And so he did not take their squabbling seriously. He laughed, as there was no depth to their attacks. They were throwing stones — yes — but they were skipping them across the surface of each other’s water. Flat and sharp-edged, the stones stung for only a moment, then sailed off. But as summer droned on he began to notice that some stones became heavier, became rocks, were dropped rather than skipped, were allowed to sink. One day in late July, a rock hit bottom.
17
John noticed that Primrose’s photo-father was drawing increasing attention from the boy. They would be watching a crime movie, for example, and the boy would say, “Hey, maybe he’s a private eye.”
It went on like that:
“Maybe he’s an astronaut.”
“Maybe he’s a cowboy.”
“Maybe he’s a salesman. Like my dad!”
Primrose’s usual response was a smirk, though John could tell she liked some of his ideas. As for the boy, he was perfectly serious and obviously thought he was being helpful.
Then his speculations became more immediate. He would see a sports announcer on TV, or a game show host or a chef: “Hey, maybe that’s him!”
Primrose would groan and say, “He doesn’t look anything like that.” And the boy would hold his ground, and they would debate the whole thing, and sooner or later Primrose would whip out the pocket-size picture and slam it next to the face on the TV screen and growl, “There — stupid. Does it look like him now?”
As disgusted as she appeared to be, she was always ready to jump back into it the next time the boy said, “Hey, maybe —” For, however unintentionally, he was goading her to do one of her favorite things: talk about her father.
Then he got silly. During a show about a circus, he pointed to a preposterous-looking clown and said it. This time Primrose’s anger was real. She ground her words into his face: “He’s not a clown.” The boy did not debate the point.
The following night they didn’t show up till after eleven. Primrose went straight for the remote and turned on the TV. The kids were groaning because channel after channel was news, when suddenly John shouted, “Stop! Hold it there.” He pulled up closer. “I’ll be darned. It’s the Waving Man.”
“What?” said Primrose, but John’s flapping hand quieted her as he focused intently on the screen. Channel Ten News was showing a shabby-looking man in a scraggly gray beard and baggy pants standing on the corner of a busy intersection, waving. Smiling and waving. When the news went on to something else, John told them, “That was the Waving Man. I saw him myself in the city a couple times.”
“What’s he waving at?” said David.
“The people driving by,” said John. “He stands there every day during rush hour, waving at the cars. He waved at me once.”
“He does it every day?”
“Far as I know.”
“All year long? Even in the winter? When it’s twenty degrees below zero?”
John nodded. “Always.”
Primrose, who had been listening with increasing disbelief, said, “Why?”
John faced her. “Why does he wave?”
“Yeah, why?”
John looked at the ceiling, and shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Is he nutso?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“So why does he do it?”
John sighed in surrender. “Who knows? Maybe he’s just friendly.”
“That’s stupid,” she said. “I think he’s just nutso. Like my mother.”
“Your mother isn’t nutso,” said John. “She’s just a little different.”
Primrose snorted. “Hah! A little? Try living with her.”
David said, “Hey — maybe the Waving Man will wave at you someday, Prim.”
Primrose sneered. “Let him try it.”
And then the boy said it: “Hey, maybe he’s your dad!”
The girl was on him in a flash, pinning him to the sofa, mashing his face into the cushion. John rushed over and pulled her off. She flailed in his arms, still wanting to attack. The boy was crying. The girl was screaming, “My father is not a bum on the street! Don’t ever mention my father again!”
The boy screamed back, wet-faced and red: “I hate you and your stupid crazy mother!”
“At least my mother’s alive!”
For a moment the boy looked like he’d been poleaxed. But he recovered and picked up the TV remote and threw it. It would have hit her face if John had not blocked it with his forearm. This was different. This was ugly. He shook the girl by the shoulders and thundered at them both: “Knock it off!”
Shocked, they fell quiet at once. Now what? he thought. He had zero experience in controlling and disciplining children. He had to say something, keep talking, divert them from each other. So he said the first thing that came to mind. He told them about the nightcrawlers.
Nightcrawlers
18
The girl was still twenty dollars short on her paint fund. Much of what she made at the flea market each Saturday she spent the following week on lunch for herself and the boy. She was a go-getting earner, but not a great saver. She had been pestering Refrigerator John for more ways to earn money, and that’s why nightcrawlers came to mind as he banished the kids to opposite sides of the living room.
He let them fire a few more I-hate-you’s at each other, ordered them to shut up, and told them he had been thinking about opening a bait shop. “Lotta people fish in the river around here, y’know. Get me some minnies and worms. Clear off a shelf in the corner of the workshop. Nail up a sign. All I need is somebody to catch the bait.” He looked at one, then the other.
The boy sniffed. “You mean us?”
John nodded.
“How much?” said Primrose.
John thought. “Well, let’s see. Regular worms are small and easy to catch. Maybe a nickel apiece. Minnies are small too, but harder to catch. Ten or fifteen cents. But what I’m really gonna need are nightcrawlers. Big and hard to catch.” He thought some more. “Say, twenty cents each.”
“What’s a nightcrawler?” said the boy.
“A worm, worm,” sneered Primrose.
“A big worm,” said John. “I seen ’em a foot long.”
The boy gasped. “Wow!” His face was returning to its normal color. He put his palms together and drew them apart till the space between seemed like a foot to him. “Wow!”
“They only come out at night,” said John, “especially after a good rain. And there’s a special way to catch them. If you do, somebody’s got hisself a fat catfish.”
“A quarter apiece,” said the girl, always turning the screw.
John gazed thoughtfully at the ceiling. He nodded. “Okay.”
“Does that go for me too?” said the boy. “If I catch a nightcrawler, do I get a quarter?”
“Sure do,” said John. “Business is business.”
The boy clapped. “All right!”
When the kids came by next day, John was ready with two flashlights. Each had a piece of red balloon stretched over the lens and secured by a rubber band. “Let’s go outside,” he said. “Time for school.”
He led them into the sun-bright weed field that bordered much of Tulip Street. He stopped and stood for a minute, saying nothing. He grinned at the boy. “Feel anything?”
The boy was puzzled. “No.”
John chuckled. “Just kiddin’.” He pointed to the ground. “They’re down there. Just a couple inches under your shoes.” The boy looked down and gave a visible shudder. Primrose snickered. “Thing about nightcrawlers is,” John said, “you can’t feel them, but they can feel you. Leastways, when you’re walking regular they can. Right now they can’t, because we’re still. So here’s the first thing you gotta do —” He got down on his hands and knees, his bad leg splayed outward. “You gotta crawl along real slow and easy and quiet.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “No talking. Signal with your hands, or the lights.” The boy was on his own hands and knees beside him. “G
ot it?”
The boy nodded. “Got it.”
John squinted up at Primrose. “Okay. Now, second thing about nightcrawlers is, they’re real sensitive to light. They don’t like it. Look here.” He twisted his forefinger into the dirt until he had drilled a half-inch hole. “The crawler comes up outta his hole except for one thing. His tail. The rest of him’s laying out on the ground, maybe all twelve inches of him, but his tail’s still in here.” He looked at David. “Know why?”
Primrose answered. “Quick getaway.”
John jabbed his thumb up. “That’s right. If he sees your light — httthhhpp” — he made a worm-down-the-hole sound — “he’s gone.”
He took the boy’s flashlight; he held it before his eyes. “But that’s only if it’s regular light. Y’see, the thing about crawlers is” — he flickered the switch, the rubber circle brightened — “they can’t see red light.” His eyes met theirs. The boy whispered, “Wow!” Primrose said nothing, but was clearly impressed.
He went through the whole routine then: crawling, shining the red light, grabbing the worm at the burrow entrance. “Grab ’er between your fingers and hold ’er tight,” he said. “You won’t be able to pull ’er out right away, because the crawler digs into the sides of the hole and hangs on. They can be stubborn buggers.”
The boy laughed. “Stubborn buggers!”
“Yep. But just be patient. Sooner or later she’ll relax, and you can pull ’er out.”
“How do you know it’s a girl?” said the boy.
Primrose thumped him. “It’s just a saying, dummy.” She turned to John. “How do you know all this?”
John pushed heavily off his good leg and got himself upright. “Used to hunt ’em myself, before I got into appliances.”
They walked back to the abode. Primrose said, “I’m not touching those things without gloves.”
“Me neither,” said the boy.
Two days later it rained.
19
They left John’s abode at precisely ten o’clock that night, each with a flashlight, a pair of gardening gloves, and a plastic jug. The jugs were capped and hung from ropes that had been threaded through the jug handles and tied around their waists. Primrose also wore John’s watch. John stood in the doorway as they headed down Tulip. “Eleven o’clock, y’hear? — or I’m coming.”
“Don’t wait up,” Primrose sang.
“I’m not kidding, missy.”
“I heard you.”
The rain had stopped hours before, yet the night could not forget. A fine mist kissed their faces. The fields crackled around them and bloomed cool scents of weed and wet earth. There was neither moon nor streetlight, only a pair of tiny, fallen red planets bouncing along in utter blackness.
“Can’t even see my house down there,” said Primrose.
“I can’t see anything,” said David. He pinched the back of her shirt, held on.
“Okay — now,” she said. John had told them to go about halfway and turn left. They entered the weeds.
As summer went on, David had stopped being afraid of the night. Of course, he never had been scared in Refrigerator John’s or under the bright lights of the supermarket or 7-Eleven. But even on the streets — the occasional pools of light, the hum of the wagon wheels or his own bike or Primrose’s skates, the warm yellow rectangles of neighborhood windows, the very firmness of the paving beneath his feet — he had come to feel at ease.
This was different. This was the first time they had left the street, the first time in such total darkness that David, looking ahead, could see no difference between earth and sky. The red smudges given by the capped flashlights might be good for hunting worms, but they gave little comfort to a nine-year-old human. The mushy, musky ground; the wet weeds hugging his legs — it was like walking blindfolded through a swamp. Creepy. A moment came to him from long ago. He was walking down a dark hallway behind his mother, her hand trailing for him to hold. “Don’t let go, Davey,” she was saying. “Electricity went off, that’s all.” He held on tight.
He wished Primrose would say something. He crooked his finger through a belt loop on her jeans. “We’re not breaking the law, are we?” he said.
“What law?”
“I don’t know. I’m asking you.”
She took her time replying. “Well, there is one law I can think of that we might be breaking. Maybe even two.”
“What’s that?”
“Hunting laws. See, there’s two things. First, you need a license. Like to hunt deer and stuff, you know?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And we don’t have one.”
“But these are worms.”
“Big worms.”
He wished she hadn’t reminded him.
A particularly tall weed slid wetly across his arm. At least, he hoped it was a weed. He crooked another finger into the belt loop. “Think we ought to turn back?”
“Wait a minute, I’m not done. The second thing is hunting season. Like, you can’t go around hunting whatever you want all year ’round. Y’know?”
“No?”
“Heck no. You want to hunt for deer, there’s a special season. Bears? Special season. Pheasants? Special season. Worms?” She shone the red light in his face.
“Special season?”
She poked him. “Brilliant.”
“So is this worm-hunting season?”
“We missed it. It ended in June.”
“Oh.” David pulled Primrose to a stop by her belt loop. “Then I guess we have to go back, don’t we?” Heavy on his mind was his vow never to break a rule.
Primrose scoffed and dragged him along. “Nah. We’re okay as long as the worm warden doesn’t catch us.”
“Worm warden?”
“Yeah, he’s like a policeman for hunters. He throws you in jail if he catches you hunting in the wrong season.”
David stopped her again. “Primrose. We can’t.”
She pulled him onward. “Don’t be such a geek. The warden doesn’t care about a couple of kids. He’s out looking for big-time worm rustlers.”
He let go of her. He screeched. “I’m not gonna break the law!”
There was silence. Then Primrose exploded with laughter that sent every worm along April Street htthhhhpping back into its hole. And David knew he had been tricked again. A kick to Primrose’s leg did nothing to stem the laughter.
At last she settled down. “Oh sheesh” — she wiped her eyes — “you are so dumb. You must take a dumb pill every morning. You believe everything I say.” When she shone her red light into David’s scowling face, she broke out again. David turned to go back. She caught him by the collar. “Okay — okay —” She took a deep breath. “No more messing around. We gotta get serious.” Another deep breath. “Come on.”
He followed her into the blackness.
20
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.
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