The Yearbook (17 page)

Grumbling, the judge set aside his whiskey and soda and went to telephone the fire department, while the guests murmured about that crazy Whoopsie Whipple, who couldn't stay out of trouble.

“Thumbtack sent me to get you, to talk Whoopsie down. What you say carries a lot of weight with her, since you're from New York and all.”

Peter coughed. “I'll drive,” he said.

They rounded the block into Ashfield City Park, and sure enough, Whoopsie was atop the flagpole. The fire brigade men were busy extending a safety net around the base. Whoopsie might have looked like a sailor in a crow's nest had it not been for her new party dress of aubergine silk chiffon with lace inserts.

Thumbtack stood at the base of the flagpole, wringing his hands. His bow tie was askew.

Peter pulled up next to the fire truck and set the brake.

“Say something to her,” Thumbtack shouted as his friends got out of the car. “She's out of her mind. She won't come down.”

“What made her go up there?” Peter asked.

Thumbtack pulled a telegram from his pocket. “Just look at it.”

Lola took the telegram and read:

The chorus girl contest. Whoopsie hadn't mentioned it in months. With the hoopla surrounding her wedding, set for that fall, Lola figured she had exchanged her Broadway dream for another one. She returned the telegram to Thumbtack. He shoved it back in his pocket, walked a few tight, frustrated loops in the grass, and pointed a big finger up toward the flagpole.

“She wants me to come with her, but I can't drop everything at the mercantile and run off to Brooklyn, New York City. All-Cutie. I don't like the sound of that.”

Mr. and Mrs. Whipple arrived on the scene just then and rushed the flagpole, their clothes flapping in a strong wind that was blowing up from the West.

“You're giving yourself sunstroke,” Mr. Whipple bellowed over the wind. “You'll get sunstroke and kill yourself. And for what? For some fool notion about being a hootchy-kootch girl.”

At the mention of mortal danger and hootchy-kootch girls, Whoopsie's mother jumped up and down and waved her arms. “Come down from there, you ungrateful brat. Come down.”

The flagpole bent in the wind and Whoopsie clung to it with white fingers. “I won't,” she said.

Lola approached the assembled officials and asked to borrow the bullhorn. The police captain was happy to surrender it.

“Hi, Whoopsie,” Lola said.

Whoopsie waved. “Hello down there, Mike.”

“Say something about New York,” Ruby advised from the sidelines.

“Windy up there, isn't it?” shouted Lola.

“Sure is,” Whoopsie called.

“I climbed a flagpole once. Girls used to climb flagpoles in New York all the time. I mean, back when it was in style.”

The expected look of concern spread across Whoopsie's face. “Whaddya mean,
used to
?”

“It's out of style. At least in New York.”

“Horsefeathers,” she yelled. “I have to make some kind of a protest.”

“I have some ideas,” Lola said. “But I can't scream them at you through this thing.”

The crowd watching Whoopsie grew. Families driving past pulled over and rolled down their car windows to gawk, and old ladies came out on the porches across the street.

“I wanna make something of myself, and now I've got my chance to be a big Broadway star, and are my nearest and dearest gonna back me? No. They want me to stay here like them because they haven't got a lick of ambition.”

Civic attention was focused so tightly on the top of the flagpole that no one noticed the thundercloud bearing down from the West. Whoopsie was raving about the hick-town dust when, with a terrifying bang, a bolt of lightning struck the flagpole.

Several people screamed, Mrs. Whipple fainted, and Thumbtack reached up toward his stricken love. Whoopsie teetered for a second or two and then spiraled down, down, down. The firemen stretched their net to intercept the poor electrocuted girl, but Whoopsie landed on tiptoe and looked around as if she were surprised to find herself no longer upon her perch. Her clothes were charred and smoking, and her hair was standing on end, but she was undeniably alive.

“I've decided to come down,” she said, smoothing her hair. Lola watched Thumbtack carry Whoopsie to his Nash and put her in the front seat, and saw the car move off in the direction of the Whipple residence. Mrs. Whipple awoke from her faint and stood up. She was white yet fuming.

“Tomorrow we'll talk some sense into her,” Mrs. Whipple said as she and Mr. Whipple started toward their car. “What she needs is a nice cup of tea and good night's sleep. Then tomorrow we'll talk through all this telegram business.”

But by the next morning, Whoopsie was gone.

She had, as she'd always vowed, shaken the dust of Ashfield off her heels and headed for New York. Behind her she left all her friends, her parents, and her beloved engagement ring.

Lola snapped on her bathing cap and jumped off the bluff into the swimming hole. The splash sent a delicious shock all over her body, which had been perched on a rock, absorbing the August heat in wool swimming bloomers and a matching tunic. Peter was diving for treasure, and so far had brought up several pennies and a nickel. Now he burst to the surface in a spray of bright droplets, holding high a pair of steel-rimmed glasses.

“Hey, Matthews,” he called. “Aren't these the spectacles Bob Gomez lost after the bonfire last fall?"

Thumbtack emitted a bored grunt from his post under a spindly sassafras tree, and relit his pipe.

“Well, I think they're Bob Gomez's,” Peter shouted. He set the glasses on a boulder and dove again.

The three of them, along with Ruby and her fiancé, Hershel Vanderveen, had come up to Eagle Rock on a Sunday afternoon to escape the dust and heat of town, but the lush, heavy forest of August was almost worse; the trees seemed to exhale a sultry breath that clung to their skin and made them lazier than before. Only the swimming hole provided relief.

“Come on in. You can't just fry there like a big dumb catfish,” Hershel called. “It's refreshing as anything.”

Hershel kicked his long, white legs, sending up a cold spray in Thumbtack's direction. But Thumbtack didn't move. Since Whoopsie's departure more than a month before he had taken on the salient characteristic of his nickname: stubborn adherence to a specific spot. He sat and moped and wouldn't talk. He had refused to chase after Whoopsie. Not a single telegram or letter had he sent, such had been the blow to his pride.

But today, watching Thumbtack on the rock, Lola thought she saw a change in him. He seemed to be agitated, arguing with himself, and she wondered if the passing weeks were wearing down his resolve to let Whoopsie go without a fight.

“Come on in, Thumbtack,” Hershel repeated, his head poking up from a clump of cattails. “It'll cheer you right up.”

At this Thumbtack stood, rolled up his straw mat, and stomped away with his pipe clamped in his teeth.

“Hey!” shouted Hershel. “Don't go away mad.”

“Not without lunch,” Ruby added, calling from the picnic blanket where she had just set out five tin plates and cups.

But Thumbtack only tipped his hat and puffed up the hill toward his Nash.

“Let him go,” Peter said. He had lifted himself out of the water and was reclined, sparkling and tan, on a rock. “He's got to figure this one out for himself.”

After the swim, the foursome sat under a big shade tree and dug into ham sandwiches, deviled eggs, homemade pickles, and potato salad. Hershel had thought he might be able to get his hands on some beer but hadn't pulled it off, so they drank ice tea instead.

“Not a drop of anything interesting since Whoopsie left town,” Hershel moaned. “Not a drop. Where was she getting it all, anyhow?”

“Oh, her daddy knew somebody who knew somebody else's daddy who knew a fellow in Pittsburgh,” Ruby said, waving her pickle fork.

“Wish I knew somebody's daddy,” Hershel said.

A beagle appeared, sniffing along the path, followed by an old man with two fishing rods and a bucket.

“Afternoon, folks,” the man said. He was drenched in sweat, and his boots were caked with fresh mud. “Hey, ain't you the Hemmings boy? And you're one of the Vanderveens.”

“Hershel, sir,” Hershel said.

“Ah, yes. Of course,” the man said.

Peter wiped the crumbs from his hands and stood up. “Hello, warden,” he said, shaking the man's hand. “Fellows, this is Mr. Arthur, he's the fish and game warden up here.”

“It's my day off today,” Arthur said. He showed his empty bucket. “But fishing's no good.”

The dog sniffed at the picnic blanket.

“Get out of there, Dandy,” the warden said.

“Oh, that's all right,” Ruby said. “Sit down here with us, why don't you? There's lots to eat, and we've got an extra place set, as one of our number has left in a huff.”

“A huff, eh?” Arthur said, setting aside the bucket and adjusting himself on the blanket. “Well, gee, that's too bad. But lucky for me, I guess. In my view, a ham sandwich is always more satisfying than a huff in the long run.” He noticed their bathing suits hanging on a tree. “Ya'll been watching out for the water moccasins in the swimming hole, I hope. They're vicious this year.”

“What's a water moccasin?” Lola asked. She suspected it wasn't a type of shoe.

“Lola here is from New York City,” Ruby explained as she gave the dog a bowl of water, “and retarded in the ways of nature.”

“It's a kind of poisonous water snake,” Peter explained. “But I've never seen one around here.”

“What?” the warden said. “Last year Cletus Parker's dog was swimmin' in this hole and a water moccasin come up and bit him on the leg, and that old hound climbed out of the water and dropped down dead as a doornail.”

“What a terrible story,” Ruby said, fanning herself with her embroidered lace hanky.

“Cletus found that snake a day later and hacked its head off with a hoe,” the warden added. “So, you see, the story's got a happy ending.”

“That's the last time I go in that water,” Ruby said. “But, oh applesauce, there isn't anywhere else to swim.”

“There's always the Blue Hole,” Peter said with a teasing smile.

“You can't swim in the Blue Hole. Everybody knows that,” Hershel said, his mouth full of potato salad.

“What's the Blue Hole?” Lola asked.

“Swimmin' hole,” the warden said, slapping at a mosquito that was trying to land on his neck. “'Bout a mile and a half up through the woods. But you oughtn't go.”

“Snakes?” Lola guessed.

“Nothing that ordinary,” Peter said. “Just that nobody's been able to find the bottom.”

“It's more than that, Peter, and you know it.” Ruby said. She turned to Lola: “People have disappeared up there. Not in recent years, but it's well documented that people have gone into the Blue Hole and never come out again. They fall in and get sucked all the way through to the other side of the Earth.”

“That's all bunkum, of course,” Peter said, taking a big bite of his sandwich. “Nobody's been able to get to the bottom of it, but there is a bottom, I promise you. If we had the right equipment—”

“Ya'll do yerself a favor and stay away from the Blue Hole,” the warden interrupted. “Bunkum or no, there are places in this world that we don't understand, places where strange things take place and are best avoided.”

Peter had reclined on the blanket, and was smiling that skeptic's smirk Lola knew so well, when he sat up abruptly.

“What's wrong?” Lola asked.

Peter dropped his sandwich and began to collect his things and Lola's. “We've got to dash,” he said.

“Dash?” Ruby said. “But why?”

“Yeah,” said Hershel. “The day's still young.”

But Peter had already hefted his satchel. “Lola, remember the judge invited us for a game of dominoes? We're almost late.”

In a moment they were in Peter's car, hurtling through the woods on a road of bubbling tar.

“Dominoes?” Lola shouted over the motor. “You hate dominoes.”

Peter swung off the road into the gravel, raising a cloud of white, choking dust. “I've been so distracted. I've been so stupid,” he began. “I've never been this stupid in all my life. I think you make me a little stupid.”

“Thanks.”

The forest breathed all around them like some huge, sleeping animal, and the cicadas buzzed and rattled in the heat. Peter stared at the dashboard.

“We have to destroy the school,” he said.

“What?” Lola asked. She hoped “destroy the school” was a bit of slang that meant “go dancing” or “wash the car.” But she could see from Peter's face he meant just what he'd said.

“Don't say things like that,” she said.

“Maybe not the whole school,” he muttered, half to himself. “But definitely the library. I suppose fire is the easiest way. Yes, fire.”

“You're scaring me,” Lola said, but he talked over her, his words running off like a lit fuse.

“You've always said you entered some unconscious state, that sleep, or something like it, was the common denominator of your movement through time.”

“Yes,” Lola said.

“You were asleep the first time you made the journey from your point of origin, and the second time, too, but you were wide awake when I saw you disappear in the reserve room.”

“So?”

“It's that room. The reserve room. You fell through something in that room, a passageway, a gap, the way people fall through the Blue Hole to the other side of the Earth,” he said, and couldn't help adding, “which, of course, is the greatest bunkum.”