Her eyes grew wide, and she breathed in quick and short. "Tucker?"
Candlelight danced across our rain-soaked faces while the silence perched on our shoulders and screamed in our ears. She stepped forward, looked closer, and let out a sigh.
"Tucker, I'm sorry. I didn't know..." A tremble of relief rippled through her body like a wave. It left her limp, leaning on her son and breathing deeply. "Oh, Tucker."
There, in that sigh, I heard the heart of a girl I once knew and the echo of a woman's voice filled with fear.
Chapter 8
IT WAS THE LAST DAY OF SUMMER BREAK. MUTT AND I were nine and Katie a year younger, but with few playmates within a few miles, age, grade, and gender mattered little.
Miss Ella woke us with the sun, spread our clothes at the end of the bed, and disappeared downstairs to the smell of pancakes and bacon. Katie got the top bunk, and Mutt and I shared the bottom-meaning I spent the night getting kicked in the face. Mutt slept in fits, wrestling with his sheets, tossing and turning, often placing his head where his feet should have been. Worst of all, he ground his teeth. He ground them so hard, he wore grooves in his teeth and later required four crowns.
My hat and two-holster belt were hanging on the post and my boots placed beneath the bed, but it was summer and I seldom wore shoes when the heat and Miss Ellalet me get away with it. I jabbed Mutt in the stomach and he moaned. Between the two of us, I was the morning person. Always have been. He crawled out, yawned, and strapped on his sword and eye patch. Katie climbed down the ladder, stepped off the top bunk, and gently slipped into the glittery wings and tinfoil crown she had worn all summer. Our closest neighbor, Katie only lived a mile away, and sleepovers were a regular occurrence.
"Mutt," I said, strapping on my holster, "you got to quit eating those cheese puffs."
"Yeah," Katie chimed in while straightening her crown, no more cheese puffs for you." She held her nose and said, "Phew!"
"What?" Mutt rubbed his eyes and tried to act like he didn't know what we were talking about.
"You know what I'm talking about," I said, tying the red bandanna around my neck. "You've been gassing me out of here all night. I almost suffocated under those sheets. I'm glad Rex didn't walk in and light a match."
"Yeah," Katie said, jumping up and down and looking over each shoulder at her wings, "and then it floated up to me." We ran downstairs like a herd of tiny buffalo, wielding shiny six-shooters, plastic swords, and glittery wings. Breakfast sat on the table, steaming hot.
Miss Ella stood at the sink, drying plates, being careful not to chip the edges. Rex didn't know the first thing about fine china, but he had a cabinet full of it. Each plate was worth more than Miss Ella made in a week, but he gave us no other option. When she stacked the last plate in the cabinet, she dried her hands on her apron and turned to inspect the table and its. The three of us had just finished breakfast and sat, backs straight, plates clean, hands folded, and forks resting at three o'clock. A picture of polish and respectability. You'd have thought Gloria Vanderbilt had come to Clopton.
Our charade had to do with one thing-we wanted out of that house. The world was outside and we wanted at it. If it meant putting our forks at three o'clock, sticking them in our ears, sucking on a lemon, or eating broccoli, we'd have done it and asked for more.
After a minute of eyeing the table, Miss Ella noddedthe final word. We knew she didn't spend all that time cooking breakfast just so we could waste it, so we devoured it in short order. I saw the permission on her face, said, "Thank you, Miss Ella," pulled my hat down tight over my eyes, and almost broke the screen door trying to get it open.
Katie hopped off her chair and made her usual detour through the living room and by the piano. She played a few notes from some dead, white-wigged composer, made Miss Ella smile, and then flapped her wings off the back porch. Katie's mom was a music teacher who taught lessons in their home. So morning to night, and often well past it, somebody was always playing the piano in her house. Even at age ten, Katie had a noticeable gift. She could play most anything, and while she could read music with proficiency, she seldom needed to. Her ear could pick up a key or melody and then her mind would translate it down through her fingers. She was no child prodigy, but her fingers danced across the keyboard like a company of ballerinas with the New York Ballet. She'd climb onto the bench, her feet dangling six inches off the ground, back straight, chin high, arms poised. A picture of strength and grace.
I didn't understand it at the time, but Katie came alive perched on that bench. It would be a mistake to say she had total control of the piano. She didn't, but she didn't want it either. Katie found someplace in the middle-as if she knew it needed her and she needed it. An even measure of give-and-take. She would play and it would sing. And she was content with that. I often thought that if Katie's heart could speak, it would sound like a piano.
The three of us tore off the back porch. I didn't look back to see if Miss Ella was watching, but I didn't need to. When it came to God, I had my questions-although I never voiced them-but I never doubted Miss Ella. She was watching, all right.
In his "renovation," Rex had added a back porch that looked like something out of a Roman villa. Rather than a simple step or two leading from the back door to the backyard like most homes had, Rex had built more than forty cascading limestone steps framed with marble columns. At the top of the steps were granite benches and fountains springing up out of fishes' mouths, seagulls' wings, and stone trumpets of larger-than-life statues. And smack in the center of all this stood a ridiculously stupid statue of himself sitting atop his best Tennessee Walker. Across his lap rested a perfect bronze match of his favorite Greener.
Rex had it commissioned when his potbelly was in the mature stage, but rather than suffer the embarrassment of the truth, he pointed to his gut and told the sculptor, "If you want your money, I'd better not find this in that statue." The day it was finished, Rex strutted around it and handed the man his money, then went inside to pour himself another drink. While the crystal tinkled with ice, Mutt and I, with Katie as lookout, took a bottle of her mom's fingernail polish and painted the horse's hooves and nose bright red and then added glitter for effect. It didn't take Rex long to find it, and it took even less time before he ordered Miss Ella to get to cleaning.
That's when I stopped being stupid. I didn't like the picture of Miss Ella on her knees, cleaning that horse's feet and face when I had painted them. So I grabbed a wire pad and me, Mutt, Katie, and Miss Ella started scrubbing. While the glitter peeled off in flakes and that horse's snout began glowing like Rudolph's nose, we laughed and smiled, and I figured right then and there that I had to find another way to get back at Rex.
When the three of us cut off the back porch, we ran by fit-and-trim Rex, who hadn't looked that way a day in his life since he was old enough to drink the hard stuff. We each ran by the horse, rubbed his nose for good luck, and started skipping down the steps.
I turned and watched Mutt swat at the horse with his sword and Katie float around it on her toes. While they slew horse and rider, I yelled, "Last one to the quarry has to do a belly flop!"
Just under the horse, Mutt turned and yelled, "Thank you, Miss Ella," and made a final stab at the horse. She nodded and started rinsing something in her hands. When Mutt passed me, he was getting it for all it was worth and fighting with the eye patch to keep it from falling down over his eye. Katie danced around the horse, smiled, curtsied, said, "Thank you," to Miss Ella in the window, and then jumped down the steps, flapping her wings.
The three of us chased each other across the lawn, through the barn, and into the peach orchard that sloped down the hill behind the barn. I was the fastest, but Mutt was close behind and Katie was a fleet footed little girl who never painted her toenails. Both had a good head start on me, but I passed them midway there. We'd have made three-quarters of a really good relay team. We rounded the bottom of the orchard and made the last stretch for the rock quarry a quarter mile aw
ay. The sun was dancing across the hay that had grown to my shoulders and needed cutting. By the time I reached the pine trees, I had forty yards on Mutt and even more on Katie, but I really didn't mind the belly flop, so I jumped behind a clump of green, stretched out next to a fallen pine tree, caught my breath, and peered through the grapevines as Mutt flew by. He sounded like a freight train, and his arms were waving wildly back and forth as he willed his legs faster.
Next came Katie. I jumped out from behind the bush, screamed, "Ahhhh!" and scared her so badly that she slapped me with an open hand and kept running for the quarry, saying, "Tucker Mason, you almost made me pee myself." The slap spun me sideways and tumbled me into a sappy pine tree while Katie danced down the trail, paying no attention to me.
Having reached the water first, Mutt ran his hands through both loops of the zip line and launched himself off the sixty-foot-high ledge and into the quarry. And no, it never really took Mutt very long to get used to jumping off that rock. Mutt was fearless, and his only complaint was that it wasn't high enough nor the zip line long enough.
The cables started up top from a platform and ended down in the quarry almost a hundred yards away. They dropped quickly out of the platform and then leveled out over the water, coming to an end on the other side of the quarry. When Rex finished gutting the earth and pulled out of the quarry, he left the lines intact. They sat dormant for about ten years until I found them one day while hunting trouble. Mose had checked to make sure they still worked and then hung two zips-kind of like bicycle handlebars that rolled on a really tight cable.
To us, the quarry was another remnant of Rex's insatiable appetite. He dug down until the geologists told him it was tapped out. Like the people he met, Rex used it, sucked the life out of it, and then left a gaping hole. Rex and that granite were a lot alike: stone cold and could crush you.
The quarry was a world within a world. Miss Ella used to say that heaven had gold streets, and all the walls and houses were covered in rubies, emeralds, and diamonds. Even the front porch rockers. Down in the quarry, when the sun cleared the pine trees and hit the busted granite at just the right angle, it lit up all that cut rock like ten million diamonds. For just a few minutes every day, it was a brilliant, glistening hole in the earth, protecting us from everything up above.
We never told anybody about all the glistening. If we did, Rex would find out, figure out a way to make money off it, dig it up, package it, and sell it. We decided there were some things you just didn't sell. So the four of usme, Mutt, Katie, and Miss Ella-made a pact and sealed it with a spit handshake.
Aside from no quit, Mutt also had no fear. Never had. When Mutt reached the water level, the zip wheels were spinning so fast that he lifted his heels like a skier and started skimming across the water. Midway across, he let go and spun three hundred and sixty degrees on his back.
About the time he dunked his head into the clear spring water and smiled, Katie ran her hands through both loops on the second zip line, planted her foot on the platform, and jumped. Katie's fifty-five pounds were slowed by the wings, so she "flew" into the quarry with a bit more grace than Mutt. She looked like an angel wearing a tank top and cutoff jeans whose frayed edges fluttered like her wings. When she reached the water, she lifted her feet and skimmed all the way to the ledge, where she dipped her feet in like a brake and slowed to a stop.
I stood at the ledge, barely breathing and half-smirking as the two of them sat dripping on the sun-warmed rocks below. Katie pointed to the water and then slapped it with her foot. "Okay, fancy pants, right here." I winched the handles of the zip line back up, grabbed it with both hands, and swung off hard. The free fall was always the best. After the fall, the slide caught and sent me slicing down into the quarry where the water came rising up at a fantastic rate of speed. I weighed a little more than them, so my speed was usually a bit faster. Descending into the quarry, the temperature dropped due to colder water and the rocks that contained it. Goose bumps traveled up my arms as I watched the water coming up to meet me. When the slide leveled, I pulled up, swung my legs forward, curled up, and spun myself into a forward flip. Just before I touched down, I opened up and hit the water belly first.
Smack!
Down here, beneath the ledge of the earth floor, was our whole world. There were no beatings, no liquor, no cussing, no punishment, and most important, no Rex. Down here, Peter Pan fought Captain Hook atop the mast of the jolly Roger, the Three Musketeers swore sword-allegiance to one another, and the brave cowboy always rescued the girl and warned the stagecoach that the bridge was out. Down here, we found buried treasure under every rock. The trick was knowing where to look. To the grown-ups above, this was nothing but a granite hole, one more scar from Rex Mason's lust. But to us, it was the happiest place we had ever known. Down here, Katie flew like Tinkerbell, Mutt said the voices didn't follow him, and I dropped below Rex's radar.
The laughter from the rock was worth every shade of lobster red on my stinging stomach. We spent the morning flying off the rocks, engaged in a full-fledged Pan and Hook battle and swimming below for buried treasure while keeping one eye peeled for the tick-tocking crocodile. Katie played a mermaid, Mutt played Since, and I played one of the lost boys. We alternated who was Peter Pan.
At noon, our stomachs brought its up the rock ladder, back to Waverly, and into more trouble. When we reached the barn, I spied Rex's twelve-foot johnboat leaning against the door and motioned to Mutt. "You think we can get that thing down to the quarry?"
Mutt stuck his hands in his pockets and eyed the situation. Tilting his head, he looked up to the house, back to the barn, and then down to the quarry-a distance of little over a half mile. "Not without a little help."
Even at the age of nine, Mutt could build more than most forty-year-olds. Just a year prior, he had built Miss Ella a twenty-holed martin house out of balsam wood. He painted it white and green and then sunk a fifteen-foot pole just outside her bedroom window. Thinking of her back, he engineered a cable and winch system to raise and lower the house for spring-cleaning. She walked outside, bent down, grabbed both his hands, and said, "Matthew, you've got a gift. I thank you."
Katie and I flipped the boat over, brushed the ants off, and checked for snakes. Once clear, Mutt reappeared with two skateboards in his hands. Borrowing a few of Rex's lead ropes from the barn, we tied a skateboard to each end of the boat and started sliding her toward the quarry. We never ate lunch. That boat curbed our appetite completely. The gentle slope of the hill made the work rather easy, and at one point we actually had to hold the boat back rather than push it. When we started pulling rather than pushing, Katie hopped in and crossed her suntanned and scuffed legs that, like all three of us, were covered with sun-bleached blond fuzz. I grabbed a golf umbrella and handed it to Katie, and she played the part of a Southern belle. Katie's gift was grace, and she had lots of it.
The work was easy until we reached the rock ledge. We looked sixty feet down into the water and realized there was only one way to get the boat into the water below. Push it and let gravity have its day. The anticipation was delicious. Katie hopped out, Mutt untied the skateboards and pitched them aside, and then we started inching the boat forward while Katie watched and waited with wide and anxious eyes. The boat tipped over the ledge and balanced on its midpoint. Mutt smiled, pushed it with one finger, and the boat fell forward. It scraped across hard granite and tumbled silently into the crystal blue below. The fall, the noise, and the splash were a concert of glory.
This was about the time we learned that the metal boat was leaning against the barn door for a reason. Rex, in a late-night and drunken skeet-shooting outing, had punched two holes in the hull with his best Greener twelve-gauge. When the boat hit the water, it sunk like a concrete barge through forty clear feet of sparkling Alabama water and settled on the bottom.
I looked over the edge, my eyes wide, and said, "Uhoh." Mutt, ghostly white, looked up from the water and asked, "How are we going to explain this?" O
f the two of us, he'd be the appetizer and I'd be the main course. Katie looked at the boat, then back at me, and immediately fell on the ground laughing. She might get a paddling, but she really didn't care. The sight of that boat plunging and sinking-and then our faces-was worth every switch.
The beatings could wait. We grabbed our swords and jumped.
The afternoon found us sunning on the warm, smooth granite ledge that protruded out of the water like a landing just below the anchor of the two zip lines.
The evening crickets picked up, and I noticed that our jeans had long since dried. Miss Ella rang the dinner bell, signaling the end, and our faces showed the disappointment. The last day of summer had come and gone. Big Ben had struck midnight, and school started tomorrow. In the morning, the bus would pick us up a quarter mile from the house and take us down to Clopton, where I would start fifth grade, alone.
The zip lines made entering the quarry delectable fun, but there was only one way out. Climbing the steps. Slipping and falling was always possible but not really a big deal. It just meant you were going swimming again.
Mutt was the first to move. He was like a cat anyway, so he hit the rock steps and bounded up and out of the quarry while Katie and I watched. Katie was next. She stood and walked to the first step, but for some reason, she returned, grabbed my hand, and said, "I love you, Tucker Mason." Before she let go, she reached up, pecked me on the lips, and floated up the rocks.
It was my first kiss, and when I close my eyes, I can still feel it.
The rocks were slippery when wet, so she took her time and climbed using both her hands and feet. Finally, I stood on the rock and looked around the quarry. Shadows climbed the walls, the water cooled the air, and I felt a chill on a hot Alabama afternoon. Summer was over. So were a lot of other things.
That day was the greatest of days. And we'd had it all to ourselves, never burdened with doubt, fear, or anxious dread. It may have been the last great day. Maybe even the best day. I hadn't thought about Rex but maybe once or twice, or about Mutt going off to school by himself or Katie being sent to the rich kids' school where they would teach her to wear a dress, little white shoes, and socks topped with lace, and how to sit properly at the piano. Problem was, the day was now over, and in its absence, shadows filled the quarry. I looked up the ledge where the two of them had disappeared. The lost boys were gone, the Red Man had quit dancing, the mermaids were nowhere to be found, and maybe Hook won after all, because Peter Pan was gone, chasing his shadow again. Rex had killed a lot of things in his life. Even Peter Pan.