A Season of Gifts Read online

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Figure at the Window

  Not a leaf stirred that last week of August as the world waited for school to start. The night before it did, Phyllis barged in my room without knocking.

  “Stop moping in your room,” she said, though she’d been moping in hers. “Let’s get out of here and go for a walk or something.”

  Phyllis inviting me to do something? “Where?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We can walk down to the school, see how long it takes.”

  How long could it take? You could see open country at either end of the main street.

  “It’s easy being you,” she said. “You’re just going into another grade of grade school. Nothing to it. I’m having to start high school—here. High school. Do you have the faintest idea of what that means?”

  Not too much. But it sounded better than grade school to me. I thought life started when you got to high school. Grade school was just one day after another.

  “If we’re going for a walk, we’ll have to take Ruth Ann,” I said.

  Phyllis slumped. This was another reminder that I had my own room while she had to share with Ruth Ann.

  “I hope I come back as a boy,” Phyllis said.

  “From the walk?” I said.

  “No, in my next life, you nincompoop.”

  I followed her across the hall and jumped back at her door. To help her settle in, Mother had let Phyllis paint her room in her choice of color. She’d picked a Day-Glo pink that really yelled at you. It was like being inside a stomach.

  Then Phyllis had painted a stripe of that same Day-Glo pink down the center of the floor and warned Ruth Ann never to set a sandal across it.

  Phyllis had hung her Elvis Presley posters, all eight of them, around both sides of the room. I know for a fact Phyllis wrote letters to Elvis Presley regularly, though she never heard back. Ruth Ann sat bunched up on her bed, clutching her dolly. Looming above her was a giant poster of Elvis in a cowboy rig and neckerchief, strumming a guitar. Another was Elvis in the gold coat he wore on his tour last year. Elvis was all swooping hair and sideburns and showing teeth in life-size sneers, all over the room. He was everywhere. It was like being in a revolving door with him.

  “I’m scared,” Ruth Ann said over her knees. She made big eyes up at a poster. “Don’t go out and leave me with him.” She whispered for fear Elvis would hear.

  “We’re taking you,” Phyllis said. “But don’t wander off from us or else. You know how you are.”

  Ruth Ann scooted off her bed, dragging her dolly. She’d loved it almost completely bald. Its eyes used to close. Now one was permanently closed. My eyes were still pinwheeling from the pink walls, but I saw Phyllis had laid out her first-day school outfit for tomorrow. Pencil-slim skirt and new blouse with circle pin, fresh-looking bobby socks and nearly new saddle shoes from the Goodwill store in Terre Haute. We made a lot of sacrifices for Phyllis.

  To copy her, Ruth Ann had laid out her dress too, the shiny plaid one that did her for church. Matching ribbons for her braids. She had about a month’s wear left in her sandals.

  Girls take their time, but we were finally ready. Phyllis wore her sundress with the jacket in case we met anybody on the street. She’d scrubbed her sneakers. I have to admit she was a real pretty girl, though whether that would do her any good at this school, who knew?

  “Stay on the lighted street,” Mother called after us.

  Out on the porch Ruth Ann plunked her dolly into the doll buggy. She never traveled light. We were lucky she didn’t bring her hula hoop. She bumped the buggy down the steps.

  “Why are you taking that thing?” Phyllis wanted to know.

  “She hasn’t been out all day,” Ruth Ann said. “She needs some air. She’s practically gasping.” She meant her doll, named Grachel. Don’t even ask why. For a name I think she couldn’t decide between Grace and Rachel, and she only had one doll.

  “And what’s this about?” Phyllis reached into the buggy and pulled up a quart jar with holes punched in the lid.

  “For lightning bugs in case we need to see our way home,” Ruth Ann said. She always had a plan.

  When we got to where the sidewalk started, it was evening under the trees. We came past the church. A lot of the plastic sheeting over the windows had blown out.

  Farther along, the lights of uptown flickered, and the red light on top of the grain elevator across the tracks. The evening St. Louis to Chicago train roared through with its Vista Dome cars all lit up. People having dinner in the dining car blurred past. The town trembled.

  There was a hole in the business block where the cafe used to be. Now it was a Dairy Queen frozen custard stand, buzzing with fluorescent lights. Not that we had any loose change for a frozen custard. But it was the only place in town to be. Cars and Harleys were pulled up. Even a tractor. Kids hung around. Big kids. A lot of denim and boots.

  “Keep walking,” Phyllis said out of the side of her mouth.

  Girls and guys lounged around in their separate groups. The guys were all buzz cuts and ducktails. Everybody was a ghastly color from the fluorescent light, like from another planet. Gum stopped snapping when we came on the scene.

  From a car radio Elvis Presley’s voice wavered out:

  “If you cain’t come around, at least, please, uh, telyphone.”

  Phyllis quivered slightly at the sound of Elvis’s voice. But she pulled herself together. “Stroll,” she mouthed. “Don’t hurry.”

  I wanted to break into a run. The crowd parted for us a little. A very little. A brassy girl with kind of rowdy red hair leaned right over Ruth Ann’s doll buggy for a better look at Phyllis. I was working hard not to meet anybody’s stare.

  The cars pulled up were mostly pre-war Plymouths and a couple of muddy trucks. Sprawled across the hood of an old DeSoto was a big galoot propped up on his elbows. I was looking right at him, and I’d know that face anywhere. Those eyes. One blue. One green.

  Roscoe Burdick. A cigarette wedged over his ear, and a cigarette pack was folded up into his T-shirt sleeve. Lucky Strikes. But he didn’t even see me. He only had eyes for Phyllis. He worked his chin from sideburn to sideburn with one of his big thorny hands and gave her a deep blue-and-green stare. It was like he’d never seen a girl before. The other girls were looking her over too, up and down, up and down. It took us about a year and a half to stroll past the whole bunch.

  When we were finally down by the Stubbs & Askew insurance agency, a long low wolf whistle came out of the crowd behind us. Then a lot of hee-haw laughing. Then Elvis again, moaning out of a tinny car radio, “Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s . . .”

  We moved on into the night to the last slab of sidewalk. The town ran out, and there was the school out in a field. It was a new yellow brick, since the war. A consolidated school with a lot of blacktop for the buses. The rope pinged on the flagpole. You could feel the whole place hunkered down in the dark, just waiting for tomorrow.

  “What’s that, Bobby?” Ruth Ann pulled up her buggy.

  “That’s it,” I told her. “School. We’ll all three be in the same building.” I figured she’d like that.

  “Us?” she said in a wispy voice. “When?”

  Phyllis sighed one of Mother’s sighs. Even I saw the problem. All along Ruth Ann had been thinking that after summer was over, we’d go back to Terre Haute, and everything would be the way it used to be. She’d only laid out her school clothes because Phyllis did. She was barely six and sort of lived in her own world. Sometimes we forgot to spell things out for her. It was dark, but you knew she was getting teary.

  “It’ll be all right,” Phyllis told her. “You’ll be in first grade, and everybody will be new. And you know your numbers and your letters. It’ll be fine. Little kids aren’t as mean as big kids.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. But I gave Phyllis credit for saying so.

  Ruth Ann gripped her buggy handle. Her knuckles were white in the dark. “Then we�
�re staying here?” Her voice wobbled.

  Phyllis and I both sighed.

  “But how will he find me?” Ruth Ann said.

  “Who?” we said.

  “You know who,” Ruth Ann said. “You know perfectly well.”

  I didn’t. But Phyllis rolled her eyes, then caught mine. Over Ruth Ann’s head she quietly spelled out a couple of words, a name.

  “S-A-N-T-A,” Phyllis spelled, “C-L-A-U-S.”

  * * *

  We weren’t about to walk home past the Dairy Queen again. We picked a darker street. People didn’t sit out on their porches much anymore. A blue television glow came out of nearly every house and frosted the yard.

  Even in Terre Haute we hadn’t had a television set.

  Some people thought it wasn’t the kind of thing a preacher’s family should have. It didn’t set a good example. Anyway, Mother said it was bad for our eyes.

  So on nights this dark back in Terre Haute we’d scouted around the neighborhood till we found a television in plain sight through a front window. We’d stand in their bushes and watch it.

  Now we were at it again.

  We came to a blue-lit window. The curtains were open, but the shrubs were low and sparse, so we’d be in the open. Still, we veered off the sidewalk and drifted up to the house. Phyllis and I made a cradle seat with our hands, and Ruth Ann climbed aboard.

  We hoisted her up, and now we were these three heads at the window. But it was okay. The people in there were facing away to the screen, eating popcorn. You could smell melted butter. They were watching an advertisement for a car. A commercial. Words appeared on the screen.

  “What do they say?” Ruth Ann whispered.

  “There’s a Ford in your future,” I read. “Make sure it’s an Edsel.”

  The screen jumped to wrestling. Ruth Ann bounced. She loved wrestling. Phyllis didn’t. She was always wanting it to be Sunday night and Elvis making a surprise appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

  But wrestling was good because you didn’t need to hear anything. The wrestlers boomeranged off the ropes and into each other. They were big bruisers. The biggest, blondest, baddest was named Gorgeous George, a major star.

  “Kill him, Gorgeous,” Ruth Ann whispered. “Twist off his ears.” There was a whistle in her whisper because she was missing her two front teeth. “Take him apart, limb from limb,” she whispered, making little fists.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Phyllis murmured. “I can’t hold her any longer. I’m numb.”

  Ruth Ann dropped into a shrub, and we stole away.

  Now we were running out of sidewalk and only a turning from home. Ruth Ann jumped for lightning bugs, but they were all out of reach. It was getting late, and it was a school night.

  But then we came to a house with a good strong blue glow through thick evergreens. It was too good to pass up, and dark as pitch under the trees of the yard. We crept forth, close, like some six-legged creature of the night. You couldn’t see where your feet went.

  I tripped over something, like a leaf bag but bigger. I made some sound.

  “Shut up,” Phyllis whispered. What had I fallen over? It felt like a gunny sack stuffed tight with something. I reached around inside.

  “What is it?” Phyllis whispered.

  “Ears of corn,” I said.

  We edged around it. Ruth Ann clung to us. The glow from a big screen beamed through the branches. We edged up till pine needles poked our faces. It began to smell like Christmas.

  We were only one branch from the house when we saw it. The shape. A figure stood in the shrubs, looking in the window. There before us and way bigger. Darker than the night.

  My blood ran cold. Phyllis’s hands clamped her mouth and Ruth Ann’s. We froze. I was scared speechless. The shrubbery was a cage now, and the branches were claws. The massive back of the black figure was as near us as I am to you and big as a bear. Its huge, thick arms came up, turning and twisting against the blue light. Ruth Ann clung. The figure bobbed and weaved, mirroring Gorgeous George on the television inside as he worked over his helpless victims. At least it’s a sports fan, I thought.

  A hand closed over my arm. I flinched. It was Phyllis. She seemed to jerk her head. We needed to edge back very light on our feet. The big figure before us was still grabbing for night air, still ducking, helping Gorgeous George tie his enemies in knots.

  Step by step we eased out of the bushes, skirting the corn sack. Ruth Ann was as silent as the ghost of a girl. We walked backward to the first tree and the doll buggy. Then we lit out. When our porch light was in sight, Phyllis drew up, fighting for breath.

  “I’m scared,” Ruth Ann whimpered. “What did you bring me for?”

  “You know who that was, don’t you?” Phyllis said. “That . . . figure at the window. It was Mrs. Dowdel.”

  I guessed it made sense. Like us, she didn’t have her own television. Or any sweet corn in her garden. Looked like she’d been harvesting it by night out of somebody else’s. Then she’d stopped to go a round or two along with Gorgeous George. Phyllis moaned.

  “This town,” she said, hopeless, “this town . . .”

  A car went past, slow. It was one-eyed. I’d have thought it must be an old DeSoto with a slipping clutch and a Hollywood muffler. It gunned into open country, and the dark swallowed its taillights.

  Personally I thought it was time to call it a night. Ruth Ann began to unpack her buggy. She stopped. I can still see her hands hovering over the doll blanket in the porch light.

  “Grachel’s gone,” she said in her smallest voice. It was a bad moment.

  “Feel around in there for her,” Phyllis said.

  “She’s gone,” Ruth Ann said.

  “Maybe she fell out,” I said. “Maybe—”

  “She was wedged in under the bug jar,” Phyllis murmured.

  “She didn’t fall out,” Ruth Ann said. “I know where she went.”

  “Where?”

  “Back to Terre Haute where he can find her. She went home. I wish I could.”

  We never saw the doll buggy again. I guess Ruth Ann put it in the pile to go to Goodwill, where it came from to begin with. I guess she didn’t want it around.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Afternoon of the Turtle

  I walked Ruth Ann home after the first day of school. She looked a little pale, a little droopy. But she’d hung on to her Davy Crockett lunch bucket. Which was better than what happened to me. Two big bozos who were repeating sixth grade stole my lunch.

  They were Newt Fluke and Elmo Leaper, Jr. Both about five ten, and Newt shaved. They also happened to be a couple of the big uglies who’d thrown me into Salt Crick. Anyway, I’d saved back an apple in my desk, the way you do when you’re not one of the bigger kids.

  Ruth Ann took my hand across the street, and I let her. Nobody was looking.

  “How’d you like first grade?” I asked because she wasn’t saying.

  “It was all right. We cut out fall leaves from construction paper,” she said. “But I thought by afternoon we’d be reading. What are nits?”

  Nits? “Ah,” I said. “Well, they’re louse eggs or baby louses. Lice. Something like that. Why?”

  “The teacher checked in our hair for them.”

  Oh. “Did she find any?”

  “She found a lot on a girl named Ida-Belle Eubanks. My desk has a name.”

  “Roscoe?”

  Ruth Ann nodded.

  * * *

  Mrs. Dowdel had fired up her cauldron that afternoon. I noticed from my window when I was upstairs messing around in my room. She was boiling shucked sweet corn in batches. She pitchforked the ears in and out. Smoke billowed up around her.

  I looked again, and there was Ruth Ann on the far side of the cannas. Mother had captured her long enough to get her out of her school dress and into coveralls. Now Ruth Ann was over by the hollyhocks, already deep into Mrs. Dowdel’s territory.

  She’d pulled off a few blossoms to make up a little family o
f hollyhock dolls. Without Grachel, Ruth Ann was kind of lost and alone in the world. She used hollyhock buds for heads and upside-down flowers for the skirts. That kind of business. Toothpicks for arms.

  Ruth Ann was helping herself to the hollyhocks, and Mrs. Dowdel was pitchforking her bubbling corn. The distance was narrowing between them. But each one was in a separate world—busy.

  Then pretty soon Mrs. Dowdel dropped her pitchfork and headed off to her cobhouse. She practically ran Ruth Ann down. But neither one paid any attention to the other. When Mrs. Dowdel came back, she was lugging a crate with something on top. A big mixing bowl? Who knows? She did all kinds of things in her yard most people do indoors.

  She planted the bowl on the ground and tipped the crate. Something rolled out. From up here it looked like a rusty hubcap, but bigger. It was there in the grass. Then it moved, by itself. Ruth Ann watched.

  It was a turtle, a great big thing. It started crawling toward the fire, thought better of that, and made a slow turtle-turn. Mrs. Dowdel stood over it, keeping an eye on it, taking her time. Ruth Ann was right there, in her shadow.

  There was a stick in Mrs. Dowdel’s hand, no longer than a clothespin. She bent to tease the turtle with it, and I guess he fell for it. I couldn’t really see from up here, but he stuck his neck out of his shell. Bad idea. A turtle will take your finger off, especially if you bother it. Mrs. Dowdel, bent double, invited the turtle to take a bite out of the stick she was offering between two careful fingers.

  Ruth Ann tucked her fingers into her armpits. She was all eyes.

  The turtle must have chomped down on the stick, because Ruth Ann jumped.

  Out of her apron Mrs. Dowdel drew a businesslike knife. It flashed once, and the turtle, who wouldn’t stop biting the stick, couldn’t pull his head back in his shell. The head flew. Ruth Ann jumped a foot. With a big shoe Mrs. Dowdel kicked the turtle head into the fire.

  Now she was squatting in the yard. A turtle can crawl till sunset after it’s lost its head. She flipped it over, and it lolled.