Grum wagged her head like a pendulum itself. “I don’t understand,” she said. “This cuckoo madness isn’t even possible.”
“It has to be possible,” I said. “It’s happening.”
“Maybe Pa did something to jam the clocks?” suggested Barbie. “Like he used to when he was a kid.”
“Except in reverse,” I said.
Grum continued shaking her head. “Even Craig couldn’t cause this chaos. Pendulums work because of gravity. They follow predictable rules. The clocks should sound the hour, and that’s it—and then only if the weights on the chains have been reset. None of these clocks have been wound up!”
“Okay, that’s eerie,” Ma said. “But they’re quiet now. What do you say we go back to bed and figure this out tomorrow?”
Grum nodded. “It’s been a long day.”
She didn’t know the half of it.
On our way past Pa, Barbie said, “Shouldn’t we bring him inside?”
Ma looked at him with an expression alternating between pity and anger, but leaning toward pity. Stepping toward him she said, “Sebby, he’s heavy. You’ll have to help me.” Man, he looked ridiculous lying there with his arms flopped out to the sides like a cheerleader.
“No!” Grum said sharply. “You told Craig what needed to be said, Claire, and now what he needs from you is tough love. Leave him be. He’s made his own bed, let him lie in it.”
“A water bed,” I almost said, but Grum wouldn’t have appreciated me joking when she was being serious.
At that the rest of us went to lie in our soft, comfortable beds.
The next morning I woke up before Barney. My back was killing me. Plus I needed to use the bathroom. And since I had to go downstairs anyway, I figured I’d put on what was left of my sneakers and drop by Zensylvania to corner Jed. During the cuckoo snafu I’d forgotten that plan, but now it was the first thing on my mind. After a bowl of Cheerios.
I was tipping the bowl to drink the thick sugar milk out of it when I noticed the trail of dried mud across the linoleum. The mud tracked into the living room and stopped at the top of a head. Pa’s.
Someone had dragged him in after all, his feet pointing toward the couch. He lay sprawled face-up in the same posture we’d seen him in last night, right down to the cheerleader arms. Except for the slight motion of his chest as he breathed, he looked stone still. He wasn’t even snoring. From the looks of it, he still hadn’t woken up from when he passed out, and I didn’t want to be the first person he saw when he opened his bloodshot eyes. I took off.
The drag marks came up the steps. Pa’s heavy body had left a deep trench in the mud. Foot trails had dried in front of the stairs, continuing out behind the house from when we’d gone to check the cuckoos. The footprints had hardened like you see sometimes in concrete sidewalks. Like fossils! Grum’s shoe fossils wobbled at the edges, showing how careful she was to find a firm grip. Barbie and I had both been barefoot. Barbie’s big toes stuck out of the prints like fat heads. I filed it away for teasing later.
Who had brought Pa inside? I tried walking in the half-erased tracks under the drag marks to identify them. They couldn’t be mine—I’d been sleeping. They couldn’t be Grum’s because Grum couldn’t drag Pa into the house without winding up in an ambulance. The prints looked longer than Ma’s feet, more like Pa’s. But Pa couldn’t have dragged himself. It must have been Barbie, even though I didn’t see any fathead toes. She was the one who’d suggested bringing him inside in the first place. Her feet were the one part of her that I hadn’t outgrown this week. Oh, and her fingernails.
Now that it was daylight and I had followed the foot fossils most of the way there already, I thought I’d look inside Jed’s castle. Maybe I’d find some kind of clue there that we’d missed the first million times we searched. After he didn’t come home, Ma had checked all of Jed’s pockets while me and Barbie rifled through his books and papers hunting for names, phone numbers, anything that might give us a lead. We contacted all his friends from school, all his old girlfriends, even a bunch of people he knew from marches, protests, rallies, and such. Nobody had seen or heard a trace of him.
Upon opening the door, the sweet smell inside the castle hit me again, but I was hit harder by the sight of the empty wall where the cuckoos had hung. It used to be just plain, grayish-white Sheetrock with white stripes of joint compound because Jed didn’t want to take the time to paint before moving in. Well, not anymore. Now it had an intricate design, all beautiful swoops and swirls of pastel colors, just faint enough that we wouldn’t have noticed it last night in the candlelight. The pattern looked a little like the baby blankets Grum crocheted. No, more like seashells all tossed together, or a bunch of old jewelry spread out on a satin sheet. Then I realized exactly what it reminded me of: the art in Boots Odum’s house. His paintings.
Had he come out here and painted Jed’s wall? No, of course not.
Had Jed come back and done it? If so, it had to be after Thursday morning when Stupid showed up inside the henhouse. I’d have noticed the change when I checked the castle then. Was the paint still wet? I ran my finger along the sea-shell curves, and that’s when I realized something that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
There wasn’t any paint on the drywall. The color came from underneath the layer of unpainted paper. It had an almost shimmering lifelike quality to it. And as I ran my finger over it, the color began to move. I didn’t need any magic glasses to see it.
I yelped. Because now I knew exactly what it was. That stuff. Whatever it was in the rocks that made the amazing colors. It had somehow leached into the wall. And somehow set the cuckoos off. And who knew what else it could somehow do? Straighten Miss Beverly’s neck . . . and turn her prized poodle into a statue.
Was that stuff what Jed had tried to warn me and Barbie about? Only one way to know, and that was to find him. Which I’d planned to do in the first place, before I got distracted. If only my brain could be more like Barbie’s sock drawer.
I went running out of the castle straight to my bike and was rounding the corner of the house when I had to slam on the brakes. Or else run over Barbie. Whoops, we had a plan to take all those poor petrified chickens with their pathetic eyes to the cavern and return them to their feathers before breakfast.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Barbie asked. A common question around me.
“Oh, just goofing around on my bike while waiting for Barbie Big Toes to get out of bed.” To prove it I hopped my bike along one of the grooves in the hardened mud.
Barbie shook her head at me. “I’m sooooo glad we’re not identical. Anyway, Mr. No, why did you go and drag Pa inside last night after what Grum said?”
“Who, me? I thought you did it.” The shock made me fall off my bike. Groan, groan, my aching back. I must have slept on it wrong. No, wait, Barbie stood on it wrong with those heavy rocks yesterday. No wonder my back killed.
“I didn’t do it. And Ma says she didn’t do it. So who did it?”
“Maybe one of his drinking buddies?”
Barbie nodded. “Makes sense. We’d better hurry—there’s just enough time to save the chickens before we have to get ready for church.”
Our plan was to load up the wheelbarrow and the little red wagon with all the chickens and haul them to the cavern in one trip. Celery came fluttering to sit on my sneaker the moment I walked inside the henhouse. “Ahoy, mate,” I said, petting her head as Barbie opened the closet.
But Barbie was the one who swore like a parrot. “Someone’s been in here!”
My perfect sister, swearing? I never heard of such a thing. “This can’t be good.” I ran to see.
All the stuff had been neatly put away on the shelves. We pulled down the things in front of the hidden door only to see that the barn boards had been replaced by a big piece of plywood. Nails with broad heads had been spiked into the studs an inch apart. That plywood wasn’t going to come off without a lot of work.
“Pa
must have done this last night, before he . . . you know!” I said.
“I guess so. But where did he put the chickens? I hope he didn’t just leave them where they were!”
Me and Barbie looked at each other, then tore around the corner to search the coop. There all the hens were, right where they belonged: sitting on their nests like sculptures on display.
“Whoever did this has a sick sense of humor,” Barbie said.
I went along the rows and waved my hand in front of their eyes, which moved. “They’re still alive!”
“How will we get the sick hens to that cavern now?” Barbie said.
“Maybe we can find a place to squeeze in between the wall and the cliff behind the coop?” I said.
Barbie nodded, but doubtfully. “Maybe, if we can clip away some vines.”
We went out to look. Celery didn’t want to let go my foot so she went along for the ride.
This time Barbie and I both cussed like parrots at what we saw. Someone had wedged rocks into the gap between the building and the mountain. Mortar oozed out between the stones. It was still damp to the touch. My heart felt like a balloon with all the air gone out of it. How were we going to save the chickens now?
15
We went back inside the coop to talk it over. I sat in the wheelbarrow with my soul mate in my lap and pet her head forlornly. “I’m sorry, Celery. I’d love to save your aunties. I really would.” I felt worse than I had when we found the chickens petrified to begin with. At least then I thought they were dead and didn’t have any reason to hope. Now I knew they were alive, and could be saved, if only we could get them to the cavern.
“There has to be another way,” Barbie said.
“Because where there’s a will, there’s a—” I said, mimicking Grum’s voice, and then it came to me: “A ladder! We can take Pa’s extension ladder into the gore and climb up to the tunnel from there.”
Barbie wasn’t having that. “Oh, Sebby. Bad idea. Even if Ma and Grum didn’t catch us trying to drag that heavy ladder and all those chickens over there, the goons would. Plus it would be suicidal trying to climb up all that loose dirt. But another entrance is a good thought. Those tunnels probably have other ways in. Remember all those passages that went off to the left?”
“Yeah, off to the left . . . that would be down . . . no, up—” I crossed my eyes, thinking.
“Toward the commune!” Barbie realized. “Too bad Cluster’s gone. We could ask her if she knows of any caves back there that we could try. It could take us days to find an entrance on our own. And then, more days to find our way to the cavern. If there’s even a way at all.”
She was pretty right, because me and Grum’s binoculars hadn’t spotted any caves when we were on our Zensylvania reconnaissance missions. But then again, we were more focused on windows than holes in the ground. Anyway, I had another idea.
“There may be someone else up in Zensylvania who can help us,” I said, excitedly, since it would allow me to kill two birds with one stone, as Grum would say. Although really we were trying to keep the birds alive. “Jed.”
“Jed? At the commune? You mean, like, now?”
“Yeah, still,” I said, and then explained in a big long sentence with no breath (so Barbie wouldn’t have a chance to cut me off) the reasons why I thought he’d been living there all this time. “So, we should go up there right now, find him, and have him explain what the heck.”
And then in her own big long sentence of revenge Barbie talked me out of my idea because if our runaway brother had been living at the commune all this time, wouldn’t A) Cluster have let it slip to us, or B) Jed have moved away with the rest of the commune, or C) he have at the very least gotten out of there before Odum’s goons fenced him in?
“What do you mean, fence?” I said.
“The fence they already had half built yesterday afternoon. Don’t you remember us talking about it on the way to skating? How, like, dozens of goons were up on Kettle Ridge cutting branches and unrolling this thick wire mesh all around the tree trunks at the edge of the property?”
Uh, no. I vaguely remembered voices buzzing in the SUV, and one of them might possibly have been mine, but the major thing I remembered from that ride was hiding my petrified pet chick and planning how I was going to explain it to Barbie.
Yesterday afternoon seemed like a long time ago now.
“Oh, yeah, good point about the fence,” I said, taking her word for it. “But where else could Jed have been to know about that cookie dough in my guts? Can you answer me that?”
Barbie thought a moment, slowly turned, and pointed toward the boarded up feed closet.
I banged my hand on my head. Why didn’t I think of it first? “Of course! He’s been living in the tunnels this whole time!”
“Well, not necessarily. He could be living anywhere, but if he knows other entrances to the tunnels, he could easily sneak back here to keep an eye on us. Or an ear.”
“So to save the chickens, we have to find Jed.”
“Fat chance of that! No, we have to find another entrance to the tunnels. C’mon, Seb, when you and your spaceship brain are out exploring, have you ever seen another cave nearby?”
That question did it. Duh! Of course I’d seen another cave. Many a time. It didn’t lead to the tunnel where Celery got her life back, but it might work the same magic. It was in the same chunk of mountain.
So I told Barbie about the Hole in the Wall, and we decided to take the petrified hens there. We had to do something with those chickens, whether or not we could save them. We couldn’t just leave them sitting on their nests with their pathetic eyes and let Ma find them like that. She already thought Odum had kidnapped them anyway, so why not take them to the gore to live? (Or not.)
But first we had to suffer through the weekly butt torture better known as church. There was no getting out of it with the Ma and Grum tag-team ironing the dress pants and pointing to the shower. It was only an hour of sitting on the hard pew but it felt like eternity on my aching back. Slouching usually made it better, but that day it only made the pain worse. So did jiggling.
“It’s all the jiggling you do that makes your butt hurt,” Jed once told me. “Resistance is futile. You might as well sit still.” This was easy for him to say. After he started high school, Ma let him choose whether he wanted to go to church anymore, and he chose to sleep in.
Anyway, I tried his advice and sat straight up without jiggling. It made Barbie seem awfully short all of a sudden. But the hour lasted just as long as ever.
My teacher said hello in the vestibule after the sermon. Ms. Byron goes to the same church we do. Pa had been surprised to hear that a kneejerk liberal feminazi even went to church. Funny, I didn’t see him there.
“Why, Sebastian, I think you’ve grown six inches since Friday,” Ms. Byron said. Her eyebrows nearly hit her Sunday hat.
“Only three inches,” Barbie said.
“He’s finally decided to listen to his old grandmother and stand up straight,” Grum said proudly. “Praise the Lord.”
As we crossed Kettle Ridge on the way home, I couldn’t resist staring out at the gore, as usual. Barbie craned her neck to look out my side, too, squinting with her hand over her eyes. Remembering yesterday, I scanned the faraway cliff on the narrow end, looking for the tunnel we’d nearly fallen out of, but it just blended into the mass of endless grayness. The boulder in its mouth probably made the tunnel impossible to see from the outside anyway.
A motion in the middle of the stripped area caught my eye, though. A silver car on Odum’s Gash. And a black one. And a red truck. A whole scattering of vehicles, heading in. You could see them blipping between the slag piles. Barbie leaned closer. She practically climbed on my lap, pressing her nose against the window.
“What do you see?” I said, resisting the urge to shove her back over to her own seat. We were nearing the edge of the kettle top now and would soon lose the view.
“What do you see?” Ma echoed, l
ooking at us through the rear-view mirror. The SUV made the turn down the hill, and the road weaved through pines intertwined with viney shrubs.
Barbie punched my arm. I guess I shouldn’t have said that. “Oh, just some cars in the gore,” she answered Ma.
“That’s unusual for a Sunday,” said Ma. True. ORC never saw much activity on the weekends. Just a goon here and there, changing guard shifts, and Boots Odum himself went in sometimes to check on things. Most of the employees had weekends off and never went near the place until Monday morning.
“They must be godless heathens,” said Grum.
Ma laughed but said, “Now now. Judge not lest ye be judged.”
They had themselves a fine time exchanging Bible verses the rest of the way home, and I kept thinking about Jed. If Barbie had been right, if he’d been keeping an eye on us from the tunnels, he could be living way over on the other side of the mountain behind us. Those tunnels could go for miles and miles.
The Hole in the Wall Page 13