Outside Looking In

by James Lincoln Collier

  Anyway, we had to get out of there. I took a look at the sun so as to get a direction, and we started pushing our way through the woods. It was pretty tough going. The brush was wiry and snapped in our faces and scratched us. About every five minutes, I had to stop to let Ooma rest. She was pretty scratched up and scared and unhappy, and I knew that if I didn’t cheer her up pretty soon she was going to quit and go back to J. P. and Gussie. We pushed on; and in about ten minutes I began to see light through the trees ahead. The woods were coming to an end.

  “You sit down here, Ooma,” I said. I’m going to check it out ahead.”

  “I want to come with you,” she said.

  I looked at her. She was trying not to cry, but tears were leaking out of her eyes. “Okay, come on,” I said. We eased through the woods, going carefully this time, and in a couple of minutes we came near the edge. “Wait here,” I said. I dropped flat, crawled to the edge, and looked out through the brush. Ten feet away was an old dirt farm road, and across it another open field, stretching as far as I could see to some hills way in the distance. I slid the top half of my body out of the woods partway onto the dirt road and took a look down it. The cop car was coming slowly toward me. I slid back into the woods. “The cops are coming, Ooma,” I said. “Quick.”

  We pushed our way back into the woods about fifty feet and dropped flat. One good thing about all that brush was that the cops wouldn’t be able to see through it very well. We lay there waiting, and in a minute, through the brush, I could see bits and pieces of the cop car easing along the dirt road. It stopped. I could see a piece of the car window and part of a cop’s head sticking out of it. “They must be in there somewhere, Joe.”

  I couldn’t hear what Joe said back. The first cop said, “Well, I ain’t goin’ in there after them. I got on good pants.” Joe said something more, which I couldn’t hear, and the first cop said, “Forget it, Joe. We’ll catch up with them sooner or later. They won’t be hard to spot.” Then the cop car started up again and slid out of sight.

  “They won’t catch us, will they, Fergy?”

  “No,” I said. But we were going to be pretty obvious hitchhiking around there.

  “I’m hungry,” Ooma said.

  “I wish I had a watch,” I said. I’d always wanted a watch, but J. P. would never buy me one. He said I shouldn’t get uptight about time. But he had a watch.

  “I’ll steal you a watch, Fergy,” Ooma said.

  “No, don’t do that, Ooma.”

  “I want to,” she said.

  “Don’t,” I said. All I needed was for Ooma to get caught stealing something. I looked up at the sun. It was around eleven o’clock, I figured. “It isn’t lunchtime yet,” I said. “We’ll get something to eat pretty soon.” I pushed my way back to the edge of the woods. There was brown dust in the air, and the cop car was turning around in the field. I slid back into the woods a little ways. After a bit, the cop car rumbled past. I waited until it was gone, leaving more brown dust in the air behind it. Then we came out of the woods and started to walk off down the dirt road, the woods on one side of us, the big field on the other, heading I didn’t know where.

  “When are we going to eat, Fergy?”

  I was pretty hungry myself. We hadn’t had any breakfast. “Pretty soon,” I said. “As soon as we get someplace.”

  We walked on, and after a little while I saw a farm up ahead—a house, a barn, a couple of sheds, a chicken house. I stopped and thought about it. Would the cops have put out some kind of report about us on the radio? I didn’t think we were important enough for that. I looked at the farm a little more, trying to get some idea of it. It seemed kind of ramshackle. The paint was peeling off the house, and the barns and sheds were gray. There was an old farm truck parked in front of the barn. I wondered if they would give us a ride to some town.

  “Maybe they’ll give us something to eat,” Ooma said. “Maybe they have hamburgers and potato salad.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” I said.

  We walked on up to the farm. It was beat-up, all right. There was a porch across the front of the house, with half the slats broken out of the railing. An old swinging bench was hanging by rusty chains from the porch ceiling. A couple of little kids were playing on the swinging bench, and a rooster was sitting up on the back, enjoying the ride. We stood at the bottom of the porch. The two little kids stared at us. They both had jeans on and long, tangled hair, and I couldn’t tell if they were girls or boys. The rooster began to crow and flap its wings. “Are your folks at home?” I said.

  They stared at us some more. One of them shook its head. “Yes, they are too,” the other one said. Its hair was longer and it seemed like a girl.

  Ooma went up on the porch. “Ask your mom if we can have something to eat.”

  “Ooma, cut that out,” I said.

  Ooma sat down on the bench and began to swing it back and forth. “This is pretty neat,” she said. The rooster began to squawk and hopped off.

  Just then, a woman opened the front door and looked out. She was wearing jeans and a dirty T-shirt and was pretty thin. “I thought I heard somebody,” she said. “Where’d y’all come from?”

  “We’re hun—”Ooma said.

  “We got lost,” I said. “We were trying to take a shortcut through the woods, and we got lost.”

  She looked at us and tucked in her T-shirt. “Where y’all heading for?”

  I decided to stay away from Memphis this time. It had got the guy in the Buick suspicious because it was too far for a couple of kids to be hitching to. “Janesboro,” I said, which was another town I’d got off the map. “We were visiting my aunt over at Whitesville and we started hitching back, but I decided to take a shortcut and now we don’t know where we are.” I was beginning to get pretty good at telling lies.

  “Can we have something to eat?”

  “Ooma, cut that out.” I looked at the woman. “She doesn’t have good manners. She always says anything she wants to.”

  The woman laughed. “Well, I guess I can spare something. Come on in.” So we followed her into the house, her kids coming along behind us, and out back to the kitchen. It was as ramshackle as the house—an old, beat-up enamel table, a gas stove, an old icebox with the white chipped off in places, like someone had whacked at it with a hammer. She sat us down and fixed us peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. We all sat there at the enamel table—us, the little kids, the woman—eating peanut-butter sandwiches and drinking Coke. After a while, the farmer came in, and I told him all my lies about getting lost by taking a shortcut from Whitesville to Janesboro.

  “You’re a long way from the Janesboro road,” he said.

  “Well, I know it now,” I said. “I got mixed up.”

  He gave me a look. “You live over in Janesboro?”

  “Yes,” I said. I sure hoped he wasn’t going to ask me where, for I didn’t know any more about Janesboro than I did about Memphis. To get him off the subject of Janesboro, I said, “We were visiting my aunt over in Whitesville.”

  It didn’t work. “Where’d you say you lived over in Janesboro?”

  I hadn’t said where we lived, but it wouldn’t do any good to say so. “In the center of town,” I said.

  “Oh?” he said. “I’m going over there in the truck after a little while to pick up a load of chicken feed. I could drop you off.”

  That was all to the good, for it would get us away from the cops who were looking for us. “We sure would be glad of a ride,” I said.

  “What kind of truck do you have?” Ooma said.

  “Ooma, don’t—”

  “A Ford three-quarter ton,” he said.

  “We got a big motor home,” Ooma said. “It has TV and everything.”

  The farmer squinted at us. “I thought you said you lived in Janesboro.”

  I stepped on Ooma’s foot under the table. “See, that’s the thing,” I said. “We’re supposed to meet our folks in the center of Janesboro. They’re going to get t
here this afternoon.”

  The farmer looked at Ooma, and then me. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Where are they now?”

  I was beginning to sweat and feel red. I could see that I still needed a lot of practice at lying. “Well, see, they left us off in Janesboro to visit—”

  “I thought you said Whitesville,” the woman said.

  “I mean Whitesville.” I wiped some sweat off my upper lip. “See, they dropped us off in Whitesville to visit our aunt and said they’d meet us in Whitesville.”

  “Don’t you mean Janesboro?” the farmer said.

  “I mean Janesboro.”

  “How come your folks didn’t come back to your aunt’s to pick you up?”

  I wiped some sweat off my forehead with my sleeve. “See, the thing is, my dad doesn’t get along with my aunt so hot. He just dropped us off.” I had to get away from them. “Listen, could I use your bathroom?”

  So they told me where it was, and I left and splashed some water on my face to cool myself down; and when I came back Ooma was outside on the porch swinging the little kids and the rooster; and after about an hour we climbed into the back of the truck and headed off for Janesboro.

  I was feeling pretty nervous. The farmer didn’t believe much of my story, and I worried that he’d drive us right to the police station or something. I was thinking about this, when Ooma nudged me. “Look, Fergy,” she said. She held out her hand. In it was a watch.

  I snatched it up. “Where’d you get that?” I said.

  “From them. It’s a present.”

  “Ooma, for—” Then I stopped. Her eyes were shining and she was looking at me, so pleased and happy she’d got me something I wanted. I just didn’t have the heart to bawl her out. “Well, thanks,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

  “It’s a present,” she said, looking happy. It must have been lying around on a table somewhere in the house, and she’d grabbed it up when she’d gone out to the porch to swing those little kids. Now what was I going to do? The right thing would be to leave it in the back of the truck when we got out, so that the farmer would think it had fallen off his wrist sometime. But, of course, Ooma would be pretty quick to realize I didn’t have it anymore. I’d have to tell her I’d given it back, and her feelings would be hurt. I didn’t know what to do, so I stuck the watch in my pocket and decided to think about it some more. Ooma put her head over the side of the truck so she could catch the air on her face, until I told her to bring her head back before she got it hit on something. We went along for half an hour, and then we saw a sign saying JANESBORO. We drove into the town past the usual gas stations and stores and all of that, until we came to a shopping mall. It was just like all the rest I’d been in—a supermarket, a dry cleaners, a big drugstore, a Sears. The farmer pulled his truck into the middle of the mall and parked it among the other cars. He opened the door and got out. “This is as far as I go,” he said. He gave me a squinty look. “Sure you kids’ll be okay?”

  “Our dad will be along pretty soon,” I said.

  I stood up in the truck and so did Ooma. Then she said, “Look, Fergy.” She pointed over the cab of the truck. I looked. There was the motor home parked in front of the drugstore. The folding table was set up, and J. P. was standing beside it giving his talk. Gussie was making change, and Trotsky and the Wiz were circulating through the crowd handing out copies of “Extracts from the Journals of J. P. Wheeler.”

  ELEVEN

  THE FARMER WAS looking out toward where Ooma was pointing. “Blamed if I believed a word of it,” he said, “but I see it’s true.”

  All I wanted to do was grab Ooma’s hand and make a run for it—run on out of that shopping mall, down the main street, and out of Janesboro. But I couldn’t—not with that farmer standing there watching us. So I climbed down out of the truck and helped Ooma down. She stood there on the ground with her thumb in her mouth, staring in the direction of the motor home. “Well,” I said to the farmer, “thanks a whole lot for giving us a ride. My folks will be glad we made it on time.”

  “It wasn’t anything,” the farmer said. He was looking off toward the motor home, too. “What are they all doing?” he asked.

  It was nice to be able to tell the truth for a change and not have to worry about getting caught. “They sell stuff,” I said. “Honey and things.” I decided not to mention the high blood pressure.

  “Maybe I’ll go over and have a look,” he said.

  The main thing was, he was curious about us—about Ooma and me turning up at his house, and not having a very good story about how we happened to be there, and all of this business of the motor home. Oh, I could have killed Ooma for opening her mouth about the motor home back there at his farm. Why couldn’t she ever keep her mouth shut? Here we’d run a hundred miles to get away from Gussie and J. P., and now we were right back in their laps again.

  I grabbed Ooma’s hand. “I have to take her to the bathroom,” I said. I looked around. The store closest to us was the Sears. “Come on, Ooma.”

  He gave me a look. “Don’t you have a bathroom in that fancy motor home?”

  “It’s broken,” I said. “It doesn’t work. Come on, Ooma.” I gave her arm a jerk. She almost fell down.

  “Fergy—”

  I pulled her again. “Come on, Ooma,” I said. “Come on before you wet yourself.” I began to drag her across the shopping mall toward the Sears.

  She slugged my arm with her fist. “Damn it, Fergy.” But I went on dragging her, and she went on cursing and shouting and trying to peel my fingers off her wrist. I gave the farmer a quick look. He stared at me, and then he began to trot off in the direction of the folding table. He was going to tell J. P. that he’d just dropped a couple of kids off, that was for sure. I dragged Ooma into the Sears, down one of the aisles, past a stack of chain saws, past a heap of motor oil, through the kids’ shoe department, toward the back. “Be good, Ooma,” I said, “and I’ll let you steal something.” She calmed down a little at that, and we went on through the Sears and out the rear doors.

  A long loading platform ran along the rear of the store. Backed up to it were four or five big trailer trucks. We stood next to one that said ACME CARPET COMPANY. The rear doors were open, and I could see that it was half-filled with big rolls of carpeting. I looked in the other direction. A wide driveway led out onto the main street of Janesboro. I could see traffic going along the street and some stores opposite. Now what? We had to move fast. We could run down the drive to that main street and beat it out of Janesboro. But I wasn’t sure that was the best idea. Once that farmer told J. P. we were in town, he’d come after us like a shot, and the first place he’d look would be out there.

  I grabbed Ooma’s hand again. “Come on. We’ve got to get out of here fast.”

  “Fergy, maybe we shouldn’t run away anymore. Maybe we should go back and stay with Gussie and J. P.”

  I didn’t have much time for arguing. “I thought you wanted to find Mr. and Mrs. Clappers,” I said. “I thought you wanted to live with them.”

  She didn’t say anything, but put her thumb in her mouth. “Maybe we could just go over and say hello.”

  “Ooma, we can’t do that. If we did, they’d catch us and make us stay.”

  She went on sucking her thumb. “It was nice in that motor home.” It was pretty hard for her to be this close to Gussie and J. P. and not go to see them.

  “Listen,” I said. “By now Mr. and Mrs. Clappers’ll have a new motor home. A brand-new one.”

  She didn’t say anything, but went on sucking her thumb. We had to get going pretty quick. “It will be nice having Mrs. Clappers wash your face and put your hair up every morning, won’t it?” That got her a little. “We can always come back to live with J. P. and Gussie if we want to.” To Ooma, all places were right near to each other. “Come on, we’ve got to hurry. They’ll start looking for us soon.”

  Then I happened to look back toward the Sears. Through the glass door, way in the distance among the shopper
s and the chain saws and baby shoes, I saw J. P. and Gussie pushing their way through the crowd. They didn’t see us yet, but they were headed straight toward the back. “Quick, Ooma, they’re coming.” I grabbed her hand. Where could we go? If we made a break for it down the driveway they would spot us for sure, because I wasn’t going to be able to go very fast dragging Ooma along behind me.

  Then I noticed the carpet truck. “Quick,” I said. I picked Ooma up and threw her into it on top of the rolls of carpet. I swung myself in after her and scrambled way into the back, dragging Ooma along behind me. They wouldn’t see us way back in the dark behind the rolls of carpet. I just had to pray I could keep Ooma from shouting out.

  So we waited, and in half a minute I heard running feet. Then the feet stopped right by the rear of the truck, and I heard J. P. say, “I don’t see them anywhere out here.”

  “Maybe they’re still in the store,” Gussie said.

  “Maybe,” J. P. said. “Or maybe they went down that driveway and onto the main street.”

  “Poor Ooma,” Gussie said. At that, I felt Ooma wriggle, and I grabbed hold of her so she couldn’t jump up. “She wouldn’t have run away on her own.”

  I realized that Gussie wouldn’t have run away on her own, either. “What I can’t figure out is how they ended up on that guy’s farm,” J. P. said.

  “Let’s just find them, J. P.”

  “I don’t want to run—” Ooma started. I clapped my hand on her mouth. She wriggled, trying to get loose from me.

  “Shush,” I said.

  J. P. said, “Fergy’s been sulking for a week. I should have guessed he’d try to pull something. He’s gotten awfully rebellious recently. He used to be a nice kid, but he won’t listen to anything I say anymore.”

  “It was because you took that motor home. I told you not to,” Gussie said. “That was your big idea.”

  “Don’t start that again, Gussie.”

  Ooma slammed me in the head hard enough to hurt. “Let go of me, Fergy,” she said into my hand.