The Secret Life of Owen Skye

by Alan Cumyn

  There was no question of saving themselves. They hurled back across the tracks and sprang on the attackers in a devastating one-two formation: Captain Volatile and Doom Monkey the Unpredictable working together to push back the forces of darkness! It was true, Doom Monkey didn’t have his Atrocious Hat, but they had the power of surprise. They screamed and shrieked like wild animals, and in the darkness the bullies were scared for nearly a minute.

  Then they realized who they were up against, and they weren’t scared anymore. The biggest brother sent Owen flying into a fern bush, then whirled Andy into some thorns, and the two younger brothers held Leonard by the arms and shook him. Owen made it out of the ferns, only to be tripped and shoved into the bicycles, and Andy got his shirt ripped just trying to get out of the thorns. When he did get out he grabbed for Leonard, but the brothers carried the little boy off down the path and pushed him into a puddle.

  Now the three of them were coming back for Andy and Owen. Andy dodged, then punched out — one-two! But his fists bounced off the big brother’s shoulder like ping-pong balls.

  “What was that?” the middle brother asked.

  “A puff-ball!” the goon said, laughing.

  “One-two!” Andy said this time, right out loud, as his punches glanced harmlessly off the bigger boy’s elbow.

  “No, I mean it!” the middle boy said. “What was that? Listen!” He looked worried. Suddenly there was an odd sound in the night air — a dull, low, menacing moan. The bigger boy stopped laughing and turned to listen.

  “Shhh!” both the boys said at once, and Owen thought it would be a perfect time for Andy to hit that bully hard in the stomach.

  But Andy stayed still. Then they all heard it again — the sickly, ghostly moan.

  “This is where the accident was,” Owen said quickly. “We were here. We saw it all.”

  “You saw the train hit the cart?” the bully asked. His face had grown quite pale.

  “No,” Owen said. “But we saw where the cart ended up. We saw where the body was. It was right over there!” And from exactly where he was pointing came another ghostly moan.

  Those bullies couldn’t get to their bikes fast enough. The biggest one hopped on and rode directly into a tree. The smallest one fell off and ran himself over with his own bike, and the middle one went straight into the puddle that Leonard was just coming out of. But they didn’t stop for long. All three of them scrambled onto their bikes again and disappeared into the night, leaving the Skye brothers alone and listening for more eerie moans.

  “Do you think it was him?” Owen asked when they were walking home. Andy said it probably was.

  They couldn’t do anything about Leonard’s wet and muddy clothes, or about the cuts on Andy’s legs and arms and cheek from the thorns, or the bruise on Owen’s forehead where he’d landed on the bicycles.

  When they got home Margaret said, “See what happens when you encourage the boys to fight!” Horace wanted to know all the details. Did they try the old one-two? The boys had a hard time explaining how big those bullies were, how weak their own arms and fists felt when it came time to match strength.

  “So what happened? How did you get away?” Horace asked, and they couldn’t explain it really, the eerie moaning that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

  That night Owen dreamed of the accident. In his dream the sound of the train was exactly like the sound of Leonard crying out. And Owen suddenly understood that by the time the father reached across to grab his son, it was already too late. But at that moment the father did the impossible. He somehow reached into Death’s pocket, pulled out his son and threw him safely onto the bushes. He didn’t have time to think. The action sprang from his blood.

  Owen woke up in a sudden sweat, seeing the crash and hearing the moaning over and over — the same eerie, haunted noise that had saved them from the bullies. He sat up and scanned the darkness to see where the ghost was, and nearly had his heart hammer out of his chest.

  Then he saw the odd smile on Leonard’s face, lost in sleep as he was, and heard the familiar moaning of his younger brother’s ghostly snores.

  The Accident

  AFTER UNCLE LORNE married Mrs. Foster, Eleanor and Sadie became Owen and Andy and Leonard’s cousins, so they were around a lot.

  Eleanor questioned nearly everything the boys did. She said she didn’t believe that a Styrofoam submarine could outrun a giant squid and that there were no aliens or ghosts.

  “But what about Brinks’ cow and the Bog Man’s wife?” Andy said.

  Eleanor said they must have been optical illusions.

  “But Brinks’ cow was on the news!” Andy said. “And Leonard talked to the Bog Man’s wife. There was nothing optical about it!”

  Eleanor listened to Andy’s crystal radio and said that the noises weren’t coming from outer space at all, they were just radio waves.

  “Right!” Andy said. “Radio waves from distant galaxies!” He even got out his table of weights and measures to show her how to decipher the codes, but she wouldn’t listen. She belonged to the Junior Scientists’ Club, and Junior Scientists stuck to the facts.

  Andy said that he thought the Junior Scientists were a bunch of weejees, and Eleanor said it took a weejee to know one. So the three boys left for their fort, which was on top of the garage door that never closed. It was a perfect place to go if you wanted to get away from a Junior Scientist.

  Eleanor didn’t care where the boys went. She said she would just mix chemicals by herself and invent new compounds to rid the world of disease. She had a Junior Scientists’ test tube kit that included many different-colored powders and complicated instructions and a hundred-power microscope to view the wonders of the biological world. She and Sadie opened up the kit on the floor of the garage and started doing experiments while the boys sat up in their fort pretending to ignore them. It was tough, though, because the experiments produced a lot of smoke that made the boys cough and wonder what those girls were going to do next. The Junior Scientists seemed to understand that smoke rises while fresh air remains at the bottom of any room.

  Pretty soon Leonard said he thought maybe it would be better to be a Junior Scientist for awhile.

  “What are you talking about?” Andy said. “And leave the fort?”

  “I think she’s trying to burn us out!” Leonard said, and then he disappeared down the rusty cable they used for climbing to and from the fort. The cable was stretched around a pulley, and at the bottom was an old iron box full of rocks. The weight of the box helped keep the door open. Not that you had to worry about the door closing, because it had been stuck open forever.

  Eleanor mixed more and more chemicals together. The smoke turned yellow and blue and red and brown, and it smelled like maybe the Bog Man was coming after you, gurgling and fuming.

  Pretty soon Owen said he’d had enough of the fort too.

  “Why are you being a weejee?” Andy asked.

  “I’m not being a weejee. Maybe I’ll be a spy and discover what’s going on with these Junior Scientists!” Then he shinnied down the rusty cable and joined Leonard and Sadie, who were squatting beside Eleanor and her smoking test tube. The clouds were coming out white now and smelled like somebody dying.

  “The power of science,” said Eleanor, “is that you can solve any problem that comes before you. This mixture I’m making now improves respiratory ailments and promotes egg production in chickens.”

  “I don’t see any chickens!” Leonard said.

  “If there were chickens,” Eleanor said, “they’d be laying eggs like crazy.”

  Andy called out from up top, “I’m going to lay eggs on you guys if you don’t stop smoking out my fort right now!”

  There was a lot of screaming back and forth, and Margaret came out to tell them to be quiet and play nicely. She was alone with the kids because Lorraine had gone into town on an
errand, and Horace and Uncle Lorne were working.

  When Margaret came out Eleanor became polite and soft and said that Andy wasn’t letting them into the fort. So Margaret ordered Andy to let them all go up. When Margaret ordered something there was an extra wood in her voice. It was as if the words became a baseball bat that she just tapped gently a couple of times, and you knew you didn’t want to argue with her.

  So Andy agreed that the girls could go up in the fort if they stopped being Junior Scientists and put out the smoke, which they did. The only problem was that they didn’t know how to shinny up the rusty cable. Owen showed them how to wrap their feet around it and pull themselves up until they got to the top. Eleanor tried and slipped off and said that she thought her dress was going to get rusty.

  “What? So now you don’t want to come up?” Andy said. “Our fort isn’t good enough for a Junior Scientist?” Eleanor got so mad she grabbed the cable with both hands and kicked her feet wildly, clutched and pulled and clutched and kicked until she got to the top somehow, spitting and saying wild things all the way.

  “This is it?” she said when she got to the top.

  “What do you mean?” Andy asked.

  “You haven’t even got anything to sit on!”

  “You sit on your behind!” Andy said. There were rafters to look at and the sloping planks of the roof and even two little windows in the floor of the fort that you could look through to see what was happening down below.

  “This isn’t much of a fort,” Eleanor said. “I don’t know what you’re so excited about.”

  Owen tried to help Sadie up. She had a hard time gripping the cable with her hands and couldn’t seem to make her feet clutch. Owen stood below her with his feet on the iron bucket and pushed, and when that didn’t work, he climbed up halfway, then reached back down to try to pull her up.

  He was in the middle of doing that when the cable started to pull him up all by itself. It felt magical for a moment, and then it felt like the most horrible thing he’d ever known in his life.

  There were screams then, not from Owen but from Andy and Leonard and Eleanor, who used to be up top in the fort but now were sprawled on the dirt floor. The garage door which never closed finally had closed for some reason that might have been science or something more mysterious. But no one cared right at that moment, because Owen was dangling near the roof with his finger caught between the rusty cable and the round pulley.

  Andy climbed up first to have a look, and when he saw the finger really was caught he called down to Leonard to run to the house to get their mother.

  It took forever for Margaret to get to the garage.

  “What’s going on?” she called. Then she opened the door to see for herself, and Owen came down with the cable.

  “Did you cut yourself?” Margaret said in the voice that she used when things weren’t very serious and kids should stop crying about them.

  “I think so,” Owen said and held up his finger.

  Then Margaret turned and ran back to the house, and all the other kids ran with her.

  Owen was left alone. The severed tip of his finger hung down by a strip of skin. There was blood on his hand and the bone showed whiter than the whitest snow.

  All at once he felt the pain, and he stood screaming and looking, screaming and looking.

  He never knew what took his mother so long in the house. It seemed like she was gone for hours, though really she must have only been looking for her purse. Maybe she really wasn’t that long finding her purse, and perhaps a sweater. Maybe it only felt like an eternity to Owen because he was all alone with disaster.

  When Margaret finally returned, she put the tip of his finger back in the right place and had Owen hold it on with tissue paper. He stopped crying then. There was something powerful about tissue paper. Everything seemed better because of it. Owen sat in the front seat of the car holding the tip of his finger on, and all the other kids sat in the back. Andy and Eleanor were crying. Owen knew they thought the accident was their fault. Leonard and Sadie were quiet and pale.

  Margaret started the car. It was an old one that Horace had just bought that week for only fifty dollars. He was going to fix it up and sell it for seventy-five, but he hadn’t got around to the fixing-up part yet. Still, it was the only car on hand and Margaret started it expertly, then backed out onto the main road and shifted it into gear.

  The car stalled. Margaret slammed the steering wheel and started it again. But as soon as she tried to shift it to go forward, the engine quit.

  Margaret tried and tried to get the car going. Owen sat still and silent and closed his eyes. His finger really didn’t hurt as much as he thought it should, with the tip broken off like that. He held the tissue paper tight to keep everything on and to stop the bleeding. Now all the other kids were crying, and his mother was using evil language.

  But Owen knew it was going to be all right. He thought of that day when he was in the middle of the burning ditch, and how he’d had the courage to face the Bog Man when he was trying to save his father stuck on the roof. This could be faced too, if he stayed calm.

  Margaret got the car in gear, finally, then drove faster than Doom Monkey on his way to rescue the world. She didn’t stop, in case the car stalled again, but honked her horn and waved a lot out the window. After awhile the kids shifted from crying to screaming, but Margaret told them to stay quiet, and there was enough baseball bat in her voice to make it last most of the way into town.

  The hospital was made of gray crumbling rock with gray walls and gray-looking people inside. Margaret and the children sat in the waiting area for most of a lifetime. Owen held onto his finger in the tissue paper. The other kids sat still with big eyes, just looking.

  There was a large man with a brown beard and an enormous belly sitting next to them, his eyes hazy. Owen couldn’t tell what was wrong with him. But the boy next to him had hurt his arm, and a woman across the way who looked as old as ashes had broken her hip just walking to the door. A vacuum-cleaner man had been right there to catch her, and instead of selling her a vacuum cleaner he’d brought her to the hospital.

  And there was a little girl in red shoes who’d been sick since she was born and came into the hospital at least once a week. She knew the names of the nurses and took six different kinds of medicine every day.

  Owen’s finger hurt all over again when he finally got in to see the doctor. He had to take the tissue paper off and though he didn’t want to watch he couldn’t help seeing that the tip of his finger looked squished and purply. The doctor washed the wound and had Owen hold the tip back on and said he was going to re-attach it.

  “How do you do that?” Owen asked. He figured that because this was medical science there would be a kind of bone glue and maybe a special ointment they could use. But the doctor got out a needle and thread instead.

  “You’re going to sew it back on?” Owen asked.

  The doctor told him not to watch, but Owen couldn’t help himself. There was the needle going into his skin. There was the black thread being pulled through. The black thread made a stitch pattern that you’d expect to see on some attached part of Frankenstein.

  “There. That should hold it for now,” the doctor said.

  There was an operation later to make sure everything really was in place. When Owen woke up he had a huge plaster cast on his finger. He was alone in a green room with gray curtains around his bed, and the cast looked like something a mummy would wear. Owen drifted in and out of sleep. Margaret came by later and said she’d taken the kids back home to stay with Lorraine. She was going to make Horace buy a proper car and how was he feeling? Was there anything he wanted?

  “How long am I going to be here?” Owen asked. Margaret said three days, and Owen told her which comic books he wanted. Then Margaret opened the curtains and wound up his bed so that he could look out the window. His room was up on
the fifth floor, and he could see rows and rows of houses and a curving part of the river and half a bridge. He imagined that Sylvia might be walking down the street with her parents for some reason that he’d think of later.

  After Margaret left, Owen kept looking and looking, and even when it was starting to get dark he didn’t want the nurse to close the curtain just in case.

  That night he had a hard time sleeping. He thought again and again of standing in the driveway bleeding and screaming, and sitting so quiet and still while the doctor threaded the needle, and those long moments when the car wouldn’t go. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be that little girl coming into the hospital every week practically for your whole life.

  Breaking one finger seemed like a lucky thing then. He might have caught all his fingers in the pulley, and Andy and Leonard and Eleanor might have broken their necks falling from the fort, and the car might never have started, and they might have had an accident on the way…

  And the Bog Man’s wife might not have visited Owen the way she did.

  It was late in the night and the hospital was eerily silent and black. There was no sound except for the drip-drip of a faucet somewhere. It was so late the drip-drip sounded like fists pounding on Owen’s eardrums.

  Then, there she was, swaying like a curtain in the wind, all in gray.

  “You talked to my brother,” Owen said, sitting up, trying to see her better.

  “How is your finger?” she asked. She stayed in the shadows and when she spoke, the wind blew.

  “I broke it,” Owen said, holding it up. “It’s in a cast.”

  “I know,” she said, blowing cool air on him, swirling her gray dress. She had the tiniest voice. He had to strain to hear her.

  “We don’t see you so often anymore,” she said, and then she blew right out the window, and though Owen tried to get her to come back, she stayed away.

  In the morning Owen had Nurse Tudley. She was about two hundred years old. Her voice was sharp and brittle like certain kinds of tree bark, and when she talked, the words snapped out like someone closing a suitcase on your fingers. She brought him breakfast on a tray, then hovered around him in case he got crumbs on the sheets. He was so anxious that he spilled his cereal bowl all over the blanket, which made Nurse Tudley squawk like a crow.