“What’s amatter with you?” Marty’s wife started in. “I don’t like that Bone character. I told you a hunnerd times….”
The Bone hit the gas to drown her out. The car hesitated, coughed, then chugged off. Fern looked out of the back window. The trailer was lost in a cloud of exhaust. But as the exhaust thinned, the cloud took on a smaller, tighter shape. In fact, the dark cloud followed, rolling alongside the car like a dirty tumbleweed. Fern refused to look at it. She tried to listen to the Bone, who was talking about his house. “Now, my place, the place I’m living in now, it’s just a temporary dwelling. It isn’t fancy. I don’t go in for fancy. I like a roof over my head and plain living.” Fern rubbed her eyes and looked out the window again. The dark cloud was still there, though it was tripping along, sagging in on itself with exhaustion. “It’s not like Tamed Hedge Road. It’s not a house on a street like that. But it’s nice enough.” She rubbed her eyes and looked again. The dark cloud was finally gone. “And the neighbors are good folks. You’ll see. You’ll be charmed. It’s quite charming in a rustic kind of way.”
Fern knew what the word “rustic” meant. Reading books will give you an excellent vocabulary. (My old writing teacher used to say that reading his books and his books alone would give you an even better vocabulary. Although I respect his paunchy belly and his horn-rimmed spectacles and his way of pronouncing things much like an overeducated British butler, I didn’t always agree with him on every point. In fact, perhaps I wasn’t his favorite student.) Fern thought she was going to a farm, a charming, rustic farm. But “rustic” is a tricky word. They’d driven away from Tamed Hedge Road, away from Twin Oaks toward seedier and seedier parts of town. There were neon signs in storefront windows, car dealerships, run-down houses and abandoned lots. The Bone pulled in front of a string of houses separated by alleys as narrow as a rat’s rump. He bumped up over the curb, then the car plopped down with a disgusted sigh. The houses backed up to a railroad track. The yards were nearly bald. The grass patches, interrupted by mud-pocks, were mowed raggedly. He looked at his own yard and sighed deeply. A man was standing there, shuffling his feet around, his head bobbing back and forth.
Now, Fern liked adventure. One of her favorite books was about a boy who came home from school to find a tollbooth in his bedroom, and he drove a toy car through it into a different world, which sounds a little absurd to me. But as much as Fern liked reading about adventure, she was feeling a little nervous about the one she was actually having as she stared at the Bone’s neighborhood. It was growing dark. There was only one streetlight working. The others looked like they’d been smashed by rocks. She kept an eye out for the dark cloud. Was it hovering behind the tire swing? Was it behind the Dumpster? Fern thought of the Drudgers at their house, where maybe they were teaching Howard to brush his teeth in small circular motions, and she was glad she wasn’t there, but was she glad she was here instead?
The Bone got out of the car. Fern did too. She grabbed the black umbrella and her bag, feeling the top for the hard outline of her diary, which held her mother’s picture. She slammed the heavy door behind her.
The next-door neighbor, a woman with a mop of blond and black hair, sat on her front stoop smoking. She said, “He been here a good couple hours, just strutting around like that.” Aside from the pecking movements of his head and the occasional flap of his arms, the man looked normal, wearing corduroys, a white shirt, an ugly necktie, and a leather belt. He seemed absorbed in the pecking and strutting and hadn’t noticed Fern or the Bone yet.
The Bone nodded. He took Fern’s bag for her, hoisting it to his shoulder. “We’ll have to make a run for it.” He paused, then called out to the neighbor lady, “We expecting a train soon?”
“We’re always expecting a train soon. They come every five minutes! Only way I tell time. Look, you gonna do anything about him?” the woman asked.
The Bone didn’t answer. He lifted his head, straining forward. Fern could hear a small rumble in the distance. “Train,” the Bone said. “Wait, wait…” The train was getting closer now, closer, the noise rising up. This startled the man. He began bobbing frantically. “Now!” the Bone shouted. The train rattled loudly, creating a gust of wind. The man was squawking. The Bone ducked his head and ran quickly past the man. Fern followed. The Bone was at the door now, rummaging for keys. Fern glanced over her shoulder at the neighbor woman and the man in the yard. The train had passed and the man was settling down.
“I know you know him,” the woman shouted.
“I don’t,” the Bone shouted back.
“He ain’t going to howl, is he? He ain’t going to start to hoot or something and go all night? I’ll call the police if that kind of mess starts up again. You hear me?”
“It’ll be fine,” the Bone assured her. “He’s a stranger. Maybe he’s lost. I’m sure he’ll go away on his own. It’ll be fine!”
But it didn’t seem that way to Fern. The man had fixed his eyes on Fern and the Bone. He was now high-stepping it toward them. Just before he was in striking distance—and it did look like he was angry about something—the Bone found the key, jiggled the lock, opened the door, hustled Fern inside and slammed it.
“Who’s that?” Fern asked, shaken.
“Who?” the Bone asked.
“That man in the yard?”
“Him? Oh, well. I’m not perfect,” the Bone said. “Hypnosis is a tricky business. Anyone will tell you that. Sometimes things go a little haywire. He signed a contract, though. Fair and square. He’s got no grounds to come after me.”
“You said you didn’t know him,” Fern said with a small accusation in her tone. The Bone lied. That’s what Fern was figuring out. He lied a little bit quite often, and although this made her a little bit mad, she also understood it. Being Fern Drudger had entailed a good bit of lying, too. Only now she knew she hadn’t been making up the things she saw. She hadn’t been fibbing when the Drudgers accused her of it, no. But she had been lying in a way every time she narrowed her eyes for them, every time she kept her mouth shut when she wanted to let a choir out of her chest. She’d lied by being the way they wanted her to be. And why had she lied to them? Well, to please them, to make things easier for them. And wasn’t that what the Bone was trying to do? He wanted things to go smoothly, for the man in the yard to be a stranger so that everything could be nice, for himself, but maybe for Fern, too. Maybe he wanted Fern to like him.
But here’s a little fact: Lying to a fellow liar is quite tough. Liars are the best at catching liars. And so his lies didn’t work on Fern. She’d catch him every time. And maybe this was the biggest relief of all: Her lies wouldn’t work on him either. She couldn’t pretend to be a Drudger in front of the Bone. He’d see right through her, just like he had at the swimming pool when he was Mrs. Lilliopole, wearing the plastic nose-pinch and the flowered bathing cap and the skirted swimsuit. He knew that she had seen the bat and the marble, and she wasn’t just any kid, but his kid.
“I don’t, technically, know any roosters. And that’s what he is.” Fern looked at him in such a way that he knew she knew better, and he smiled a small, guilty smile accompanied by a small, guilty shrug.
The Bone flipped on the light switch, illuminating a small hallway. There were two doors: one to the right, the other straight ahead. The Bone unlocked the door to the right. “We only have the bottom floor. The Bartons live upstairs. They’re clog dancers, I’m sorry to report.” (I’d like to add here that the Bartons, though you’ll never meet them in this book, are actually quite famous clog dancers—that is, in clog-dancing circles, which tend to be very, very small circles.)
They stepped into the apartment. It was still dark and muffled, too, with a distant ching, ching, ching of little tiny bells. Although Fern didn’t know the names for everything she smelled, here were a few: garlic, heavy Indian incense, blooming narcissus, Chinese food gone bad, cedar chips, mothballs, a mix of oranges and onions, and mint.
The Bone flipped a wall swit
ch. A dim light flickered on and at the same time music came on, too, from a radio in the corner—horns and a singer singing, “Hope the sun gonna shine, hope the sun, hope the sun, hope the sun gonna shine on down.” The walls were draped in velvety cloths, like in a movie theater. And there was artwork on top of the draping: framed shoe inserts, a fish made out of tea bags, a painting of dental floss, which made Fern think how funny and beautiful and sad life was all at the same time. They were nothing like the single painting in the Drudgers’ living room of the Drudgers’ living room, which only made one think of the Drudgers’ living room. There was a card table with pop-out legs and two folding chairs, an orange knit sofa and a bunch of beanbag chairs that’d seen fluffier days. The Bone walked quickly to the windows that were covered by heavy curtains. He pulled each one back, peering out. “Spies,” he told Fern. “The Miser knows something’s going on. He’s hired a ring of spies. They press their cups against the windows and try to hear what my next step will be.”
It was hard to believe that anyone would spy on a place this strange and small and unofficial looking. Fern had a more glamorous impression of spies—for example, that they had equipment that was higher tech than cups pressed to windows—but she could tell that the Bone believed in the spies, even if she didn’t (not yet, at least).
Fern turned around in a slow circle, taking the place in. She’d always wanted to feel at home someplace in the world, but was this it? She doubted it. It didn’t feel like home, not really, but she kind of liked it all the same. It was so different. That’s what she liked about it most of all.
The Bone walked into the cramped kitchen. He could only open the refrigerator door six inches before it hit the opposite wall. “Are you hungry? Thirsty?”
“Both,” Fern said.
“I’ve got an onion. Oranges. A can of mushroom soup.” He pulled out some Chinese leftovers, sniffed and tossed them in a plastic garbage can.
“Sounds fine.”
“I used to have a dog,” the Bone said. “But when we went to the circus, you know, where Howard tried the unicycle, the dog decided to stay. He had some high-quality tricks and, I suppose, thought he was wasting his talent on such a small audience as Howard and me and sometimes Marty.”
Fern wandered around the living room. There was still a good bit of dog fur, an extra coat on the sofas.
“Why do they call you the Bone?” she asked.
“I’m as tough as a bone. I’m not at all soft,” said the Bone, but he was a little flustered, like he didn’t care for the question, like he was lying. “I’ve always been called the Bone and so that’s that.”
“Okay,” Fern said. She didn’t want to upset him.
When the Bone came in with the food, Fern was holding a framed photograph. It was a picture of the Bone and an enormous man with a boxy nose, arched black eyebrows, dark-circled eyes. The two were standing, laughing, pointing at each other.
“Your mother,” the Bone said, a hitch in his voice, “took that picture. That guy was my best friend. But not now.”
Fern stared at the man’s face. She felt a chill. He scared her. She remembered the angry glare of the man from the census bureau and his dark, ghostly hand. “The Miser.”
“That’s right,” the Bone said.
Fern stared into the Miser’s eyes. They were the same as the census bureau man’s, weren’t they? Had the Miser been the gusty dark cloud that had tried to pull her in, closer, whipping at her clothes? Was the Miser capable of turning himself from a bird to a dog with one shiver? But the bird couldn’t have been him. She’d liked the bird. It had watched her kindly with its little head cocked and its eyes wet.
“You were once friends?” she asked.
“Yes. Best friends. I keep the picture as a reminder. We grew up in the circus together. The spies are a troop of little people. The Miser knew them from his ties to the circus and hired them away. My mother was a trapeze artist, as I said, and his father was the strong man. He ate nails. The Miser was once the sweet, sensitive type. He was named the Miser as a joke, because it was the opposite of who he really was. He’d write you an apology if he thought he hurt your feelings. We resorted to trickery, but I tell you, he made sure we were always the good guys.”
“But now he’s after you?” Fern asked.
“He was in love with your mother, see? And she loved me. He never got over that, I tell you. He got me put in jail as soon as I married your mother!” The Bone shook his head, sighed. “I don’t want the Miser to get his hands on that book. It’s powerful, and he shouldn’t have it! You see, the book doesn’t really mean much to either me or the Miser. It’s just a big coded mess to the two of us. Only your mother could make sense of it. And he was hoping that Howard would be born with some of Eliza’s powers and that he’d understand the book. I guess I was hoping too. It was clear that Howard wouldn’t be able to make any more sense of it than we could—he lacks the gifts. But then the Miser found out that you existed, and now he wants that book again because you’re the key to unlocking it.
“Honestly, Fern, and I’m not used to being honest, but I want the book because your mother loved it. I can picture her now walking down the street toward me, lost in thought, the book held tight to her chest. That big old leather book with a small leather belt wrapped around it. Your mother kept it safe, always safe.” He seemed to drift off a moment here, lost in the memory, and Fern lost herself, too. She liked this glimpse of her mother, a young woman carrying a giant book. Fern could relate to it. She loved books too, and she loved imagining that she and her mother had this in common. The Bone came to and went on. “Now we’re both looking for the book. And he wants to make sure he gets it first. Your mother would want me to have it, Fern. Me. The Miser thinks the book should be his, but he’s wrong! Your mother left it for me.”
Fern wanted to see this book with her own eyes. She wanted to feel the weight of it and carry it locked to her chest. “And you don’t know where it is?”
“Nope.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “The book is for me, for you, for us, Fern. We have to find it first. The book holds more secrets. Dark secrets. He could learn how to hypnotize nations, Fern, and he wouldn’t do any good with that. None.” Fern felt that sense of dread again, the windy pull of the dark cloud. The Bone looked at Fern. She knew her eyes were wide with fear. She hadn’t known that there was so much at stake.
“I didn’t mean to scare you!” he said.
“I’m not scared,” Fern said, but she was lying. It was too late. She was already scared.
The Bone held out his hand and Fern handed him the picture. He sighed deeply. “Your mother, she was the real thing. Before I met her, I could make people waddle around onstage or sing silly songs for the audience. But your mother taught me how to be an Anybody. I was already an okay hypnotist. But together the two of us, your mother and me, we could cure people. Together we never turned anybody into a rooster. We were healers, really. Now I try to cure folks, and that’s what happens.” He pointed to the front yard, to the rooster man. The Bone turned back to Fern. “Go ahead and eat.”
Fern wasn’t sure if her hands were shaking because she was frightened or starving, or both. Mr. and Mrs. Drudger preferred oranges so dry and pruned that their white casings were brittle. Their soups were homemade and tasted like wet air. She’d never eaten an onion before, much less a raw one. Here, the orange was so juicy it dripped down to her elbows. The soup, from a can, was salty. The onion tasted like a sharp sting. She gulped whole milk, chocolate, in fact.
The Bone was up and down. He watched her eat some, gazed at the photo from time to time; but he was often drawn to the front kitchen window, where he kept an eye on the man in his yard.
“Is he still there?” Fern asked a few times, anxiously.
“Yep. Still there.”
Fern looked around the apartment. There was one neat corner with a shelf of oversized books. Fern could read the titles of the books from where she sat, things like The Complete
Book of Mathematics. Fern assumed it was Howard’s territory. That was one thing she missed here at the Bone’s, her small but growing library. All of the books seemed to be Howard’s. Didn’t the Bone have a few of his own favorites? Fern couldn’t imagine going without books. Howard’s area was small and tidy. There was a box of earplugs and an air spray, regular scent. Howard! Would he really love being with the Drudgers? Could he? Hadn’t he liked something about living with the Bone after all these years? Wouldn’t he miss it? Fern already felt different, and she’d only known the Bone a few hours.
When Fern finished eating, she wiped her mouth on her sleeve. It was a test. Mr. and Mrs. Drudger would have scolded her. She wanted to see what the Bone would do. He said, “You like my cooking? I once had an Anybody gig as a French chef. Those were the days!”
Fern imagined the Bone in a puffed white hat. It made her smile. She almost said, “I’m glad I’m here.” But she didn’t. She was pretty sure the Bone didn’t want to hear anything that might come off as soft. He’d told her that he didn’t like anything mushy. Plus, she was still getting used to it all. She still felt off-kilter. She said, “I’m glad I’m not still at my house.” That was the truth. She was happy to be relieved of math camp and Lost Lake and boredom. But she was scared, too. She wanted to help get the book before the Miser did, but what if she wasn’t able to? She was just a kid, after all, and not even the type to be the first one picked for kickball, or the second or the third. “What should we do about the Miser?” she asked. “How can I help?”
“Well,” said the Bone, “there’s a more pressing issue.” He looked at a clock on the wall. The clock looked unreliable, at best. It had faded numbers, and the nine had slipped down so that the clock had two sixes. The second hand was inching uphill. It got stuck, then sprang five seconds forward. “Mr. Harton.”