When the Stars Begin to Fall

by James Lincoln Collier

  WHEN THE STARS

  BEGIN TO FALL

  WHEN THE STARS

  BEGIN TO FALL

  JAMES LINCOLN COLLIER

  WHEN THE STARS BEGIN TO FALL

  Copyright © 1986 by James Lincoln Collier

  All Rights Reserved

  First ebook copyright © 2013 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  978-1-62064-663-2 Trade

  978-0-7927-9796-8 Library

  Cover photo @ ferrantraite/iStock.com.

  For Asa

  Other eBooks by James Lincoln Collier:

  Chipper

  The Corn Raid

  The Dreadful Revenge of Ernest Gallen

  The Empty Mirror

  Give Dad My Best

  It’s Murder at St. Baskets

  The Jazz Kid

  Me and Billy

  My Crooked Family

  Outside Looking In

  Planet Out of the Past

  Rich and Famous

  Rock Star

  The Teddy Bear Habit

  Wild Boy

  The Winchesters

  The Worst of Times

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  ONE

  I was up in my room trying to fix my stereo when I heard the car drive in. I looked out the window. An old Buick was coming up the dirt driveway, going slow so as not to splash water up out of the puddles in the drive left over from last night’s rain. I couldn’t see who was in the car, but I knew it was Charlie Fritz and some friend of his. I knew what they were coming for too. They were going to get my sister, Helen, up in the barn with them. That’s all they ever came around for. I hated it when they came. It made me feel rotten, and usually when it happened I would go out for a walk.

  I decided to concentrate on getting my stereo to work right. It wasn’t much of a record player. Dad had found it in the town dump and brought it home for me. It had a bad hum. I’d figured I could fix it, but I never had been able to get the hum out, so it wasn’t much use to me. Still, I kept trying.

  I heard the doors to the Buick slam, and then I heard them knock on the kitchen door. The front door was nailed shut because it was so warped that if you opened it you’d never get it shut again. I heard Helen let them in, and then I could hear them talking and laughing. I figured they’d brought some beer. They usually did when they came to see Helen.

  I wished Mom were home. When Mom was home, they took Helen off for a drive in the Buick, and I didn’t have to know anything about it. But Mom had walked down the road to Mrs. O’Brien’s to watch one of her shows there, because our TV didn’t get that channel too clearly. I didn’t know where Dad was. He never told us where he was going. He just got up in the morning, hardly said anything to anyone, ate his breakfast, and got into the truck and went. Sometimes Mom would say, “Frank, where will you be in case anybody wants to know?” He wouldn’t even answer. He’d just grunt and go out and drive away, and not come back until supper time.

  So my sister was safe for a while. She was sixteen, I was fourteen. I didn’t want to think about it, so I made myself concentrate on the stereo. After a little while I heard the kitchen door open and shut, and their voices outside. They were going up to the barn. I decided to get out of the house. I couldn’t get that stereo to work anyway.

  I waited until they had got into the barn and were out of sight, and then I went downstairs and out through the kitchen door. It was almost the end of April but still cool, and the grass didn’t need to be cut yet. Dad said he didn’t care if it was ever cut—that was too tidy and middle-class for him; he didn’t care if it grew up into a hay field. But I kept it cut—as much as I could anyway—with our old mower. It helped the looks of the old place some, but there wasn’t much you could do about dressing it up. The paint was mostly peeled off, and some of the window-panes were missing and Dad had filled them in with cardboard. The old gardens that had once been there were full of weeds, and big rocks sat on top of the garbage cans out back so the raccoons wouldn’t knock the tops off and spread the garbage all over the yard. Dad always said he didn’t care if the place fell down; it wasn’t his, why should he put time and money into somebody else’s place? That made sense, but still I wished we had a place like most of the kids around there had, with nice lawns and curtains in the windows and rugs and things. We didn’t have much furniture, and it all came from secondhand stores. The sofa had a hole that Mom kept a towel over, and there was nothing on the living room floor but a little old beat-up hooked rug. Dad always said he couldn’t afford any better, and besides, he didn’t want all that middle-class nonsense anyway.

  Besides, there was always a couple of junkers sitting next to the driveway that Dad had bought for a few bucks and towed home with the idea of repairing and selling them for a few hundred. He would do it, too—he was kind of a junk expert and could generally figure out a way to get some value out of things somebody else had thrown away. But usually it took him months to get around to it, and meanwhile the junkers would sit there with their tires flat and the bodies rusting and weeds growing up around them.

  There wasn’t much hope of dressing the place up, but I cut the lawn anyway. It helped some. Mom liked it when I did it. She always said I was the only one who ever did anything around there.

  I went across the lawn feeling sad and low about everything—the weeds in the garden and the paint peeling off the house, and Helen up there in the barn with Charlie Fritz and that other guy. I crossed the lawn, and jumped over the stone wall that divided the old pasture from the lawn. Sumac and small cedars were beginning to grow in the pasture. In a few years it would be filled with brush, and after that the woods would come down the hillside and take over. I trotted up the sloping pasture to the woods beyond the next stone wall. I liked going into the woods. They were clean and natural, and there wasn’t anything junky there. I climbed over the stone wall and stood there looking around. Being so far upstate New York, the trees were just beginning to bud, and when you looked off through the woods, it was like a thin yellow light was coming out of them. I looked down. There was a patch of moss right where I was standing. I knelt and ran my hand over it to feel the softness, carefully, so as not to tear any of it up.

  Then I sat down on the stone wall, and began looking through the woods for birds. I knew about birds. I’d been studying them for years. I loved seeing them swoop and dart. They moved so fast, you could hardly believe it. You’d see one take off, and the next thing it’d be all the way over to the other side of the pasture. That time of year there was always plenty of birds around—dark-eyed juncos, tufted titmice, nuthatches, and lots more. The nuthatches made me laugh, because they walked up tree trunks upside down.

  I was interested in fish too. Sometimes I would go down to some creeks and streams I knew about, and lie by the bank watching the fish down in the water. You couldn’t do that on the Timber River, which was the big one around there, because it was polluted, but you could on the little streams that fed into it. It was terrible the way the Timber River had got polluted, but nobody seemed to be able to do anything about it.

  So I sat there on the stone wall watching the birds. I wished I had a pair of binoculars. Old Man Greenberg sold them in the Sports Center. The ones I wanted cost forty dollars, and I never could get forty dollars together. Every time I got fifteen or twenty dollars saved, something
would come along that I had to pay for—new tires for my bike, or a school trip or something. It was no use asking Dad for stuff like that. He always said he was broke, and besides, he wasn’t about to spend a lot of money on stuff like that.

  After a while I heard voices, and I knew they were coming down out of the barn. I went back across the pasture. I could see the three of them come out of the barn and head for the car. I climbed over the stone wall into the yard. Charlie Fritz and the other guy got into the car. Helen stood there near the car. She was frowning and looking sad. “Where are you guys going?” she said.

  “No place special,” they said.

  Her shoulders sagged, but she didn’t dare ask if she could go with them, because she was afraid they would say no. So she stood there watching until they had driven away. She looked sad and frowned. Then she saw me come across the lawn. “What are you looking at?” she said crossly.

  “Are you in love with Charlie Fritz?” I said.

  “What makes you think that?” she said.

  “It seemed like it,” I said. “You shouldn’t go up to the barn with those guys. If Dad ever catches you, he’ll kill you.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “It’s none of his business.”

  Then she went into the house and up to her room. I knew she felt lousy because those guys hadn’t asked her to come with them. They never did. And the reason why they never did was because we were trash. Some people said we were no-goods. Some said we were low. But mostly they said we were trash. Mom was trash, and Dad was trash, and my sister and I were trash. Nobody in town would have anything to do with us if they could help it. It took me quite a while to learn this. But things slowly happened, and I learned it.

  The first thing that happened was when I was little, five or six. Maybe even littler than that. Helen and I were playing somewhere. All I can remember is that it was a grassy place and we were playing with a bunch of kids. Some woman came along in a station wagon and said for everybody to get in, she would take the kids for a Carvel. But when Helen and I started to get in, she said we couldn’t come with the other kids. She said she couldn’t have us in her car. When we got home later, we told Mom. She put her head down on the kitchen table and cried. Helen and I didn’t understand it, and we forgot about it. Years later I remembered it, and I realized why the woman wouldn’t let us get in her car. It was because we had cooties in our hair.

  By the time I was in the second grade, I was beginning to see that the other kids didn’t like us. When we tried to go over and play with them in school, they would usually say, “You stink.” I never thought much of it. I figured it was just the kind of thing kids would say to each other.

  But then one day when I was in the third grade, I walked into the classroom and somebody had written on the blackboard “Harry White stinks.” Suddenly I knew they meant it.

  I got red and felt uncomfortable and sat in my seat looking down at my desk. Then I began to lose my temper, the way I always do. I stood up and shouted out, “I’ll punch the one who did that.” They all started to shout back, “You stink, Harry, you stink.” Just then Mrs. McGarvey came in and they shut up. She erased the words from the blackboard and said that she would keep everybody after if it happened again. Then, when three o’clock came, she kept me after and talked to me.

  “Harry, do you have a bathtub in your house?” she said.

  “Sure,” I said, trying to figure out why she was asking that.

  “And a washing machine for clothes?”

  “No,” I said. “We don’t have a washing machine.”

  “How does your mom wash your clothes?” she said.

  I stood there thinking, and after a minute my head got hot and I scratched my scalp. I couldn’t remember how she washed our clothes. “I guess she does it some way,” I said.

  “Harry,” Mrs. McGarvey said, “I think the other children would be nicer to you if you took a bath every day. And ask your mom to be more frequent about washing your clothes.”

  I couldn’t wait to get out of there, I was blushing so hot. It was true. We stank. We weren’t clean. I stank and my sister, Helen, stank too.

  I felt red and sweaty, and I didn’t dare take the school bus home but walked the whole four miles up to Mountain Pass Road, where we lived. I didn’t say anything to Mom or Dad but went right into Helen’s room to tell her about it.

  Our rooms were pretty small, but it didn’t matter because we didn’t have much furniture anyway—just our beds and a table for doing our homework on, and hooks that we’d put up for our clothes. We kept some of our clothes in the cardboard boxes under our beds.

  Helen was lying on her bed when I came in; she was wearing her old blue jeans and an old sweater. I looked at her and I saw that Mrs. McGarvey was right. There was a big cocoa stain on the front of her sweater, the knees of her blue jeans were dirty, and one of them had a hole as big as a quarter. There was dirt in her fingernails, dirt on her hands, dirt around her ankles where they came out of her socks. “Helen, we stink,” I said. And I told her what had happened at school.

  She jumped off the bed and started for me. “It isn’t true,” she shouted. “It’s a lie.” She started to swing at me.

  I jumped out of the way. “Don’t hit me,” I said. “I didn’t say it.”

  “I’ll get them,” she shouted. “I’ll get the ones who said it.”

  But after that she was in the bathroom a lot more. So was I. It took us a long while to learn how to be clean. We had to learn that you couldn’t just wash the parts you could see, but had to wash your ears and your hair once in a while, too, and clean your fingernails with a knife or a bent paper clip or something. We helped each other. If I saw that Helen’s ears were dirty or something, I’d tell her. She would make me comb my hair in the morning before we went to school. We weren’t just being nice to each other either. We wanted to make sure that the other one didn’t disgrace us. But I figured it was worth the trouble, because once we got clean, the other kids would finally like us.

  It was harder to keep Mom and Dad from disgracing us. We didn’t dare tell Mom to start washing our clothes more often. We just started doing them ourselves, washing our jeans and things out in the bathtub and hanging them on chairs and things to dry. It took us awhile to learn about that, too: that you couldn’t just wash things out once every couple of weeks but had to do it all the time. We never knew what Mom thought about it. She must have known we were washing our own clothes, because they were hanging all over the place. But she never said anything, and I figured that she never felt guilty about it or anything—she just figured that kids ought to be responsible for washing out their own clothes. But I knew that the other kids in the third grade didn’t wash their own clothes.

  We couldn’t get mad at Mom, because she had something wrong with her. I never knew what it was. I guess nobody ever knew what it was. She just seemed to be tired all the time. Dad was always taking her over to the county hospital for tests and checkups. They never could cure her. She had to sit around a lot in her bathrobe and watch TV. Sometimes Helen had to make supper, because Mom was too tired. So we didn’t blame Mom for not washing our clothes—she couldn’t help it.

  So anyway, after a while we started being clean, but it didn’t help us very much. The other kids still weren’t too interested in doing anything with us. We didn’t have any friends. For one thing, they said that the Whites stole. Once when I was in sixth grade I came into the cafeteria with my lunch bag. There was an empty seat near where a bunch of kids were sitting at a table eating. I went over and sat down. There was a watch lying on the table, and when I sat down, some kid said, “Don’t touch that watch, White,” and snatched it up.

  “I wasn’t going to touch your watch,” I said. “What do I want to touch your watch for?”

  “Everybody knows your family steals.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Your sister steals stuff out of the drugstore. My sister said so.”

  “That’s a lie,
” I said. I was beginning to lose my temper.

  They all turned toward me, getting ready to gang up on me. “Oh, yeah? What about the chain saw your dad stole from the Otto brothers?” The Otto brothers owned the biggest gas station in town.

  “Jim Otto was wrong,” I shouted. “Dad bought that chain saw from somebody.”

  “Oh, yeah?” the kid said. “The cops told my dad it was Jim Otto’s chain saw all right, but they couldn’t prove it.”

  “That’s a lie,” I said. I jumped up and started to go for the kid, but Mr. Creasy came over and broke it up. “Take your lunch into the janitor’s room, White,” Mr. Creasy said.

  “He started it,” I said. I was sore and breathing hard.

  “Don’t give me that,” Mr. Creasy said. “Go eat in the janitor’s office.”

  But the truth was, I wondered. I sat there in the janitor’s office with the mops and buckets all around, smelling the soap and the disinfectant and such, mixed in with the smell of my peanut butter sandwiches, and thinking about the time Jim Otto had come out to the house with the cops. That afternoon Dad had brought home an almost new chain saw. He said he’d bought it from a guy who’d got a bigger one and sold this one to Dad cheap. I was pretty excited about it, and I got Dad to promise he’d teach me how to use it. While we ate supper I kept looking over at it sitting on the kitchen floor. It was bright red, clean, and solid. It excited me. And we were just getting finished with supper when there was a knock on the back door. Dad went to answer it and found Jim Otto standing there with a cop.

  Otto pointed at the chain saw. “There it is,” he said. “That’s it.” He started to push past my dad to get the saw.

  My dad grabbed Jim Otto by the arm. “Oh, no you don’t,” he said, as calm as could be. “You don’t walk into a man’s house without his permission. Out you go.”

  Jim Otto looked my dad in the face. He was pretty red and sore. “That’s my saw, White. I got witnesses who saw you out back of my store this afternoon.”