Past Perfect, Present Tense Read online

  Priscilla was sort of above everything, if you’ll pardon a pun. And very calm, as only the very big can be. If there was anybody who didn’t notice Klutter’s Kobras, it was Priscilla.

  Until one winter day after school when we were all grabbing our coats out of our lockers. And hurrying, since Klutter’s Kobras made sweeps of the halls for after-school shakedowns.

  Anyway, up to Melvin’s locker swaggers one of the Kobras. Never mind his name. Gang members don’t need names. They have group identity. He reaches down and grabs little Melvin by the neck and slams his head against his locker door. The sound of skull against steel rippled all the way down the locker now, speeding the crowds on their way.

  “Okay, let’s see your pass,” snarls the Kobra.

  “A pass for what this time?” Melvin asks, probably still dazed.

  “Let’s call it a pass for very short people,” says the Kobra. “A dwarf tax.” He wheezes a little Kobra chuckle, and already he’s reaching for Melvin’s wallet with the hand that isn’t circling Melvin’s windpipe. All this time, of course, Melvin and the Kobra are standing in Priscilla’s big shadow.

  She’s taking her time shoving her books into her locker and pulling on an extra-large coat. Then, quicker than the eye, she brings the side of her enormous hand down in a chop that breaks the Kobra’s hold on Melvin’s throat. You could hear a pin drop in that hallway. Nobody’d ever laid a finger on a Kobra, let alone a hand the size of Priscilla’s.

  Then Priscilla, who hardly ever says anything to anybody except to Melvin, says to the Kobra, “Who’s your leader, wimp?”

  This practically blows the Kobra away. First he’s chopped by a girl. Now she’s acting like she doesn’t know Monk Klutter, the Head Honcho of the World. He’s so amazed, he tells her. “Monk Klutter.”

  “Never heard of him,” Priscilla mentions. “Send him to see me.” The Kobra just backs away from her like the whole situation is too big for him, which it is.

  Pretty soon Monk himself slides up. He jerks his head once, and his Kobras slither off down the hall. He’s going to handle this interesting case personally. “Who is it around here doesn’t know Monk Klutter?”

  He’s standing inches from Priscilla, but since he’d have to look up at her, he doesn’t. “Never heard of him,” says Priscilla.

  Monk’s not happy with this answer, but now he’s spotted Melvin, who’s growing smaller in spite of himself. Monk breaks his own rule by reaching for Melvin with his own hands. “Kid,” he says, “you’re going to have to educate your girlfriend.”

  His hands never quite make it to Melvin. In a move of pure poetry Priscilla has Monk in a hammerlock. His neck’s popping like gunfire, and his head’s bowed under the immense weight of her forearm. His suede jacket’s peeling back, showing pile.

  Priscilla’s behind him in another easy motion. With a single mighty thrust forward, she frog-marches Monk into her own locker. It’s incredible. His ostrich-skin boots click once in the air. And suddenly he’s gone, neatly wedged into the locker, a perfect fit. Priscilla bangs the door shut, twirls the lock, and strolls out of school. Melvin goes with her, of course, trotting along below her shoulder. The last stragglers leave quietly.

  Well, this is where fate, an even bigger force than Priscilla steps in. It snows all that night, a blizzard. The whole town ices up. School closes for a week.

  The Past

  I call 1900 the year of my birth, but Mama claims to have no idea of the day.

  —“The Special Powers of Blossom Culp”

  These next four stories appear together because they’re set in the past, and the past is my favorite place. All fiction is historical fiction the minute the ink is dry, particularly if you write for the young.

  Very little history is learned in school or college now, but that only spurs on the fiction writer. Whole generations of us fell for history, not in class but in the pages of Gone with the Wind and The Young Lions, just as an even earlier generation was swept up and carried back in time by Ben Hur. The first book I ever loved throbbed with the turning wheel of a long-vanished riverboat plying the nineteenth century.

  “Shotgun Cheatham’s Last Night Above Ground” is set in 1929. “The Electric Summer” goes to the great world’s fair of 1904. Blossom Culp displays her Special Powers during the 1910 school year. “By Far the Worst Pupil at Long Point School” is set in that timeless territory, the recollections of old folks.

  Three of these stories have something else in common. They all relate somehow to my novels. My first story, “Priscilla and the Wimps,” had taught me how a short story can inspire a novel. I found I liked Priscilla and Melvin and wanted to see more of them. I wanted to learn how the friendship between the largest girl in school and the smallest boy would work out. They therefore reappear as Teresa and Barnie in a novel called Secrets of the Shopping Mall that had a long and happy life of its own, in several languages.

  “Shotgun Cheatham’s Last Night Above Ground” has had a happier history still, from even less likely beginnings. It started when author Harry Mazer sent out a letter to his writing friends in 1995. He wanted, of all things, gun stories for a collection that came to be Twelve Shots. Even before Columbine, this didn’t seem a promising project to me. But Harry thought the controversial gun topic would stimulate a bracing range of writerly response.

  I wondered. It seemed to me he was apt to get too many terminally gritty, male-dominated, testosterone-tainted tales—all grim. For balance, I thought I’d try a comedy starring a female character. It was the assignment I gave myself. Harry provided the necessary deadline.

  This is how Grandma Dowdel came to be—and to seize control of my career. When the editor of my novels read this short story, she told me to write some more short stories this grandson, Joey, tells about his grandma, and to shape them into a novel told in stories.

  The result was A Long Way from Chicago. It was a National Book Award finalist in 1998. It won the John Newbery silver medal from the American Library Association in 1999. When these things happen, your editors say, “We’ll need a sequel,” and again, they’d like it by Thursday. That second book became A Year Down Yonder, the John Newbery gold medal winner in 2001 . . . a pair of ascending Newberys, and all because a writing colleague asked me to write a gun story. I scanned the mail daily for my next assignment.

  Along it came in a letter from the well-known anthologist Donald R. Gallo. He wanted short stories from ten young-adult writers, one story for each decade of the twentieth century for a collection that became Time Capsule.

  Somehow I was assigned the 1900–10 decade for the setting of my story. (Or did I ask for this decade so mine could be the first story? Surely not.) The signal event of that decade, to me, was the great Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the world’s fair of 1904 in St. Louis. An Illinois farm girl named Geneva Peck had brought a ruby-glass cup etched with “1904” from the fair to her little brother, who became my father. Not for the first time did I mine the memories of my elders for a story.

  In “The Electric Summer” a farm girl who’s never been anywhere sees the great world suddenly unfold before her at the fair. What ideal metaphors for finding your future were world’s fairs in their heydays: electrically lit epiphanies.

  A short story couldn’t begin to explore the possibilities. So was born a novel called Fair Weather about a farm family of kids who find their twentieth-century futures at another fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition in the Chicago of 1893.

  A grateful Chicago Tribune gave the book the paper’s first annual young-adult novel prize in 2002. All because of a short story.

  The history of “The Special Powers of Blossom Culp” is a tale told in reverse. When Johanna Hurwitz sent out her call, she wanted an entire collection of stories, Birthday Surprises, to explore the same odd idea: A child receives a handsomely wrapped box with nothing in it.

  Somehow this brought Blossom Culp to mind. Through four books of my early career she’d become my most popular char
acter: the poorest, plainest, least truthful pupil at Horace Mann School. From Blossom I’d learned that young readers will identify most lovingly with exactly the kind of people they wouldn’t sit next to in school.

  Blossom lives by her wits. Being an outcast, a peer-group pariah, she has nothing to lose and is therefore the freest spirit in Bluff City.

  The empty-gift-box motif of the collection seemed just right for a prequel to the four novels that start with The Ghost Belonged to Me a little later in Blossom’s busy career. The short story dramatizes the lasting first impression she makes when she and her eerie mama blow into town.

  The last story in this section, “By Far the Worst Pupil at Long Point School,” is one of the most recently written. But it has a long family history. My mother was a student (never a teacher) at a one-room schoolhouse in rural Morgan County, Illinois, called Long Point School. And so that’s the name of the school in this story with a surprise at the end.

  My mother, who was a first grader in 1912, recalled riding a horse to Long Point School. A picture hangs in my mind of her and two of her older brothers astride a big farm horse, clopping down the dirt road, my mother the small figure behind with the big bow at the back of her head. Very likely there’s a story waiting to be told about these three.

  The Electric Summer

  I was sitting out there on the old swing that used to hang on the back porch. We’d fed Dad and the boys. Now Mama and I were spelling each other to stir the preserves. The screen door behind me was black with flies, and that smell of sugared strawberries cooking down filled all out-of-doors. A Maytime smell, promising summer.

  Just turned fourteen, I was long-legged enough to push off the swing, then listen to the squeak of the chains. The swing was where I did my daytime dreaming. I sat there looking down past Mama’s garden and the windpump to the level line of long distance.

  Like watching had made it happen, dust rose on the road from town. A black dot got bigger, scaring the sheep away from the fence line. It was an automobile. Nothing else churned the dust like that. Then by and by it was the Schumates’ Oldsmobile turning off the crown of the road and bouncing into our barn lot. There were only four automobiles in the town at that time, and only one of them driven by a woman—my aunt Elvera Schumate. She cut the motor off, but the Oldsmobile was still heaving. Climbing down, she put a gloved hand on a fender to calm it.

  As Dad often said, Aunt Elvera would have been a novelty even without the automobile. In the heat of the day she wore a wide-brimmed canvas hat secured with a motoring veil tied under her chin. Her duster was a voluminous poplin garment, leather-bound at the hem.

  My cousin Dorothy climbed down from the Olds, dressed similarly. They made a business of untangling themselves from their veils, propping their goggles up on their foreheads, and dusting themselves down the best they could. Aunt Elvera made for the house with Dorothy following. Dorothy always held back.

  Behind me Mama banged the screen door to scare the flies, then stepped outside. She was ready for a breather even if it meant Aunt Elvera. I stood up from the swing as she came through the gate to the yard, Dorothy trailing. Where their goggles had been were two circles of clean skin around their eyes. They looked like a pair of raccoons. Mama’s mouth twitched in something of a smile.

  “Well, Mary.” Aunt Elvera heaved herself up the porch steps and drew off the gauntlet gloves. “I can see you are having a busy day.” Mama’s hands were fire red from strawberry juice and the heat of the stove. Mine were scratched all over from picking every ripe berry in the patch.

  “One day’s like another on the farm,” Mama remarked.

  “Then I will not mince words,” Aunt Elvera said, overlooking me. “I’d have rung you up if you were on the telephone.”

  “What about, Elvera?” She and Mama weren’t sisters. They were sisters-in-law.

  “Why, the Fair, of course!” Aunt Elvera bristled in an important way. “What else? The Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. The world will be there. It puts St. Louis at the hub of the universe.” Aunt Elvera’s mouth worked.

  “Well I do know,” Mama said. “I take it you’ll be going?”

  Aunt Elvera waved her away. “My stars, yes. You know how Schumate can be. Tight as a new boot. But I put my foot down. Mary, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. We will not see such wonders again during our span.”

  “Ah,” Mama said, and my mind wandered—took a giant leap and landed in St. Louis. We knew about the Fair. The calendar the peddler gave us at Christmas featured a different pictorial view of the Fair for every month. They were white palaces in gardens with gondolas in waterways, everything electric lit. Castles from Europe and paper houses from Japan. For the month of May the calendar featured the great floral clock on the fairgrounds.

  “Send us a postal,” Mama said.

  “The thing is . . .” Aunt Elvera’s eyes slid toward Dorothy. “We thought we’d invite Geneva to go with us.”

  My heart liked to lurch out of my apron. Me? They wanted to take me to the Fair?

  “She’ll be company for Dorothy.”

  Then I saw how it was. Dorothy was dim, but she could set her heels like a mule. She wanted somebody with her at the Fair so she wouldn’t have to trail after her mother every minute. We were about the same age. We were in the same grade, but she was a year older, having repeated fourth grade. She could read, but her lips moved. And we were cousins, not friends.

  “It will be educational for them both,” Aunt Elvera said. “All the progress of civilization as we know it will be on display. They say a visit to the Fair is tantamount to a year of high school.”

  “Mercy,” Mama said.

  “We will take the Wabash Railroad directly to the gates of the Exposition,” Aunt Elvera explained, “and we will be staying on the grounds themselves at the Inside Inn.” She leaned nearer Mama, and her voice fell. “I’m sorry to say that there will be stimulants for sale on the fairgrounds. You know how St. Louis is in the hands of the breweries.” Aunt Elvera was sergeant-at-arms of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and to her, strong drink was a mocker. “But we will keep the girls away from that sort of thing.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “And we naturally won’t set foot on The Pike.”

  We knew what The Pike was. It was the midway of the Fair, like a giant carnival with all sorts of goings-on.

  “Well, many thanks, but I don’t think so,” Mama said.

  My heart didn’t exactly sink. It never dawned on me that I’d see the Fair. I was only a little cast down because I might never get another glimpse of the world.

  “Now, you’re not to think of the money,” Aunt Elvera said. “Dismiss that from your mind. Schumate and I will be glad to cover all Geneva’s expenses. She can sleep in the bed with Dorothy, and we are carrying a good deal of our eats. I know these isn’t flush times for farmers, Mary, but do not let your pride stand in Geneva’s way.”

  “Oh no,” Mama said mildly. “Pride cometh before a fall. But we may be running down to the Fair ourselves.”

  Aunt Elvera’s eyes narrowed, and I didn’t believe Mama either. It was just her way of fending off my aunt. Kept me from being in the same bed with Dorothy too.

  Aunt Elvera never liked taking no for an answer, but in time she and Dorothy made a disorderly retreat. We saw them off from the porch. Aunt Elvera had to crank the Olds to get it going while Dorothy sat up on the seat, adjusting the magneto or whatever it was. We watched Aunt Elvera’s rear elevation as she stooped to jerk the crank time after time. If the crank got away from you, it could break your arm, and we watched to see if it would.

  But at length the Olds coughed and sputtered to life. Aunt Elvera climbed aboard and circled the barn lot—she never had found the reverse gear. Then they were off back to town in a cloud of dust on the crown of the road.

  I didn’t want to mention the Fair, so I said, “Mama, would you ride in one of them things?”

  “Not with Elvera running it,” she said, and w
ent back in the house.

  I could tell you very little about the rest of that day. My mind was miles off. I know Mama wrung the neck off a fryer, and we had baking-powder biscuits to go with the warm jam. After supper my brothers hitched up Fanny to the trap and went into town. I took a bottle brush to the lamp chimneys and trimmed the wicks. After that I was back out on the porch swing while there was some daylight left. The lightning bugs were coming out, so that reminded me of how the Fair was lit up at night with electricity, brighter than day.

  Then Mama came out and settled in the swing beside me. She never sat out until the nights got hotter than this. We swung together awhile. Then she said in a quiet voice, “I meant it. I want you to see the Fair.”

  Everything stopped then. I still didn’t believe it, but my heart turned over.

  “I spoke to your dad about it. He can’t get away, and he can’t spare the boys. But I want us to go to the Fair.”

  Oh, she was brave to say it, she who hadn’t been anywhere in her life. Brave even to think it. “I’ve got some egg money put back,” she said. We didn’t keep enough chickens to sell the eggs, but anything you managed to save was called egg money.

  “That’s for a rainy day,” I said, being practical.

  “I know it,” she said. “But I’d like to see that floral clock.” Mama was famous for her garden flowers. When her glads were up, every color, people drove by to see them. And there was nobody to touch her for her zinnias.

  Oh, Mama, I thought, is this just a game we’re playing? “What’ll we wear?” I asked, to test her.

  “They’ll be dressy down at the Fair, won’t they?” she said. “You know those artificial cornflowers I’ve got. I thought I’d trim my hat with them. And you’re getting to be a big girl. Time you had a corset.”