“Listen, you little bastard—Friday afternoon! You show up at old man Bennett’s house with that nine bucks, I’ll be there to check, and if you don’t show up I’ll beat the living hell out of you, myself, personally. It don’t make no difference to me. All you young punks are alike. Another trick like this and I’ll send you up to reform school, remember that! All right!” He adjusted his goggles again. “By Christ, I’ll fix your little ticket, do you hear!”
Charley braced himself for another stinging blow but without further ado, Tooey Warner re-adjusted his glove, patted his visor briskly, jammed the starter with a violent kick, and with his legs magnificently atilt like a jockey on a renowned horse, he roared off in a blast of appalling glory that had long been the living image of bane and woe to every Galloway boy old enough to walk.
Charley knew he was going to have a hard time raising the money and meeting his awful deadline. It was the furthest thing from his mind to ask for help from his parents. On the first day of his labors on the city dump, after school, he found that, at the rate he was going, he wouldn’t have enough time to salvage a sufficient amount of scrap—metal fixtures, bits of lead and brass, old aluminum pots and pans and such—to sell to the notoriously tight-fisted junkmen and at the same time make the deadline. He had to start playing “hookey” from school to spend the whole day at his task. This raised the problem of absentee notes for his school principal. He was full of troubles.
Silently forbearing and self-reliant, Charley decided to worry about all that later and concentrated on the first thing at hand—gathering scrap on the dump. He had only four days to make it. It was a bitter and grueling task, in the dead of winter, on steep snowy banks swept by insistent winds all day long. He foraged and grubbed and labored among rusty fenders and old chassis, oil drums, tin cans, empty tomato crates and whiskey bottles that covered the sloping floor of the dump—which was really a floor and not a ground, with its sagging spongy layers of old coalesced swill and ashes, underneath which furtive dump rats scampered in their burrows.
He worked there in a fury of energy, tearing off shapeless masses of junk to clear away whole areas of snow so that he could see what was to be found, until his hands were raw and cut and his face burned from the perpetually smoking fires. He was alone in the deserted slopes. Even the dogged grubby junkmen had been discouraged by the winter cold, and the air about him was foul from the smell of burnt-rubber smoke, from rancid exhalations that steamed up out of whole sections of ancient sour rot and from the general teeming putrescence of winter dampness on a dump along a river that received sewage and dye-mill disposals the year round. It was a stretch of the Merrimac River some distance below the White Bridge falls and about a mile below where it flowed so placidly, broadly, and undefiled off the Martin home on Galloway Road. Such was Charley’s fate.…
Down by the water’s edge near a cluster of big rocks he erected an ingenious shelter where he stored his day’s scrap, before carting it at nightfall to a young friend’s backyard not far from the dump, and which he also used as a dressing-room. He could not come home for dinner at noontime all dirty from the junkheap, when he was supposed to be in school all morning, so he hit on the idea of preparing a bundle of old clothes, old shoes, towel and soap, which he took with him every morning from home along with his schoolbooks, and every noon after his morning’s work he changed in the shelter, washing with snow melted in the sun in a bucket, and then went home for dinner looking clean and scholarly. Then, at one o’clock, he returned to the dump for his afternoon’s work, changed back to his working clothes, hid the bicycle in the shelter and started in again in pitiable laborious measures.
On the third day he was getting desperate. He had only collected a few dollars’ worth of junk, at most, and his last day of grace was approaching swiftly and hopelessly. At one o’clock he was hurrying across the Rooney Street bridge on his bicycle for another desperate afternoon’s work. The clear sharp pristine air was all sparkling with snow and icicles, the kind of day he used to enjoy. Suddenly he heard someone calling him from the boardwalk of the bridge. It was his sister Liz. She stood there with her hands lodged casually in her coat pockets and with an expression of unmistakable severity on her rosy young face.
“Charley Martin, tell me what you are doing out of school!”
“Hah?”
“And don’t give me that stuff either!” She stood there, tall and calm, surveying him with an air of sisterly sternness. It was a little difficult to make convincing, however, due to the fact that she was wearing a boyish half-length raincoat over a pair of bright blue slacks, and looked a blithe winsome high-school girl from top to toe, scarcely authoritative.
“What about you?” yelled Charley, snickering.
“Never mind about me! I want to know what you are doing out of school!”
“Ah, Liz, it’s a big story. You don’t want to hear it, do you?” He suddenly laughed savagely. “What you doing in slacks? You didn’t have those on this morning at breakfast!”
“I told you never mind about me!” she said slowly through clenched teeth, slitting her greenish eyes, pointing at him. “I want you to tell me that long story of yours. Where were you headed? Tell me!” She took the bicycle and shook it angrily.
“The dump over there.”
“And what for?”
“I’m collecting junk so I can sell it. I need some money bad.”
“And what for?”
“Because.”
“What for?”
So Charley had to tell her all about it. Anyway he trusted and loved Liz. But while he told her about his predicament with the police he couldn’t keep a straight face, somehow. She was standing so gravely, so solemnly before him, a fellow hookey-player.
Her own eyes gleamed a little, with infectious gravity, but she said, “Listen, sonny boy, this is nothing to laugh about, those cops are tough. We’ve got to get you out. How much money did you make so far?”
“Gee, only about two bucks, Liz.” He turned away to snicker.
“Cut that out! And we’re not gonna stand here in the cold talking about it,” she cried sharply, and lowered her head a moment to think, with a quick brooding movement of decisive reflection, while Charley leaned his chin in his hand with a bored expression. “And don’t be such a wise guy!” snapped Liz, noticing his little gesture of manly patience. “You think you know everything, don’t you! Well, listen to me—I’ll get the money for you in the bank this afternoon and you’ll go and give it to that old fool right away, tonight! That’s what you’re going to do, Mister Martin!”
“Oh, no!” cried Charley, surprised. “I’m getting that money myself with the junk I sell—”
“Shut up! You’ve only got two dollars’ worth, you nitwit, and you haven’t even sold it yet! You’ll never make it!”
“I’ll make it, I reckon.…”
“Don’t give me that cowboy talk! I’ll break your head!” she yelled, shaking the bicycle furiously. “You’re not going to get all dirty on that filthy dump and maybe catch a disease.”
“I figured it out,” returned Charley quietly, reverting to the tone of voice he used whenever he carried on judicious discourses with himself, “and I reckon I can make it easy.…”
“What did I tell you about that cowboy-reckon talk!” shouted Elizabeth, stamping her foot on the boardwalk. “You’re going to go right back to school this very minute. I’ll write your absent notes for you, and that’s all there is to it!”
“No.”
“Are you going to do what I say?” she said finally.
“I can’t!”
“All right then,” she said with the crisp finality of a woman making up her mind, “if that’s the way you want it, okay. Get off the bike and let me get on—”
“Why?”
Liz shook the bicycle again peremptorily. “Because. I’m going back to Dotty Beebe’s house and get into some old clothes. And I’ll meet you on the dump in ten minutes.”
“What?
” howled Charley.
“Listen!” Elizabeth hissed through her teeth, and she took Charley’s jacket lapel firmly in her strong hands. “I’ve made up my mind and you’re gonna keep your big mouth shut this time.”
“But you’re not gonna dig for junk?” he cried incredulously.
“That’s it,” she recited in a kind of monotone. “Now shut up and get off that bike.”
And Charley got off, and stood there scratching his head. She mounted the bicycle with an air of busy authority, and said, “Now! I’ll meet you over there across the bridge in ten minutes. Be there!” She pedaled off. Charley walked across the bridge, and waited for his sister in complete bafflement. Liz was his strange, wild, unpredictable sister all right.
She was back in fifteen minutes roguishly attired in dungarees and a brown leather jacket, wearing shoes and a pair of work gloves she had borrowed from her girl friend’s brother while he himself was in school. They promptly started off across the field.
In a matter of minutes they were both rooting and digging about on the junkheaps, calling excitedly whenever they found some odd scrap that seemed valuable, tossing it on the pile in Charley’s shelter down by the rocks with a feeling of mounting efficiency. The girl found an old rusty aluminum frying pan, one magnificent iron kettle with the handle partially broken off, and an old black fireplace grate. The boy, with an eye for larger details, found a huge sheet of metal that rumbled like thunder when he struggled down to the shelter with it.
Liz, the strange impulsive Liz, was enjoying herself very much. To her, the fact that she was grubbing on the city dump with her kid brother, wearing a man’s crude workclothes, playing hookey from high school on a cold December afternoon, was a fantastic and wonderful adventure she was convinced no other girl could appreciate. She hated “most girls” anyway and the strict conventions by which they generally behaved. The original, the different, even the shocking thing, in her proud and exultant belief, was the only thing to do. She had long been a confirmed tomboy. She believed fiercely in everything that this kind of American female child believes in—the besting of snotty little boys in fights and races and tree-climbing. She had nothing but contempt for the fluttering little girls who gave up easily and resorted to feminine wiles. She wanted to go slapdash through the world anyway she liked.
Yet, with all that, everything about her already suggested depths of charming tenderness, infinite and womanly. At sixteen she was comparatively tall, erect in bearing, with a luxurious head of brunette hair, and eyes that really were lustrously green. In the way that she jumped down the slope of the hill with a graceful dainty bend of the knees, her hands waving in the air timorously for balance, in the way that she paused sometimes to stand and gaze with that patient, silent, and voluptuous brooding that women have, in all those things was the eloquence of a truly beautiful mien and manner. She was Charley’s sister and his best friend.
At that moment, however, neither Elizabeth or Charley was going unnoticed. As they dug and ripped and dragged the junk down to the shelter, and shouted jubilantly to one another in the wind, a young man, who had just driven up in an old 1928 Chevvy sedan with the back seat and windows removed to make room for loads of all sorts, was standing on top of the hill watching them with a puzzled and curious air.
It was their brother Joe. Having spent the day working on the old Ford in the Martin barn, he had decided that certain parts in the old car needed replacement, so he had borrowed the rickety Chevvy from a friend to drive down to the dump to see what he could find among the wrecks regularly dumped there. Joe stood now, peering down intently at the two youngsters trying to decide what they were up to.
Some schoolboys, their shadows cast far along the brow of the slope in the slanting afternoon light, had paused on their way home from school. They also stood on the hill watching Charley and Liz, with motionless, brooding curiosity.
Suddenly one young schoolboy, with a casual and incredible show of perfectly composed cheerlessness, picked up some rocks and began to throw them down at Charley and his sister. The whole thing happened so swiftly that at first the two kids below couldn’t understand what was going on. When the steady beat of rocks all around them apprised them of the little scoundrel’s purpose, they began yelling up angrily at him. But the schoolboy stood calmly surveying them from his advantageous hilltop and kept throwing more and more rocks. His schoolmates hurried away in embarrassment and dread.
Charley picked up some rocks of his own and furiously began to loft them as far as he could towards the schoolboy. This only urged the little knave on to greater efforts, perhaps out of a kind of coldblooded desperation. He proceeded to intensify his assault with vicious enterprise and actually stoned Charley on the leg. Charley let out a yowl of rage and charged right up the hill over heaps of junk that gave way and slipped under his feet in his scrambling haste, but he was bound to get him. And just as he reached a fairly stable stretch of ground and was running straight up to the tormentor in a hail of rocks, one of them struck him squarely on the forehead and he fell on his knees.
When Liz saw Charley fall she let out a howl of her own that struck doom in the heart of the little fiend. She came charging uphill with appalling speed in great antelope strides, terrific with girlish wrath and he, sensing the imminent end of his advantage, decided to run away. But just then Joe swooped down at him and took him by the arm and shook him off his feet.
“You crazy little bastard, what are you doing?” Joe yelled.
Charley had risen to his feet again, with that unpredictable obstinacy of his nature, and he came charging the rest of the way up the hill with blood streaking down his face, grimly silent, his teeth bared. With a frantic lunge the schoolboy disengaged himself from Joe’s grip and began to run for dear life across the field.
Liz had come up, and she and Joe stood rooted to the spot in fascination as Charley raced off in pursuit of the schoolboy. In the hushed silence of the terrible moment that followed they could hear the sound of small feet running over the rubble, frantic and absolutely urgent, until Charley dove in a long flying tackle and sent the other boy crashing to the ground.
“I think I’d better go over,” said Joe.
Charley merely pulled the schoolboy to his feet by the collar. For a moment it seemed as though some unspeakable violence would erupt, but nothing of the sort seemed to happen. Charley just held his adversary by the back of the collar and stared at him without a word. The other boy, meanwhile, had craned his neck around to avert his eyes from the sight of Charley’s bloody face, yet every time he tried to jump away, or just look away, Charley tightened his grip and pulled him even closer, until finally with a slow, hesitant, almost hypnotized movement the little rascal had to turn his face to Charley and look with fearful blindness at him.
“Look what you did to me,” said Charley in a low voice. The cut on his forehead looked bad, but it was nothing more than a minor laceration.
“Do you see what you did to me?” said Charley quietly.
The schoolboy lunged convulsively aside, but to no avail. Once more he was brought face to face with his fearsome victim.
Liz and Joe walked up and waited nervously to see what would happen. Suddenly Charley flung the other boy around with amazing swiftness and delivered him a tremendous kick in the behind. The schoolboy went sprawling on his knees from the force of the kick, but almost as instantly he was up on his feet racing off, with such frantic exertion that he plunged headlong on his knees again where he groveled for just a moment with great clutching fury, got up, slipped, all in an ecstasy of savage futility, and finally made off in a crazy sprint across the field. Charley for his part didn’t choose to pursue the matter any further. He stood at ease, with almost sad composure, and gazed after the schoolboy’s retreat with a calm, baneful eye.
Joe got some band-aids out of the car and wiped up the cut and bandaged Charley’s head.
“Well!” he said. “I don’t know what you two are doing here, but I never seen a
better boot in the you-know-where! Hyah! hyah! hyah!” He examined Charley’s cut again with careful gravity, and Elizabeth watched anxiously.
“Now! I guess that’ll be all right for now. We will wrap a handkerchief tight around your head, so, and damn if you don’t look like Captain Kidd. Now!” he said, folding his arms. “Lizzy, what’s this all about? Why aren’t you in school?”
They explained everything to him.
“What! Nine bucks for a window!” Joe commented. “Why, that old crackpot’s off his nut! Somebody ought to shoot that cop Warner, he’s too damn rough on kids. He’s had it coming to him for years.” Joe walked to the edge of the hill and scanned the whole length of the dump in silence. He strode back reflectively.
“Look, jerks, now that you started this crazy business we might as well finish it. In the first place, you morons, you’re not working the right side of the dump, it’s over that way that you find where the city trucks dump their loads every day, the new wrecks with good bumpers on them, and sometimes good motor parts too. I’m looking for an oil filter myself,” he added speculatively. They were leaning on his every word eagerly, because if anybody knew, Joe knew.
He walked around the Chewy, lit a cigarette, suddenly jumped in and yelled, “Come on then, what are you waiting for?” They went rattling over the rubble down to the other side of the dump, bouncing and swerving crazily. Each of them was grinning with sly delight, as though something wildly funny had suddenly come into the air.
Joe parked the car by the water’s edge. “Now!” he said, and marched off towards the nearest old wreck where he immediately appraised the general situation and sprang into action. First he lunged at a kind of old rusty bar protruding from a tangle of junk and immediately wrenched it spectacularly from its moorings, in a furious display of industry. With it he began to belabor a single headlamp on the front of the wreck until it was lopped off. “Fifty cents!” he called out. “You see how it’s done?” He threw his cigarette away and looked around authoritatively.