Gemini Summer Read online

  It was a block to Kantor’s. The boys pushed the cart right inside, and Mr. Kantor got up from his stool behind the cash register.

  “Oy, it’s you?” he said. “And I thought my day wouldn’t be exciting?” Everything that Mr. Kantor said sounded like a question. “Did you rinse those bottles?”

  “Yes,” said Danny.

  “You couldn’t have rinsed your feet?” said Mr. Kantor. “You think the store sweeps itself?”

  Danny looked down. Flakes of mud were falling from his legs and his trousers, from the wheels of the cart and its metal frame. Mr. Kantor was like a kind man hiding in a mean one, and Danny felt bad about the mud. He tried to kick it underneath the counter.

  Mr. Kantor examined each bottle, squinting over the top of his little spectacles. Six he pushed aside, shaking his head. “I should give you money for no deposit?” Then he took up a short pencil and licked its tip, and added numbers on a slip of paper.

  The boys spent their money right then, filling little brown bags from the boxes of candy near the counter. Danny took jawbreakers that would change color in his mouth, and caramels, and a packet of Munsters cards. Beau picked wax pipes full of juice, and a yellow sherbet fountain that looked like a stick of dynamite.

  Mr. Kantor stood above them with his neck bent like a buzzard’s, but he kept smiling. “Have you got your dog yet, Danny?” he asked.

  “No,” said Danny, counting out caramels.

  “What are your parents thinking? Every boy should have a dog,” Mr. Kantor said. “Dogs are always your friend no matter what. Dogs are good. People, they can be animals, you know. Trust me, I’ve seen it.”

  He emptied the bags that the boys had filled, and counted the candies. Danny watched his long fingers rolling the jawbreakers, and couldn’t help staring at the blue numbers tattooed on Mr. Kantor’s arm. He’d always wanted to know why they were there but hadn’t yet felt brave enough to ask.

  The boys left with the cart, their six rejected bottles rattling inside. At the top of the hill, where the path led into the woods, Beau told Danny, “Get in.”

  Danny didn’t want to at first, but Beau insisted; he said it would be fun. So Danny clambered into the cart and wedged himself along its length. Then Beau pushed it forward an inch, drew it back another.

  “Three, two, one,” he counted, and Danny shouted, “Ignition!”

  “Blastoff!” said Beau, and down the hill they went.

  The cart veered madly, tilting round the corners. It crashed through a bush and leapt from a root, and the bottles bounced round Danny’s knees. It very nearly went tumbling over the cliff—thirty feet down to the creek—but skidded aside at the last moment. Beau came stumbling behind it, his arms straight out; he could hardly keep up with the cart.

  Danny hurled the bottles at trees and boulders. They spun into bushes, bounded up, and spun again, and before they stopped he was past them.

  He shot over the bridge on two wheels. Then the path went uphill, and he was airborne at the top, flying for a moment with the last two bottles floating weightless beside him. Then he landed with a crash and kept going, out of the woods, onto the grass beside the road. He thought the cart would carry him clear across it, so he cried out for Beau to stop him. He was heading for the Colvig house.

  He looked back but couldn’t see Beau. The cart bounced and rattled over the boulevard, and Danny now was truly frightened. He imagined rattling across the street and up the Colvigs’ driveway, smashing into Creepy’s garage. But suddenly, like a miracle, the cart flopped on its side and spilled him onto the grass.

  Beau came up a moment later, panting and laughing, and collapsed at Danny’s side. Danny could hardly believe he’d ridden the whole hill; no one had ever done it before. He told Beau what it had been like to shoot over the bridge. And Beau told him how he had looked from behind—like Colonel Steve Zodiac. “Like Colonel Zodiac!” Beau shouted.

  Danny held up the last of the bottles. “Watch, Beau!” he shouted, winding up with his arm. He cried, “Achtung!” like one of the little blue Nazis in the G.I. Combat comics, and lobbed the bottle—now a hand grenade—high and far. It twinkled in the sunlight as it spun end over end, then exploded on the road into a million white shards that skittered across the pavement. “Kaboom!” cried Danny.

  They righted the cart. The front had dented inward, and they tried to bend it out again. Then Danny looked up and said, “Uh-oh.”

  Beau swallowed. “Creepy Colvig.”

  The man came across the road in his shorts and sleeveless undershirt. His arms and legs were covered with black hair, and his muscles—and his stomach—bulged. He was carrying a shovel on his shoulder.

  Danny had never been so close to Creepy Colvig before. He could smell the man’s sweat and see how his hairs sprouted right through his undershirt in places.

  “Who busted that bottle?” said Creepy Colvig.

  “I guess I did,” said Danny.

  “Then guess who’ll clean it up.”

  Creepy Colvig threw down the shovel. He made sure that Danny found every speck of the million shards. “Sweep them up!” he ordered. “Put them in the shovel.”

  Danny was crying before he was halfway finished. He had to get down on his knees and gather the glass with his bare hands. He could feel it digging into his skin, and as he crawled back and forth his jawbreakers and caramels dribbled from his pockets. His eyes were blurred with tears, but wherever he turned he saw Creepy’s feet in front of him, in sandals with straps, in white socks that had fallen in rolls round his ankles. Beau was just standing there, not saying anything.

  When at last he stood up, when Creepy went off with the shovel full of glass, Danny’s knees were scraped and white. Like his hands, they were bleeding.

  He didn’t say a word to Beau all the way home. They didn’t even bother with the cart; they just left it in the grass. Beau put his arm on Danny’s shoulder.

  They found the Old Man digging. It was after five o’clock and he was home. Almost knee deep in the ground, he looked up. “Danny boy, what have you been doing?” he asked.

  “It was Creepy Colvig,” said Danny. His eyes started blinking; he couldn’t help it. Then suddenly he was blubbering, with his nose running and his face feeling hot as fire. “Creepy Colvig made me—”

  “Mister Colvig,” said the Old Man. He didn’t care for Mr. Colvig any more than anyone else in the Hollow, but he hated that nickname.

  “Yeah,” said Danny. “He made me pick up broken glass, ’cause I smashed a bottle, Dad. He made me pick up all the pieces.”

  “He did, did he?” The Old Man let his shovel fall. He came and knelt in front of Danny, then grabbed Danny’s hands and looked at the palms. “Were you there, Beau?”

  “Yes,” said Beau.

  “What did you do?”

  Beau’s answer was so quiet that he had to say it twice, and then his voice was still tiny. “Nothing,” he said, looking down at the dirt.

  “Why not?” said the Old Man.

  “I was scared of him, Dad.” It looked as though Beau, too, might start to cry. “I wanted to, but…” He shrugged.

  “That’s all right, son.” The Old Man stood up. He gave his cap a twist, then climbed from the hole. “You two go inside,” he said. “Get your mother to look at those hands, Danny.”

  He turned his back, and off he went in his jangling walk, with a streak of black sweat down his spine. Danny wiped his eyes and his nose. “He’ll fix him, won’t he, Beau? He’ll teach him a thing or two.”

  “Yeah,” said Beau. He looked up at the sky.

  “Creepy won’t bother us anymore, will he?”

  “He better not,” said Beau. “’Cause if he does, I won’t just stand there like a rat fink, Danny. I won’t let him do that again. Not him, or Dopey neither. If they try to hurt you, I’ll fight back.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Danny.

  They went together into the house, and when Danny shouted for his mother she came thundering fr
om the basement, plucked by the noise from her novel and the plantations of Georgia. She looked at Danny and, in her voice like Scarlett O’Hara, said, “Great balls of fire!”

  Mrs. River told Danny to sit on the kitchen table. She sent Beau to fetch tweezers and the bottle of iodine, and began to pick bits of glass from Danny’s skin.

  eight

  The boys never learned what Old Man River said to Creepy Colvig. They didn’t even know he’d come back until they heard him digging again. Then Danny, a bit ashamed of what he’d done, was afraid to go out and ask.

  Right then, he decided that he would have to spend the rest of his life in the south end of the Hollow and never go near where the Colvigs lived. As he sat on the table, watching his mother scrub the skin raw on his knees and his hands, he felt quite sad about that. He could never cross the little bridge again. He would have to use the big one instead, and walk nearly twice as far to get to school.

  “Sit still,” said his mother.

  “Sorry,” said Danny. He’d been squirming.

  She opened the bottle of iodine. A glass dropper was built into the cap, and it tinkled round the bottle as she stirred.

  “Is it going to hurt?” asked Danny.

  “It might sting,” she said, and it did. But Danny only grimaced; he made no sound as she smeared the iodine across his knees with the glass dropper. It felt tangy and sharp, like lemon juice rubbed into his cuts. Outside, the Old Man’s shovel was scraping on stones. “You should help your father sometimes, Danny. And you too,” said Mrs. River, raising her voice so that Beau would be certain to hear. He was in the living room, and the TV was on.

  She made brownish, rusty streaks across Danny’s knees and his palms. “I don’t know what he’s doing out there, but I don’t like him doing it on his own. He’s like a crazy man, all that digging.”

  “A dog could help him,” Danny said. “If we had a dog, Dad could just show him where to dig, and then stand back and—”

  “Fiddle-dee-dee, is that all you ever think about?” said Mrs. River, suddenly smiling. She gave Danny’s head a little push, and he saw how her eyes were shining, and it made him happy inside. “One day we’ll move to the country,” she said. “We’ll move down South, and the first thing we’ll do is get you a dog. That was always the plan, to live in the country. To have dogs and horses.”

  “Then why don’t we move there?” said Danny.

  “Not enough work for your father.” She looked out the window, then dabbed again with the iodine.

  “But the Hollow’s like the country,” said Danny. “It’s nearly the country.”

  “Oh!” she said with a little laugh. “Now don’t you sound like your father? He said the same thing years ago, when we first came down here. He found he could park his truck out front, and to him this was the country.” She put the dipper back in the iodine bottle and tightened the lid. “Well, he’s never known what it’s like to have your neighbor a mile away. Sometimes I think this is as close to the country as your father ever really wants to get.”

  The Old Man came in then, so suddenly that Danny jumped at the sound of the door banging open. But the Old Man didn’t look angry. He only got himself a glass of water, and he rubbed Danny’s head on the way to the sink, and again on the way back. At the door, just before he slipped out, he said, “I found a burial ground out there, Flo.”

  Beau was gone in an instant, but Danny had to wait as his mother covered his knees with Band-Aids, all that were left in the box. She crossed them over each other, until his knees looked like pink baskets. Then Danny leapt down and ran out, his mother shouting after him not to get himself dirty. He scrambled to the top of the pile, and from there saw the bones right away.

  Three skeletons lay in the ground, in a row that wasn’t quite straight, and not level at all. The Old Man had uncovered them carefully, so that Danny could see how the yellow bones had once been joined.

  The tiniest little body, with its tiny little bones, had been a hamster or a mouse. In the middle was a cat, set down in the ground all curled round itself, the way cats always curled when they slept. The big one had to be a dog, because it wore the loop of a red collar, now dark and moldy. The bits of a brass buckle were there, and a name tag shaped like a bone.

  The Old Man glanced up and saw Danny. “You don’t want to look at this,” he said, shuffling sideways to stand between Danny and the bones. “Me and Beau, we’ll deal with it, son.”

  “I want to see,” said Danny, and he went down and crouched beside the dead dog. He didn’t mind at all that it was now only bones. It was interesting to see the insides of a dog.

  “How long have they been here?” asked Beau.

  “I don’t know,” said the Old Man. “Thirty years if a day, I guess.”

  Danny pulled the name tag from the dirt. He could see that it had once been painted yellow, but now it was almost all rust. He rubbed it on his sleeve, then read the name—Billy Bear—and it made him deeply sad. He could imagine what Billy Bear had looked like; he saw him, in his mind, covered in reddish brown fur, much fatter than he seemed now that he was only bones. He could picture Billy Bear playing with sticks, or reaching up a paw, asking to be stroked. Then he started crying, and kept his head down so that no one would see, because he was very ashamed to be crying twice in one day.

  Beau and the Old Man were talking about the tiniest body, trying to figure out what the mushy stuff around it was. “I bet it’s cardboard,” said Beau. “I bet they buried him in a little cardboard box. See, Dad, that dog was laying on a blanket.”

  Danny hadn’t noticed that, but now he did. Only a shred of cloth was showing, but there were scraps here and there that had been torn away by the Old Man’s shovel. It had been a yellow blanket, just the same color as the name tag. Yellow must have been Billy Bear’s favorite color, Danny thought, and this his favorite blanket, where he’d slept each night for all his life, beside a bed or beside a chair, and now for thirty years in the ground.

  It was clear then to the Old Man and to Beau that Danny was crying. His shoulders were shaking, and a tear fell from his face to land on the little name tag. Danny thought Beau might laugh, but he didn’t. And the Old Man picked him up, lifting him right from the ground the way he hadn’t lifted him in two or three years. The Old Man pressed him to his chest, and Danny smelled the dirt and the sweat, and he shuddered in his father’s strong arms.

  “It’s okay. It’s all right,” said the Old Man, holding him tightly. “Danny, I knew you shouldn’t have looked. Beau, go get the trash can, will you?”

  “No!” said Danny. “He isn’t garbage, Dad. He had a name—it was Billy Bear. What if he’s sleeping here? What if he wants to be petted again?”

  “Oh, Danny, that’s not how it is,” said the Old Man. He eased down to the earth, so that he was kneeling and Danny was standing beside him, still wrapped in his arms. “These are just bones, Danny. They’re no more or less than what’s left on your plate when you finish a pork chop. There’s no feeling in bones, son. The part that was a dog, that’s long gone.”

  “Where did it go?” asked Danny.

  “I don’t know,” said the Old Man. “It’s just gone. Like his heart and his brains and all that. See, Danny, they’re gone. It’s just dirt now, nothing but dirt. The bits that made him up, they make up something else now. A part of Billy Bear could be in a tree, or in the grass over there by Highland Creek. He could even be in you.”

  Old Man River rubbed Danny’s chest with one hand, his back with the other. “I don’t know much about it, Danny. But Billy Bear isn’t down here in the ground anymore, I’ll tell you that.”

  Beau was standing nearby. “Do you still want the garbage can, Dad?” he asked.

  “Well, that’s up to Danny, I guess,” said the Old Man. “If he wants to rebury the bones somewhere else, that’s fine with me.”

  “Why can’t they just stay here?” asked Danny.

  “Because they’re in the way.”

 
“In the way of what?”

  The Old Man sighed. He gestured with his hand, to show Danny all the digging that he’d done. Then he pushed up his cap and sighed again. “Well, maybe it’s time you know. Maybe I should have told you from the start.”

  nine

  From his pocket, Old Man River took out a handkerchief. It was white and blue, with a crimson border, like an American flag squashed in his hand. He wiped Danny’s nose, then folded the cloth and wiped his own forehead. “Boys, I’m not just digging here. I’m building a fallout shelter.”

  None of them knew until then that Mrs. River had come out from the house. She was standing just beyond the pit, at the driveway, where the Old Man’s pile of dirt was smallest. She’d arrived when Old Man River was talking about Billy Bear, and had listened with a look on her face that was soft and tender. But that vanished now.

  “Have you lost your mind?” she shouted. “A fallout shelter?”

  “Now, Flo—” he said.

  “Great balls of fire, Charlie. Why?”

  All of Hog’s Hollow must have heard her shout that word. Birds flew from the trees, and a distant lawn mower stopped mowing, and in the August heat there was such a stillness that Danny heard the crack of a ball on a baseball bat from the field far away. His mother stood there with her hands on her hips, and the Old Man looked as though she’d slapped him.

  “Don’t you read the papers, Flo?” he asked. “Don’t you know what’s going on in Vietnam? It’s 1941 all over again, but this time it’s worse. It will bring the end of everything.”

  The Old Man climbed up onto his mountain of dirt. He stood like Moses at the top of it, and the boys sat below him, and Mrs. River stared up from the driveway. “I see it coming,” said the Old Man.

  Danny was still thinking about Billy Bear, and only half listened to what the Old Man had to say. He’d never heard of Vietnam or the Gulf of Tonkin.

  “This is how the last war started,” said Old Man River. “It’s how they all begin, I guess. A bit of shooting, then it spreads like fire, and there’s no putting it out. But this time it won’t be guns; it will be missiles. It’ll be men pushing buttons, and it will all be over before you even know it’s begun. For crying out loud, they might be pushing the button right now. Those missiles could be dropping out of the sky and—”