Rainy Season

by Adele Griffin

  “We can take him, you and me, Ted,” he calls frantically. A mango bounces solidly off his shoulder and lands by his feet. Charlie winces and touches his hand to the target.

  “Yeah, but not now. Forget about it for now.”

  Charlie holds Ted in his eyes for a long second; then his eyes pin back on the tree. He starts circling the tree suspiciously like a bear who can’t climb but knows his dinner’s up there somewhere.

  “Forget about it,” Ted repeats.

  “Come on, Charlie,” Dan adds, with an exasperated look at Ted. “Kid’s a serious head case,” he mumbles.

  Charlie finally starts backing away from the tree in slow, careful steps, like he thinks the kid might just leap out of the tree. But the tree is silent and the mango missiles stop.

  “Let’s go,” he mutters detachedly, as he joins us. “Let’s just get out of here. I’ll come back.”

  “You and me,” Ted answers. “Tomorrow, how about?”

  “Yeah.”

  Our defeat hurts Charlie most. Even I, rubbing the back of my head in search of blood (there’s none), don’t care so much about revenge. But Charlie’s always distracted by new battles, and knowing he’s losing never makes him think of stopping. I understand that much about Charlie, anyway. Not like it really matters; a person can’t fix Charlie just by explaining him.

  “Ted, you still got your first aid kit in the truck?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Let’s clean you up, Charleston. That’s your real name, right, Charleston? Isn’t that what the Duchess named you?” Ted elbows Charlie in the ribs.

  “Shut up, Ted.” Charlie’s mouth twists up in a kind of smile. “It’s just Charles, you Zone-iguana. Charleston—what am I, on ‘General Hospital’?”

  “There’s a Port Charles on ‘General Hospital’,” Mary Jane informs us. “Does your mama lookit ‘General Hospital’?” We are pushing back through the weeds to the truck. None of us looks over our shoulders to the fort and the enemy hidden in the tree.

  “Yeah, maybe you were named for Port Charles,” Steph’s face brightens. “My middle name’s Amber, named after a royal lady from this book my mom read. Real royalty, I mean, not like in some fake romance story.”

  “I was named for my grandfather, who fought in World War II. Commanding Officer Charles Garfield Fogarty,” Charlie says proudly. “Not for ‘General Hospital,’ Steph, you retard.”

  “I wonder,” Steph muses. “That kid in the tree might have been Jason McCullough. In fact, I bet it was.”

  “Steph, you’ve got zero idea what you’re talking about,” Ted snaps.

  Steph looks hurt, but of course she keeps at it. “How do you know, Zonie? I think I recognized those blue sneakers from soccer camp. It’s not like you know what he looks like.”

  “It’s not like blue sneakers prove that it’s Jason McCullough.”

  “It’s not like they don’t.”

  “Whatever.” Ted looks at Steph in such a way that she decides not to push it. We then walk without talking the rest of the way to the truck.

  8

  OUR OWN FORT SITE lies between Third and Fourth Streets, on an inclined sweep of field. Ted had checked it out before and picked it for its privacy. Since the location’s close to a swampland near the edge of the jungle, the houses are built far away and the land is too soggy, even for military drills. The grass is kept short as a crew cut, though, because the field technically is Bravo Company property. That, at least, is what Ted says. Ted always seems to know more army facts than anyone else. He’s seen lots of families come and go, and he’s combed the bases his whole life. He can tell me the names of four families who lived in our house before it got stamped #4J LT. COL. BECK.

  We post sticks at the four corners of the fort, which we decide to build in the shade of a lanky tree—way too puny for us to use as a climbing hideout plus arsenal. Still, it’ll give our fort some protection from the sun.

  Ted ticks off on his fingers who’s responsible for what. Charlie and Dan and he will nail the framework together, Steph and Rat can start shaping the door, and Mary Jane and I will dig out all the weeds and rocks and other junk that’s embedded in what will be our floor space.

  We all unload the wooden planks from the truck, making a few trips apiece. As Steph and Charlie tug a heavy board from the flatbed, she peers over at Charlie’s skin-grated fingers.

  “He really got you bad.”

  “It doesn’t hurt, though. Not like my stomach when I hit the ground.”

  “Jason McCullough’s a wild kid. He’s so wild that his dad ties him up outside on a leash like a dog to punish him. Crazy, most likely,” Steph says. Her voice seems to me to be a little bit gleeful. She sure likes that tied-up dog story.

  “Hey, Charlie, that reminds me.” Dan sits on the edge of the truck, fishing around for tools in Ted’s toolbox. “Last week at the beach, I think you must’ve accidentally picked up my Steve Martin T-shirt, the one where he’s holding the balloons and it says ‘Wild and Crazy Guy’ underneath. I think I saw you wearing it the other day when you were out bike riding.” Dan doesn’t look at Charlie while he talks. He lifts out different sized screwdrivers from Ted’s tool box and compares them carefully.

  “Maybe I have it,” Charlie responds indifferently. “But if I do, it’s in the wash.”

  “Whenever you can get it back to me, I kind of want it.” Dan keeps his eyes harmless as a puppy, but now he looks up directly at Charlie, who’s scaling a piece of wood with Ted’s measuring tape.

  “If you’re so positive it’s yours, what T-shirt have you got I might like?” Charlie asks, which is his way of saying he’ll exchange the Steve Martin shirt for something else of Dan’s. It’s not exactly a fair trade, except in a Charlie way. Dan knows by now that whatever string he tries to pull, the same tangle of Charlie-logic will fall down on his head. The trick is figuring out how to pull down what you want without yanking Charlie into a fight you know you’ll lose.

  “I’ll check around,” Dan says casually. He smiles to himself, so I guess he feels pretty good about the conversation and the swap, and he should. On a bad day Charlie would have denied taking anything.

  We work without speaking, except to ask Ted what goes where and how to do certain things. The kid in the tree stole our good mood, but gave us a purpose.

  After a while, the space between my shoulder blades starts aching. Between us, Mary Jane and I have heaped up a pretty big pile of crumbly-rooted weeds, and my hands are sore from the effort.

  “I need a break,” I tell her. Mary Jane nods.

  “I need water,” she chuffs. Ted looks up from his hammering.

  “What a couple of lightweights,” he snorts. “I’m glad you’re not on my payroll.”

  “Yeah, come on, you two,” Steph agrees. “Get back to it.” I know she’s just talking so that Ted notices she hasn’t stopped working.

  Dan looks up from his digging. Sweat has separated his hair into dark bands. “Now I know how bad it must have been to dig the Canal,” he half-jokes. “Phew—the ground is tough to break through.”

  “Aw, you don’t have it near as bad as those poor guys who dug the Canal,” Ted says. “People died trying to get that thing finished.”

  “Wasn’t it a lot of Korean people?” Mary Jane asks. “That’s what my dad told me anyway.”

  “A lot of Chinese, not Korean, people, a lot of locals, some Americans; it was a lot of people came down who’d never been here before in their lives. Laborers, man. Serious raw deal, trying to build the Canal.” Ted stops hammering and unscrews the lid from his canteen, takes a long swallow of water and then passes it to Mary Jane. “Tons of people got sick and died from all the stuff they weren’t … prepared for? What’s the word I’m looking for, Lane-brain?”

  “Immune?”

  Ted snaps his fingers and points at me like a game show host. “Immune, right! They weren’t immune. So they got all these really bad diseases and infections like malaria and yellow fever and dysentery.
”

  Mary Jane makes a shuddering sound and passes the canteen to me. I take a drink; the water tastes like warm pennies. I recap the bottle and toss it over to Steph.

  “Yellow fever’s that disease where you can’t digest anything and so you starve to death, right?” Dan asks.

  “Something like that. I don’t really know, but the reason they called it yellow fever was because of the Chinese people being yellow-skinned,” Ted says.

  “No, the reason they called it yellow fever was because they thought the sickness came from the sun,” I tell him. “I read that last year in social studies or somewhere.”

  “Both you guys are wrong. Yellow is what you call someone if they’re a coward.” Charlie sighs, as if he’s bored having to explain something so obvious. “Cowboys used to say like—you’re yellow, and then that was a total insult. So yellow fever is, uh—different from regular fever, because you know you’re going to die, and so you’re really scared, like a coward. Yellow fever—see?”

  We’re all quiet a moment, turning over this strange new information, and then Charlie adds, “The only thing is, though, I know if I had yellow fever, I would probably be pretty scared to die, but I’m no coward.” A vicious expression fixes on his face, like he’s daring anyone to call him a coward. “Pass me the water, too.”

  “Coward fever?” Rat says, looking at Steph. “I never heard that.” Steph nods like she heard of it.

  “Well, there’s a lot of kind of yellowish-skinned Chinese still living here, and they’re descendants of the Canal diggers.” Ted hangs on to his point.

  “Chinese people here don’t have pure yellow skin.” Rat shakes his head. “It’s more of a goldish-brown colored.”

  “I think Lane’s right, anyway.” Mary Jane nods. “Once I got sunburned real bad? And all these hives and bumps were just trifling my whole entire skin? And Doc Perkins says, better get this gal some kammymeal lotion, for this here could turn into a bad spell of sun-yellow fever!”

  Steph gives Mary Jane the slit-eye. I can tell that she’s fueling up for another attack on Mary Jane’s inability to tell the truth.

  “Hey, what was that song Mrs. Ellerson taught us about the mule and the canal last year in music?” I ask Steph. “Do you remember?” Steph doesn’t even see me; she won’t look away from Mary Jane.

  “Mary Jane Harris,” she fumes. “You did not once ever get yellow fever, okay? Because before you came down here you got a bunch of shots, remember? And one of them, if you recall, was called a yellow-fever shot? And no—I repeat no—doctor’s going to look at a little bit of sun poisoning and be dumb enough to think it’s a symptom of yellow fever, unless he happens to be a cowpoke relative of yours or something. You’ll say anything for attention, I swear.” Steph’s eyes are hard as bullets.

  “I know what song you’re talking about.” Rat turns to me. “‘Erie Canal,’ it’s called. About the mule.” Softly, he starts to sing, “I got a mule, her name is Sal—”

  “Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.” I join in. My voice sounds too high pitched and girly, which is sort of embarrassing. “She’s a good old worker and a good old pal.”

  “Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal!” Charlie bawls, totally off-key but very confident.

  “Just one more stop and back we’ll go, through the rain and sleet and snow! ’Cause we know every inch of the way, from Al-ban-ee to the Buh-fu-lo—Oh!” Soon everyone’s singing, except Ted, who didn’t learn “Erie Canal” in Escuela Balboa. We sing-shout it through a couple times, then Rat starts off with “Don Gato,” another music class song, and this time Ted knows it.

  I pull up more weeds, finding fresh energy with the singing. It’s rewarding, anyway, tugging at a weed until I feel its witch-fingered roots detangling from the dirt. I keep count of how many Mary Jane tosses in the pile so that I always stay one or two weeds ahead of her. Little private games like that always keep me working longer and faster than normal.

  “The fort’s looking good!” Dan exclaims. “Check it out.” He stands and stumbles backward a little from where he’d been hammering. I stand up, too, stretching out the crick in my back. It looks better than good; I can see the beginnings of a real war fort: two solid walls of rough-cut wood sunk tight into the ground over the skeleton box Ted, Dan, and Charlie had constructed. Mary Jane’s and my work has cleared the ground to a floor of solid dirt. Steph’s and Rat’s plywood door is sanded and hinged, ready to slot into place once the third side of the fort is put up.

  Ted looks up. “Time to go swimming.”

  “I could use the bath,” Dan announces. “I stink.”

  “So let’s get over to Miraflores.” Ted starts replacing scattered tools and nails into his toolbox. “Before it rains, right?” He pretends to pop Steph on the head with his hammer.

  “I’m ready. Pack up and ship out!” Steph’s voice is hard and fast enough to make us all remember why she wants to get going.

  I check Mary Jane for signs of nervousness. She’s kneeling on our new fort floor, spitting into her hands and scrubbing them together to wash off the grass and dirt stains, but doesn’t look scared about the tower or her jump. I bet she’s plotting her escape. That would be a pretty interesting, Nancy Drewish thing to do. Except that Nancy would already have jumped off the tower bravely and afterward laughed while shaking out her dampened curls.

  “Creo que va a llover.” Ted speaks to the sky. “Tengo mucho calor y estoy sudando.”

  “Huh?” Steph laughs and blinks her eyes at him. “Translation, please.”

  “Just that I wish it’d rain—I’m hot and bothered.” He ruffles his hair so that it stands up in spikes.

  Ted and his parents talk a lot in Spanish—they’re not like a lot of other Zonians, who only speak Spanish if they absolutely have to, and then use a flat American accent. That kind of Spanish sounds strange, though, like bad acting in a dubbed movie. It’s almost as if the Zonians are trying to insult the words while they speak them. Ted says the dialect makes Zonians feel more separate from the locals, more like Americans.

  “Ted Tie, Touch and Die!” Steph tries to give herself a man voice. She picks up Ted’s toolbox. “Ted, does that mean if I touch you, I’ll die?”

  “Only from ecstasy at my physique.” Ted flexes an arm, and then seizes his toolbox from her.

  “Oh right.” Steph laughs and draws her own bony self up to full height.

  Sometimes, especially when they aren’t arguing, the combination of Ted and Steph needles me. I’m always sort of half-waiting for the day those two decide they don’t like the rest of us. I could see Steph counting us off with her fingers—Dan’s too weak, Charlie’s too unstable, Lane’s too quiet, and Mary Jane’s too girly. Rat can be slow … Although Steph would never ever completely turn against Rat, she’s quick to dismiss him with her mean eyes and her teacher-talk.

  As we walk back to the truck, loaded like pack mules with scrap wood and tools, Mary Jane is suddenly at my elbow.

  “Lane, I was fixing to tell you something.” Her voice is secretive and I turn to look at her. She’s pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and finally I can see her face, pale and easy to read.

  “You never jumped, right?” I say.

  “No.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Think she’d push me off?” Mary Jane’s forehead puckers slightly as she frowns.

  “No way.” I watch Steph striding ahead, talking casually to Ted and Rat in a way that nevertheless looks like she’s giving orders. “But if I were you, I’d rather jump and hurt myself than not jump and—”

  “Yeah, I know. Have Steph on my back until we relocate.” Mary Jane cuts me off. “Don’t go gabbing about it to anyone, okay?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  She brushes past me then, rushing to the front of the line as if suddenly she’s impatient to get the jump over and done with.

  9

  TED HAS THE RIGHT identification to use the dock and the Canal patrol skiff becau
se of his dad. During school breaks, Ted himself sometimes works as a line handler for the ships. Today, he parks the truck on the bank of the Miraflores lock and pays an old local man working on the dock fifty cents to watch over it.

  We take the boat to get to the tower. The skiff has a low-power outboard motor, and there are so many of us crammed in together that I worry through the whole ride that we will sink. It doesn’t help that as soon as we move far enough away from the dock, Charlie launches into a long story about alligators. He talks on about how they swim down from Florida to live in the locks and once they snap you up, they’ll drag you down and bury you in mud flats for days before eating you. “So you’re nice and soft and rotten to sink their teeth into,” he finishes, looking at me.

  “Whatever, Charlie. No alligators live here.”

  “Rotting, decomposing flesh.”

  “If you don’t shut up I’m going to push you overboard.” I shove away from him and stare down at the brown, murky image of myself that trembles on the surface of the water. Silent orange fish dart beneath my face; they flicker and are gone like candle flames. Then the water turns black; I look up into the sky and for the first time notice that clouds have gathered and are covering the sun. It seems like it happened in an instant.

  “You were right,” I say to Ted. “About the rain.”

  “We better jump quick is all I’m thinking,” he yawns. “Lightning. Of course, we could always sacrifice Charlie to the Lightning Gods and then maybe it won’t rain so hard. Tie him to the top of the tower, sling a shell necklace around his neck …”

  “Please feel free to shut up anytime, Ted.” Charlie beats on his chest with his fists. “I’m too tough to sacrifice.”

  “It’d be nobler than a lot of other ways you might meet your maker, Charlie. Lightning Gods—gotta love ’em.” Ted scans the water. “Land-ho! I see the Eiffel tower.”

  The Miraflores water tower is a tall skinny rusty iron scaffolding that stretches up about twenty-five feet out of the river. We call it the water tower because that’s all we know about how to describe it, although Ted once said it’s a watermark to let ship captains know how deep the Canal is in this part of the lock. I don’t know if that’s truth or Zonie-truth. Zonies like to make up stuff about the Canal and the Zone and the locals, hoping military people accept it as God’s truth. They know that no matter how dumb it is, we’ll most probably believe it, since we wouldn’t know any different.