Mr. Mee poked at his eyeglasses. “Let us remember the words of the mystic Suso, in The Little Book of Truth,” he said.
Who was Suso? Their book at least sounded more promising than that pretty little pocket one.
“By ignorance the truth is known.”
That didn’t make any little bit of sense whatsoever. But old Suso gave me a great idea. In an instant I figured out how I could pay the new mortgage bill by April 15th. Mr. Mee always talks about his blessings, and I just hoped that by blessings he meant financial. I jabbed Winky to mean: listen to this!
“I’ll bet you I can find a fact that you don’t already know, Mr. Mee. And if I do, what’ll you give me?” I asked. I was already scanning the bookshelves out of the corner of my eye. There’s no way Mr. Mee can have read every single word in this library, I was thinking. All I had to do was find one thing he didn’t already know, and I would win the bet.
“For money?” Mr. Mee was shaking his head. “I’m not about to engage a minor in gambling.”
“Not gambling, Mr. Mee. Betting! For fun! And money!”
“Certainly not. If you find a fact I don’t already know, I’ll gladly give you my highest compliment: a hearty handshake,” he said.
“Okay, but instead of your idea about the hearty handshake,” I said, “for now let’s just say ‘prize winnings to be determined.’ ”
Bubba Davis’s head swiveled to Mr. Mee.
“Let’s not,” said Mr. Mee.
Bubba swiveled his head back my way, tennis-match style.
“I already said it.” I picked up my backpack and slung it over my shoulder. “Respectfully. See you later, Mr. Mee,” I said.
“What will you give me, Josie,” Mr. Mee said behind me, “if you fail?”
I didn’t even turn around. “Squirrel-fur slippers.”
I really needed those prize winnings.
A Kind of Faith
I borrowed a bunch of big, giant reference books from homeroom, so I could win that bet. By the time I was halfway home, I was panting and sweating and my shoulders felt like somebody’d stuck a hot poker between them. So I stopped to rest at the baseball field. I dropped my backpack in the patchy grass behind the backstop and hung my fingers from the chain-link fencing. Only a week or so ago there had still been a little snow hanging around the shady edge of the baseball field, and here the team was all in shirtsleeves.
Winky was sitting on one end of the players’ bench. I knew I was too far away for him to see me, but I didn’t call out to him, because he was on duty. He loves baseball so much, he’d settled for being the team’s water boy.
“Maximal torque!” Coach Clay was shouting to the players on the infield. “Elbow position… think about where your power comes from…”
Winky tidied a small stack of towels. Then he lined up a couple of water bottles.
“Your head and shoulders, now, you want to keep some distance between ’em…,” Coach Clay said to a player.
Winky walked over to the fenced enclosure at the side of the field where a wheel pitching machine was set up, and he turned it on. Then he got in front of the machine and took up position.
Uh-oh.
* * *
I have tried to squint and blur my vision and imagine what it would be like to have such terrible eyesight as Wink’s. “Winky,” I asked him one time, “if you wanted to describe how it is you see things, would you say it was a color?”
“Maybe. Yeah, maybe a color.” Winky thought a minute. “Green,” he said. “Spotty green.”
“If it’s green, would you call it lime green, or grass green, or some other kind of green?”
“Green with black in it.”
“Green with black in it is… Winky, they don’t make that color. That seems like it would just be black. The black would cancel out the green.”
“Okay, maybe green with a lightning storm in it. At midnight.”
“The storm is at midnight.”
“Right. In a hot place like Florida that’s also freezing cold.”
* * *
This is why it surprised me that Winky was squaring off with a ball machine, and—
Crack!—and why I was surprised when he hit it! The ball went straight and low and caught in the netting beyond.
Again a ball came out of the wheels and—Crack!—he hit it.
“It’s a dance of balance and stride…,” the coach was saying now to the players.
Crack!
“Short quick swing…”
Crack!
“You want that ball to jump off the bat…”
Crack! I could hardly believe my eyes. Wink was hitting every ball.
Crack!
“Listen, Fiske, you wanna—”
Crack!
Coach Clay turned and watched Winky swing and connect.
Crack!
“Coach, you were say—”
“Shhhhhh-shhh-shush!” Coach Clay flippered both hands in the direction of Jim Fiske without taking his eyes off Winky.
Crack!
The coach took off his cap, scratched the very top of his head with one fingertip, spat in the dirt, shoved the cap back on his head, and tugged the brim.
Crack!
“Hey, Water Boy!” Coach yelled.
Winky turned toward the coach’s voice, but not before stepping out of range of the next ball.
“Get your buttinsky over here!” hollered Coach Clay. Winky shut the machine down, then walked toward the infield. The boys watched. I moved from where I stood behind home base over to the bleachers to keep out of the way.
“What’re you doing over there, Elwyn?”
“Nothing much,” said Winky. He poked himself between the eyes to push up his dark sunglasses.
Nothing much! I thought. You just hit every single ball that came firing out of that machine top-speed! And you’re legally blind! Which is basically what Coach Clay said. He removed his cap again, scratched, spat, replaced the cap. He rubbed his jaw and squinted. Winky stood there while Coach Clay ran through his routine.
“How do you do it?” Coach finally sputtered like a cartoon character. “You can’t even see the ball!”
The boys mumbled.
“Good question, Coach,” Winky began. “I can’t see the ball very well—it’s sort of a fuzzy place in the sides of my vision.” He shrugged. “I just know the ball is on its way, and I just know where it’s going to show up over the plate and when it’s going to get there.”
The coach looked Winky up and down like he was Coach Monkey and Winky was a bunch of bananas. “Whaddaya say you hit what I throw ya, Elwyn. Ya think you can do that?”
“Naw,” said Winky.
Coach Clay ignored him. “Man versus machine is one thing, but mano a mano is another slice of pepperoni,” he said. “Tell you what. I’ll shovel as many snowballs as you can hit, okay?”
“Okay, Coach,” said Winky. Like I said, he’s a try-er.
Winky went and stood at the plate.
“Here we go, nice and easy.” Coach wound up and pitched one slow and in the strike zone.
Winky made contact.
“Attaboy!”
Winky grinned.
Then Coach Clay unleashed his inner All-Star.
I’d like very much to say that Winky hit them all. He did not. Hit any.
“All right, that’s enough,” Coach Clay said at last. He stuffed his glove under his armpit and rubbed his elbow. Some of the players began to grumble.
The Coach walked to the plate and Wink held the bat as if he didn’t know what to do with it. “Oh, well. Worth a try, son. You mighta been a miracle.”
Winky shrugged again. “I used to hit ’em all, when I could still see. I was a very promising Pee Wee player.”
Some of the boys snickered at Pee Wee.
Coach Clay ran a hairy hand over his stubbly chin. “Well, you sure can hit ’em outta the Iron Mike. I’ll give you that.”
Coach Clay put his hand on Winky’s back and
turned him to face the team. It was just the two of them out in front of all the other boys. He squeezed Winky’s shoulder and didn’t let go. Everything was very quiet while Coach Clay chewed on his lip and looked at his own feet. Then he looked at the boys and said, in a thin sort of voice that sounded like he needed to have a good hard swallow, “This here’s a kid who’d give anything to be able to play the beautiful game you ay-hats take for granted.”
So maybe it wasn’t the big league. But to hit like that? To stand there and swing away again and again, when he can’t even see the ball coming at him? I admire Winky Wheaton for that. I would say it shows a kind of faith. The shape of Winky’s longing would be a bat.
Knock-Knock
I headed straight home from the field. But as I came down the driveway, the Way was Not Open. There were seven or eight of them, squirrels, all wicked busy leaping and springing on the steps leading up to the mudroom off the kitchen. Seven or eight isn’t a big number when you’re talking toes, or twenty-point pop-quizzes, or M&Ms, but it is when it’s squirrels. They—all of them—stopped and looked at me. Wicked creepy. Was it my imagination, or did those squirrels lean toward me all as one, like a giant Oregon fungus?
I stood verrrrry still. Just then Grandpa’s bald head came into view through the window. He waved. I went “Squir-rels!” without making a sound. I didn’t want the squirrels to know I was onto them. Grandpa opened the window. The squirrels startled, but only for a second. Then out came sailing a handful of peanuts in the shell. The squirrels went wild. I saw my chance and dashed by them up the stairs and into the house.
“You scared them,” Grandpa said.
“They scared me,” I said. “You hate squirrels, Grandpa.”
“I admire their industry.”
“You worry they’ll nest in the attic.”
He looked out the window and rubbed his chin, probably thinking about the nesting and the attic.
“I bet I could train them,” he said.
After a snack (I went for the peanuts, but Grandpa swatted my hand away. “They’re for the squirrels!”) and a little math homework, and a one-dish supper of Bush’s baked beans (two cans for a dollar) with Starpact tuna fish (79 cents) and salsa (splurge), and cleaning up the kitchen (easy—two bowls, two spoons, two cups), I went up to my room to gain knowledge. I know I fell asleep at some point, because I was suddenly not asleep.
My bedside table lamp was still on. Ripley’s You Will NOT Believe It! was open on my stomach. Mom’s old teddy bear, Toddles, lay very still beside me. I replayed the last few seconds in my head, and heard in my mind’s ear what had woken me: the cough of Grandpa’s truck starting up.
I fell asleep again listening for the sound of its return.
* * *
I dreamed about Amanda Mandolin. In the dream, Mandy Mandolin was running after a speeding truck. It was a big yellow truck. For some reason, the truck had no brakes. There was one of those runaway truck ramps you see on the highway up through Pinkham Notch. I could see the truck ramp, the way it went practically straight up, and then it would go all into shards of a picture. Then I could see it again, in and out of focus like that. The seeing clearly and not-seeing the truck ramp went on for a while, or maybe it was only a short while; you never can tell, in dreams. Then Mandy caught up to the runaway truck and jumped up onto the step thingy, reached in the driver’s side window and cranked the wheel hard to get it to go up the truck ramp and stop. There wasn’t any driver. But the passenger side fit three people—Mom, Grandpa, Winky. This time, though, Mandy couldn’t save the day. She couldn’t turn the wheel in time. The truck kept speeding and speeding away. And then it was me on the step thingy, trying to crank the steering wheel. And a voice yelled, “9-1-1, jump off, jump off!” I jumped. And then I was standing beside Amanda Mandolin. The truck went speeding, speeding away. The two of us had to watch it go.
“What will happen?” I said to Mandy Mandolin. And Mandy Mandolin said, “I surely do not know. But I have faith in things seen fuzzily.”
I thought about that, later, when I woke up and wasn’t dreaming anymore. It was confusing. Dreams are like that.
* * *
In the morning, Grandpa was whistling like he hadn’t got one single care in the world. I asked him where he’d gone last night.
“Nowhere.”
“Well, somebody must have taken your truck because I heard it. Maybe the squirrels. Did you train a crack team of squirrels to drive a stick shift?”
Grandpa made a big deal of pulling a handkerchief from his pocket and blowing his nose.
“Maxwell House!” he blurted.
“You left the house late at night to buy Maxwell House coffee?”
“Mm-hmm! The Pay ’n Takit. They’re open till ten.”
I looked in the blue can of coffee on the counter, the same can of ground coffee he’d scooped from yesterday, and it was half-full. It was definitely not a new can bought at ten o’clock last night!
“It looks like there was plenty of Maxwell House, Grandpa,” I said.
Grandpa’s mouth shifted around like he was worrying a wad of bubble gum. He folded up the Hamburg Catch-up!, including the funnies. Then he stood up and looked straight at me with eyes as sharp as laser beams.
“Knock-knock,” Grandpa said.
So I said, “Who’s there?”
“Money.”
“Money who?”
“Money’d your own business.”
While I sat there with my mouth hanging open, Grandpa shoved the newspaper under his arm, made a tight turn, and marched out of the kitchen.
Now Grandpa’s fibbing, I thought. He was a fibber. They say it takes one to know one.
Graphs
On Monday I called an emergency breakfast meeting with Winky. I told him all about what happened, including the knock-knock joke, which he agreed was pretty good.
“And that’s not all.” I looked over one shoulder and then the other, in case of intruders like Mrs. Blyth-Barrow or Becky Schenck. “Later, when I went to pay the electric bill, I saw in the checkbook register that we were all caught up. He had already paid the bills and the mortgage for the month. So does that mean everything’s okay, you think? Does that mean I don’t have to worry anymore?”
Winky slowly chewed his French Toast Fingers. “It’s mysterious,” he said. “Money comes in, money goes out, and you keep your fingers crossed.”
“Right. That’s good,” I said. “I should burn that onto a wood plaque.”
* * *
Over the next couple weeks, I noticed a sort of pattern to the money coming in and going out. Grandpa would go out in the night, and the next day or two I might find cash hidden in the usual odd places in the house. Or there would be more money in the bank account according to the checkbook ledger, or I would put the money into the bank account. Grandpa might be sucking on a lollipop, and so I knew he’d been to the Anchor Bank. Sometimes, though, after Grandpa went out in the night or at other times of day, if I dropped by the Anchor Bank to see nice Mrs. Gagne, I’d find there was less money in the bank account. And there was always the obvious question of whether or not I was seeing all the bills. Also, whether I was aware of when Grandpa went out in the night. Sometimes I do sleep very soundly.
Meanwhile, Winky and I had several good money-maker ideas:
We set up for a carwash, but it snowed three inches (!) and nobody came.
We planned a talent show, but nobody who had any talent would agree to let us keep the proceeds.
We pulled together a bake sale, outside the Pay ’n Takit. Mr. Miller let us borrow a card table from his storeroom, the same table the Jubilation Girls use every August to sell their famous rock-candy necklaces and bracelets. Jewelry you can eat! Genius.
“What’s the bake sale for?” asked a friendly woman, eyeing my Betty’s Better Butter mix brownies and snapping open her purse.
“To make money,” I said.
“For what?”
“For me.”
> Winky smacked his forehead.
That lady wasn’t the only one who didn’t care to buy baked goods that weren’t for the school, or the mothers, or the team, or the firefighters. We did not enjoy the same sweet success as the Jubilation Girls.
All the while, I kept a stash of cash in the Keds box under my bed. Everyone knows it’s important to save for a rainy day. Even when you have a long string of rainy days, there could always be a day that’s even rainy-er.
* * *
In math class, we did a unit on graphs. They always tell you math applies to real life, and here was a chance to make me believe it! If I could make a “diagrammatical illustration” of my “set of data,” I could use it to make “educated decisions.”
Wicked! That’s just what I needed!
I drew a graph where one line was M for Money and the other line was G for Grandpa’s Whereabouts. It ended up looking like a very poorly planned city skyline, where some of the skyscrapers actually went under the ground.
“I don’t understand this graph,” said Mrs. Blyth-Barrow.
“Me neither!” I said.
“How do M and G relate?”
“Exactly!” I said.
“This graph makes no sense, Josie.”
“Don’t I know it!” I said.
Mrs. Blyth-Barrow was not impressed, and neither was I. Once again, math was useless in real life.
I failed the assignment.
Laundry
That’s not all I failed.
I missed a bill. A big bill. The same bill a couple of times, I guess.
Which is why I was doing emergency laundry in the girls’ bathroom at school.
“Hey, Brillo.”
Great. Becky Schenck.
“Are you doing what I think you’re doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing?”
“Washing socks and underwear in the girls’ bathroom.”
I wasn’t about to tell Becky Schenck I’d missed the water bills and the water was shut off at home. I squeezed out my clothes and rolled them up in a long length of paper towels.
Josie Bloom and the Emergency of Life Page 5