by Dean Ing
Charlie was arranged on stouter bones than his friend and, for over a year, had stayed wary of Aaron not so much from the playground label of “jewboy” as for suspicion of any kid who acted so much like a teacher, which is to say Aaron was studious and scrupulously fair. When the Fischers first moved to Austin from North Texas when both boys were eight, Charlie had taken his own physical superiority for granted. Aaron revised Charlie’s opinion the day they got into a punching, dirt-wallowing fight that Aaron finally pronounced a draw, though they both knew Aaron had got the best of it. Aaron looked skinny, with tight dark curls roofing classic Aramaic features on a head a few sizes too large to match his frame. But Aaron had a secret weapon, too, one he would share with Charlie; it was called Dynamic Tension, and he had taken it from the back cover of a comic book. Aaron had read the tale of Mr. Atlas, the onetime ninety-seven-pound weakling, knew he failed to qualify by at least ten pounds, and financed his mail-order muscles by clerking for a week at a fireworks stand. After that it was only a matter of following instructions and faithful calisthenics.
Aaron’s wrists and ankles were still girl-slender, but his agility was superhuman. Watching Charlie try to pin his friend in a good-natured wrestling match was, as Coleman Hardin put it, “. . . like shoveling fleas with a pitchfork.”
For a moment after their handshake, neither boy spoke. Then Charlie began, “That guy is really lucky. If I ever get mad at him, boy . . .” and trailed off.
Aaron gave a quick nod of agreement followed by a slow negative headshake, which Charlie understood perfectly: agreement, then irritation. All he said was, “What a momzer,” and then loped off down the tree-shaded avenue. Charlie accepted that while Aaron’s dad was lenient on some points, for some reason he wanted Aaron at home by sundown on Fridays.
Charlie trotted home constructing great towers of retribution for Jackie Rhett that always crumbled when Charlie struck them with blunt reality. Jackie was a fact of nature that defied all Sunday-school logic; he was social Darwinism in the raw. Mean-spirited, pudgy, quick-tempered, badly raised, by all rights Jackie should have been a pushover. Yet Jackie pushed everything else over with regularity. Jackie could hit harder, bear more pain, add a column of figures quicker, and catch more sun perch than any of his classmates.
Charlie never thought about the likelihood that in a taller, tapered form and without the touch of acne, Jackie might have been the class hero. What Charlie did consider was that most likely he would fall asleep that night replaying his inglorious retreat from the older boy.
But Charlie was wrong. His last thoughts that night were that he’d give a nickel to know what a momzer was.
CHAPTER 2:
FUNDS FOR A SATURDAY
Charlie waked to the distant music of plates clattering in the kitchen, and seconds later he was underfoot there. Five days a week during the school year he emerged from his room as if drugged and might not struggle fully awake until midmorning recess. On the sixth day he was atingle at the first flutter of his eyelids. His mother had only to murmur, “Charlie,” for him to materialize at the breakfast table. Since the age of ten he had graduated to shoes and something that might pass for a T-shirt. When younger, often barefoot and shirtless, Charlie had been formally dressed for Saturday.
Coleman Hardin, already in the alcove called a “breakfast nook,” crinkled a smile over his coffee cup toward his son. Then as Charlie slid into the bench opposite, his father placed the cup in its saucer with surgical precision.
Charlie knew the signs. So far he had heard only one word: his name. Yet a huge amount of communication had passed through the little family. His mother had nodded her welcome and smiled toward the alcove table as she forked strips of bacon onto a paper napkin. A good sign, and her pretty, fine-boned features were defined by lipstick and an obvious touch of rouge, which meant she was ready to confront whatever the world might hold.
And Charlie’s dad had smiled, usually another good sign—but he wore his old khaki work clothes, a bad sign. He hadn’t fixed Charlie with that flinty arctic eye feared by all sons, but his smile was not entirely convincing and he had taken special care with his cup, as though it was half-full of nitroglycerine. His fair hair had been combed but was now mussed, a clear sign that he had already engaged in some undisclosed work. Before breakfast. And Charlie’s dad would stroll over hot coals sooner than do manual labor before breakfast.
Now the elder Hardin lowered his head, eyeing Charlie in the manner of a man peering over invisible bifocals. Even before his father spoke, Charlie was fidgeting. “Very good job on that mesquite, Charlie.”
Understanding and shame crossed the boy’s face. He bit his lip and said nothing, but risked a glance at his mother. He knew she was listening though she appeared to give all her attention to frying eggs in bacon grease, a wartime economy that would be complete only when a jarful of that grease was donated to the war effort.
His mouth still set in that fraudulent smile, Coleman Hardin lifted his cup again; swirled its contents. “Yep, a good job, even a fine job. You left it in my way because you knew good and well I didn’t really want to paint that side of the porch this morning,” he said, his drawl-and-twang peaking on “good and well,” then diminishing in a friendly way. He sipped and watched the boy without malice.
Charlie worried because his father showed no sign of distress, a sure hint that he had devised some punishment to fit Charlie’s crime of forgetting to haul away several armloads of mesquite trimmings stacked near the house. Charlie kept his eyes averted, hoping his dad would develop some steam behind the rebuke, to vent in words and not in deeds. Charlie’s dad could be a booger with deeds.
Warming to his topic: “I took one look at those clippings and I said to myself, why, that boy knows I wanted to do the whole job later, I said. I said yep, and he’s willing to make sure that I do it, too, running off to the creek after school yesterday instead, most likely. He won’t mind doing it this morning, says I; he won’t even mind if I dock his allowance.”
Charlie jerked at the key word, “allowance.” “Aw, Dad . . .”
“That’s what I told myself, Charlie. I realized you wanted to work this morning, and save me a quarter too.”
“Couldn’t I just save you thirteen cents?” Though no math scholar, Charlie could subtract in an instant, from a quarter, the price of a twelve-cent ticket to a Saturday matinee at the Queen Theater.
“A quarter,” was his father’s reply, a few decibels added to offset a twitch at the corners of his mouth and a flickered glance toward his wife. “I reckon it won’t destroy you to miss a chapter of The Lone Ranger.” It was well known that Charlie cared little for the main feature every Saturday. It was the serial that drew throngs of boys to the Queen Theater once a week, as a magnet draws iron filings.
“It ain’t The Lone Ranger, it’s Flash Gordon,” Charlie replied, “and it’s on with After Midnight with Boston Blackie! Aw, please Dad, pleeease,” he pleaded.
Proving she had missed nothing in the exchange as she delivered two plates of bacon and eggs: “Don’t say ‘ain’t,’” said Charlie’s mother.
“I know where he gets it all,” his father said, his fork held aloft as a preacher might hold a Bible. “It’s that fool Rhett kid I’ve told him a million times not to associate with.”
“Jackie’s not a fool,” Charlie blurted before he remembered that negotiations were underway. “Your tongue will burn in heck, Miz Taylor said so,” he added, invoking the mighty name of his Sunday school teacher.
Charlie’s mother sat down quickly. “Your father didn’t actually call anybody a fool, Charlie,” she said, though the darted glance at her husband was cool. “It was just a figure of speech. He meant to say,” and again the glance, “he meant to say, that foolish Rhett kid.”
Charlie’s dad had not intended to ground the boy completely until this moment; had meant to motivate him into a furious assault on prickly mesquite clippings and then to part with seventeen cents, enough for the m
ovie and a nickel sack of popcorn. But somehow Charlie had managed to enlist a man’s own wife against him. This was the trickiest sort of treachery, thought Coleman, and it needed strong measures. “That fool Rhett kid and that fool Hardin kid,” he exclaimed. “Maybe it’s our son who’s the bad influence!” In the silence he had produced, Coleman Hardin addressed his breakfast with furious speed, drained his cup with a gulp, and swung up from the table. “I’ll tell you one thing, sonny boy,” he said, tipping Charlie off by use of the diminutive that he was really angry at someone else, “if those clippings aren’t gone by lunchtime, I promise to run you through ’em at the end of my belt. Now if you will excuse me, Willa, I have to buy some brushes and thinner.” And Charlie’s dad stalked out of the house, having threatened a punishment he would not dream of fulfilling.
Now Charlie knew where most of his father’s irritation lay. Both parents normally called each other “honey.” When they didn’t, they were prissily formal; and when formal, they were either angry or at a church picnic.
Willa Hardin knew that correcting her husband in the boy’s presence had “tipped Coleman’s madbox over.” If Coleman was the best of husbands and fathers, like many others he had emerged from the recent national depression so thin-skinned in a few places that an unwary wife could poke a hole clear through him. Many a breadwinner still waked in the night shivering with sweat from a remembered nightmare in which he slumped at a breadline or swung a pickax eighty-four hours a week for a twelve-dollar paycheck. When a man has so recently escaped an era when his pride was all he owned, he is likely to keep that pride oiled and polished and automatically functioning far too long for his own good.
So it was that the Great Depression made Charlie spend much of that Saturday forenoon armored by shoes and shirt hauling mesquite to the neighborhood dump, which was only a sinkhole in a vacant lot near the creek, where locals disposed of such things. From time to time Charlie greeted other boys, all of them gloriously unemployed. A few times, he tried to make it appear such fun that any sensible person would rush to help, but apparently every boy in Austin had read the same books as he. As one said in parting, “Don’t hand me that Tom Sawyer crud, Charlie.”
It was only a block or so to the sinkhole, and the total weight of those clippings would not have outweighed the boy. Yet any opinion that Charlie’s job was an easy one can be held only by one who lacks intimate experience with mesquite. When God made the world and found it good, He rested. It was while He was resting that someone noticed that He had left the Southwest without any truly spiteful trees. God chose not to bother further with such things. And that is how the devil inherited the job of inventing mesquite.
In crusted caliche desert, mesquite keeps its head down and seldom rises higher than a shrub. But when it can steal enough water to wet its whistle, a mesquite tree will tower over a four-story building. Its leaves divide into slender leaflets the size and usefulness of a broken shoestring, and if they promise shade, they lie. Its beanpods can be fodder for a determined cow of an experimental turn of mind, but since the Texas longhorn was the result of this research, it merits no applause.
More: the unwary dude who sits under a mesquite for long will go away gummier and wiser; the demon tree drips a useless sap. And all of this evil intent grows pale beside the main feature of the mesquite, for it is the grand champion porcupine of the vegetable kingdom, a living snarl of barbed wire. A mesquite branch as long as a boy’s arm grows thorns as long as his finger. None of your spindly undernourished thorns, either; at its base, the thorn is as thick as a pencil, honed to a point that can penetrate a truck tire. Tell an Austin boy that an army tank sustained thirty-six flats driving over a mesquite and he will believe it.
No wonder, then, that Charlie piled branches on his old Radio Flyer wagon with such respect, and why his black and white fox terrier, Lint, could not be coaxed into pulling the contraption. Lint liked a good joke as well as the next dog but a stray mesquite thorn was outside the joke category. It took Charlie two hours to deliver the last of those clippings to the sinkhole.
And ten seconds to realize that he had created a shield for a boy on the run.
Charlie stood gazing down at his work for a long time. The sinkhole was five yards across and, with its new contents, almost up to ground level. He saw that if a fugitive could keep that sinkhole between himself and a pursuer, he could gain temporary refuge. No one would dare try to jump across; failure to clear the gap would be like falling into a den of pit vipers. And after a boy regained his breath he might find, or make, a special path through other nearby shrubs to stave off pursuit.
As it was, every turn of every path in the neighborhood was known to every boy. But why should this state of affairs last forever? Charlie filed this idea away and trundled his wagon home. It was nearly eleven o’clock, and he decided against trying to wheedle money from his dad. There were, after all, other sources of income.
As Charlie neared his best pal’s house, he slowed his gait and dropped the tongue of his wagon so that it was hidden by the sidewalk hedge. He could not have said why he did this, but the wagon implied work of some sort and Charlie understood vaguely that one boy’s Saturday was another boy’s Shabbes. On the Jewish Sabbath the Fischers, while not overly strict, could be depended on for mysterious habits. There would be bread pudding to fill the inner boy, but there would not be “anything happening,” including chores or loud play, and the Fischer pace in walking or talking would be, for Charlie, artificially slow. Yet Martin Fischer knew his son too well to expect total immersion in the traditional ways. His son Aaron could be depended on to avoid work on this day—on most days, in fact—but Fischer knew that few things are more holy than a boy’s love of life. Aaron was permitted a bit of Saturday in his Shabbes.
Standing on the sidewalk before the Fischer bungalow, Charlie cupped his hands as if holding some rare insect, then blew between his thumbs. A soft mournful note hung in the air. He repeated this quickly, adding a higher note and returning to the original tone. It was the song of a flute with laryngitis, and several of Charlie’s tribe had mastered it for such tasks as calling a pal outside without voicing anything.
Presently a similar tootle-EE-oot rewarded him from inside the house. Moments later Aaron followed his toot outdoors, wearing shoes and shirt as always. “Eat yet?” he asked, falling in step as Charlie pulled the wagon.
A shrug. “You?”
Identical shrug, but Aaron flipped a quarter and caught it to show that at popcorn time he would be financially equipped. “Got your money?”
Headshake from Charlie. “Thinkin’ about a bottle run,” he said. “I figure we’ve got an hour.”
Aaron no longer wondered about the wagon. “Can’t work today, but I s’pose I could play Find the Bottle with you,” he said. A few blocks uphill, finer homes with bigger yards sat farther back, marking families that did not save empty bottles for the deposit. Their empties were left for trash collection behind back fences in alleys used for little else. With a nod toward noble impulse, some of the well-to-do might leave those empties beside their trash cans. A Hires root beer or Dr Pepper bottle could be sold to any grocery for two cents, and a milk bottle was worth a full nickel. It never occurred to the boys that trashmen might value those pennies too, but because trash was never collected on weekends and the boys gathered bottles only in extremes, bottle runs went unnoticed.
Lint heard the wagon’s particular squeal from a block away and joined the troop, wary of other dogs behind fences, alert for cats to chase. It was a moment of pride for Lint when he was allowed on such tours but a galling rebuke if Charlie said, “No. Home, Lint. Go home.” And Lint would obey. This was not a trick anyone had taught the terrier. Early in puppyhood, Lint had somehow learned what “home” meant and reacted to the word as if he had just noticed a signpost: SMALL DOGS WILL BE EATEN. Charlie soon learned to avoid using the word for any other purpose when Lint was in earshot. If Aaron, in a forgetful moment, happened to remark, “I shoul
d be home by dark,” Lint might pause, or even stop undecided. If Charlie said it, Lint would instantly head for home as if his master had hurled a clod in his direction.
Several blocks up the hill they turned down an alley, gaining two cents from a Nehi bottle. The next block was without profit. The third block produced two milk bottles and four bulbous little Coke empties that inflamed both boys with expectation, but now all those bottles rattled in the wagon so that every dog in the neighborhood began to make pointed remarks. And some wealthy folks kept big dogs.
“Maybe we should pack trash around the bottles,” Aaron said, and mentioned a comic radio program’s most infamous sound effect. “We sound like Fibber McGee’s closet.”
“Fill my Flyer with actual garbage? I reckon not,” Charlie scoffed.
Instead, he took off the shirt he no longer needed and stuffed bottles in its sleeves, muffling their progress. Presently they walked to another alley and headed back downhill, finding a trove of RC Cola empties that virtually filled the wagon. Charlie added his shoes to the mix, which helped silence the racket somewhat until they discovered a litter of half-pint milk bottles. Now, even granting Aaron a share, they had more than enough to fund Charlie’s movie. By now they needed to hurry their clattering treasure down to the tiny store which, before home refrigeration, had sold only blocks of ice. Since the Ice House owner now sold a bit of everything at all hours and knew the value of goodwill, he was obliged to redeem bottles.
“We might not make it in time,” Charlie said, guiding the wagon with difficulty because, downhill, it kept darting left or right without warning. “You go on, save me a seat.”
“Nuh-uh,” said Aaron staunchly. “We can make it if we run.” He meant only that they should run the half mile from the Ice House to Congress Avenue and the theater.
But Charlie was not one to leave a good idea alone, and thought to improve Aaron’s. “I’ll steer,” he said, flipped the wagon tongue back, and mounted his clattering load as if it were a saddle. Now, if all went as planned, he could keep the front wheels properly aimed. “You better keep up,” he warned, taking it for granted that Aaron would maintain his grip on the wagon. It has been mentioned that Charlie was an optimist.