The Right Side of Wrong Page 11

  Poole and a number of the long-gone city leaders didn’t want to drink water coloreds swam in, so they blocked the transfer and the parks department gave up. After that, the lake was the municipal water source, but it was almost ignored by the City Council and most disturbances were handled by the local constabulary.

  John knew full well why Ned didn’t want him there, but he flashed the Parkers a grin. “I’ll take these two from here. Y’all let me know what happened.”

  ***

  Glad to be relieved of Tamara and Carl, they pulled up to a crowd surrounding the funeral home ambulance. Two boats were already on the sun-drenched lake, dragging for the body. It surprised Ned, because the lake was owned by the town of Chisum, and they were notoriously slow at responding to incidents at their own water source.

  The milling onlookers parted as the lawmen made their way down to the rickety boat dock. It was a scene they’d seen all too many times. A woman shrieked on the nearby grassy bank, surrounded by several children that favored her. A number of shocked faces watched the men as they approached.

  They hoped they could help, but as unfortunate tradition dictated, lawmen usually arrived too late to do much more than take reports and try to assist the living.

  The dead were already gone.

  James met them beyond earshot of the grieving family. Top and Pepper hung close, away from the crowd and weeping woman. “Dad, I know there ain’t much you can do, but I figured you oughta be here anyway. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything so terrible happen so fast, and weren’t nothing anyone could do.”

  He paused to gather himself.

  “We were sitting under that tree over there, eating our dinner, when this family here came up in their little boat. Didn’t none of them have a life jacket on, but nobody out here was wearing one today, the wind was so still.

  “They came up to the dock here, and the daddy set the kids out one at a time. Then the mama got out while he steadied the boat. When she stepped off, the boat shot out from under him and he fell out and hit his head on the corner post there.

  “Ned, that feller went in the water as slick as a snake and he never hardly caused a ripple, and he ain’t come up yet.”

  Cody nodded his head toward Top and Pepper. “They see it?”

  “Sure ’nough. Everybody was watching them get out of the boat because they had a whole stringer of perch and were holding it up.”

  Ned stared across the still lake and felt his heart sink. “My Lord. The angels come and get you just…that…fast.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Miss Becky was stirring a pot of boiling rice when I came in for breakfast. She always considered rice a breakfast food. Long before the water cooked out of the pan, she shut off the burner and put a lid on the pot. It sure beat the corn flakes Grandpa liked to eat before she put eggs and bacon on his plate.

  She kneaded the biscuit dough resting on a plywood breadboard. I had never seen her hands idle. They were always busy as all get-out with sewing, cutting vegetables from the garden, or washing.

  “It’s nearly dinnertime and you’re just now stirring this morning. I guess it’s ’cause you flopped around most of the night, little man. I heard you all the way in our bedroom.”

  “I was having bad dreams.”

  She rolled the dough flat with a glass rolling pin. “They weren’t about the Rock Hole, were they?”

  “No ma’am.” Those dreams I had about the swimming hole were bad for several months, but they finally led Grandpa and Mr. John to save us from the Skinner, a killer who terrorized people in Center Springs over a year earlier. “These are about a big ol’ dark building and people with black hair. They keep trying to catch me and lock me up in caves.”

  Some of us Parkers had always been either blessed or cursed, however you wanted to look at it, with a vague ability to see the future. Unfortunately for us, the dreams seldom made sense, and we usually couldn’t figure them out until after something occurred. Then everything was usually clear, but always too late.

  She used a biscuit cutter to remove round disks from the dough, and dipped each one in lard before crowding it into the pan. “Sounds like the Cotton Exchange. That place burned down, and good riddance. I’m thankful to the good Lord that Cody and John got out of there before it fell.”

  “It ain’t the Cotton Exchange.” I thought about it for a minute. “I was using my secret agent briefcase outside there in the hot sun and taking pictures with it of dark people talking. I don’t know what all this is, but I wake up feeling like I’m in trouble or something.”

  “You ain’t in trouble, hon.”

  “I know that, but I still feel like something bad is about to happen. There’s kids in the dream, too, and it looks like one of them old timey movies with Model T cars, and horses, and people who look Indian.”

  Miss Becky paused, turning something over in her mind. “I want to ask you something, but you don’t say nothing to nobody after we’re done here. There ain’t nothin’ wrong, but there’s some stories and feelings that needs to be left alone.”

  “Yessum.”

  “In these dreams, are there colored people with the Indians, and are there little children that ain’t right?”

  By that, she meant retarded, because that’s the way our people talked about anyone who wasn’t right, the way they called some kids Mongoloid.

  “No. They’re Indian-looking people.”

  “What about them horses? Do they act normal?”

  I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about. “They’re horses.”

  “Does it look like when me and your Grandpa were young?”

  “I didn’t say y’all were in the dreams.”

  “I know, but was it around that time?”

  “I can’t say.”

  Great-Grandpa could put his finger a time or two on things that he dreamed and understood, but his visions weren’t dreams. They were real, like the time he and Great-Grandma were hurrying out of the bottoms in the wagon to get the doctor for his mama. Before they crossed the creek bridge in broad daylight, a wooden coffin floated across the dirt road. He knew what had happened, reined in the horses, and went on back home, because he knew his mama had already died.

  She was gone when they got there.

  “Where’s Grandpa?” I didn’t want to tell her about the angels, either. I had to study on that one for a while. I’d dreamed they were wrapping someone up with their wings so they wouldn’t get hurt in a hailstorm, but I couldn’t tell who it was that was in trouble. I thought it was Uncle Cody in the car wreck a few months earlier, but there wasn’t any hail that night, only snow, and we usually don’t dream of stuff after it happens, so I didn’t want to worry Miss Becky about angels, ’cause I knew she’d have to take us to church and pray on it.

  “He went with your Uncle Cody up to the store.”

  The rice was still soupy and full of juice when she dipped a bowl full and sweetened it with sugar. “Eat this. Pepper and Ida Belle will be here in a little bit.”

  “I remember one dream real clear, though. It was about Mark Lightfoot.”

  She brightened at his name. Mark Lightfoot was full-blood Choctaw, and I met him up at the feed store in Hugo. He came to live with us for a while when his whole family was murdered not far from Grandpa’s house. His no’count daddy went to jail, and nobody could find any of his relatives. I think Grandpa and Miss Becky were about to try and adopt him when some of his Choctaw kinfolk showed up in the yard one day and took him away.

  “What was it about?”

  “Not much, but he was talking about you and wanted some of your biscuits.” Mark loved her cooking, and while he lived with us, he must have growed three inches. “We talked for a while, but I can’t remember what it was about, and then an Indian with his long hair tied back threw a handful of powder onto a fire and Mark disappeared.
”

  Miss Becky closed her eyes and moved her lips in a quiet prayer. “Well, let’s hope he’s doing all right. Was there anything else?”

  I still had angels on my mind, but I kept that one to myself.

  ***

  I was on my hands and knees beside the pasture, crawling up on a red bird sitting on the bottom strand of the bobwire fence, when Uncle James’ car pulled up in the drive and Aunt Ida Bell and Pepper got out. For once Hootie wasn’t interested in what I was doing. He was dozing on the front porch and out of my way. Aunt Ida Belle pulled a bag full of clothes out of the back seat and went inside the house.

  Pepper walked over to where I was within ten feet of the bird, but she didn’t sneak. The red bird cheeped, flipped the line, and was gone.

  I stood up, frustrated. “What did you do that for?”

  “What? What were you doing?”

  “I was sneaking up on that bird.”

  “What’s in your hand?”

  “Miss Becky’s salt shaker.”

  “What are you doing with that?”

  “Uncle Cody told me that if I could sneak up and shake salt on a bird’s tail, it’d let me pick it up.”

  Pepper snickered. “You ignernt shit! That’s what adults tell us, but it ain’t true. You can’t sneak up on a tee-tiny bird like that and shake salt on it. It’ll fly away every time. What they’re trying to say is if you can get close enough to shake salt on it, you’re already close enough to catch the stupid bird, and that’s all.”

  I was suddenly embarrassed when I realized I’d been had again by an adult. I held the shaker down low beside my leg, to get it out of sight. I felt like giving her a punch in the kisser. “What are y’all doing here?”

  “Mama had some clothes that needed sewing, and our machine is on the fritz, so she came over to use Miss Becky’s treadle.”

  Electric machines sometimes have problems with their motors, but Miss Becky’s foot-treadle Singer always worked.

  I noticed the pocket on Pepper’s jeans was full of something. “What’s that?”

  With a grin, she tugged out a little transistor radio covered by a leather case. “Listen.” She flicked the ON dial with her thumb and Sam the Sham was counting in Spanish. Then his song “Wooly Bully” started.

  “That’s a nasty song,” I told her.

  Pepper turned it up. “No it ain’t. It’s about buffalo.”

  I wasn’t sure, but she usually knew more about that stuff than I did. “Where’d you get the radio?”

  “It belongs to Christine Berger. She got it for her thirteenth birthday, but the battery ran out and she didn’t have a new one, so she let me borrow it for a while if I’d put a new one in. Look, it has seven transistors, that’s the best, and it has a marine band, too, so you can hear about the ocean.”

  “Let me see it a minute.” She handed me the radio and I slipped the case off, then used my thumb to pop off the back.

  “Hey, what the hell are you doing?”

  She snatched at my hand, but I jerked it away and held the open radio to my nose to take a deep sniff. Of all the smells in the world, I loved to smell the plastic and transistors best.

  “Gimme that back. You’re the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Here.” Instead, I put the radio back together, but not until after one more sniff. The Beach Boys were trying to get Rhonda to help them when I gave it back.

  This time Pepper slid it into her shirt pocket so we could hear the music. “Well, what do you want to do?”

  “Look at these.” I took a package of pictures out of my back pocket. “Miss Becky had these developed at the drugstore. I took ’em with my spy camera.”

  The pictures were stapled on one end, and bound inside a fold of yellow cardboard. The first shot was fuzzy, but you could tell it was Pepper standing on the front porch.

  “I don’t remember you taking that one.”

  I grinned. “That’s how you use a spy camera in a case. This is the first one I took and you didn’t know it, but it’s a little fuzzy.”

  She flipped to the second photograph. Miss Becky and Grandpa were sitting at the table, and you could tell I shot through the window screen. The third picture of Grandpa asleep in his rocking chair was much better.

  “These are boring.”

  “The snow pictures are next.”

  She flipped to the next one showing everyone standing outside St. Joseph’s Hospital, looking worried. It was the morning we went to visit Uncle Cody after his wreck. “Did you take these through the case?”

  I swelled up with pride. “Yep. I got better at holding it still and figuring how to aim.”

  The last three shots were clearest of all. One was Pepper making a snowball. Another showed the street covered in snow. The last picture was Pepper making a snow angel in front of the courthouse while we waited for Grandpa to come down from visiting with Judge Rains.

  She handed them back and I stuffed the booklet into my back pocket. “I’m bored.”

  I grabbed my BB gun that was leaning against the porch, and Hootie stretched and trotted along behind us. “Let’s go to Mr. Tom’s.” We hadn’t been over there in several days, though the sounds of constant hammering told us he was still working on the house. It was quiet that morning, though.

  We walked down the hill and along the gravel drive to the highway, then darted across the cement and the bar ditch into the trees on the other side. Hootie ran ahead and then locked up in a point when he smelled quail hiding under a dead limb half-covered with last year’s berry vines.

  I stepped up like I’d seen Grandpa do, and the little hen exploded through the dried vine and whirred away. I threw the BB gun to my shoulder and sent a shot after it.

  “You better be glad you missed that bird,” Pepper said. “It ain’t quail season and she’ll probably make a nest to set pretty soon. Grandpa’d wear your ass out if you’da hit it.”

  She was right, and I felt bad about shooting, but it didn’t seem right to let a flushing bird go after Hootie made such a good point. “Well, it’s almost impossible to hit a flying bird with a BB anyway.”

  “Colton Jenkins hunts them with a twenty-two.”

  “I’ve heard that, but I don’t believe it. You can’t hit a flying bird with a rifle, especially not one as little as that, besides, it’s dangerous, there’s no telling where that bullet will go.”

  “Well, they say he does.”

  For my entire life, I’d wondered who “they” were. “They” were always telling people stuff that was both true and untrue.

  We continued through the woods, intending to intersect the two-track road leading to Mr. Tom’s house. It didn’t take us long to get there, and the silence told me Mr. Tom was gone.

  I wanted to turn around and go back home, but Pepper got that light in her eyes again. “Come on. I want to look around while he’s gone.”

  Walking around the house by ourselves didn’t seem right to me, even though we’d been over there so much helping him work. The outside was finished, though not yet painted. The foundation was still open, but the floor joists in a couple of rooms resting on fresh new bodark posts were straight and level. I knelt to see if there were any critters under the house, but the only thing under there was Hootie sniffing around.

  Everything in the still air smelled like fresh-sawed pine, and sawdust caught in the grass like yellow snow. There were still stacks of lumber covered with canvas tarps in the yard. The scrap lumber fire was almost completely out, though a tiny wisp of smoke rose straight up.

  Pepper climbed the porch steps and peeked through the new windows. Mr. Tom hadn’t gotten around to hanging curtains yet, and the living room was wide open to the outside. “There’s that trunk still sitting in the middle of the floor.”

  “So.”

  “I’ve been wondering what’
s in it.”

  “Oh no. You stay out of that house. That’s Mr. Tom’s trunk, and when he wants us to know what he has in there, he’ll tell us.”

  She left the window and stopped in front of the wooden door. She gave it a push, and it silently swung open. “Ooops.” There was that Betty Boop voice of hers, and every time she used it, we got in trouble. “Look, the door is open. He didn’t lock it when he left. I bet we oughta to go in and make sure everything is all right. You know, bandits could have come around and robbed him.”

  I stayed right where I was beside the dying fire, and didn’t move. “Don’t go in there.” We’d been in the house a hundred times in the last few weeks, but it didn’t seem right to go in while Mr. Tom was gone.

  She peered inside and called in a singsong voice. “Mr. Tom! You’ve got company! You home?”

  I expected to find his truck rolling down the dirt drive at any time.

  Pepper stepped inside. “We’re here to help clean up some of this sawdust.”

  Her voice was barely audible, and I was shocked to find myself standing at the base of the new porch steps. “Who you talking to?”

  “Nobody, you idiot. He’s not home. Come on! Don’t you want to know about him?” She came back to the door. “He doesn’t tell us anything. I bet there are some papers in the trunk that’ll let us know what he did down there in south Texas. I bet he was a cowboy, or a big rancher. I bet that’s it. He owned a giant ranch down there like the Ponderosa in Bonanza, and then he sold it and came back up here.”

  Her eyes widened. “The trunk is probably full of money from the ranch. He hasn’t moved it since we first came here, because it’s probably full of twenty-dollar gold pieces and it’s too heavy.”

  And there I was, peeking in the doorway. “You think it’s full of gold?”