Read It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC Online
Authors: Dean Ing
Tags: #juvenile fiction, #Action & Adventure, #General, #family
While Roy swilled a half-cupful, Charlie wiped his eyes. “Tastes kinda hot,” he said. “Pepper hot, not stove hot. But maaan . . .”
Aaron, blinking his own tears away, watched Roy with a pensive air. “Yeah, like Passover wine,” he said. “Smells like it too, a little.” The two shared another glance. Then, “You know what I think? I think a little jam like this will go a long way. Hey, Roy! Now you’re the hog.” Roy managed to shake his head without taking his lips from the jug.
“Leave some for Jackie. Or we’ll tell,” Charlie chimed in.
Roy lowered the jug, grinned, and produced a belch that really needed a larger boy. “Bites your tongue,” he said happily.
Charlie screwed the cap back on the jug and hid it away where he had found it. “We gotta remember this.”
“Next time, a whole pound of sugar. And two jugs,” said Roy. He looked around, blinking. “I’m full,” he decided. “You guys got any marbles on you?”
At any given time, a boy’s pockets might contain a penny or two, a pink blob of bubblegum (chewed only a little) wrapped in waxed paper imprinted with a tiny comic strip, a rubber band, and half a dozen cheap glass marbles. So, though Roy needed no answer, the older boys dug into their pockets and found enough colorful little spheres to have a game.
“Hot in here,” Roy said, wiping sweat from his brow. “Let’s go out.” And as he led the way into the tree-shaded backyard, he paid no attention to the murmurs of the older boys.
No Austin yard was very useful to a boy without a room-sized plot of barren dirt with the flatness of a table. A twig might serve to scribe a two-foot circle roughly in the middle of the plot, with a straight line drawn three paces distant for “lagging”—a competition to see who could toss a marble nearest the line, which established the order of business. A favorite marble for shooting was a “taw,” and a boy who insisted on using a taw larger or heavier than the norm was likely to find himself playing alone. This, because a boy captured a marble by shooting it out of the circle with his taw, and a heavy taw had an unfair advantage.
Moments later they had forgotten all about eggs and liquid jam while they knelt in the dirt and exercised their thumbs, shooting from outside the circle, with urgent calls of “knucks down, you’re ooching,” and “missed by a mile.” They were not playing “keepsies,” in accord with a common belief that playing for keeps was as sinful as any other form of gambling.
The first time Roy hiccuped, no one paid much attention. The second time, he was taking careful aim and grunted in irritation as his shoulders jerked. Aaron, patiently waiting his turn, sighed and leaned his head against Charlie’s back. Charlie did not notice. Then Aaron giggled. Roy, hunkered down with his knuckles properly touching dirt, turned his head sideways to see what Aaron thought so funny. And then, very, very slowly, remaining bent in a kneeling position, Roy fell over, his hair in the dust inside the circle, and still holding the marble.
Now Charlie began to laugh too. So did Roy, in total silence with eyes closed as if in unspeakable joy or agony, and after an endless pause he flicked his marble, which soared away nowhere near the field of play. It was then that Aaron saw the wet patch spreading from the crotch of Roy’s pants, and pulled himself fully upright. “Charlie?”
“I see it. And smell it too.” He toed at Roy’s arm, none too steadily. “Hey, Roy. You peed. You know what? You are one dumb kid.”
Aaron snickered again. “Shikker,” he muttered.
From Charlie: “What?”
“Drunk. Charlie, he is!”
Charlie bent down to shake the smaller boy’s shoulder, lost his balance, and found himself sitting. “I think he’s snoring,” said Charlie, and blinked. “And you’re fuzzy.”
“Charlie, we’re all drunk,” Aaron said suddenly. “That jurn dam—durn jam did it, and we’re in big trouble.”
They both risked a look toward the house, expecting a frown from every window, but no one was watching. “Not yet we aren’t. We better carry him back under the house,” Charlie said.
“I don’t think so. Maybe we can sit him up,” Aaron said.
The deed was done with more haste than skill, but moments later Roy slumped with bowed head in the sleep of the innocent, more or less sitting, hands in his lap, legs splayed before the scribed circle while two larger figures melted away over the Kinney back fence.
Charlie had no hope of avoiding church services on Easter morning, and because his hard-boiled eggs were still in the Kinney refrigerator, he took care to craft a special, unusually earnest and detailed prayer. Mostly it involved homemade jam, good intentions, and avoidance of punishment. Evidently God was in a forgiving mood. When Charlie migrated to the Kinney home after lunch, no one seemed curious about Roy’s long nap the previous Friday. After Sue Ann distributed the eggs, each of the four boys took a turn hiding all the eggs in a neutral location, which was the ill-tended grounds of the public library a few blocks away. They might have preferred the small adjacent park but had learned in previous years that younger egg-hunters with watchful parents would be numerous as insects there on this day. Since the library was closed on Easter Sunday, no one would shoo them away. They managed to lose two eggs and crack a few more that afternoon, but took these setbacks in good humor and each took his eggs home for future use. No bright yellow eggs figured in any of this.
For the next few school days, Easter and its products were forgotten, but on Thursday, Jackie Rhett declared war. Charlie learned this when, at the end of morning recess, he saw Aaron in the hallway of Pease School. Aaron rubbed an ear with one hand and displayed a badly flattened egg in the other. “Just thought I’d give you fair warning,” he said. “I’ll tell Roy at lunch if Jackie doesn’t see him first.”
Charlie studied the missile. “Jackie’s?”
“Gotta be, it’s orange. Shoot; I never saw him. Got me good. I hadn’t thought about bringing our egg war to school.”
Charlie nodded, shrugged, and said, “Almost late for art class,” as he turned away. He was almost inside the classroom when he felt a solid thump between his shoulder blades. Aaron was already halfway down the hall, looking back with a grin, and those pieces of egg at Charlie’s feet were no longer in a condition to be used again. Thus was the annual egg war declared, each boy against all the others.
Since Aaron had come to school eggless, Charlie waited for him after school as usual. His plans changed the instant he saw his pal burst out of the building between two girls, pursued by Jackie Rhett. Everyone knew how fast those stubby legs could propel the older boy, but Aaron managed to dodge and weave among others as he made his way across the playground. Aaron stayed a healthy fifteen yards ahead as they sped across the street and Charlie guessed the chase would lead along the byways of Shoal Creek.
Charlie trotted home alone to his trove of ammunition, which lay on a shelf in the Hardin garage, and filled his pockets. He left his yellow egg, which might need another few days to develop its full authority, and hurried down the street toward a spot near Aaron’s home where one of the trails climbed away from the creek bottomlands. With skill and surprise, he might splatter both opponents.
But he had taken too long. A half-block from the trail Charlie saw that an exchange of pleasantries had already taken place because Jackie emerged first, watching the expanse behind him; watching it so intently that he didn’t see Charlie. That meant Aaron must be armed now with what remained of one of Jackie’s eggs. It also meant Charlie was in luck.
Running almost silently, Charlie was within a few paces of Jackie before Jackie heard him and dropped to a crouch, so that Charlie’s egg sailed inches over his head. Facing this new enemy, Jackie hurled a handful of nothing toward Charlie at point-blank range, but this trickery was an old tactic, and Charlie had seen that Jackie’s hands were empty.
Aaron’s were not. As Charlie veered away to hide among shrubs at the trail, something that might once have been an orange egg found its target of naked skin in the exact center of Jackie’s back between his pants and shirt, just as Jackie leaped to his feet. His “Yow!” said all that Aaron wanted to hear, and most of that eggy debris slid from sight down the crevice in the back of Jackie’s pants.
Now Charlie had another egg ready, and this time his aim was better. Jackie, in full flight, took the blow on one arm without slowing and found safety behind a pomegranate bush. “No fair, no ganging up,” he called.
“Who’s a gang?” Aaron cried in protest, bobbing up from cover.
Charlie, realizing his friend hadn’t seen him, yelled, “I am!” With that, he air-mailed another perfect strike, catching Aaron on the shoulder.
Aaron lost his balance and fell from sight downslope, giving Charlie time to pull another missile from a pocket. Jackie, seeing that he had not been unfairly singled out, but now eggless while Charlie was armed, took this opportunity to set off for home. Every few steps, small bright orange shreds of his own ammunition dribbled from the legs of Jackie’s pants, which Charlie watched with great satisfaction.
From nearby, but well hidden: “Where’d you come from, guy?” cried Aaron.
“Shangri-La,” Charlie called.
“Durn you, Charlie,” said Aaron, laughing.
“Durn yourself,” said Charlie, advancing.
Aaron heard those footsteps. “I got my yellow bomb,” he warned, his voice more distant.
“Oh, sure you do, and so do I,” said Charlie, knowing both claims were false. He skulked among the shrubs until he saw, beyond his range, a curly head hurrying toward the bottomlands. “I guess that’ll teach guys to mess with Charlie Hardin,” he called, with a quick look to be certain Jackie wasn’t in earshot.
Charlie walked home whistling, inhaling the sweet air of the victor, replaying the past few minutes and revising and polishing each detail until it suited him to perfection. Finally in sight of home, he had convinced himself that superior Hardin skill, and not luck, was the secret of his triumph.
He did not alter his opinion until he felt the thump of Ray Kinney’s mottled mouse-brown egg, hurled from behind the Kinney hedge, against the back of his head.
CHAPTER 4:
CHARLIE’S HIGHWAY
In the next few days, the egg-warriors learned that it had been a mistake to bring war to school. Roy had no classes with the bigger boys and merely kept a wary eye peeled at lunchtime. The others soon developed headaches from frequent dartings of the head, and a whole-body flinch at every sudden move by some other student. Even then, Charlie was grazed between classes by something that might once have been most of an egg—though after being molded into a missile between Aaron’s hands it looked more like a blob of paint-flecked cement—and the same day, Aaron’s locker door took a direct hit as he was about to close it.
Aaron didn’t see the marksman, but an hour later, when called with Charlie to the principal’s office by school loudspeakers, he soon got a broad hint. From fifty feet away they saw through the office doorway that someone sat almost hidden across from Principal Frost, but they recognized a familiar pair of rundown cowboy boots.
“Whad you do,” Charlie asked softly, “tell on him?”
Aaron, his lips barely moving: “Nah. He’d just tell back. And then get me later.”
Charlie was nodding agreement as they stopped in the doorway. “We were s’posed to come, Mr. Frost,” said Aaron as he locked eyes with a Jackie Rhett who looked as if all the meanness had dribbled out of him.
“But we can come back later,” Charlie put in.
“Ah, Fischer and Hardin. Right on time, boys,” said the principal, and swung around in his chair without rising. Mr. Frost was a small man of economical movements and eyes that shone with sly intelligence. It was rumored that his bow ties numbered in the millions. “An eyewitness tells me you young thugs have been terrorizing this poor lad with Easter eggs,” he said calmly. A flicker of his glance made it clear who that eyewitness probably was.
“Not me,” said Aaron. “Ask anybody, Mr. Frost; it has to be somebody else.”
Frost’s gaze flicked to Charlie who only said, “Nossir,” with a shrug that practically hid his head in his shirt.
“But what am I to think when this innocent boy is so terrified of you that he throws eggs at your friends?” said Frost, still at his mildest.
Charlie and Aaron lifted eyebrows at one another. “I dunno,” said Charlie, thinking of Roy. “What friend?”
“Felice Gutierrez,” Frost replied, with a friendly nod toward Jackie.
The other boys stared at Jackie as if he had begun singing opera in some dead language. Aaron managed to squeak, “Sir?”
“Sixth grade, never talks, scared of everything,” said Charlie, and Aaron nodded. “What about her?”
“She’s with the school nurse, getting boiled egg combed out of her hair,” said Frost. “It was her distinct impression that young Rhett hit her deliberately.”
In an effort to make sense of it all, Charlie turned to Jackie. “What did she do to you?”
“I was aiming to egg you back,” Jackie said abruptly, then added to the principal, “I don’t even know that greaser kid.”
“But now she knows you,” Frost replied, resigned to such disrespect for Tex-Mex children from the likes of Jackie. “And I expect her brothers will, soon. They’re both in Austin High, you know.”
The boys digested this in silence. Austin High School stood just across Twelfth Street, facing this very school. It did not take an honor student to figure out how quickly a pair of offended Latino teens could launch a search-and-destroy mission after school to find one short-legged Anglo egg thrower. “She didn’t mention me or him?” asked Aaron, indicating Charlie.
Frost shook his head. “I didn’t tell her you two caused young Rhett to do what he did.” And after the tiniest of pauses: “Yet.” Rich in experience, Frost could build a threat the way an insect builds a sandhill, grain by grain. When none of the boys replied, he said, “Have you two been bullying poor Rhett?” Seeing rapid headshakes, he went on, “I’ll put it another way. Would you happen to be carrying any food in your pockets? Eggs, for example.”
Charlie thought furiously, wondering whether his answer could refer to “eggs,” plural, or to the one he suddenly remembered that lay, at this exact moment, in his pocket.
But Aaron had Frost’s attention, quickly reaching into both pants pockets. He turned them out without a word, producing two marbles and a pink eraser. No eggs.
But Mr. Frost’s eye was good. He saw the five small flecks of eggshell, one orange, one blue, and three crimson, that clung to Aaron’s pocket. When Aaron noticed the evidence and drew a long breath, the principal stared him down. “You’re going to say you sometimes bring hardboiled eggs to school for lunch. Aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” said Aaron.
“Don’t say it,” the man said.
“No, sir,” said Aaron.
“You didn’t answer me, Hardin,” said Frost, not unkindly. “Is it possible you could have colorful reminders of ancient food with you as well?”
“I might have forgot something,” Charlie admitted, and placed a hand over the pocket that bulged with his one partly flattened egg. “Uh-huh, I did. In fact, here it is.” And Charlie carefully detached his lime green, much-abused egg from the fabric.
Frost knelt, sniffed elaborately, nodded. “And you boys both eat hardboiled eggs at lunch?”
“Sometimes.” Charlie looked to Aaron for agreement and got it.
“Very well. Hardin, divide that disgusting thing in your hand into halves. No no, over the wastebasket, for heaven’s sake. Fischer, you choose which half of it looks less repulsive. Then you will both prove to me that you eat antique eggs at school.” And seeing their pleading looks, he added, “Yes, right now, unless you want your parents here in my office to discuss all this. Wait,” he said suddenly. “Rhett, you seem to find this entertaining. I can have the nurse bring what she recovered from the Gutierrez girl for you to eat—I imagine it will include some of her hair—or I can put you in study hall for an hour after school every day next week. Just to keep you safe from thugs like these two after class, mind you. Your choice,” he finished. While the principal’s words continued to paint Jackie as a victim, his tone lacked sincerity.
Jackie swallowed by reflex as he watched Charlie begin to nibble. “I’ll take study hall,” he said, his face in an awful grimace.
“A wise decision. So it’s back to class for you. Right now,” said Frost, and waited as Jackie hurried out of the office.
Charlie struggled to swallow a bite. “You got any salt, Mr. Frost?”
The principal sighed. “Just eat it, Hardin. Children are starving in Europe.”
Aaron and Charlie walked home together that afternoon, swollen with pride at being called thugs by Principal Frost, though they suspected the label had been applied in gentle sarcasm. “But that went over like a German zeppelin with Jackie,” Aaron said. “I think we better cancel the war while we’re still ahead.”
Charlie nodded. “Goes without saying.”
“This is Jackie Rhett we’re talking about, Charlie. For that guy,
nuthin’
goes without saying. And we say it to him together so Jackie knows we agree.”
Charlie was more than willing, but in his mind the pair of yellow eggs lingered like the last two plump kernels of popcorn in a sack, tempting and unconsumed. “One thing I’m durn sure not gonna do is tell anybody we fixed those eggs special,” he said. “I’ll flush mine down if you’ll flush yours.”
Aaron did not reply for so long that Charlie knew he was thinking ahead, as he did when playing checkers. At last: “More fun if we just put ’em somewhere so they’ll get found someday, like they’d been lost ever since Easter Sunday.”
“Found by who?”
Aaron grinned and shrugged. “Anybody but us,” he said. So the boys disposed of their yellow bombs together, nestled out of sight at the base of a shrub in the hedge of a childless neighbor. The disposal was noticed by no one; well, almost no one.
Ever since he stood over that tangle of mesquite at the sinkhole and grasped the notion of a secret path in plain sight, the idea had festered in Charlie’s mind. After supper on Friday, he rummaged among garden tools in search of something powerful enough to help him cut small branches but soon realized that the task was beyond him. He might have enlisted Aaron, but Friday evenings in the Fischer home were devoted to other things. Besides, something in the solitary nature of his project appealed to him, something he knew might fill his pal with awe. So when Charlie spotted his mother’s new rose clippers, a new use for them sprang into being in an instant.
The tool wasn’t too big, and its scissoring blades were sharp as knives. And while his original escape highway had begun to seem too much like work, he did not need much time to settle on an alternative that was closer than the creek.
When Charlie slipped away up the street at sundown with the clippers in a hip pocket, he knew exactly where he was going and thought that he might get a good start on his project before the April twilight faded.
His goal was a solitary midsized oak that leaned in toward the old stone wall surrounding the castle courtyard. From open windows in homes along the street he could hear bits of dialogue and laughter from radios, though television had not yet infected Texas airwaves. No nosy adults lurked in porch swings to wonder why some neighborhood kid was fooling around in a tree during twilight at the castle wall.
Once, he had been small enough to hide in bushes as Roy still did. But Charlie had grown enough to shinny up the oak which hung over the wall, its branches drooping far down inside toward the sunken courtyard. Another oak, huge and spreading, stood in the courtyard’s very center, and Charlie had vague plans for it.
Neighborhood myth claimed that, long ago, a boy had once tried to climb the outer wall itself. No one Charlie knew had ever been so foolish because a century before, such walls were erected with broken bottles cemented into their tops. Standing at the smaller oak Charlie could see the last rays of sunlight glinting from cruel shards that might injure generations to come.
But Charlie had once seen Jackie Rhett use the oak as a path, merely to show off, daring anyone to follow. Jackie had picked his way up ignoring welts from tough little branches, well above the top of the wall, then across and finally, hand over hand and aided by gravity, down inside through foliage to the sunken meadow of the courtyard. At last Jackie had hung there for a full minute, his feet still more than a man’s height above the ground, before trying—and failing—to climb back up. Eventually he had dropped to roll in the weedy meadow, then limped proudly to the carriage gate before squeezing his belly out between rust-scabbed iron bars. That was when Charlie knew Jackie had found no special path, had formed no highway of his own. An idea of that sort was not like Jackie Rhett.
Ideas of that sort were up to Charlie Hardin.
The first few feet of oak trunk were nearly vertical but, pressing his back against the wall, Charlie found that he could thrust his feet against rough bark and walk up the trunk far enough to grasp low branches. After that it was easier to pull himself up to where the trunk sloped inward toward the wall.
Here Jackie had fought his way across dense foliage a few inches above broken glass, through branches too thick to trim with mere clippers. But after snipping off one finger-thick branch, Charlie moved higher until he could stand on a big branch while gripping still higher ones with both hands. It was a simple matter then to walk safely across above the wall.
It looked like a slower route, but it wasn’t. Soon Charlie was several feet past the wall, high enough to grasp leafy handholds Jackie had never reached. As he moved farther out on the branches they all became thinner, more springy, and several more times Charlie sliced away bits that interfered. He rejoiced to see that the farther out he moved, the more the branches drooped, and presently he found himself much nearer the ground than Jackie had managed, little more than an arm’s length above courtyard weeds. Almost as soon as he dropped to the courtyard he was on his feet again.
The job had taken only minutes! Charlie was so elated he ran to the massive iron-barred carriage gate and slipped through, snorting with self-congratulation. It took him half a minute to run around the corner and up the hill to test his new highway through the oak again. He went up the tree with the ease of a squirrel, climbed to the pathway he had cleared, and in his overconfidence would have fallen onto the terrible glass except that both hands gripped the handholds he had memorized. Then across the bigger branches, then farther still until they grew small and began to sag with him, and this time when he plunged to earth Charlie ran directly to the middle of the courtyard. He had mastered the smaller oak, and fairly dared the big one to defeat him.
Standing before him was a tree six feet thick whose branches spanned half the entire courtyard, fifty feet high. There was no way a boy could scale an oak trunk thicker than he was tall, if its first fork began more than ten feet up. But centuries-old specimens like this tended to spread so far that the tips of larger branches spread downward again almost to the ground, far away from that mighty trunk. This boy-friendly arrangement meant that Charlie could simply reach up, find any branch thicker than a broom handle, and climb into the tree hand over hand.
This tactic, climbing toward the trunk, was new to Charlie and in gathering dusk he did not find the smaller, mean-spirited twigs so much as they found him. Cheeks, ears, and chin all felt the insults of this monster vegetable. As soon as he could grip its foliage safely, he began to counterattack with the clippers.
In this way he moved up into the tree until the branch supporting him was as thick as his waist and the ground below was littered with neatly severed twigs. The supporting branch sloped upward enough that he could walk on it as easily as climb it, so Charlie took the clippers in his teeth and grasped handholds with both hands.
But the bitter-sour tang of metal in his mouth made him grimace, and in an instant the clippers were gone to fall silently, invisibly, far beneath his feet. Charlie felt an instant of desperation. But how far away could the precious clippers be? He retraced his path in the dimness, swung his legs to one side, and felt leaves scrape his cheeks as he dropped to the courtyard.