Us and Uncle Fraud

by Lois Lowry

  "If you do," Marcus said, "they'll have to cut your foot off. But they can make pretty good artificial ones."

  "Listen, you two," Tom said, ignoring my foot gangrene, "I was talking to Joyce Stratton at school today."

  I leaned over to investigate the stone in my shoe more thoroughly. Joyce Stratton was Kenny's older sister, and she was just as skinny and boring as Kenny, but I sure wished that Tom hadn't been talking to her.

  "So?" Marcus said.

  "So. She said that Kenny knew about that key, and that he had shown it to you kids, and that all three of you had been in the Leboffs' house."

  "So, you know what that proves, Thomas Frederick Cunningham? It proves that Joyce Stratton knew about it, too! And maybe she was the person who robbed the house!" I drew myself up, prepared to testify against Joyce Stratton till the end of time.

  "Yeah," Marcus added. "Joyce Stratton hangs around with that whole gang of junior high girls, and maybe they all did it together. Heck, maybe you even did it with them, Tom!"

  Tom leaned back in his chair with a patient sigh. "Look, pip-squeaks," he began.

  I interrupted him angrily. "Don't you dare call us that! Only Father calls us that!"

  Tom tried again. "Okay, I'm sorry. But look, you guys. I know you didn't steal the stuff. And Joyce and Kenny didn't steal the stuff. I'm only trying to tell you that you could have gotten yourselves into a lot of trouble, breaking into the Leboffs' house—"

  "It wasn't breaking into," Marcus said. "When you have a key, it isn't breaking into."

  "Listen to me, will you? I'm trying to tell you that you should think before you do stuff like that. Think about what could happen if you got caught. I don't want you dragging the name of this family through the mud."

  I giggled, picturing the letters that spelled Cunningham, at the end of a string, being dragged down the street through puddles and dirt. Tom glared at me.

  "Are you going to tell on us?" Marcus asked.

  "Of course I'm not. I just wanted to have a talk with you, that's all."

  "You can't tell us what to do, Tom," I said belligerently. "You're not Father. And you're only fourteen."

  "I know that. And I've done a lot of stupid stuff, too. But I don't go around breaking into people's houses." Tom stood up. "Well, anyway, I just wanted to warn you. If you end up in jail, don't say I didn't warn you."

  Dismissed, Marcus and I left Tom's room and went to mine, where we closed the door, fell onto my bed, and laughed. "He never even guessed that Claude knew, too!" I said with pleasure.

  Marcus imitated Tom's serious voice: "I don't want you dragging the name of this family—"

  "THROUGH THE MUD!" I shrieked and fell over again, laughing.

  "You know what Tom is?" Marcus whispered.

  "What?"

  He lowered his voice even more, until I could barely hear him. "A turd," he said with furtive glee.

  I pounded my fists on the bed with delight. We repeated the wonderful, forbidden word over and over again, roaring with laughter until our stomachs ached, muffling our mouths with the pillows from my bed, until Mother called to tell us that Father was home and it was time to wash our hands for dinner.

  In the evening, I did my homework half-heartedly, sitting at the table under my bedroom window. Outside, it was beginning to rain: first a light spring drizzle, then increasing in force until it pelted the house fiercely. Mother came upstairs to check the windows.

  "Did you put your bike in the shed?" she asked Tom.

  "Of course. I always put my bike away."

  I could hear Marcus puttering in his room next to mine. "'Of course,'" I heard him mimic Tom in a low, exaggerated voice, "'I always put my bike away.'"

  "Well," Mother said, sticking her head into my doorway, "I left the sheets on the clothesline. I guess there's no point in going out to get them now."

  "If it's still pouring in the morning, do you think Father will give us a ride to school?" I asked her.

  "I suppose so," she said. "The radio says it isn't going to let up. I hope it doesn't ruin the forsythia." She came over to my window and looked out, but the bright forsythia bush beside the driveway was invisible through the driving rainstorm.

  "Mother," I asked, pushing my geography book aside. I unfolded Claude's note again. "Do you think it's true that Claude is crazy, like Tom said?"

  She sighed. "Oh, Louise, who knows what 'crazy' means? He's different, certainly. He always has been."

  "What was he like when he was a kid?"

  She sat down on my bed. "Well, he was different then, too. He's the only child I've ever known who created whole worlds for himself. He always had entire cities built out of blocks—or later, when he was older, out of Erector sets—in his room."

  "All kids do that. Marcus does."

  "Yes, but—well, this was different. His cities and worlds became very real to him. Sometimes it was as if he lived in those worlds, instead of the real one."

  "I don't understand what you mean."

  "Once, out in our back yard, he built a tree house. It was the most wonderful tree house, with little windows and a ladder that he could pull up after he was inside so that no one else could climb it. Sometimes he slept out there."

  "Did he let you play in it? Or was he selfish, like Marcus?"

  She smiled. "Marcus isn't selfish, Louise. He's just a normal boy. Claude was a lot like Marcus in some ways: cheerful and fun. He always had wonderful ideas, but sometimes they were so complicated, and sometimes he took them so seriously, that the other kids in our neighborhood would get sick of him, and they'd go off to play their own games."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, the tree house, for example. After it was built—and he took a long time to build it, and wouldn't let anyone help—he did invite a group of neighborhood children to climb up. And me, too. It was the first time I'd been in his tree house. We were all thrilled, of course, because it was truly the most spectacular tree house we'd ever seen. But then Claude started explaining the rules of the tree-house—"

  "That's okay. I can understand about having rules, especially if you built it all by yourself."

  "Yes, but Claude had created one of his worlds up there in that tree. He had made it into a kingdom—I remember he even called it that: kingdom. He was the king, of course."

  "That's fair," I said. I could sympathize with that, the need to be king if you had invented the kingdom.

  "But more than that. He had made up a language, and we were to speak only that language when we were in the tree house kingdom. And there was a set of complicated laws. Rules about the kind of food you could eat and particular sorts of clothes that people in the kingdom were to wear. I seem to remember that he had even created a special religion for this kingdom, with songs and prayers, all in this strange language that he had spent hours concocting."

  "I think that's a great idea!"

  She smiled. "It would have been. But Claude took it all so seriously. It was one of his fantasies that grew out of proportion, so that it became too real, at least to him. The kids got bored. The language was too complicated, and he said we couldn't come into the tree house until we learned it. Everybody just gave up."

  "Even you?"

  "Well, I stuck with it longer than the others. So for a while, it was just he and I in the tree house, speaking this odd language to each other. But after a while, I got bored with it, too. For me it was a game, I guess. And for Claude it really was a whole world; it seemed quite real to him, and important, and he forgot that it was all just a pretend thing. I think he kept it up for a year or so, all by himself. He was about Marcus's age, then."

  Something occurred to me. "Do you remember any of the language?"

  She shook her head.

  I pulled out the sheet of notebook paper that I had been writing on and showed it to her.

  L

  YA

  U

  TEBYA

  L

  Y

  U

 
; "I'm still trying to figure this out," I explained. "Could it be from his tree house language?"

  "I don't think so, Louise," Mother said, examining the words. "I don't remember the language, but I remember the sound of it. It wasn't like this."

  "Well," I sighed, "I keep rearranging it, but it doesn't make any sense."

  She smiled. "You know what your father would say? That Claude himself doesn't make any sense. And maybe that's true. But you know, Louise, there was always something very special about Claude. It's hard to explain. Often the other kids called him a liar, especially when he insisted that his made-up world was real. But I never thought that his fantasies were lies—they were more a magical kind of thing. When you're with Claude—and this was true even when we were children—the most everyday things seem, well, charmed."

  Charmed. I liked her choice of words. It was true.

  "I wonder where he is now," she said suddenly, and went to the window again, to peer through the torrents of rain that were slapping the side of our house now in punishing sheets. "He takes off like that, with no idea where he's going, heading for the most obscure places, just—" She shrugged.

  I finished the sentence for her. "Just passing through."

  She laughed. "Finish your homework, Louise," she said. "It's almost nine o'clock."

  When she had gone, Marcus came into my room, grinning. "I have a surprise," he said. "I've been working on it ever since supper."

  "You were supposed to be doing your homework," I told him, feeling as I said it that I sounded like Tom.

  "Sit on your bed," he said, and pointed to the exact spot where he wanted me. "And wait. I'm almost through. Just wait there and see what happens !"

  Obediently I sat where he had told me to. He went back to his room, and I waited. I could hear small scraping noises from Marcus's side of the wall. They continued: rhythmic, digging sounds, through the sound of the rain outside, almost the same sounds we could hear occasionally in the shed when mice scurried and gnawed invisibly behind the old planks and boards.

  "What are you doing?" I called impatiently.

  The noise stopped, and Marcus appeared again in my doorway. "Watch your wall," he ordered in a loud and self-important whisper.

  I sighed. I hated it when Marcus ordered me around; after all, I was a year older than he. I thought of Mother, a year older than Claude, being ordered to learn a language and a set of laws for an imaginary kingdom. And I sat there on my bed, dutifully watching the wall, because whatever Marcus was up to, it was bound to be fun.

  A small flower on my wallpaper, slightly above the table beside my bed, began to shiver and move. I stared in amazement. Seconds later, a yellow petal on the flower disappeared. I blinked. Where the petal had been, a shiny piece of metal appeared, and then grew larger. A tiny puff of plaster dust poofed into the air and fell to the table. With a final shove, the end of a screwdriver emerged into my room through the wall; it moved briefly in a rotating pattern and was withdrawn. I could hear Marcus's breath as he blew through the hole, and more plaster dust flew out and settled on the table.

  I leaned over to look more closely. I could see the light from Marcus's room. Then the hole darkened ; I could hear a rustling sound, and an instant later, something new began to appear in the hole. I reached for it and drew it through: a piece of paper rolled tightly into a cylinder.

  I unrolled it and read: HELLO FROM MARCUS THE NEWBOLD.

  I took it to my desk, found my pencil, and wrote: LOUISAMANDA SENDS GREETINGS. MOTHER IS GOING TO KILL YOU WHEN SHE FINDS OUT.

  ARE YOU GOING TO TELL? Marcus sent back.

  I marched to his room and found him hunched over his side of the hole.

  "No," I assured him. "I'm not going to tell."

  Later, when I was in bed, and Mother had checked the windows one more time, and outside the rain was still a heavy deluge against the roof and sides of the house, I heard the rustling sound again, near my head. I reached toward the wall and felt the rolled paper appear. I turned on the light, and read:

  JUST PASSING THROUGH.

  10

  It rained and rained. Mother's sheets flapped in the wet wind for days until finally she dashed outside with a raincoat draped over her head, took them down, rewashed them, and hung them in the basement in disgust.

  The forsythia blossoms were all gone by the first day, pulled loose from the fragile stems, smashed to the ground beside the driveway, and then washed away in the water that had changed from puddles to rivulets to torrents that streamed from the driveway into the wet street.

  The after-school Softball games were a thing of the past, now that the vacant lot where they had been played had become a brown sea in which Popsicle wrappers drifted and churned. Tom stayed in his room in the afternoons, working on a school project; Stephie, bored with her indoor toys, whined and made a pest of herself. One afternoon I held her against the window and pointed to her sandbox, showing her that it was awash in the ocean that had once been our back yard.

  "It's a boat now, Stephie," I told her. But she wailed, following her favorite tin shovel with her eyes as it moved in aimless circles through the water. She kicked me angrily, pushed herself out of my arms, and ran to cling to Mother's skirt.

  School continued, with recess held indoors now. The distracted teachers dreamed up activities we could do at our desks: word games and art projects. But we misbehaved, making paper airplanes with our construction paper, calling loudly across the room to special friends, all of us outraged that our outdoor world had spurned us and was keeping us prisoners here in a chalk-smelling room.

  Many school desks were empty. The buses still came in every morning from the country, but only the girls from the farms came to school. Their brothers were kept at home to help try to save their land, for the interminable driving rain was pulverizing the rich topsoil and washing it away, and the mud-filled river was rising and threatening the fields. In my sixth-grade class, the Sorenson twins, Anders and Karl, were absent; and sturdy Nicholas Rostov was gone, though his sister Lydia still came every day to third grade, running from the bus with her kerchief tightly knotted under her chin and rain streaks on her ruddy face.

  Father was tense and agitated in the evenings and was frequently on the telephone. The robbery at the Leboffs' house, though still unsolved, was old news now; there were more immediate concerns. The river was higher already than it had been in years, the rain was still coming down, and if it didn't stop, there would be a flood.

  Yet in other parts of the country, there was sunshine. Marcus and I knew because Claude sent us a postcard to tell us so. Claude was apparently in Denver, far to our west.

  "In Denver the sun is shining," I told Mother, holding the treasured postcard.

  "Actually," I went on, looking at the card again, "the sun is shinning in Denver. At least that's what he says."

  It still bothered me that Claude—a man who'd been to the edge of the Baltic Sea—couldn't spell. "Well," the postcard addressed to me and Marcus read, "hear I am in Denver, Colaraddo, would you beleive it? The sun is shinning."

  I didn't want Father or Tom to know and to ridicule Claude. But privately I showed the card to Mother and watched her face as she read it. She simply smiled and gave it back to me.

  "He must have been in a hurry when he wrote it," I suggested. "See how he spelled things wrong? Same as the note he left for us. And I know he was in a hurry then, to catch the train."

  But she said no. "That's just Claude," she said. "Such a talker—he always was, even as a child. But reading and writing came hard for Claude. He was never much for school."

  I told Marcus what she had said, and he rubbed his tongue across his jagged-edged tooth and nodded. "Like you and diving," he pointed out matter-of-factly.

  I glared at him for a moment. But he wasn't needling me, not this time; he was simply stating a fact. And it was a fact. I was an excellent swimmer, "a veritable fish," Father always said proudly. Every summer we spent a month in a rented cottage on t
he shore of the small lake fifteen miles east of town. I had learned to swim there so long ago that I could no longer remember the learning. The water was like air to me; I felt at home in it, and every morning, even when it rained, I ran across the tiny pebbled beach and, without pausing, continued into the lake until I was submerged. Then I would simply go on, running merging naturally into swimming, and I moved easily, weightless and supple, through the cold green fluid world. I never tired. Sometimes for hours I propelled myself through the lake, under the water or on its surface, occasionally so far out that I could look back toward shore and see the cottage and my family on the beach, flattened in perspective like cardboard scenery on a stage. From the distance I could hear Mother's voice: "Not so far, Louise!" and I would knife my way back, slicing through the water, to placate her, peering through my beaded, watery eyelashes until she waved and smiled, reassured.

  I was as buoyant and facile in the lake as Claude was with speech. But I couldn't dive. Tom was an agile, competent diver who had won awards at Boy Scout camp. And even Marcus, a thrashing dog-paddler easily given to panic if he couldn't feel the stony bottom under his feet, could fling himself fearlessly, headfirst, from the splintery dock. He could do it forward, backward, curled into a ball, or with his arms spread wide.

  "It's easy, Louise!" Tom and Marcus would tell me every summer. Yet when I stood on the edge of the dock looking down into the lake, the water seemed to change. It was murky, dark, and terrifying from that unaccustomed angle; and when finally, shivering, I would force my legs to move like springs and send me into the air and down, I would fall awkwardly, slapping my stomach, stinging my knees, and I would come to the surface choking, angry, and humiliated.

  I turned Claude's misspelled postcard over in my hands, and wondered if Marcus was right, if Claude felt that way, scared and incompetent, when he held a pen and tried to plunge into something that came so naturally to the rest of us.

  After we had examined it carefully for new messages or clues—but there were none; there was only that foolish, misspelled greeting—Marcus and I tucked the card away in the drawer of my bedside table with Claude's note. It was reassuring, at least, to know that he was still thinking of us. Surely one day soon he would write to ask if we had found his gift; he would give us an address, and we could write to him and ask humbly for his help. We still searched diligently, almost every day. But we were running out of places to look.