Orwell's Luck (3 page)

School was not really such a bad place. It just contained too many strangers and lasted too long. My father told me that for him, the worst part about his job was not being able to leave when he wanted to. That's how I feel about being at school. Once you get there, you're stuck like a bunny in a bathtub.

But some parts of school are actually interesting. Like band and science and P.E. Math is OK. Also, I started taking French. I hadn't learned very many French words, but the few I did know made me think that one of the reasons there's more than one way of saying things is because there's more than one way of looking at things.

For example, in English, when we decide it's time to leave, we say, "Let's go!" The French, however, say, "
Allons-y
," which means, "Let's go to the aforementioned place." This little difference between the two languages says to me that the French don't go anywhere unless they know where they're going, but Americans, on the other hand, are happy just to keep moving.

Orwell could not keep moving, and so, I concluded, unless he is French, he must be unhappy.

I tried to imagine what he must have been thinking when he found himself unable to hop and was forced to crawl on his belly, powered only by the strength of his underdeveloped front legs. Did he say to himself, "Let's go!" and then, through sheer luck, wind up here? Or did he think, "Let's go to the aforementioned kid's house"?

When I found Orwell in so exhausted a state, how far had he traveled before pausing to rest, putting a rolled-up newspaper between his tender white belly and the hard, cold, frost-covered ground? Was he trying desperately to get to my door, like a doomed man delivering a newspaper-wrapped falcon to a black-and-white detective? Was Orwell delivering something to me? A message, perhaps?

This is called deductive reasoning. All the best detectives do it. By putting my brain to work doing deductive reasoning, I was able to come up with a few plausible theories.

Theory number one was that Orwell was an accident victim, a hapless rabbit who stepped blithely into the path of a newspaper truck driven by a careless part-time worker in a hurry to get back to bed.

Theory number two was that someone tried to kill Orwell to prevent him from delivering a message.

Then there was theory number three, made up of parts of theories one and two. Theory number three dismissed the injury as an accident, but kept in the part about the message.

The only problem with this line of reasoning was that it led to a very big question—namely, What was the message? Whatever it was, I had a feeling it was going to be a lot tougher to crack than the seven little numbers printed in my daily horoscope guide.

My thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the bathroom door. It was my sister, wearing a smile that looked like the one the stars had been issuing to Scorpio lately. Standing behind her, lined up like they were waiting to buy tickets for a movie, were the two little girls who live next door.

"They want to see Orwell," my sister said.

"Beat it!" I told them. "
Va-t'en!
"

The next day, a frown face on my horoscope made everything go haywire. The prediction for Scorpio began positively enough. "A good day," it said. But by the time I finished decoding the rest of the message, it had turned into

A GOOD DAY TO CUT YOUR LOSSES.

Yikes!
I thought. And for good reason.

I got a C on a history paper, my father lost his job, the construction project on the back of my house was stopped dead in its tracks, and my mother walked around all evening with a goofy look on her face hardly saying a word.

The one good thing about this day was that Orwell didn't die.

After the school bus brought me home, I shot baskets until suppertime. I like the way a basketball feels. Unlike a baseball, a basketball is too big to hold on to for very long. You have to do something with it. You have to keep it moving. If a basketball could talk, it would always be saying, "Let's go!"

After supper, I did my homework with Orwell in his private rabbit hutch. He seemed to be doing OK. He really liked the lettuce leaves my mother had saved for him. In spite of what she sometimes says, deep down inside, my mother has a kind heart.

I tackled my science homework first. Science is an interesting subject. I especially like learning about animals. Take rabbits, for example. A lot of people will try to tell you that rabbits are rodents, like guinea pigs or woodchucks or mice, but they're not. Rabbits are members of the order Lagomorpha. Unlike rodents, they have not one, but two sets of upper front teeth, a little pair behind the big pair. And let me tell you, every one of those front teeth is razor sharp!

There are many kinds of rabbits living all over the world. The best known is the cottontail. Orwell is a cottontail rabbit. According to my science book, although many rabbits settle in large groups in underground burrows called warrens, cottontail rabbits are different.

Cottontails are "Let's go!" kind of rabbits. They like to stay on the move, spending their days above ground. Their homes are just temporary hiding places in tall grass or bushes. They prefer to be alone and only get together with other rabbits when it's time to eat or to start a family.

I looked up from my notebook. Orwell was watching me. He didn't act scared at all.

"Hey, Orwell," I said. "Was there something you wanted to tell me?"

His ears perked up and he raised his chest up, too, like he was going to stand. But, of course, he couldn't.

"Don't worry, Orwell," I told him. "It'll be all right. My grandmother says that when stuff happens, even when it's bad, it happens for a good reason. It's just that we don't always know what the reason is."

Orwell twitched his nose at me a mile a minute and opened his little pink mouth like he really was going to say something. Then, all of a sudden, he smiled at me. It was really fast, and it only lasted a second, but it was definitely a smile.

Three weeks passed, but nothing changed. Not Orwell. Not my house. Not my father's jobless situation. It was as if time, like an injured rabbit, had simply stopped moving forward.

Each morning, before getting ready for school, I read my horoscope, and each morning it said things like

MAKE GOOD USE OF OPPORTUNITIES PRESENTED YOU
and
RESUME PROJECT YOU HAVE PUT ON HOLD
.

Hardly predictions. Not even very good advice. About what you'd expect from the fortune cookies at the Imperial Garden. It seemed that even the stars had slowed down.

And then, quite unexpectedly, my horoscopes began to change. One Monday morning in late January, the seven deciphered numbers in Scorpio spelled out this message:

UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT
WATCH FOR SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS
.

"What kind of horoscope is this?" I asked right out loud.

Starting over at the beginning, I carefully checked every word again. Then I deciphered Pisces and Aries, choosing two strangers at random, to see if their messages were anything like mine. Theirs was the usual stuff:

DRESS FOR SUCCESS TODAY YOU'LL BE GLAD
and
A TELEPHONE CALL BRINGS NEWS FROM AFAR
.

This is strange,
I thought. But by the time I got to school, I had forgotten all about it.

The next day, my horoscope was at it again, advising

STAY TUNED FOR AN IMPORTANT NEWS BULLETIN
.

This is really weird,
I thought.

Then, in a complete departure from horoscope protocol, I got the very same message for two more days. Just when I was getting tired of staying tuned, on Friday the repetitive series was broken with these words:

KEEP ALL FURTHER COMMUNICATIONS
UNDER YOUR HAT.

"What in the Sam Hill universe is going on?" I blurted out.

"Watch your language!" my father admonished, barely lifting his eyes from the Help Wanted section.

"I should say so!" my mother agreed.

"Maybe you better go feed the dog," my father instructed.

The dog is older than I am. My parents got him so they could practice taking care of something before they decided to have kids. My mother says it was all my father's idea. She didn't need a dog to tell her if she wanted children. The only thing getting a dog did for her, she says, was convince her that she didn't want a dog. Under the circumstances, I guess I am lucky to have been born.

That night I hung out with Orwell until bedtime. I had come up with a special knock on the door, so he'd know it was me. Three longs, a short, and a long.

Tap-tap-tap-ta-tap!

This was the secret signal, and I was careful not to perform it in the presence of others.

Unfortunately, since Orwell's thumping feet were out of commission, he could not return the signal. But he seemed to like it, because he looked happy when I let myself in.

"Hey, Orwell, what's the good word?" I greeted him, handing him a carrot strip.

While he ate his snack, I cleaned up his habitat and told him about my day at school, what was going on with my father and his job, what my sister was up to, and how my mother was taking everything. I even told him about stuff I'd read in the paper and seen on TV.

Orwell continued munching on carrot strips. Every once in a while he'd rotate his ears or wiggle his nose. But when I mentioned the recent episodes with my horoscope, Orwell stopped what he was doing, sat very still, and looked me in the eyes for the longest time, so long that I was able to see my reflection in them, and not just me, but the whole room, curved and reproduced in miniature—a tiny, magical world displayed in duplicate by two of the brightest, shiniest, brownest eyes I've ever seen.

On Saturday, I picked up the paper in the rain. It was a gentle, sorrowful rain that began sometime in the middle of the night. Despite its misty quality, by the time I got outside it had created a puddle near the basketball goal. This was a sign that the creek was rising. Soon the outdoor creatures would be moving up the hill toward the safety of the higher ground on which our little house was perched.

The dog wisely went back inside, but I stayed out to restock the Science City diet pellets and after that tossed out some cornbread left over from supper, plus a brown-spotted apple that Orwell had declined. Then I went back to my room to read the paper.

Saturday's horoscope was the strangest one yet:

BRONCOS TRAMPLE FALCONS
3419
GRAB SECOND RING.

By now, of course, I was expecting it to be a surprise. But I wasn't expecting it to be a code within a code. This one had me stumped. I got up from my desk and sat down on my bed to noodle it over.

My room is on the second floor at the end of the hall. It is the only room in the house that is L-shaped. My desk is in the short part of the L. My bed is in the long part. Along the walls of the long part are bookcases filled with my collections, souvenirs, science equipment, and books. Above the bookcases hangs a framed poster of lightning flashing over the prairie. I don't know where the picture was taken, but it looks a lot like where I live.

In the corner of my room are two windows that meet at right angles. When I sit on the edge of my bed, I can see everything in the backyard—the new addition, the concrete patio, the dog dishes, the goldfish pond, the woodpile, and the hedgeapple tree with the tree house that my father built a long time ago. I can even see over the bushes into the neighborhood park. That corner of my room is my own private watchtower.

It hadn't taken the neighborhood animals long to discover the stash I'd set out. The scavenger birds and half-tame squirrels were already at it. They're always the first to arrive. Soon, however, the shy ones began poking their faces out from the thick honeysuckle hedge. Chipmunks came to the party, darting and dashing across the ground like minnows in a stream. A flock of purple finches, seeing that the braver birds were having a good time, decided it was safe for them to join in. Species by species, a crowd began to form.

Then, fashionably late, a rabbit appeared, a brown rabbit, moving ever so carefully, its radar turned on high beam, listening for warnings from the starlings and jays and sparrows, cautiously waiting for an opportunity to inspect the bounty. It was smaller than Orwell, and not as picky either, because it soon began nibbling the soft, spotted apple that no one else wanted.

Sitting still as a winter tree, I watched the rabbit eat its breakfast. It was darker than Orwell, but maybe that was because it was wet. I tried to get a look at its face, but its back was turned to me.

Suddenly, the rude raspy bark of a neighbor's dog out for a forced walk caused the timid little visitor to leap up, zigzagging across the yard, through the honeysuckle, into the park, and on to some distant hideout far beyond my field of vision.

"
Allez-y!
" I whispered in encouragement. "Go there!"

On Orwell's behalf, I envied this stranger's superb hopping skills. The little creature sure did make it look easy.

I lay back on my bed and closed my eyes. Even though I tried not to think about them, the week's weird horoscope messages flashed on and off in my mind, like insistent little neon signs.

I also thought about giving up my plans for becoming a detective. Figuring things out was becoming too hard. It occurred to me to become a weather forecaster instead. I really like weather. Weather is one of those things that's always on the move.

The rain that fell on Saturday turned the world into ice on Sunday. The streets and the rooftops were white. If you took a picture of it, it would look like snow. But if you touched it, you could see that it was really tiny pebbles of ice.

This was the kind of morning when most people figure the best thing to do is stay inside. But not us. After my father lost his job, Sundays changed around our house. Among other things, the whole family started going to church every week.