It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC (18 page)

CHAPTER 18:

TRAPPED

After the boys agreed that the morning’s events would remain secret, their shared worries drove each of them toward solitude. For much of the afternoon Charlie sat near the family victory garden, basking in the sun like a lizard with Lint to help him do it. The dog soaked up more than his share of pats from a master thoroughly proud of the way his twenty-pound terrier had stood firm against a grown man.

Reading through a mixed stack of
Planet
and
Captain America
comic books, Charlie reveled for a while in freedom from responsibility. Aaron had shouldered that heavy load, and Charlie knew well that Aaron would be feeling the weight of his decision. For the moment, Charlie’s own guilt was no more bothersome than a speck of gravel in his shoe.

But gradually, that speck began to grow to the size of a marble, then a brick. When his mother sent Charlie off in midafternoon to buy groceries at the Checker Front store, he actually rejoiced to have the chore as a distraction. Lint, having judged that the gathering clouds might bring cold winds, wagged a farewell and crawled into his den.

As he walked, Charlie reflected on how much more agreeable the world would be if a guy could just revise little pieces of reality here and there. He imagined other ways the storm drain discoveries might have happened, and was taking a shortcut down the grocer’s alley when Jackie Rhett called to him. Jackie was itching to show off his just-discovered skill in smoking a discarded cigarillo he had found in Checker Front’s garbage. The absolute prohibition against Charlie smoking, or even the pretense of it, was made more galling by the grand gestures Jackie made in his efforts to blow smoke rings at the sky. It was Jackie’s self-admiration as a young man of important skills that prodded Charlie to spin out his wishful version of the morning, in which Charlie was important too. After all, it wasn’t as if Charlie were telling what had
really
happened.

And the part he told about the fearsome storm drain leading to the bowels of a bank fitted all too neatly into Jackie’s beliefs. For some weeks past, he had felt increasingly sure that Charlie and Aaron had somehow become capitalists.

In late afternoon when Pinero moved down the basement stairs, he knew even before he heard his partner’s snores that something was amiss. For one thing, the place stank of that whoopee juice Bridger drank, though Pinero had warned him against it a dozen times. Also, when Bridger weaved up from his squat on an overturned bucket it was plain to see as well as to smell that he had wet his overalls, and a pair of those botched counterfeit bills lay in plain sight, flattened and torn on the press.

“You were supposed to burn every piece of that bad paper,” said Pinero, wadding the bills together in contempt and tossing the wad at Bridger. “All of it. You think if you wrinkle it up enough you could pass it?” He wore an unpleasant grin, intending his question as sarcasm.

To Bridger, whose brain churned with doubt about youthful invaders in the storm drain, this sounded as if someone had told Pinero about the scene at the Ice House. “It wasn’t me,” Bridger slurred. Anxious to point blame away from himself, he went on, “Those crooked kidsh.” But when he saw what passed across Pinero’s face, he wished he had held his tongue.

Pinero sat down on the stair and looked at his partner for a long moment, the way a wolf might look at some kind of rabbit he had never thought much about before. Then—but casually—he said, “What wasn’t you, Cade? What crooked kids?”

“Why, the ones that broke in from the storm drain,” Bridger stammered, realizing that his partner had not found out about the Ice House foolishness after all. But Pinero seemed very interested now: had the boys seen the press? Hard to tell, Bridger told him, but in any case he had driven the young thieves away before they could take anything.

And when had all this happened? Bridger did not own a wristwatch and was not clear on the question, but he figured it had been about half a bottle ago. Further questions, with replies rooted half in fact and the other half in more of Bridger’s fantasies, left Pinero convinced that all his hard work would amount to nothing. But if the weather signs could be trusted, he might have a stormy night to work in, undisturbed.

By now, from studying the look in Pinero’s eye, Bridger wanted his artfully decorated details to be true so much he half believed them. He mentioned a big dog, and a challenge near the creek where he had wrestled the bills from two youths the size of adults. This had the added feature of explaining how one foot was encased in mud he had forgotten to clean off. Because Pinero’s calm seemed so dangerously brittle it might shatter with further explanations, Bridger thought it better not to mention anything about the Ice House. Furnished with this balderdash, Pinero understood the day’s true events about as well as a snake understands a footrace.

“Well, with their break-in to explain, they’re not likely to be yelling to the cops,” Pinero said at last. “If they had, you’d be behind bars already. All the same, they could be back up that pipe any time now, and they’ve seen our operation.” He fell silent for a moment, his mood dark.

Bridger simply stood with arms at his sides, awaiting whatever fate held for him, weaving slightly as he blinked. If he had any remaining doubt about his partner’s mood it evaporated after he said, “So what do we do?”

Pinero’s hand lashed out in an open-handed slap. It caught Bridger full across the cheek and sent him reeling against the nearest wall. Pinero took a step as if to follow this with heavier blows, then mastered his fury, his breaths long and hard as he watched Bridger stumble away. “What I do is try to do one little print run, to get something out of this mess. What
you
do is plug that pipe enough so we could still get out, but if your thieves tried to come back we’d hear them. Can you understand that much? And don’t pile things up where they could be seen from creekside. Plenty of concrete chunks around here.” This was true; when breaching the side of the pipe weeks before, Bridger had simply shoved broken hunks of concrete into corners of the basement.

As Bridger hoisted pieces of concrete to the level of the pipe, he could hear occasional scurryings up there somewhere. He decided the sounds might have been a rat, or the trickling of rainwater punctuated by occasional mutters of distant thunder that echoed along the pipe from curb gratings. Pinero had never struck him before this but seemed ready to do it again. Bridger thought of escape, to stumble down the pipe and disappear into the twilight never to return, but the odor of ink and Pinero’s feverish haste to—
finally!—
create useable counterfeits overpowered the drunkard’s sensible fears. Panting, grunting, Bridger began to stack fragments of broken pipe in a way that would let water continue to trickle down toward the creek while preventing boys from climbing past without making an obvious clatter.

Meanwhile, Pinero set his mind firmly on leaving this very night, now that their hideout had been discovered. He began arranging adequate light and cleaning his equipment so that he might print a stack of twenties before abandoning this entire operation. At worst, he might have to abandon the heavy, foot-operated old press. He had stolen one press and he could steal another. Far more important were the engraved Nazi plates, no heavier than metal bricks, the only things he could not replace.

The summer rain took its time. Charlie arrived home before the first big spattering drops could do more than moisten his grocery bag. His mother chased him out of the kitchen with only an apple because, she said, it would be dinnertime in an hour. Soon he was lost again in the adventures of Captain America, but now in his own nook under the workbench in the garage with Lint curled like a parenthesis beside him. From time to time, brief freshets of rain drummed against the metal roof corrugations.

As evening approached and Coleman Hardin set his parking brake in the driveway, he smiled at the sight of his son, who stood waving a welcome in sprinkling rain even though he stayed fully dry, which suggested that Charlie had been elsewhere seconds earlier. It was almost, he thought, as if the boy had some kind of radar. In fact, this is exactly what Charlie did have—in his dog. A hundred cars a day might move downhill toward the Hardin residence without drawing the least show of interest from Lint. Brakes squealed, or whined, or did a half-dozen other animal imitations down that hill, but the Hardin sedan’s faint screech was a whispery song that Lint distinguished from any other. That song was too faint for any human ears but whatever the dog might be doing, when those floppy ears came to attention Charlie knew which Plymouth, of all the vehicles on earth, was about to enter their driveway.

The weather often chose which dinner Willa Hardin would prepare. Today the signs of her choice had hung in the air like delicious dust: chicken and dumplings, a Hardin favorite on evenings like this, when storm clouds hung in blankets over the city.

Charlie and his dad were ravaging their dessert of oatmeal cookies when the telephone rang. Coleman Hardin sighed and stood up because, while his wife answered the hallway phone—their only phone—as all good wives were expected to, calls were almost always for men. But Willa Hardin announced with a hint of “la-de-daa” in her tone that the call was for Charlie.

People of Charlie’s age were encouraged in those days, and for no very good reason, to leave telephones to adults, as though electrons were very expensive things not to be spent by children. A faint pang of alarm sounded between Charlie’s ears to share space with the guilt he had nearly forgotten, but he moved into the hall with a show of nonchalance.

Charlie’s inner alarm rang louder when he heard Aaron’s warning. “Listen, guy, I’ve been thinking about Roy,” said Aaron.

“Then I reckon you don’t have a whole lot on your mind,” Charlie retorted.

“I wouldn’t, if you didn’t live across the street from him,” Aaron said, in no mood for banter.

“Is that all the reason you called?”

Aaron pressed on. “I guess you remember how Roy likes to tattle. It bothers me to think what a pesty little cuss he is. If you had anything you really,
really
didn’t want other folks to know, Roy’s the last person a smart guy would tell about it. Just wanted you to be careful.”

“Why sure, anybody would know that much,” said Charlie. “Even if Roy wouldn’t have the gumption to go check up on whatever I told him, which I won’t, Sue Ann might,” he joked.

Aaron, without amusement and just to prove his point, said, “Or Jackie.” After a moment he added, “Charlie? You there?”

“Uh-huh. Listen, I gotta go. You know how my mom is.”

“Yeah, mine too.” But now Aaron was talking to a dial tone.

Ordinarily, Jackie would have hidden the stub of his cigarillo and hurried home as the storm approached, knowing how his gram feared lightning. Furthermore, she had a carved-in-granite rule that whatever villainy he was up to in the afternoon, he must be home by five o’clock without fail. Gram was a real boogerbear about that.

But it was still only the dregs of afternoon, and Jackie felt sure he could beat Gram’s deadline. Besides, the prospect of a fast run to the creek and a foray up that old storm drain, a dare he had never considered until a lesser boy claimed it on this very day, was a risk Jackie could not resist. It should take only a few minutes to learn, one way or the other, how much of Charlie Hardin’s tale might be true.

Jackie was rain-soaked enough to feel a chill wind before he climbed up into the mouth of the drain pipe and hunkered down to catch his breath. The gooseflesh on his arms and scalp owed less to the weather than to the stench and the deep forbidding blackness ahead, but hadn’t Charlie Hardin done it? At least he’d
said
he had. Charlie had made no mention of candles or flashlights, but the pack of paper matches in Jackie’s pocket was nearly complete. And later he could always claim he hadn’t had any matches, just to gold-plate his boast. Jackie lit a match and scuttled forward shielding his source of light from a faint musty air current.

Very soon he bunged his toe a nasty wallop against a D-Word smaller pipe, fetched it a mighty curse, and had to fumble for another match in a darkness that was not quite so deep when he turned around to face the creek. After two more matches he noticed that the blackness was less profound as he moved forward, and this made him bold enough to continue despite a soft rasping that got louder with every step. He recognized what it was, finally, because Gram made noises like that when sleeping off her wine sozzlings. Funny that Charlie hadn’t mentioned snoring but in Jackie’s experience, when a person snored like that you had to wake her with a Chinese gong.

When Jackie reached the pipe’s broken sidewall, he saw that a kerosene lamp several feet below the break provided soft light that streamed from an ordinary basement, and that the raspy snores came from a man in muddy overalls who squatted on an inverted bucket wearing only one shoe, arms crossed over his knees, head on his forearms. Until this moment Jackie would have bet heavily on a whopper of a lie by Master Charles Hardin. And then he saw what looked like money lying atop some kind of big metal thingamajig, and in that millisecond Jackie’s curiosity became greed. Was there more money in those boxes? Was money stored at the top of those stairs in the shadows? If somebody filled his pockets with it, would the sleeper ever miss it? And if he did, would Jackie give a hoot?

With a man sleeping so near that Jackie could have hawked a loogie on his shoe, this was no time to take another step without thinking it over. The several minutes Jackie spent studying stairs, supplies, even the stinks of the place, seemed like hours but his first cautious step across the pipe caused a tiny landslide that produced whispery sound effects on the basement floor. A snort escaped the sleeper and Jackie froze for a thirty-second eternity. Then gradually the snoring resumed, and Jackie slow-crept past the break in the pipe to observe the scene from a slightly higher perspective.

Jackie’s spirits were not helped by sounds from further up the pipe, where a tiny but growing waterfall trickled from somewhere near to become part of the brook between his feet. He heard a familiar medley of noises and recognized the squish of water between pavement and automobile tires. Creeping up the gentle slope of the pipe, Jackie soon discovered a complicated molding of concrete that fed water down into the storm drain from an iron grating. Moreover, he could feel a rough disk the size of a barrel top set into the uppermost part of the molded concrete, and knew it must be a manhole cover. He pushed against it; pushed again, harder. It did not give him even a shadow of a hint that it might budge. He put the crown of his head against it and shoved until it made him grunt, and only then did it move ever so slightly. He would have needed a second Jackie to do more.