Hound Dog True (2 page)

Things that don't belong on the walls have shelf spots or drawer spots, all of them labeled neat.

SCREWS

GLUE

TAPE

EXTENSION CORDS

STRING

Uncle Potluck's chair has a label, too.
DIRECTOR OF CUSTODIAL ARTS
it says on the back. Neat and square.

Mama is neat, too, Mattie thinks. But Mama's neat is about getting rid of things. Every time she and Mattie moved, things got left behind. Toasters and TV trays and Mattie's old dollhouse, all left by the driveway, a
FREE
sign propped against them. Mama never owns more than can fit in a pickup truck.

When Mattie was real little, she would buckle herself into the truck before any boxes got packed, afraid maybe there wouldn't be room for her. Used to think that was what had happened to her father, that he hadn't fit in the truck and Mama had driven off. Really, he was just too young to get married, so he drove off himself.

Mattie pushes the
DIRECTOR OF CUSTODIAL ARTS
chair up to the desk, so Uncle Potluck can maneuver the ladder. Watches him hang it firm in the ladder spot. Sees a spot marked
RECYCLING
and sets the bulb box there, which is exactly where it goes.

"Mattie Mae," Uncle Potluck says. "I have a mind to declare you too talented for this here school and take you on as an apprentice." And it feels like Uncle Potluck has drawn a fat white belonging-line around her.

MATTIE MAE BREEN CUSTODIAL APPRENTICE

T
HAT AFTERNOON
M
ATTIE TAKES
something shiny-silver out of her bureau, carries it to Uncle Potluck's rock ledge out on the rise. It is shady there now, but most of the day the rock has kept company with the sunshine, and the day-heat has soaked up into it. Mattie lies down flat on the rock, feeling the warmth of it on her belly. She places the silver thing in front of her.

It is a notebook.

A silver notebook with creamy white paper stitched into it—the kind a person would have to work real hard to tear a page out of.

It was a gift from Mama, given two weeks ago, on the very day she said they'd be moving again. "I thought you might want to write your feelings in it," Mama had said, but right off, Mattie knew that book was too fine for feelings. And she didn't write stories anymore. Not since Star.

Mattie didn't tell Mama that, though. Just said
thank you.

Now, turns out, she does have something worth writing in that silver book.

Mattie Breen, Custodial Apprentice, she writes.

Her stomach flutters, sam as Mama's fingers. This is how it feels to make a plan.

 

There are laws, Mattie knows.

There are laws that say she has to be in the classroom and learn fractions and spelling and survival of the fittest. But there are not laws about going outside at recess time. And there are not laws about where to sit at lunchtime.

And there are not laws that say you have to show up at the same exact time everybody else does and jostle around in the coatroom. You could go earlier. Your coat doesn't have to be with everybody else's coat.

It could have its own peg someplace else.

And your boots could rest someplace else, too.

If you were helpful to somebody—really, truly helpful, apprentice-like helpful—you could probably go help that person during all those lawless times.

Mattie turns the page, runs her finger down the center stitches. Her stomach flutters again.

Custodial Wisdom, she writes.

Underneath, she writes all the things she's learned—about custodial safety and being prepared, mostly. Like how as soon as you are done vacuuming, you are supposed to pull the plug from the socket and wind the cord snug up so nobody trips on it. And how before you do any mopping, you have to set out that yellow
CAUTION
pyramid.

There's a stick man on the pyramid, like the one on Uncle Potluck's ladder, except this stick man has one leg up in the air and his arms flung around with little motion parentheses. Like he's lost his footing, Mattie thinks, except he doesn't really have feet, just rounded spots at the ends of his legs. Makes sense he'd slide.

She doesn't write the footless part in her notebook. Just the serious part about putting out
CAUTION
pyramids and mopping and how when you're all done, you have to look back and make sure you didn't miss a spot or leave puddles orphaned anyplace. Either was an indication of faulty professionalism, Uncle Potluck said.

Mattie writes that down, too.

Faulty professionalism.

She will not be a faulty professional. She will spend the next four days writing and learning and being professional next to Uncle Potluck, proving herself worthy of being a true custodial apprentice. Proving how once school starts, he should keep her by his side, instead of making her go to lunch or recess or be with whatever wild kids might be at Mitchell P. Anderson Elementary.

That is Mattie's plan.

Four days of proving. And then on Saturday, or maybe Sunday, she'll talk to Uncle Potluck about it—apprentice to custodian. And on Monday she'll be able to introduce herself to her new class just fine.

I'm Mattie Breen.

I'm a custodial apprentice.

She can hear herself saying this bold and friendly, standing in front of the blackboard. Sees and hears it so much, she does not see or hear anything else.

Does not hear someone else coming up the rise toward her. Is not ready when the voice stabs out.

"What are you writing?"

Mattie feels herself spring from the rock, spill to the grass, scramble upright. Out the side of her eye she sees a flash: her silver notebook turning in the air, pages exposed, falling to the ground.

A hand reaches for it, but Mattie grabs faster.
Mine,
she shouts, but only in her head.

Thumpthumpthump,
the thump of her heartbeat matching the thud of her feet on the ground, already running down the rise, her head saying
stop
and
stupid
and
baby,
but she does not stop because her head is also already saying
too late now
and
too late now
and
too late now,
until she is in the house with the door shut solid behind her, sliding down to sit, her notebook pressing to her
thumpthumpthump
ing heart.

Thumpthumpthump.

Thump-thump-thump.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Mattie peeks out the kitchen window, looks past the garden and up the rise.

There is a girl out there. A tall girl. A teenager-looking girl, standing up by Uncle Potluck's rock, holding a yellow toolbox, staring down the rise to the porch door. Thinking, probably, about the crazy baby person she has just seen disappear behind it.

"What is it, Mattie Mae? Have we got marauders again?" Uncle Potluck is standing at the stove, stirring something tomato-smelling in a tall white pot.

"Marauders?" asks Mattie.

Uncle Potluck taps his spoon on the pot rim. "Marauders," he says. "Villains. Pirates. Plunderers of booty. Profiteers set on thieving our valuables. Are they out there again?"

Mattie turns her eyes back to the window. The teenager-looking girl is walking around the rock, looking at the yard from one angle and then another.

"There's a girl out there," Mattie says.

"Does she have a peg leg?" he asks, and Mattie can't help laughing.

"No, she does not have a peg leg."

He wipes his brow, playing relief. "Probably just Crystal's niece, then," he says.

Crystal Sweet rents the house out back. Always she's asking Uncle Potluck to come check on her thermostat or look at her pipes, but really what she wants is for him to come look at her. Miss Sweet is sweet on Uncle Potluck, Mama says.

"Crystal called while you were outside, asking where my awesome niece Mattie was, because her awesome niece Quincy had come to visit," Uncle Potluck says. "She was of the opinion that you two girls should hang out together."

"Hang out?"
Thump thump thump.

"She proposed that the two of you hang out, yes. Awesomely," says Uncle Potluck.

Out at the rock, that girl—that Quincy—has set her toolbox down. She is fiddling with the latch. Mattie cannot tell if she is awesome, but she knows that Quincy is not young. She looks like she wears a bra.

Mattie crosses her arms over her notebook and presses it to her chest. "I can't hang out right now," she says. Not with a teenage bra-girl like Quincy Sweet, who is right now staring down the rise again, right now probably thinking about how not-awesome and not-teenage Mattie is.

Uncle Potluck nods. "Okay, Mattie Mae," he says. "You do what you need to do. I, for one, am simply relieved to know the yard is not full of marauders. I will sleep easier knowing our valuables are safe and secure."

Mattie pulls her eyes from Quincy Sweet.
Safe and secure.
Mattie will sleep easier tonight, too.

A
LWAYS
M
ATTIE HAD BEEN SHY.
Always school had made her feel skittish and small. Always it had taken a while to warm up to things, to people.

But most nights she had slept easily.

Until fourth grade. Until Star.

Mattie had talked to her once. Said just one word.

In the coatroom, behind the cinder-block wall in back of Mrs. D'Angelo's classroom, Mattie was sitting on the bench half-hid by winter coats, switching her recess boots for shoes. Star didn't see her, wasn't looking for her. Star was looking in coat pockets and backpacks, slipping change out of them, putting that change in her own pocket. Mattie watched Star come up on her backpack. Watched her pull the zipper around and down, watched her reach deep inside and find no change. Saw her find Mattie's own yellow notebook, PRIVATE written on it, big and red.

Mattie turned to stone watching Star turn pages. Hearing her say words out loud.
No. Bad. Out. Run.
Star said some words in sound-out ways.
Ah-fray-id
for afraid.
Cast-lee
instead of castle.

Star was reading Mattie's stories.

She was holding Mattie's notebook open flat in one hand, the other hand pointing down the lines, turning pages, reading Mattie's words.

She knows,
Mattie thought, though what Star knew Mattie couldn't say exactly. Something important, was all. Something true.

Mattie held her breath and watched, waited for Star to look up at her there in the coatroom. Waited for Star to see her, to read her stories and really see her, and for everything to be different after that.

She'd give Mattie some of the coins she stole, maybe, or ask Mattie would she share her lunch so she didn't have to steal coins anymore.

"Take. Go," read Star. She stopped, looked sideways at the page. "Og-ree," she sounded out.

"Ogre." That was Mattie's voice.

Star saw Mattie then. Saw her for a second and then looked on through her—fist-crunching Mattie's story page, tearing it from the others, letting it drop to the floor with the winter boots. Melted snow sucked up into it and turned it dark.

"Og-ree," Star said. She tore another page and dropped it, too. And another and another, until the floor was thick with pages and the notebook nothing but a twist of wire and the PRIVATE cover. Star shoved that back into Mattie's backpack.

"Og-ree," Star said, and it became a magic word.
Og-ree. Og-ree. Og-ree.
Star grew bigger and bigger until she touched the ceiling and filled the coatroom, and Mattie knew Star could swallow her whole.

T
HAT NIGHT, IT RAINS.
There is no moon.

Mattie pulls her pajamas on, which she can do in the dark. She does not need to see her pajamas. She knows they are pale green with skinny stripes on them, and that the top has three little mouse-shaped buttons. Eenie, Meenie, and Miney.

The last button hole stays empty. Moe is long lost.

"Poor Moe," Mattie says.

The bedroom she is in used to be Mama's when she was a girl. The furniture had been changed around since then, but soon as they moved here, Mama put it back the way it used to be, sliding the bed under the window and pushing the bureau to the far wall. Once the bed got in place, Mattie had hopped up on it, sat cross-legged watching Mama put the rest of the room to rights. Best to get out of the way once Mama got going, Mattie knew.

Mattie sits on her knees now. Looks outside at the moonless night.

There is still some light out there. Miss Sweet has the night off from hospital work, and her orange car is spotlighted in the rental house driveway. A blue square shimmers in her living room window. Probably she and Quincy are watching TV. Probably some teenager show Mattie has never seen.

There is a light in Mattie's ceiling, too, shining round through a pinkie-size hole. When Mama first got this room, her big brothers—Sonny, Roy, Tommy, and Potluck—had shared the room above. They had drilled a hole in her ceiling, pushed a string down through it, and tied a can on each string end.

The idea was that the boys could talk into the can on one end and Mama could listen on the other, or Mama could talk and the boys could listen. Never really worked right, Mama said. "Nobody ever stopped talking long enough to know if you could hear anything."

Now it is Mama above and Mattie below. Both of them are quiet.

Mama was not quiet at supper. Said Quincy Sweet is almost twelve—just a year older than Mattie,
really—and doesn't know anyone in town—j ust like Mattie doesn't—and can't stay alone in that house when Crystal goes to work the night shift at the hospital tomorrow—just like Mattie wouldn't want to should Mama have to work nights—and doesn't Mattie want to have a sleepover with Quincy?

Mama's hands had sat still on the table. Mattie checked. No piccolo fingers, no plans being made. Wouldn't be too much of a disappointment if Mattie said no. So she did.

"No, thank you," she said.