Rainy Season (6 page)

“Yep.”

“And stop worrying.”

“Yep.” I hang up. The Wagners’ blue ocean carpet looks so restful. I lie down on the carpet and close my eyes. My body feels limp, like those papery-winged brown moths that get trapped inside our house. Whenever I see them, dead in Marita’s dustpan, I always try to think how it served the moth right for heading like a kamikaze pilot right into our burning hot lightbulbs. Still, those dumb moths make me sad, especially when Marita sweeps them off to their garbage can graves. What a strange place to die and be buried, in a place that doesn’t have anything to do with how you lived. Even if you are just a moth, it’s a shame.

From far away I think I hear Charlie’s voice. He and Ted must have arrived already. Maybe they’ll all just go along and build the war fort without me. Then I could sleep for a while. I can hear them talking and laughing. Soon their voices are only little hooks of noise that catch me from drowning into sleep.

“Hey, Sleeping Ugly, are you sick?” Charlie’s voice jerks my eyes open.

“I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Why are you lying down on the rug? Everyone’s heading out.” He crouches beside me. “Let’s go.”

“Mom thinks I should see Dr. Forrest again.”

“Old Forehead? What for?”

“For my worrying. What do you think?”

“How do I know? It’s not like it’s the job of my life to understand about
you,
Lane,” Charlie says impatiently.

“Should I go back to Dr. Forrest, though?”

“I’d rather be crazy all day long than listen to that lady again.” He flattens his hair back from his forehead and in a froggy voice says, “Hello, I’m Dr. Forehead. What are you problems? My problem is that I’m a big, boring pumpkin-head since all I do is listen to other people’s problems.”

I smile and Charlie punches my arm, not quite hard enough to hurt. “Get up. Everyone’s waiting. If you act normal for a few days, we can all forget about it.”

W
HILE MRS. WAGNER FIDGETS
and twitches, but dares not say a word, Dan, Steph, Rat, and I pile into the flatbed of Ted’s old truck. Bundles of rough yellow wooden planks, tied and stacked, take up most of the room. Charlie’s up front, but he has to hold the handsaw and Ted’s toolbox on his lap. Ted refuses to let the toolbox out of his sight, for even a second, although the only one who’d ever think of stealing it is Charlie.

We each slurp a Popsicle from the box Mrs. Wagner passed around after lunch. Mine is grape. Purple juice rolls down my wrist faster than I can lick it away and my fingers are stained and sticky. Steph and Rat both picked lime and their lips are smeared green.

“All on?” Ted shouts. He starts the ignition.

“Are you kids safe?” Mrs. Wagner finally peeps. “I mean, isn’t this a little dangerous, with everyone in the back and no seatbelts?” Steph and Rat look straight ahead, like they don’t have any connection to this weird lady who decided to come out of her house and ask us questions.

“Ted’s a good driver,” I say. I feel like I
have
to say something. “And we’re just going over to Third Street.”

“You should stop by and pick up Dana Franken, then. Her family lives on First Street, I think, and she seems like a nice girl.”

I can’t answer because the truck lurches away from her, kicking up a cloud of dust.

“Did you hear her say that?” Steph bares her teeth and opens her eyes wide like Orphan Annie. “Frankenstein’s daughter? So we could talk about what—Ozzy Osbourne and ACDC? And it’s not even on the way. Why’s Mom just so totally, incredibly winky?”

“Don’t worry about it, Steph.” Rat scratches his chin. “Hey, you know, maybe we should cruise over to the other side and check out the other fort.”

“Good plan.” Dan leans into the rear view window and signals.

“What?” shouts Ted over his shoulder. He slows down the truck.

“Check out the other side first,” Dan yells. “The competition, right?”

“Done.” Ted yells back “But first we gotta swing around to Fifth Street and get Mary Jane Harris.” I snake my eyes a fraction over to my right to catch Steph’s reaction. She’d been slouched, mosquito-gnawed legs splayed out in front of her and arms spread-eagled over the sides of the truck, but at the mention of Mary Jane Harris’s name she yanks herself up so that her spine is rifle straight.

“I don’t think so!” she brays. “I do not think so!”

“Let it go,” Rat tells her. “Forget about it.”

“I don’t think so!” Steph tries to stand and manages a wobbling stoop. She begins pounding her fist on the roof of the truck on the driver’s side. Ted swerves off to the shoulder of the road and brakes; we all hang on to the walls of the truck at the sudden motion. Ted leaps out and looks up at Steph, who’s now planted in the center of the truck. Green-mouthed, hands clamped on her hips and feet locked a shoulder’s width apart, she looks like a mule or a skinny version of Wonder Woman.

“She comes, I go.” Steph rubs the side of her nose and flicks the sweat off her fingers.

“She comes. I invited her yesterday at Kobbe and she called me this morning,” Ted answers flatly.

“Then I go.”

“What’s your problem, Steph?”

“Unless she admits she never jumped off the Miraflores water tower.” Steph holds up one finger. “I know for a fact she didn’t and for a month she’s told everyone she did, which makes her a liar, because her initials aren’t up there. I should know because mine are up since I’m the only girl I know who ever jumped! Ever!”

“Here we go again.” Rat snaps his Popsicle stick in half and begins tapping them on his knee in a drumbeat. “Day-oh!” He sways his head and sings in reggae rhythm, “Day-light come and Steph never for-get.”

“Shut up, Rat,” Steph snaps.

“Steph, no one cares about this except you,” Ted sighs.

“You wouldn’t say that if Mary Jane was a guy. You’d care—you’d make him do a do-over.”

Ted pauses, and I can tell he can’t figure out if he agrees with her on this point or not. “Let’s just go by her house and see what she says.” He pulls off his shirt and ties it like a bandanna over his head. “Maybe ask her for a do-over and see what happens, okay?”

“Okay.” Steph looks smug. They exchange a nod of truce and Ted climbs back in the truck. Steph slouches back and closes her eyes, her chin dropped down to her chest. Her expression reminds me of a boxer during a time-out.

“This should be interesting.” I try for a careless laugh and a toss of my hair, like Nancy Drew. Except that Nancy Drew’s hair is titian-colored, which I looked up and it’s just a complicated, pretty way of saying red. I can’t think of a pretty way of saying dark brown. Dead grass, dirt, moths, meatloaf … only ugly, boring things are dark brown.

“Hey, you don’t think Mary Jane Harris actually jumped, do you?” Steph’s eyes crack open to glare at me.

“Well, if she was at the tower, someone had to take her there, right? It’s not like she rowed herself out there all alone. So who are her witnesses?”

“She says it was her hicksville cousins visiting from the States.” Steph leans out of the truck and shoots a lime-green wad of spit into the road. “That’s convenient, huh?”

“We’ll hear the story soon enough,” Rat grumbles. “Like we haven’t heard it a hundred times before already.”

“It ain’t fair, though.” Steph never says “ain’t” unless she’s really peeved about something. She flutter-kicks her heels, and the metal floor sounds like a kettle-drum beneath us. “I one hundred percent know that she didn’t jump. I just
know,
because she got a lot of facts wrong when I quizzed her about exactly how it feels to fall down from so high and plus she didn’t put in her initials before she went. I don’t see why Ted invited her to come along with us, anyway. It’s not like she’s in our usual group. Why couldn’t he have asked Chris Lorno or Tim Polanski? Mary Jane Harris! That girl’s such a wink! She gives girls a bad name!”

“Calm down there, Steph.” Rat reaches over and pinches the toe of her sneaker. “You act like jumping off the top of the Miraflores tower is the biggest thing in the world.”

Steph quiets down but I can almost hear what she’s thinking—that Rat wouldn’t know since he’s too chicken to jump. I am, too.

Showing some loyalty to Steph’s side of the story, Ted rudely beeps the horn when we pull up to Mary Jane’s house instead of getting out and walking to the door the way he usually does. Mary Jane sweeps out immediately, swinging her ugly white fishnet purse that she carries everywhere and wearing a pair of purple-rimmed sunglasses. Steph huffs, “What’re those stupid glasses—” but Rat smacks Steph quick on the shin to interrupt her before Mary Jane can hear.

“How do, all?” Mary Jane slurs in her funny Southern accent, hoisting herself up into the flatbed. She thumps the side of the truck, so Ted knows to push off, but it stays stopped. We all mumble hellos; everyone’s nervous, waiting for Steph’s attack. She doesn’t disappoint us.

“Look, M.J.,” she starts off immediately. “We’re all having a problem with this supposed, so-called jump you made off the Miraflores tower last month, which no one saw and no initials to prove it.” Steph’s saying “we” makes me look down and start examining my fingernails.

“My cousins seen. They seen when they come down to visit, but all of ’em’re home, now.” Mary Jane talks like she’s stumbling for the right words. “Y’all know they went back to Roybrush, to Georgia.”

“Ain’t good enough.” Steph stretches out her bony arms behind her and then lets her neck drop back into the sling she’s made from her interlocked fingers. She draws her elbows together in front of her face. Now no one can see her lips talk. “I am officially challenging you to a do-over, Mary Jane Harris. Today if possible. So that none of us has any doubts.”

Up in the driver seats, the backs of Ted and Charlie’s heads are still, listening. The purple-rimmed glasses shield most of Mary Jane’s expression and she doesn’t speak for a while. Dan leans out the side of the truck and hucks a glob of grape spit. I copy him, watching it sizzle to nothing on the black road. Rat coughs into his hand. The sun feels like it’s broiling up my sweat before it has a chance to cool me down, and it hurts when I unstick my fricasseed legs from the floor of the truck.

“Look here,” Mary Jane finally says. “I done it before, I do it again. Anytime. Ya’all can be witnessers.”

“Fine,” Steph says. “Right.” She looks a little confused. I bet she was hoping for a crybaby breakdown and confession.

Ted pulls away from the curb. No one speaks. Mary Jane rummages in her big ugly pocketbook and extracts a tube of Bonnie Bell spearmint lipgloss, and she begins to slather it over her lips. I breathe the layered smell of mint and lumber and close my eyes against the tension of Steph’s clamped face.

We turn off Fifth Street and onto Main Road, which runs clear from the front gate of Fort Bryan all the way to the back entrance. Every public building on base is located just off Main Road, all in sight. We pass the squat commissary and the red-tile roofed post office, the box-shaped church, and the compact shopping complex where a few stores offer a limited selection of shoes or bedsheets or lamps. Most of what Mom buys comes from catalogs from the States or downtown, off-base. We pass the Rec Center, where you can go bowling or take karate classes, the movie theater with only one screening room, and over the hill, all by itself, the gym where everyone plays racquetball. There are only two courts and you have to call to reserve a spot almost a week in advance. Charlie and I love to play racquetball, even though he usually wins, and we always fight over who gets the blue-grip racquet.

Suddenly Charlie twists around from the front and yells, “We should grab one so I can crush you again.”

“I’ll call when we get home,” I say.

“What are you guys talking about?” Dan stares at me with a frown between his eyes. “I hate it when you both do that weird mind-reading stuff. Steph and Rat are
twins,
and they never do that.”

“Speaking of getting crushed,” Steph says, her eyes thoughtful in the distance. “We need to get some weapons for our fort. Those kids from the other side mean business.”

“Yeah.” Everyone agrees in grave voices—even me, although I wonder if everyone’s clear on what “mean business” really means. In fact, even though I’d never really admit it to Steph or Charlie, or even Ted, I’m not sure why we fight against the other side kids at all, except that we don’t know them because they don’t go to our school.

We’re winding along past Ninth Street when Charlie calls out, “Where’s their fort, anyway?”

“Behind Tenth,” Rat shouts back. “All the way in back of the basketball courts.”

By the time we climb down from the truck, I’m excited to see the other side’s fort for myself. Tenth Street is long and mostly uphill, and we make a straggly path up to a building stamped
#8BQ
; a plain gray block divided by cookie-cutter lines of curtain-less windows. Dan says it’s where unmarried soldiers live and that BQ stands for Bachelors’ Quarters. The basketball court lies behind it. It’s just a sunken rectangle of poured concrete, with stairs leading down—built like a swimming pool that’s all shallow end. Weeds spring up in the loose chinks, and a deflated basketball is slumped in the corner.

The kids from the other side have built their fort in the far backyard of the BQ. We spot the fort immediately; it looks like Mina and Pop’s old outhouse, only it’s built against a thick-trunked tree. I can just see the bicycle chain and lock twisted tight around the door. But what I don’t see is what Charlie spies immediately.

“Kid,” he hisses.

We stop in our tracks. It’s then that I notice the skinny legs, attached to a pair of blue sneakers, dangling from the tree.

T
HE REST OF THE
body’s invisible, lost in a rubbery leaf awning. We don’t know if the kid sees us so we approach carefully. Charlie glances at me with that weird, blank expression he always gets when he’s in the middle of a situation that he can’t predict. I don’t even swallow; water gathers slowly in my mouth as we shove through the ragged weed grass. I do notice that Steph takes the opportunity to catch hold of Ted’s wrist, but he doesn’t seem to care.