight with woven runner vines. I called it my ToothClub, and practiced swinging it at imaginary solar bears. Even though I knew it wouldn’t do me any good if a real solar bear truly wanted to eat me, carrying that ToothClub made me feel a little better.

  I don’t know how long we wandered. Maybe Dad and Ma kept track, but for me it just seemed like it was the only life we’d ever known, and that those other fuzzy memories belonged to another girl. Ma was growing skinnier. There were dark circles under her eyes. Back then, she was the sickly one and Dad was strong and tough. Once he twisted his ankle on a rock and it swelled up and we didn’t know if it was broken. By the next morning it was back to its normal shape and he could walk fine. Dad was weird that way. He was really healthy, and he healed really fast. Maybe the garlic really did work. He never got a cough or a cold, and if he got a scratch on his arm in the afternoon, by the next morning you could hardly see where it was. I asked Ma about it once, and she just said, “Your father has a remarkable constitution.” I asked her what constitution meant, and by the time she got done explaining that one, I had forgotten what I asked in the first place.

  We wandered for a couple of years. We moved a lot and scrounged our food from the woods. My hair grew long and tangled. I outgrew my clothes and Ma had to patch them together with pieces torn from one of Dad’s old T-shirts. Sometimes we would stay in one place for a few months, then we’d pack everything up and move again. One day after we had been wandering again we were scouring the hills for wintergreen berries and windfall apples—and still more wild garlic—when we came to a sharp cut in the earth. Dad walked to the edge, peered over, and hollered, “It’s a gold mine!”

  I ran to his side to look. And there below me I saw piles and piles of . . . junk. Bedsprings. Rotting lumber. Cracked rubber tires. Rusty soup cans and empty oil cans. Broken bottles. Pipes and chunks of iron and gears from old machines. A cracked cast iron stove. This wasn’t even fresh junk. It was old junk, half-buried, with trees and brush growing out of it.

  Dad clambered over the edge and started tugging at the piles like a man who’d just discovered a pile of loose money. “We don’t have to scrounge anymore!” he said. Now we can scavenge!” I remember thinking, Is there a difference? Neither one sounded very thrilling.

  Ma was kinda hanging back. But down there in the junk Dad was scampering around like a little kid. “Hey!” he said, bending down. When he stood up he was holding a window frame high above his head. It had all the little squares, but the glass panes were missing. “A window! For your mother!” Ma was always saying that of all the things she missed from her old life, most of all she missed drinking tea while reading a good book beside a window.

  Dad scrambled back up to where Ma was standing and surveyed the scene one more time.

  “Goldmine Gully!” he declared. Then he hugged Ma. “Marlene, we’re stayin’ put!”

  For the first time since I don’t know when, Ma smiled. Then a darker look came over her face. “But, John . . . can we? Dare we?”

  “We don’t really have a choice now,” said Dad, his face turning serious too. Then he noticed how closely I was watching him, and he switched quickly back to a smile. “And what better place?” he said, nodding toward the ravine and switching quickly back to a smile. He raised the glassless window so the sun passed through it and fell in squares at Ma’s feet. “I’ll build you a cabin! With a window, for reading! And a bookshelf!” Of course he had no idea how he would do this, especially since he had no tools. And Dad wasn’t even very good at rigging up a simple shelter with our tarp. But I could tell he was more excited than I had ever seen him, and Ma’s smile returned.

  “It’ll be just like Little House on the Prairie,” said Dad.

  “You mean Little House Perched Over the Junkpile,” said Ma, but she was still smiling.

  “We’re staying put, kids!” said Dad, gathering us into his arms.

  Over the next few weeks we dragged enough lumber and tin out of Goldmine Gully to build a sleeping shelter. It wasn’t very sturdy. Everything was just propped up and tied together with vines and woven grass and old rusty wire, and the roof was the same old tarp we’d been sleeping under when we were moving camp every day. The window Dad found was still leaned against a tree with not a pane of glass in it. Ma had gone back to looking as tired as ever. We were always hungry. Dad would dig in the junk for a few days straight and tinker on the shelter, but then he would seem to lose interest and wander off into the woods for the rest of the day. Sometimes he didn’t come back until late at night. The next morning, he was always grinning his goofy lopsided grin and was ready to scavenge again.

  One day when Dad had walked off yet again and I could see the worry in Ma’s eyes, I went for a walk of my own to think things over.

  I was angry. Angry with my father for wandering off. Angry with Ma for not standing up to him. Angry with both of them for making us live like wilderness hobos and not telling me why. Part of me wanted to run away, and part of me knew I had a responsibility to help my family. I guess I was learning you can love your Ma and Dad and still get angry with them sometimes. I didn’t want to leave, but I wanted to be alone. I stomped off downhill from Goldmine Gully, not sure where I was headed. I didn’t make it very far when I came upon that old Ford Falcon. It was half-hidden behind a clump of brush and sunk into the dirt, but when I tried a door it opened. The car smelled funky inside, but it was in pretty good shape and not all chewed up like I thought it would be. The middle seat was folded down, and there was plenty of room for me to stretch out. Looking back up the hill I could still see our shelter. At that moment I realized that this old car would let me hide out but still be where I belonged, and that’s when I stood up on the hood and declared myself Ford Falcon forevermore.

  And then I saw the old man standing in the trees.

  4

  HE WAS SUPER SKINNY. LIKE A PIECE OF BEEF JERKY WITH LEGS. His narrow face was tan and wrinkly, and his eyes were bright as a bucket of sparks.

  “Eetings-gray!”

  I just looked at him, confused.

  “Ig-pay atin-lay!” he said, as if that explained everything. His voice was half yell, half laughter.

  “Dow y’hooin’?”

  “D’wha?” I said.

  He was grinning ear to ear. “Spit’s an oonerism! A flop-flip! A verbal mishmash in honor of the Reverend William Archibald Spooner, door as a deadnail for bass-not-tenor a penny-ury or embroider, but still a-lip in our lives!”

  Now my mouth just hung open.

  Suddenly the man stepped forward and extended his hand and, in a completely normal voice, said, “Greetings. Name’s Toad. Toad Hopper. Real name, Thomas. But I was born legs first and Daddy said I was kickin’ like a toad, and, well, the name stuck. For seventy-eight years now.”

  I reached down from the hood of the car and shook his hand. It was like grabbing a fistful of wire wrapped in leather. “My name is Mag . . . Ford!” I said. “Ford Falcon.”

  “So I hear,” said Toad, and although I had felt a little silly saying my new name, and even sillier knowing he’d just watched me talking to myself on the hood of a car, he didn’t act like it was a silly name at all.

  “I’m yer neighbor,” said Toad, pointing back over one shoulder with his thumb. “Live on the other side of the ridge. Down there in Hoot Holler.”

  “Hoot? Holler?”

  “Yah, folks used to call it Owl Hollow, but that’s hard to say. Like y’got ball bearings in yer yapper. Mainly though, I figured Hoot Holler was a lot funnier.” At this point he gig
gled like a little kid. Later I learned that he came up with the name Skullduggery Ridge, too, because in all the cowboy books he read when he was a boy, the bad guys (“skullduggerers” Toad called them) always snuck in over a ridge. Arlinda told me once that she still catches Toad sometimes trying to hitch his pants and squint like a gunslinging cowpuncher.

  “You own a rooster?” I thought I might as well ask.

  “Hatchet!” he said. “Named him that ’cause his crows are all hacked off!”

  “That would be the one,” I said.

  He giggled again. Then his face turned serious.

  “I’ve been keeping an eye on you and your family since you arrived. Smelled your campfire smoke one day and tracked you up here. I figure you’re good people. And I figure . . .”

  Here he paused and looked up toward our ragged tarp-shack.

  “ . . . I figure you could use some help.”

  I just looked at him.

  “I figure,” he said, “you could use a neighbor.”

  I led the old man uphill to meet Ma and Dad. Ma was cooking over a smoky fire, but Dad didn’t show up for a minute or two, and when he did, he came out from behind a tree and I thought he looked pale and nervous. But in five minutes Toad had them chattering like old friends. Toad had that way about him. And I think they were relieved to talk to a grown-up for a change. Later I heard Dad talking quietly to Ma, and Ma said, “If he was trouble, there’d have already been trouble.”

  Toad told Ma and Dad that back when he was a boy, the spot we were living on was located where the property lines of four farms came together. In those days, he said, before garbage trucks and landfills, every farm had its own “back forty” junk dump, and since ours had served four families for several generations, we’d find plenty of good stuff in there if we kept digging.

  He also said he made regular trading trips to a nearby village named Nobbern, and if we scavenged up any iron or other useful items in Goldmine Gully he could trade them for nails, or flour, or sugar, or other things we might need. Later, when we learned that Toad had an entire junkyard of his own full of things to trade, we realized he certainly didn’t need to lug ours to town. But at a time when we barely had two sticks to rub together, it was a big deal.

  Over the next few months, Toad changed our lives completely. He lent us tools and gave us lumber and helped us build a real shack, dragging everything up the long ridge behind his twin oxen Frank and Spank. He gave us rain barrels so we didn’t have to carry water or collect it in slimy plastic jugs, he brought up some cast iron pots and pans, he gave us an ax for splitting firewood, and after helping us build a coop, he gave us half a dozen chickens.

  He also introduced us to his wife, Arlinda. She taught Ma and me about foraging for herbs and edible plants, and helped get us started with a garden. She even gave us garlic bulbs, so Dad would never run out. And about every other week she gave us one of her homemade pies, which are so big you could use one for a pillow.

  Before long it seemed like we’d always known Toad and Arlinda. Like they were part of the family. One or two days a week I hiked down to help Toad—sometimes we’d sort junk and old steel for his trips to Nobbern; sometimes I’d help him clean his pigpens and chicken coop, or use an old scythe to cut and gather hay from the small meadow tucked up in Hoot Holler. In return, he and Arlinda gave us some of the ham and bacon they smoked, or seeds for our garden. Working with Toad was like going to school—he taught me all kinds of things, like how to use tools and repair leather, how to butcher pigs and chickens, and how to weave a rope from grass.

  I even got to where I could understand more and more of Toad’s silly talk.

  Pig latin, he taught me, is where you move the first letter or couple of letters to the back of the word and then add -ay—as in “ig-pay atin-lay.” And Reverend William Archibald Spooner was a preacher who lived in the 1800s and was known for flipping the front end of his words around in a way that wound up making them funnier, like the time he called a “well-oiled bicycle” a “well-boiled icicle.”

  And then sometimes Toad just invents his own rules. Like saying “flop-flip” instead of “flip-flop.” Or describing Reverend Spooner as “door as a deadnail for bass-not-tenor a penny-ury or embroider but still a-lip in our lives!” If you study it out, you will see he is using “bass-not-tenor” instead of “low,” which sounds the same as “lo,” or “penny-ury” instead of “century” and “a-lip in our lives” instead of “alive in our lips.” Oh, and “embroider” is a synonym for “sew,” which is a homonym for “so.” In other (normal) words: “The Reverend William Archibald Spooner, dead as a doornail for lo, a century or so, but still alive in our lips!”

  “Mr. Toad,” I said, one day when I got to know him better, “you talk weird.”

  “I just lang love-uage!” said Toad, grinning like Christmas.

  “Hmmm,” I said. “Wouldn’t know it the way you treat it.”

  He laughed and laughed.

  5

  “COCK-A-DOODLE . . . AAACK-KACK-KACK-KACK!”

  Breakfast is finished. Dad and I are down in Goldmine Gully, digging in the damp, mossy earth. Hatchet is still at it.

  “Admit it, you miss that bird,” says Dad.

  I roll my eyes, and Dad grins. Hatchet the Rooster and I do not get along. The last time I went down to help Toad clean his pig shed, that bird came after me like I’d been dipped in lard and rolled in seeds. Those peck marks on my kneecaps? Hatchet. The claw scratches on my forearms? Hatchet.

  I pat the SpitStick slung over my shoulder. “The only way I’d miss that rooster is if I didn’t aim straight,” I say. Dad chuckles and goes back to digging. After his slow start, Dad is having a good day. It’s good when Dad’s happy, and I’ve learned to enjoy it, because I know eventually he’ll get hollow-eyed and cranky, and then he’ll disappear again.

  I asked him about it once. “Now and then I just need some time alone,” he said. And then he turned and walked away, like he didn’t want to talk about it.

  Like he needed some time alone.

  Today though, the sun is shining and it matches our mood. Even though we’re basically digging through trash, it still feels like a treasure hunt. You never know what you’ll find. Mostly it’s pretty unexciting—rotten wood, rusty soup cans, worthless plastic. But sometimes you find a pail with only a tiny hole in it, or a spoon that isn’t bent, or maybe a chunk of iron Toad can trade for bags of oatmeal and brown sugar. One time I unearthed a cast iron wheel still attached to its axle. Toad said it was from an old hay stacker. Rather than trade it in Nobbern, Toad used it to rig up a device that allows Ma to adjust the heat on her cooking cauldron by turning the wheel to raise and lower it over the fire. Another time I discovered a faded red plastic dinner plate that was rounded on the bottom and wouldn’t really sit flat. Dad saw me puzzling over it and grinned. “Go stand up by the shack,” he said, taking it from my hand. Then he flipped it over and sailed it through the air right into my hands, and that was the day I learned to play Frisbee.

  The first thing I dug up today was some clear plastic sheeting. It’s still carefully folded, in its original wrapper. This is a big discovery because we can use the plastic to build miniature greenhouses—we call them hoop houses—for the garden. We don’t get winter like we used to, but there are enough snap-blizzards and freeze-blasts to put the earth through herky-jerky seasons that can catch us by surprise, so much of the garden has to be kept under plastic. Also, until Dad finds more windowpanes, our shack windows are made of plastic sheeting just like this. They’re nothing like glass, but they keep out most of the rain and let in some of the light.

  We could survive without scavenging in Goldmine Gully, but we would be a lot skinnier and a lot more miserable. The things we dig up help us fill the gaps when we trade them for things we can’t grow or make ourselves . . . and sometimes, for things just to put a little brightness in our lives.

  “Hey!” says Dad. He’s been working very carefully, scraping at
the dirt and brushing it away with an old paintbrush, like he’s an archaeologist looking for fossils.

  His careful work has paid off, because there before him is a complete pane of glass—dirty, but without a single chip or crack. We find a lot of glass, but most of it is broken. In fact, as a scavenger, you learn pretty early never just to paw around in the dirt. Besides broken glass, we uncover a lot of sharp tin and old nails. One careless move and you’re missing half a finger. And you can’t just trot off to a hospital to get it fixed.

  That glass pane would be valuable in Nobbern. But I know Dad won’t give it up. He’s been collecting them ever since we started digging, all in hopes of giving Ma her reading window. “Only six more to go!” he says, with a big lopsided smile. Dad carefully wraps the pane in some rags and tucks it into his work pack. He’s still smiling as I turn back to dig again.

  But just as I’m reaching out with my digging stick I spy what looks like a tiny pink mouse ear protruding from the hillside. I brush the dirt away, and there looking right back at me is a small, round pig face. His eyes are wide and his mouth is open, and I can see the pale blue bill of a cap set back on his round head, which is about the size of a crab apple. “Oh!” I say, like a kid who sees a pretty rock, and forgetting everything I’ve learned, drive my hand straight into the dirt. Immediately a sharp pain shoots up the side of one finger. Sure enough, I’ve sliced it on a splinter of glass. I flex my finger quickly to make sure it still works, and it does, but it’s bleeding pretty good. Now just to be safe I’ll have to go back to the shack to wash it out and wrap some of Ma’s poultice strips around it. First though—more carefully now, and using my digging stick instead of my fingers—I pry the pig free and hold it up so Dad can see it.