Night Relics (26 page)

“I think you’re smoking dope,” Bobby said back to him.

“
What?
” Peter nearly laughed, but he restrained himself. He probably shouldn’t encourage that kind of talk.

“Nothing,” Bobby said. “That’s what my friend Caleb says when he means you’re talking stupid. You know.”

“Yeah, I knew that. I was just wondering if it was a
good
thing to say.”

“It’s not dirty, is it?”

“No, it’s just … it’s just not the kind of thing to say around people who wouldn’t understand you were just being funny.”

“I don’t care what they think,” Bobby said. “You said people like that were hosers.”

“Well,” Peter said, looking for some way to change the
subject. “Dirt’s pretty hard, eh? You know what I’d do?”

“Buy a six-pack and draw up plans?”

Peter gave him a mock-threatening look. “I’m telling you to lay off that kind of thing. Maybe you don’t want to let your mother
hear you talking that way. Where did you get that? Caleb again?”

“No, I heard it on television.
I
was the one who told it to Caleb.”

“Well, do your mother a favor and don’t tell
her
things like that. There’s some things mothers shouldn’t hear. You wouldn’t say that kind of thing to your teacher, would
you? It’s kind of smart aleck, isn’t it?”

Bobby shrugged. He hacked at the hole with the spade again. “Maybe
I
wouldn’t say it to her. But Caleb got in trouble yesterday for saying something worse.”

“What?” Peter asked.

“The
S
word.”

“The
S
word?” Peter could only think of one.

“Sex,” Bobby said.

Mildly relieved, Peter shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe anybody would say such a thing. “Did your teacher give
him detention? What’s her name again? Mrs. Cheese, isn’t it?”

“Mrs. Crumb. He didn’t exactly say it, but he got in trouble for it anyway. It was Mrs. Crumb, really, who said it.”

“She
said the
S
word in class? What grade are you in?”

“Second.”

Peter shook his head. It was a brand-new world, full of mysteries. “So why did Caleb get in trouble?”

“Well,” Bobby said, “Mrs. Crumb was talking about Columbus, you know? And she was talking about sailing to America, and how
they were lost and all. And she said that they found their way by using a sextant. It’s one of our spelling words. Off the
special list. And anyway, when she said sextant, Caleb said, ‘What kind of tent?’ ”

Peter started laughing. He couldn’t help himself this time. Of course he ought to act as if the whole thing were
shameful, so he pretended to be clearing his throat. “Right out loud?” he asked.

“Yeah, and Mrs. Crumb really lost it.”

“I bet. Nobody laughed, did they?”

“Of
course
everybody laughed,” Bobby said. “Wouldn’t you laugh? You just did.”

“I was coughing. And anyway, the thing is that you can’t say that kind of thing in front of grown-ups. They can’t take it.
Kids can take it, but grown-ups have trouble with it.”

Bobby looked at him suspiciously, as if he found Peter’s statement intriguing but probably a lie.

“It’s true,” Peter said. “I’m not kidding about this. There’s things you better not say around adults. Now
I
don’t really care, mostly. You can say almost anything around me. But I’m what they call a deviation from the norm. Most
people have a thing in their inner ear. You know about the inner ear?”

“There’s bones in it. Little ones. The hammer and something.”

“That’s right. Well, you understand then. I don’t have to tell you about that part of it. There’s a delicate balance there
that mustn’t be upset. Mrs. Crumb’s ear bones upset easily, and you don’t want to start talking dirty in front of her and
make her get dizzy and fall over.”

“There’s nothing dirty about what I said about the six-pack.”

“You know what I mean. Dig that hole deeper. You’ll never get to China at that rate. Here, let me take a stab at it.” Peter
stepped down off the porch and kicked at the shovel, which clanked against a rock. He jammed at it and wiggled it, managing
finally to unearth a piece of granite about as big as a lemon. Around it the dirt was hard and dry. They’d need a pick. Better
yet, a jackhammer. “Does Caleb talk like that all the time in class?”

“Yeah. He got in trouble on Wednesday, too.”

“What did he say?”

“The
D
word.”

“Damn?” Peter asked.

“No, ‘dick.’ ”

Peter started laughing again, despite himself. “Dick! He said that? What? In a joke or something?”

“No,” Bobby said. “Just out loud. He stood up, too.”

“He just stood up and said, ‘Dick’? Then what did he do?”

“Sat down again. He yelled it, actually. Mr. Brown heard him, too.”

“Who’s Mr. Brown again?”

“The principal. Caleb was dead meat.”

“I bet he was,” Peter said. “That’s what I’ve been warning you about. Principals can’t stand that kind of language. They can’t
take it. It’s a threat to them. It’s worse than the chicken pox. Worse than head lice. It gets into their eustachian tubes
and they get dizzy and sick, like they just got off a bad carnival ride. People who say words like that in front of principals
end up in the penitentiary half the time, picking oakum.” Peter tilted the shovel against the wall. It was no use even trying
to dig the hole any deeper.

“What’s oakum?” Bobby asked.

“I don’t really know,” Peter said, wiping his forehead, “but in jail they make people pick it.”

“Do you know what I’d do?”

“About what? Caleb talking like that, or picking oakum?”

“About this hole. I’d fill it with water, you know. And then you let the water soak in and maybe fill it up again. Then the
ground’s softer, and you can dig in it.”

“That’s a brilliant plan,” Peter said. “Get the hose.”

Bobby trotted off around the side of the house. A moment later Peter heard the side door slam shut in the bus, and Bobby reappeared,
dragging the hose and carrying a box full of toy trucks and alien-looking plastic figurines. “I’ll hold it,” he said. “You
turn it on.”

“Sure,” Peter said. He headed around to the back where the water spigot was. “Holler for me to shut it off!”

“It’s not even on yet!” Bobby shouted.

“I know. I mean when it
is
on.” He cranked the water on and waited until Bobby hollered. When he got back around to the front, the basinlike hole in
the dirt was brimming with muddy water, and Bobby was dropping the aliens one by one into it. He picked up a couple of boards
nearby, blocked one of them up into a ramp, and drove one of the trucks up the ramp so that it sailed into the water.

“You want to do one?” Bobby asked hopefully.

“Sure,” Peter said, picking a big truck out of the box. “Watch this.” He put one of the aliens into the cab, then drove the
truck up the ramp. It sailed off into the hole, sinking until only the front bumper and the top of the cab stuck out.

“We’ve got to get him out,” Bobby said, “before he drowns.” He ran off again. Peter heard the bus door slide open and shut,
and then Bobby was back, carrying a tow truck with a little winch in back wound with string.

Pretending to be the trapped alien, Peter made drowning noises while Bobby tied the end of the string to the bumper of the
sunken truck and began turning the crank on the winch. The truck bumped forward a couple of inches, exposing the head of the
sorry-looking alien. Bobby picked up the rock dug out of the hole and dropped it into the water by the open truck window.
A little wave washed into the cab, momentarily submerging the alien again. Peter made noises like a man talking underwater
while Bobby scooted the tow truck forward, hauling the drowned truck out onto dry land.

“He’s dead,” Bobby said, looking in the window at the creature behind the wheel. He poked at it with a finger, and the alien
fell over sideways.

“Maybe we can revive him,” Peter said.

“No chance. He’s drowned. He was a bad guy anyway. He stole the truck.”

“Oh,” Peter said.

“We need more water. This is soaking in.”

“What we need is a bigger hole,” Peter said.

“And a river. There should be a river leading somewhere. Into the bushes. That over there is the jungle. Can we use any of
those boards in the pile? We need a base.”

“A base? We used to call it a fort.”

“We call it a base now. Can we use them?”

“Sure,” Peter said.

Together they salvaged a dozen short pieces of lumber out of the scrap pile and built a base for the good aliens. Peter remembered
doing that countless times as a kid. Once he had spent all day building a fort out of sticks in the soft dirt of a flower
bed, fashioning a jungle compound like the one destroyed by King Kong. After dark he had wanted to go back out with a flashlight
and work on it some more, but his mother hadn’t let him.

Somehow he had never done that with David—built forts in the dirt. All his memories of that kind of thing were left over from
his own childhood. Thinking about it now wrecked his mood, and suddenly all the magic went out of the boards and the waterways
and the aliens. There was a time when that kind of thing looked like the kingdom of heaven, but somewhere along the line it
had lost its glow. Maybe that was just the cost of growing up. And maybe the cost of growing up was too high.

Those were easier days, he thought, but then suddenly he remembered David. What might he be going through? Nothing
easy.
He pushed the thought back into the darkness, and just then Beth came out of the house, carrying two plates.

“Did you dig the hole for the rose?” she asked doubtfully.

“We’re conditioning the soil first,” Peter said, taking one of the plates from her.

“Ah,” she said. “That’s what it is. I can see that now.”

“We just drownded the bad alien,” Bobby said. “Now we’re setting up a base. What you do is put your guys around inside and
then knock it down and then see whether
they got crushed or not.”

“Seriously,” Peter said to Beth. “The ground’s too hard, so Bobby suggested we soak it with a little water. I think it’s a
brilliant idea.”

“I do too,” she said, picking up the shovel and scooping wet dirt out of the hole. She pried out a couple of rocks, chopped
more dirt out, and sent Bobby around back to turn on the hose again. She worked silently, and Peter knew she had something
to say and was waiting for the right time.

“I brought the spud gun,” Bobby said to him. Peter hadn’t seen him return from the back of the house. Beth went back inside
to get the coffee. Bobby pulled the gun out of the cardboard box along with potatoes in a paper bag. “Four potatoes,” he said.
“Too bad we only have one gun.”

“We have two,” Peter said. “I bought one for me at the same time I bought yours.” He stood up and walked over to the Suburban.
There was no use letting the spud gun sit around in the glove compartment. So what if he had bought it for David? He’d done
it out of guilt, and he could do it out of guilt again. When all this was over, he’d buy ten spud guns and a sack of potatoes
for each one, and really make the guilt count for something. He opened the car door and twisted the glove compartment latch.
When it sprang open, Peter stood there looking at it, not quite believing what he saw.

The spud gun was gone, along with a tire pressure gauge and a ball-point pen. He rummaged among the insurance papers and maps.
What else? There had been something else along with the spud gun….

David’s flute. Damn it! To hell with the rest of it, David’s flute
meant
something. He couldn’t believe he’d been robbed, right in broad daylight. It must have been this morning, or maybe late last
night. He checked the back: his toolbox was there along with a bundle of road flares. The notion was almost too preposterous.
Between last night and this morning, someone had stolen four dollars’ worth of junk and left a hundred bucks’ worth of tools.

“W
HY DO YOU THINK IT’S THIS GUY
A
DAMS?”
P
ETER
asked.

“I don’t know,” Beth said. “Something. Intuition. I guess because he’s the only one I’ve met lately that would do something
like that. I don’t believe it’s just some guy out walking in the neighborhood.”

“Could you tell anything from his voice when he called?”

“No. I don’t know what he was doing to it, but I didn’t recognize his voice. Probably he was talking through a towel or something.”

Peter stood up and looked out toward the creek. Bobby had finally gotten bored with the aliens and their base and had gone
for a hike. The wind was blowing hard again, and Peter was edgy even though Bobby had promised not to go very far. “You’ll
have to get a line trap on your phone, whatever they call it,” he said, sitting down again. “A line I.D.”

“That’s what the police said. Now that I’ve got a case number from the police, Pacific Bell can hook it up. The only trouble
is that he’s calling from a pay phone. I could tell that much. So the best thing I can hope for is that if he keeps calling
he’s stupid enough to keep using the same pay phone. I don’t think he will, though. And even if he does, then the police have
to stake out the phone, and how long are they willing to do that?”

“Probably not at all. Why don’t you think he’ll use the
same phone? One near your house?”

She shrugged. “That’s what he said—that he was nearby. But he’s obviously not just a telephone freak, not if he called twice
and then came right over. I think he used the phone to call me just like anyone else would do.”

“That’s a little bit scary.”

“A
little
,” Beth said, wrapping her arms around herself as if she were suddenly cold. “It’s not quite as scary as your story, though.
I think you win the prize.”

“I don’t know. I think I’d rather have ghosts than maniacs. Anyway, I don’t like the idea of your being in the house alone,”
he said, steering the conversation away from himself. “If he calls again, leave. Go to a hotel. Drive out here.”