The Scavengers (12 page)

It takes four more Whomper-Zooka blasts before we get the mob thinned out and we can go back to picking them off one by one. When things calm down even more, Toby puts aside his fight-stick and practices with his whip-bow. Instead of sharp arrows he’s shooting dumdum pepperheads, which are basically pepper-peas on sticks. He’s amazingly accurate. Fifty yards away a GreyDevil takes a step toward us. Toby flicks his wrist, the dumdum shaft flashes through the air, and a red pepper puff blooms at the end of the GreyDevil’s nose. As it claps its hands over its eyes and stumbles backward, Toad and I both turn toward Toby and applaud.

Our applause is interrupted by an explosion of scratchy screeching. We swivel our heads back around. A GreyDevil is approaching Frank and Spank, head-on. Toad raises his whip, but before he can crack it, Hatchet flaps into the GreyDevil’s face, flailing his spurs and epaulet blades like a frazzle-feathered fighter jet. The GreyDevil falls to the ground, and Hatchet dives after it, his beak spear flashing back and forth like a sewing machine needle. He’s cackle-screeching like someone took a buzz saw to the chicken coop. The GreyDevil struggles to its feet and stumbles into the ditch. It turns to look back and its face looks like someone dragged it headfirst through the briar patch.

Hatchet tries to get back up to his perch, but he’s tuckered and his weapons are heavy. After a few fruitless flaps and cackles, Toad punches the “retrieve” button and the dog leash zips Hatchet back to roost. He clucks grumpily and sticks his chest out.

There are no more GreyDevils in sight. As the dust and feathers settle, we take inventory. Toby has a cut to his forearm. I have a bump over my right eye. “A-OK, not DOA!” hollers Toad, hanging his helmet back on its hook and grinning like he just got off a neat ride at the Bubble City amusement park. Frank and Spank are plodding along at the same pace they’ve maintained all day. Monocle is flopped on the buckboard floor, panting happily. Hatchet is tut-tutting, fluffing and resettling his feathers just the way he does on any given day in the barnyard. Most important, all of our supplies are intact. I bandage Toby’s arm with gauze and dressings from the first aid pack. Toby doesn’t look at me. Instead, he keeps his eyes moving, scanning the road and ditches for troublesome stragglers.

And up on his perch between Frank and Spank, Hatchet fluffs his feathers and tips his needle beak to the sky.

“Cock-a-doodle . . .
aaack-kack-kack-kack
!”

Yeah. We’re fine.

22

TILAPIA TOM IS WAITING FOR US AT THE CURVE ALONG BEAVERSLAP
Creek. Toad and I help him and Toby unload their supplies, then we say good night and head down the road. At the gate, Monocle barks until Arlinda lets us in, and Toad drives the
Scary Pruner
into the barn. While I still have all my armor on, I wrestle Hatchet off his perch and out of his gear, then carry him to the coop in a headlock. I throw him inside and slam the door before he can get at me. As I walk away I can hear him clucking importantly. He’ll probably keep the hens up half the night with his bragging.

Arlinda has put a bowl of water out on the porch, and Monocle is lapping it up. Tripod is purring and rubbing up against Monocle’s legs, letting him rest so they can get back to chasing each other.

I help Toad unhitch Frank and Spank. We give them water and feed and brush them while they eat. Then I help Toad unload the
Scary Pruner
. Finally, I go over each piece of my armor, checking for broken straps or missing pieces—anything that could leave me in danger. You repair your armor before you need it, because you never know when you’ll need it. When I’ve made sure everything is in good shape, I give it a polish and oil the leather, then hang it up in my locker so it’s all ready to go.

Arlinda invites me in for supper, and it smells wonderful, but the sun is already dropping, and I want to get back to my family and my Ford Falcon bed. “I figured,” says Arlinda, handing me a package of food wrapped in cloth. It’s heavy and warm. I tuck it in my backpack next to Ma’s tea and the other supplies and begin my climb out of Hoot Holler and up to Skullduggery Ridge.

By the time I get home, dusk is gathering. I can see a glow through the plastic shack window, so I stick my head inside. Dookie is asleep, and Ma is at the table, reading by candlelight.

“How did it go, dear?” asks Ma.

“Oh, fine, nothing too much,” I say. I figure it’s not a lie if you don’t get too specific. Plus, Ma has enough to worry about.

“I got you something to go with your poems.” I place the brown paper package beside her book.

“Oh, Maggie,” says Ma as she picks it up and begins unwrapping it. “You shouldn’t . . .”

“Turns out that pig was worth quite a bit,” I say.

“Oh, Maggie!” she says. “Earl Grey!” She cracks the lid, closes her eyes, and takes a long sniff. When she opens her eyes they glisten in the candlelight.

“Go ahead and make some, Ma.”

She’s hugging me now. “No, just that one sniff took me to another world, dear Maggie. It’s enough. Oh, thank you.”

I look around the shack. “Where’s Dad?”

She lets me out of the hug and turns away.

“I . . . I don’t know, Maggie. He went out a little while ago. For a walk, he said.”

“At sundown?”

“Maggie, you know he needs his time alone. It isn’t easy for him. There are things . . . he . . .”

She pauses, and I feel awful that I’ve taken her from being happy about the tea to feeling bad about Dad.

“It’s all right, Ma. I know. I’m used to it. I shouldn’t have asked.”

She looks at me, trying to smile.

“G’night, Ma.”

“Good night, Maggie.”

“Ma?”

“Yes, Maggie?”

“Tomorrow it’s Emily and a visit with the Earl.”

Before heading down to the Falcon, I check the root cellar door. It’s locked. No light leaking out. I stand there for a moment, remembering my vow to dig up those carrots, and wondering where Dad might be. Where he goes on these walks of his. Up atop Skullduggery Ridge I can see the empty flagpole silhouetted against the last of the fading light.

And next to it, another silhouette: Dad.

I walk up the trail. This time I don’t try to be quiet, but Dad doesn’t seem to hear me coming anyway. He’s standing still as a statue, staring at the countryside below. I walk to within a few feet of him and look in the same direction. I can see the faint yellow square of Toad and Arlinda’s kitchen window, and dotted all round them the orange pinpoints of GreyDevil bonfires winking to life. I step up beside Dad. He has his arms wrapped tightly around himself, as if he is cold. He is so still I can’t even see him breathing, but even in the last of the fading daylight his eyes are bright. Not weird glow-in-the-dark bright, but feverishly bright. Like he’s trying to see so hard his eyes are watering.

“Dad.”

His head snaps around immediately, but it seems like he stares at me for a second or two before he actually sees me. Then he blinks and his arms drop, and he says, “Oh—
ah
—hi, Mag—
Ford
.”

“You all right, Dad?”

“Oh. Sure.” He doesn’t sound sure. “Sunset,” he says. “I like to watch the sunset. Reminds me of back when things were . . .” He trails off.

We stand there for a moment. Then he squares up his shoulders, all businesslike. “Well! Better hit the hay!”

We walk quietly back down the trail.

At the door of the shack, he hugs me. “G’night, Maggie.”

“G’night, Dad.”

I watch him enter the hut and close the door. I listen until the bar drops, and wait until the candlelight goes out. Quietly unlocking the root cellar door, I enter, and close it behind me. After feeling my way down the stairs in the dark, I kneel down and fish the jacklight from my pack. I scratch a match and touch it to the wick, shielding the glow by leaning over it as I dig through the sand pile. The carrots look weird and wiggly in the shaky yellow pool of light. I dig and dig, sweeping the sand to the side and stacking the vegetables, being careful not to scrape or bruise them. All the while I am wondering what I will find.

Finally all the sand and carrots are swept and stacked to the side, and there in the jacklight glow I see . . . nothing. Just that bare slate floor. I sift the whole pile of sand through my fingers to be sure I haven’t missed something.

Still nothing.

I even hold a handful of sand up close to the jacklight and pour it from one palm to another, just to see if I can spot anything. It’s just sand.

Whatever Dad had hidden with the carrots, it’s not here now. I cover them back up, then snuff the jacklight and quietly sneak out of the cellar. I stare at the shack, a darker square in the dark.
Maybe
, I think,
he just wanted a carrot
.

But that wasn’t what his eyes told me.

Down at the Ford Falcon, I stand on the hood and look at the stars. I do this nearly every clear-sky evening. Just take a moment to stand there wide-footed with my head tipped back and my hands on my hips, and gaze at the whole twinkling-sky universe.

The stargazing helps me somehow. Makes me feel lonely sometimes, sure, but mostly it just makes me realize that no matter how big the troubles here seem, even the type of troubles that can drive the people of a great nation under bubbles, well, these troubles don’t amount to a fly speck on the moon compared to all of space and time. Somehow knowing that just takes the pressure off.

“
The stars about my head I felt
,” I whisper. Emily Dickinson wrote that. Alone in her room. I wonder if she ever waited until dark and snuck out to look at the stars.

I crawl back inside the Falcon and roll into my bedding. It feels good to stretch out beneath my own blankets. The trip to town, trading Porky Pig, the GreyDevil battle, it all seems like another day, another world. But over and over, as I try to drift off, I keep thinking about Dad. About his mysterious walks. About the root cellar. About how strange it is to know someone so well they hug you good night, but to be in the middle of that hug and suddenly realize he too is part of some other world.

23

WHATEVER SORT OF WORLD YOU LIVE IN, IT WILL GET BORING IF
you live there long enough. In the week since my last trip to town with Toad, nothing exciting has happened. I may be surrounded by solar bears and GreyDevils and corn that grows like it’s trying to tickle the sun, but that doesn’t mean every day is an adventure. There are the hoop house gardens that need to be watered and weeded, the chicken coop that needs to be cleaned, whirligigs to make, vegetables to pick and preserve, pigs to feed, weapons to make and repair, clothes to make and wash, and every day more “gold” to be dug out of Goldmine Gully.

Even if you’re doing them on the moon, chores are still chores.

I’d be a lot more bored if I didn’t have my family. Although I’m still happiest when I’m hiding out in the Falcon all alone, I look forward to the times Ma and I read poetry and have tea, or the times we just
talk
. There are things only a mother can tell you. Or only a mother can hear. Dad, on his good days, still makes me smile—although lately he’s been disappearing more than ever, sometimes even during the day. The last time he straggled home he was all scraped up. He said he slipped and fell into a gully. “Maybe you need to eat more garlic,” I said, but I wish I hadn’t, because I could see it hurt his feelings.

In his own weird way, even Dookie helps: just when I’m becoming bored enough to chew off my own toenails he jumps out of nowhere two inches from my face and hollers “
SHAZZ-WHIFFY!
” or “
FUZARKUS!
” or some other nonsense. I’ve also grown used to that dang red rubber ball coming out of nowhere to bounce off my head. I never should have gone back to get it from Magic Mike. Still, even as I’m giving him the third noogie of the day, I have to admit—at least for as long as it takes to rub a red patch into his noggin—I don’t stay bored long.

I’d really go nuts, though, if I didn’t get to go down to Hoot Holler and work with Toad. Today he and I will be sorting scrap, so as soon as Hatchet’s first evil crow-hack wakes me, I crawl out of the Ford Falcon in the dark, hoist my pack, and hike to the flagpole. It’s too dark for flags, but lately Toad and I have been experimenting with a semaphore. It looks a lot like a jacklight, only the box is bigger, and instead of a tin reflector, there is a curved mirror that we got by very carefully taking apart a headlight from one of Toad’s junkyard cars. The glass on the side where the light shines out is covered by tiny little shutters that can be rapidly opened and closed with a small handle. Toad learned Morse code when he was a boy, and he quizzes me on it when we work in the junk piles. I see a light in Toad’s house far below, so I whistle three long and three short. Then I strike a match and touch it to the candle in the box.

Pointing the semaphore toward Toad’s house, I flash out a few words.

“
Ford Falcon descending
.”

I wait, then a light in Toad’s yard winks back at me:

“O-K.”

I smile, partly because our system is working—old Daniel Beard would have loved this giant version of his jacklight—and partly because I realize the most powerful thing about Toad’s semaphore lamp is how it forces him to speak in plain and simple words. Then I smile even bigger when I wonder how long it will take before he figures out how to do semaphore spoonerisms.

Because I’m not gathering ferns or chasing down Dookie, I make good time getting down the ridge. Halfway along I see a patch of wintergreen, and stop to pick some. Wintergreen leaves are like nature’s chewing gum. It’s hard to believe a shiny green leaf can taste so much like candy. Like with most things, it’s that first taste that’s the best, so I pop in a leaf and chew it, stopping just for a moment to enjoy fresh, sweet flavor.

It’s getting lighter. Through a gap in the trees I can see the countryside below. Things look a lot different down there right now, because it’s almost harvest time. Instead of brilliant green, the Sustainability Reserves are flat tan. It changed about five days ago, just like someone threw a switch, which Toad says is basically what happens, because that is how the corn cells are programmed. It takes the corn about one month to cure. Then the big harvesting machines will arrive, the cornvoy trucks will be running night and day, and the GreyDevils will be all stirred up and crazier than usual.