Incommunicado

by Randall Platt

  incommunicado

  Randall Platt

  Sky Pony Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2014 by Randall Platt

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Sky Pony® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-62914-646-1

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-210-9

  Cover design by Rain Saukas

  Cover photograph credit Thinkstock

  Printed in the United States of America

  For my agent, Andy Ross, who

  never stopped believing

  in this story.

  CHAPTER 1

  “Oh look! There’s my dress!” Aggie squealed loud enough to be heard all the way to Astoria, let alone acrost our small school cafeteria. She snickered with some other girls and everyone looked at me as I made my miserable way to the farthest table.

  I was nine and in the fourth grade when I finally figured out the true meaning of “enough is enough.” So, it’s not as though I wasn’t ready for it. This girl, Aggie Steen, centerpiece of the sixth grade girls’ table, had been saying “oh look, there’s my dress!” all day—first on the walk to school, then in the girls’ can, then echoing in the halls, and now in the cafeteria.

  I set down my tray, went over to Aggie, and stood in front of her.

  “I loved that dress,” she cooed to her pals, “when I was in third grade!”

  I stood my ground and stared at her, cool as I could be, and then I started to unbutton the dress. First the pastypearly type buttons at the lacy neck and going right down to the frayed belt at the waist, and then unzipping the sticky zipper. Well, things were getting pretty quiet at the Queen Bee table. In fact, by the time I stepped out of the dress, all eyes were on me, including Mrs. Adams’s, the principal.

  But, criminently, I had to do it!

  “Here! You can have the dress back! It smells like a hog trough!” I wadded up the dress and tossed it on Aggie’s hot lunch, the belt whapping her in the face.

  Her milk spilled and she screamed and jumped up and called me something pretty awful. And there stands me, in my cheesy cotton slip, scarred, knobby knees, hairy legs, skinny arms and all.

  I returned to my table, took my lunch, and walked toward Mrs. Adams. Even her face was blank, her eyes and mouth both wide open. It was quiet as death in the cafeteria.

  “How many days?” I asked Mrs. Adams, getting it over with before she got her senses back.

  “Three,” she mumbled. “I’ll send over your homework assignments.”

  But that day I learned two lessons, and they didn’t have anything to do with homework assignments. Number one: the only thing worst than being the poorest kid in town is being the poorest kid in the poorest town. Number two: never wear anything to school your mother buys at a church rummage sale. In a town like ours, someone’s bound to recognize it.

  That was in the fall of 1938, more than three years ago, and I can still hear the laughter after I left that cafeteria and walked down the hall to my classroom, where I grabbed my coat—also second-hand—and rode my bike home. I can still feel the sting of the rain on my steaming face.

  I think the whole town of Sea Park, Oregon, population 542, is still laughing about it.

  Today, I’m a twelve-year-old seventh grader stuck smack-dab between being that skinny, dress-less girl and a half-grown “lady-in-waitin.’” That’s what my oh-so-Southern mother calls it. That’s me—a lady-in-waitin’— and I don’t even know what I’m waitin’ for. Mom does, though. She also calls this change-over thing poooooberty. Yes, that’s what she called it when I got the facts of life lecture—pooooo-berty. Sounds more like what you’d name a dang lap dog. Anyway, pooooo-berty and me are on a first-name basis. The curse, pimples, greasy hair, these bumpy chesty things and all. So far, twelve is a raw deal.

  I fight it sometimes, this whole pooooo-berty thing. Sometimes I can’t wait to grow up, and sometimes I just want to stay a kid. And that back and forth tug-of-war is kind of the reason I am where I am now—sitting in Sheriff Hillary Dutton’s office with my older brother, Rex, staring down at the complaint form.

  • • •

  “I don’t care if you did it or not. I don’t care if Martians landed and painted those lion statues’ eyeballs. I don’t care if Franklin Roosevelt and his dog Fala did it. You are now officially the one responsible,” the sheriff says to Rex, pointing her cigarette lighter shaped like a tiny pistol at him.

  You can tell she’s said that line more than once. This is what it means: now, whenever anything goes wrong in Sea Park, no matter who does what, my brother, Rex Alan Stokes, will be blamed for it. Here’s why: Sheriff Hillary Dutton picks a high school boy to officially take the blame for any prank or joke or vandalism the kids in town do. She calls the position Town Hood. She says since she’s the only cop around, she just doesn’t have time to deal with us kids and the stuff we do to kill the boredom or impress each other and the tourists. Just about every boy has to take a turn at being Town Hood.

  Being Town Hood is sort of like being drafted, only you don’t get a uniform, a gun, and a ticket out of town. Town Hood is half Public Enemy Number One and half town janitor. The Town Hood will make sure all the other kids toe the line so he doesn’t take the rap for anything. I might be the only one, but I think it’s a Badge of Honor, and I sure want to wear it. Being the first-ever girl Town Hood has been my first-ever goal in life. I love being a first-ever—like I was the first-ever girl to take off her dress in a school cafeteria.

  “Hey, I painted those lions’ eyeballs crost-eyed! Make me Town Hood!” I pipe up.

  The sheriff looks at me and says, “I guess you might have a crack at being our first girl Town Hood someday. But not today.”

  “What about Billy McCormick? Just last week he snuck into the Majestic Theater and lifted a box of Milk Duds,” Rex says.

  “How do you know?” she asks, lighting another cigarette and swishing away the smoke.

  “I was standing right next to him when he did it.”

  “Well, as of now, it’s your fault. You know how this works, Rex. As the T. H., you’re officially to blame for any delinquent behavior. Make sure all the boys get wind of this. Some boys send around a memo,” Sheriff Hillary says. “Jerry Adams even took out an ad in the Sea Park Sentinel.”

  Then she turns to me and says, “And you, missy. You of all people need to straighten up and fly right.”

  If I got two bits for every time someone has told me that, I could buy those stupid lion statues and paint them yellow with little pink polka dots.

  “But this whole Town Hood thing is Draconian,” Rex says. “About the most uncivilized thing I’ve ever heard of. And I’ll bet it’s unconstitutional. I know it’s unethical! Even England did away with whipping boys centuries ago!”

  That’s Rex all over. I never understand half of what he says, like he swallowed a dictionary. But Rex can go on and on about his political opinions, which he has on ever
ything, and pretty soon my own eyes go crost just like those lion statues.

  “Get yourself a soap box and head over to the park, son,” Sheriff Hillary says, shuffling some papers around on her desk.

  “And,” Rex goes on, “guilt by association is not guilt. It’s association, and nothing more.”

  “What are you, a lawyer?” she asks, giving him a look of disgust.

  “No, but I will be someday. And then I’m coming back here and suing everyone!” he barks.

  “Fine. Until then, Clarence Darrow, you’ll have to settle for Town Hood.”

  “Aw, come on, Sheriff Hillary. I’m too busy with my senior year to babysit all those other kids. Give a guy a break.”

  She makes like she’s playing an invisible violin.

  Rex points a finger at her and says, “You know what you are? You’re an autocrat. No, a fascist! No, a dictator! That’s what you are! A regular Hitler!”

  She looks up at him and there’s something kind of sad in her face. “No, son, I’m just a small-town cop filling in until her husband’s hitch is up.”

  See, her husband, Sheriff Norm Dutton, joined the Navy over a year ago, the summer of 1940, and Hillary stepped in since his uniform fit her and she had a gun and knew how to use it and all. Temporary or not, she keeps a tight rule over the town, and I think this Town Hood thing is one reason why.

  She tells us to get out and warns the new Town Hood to make sure I repaint the eyeballs of those two lion statues so they look normal and not like constipated clowns. I thought crossing the lions’ eyeballs was funny, and heck, kids have done that every year since those stupid lions were put there. Same thing with that black jockey statue standing in front of Mayor Schmidtke’s house. That poor iron jockey looks pretty darn confused standing where he is, on a pedestal in a town where the blackest person anyone has ever seen is leathery ol’ Babs Bishop after a summer on the beach, soaked in her own personal concoction of baby oil and iodine. And the closest thing to a racehorse we have is an eighteen-year-old beach nag named Florence.

  Look, you don’t go putting up any statues in a town like Sea Park and not expect kids to express themselves with a little paint. Then again, if I hadn’t been so bored and looking for a way to express myself and some ol’ biddy Lioness butinski lady hadn’t caught me red-handed, then my brother probably wouldn’t suddenly be wearing the badge of Town Hood.

  The badge I deserve.

  CHAPTER 2

  Now about Rex and me. Guess you could say we’ve pretty much been on our own for a long time. Fact is, I can’t remember much about our father except just noise. Rex remembers more, being older. He remembers getting clobbered and yelled at and bullied. Rex told me one night these men in uniform came—cops, I guess—and all of a sudden, poof!, our old man just wasn’t there anymore. Ever.

  If Mom’s had enough to drink and you really bug her about it, she’ll let a few clues slip: that bum, what a rat, ruint us all, “I loved that jerk!” After a few years, I stopped asking about him, and I think we all just forgot there ever was a father, jerk or no.

  Anyway, since we were “gettin’ on” as Mom called it, we could do for ourselves. But since Rex is seventeen and I am twelve, that’s twenty-nine years betwixt us and yes, we can pretty much do for ourselves.

  When Mom is out to sea cooking or on a binge, me and Rex work to keep the forty Stay and Play housekeeping beach cabins neat and tidy, but it seems like I am always the one who gets stuck cleaning the toilets after the tourists leave. We don’t own the cabins; we just clean them. We get to live in two of the cabins, though, connected with a plywood kind of hallway. We also get all the food we can pilfer since Mr. Kaye, the owner, has this fancy restaurant next door, the Look-Sea Lounge. And there’s the Kozy Korner Kafe under the lounge, so at least we get what Mom calls hots and cots—food and a place to live.

  Mr. Kaye. I like him a lot. He sort of just stepped in when our old man stepped out. Just like I don’t remember when my father was there, I don’t remember when Mr. Kaye wasn’t there. I guess if it weren’t for him, we’d been out on our butts.

  I figure Tommy Kaye owns most of Sea Park. At least, that’s what everyone says. The cabins, the restaurant, the café, and the bowling alley that turns into a dance floor for some pretty big bands he brings in from Portland and Seattle. He also owns the Feed and Seed where I help out sometimes. I love it there. Something makes me feel good about feeding animals and making things grow. Just the smell of the Feed and Seed makes me all warm and settled inside.

  Mr. Kaye also owns acres and acres of land up behind Sea Park—mostly forests and pastures. Mr. Kaye says Sea Park has a big future and that someday the world will sit up and take notice of our little tourist town.

  I used to hope that Mr. Kaye would pop the question to ol’ Malice Alice—oh, that’s what Rex and me call Mom sometimes, but never to her face and only when she deserves it, which is pretty much every Saturday night. Rex told me I was an idiot for even thinking about Mom marrying Mr. Kaye. “Look at him and look at her. Figure it out,” I remember him telling me. I guess he was right. Mom’s something of a handful . . . okay, make that a beach floozy, and Mr. Kaye is quiet and refined and smart. They say opposites attract but that’s in science, not in Sea Park.

  When you’re the daughter of Malice Alice Stokes you don’t have much of a chance at anything here in Sea Park. As far as I figure, the highlight of her life was being appointed Miss Good-Time Charley of 1937 at Edna Glick’s Inn and Out. Oh, she can dig clams faster than anyone I know. And oh yes, there’s that billboard outside of town that she claims she posed for. Okay, I can see as how she might have been pretty on her own, you know, without all that makeup and henna hair rinse and girdles that pull her in on the bottom and then jut her back out on top.

  But Rex . . . he’s our saving grace. Rex is smart enough for all three of us Stokes! With a brother like Rex, you just have some hope things’ll be okay.

  Alright, I’ve put this off long enough. I’ve been saving this part up because I don’t want you to judge me on account of my name. Ready? I am RubyOpalPearl Stokes. Don’t ask me where my folks got all those names from. Could have been names from my ol’ man’s little black book of old girlfriends for all I know. I can barely stand to say my names, let alone write them. So don’t ever call me RubyOpalPearl or Ruby or Opal or Pearl. I will just ignore you.

  Call me Jewels, or don’t bother calling me anything at all.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Hey, Stokes,” Eldon Johnson says, pulling Rex around by his jacket. “If it ain’t the new Town Hood and his sister, the Town Clown. Guess I’ll go steal me a car.”

  See, that’s the problem with being Town Hood. Depending on what the other kids think of you, you could end up in more trouble on account of them than if you did the hooding yourself. If they like you, that’s a whole other kettle of fish: you’re sitting pretty and they’ll keep you clean. Didn’t sound like Eldon was going to let anyone sit pretty, though.

  Eldon Johnson is cute, I’ll give him that. I had a crush on him for maybe about six seconds when I was ten. If anyone deserves to be Permanent Town Hood, though, it’s Eldon.

  Not even looking at him, Rex says, “Make sure you’re smart enough to steal one with gas in it.”

  “Me stealing a car lands the Town Hood in jail, I figure. What a sweet deal,” Eldon says.

  “Take a long joy ride off a short pier,” Rex tells him. We’re in Wingard’s Five And Dime getting model paint for the lions’ eyeballs. I pretend to be watching Mrs. Wingard balance on a ladder putting up Christmas garlands, but I’m listening.

  You need to know something else about my brother: he doesn’t fight. Anyone. Ever. He won’t even fight me, and believe you me, I’ve chalked up first blood on him many times. He doesn’t go for violence. I think we have our old man to thank for that. Usually dogs that get kicked around will turn mean, so you’d think Rex would put up his dukes once in a while. But I don’t think he’s ever even made a duke, l
et alone put one up.

  Don’t get me wrong, Rex is no coward. He’s just smart. He told me once that fighting might be an answer, but not a solution. He thinks there’s better ways. Maybe that’s why he took a trophy in State Debate last year up at Astoria High. I don’t know what they were debating about. I think I’d just rather fight and get the whole discussion over with.

  “Like I say,” Eldon says with a smuggish smile, taking a balsa wood airplane and slipping it into his jacket pocket, “you’re the golden boy now. Maybe you’ll grow a set of nuts.”

  He turns and, pretty as you please, walks right out of the store.

  I look at Rex. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

  “Cou-rrrrage,” Rex says, making like the Cowardly Lion.

  “You’re not afraid of anything! Besides, you can clobber him. He’s a jerk.”

  “Yeah, but nothing makes him madder than when someone won’t fight him.” Rex grins down at me and adds, “I win as long as he’s mad.”

  “Well, I think you should knock his block off. If Mrs. Wingard misses that balsa plane and she’s seen us here at the model counter, then . . .”

  “Quit yapping, Jewels, and pay for that paint. Leave an extra nickel on the counter.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it,” Rex says, heading toward the door. I don’t know if that’s his first official duty as Town Hood or if it’s because the Wingards have six kids, one of them with polio and, like us, need every nickel they can get their mitts on. But that’s Rex for you.

  We leave the store and bump into ol’ Frank McAloon, just tying his horse to the bumper of a car. “Hi buckeroos,” he says. He calls all kids buckeroos. You just have to get used to it. “Say, where’s your ol’ lady been? Haven’t seen her around lately.”

  “Cooking. She got a job on the Tinker II out of Warrenton,” I say, patting the velvety nose of Florence, his broken down beach nag. Frank and his twin brother, Leo, are okay. Old as God and if you ever wondered if twins grow old looking alike, well, they do. Both are old soldiers from The Great War. Here’s a hint: don’t ever ask them about that or you’ll be stuck listening to them for hours. You know how old folks can be talky about that stuff.