by Dean Ing
Charlie followed. “We’re not supposed to go this way?”
“Doesn’t matter whichever way,” Gene confided, “so long as folks don’t know, Charlie. Never let them know which way you go.”
This advice was delivered with the kind of earnestness that suggested it must be important, and Charlie replied with a serious “Uh-huh.” On a parallel track, Charlie’s mind began to toy with the suspicion that if a boy wanted people never to know his intentions, maybe those intentions tended to be unpopular. On the main line of Charlie’s thoughts, however, lay a growing curiosity about Gene Carpenter and his rumored habits.
Gene set a brisk pace toward a gravel street some distance away, all the while talking to Charlie in a pleasant way. It was all about golf balls, and how infernally expensive they had become, and how golfers loved to buy them at half-price, and how a boy with any gumption at all could collect a dozen perfectly good golf balls in an afternoon, if he hid in bushes near the creek. And how Gene had only recently thought up a new wrinkle in the Wandering Golf Ball business, a wrinkle so new he had waited for Charlie’s visit before trying it. And . . .
But Charlie’s mind was working on ways to make sense of his friend’s ways. The Carpenters lived more comfortably than the Hardins, yet Gene had radical ideas about the ownership of golf balls. Though he showed all the politeness a mother could ask, he had a genius for seeming to do one thing while intending a different thing. And however much he might behave all goodygood in front of his parents, Eugene Carpenter apparently made up for it when out of their sight. As the boys drew near the cross street, Charlie judged that, for Gene, out of sight meant out of control. And Gene could get out of sight quicker than a ground squirrel.
Someday it might occur to Charlie that he and Aaron—many boys, in fact—practiced the same strategy to some degree. But now, as Gene led the way stepping carefully down to the edge of the creek, Charlie noticed that the water issued as a small waterfall from a metal conduit not quite big enough to crawl through, and that the one-lane street ten feet above it was, in fact, the top surface of a primitive dam. The structure might have been in place a half-century or more, and it stretched completely across the ravine, which, here at the edge of the golf course, was no more than twenty yards wide.
Gene squatted and peered up the metal conduit, pointing. “See, there’s this thing across the other end.”
Charlie looked, jumped to a conclusion and shook his head. “No. Uh-unh. Over and out, lieutenant. I am not goin’ up that thing,” he said firmly.
“Course not, I wanted you to see the floodgate,” Gene replied, laughing. “I figured out how it works. It lowers a big iron plate when you turn a wheel, I think.”
Charlie squinted up the conduit some more. “Why do they do that?”
“They don’t. If they did, it oughta shut the creek off.”
“So what if they did?”
“No more water. No more creek. No more shallow pools where a jillion golf balls have been waiting for somebody to collect ’em.”
An inner vision of countless golf balls infected Charlie’s imagination. After a moment he said, “Yeah, but as soon as the creek stopped somebody would just turn it on again.”
“If they noticed, they might. But nobody plays golf in the dark. They mostly quit about now, around sundown, and start again next day.” Gene was in high spirits as he outlined his “new wrinkle,” and in a moment he had clambered up the stones and cement of the old dam, drawing Charlie after him by animal magnetism. For the first time, Charlie noticed the poles of high cyclone fencing set in cement between the street and the creek. The creek extended out of sight through the middle of a grassy valley.
Gene walked quickly to a clump of wild grass just off the street and sat down. Charlie stood and faced the parklike valley, leaning on the fence.
“Get away from there, guy, you really don’t know much! You can see it all from here,” Gene said, urgency diluting his good humor. Then, “Anybody watching could prob’ly see you there on the fence,” he added without heat as Charlie took a seat beside him.
“Who could?”
“The Terrys. Old man Terry used to own everything around here,” said Gene. “That’s his mansion over yonder.”
Only now did Charlie begin to appreciate the full extent of the place on the other side of the cyclone fence. It seemed to stretch forever, and it impressed him as the owner had intended it to impress adults. He studied the huge home off in the distance half-hidden by trees, saw a scatter of lawn furniture and a barbecue grill with its own stone chimney in the valley, and whistled to himself. “I guess rich guys have their own parks,” he marveled.
“You bet they do,” said Gene. “And they don’t much wanta share it, neither. Maybe they’re afraid somebody will turn that big wheel there, and shut off the creek.”
Charlie’s gaze followed a pointing finger and settled on a big weathered iron wheel held by an axle that extended from the back face of the dam. To seize that wheel a boy must be on the other side of the fence. All his uncertainty about this mission disappeared in a flash. “Yeah, and I’ve tried to climb a cyclone fence. Those sharp tops tear you up pretty good,” he said, hoping Gene could interpret a “no” without hearing it aloud.
“I know,” his companion grinned, and displayed old scars on one arm. “Lucky for us, there’s a gate.”
“I don’t see it,” said Charlie.
“Sure you do. For them it’s a tree. For us it’s a gate.” With that, Gene pointed along the street to a medium-sized hackberry tree just across the fence. It stood twenty yards away, its trunk within arm’s length of the fence. The lowest branches began perhaps ten feet up, some overhanging the street.
This was familiar stuff to Charlie, and it was his turn to grin. “I’ve done that. You gonna go into the tree?”
“Can’t reach the branches. If you were bigger than me you could grab the fence and boost me.” Gene accompanied this with a sorrowful headshake.
For an endless moment, neither boy spoke. Then Charlie said, “But I bet you could grab that ol’ fence and boost me in a jiffy, right?”
Something in Charlie’s tone caused the older boy to look away, and a pink flush crept across his face. “You think I’m afraid, don’tcha?”
“Nope. Prob’ly not,” Charlie shrugged. “The only durn thing I expect scares you is gettin’ caught. But I think you wanted me here because you figgered you couldn’t do this by yourself.”
Gene sighed the sigh of a lost boy. As the normal color returned to his face he said, “I’m sorry. I kinda had the idea you and me might be alike, and this is a little scary, so it’d be fun. I don’t blame you if you don’t want to, Chuck.” And as the last rays of direct sunlight floodlit the scene, Gene stuck out his hand to be shaken.
Charlie stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants. “Who said I won’t? And it’s not ‘Chuck,’ it’s Charlie. This is up to Charlie Hardin. Come on,” and he used the handshake to pull Gene Carpenter to his feet.
It was unsettling to Charlie, hearing a steady fit of giggles and feeling excited trembles from his partner, who took a double-handed grip on the fence and let Charlie use him as a climbing pole. The mission was in doubt only when Charlie stood with both feet on the taller boy’s shoulders and leaned his thighs against the top of the fence. By the time Gene began to sag, Charlie was clinging to hackberry branches and making slow progress.
His weight was enough to bend the foliage down, and after two failed attempts, Gene had snagged a lowered branch himself. “Go on, didn’t you think I’d be behind you?”
“Guy, I swear I don’t know what to think.” Charlie reached the tree trunk and shinnied down without obstruction, Gene following until they picked their way across to the big rusted wheel pocked by flecks of red paint from many years ago.
Gene knelt to inspect the device. “Oh, D-Word it,” he muttered, “it’s wired up.” The wire delayed them only until Gene unwound it. Then he gripped the wheel and turned it;
no, tried to turn it. The wheel budged but would not yield, and no amount of his grunting and straining made any difference.
Charlie kept up his glances toward the distant home until Gene begged for help. When Charlie added his efforts the wheel’s hub suddenly squealed like a live thing, then gave way gradually, and every little screech made both boys grimace. Some distance below them, scrapes and crunches said that something was being accomplished, and now Gene could turn the wheel alone. Charlie climbed down the face of the dam near the water to inspect their progress. “There’s a big old iron tray that slides between grooves. It cuts down through some twigs into the water,” he said.
The wheel would turn no further. “Listen, Charlie. Hush and listen.”
Without all the screeching and grunting and commentary, the place fell silent as a mausoleum. “The waterfall down there?”
“Can’t hear it,” said Charlie.
The reply was a whisper powerful as a steam leak. “Right, it’s quit! We’re done. Climb back here and I’ll boost you up the tree.”
Hackberry bark was so sturdy, Charlie could have climbed without help but with both of Gene’s hands supporting his rump Charlie quickly climbed the tree. Gene’s only way up was by gripping the trunk between his arms and legs to inch his way aloft. Meanwhile Charlie fought his way across the foliage, a practice he had mastered before, then hung by his hands and dropped onto the edge of the street. Soon, accompanied by those fitful giggles of his, Gene landed beside him.
“Now we’ll see how it works,” said the older boy, and raced away across the street down into the cover of creekside brush with Charlie at his heels. At the water’s edge he scooped sand into one hand and used it like soap, scrubbing both hands vigorously in the shallows. It was easy to see that the creek’s level was already dwindling. “You better get that stuff off your hands.”
Charlie hadn’t noticed his palms, which were stained as if he had been stacking old bricks, thanks to his struggle against the ancient wheel. “It’ll come off,” he said.
“Yeah? What if they ask what it is?” Moments later Gene forgot his own question as he spied something a few paces downstream. “Hot diggety, there’s one!” And he hopscotched across shallows to collect the first ball.
Charlie wondered who “they” might be. As those soft cries of new discoveries grew fainter, he squatted and began to scrub his hands thoughtfully. It was starting to look as if, for Gene, “they” meant anybody on the planet; and it seemed that this happy young outlaw ran wild not so much for treasure as just for the heck of it.
By draining away, the creek was becoming little more than a series of pools, some perhaps a foot deep, but much of it only wet sand and limestone. Charlie found his friend hunkered down near what clearly had been a broad pool, now mere inches deep. Gene was pointing. A half-dozen small dimpled spheres crowded together at a crevice in the stone bottom, like a clutch of hen eggs in a watery nest. “Wow, you were right,” said Charlie.
“Just made sense,” Gene said, and emptied several balls from his hand to Charlie’s so he could retrieve his latest find. “Boy, am I dumb. I shoulda thought to hide some old sacks near the dam.”
As he stood up, Charlie saw that his friend’s pockets were full of rounded lumps. He recalled a similar problem with coins from a lily pond but kept silent about it as he pocketed the new treasure. “I wouldn’t say dumb, guy,” he said.
“We haven’t come a city block and we’re almost full-up,” said Gene, to illustrate his own dumbness. “We’ll have to hide this bunch here and do it as many times as we have to and come back for ’em all later.”
“Yep. So don’t say dumb,” Charlie insisted. “You’re not dumb. What you are is scary.”
“Aw, hey,” said Gene, looking as though Charlie had just slapped him.
“It’s okay, Gene. You’re not mean, or clumsy or anything. Shoot, you’re not clumsy enough. I just don’t know what you’re up to until we’re in the middle of it, you know?”
“Well shoot, neither do I. That’s the fun of it,” Gene explained, with a combination frown-and-grin that said, “everybody knows that.”
“There’s another one,” Charlie said to change the subject, and hurried downstream after a small dimpled orb he caught peeking above the water’s surface. Darkness overtook them before they could survey the full length of the course, but by then they had hidden six piles of golf balls and headed for home.
In late dusk, Gene’s parents seemed pleased that their son had gone “no place much” and “just played” with young Charles Hardin, and they treated Charlie like visiting royalty at dinnertime. A big tiger-striped cat that Charlie hadn’t noticed before snaked around at Mrs. Carpenter’s feet in the kitchen but evaporated in a twinkling when Gene sought a pair of RC Colas from the refrigerator.
A portion of Charlie envied the way his friend was allowed small decisions without asking permission, while an equal portion of his mind argued that Gene might need a few more permissions now and then. Mr. Carpenter, a handsome older man of few words, erected an expensive camping tent in the backyard at Gene’s suggestion so the boys could toy with a flashlight and sleep like adventurers. Around midnight Charlie’s energy began to drain away, and after that, his sleep was deep as a coma. Evidently Gene was a sleepwalker because, sometime during the night, he imported two grocery bags of golf balls to the tent.
With morning’s first sparrow chirp the boys were up again, burying grocery bags in last year’s leaves behind the garage. That garage was full of little mysteries for Charlie, including a handsome bicycle locked with a chain. Gene was vague about the bike and Charlie decided to keep his guesses to himself. The croquet set looked almost new but all the heads had been removed from the mallets. The badminton racquets looked as if someone had pounded them with a hammer. “Not as good as a baseball bat,” Gene confided, and Charlie supposed they had been used to whale the tar out of a few golf balls.
By the time he was burping from a late breakfast that included bacon, eggs and butter, Charlie had seen how a boy might live, given the comforts of money and parents who denied him only one thing: supervision. Charlie took wartime rationing for granted the way all his other friends did, but he found that the Carpenters lived as though rationing did not exist. From this he learned a Great American Truth: the wealthy do not understand rationing, nor need to.
At midmorning the boys were looking through Gene’s enviable collection of Big Little Books, volumes smaller than paperbacks but with hard covers and pictures on alternating pages, when a telephone rang somewhere in the house. Presently Mrs. Carpenter came to Gene’s room with the news that Charles’s mother would pick him up within the hour. “And Eugene, your father is having more trouble taking the tent down than he expected. I know he could use your help,” she added.
Charlie followed his friend outside to find that Mr. Carpenter, though plainly surprised and pleased to find Gene offering aid, would not let a guest take part. Charlie basked in sunlight on flagstones, watching father and son puzzle at their work halfway across the yard, until the family’s striped cat ambled up to him and applied for a skull-massage, which Charlie was happy to give. By stages so subtle that Charlie did not notice them, the cat insinuated itself into his lap where finally it lay on his knees in a Sphinx position, eyes shut, accepting his fingernails between its ears in catly drowsiness.
Both boy and cat became sun-stunned, so near sleep that when at last the tent was stored, Gene stepped onto the flagstones before the cat came alert. A sizzle like grease on a hot skillet erupted from Charlie’s lap and the cat dematerialized in a stripy flash. “Ow, ow, durn you,” Charlie scolded after the departed animal. “Thanks a lot, Tiger,” he added, rubbing furiously at tiny wounds those claws had made through his trouser legs.
“Peeve, you mean,” said Gene, not at all surprised at the way the family feline had greeted him. “Her name’s ‘Peeve.’ ”
“New cat, huh,” said Charlie.
“Mother’s had her since
I was, I dunno, five maybe.”
Some unspoken understanding passed between the boys. Then Charlie asked, “Why’d she name her pet ‘Peeve’?”
Gene grinned that impudent grin of his. “You just said. Her pet peeve, get it?”
Abruptly Charlie did get it, and slapped himself on the forehead with the heel of his hand. “Keen.”
“Hey, we don’t have much time before your mother comes,” Gene said abruptly. “Don’t you wanta see the creek?”
Charlie fired off a grin of his own. “If there was one.”
“I bet it’s still there behind the dam. And if we’re good guys we better turn it back on while we can.”
Scampering away down to the throat of the golf course, they hurried toward the ancient dam, staying hidden in greenery. The boys reached the graveled street together and saw through cyclone fencing at the same time. One of Gene’s special giggles burbled up at what they saw, but Charlie was silent with awe.
That merry little brook of the day before was nowhere to be seen—or rather, it was everywhere, but not as a brook anymore. Charlie marveled how a lazy little stream pouring twenty gallons a second through a ravine could produce a real swim-across-it, float-rafts-on-it, drown-in-it pond after being sealed off for twelve hours or so. In an instant the scene told Charlie more about multiplication tables than his teachers ever had. Wooden lawn chairs lazed across the lake surface.
“Must be six feet deep in the middle,” Gene marveled, and moved over to grip fencing nearest the hackberry branches. “C’mon, guy, time to open it back up!”
Charlie rushed to obey and was standing on Gene’s shoulders leaning toward the tree before he realized that somewhere far off across those fenced acres, men’s voices were calling back and forth. “Hurry, Charlie,” Gene insisted. “I don’t see anybody yet.”
The hackberry seemed to have developed claws that tore at his clothes as Charlie reached the trunk and slid down inside the property. He slipped and would have fallen headfirst into the pond near his feet if not for the rusted wheel, and as he gripped it with both hands he could hear one of those distant voices, now much closer. No telling what it said. It didn’t matter what it said.