The Good-Luck Bogie Hat

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The Good-Luck Bogie Hat Page 3

by Constance C. Greene


  Mesmerized, Charlie and Arthur stayed in the back seat. Penny put the car in reverse. She backed up. A loud screech of brakes sounded and a man shouted, shook his fist, and zigzagged just enough to miss hitting the car.

  “You pulled out too far,” Arthur said weakly. “You’re in the road.”

  “You didn’t look,” Charlie said. “Wow! That was close.”

  “I think maybe you’d better put the car in the garage,” Arthur suggested.

  Penny ran the comb through her hair. “Right,” she said.

  She put the car into drive. It glided smoothly up the driveway into the garage and kept on going.

  “Put the brakes on, you dim-wit!” Charlie yelled. Arthur covered his head with his arms and said nothing.

  At the last minute, just before the car went out the other end, Penny put on the brakes. Rakes, ladders and stacked firewood bruised the shiny surface, and all was still.

  Penny wet her lips and looked in the mirror. Arthur sat with his hands over his eyes. Charlie said, “Let me out of here while I can still walk.”

  They inspected the damage. Not too bad. A few nicks and scrapes that could be touched up.

  “You were lucky,” Charlie said. “You might’ve gone right out the other end.”

  Ack Ack stood there, wringing his hands. “She did it, not me,” he said over and over. “What’ll Dad say? He’ll think it was me. I better run away from home. Tell Mom to forward my mail.”

  “Ben can fix it,” Charlie said. “He can fix just about anything.”

  For the first time, Penny looked at Charlie and smiled. “Good idea,” she said. “Let’s call him up.”

  A car that sounded as if it had no muffler stopped at the curb. Looking very sharp in his red vest, black shirt, and striped pants, Ben got out. “Thanks,” he said to the driver. The car sped away.

  “You got here just in time, Benny boy. A most fortuitous moment for your arrival,” Ack Ack said. “We have a problem.”

  “She almost killed us,” Charlie said. “She almost ran her father’s car through the wrong end of the garage.”

  Ben laughed. “Just like a dame,” he said. Penny smiled at him.

  “Come on in and have a Coke,” she said. Always ready for refreshment, Charlie and Arthur went along.

  “I didn’t mean you two,” she said when she discovered they had followed her into the kitchen.

  “Hey, she’s not as fat as she used to be but she’s just as bossy,” Charlie whispered in a loud tone.

  Penny got three Cokes out of the refrigerator. “You kids will have to split one,” she said, flipping her hair over her shoulders. “Let’s go into the den where we can talk in private,” she said to Ben.

  “Hey,” Charlie said, “I didn’t know you had a den. I thought only bears and lions and like that had dens.”

  “That brother of yours is a laugh a minute,” Penny said.

  “Yeah,” Ben agreed. “Listen, tell me about your school. You must get awful bored, surrounded by nothing but girls all day long, no dates or anything like that.”

  “Oh,” Penny said, “we have lots of boys’ schools near us. We have dances and things with them. Actually the social life is a heck of a lot more active than it is around here.”

  Sometimes it didn’t pay to eavesdrop. Charlie made throwing-up noises, flexed his muscles, and punched Arthur a couple of times. Not hard.

  “Cut it out,” Arthur said crossly. “You and your muscles.”

  “Let’s go in the den and chew the fat, Artie,” Charlie cooed.

  The door to the den slammed loudly.

  “I’ve got a whole bunch of things I want to tell you,” Charlie said in falsetto. “But first let me borrow your comb. My hair’s a mess.”

  “It doesn’t look any worse than usual,” Arthur said.

  7

  On Saturday, Charlie leaped out of bed and did twice the number of push-ups he did on weekdays. Then he stood in front of the mirror and forced the blood into his veins by holding his breath and sticking his neck out as far as it would go. This produced a set of the most impressive veins Charlie had ever seen. Fat and thick and blue, they looked like the Amazon on a map. They were some powerful veins, all right. It was too bad there was no one else to admire them. It wasn’t every guy in the sixth grade with a set of veins like those.

  Charlie did some deep knee bends and ran in place for a few minutes, making guttural noises and shouting unintelligible words like the pro-football players do on TV.

  “Hey, cut the racket!” Ben shouted from his room. “Let a guy sleep, will ya?”

  Charlie looked at the clock. It was already twenty past six. What the heck was the matter with Ben anyway? Charlie could remember not so long ago when Ben was always first out of bed. Now he slept half the day away. He must be getting soft in his old age. One thing was certain: Charlie wasn’t going to let himself get old and soft.

  His physical-fitness program over, Charlie sat down and wrote a letter to Camp Pilot asking them to please send him the informative brochure they had advertised in last Sunday’s paper. This camp not only offered a program of professional flight instruction plus ground school which would qualify him for a private pilot’s license, it also offered hiking, mountain climbing, and water sports. That was a lot of camp for the money, although there was no mention in the ad of how much anything cost.

  As a postscript, Charlie said “Please send me a complete price list.” The first thing his father would say when Charlie brought up the subject of Camp Pilot would be, “How much?” It had been Charlie’s experience that when price was not mentioned in print, it meant “Watch out.”

  Charlie closed his eyes and imagined himself on his first solo flight. A smile played across his face as he felt the engine responding to his touch. He was halfway across the Atlantic when he had to turn back for fuel. Somebody had goofed. Heads would roll.

  Excitement always made Charlie hungry. He tiptoed downstairs, eased the refrigerator door open, and leaned into the crisp and frigid air. If his mother wasn’t asleep, she would yell, “Shut that refrigerator!” She could hear the door opening even if she was running the vacuum cleaner.

  Not much there. A roast for tomorrow, some eggs, a couple of covered dishes that probably had green fuzz covering whatever lay underneath. His mother was an expert on growing fuzz on things. His father called it her green thumb.

  Arthur’s face pressed against the back door, his breath fogging the glass. He looked sleepy but he could hear that refrigerator door opening as clearly as Charlie’s mother.

  “Get lost,” Charlie directed.

  Arthur took this to be an invitation and came in. He leaned over Charlie’s shoulder.

  “Is that chocolate pudding?” he asked. “And a jar of herring?” He smelled of peanut butter.

  “No, it’s spinach,” Charlie said. Arthur liked to ask questions he already knew the answers to.

  The dish of pudding had been around for a while. It had started to shrink away from the sides of the bowl. That was how you could tell.

  “Do you think your mother’d mind if I polished off the pudding and the herring?” Arthur asked. He had very good manners. He never ate anything without asking permission.

  Charlie threw his shoulders back and tucked his fists in, the way guys did in muscle-building ads.

  “Naw, she won’t mind,” Charlie said. She probably wouldn’t. She didn’t believe in throwing away what she called “perfectly good food,” even if the food was starting to shrink. Arthur was very useful when it came to cleaning out the refrigerator. About the only thing he wouldn’t eat was the green fuzz.

  “My muscles are getting so big I might get stuck going through our front door,” Charlie confided. “You know why they stick out so far? Push-ups, that’s why. You ought to try ’em.” He was always trying to get Arthur to build up his body. “You’re not in very good shape,” he said.

  “Fat runs in my family,” Arthur said proudly, the way other kids might say “
Brains run in my family” or “blue eyes” or “big noses.” Arthur was proud of the fat that ran in his family.

  “You drag too much weight around, you’ll have a heart attack,” Charlie warned.

  “No kidding?” Arthur unwrapped a Hershey Bar.

  “You ever see veins like that?” Charlie thrust his neck and wrists toward Arthur. “Look at those if you want to see some veins.”

  Arthur looked away. He didn’t particularly like things like veins and arteries and stuff like that. He knew they were necessary, but that didn’t mean he had to like looking at them.

  “You ought to see Ben lift his bar bells,” Charlie said. “He just picks ’em up like they were a bag of feathers. He is some powerful guy.”

  “He doesn’t look so powerful to me,” Arthur said. Sometimes he got tired of hearing how great Ben was. To hear Charlie tell it, Ben was the smartest, strongest, funniest guy in the world. Arthur did not have a brother to brag about. He wished he had.

  “For his size, he is extremely powerful,” Charlie said firmly. “You should see his muscles. They’re terrific. And you ought to see him work out on the parallel bars. Wow!” Charlie rolled his eyes back in his head. “I only hope I’m as strong as he is when I get to be his age. Not to mention as smart, in the Honor Society and all.”

  “If he’s so smart,” Arthur said, “how come he’s going out with ole Penny the Pig? My mother said she saw them at the movies last night. Tell me that. Just tell me that.”

  He had him there. From the expression on Charlie’s face, Arthur knew he had him there.

  “If he’s so smart,” Arthur pursued, crowing, “how come he takes out that dope, huh?”

  “She’s pretty good-looking, now that she got skinny,” Charlie said. How did he get pushed into defending somebody he hated the way he hated Penny? That made him mad.

  “Would you take a girl like her out?” Arthur asked.

  “Me? I wouldn’t take any girl out. I’m the wrong guy to ask. That is the dumbest thing I ever heard of,” Charlie said disgustedly. “You have just hit rock bottom, plain old rock bottom when you say things like that.”

  “O.K., O.K.,” Arthur said hastily. He didn’t want Charlie to blow a gasket. “Listen, I made up a new poem. See what you think.” He stood up and closed his eyes. He could only recite standing up with his eyes closed.

  “Chris Columbus said the world was round, with good ideas he did abound.”

  He stopped.

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. “Go on.” He secretly liked it when Arthur asked his opinion on poetry.

  “That’s all. I couldn’t think of any more words to rhyme.”

  Charlie found a bag of potato chips in the cupboard. He gave Arthur a handful. “I don’t call that a poem,” he said, spraying crumbs. “I can do as good as that.”

  He thought a minute.

  “Chris Columbus sailed the seven seas, looking for a bag of fleas.”

  “Hey neat,” Arthur said.

  Charlie smiled, lay down on the kitchen floor, and did ten more push-ups without even breathing hard.

  Arthur looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “It’s time for breakfast.”

  “You can eat here if you want. Nobody’s up but me.”

  “What’s for chow?”

  “I could make some pancakes,” Charlie said. The last time Arthur had stayed for breakfast, Charlie made pancakes and each one had lain like a lead bullet at the bottom of Arthur’s stomach all day long.

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly.

  “How about a jelly sandwich?” Charlie asked.

  Arthur made a face. He wasn’t all that hot on jelly sandwiches.

  “What kind of jelly?” he asked.

  Charlie got the jar down from the shelf.

  “Currant,” he said.

  Arthur looked relieved.

  “O.K.,” he conceded, “just so long as it isn’t grape.”

  8

  “How about meeting me after school today and going down to Sammy’s for a fast check to see what he has?” Charlie asked. He was sitting on the edge of the bathtub watching Ben decide whether he needed a shave or not. He had shaved last week. Maybe it was time for another scrape job.

  “I can’t,” Ben said, inspecting his upper lip.

  “Why not?”

  “I told Penny I’d go to her house and take a look at her father’s car to see if I can patch it up before he gets home. The guys at B and T said they’d give me the putty and the paint. I helped them paint a car last week and it’s not hard.”

  “How much you going to charge her?”

  “Don’t be a boob. I’m not going to charge her anything,” Ben said.

  “You got to be kidding me,” Charlie said, twisting the brim of his Sherlock Holmes hat to the left. “Since when are you doing jobs like that for nothing? Since when, is what I want to know. Boy, times sure have changed around here.”

  Charlie yawned elaborately and tightened the green-and-orange muffler around his neck. Sammy had given him the muffler gratis and it was a beauty. It was so long Charlie had to wrap it around his neck quite a few times so it wouldn’t drag on the floor. There weren’t too many mufflers around as cool as this one.

  “You won’t see yourself coming and going in that, I can tell you,” Charlie’s mother had said when he showed it to her.

  “You know it, Mom,” he had agreed.

  “You were over at Penny’s house last night too, and Mom nearly blew a fuse. She thought you were doing your homework and when she went into your room and found you had skinned out, she was burned up,” Charlie said.

  “You told her, I suppose? You’re getting to be a regular little brown noser, aren’t you?” Ben asked scornfully.

  “I did not tell,” Charlie said indignantly. “She came up to put some sheets away or something. What do you think I am, some kind of a stool pigeon?”

  “I just went over for a couple of seconds to hear some of her records. She has a very interesting collection of records. Where’s that shirt Grandma gave me for Christmas?” and Ben started to burrow through his drawers.

  “What shirt? How do I know? You mean that white shirt? The one you said you wouldn’t wear on a bet?”

  Ben ignored him. “I know it’s here somewhere,” he said.

  “How come ole Penny the Pig is so fascinating all of a sudden? Outside of the fact that she’s skinny instead of fat, she looks the same to me. And her personality sure is the same. I don’t get it. The Pig is a big deal all of a sudden.…”

  “Watch your mouth, kid,” Ben said softly. He put an armlock on Charlie. It didn’t really hurt but a little pressure would make all the difference. “Just watch what you say.” Ben’s voice was angry and his eyes were not smiling the way they usually were.

  Charlie broke away.

  “You don’t have to start throwing your muscles around, either,” he said. “You think you’re some kind of a strong-arm guy, like in the Mafia.”

  “She’s changed,” Ben said. “She’s really nice. She’s grown up a lot.”

  “You used to think she was a fink. I remember you said she was one. And when she asked you to her party you made up a big lie about how you had a toothache and had to go to the dentist. That was only last year. And how about calling her Captain Chubby?”

  “That wasn’t last year,” Ben said. “It was about a year and a half ago.”

  “O.K., so it was a year and a half. She’s a bigger boss than ever. You should have heard her giving Ack Ack orders in the car the other day. She sounded like a drill sergeant,” Charlie said.

  Ben started to whistle under his breath. He had found the white shirt and now he tucked it into his gray flannel slacks, which had been bought before he had started to really grow and were too short now.

  “You look like you’re going to a funeral dressed like that,” Charlie said. “You look like a square.”

  Ben put on a pair of brown loafers.

  Charlie let his arms h
ang down until the blood swelled his veins.

  “You’re going out of the house in those?” he asked. “I thought you said only straight arrows wore loafers. Where’d you get them?”

  “I borrowed them from Ed Reilly,” Ben said.

  “Boy, if only Sammy could see you now. He’d think you were some kind of a traitor, I bet.”

  “What if he did? I’m tired of looking like a bum. If a guy feels like looking decent, he ought to be allowed to without some people making a Federal case out of it,” Ben said angrily.

  “I can hear Sammy laughing from here,” Charlie said. “Are you going there any more at all? How about that coat he’s holding for you? Don’t think plenty of other guys wouldn’t like to get their mitts on that tail coat. Don’t think that. You’re some pal. He could’ve got a lot more dough for it too. He gave you a bargain. He must’ve had about a thousand people in there trying to get it off him and he told them No, he was saving it for a special customer.” Charlie ran out of breath. “You make me sick,” he said finally.

  Ben looked at him coldly. “Don’t blow your mind on my account,” he said.

  “Maybe Mom would let you have some of her perfume to put behind your ears,” Charlie said.

  “Give me a break.” Ben started to put on his black fedora, then hung it back on the bedpost. “Just give me a break.”

  Charlie turned his hat around and tightened the muffler. The Boston Strangler had finally caught up with him. When his head started to pound and the spots in front of his eyes got so numerous he lost count, he loosened his bonds. “You’re going to need one,” he said when he could talk.

  “What?”

  “A break, that’s what.”

  Charlie looked at himself in the mirror. A pipe would be perfect, he thought. A pipe would really add the finishing touch. What was the use of having a hat like this without a pipe too?

  9

  “Where’s the big brother?” Sammy asked. “I haven’t seen Ben for a month of Sundays. I hope his health is all right.”

 

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