Footer Davis Probably Is Crazy (7 page)

I blinked at her, trying to make myself act right.

Ms. Malone poked the arm of my chair. “Tell her why your mom went to the hospital, Footer. And be nice.”

“She hurt her shoulder and had to go to the emergency room to get it taken care of.” I shrugged like that was no big deal. “She really hates doctors, so that probably upset her.”

“Is she easily upset?” Stephanie Bridges asked.

“Not always.”
Liar, liar! Bad luck!
“Well, sometimes.”

The woman narrowed her eyes. “Has she ever gotten angry with you when she was upset?”

“Well, sure.” I picked at the chair arm. “But I deserved it.”

Stephanie Bridges scribbled a note. The triumphant look on her face made me lean forward. “I mean it. I really deserved it. Sometimes I do stupid stuff. Like, I accidentally lit the backyard on fire trying an experiment with a magnifying glass.”

The DCFS woman looked up slowly, her pen frozen in her hand. “You set a fire?”

Doom crashed over me like a cold wave. I wanted to fall out of my chair and die.

Ms. Malone cleared her throat. “You mean the experiment in
Superspy
magazine?”

“Yes, ma'am.” I tore my gaze away from Stephanie Bridges and looked at Ms. Malone instead.

Ms. Malone's expression was relaxed, and her eyes seemed as nice as ever. “Did you use too many newspapers?”

“Way too many.”

The heat in my face faded as Ms. Malone nodded. “I did that too. Driveway still has a black spot.”

We both looked at the DCFS worker, who didn't seem to know what to say next. She finally came up with “What does your mother do when she's angry with you?”

“She tells me not to do stupid stuff like accidentally setting the backyard on fire.” I smiled at Stephanie Bridges. When she didn't smile back, I said, “Sometimes she yells it?”

Would that make her happy? What did she want, anyway? Me, I wanted to get out of that conference room and go back to class, then go home and lie in my bed and think without anybody bothering me. Being interviewed sucked. Maybe Peavine and I shouldn't interview any more people because it sucked so bad. We were probably earning ourselves barrels and barrels of rotten luck. Who wanted to answer hard questions like this?

“Has your mother ever hit you?” Stephanie Bridges asked like she was reading from a list of dumb questions she made up before she ever met me.

“No.”

“Has she ever threatened to hurt you in any way?”

“No.”

“Has she ever put you in danger?”

“Mom would never do that.” The tips of my fingers dug into the chair arms. “She worries about me all the time. She hurt her shoulder trying to be sure a snake didn't bite me.”

At this, Stephanie Bridges brightened, and that doomed feeling washed over me again. “She shot the snake with your father's largest firearm.”

Firearm?
This woman and Angel would get along well. I wondered if she was going to start babbling about well-organized militias. “Yes. The Nitro. It's an elephant gun.”

Stephanie Bridges scribbled on her paper some more, then locked eyes with me. “Did she have any training to use that weapon safely?”

“Who has training to use an elephant gun? I mean in this country. I'm sure people in Africa and India might get training, since elephants actually live there.” I shook my head. “I don't even know why they make elephant guns, because elephants are endangered, and nobody's supposed to shoot them. They should make walrus guns. Walrus guns would make a lot more sense.”

“I agree,” Ms. Malone said. When Stephanie Bridges stared at her, she added, “It's the tusks,” and shivered.

Stephanie Bridges seemed to consider this but then
decided to ignore it. “Your father has quite a collection of dangerous firearms, doesn't he, Font—I mean Footer?”

She was starting to make me really mad, with all her stupid questions and stupid words. “I hear your accent. You're not from any great-big city up north or out west, right?”

“I—uh, no. I'm from Jackson.” Her cheeks got red around the edges.

I tapped my fingers on the table a few times, then tried to be nice again. “Jackson's big enough, I guess.”

“Big enough for what?” She looked confused.

“To mess up your brain so you say ‘firearm' instead of ‘gun.' ”

Now she looked really confused, and her cheeks got a bunch more red. Ms. Malone was smiling a little, and I could tell she was trying not to smile a whole lot. After coughing a few times, Stephanie Bridges came up with “ ‘Firearm' is the proper term. They teach us to use proper terms.”

I stared at her. “Where? In DFCS worker school or something?”

“In social work school, and in our training classes.” Her face was all kinds of red now. That should have made me feel guilty, but it didn't. “It's supposed to make things more clear, and easier when we interview people.”

“It doesn't make it easier for me,” I told her. “It just sounds stupid.”

“Okay,” she said. “I'll try again. Does your dad have a big gun collection?”

She didn't look mad yet. She didn't sound mad either. Did I want her to be mad? Probably not. Only I did, a little bit.

“Dad was a soldier,” I said. “Now he's a policeman. Of course he has guns, but he keeps them locked in the gun case and gun safe so they aren't dangerous. I never shoot them unless he's with me, except for my BB gun.”

The woman's eyes got round. “You have a BB gun?”

Oh, great. “Yes. And safety glasses, and a certificate from the class I took at the sheriff's department to learn to use it safely.”

This seemed to surprise her. “But aren't you a little young to have any kind of gun?”

“You didn't have any brothers, did you?” Ms. Malone asked, only it wasn't really a question. “It's a BB gun. It barely makes holes in cans.”

“You could shoot out your eye with that!” Stephanie Bridges almost yelled, and I wanted to bang my head on the conference table. “And no, I didn't have brothers. It was just my mother and me, but I don't see how that matters.”

“Sure you could shoot your eye out with a BB gun,” I said. “If you were stupid enough not to wear your safety glasses and stare into the barrel while you were shooting it, which would be hard, because it's kind of long, and if
I put my eye on the barrel, I probably couldn't reach the trigger. Are you going to tell Dad you came to talk to me? Because I'm calling him about it the second you leave.”

Stephanie Bridges looked back at her papers and made a few more notes, letting the room get quiet around the air-conditioner hum. Then she said, “I'm not sure it's a good idea to have guns in the house with children and a person who has mental illness.”

I sighed. “I told you, they're locked.”

“Your mother opened the case,” she said. “How?”

The dull
beat-beat
of my heart made me bite my bottom lip. I so wanted this to be over, and I so didn't want to answer this question. I thought about the gun case down in our big basement. There was a pool table down there too, and a television, and Dad's weights, and a little bedroom with a bathroom and shower but no windows. I wanted to be down there right at that moment, watching movies and lifting Dad's hand weights instead of talking to this woman.

“How did your mother open the gun case, Footer?” Stephanie Bridges asked again.

“She bent the lock. Look, I have to go to the restroom,” I said. “And it's almost lunchtime. Are we done?”

Stephanie Bridges shifted her gaze to Ms. Malone, then seemed to process the title of the serial-killer book Ms. Malone was holding. “Are you teaching
that
in the classroom?”

“I took it up from a student,” Ms. Malone said.

“Which student?”

Ms. Malone gave her the best smile I had ever seen. “Footer asked if you were finished.”

Stephanie Bridges eyed her and the book, and then she eyed me. “For now,” she finally said. “But I may have more questions later.”

I'd probably be a good journalist, because when I can't stand stuff anymore and my brain does its freeze-frames, nothing matters more than the words. Like the conversation with Ms. Malone, after Stephanie Bridges finally went away:

Ms. Malone:
I'll take the serial-killer book back to the public library. Why were you reading it?

Me:
Because
Dateline
said maybe a serial killer kidnapped Cissy and Doc Abrams. I wanted to see if any of the guys in that book kidnapped kids.

Ms. Malone:
This is where I'm supposed to lecture you about not messing around the
Abrams farm because it could be dangerous, then get annoyed because you're saying “Yes, ma'am” but really ignoring me.

Me:
Yes, ma'am

Ms. Malone:
Footer, while Ms. Bridges is involved with your family, I wouldn't light any fires with magnifying glasses or poke around those ashes or check out any more books about serial killers. She might get the wrong idea.

Me:
Yes, ma'am.

I remembered it all, but it was snips and snaps, with words in the picture instead of faces. No other sights, no other sounds, no other feelings. Snip, snap.

“What'd your dad say when you called?” Peavine asked me a few hours later, at recess.

“He was ticked.” I wiped sweat off my forehead with my arm, then scrubbed my arm on my shirt. “He's checking with people. He said we'd talk when he gets home tonight.”

We were standing under the maple tree near the back of the sixth-grade wing. We could see Angel's class out behind their wing, and across the street from the third graders a bunch of teachers were coming and going from the convenience store and fast-food restaurants, carrying sacks. There was a guy standing out beside the store too.

“Your dad and the doctors going to let you go to the hospital tomorrow after school?” Peavine asked.

“I threw a big fit this morning about seeing Mom, so probably.” I studied the guy at the store. He had on jeans and a red plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off. He had to be about to melt in this heat. His hair was dark and short, but he was too far away for me to make out more details. He stood near the store's door eating a sandwich, as if he wanted to seem like he was minding his own business and having lunch, but I knew he was watching the playground.

Here was a suspicious stranger if I ever saw one.

“Look,” I told Peavine, nodding toward the store. “That guy is creeping me out. Just what we needed in Bugtussle. Wood lice, snakes, a fire, missing kids, my mother, a serial killer—and now a creep. We should maybe interview him.”

“Great,” Peavine muttered, like he was the one catching a creep at work, but then I glanced toward where he was pointing. Angel was standing near the corner of the third-grade wing. She had on a yellow dress covered in long ribbons. She also had one of her thick books clutched against her chest, and a ring of kids around her. The teachers were halfway behind the other corner, so they couldn't see what was happening.

Peavine started forward, swinging his legs with a vengeance.

“She hates it when you help her,” I called after him.

“Yeah, well, too bad,” he shot back.

I followed. The kids around Angel didn't see us coming. When we got there, the boy in front, a grimy little bully named Max Selwin, pushed Angel backward. Her shoulders hit the red brick wall.

“Gimme the book, freak,” Max said.

Angel stared at the ground and shook her head. “No.”

“I said, give it here.”

“No!”

Peavine didn't stop at the line of kids. He shouldered right through them. They scattered sideways, letting me through too. Max raised his hand to grab Angel's book, but Peavine hit him in the elbow with his crutch.

“Ow!” Max grabbed his arm and whirled to face us. He had to look up to go eye to eye with Peavine, and that only seemed to make the kid madder.

“Oh, good.” His dirt-smeared face twisted into a sneer. “It's the freak's crippled brother.”

Max laughed. Nobody else did. I stopped beside Peavine, fists raised and ready. I'd never hit anybody in my life, but just that second, I thought I could.

“I can handle this,” Angel said from behind Max. “It's no big deal.”

“Your sister's a retard,” Max snarled at Peavine, only he couldn't really pronounce the word right. It came out
reee-tord
.

“You're trying to say ‘retard,' ” Peavine corrected, like he was talking to somebody who couldn't spell his own name. He gave Max the once-over, from his grubby tennis shoes to his lame band-logo T-shirt. “What you mean is ‘intellectually disabled'—and you're stupid enough to think that's an insult. If you'd called her a gutless wonder like Max Selwin, now
that
woulda been rude.”