The Same Stuff as Stars (9 page)

“What hidden treasure?”

“In those piles of junk in the yard there lies a wonderful treasure, just waiting for you and me to discover it.”

“You're lying!”

“Okay Go on back into the house. I'll go on this adventure all by myself.”

“I don't want to go in the house.”

“Suit yourself.” Angel headed back to the yard. He followed her, trailing Grizzle along behind him. She pretended not to see.

The chief junk pile was a small hill of rusting metal. She guessed it was discarded farm machinery of some sort. She was afraid to touch it. You got terrible diseases if you cut yourself on rusty metal, didn't you? Lockjaw or something. “This is the wrong pile for treasure,” she said as Bernie caught up with her.

“How do you know?”

“I just know,” she said. “I choose we explore the shed.”

“How come you get to choose?”

“Because I'm the biggest.”

“You're always the biggest.”

She ignored him and picked her way around the yard to the small shed. The door sagged like it was worn out from trying to stand up straight for too many years. There was an encrusted orangy latch that could no longer fasten, from which drooped a useless lock, its rusted shackle hanging open. She pulled at the door, but the bottom was embedded in dirt and it didn't move. She gave it a tremendous jerk, yanking it wide enough open to peer in. “It's like the door to the Secret Garden,” she whispered.

“What garden?”

She didn't answer.

 

 

NINE

The shed, as Angel might have guessed, was piled with junk, but there was enough space for the two children to slip in. There was a small dirty window on either side and, to her surprise, light coming in from above. Not from an unpatched hole, but from a little tower with holes as though someone had put them there on purpose. Then she remembered the fourth-grade field trip to see maple syrup being made. That building had a tower with holes in it to let steam and smoke rising from the boiling sap escape. So what she'd thought was a shed in Grandma's yard was really a sugar shack, long past its maple sugaring days. Around the walls the children could see stacks of old papers and magazines, a baby bed, a highchair, something that might once have been a lawn mower, rusting sap buckets and large metal pans. In the middle, loaded down with more papers, was the old boiling stove, a piece of rusted pipe still hanging from the wall.

Bernie wrinkled up his nose. “It stinks in here.”

It did smell in the shed, like mold and rot, and something sickly sweet, left over from its days of glory when sap had boiled down to syrup on the stove.

“I don't like it in here,” Bernie said. He began to wheeze. At the clinic they had told Verna to watch for signs of asthma.

“Go back outside,” Angel commanded. She meant to follow him, but something caught her eye: a line of books, tall volumes that had once been maroon, now multicolored with mold. She pushed aside a stack of buckets to get close enough to see what they were.

“An-gel,” Bernie whined from the open door.

“Just a minute. Just a minute.” They were old encyclopedias. But the sky wouldn't have changed, would it? She searched the shelves for the S volume—something that would tell her about the stars. The volumes were all out of order, so she ran the point of her fingernail across the numbers and letters until she found
Sordello – Textbooks
and began frantically to flip through the musty pages, trying to ignore Bernie, whose whining was getting louder.

Between “Star Chamber,” which was not about stars at all and “Starfish,” which might look like a star but wasn't one any more than she was, there was a long article about “Star Clusters.” She could tell it was way beyond what she could understand. Bernie was blamming on the side of the shed, but she couldn't stop now. “Okay. Okay. I just need a minute.”

“That's what you always say!”

She didn't bother to argue. Her eyes raced down the page. At the end of the article it said:
See
Nebula; Astrophysics; Astronomy. Of course, astronomy. That was what she wanted.

“An
-gel!”

“Hold your pants on, Bernie. I said I wouldn't be a minute.”

“You already been lots of minutes.”

“Well, you just got to wait a few more minutes.” Why was it you could always find everything except the one thing you had to have? There was Volume 1, but it stopped with “Antarctic.”

“I'm warning you, Angel Morgan, you better get out here this minute. Or...or else!”

There it was! She pulled out the heavy volume and turned quickly, setting the pile of buckets clattering about. She picked her way around them—no time to stack them upright again—and came out of the shed panting, as though she had just finished a long race.

Bernie eyed her and the big book with suspicion. “I'm telling,” he said.

“What?”

“I'm telling Grandma you're stealing her book.”

“I'm not stealing. I'm just borrowing it. Like from a library.”

“You are, too, stealing and you know it.”

“Oh, Bernie. I'm just moving it from the shed to the house. It's not even leaving the property. Don't tell, okay, Bernie?”

“If you're not stealing, how come I can't tell?”

It took her a minute to come up with an answer. “Grandma doesn't know us very well yet, see? She might not understand. She might not want us going into the shed at all.”

“I'm not going in anymore. I don't like it, and it makes me breathe funny.”

“You don't have to go inside anymore, but you might want me to.”

“Why?”

She paused and looked at him, Grizzle dangling from his left hand, his right hand on his hip, challenging her. “Because there might be a hidden treasure in there or something.”

“A treasure?” The hand popped off his hip. “A real one? Not just pretend?”

“Uh-huh.”

“If there was, would you share?”

“Of course I would. Don't I always share with you, Bernie? Still,” she added, “we'd have to tell Grandma.”

“Why?” His eyes went wide.

“Because,” she said, “if we didn't, it would be like stealing.”

“No, it wouldn't! If we find it, it's our treasure. That's the law.”

“But you just said if I took the book—”

“Books are different.”

“Well, just to be on the safe side, maybe we better not say anything about the book, either, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, jamming his thumb into his mouth.

***

They waited until they were sure that Grandma was not in the kitchen before they sneaked in. They carried the book upstairs. Angel slid it under her pillow. She took a look around the room. “We better make up our beds, Bernie.”

“Why? Grandma won't care. She never comes up here. She said so.”

“Because it looks nicer to have your bed neat.”

“Then you do it,” he said, turning on his heel and marching downstairs, still dragging the bear. He was going to ruin Grizzle, she knew, but how could she save the bear and still keep Bernie from throwing a fit? She sighed and began to make the beds. The bottom sheet wasn't fitted, so it was hard to do the corners and smooth the covers, but with the quilts on top, the wrinkles didn't show so much.

She could hear Bernie downstairs talking to Grandma, so she slipped the encyclopedia out from under her pillow and looked for “Astronomy.” The print was small, and there were no real pictures, just scientific drawings, but she'd have to try. “Astronomy is the most ancient of sciences, having existed before the dawn of recorded civilizations.” She let out a long sigh as though she'd been holding her breath all her life. She was about to embark on a mysterious make-your-own adventure. She was about to go back “before the dawn of recorded civilizations.”

***

“Angel. Angel. An
-gel!”
Bernie was leaning over her. “Wake up!”

She sat up on the bed. She must have fallen asleep over the heavy book. “I'm awake,” she said. “I was reading.”

“No, you wasn't. You was snoring.”

“What do you want, Bernie? I'm really busy right now.”

“Grandma says if we want something to eat besides beans and peaches and that yucky cereal, you got to walk to the store.”

“Okay.” She sat up quickly, shoving the book once more under her pillow.

“She says
you
got to go. She thinks I'm too
little
to go by myself.” His bottom lip stuck out a mile.

“We got to go together,” she said. “I need you to help carry things.” She stood up and pulled down her T-shirt. “Is she going to give us some money?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I guess so.”

Grandma handed Angel a five-dollar bill. Not enough, Angel knew, for much in the way of groceries. But it would get them through the day. Verna would surely be back tonight—or tomorrow at the latest. Surely.

It was about two miles to the store, Grandma had said, well beyond the old house where Verna had stopped for directions, all the way back to the village they had come past. Still, it was a beautiful late-summer day, not too hot, and what else could she do to entertain Bernie? She made him leave Grizzle behind. “You can't carry groceries
and
a bear at the same time,” she told him.

They started up the road in good spirits, but long before they got to the house where Verna had asked for directions, Bernie began dragging his feet and complaining. “I'm too hot and tired,” he said. “Why doesn't Grandma drive us to the store?”

“She doesn't have a car,” Angel said. “She's probably too old to drive anyway.”

“She does, too, have a car, ” he said. “Over by the trailer.”

“I didn't see any car.”

“Well, I did. I saw it yesterday when we got here. A big old dirty car over on the other side of that trailer.”

“It's probably just junk—like the trailer. In the country, if a car breaks down, people just leave it to rust away. They don't bother taking it to a junkyard.”

“Why wasn't it there this morning, then?”

Angel stopped still in the road. “Bernie, you saw a car there yesterday, and this morning it was gone?”

“I just said I did, didn't I?”

Maybe the star man wasn't a dream. “Maybe—”

“What?”

“Nothing, Bernie. I guess somebody lives in the trailer, that's all.” She started walking again, but Bernie didn't move.

“Angel!” She turned. The pout on his face had been replaced by fear. “Suppose it's the robber? The one with the big gun?”

“That wasn't a robber. You heard Grandma.”

“She said it was Santa Claus. That was a lie, for sure.”

“Well, whoever it was, it's nobody that's going to hurt us.”

“How do you know? He had that big gun.”

She went back and took his hand. “It probably wasn't a gun, Bernie.”

He snatched away his hand. “Then what was it if it wasn't a gun? Just tell me that!”

Why couldn't she say “telescope”? Why couldn't she just tell him about the star man? Instead, she said, “Well, what if it
was
a gun? Lots of people in the country have guns. That doesn't mean they're crazy or that they want to shoot you. People in the country like to hunt and stuff.” She took his hand again. “Tell you what. If they have Sugar Pops in the store, I promise I'll buy a box, okay?”

“You'll just say they're too 'spensive.”

And she wanted to. In the country store, which smelled just a little less musty than the shed, Sugar Pops cost more than three dollars, and she had only five. But the chubby clerk had already climbed the ladder and gotten them down from a high shelf before she told Angel the price. Angel got a small jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread with the rest of the money. That should get them through until Mama got back. There was no money for jelly, but it couldn't be helped. She had to buy the Sugar Pops for Bernie.

He was not particularly grateful. The store had rows of candy bars and a whole case full of Popsicles. “I need a Popsicle,” Bernie said.

“We don't have enough money,” Angel said as quietly as she could.

“Okay, then, how 'bout a candy bar.”

“I can't, Bernie.” If only she'd put the taxi money in her socks. It hadn't occurred to her that she would need emergency money out here in the country where there wasn't a taxi for miles around.

The clerk looked at her as though she felt sorry for her—no more money and a little brother who couldn't understand. Maybe she'd feel sorry enough to throw in a candy bar or something, but “Have a nice day, kids” was all she said when she smiled and handed Angel the few pennies of change, pushing the small bag of groceries across the counter at her.

Angel grabbed Bernie's hand and dragged him out of the store and down the steps. At the bottom, she put the bag on the ground and took out the Sugar Pops. She opened the box and handed Bernie a handful. “Here,” she said. “It's just like candy.”

“No, it's not,” said Bernie, but he began eating it anyway, sucking each bit until it dissolved in his mouth. It kept him quiet for almost five minutes.
Oh Lord, what am I going to do if Mama doesn't come back tonight?

 

Mama didn't come back that night—or the next night.

“You promised!” Bernie accused her. “You said she'd be right back.”

“I know, Bernie. I don't know what's keeping her.”

“She's never coming back. Never. Never. Never.”

She tried calling their old number. Grandma's phone was an old black one attached to the kitchen wall. It was a dial phone with numbers in a circle instead of buttons to push. She knew it was long distance, and she felt bad about using Grandma's phone for long distance, but she couldn't help it. She had to try. The phone just rang and rang. The third day someone answered. It wasn't Verna. It was the machine operator voice saying, “This is no longer a working number.” That meant Verna had settled everything, moved out, and was on the way back! “See, Bernie, I told you. She'll be here tonight.”