Quicksand Pond

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  Terri seemed to like Jessie, too, because she began to turn up in the morning with some regularity at the Kettels’ cottage. She wouldn’t come in. She’d sit cross-legged on the grass a little way from the front door and wait for Jessie to come out.

  “Who is that?” her father asked the first time.

  “Terri,” Jessie said. “She lives near here.”

  “Well, ask her to come in.”

  “She doesn’t want to,” Jessie said.

  Julia looked out and said: “She looks weird. What’s wrong with her?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with her,” Jessie said. “She just wants to stay outside. Actually, she’s a great person.”

  And so she seemed to Jessie. Terri was unlike the people she knew at home. For starters, Terri said what she was really thinking, even if it wasn’t nice. If she didn’t like something, or somebody, she said so. She didn’t show off or try to prove that she was better or different. She just was who she was, and that was fine with her.

  She could be quiet. Sometimes she didn’t speak for an hour or more. She kept apart during these spells. She’d walk away and sit by herself, fingering the name charm on her throat and looking out at the pond. There was something about feeling that charm secure in its place around her neck that seemed to give her peace. At such times Jessie knew to let her be.

  But after a while she’d come back and be loud and sarcastic. During these moods she’d tell Jessie things, information that opened her eyes. Terri knew things other people didn’t. She knew what was really going on under the surface of what seemed to be going on.

  “You know that old Buick your sister is riding around in with that preppy boy?”

  Jessie hadn’t thought of Julia’s beach chauffeur as preppy. Now, thanks to Terri, she noticed his clothes and the way he combed his hair. She saw he was a type.

  “Well, it’s stolen,” Terri said about the car. “A lot of people know. Not stolen by him. His rich parents bought it for him off a guy in town who bought it from the guy who stole it in New Hampshire. The parents were clueless. They just thought they got a good price.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t tell your sister, though. It might leak out and get someone in trouble.”

  “Okay. But if everybody knows . . .”

  “Not the summer people. They don’t know anything. But we know, the people who live around here know. Want a Milky Way? I’ve got two.”

  Terri always had food tucked away on her somewhere. She kept soup crackers in her pockets, or crushed packages of snack cakes, or linty jelly beans. She was generous about offering to share.

  “No thanks,” Jessie would say. “Not right now.”

  Terri carried other things in her pockets too.

  “I bet you’ve never seen one of these.” She showed Jessie a black case that snapped open into a knife blade. A little button on the handle was the trigger.

  “For protection,” she said. “I could take somebody down if I had to.”

  Jessie was startled. “But you wouldn’t . . .”

  “No. I just know I could. If I was alone somewhere and they came at me. I’ve killed rabbits with this knife, but you can do that with your bare hands.”

  “Why would you?”

  “Kill a rabbit? Well, for one thing, they’re real tasty in a stew. Have you ever had rabbit stew?”

  Jessie hadn’t.

  “My mom used to make the best one in the world, everybody said so. You could bring her four or five rabbits and she’d have them dressed and in the pot before you could hardly blink. And that night, wow! We’d all be there for sure to eat, and so would my brothers’ friends. We had good times when she was here.”

  “What do you mean, ‘dressed’?” Jessie asked. She didn’t want to ask what had happened to Terri’s mother. She thought it wouldn’t be polite.

  “Oh, you know. Skinned, and the guts cleaned out. You need to skin a rabbit right away, soon as you can before it cools down,” Terri advised. “Otherwise it gets sticky.”

  They’d been acquainted for several days by the time this conversation took place. The raft was still not fixed, but they’d figured out how to ride it lightly through the water with the least amount of friction. Their feet were always wet, but who cared? Jessie got to love the feel of pond water washing through her bare toes. She loved the pond’s warmth in sunny, shallow places and its sudden cold in the shadows between the reeds. Splinters were a problem, though. The raft’s pine boards were rough and slippery. After Jessie got a couple of big slivers in her feet, Terri took off her own rubber flip-flops and handed them to her.

  “That’s okay, you don’t need to give me yours.”

  “It’s no problem, just until you get some. I guess you don’t need flip-flops where you live.”

  “It’s in the city, so we don’t,” Jessie agreed. “What about you?”

  “I’ll just use a pair of my brother’s. He won’t care.” Terri grinned. “Long as I don’t tell him.”

  Sometimes they pulled the raft out into deeper water and swam off it for a whole afternoon. Those were the best days because they were so free. There was no one to tell them what to do or when to do it. Hours passed, the sun shone, and for Jessie, at least, there was the blissful sense of having no one nearby to call her home.

  “You’re so lucky you can always do what you want,” she told Terri. “I mean, no one worries about you, do they?”

  Terri shrugged. “Yeah, I’m pretty much on my own, if that’s what you want to call it.”

  Some days were spent in exploration. The pond had so many inlets and outlets, nooks and crannies. They poked along the ocean end of it, where the babble of children playing on the beach came through the thick brush.

  “Did you swim on that beach when you were little?” Jessie asked.

  Terri said, “Are you kidding?”

  They went up the shore in the other direction, past the old Carr house with its messy backyard.

  “Is your dad there?” Jessie asked nervously.

  “When his pickup isn’t there, you know he’s not home,” Terri said. “Unless he got a ride with someone. Sometimes he fools you.”

  They went to a mudflat that was filled with sunning turtles. Terri caught a couple of young ones and let them scrabble around on the raft, looking for escape. Jessie was relieved when she tossed them back in the water. They looked so small and desperate.

  They poled up an inlet to a field where a gray fox lived in a burrow, raising a litter. Terri knew how to call the kits with a high, yipping cry. There were four, or perhaps five. It was hard to tell because they were shy and would not come out for long. The next day, at Terri’s suggestion, Jessie brought a loaf of sandwich bread she’d sneaked out of the kitchen. They tore off pieces and threw them near the foxes’ burrow. The kits appeared at once—five!—and fought fiercely among themselves to get their share. When they’d eaten everything, they glanced over their shoulders at their strange human feeders (Jessie thought she and Terri must appear this way to them) and cried out for more like demanding children.

  “So cute!” Jessie exclaimed, but Terri warned, “Don’t get too close. The mother’s in the bushes. She’ll come out and go after you if she thinks you’re bothering them. There’s nothing nastier than a mother fox watching out for her kits. Except maybe a mother bear.”

  By then Jessie knew what she’d suspected was true: Mitch was Terri’s father. She knew because that’s what Terri called him.

  “I’ve got to go home now to help Mitch fix the porch,” Terri would say. Or, “Jerry crashed his truck again, so Mitch took him to work.” Jerry was one of her brothers, who worked on and off in an auto repair shop. Her other brother showed up only once in a while, an event no one looked forward to.

  “It’s usually when he’s broke,” Terri said in disgust. “Then everyone gets in a fight.”

  “Why do you call your father Mitch?” Jessie asked.

  “It’s just what everyone calls him.”


  “But he’s your dad.”

  “So what? He’d probably laugh his head off if we called him that.”

  Terri’s father was the same person her father had gone fishing with in the old days. He was the poor, good-natured kid who’d lived on the pond, probably in the same broken-down farmhouse they lived in now. Jessie didn’t tell Terri that she knew, and she didn’t tell her father. Something terrible had happened to Mitch Carr since then. He’d turned mean or gone crazy from his downtrodden life. Jessie thought it would be better for her father to stay away from Mitch, and from the brothers, who didn’t sound very reliable. It was safer for all the Kettels to keep away from the Carrs, Jessie decided.

  Except for Terri. Terri was great.

  * * *

  Not long after their second visit to the fox kits, Jessie was poling them both down the pond when Terri announced, “Okay, we’re going in to the Cuttings’ to look around. I just found out there used to be a workshop there.”

  “What kind of workshop?”

  “What do you think? Tools! I bet you thought I’d forgotten about fixing up this bathtub, but I didn’t. I’ve been working on it.”

  They brought the waterlogged raft through the reeds to the bank below the big house with the porches, and got off.

  Terri said, “We’ll have to sneak up from here. Somebody might be looking out the window.”

  They went through bushes up the left side of the wide lawn, behind a row of bent-over, crook-limbed pine trees. The winter did that to trees along the coast, Jessie’s father had told her. Winds could get up to forty or fifty miles an hour, more if there was a storm. That was why there were no tall trees, only bent and stunted ones, even on a grand estate like this.

  “Watch out for gardeners,” Terri murmured. “They’ve got a mass of people working on this place. All for one little old lady, imagine that.”

  Terri said the workshop was supposed to be in the garage and they might be able to get in because the door might be open. Her dad had told her.

  “But we don’t want to go in, do we?” Jessie whispered. “It’s not our property.”

  “So?” Terri gave her a glance. “Okay. If you want, we’ll just look for now. Mitch is usually right about stuff like this, though. He worked for them a while back.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, for the Cuttings. He said there are a lot of tools in the garage that nobody ever uses. They’re just hanging up, rusting.”

  They tried to look through a window but couldn’t see anything. Terri found a door around back, screened by bushes. It wasn’t locked. She looked at Jessie, shrugged, and went inside. After a minute Jessie followed. She closed the door behind herself so no one would see they’d gone in.

  The garage wasn’t for cars anymore. It was a storage place crammed with household junk: old rugs, chairs and tables, cardboard boxes full of stuff wrapped up in yellowed newspaper. A huge Chinese vase painted with a fire-breathing dragon sat in a box of its own. Under the windows a bronze table lamp with a colorful stained-glass shade was pushed against the wall. Layers of dust had sifted down over everything. The floor was so old that the concrete had cracked and sunk in places. They were careful where they walked. The air smelled earthy and damp.

  “I don’t see any tools,” Terri said.

  There was a half-hidden alcove built off one side of the room. While Terri investigated a box of old china (“This stuff is beautiful! Somebody should be using it!”), Jessie crossed over and looked inside. It was the workshop, shrouded in cobwebs but all set up, neat as a pin. The tools hung in immaculate order around the walls: hammers small to large; saws in ascending lengths; screwdrivers, drills, and picks flanked above the workbench; glass bottles full of nails sorted by size, from tiny tacks to giant, peglike spikes.

  “Terri. Here it is.”

  She came at once and gave a little gasp. “This is great.”

  “No one’s been in here for ages, you can tell.”

  A heavy iron rod with a snoutlike end was leaning against a wall. Terri went over and lifted it up for Jessie to see.

  “This is a crowbar,” she said. “This is what we need.”

  “Do you think they’ll let us borrow it?”

  Terri snorted. “Oh sure, they’ll let us. They won’t even know.”

  “But I think we should ask first.”

  Terri said she wouldn’t recommend it.

  They were beginning to argue about this when a sound came from the driveway. A car was pulling up outside the garage. Jessie ducked with a beating heart. A car door closed and there was the crunch of footsteps crossing the gravel drive.

  Terri crept to the window and looked out. She glanced back at Jessie with a smirk.

  “No big deal, it’s just the deliveryman from Dolan’s. He’s bringing in some groceries. Sit tight. He’ll be gone in a minute.”

  She was right. He came out a few minutes later, started his engine, and drove off. Even so, Jessie was nervous. She said they should leave immediately in case someone else showed up. Terri didn’t want to, but she came away slowly. She couldn’t get over all the boxes of things, especially the beautiful china.

  “Can you believe the stuff that’s just sitting in here? What a waste!” she whispered. “Somebody could be using it. There’s enough here for somebody’s whole house!”

  “The furniture looks kind of old,” Jessie said doubtfully.

  “Nothing’s wrong with it, though. I bet most of this stuff could be fixed up like new. Look at that vase. It should be in a museum.”

  They went out of the garage, closed the door, and sneaked down the hill behind the stunted trees. By then the afternoon was winding down. Terri wanted to get back to pick up the mail before Mitch came home. (“There might be a bill or something that’ll get him upset. I know how to handle that stuff.”) Jessie said she’d drop her off. They took turns poling the raft up to the sand spit in front of the Carrs’ house. The whole way Terri was excited, more excited than Jessie had ever seen her.

  “So, no problem. We’ll pull the raft up there”—the Cuttings’ field, she meant—“and work on it. It’s real private. Nobody can see us. There’s even some big old planks in the garage. I saw them leaning against the wall in the corner. Wow, did we luck into something! My dad was right!”

  “I really think it would be better to ask somebody before we borrow anything,” Jessie said. “What if someone sees us going in and out?”

  “Who’s going to see us? The only people who live there are the old lady and the live-in that takes care of her.”

  “I still think . . .”

  Terri lost her patience.

  “Listen! You don’t know anything about how things work around here. It’s simple: If we ask, they won’t let us. They don’t care about what we need. They don’t care that they forgot these tools are even there. You can’t borrow from people like them. Their stuff is their stuff and they would never let you use it. Especially not for free. If we want to fix the raft, we have to do it this way. It’s okay, really. Nobody’s going to get hurt. We’ll put everything back. They won’t even know we’ve been in there or that anything was ever gone. And we’ll have a new raft.”

  EIGHT

  They took the crowbar first.

  It wasn’t easy dragging the raft out of the water. It weighed a ton and stuck in the mud at the edge. Terri cut bunches of tall field grass with her switchblade, and they laid the grass down in front of the raft. They tried pulling it again. The raft slid, inch by inch, up over the grass until it rested in the Cuttings’ field.

  Terri looked at it and said: “You know what? This big piece that’s on the top should be on the bottom. This raft has been upside down all this time. No wonder it wouldn’t float right.”

  They went to work with the crowbar. Terri pried and Jessie pulled. The thick, waterlogged timber creaked and splintered and came up . . . about three inches. They were so tired by then, they couldn’t do any more. They left the raft where it was, split up, and went h
ome, muddy but happy.

  They worked on it again the next day, and the day after that, gradually peeling away the rotten wood on top. They progressed slowly. Some days they lasted only an hour or two before they lay back, exhausted. Then they’d sit and talk until Terri had to leave to do some job at her house, or Jessie needed to go home to stay with Jonathan while her father ran errands.

  Sometimes Terri walked back with Jessie to the Kettels’ cottage, just for something to do. She wouldn’t stay if Jessie’s father appeared in the yard. She shied away from running into him, which was fine with Jessie. But if Terri saw Jonathan out there alone, that was a different story, because Jessie had told her about Jonathan’s insects.

  “He crawls around with a glass jar, capturing helpless little spiders and crickets. Then he examines them with this magnifying glass Dad bought him,” Jessie had said, laughing. “He counts their legs!”

  Terri hadn’t laughed. She said she used to do that. (“Not with a magnifier. Never had one of those.”) She began to keep an eye out around the raft for bugs she thought Jonathan would like. If she found him outside in the afternoons, she’d call him over and show him what she’d caught.

  “I thought you might like this one,” she’d say in a soft, conspiratorial voice, opening the paper bag she’d kept it in. Jonathan’s eyes would light up.

  She brought him a giant water bug with enormous pincers that he loved so much he named it. Arthur, for his best friend back home. (“I bet you miss him,” Terri said as they hovered over the bug. “I do,” Jonathan told her with a sad nod. “I keep wishing he was here.”)

  Another time she gave him a plastic sandwich bag full of wood-boring beetles with silvery stomachs.

  “Don’t take them inside,” Terri warned. “They could eat your whole house down once they get started. They’re in our porch, so I know what I’m talking about.”