Man in the Moon
Authors: Dotti Enderle
Man in the Moon
CONTENTS
No writer does it alone, and I’m no exception. A lot of people helped make
Man in the Moon
shine.
I’d like to thank Elaine Trull and Adrienne Enderle for reading it and encouraging me. A special thanks to Vicki Sansum, who explained to me exactly how Janine should relate to Mr. Lunas.
Many thanks to my editor, Stephanie Lane. And multiple thanks to my agent, Erin Murphy, who helped me through those early drafts and put her faith in me and my work.
Shine on!
Phase One—New Moon
I
sat in the shadows of my bedroom, staring through the window screen. Except for an occasional lightning bug twinkling by, the night was black as molasses, and the air as thick. I prayed for just one breeze to blow through and cool the sweat on my face. But everything was still—dead still—like right before a storm.
My dog, Buddy, was laying outside, just under my window. I could hear him panting. Poor dog. He had no spit at all left on that long rough tongue of his. He’d probably found a cool spot in the dirt, or maybe he just took comfort in lying next to me, even if the wall did separate us.
I yawned. Buddy whimpered and rolled over. I could smell the dry dirt he’d stirred up from the flower bed. I leaned forward, pressing my head on the screen, trying to see what Buddy was up to.
That’s when something moved in the cornfield. I heard it, just on the other side of the chicken coop. The corn shook for a moment, like someone trying to burrow his way beyond those giant stalks. I sat still as a possum, listening in that direction. Buddy stopped panting. I couldn’t see him, but I could sense he was alert.
The only noises were the crickets, and the dryflies crying for rain. And that pesky mosquito buzzing and sticking to my sweaty hair. The cornfield sometimes swayed and crackled when a strong wind sang through. But there was nothing out there tonight to move that corn—no breeze. Nothing. Except an animal . . . or a person?
It moved again. Buddy shot toward the chicken coop yapping and barking, his dry throat making him sound like an old man with the whooping cough.
I slipped out of my room and hurried to the back door to see what it was. I had to tiptoe when I got to the screened-in porch. Mama and Daddy were sleeping out there again tonight. They’d propped a portable fan on one of Mama’s plant stands with a long black extension cord snaked under the back door to the kitchen plug. They could barely take the Texas heat during a normal summer, but this July had temperatures soaring higher than the stars. And the humidity had us all feeling like chewed gum. I had heard on the news a few months ago that President Kennedy wants to send a man to the moon. Daddy said if he does, he hopes he’ll install a giant air conditioner up there and point it straight at us.
I tried to see out back, but the darkness blinded me. No porch light or moonlight. I heard Buddy roll off one of his low, menacing growls, telling whoever or whatever was out there that he meant to tear ’em up if they took another step. I heard the shuffling of the cornstalks again, then silence. A minute later Buddy came trotting back to the house like nothing was wrong.
But something
was
wrong. I could sense it. Feel it. Someone was out there in the corn, all right. And I had a feeling he was staring right at me.
After a restless night, I woke to a yellow sun slanting through the crevices. I headed into the kitchen, where Mama sat at the table, studying the wet brown leaves that had blobbed together in her teacup. Ricky was perched next to her, already dressed in blue shorts and a plaid cotton shirt.
“You’s a sleepyhead,” he said, dragging his spoon across the sugar on his milky toast.
I answered him with a yawn.
“Janine?” Mama said, never looking up from her cup.
I knew a question would follow.
“Did you go outside last night?”
“No.” That wasn’t a lie. ’Cause I only
looked
outside.
“Somebody was out there.”
The way she said it made my skin crawl. Then she sighed. “And we know it wasn’t Ricky.”
Ricky squinted his eyes and gave me a gap-toothed grin. He knocked out his front tooth falling out of a tree two years ago, and Mama swears it’ll never grow back in.
I grabbed a chair and plopped down. It made a grating screech as I pulled myself up to the table. “What makes you think somebody was outside?” I was careful with the question. I wanted to hear the answer, but at the same time, I was afraid it might scare me to death. I just knew Mama was going to say she saw some trampled corn. That would mean someone really had been snooping around our place.
She shifted her eyes toward me. “When I went out to feed Buddy there were footprints on the steps. Footprints, not shoeprints. You’re the only one here that spends the entire summer barefoot.”
“How come I can’t go barefoot?” Ricky asked, kicking a sandaled foot in the air.
“You know why,” Mama answered. She stared back down into her cup.
I’m not convinced Ricky really did know why. I know I didn’t! He was sick, that was for sure, but Mama never would let him do the things other kids did. He could only go outside at certain times, and he was never allowed to go without shoes. Mama wouldn’t let a fan blow directly on him, even when he slept. I guess that’s why he always looked like he had a fever. I asked Daddy once what was wrong with Ricky, and all he said was “He was born with his gizzard backwards.” That was Daddy’s way of protecting me from the truth, whatever it was.
But when Ricky and I played together, he acted like anybody else. He didn’t faint or swoon or puke. Just an occasional nosebleed or cough. Sometimes he sat down tired. But then, so did I.
Mama set the cup aside and rubbed her eyes.
“What’d you see?” I asked, leaning on my elbows and gazing at her plump face.
“Same thing I always see. No money. No jobs. The world going to hell in a handbasket. Oh, and a little girl who won’t admit that she went outside after bedtime.”
“That’s bullcorn!” I shouted, slapping my hands on the table.
“Watch your language,” Mama warned.
“I swear, Mama, it wasn’t me.”
She gave me that stare, like her eyes were firing bullets. No words, just a hard stare.
“It’s not fair! I get blamed for durn near everything. How do you know it wasn’t Ricky? It coulda been!”
Ricky’s head shot up from his breakfast and his mouth went slack. “It wasn’t me.”
“Don’t smart-mouth me,” Mama said to me, her eyes still firing. “And apologize to your brother. He don’t need the aggravation.”
“Sorry,” I said to him, not meaning it. I think I’ve spent most of my life apologizing to him about something. I can’t remember a time when Ricky wasn’t the favorite, but I did see a picture once, from when I was a baby. It was just me and Mama and Daddy. Everyone was smiling. More than smiling. Mama and Daddy were grinning like I was the best thing to happen since ice cream. But just like all little brothers, Ricky had to come along and ruin it for me.
I forced my lip out of a pout and continued. “Anyway, I heard Buddy barking last night, so maybe it was a stranger at the back porch.”
Mama let out a fake laugh. “What would a stranger want around here?”
I shrugged.
“Could’ve been a robber, huh?” she said. “Got up to the house and realized we didn’t have a danged thing to steal.” Mama shook her head and let out another phony laugh.
I didn’t like that talk. Even in the stifling heat, a chill prickled me just thinking it could have been a robber.
“You gonna eat anything?” Mama asked me, picking up Ricky’s plate. He’d eaten only the inside of his milky toast, leaving the soggy crust to wilt in the remaining milk.
My stomach grumbled. “I’ll have a boiled egg, I guess.”
I heard the clinking of dishes in the sink; then Mama turned on the faucet. “You better go gather some from the henhouse then, ’cause we ain’t got any in the icebox.”
I suddenly lost my appetite for a boiled egg. That would mean I’d have to go out to our chicken coop, right there in front of the cornfield—a little too close to whoever was spying on us last night.
The sun was unforgiving that day. If I’d taken a notion to eat an egg after all, I probably wouldn’t have needed to cook it. The earth was an oven, baking us to the bone. Mama let Ricky go outside with me late that afternoon on the condition that he stay in the shade, close to the house. But we knew Mama pretty well. Soon she’d be cleaning and sewing and she wouldn’t know what we were up to.
“Let’s go out to the truck and dig through the junk,” I said.
Ricky lit up like a sparkler. “I’ll race ya!”
Before I could protest, he was flying across the pasture, his arms flapping like wings. Buddy chased at his heels. I ran too, but even though I have tough feet, I had to dodge the cow pies and bull nettles, so Ricky beat me by a mile.
“Loser!” he said, leaning against the old flatbed truck.
I couldn’t let him get away with that. “I let you win.”
“Yeah, you say that every time.”
“ ’Cause it’s true every time.” Actually, it wasn’t. For a kid with a backwards gizzard, Ricky could run like the wind.
We walked around the truck and started digging through the heap of trash. We didn’t know whose truck it was, but someone had abandoned it on the property next to our farm. The cab was rusted out and filthy, and the tires had been taken off ages ago. But the wooden bed in the back had a mountain of trash just waiting for us to explore. We’d found some pretty neat stuff here before: old dishes, a rickety baby carriage, a dirty coin purse with a nickel caught in the lining. It seemed like Christmas every time we came out here. We even found an old wooden leg once. It was splintered and worn, and the pointed leather foot had some dark stains. But it was an awesome find. I wanted to bring it home to make a spook house in the barn, but Mama said to leave it be. A wooden leg would bring bad luck.
I climbed on top of the truck, then pulled Ricky up. We had to be careful not to step on anything rusty. Mama said we’d get lockjaw and starve to death from not being able to open our mouths. A heck of a way to die.
It didn’t take long for us to find something to play with. Ricky dug out a broken swim flipper, and I found a greasy tennis ball. I wiped it off on the wooden truck bed as best I could; then Ricky and I played a long game of Swat. I pitched the ball to him and he swatted it with the flipper. Sometimes he’d hold it to the side like a baseball bat, and sometimes he’d hold it flat out in front of him and swat the ball straight up. No matter which way, he was pretty good at it. When it was my turn, I barely hit the thing—maybe once out of ten times. When I’d miss, Buddy would grab the ball, and we’d have to tug it out of his slobbery mouth.
“You swat like a girl!” Ricky yelled.
“Well, you look like one!” I yelled back.
Ricky tossed the ball up high and caught it himself. “Guess what?” he said. “I’m going to ask Daddy if I can have a go-cart.”
That was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. “Uh-huh. And I’m going to ask him for a mansion in Hollywood.”
“No, really,” Ricky said, tossing the ball toward me.
I swung and missed . . . again. “You’re full of beans. Daddy won’t buy a go-cart unless we can eat it for supper. Or did you forget? He ain’t got a job!”
“I’m going to ask anyway,” Ricky said.
“What do you want a stupid go-cart for? You ain’t got nobody to race.”
“Ain’t you ever heard of racing time?” he asked.
How fast did he think a go-cart would move? “You ain’t got a stopwatch, either.”
He looked down at the ground and kicked the dirt. “I just want a go-cart, okay? I want to zoom . . . like a rocket.”