Beezer pushed his thick glasses back up his nose and smiled. “I got a little place out back in the woods—used to be the slave house. If you need anything fixed, just send one of the kids for me. You’ll find me very useful.” He patted Joey on the shoulder. “I’ll be going now. You won’t see too much of me unless you call.”
He bowed again in his funny way, whirled around, and walked out the library door. Joey and his mother heard his footsteps down the hall followed by the slam of the back door. Suddenly it felt different inside the house—lonelier. Beezer was like sunshine. His leaving was like the sun going behind a cloud. Joey wondered if he were imagining things. Looking up at his mother he saw she felt it too.
“What an interesting man,” Mrs. Johanaby said.
“He sure is,” answered Joey.
“I think you best leave him alone. Don’t go bothering him at his place unless we really need him.” Mrs. Johanaby’s furrowed her eyebrows as she spoke.
“Okay,” said Joey.
“Now you better go keep an eye on the kids and let me get back to my studies.” They both glanced at the computer screen. His mom seemed embarrassed. Apparently she wasn’t as far along as she would have liked. Joey nodded pretending not to notice whatever it was his mom was embarrassed about. Giving his mother one last smile he turned and ran up the hall, through the kitchen, and out the screen door. He leaped off the back porch as if he were Superman flying in search of his brother and sister.
Chapter 5
As much as he despised the job, Joey took his babysitting responsibilities seriously. He spent almost all of his time watching the twins. Mrs. Johanaby spent every available moment during the day working on her on-line course to be a medical transcriptionist. She had explained to Joey how important it was for her to get the course completed. They were living on the last of their savings. It wasn’t going to last very long.
“I have to finish this course and then I can make some pretty good money. Best of all, I can work from home!” she said. “But I have to get it done before the summer is over or . . . .” She trailed off.
“Or what?” Joey asked.
Mrs. Johanaby bit her lower lip nervously. “Or things will get harder,” she said.
Joey did his best to keep the twins from interrupting Mrs. Johanaby. It wasn’t easy. When the twins got along, which was most of the time, they got along great. There were days, though when they were mortal enemies. On these days their entire goal was to make the other miserable. These were very hard days for Joey. They always ended with everyone—even Mrs. Johanaby—being angry with him. Glory and Story would be angry because he would be forced to take sides with one or the other. There would be an appeal to Mrs. Johanaby. Mrs. Johanaby would be angry at Joey for not keeping the peace better.
At times like these he felt helpless and frustrated. He couldn’t control the twins any more than he could control the wind. His mother acted like he should be able to.
On one particularly bad day it all started at breakfast. Glory had on her angry face. There was a hardness to her eyes and her lips were pulled thin. This face always made Joey nervous. Glory was at her meanest when she wore this face.
“What’s wrong with you?” Joey asked. He said the words aggressively, trying to show no fear, as a kind of preemptive attack. His attack bounced off of her anger like a bullet off a tank.
“Story wet my bed!” Her words were not loud, but there was a jagged edge to them that told how really angry she was. Story came into the kitchen. His head was down and his pajama bottoms were soggy. “You are never sleeping in my bed again!” Her tone was unmerciful.
“You made me drink the water,” Story said. There were tears in his eyes, but his indignation was rising.
“You didn’t have to drink it all!” Glory said.
“You gave him water before bed?” Mrs. Johanaby asked as she brought apple sauce for the pancakes to the table.
“You said we don’t drink enough water so I gave him a glass last night.”
“She bet I couldn’t drink it all,” Story said. “So I did.”
“And you WET MY BED!” Glory yelled.
“Stop it!” Mrs. Johanaby said, losing her patience. “You are in time out young lady. You sit right there and don’t say a word. No pancakes, Glory, until I get back.” She took a very embarrassed Story to the bathroom to bathe him.
Glory kept mumbling under her breath, “He wet my bed!”
Joey wanted to gloat that he could eat pancakes when she couldn’t. The smoldering look in her eyes as she watched him was frightening and ruined the fun of it.
Later that day Glory and Story argued over the banana seat in front of the TV. One had been there and left. The other claimed ownership. Now the fight was on. Their volume rose as they argued. Joey ignored them until Glory angrily whacked Story with a pillow. She was about to do it again when Joey caught the pillow and pushed Glory to the couch.
“And don’t get up until I say,” he said
“You can’t boss me!” Glory said. “Give me my pillow!”
Joey, put out by her behavior, tossed the pillow Frisbee style a little harder than he meant to. It smacked Glory right in the face. Except for shock effect there was no damage done. It was then Joey made his mistake—he apologized.
“I’m sorry . . .” he started to say. Glory, like a shark smelling blood, picked up on his weakness immediately. She was almost smiling as the tears came to her eyes. Then she ran off, crying in feigned pain, to Mrs. Johanaby. Mrs. Johanaby gave him a scolding for using physical force against the children. Joey tried to explain, but she wouldn’t listen.
That afternoon, while he was moping outside under the weeping willow, Beezer came out of the garage and joined him.
“You ain’t looking too happy,” Beezer said.
It didn’t take long before Joey blurted out his babysitting troubles. “Mom expects me to control them, but I can’t control them any more than I can control the wind.” Joey liked that image.
Beezer sat and chewed on a long stem of grass while he thought. Then he said, “It’s true, you can’t control the wind, but you can direct it. The old sea captains couldn’t control the winds, but using their sails they could use it to take them places all over the world. They could even sail against the wind when they had to.”
“How did they do that?” Joey asked.
“Tacking,” Beezer said, “but the point is the twins are the wind and you have to direct them. If you do it right they won’t have any idea what you are up to.”
“But how . . .” Joey began.
“I thought you’d never ask,” Beezer said. “Hang on.” He grunted at the effort of getting up. He went to the garage and came back with a notebook and a pen. He grunted again as he sat down.
“You got to plan activities,” he said. “Indoor things and outdoor things along with the best times to do them. Then, when one thing starts to fail you’ll have a good idea of what to move on to. This way you can keep them out of your Mom’s hair and busy enough so that they don’t come after you.”
Together they sat and made a list of activities. Joey could see that this might really make a difference. Just as they were finishing Joey heard a rustling sound in the tree limbs above them. He looked up to see a large rocket, parachute deployed, hanging on a limb near the top of the tree. Apparently it had just landed.
“It’s about time. That’s the longest she’s ever been gone,” Beezer said.
“Is that your rocket?” Joey said. “The one that . . .”
“That broke my window?” Beezer finished. “Yep. Gonna be hard to get her down isn’t it. Do you climb trees?”
“How—?” Joey wanted to know how it was that the rocket, which he had seen shoot up into the sky about three weeks ago came to rest in the tree limbs just now, but he didn’t know how to form the question.
“You just grab a hold of the lower limbs and start climbing,” Beezer said.
“No,” Joey replied. “How did it get there
? I mean how was it gone so long?”
“She ain’t an ordinary model rocket,” Beezer said. “I don’t deal in ordinary.”
Joey wanted to climb that tree to get the rocket. “I bet I could get her,” Joey said, longingly, “But—”
“But?” Beezer asked.
“My Mom doesn’t want us climbing trees. She says she knows a boy who was impaled on an iron fence when he fell from a tree.”
“Oh,” said Beezer. He seemed disappointed.
“But I could do it if you wanted me to,” Joey said, trying to find a justification.
“What I want is for you to obey your mother,” Beezer said. “The wind’ll bring’er down sooner or later. It may take some time, but she should have thought of that when she landed up there.” Without another word he got up and walked toward the back field and the woods leaving the pen and paper with Joey.
“She?” Joey thought. Beezer spoke of the rocket as if she were alive. She sat, still swinging from her landing, maybe thirty or forty feet above him with her parachute wrapped around a limb. Somehow he was going to get her down.
Late that afternoon Joey took the twins out in the back field. Behind the garage there was a set of wooden steps, more of a double sided ladder, built over the wire. It made getting over the fence a snap. To the twins it was a game.
“I bet Beezer built this,” Story said leaping off the top rung. Joey wondered too, but they seemed so ordinary. “Beezer doesn’t do ordinary,” Joey said.
“It makes me feel like I can jump over the fence,” Glory said as she ran up and then down the steps. Joey ran over the steps with them.
Story looked at the windows in the back of the garage as he climbed the steps again. These were the windows to Beezer’s magic room.
“Look, the window is fixed,” he said.
Sure enough, there was no sign of the broken pane where the rocket had made its dramatic exit.
“Beezer’s a good fix-it man,” Glory said. “He put the head back on my doll.”
Joey remembered the night the doll’s head came off. Glory had been brushing her tangled hair and pulled so hard the head popped right off. She didn’t think it was funny like her brothers did. Joey failed in his efforts to reattach it.
“I knew you couldn’t fix it,” Glory said, grabbing the body and head from his hands.
The next day Beezer was the hero. Glory was ecstatic. “Look, no matter how hard I pull it won’t come off!” she said, demonstrating.
“Let’s go look through the windows,” Glory said, an impishness in her voice.
“What if he’s in there?” Story asked. Joey said nothing. He looked curiously at the windows. The windows stared back. Something glinted behind them. Glory and Story squealed, leapt off the steps and ran for the field.
Joey turned to follow them. Over his shoulder he looked at the now whole pane. From where he was he could also see the rocket hanging in the tree. It would be easy to forget that the rocket had ever magically taken off. Looking back at the windows Joey waved in case Beezer was in there watching. He then turned and followed the twins into the field.
The grass in the field was long and green. Summer hadn’t had enough time to bake it brown yet. When the kids sat down the grass reached well over their heads. It was the perfect place for a game of hide-and-seek. One of them would kneel down, face to the ground, and count to fifty. The others would run one direction or the other and then just sit down in the grass. If they sat real still they were hard to find.
There were big, puffy clouds floating lazily through the sky trailing their shadows across the ground. Sometimes a shadow would find the kids and lift the weight of the heat. Joey and the twins played for almost two hours before growing tired. There were trails of bent grass zigzagging all over the field. The kids lay down on their backs, their heads together, watching the clouds silently pass by. It wasn’t long before they started seeing shapes. There were airplanes and cats and explosions. There was the throw-up pattern in the Thriftway parking lot from when Glory had lost the hamburger and fries she had eaten for lunch. Story pointed out Mrs. Johnson’s butt. She was his first grade teacher. Glory and Story giggled over that for some time. For Joey the clouds were a fleet of space battleships moving slowly, but unstoppably, toward their target.
“I love it here,” Story said, letting out a sigh of contentment.
Glory sighed, “I love it, too. I bet Dad would have loved it.”
Joey’s heart beat faster at the mention of his dad. He always had two conflicting pictures of his dad in his mind. One was the silly, but happy grin on his Dad’s face when the Pinewood Derby car they had built together hit the stop at the end of the track and the front tires fell off. The other picture was his dad’s gaunt face with the sunken eyes. He lay in his hospital bed nearly dead from cancer. Those two pictures fought with each other in his brain until they blurred.
He had photos of his dad. Lots of them. Anymore, when he looked at them, he had trouble remembering what his living dad had looked like. Looking at pictures of his dad instead of seeing him in real life was like eating a picture of a steak—it gave him no comfort.
“If Dad was alive we probably never would have moved here,” Glory said.
“Then I wish we had never seen this place,” Joey said, bitterly. His words dampened the feeling of contentment like rain at a picnic. Joey could feel the twin’s happiness evaporate and float away with the clouds. They grew quiet.
Guilt flooded Joey. It was always the same—anger followed by guilt. Joey had promised a grief counselor and his mother that he was not going to let the hurt from his father’s death turn into anger. He learned that sometimes words are empty. The grief counselor had said many nice things. He had made promises in return. And yet all of it meant nothing. His father was still dead and his heart still ached.
The twins had grieved. On top of his own sorrow it broke his heart to see them sob like they did at the funeral. It was only two weeks later when he heard them laughing again. He wondered then how they could find laughter. He wondered now how they could feel such contentment. He suspected it was because they had each other. Joey had no one. He often felt envy of their togetherness.
Glory got up. “C’mon, Story,” she said.
Story stretched with his signature moan of relaxation. He got up to follow Glory. Joey stayed where he was trying to push his reawakened grief back into the lower drawer of his heart.
He didn’t realize it, but he was drowsy. He was on the edge of sleep when the sound of a chime brought his eyes open. It was a far-away sound, but very distinct. Joey was a long way from the house or any building where chimes might be hanging.
“How far can the sound of a wind chime go?” he wondered. He sat up to look around him. The house and garage were a couple hundred yards away. So were the woods the other direction. He had heard these chimes several times over the past few weeks. Never more than one at a time, and not always the same note. He was determined to find where they were hanging. Every search came up empty or ended early in a distraction. It occurred to him that finding the chimes was another activity to add to his list of things to do with Glory and Story. Thinking of the twins he sat up to look for them. He was just in time to see their heads bobbing in the grass as they slipped out of the field into the woods.
“GLORY! STORY!” he yelled jumping to his feet. They were already gone. He started after them stomping through the grass at a fast walk. He was already mumbling the angry words he was going to say to Glory when he caught up to her. She was there when Mom laid down the rules about staying out of the woods. She knew the rule. She also knew that if she broke the rule it was Joey who was going to get in trouble for letting it happen. Life was so unfair.
Before he got to the woods he found himself on a narrow, well-worn trail through the grass. It was just wide enough for one person. Clearly this is what had gotten the twin’s attention. It had to be the path to Beezer’s house in the woods. Joey quickened his pace. It was much darker
and cooler in the woods. The trees were thick. Joey was soon glad he had a trail to follow. He hoped the twins wouldn’t leave it.
In a hundred yards the trees parted into a small clearing. There sat Beezer’s house. It was just a little cottage, actually. It couldn’t have more than one room. The wood was weatherworn and gray. There were signs that it had been white in years past. On the side facing them a sagging porch led to a door. Next to the door was a window. Blue curtains hung on the inside. An iron fence encircled the house. The fence seemed out of place here in the woods. Joey wondered whose idea it had been.
Then Joey saw the garden. At first it appeared to be nothing more than forest undergrowth. It wasn’t like the well-kept gardens he had seen in Oakley. It was wild and unkempt, but still a garden—a beautiful one at that.
Joey, forgetting his anger, joined Glory and Story at the fence next to the iron gate.
“Beezer lives here,” said Story, his eyes wide.
“I guess so,” Joey answered.
“Oh, he does,” Glory said, with authority. “It’s just like him.”
Surrounding the cottage were tall plants and short plants. Some were delicate and others were bushy. Many wore flowers of red, yellow, pink and purple. Others were just green. There were no paths among these plants. They ran together peacefully. Among them were plants that Joey recognized—vegetables. There were strips of carrots and peas and lettuce. He saw the purple pod of an eggplant sticking above a patch of an herb he knew as Sweet William.
“Wow,” Joey said.
“That’s what I said,” grinned Story.
“Beezer,” Glory called out, hoping he was in the cottage.
“What are you doing?” asked Joey.
“I want to go play in his garden,” she said. “I bet there are fairies in there.”
“He’s not there,” Joey said. “I’m pretty sure I saw him in his magic room when we went to the field to play.”
“Darn!” she said with a little scowl on her face. The scowl left as she thought of something. “Or maybe not,” she added. She went to the iron gate and began to open it.
Joey and the Magic Map Page 6