When the Stars Begin to Fall

by James Lincoln Collier

  Would I really have the guts to do something like that? Or would it be one of those things that you just think you’re going to do and never get around to actually doing? It was exciting thinking about it, though, and I walked around going over it all in my mind: how I would go out to the river, walk up and down the bank until I found the pipe, and then go and get the police and the reporters and stuff. They’d take pictures of me and write a story about it in the papers. It was exciting thinking about it. But after awhile a little spring breeze came up, and it got chilly and I went in.

  In the morning I had to finish my geometry homework while I was eating my breakfast, and I didn’t have a chance to think about tracking down the river pollution. I had only got my geometry half done when Dad said, “Harry, I want you to bury the garbage this morning.” The town garbage trucks didn’t come out that far, so we took it out into the woods and buried it.

  “The bus is coming soon,” I said.

  “You can skip school for once,” he said.

  “I can’t, Dad,” I said.

  “It’s a waste of time anyway. If it was me, I’d close the schools down and put all those lazy so-and-sos to work. What do you learn down there anyway? What’s the use of that stuff?” He pointed to my geometry homework.

  I knew that I would need to pass geometry if I wanted to go into the air force, but I didn’t say that. “I have to pass it,” I said.

  “Frank,” Mom said. “He has to go to school. It’s the law.”

  “Forget about the law,” Dad said. Then he got up, put on his jacket, and went out. In a moment we heard the truck start and go down the driveway.

  Mom said, “You better come right home from school and do the garbage, Harry.”

  “Okay,” I said. So, between everything, I didn’t remember about the carpet factory and all that until I was on the school bus. There’s a place where the Timber River runs alongside the road into town. The sun was bright and glinting on the water, and when I looked out at it, I remembered.

  The whole idea of finding where the pollution was coming from was more scary in the daylight than it had been at night. It wasn’t just something to have a daydream about, but real. The river was real and the carpet factory was real and the people who worked there were real. Maybe I ought to forget about the whole thing. Maybe it wouldn’t make me into a hero anyway. Maybe I’d go on being trash.

  Then I told myself I was just being chicken. I was just afraid of standing up to the grownups. What difference did it make that I was just a kid? What mattered was who was right, didn’t it? But still, I felt nervous about it, and I wondered if I would really do anything about it.

  I hadn’t finished my geometry because of Dad interrupting me at breakfast, so I forgot about the pollution and worked on the geometry as best as I could with the school bus bouncing every which way. I didn’t think about it again until lunch.

  Our school was old because Timber Falls was poor. The cafeteria was in the basement. There were steam pipes overhead, and the fluorescent lights were on all the time because hardly any light came in from outside. The folding tables were all carved with initials, and there was always a sort of tomatoey smell down there.

  Helen and I were supposed to bring our lunches instead of buying cafeteria food. Dad said there wasn’t anything wrong with sandwiches, we needn’t expect to be raised in the lap of luxury. Mostly I tried to remember to make my lunch the night before. There was usually enough stuff in the icebox to make good sandwiches out of—some leftover cold cuts or hot dogs, or baked beans. I liked cold baked bean sandwiches with a lot of mayonnaise. Cold hot dog sandwiches with catsup were good too. But if I forgot to make my lunch the night before, I would only have time enough to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They were good, too, but you got tired of them after a while.

  Helen never bothered to make a lunch. If she had some money, she bought a hot lunch in the cafeteria, and if she didn’t, she’d beg something from somebody, mostly me.

  When I came down to the cafeteria, I saw her sitting by herself at the end of a table, reading a romance. There were these two girls who would sit with Helen, but sometimes they were with other people, and Helen would be afraid to go over and sit with them in case somebody started making remarks. I never sat with anybody except Helen. If they didn’t want me around, I wasn’t going to make them. So I went and sat with Helen, and opened my lunch bag. “You still in a bad mood?” I said.

  “I just felt like reading,” she said.

  “Don’t you have any lunch?”

  “No,” she said. She went back to reading.

  “You want half a sandwich?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Can’t you see I’m reading?”

  “Don’t you have any money?”

  “Stop bothering me,” she said. Then I saw her face get red. I looked around. Charlie Fritz was coming slowly through the crowd carrying his tray and looking around for a place to sit.

  “Charlie Fritz is coming,” I said. She looked back down at her book, but her face stayed red. “He’s coming right toward us,” I said in a low voice.

  Helen flicked up her eyes to look, and then looked back at her book again. A little bit of sweat came out on her upper lip, and she nervously licked it away. She was still red. Charlie kept on coming closer. He was looking around here and there, and I figured he didn’t see us. Helen flicked her eyes up to look at him again, then flicked them back to her book. He was by the next table now, standing there, still looking around. Then he saw a place he wanted to sit, and started to come right by us.

  Helen looked up, and licked at the sweat on her lips. Finally Charlie saw her. “Oh, hello, Helen,” he said.

  “Do you want to sit here, Charlie?” she said.

  “I guess not, Helen,” he said.

  She blinked. “Oh,” she said. Her face went redder than ever, and she looked back down to her book. Charlie went on by and sat down with some guys a couple of tables away from us. Helen kept her eyes on her book, but she was hot and sweaty anyway. I looked over to where Charlie was sitting with the other guys. He was leaning forward, talking in a low voice, and the other guys were leaning forward toward him. Every once in a while one of them would take a quick look over at Helen. I wanted to go over there and slug them. I wanted to start heaving dishes at them. I just hoped Helen wouldn’t look up.

  But she did. I guess she couldn’t help herself. She looked up and she saw them, all leaning their heads together across the table, listening to Charlie; and two of them were staring right at her.

  When they saw her looking, they snapped their heads away. Helen’s face stopped being red and went pale white. She blinked and bit her lip. Then she closed her eyes, and the tears began rolling out of them.

  “Helen,” I whispered, “don’t pay any attention to those guys.”

  She jumped up, threw her hands over her face so that nobody could see the tears, and ran out of the cafeteria as fast as she could go. I watched her run. Charlie Fritz and those guys stopped talking and watched her, and then everybody in the cafeteria was silent and watched her run through the tables with her hands over her face, bumping into chairs and things. Suddenly she was gone. For a moment the cafeteria was dead quiet, and I could hear the tap-tap of Helen’s shoes as she ran up the cement cafeteria stairs. Then the cafeteria noise started up again. I picked up Helen’s book and began pretending to read it, because I knew a lot of them would be staring at me. I didn’t feel like finishing my lunch. I just wanted to get out of there, but I wasn’t going to walk out in front of them all. So I sat until the bell rang and the place emptied out. I got up, darted up the cafeteria steps, and trotted away from school through the sunshine, feeling just terrible. There was one thing I didn’t have any question about anymore: I was going to do something to show everybody in Timber Falls that we weren’t trash.

  THREE

  I didn’t really know where I was going. I just wanted to get away from school. I took the school road and then swung on
to a side road where there wouldn’t be much traffic. I was feeling sort of numb, and trying not to think about Helen. Instead, I thought about the pollution in the Timber River.

  If they were dumping stuff in the river, it had to be coming out of a pipe somewhere along the river-bank. All I had to do was walk along the riverbank until I found it, then get a camera from somewhere and take some pictures of the pollution coming out. I wasn’t exactly sure what I would do with the pictures. I figured there had to be some sort of state agency in Albany that was responsible for pollution. Or maybe the police. Or maybe I would just give the pictures to the Timber Falls Journal and let them run a big story about it. Then I could send the story to the agency in Albany or whatever it was.

  In fact, that seemed like the best idea. They were bound to take the whole thing more seriously if they saw a story about it in the paper than if some kid just sent in some pictures. That was the way to do it: Get the story in the paper first. Of course, I didn’t have a camera, and neither did Mom and Dad. We’d never had one, as far as I could remember. In the ads on television families always have cameras and take pictures of their trips and vacations and kids" birthday parties and all that. We didn’t go on any trips to take pictures of. Sometimes Dad went off for a few days or a week. He always said it was for a job out of state, but he never said where it was, or what it was, and we never knew for sure. But the rest of us never went on trips, so we couldn’t have had pictures of them even if we’d had a camera.

  We had birthdays, though. I mean, we didn’t have real birthday parties with other kids coming over and balloons and hats and stuff. On our birthdays Mom would buy us a present—a toy or a doll or something when we were little, a sweater or a jacket when we were bigger. She would make something special for dinner that we liked—hamburgers and french fries or something—and she’d buy a cake and ice cream, and we’d blow out the candles and all that. But we never took any pictures of our birthdays, or Christmas or anything else. About the only pictures of myself I’d ever seen were one of Mom holding me when I was a baby, and another one that Helen and I took in a photograph machine once when we all went over to Watertown to see Mom when she was in a hospital for tests.

  So getting hold of a camera was going to be a problem, but I figured I could solve it some way. I’d think about it for a while and see what came to me.

  No matter how I tried to change the subject in my head, I couldn’t help thinking about Helen. I didn’t think she had gone home. If she came home early, Mom would want to know why, and Helen sure wouldn’t want to tell her. I figured she would hang out someplace until three-thirty when we usually got home. I felt sorry for her. Going back to school the next day and facing everybody was going to be hard for her.

  The truth was that it was Helen’s own fault. I knew that. If she hadn’t let those guys come around, none of it would have happened. But I guess she wanted so much to have some guys come to see her, she couldn’t stop herself.

  Still, I felt bad for her. What had happened to her wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair, and if Dad had only got a real job and a real house, maybe things would have been different. But there wasn’t any use thinking about that. It wasn’t Dad’s way. He was his own man, he always said. He wasn’t going to spend his life taking orders from the middle class. The whole thing confused me a lot. It wasn’t fair for Helen; but why should Dad have to get a real job just for Helen?

  I wondered what time it was. I couldn’t go home either, not until three. But I had to go someplace where no cop was likely to come along and ask me why I wasn’t in school. I would have to get away from town. And suddenly, just like that, I decided I would go out to the carpet factory just to have a look around.

  I didn’t know much about the place. I’d gone out there two or three times with Dad when he had something to deliver and needed help unloading. It was a big one-story cement block building with a corrugated iron roof. It had been there a long time—forty years maybe. Behind it there was a blacktop parking lot, which ran down to the Timber River. That was about all I knew about it.

  I could get from the school road to the carpet factory without going through town. So I headed on out, going as quick as I could. In a little while I came to the road that ran along the Timber River out to the carpet factory. It was pretty out there. The river was boiling along with the spring rush, and the mountains stood all around me. Sometimes the road swung in close to the river so that it was not more than fifty feet from the bank; other times it swung away from it, so there was maybe a quarter of a mile of woods between the river and the road, and I couldn’t see the river at all, or hear it boiling along either. It was only a couple of miles out to the factory, and after a while I began to get close.

  Here the road was a good way from the river, with the woods in between. I kept on going, and pretty soon I came to an eight-foot-high steel mesh fence running along beside the road. I stopped and in a minute I realized that the fence turned the corner there and ran off down through the woods toward the river. I knelt down pretending to tie my shoe and took a look to see if anybody was around. A car was coming up the road. It slowed down when it came to me, but then it went by. I waited until it was out of sight, and then I slipped into the woods and worked my way along the steel mesh fence down to the river. I stopped on the riverbank and looked through the fence. It turned the corner again here and ran along the riverbank upstream in the direction of the carpet factory. It was pretty clear that the mesh fence must go all around the factory. I looked up at the top of the fence. There was barbed wire along the top. I could come back here with a pair of Dad’s wire cutters and get through that easily enough, but I had a hunch that it would set off an alarm if you cut the barbed wire.

  I turned back and looked at the river. Here, this close to the factory, the water had a kind of greenish tint to it, and the little spots of foam on the surface didn’t look to me like ordinary whitecaps. I decided to take a look at the factory itself. I went back to the road and began walking along again. In a couple of minutes the woods ended, and there was the factory, about fifty yards back from the road, with a little lawn and some bushes out front, and behind it, as much as I could see from my angle, the parking lot and the loading docks. There were maybe a hundred cars in the parking lot.

  The steel mesh fence went right along the whole thing and disappeared into more woods on the other side. It would go all the way around, I figured. There was a big steel mesh gate in the middle of the fence, where the factory road went in. The whole place was pretty well guarded, and I wondered why. I figured there was always the risk of thieves.

  Anyway, it was going to be pretty impossible to get in there and prowl around looking for the pollution pipe. How was I going to find it? Then it came to me that if I crossed the river, and went along on the opposite bank, I would see it. I didn’t know how big a pipe you needed for something like that, but, I figured, from the amount of pollution that was in the water, it couldn’t be some little piece of one-inch pipe. It would be a twelve-inch pipe or something. It wouldn’t be hard to spot something that big sticking out of the riverbank.

  I looked up at the sun, and judged that it must be getting on toward three, so I started for home, feeling a whole lot better. It felt good to be working on something interesting like this. It was sort of scary, too: but what was the danger? It wasn’t going to be much of a problem going along the opposite river-bank trying to spot that pipe, I figured.

  Mom was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee. She had a dress on, like she was going somewhere. “Where have you been, Harry? I’ve been so scared. My heart’s been pounding so, I thought I’d have an attack.”

  I began to feel scared myself. “What’s the matter? I’ve been at school.”

  “No, you haven’t,” she said. “They called from school. They said that you and Helen ran off after lunch. I’ve been so worried.”

  “Ran off?” I didn’t know what to say.

  “That’s what they said. Where�
��s Helen?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t worried about Mom so much as Dad. Mom wasn’t much for punishing us. Dad always told her that she had to bear down on us harder. But Dad would hit you if he got mad enough. Suddenly I saw a way out. “I don’t know where Helen went. I was looking for her.”

  “Harry, they said Helen was upset.”

  I didn’t know what to say, but I had to tell her something. “She was crying in school,” I said.

  “Crying? What was she crying for?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She was just crying.”

  “She didn’t say where she was going?”

  “She didn’t say anything. I went looking for her, but I couldn’t find her. I figured she came home.”

  “Where did you look?”

  “Just around town,” I said.

  She took a sip of her coffee. “I’m so worried,” she said.

  “I have to bury the garbage before Dad gets home,” I said.

  I went outside, picked up the garbage can from behind the house, and toted it past the barn up into the woods. About a hundred feet in, there was a pit I’d dug for the garbage. We would dump the garbage in and cover it over with some dirt so that the animals wouldn’t get into it. About every three months I would have to cover over the garbage pit with the dirt that was left, and dig a new one. The pit was pretty full. I was going to have to dig a new one pretty soon. I hate that: it was hard work and took a morning.

  I dumped the garbage into the pit and shoveled dirt over it. I wondered where Helen was. I’d figured she’d come on home after three-thirty, but she wasn’t home yet. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t think she’d go to visit those two girls who liked her, because she’d have to tell them what she was crying about. Where else would she go? If it had been me, I’d have gone off into the woods someplace to take my mind off it, but Helen wasn’t much for going into the woods. Where could she be?