The Scavengers

by Michael Perry

  Toad still grumbles about the fence, but now with all the GreyDevils around, he’s glad it’s there. If they could get to his junkyard, they’d trade it for a whole lake filled with PartsWash. But the fence is tall and solid and Toad is always adding barbwire and broken glass and pretty much anything jabby and sharp along the top. It’s not BarbaZap, but it does the job.

  The only space between the Sustainability Reserve and Toad’s fence is a narrow strip of blacktop used by the truckers who haul the URCorn during harvest. We call it Cornvoy Road, because when a bunch of trucks are running together, it’s called a “convoy,” and when a bunch of trucks loaded with corn are running together, well, that’s a cornvoy. When the government was making Cornvoy Road, one of the bulldozers backed through Toad’s fence and bumped his silo. The silo teetered and leaned, but it didn’t fall. Toad tried to get both the government and CornVivia to repair it, but they never did, and to this day it leans out over the road at a crazy angle. Toad calls it the Leaning Tower of Pisa. On one of my first visits, I was reaching for the door to peek inside and Toad hollered at me in a way he never had before and never has since. “Don’t ever go in there!” he said. “That thing could flopperize at any time.”

  I can see Toad now, far below us. He is out behind the house, collecting firewood. I finger whistle—three long and three short—and sure enough, Toad straightens up and waves.

  As we walk, we keep gathering fiddleheads. Ferns mostly sprout in batches of seven, and Arlinda says you should never pick more than three from the same group. Ma and I snip the fiddleheads and toss them into Dad’s shirt-basket like teensy organic Frisbees. Sometimes I holler, “Bank!” and bounce them off his chest first. Dad smiles his crooked smile and just keeps plodding along.

  Suddenly Dookie jumps out in front of us, his eyes wide and serious, his hands fluttering.

  “Shibby-shibby-shibby!”

  We all freeze.

  Dookie speaks mostly nonsense, but when he flutters his hands and says “shibby-shibby-shibby” we pay attention, because that is what he does when he senses trouble, and Dookie has a sixth sense for trouble.

  I am reaching over my shoulder for my SpitStick when I hear a twig snap behind me. Spinning on my heel, I snatch a pepper-bomb from my satchel with my right hand and even as I am turning I am raising it into throwing position. Drawing the ToothClub from my belt with my left hand (the ToothClub is better than the SpitStick for fighting in close), I raise the weapon and spin toward the sound.

  The solar bear is only partially visible, just a face and one front paw sticking out from behind a tree trunk. But the dark black eyes are locked on us and the animal is standing still as a stone, which is a bad sign, because about the only time a solar bear freezes is when it sees something it would like to eat.

  With a flick of my wrist I send the pepper-bomb flying. All that practice of throwing eggs at Dookie’s head pays off, because the pepper-bomb smacks the solar bear square in the snoot. There is a dusty red poof as the ground pepper is released, and the bear falls backward right onto its butt, where it howls and paws at its nose and eyes before giving an especially loud howl and crashing off into the brush at a run. We stand very still ourselves now, listening until the howling and crashing fade away.

  Then everyone looks at me.

  And I raise my fist and say, “Ford Falcon!”

  “Yes, Maggie,” says Ma, pointing behind me, “you missed a fiddlehead.”

  As we walk the last part of the trail, I look down the valley again. Toad’s one-eyed dog, Monocle, is chasing Tripod, the three-legged cat, around the barn. They’re faking it, because in reality they are the best of friends. Toad is back outside. He flails one arm. At first I think he’s waving again, but then I realize he’s throwing something. Then he runs across the yard, picks the object up, and flails again, and now I realize he’s practicing throwing his homemade boomerang, which he built using the instructions on page 192 of The American Boy’s Handy Book. Toad has been throwing that boomerang as long as I’ve known him, but he can never get it to return.

  The smoke from the chimney has gone thin. This doesn’t mean the fire is out. It means Arlinda has it burning hot and pure and is cooking up a feast. Stopping to itch one of the scabs left over from my last visit with Hatchet, I close my eyes and pray Arlinda is making rooster soup.

  “Cock-a-doodle . . . aaack-kack-kack-kack!”

  Sigh. I close my eyes again and imagine Hatchet neck deep in noodles.

  12

  “SNOOKY HOLER-TABLES!”

  Toad’s voice is floating over the tall security gate as we wait for him to let us in. When the heavy gate swings open, he is rubbing his head and hopping up and down like a puppet on rubber bands. Monocle has stopped chasing Tripod and is peeking nervously around the corner of the barn. On Toad’s forehead there is a bump like a big red egg.

  “Snooky holer-tables!” hollers Toad again, gently probing the egg with his fingertips.

  “Snooky holer-tables!” is Toad’s way of cussing without really cussing. What he’s really saying is “Holy snooker tables!” Dad told me snooker is a game where you try to shoot balls into the holes in a table. Toad has never played; he just likes the goofy sound of it. Twist it with a spoonerism, and you’ve got your very own Toad Hopper cuss word.

  “But, Toad,” I said, the first time I heard him use it, “that doesn’t even make sense.”

  “It’s a nonsensical epaulet!” said Toad.

  “Um, Toad,” I said, “I think you mean epithet. An epithet is a curse word. An epaulet is a fringed shoulder pad on a soldier’s uniform.” Emily Dickinson used the word in one of her poems and Ma had to explain it to me. That’s how I knew.

  “Epaulet!” said Toad. “A woo nerd! How le-dightful!”

  It really is hard to keep up with him.

  At first I think the big red egg over Toad’s eyebrow means he finally got his boomerang to return, but when I congratulate him, he says what happened is it ricocheted off the barn eaves and he tried to catch it. It’s lucky all he got was a knock to the noggin. In his book, Daniel Beard writes, “A boomerang cast by a beginner is very dangerous . . . when it does come down it sometimes comes with force enough to cut a small dog almost in two.”

  No wonder Monocle ran off to hide behind the barn.

  The screen door opens and Arlinda steps out onto the porch. Her cheeks are red from working over the stove and her bun is frazzled, but she smiles like she’s been waiting all week to see us.

  Dad climbs the porch steps and says, “Hold out your apron, Arlinda.” She gathers it up to form a miniature hammock, and Dad dumps in the fiddleheads. The green coils remind me of snake fetuses, but Arlinda looks at them like they are chocolate-frosted bacon. “Ooooh!” she says. “I’ll boil these right up!”

  She twirls and returns to the kitchen, and Ma follows. Then Arlinda hollers out the window.

  “Mr. Hopper! Before you go to work, I need some fish.”

  Before Toad can answer, I say, “I’ll do it!”

  A mile past the Hoppers’ farm, where the road curves past BeaverSlap Creek, lives a gigantic man we call Tilapia Tom. From the story Toad tells, he showed up not too long before Declaration Day, standing outside the security gate holding the hand of a small boy. “I need some lumber,” he said, in a voice so low and rumbly Toad checked the sky for thunderclouds. “And water pipes.”

  “Whaddya got to trade?” asked Toad. Money was already not worth much.

  “Fish.”

  The man told Toad he had lived in the roughest part of a big city, where he taught people how to grow their own gardens on top of water tanks filled with fish. It sounded crazy, and everyone told him it would never work, but it did. But then, in preparation for the Bubbling, the government claimed his part of the city. When the man got to this part of the story, Toad waved his fist in the air and hollered, “Arrogant ptomaine!” The man just looked at him quietly, then continued. In the final days, when the bulldozers were closing in, t
he man strapped a water tank to his truck, loaded as many fish into the tank as he could, and then drove until he was about to run out of gas, which was near the abandoned farm beside BeaverSlap Creek, where fresh water was in good supply. Now he needed to build new fish tanks. So they worked a trade: Toad gave him lumber and pipes, and once the man finished his fish tanks, he built one for Toad and stocked it with fish. He told Toad the fish were called tilapia, and from that day forward he was known as Tilapia Tom.

  When I say fish tank, we are not talking goldfish aquarium. I mean, a tank. Made of wood slats wrapped in ropes and big enough around you can swim laps in it if you don’t mind the slimy fish-fin swish against your kneecaps or the sandpaper tickle when a tilapia nibbles your toe, or their skitterish tail-splats when they spook at shadows. Sometimes the slats leak and we have to plug the holes. On page 83 of The American Boy’s Handy Book, you will find a section titled “How to Make a Wooden Water-Telescope,” so Toad and I followed the directions and made one so we can inspect the inside of the tilapia tanks and plug the holes without having to drain all the water. But Dookie uses the water-telescope more than we do. He just likes to watch the fish.

  Toad and Arlinda feed those fish by hand and give a few of them names like Squirtfirgle and Phineas Phantail, but when it’s time for fillets or fish sticks, Toad and Arlinda don’t mess around. Out comes the pan, in goes Phineas. When you live OutBubble, food is not necessarily scarce, but neither is it easy. If you have fish, you eat fish. On page 188 of Daniel Beard’s book, you will find a section titled “How to Make a Fish Spear.” I made one of those too. It hangs next to the water-telescope on a set of hooks beside the tank ladder. I grab them both now, climb the ladder, and, peering through the water-telescope, choose a nice chubby tilapia. A quick jab of the spear, and the fish is flopping in a bucket. A few more jabs, and we have our main course. I hang the water-telescope and spear back on their hooks, run the bucket of fish in to Arlinda, and then follow Toad and Dad out to the barn.

  Dad and I wait while Toad unlocks the large sliding door on the side of the barn. We know what’s coming next, because every single time we help Toad on loading day he does the same thing. Rolling the door open like he is about to reveal the hidden treasures of the Egyptian pharaohs, in his most dramatic voice, he announces, “He-bold! The Scary Pruner!”

  Inside the barn is a vehicle that looks like a cross between a wooden wagon, a wooden ship, and a wooden jungle gym.

  One day when Toad was just a little Hopper, he was exploring a shed behind his father’s barn when he discovered a broken-down old buckboard. At first he just played in it, pretending to be a cowboy. Then when he got older he began fixing it up, replacing broken spokes and rotten planks, regreasing the axles, and putting every angle back in square. When Toad’s father saw how hard he was working he gave him a pair of steer calves and helped Toad train them to yoke up and pull the buckboard up and down the road. After Toad married Arlinda, they decorated the oxen and drove the buckboard in the Nobbern Jamboree Days parade. They had so much fun they did it again, and soon they were appearing in every parade within fifty miles of their farm.

  After Declaration Day, there were no more parades. Toad tore his buckboard apart. He reinforced the axles so he could carry more weight. He widened the wheels so they wouldn’t sink in mud. When GreyDevils began showing up, Toad added sharp spikes and barbwire around the sides of the wagon and built spring-loaded “side-whackers” that can pop out and knock a GreyDevil silly. He screwed a wooden chair to the wagon bed so a helper could ride facing backward and guard against attacks from the rear, and built a crow’s nest that stands tall on a column in the middle of the wagon so another helper could ride lookout.

  Finally, Toad went through his old shop and gathered up years and years’ worth of leftover paint cans and repainted the entire wagon a whole zoo’s worth of colors. Stripes and swabs of green, red and yellow, but also dollops and smears of pink, fluorescent orange, and lime green. A flurry of fake flames along each sideboard, and shark teeth on the tailgate.

  “Wouldn’t it be smarter to paint it gray, or camouflage?” I asked Toad once.

  “This is a shattlebip!” he said. “And you don’t hide a shattlebip, you sail it right on out there and make sure people know exactly what you’ve got! And what you’ll give ’em if they try to take it!”

  “What I’ve got here,” he said, sweeping one arm toward the transformed buckboard, “is a prairie schooner . . . only scarier.”

  “Yes, Toad,” I said. “That’s why you named it the . . .”

  “SCARY PRUNER!”

  It takes Dad and me all afternoon to help Toad load the Scary Pruner. We lug chunks of steel and wheels and pipes and pieces of sheet metal Toad and I have unbolted from old machines or cut from old cars. We tie smaller objects—like most of the things in my pack—to the racks or tuck them in the cubbyholes. I put Porky Pig in a hidden compartment beneath the spring-loaded seat.

  I also lug three pails full of potato-sized rocks up into the crow’s nest. Since his last trip to town Toad fitted the Scary Pruner with something he calls a “flingshot.” The flingshot is made from half of a fifty-five-gallon drum and parts from an old bicycle, and is mounted on a mast above the crow’s nest. You fill the drum with rocks, then use your hands to turn a set of bicycle pedals that spin the drum. When the drum spins fast enough, the centrifugal force opens a spring-loaded trapdoor and the rocks go flying out in every direction. It worked great in the yard, but we haven’t tried it out on real GreyDevils yet.

  When the final item is aboard the Pruner, we step outside. Toad pulls the sliding door shut, turns toward the house, and raising his arm like a general ordering a cavalry charge, says, “Foodward!”

  I detect the scent of pork chops and deep-fried tilapia. I am hungry, hungry.

  And then—flap-flap-WHACK!—I get hit upside the head with a feather bomb.

  Hatchet.

  13

  THE VICIOUS LITTLE CLUCK MONSTER HAS BEEN WAITING FOR ME, and distracted by the smell of those pork chops, I let my guard down. He came at me talons first and is now tangled in my hair. Cackling madly, the dang bird flaps and twists until he is snarled right up to my scalp. I grab him by both wings, yank him loose, and fling him as far as I can, but he comes right back, like a demented feather duster strapped to one of Daniel Beard’s killer boomerangs.

  I keep ducking and flailing but Hatchet is all over me. He is not a chicken, he is a sewing machine with wings.

  “FETCH ’IM!” hollers Toad, grabbing a broom from the porch and tossing it my way.

  “And how in boogety-blazes,” I holler, in between ducking and dancing and grabbing for the broom, “am I supposed to fetch a rooster with a broom?”

  “No!” says Toad, snatching up the broom as I drop it. “Don’t fetch ’im, FETCH ’im!” And cranking the broom back so far it looks like he’s trying to itch his heel bone, he unleashes a splitting-ax swing and pops that rooster a shot that fetches him—yes, FETCHES ’im—clear across the yard and splat against the trunk of a big pine tree. The bird biffs the bark with a squawk and a burst of feathers and falls to the ground like a rock. Then he shakes his head and scuttles off around behind the machine shed, tut-tut-tutting to himself all the while. He looks like an ugly ball of frayed lint. But Hatchet never stays humble for long. Ten minutes and he’ll be right back to skulking and darting.

  You have to understand how embarrassing this rooster business is for me. I am Ford Falcon. I have just pepper-bombed a solar bear. But this blankety-blank rooster gets the better of me. And no matter how hard I fling him or Toad “fetches” him, he always comes cackling back. Somewhere in me I admire him. But most of all I would like to admire him on a big plate surrounded by boiled potatoes and cooked carrots.

  Walking into Arlinda’s kitchen is like walking into the boiler room on a steamship. When the government pulled the plug on everyone’s electricity, Arlinda just cleared the newspapers and magazines off the top of her hulkin
g cast iron wood range and fired it up like the old days, and she’s kept the fire stoked pretty much ever since. I don’t know how she does it in there. The sweat pops up on me the minute I cross the threshold.

  You don’t want to get in her way. Arlinda is a stout woman with shoulders as wide as a doorway, and she moves around the kitchen slinging pots and pans like she’s driving pirates off a gangplank. But, oh, her cooking. Arlinda makes all of the good stuff: roast beef, pork chops, fried chicken, meat loaf, hamburger hot dish, mountains of mashed potatoes. . . . It’s the kind of food where the only thing you want for dessert is to roll into a corner and sleep it off. But she’s not all steak and spuds. When those fiddleheads come to the table, they’ll be resting on a bed of fluffy rice and drizzled with dark vinegar made from windfall apples. In other words, they’ll look almost good enough to eat.

  I help Ma set the table, while Dad and Toad carry in extra chairs from the sitting room. Dookie is supposed to be placing the silverware, but he’s over in the corner playing with a pair of spoons.

  Clackety-clackety, say the spoons.

  “Clackety-clackety!” says Dookie.

  Ma just sighs and gets two more spoons.

  As Ma and Arlinda stack the last of the food around the table, Arlinda has me stir the gravy. My stomach growls as I spoon the velvety brown liquid round and round, and if it wasn’t bubbling hot I’d guzzle it straight from the pan. Fat, salt, and mystery brown bits. There was a time people worried about these things, but when you spend entire days grubbing the dirt for chunks of old tin and iron, you don’t worry too much about eating gravy.