Being Fishkill

by Ruth Lehrer

  “Jesus Christ, kid, I haven’t arrested you yet. Just stand up and come with me.” The cop grabbed both of us by an arm, hauled us to our feet, and shoved us toward the gate. “We’re just going to have a little chat.”

  “We’re minors,” said Duck-Duck as he pushed us toward his car. “You have to get approval from the Supreme Court before you interrogate minors.”

  “Don’t worry, kid. As soon as we get to the station, I’m calling your mothers. That’s as Supreme as we get around here,” and he pushed us into the back of the cop car and slammed the door.

  I was screwed. They would send me to an orphanage or to jail. My stomach cramped. Maybe I could ask to go to the bathroom and climb out a window at the police station. I started thinking of what I didn’t have with me for my escape. My backpack, my Yodels. The heat in the car was nice, though, after being in a cemetery all night.

  When we got to the police station, there was only one other cop, and he was on the phone. He looked vaguely familiar. Almost all the cops in Salt Run were part-time. I guessed if there were others on duty, they were out doing important things, not arresting kids for spray-painting old gravestones.

  “We demand to be released on our own recognizance,” said Duck-Duck. “We aren’t a flight risk. We can’t even drive yet.”

  “You have to wait for court to say that,” said the cop. “Plus, you have to wait till you’re arrested. What’s your mother’s name?”

  “I plead the Fifth,” said Duck-Duck. She wouldn’t sit down where the cop was pointing but stood facing him. “It’s not Mom’s fault she’s related to me.”

  “Kid, you have watched way too much Law and Order. Sit down and tell me your mother’s name.”

  Duck-Duck sat down and made a big show of writing her telephone number and name. To me she whispered, “That’s all you have to give them, you know. Your name, your age, and your telephone number.”

  I was worried about even this, but so far the cop hadn’t said a word to me. He seemed to have had enough to think about just dealing with Duck-Duck.

  The cop picked up Duck-Duck’s number and walked away. I looked around for escape routes until he came back with two Cokes.

  All I had had to eat that morning was two sausage links and a little grape juice. My mouth was still sticky with cemetery dirt and night spit.

  “Don’t touch it,” Duck-Duck hissed at me. “They do that just to get your fingerprints and DNA.”

  “What if I open it with a napkin?”

  “Then you have to eat the napkin, or they take that too,” whispered Duck-Duck.

  I figured I’d rather have the Coke and eat a napkin than not have the Coke. I opened my can with the napkin and poured some into my mouth, trying not to touch the can with my lips. I spilled some on the table, but mostly it went in. The can was damp with condensation, which seeped into the napkin. It would be a lot of work to get DNA off a Coke can, and there were only two policemen. Cops were busy. They always said, “Don’t waste my time,” when my mother called them to the house, and “Why am I here again?” when they came back for the third time that night.

  “Okay, now you, kid.” The cop was talking to me. “What’s your mother’s name and phone?”

  In fourth grade, I had a math teacher who didn’t like noise. Despite our reputation as the worst-behaved, noisiest class in ten years, Miss Benson insisted that if our minds were quiet, our mouths would be quiet too. She taught us to sit down, put our hands on the desk with the pointer finger and thumb touching, and quiet our minds. When she tapped her table and said, “Calm minds, calm minds,” we were supposed to close our eyes too, but that was just dumb. You’d have to be stupid to close your eyes in the middle of the day with the worst kids in ten years sitting right behind you.

  I didn’t close my eyes at the police station, but I put my hands on the table, pinched my pointer fingers and thumbs together, and thought of Miss Benson.

  “Kid, you deaf?” said the cop.

  “She’s meditating,” said Duck-Duck. “You should try it. You wouldn’t get so snappy. Her mother is out of town, getting rejuvenated. Fishy is staying with us. When my mother comes, she’ll tell you.”

  “Is that paint on your jacket, kid?” He pulled my sleeve up a little. “No wonder you’re not talking.”

  “Oh. My. God,” said Duck-Duck. “That is such circumstantial evidence. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  I was still thinking about Calm Mind and Miss Benson when it occurred to me: Duck-Duck had just lied. Not about the circumstantial stuff but about my mother. And she did it like a pro. Not one stutter, not one extra pause.

  My feeling about lying was that it was probably wrong. Grandpa did it a lot. The cops would come, and Grandpa would say my mother had walked into a door, or that she hit him, or that all that the neighbors had heard was the TV. It always made me feel sick because I knew if the cops kept asking questions, eventually they would try to ask me, and I’d have to lie too.

  But Duck-Duck lying didn’t make me feel sick. It was a nice lie, not a mean-blame lie, so maybe lying wasn’t all bad? Maybe it was more like Little House on the Prairie. Miss Carew had said it was the story of the writer growing up, but it probably didn’t happen exactly like that, or it would be called an autobiography. So Little House wasn’t exactly true, but you wouldn’t call the author a liar either. I didn’t want to go to prison, but I couldn’t climb out a window when Duck-Duck had just lied for me.

  Calm Mind took a lot of work. Just as I was thinking I couldn’t stay quiet any longer, Molly showed up. When Molly started talking to the cop, first she looked worried, then she looked mad, then she made nasty eyes at Duck-Duck and me. She looked at us quick, so the cop didn’t notice, but we saw. Duck-Duck made a squinty-eye look back at her. I looked at the floor. All those blue-eyed messages were confusing. I didn’t know what they meant for my chances of getting out of there. Molly didn’t know Duck-Duck had lied about me staying with them. What if the cop asked her, and Molly said she’d never seen me before in her life? Maybe she was one of those parents who thought life experience was important, and she would leave us here overnight, which would give the cops time to figure out who I was and go looking for my mother. Maybe Molly would say her Duck-Duck was a good girl and blame everything on me. Even after all that Calm Mind stuff, this almost made me cry. Fishkill was never supposed to cry. Never.

  Finally, the cop said, “Okay, kids, your mom and I have negotiated a deal.”

  “We are representing ourselves,” said Duck-Duck. “We don’t need outside counsel.”

  “Too late,” said the cop. “Mom and I have decided that if you both promise never to do it again and do a community service cleanup job, we’ll just keep this between us. Okay? The Historical Society really just wants to know it won’t happen again and wants the stones cleaned up.”

  Duck-Duck opened her mouth to speak, but the cop cut her off. “Ma’am, Miss Jail-House-Lawyer is about to file a class-action suit, but since the other one is staying with you, I figure you can take care of it for both of them. Do we all have a deal?”

  “Yes, we most certainly do,” said Molly. “Don’t we, girls?” And she gave Duck-Duck and me, but mostly Duck-Duck, a nasty blue-lightning look. And to my surprise, despite the fact there was no good evidence and a lot of bad logic, Duck-Duck tucked in her chin, looked real mad, and didn’t say a word.

  Molly didn’t deny I lived with them. She didn’t even blink. Maybe she and Duck-Duck did have telepathic eye-talk. Molly herded us into her car, and we were free. Or at least Duck-Duck was free. Me, I wasn’t so sure.

  “How could you let him do that to us?” Duck-Duck said to Molly as soon as we were out of the parking lot. “We never even confessed.” She crossed her arms and glared into the rearview mirror.

  “Mom Court has less burden of proof,” said Molly. “He knows, I know, you know. That’s good enough. We’re lucky he’s not pushing it. This afternoon you both are becoming best friends with a can of paint
remover. Plus you’re grounded for a week.”

  The weird thing was, after we got home and had real breakfast and got ready to go out and do the community a service, Molly and Duck-Duck still hugged and kissed like all those nasty eyes had never happened.

  Molly bought us spray bottles of paint remover, little scrapers, washcloths, and rubber gloves. She put water in buckets and drove us to the famous people cemetery.

  “I am going food shopping. I will be back in two hours. Every single drop of paint had better be gone by then, or you aren’t going to see free time for a month.” She sounded mean, but then she handed us a snack, a bag of what looked like potato chips. Duck-Duck gave her squinty eyes, but then she followed that with the kiss-kiss thing again. The two of them really confused me.

  “And you,” Molly said to me, “if I get the whole story straight up when we get home, you can stay with us for a while.” Even though she sounded strict, I didn’t think she looked like she was sorry she had bailed me out along with Duck-Duck. After telling Duck-Duck the whole story, it didn’t seem so hard to have to tell Molly. She hadn’t ratted me out when she had the chance. I had my backpack again. I found it in her car, just where I’d left it. I didn’t feel so dead anymore.

  After Molly left, we went back to the quince tree.

  “Let’s not do it right away,” said Duck-Duck. “Grrs don’t take orders. Besides, we have to recover from our brush with the law first.” She pulled herself up on a big gravestone, and I handed up her backpack. The snack turned out to be salted sunflower seeds.

  “I hope Mom doesn’t ground us through Halloween. I thought we could go trick-or-treating together. Even if she does, though, we could still celebrate Day of the Dead.”

  “What’s Day of the Dead?” I asked. I could think of things I wanted it to mean, but I’d probably be wrong.

  “My mother had a patient who was from Mexico. Where he was from, they do Day of the Dead instead of Halloween. It seems like a better holiday than Halloween.” Duck-Duck swung her legs and spit out a sunflower shell. I wondered if I dropped a salted sunflower seed would it grow sunflowers later. In the spring. After the salt washed off.

  “You’re supposed to leave food and drink for the dead. And flowers too, I think. And you talk to them. I don’t think you have to speak Spanish. It sounds cooler than just running around asking for candy. Anyone you want to leave food for?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Did the patient from Mexico die?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Of what?”

  “I think he had cancer. My mom’s a nurse. She works in a hospital.”

  The first-aid kit made sense now. No one else I knew kept a little box of bandages.

  “Even if we’re not Mexican, maybe we could leave the lady poet something,” I said. I felt a little bad that I had made her rock all bloody-looking. I wanted to leave her something good. I opened my backpack. “You think she’d like a Yodel?”

  “Sure, and a juice box.” Duck-Duck pulled out a cranberry juice box. “We should open it for her. These boxes probably aren’t easy to open if you’re dead.” She popped the top with the straw.

  She jumped down, and we went over and laid the Yodel and the juice box in front of the lady poet.

  “Now you should talk to her,” said Duck-Duck.

  I looked at the stone with our gang words glowing white and red. “What should I say?”

  “It probably doesn’t matter a lot. She’s probably just happy someone came to say hi and left her a juice box.”

  I looked at the stone. Maybe she liked the paint. Maybe she had been bored with gray stone and missed her white dresses and red flowers. Maybe she would be sorry to see the paint go. I knelt down and pushed the straw a little deeper into the juice box. On the top was the expiration date, which hadn’t come yet. The food my mother used to bring home from the Walmart trash had dates that had already happened. I wondered how long a juice box lasted. The poet lady had an expiration date carved on her stone, but she only found it out when she died. I thought it was funny that a juice box would know how long it had left but a person wouldn’t.

  “I’m sorry you died,” I said to the lady poet. “I hope you liked the paint.” I wanted to ask her if she missed being alive, but it seemed a bit rude.

  “Maybe she’s never had a Yodel before,” said Duck-Duck. “She died a long time ago. Maybe even before Yodels were invented.”

  “I hope you like the Yodel too,” I said. The Yodel looked good. “You think she would mind sharing?” I asked Duck-Duck.

  “My mother says it’s good to break bread with people. That probably means Yodels too.” Duck-Duck broke us both off a piece of Yodel and put the third piece down again. “To lady poets and Grrs.” She raised her Yodel and then popped it into her pink mouth. I ate mine too. Maybe the lady poet was just a little less lonely after Duck-Duck’s toast and a third of a Yodel.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get red and white paint off the gravestone. I didn’t think any more about bus tickets or what would happen when Molly picked us up.

  Molly came to get us at four o’clock. She examined the lady poet’s stone, front and back, taking a little walk around the cemetery as if we might have sprayed something else while we were there. Then we all got in the car, and, except for the fact that Duck-Duck was grounded and probably I was too, that was the end of it. Molly had gone food shopping and brought us two yellow apples. And on the way home, Molly and Duck-Duck’s conversation was about what type of tomato sauce was right for whole-wheat spaghetti. Mushroom? Basil? It was kind of nice, but I wondered if something was wrong with their memories. Maybe they didn’t hold grudges because they couldn’t remember what to be mad about. Grandpa would have gone on for days about having to pick us up at the police station and how much gas cost. Keely wouldn’t have spoken to me for a week.

  Whole-wheat spaghetti turned out to be okay but not quite as good as white. The sauce had chunks of tomato and mushroom, with whole pieces of parsley — like a garden in a pot. Duck-Duck grated two kinds of cheese, and we sprinkled it over each plate before we ate.

  After dinner, Molly made herself a cup of tea and gestured for me to sit down.

  “Okay, kid, tell me the deal.”

  It was easier to tell Molly than it had been to tell Duck-Duck. It was as if after I had done all the work to make it into words once, the next time I could just use the words again and it wasn’t as painful.

  This time, the story came out a little different. I told Molly how I saw Keely go under, down into the yellow rush of water. I said how at first I froze, staring at the spot as if it were a door that after closing, would open again if I waited long enough. Then how I ran along the riverbank, fighting brush and mud, hoping I would catch her before she washed away to the mountains of Mongolia. I said I ran for miles, searching the water, but I never caught sight of even a hand.

  Molly didn’t say anything. She just listened. I stopped.

  “When did that happen?” she asked.

  “June,” I said. “Just after school ended.”

  “So you were alone all summer?”

  Duck-Duck started to interrupt, but Molly shushed her.

  “Let Fishkill talk,” she said, and Duck-Duck made a zipping motion over her mouth. “Tell us about the summer,” Molly said to me.

  I hadn’t made words for that part yet.

  It was a long summer of lies, but it didn’t feel wrong. For the first time, I was alone on Birge Hill, alone in the world. It was a summer of one, and I liked it. The lies were to try and keep it that way.

  People say summer, and they think picnics and beach and fun. My summer wasn’t like that. I would walk across town and up the hill with my backpack. I would smile and lie and tell the nosy church ladies my mom was sick, or working, or had a new job. I would put as much food as I could in my backpack and walk home. They usually gave out cans. Cans of soup. Cans of baked beans. They gave me powdered milk and powdered Jell-O. Nothing I could eat on
the way home. By the time I got home, the backpack would be made of rocks, and I would be hot and hungrier than ever.

  I watched the mail for school letters. Anything that needed signing, I signed. I kept a pile, since I had no stamps. At the end of the summer, I walked them up to the school office and gave them to the front-desk people.

  It was signing the papers and filling in names that made me realize I could just sign a different name and that name would become me. I realized I could re-carnate, just like that, and never let anyone hit me again.

  Molly had a funny look on her face after I told her the story. I was afraid she had changed her mind about me staying with them, since she knew I was a criminal now. Then I thought that maybe she wasn’t used to kids talking so much, but I remembered Duck-Duck talked all the time, and Molly seemed okay with that.

  “What about food stamps?” said Molly suddenly. “Why didn’t you have food stamps last summer?”

  “Mom took the card with her into the river.”

  “I see,” she said, and paused. “Okay. You can stay with us in Chrissy’s room. We file a missing-person report tomorrow.”

  That’s when I knew I’d made a mistake. I had been taken in by the garden-in-the-pot spaghetti. Molly was just a grown-up, and grown-ups always made things worse. I looked around for my backpack.

  Molly gave me that squinty look she was always giving Duck-Duck. “No more running. Why don’t you want to go to the police?”

  Duck-Duck piped up: “She thinks they’re going to say she’s a murderer and put her in jail without bail.”

  I hadn’t thought of the bail part, but I was sure it was true.

  I looked Molly straight in the eye. “If you are going to the cops,” I said, “I’m going to run away first chance I get.” I don’t know why I thought threatening would work, but I hoped it would. “It’s been months and months,” I said. “It won’t matter if we wait another month or so. You can tell them I lied to you and said my parents were on vacation.”