One Day and One Amazing Morning on Orange Street (15 page)

“If I could just reach that one orange,” she said, “you wouldn't believe the ambrosia I'd make! And all our wishes would come true.”

Some of Larry's friends would laugh because his mother was taller than his dad.

“That's not the way it's s'posed to be!” they'd shout, and Larry would have to punch them out.

But his dad, Ralph Tilley, was strong, even though he was short and skinny. The dogs never threatened him on his long mail route; Mr. Tilley knew how to stare them down. Some of those dogs weren't as gentle as Larry's old dog, Cream. Ralph Tilley's muscular arms were good for reaching under a sink
to fix a leak, or hammering nails in his backyard tool shed, or playing catch with his sons. He had blue eyes like Larry, which were handsome to look at, except when they were icy-blue like Pug's stone. That's what Mr. Tilley's eyes looked like when he was angry. He didn't get angry often, although he didn't like it much when Pug dropped the ball in a game of catch, or forgot to put “I” before “E,” except after “C.” And one time those eyes got icy-blue for something Larry wanted to do. Larry never forgot that.

It was late one Sunday afternoon in early spring, and the orange blossoms were still perfuming the backyard. Larry and his dad were playing catch, and Pug was leaning up against the trunk of the orange tree, drawing in a big pad with a stubby pencil. Every time he finished a picture, he'd tear it from the pad and lay it out on the ground, one of his many stones holding it down. He drew a small cloud that happened to look like an igloo; a fat beetle with pincers; Mitzi, the cat from across the street, lounging under the tree with old Cream. And then he drew Mrs. Tilley, resting for a bit on the back stairs, a sprig of bougainvillea in her hair, which Mr. Tilley had pinned there.

Mr. Tilley looked over at all of Pug's drawings, and laughed. Then he said what he always said. “Hey, artsy-fartsy,
what's the point of drawing? It's a big waste of time when the real thing is right in front of your nose!”

Larry could see those drawings, too.
I can draw just as well!
he thought.
Even better!
He knew how good it felt to capture the shape of a beetle, its hard shell shaded just right on the page. Drawings said,
Look! You'll see things you've never noticed before, even if they're right in front of your nose
. Larry wished he could sit down beside Pug, with his own stubby pencil, right out there in the open, instead of hiding behind the bougainvillea bush. That's where he usually drew in secret. Every now and then, he'd even write a poem on the page, to go with the drawing. The poems were nothing fancy, just words he liked. Poems could be short, but still say a lot. He liked that about poems.

Of course, after he finished a drawing or a poem, Larry would crumple it up and throw it away. He could see no real purpose in drawing, and boys didn't write poems, his dad said.

That afternoon, in the backyard, he got a great idea, out of the blue. Larry decided to make comic strips, just like the ones in the newspaper, except they would be about the kids on Orange Street and all the stuff they did together. And his dad could make copies of it on the mimeograph machine down at the post office, and Larry could charge ten cents a copy. Making some money, that's what the
purpose
would be.

But when his dad saw him scribbling and drawing under the tree, his eyes got that icy-cold look, and he said, “You, too? I told you, that artsy-fartsy stuff is not what men do.”

But men did go to war. Around that time, the U.S. was fighting a war in faraway Vietnam, and Mr. Tilley enlisted in the army.

“It's my chance to see the world,” he said to Mrs. Tilley. “To fight for my country!”

And to Larry and Pug he said, “Vietnam's a beautiful place, boys, with rice paddies and emerald jungles and dragon fruit and flying frogs.”

Larry got the feeling that Orange Street, with its gray mourning doves and cracked sidewalks and single citrus tree could never compete with that beautiful place.

One day their father hugged the dog, kissed everyone good-bye, and told his family not to worry when he was gone.

“I'm bringing my good-luck stone,” he said. Pug had given him his heart-shaped stone, and Mr. Tilley looked like he believed in it almost as much as Pug did.

Their dad wrote that he'd volunteered to be a tunnel rat—a soldier who crawled into small spaces to flush out the enemy. It was one of the most dangerous jobs of the war.
“It's a good thing I'm not a big man,”
he wrote. “
I fit just fine in those tunnels. But don't worry. All I've met in a tunnel is one scared chicken!”

Larry wrote to him about baseball and hot days and Cream's fleas. He didn't tell him that Mrs. Tilley went around looking sad all the time, her long hair unbrushed; that she was not doing much cleaning, or singing, or drawing with frosting anymore. He didn't tell him his dad had left a great big hole, like the hole in Larry's mouth when a tooth fell out, which he couldn't help touching with his tongue.

One day Pug drew a picture of their dad with his beard, before he shaved it off for the army, and his blue eyes, as warm as an L.A. sky in summer. And that's when Larry
started drawing again, too. His pictures were of the four of them having a picnic under the orange tree, or sitting around the kitchen table, everybody ready to dig into a boysenberry pie or last summer's fruit preserved for cold-weather eating.

You could tell it was winter because there were raindrops at the window, and you'd know the kitchen smelled like oranges, because it always did.

His dad wrote that he'd saved someone's life. He wrote that his best friend had died. He wrote about the mud and the dark and the clattering helicopters and jungle heat. Sometimes, for weeks, he didn't write at all.

One afternoon Pug asked his mother, “How do you spell Vietnam, anyway?”

She told him it was spelled “Vietnam,” not “Veitnam,” as he'd written it. She told him how to spell other words, too, like “platoon” and “battalion” and “infantry.” Then, after Pug had checked things over and over, because he really wanted to get it right, he put a bunch of drawings into an envelope and mailed them off to his father.

That's when Larry learned the most important thing about drawing, something he'd known, deep down, all along. Homemade pictures said,
This is home. Come back safe and
sound. We love you and we are thinking about you every minute—
even if the artist didn't write down a single word.

To Larry's big surprise, Mr. Tilley had learned the same thing in the jungles of Vietnam. He didn't think those drawings were artsy-fartsy at all anymore.

“
NOTHING here is as nice as those pictures
,” he wrote back. “
Keep them comin'! I miss you all like crazy! I'll be home real soon. I'm going to build a tree house for you guys. And, for your mom, I'll set up some raised beds for tomato plants and sunflowers. Oh, boy, can't wait to take you all to a Dodgers game!
”

So Larry drew, too, one picture after another, his initials marked at the bottom of each one. He hoped the drawings themselves would bring their dad home from Vietnam sooner.

That would be their dad's last letter. The family was told that Ralph Tilley found more than a chicken in those tunnels. He was hit by a piece of a booby trap while he was crawling through one of them. He didn't return from Vietnam, but their letters and those drawings did. They came back with their father's shaving stuff, his clothes, and Pug's blue stone. And Mr. Tilley's body was laid to rest in Los Angeles at a military funeral with horns blowing.

After a while, Pug got it into his head to pin up the
drawings in the tool shed. “I will leave them there forever,” he said. He put his blue stone on a shelf in the shed, too.

“You are so dumb!” Larry said. “He's never coming home to see them. There's no
purpose
in doing that!”

Larry had never called Pug dumb before. But this was a dumbness that had nothing to do with being terrible at arithmetic and spelling, and the forgetting of simple things: This was a dumbness that had to do with not realizing everything had changed. But Pug just kept looking at those pictures in the tool shed, and crying. His mother cried, too. Larry was too angry to cry.

Other things made Larry angry, too. Their mother was singing again, but in a sad voice now. That's how Larry found out she didn't want to live on Orange Street anymore. Sure enough, one day Mrs. Tilley told her boys they were moving to Santa Maria to live with her parents.

But what made Larry angriest of all was Pug's blue stone. He thought that Pug was dumb to think it could bring good luck. And he was angry at his father for believing that, too, even though being angry at a dead person felt dumb.

The day before they moved to Santa Maria, it was so hot, you could fry an egg on the sidewalk. Not that they had time to test that out, with all the packing they had to do. Their
dog, Cream, had decided to disappear, spooked by all the boxes. The boys had been calling for him all day, and that was really tough. But worst of all, it was Larry's birthday, and his mother, sweaty and exhausted from packing, had forgotten. Larry waited all day, thinking maybe she had a cake or a pie or a small gift, hidden away as a surprise. But no dice.

“Tell her,” said Pug.

“Nah,” said Larry. “Why should I tell my mother when it's her own son's birthday? And don't
you
tell, either!”

Sometimes it felt like he needed to keep finding more stuff to be angry about, just to feed the anger, like a fire burning inside of him.

It usually cooled off when it got dark, but the heat woke him up early the next morning, before dawn. Larry lay there for a while, getting angrier and angrier. Then he jumped out of bed. Barefoot and in his pajamas, Larry raced out to the backyard tool shed.

He took down the old preserve jar where his dad had kept his nails. Out went the nails, and into the jar went his father's last letter, as well as a poem Larry had wanted to send him. He grabbed a garden trowel and ran out to the backyard, where he buried that jar, holding all its dead promises.
Then he remembered the blue stone and went back to get it. Scraping the dirt with his bare hands, he plopped the stone into the same hole, then covered it up.

But Larry wasn't finished. He found his father's matches in the tool shed and began to burn up all the drawings, one by one. And before Larry could stop it, one corner of a drawing, a little ember, really, burst into a flame again. One split second is all it took! The flame leaped up, like a long tongue, to lick the polka-dotted curtain high up at the little window. First the wall, then the whole shed was on fire! Larry stood frozen, staring at the flames, too terrified to move.

It was Pug who saved him, racing into the shed. Just as Larry could draw really well, Pug could run fast when he needed to. He yanked his brother out through the tool shed door, yelling, “Mom, anyone, please! Help us!”

Mrs. Tilley pulled out the garden hose and Larry and Pug ran back and forth with buckets of water. Flames began to spread to the dry weeds surrounding the shed. Someone must have called the fire station because soon the sirens were screaming down Orange Street. The shed and garden were hosed down with bigger hoses from the fire trucks.

As the sun slowly rose they got the fire under control
at last. Neighbors who had wandered into the yard to help or gawk returned to their homes. Larry, Pug, and Mrs. Tilley sank to the ground against the chain-link fence, exhausted.

“Who started it?” Mrs. Tilley finally asked.

Pug said, “It was an accident.”

But Mrs. Tilley stared hard at Larry. Suddenly her face softened. “Yesterday was your birthday,” she said softly. “I'm so sorry.”

And that's when Larry began to cry. “It was me,” he said. “I did it. I was burning the drawings.”

His mother pulled him close, whispering, “I understand.”

A few embers were still sizzling and fizzling around the trunk of the orange tree, where water from the hoses had pooled. It was as if the tree itself had willed the fire to go no further.

Enough.

Mrs. Tilley slowly got up and went to pick an orange from a lower branch. “This is your gift,” she said, handing the orange to Larry. “I'm much too tired to climb to the top for the highest one, but believe me,
all
these oranges are special. Make yourself a birthday wish.”

They sat down on the back stairs for the very last time, and Larry peeled the orange. Its sharp perfume made the
air smell less smoky. He shared the juicy chunks with his mother and Pug, so that their wishes would come true, too. The orange tasted tart, but mostly sweet, because that's what hot summer days will do. Larry wished for happier times, for all of them. He felt happier already.

The moving van rumbled down Orange Street. After their belongings were loaded and Larry and Pug had yelled for Cream one more time, and he'd finally crawled out from his hiding place under the back porch, they all piled into their car and followed the van to Santa Maria.