Primrose came to a halt. Turning the dim light on herself, she put a finger to her lips. She drew gloves from her pocket and pulled them on. So did David. She pointed to the ground and got down on her hands and knees. David, with a faint shudder, did likewise. They began crawling.
Wet blood-red stalks came at David like a nightmare, bumping his nose and slipping across his cheeks; damp leaves licked his ears. The sog soaked straight through to his knuckles and his knees. He hated worm hunting.
As instructed by Refrigerator John, they crawled in the same direction, side by side. Whatever worms showed up in their paths were theirs. The chirruping of a hundred unseen crickets masked their own rustle.
They had barely begun when Primrose pounced. She held up her hand. David’s red beam revealed two inches of wiggle dangling from her gloved fingertips. An ordinary worm. She dumped it into her jug and in front of a proud grin held up five fingers: a nickel for her.
Then David saw one, another two-incher. He picked it up and dangled it in her face and stuck out his tongue. Into the jug. A nickel for him.
For the next several minutes they both collected a good handful of worms, all of them two- and three-inchers. David kept tabs on his growing wealth: twenty cents . . . twenty-five . . . thirty. He could now understand the profit in nightcrawlers: twenty-five cents in one swoop. Four, and you had a dollar.
But where were they? Refrigerator had said they would be all over the place. He was about to pick up another two-incher when his eye caught movement at the hazy edge of the light. He looked — and yelped “Snake!” as he leaped onto Primrose’s back.
Primrose jumped to her feet to shed him, but he clung like a saddle, his arms around her neck, legs around her waist. She peeled him off, growling, “That was no snake, dummy. That was a nightcrawler. I saw it go back in its hole.” She smacked his shoulder. “And that’s probably where they all went now, ya baby bigmouth.” Her fist shook in front of his nose.
“If you punch me I’m calling nine-one-one.”
“If I punch you, you won’t be able to talk for a week. I never should’ve brought you along. I’m never gonna get my paint at this rate.”
She abruptly stomped off in another direction. David hurried after her. “Hey, don’t you lose me.”
She whirled, she squeezed his shoulders, she shone her light in his eyes. “Are you gonna keep your mouth shut?”
“Yes.”
“Are you gonna make me mad again?”
“No.”
She shone the light on the watch. “Half an hour left. Crap.” She dropped to her hands and knees and started crawling. David fell in beside her. Within seconds Primrose had stopped and signaled David to a halt. Five feet ahead of her, lying flat across the ground as easy as you please, was the longest worm David had ever seen. And that wasn’t even all of it — one end was still in the hole. He stayed rock-still and held his breath while Primrose did as instructed: creeping ever closer, closer; holding the light steady, steady, till —
now!
— she clamped its tail at the hole and held on. The monster worm flailed about for a good minute before Primrose was able to pull it free.
With both hands she held it out full length. It looked as long as a school ruler and fat as a man’s thumb. She poured it into her jug and flashed five fingers five times. Twenty-five cents.
David started crawling and was promptly rewarded with a long, fat one in his own path. In his haste, he moved too fast, jerked the flashlight, and —
httthhhpp
— the worm was gone. Primrose made a mocking snort. David stuck out his tongue and pushed on. He’d show her.
The next nightcrawler he came to, he did it right: slow, silent, clamp the tail. Yes! He had it. It looked longer than hers, maybe a world record. He reached over and waggled it in her face, dumped it into his jug, and paused to calculate. Counting the two-inchers, he was up to fifty-five cents now.
He plowed on, ignoring weeds and wet, spurning the two-inch runts, flicking them aside. He was going for big game now.
There
was one. Got it!
There.
Got it!
Compared to Easter eggs, worms were a snap. They were still following parallel paths, but they were no longer side by side. When one stopped to nab a worm, the other moved ahead. It was a race.
Quarter by quarter, David’s total rose. Unlike Primrose, he had nothing particular in mind to spend his money on. He just loved the idea of accumulating it. If there were so many nightcrawlers in this small area, think how many there were all up and down Tulip Street. He could make a million!
He was up to three dollars and sixty cents when he spotted the next victim, a fat ten-incher up ahead and a little to the left. Closing in slowly on his prey, he pounced on one end — just as another gloved hand — Primrose’s — snatched the other end. They lifted together, the worm like a short slick jump rope between them.
“Let go!” hissed Primrose.
“
You
let go,” hissed David.
“
I
saw it first,” growled Primrose.
“
I
did,” growled David.
Primrose pulled. David pulled. The ten-inch worm became an eleven-incher.
“I need the money,” snarled Primrose.
“So do I,” snarled David.
“I’ll spit on you if you don’t let go!” screeched Primrose.
“I’ll spit on
you
!” screeched David.
They stood. Primrose pulled. David pulled. Twelve inches.
“It’s
mine
!” roared Primrose.
“It’s
mine
!” roared David.
She pulled. He pulled.
Thp.
Each now held six inches of flailing nightcrawler.
“See what you did!” yelled Primrose. She smacked David with her half.
David threw his half at her. “
You
did it! You’re greedy! It was my worm and you took it!” With the hand speed of a yo-yo ace, David flipped the lid off Primrose’s jug, turned it over and shook it.
By the time Primrose reclaimed the jug, a half-dozen ten-inchers were on the ground crawling back into the night.
In the beam from David’s flashlight her eyes burned like a demon’s. She stepped toward him. He backed up. She was about to take another step, but halted. She smiled evilly. She held her flashlight before him. “Take a good look,” she said. As David stared, he was impressed by the perfect red roundness of the disc. He wondered why worms couldn’t see it. Primrose’s voice, seeming to come from the red disc, said liltingly, “Have a nice night.” And the light went out.
David raised his own light, pointed it. She was moving off, reduced already to a shoulder and a jug rope at the dissolving limit of the red beam. He tore off the rubber cap and jabbed the fresh light outward. She was gone. He heard a rustle. There? . . . There? . . . His light showed only weeds and night.
The clock on the wall said 10:55 when Refrigerator John heard the screams. A moment later he was lurching down Tulip, cursing his bad leg. He veered into the weeds, the beam of his flashlight probing the night, homing in on the shrill cries.
He found the boy screaming with his eyes shut and his flashlight thrust upward, its pitiful beam vanishing mere inches above his head into the black vastness. “David!” John barked and took hold of him; impossibly, the screaming got louder. The boy fought, flailed his flashlight. Only when John pinned his arms and gathered him in and smothered him to his own body did the boy release his terror and sob, “Mommy . . . Mommy . . .” into his chest. The boy clung to him with surprising strength.
John held him there until the sobbing and trembling ceased. Fearfully then, having no idea what had happened, he called out Primrose’s name. He prayed he would not have to call a second time. A sniffle in the dark, a rustling to the right, and his answered prayer walked into the light. Her glistening, gaping eyes; the hunched stiffness of her shoulders; and the cold terror on her face told him no reproach was needed. A lesson had been learned.
On the way back to the abode, the boy told what had happened. John marveled that such combat could result from a broken worm. He told them now what he should have told them before. “When a nightcrawler splits,” he said, “the head end grows a new tail and the tail end grows a new head, and there you go — two new worms.”
They both went, “Wow!”
Fifteen minutes later they were sipping hot chocolate. The boy had suggested it. Primrose’s response — “In
July
?” — was more reflex than protest, and as it turned out, the boy was right. Hot chocolate was perfect for the moment.
Thirty minutes later the kids were squabbling over the TV. Refrigerator John sat back and relaxed and found reassurance in their return to the usual bickering. He suspected it was no accident, that some instinct beyond their years was driving them onto safe, familiar ground.
An hour later the boy was braiding her hair and she was grousing because he was pulling too hard.
The first Saturday in August featured perfect flea-market clouds: sun-blockers but not rain-makers. The tables on the gravel acre along Ridge Pike displayed everything from watches to monkey wrenches.
One of the tables was rented by Refrigerator John, who in turn donated a third of his space to Primrose. David helped arrange the wares from their Thursday night shopping sprees. One of them was a toilet seat. A sign taped to it said, wouldn’t this make a charming picture frame?
There were also two paperback mystery novels, a painting of a bullfighter on velvet, an old blue-green Coke bottle, five baseball cards, a hubcap, an orange-colored bowl, a vase, a beaded lizard-looking pocketbook, and, under the table, the child’s rocking chair that John had repaired.
Primrose was even grumpier than usual this day. John had decided not to have a bait business after all, so there was no market for worms. Primrose was still twenty dollars short on paint money, and the customers strolling by the tables were mostly the same ones she saw every week. “Lookers, not buyers,” John called them.
Lookers drifted sideways toward the table, never facing it squarely, never quite standing still, moving along even as they eyed the goods. Sometimes they gave a quick glance and were gone, sometimes a slower broom-sweep of the eyes. Occasionally a pair of eyes would land on a particular object, stare a moment, then look up at Primrose, as if to see what sort of oddball would actually ask money for such a thing. Even more rarely, someone would pick up an object and say, “How much?” Primrose’s heart would quicken as she told them the price, and sink as they set it back down and walked off.
Early in the summer Primrose had taken John’s advice and treated each table approach like a golden opportunity. She would rise from her chair, stand smartly behind the table and smile as the person looked over the merchandise and walked off. As the summer went on she dropped first the smile, then the smart pose. Now it took the sight of an open wallet to get her out of the chair. She slumped and grumped and stared into outer space and muttered with the regularity of a grandfather clock, “This business sucks.”
Half the morning had gone by on this day when a shopper finally held up something — the Coke bottle — and said, “How much?”
“What do you care?” Primrose snarled.
The shopper gaped disbelievingly at the slouching girl, set the bottle down, and left.
To the next one who said, “How much?” Primrose answered, “A thousand dollars.”
By eleven o’clock she was challenging nearly everyone who came near the table.
“You gonna look or you gonna buy?”
“You touch it, you buy it.”
“Whatta
you
lookin’ at?”
When he wasn’t laughing, John was begging her to stop: “You’re ruining my business.” Meanwhile, word about the rude teenager spread across the fleet of tables.
Primrose’s behavior was neither new nor entertaining to David, so he occupied himself by eating. Every half hour he visited the vending truck. By eleven o’clock his stomach was stuffed, his pocket empty of all but a dime.
What could he buy for a dime?
He wandered among the tables, scanning the goods: clothes, knickknacks, books, tools, toys, utensils. When he came to a table half-covered with framed black-and-white photographs, he barely gave it a glance — then stopped cold. He came closer. The pictures were all of people’s faces. The frames were fancy, tinted with gold or silver. They came in many sizes.
At least half of them — ten, he counted — were pictures of the same man, like TV sets in a store all turned to the same channel. And here was the shocker: each one looked exactly like the little one in Primrose’s pocket and the bigger one on her dresser in her four-wheeled room. The same handsome face. The same mustache. The same sly, slightly tilted smile. The same black, shiny, combed-back hair.
Primrose’s father.
What was a picture of Primrose’s father doing here? Why were they selling it? Why would anyone other than Primrose or her mother want to buy it?
“See something you like?” said the lady behind the table.
David didn’t know what to say.
“Looking for a present for somebody?” The lady was eating a hot dog. A spot of mustard gave her upper lip a yellow mole. “Your mother maybe?”
“No.”
She let him look awhile. She bit into the hot dog. “This ain’t used junk like most of the tables. This stuff’s new.”
David said nothing.
She pointed with the hot dog. “That there’s a nice one you’re looking at. Only three bucks.”
Three bucks for Primrose’s father’s picture.
“Okay, for you, two-fifty.”
David said, “How come you’re selling his picture?”
“I’m not,” said the lady. Her tongue, like a nightcrawler, slid out, poked around her upper lip till the yellow spot was gone —
httthhhp —
back into its hole. “It’s the frames I’m selling, not the pictures.”
“I just want a picture,” said David.
“Two bucks, you get the whole shebang.”
David held up his dime. “This is all I have.”
A voice croaked, “Give the kid a picture.” The voice came from an old man in a lawn chair. He was eating something out of a plastic cup.
The lady growled, “What am I, Santa Claus?”
“Give it to him.”
The lady glared at the old man, glared at David. She snorted like a horse and snatched one of the small silvery frames. She worked out the picture and jabbed it, scowling, at David. “Merry Christmas.”
David took it and walked away. And now he wondered: Why? Why had he asked for it? What was he going to do with it? He didn’t know. He stared at the picture. Could he be wrong? No. Thanks to Primrose, he had seen the face too many times to be wrong. This was the man, all right. Her father. Bob.
So why wasn’t he racing to her and shouting, “Primrose, look, your father’s picture! It’s all over that table there!”? Because something didn’t feel right. Something so wispy it would not fill the hollow of a thought. Something that made him want to drape a sheet over the table of gold and silver frames.
Across a dozen tables he could see Primrose. She was lobbing popcorn at the backs of people who failed to stop at her table. He put the picture in his pocket.
Minutes later it was Primrose who came running. She was waving money. “Look! Twenty-five
bucks
!” Some lady bought the orange bowl. She said it’s called Fiestaware and she has a whole set of it except for the bowl, and she said would I take twenty-five dollars for it.” She grabbed his arm. “Come on. We’re packing up. We’re going for paint!”