The boys went outside and trooped across the footbridge, then up the grassy hill in the June sunshine. When they reached the clearing between the house and the garage, they saw two cars sitting in the Malloys’ driveway and three girls trying to wash two cars at once.
“Help!” Caroline cried again when she saw the Hatfords.
“Who’s drowning?” asked Jake suspiciously.
“We’re drowning—in work!” Eddie told him. “We started a car wash to earn money for the hospital, and now we can’t keep up with all the cars turning in. If you guys will help out, we’ll split the money seven ways.” Even as she spoke, another car came up the drive.
It was better than nothing, Wally thought. Heck, he’d help even if his brothers didn’t. Peter immediately picked up a rag.
“I guess we can do it,” said Jake.
“I’ll polish,” said Josh.
It was sort of neat to form an assembly line, Wally decided. Caroline and Peter were assigned to the wheels, Eddie used the hose, Beth did the vacuuming, and Jake and Josh did the cleaning and polishing.
“What am I supposed to do?” Wally asked.
“You need to go to the end of the driveway, stand by the sign I made, and try to get cars to turn in,” said Eddie.
Heck, he had the best job of all, Wally thought. That was a change. Usually he got the worst of things. How did he get to be traffic cop all of a sudden?
Wally walked to the end of the wide driveway and stood by the car wash sign. It was two or three minutes before any car passed at all. Finally a tow truck appeared in the distance. Wally decided that a tow truck would be unlikely to use a car wash, and he was right. Even though he motioned for it to turn into the Malloys’ driveway, it sped on past.
Wally stood on one foot, then the other. He counted to a hundred by fives, then by fours and threes. Another car came by, tooted its horn, and drove on. The third car, however, slowed down and turned in.
“Do you guys do a good job?” the driver asked.
“Oh, yeah!” said Wally, and directed him toward the clearing. There was space for four cars at once.
He wished he were wearing a traffic cop’s orange vest. That would be neat—standing out here directing traffic, making the cars stop. Holding out the flat of his hand to stop cars in one direction, motioning the other cars right up the driveway. He’d even use his whistle. He would back them up all the way to the bridge just to let a car turn in at the car wash.
Wally tried counting to a hundred by sixes and sevens and eights. Another car came by and slowed.
“For four dollars, that’s a bargain!” the woman said, and took her place in line.
Wally had just started to count by nines when he heard somebody yell, “Hey!” He turned around.
There were two boys from school walking toward him. Big boys. Probably fifth or sixth graders, and one was as big as a washing machine.
“You stole our idea!” said the washing machine.
“What?” said Wally.
The other boy pointed toward Eddie’s sign. “Car wash. We did it first.”
Wally shrugged. “I don’t know anything about your car wash, but so what? Anybody can wash cars. I’m just helping the Malloys out.”
“Well, you’d better stop. You’d better close up, because you’re taking customers away from us,” said the first boy.
“Where do you live?” asked Wally.
The boys pointed far down Island Avenue.
“What are you charging?” Wally asked, curious.
“Five dollars. Six to wash and vacuum. You’re stealing our business.”
“You’d better talk to Eddie Malloy, then. She’s the one with the hose,” Wally said, pointing her out.
The boys looked up the driveway to where Josh and Jake and Eddie and Beth and Caroline and Peter were all hard at work.
“We don’t want to talk to Eddie, we’re talking to you,” said the washing machine. “And you’d better tell her to close up shop, or we’ll come back and clean your clock.”
“Yeah,” said the other boy. “We’ll clear your deck.”
“Punch out your lights,” said the washing machine, and they went off down the road. One of them turned and waved his fist in the air before he started on across the road bridge.
Wally waited a minute, then walked up the drive toward the twins, who were polishing the hood of a car.
“Somebody’s going to come back here and punch out my lights if we don’t close the car wash,” he said.
“They’re going to do what?” asked Eddie.
“Clean my clock and clear my deck,” said Wally.
“Who were they?” asked Josh.
“Fifth or sixth graders, I think. One was as big as a washing machine.”
“Gus Bradley,” said Jake. “I’ll bet that’s who it was. He just goes around talking big.”
“He is big!” said Wally.
“Well, you just go out there like you belong by that sign,” said Jake. “And if they come back and start anything, you tell them you’ll clean their clocks!"
“What?” said Wally. He had never won a fight in his life. He’d never even been in one, except with his brothers.
“You’re not afraid of them, are you?” asked Beth.
“Heck, no!” said Wally. He was terrified.
“So just go right back out there and keep directing cars up the driveway. If they come back and tell you to close up, say, ‘Try and make me,’ “ said Eddie.
Wally swallowed. One punch to the nose and they would make him.
He hunched his shoulders and went back to stand by the road. Another car came along, then stopped, and the man looked at the car wash sign. Wally waved him on in. Fifteen minutes went by. Another car pulled in. Twenty minutes…
And then, coming back across the road bridge was the washing machine. This time it appeared he had the dryer with him, because there was a third boy, almost as large. Three boys on sturdy legs who had the look of trouble about them. One was going to clean his clock, one was going to clear his deck, and the third was going to punch out his lights.
Why was it, Wally wondered, that even when it looked as though he had the best job of all, it was really the worst? Why was it always Wally who seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
“Hey, pipsqueak, you still in business?” called the washing machine.
“I thought we told you to close up,” said the second boy.
“I think it’s time we cleaned his clock,” said the dryer.
Wally stood like a statue, his jaws clamped shut.
“So what do you have to say? Anything? You going to close down?” asked the dryer.
“Nope,” said Wally, and wondered what a broken nose felt like.
“You mean you’re going to stand out here and keep stealing our customers?” asked the washing machine.
“I guess we’ll take whatever business we can get,” said Wally.
The three boys looked at each other.
“I think he wants us to punch out his lights,” said the third boy.
“I think he wants us to clear his deck,” said the dryer.
At that moment there came a voice back by the car wash yelling, “War!"
Wally turned around. Down the driveway came Jake with the hose, Josh with a bucket, Eddie with a broom, Beth with a brush, Peter with a dirty, wet rag, and Caroline waving a towel above her head like a lasso. They were hooting and hollering and bellowing and braying.
The three boys in front of Wally each took a step backward, their fists clenched, then stepped back again.
By the time the broom and bucket and hose and rags and brush reached the end of the driveway, two of the men customers had started down the drive as well. “Need some help?” one of them called.
The three big boys suddenly turned and began walking rapidly down Island Avenue, then faster still.
“Yahoo!” yelled Eddie.
“Look at them go!” said Jake.
“If they
don’t watch out, they’ll trip over their own feet and punch out their own lights.” Josh laughed.
With a huge sigh of relief, Wally went back up the driveway with the others and helped finish washing the last of the cars. When evening settled in over the neighborhood, they divided their earnings among their seven collection cans. As it happened, exactly seven cars had come by, which meant that each of them got four dollars for his collection can. It seemed like a lot of work for only four dollars, but they had to admit it had been fun.
“If we do this next weekend, I think we’ll have it made,” said Eddie. “You want us to deal you in?”
“Sure,” said Jake.
And even though both the Hatfords and the Malloys had promised they would do their projects alone, it began to look as though they were going to be stuck together in this business like Velcro.
As the boys went back home across the footbridge, Jake said, “Don’t worry. One more week of school, one more weekend of the car wash, and we’re out of here. We can stay on our side of the river the whole rest of the summer if we want to.”
Nine
Plane-Wrecked
The last week of school had arrived, and Caroline was as sorry as she was glad. Glad because she could put all her energy into planning for the Strawberry Festival; sorry because one of the pleasures of her life was doing anything at all in front of the class.
It didn’t matter if she was only asked to put a problem on the blackboard or read aloud the next two pages of their literature book. She always managed to make it a performance. She never just read from her seat, either; she stood so that everyone could see her. If she knew she was going to do something special on a particular day, she would wear an especially pretty dress to school.
“Crazy with a capital C !” the other girls called her, but Caroline didn’t care. They tolerated her because she was a year younger than anyone else, and besides, school would be twice as boring if Caroline Malloy weren’t there to entertain them, and they knew it.
Miss Applebaum finished reading Hatchet aloud, and after she closed the book, she said, “Okay, class, here’s a fun project for our last week of school. I want each of you to pick a primitive place anywhere you like in the world. A real wilderness. Research it here at school—you don’t have to do any work at home—and make a list of all the things you would need to survive there for a month. Then write down what you would do first if you were shipwrecked or plane-wrecked at this spot.”
Well, that’s certainly an unusual assignment, Caroline thought.
The teacher went on: “You may work alone or in groups of two or three, and at the end of the week, after you’ve shared your report with the class, we’ll have a survivor party here in the classroom.”
Friends began turning to friends to see who wanted a partner. Caroline tapped Wally on the back with her ruler.
“Wally,” she said, as nicely as she could. “Do you want to be my partner?”
“No,” said Wally.
“I’ll choose anywhere you want. We could even be plane-wrecked in Antarctica.”
“If you go to the South Pole, I’ll go to the North,” said Wally.
“How about Tibet?” asked Caroline.
“If you go to Tibet, I’ll go to the Amazon,” said Wally.
Caroline sighed. Trying to be nice to a Hatford was one of the hardest things she ever did. She rested her chin on her hands, closed her eyes, and thought. She did not want to be cold, so Antarctica was out. She did not want to be hot, either, and she did not want to be in a jungle where lions and insects could eat her alive.
If she was ever in a plane wreck, she wanted to be found, she decided, and to be found, she’d need to be seen. For her to be seen, there would have to be open spaces. So Caroline chose the Australian outback.
She spent the afternoon in the library looking at a topographical map of Australia showing the highlands, lowlands, and lakes. At last she chose what appeared to be open land on the edge of a desert next to a lake. Then she looked up temperatures to decide what month she would choose for her plane wreck. She allowed herself to salvage a raincoat, a jug of water, and some apples from the wreck. After that, she put her mind to being rescued.
Wally had walked behind her chair in the library, she knew, and had seen her studying the map of Australia. She was sure that was why he picked the North Pole. He was sitting across from her now at a library table because all the other chairs were taken, and he was reading a short book about Robert E. Peary.
“Wally,” she said softly, “if you were searching for me in Australia, what would I need to do for you to find me?”
“Come hopping by on a kangaroo,” Wally said without even looking up.
It was especially hard to be nice to a Hatford when he wouldn’t take you seriously, Caroline decided.
“If you were plane-wrecked at the North Pole, I’d come and rescue you,” she said as sweetly as possible. But Wally didn’t answer, and Caroline knew she would get no help from him. She decided that if her plane was too smashed up to use for shelter, she would use her raincoat to make herself a tent. The real problem was how to let rescuers know where she was.
First she would gather rocks from the riverbank to spell out her name, Caroline Lenore Malloy. If she was a Broadway actress when the plane went down, think what the newspaper headlines would say when a plane spotted her name spelled out in rocks!
When she tried to figure out how many rocks it would take to spell her name in big letters—big rocks, at least as large as footballs—she decided to leave off her middle name. And when she realized how many trips to the riverbank it would take to spell out her first name, she decided she would just go with the word HELP!
There was every chance, however, that if her plane went down in Australia, an Aborigine would see her.He would tell someone else, and that person would tell another, until a whole tribe of Australian Aborigines would travel through the outback to see her. And she knew what that would be: an audience.
And once she had an audience, she would sing every song she’d ever learned, tell every story she’d ever heard, act out every part she’d ever played. And then, perhaps, the natives would tell the outside world where she was.
It was exhausting, doing all this planning, and by the time Caroline started home that afternoon with the others, she felt as though she had been carrying rocks from a riverbank all day long.
Wally told his brothers about the assignment.
“You’re lucky!” Josh said. You know what we have to do, just because it’s our last year in this school? We have to pick up trash on the playground, paint the seesaws, collect all the volleyballs and get them back to the right rooms, clean out the supply cupboard, wash the blackboard, and help check in books at the library.”
“No graduation ceremony?” Caroline asked. She could not imagine leaving elementary school for junior high without a ceremony of some sort.
“We get our class picture in the newspaper, that’s all,” said Josh. “They always print a sixth-grade graduation picture along with all the stuff the class did for the school before they left.”
That was a ceremony? Caroline wondered. If all they got in Buckman was a picture in the newspaper, she would arrange to be in the very center of the front row.
“So where are you going to be plane-wrecked, Caroline?” Eddie asked as the seven kids made their way down the sidewalk on College Avenue.
“The Australian outback,” said Caroline. “I’m going to sing and dance and attract the attention of the Aborigines, and if that doesn’t get me rescued, I’ll send up smoke signals.”
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer person.” Jake grinned.
“I don’t have to clean out a supply cupboard or be in a plane crash or anything!” said Peter. “Our class is going to have a picnic out under the trees and make our own ice cream.”
Caroline almost wished she hadn’t been moved up a grade. Not that she would have been in Peter’s class, but it seemed that the younger you
were in school, the more fun you could have. She was just about to say so when she stopped walking and said, “Hey! Isn’t that Mom way down the street?”
Her sisters shielded their eyes from the June sun. “Sure looks like it,” Eddie answered. “Is she coming out of your house, Jake?”
“No, she’s coming out of the house next door,” he said. “The Corbys’.”
“She’s heading for the footbridge,” said Caroline. “Maybe she was out collecting money for us so we can all be in the parade.”
“Dream on,” said Eddie.
Josh must have been in an especially good mood, because when they reached the Hatford house, he said to the girls, “Anybody want some lemonade? We made a couple jugs of it over the weekend.”
“Sure,” said Beth. “We’ll have a glass before we go home.”
If any one of the Hatfords would miss them if they moved back to Ohio, Caroline thought, it would be Josh. Next to Peter, of course. And Josh would miss Beth most of all, she was sure of it.
They all trooped inside. As always, they had barely got the screen door closed behind them when the phone rang.
“That’ll be Mom,” said Wally, and picked it up. “We just walked in the door, Mom, and the kitchen’s full of crazy people,” he said into the phone, looking at the Malloy sisters sitting around the table.
Caroline stared.
Wally listened for a minute, then said, “Yes, there’s a key on the table….” And suddenly he started to yell: “What?” And then, after another pause, he yelled “What?” again, even more loudly. Everyone turned to stare this time. And then Wally held the phone out away from his ear so the others could hear too.
“Now, why should that upset you?” Mrs. Hatford was saying. “All I said was that if our neighbors aren’t home when Mrs. Malloy comes by, she’ll stop over here for their key and you’re to give it to her. She’s thinking about renting the house next door if they stay in Buckman.”
Ten
Stunned
Wally silently followed the others out onto the porch to stare at the house next door. He could see someone moving around inside, so the Corbys had been home after all to let Mrs. Malloy in. It was a big house, with a living room that stretched from one side to the other. He had known the Corbys were planning to move, but he hadn’t thought they were going this soon.
Girls Rule! Page 5