“Why do you have them wings on?” Elvis said.
She looked over her shoulder at the wings, as if she had forgotten they were there. Then she picked up the jar of dirt, walked past the boys, and disappeared around the corner of the house.
Elvis frowned and shook his head. “She’s crazy,” he said.
But there was something about the girl with wings that took the qualms out of Popeye and replaced them with an unusually adventurous spirit.
“Come on,” he said, motioning for Elvis to follow him.
When they got to the backyard, the girl was drinking from the hose, the water splattering mud onto her skinny legs. When she finished drinking, she took the jar of dirt over to the porch. The butterfly wings flapped slightly as she walked. She placed the jar on the edge of the back porch, carefully lining it up next to three other jars of dirt.
“Y’all want a Yoo-hoo?” the girl said.
Popeye’s adventurous spirit did a cartwheel. He grinned at Elvis. “She’s the one who made the boats,” he whispered.
Elvis nodded solemnly. Then he turned to the girl and said, “Sure.”
“Wait right here.” She opened the squeaky screen door and disappeared inside the crazy-looking house.
Elvis didn’t hesitate. He leaped up the steps two at a time and waited outside the door.
Normally, Popeye would have hesitated.
But today wasn’t normal.
Today, he leaped up the steps two at a time. But before he got to the top, the girl poked her head out of the door and said, “That dog can’t come on the porch. He looks like my uncle Haywood.”
Popeye looked down at Boo, who sat forlornly at the bottom of the steps, gazing up at him with those watery, sad-dog eyes of his. “Sorry, fella,” he said. Then he went up on the porch to drink a Yoo-hoo.
16
THE THREE OF THEM sat on the top step of the porch. Music from a radio drifted through the screen door from inside the house.
The girl poked Popeye in the arm with a skinny elbow and said, “What’s your name?”
“Popeye.”
“That’s dumb.”
Elvis spewed Yoo-hoo into the air and slapped his knee, laughing.
“What’s your name?” the girl said to Elvis.
When he told her, she said, “That’s dumber.” She tilted her head back and gulped down the last of her Yoo-hoo drink. “I am Princess Starletta Rainey.”
“Well, what do you know, Popeye?” Elvis said. “Here we are, sittin’ on the porch with a princess.”
“I am called Starletta,” the girl said. She flapped both palms out in front of Popeye and Elvis and said, “Give me those.”
The boys finished their drinks and placed the empty cartons into Starletta’s hands.
“Did you make them boats in the creek?” Elvis said.
Starletta hopped down the porch steps. “Yep.”
“Show us how to make ‘em.”
“No.” Starletta reached up under the porch and pulled out a plastic milk crate filled with empty Yoohoo cartons. She tossed the three cartons into the crate and said, “Want me to show you how to make a boat?”
Elvis looked at Popeye, twirled a finger around his ear, and whispered, “Cuckoo. Cuckoo.”
Starletta held up one finger. “First,” she said, “you drink the Yoo-hoo.”
Elvis poked Popeye with his elbow again and said, “Duh.”
Starletta shot him a glare.
“Next,” she said, holding up two fingers, “you unfold the top to be the front of the boat.” She demonstrated.
“Then . . .” She held up three fingers. “You cut out part of the side, like this.” She took a pair of rusty scissors out of the crate and cut off part of the Yoo-hoo carton.
“There!” She held the little boat out in the palm of her hand.
Elvis said, “Cool!” and Popeye said, “Wow!”
Then the three of them sat on the porch steps and made Yoo-hoo boats.
Elvis kept asking Starletta about the notes she had put inside the boats. What did “float like a butterfly” mean? How come she wrote all those sevens? Where are the dead dogs?
But Starletta wouldn’t answer. She just kept unfolding and cutting and humming like Popeye and Elvis weren’t even there.
Popeye could tell that Elvis was irritated as all get-out. But it didn’t bother him one little bit that Starletta wouldn’t talk about the notes. He wanted to figure them out by himself.
He had already guessed the one about the Indian pipes.
And the very first one was just Starletta making a joke: Yoo-hoo! Ha! Ha!
Suddenly, Popeye snapped his fingers. “Float like a butterfly!” he said, pointing to Starletta’s wings. “ ‘Cause you like butterflies, right?”
Starletta jumped off the steps and bounced around the yard on her toes, punching the air with her fists, the scruffy butterfly wings flapping in the breeze.
Elvis rolled his eyes and made that finger-circling cuckoo motion around his ear again.
But Popeye watched Starletta and thought of a vocabulary word.
mesmerize: verb; to hold the attention of someone to the exclusion of all else
Starletta bouncing around the yard in those butterfly wings mesmerized him.
She stopped suddenly, tilted her chin up, and recited into the air, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Your hands can’t hit what your eyes can’t see.” She arched her eyebrows at Popeye and Elvis. “Get it?” she said.
“No,” Elvis snapped.
“Muhammad Ali,” she said. “The greatest boxer of all time.” She punched the air again. “He made up that poem.”
“Boxers don’t make up girl poems,” Elvis said.
Starletta stomped off to the vegetable garden, wings flapping. She took her hat off and began picking beans and dropping them into her hat. Then she came back over to the porch and dumped the beans into a metal bowl on the steps.
Popeye was thinking about the notes, trying to remember each one. He’d figured out three of them. How many were left?
Elvis must have been thinking the very same thing at the very same time, because he tossed a Yoohoo boat into the crate and said, “So where are the dead dogs?”
“I might tell you,” Starletta said. “And I might tell him.” She pointed at Popeye. “But I’m not telling those kids.”
“What kids?” Elvis narrowed his eyes at her.
“Those kids in the bushes over yonder.”
Popeye looked over at the bushes just in time to see five curly-haired heads duck down out of sight.
Prissy, Calvin, Walter, Willis, and Shorty.
17
ELVIS RACED OVER to the bushes and started hollering and flailing and kicking and thumping everyone on the head.
Words were flying.
Sneaky
No-good
Slimy
Dirty
Stinking
Spies
Popeye and Starletta watched as the tangle of kids punched and kicked and tumbled in a heap around the yard, stirring up swirls of dust and sending the chickens squawking.
Starletta slapped her knee and let out a “Woohoo!”
Finally, Calvin hollered, “Truce!” and everyone stopped, panting and gasping and sniffling.
Elvis got in one last whack at Willis, and then Starletta said, “I guess y’all can’t read.”
Prissy and Calvin and Walter and Willis and Shorty stared at Starletta. She jammed her hat back on her head and jabbed her thumb toward the sign at the edge of the woods. “That says ‘Keep Out.’ “
Prissy skipped over to the back porch steps and peered inside the milk crate. “Let me make a Yoohoo boat,” she said.
“No!” Elvis hollered, and the two of them started going at it again until Starletta yelled, “Uncle Haywood’s in the garden!”
Elvis and Prissy stopped with their hands in midair, and everyone turned to look at the garden.
Boo was digging, his rear end up i
n the air and his front paws working fast and furious, sending up a spray of dirt and pebbles and pole bean vines.
Popeye raced over and grabbed Boo by the collar. “Dang, Boo,” he said.
He dragged his dog out of the garden and said, “Sorry,” but Starletta seemed to have forgotten all about Boo. She was gathering rocks from the yard and tucking them into her pockets.
“What are you gonna do with those rocks?” Calvin said.
“Throw ‘em at you, probably,” Prissy said, grinning over at Starletta. “Right?” she added.
“Is he a blackbird?” Starletta said.
“No, he’s a dodo bird,” Walter said.
Calvin punched him, and there was another brief whirlwind of dust as the boys wrestled.
“When those nasty blackbirds come squawking around our garden again, my daddy’s gonna bake them in a pie,” Starletta said.
“A pie?” Prissy picked up a rock and handed it to Starletta.
“A blackbird pie.” Starletta hurled a rock up in the air. It landed on the rusty tin roof of the house with a loud thwang. “Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,” she sang.
The Yoo-hoo note!
Popeye looked over at Elvis, but he was kicking at the dirt and glaring at his brothers.
“Who wants to see my lucky walls?” Starletta said.
“I do!” Prissy called.
“I do!” Calvin hollered.
Walter and Willis and Shorty waved their hands and hopped around, and they all clamored up the back steps after Starletta, who had already disappeared inside.
“Come on,” Elvis said, running after them.
Popeye wasn’t about to be the only one who didn’t go inside, but it took all his strength to shut out the voice of Velma, yelling inside his head: Don’t you never ever go following any strangers anywhere. You hear me?
But he managed to do it.
Shut the door on Velma’s words.
Slam!
Then he bounded up the steps, leaving Boo sitting forlornly in the yard.
Popeye stepped through Starletta’s back door and could not get his eyes to look fast enough at all the stuff inside her kitchen. Every inch of counter and table and floor had something just begging to be looked at.
Prissy and the boys went crazy, running around picking things up and checking things out. Even Elvis quit his scowling and gazed around him in awe and admiration.
A giant pink teddy bear.
A rusty tricycle.
Plastic sunflowers.
A chipped, concrete flamingo.
An inflatable Santa Claus.
Golf clubs.
A birdhouse.
A cowboy hat.
A wagon filled with flashlights.
plethora: noun; an excess of something
Starletta’s kitchen was filled with a plethora of stuff.
All the others were so busy checking out the plethora that they didn’t notice the most amazing thing of all. The walls of the little kitchen were covered with about a million number sevens.
Big ones.
Little ones.
Medium ones.
Painted in red.
Painted in black.
Written with pen.
Written with pencil.
On nearly every inch of every wall.
“My lucky walls,” Starletta said.
Popeye grinned.
Another Yoo-hoo note!
7 7 7 7 7 7 7
The number 7 written seven times.
Starletta grabbed a red marker out of a coffee can on the kitchen counter and wrote a tiny number 7 on the wall next to the stove. “My lucky number.”
Once again, Popeye was mesmerized. Here was a twig of a girl with butterfly wings, writing sevens on the wall.
“Starletta!” someone hollered from a room next to the kitchen.
“What?” Starletta hollered back.
“What’re you doing in there?”
“Nothing.”
“Who’s in there with you?”
“Nobody.”
A woman appeared in the doorway.
A tired-looking woman in a bathrobe.
“Y’all get on out of here,” she said, throwing her arms wide as if to sweep them all out of the house.
Everyone scrambled.
Prissy jumped up off the floor, tossing a plastic snow globe back into a cardboard box. Calvin pushed Willis out of the way and jumped over stacks of magazines as he scrambled to the door. Walter yanked Shorty out from under the table, and Popeye and Elvis burst through the screen door with Starletta right behind them.
“So, who’s that?” Elvis said when they all gathered in the yard. “The Queen?” He grinned at Popeye.
“Yes, she is,” Starletta said. “Queen Starletta Rainey.”
The kids giggled.
“And I reckon your dad’s the king, right?” Elvis said.
Starletta unscrewed the lid from one of the jars on the porch and poured the dirt out into a little mound on the step. “No, he is not,” she said. “He is T-Bone. Charlie the T-Bone Rainey. And he drives a chicken truck.”
While the others were busy laughing about T-Bone and the chicken truck, Popeye was busy thinking about the note in the Yoo-hoo boat.
Princess . . . Queen . . . T-Bone
Starletta’s family.
Princess, Queen, and T-Bone.
Now Popeye had figured out all of the notes but one.
The best one.
Dead dogs live here.
What in the world could that mean?
18
“SOMEBODY’S CALLING Y’ALL,” Starletta said.
Sure enough, from somewhere out in the woods, someone was calling a name.
The someone was Velma.
The name was Popeye.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “I got to go.”
He raced toward the path at the edge of the yard, with Elvis, Prissy, Calvin, Walter, Willis, and Shorty right behind him.
Popeye’s heart was pounding as he ran past the Indian pipes toward the creek. Boo galloped along beside him, ears flapping.
Velma’s wrath-filled voice thundered through the woods, trampling the ferns and crashing into trees.
When he got to the creek, Popeye stopped.
Boo stopped.
Elvis, Prissy, Calvin, Walter, Willis, and Shorty stopped.
“Listen, y’all,” Popeye said. “Don’t tell Velma about Starletta, okay?”
Elvis nodded solemnly. “Okay.”
“Maybe,” Calvin said.
Elvis punched him in the arm with a knuckle.
Then Popeye took a deep breath and walked around the curve in the path to meet his fate.
Velma had thumped Popeye in the head.
Thoink!
Like thumping a watermelon.
He’d looked down at his sneakers.
She’d thumped again.
Thoink!
Then she’d let fly with an avalanche of angry words. She’d been looking for him for hours. She’d been worried sick that he’d drowned in the creek. He had no business hanging around all those wild kids. He’d better get himself on home in a hurry and stay there.
He had followed her back to the house, his head hanging, while Elvis and the others ran off to the Holiday Rambler.
And now here he was the next day, staring up at the heart-shaped stain on the ceiling of his bedroom.
“George V, Edward VIII, George VI . . .” drifted through the bedroom wall from the living room.
“Dead dogs live here,” Popeye whispered.
Boo’s ears perked up.
“Dead dogs live here,” Popeye whispered again.
He got off the bed and looked out the window. The once-muddy yard had dried into hard slabs of red dirt. Patches of brown grass and weeds poked through here and there. Every now and then, a grasshopper sprang up and buzzed through the thick, still air before disappearing into the weeds again.
Popeye looked down the road in the direction of
the Holiday Rambler. He wished he were in that silver motor home, playing cards with Elvis in the diner booth. Eating potato chips off a paper plate with his name written on it in crayon. Helping Glory Jewell write country-western songs.
But here he was in his bedroom, listening to Velma recite the kings and queens of England in chronological order.
Popeye flopped back down on the bed.
Pssst.
Popeye sat up. “What was that?” he said to Boo.
Boo ambled over to the window, tail wagging.
“Pssst, Popeye.” Elvis’s voice came through the open window from the bushes outside.
Popeye hurried over. “Hey,” he whispered.
“Calvin and them rode their bikes to the Quiki Mart, so you and me can go on back to Starletta’s without them following us.”
“I got to stay in my room,” Popeye said. “Velma’s still mad.”
“Yeah, but guess what?” Elvis said. “She told my dad he could count on Dooley to help him dig out the motor home. And . . .” He wiggled his eyebrows and grinned. “She said she’s going to drive over to Simpsonville today to pick Dooley up at his friend’s house and bring them both back to help.” He jerked a thumb toward the road. “Soon as she leaves, come get me.”
Popeye glanced over at his bedroom door. He could feel it coming.
Another vocabulary word.
quandary: noun; a state of uncertainty over what to do in a difficult situation
He was about to find himself right smack in the middle of a quandary:
Should he go back to Starletta’s with Elvis and find out about the dead dogs?
Or . . .
Should he stay here in his boring bedroom like Velma told him to?
19
WHEN THE BOYS got to Starletta’s backyard, she was sleeping on a blanket, with chickens clucking around her and blackbirds flapping on the garden fence. She lay curled up on her side, her head resting on her hands and her butterfly wings flopping droopily behind her.
Ahem.
Elvis cleared his throat loudly.
Starletta opened her eyes.
Ahem.
Elvis cleared his throat again.
Starletta sat up, blinking in the morning sun. Popeye and Elvis sat beside her. The blanket was hot and scratchy, with the faint scent of cedar.
The Small Adventure of Popeye and Elvis Page 5