For the next two hours, Suze did her spelling words, and tried to read the geography chapter about the Spanish coming to New Mexico, but she couldn't concentrate. The apartment felt crowded. Every time she made a noiseârustled papers, dropped her pencilâshe wondered if Dewey was listening.
Once she heard Dewey get up from the table, heard the soft rumble of a chair being pushed back across the linoleum, the click of the cupboard latch, the rush of water running, and she stiffened. Dewey was in the kitchen, her kitchen, opening private cupboards without even asking. She probably wasn't doing anything bad like stealing, just getting a drink of water. But it bothered Suze that she might be using a juice glass, or even a teacup, not a water tumbler, disturbing a routine Suze hadn't known she was attached to.
By quarter of nine, Suze was tired and ready to go to bed. But she didn't want to go first, didn't want to leave Dewey unsupervised. She went to the bathroom and brushed her teeth, running the water a little harder than she needed to, so it would make more noise and Dewey would maybe get the hint that it was bedtime. She flushed the toilet, twice, in case the water hadn't registered.
It worked. When she came out of the bathroom, Dewey was standing in the hall, holding a red plastic toothbrush and a shiny new tube of Pepsodent.
“Are you done in there?” she asked.
“Yeah, ” replied Suze.
Dewey nodded, and shut the door. Suze heard the unfamiliar sound of the lock turning.
When Dewey came into the bedroom, she was wearing yellow flannel pajamas patterned with little red and black Scottie dogs. She carried her shoes, which she put just under the end of her bed, and her clothes, which she put into the dresser drawer. Barefoot, she didn't walk too gimpy, Suze noticed, just a little bit of a lope, like a cowboy after a long day.
Dewey climbed into bed. “Do you mind if I read for a little while?” she asked, picking up a book from the nightstand.
“No. My mom'll be home any minute, and she'll probably turn off the light, but until then it's okay. ” Suze leaned over and got a
Captain Marvel
comic off the floor, and began to read herself. She sneaked a few sideways glances, but couldn't see the title of Dewey's book.
Half an hour later, Mrs. Gordon hadn't come home. Dewey shut her book and put it back on the stand. “G'night, ” she said. “You can keep the light on if you want. It won't bother me much. ” She took off her glasses, folded them, and put them down on top of the book. She looked different without them. Her face was oddly naked and exposed. Suze wondered how much she could see. She'd looked through her mother's glasses, and everything was all blurry. Dewey's were even thicker.
“I guess I'm done, ” she said. She dropped
Captain Marvel
to the floor and reached over to turn off the light.
It was late when she finally heard her parents come in the back door. She hadn't been able to fall asleep. Dewey wasn't making any
noise
, but Suze wasn't used to someone else being in her room.
Through the thin walls, she could hear her parents talking in the living room. She heard her name and got up, stepping carefully across the yellow line so her feet didn't erase it, and tiptoed to the bathroom for a drink of water. She turned the water on, barely a trickle, and stood in the open doorway to listen.
“âasked right out, ” her mother said. “I guess you can't really blame her. I'd be curious if I didn't know. ” Suze heard the click of a lighter, but couldn't tell if it was for her mother's cigarette or her father's pipe. “Poor lamb, ” her mother continued. Suze figured that was probably Dewey, not her. “She just said it was an accident. ”
“Wasn't it?” asked her father.
“My aunt Sally! Jimmy said Dewey's mother was drunk as a skunkâapparently as usualâand one night she dropped her baby on the stairs. Dewey was barely two. Can you imagine? Then she left, just up and left, while her little girl was still in the hospital. Jimmy hasn't seen her since. Said she's called a couple of times. Not here, of course. In Chicago. And just to ask him for money. Not a word for Dewey, not in ten years. Poor brave little lamb. ” A pause. “Did you hear something?”
Suze heard someone put a glass down, then footsteps. She ducked back into the bathroom.
“Suze? What are you doing up?” Her mother appeared in the doorway. “It's nearly midnight. ”
“I was thirsty. ”
“Well, okay. Drink up, then I'll tuck you back in. ”
Suze nodded. They walked quietly back into the bedroom and when she was in bed, her mother tucked the wool blanket up under her arms and kissed her on the cheek. “Sweet dreams, pumpkin, ” she said, and tiptoed out, pulling the door almost shut behind her.
The thin sliver of light fell across the girl sleeping in the other bed. Suze thought about what she'd heard. She saw stairs in her mind and felt goosebumps all over her arms. She burrowed deeper under the covers and as she drifted off, wondered if weird old Dewey's dreams were ever sweet.
April 12
UNDER THE FENCE
DEWEY NOTICED THAT
Suze put a big red X on the calendar in the kitchen every morning after breakfast. She thought at first that it was to count down the days to some occasionâa birthday, or a trip to town. Then she realized that the first X was on the day that Papa had left. Suze was tallying the days Dewey had been there, like a convict in a
Saturday Evening
Post cartoon marking off his sentence on the stone prison walls.
“You better not walk with me, ” Suze had said on their first school day together. “And don't even think about eating lunch with me. ” Dewey had only nodded. She'd never hung around Suze before, and staying at the Gordons' hadn't changed that. She left for school ten minutes early and stayed ten or fifteen minutes after the 3:30 bell, finishing some of her homework.
The third day of her visit, Dewey packed a thermos of milk and a deviled-ham sandwich and went for a walk at lunchtime, a picnic in the woods, where it was quiet and she could be by herself. Really by herself, without Suze in the next room sighing and thumping and letting Dewey know in a hundred small ways that she was just an unwanted intruder.
Then it rained for a week, pouring, drenching rains, and it was too wet and muddy to go outside. The boys sat in one corner of the schoolroom, eating and trading baseball cards and reading comics, and some of the girls pushed their desks together and played euchre. Dewey brought her cigar box with the bits and pieces of her latest project and sat at her desk near the window, ignoring Suze's stares and working on it in between bites of her sandwich.
Thursday afternoon, finally, the sky cleared, and the breeze was soft and held the promise of spring. When the school bell rang, the other children ran, yelling, out into the playground. Dewey lingered behind.
When she walked out of the school building about quarter of four, Betty and Joyce and some other girls were playing jacks on the concrete, in a space where there were no puddles. Suze stood a few feet away, watching. Dewey was pretty sure she wasn't playing
with
the other girls, just standing nearby and pretending that she would be, any minute. Sometimes Dewey felt sorry for Suze, because the other girls didn't ask her to play very often. But she knew better than to say anything. It would just make Suze mad.
Suze was between her and the gate. Dewey thought about going back inside, but then Suze looked up and saw her. Suze's posture changed. She stiffened, just a little, the way Rutherford sometimes did when another cat walked by the base of the stairs.
Dewey took a deep breath, gripped her cigar box, and focused on a spot about ten yards beyond the gate. She walked toward it, not slow, not fast, not looking at Suze. She was almost past when Suze casually, elaborately, pretended to sneeze, flinging out her arm at the moment of
katchoo
. Her wrist hit the edge of the cigar box, sending it flying.
It landed on the concrete about six feet away with a loud crack and a clatter like hailstones as its lid popped open and its contents scattered. Bolts and screws rolled into puddles and half a dozen corks bounced off in every direction.
“Oh, ” said Suze. “
I'm
sorry. It was an accident. ”
Dewey almost believed her for a second. But then she saw Suze look over at the other girls, to see if they were watching. When Suze saw that they were, she smiled. A smile of bravado, overdone and insincere. And Dewey knew it had been no accident.
She thought of a dozen things to say, and said none of them. The other girls were watching, waiting to see if anything would happen. And Dewey knew if there were sides to be taken, the girls with the jacks would, for once, be happy to pick Suze.
Papa had told her that no good ever came from fighting, that it was better to walk away with dignity than to stoop to that level. Dewey suspected it had been a long time since Papa had been picked on. She didn't like being a patsy, but she cared more about the project in the cigar box than what the other girls thought. She bent down and began to gather up the pieces, her body angled so she could still see Suze out of the corner of her eye. Suze just watched the other girls.
Dewey tumbled screws and a gearbox and some round typewriter keys into the box with a rattle that grew more muted as the box filled again. She hadn't found all the pieces, but she'd found the important ones, and if she'd lost a few nuts and bolts, that wasn't too bad. There were more in the jars under her bed. It might be a good idea to take some of them back over to Morganville, although she didn't think that Suze would do anything at home that she might get
caught
at. Suze didn't know whether Dewey would fink to Mrs. Gordon, and that gave Dewey a little bit of protection.
She went back into the school to get a rubber band to hold the box together. The wood on one edge had cracked, and the paper hinge holding the top was loose. When she came out, Suze had left, and the other girls were busy with their jacks again.
Dewey sighed with relief. The woods were probably a little muddy, but they would be peaceful, and there might be mushrooms. It had rained enough. She pushed her left hand under the rubber band and carried the box down at her side, walking west from the school. She had just crossed the road that separated the populated parts of the Hill from the wooded canyon beyond when she heard footsteps behind her. Had Suze followed her? She ducked behind a tall ponderosa pine and tried to make herself small. But it was just Charlie and Jack. Charlie had a brown Boy Scout knapsack over one shoulder. It sagged as if it was full of something heavy.
“Hey, ” she said, stepping away from the tree.
“Hey, Dewey, ” Charlie said. They stopped and Jack nodded his head in greeting. “Where're you going?”
“Just into the woods, ” Dewey said. “With all the rain, I figure there might be mushrooms to look at. ”
“Maybe, ” Charlie agreed. “But we've got something even
more
interesting to look at. ” He patted the bulging knapsack. “Somebody in the enlisted men's barracks threw out a whole stack of magazines. ”
“We're going to the tree house, to read 'em where nobody else can see, ” said Jack. He sounded excited.
“What kind of magazines?”
“Really good ones.
Lots
of pictures, ” said Charlie. “You wanna come along? We've got Cokes. ”
Dewey shook her head slowly. “It sounds like fun, but I'm not supposed to go outside the fence. ”
“How's your dad gonna knowâunless you tell him?” Jack said.
She thought for a minute. That was true. And she hadn't
promised
Papa she wouldn't. “What about the MPs?”
Charlie smiled. “They don't care anymore. They used to patch the holes, and we just dug more. But now they leave us alone. I guess they figured it's easier to keep track of holes you know about than to keep looking for new ones. ” He looked at his watch. “Besides, it's just after 1600 hours. If we see anyone, it'll be TommyâSergeant Nelson. He's okay. He lets us feed his horse apples. ”
Dewey thought about it again. She wanted to, butâShe was about to shake her head no when she looked down at the cracked cigar box. She was tired of being pushed around. “Okay, ” she said. “Where do we go?”
“Just follow me, ” said Charlie.
They set off on a narrow, well-worn path. The ground was spongy, but not too muddy, because of all the pine needles. It smelled good, cool and damp and earthy, and Dewey took a deep breath and felt her shoulders relax. About five minutes in, they came to the chain-link fence, topped with strands of barbed wire.
“This way, ” Charlie said. He jerked his head to the left, and they walked single file along the fence. The path wasn't as clear, but there was a corridor of trampled grasses and wet underbrush. Dewey's pants cuffs were getting damp, and a few springy branches had snapped her in the arm, but she felt pretty good.
“This is it, ” Charlie said, holding up his hand.
The grass and pine needles and leaves had been cleared away and the dirt scooped out to form a hollow more than a foot deep and about three feet wide, directly under the fence. Someone had taken pliers and bent up the sharp points at the bottom of the chain link.
Charlie took off his knapsack and, with a small grunt, tossed it underhand onto the ground on the other side of the fence. It bounced a few feet in the leafy undergrowth, and Dewey heard the muffled clink of the Coke bottles inside. He lay on the ground, feet first, and wriggled under the fence, then stood up and brushed leaves and mud off the backs of his jeans.
“Well, c'mon, ” he said. “What're you waiting for?”