Harry Sue

by Sue Stauffacher

  I could make a profession out of studying Homer’s face. I just could. But today, it was too hard to look, as his eyes were full to spilling over and he was biting his lip to keep the sound inside.

  “No,” he said, letting his breath out. “It’s a bad day, Harry Sue.”

  Of course it was, I thought as I saw the salt trails leading from his eyes to his ears.

  Take the cotton out of your ears, Fish. I feel a teachable moment coming on. Remember it: Cons don’t hear crying.

  Of course they cry; wouldn’t you? Everybody cries, Beau says, especially at night, when you’re thinking about your mama and how bad you hurt her. But no con will admit to hearing it. Not if he’s your road dog.

  “Want me to … ?”

  Homer nodded and turned his head while I found the Kleenex box tucked into the metal rail and pulled out a tissue. I wrapped it around my finger and stuck it in Homer’s ear where his tears always ran and plugged up his ear canal so he could barely hear.

  On days like these, it seemed like Homer was on the edge of something, like he was starting to fall. He was just at that moment where he was about to lose his balance. I felt so nervous, not knowing whether I would be able to catch him, to save him.

  Of course, I’m not talking about falling for real. It was more like a hole of sadness he was balancing on the edge of, a sadness that could swallow him up for days.

  Beau says the real name for it is special handling unit, or SHU. Don’t say the letters; say, “Shoe.” It’s isolation, you little minnows. No people. No noise. No light. Crazy maker. But cons and conettes have their own name for it. They call it the hole.

  Every once in a while, I could save Homer from the hole by grabbing him, not his body, but his mind, with an idea.

  “Homer,” I said, trying not to, but sounding desperate anyway. “I need a favor. Remember Violet, that lousy cheese eater who can’t do her own time? She disrespected me in a major way, Homes, and I need to lay it down.”

  But my words were going nowhere. They were just puffs of air that came out of my mouth, just sound, like the traffic in the street below. I wasn’t judging it right at all. Homer had already lost his balance.

  Part 2

  Falling

  Some of the Monkeys seized the Tin Woodman and carried him through the air until they were over a country thickly covered with sharp rocks. Here they dropped the poor Woodman, who fell a great distance to the rocks, where he lay so battered and dented that he could neither move nor groan.

  —The Wizard of Oz

  Chapter 8

  I knew right then something that might work, but I sure hated to do it. Homer wouldn’t make me if he could help it. Cons hate to go back to the scene of the crime. Nobody wants to relive it.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s gonna be okay, Homer. Let me get the file.” I pressed the Kleenex to his face until he stopped leaking and reached under the mattress to pull out a file thick with yellowed news clippings.

  Somewhere in this mess was the two-inch clipping about the Marshfield boy who’d broken his neck diving off the Grand Haven pier. But the bulk of the file, which his mother had dutifully clipped and collected at the urging of her young son, was about me, Harry Sue, the little girl who’d survived being thrown from a seventh-floor window.

  I sifted through the pile to find Homer’s favorite clips, not the ones that described what happened— the who, what, when, where, how—but the ones that in the weeks following the tragedy analyzed what had happened from every possible angle.

  “This one’s from the Ottawa County Courier,” I said, my voice still shaking.

  “LeDeaux,” Homer whispered, his voice hoarse. “The scientist.”

  I took the cup of water from the holder at the side of the bed and put the straw in front of his lips, just barely touching. There was an important difference between the way his mom did it—parting his lips with the straw like he was a baby—and the way I did. Mine was a question: “You sound hoarse. You want to drink something?” Hers was a decision: “My baby needs a drink.”

  Homer lifted his head, drank from the straw, and dropped it again.

  “‘Girl Survives Ninety-Foot Drop,’ by Pierre LeDeaux. A five-year-old girl has lived to someday tell the story of how she survived a fall from the seventh floor of Destiny Towers.

  “‘The statistics are rather clear,’ said Dr. Omar Melendez, chief of the emergency trauma unit at Ottawa County General. ‘Without extenuating circumstances, such as a parachute, we have no data on the survival of individuals from drops above the seventh floor. Less than two percent of individuals survive drops from the seventh floor. By the fifth floor, your rate of survival increases to fifty percent, and most will survive a drop from the second floor as long as they don’t fall headfirst.’

  “‘The child’s survival is attributed to a combination of factors,’ said First Response Team Leader, fireman Harper Rowell.

  “‘You got rain, rain, rain, for three weeks. Heavy tree cover. Mulch. Go figure. If you’d dropped a watermelon from that high up, it’s not hard to imagine what would have happened.’

  “But survive she did. Little Harriet Clotkin will be a noteworthy addition to the record books….”

  “Notice how he never says it,” Homer whispered. “He never says the word.”

  I knew the word he meant. But for now I held it inside, like a winning card, tight against my chest.

  Homer was trying. I could see it. But he was like the Scarecrow after the winged monkeys had done their work on him. All the stuffing pulled out of him, his legs in one tree, his arms scattered across the ground.

  Let me fall again if it keeps him out of the hole, I thought. What difference does it make?

  The words I read were the straw putting him back together. One word in particular worked magic on Homer. But it wasn’t time to say it yet. We were both keeping it with us in silence. Letting the tension build.

  “Peter Ricci,” he said now. “Luck and chance.”

  I pawed through the papers, dropping the folder to the floor once I’d found the clipping.

  “‘Young Girl Lucky to Be Alive,’” I read. “Peter Ricci in the Spring Lake Standard.” I glanced up at Homer. His face was turned toward me. You have no idea what that meant. It was the smallest of hopeful gestures for him to turn toward me as I read, instead of facing the other plywood wall.

  My heart seized up, but I looked back down quickly. I didn’t smile. The thing to do was to keep reading.

  “Young Harriet Clotkin is recovering from bruises, a dislocated shoulder, and two broken ribs after an argument between her parents nearly caused her death.”

  I always paused at this point in the article, wanting to ask this Peter Ricci: What are you saying about my mom? You think she had something to do with this?

  “Initially, Garnett Clotkin dangled his daughter out the window by one leg,” I forced myself to keep reading. “A drop from this position would have meant certain death. But she survives today because of a hard toss, a nearby elm, and a pile of mulch.”

  “See how he says that,” Homer said, lifting his head off the pillow. “It’s like he’s practically saying life’s a crapshoot. He can’t believe it, you not dying.”

  Now I knew it was working. Homer’s neck was stretched as far forward as it could go. If his hands were up to the task, he’d be pulling himself up.

  Time for Mona Sears in the Grand Haven Gazette. I fanned the clippings out with my foot and grabbed the article.

  “In the wake of a media onslaught,” I read breathlessly, “the residents of Destiny Towers are fighting to keep a reputation for violence and hard living at bay by refusing to comment on the recent near-death experience of a five-year-old girl. However, they all called the child’s survival from a ninety-foot fall a”—I glanced up at Homer. His eyes were shining as he mouthed the word—“a miracle as they hurried through the courtyard to their destinations.

  “‘I’ve seen some amazing things,’ said Dr. Omar Mel
endez, chief of the emergency trauma unit at Ottawa County General, ‘but this tops them all.’

  “‘Sometimes there is no explanation,’ said Borne Peterson, a physician at the West Michigan Clinic for Rehabilitative Services. ‘In this case, there was something to break the fall.’ Peterson recalled treating a man who’d fallen through a hundred-foot canopy of leaves and lived. ‘Trees can absorb energy, slowing a fall,’ he said.

  “‘As a physician, I believe in miracles. I have seen life defy science. I would say this is a very special girl.’”

  “Wait a minute,” Homer said, straining so hard that he caused one arm to slip through the bars of the bed and dangle at his side. “Read that last part again.”

  “‘As a physician, I believe in miracles,’” I read, rather dramatically, to play to the audience. “‘This is a very special—’”

  “No, before that. About the energy.”

  I searched backward and found the word. “‘Trees can absorb energy, slowing a fall.’”

  “Amazing.”

  I could see it now. He was pulling himself out in one swift motion. Homer bit at his control box, making the bed rise.

  “You know what that means?” he asked, eyes wide.

  I stood up. I didn’t have the faintest idea, but I wanted to be ready.

  “That rock. At the pier. The one I hit …” Homer locked onto me. He could do that, grab you with his eyes, I swear, all desperate and pleading and dangerous.

  “That rock at the pier. It has my energy.”

  You probably wouldn’t understand the importance of a statement like that. I know I didn’t.

  “Huh? The rock?”

  “Nothing,” Homer said, but he had a wild look in his eyes as he stared out his window. A faraway look.

  “Violet,” he said finally. “She the one who always PCs up? The cheese eater with the allergies?”

  I could see that he was not ready to let me in on it.

  “Yeah, the one who can’t do her own time.”

  “That’s easy,” Homer said, and in less than three minutes he had a plan he was sure would make Violet Chump very sorry she had dropped a dime on Harry Sue.

  “You sure about this?” I asked him. “Doesn’t seem like chalk can do much damage.”

  Homer gave me his look that said: Who’s the inventor here?

  “Before you go, I want you to set me up with my encyclopedia, Harry Sue. I want to learn more about rocks.”

  Using Homer’s instructions, I’d mounted a little book stand on one of those trays with legs, the kind you see in movies where fake people are making breakfast in bed for their kids when they’re sick. If I fit the tray under his neck just right, he could rest his chin on whatever book was on the stand and turn the pages.

  I left him like that, studying rocks of all kinds, using the two-volume family encyclopedia Mrs. Dinkins had scored at a garage sale. His mind had latched on to something. Homer chewed an idea the same way Ivan Denisovich chewed his crust of bread or his little piece of potato in the book we read about him surviving life in a Russian prison. He chewed it slowly, over and over and over, until there was nothing left of it. They gave the prisoners so little bread that most of them starved to death, but the way Ivan Denisovich chewed kept him alive. By chewing that way, he wrestled every little bit of nutrition out of that piece of bread.

  That’s how Homer was with a new idea. If you could see it, it would look like one of those bug carcasses that pile up under a spiderweb: sucked dry.

  I can’t say exactly why, but as I closed the trapdoor and swung with one hand onto the knotted rope, I felt a little stab of worry about it.

  Until I told myself that Harry Sue does not get intimidated by a rock.

  Chapter 9

  My morning chores looked like this:

  Swipe a box of chalk from Granny’s supply closet.

  Scare Sink and Dip out of drugging the crumb snatchers.

  Give the new art teacher the infamous Harry Sue welcome.

  Keep Spooner out of the muck!

  And that was all before lunch.

  Let me explain. The chalk was an ingredient for revenge. It was to help teach Violet Chump a few pointers about doing her own time. Second, somebody had to make Sink and Dip realize they would be sent up if they hurt one of the babies. And every new teacher had to be educated about my bad-to-the-bone character. How else was I going to get to the joint?

  The Spooner situation is a little harder to explain. Spooner’s parents worked the graveyard shift at West Olive Tool and Die, which meant he got dropped off around the time we went to bed and left for home about the time I went to school. That didn’t give us too much quality time together, unless you count the four times a week he woke up crying from bad dreams and I had to get him back to sleep.

  His parents seemed okay. They drove a nice car. They were clean. But you don’t get chased by bad dogs half the night on one of those happy TV-family shows. And then there was the little habit he had of sinking himself in the pond out back up to his eyeballs every morning just before they came to pick him up.

  In our war of words, Granny called her backyard a wetland, a unique learning opportunity. I called it a swamp. Our whole neighborhood bordered the spongy, marshy muck. The only good thing about it was it gave Homer all kinds of things to see through his window. Every once in a while a blue heron would fly through the patch of sky that was his viewing screen. He saw hawks and kestrels and turkey vultures there, too.

  There’s just a lot to eat in a swamp. It’s like a regular bird buffet.

  I gave Ferdinand Ponce de León Parker the name Spooner because of the way he backed himself right up next to my chest when I comforted him as a baby. Now that he was older, I made him stay in his own bed. Mostly that meant I spent part of the night on the braided rug next to it, holding his hand and telling him stories so he would fall back asleep.

  I know what you’re thinking. This is not the sort of behavior you associate with criminals.

  I know that.

  I always told myself that, somehow, I’d be tougher in the morning.

  Spooner was the one who got me in the habit of wandering the house late at night. When he finally fell into a restless sleep, I was as wide awake as Dorothy when she first eyeballed the giant head of the Wizard of Oz.

  Spooner figures into Homer’s web of all things. Because he kept me up at night, I started messing with the people in China Country who were locked away in Granny’s curio cabinet. To do that, I had to figure out how to pick the lock. But time goes slower from 2 to 4 a.m. For real. I can pick just about anything now with a jumbo paper clip.

  I started putting the squirrel next to the princess instead of his nut. I took the kissing cousins and turned them around so their butts touched instead of their lips. Since Granny made Sink or Dip dust the cabinet a couple of times a week, she always blamed it on them.

  Then later, just before the end, I started breaking off tiny little pieces, the flip of a dress or one little stuck-out princess finger. Whoever noticed the damage—Sink or Dip—would show it to the other in a panic. And if I happened to be around, I’d say casually, but loud enough for Granny to hear, “Oh, that must have been my celestial beings getting knocked out of orbit after Granny put Princella in the closet for coloring on her Quick Pick.”

  Or some such.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Unless you kept him under constant surveillance, Spooner would slip outside and wade into the marsh just before his parents were due to arrive.

  That morning, I used my trusty jumbo clip to pick the lock on the cheap metal cabinet where Granny kept the art supplies. She never used them herself, as I have already demonstrated. It was just a front for the parents, swung open wide during interviews to con them into believing we gave a regular course in art education.

  Next, I had the challenge of keeping an eye on Spooner while grinding the chalk in the blender according to Homer’s instructions.

  “Special treat today,” I
said, picking the lock on Granny’s private pantry. “We got Frosted Flakes.” My hope was that real Frosted Flakes would keep Spooner at the table.

  I eyeballed the morning crowd: four sleepy crumb snatchers whose parents all worked the third shift.

  Spooner looked back at me through one squinted eye.

  I returned his look with my look that said: Please don’t burn the spot, Spooner.

  I had too many other things to do.

  “Spooner’s gonna pour,” I said.

  The crumb snatchers on the graveyard shift knew the drill. Keep quiet and eat your chow. Granny didn’t allow for much noise before 9 a.m.

  Too bad I wasn’t one of them.

  I dumped the chalk in the blender and pressed the button. Clouds of white dust spewed out of the top. I let it run until I couldn’t take the burned smell of the motor any longer. Then I poured it all in a paper bag and tossed it in my backpack.

  As soon as I turned around, I realized my “please don’t burn the spot” look did not have the desired effect. Spooner had flown.

  Dang.

  I glanced at the rest of the crumb snatchers and then back at the clock. I’d have to work fast. There was plenty of danger for three sleepy preschoolers in Granny’s kitchen and I refused to risk it. I pulled the box of matches off the window ledge and ran upstairs and down the hall until I stood right under the smoke alarm. I lit a match, blew it out, and let smoke drift upward. It’s what I call “Granny’s little alarm clock.”

  As a rule, I didn’t like to rely on Granny to oversee the crumb snatchers. But she’d have to do in a pinch.