"What do you think about it, Toby?" Pop said.
It did seem the lights was getting real dim. "She's got something there, Pop," I said.
"Well," Pop said, "all she has really got there is another worry and we don't need no more of them. Either we keep the car lights on and run down the battery and set in the dark, or we turn off the lights and set in the dark."
The babysitter said, "But if we sit here in the dark and another car comes around that bend fast, it may hit us."
"Holly," Pop said, "I told you we don't need no more worries."
"But I was going to suggest something," she said. "Up ahead next to the bridge, there's a nice wide space off the road where we could park the car. The twins and I were up there. It isn't mud or sand, either. It's mostly crushed shell, so the wheels wouldn't sink in. Don't you think we ought to push the car up there and get it off the road?"
"I don't know as we could get her up there," Pop said. "It's a hundred yards and there's a little rise to the road."
"Oh, we can get her there, Pop," I said.
"I ain't going to have you pushing this car, Toby," Pop said. "Not with that bad back of yours. Holly, do you reckon you and the twins can push her while I steer?"
They thought they could do it, so we all got out of the car but Pop, and the twins and the babysitter tried to push. Well, like Pop said, there was a little rise up to the wooden bridge, and they couldn't get her going. Pop clumb out and gave me the wheel, and he and the others gave her a try. Pop hasn't never been nothing like as big as I am, but they tell me that years ago he used to be able to whomp down a thirty-foot pine with four-five swings of an axe, and then drag it off by himself. Tilings was rugged in Cranberry County back then and folks had to do for themselves. But then relief and WPA and Aid to
Dependent Children and Compensation and all that come along, and Pop found out the government would rather give you a cord of wood than have you chopping it up, and he started taking tilings easier. So now it would run Pop out of puff to try to whomp down a sapling. Him and the others couldn't budge the car.
I said, "Let me try her, Pop. I won't put my back into it. I'll just put my legs into it."
"Oh," Pop said. "Why didn't you say that before?"
He took the wheel again and I give the car a shove and got her going real good. By the time we reached the wide place in the fill I had got so interested in seeing how fast I could make her go that Pop had to slap on the brakes, and when I seen the wheels skidding instead of turning I laid off pushing and she stopped just short of the water. Pop was pretty mad when he clumb out, because he thinks the world of that car, old as it is, and for a moment he had figured it was going to end up in the middle of the bay. I told him it warn't my fault on account of I couldn't see where I was going and I had just got carried away, and finally he cooled off.
We settled down for the night with the twins in the back seat and the babysitter in the front, and Pop and me out on the fill with some old clothes under us. Pop complained about the shell, but it didn't seem bad to me. Most of it was crashed, and the few big pieces that stuck up warn't really sharp enough to cut. So I slept pretty good. Pop claimed he didn't get no sleep at all, but the first thing he asked next morning was had any cars passed in the night. I reckon we should have took turns watching but I figure the lights and sound of a car would have woke anyway one of us, and nobody had heard nothing.
I got into my bathing trunks and took a swim off the bridge and come back feeling real good. "Things always look better in the morning, don't they?" I said.
Eddy said, "I'm hungry."
Teddy said, "I'm thirsty."
Pop said, "One thing they don't need in this here state is another ray of sunshine, so you can just quit trying to make things look bright, Toby. I'm hungry and thirsty. I can't figure why no highway patrol cars have went by. It's the first time the government has let me down. Why, a man could starve to death here, and the country full of surplus food the government is trying to give away. What I want to know is, why ain't they giving some of it away here where it's needed?"
The babysitter said, "I think I know how we can get some water, but it would take a lot of work."
Pop said, "Can't you think of a way that don't take a lot of work?"
"The only way to get it here is to dig for it," she said.
"This here is all salt water," Pop said. "We can get all the salt water we need without no digging."
"There's always what they call ground water," the babysitter said. "When it rains, the water sinks into the ground. It doesn't mix with the salt water. So if you go back a little way and dig far enough, there's sure to be fresh water no deeper than the water level of the bay."
"I'm willing to give it a try," I said.
"Toby," Pop said, "you lay off straining that back of yours."
"I won't put my back into it," I said. "I'll just put my arms."
"Well, all right, then," Pop said.
The babysitter and the twins took me across the wooden bridge and up the road a little piece to where the mangroves stopped and there was sand instead of muck. We both reckoned it was maybe five-six feet down to bay level. That meant digging a pretty wide hole so the sides couldn't keep caving in and filling it up. I looked all around for something to dig with, like a wide board, and couldn't find nothing. The twins went racketing back to the car and brung me a Scout axe one of them owned, and a little sand bucket and a toy shovel. The axe was handy when I hit a root, but the toy shovel broke on me, and the bottom come out of the little bucket when I tried scooping with it. I dug some with my hands and didn't do very good. There was too many shells in the sand for me to scoop fast with my hands, and without I scooped fast I warn't never going to get down six feet.
I went back to the car and told Pop and said, "There must be something in this car I can dig with."
"There ain't a thing," Pop said.
I poked through the trunk and didn't find nothing useful but pliers and a wrench and screw driver. I stuck them in my pocket in case they might come in handy, and walked around the car thinking and getting nowhere and getting upset at getting nowhere, and finally I took a little poke at one of the front fenders to let off steam.
"Don't you take out your bad temper on this car," Pop said. "If you put a dent in that fender—"
I got down and looked under the fender.
"If there is a dent in it," Pop said, "you can see it just as good from the outside."
I hadn't been looking for a dent, though. I had been looking for an idea, and dog me if I hadn't found one. Pop's old car warn't like these new ones where the fender and most of the body is all one piece. On Pop's car, each fender is a separate piece, and when I looked underneath I saw it was easy to get at the bolts. "Pop," I said, "I got to borrow this fender."
"You ain't talking sense, Toby. What would you want to borrow a fender for unless you had a car that needed a fender?"
"This fender will make the best scoop for digging a well you ever seen."
"You're not taking my fender. You'd get her all scratched and dented."
"Pop," I said, "would you ruther have a scratched fender and a nice smooth throat with cold water running down it, or a nice smooth fender and a dry scratchy throat?"
Pop ran his tongue over his lips. "Well," he said, "I reckon you got to do it. But I can't bring myself to watch." He walked off a ways down the road.
I crawled under the car and went to work on the bolts and got them off and got back on my feet and wrenched off the fender. It screeched as it come off, and down the road I seen Pop wince like he had been stabbed. I carried the fender back to where I had tried to dig, and it worked good. Every time I scooped with it I come up with a big load of sand and shell. It didn't take more than twenty minutes to dig a hole six feet around and six feet deep, and by that time the bottom was getting wet. I clumb out and the babysitter and the twins and I watched. It was like magic to watch the water come in at the bottom. It didn't take no time to clear up, and
I got down in the hole again and took a swig and it was as nice and fresh as you would want. The babysitter passed down the empty pop bottles from the night before and I kept filling them and passing them up until everybody had enough.
We carted a load of filled bottles back to Pop, and he emptied them and come back with me to see the well. "I got to hand it to you, Toby," he said. "For once you had a smart idea. You . . . goddam it, look at that fender!"
The fender was lying beside the hole, and I had to admit it had got a mite rumpled. "I went through a few roots with it," I explained. "Then there was a couple of big stones I hit."
"All right," Pop said hoarsely. "If I don't talk about it maybe it won't prey on my mind much." He did love that car.
"Now when do we eat?" one of the twins said.
Pop looked at me and I looked at Pop. We didn't have no answer to that, but Pop said, "I reckon we wait for a car to come along."
We filled up the pop bottles again and went back to the car and waited. I hadn't been real hungry before, but what with the exercise and not being thirsty now, I could have gone through a few steaks without even waiting for them to stop mooing. After a while the babysitter and the twins had a whispered talk, and the twins got the fishing outfits Pop had bought them for the trip, and went with the babysitter to the bridge and began getting ready to fish.
"Do you figure they'll catch anything, Pop?" I said.
"They never caught nothing in their lives," Pop said. "And on top of that they don't have no bait. If they had had any bait I'd of eat it an hour ago."
I didn't pay no attention to them twins for a while, but when I finally looked their way again it seemed to me they was yanking back on their rods now and then, even though they warn't reeling in nothing. Likely they was just playing they had bites, but it got me wondering. I walked up to the bridge and got there as one of them yanked back hard and brung up his line, and cussed a little at the bare hook. Of course I knowed it had been a bare hook to start with, so he was just pretending to be mad but he was pretending right good.
I said, "Maybe if you put a little rag of cloth on that hook and keep moving it through the water, it might fool something. Always allowing there is something down there to be fooled."
"Ho," the twin said, "we got something better than that. Holly, can I have another bait?"
Holly come over and dug into a pocket of her blue jeans and brung out a small black thing and put it on the hook and dropped the hook back over the bridge rail.
"What's that you put on his hook?" I said.
She dug in the pocket again and brung out another. It was a crab no bigger than the end of her thumb, with one big claw it kept waving around like a batter getting set to knock one over the fence. "They're fiddler crabs," she said. "I found some the other side of the bridge in the mangroves. They make good bait for some kinds of fish. The twins have been getting bites but they can't seem to hook any."
"You never done any fishing," I said. "For that matter you never dug no wells that I know about. Where did you pick up all this about fiddler crabs and digging for fresh water?"
"I read a lot, Toby. I read all the time when I'm not babysitting for somebody."
"Oh, well, that explains it," I said. For a moment I had wondered if she was a lot smarter than you would think, but it warn't nothing but reading after all.
Just then one of them twins let out a yell and yanked back on his rod. But this time he didn't bring up no bare hook. There was a great big bend in his rod, and he had something on.
The twins was both screaming at once and you couldn't tell which was saying what. They was saying, "I got him I got him don't you lose him you dope who's a dope he's taking you under the bridge who's fish is this it ain't gonna be yours very long go catch your own fish keep a tight line on him you dope I got him coming my way you're losing him ..."
All of a sudden it got too much for the twin that hadn't got the bite. He went right off the bridge after that fish. I was scared, because the creeks in Cranberry County near our home are shallow, and this was deep water and he couldn't swim. So I kicked off my shoes and dove off and seen a swirl in the water by a piling and went under. That twin was down there hanging onto the piling with one hand and holding the fish by the gills with the other. I grabbed him by the pants and brung him up and towed him to shore, with him hanging onto that fish like it couldn't swim neither and he had to save it. The other twin was jumping up and down, cussing his brother out.
As soon as my twin had choked up some water he began howling, "I caught him, I caught him!"
"You did not, you did not!" the other twin screeched, and the two of them would have been making bait of each other if I hadn't grabbed the slack of their pants and lifted them up off the ground and held them apart.
The babysitter ran up gasping and called, "Eddy! Teddy!"
The twins stopped wriggling and hung limp from my hands and said, "Yes'm?"
"Eddy, I'm ashamed of you for using such language," she said. "Any more of it and there will be no more fishing today."
"Yes'm," Eddy said. "I'm sorry." It turned out he was the one hanging from my right hand.
"It was your fish, though, Eddy," she said. "And you get full credit for catching him."
The other twin sniffled a bit. "What about me?" he said.
"You landed him, Teddy," she said. "And you get full credit for landing him."
You wouldn't think a kid could strut, dangling off the ground the way he was, but he got across the feeling of a strut. I shook him and said, "What was the idea jumping off that bridge? You can't swim."
Teddy peered up at me and said, "How do I know I can't swim until I try?"
I shook him again and said, "Don't you try again until I give you some lessons."
Pop looked at Teddy dangling from my hand and the fish dangling from Teddy's. "Which one is the fish?" Pop said, and had a good old buster of a laugh. I had to admit Pop had got off a good one even if Teddy didn't think it was so funny.
We took time out to admire the fish, then, and it looked right nice. It was a fat one with dark bars and it would go four to five pounds. The babysitter said, "It's called a sheepshead."
"Are they good to eat?" I asked.
"That's the silliest question I ever heard," Pop said. "Because I am sure going to eat my share of him and I'd just as soon not bother about is he good to eat."
The babysitter said, "They're very good eating."
"How are we going to cook him?" Pop said.
"Well, let's see," the babysitter said. "Should we grill it on a stick? No, it wouldn't stay on very well and it might fall in the fire. Anyway it would get all dried out. I wonder about wrapping it in leaves and burying it in hot embers? No, that might take hours. I guess we'll have to use a pan."
Pop said, "But we haven't got no pan."
"Umm," the babysitter said, walking to the car and studying it.
Pop said, "Quit looking at my car. I already lost one fender."
"A fender would be too big," the babysitter said. "But those hub caps are just the right size."
She couldn't have asked for nothing Pop set more store by. He couldn't get a new car every year but he could get new hub caps, and he always got the biggest ones he could figure out how to fit on the wheels. Whenever he was on the road he kind of looked down on folks that was driving a set of last year's hub caps. Pop said, "I'd ruther give up my teeth than a hub cap."
I said, "You better not give up those teeth, Pop. Because you sure as fate will need them to eat this fish raw."
"I might think about letting you have a hub cap," Pop said, thinking he saw a way out, "but you couldn't use a hub cap for a pan because it has a hole in it for the tire valve."
"That's easy to fix," the babysitter said. "We can use two hub caps and make sure the holes don't line up."
"Goddam it," Pop said. "Now I lost two hub caps instead of one."
"Could we have three?" the babysitter asked. "I'll need a third for a cover."
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sp; Pop gulped a few times. "Once you start giving in to a woman," he said, "there ain't no end to it. Go ahead, but this fish will choke me."
I levered off the hub caps. The twins took them down to the water to scrub them off, and the babysitter began cleaning the fish. I got some dead pine and built us a fire. After that, the babysitter had me get the fender I had used to dig the well, and we cleaned that out good. She had worked out a cute trick to keep the fish from burning.
What she did was put the fender in the fire and pour in a couple inches of water. Then she put adhesive tape over the holes in the hub caps, and put the fish in the hub caps with one on for a cover, and let them rest in the fender with the water a little below where the hub caps fit together. That way she had a sort of double boiler. It didn't take long before we had the best steamed fish I ever thrun a lip over. The babysitter had done another cute trick, too. She recollected we didn't have no salt, so she had used bay water in the fender, and what with most of it boiling away, the water ended up so salty you could sprinkle a httle on the fish and salt it real good.
After we ate, Pop clumb in the back of the car to catch a little sleep, which is one of the things that is too slow to get away from Pop. The twins began fishing again, and the babysitter and I cleaned up.
"I saved the fish head," she said. "I thought I might do some crabbing in the shallows."
"You won't get no crabs without a net," I said.
"I can make one," she said. "The twins have a big ball of string for that kite your Pop bought them. I can tie that into a net. I can get a long smooth branch for a pole. All I need is a hoop to hold open the net. I'll tie the hoop onto the pole. Can you think of anything we could use as a hoop, Toby?"
Pop warn't being very lucky that day because I saw a nice chromium strip on the car, running below the doors. It was a good five feet long. I snuck up to the car and saw that Pop was sleeping sound, and I went under the car and straightened the clamps that held the strip on, and then I come out and yanked it off. It screeched some, and in the back seat Pop squirmed and maybe started to have a bad dream about fenders, but he didn't wake up. The babysitter said it would do fine.
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