The Scavengers Page 4

  But I’ve never been tempted to try that Urpcorn again.

  9

  MA WANTS TO MAKE SOUP FOR SUPPER, SO I HEAD FOR THE ROOT cellar to get carrots and onions and maybe some parsnips. Dad dug the cellar into the hillside out behind the shack. He took a lot of pride in that project, and he wouldn’t allow Toad or me to help. It seemed like despite his ups and downs he wanted to prove he could finish something on his own. It wasn’t easy: toward the end he ran into slate—a type of rock that breaks into flat slabs—which he had to chisel and pry out of the way. But even for Dad, he did a pretty good job. The door is crooked, and the hinges are made with pieces of rubber hacked from an old tire, but it works. The hole he dug into the hillside is large and roomy, and inside all the corners are square. He even rigged a small set of stairs to get to a lower second level.

  Way down in there where the carrots are, it’s dark as night. Before I enter the cellar, I pull a stick from Ma’s cooking fire and touch the flame to the candle inside my jacklight, which is the pioneer version of a flashlight. I made it myself using directions from a book Toad gave me shortly after we first met. I had been down in Hoot Holler helping him sort steel and was getting ready to hike home when Toad went into the house and returned with a tin box.

  “Here,” he said. I took the box, and it was solid and heavy in my hands.

  “Open it,” he said.

  I lifted the lid, and inside was a book. The front was covered with illustrations of butterfly nets, fishing poles, knots and ropes, a homemade paper balloon, a doll strapped to a parachute, and three boys: one swinging on a rope seat, one rowing a raft, and one building a snowman. And splashed across the cover in bright orange letters, the title: The American Boy’s Handy Book.

  I looked at Toad.

  He looked at me.

  “But, Toad, I’m a—”

  “Boost bek in the world five-minus-one you!” he said, before I could finish. “Hook lere!” He flipped the book open to the first page. There were more illustrations of more boys doing adventurous things, and the words “What to do and How to do it.”

  Toad started jabbering then, telling me how many times he had read this book when he was a boy, and how he still read it even though it was printed over a century ago, and how while there were many fun and silly things in the book there were also many things that would help me survive in this world. “Jike a lacklight!” said Toad, flipping to page 190 and pointing to the instructions for making a jacklight. Basically it’s a candle in a three-sided box. The fourth side is made from a pane of glass. A piece of tin behind the candle reflects the flame, which shines out forward like a shaky flashlight.

  I could use one of those, I thought. When the government put up the Bubble Cities, they took away our gas and electricity. They said it was to save the environment, but Toad says it was to hog their own bacon. I’m not sure exactly what he meant by that, but I do know you sure can’t jump in the car and run to town for flashlight batteries.

  Toad pointed to the next page. In bold letters it said, “How to Make a Boomerang.” On the page after that were instructions on how to throw a boomerang. Now I was interested. I took the book from Toad and turned another page. There was a picture of a boy with a cool-looking weapon called a “whip-bow” and a diagram of how to make one. “Whoa,” I said. “Cool.”

  Toad smiled as I began reading the instructions aloud. But then I came to this section:

  Arrows can be bought in any city, but most boys prefer to make their own, leaving the “store arrows” for the girls to use with their pretty “store bows.”

  I flipped to the front of the book and checked the author’s name. Then I shoved the book right back into Toad’s hands. “Girls, schmirls!” I said. “If Mr. Daniel C. Beard was here right now I’d noogie rub ’im until he needed a steel-plated wig!”

  Toad tried to hand the book to me again. I pushed it away.

  “Does Arlinda know this is your favorite book? She’d put that loser over her knee and spank him. And yank his Daniel Beard beard!”

  Toad kinda shifted his feet around. “He bas a wit of a postal chaufferist.”

  “Was a bit of a male chauvinist?” I asked. I had heard Ma use the term. Apparently Toad had half heard Ma use the term.

  “Affirmer-ized,” said Toad. “But he was a tan of his mimes.”

  “Tan of his mimes, man of his times—either way I’m not interested in his long-gone old-man yapping!”

  But Toad handed me the book again. “If you’re going to be Ford Falcon and not Maggie,” he said, this time in a serious voice with no word tricks, “you need to read this book.”

  And I have.

  According to Toad, Daniel C. Beard was friends with Mark Twain and helped invent the Boy Scouts. In the book there are a lot of words like “baneful and destroying pleasures” and sentences like “The advance-guard of modern civilization is the lumberman, and following close on his heels comes the all-devouring saw-mill.” When I think of Toad reading this book over and over ever since he was a kid my size, I start to understand why he sometimes talks like an overcranked gramophone stuffed with an antique dictionary.

  I gave up on the boomerang pretty quickly. But I did follow Beard’s instructions for making a blow-gun. Only instead of the glass tube he recommends for a barrel, I used a piece of plastic tubing I scavenged from one of Toad’s “miscellaneous mystery piles.” Also, I call it a SpitStick because that just sounds cooler. Mostly I use it to shoot pepper-pea pellets at skunks or GreyDevils or anything else I don’t want to get too close. I make the pepper-pea pellets by filling hollow clay balls with ground-up dried peppers we grow in our hoop houses. I also make some that are the size of an apple—I call them pepper-bombs. Those I just throw by hand. When they hit something, they hurt. They also explode in a cloud of pepper dust. And sometimes just for target practice I make clay pellets with no pepper and use them to shoot Dookie in the butt.

  I also made myself that jacklight. I light it now and step into the dark cellar. The candlelight wobbles and makes shuddery shadows, but I can see clear down into the deepest part, where we keep the root vegetables stored in piles of sand. As long as it’s cool and dark, they’ll keep for a long time like that and be just as crispy and sweet as when we pulled them from the ground. At the bottom of the stairs I kneel and dig out some carrots and parsnips. I smooth the sand carefully so that all of the remaining vegetables are covered and join Ma at the cooking area, where she is baking bread in the clay oven Toad and I built. We got the instructions from a chapter in The American Boy’s Handy Book called “How to Camp Out without a Tent.” Next to the oven is a stove we built by looking at an illustration Daniel Beard drew in the same chapter. First we stacked flat rocks in a short U-shaped wall. Then we took a big, flat sheet of slate Dad pried loose when he was making the root cellar and laid it across the U, leaving a gap at the back for the smoke to escape. It makes a perfect stove top for Ma’s pans, and when we want to cook something in the cauldron—like the soup we’re making today—we just remove the slate and let the cauldron dangle directly over the flames.

  I use my hunting knife to cut up the vegetables, then drop them in the soup, adding salt and pepper and herbs from the garden. Before Toad gave me the knife, he taught me how to keep the edge keen, using a stone and my spit. Sounds gross, but it works. The spit helps the blade slide on the stone and makes a gritty little slurry that gives it an extra-sharp edge. I sit down to sharpen the knife now while I wait for the soup to come to a boil. While I work, I think about the day Toad handed me this knife. When I tried to pull it away, he wouldn’t let go and said, “Roo tules, Ford Falcon.”

  “Two rules?”

  “Nule rumber uno: sheep it karp.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Knull dife, lort shife.”

  That seemed a little dramatic, but I got his point, and gave him extra points for the neat little rhyme.

  “Nule rumber half a dancing skirt.”

  Back then I was still
not too good at figuring out Toad when he was in nonsense mode, so even though I knew it was Rule Number Two, it took me a second to convert “dancing skirt” to “tutu” and “half a dancing skirt” to “tu.” Toad’s knives are never dull, and neither is he.

  “Yes,” I said. “Nule rumber half-a-tutu? And maybe just so I can get home before dark, we could do this one in normal language?”

  Toad grinned and said, “Unless you’re using that knife or sharpening that knife, it belongs in its sheath.”

  “To protect the blade?”

  “Yes, but also because all it takes is for you to misplace it once and it’s lost forever. Make it second nature. There are only two places for that knife: in your palm, and in the sheath.”

  “Yessir,” I said as he released the knife to me. I was surprised at how that little speech made me feel. It started out silly, but when it was over I didn’t feel like I had been given a knife, I felt like I had been given a responsibility. That night I stayed up by the fire and laced the sheath to my boot top, and the knife has ridden there ever since.

  As I was walking away, Toad spoke again.

  “If you ever get in a knife fight,” he said, “turn the blade sharp side up.”

  “Is that how cowboys do it, Toad?” I asked, grinning.

  “Affirmer-ized,” he said, and grinned back.

  It’s nice to sit near the cooking fire, running that knife blade over the stone, hearing the crackle of the fire and the soup softly bubbling. When it gets to boiling too fast, I use the hay-stacker rack Toad rigged for Ma to raise the cauldron away from the heat. I catch a whiff of the soup and the baking bread, and it’s hard to imagine two smells that go together better. When it’s time to eat I stick my fingers in my mouth and whistle three long and three short. Dad whistles back from somewhere down in Goldmine Gully, and Dookie comes spinning out from behind the shack humming a tune that is music to his ears only.

  Dad goes into the shack to wash up. When he comes back out he’s wearing his favorite T-shirt. “Figured I’d get dressed up for dinner,” he says, and once again it’s good to see him smile. The back of the blue T-shirt is decorated with an illustration of an old-fashioned door lock, and the front has an illustration of a key. Above the key hover the words “Bon Hiver.” Dad says Bon Hiver was a man who lived alone in the forest and made music. Eventually his music made him famous, but he slowly went crazy after years of explaining that “Bon Hiver” was supposed to be pronounced “bony-vair.” Whenever Dad tells me that story he puts his finger in the air and says, “Moral of the story?” And I say, “Careful what you wish for.”

  We sit in camp chairs I made from tree branches and old canvas (yep, using instructions from The American Boy’s Handy Book, page 157). It’s good to gather around the oven and eat the warm bread and hot soup in fresh air. Even Dookie stays put for a little while, dunking his bread in the soup and very carefully using his spoon to pick out all the pieces of carrot and place them on a rock.

  “Eat your carrots, Henry,” says Ma. Henry is Dookie’s real name.

  “Yes, Henry,” says Dad, sprinkling garlic on his bread. “They’re good for your eyeballs.”

  “Flargle-tocky,” says Dookie.

  10

  BY THE TIME THE DISHES ARE DONE, THE DAY IS FADING. EVERY night before I go to bed it’s my responsibility to make sure all the chickens are in and lock up the hatch door so we don’t lose any birds to varmints, so I head up that way.

  On my way past the shack, I peek in the door.

  “G’night, Ma.”

  “Good night, Maggie.”

  “G’night, Dookie.”

  “Yabba-loo.”

  “Where’s Dad?” I ask.

  “Up at the flagpole. He said he wanted to watch the sunset from the ridge.”

  “Why didn’t you go with him, Ma? It’d be romantic!”

  “Oh, Maggie,” said Ma, waving me away with her hand. “Someone needs to watch Henry.”

  After locking up the chickens, I’m climbing into the Falcon when I realize I left my jacklight up by the oven. I start back up the trail. It’s almost completely dark now, and I’m surprised when a faint light behind the shack catches my eye. I stop. The glow is coming from the root cellar. Gripping my ToothClub, I silently steal through the darkness toward the door. I pause twice to listen but hear nothing. Okay, that’s a lie—I hear my own heart, beating faster than normal.

  I take a deep breath. Raise my ToothClub. Slowly ease my head around the doorjamb. Even as I look, I’m ready to retreat at full speed.

  It’s Dad.

  He’s way down in the back, on his knees, with a jacklight by his side. It looks like he’s carefully smoothing the sand that covers the carrots. I lean in to better see what he is doing.

  CLONK!

  That would be my head. Smacking the door. So much for that silently sneaking thing.

  Dad whirls around.

  “Mag . . . For . . . FALCON!”

  “What’re you doing, Dad?”

  “I’m . . .” He just looks at me for a second, then jams his hand into the sand and pulls out a carrot. “Bedtime snack,” he says, taking a bite. I can hear sand crunch between his teeth, and he makes a face.

  We look at each other for a minute, his jacklight filling the cellar with uncertain light.

  “G’nite, Dad.”

  “G’nite, Maggie. Er, Ford.”

  Back at the station wagon, I hang the jacklight from a hook over the door and arrange my sleeping spot. Then I blow out the flame and close my eyes. I wait for sleep, but the questions keep coming.

  Why was Dad in the cellar? And why did he tell Ma he was going up to watch the sunset?

  I know one thing: he didn’t go down there for a carrot.

  Tomorrow is a big day. We’ll hike down to Hoot Holler and load up the goods for the trip to town. And tomorrow night when the rest of my family hikes home, I will stay behind. When Toad goes to Nobbern, I’ll be going with him. There will be some danger, and already I feel a little nervousness in the pit of my stomach. But I’m also eager to go, because Porky Pig will be going with me, and I think that little critter is going to let me get something nice for Ma.

  But this is for sure: when I get back, I’m going to have a look around that root cellar. Maybe dig through those carrots.

  And then—if I have to—I’m going to dig a little deeper.

  11

  WE ARE HIKING TO HOOT HOLLER. MY PACK IS BACK-ACHINGLY heavy with treasures discovered in Goldmine Gully: a dented tin cup, a broken-handled screwdriver for which I carved a new handle, two screwtop bottles (with their tops, which makes them twice as valuable), a cracked cast iron ladle, and a cloth bag filled with rusted nuts and bolts that can be melted down and used by Freda the blacksmith. But a lot of the weight is made up of VARIOUS AND DIVERS WHIRLIGIGS. I’m not yelling, I’m just saying it how Daniel C. Beard wrote it on page 359 of The American Boy’s Handy Book. “Whirligigs” are toys that move, usually powered by nothing fancier than a length of string. I make spinning rainbow whirligigs from whittled wood and scraps of colored cardboard (Arlinda has thousands of old folded cereal boxes in her basement), and paradoxical whirligigs that look like they’re spinning when they’re not, and the parts for a toy Daniel Beard calls a “potato mill,” which makes a potato spin like a top. One pocket of my pack is filled with a dozen “block bird singers,” which I make by carving two pieces of wood in a flat C shape. You place a blade of grass between the two pieces, squeeze them in your teeth, and blow, and bird sounds come out. I’m also packing several wooden shingles I pried from a caved-in, half-rotted doghouse we found in Goldmine Gully. I’ll use Toad’s old hand drill to put a hole in one end of each shingle, then tie a long string through the hole. Then if you swing the shingle in a circle it makes a loud buzzing noise. Daniel Beard called this “the hummer.”

  I test most of these toys out on Dookie. If he likes them, I make more, because that means they’ll sell well in town. Nobody really needs an
y of these things, but anything that can provide a child with some amusement is welcome, and they always earn me a few extra BarterBucks when I go trading with Toad.

  But the most valuable object in my pack today? Riding way down at the bottom, carefully wrapped in rags?

  Porky Pig.

  Whenever we visit Toad and Arlinda we try to find something along the way to add for the meal. Depending on the weather and the season, we gather morels, dandelion greens, wild mustard, cattail root, apples, and watercress. I like wood sorrel; it has a rhubarby tang. Sometimes we can pick a whole salad by the time we make our way down the ridge.

  Today we’re collecting fiddlehead ferns. Ferns don’t sprout straight up like corn. Instead they poke out of the ground coiled tight as the knob at the far end of a fiddle. I guess that’s why they call them fiddleheads. If you pick the coils before they uncurl, you can boil and eat them, but I think they taste like damp dirt and dead leaves. Ma and I do the picking and Dad follows behind us, holding the front of his shirt out to make a basket. Dookie isn’t helping at all. He scampers and darts around us like a zigzagging rabbit. Five minutes ago I found him playing patty-cake with a pine tree. He’s more likely to pet a fern than pick it. I’m always calling Dookie names, so often that I run out of names. So now I try a new one: “Hey, fiddlehead!”

  “Shazoodle!” says Dookie, ducking behind a tree to pick his nose.

  “Stop picking your nose, Dookie!”

  “Blardy dot!” hollers Dookie, which is his way of saying “I’m not!” but by the stuffy-nose sound of his voice I’m pretty sure he’s at least two knuckles deep. On second thought, I’m glad Dookie isn’t helping with the fiddleheads.

  We’re about halfway down the ridge now, following a trail along one side of the valley that leads to Hoot Holler. From here we can see more of the Hopper homestead, which is surrounded by a tall fortresslike fence of wood and steel. Toad had to put the fence up years ago after people began building houses right in the middle of some of the best farm fields surrounding his farm. These new people didn’t want to sit in their new houses looking at junkyards, so they put up a stink and the local officials made Toad put up a fence. In the end the joke was on them, because when the government proclaimed arrogant ptomaine, not only did they take Toad’s fields, they also plowed all those houses flat and planted corn right over the top of them.