Strays Like Us

by Richard Peck

  Just a joke.

  We were over there one day after school. Mrs. Voorhees had some new feel-good medicine she’d talked out of her doctor. She wanted Aunt Fay to be there in case of side effects.

  We were late because Aunt Fay had been sitting with Mr. McKinney. When we got to her room, Mrs. Voorhees was on the bed, dressed, holding her head up off the pillow because she’d been to the beauty parlor. It looked like she’d raced up to bed a minute before we got there.

  “Where you been?” she, said to Aunt Fay, real snappish. She even held up her bedside clock and shook it in the air. “I could have been going into convulsions by now. Fay, I have a notion to dock your pay.”

  I waited for Aunt Fay to jerk a knot in her tail. But she didn’t. She wasn’t the same these days, not since Will’s dad died. She stood at the end of the bed, gazing at Mrs. Voorhees like she was something in a zoo.

  “Well, I went ahead and took that medicine. By now I could be having a conniption…” Mrs. Voorhees’s whiny voice tailed off.

  Still, Aunt Fay just stood there. She didn’t even plant a hand on her hip. It was like the game the two of them had always played didn’t work anymore.

  Mrs. Voorhees couldn’t stand the silence. “What’s got stuck in your craw anyway, Fay?”

  Another long pause, and I felt a squirm up my spine. Then Aunt Fay said, “I’ve got a lot of responsibilities, Edith, and you’re the least of them.”

  Yes, the game was surely over.

  “I’ve got a responsibility to Wilma McKinney.”

  Mrs. Voorhees turned over one of her little manicured paws, to brush Wilma McKinney aside. But she didn’t dare say anything.

  “There’s limits to how much Wilma can lose. I couldn’t save Fred, but I’m trying to keep Claude going. I couldn’t save her son, Edith, so I’m trying to save her man.”

  Mrs. Voorhees rallied a little. “Well, Fay, you don’t have to take my head off. You and Wilma always were too thick to stir.”

  “And I’ve got responsibilities to Wilma’s grandson too. He’s a thirteen-year-old boy, and he’s lost his dad, and he don’t know how to grieve.”

  I thought Mrs. Voorhees might be sinking into the bedclothes by now. But she sat straight up and locked eyes with Aunt Fay.

  “Don’t lecture me about loss, Fay. I’ve lost my full share. I’ve lost what you never had, and you know it.”

  She looked fierce and feisty. I thought she might jump out of the bed. She was wearing shoes.

  But Aunt Fay kept on. “And I’ve got responsibilities to this girl here.” She pointed at me, though Mrs. Voorhees’s eyesight wasn’t that bad. The air crackled between them. They went on talking with their eyes, but I couldn’t hear.

  “We’ve all got responsibilities, Edith,” Aunt Fay said. “Even you.”

  Then she walked across the mirrored room, refusing to limp.

  Something had happened, and I didn’t know what. Aunt Fay looked back at me and said, “Out.”

  When we were both at the door, Mrs. Voorhees spoke in a frail voice from the bed. “Are you coming tomorrow, Fay?”

  “Yes,” Aunt Fay said. “I need the work.”

  §

  She didn’t say a word in the car, and I couldn’t think of one. Why couldn’t she go back to being the way she’d been, getting sassed by Mrs. Voorhees and sassing her back? Why did things have to keep changing, even here?

  When we turned onto Cedar, I saw a car parked in front of our house. No, I didn’t think Debbie. Not even in my dreams now. We saw a light in the kitchen when we pulled into the garage. But it could have been anybody.

  When we came in, a big man in a sweatshirt with a whistle around his neck was getting up from the chair. I looked twice and saw it was the coach from school. Will was sitting at the table.

  “Mrs. Moberly? Coach Allen.” He whipped off his ball cap and looked at Will. “He said to bring him here.”

  People felt pretty free to wander into other people’s kitchens around here, but Coach Allen looked uncomfortable. Will pushed back from the table and hiked up his pant leg. His leg was bandaged from knee to sock. “He was sliding to third and bunged up his leg.”

  Still, Will didn’t say anything. “He didn’t want me to bring him to his grandparents,” the coach said. “Says you’re a nurse.”

  Aunt Fay was over by Will now. Some blood had soaked through, and the bandages were already unraveling. I read her mind. She thought a man had done the wrapping.

  “We took him over to Miss Throckmorton,” the coach said. “She fixed him up.”

  Aunt Fay propped Will’s ankle on the edge of the table. Sending me for the scissors, she cut the bandages away, and Will wouldn’t wince when the cotton stuck to the blood. A patch of skin was missing, and there were some deeper digs.

  “There’s still dirt in this wound.” She sent me to her supply cupboard and worked over Will’s leg, cleaning it with soap and water from an enamel pan. When she sprayed the disinfectant on, he dropped his head and clenched his eyes. I noticed how the sideburns were beginning to grow down the sides of his face.

  She worked quick and quiet, bandaging and taping his leg up into a neat, smooth package. You could have put it in the mail. Will made a move, but she laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “That’s as neat a piece of work as I ever saw,” the coach said. “I’m all thumbs.” He stood there, swatting his ball cap against his sweatpants. “You could give Miss Throckmorton a lesson – ma’am,” he said, eyeing the back door.

  Aunt Fay wasn’t stopping him, but he had something to say first. Her eyes narrowed behind the glasses. You didn’t beat around the bush with her.

  “Why don’t you keep him home from school for a few days,” the coach said, looking at the floor. “Say a week.”

  “That’s for his grandmother to decide,” Aunt Fay said. “But he can go to school on that leg. If you want to keep him on the bench till it clears up, that’s your business.”

  The coach worked a hand around the back of his neck. “Mrs. Moberly, what I’m trying to say is there’s going to be trouble here. He’s lost some blood. There were some splatters. The other boys are already – ”

  “Don’t that happen when you’re playing ball?” she said. “Didn’t you ever see that before?”

  “Mrs. Moberly, you’re making it tough on me.”

  “Then talk plain,” she said. “I do.”

  The coach heaved a sigh and looked over at me. He wanted me out of the room, but I wasn’t going.

  “Ma’am, you know how people are. Kids. They know how his daddy died. They don’t want his blood on them.”

  A silence smoldered in the room. Will stared at the floor.

  “They won’t get anything from him,” Aunt Fay said in a low voice, not wanting to say this. “He’s healthy, if it’s anybody’s business but his own. I had him tested one time when I took his dad to the clinic.”

  “Then you thought – ”

  “I didn’t think anything,” Aunt Fay said, full-voiced again. “But I saw this day coming.” She pointed at the coach. “I didn’t know what shape it would take, but I saw it coming.”

  “Well, ma’am – ”

  “Don’t ma’am me,” she said. “I’m mad. If the kids at that school are so dumb they think you can get HIV from a splatter of blood out of just anybody, it’s up to you to educate them. What’s a school for if not to teach?”

  She waited for an answer.

  “We teach them, but they don’t hear,” the coach said. “They only listen to each other.”

  That was true. I felt a little sorry for him, and not just because he’d come up on Aunt Fay’s wrong side, on the wrong day. He left then.

  Another silence fell on us.

  Then Aunt Fay said, “I’m going over to look in on Wilma. You two talk it out. You’re the ones who have to go to that school.”

  Will looked up as she turned to go. “What are you going to tell Grandma?”

  “All I know,” Au
nt Fay said. “You skinned up your leg sliding to third, and I dressed it.” The screen door snapped shut behind her.

  §

  We sat there, listening to the throb of the motor inside the icebox.

  “Miss Throckmorton worked on me too fast to do a good job,” Will said at last. “She wanted me out of there. And she wore rubber gloves.”

  “Maybe they’re supposed to.”

  “Did she wear rubber gloves that time you whipped Rocky Roberts’s tail?”

  “No. But – ”

  “You know what it reminded me of? Watching my dad die in the van. The paramedics wore rubber gloves and face masks and these big disposable paper cuffs. They looked like they were on a moon shot. Like astronauts. I couldn’t see their faces. So it was just me and my dad. Then not even him.”

  I didn’t know what to say. His eyes were hard as rocks.

  “Does it hurt?” I said finally.

  “You mean my leg?”

  I glanced around the kitchen. I ought to be busy doing something. That was the Aunt Fay in me. “She was steamed anyway, before we got home,” I said, beating around the bush.

  “Why?”

  “She and Mrs. Voorhees got into it. Serious this time.”

  “What about?”

  “Seems like it was about me, but I don’t know.”

  We sat there. “Well anyway,” I said, “you got a ride home.”

  “He only brought me home to say I ought to stay home,” Will said. “He’s trying to keep the lid on. If I’m on the team, he’s afraid parents will start complaining.”

  I saw what he meant, but I wasn’t used to him seeming this much older.

  “You’ve got a right to play on the team,” I said. I didn’t know why anybody would want to play on a team, but it was something to say. And he was a guy.

  “Right,” he said. “Or I could take the report from the clinic that says I’m clean and post it in the locker room.” His voice was all sharp edges. “Like I owe them an explanation.”

  “How did the guys find out, anyway?”

  “Because they don’t let you keep a secret in a town like this. The undertaker probably told. And if he didn’t, somebody else would.”

  I waited, not knowing what to say.

  “I’m taking myself off the team.”

  I tried to read his face. “You sure?”

  “It’s no big deal. Hey, I got carried away. We’ve been here all year, and I started following the crowd. I forgot who we are.”

  Strays –

  “I haven’t got time to play their games. I’ve got to be as old as I can be. Grandpa calls me Fred now.”

  After a little bit, I said, “But you liked having lunch over at the team table.”

  “I’d just as soon have lunch with you,” he said, not looking at me.

  “Just as soon?”

  “Sooner.”

  I wondered if I’d gotten off easy. My mother just drifted away. “You sure nobody’s going to – ”

  “By next Monday everybody’ll be talking about something else.”

  I hoped so. “When you slid into third base,” I said, “who’d you splatter?”

  “If I splattered anybody,” he said, beginning to smile, “it was Nelson Washburn. And I’d been working up a pretty fair pitching arm too. He didn’t like that either.”

  Now we were both grinning, but his grin was thin.

  “Listen, you want to walk to school together tomorrow?” Will said. “That way both of us would know two people.”

  §

  We did. We even walked all the way there on the same side of the street. When we came up the school steps together, there was Brandi Breathwaite, making big eyes and pointing us out to her girls. She’d pegged us for a twosome ever since that day Will cut school, and Brandi knows it all. Ask her.

  In language arts that day Ms. Lovett had written on the blackboard of her portable:

  By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

  Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

  Here once the embattled farmers stood,

  And fired the shot heard round the world.

  She read us the whole poem, I guess because it was April. It was the last thing she ever wrote on that blackboard.

  And it was true that by next Monday everybody was talking about something else. Will got that right.

  ∨ Strays Like Us ∧

  Thirteen

  The sirens went off late Sunday night. It was bedtime, but I was still at my table, doing a little homework. I’d kept my Debbie notebook around, and I was using the blank pages at the back to take notes. It was warmer than April, and from someplace way off, the scent of lilacs wafted in the window. Then the sound of sirens.

  First the one in the courthouse tower. Pretty soon the firetruck’s. Then a kind of whispering night breeze like everybody in town was asking, “Where is it? How near is it?”

  The gate between us and the McKinneys’ squeaked. From down in our yard, Will said, “Molly? They say it’s the junior high.”

  Sunday night and the school’s on fire? I was downstairs in two jumps.

  Aunt Fay rose up from the living-room couch. She’d been dozing, still dressed. “Where is it?”

  “Will says it’s the school.” I was aimed at the front door, hoping she’d let me go. Her feet hit the floor, and her head disappeared as she scrabbled around for her shoes. “I haven’t missed a fire yet,” she said, rounding the couch, grabbing for her car keys. Then she and Will and I were driving the long way around on side streets, closing in on the school.

  We followed a glow in the sky until we saw they’d blocked off the street. Aunt Fay swerved to the curb, and we walked from there past people in their pajamas on porches.

  We were in a mob when we came to the school. It was still there, black against smoky orange light with bits of burning shingle spiraling up into the night sky. “It could be the new building,” Will said, meaning the gym and caféteria.

  It was a couple of portables, Ms. Lovett’s and another one, going up like bonfires. The firemen were dragging hoses. A half-moon of people stood as close as they could get with the glow of the fire on their faces. When the water arched up, they made that sound they make for fireworks.

  But it was too late, and all I could think was how neat Ms. Lovett had always kept the top of her desk. We stayed until both portables were sizzling piles of embers.

  It looked like half the student body of the junior high had turned out, hanging on till the end. Even then, a question was murmuring through the crowd: “Where’s Rocky?”

  §

  That was one Monday morning nobody minded going to school. Will and I got there early to look over the ruins. The portables were just bent metal and broken glass and black patches on the grass. But there’d been another fire too. A little one had licked up the far side of the gym, but they’d got that out before it could really take hold. A cop car was pulled up, and they had the back of the gym taped off. They were taking pictures of an empty can that people said had gas or paint thinner in it.

  When the bell rang, we milled around like the first day of school while they tried to find us classroom space. Finally we had some language arts on the auditorium stage. Ms. Lovett looked near tears. But you know how it is. Everybody was pretty excited.

  Rocky Roberts wasn’t in school. Maybe this was just one of his days for not being here. But by lunch people said he’d lit out. By sixth period they said the cops were holding him at a roadblock. If the school day had run any longer, they’d have had Rocky convicted and serving time.

  §

  Now that Will’s dad was gone, Aunt Fay had taken on a couple of new patients. She came in late that Monday night. If she’d been a minute later, I’d have answered the phone. It rang as she walked in the kitchen door. I was waiting supper for us.

  “That’s right,” I heard her say. Then “I believe she mentioned it.” Then “I’d sooner you tell me now, over the phone.” I wasn’t paying much attenti
on. I was stirring up a can of soup. “Well, all right, I’ll come,” Aunt Fay said. “No, I’m going to bring her. She knows you folks, and I don’t.”

  She hung up. I stopped stirring.

  “A Mrs. Pringle?” she said.

  Tracy.

  “She’s the one who gave me the clothes. Why – ”

  “I don’t know. But it sounds worse than she’s letting on. She wants me to go up there. It’s cooler tonight. Slip something on and show me the way.”

  §

  My mind was a blank all the way up the hill. I showed Aunt Fay where to turn and the Pringles’ house. A light was on over the door. I’d never expected to be here again.

  The front door opened, and it was Mrs. Pringle, almost every hair in place, looking past us as she ushered us inside.

  “Yes. Molly, isn’t it?” Her eyes swept over me to Aunt Fay. “Very good of you to come. I’d just like you to have a look at my daughter. I’m sure it’s not – ”

  “Where is she?” Aunt Fay said.

  She’d be in her bedroom with all the white flounces and framed flowers. When Mrs. Pringle saw I was following them up the carpeted stairs, she turned. “You may wait downstairs.”

  “No,” Aunt Fay said. “She can come.”

  Mrs. Pringle caught her breath but wouldn’t take the time to argue. I wasn’t sure where I wanted to be. I hadn’t seen this house at night. It was all shadows. And I didn’t go farther than the door of Tracy’s room. It was dim, with one light on beside the canopied bed. Someone – Tracy was lying on top of the covers. I just glimpsed. She didn’t seem to have a lot of clothes on. All I could think of was how many clothes she had and how few she was wearing.

  Aunt Fay was around on the far side of the bed, and Mrs. Pringle was beside her, hovering. Then Aunt Fay put up her hands and stepped back. It wasn’t like her. It wasn’t a move she made. “What in the world has happened to this child?”

  “It was – we were burning some trash,” Mrs. Pringle said.

  Tracy was awake. I saw her head move, but Aunt Fay turned on Mrs. Pringle. “Call an ambulance.”

  “Surely you can do some – ”