The 10 P.M. Question (2 page)

Just before the tenth corner, they prepared themselves to ambush Ronald, the bad-tempered dachshund who lurked beside his owner’s picket fence, ready to yap at unsuspecting pedestrians. Ronald’s owners were nice enough, but their pet was a loser and thoroughly deserved everything he got.

“What a dumb dog,” Gigs said, bending down. He said this every day as he and Frankie crouched and inched their bodies around the tenth corner. That was the pleasing thing about ambushing Ronald. It worked every time because Ronald never learned from the past. He seemed never to expect the two boys to burst around the corner and let rip a machine-gun rattle of fearsome boy yaps, though they’d been doing this at the same time, twice a day, for nearly three years. Ambushing Ronald never failed to make them laugh like hell.

“We’ll know we’re practically dead when we don’t want to do old Ronald,” said Frankie.

“Does that mean we’ll actually be sad when he dies?” said Gigs. He leaped up on the Ernest Burrows Memorial Seat, balanced briefly and daintily on its upright back, then jumped down to the thirteenth zig. Frankie followed. They did this every morning, too. The Ernest Burrows Memorial Seat allowed a view of a cascading garden of succulents on the gentle hillface opposite, but Frankie and Gigs had never actually sat on Ernest Burrows. He was merely their launching pad for the canter down the remaining four zigzags and along the riverbank to the bus stop.

“Imagine Ronald’s effect on stress levels,” shouted Frankie. He lobbed the bus stop cricket ball up over the bus shelter to Gigs on the other side.

“Sky-high,” Gigs called. He cupped his big freckled hands ready. They were like the firm but flexible petals of an aging tulip.

Stress levels were a recurring topic of conversation between the two of them just now. They had an acute and quite professional interest in stress, because it was the subject of their ingenious — and completely secret — Science Fair project. Their project would, Gigs confidently predicted, beat all other Year Eight entries, which were all wire and battery units, or plant habitats, or tidal river patterns, the usual old stuff. Their project was so novel, it would enchant the judges at school, the judges at the regionals and the nationals, and probably the world.

They had conceived the project together over the summer, but Frankie claimed the original moment of inspiration. He had been watching Uncle George in the weeks before Christmas — a period when Uncle G’s work was particularly hectic and consuming. Sometimes after dinner Uncle George would settle his substantial frame into the cushioned green sofa. He had a particular way of not relaxing when he was seated in an easy chair or on the sofa. His feet tapped, his arms jerked, his head was up and alert like a rotating periscope. He twitched and barked and generally disturbed anyone else’s attempts to idle and lounge.

“Keep
still
!” ordered Gordana, smacking his arm. “You’re ten times worse than the Harding twins.” (The Harding twins were Gordana’s regular babysitting charges. According to her, they were human hurricanes. Looking after the Harding twins was enough to prostrate Gordana for an entire day.)

The only thing that ever settled Uncle George, Frankie noticed over the weeks before Christmas, the only thing that stayed his perky head and flailing limbs, the only thing that shut up his constant talk, was the Fat Controller. When the Fat Controller leaped weightily upward and planted her big body in Uncle George’s lap, a strange quiet settled over them both. Uncle George’s hand kneaded the Fat Controller’s head, tickled her ears, and played over her massive back, and the Fat Controller spread her considerable length and width over Uncle George’s legs. At the same time, a liquid calm seemed to seep through Uncle George’s normally electric self.

“It’s like a drug,” said Ma admiringly.

“Stress buster,” said Louie one time. Which was the moment Frankie had his inspiration.

It was Gigs who refined the idea for the purposes of the Year Eight science project. Gigs was a great organizer. He liked to draw up lists and charts and graphs and spreadsheets. He liked to underline. He liked to assign tasks. Their own task, he said, was to sit people down and measure their pulse rate, stick a cat in their lap for five minutes, then measure their pulse again. They would do ten people each, he said, which would give a good range.

They had borrowed a digital sphygmomanometer from Gigs’s dad. As well as blood pressure readings, it had a pulse rate counter. That was the best part — attaching the sphygmomanometer cuff to people’s arms and watching it balloon when they pressed the start button, listening to the rising whine of the machine. It sounded like a light plane taking off. So far, the statistics were 80–20 in favor of a cat’s beneficial effect on adult stress. The only person who disproved the hypothesis was Gigs’s stepmother, Chris. Her pulse rate went stratospheric whenever anyone put a sphygmomanometer cuff on her.

“You’ll have to put that in the experiment,” she said. “That’s a margin of error, or something.”

“No problem,” said Gigs. He had a special column on their spreadsheet for this sort of thing — people who got asthma from cats, people who got scratched in the course of the experiment, people who freaked out at sphygmomanometers.

“You should be an accountant,” Frankie told Gigs. “They like spreadsheets.”

“Or a general,” said Gigs. “They use spreadsheets to deploy troops. They just feed instructions into the computer and bingo. They don’t even really need to be there.”

That was the thing about Gigs. He could imagine being a general and not worry in the least about army training, or war, or getting wounded. Or ants in the hot countries. Gigs saw the bright side of everything. It made him a good person to be around.

“Come over after school,” Frankie called as the bus rounded the hospital corner. He lobbed a last ball over the shelter. “It’s Aunties.”

“Hot damn!” said Gigs.
Hot damn
was his latest phrase. He’d picked it up from some country song. “Will there be brandy snaps?” According to Gigs, they never had cake or biscuits because Chris was too busy with the little kids.

“Probably,” said Frankie.

“You stress-tested the Aunties?” asked Gigs. He dug in his pocket for money and dribbled one-dollar coins into Frankie’s open hand. “Don’t spend it all at once,” he said, just as his father did.

“No,” said Frankie, stepping up to the bus stop pole. For some reason, he’d entirely failed to try the Aunties with the sphygmomanometer. He felt minutely cheered. Testing them would be a laugh, especially if Gigs was there. He had a way with the Aunties, which Frankie had admired often.

The bus roared to a halt. Cassino, their bus driver, prided himself on a full-speed, accurate stop — the brakes singing, the air seizing, the doors sucking open precisely in front of the waiting passengers. Frankie and Gigs held their breath every time, anxious that Cassino should maintain his own high standards. In five years, he hadn’t failed them.

Cassino was big and brown and had an impressive boa constrictor tattoo running the length of his left arm. Like Frankie and Gigs, he was a creature of habit; every morning, as he took their coins or slotted their bus cards, Cassino said the same thing.

“And the code word is, fellas?”

They took turns inventing the code word. You could never use the same one twice, and Cassino had a phenomenal memory for repeats.

“Lorikeets,” said Frankie. He often did birds. He knew a lot of wacko bird names. Tomorrow he planned to roll out
kittiwake,
and the day after,
wigeon
. He was still debating about Friday; it would be either
lily-trotter
or
capercaillie,
which were both names that made him smile.

“Fair enough,” said Cassino, which was what he always said — even when Gigs had been on a bodily excretion theme and had worked his way from
snot
to
earwax
to
bile
to
toe
jam
to a grand finale of
feces.

They rolled down the aisle to their usual seat, the left corner of the long bench at the back of the bus. Frankie and Gigs had been sitting there for years and no one had ever argued against it — except Bronwyn Baxter, who’d taken it into her head last year to challenge the arrangement. They’d worn her down, though, and driven her to the front of the bus by talking Chilun in a constant monotone from the other end of the bench seat.

Chilun was a code, a complicated language spoken by only two people in the world. Frankie had invented it one dull summer and then taught it to Gigs. It was a mixture of pig Latin, inverted syllables, truncated words — and bits of Russian.

Frankie and Gigs found Russian hilarious. Sometimes for a good laugh, they listened to Ma’s old tapes from her Russian study days. In class, Frankie could always make Gigs (and himself) crack up by whispering,
“Feodor, Feodor, rastsluy menya, da po zharche,”
across the desk. It meant: Feodor, Feodor, kiss me more passionately.

Frankie enjoyed languages. Their different sounds and patterns interested him, and his ear seemed to sort out their mysteries quickly. He was the best in the class at French, and he’d picked up a bit of Italian from Mrs. Da Prini, too. He knew the word for
bird
in eight languages. Inventing Chilun had been easy.

Gigs wasn’t interested in languages, but after four years, he, too, had pretty much mastered Chilun. It was the ultimate nonviolent weapon, Gigs reckoned. If you talked in Chilun long enough and repeated an offending person’s name at regular intervals, they eventually got fed up and moved out of earshot. Gigs used it all the time against his twin brothers and little sister. It was useful on the phone, too, Frankie had found, especially when Gordana was hanging about. (Nynodimus was Gordana’s Chilun name, though, amazingly, she’d never caught on. Chilun just brought her out in a rash, as the Aunties would say.)

“So,” said Gigs, taking out his breakfast. He always ate breakfast on the bus, an arrangement he had made with Chris. He could stay in bed every morning until the last possible minute — and thereby avoid his siblings — as long as he ate a decent breakfast on the bus. A decent breakfast, according to Chris, included a BLT (with egg) and a milk drink and fresh fruit. Chris’s BLTs were top heavy with bacon and avocado. Her smoothies were excellent, too. And her definition of fresh fruit encompassed canned peaches. The Parsons certainly had great baking, but Gigs’s breakfasts always made Frankie a little envious.

“The Aunties,” continued Gigs, through a mash of pig and vegetable. “We should do them during the card game — they’ll be super stressed. Shotgun Alma.”

Alma was the eldest Auntie and Gigs’s declared favorite. Frankie, who was deeply fond, really, of all the Aunties, also secretly favored Alma. She was enormously fat and very funny; she smoked small cigars called cheroots and drank whiskey and liked to gamble on all her card games. And when she’d had quite a lot of whiskey and a winning hand at crib, she sometimes demonstrated her ancient ballroom-dancing skills.

For someone so hefty, Alma was surprisingly light on her feet. The flesh around her middle and arms shook alarmingly when she bossa novaed. Sweat gathered in the folds of her chins, and her breath came fast and rattling. But her feet tripped and darted as daintily as any slim-line ballerina. Frankie found an Alma dance routine peculiarly mesmerizing.

Alma’d had dozens of boyfriends in her time, but none of them, she maintained, had been good enough dancing partners to marry. It was Frankie and Gigs’s private view that all Alma’s boyfriends had run off for fear of being squashed.

When he was in the mood, Frankie found Alma a riot.

On the whole, he really wasn’t in the mood today.

“Okay,” he said. “You can do Alma and I’ll do Nellie and Teen. But we’ll have to factor in who’s winning and how much they’ve had to drink. And hopefully it won’t prejudice the judges.” (Ms. Oates, the Junior Dean, was one of the school judges, and Frankie knew for a fact that Ms. Oates didn’t approve of alcohol.)

“Man, your Aunties put it away, don’t they?” said Gigs in perfect imitation of Uncle George.

Put it away they certainly did. Uncle George had said to Frankie once that the Aunties were the last great lady drinkers in the Western World. And he was all for it. Uncle George loved the Aunties. It was a match made in heaven, Frankie thought. They were all four of them boisterous and loud and optimistic, with big appetites for food and fun.

He sighed and stared out the window at the river, at the ducks gliding, apparently happy, on the lit-up surface. Food, fun, and fast hands of cards were great, and, really, he liked them as much as Uncle G. But there was so much else to think about and no one except him seemed to bother doing the thinking.

Worms, for instance. Frankie was pretty sure the Fat Controller had worms, which meant that he, Frankie, probably had worms, too, since the Fat Controller slept on — and often
in
— his bed at night. Frankie found the idea of worms almost as revolting as ants. He’d mentioned the worm possibility several times to Ma but she insisted the Fat Controller was fine. He’d have to deal with it himself, he supposed — get money from Uncle G, buy the worm tablets, and make everyone in the house take the dose along with himself and the cat.

Then there was the smoke alarm. The batteries had passed the use-by date and were certainly dead by now. He’d asked Uncle George a thousand times to get new ones but, as usual, Uncle George kept forgetting. So Frankie would have to do it himself.

Also, school camp was coming up and he just knew the house would go to rack and ruin if he went away. No one would remember rubbish day; no one would get the right groceries; no one would vacuum or wipe the table properly and ants would gather, for sure. Gordana would stay at Ben’s too much and Uncle George would work late and Ma would have no one to talk to or to run errands.

Also, there was a strange rash on his chest that was starting to greatly preoccupy him. He’d ask Ma about it tonight but he knew pretty much how the conversation would go: