The Scavengers Read online

  When we are all at the table, Toad says, “Let us give thanks.” As I bow my head I sneak a peek at the tabletop and see the fried fish and pork chops, buttered yams, heaps of green beans, fresh biscuits, salad straight from the greenhouse, and a steaming pile of mashed potatoes. Arlinda’s cracked ceramic gravy boat is so full it’s about to slop over. Even the fiddleheads—nestled in a bowl like slimy green sea creatures—don’t look that bad. The whole works is stacked on one of Arlinda’s ironed and embroidered tablecloths, and as I close my eyes and Toad starts in, I can’t help thinking that sometimes I have a good life after all.

  Toad’s grace covers all the bases, and takes awhile. About halfway through I get hit in the head by what feels like a small insect. Then it happens again. I crack open one eye and instead of a fly, I see Dookie grinning evilly. He holds one palm out flat before him and just as I see the little white spot, he flicks it and the spot flits across the table, rises over Toad’s bowed head, and starts coming back at me.

  It wasn’t enough for Daniel Beard to teach young boys how to make boomerangs that could slice a dog in two; he also included another section on how to make miniature boomerangs. On cold winter nights Toad sits beside the stove and carves them by the jarful. Unfortunately, Dookie knows where Toad keeps the jar, and whenever we visit he grabs a pocketful. The one he just flicked has made a U-turn and is coming straight for me. I duck and my forehead hits the edge of the plate, making it flip up and then crash down on my silverware. Toad stops his praying and all the grown-ups stare at me. I shoot a paint-peeling glare at Dookie, but he has his eyes closed, his head bowed, and his hands folded like an angel.

  “AMEN!” declares Toad, and then we eat. Arlinda puts extra butter on my serving of fiddleheads and that makes them almost taste okay.

  Us safe around this table, filling our bellies, it is easy to pretend that Declaration Day never happened.

  14

  I HAVE SOME FOGGY MEMORIES OF WHAT I SAW ON TELEVISION IN the days before Dad brought the red balloon home, but most everything I know about Declaration Day and the Bubbling I’ve learned from conversations between my parents and the Hoppers and the old magazines and newspapers stacked all around Toad and Arlinda’s house. By the time the trouble began most people were using television and wrist readers, but Toad and Arlinda hung in there and got their news the old-fashioned way—so I can still get a pretty good idea of how things happened. There are pictures and stories of floods and hurricanes, fireball lightning storms that set sun-blackening forest fires, tidal waves that roared to shore more often than they used to, and sleeping volcanoes that woke up and blew like never before. Nothing like that happened around here, but we did get parrots, wild hogs, and solar bears . . . and GreyDevils.

  The planet got a fever, you could say, and the people caught it. Or, as Toad told me once, in his best Daniel C. Beard voice, “The citizenry waxed distemperous! There was a prevalent feistiness!” You’d think “feistiness” would lead to fighting, and around much of the globe it did. “But weren’t we pretty safe here?” I asked Toad. The magazines described some bombs and strange airplane crashes, and a lot of marches and even a few riots, but nothing like a war. “Yah,” said Toad. “But pen wheople are somfy and coft, feisty stands only one-plus-one steps from fearful, and when people are fearful, you can get them to do things they said they’d never do.” As I heard the word tricks fade by the end of that sentence I realized Toad couldn’t really find a way to make that truth funny.

  “All the government needed was one big scary moment,” said Arlinda.

  “And they got it,” said Toad.

  “Or they made it happen,” said Arlinda.

  Some of the pictures are black and white, some are in color, and they’re all from different angles, but they all show the same thing: the Statue of Liberty, with a smoking, ragged hole where her arm used to be, and her lamp floating in the harbor. Terrorists, said the government, and many more to come. Toad says the arm rusted off because the government hadn’t kept the statue “up to snuff,” thanks to “cutbacks.” Arlinda believes the government blew the arm off on purpose. “You get people riled up and worried, it’s easier to herd them in the same direction,” she said.

  I don’t know if it was knocked off, blown off, or just fell off. But I do know it did what all the natural disasters couldn’t do. It got people thinking the entire country was in danger—not just from radiation and volcanoes and all the strange weather, but from mysterious people from mysterious countries. They demanded that the government do something, and do it quickly. So while crews were still fishing Liberty’s lamp from the drink, the government announced a plan to build safe, secure places—called Bubble Cities—all around the country.

  “They called it the ‘Seal Our Nation’ plan!” snorted Arlinda.

  “More like Steal Our Nation!” snorted Toad.

  “Silliest idea ever,” said Arlinda.

  “Yah, but silly never stopped ’em,” said Toad.

  “Dessert!” says Arlinda, jolting my brain back into the present as she takes an apple pie from the oven. It’s so thick Toad uses a butcher knife to cut the slices. We each dish up a piece, then move to the porch. Toad and Arlinda sit in their rocking chairs. Dad sits next to Ma on a bench, and I lower myself down to sit with my back against the house. Dookie sits cross-legged in the grass. Between bites of pie he’s making faces at a milkweed.

  It’s quiet for a while as we dig in. The Hopper house sits on a small rise. From the porch we can see over the security fence and out beyond the Sustainability Reserves to the horizon, where several columns of smoke are visible above the tree line.

  “GreyDevils are busy tonight,” says Toad.

  They’re out there setting up for another night of bonfiring and slurping PartsWash. Every now and then the smoke burps up all poisonous and black, and you know they’ve pitched in something nasty, like maybe some old vinyl siding they dug up from what was left of some bulldozed house. I hope the GreyDevils gargle PartsWash all night long and get good and wiped out, because tomorrow I have to sit beside Toad on the Scary Pruner and drive right through the area where all that smoke is rising. Each black puff is a smoke signal telling me that right now we might be eating warm pie, but there is danger all around.

  Ma and Dad are silent. They seem to be staring past the barn, past the Sustainability Reserves, even past the GreyDevil smoke, to some place I can’t see. It’s hard to tell if they are even hearing us. They are right here, but it seems their minds are far in the distance . . . or the past. They never talk about life before Declaration Day. When I do ask, they say the past belongs in the past. But looking at them together there, I decide to ask about the past anyway.

  “Ma,” I say, “how did you and Dad meet?”

  They look at each other for a second like neither one knows what to say, then Ma smiles.

  “We were in college,” says Ma.

  “She was a word nerd,” says Dad. “Always with her nose in a book.”

  “Your Dad saw me on a bench reading Emily Dickinson,” says Ma. “He stopped and said she was his favorite poet.” Then Ma giggles and gives Dad a little shove. “I found out later everything he knew about her he’d looked up on a computer ten minutes earlier.”

  “And what did you study, Dad?”

  He looks at Ma again, like he’s deciding how to answer.

  SPLASH!

  “Henry!” says my mother, and I realize Dookie is nowhere to be seen. His pie plate is empty on the grass. We all leap from the porch and run around the house toward the sound of the splash, and we’re all thinking the same thing: the tilapia tank. Sure enough, there at the foot of the ladder is the water-telescope, lying in the grass as if it’s been dropped.

  “Henry!” says my mother, for the second time. In the footrace to the tank she beats everybody, and now she is on the top rung of the ladder, hoisting Dookie out. Ma often seems worn and weary, but right now she is fierce and bright.

  “Henry!” she says for
a third time. Dookie’s head is lolling around, but his eyes are fluttering, and the minute Dad takes him from Ma’s arms and places him on the ground, he begins spluttering and hacking, and you have never heard such a beautiful sound.

  Toad climbs down the ladder, a fish spear in his hand. Dookie must have been trying to stab tilapia while spying on them through the water-telescope. Apparently he leaned over too far, and when he lunged with the spear, in he went.

  “Oh, Dookie,” I say, kneeling down to hold his soggy little hand.

  Dookie is staring off into space somewhere past my left ear. Weakly, he mumbles something.

  “Shibby . . . shibby . . . shibby . . .”

  Huh?

  Flap-flap-WHACK!

  Hatchet.

  Honestly! I think, even as I’m flopping over sideways. That rooster has got to go. Toad pulls him from my hair and gives him a quick dunk before launching him toward the coop, where he hides behind the hens and makes soggy clucking noises.

  Arlinda and Ma take Dookie into the house to towel him down and get him some dry clothes. When he comes back out he is belted into a pair of Toad’s red long johns. They’re all baggy in the butt and the cuffs are rolled up above his ankles and wrists. I take one look at him and snort right out loud, but Dookie being Dookie, he doesn’t give two hoots how he’s dressed.

  To get back to the shack before dark, Ma and Dad have to leave now, so I hug them good-bye and let them out the gate. Dookie darts ahead of them, a ragamuffin in a red union suit, zigzagging his way up the trail, stopping to say hello to a toadstool.

  I help Arlinda with the dishes, then go to the barn to prepare my armor.

  I made it myself. Shin and forearm guards from stovepipes trimmed in rabbit fur, a breastplate cut from cowhide and strips of steel from a car door, a pair of Toad’s old welding gloves restitched to fit my hands, and a helmet made from a steel dog dish I found in Goldmine Gully.

  As I lay each piece out, I’m excited about going to town tomorrow. I always am. I am eager for the chance to see something other than Skullduggery Ridge, eager to see faces that don’t belong to my brother, Dookie, and eager for the sights and sounds and smells of civilization. Eager just to move. But as I check over each piece to make sure it’s in good shape, and when I turn and see the Scary Pruner loaded and waiting, I am reminded we aren’t just getting ready for some hippity-happity picnic trip.

  I put my helmet on and wiggle it to make sure the chin strap is tight. The helmet is covered in spatters and zigzags of paint left over from when Toad painted the Scary Pruner, and I attached pheasant tail feathers to the temples. I pounded patterns into the leather of my breastplate and then dyed the patterns with berry juice. My gloves are beaded and I punched ventilation holes through my arm guards in a swirly pattern. I decorate my armor because I think it makes me look a little fiercer—although I’m not sure the GreyDevils even notice. It does make me feel a little fiercer. Sometimes that’s just the difference you need.

  I know there will be danger, but it makes me proud that Toad trusts me to come along and help out. Some people would think it was weird that my parents would let me do this, but we live in a world where each of us has to do what we do best, no matter what our age. I asked Dad once why he didn’t help Toad on these trips to town, and he said it was because he had to stay back and guard our place, and Dookie, and Ma. I asked Toad the same question, and he gave the same answer. But something about the way they said it made me think I wasn’t getting the whole story. Plus if Dad was really worried about protecting us, why would he wander off like he does? Sometimes I think the older I get, the less I understand grown-ups.

  Toad and Arlinda have always let me know I am welcome in their house, but just as I prefer to sleep in the Ford Falcon when I’m home, when I’m down in Hoot Holler I prefer to sleep in the barn. I keep some blankets and a pillow in my armor locker and sleep on some straw in one of the old horse stalls. There’s an Emily Dickinson poem that goes, “The soul selects her own society, / Then shuts the door.” The first time I read that one, I smiled. I’m not mad at anybody; sometimes I just like to be alone. Well, except for a three-legged cat; whenever I sleep out here Tripod curls up beside me and purrs me off to sleep.

  When my bed is ready, I step outside. The final light is fading. From the top of Skullduggery Ridge, I hear a whistle: three long and three short.

  My family is safely home.

  15

  WHEN I WAKE UP, THE BARN IS DARK AS A BAT’S BUTT.

  We begin our town trips this early because GreyDevils are useless in the morning. They’re all scattered, lying wherever they flopped when the last bonfire went out and the final drop of PartsWash went gargling down someone’s raw throat. By early afternoon they’ll start to prowl and gather up in their ragtag packs, looking to steal anything they can to trade for PartsWash.

  I get dressed in the glow of my jacklight, then open the barn door. Over Skullduggery Ridge the very first gray smudge is starting to show. I can see a lamp in the Hoppers’ kitchen window, and the door opens into a yellow rectangle of light as Toad steps out onto the porch.

  We pack the last of the day’s goods on the Scary Pruner. Mostly it’s food: jars of jam, salted ham, smoky cured bacon, and a batch of Arlinda’s fresh pies, carefully wrapped and protected in the light wooden crates Toad builds. It’s all I can do not to sit right down and eat every one. Next we go over the whole load, checking every rope, lock, and latch to make sure everything is safe and secure.

  Finally, Toad turns to me and says, “Whomper-Zooka!”

  If you didn’t know better, you’d think Toad had stopped talking weird like Toad and started talking weird like Dookie. But the Whomper-Zooka is an actual thing. Toad cobbled it together using an old coffee can, a broken leather harness, and a stovepipe. It has two wooden handles and can be hung from my shoulder on a leather strap, but on trips to town in the Scary Pruner we mount it on a swivel in the crow’s nest. Toad calls it his “hillbilly artillery,” but rather than bullets or cannonballs it shoots saltpowder, which we make by mixing homemade gunpowder with rock salt. We’re not trying to kill the GreyDevils, just get rid of them, and the rock salt is perfect for that. It isn’t deadly, but it gets in their skin and burns like crazy. I guess you could call the Whomper-Zooka a pest remover.

  While I get the Whomper-Zooka and stow it in the crow’s nest, Toad hitches Frank and Spank. Toad raised them from the day they were born, and now they’ve been pulling together for ten years. He says they’re the biggest pair he’s ever owned. They are gigantic but gentle, standing patiently as we hitch them in place and drape them in chain mail Toad made from twisting fine wire into thousands of little loops while he sat beside the woodstove. It took him three winters to finish. The chain mail can’t protect them from everything, but it’ll handle most things any GreyDevil might throw our way. To protect their eyes, Toad made them each a pair of goggles with steel-mesh lenses. He calls them “oculator protectorators.”

  Toad also made a miniature set of chain mail for Monocle, and I fasten it around him as he bounces up and down. Monocle loves to go to town. Toad has built a plank walkway around the Scary Pruner so that Monocle can patrol the perimeter, and the boards are worn smooth by his paws. When I finish fastening his mail, he leaps to the plank and trots his first loop of the day. He always runs clockwise, of course, so his good eye is pointed outward.

  Toad takes one last walk around the Scary Pruner. Then he pauses before Frank and Spank, scratching their ears and looking long and gently into their goggled eyes. This is the most vulnerable part of our traveling show. Toad can protect their flanks with the gigantic bullwhip he keeps in a holder beside his seat, but the one area he cannot reach is the front of their faces—their big, wet noses. If a GreyDevil grabbed Frank or Spank by the nose, they could steer us off the road and tip us over.

  But we have a plan to prevent that.

  “Procure the secret weapon!”

  I roll my eyes and lower my face mask. O
ur secret weapon is currently across the yard in the chicken coop desperately trying to announce the new day.

  “Cock-a-doodle . . . aaack-kack-kack-kack!”

  That’s right.

  Hatchet.

  Our secret weapon is a demented rooster.

  Hatchet may be on our team, but he’d still love to peck me bald and scratch me silly. Flexing my fingers in my gloves, I stride off toward the chicken coop. This could be the biggest battle I face all day.

  When I return, my helmet is knocked sideways, my breastplate is scratched, one of my pheasant feathers is bent, and there is a drop of blood on my chin. But Hatchet is clamped in my gauntleted hands.

  Toad just grins.

  In the middle of the yoke, right between the oxen’s two giant heads, Toad has rigged a perch made of two dowels in the shape of a T, and this is where Hatchet roosts, tethered in place with an ankle bracelet and a length of rawhide. The rawhide is attached to an old spring-loaded dog-walking leash—if Hatchet can’t get back to his perch, Toad pulls a string and—zooooop!—the leash reels Hatchet right back in.

  I deposit him on his perch while Toad secures his ankle bracelet. When we back away Hatchet tut-tuts and shakes out his wings, but then he settles in and puffs his chest out like he was born to be a hood ornament.

  Finally, Toad puts on his armor. It’s much plainer than mine and looks more like heavy-duty work clothes, except for his helmet, which is an actual shiny red firefighter helmet from the days when he volunteered on the local department. Most of the time the helmet hangs on a hook behind Toad’s seat. When Toad reaches back and grabs the helmet, you know it’s time to check your weapons. When he reaches up and flips the visor down, well then you know things are about to get real busy.