Rainy Season

by Adele Griffin

  6

  WHILE MRS. WAGNER FIDGETS and twitches, but dares not say a word, Dan, Steph, Rat, and I pile into the flatbed of Ted’s old truck. Bundles of rough yellow wooden planks, tied and stacked, take up most of the room. Charlie’s up front, but he has to hold the handsaw and Ted’s toolbox on his lap. Ted refuses to let the toolbox out of his sight, for even a second, although the only one who’d ever think of stealing it is Charlie.

  We each slurp a Popsicle from the box Mrs. Wagner passed around after lunch. Mine is grape. Purple juice rolls down my wrist faster than I can lick it away and my fingers are stained and sticky. Steph and Rat both picked lime and their lips are smeared green.

  “All on?” Ted shouts. He starts the ignition.

  “Are you kids safe?” Mrs. Wagner finally peeps. “I mean, isn’t this a little dangerous, with everyone in the back and no seatbelts?” Steph and Rat look straight ahead, like they don’t have any connection to this weird lady who decided to come out of her house and ask us questions.

  “Ted’s a good driver,” I say. I feel like I have to say something. “And we’re just going over to Third Street.”

  “You should stop by and pick up Dana Franken, then. Her family lives on First Street, I think, and she seems like a nice girl.”

  I can’t answer because the truck lurches away from her, kicking up a cloud of dust.

  “Did you hear her say that?” Steph bares her teeth and opens her eyes wide like Orphan Annie. “Frankenstein’s daughter? So we could talk about what—Ozzy Osbourne and ACDC? And it’s not even on the way. Why’s Mom just so totally, incredibly winky?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Steph.” Rat scratches his chin. “Hey, you know, maybe we should cruise over to the other side and check out the other fort.”

  “Good plan.” Dan leans into the rear view window and signals.

  “What?” shouts Ted over his shoulder. He slows down the truck.

  “Check out the other side first,” Dan yells. “The competition, right?”

  “Done.” Ted yells back “But first we gotta swing around to Fifth Street and get Mary Jane Harris.” I snake my eyes a fraction over to my right to catch Steph’s reaction. She’d been slouched, mosquito-gnawed legs splayed out in front of her and arms spread-eagled over the sides of the truck, but at the mention of Mary Jane Harris’s name she yanks herself up so that her spine is rifle straight.

  “I don’t think so!” she brays. “I do not think so!”

  “Let it go,” Rat tells her. “Forget about it.”

  “I don’t think so!” Steph tries to stand and manages a wobbling stoop. She begins pounding her fist on the roof of the truck on the driver’s side. Ted swerves off to the shoulder of the road and brakes; we all hang on to the walls of the truck at the sudden motion. Ted leaps out and looks up at Steph, who’s now planted in the center of the truck. Green-mouthed, hands clamped on her hips and feet locked a shoulder’s width apart, she looks like a mule or a skinny version of Wonder Woman.

  “She comes, I go.” Steph rubs the side of her nose and flicks the sweat off her fingers.

  “She comes. I invited her yesterday at Kobbe and she called me this morning,” Ted answers flatly.

  “Then I go.”

  “What’s your problem, Steph?”

  “Unless she admits she never jumped off the Miraflores water tower.” Steph holds up one finger. “I know for a fact she didn’t and for a month she’s told everyone she did, which makes her a liar, because her initials aren’t up there. I should know because mine are up since I’m the only girl I know who ever jumped! Ever!”

  “Here we go again.” Rat snaps his Popsicle stick in half and begins tapping them on his knee in a drumbeat. “Day-oh!” He sways his head and sings in reggae rhythm, “Day-light come and Steph never for-get.”

  “Shut up, Rat,” Steph snaps.

  “Steph, no one cares about this except you,” Ted sighs.

  “You wouldn’t say that if Mary Jane was a guy. You’d care—you’d make him do a do-over.”

  Ted pauses, and I can tell he can’t figure out if he agrees with her on this point or not. “Let’s just go by her house and see what she says.” He pulls off his shirt and ties it like a bandanna over his head. “Maybe ask her for a do-over and see what happens, okay?”

  “Okay.” Steph looks smug. They exchange a nod of truce and Ted climbs back in the truck. Steph slouches back and closes her eyes, her chin dropped down to her chest. Her expression reminds me of a boxer during a time-out.

  “This should be interesting.” I try for a careless laugh and a toss of my hair, like Nancy Drew. Except that Nancy Drew’s hair is titian-colored, which I looked up and it’s just a complicated, pretty way of saying red. I can’t think of a pretty way of saying dark brown. Dead grass, dirt, moths, meatloaf … only ugly, boring things are dark brown.

  “Hey, you don’t think Mary Jane Harris actually jumped, do you?” Steph’s eyes crack open to glare at me.

  “Well, if she was at the tower, someone had to take her there, right? It’s not like she rowed herself out there all alone. So who are her witnesses?”

  “She says it was her hicksville cousins visiting from the States.” Steph leans out of the truck and shoots a lime-green wad of spit into the road. “That’s convenient, huh?”

  “We’ll hear the story soon enough,” Rat grumbles. “Like we haven’t heard it a hundred times before already.”

  “It ain’t fair, though.” Steph never says “ain’t” unless she’s really peeved about something. She flutter-kicks her heels, and the metal floor sounds like a kettle-drum beneath us. “I one hundred percent know that she didn’t jump. I just know, because she got a lot of facts wrong when I quizzed her about exactly how it feels to fall down from so high and plus she didn’t put in her initials before she went. I don’t see why Ted invited her to come along with us, anyway. It’s not like she’s in our usual group. Why couldn’t he have asked Chris Lorno or Tim Polanski? Mary Jane Harris! That girl’s such a wink! She gives girls a bad name!”

  “Calm down there, Steph.” Rat reaches over and pinches the toe of her sneaker. “You act like jumping off the top of the Miraflores tower is the biggest thing in the world.”

  Steph quiets down but I can almost hear what she’s thinking—that Rat wouldn’t know since he’s too chicken to jump. I am, too.

  Showing some loyalty to Steph’s side of the story, Ted rudely beeps the horn when we pull up to Mary Jane’s house instead of getting out and walking to the door the way he usually does. Mary Jane sweeps out immediately, swinging her ugly white fishnet purse that she carries everywhere and wearing a pair of purple-rimmed sunglasses. Steph huffs, “What’re those stupid glasses—” but Rat smacks Steph quick on the shin to interrupt her before Mary Jane can hear.

  “How do, all?” Mary Jane slurs in her funny Southern accent, hoisting herself up into the flatbed. She thumps the side of the truck, so Ted knows to push off, but it stays stopped. We all mumble hellos; everyone’s nervous, waiting for Steph’s attack. She doesn’t disappoint us.

  “Look, M.J.,” she starts off immediately. “We’re all having a problem with this supposed, so-called jump you made off the Miraflores tower last month, which no one saw and no initials to prove it.” Steph’s saying “we” makes me look down and start examining my fingernails.

  “My cousins seen. They seen when they come down to visit, but all of ’em’re home, now.” Mary Jane talks like she’s stumbling for the right words. “Y’all know they went back to Roybrush, to Georgia.”

  “Ain’t good enough.” Steph stretches out her bony arms behind her and then lets her neck drop back into the sling she’s made from her interlocked fingers. She draws her elbows together in front of her face. Now no one can see her lips talk. “I am officially challenging you to a do-over, Mary Jane Harris. Today if possible. So that none of us has any doubts.”

  Up in the driver seats, the backs of Ted and Charlie’s heads are still, listening. The p
urple-rimmed glasses shield most of Mary Jane’s expression and she doesn’t speak for a while. Dan leans out the side of the truck and hucks a glob of grape spit. I copy him, watching it sizzle to nothing on the black road. Rat coughs into his hand. The sun feels like it’s broiling up my sweat before it has a chance to cool me down, and it hurts when I unstick my fricasseed legs from the floor of the truck.

  “Look here,” Mary Jane finally says. “I done it before, I do it again. Anytime. Ya’all can be witnessers.”

  “Fine,” Steph says. “Right.” She looks a little confused. I bet she was hoping for a crybaby breakdown and confession.

  Ted pulls away from the curb. No one speaks. Mary Jane rummages in her big ugly pocketbook and extracts a tube of Bonnie Bell spearmint lipgloss, and she begins to slather it over her lips. I breathe the layered smell of mint and lumber and close my eyes against the tension of Steph’s clamped face.

  We turn off Fifth Street and onto Main Road, which runs clear from the front gate of Fort Bryan all the way to the back entrance. Every public building on base is located just off Main Road, all in sight. We pass the squat commissary and the red-tile roofed post office, the box-shaped church, and the compact shopping complex where a few stores offer a limited selection of shoes or bedsheets or lamps. Most of what Mom buys comes from catalogs from the States or downtown, off-base. We pass the Rec Center, where you can go bowling or take karate classes, the movie theater with only one screening room, and over the hill, all by itself, the gym where everyone plays racquetball. There are only two courts and you have to call to reserve a spot almost a week in advance. Charlie and I love to play racquetball, even though he usually wins, and we always fight over who gets the blue-grip racquet.

  Suddenly Charlie twists around from the front and yells, “We should grab one so I can crush you again.”

  “I’ll call when we get home,” I say.

  “What are you guys talking about?” Dan stares at me with a frown between his eyes. “I hate it when you both do that weird mind-reading stuff. Steph and Rat are twins, and they never do that.”

  “Speaking of getting crushed,” Steph says, her eyes thoughtful in the distance. “We need to get some weapons for our fort. Those kids from the other side mean business.”

  “Yeah.” Everyone agrees in grave voices—even me, although I wonder if everyone’s clear on what “mean business” really means. In fact, even though I’d never really admit it to Steph or Charlie, or even Ted, I’m not sure why we fight against the other side kids at all, except that we don’t know them because they don’t go to our school.

  We’re winding along past Ninth Street when Charlie calls out, “Where’s their fort, anyway?”

  “Behind Tenth,” Rat shouts back. “All the way in back of the basketball courts.”

  By the time we climb down from the truck, I’m excited to see the other side’s fort for myself. Tenth Street is long and mostly uphill, and we make a straggly path up to a building stamped #8BQ; a plain gray block divided by cookie-cutter lines of curtain-less windows. Dan says it’s where unmarried soldiers live and that BQ stands for Bachelors’ Quarters. The basketball court lies behind it. It’s just a sunken rectangle of poured concrete, with stairs leading down—built like a swimming pool that’s all shallow end. Weeds spring up in the loose chinks, and a deflated basketball is slumped in the corner.

  The kids from the other side have built their fort in the far backyard of the BQ. We spot the fort immediately; it looks like Mina and Pop’s old outhouse, only it’s built against a thick-trunked tree. I can just see the bicycle chain and lock twisted tight around the door. But what I don’t see is what Charlie spies immediately.

  “Kid,” he hisses.

  We stop in our tracks. It’s then that I notice the skinny legs, attached to a pair of blue sneakers, dangling from the tree.

  7

  THE REST OF THE body’s invisible, lost in a rubbery leaf awning. We don’t know if the kid sees us so we approach carefully. Charlie glances at me with that weird, blank expression he always gets when he’s in the middle of a situation that he can’t predict. I don’t even swallow; water gathers slowly in my mouth as we shove through the ragged weed grass. I do notice that Steph takes the opportunity to catch hold of Ted’s wrist, but he doesn’t seem to care.

  “Hey, kid!” Charlie shouts. Rat and I exchange an anxious look. I hope he’s thinking what I’m thinking, that more kids might be hidden inside the tree. The tree crackles and the legs draw up and disappear inside it.

  “What are you? Scaredy-cat? Cats climb trees but they can’t get down!” Charlie’s voice picks up confidence. He’s proud of his cat comparison. “Here, kitty kitty kitty!” Charlie’s now leading us all by a few paces. He looks over his shoulder and motions to us. “Come on, guys. There’s seven of us and one of him. Let’s take him!” He breaks for the tree.

  “Wait, Charlie. Hang on a second!” My own voice strains my throat. “Maybe there’s more kids, okay, so let’s just see—” But then Dan tears away, too, speeding after Charlie. They reach the tree together. Charlie points up into the leaves; then Dan crouches and makes a stirrup with his hands to give Charlie a leg-up.

  “Ooh, they all’re just plumb loco!” Mary Jane adjusts her purple sunglasses with her matching grape-painted nails. “It’s kinda like a war!”

  “Shut up, Mary Jane,” murmurs Steph. “It is a war.”

  Charlie swings up from Dan’s handmade rung to grab the lowest branch of the tree. I watch as he squirms, legs kicking at the air, working to thrust his weight onto the branch.

  “Here kitty, kitty,” he grunts. Ted snickers. Charlie makes a final heave up to try beaching his stomach on the branch, but he never gets that far. With a surprised yelp of pain, Charlie suddenly lets go of the tree limb and falls to a thud on the dirt. He doesn’t move. I start running.

  “Charlie!” I cry out to him. “Charlie, I’m coming!”

  I drop down to all fours on the dirt beside him. Dan’s scowling up into the tree. Charlie moans and slowly rolls over on his side, his knees bent up under his chin like a crushed mosquito.

  “That kid stepped on my hands,” he wheezes. “Wind’s knocked out of me! Ah, Jeez—my stomach!” But it’s Charlie’s knuckles that look painful and disgusting, all shredded, ripped, and bloody skin.

  An angry cry from Dan distracts my attention; I turn to see him gripping his head with both hands.

  “Rocks!” he yelps. “Damn kid just hit me with a rock!” It takes me a second to understand what Dan means, but not before something knocks against the back of my head. For a split second I’m numb, and then pain shoots from the base of my skull and spreads down through me like a stain. Charlie’s already back on his feet, bellowing. He rubs his knuckles on the sides of his shorts, leaving dirty marks of blood smudged against the khaki.

  “You stupid kid! There’s seven of us and one of you, you freak kid!”

  A large green rock whistles from the tree, grazing Charlie’s shoulder. I crane my neck to get a better look and realize it’s not a rock; it’s a green mango.

  “Get to the side, over to the side!” Ted is yelling, has been yelling. He waves us in with his arms. He and the others stand in a frozen knot, out of range. Mangoes now are spitting from the tree in rapid fire. One thuds hard on my toes; I stagger to my feet and start moving away from the tree fast.

  Idiot that he is, Charlie charges to the base of the tree and starts trying to shinny up its trunk.

  “That’s no mango tree either,” Dan yells, jumping up and down. “They must have brought some supplies up there. Charlie, don’t be dumb. We’ll get ’em later.”

  “Get back, Charlie!” I call out. “We’ll all come back later!”

  “With helmets!” Steph adds. She looks at me. “That kid might have worse than mangoes up there,” she confides. “He could have a whole, you know, arsenal—BB-guns, machetes, blinding sand, you name it.”

  “What’s blinding sand?” I ask. I flinch, watc
hing the mangoes beat like green hailstones against Charlie’s back and shoulders. Both his hands are clamped over his head and I feel slightly nauseated as I watch a mango smack against his bloody fingers.

  “You don’t want to know. It’s like getting pepper in your eye, and then you’re permanently blinded,” Steph tells me. “For life.”

  I prod Ted in the shoulder.

  “Do something. Make Charlie get back.”

  “What can I do? Move to the side, Charlie,” he shouts so loud that I can see veins tighten in his neck. “You’re acting like a stupid little kid.”

  Watching Charlie not listening to us reminds me of this other time, after the accident, when Charlie and I were both in the hospital, placed in the same room in beds side by side because the doctors thought it would be easier for us that way. So much of him was messed up, not just his leg and his shoulder, but in his head he wasn’t exactly right either. Every morning Charlie would thump out of bed and pull back the divider that was rigged up like a shower curtain in the middle of our room. I’d hear the slither of the metal rings push back, and I’d open my eyes to see him standing next to my bed in his green hospital nightshirt.

  “I’m going to look for her again. Are you coming to help?”

  “You can’t just leave your room, Charlie. It’s a hospital,” I always said.

  “Are you coming to help?”

  “You can’t just leave.”

  “Are you coming to help?” Back and forth our words would slide, until he gave up and left without me. I would be by myself for a few minutes, and then I’d hear the nurses’ voices; caught by surprise, yelling at him, delivering him back into our room. Those moments when Charlie was gone made me feel nervous and lonely, but when they’d bring him back I always felt too sorry for him to look at him.

  I feel the same way now.

  “Do something, Ted,” I say again.

  “Charlie, you cretin, report back here double time!” he shouts.

  Charlie finally must register Ted’s voice because he looks up.