It's Up to Charlie Hardin

by Dean Ing

  “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 hard-boiled 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 branc
hes 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.

  The clippers seemed to have scuttled off somewhere in the gloom, yet he knew perfectly well they lurked near, teasing him. He told himself they didn’t really have legs, and since they couldn’t hide in daylight he could find them in the morning. Still, he kept up his search until he heard a rhythmic series of faint reports that sounded like firecrackers far down the street. He ran to the carriage gate. Those reports were his father’s handclaps calling him home, and two minutes later Lint met Charlie as he shuffled into the driveway with, “I’m ho-ome.”

  As long as he was near enough to obey those claps, Charlie rarely had to give a detailed account for his comings and goings. To avoid any questions he immediately set about mixing canned dog food with table scraps set aside earlier by his mother, and when the last twilight faded, Charlie was sitting at the back porch steps beside Lint listening to the dog’s bowl scrape across cement.

  Charlie stayed outside talking to Lint much longer than usual that night. He knew that his parents had a supernatural ability to read his face for any guilt he might be carrying, and once they faced him squarely with probing questions, any sin on his conscience would soon be known. Boys like Jackie or Roy might escape by lying, but Charlie operated with a stricter code: he simply did not know how to lie convincingly and had learned long ago not to try. Aaron suffered the same weakness but had worked out strategies to deal with it, and bit by bit Charlie was learning them. The creek was forbidden territory, so if you played there, you also played for a few minutes at the schoolground or the park, and later you volunteered the safe location. If you had done something spectacularly dumb—like losing your mother’s rose clippers—you stayed out of sight or threw yourself into some task that demanded your full attention.

  Lint’s supper had provided that escape, and as he scratched between the dog’s shoulders Charlie resolved to try his new highway again the following morning on his way to recover those clippers. If he failed to find them, he would have to buy a new pair, at a price he could not hope to meet by selling a few measly bottles.

  CHAPTER 5:

  MINING THE DEPTHS

  With the nation at war, most families recycled their paper and metals, and tended vegetables in tiny plots they called “victory gardens.” The garden behind Charlie’s home grew tomatoes, radishes, beets and cucumbers in a space the size of his bedroom. If no other work was needed on a given Saturday, Charlie weeded the plot in return for his weekly quarter. On this day he hurried through his task and received his quarter fully expecting to have the missing clippers safely back in place by midmorning.

  So much for Charlie’s plans. At the castle wall, with a quick scratch to soothe doggy feelings, he sent Lint home. Then, just for practice, he scrambled up through the small oak improving his memory for handholds, across the dreaded wall, and down into the courtyard, running quickly to where he knew the clippers lay. Then he dropped to his knees and began to grapple in the weeds, slowly coming to realize that what he “knew” did not fit an awful fact: the clippers were not to be found.

  At this point Charlie’s internal map of his day’s business fell apart like a rain-soaked newspaper. He climbed into the huge central oak as he had done the previous evening, then sat balanced above the scene of this disaster and carefully scanned the area. Still no clippers.

  He swiftly reviewed a supply of remedies. He would run off and join a circus—but the circus, as everyone knew, lived in Florida, and Charlie did not have the price of a Trailways bus ticket. Moreover, he was strictly forbidden to hitchhike. Well then, he would buy another pair of clippers—after collecting a mountain of bottles, enough bottles to produce a sum so princely it made his head swim. Or he could do without the Lone Ranger for as many Saturdays as it took to accumulate the price of those confounded clippers. Or he might even sell the secrets of his highway to Jackie Rhett.

  None of these fancy schemes seemed quite real even to Charlie. He knew the answer to his problem could be summed up in one word: money. Charlie knew boys who claimed to have earned scores of dollars with newspaper routes. But by some secluded rule that parents left unexplained, none of Charlie’s friends were allowed to have a paper route or any other job beyond the home. Charlie reasoned that a regular salary could make him much more independent. He had not figured out that, to his parents, a more independent Charlie would be as welcome as a Japanese air raid.

  Presently, Charlie noticed a figure moving along the street a block away, coming nearer. A host of oak leaves prevented him from making certain, but by blowing familiar sad little hoots so hard that spots appeared before his eyes, he was rewarded. The walker paused; continued; paused again to listen; cupped his hands near his mouth. And the answering hoot told Charlie that the walker was Aaron.

  Invisible on his perch, Charlie enjoyed his pal’s puzzlement as he hooted Aaron through the old gate, under the limbs of the mighty oak, and finally almost beneath the hidden hootist before Aaron knelt and fumbled in the tuft grass. When Aaron stood up, it was Charlie’s turn to be mystified.

  “You found ’em,” Charlie exclaimed.

  “Who chased you up there?” asked Aaron in surprise, holding the clippers as he stared aloft.

  “Never mind,” said Charlie, hoping to keep his highway secret as he struggled lower to a safe height. He dropped to the ground, lost his balance, and found himself sitting at Aaron’s feet. “Gimme,” he said, and held his hand up. “Those are my mom’s.”

  Aaron studied the tool. “What would your mom do with an old busted pair of snips?”

  “Clippers,” said Charlie, rising. “And they’re not old; not busted either. You better gimme.”

  “Take ’em,” Aaron said with disdain, and dropped the clippers on the ground. “No good for anything anyhow.”

  A faint moan escaped Charlie as he examined the clippers. “Ohh, boy. You’ve done it now,” he said, hoping to share the blame. “You busted the little doodad on the end.”

  “Me? I just got here. Tell me how I broke ’em before I ever found ’em.”

  Something in Charlie seethed for release, anything to vent his misery. And here stood his best friend, squinting with hands on hips, ready for anything up to a yelling argument. In a flash of mixed memories Charlie realized this was a drama they had enacted a hundred times, and not once had it ever ended pleasantly for either of them.

  “Well, they weren’t busted when I dropped ’em,” Charlie said.

  Aaron’s gaze measured the distance to Charlie’s lofty perch. “When you dropped ’em,” he echoed. “Gee, what does that tell us?”

  What it told Charlie, he
admitted, was that he expected serious trouble unless he could buy new clippers. Charlie’s punishments tended to fit his crimes, and this combined the crime of breaking a prized tool with the crime of borrowing it without asking.

  “Get your money yet?” Aaron asked suddenly.

  “Boy, don’t I wish,” said Charlie. “We oughta talk about that. All I got is my quarter.”

  “That’s what I meant. I was on my way to your house. Got an extra dime, so we could go buy a zoom plane before the movie.” Small balsa gliders with “zoom” lettered across the wing were more fun between two boys than a baseball because the flights were unpredictable. “You ready?”

  Moments later the boys were trotting toward Congress Avenue, once a main trail for cattle drives, still a hundred yards wide and now Austin’s central traffic artery. Theaters such as the State and Paramount shared Congress Avenue frontage with the less ritzy Queen and “dime” stores like Woolworth’s and Kress’s, where a boy might shop for model airplane kits, candy and marbles. At Scarborough Hardware they priced a pair of clippers and walked more slowly afterward, agreeing that $2.49 was an outrageous price for anything so easily broken.

  At Kress’s, Aaron bought his zoom plane and assembled it on the spot. To cheer Charlie he pointed out that the Lone Ranger would not be Hi-Yoing on the screen for more than an hour. The blockwide park between the governor’s mansion and the state capitol building was four blocks up Congress, usually an ample space for a zoom plane. Aaron mimed tossing the glider. “Wanta?”

  Because a public hug for a pal was unthinkable, Charlie responded with a grin and a gentle fist against Aaron’s upper arm. In another five minutes, free from any trees big enough to steal a boy’s toy, they were adjusting the little balsa craft for longer flights. After another ten minutes one of Aaron’s tosses ran afoul of an unexpected breeze, and in moments the model had soared to a height they had thought impossible.

  “Whoa, you’re gonna lose it,” Charlie called, marveling.