The Seventh Most Important Thing (14 page)

O
ne of Arthur's favorite memories of his dad was the time they made a Pinewood Derby car for Cub Scouts when Arthur was eight or nine years old.

By itself, Cub Scouts was not one of his favorite memories. He had missed a lot of meetings because his dad would go out with his buddies and forget about them. Or he'd come home smelling like beer and cigarettes and Arthur would suddenly get a stomachache and not want to go to the meeting. Especially after one of the kids said once, “Your dad always smells kind of weird, doesn't he?”

But making the Pinewood Derby car was something Arthur would never forget.

Most kids didn't have the advantage of having a mechanic for a dad. He remembered how they worked on the project for a couple of weekends. Designing the shape. Cutting the body from a smooth block of white pine. Painting the car with real auto body paint. His car was neon blue with white racing stripes.

It won second place. Arthur still had the red ribbon hanging up in his closet. They'd gone out to celebrate, which was the only time Arthur had eaten a steak dinner in a restaurant in his life.

He wasn't sure why helping Mr. Hampton make angel wings the next Saturday reminded him of building the Pinewood Derby car with his dad, but it did.

Squeak couldn't come along—a violin concert, he said—so it was just Arthur and Mr. Hampton working in the garage.

“We're short on wings,” he said when Arthur walked in. “You can help me with wings today.”

Arthur was surprised to see that Mr. Hampton looked pretty good again. He wondered if maybe Officer Billie had been mistaken about the cancer. He couldn't see anything wrong with the guy, other than the fact that he was wearing the same holey brown cardigan sweater as the last Saturday and he didn't get up from his rolling chair when Arthur walked in—just used his feet to turn himself partway around.

“You can work over there at the table.” Mr. Hampton pointed to one of the rickety sawhorse tables in a far corner of the garage. “I need you to draw two sets of angel wings about, oh”—he glanced toward his creation, as if trying to visualize where they'd go—“about thirty-six inches across.”

Arthur had no idea how to draw angel wings.

“Do you have something I could copy from?” he asked Mr. Hampton, who was starting to glue a row of foil decorations along the edge of a table.

“What?” He turned.

“Do you have any pictures of angel wings I could trace or copy?” Arthur repeated.

“Just use what you've seen.” Mr. Hampton went back to his work.

Arthur wasn't sure what the guy meant. Did he really think he'd
seen
real angel wings?

“Uh, do you mean real ones?” Arthur said. “Or ones in, uh, books and stuff?”

“Oh, for goodness' sake!” The old man glared at Arthur as he got up from his chair. “I'll do them myself.”

Arthur noticed that Mr. Hampton moved slowly as he came toward the worktable, but maybe he had always walked that way. It was hard not to notice every little thing now and worry that it might be a sign of something being wrong.

After pausing to catch his breath for a minute, Mr. Hampton took the pencil from Arthur's hand. “Here, I'll draw one. Angel wings are like bird wings, right?”

“Sure.” Arthur nodded.

Mr. Hampton glanced at him oddly. “Of course they are. Only larger, depending on the angel. Two wings per angel. No two are the same. Every pattern is different. Colors and iridescence are different. Some angels are like peacocks. Others are less flashy. Like city pigeons.”

Arthur had never pictured angels as city pigeons.

“Watch. You draw them like this.” His hands trembling ever so slightly, Mr. Hampton began sketching a pair of wings on a large piece of cardboard. Arthur noticed it was a flattened grocery carton. Probably one he had collected.

When he was done, he handed the design to Arthur. “There. Now you cut them out.”

After Arthur cut out the wings, the rough cardboard edges had to be sanded smooth. Then the wings were covered in gold or silver foil. Hampton wanted each wing to be made of four or five layers of foil-wrapped cardboard. He liked to alternate gold and silver layers—with a little purple paper sometimes—so the wings looked sort of three-dimensional when they were finished.

Arthur spent most of his four hours working on only one wing.

“Anything of value takes time,” Hampton declared.

As they worked, Arthur kept thinking about his dad and the Pinewood Derby car. Maybe it was the smell of the glue making him delirious, but if he closed his eyes, he could almost picture being in their garage at home, with his dad standing beside him as they sanded and painted the race car.

“I used to work on stuff with my dad,” he heard himself saying to Hampton, and then instantly regretted it. Mr. Hampton didn't know his dad. Or care, probably. Plus, talking about his dad always made his voice do embarrassing things.

“Did you?” Hampton didn't look up from the wing he was gluing and wrapping. “Tell me more about him.”

Arthur studied Hampton's face. Was he just saying that to be polite? Or did he really want to know?

Arthur couldn't decide.

He figured Mr. Hampton might like hearing the story about the Pinewood Derby car, since it made his dad sound like an average guy who built cars with his kid. But the whole time he was talking about making the car—the special paint they used, how they tested it, and how they came in second to a kid who had won three years in a row with the same car—Mr. Hampton didn't look up from his work or seem interested in a thing.

When he was done, Arthur felt stupid for having babbled on so long about his dad. “Anyhow, that's one of the main things I remember about him,” he finished.

“Do you still have it?” Mr. Hampton asked finally.

“Have what?”

“The car.”

Arthur really hoped he didn't want it for his masterpiece. He wouldn't give up the car for anything. Not even for heaven.

“Yeah, I've got it somewhere, I think,” he replied vaguely, even though he knew exactly where it was. He kept it in a box in the back of his closet with the warning
Don't Open or You'll Die
scrawled across the top. Just in case his sister got any ideas about borrowing it for her Barbies.

“Well, you should keep it. Your father sounds like he was a good man.” Mr. Hampton nodded as he drew another small wing. “And he wore those angel wings on his hat. So he must have been a good man.”

Arthur's eyes darted toward Mr. Hampton. He couldn't tell if the guy was serious about the wings or joking.

“The wings were for motorcycles,” he tried to explain, since Mr. Hampton didn't seem to know what they were. “It's a logo. You know, Harley-Davidson. They didn't mean anything. He rode motorcycles.”

“Oh yes.” The old man pressed his lips together and nodded solemnly. “That's what I thought.” Then he shrugged and smiled a little. “But you never know about angels, right?” He pointed at a bottle of glue near Arthur. “Hand me some glue, young man. I'm just about finished with this piece.”

Arthur passed the glue to him. “Really, my dad wasn't an angel.”

Mr. Hampton chuckled to himself. “None of us are.”

“But he wasn't all bad,” he added quickly, just in case his dad might be listening, wherever he was.

“I'm sure he wasn't. Tell me some more of the good stuff.”

This was the point when Arthur definitely wished he'd never opened his big mouth. He could feel a lump already rising in his throat. He really wanted to change the subject. “There's not much else to say about him,” he mumbled. “That's it.”

“Food…what'd your dad like to eat?” the old man inquired as he put a careful line of glue around the edge of the wing he was finishing. “He a big eater or not?”

In spite of himself, Arthur smiled. “Yeah, he loved burgers and fries. And chili. He made killer chili. Every January, or whenever it got cold, he used to cook a big pot for all the guys at work. There'd be ingredients strewn all over our kitchen when he was done. My mom would have a fit. But everybody at the shop loved his chili. The hotter, the better.”

“Me too.” Mr. Hampton nodded. “Give me a big pot of chili with a slab of warm corn bread in the middle of winter. Nothing better than that.” He pressed a piece of foil onto the glue. “What else? He play music or sing or anything?”

Arthur shook his head. “No, but he listened to the radio all the time. He liked Johnny Cash, anything by Johnny Cash. And he always watched
The Price Is Right
on Friday nights if he wasn't out with his buddies. Nobody—not even my little sister—was allowed to bug him during
The Price Is Right.
He'd throw a pillow at you if you interrupted his show.”

Mr. Hampton laughed. “Yeah, I like that one too.”

They kept talking about Arthur's dad for a while longer, in between gluing and wrapping more wings. They chatted about what kind of work his dad did. How he got started as a mechanic. His favorite cars. Arthur even told Mr. Hampton about his dad putting up the Christmas tree every year—how there couldn't be any dark spots or black holes. Mr. Hampton loved that story.

“Don't want any black holes in my masterpiece either,” he said, nodding. “I want the whole garage filled up with gold and silver. No space left at all.”

Arthur couldn't help asking, “How will you know when you're done?”

In an instant, Mr. Hampton's expression changed and he glared at Arthur. “A saint's work is never finished, young man.”

“Okay, yeah. Sorry.” Arthur shut up and went back to wrapping foil around another scrap of cardboard. Sometimes he couldn't understand Mr. Hampton. One minute, he would seem perfectly normal, and then the next minute, he'd say something crazy about angel wings or being a saint and you'd wonder what the heck he was talking about.

But he was the first person in months who had asked about his dad's life instead of his death—Arthur had to give him credit for that. Almost nobody else cared that his dad had made great chili and listened to Johnny Cash and watched
The Price Is Right.
All most people wanted to know was why he'd been drinking and racing his motorcycle in the rain.

Arthur shook his head. Life was strange. Who could have guessed that the person who would be the most interested in his dad's life would be the Junk Man who had taken his stuff?

T
he next week, Barbara got chicken pox and Arthur got sick with the flu that was going around, so he missed his last Saturday of probation in February. Squeak volunteered to do his hours instead, but Arthur knew Officer Billie would never agree to that, so he didn't even bother to ask.

In March, the weather was mostly gray and damp. Arthur got used to slogging around Seventh Street in the rain. When it was too miserable outside, he would help Mr. Hampton with gluing foil and making wings. One Saturday, Mr. Hampton sent him to the library to research pictures of crowns for the display. “What kinds of crowns?” he asked Mr. Hampton before he left.

“Heavenly ones, what else?” the old man said impatiently.

Arthur knew better than to ask the librarians for help with finding heavenly crowns. He looked up
crowns
in
The World Book Encyclopedia
and did sketches of some famous ones for Mr. Hampton.

Fortunately, the month of April finally brought some sunshine and color back into the world. At first it was just a few patches here and there, but then the color spread out to cover everything else.

Squeak came to help on a couple of the Saturdays in April. One afternoon, they cut stars out of cardboard for Mr. Hampton to use as decoration on some of his pieces.

“You're a lot better at making things now,” Squeak noticed as Arthur was working an eight-pointed star with little balls of foil on each point. Arthur showed him how he'd come up with designs for different stars and wings in his school notebooks.

“I do a lot of these in class,” he said, holding up one of his notebooks. “I've got pages full of them.”

Squeak shook his head. “You should be paying attention in class.”

Arthur rolled his eyes. “Please.”

When they weren't working in the garage, Squeak and Arthur took the grocery cart around the neighborhood to collect the usual stuff on Mr. Hampton's list. Arthur had a routine now. He knew where to get a lot of the things without having to search around too much.

The body shop down the street saved lightbulbs, busted car mirrors, and coffee cans for him. The small grocery store across from Groovy Jim's always had cardboard boxes and empty bottles. Foil was harder to find, but a week's worth of foil from Squeak's lunches did add up. Tossed-out furniture was plentiful on almost every curb in April.

“Spring-cleaning,” Hampton told Arthur. “You'll find a lot of good stuff now.”

He was right. Arthur couldn't believe what people threw away. Sometimes it was hard to focus on the Seven Most Important Things with all of the other great things people were pitching out.

On their treks through the neighborhood, Squeak and Arthur found rusty bicycles leaning against garbage cans. A cracked skateboard. A kid's red wagon with one missing wheel. A telescope with a broken stand. Old birdcages. Discarded fish tanks.

Surprisingly enough, Roger the Carpenter turned out to be useful for something after all.

He could fix things.

The skateboard—which Arthur kept for himself—had a hairline crack at one end of the board.

“No problem,” Roger said when Arthur showed it to him after another Friday dinner. (The dinners had become a regular thing.) “I'll get right on it.”

By the next Friday, Arthur had an almost-new skateboard.

Eventually, Squeak got a telescope with an almost-new stand. Barbara got an almost-new wagon and bike. Arthur kept a fish tank and birdcage for himself in case he decided to get a pet someday. He'd never had a pet.

When Arthur's mom asked where everything was coming from, he told her they were helping James Hampton and his neighbors clean out their garages. “Spring-cleaning,” he said. It wasn't a complete lie.