Whippoorwill Page 8

  If I had a pack—and Father Jasper says everyone does, for better or worse—then my pack was right in that kitchen. I could pretend my pack was bigger, or cooler, but that would be lying.

  It got even better. At some point it became clear that it wasn’t going to stop raining, and it became clear that Wally wasn’t going to turn into a hellhound and stick his head in the oven, and it became clear that Dad wanted to go upstairs to nap but only after he captured one more doughnut. So I gave him one and he tottered away, and the biscuits kept coming out. We made a zillion and put them in a bunch of empty coffee cans Dad had down in the basement, and Holly said they would make great Christmas presents, we should remember them for that season, and that made Danny laugh so hard he had to put his head down between his knees to catch his breath.

  It wasn’t that funny, but it was, sort of, just a moment-and-place goofiness, but now, each time we pulled a sheet of biscuits, we pretended to puzzle out whom we should give this batch to for Christmas. Holly got a wounded look on her face at first, but then she saw the humor of it and we took turns nominating people for our Christmas list.

  That may not sound funny, but it was. It was.

  Wally was true blue the whole time, stretched out and watching everything, apparently amazed to be a part of something he had only dreamed about. This was a gigantic Daily Growler, bigger than anything he could have dreamed, and he handled it way better than I could have anticipated. After a while Holly dialed in music on an old radio my dad had next to the sink, and pretty soon she danced like a geek, her shoes off, her face red and flushed with laughing. Then a little later, when we finally finished with the biscuits and cleaned up the kitchen, we played a game of Candy Land on the table. It was the only game we had, and I sat at one end, Danny at the other, and Holly in between. The game made no sense at all, but we kept playing it. It felt like being a kid again, something maybe we all needed, and the game only broke up when Wally whined and indicated he had to go out.

  “I’ll take him,” Danny said, jumping up and slipping into his coat. “Be right back.”

  “What have you been hiding?” Holly asked, her voice squeaky and wild and fitting the precise motion of the door so that her question came alive the instant Danny was out of earshot, “And why haven’t you told me about him?”

  “What?” I asked, standing to wipe down the counter that didn’t need wiping down. “No biggie, Holly.”

  “‘No biggie’!” she squealed. “Only that he is madly, totally, helplessly in love with you.”

  “Stop being ridiculous.”

  “He is.”

  She stood and grabbed me and pretended to smooch me like a boy. It was weird and I had to push her away and threaten her with a smear of the biscuit-dough sponge. She was simply being crazy on a rainy afternoon. Then she skated around in her socks, sliding back and forth on the floor. It was funny. Watching her, I had a nervous buzz in my head because part of me was thrilled that she thought Danny liked me. Another part wanted not to get involved in some wild girl-talk speculation, and I kept rubbing at the counter every few seconds, hoping it would all go away.

  Holly was being Holly. She could turn anything into fun, or at least into drama, and this was a tailor-made situation for her. She loved relationships, who was dating whom, and she kept track of things like some kids keep track of baseball statistics.

  “He’s cute!” she said, glancing out the window. “And when he’s all serious with Wally and he looks over at you . . .”

  “Cut it out, Holly.”

  “I’m telling you! He’s going to be like the best father ever.”

  “Do you think his sideburns are insane?”

  “I love his sideburns. They’re the best things about him. He’s so quirky.”

  Then we heard steps on the porch, and Holly closed her mouth and pretended to lock it. She crossed her eyes too, and that got me laughing.

  “What?” Danny said when he came back in, his eyes going back and forth. “What’s so funny?”

  “Let’s go to the movies. Or bowling or something,” Holly said. “Let’s go somewhere.”

  So we did.

  Twelve

  WE DROVE PAST the movies, but we didn’t see anything we wanted to watch. Besides, it was expensive and none of us had any money to speak of, so Danny kept driving and playing us blues cuts. Holly sat in back with Wally, and that was funny too, because when you turned around quickly and looked at them, it seemed like they were two people dating. I couldn’t speak for Holly, but it was the first time I had ever been with a boy in a car—except for the ride up to Smitty’s for a hamburger and then the other night—and it felt strange and funny and interesting. Danny took up his seat, and I took up mine, but an area existed between us that could be claimed by either of us, or neither of us, and yet it was somehow ours. We weren’t a couple, no one would say that, but we weren’t completely isolated from each other either. Holly stuck her head over the edge of the seat a lot, and I turned around whenever I could, but my antennae stayed fixed on Danny and noted where he moved and how and why.

  “So, bowling?” Holly asked, her arm draped around Wally. “Or we could just go to the mall.”

  “I hate the mall,” Danny said. “Pretty much, anyway.”

  “How could you hate the mall?” Holly asked. “I’d die without the mall. Seriously. I have mall withdrawal if I don’t get there every few days.”

  “Have you guys ever seen the Peppermint Bridge?” Danny asked. “We could go there. Then Wally could walk around too.”

  “Where is it? Is it far?” I asked, not sure why it mattered.

  “No, it’s not that far. I can’t believe you guys haven’t seen it.”

  His posture changed now that he had a destination. I also suspected he liked feeling he could show us something we hadn’t seen. He drove over toward Colton, then took a dirt road that I recognized but couldn’t quite place exactly. Danny had to slow down over the ruts in the road, and twice, because it was spring, he fishtailed through a muddy patch. He liked that, I could tell, and his hands moved fast on the wheel and his feet switched rapidly on the pedals. At the same time he didn’t want us to think it was a big deal. Boys had funny ways, I realized, and still I was aware of the space between us, the seat and console and sound system dials that we sort of shared.

  “Keep an eye out for a sign that says ‘ELLISON’S CAMP,’” he said, ladling the car easily over a rutted section of road.

  “What kind of sign?” Holly asked.

  “Just a homemade sign,” Danny said. “You know, the kind with a bunch of camps . . . Up here, I think.”

  We spun and veered off and the road got a little muddier. I would have mired it down ten times in about a quarter mile, but he kept going and finally pulled into a dirt parking lot. A hand-painted sign pointed to the right and said PEPPERMINT BRIDGE 0.7 MILES.

  “What is this place?” Holly asked. “It’s like some mad make-out spot. Do you bring all your girlfriends up here, Danny?”

  He blushed and shook his head. I climbed out fast and let Wally jump free. He sprinted off and for a moment I thought I’d never see him again, but he simply lowered his landing gear and took care of business. Then he trotted around, his nose down, his tail up in a question mark. We stood around and watched Wally for a while. It was hard to believe how far he had come in such a short while. Before, he would have taken off, or done something crazy, but now he knew he had us to count on.

  “Ready?” Danny said. “It’s going to be kind of wet.”

  “Let me get my jacket,” Holly said. “I’m not exactly dressed for hiking.”

  “You can make it,” I told her. “Let’s go.”

  “Ready, boy?” Danny called to Wally. “You ready to go for a hike?”

  “He’s never been on a hike, I’ll bet,” I said. “Poor thing.”

  “Today’s his day,” Danny said, and he looked right at me.

  “Want me to lock it?” Holly called, pulling out of the back sea
t with her jacket.

  Because of the rain, no one was around except us. If Wally was ever happy, he was happy that afternoon. At first he couldn’t seem to believe what his brain told him was true: He got to walk through the woods off leash, smell whatever he wanted to, pee on anything he felt a need to mark, and could come back once, twice, a thousand times, for the homemade biscuits we had luckily remembered to bring. A dog doesn’t want much more than that.

  It was probably silly to be out hiking on such a wet day, but we had been cooped up all morning and it felt good to be outside. Wally made it more fun, because he nearly quivered with pleasure at everything he discovered. Also, it was interesting to feel the difference it made to hike with Danny. Holly flirted with him and kept trying to splash him by sneaking up and jumping into puddles near him, and he retaliated by shaking branches over her head and dumping that water on her. It felt weird, too, because they seemed to be buddy flirting, not boy-girl flirting, both of them somehow aiming it toward me. I connected them, I suppose, and Danny couldn’t flirt with me unless he intended it to mean something, so he flirted with her and let it spill over. Still, Holly flirted hard, and I didn’t know what that meant in the scheme of things. I concentrated on hiking and on rewarding Wally whenever he zoomed back to us through the understory.

  Fog made the woods prettier. Every branch had a ghost. Everything dripped and glimmered and sagged, but you could tell the sun would pick it all up, if not the next day, then the day after that, or the one after that, and then the water and rain would be turned to strength and growth and green.

  “It was some sort of mill,” Danny said, looking down at the watercourse we came to after about ten minutes of walking. “At least that’s what I heard. The creek is called Black Brook.”

  “How did you find it?” Holly asked.

  “My uncle Desmond showed me. He grew up here before he moved away. He liked to go out exploring in his car. He saw everything around here.”

  “What kind of mill?” I asked, because it didn’t quite make sense from the little I knew about local history.

  “Not sure,” Danny said, leading us down the hill, then straight down five cement steps. “You’ll see.”

  It was a spillway. Someone had built a walkway underneath the drop of the creek so that you could step behind the sheet of spilling water and look out. I couldn’t think of a purpose for building such a thing except as a gimmick, but Danny kept saying it was a mill of some sort and I didn’t want to dispute it. I would have guessed it was a salmon ladder, or something to do with fish, but that didn’t make much sense either. No matter what it was, though, it was pretty cool. We stepped to the center of the underpass and the water filled the whole world with sound. Holly started making little shrieks and yells, and her voice echoed and bounced off everything, and pretty soon we were all doing it. The water hitting the creek made a solid bassline, and our voices sounded like chirps. Wally didn’t like any of it. He stayed at the edge of the underpass, uneasy about entering.

  “It’s okay,” I said, squatting to bring him forward, but he didn’t budge.

  “He doesn’t like it,” Holly said. “Not one bit.”

  “But at least he’s staying with us,” Danny said. “At least he wants to be with us.”

  That was true and it was a good point.

  Then for a while we didn’t do anything or make ridiculous sounds. We simply stood on a rainy day in spring underneath a curtain of water and looked out. The water refracted everything and turned it hazy and wavering, so that whatever you set your eyes on wanted to be a dream. Leaves slipped off the spillway sometimes and became dots of color as they passed. It all made me feel happy inside, and scared, too, though I couldn’t have said why if you had asked me a thousand times.

  “Why is it called the Peppermint Bridge?” Holly asked on the way back to the car.

  Danny shrugged. He looked tired suddenly.

  “I mean,” she continued, “why not the Tunnel Bridge, or the Underwater Bridge, or anything? Anything at all? Why Peppermint?”

  “A mystery of the universe,” Danny said.

  “I hate when things aren’t named what they should be,” she said.

  I ignored her and concentrated on Wally. He was gloriously muddy and happy and his tail went a million miles an hour. I thought about what Father Jasper says, how walking in the woods does a dog great good, and I knew what he meant. Wally continued to move and cover ground, but now he did it more thoughtfully, not like a spaz who felt he was going to be caught and put on a pole at any moment. He didn’t mind coming back to us, because we simply rewarded him and let him continue on his way.

  “I’ve got a little bit of a headache,” Danny said when we got back to the car. “Sorry, but I’d maybe better call it a day.”

  “I should get home anyway,” Holly said. “Clair, did you do the French homework?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I hate that class,” she said, climbing in after Wally.

  “You okay?” I asked Danny over the car roof. He hadn’t climbed in yet. I wondered if he had been up late, fighting with his father again.

  “I don’t know. Just feel a little rocky, I guess.”

  “Sorry.”

  He shrugged and ducked into the car. A minute later we were fishtailing back along the road we had taken to arrive at the Peppermint Bridge.

  Danny texted me almost as soon as we got home.

  You want to go for a ride on Wednesday?

  I wrote back a bunch of question marks. A few seconds later he texted again.

  Teacher in-service, it read. No school.

  Maybe, I wrote back.

  It struck me as a little strange that Danny knew the school schedule better than I did.

  Around eight Holly called and wanted to go over everything that had happened that day. She wanted to know what I thought of Danny, did I like him, what did I think of his car, what did I think of his sideburns, wasn’t he good with Wally, and on and on. Listening to her, I realized part of her truly wanted to know the answers to those questions, but another part, just as big a part, wanted to see if I had anything to say about Danny flirting with her. Or at least what he thought about her. She didn’t mean it to be selfish, it was merely human nature, but she had questions inside the questions.

  “Peppermint Bridge? It wasn’t a mill,” Jebby said. “It was rigged for a turbine. It powered a commercial dairy farm up that way. Isn’t that right?”

  He looked across the kitchen table at my dad. My dad nodded.

  “I haven’t been up to that place in a million years,” Dad said, his hand tightening a nut down on a bolt that had something to do with an engine mount. As usual he had a bunch of things spread out on a newspaper on top of the table. “I’m surprised it’s still in one piece.”

  “Oh, they built things to last in those days,” Jebby said, swigging a jolt of his beer. “Not like now.”

  “We build things just as good now as we ever did,” Dad said.

  “Not projects like that. Not dams and things. I’ll admit, planes are better and cars, for the most part, but dams and bridges? No way.”

  I knew they had launched an argument that could go on for hours, so I interrupted.

  “Did you guys go to school with Elwood, Danny’s father?”

  Jebby nodded and peeled his beer label.

  “He’s one strange bird, I promise,” Jebby said. “He liked nothing better than to get into a fight. I never saw him beaten. It wouldn’t have mattered if he had been beaten. He just liked hitting and liked getting hit.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  I had an egg sandwich on a plate, but I didn’t want to sit at the table with them. I stood next to the counter and kept an eye on Danny’s house. He had Wally inside with him. At least I didn’t see Wally outside on the pole.

  “He’s a bit of a socio-something,” Jebby said. “A whatchamacallit?”

  “A sociopath,” Dad said. “Most people, they get in a fight and they
stop when they’ve vanquished the other guy. You know what I mean. But not Elwood. He would keep kicking the guy, punching, even when it was clear he had won. People had to pull him off to get him to stop, and even then he’d try to get back to the guy on the ground. He was like a crazy person, really.”

  “That’s some family, I’m telling you,” Jebby said. “Hard people, believe me.”

  “Danny’s nice, though,” Dad said, glancing over at me.

  “He’s pretty nice,” I agreed.

  “Of course, you shape wood with a plane, you blame the plane if the work doesn’t come true, not the wood,” Jebby said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Dad asked, his look going over the pair of reading glasses he wore. “You just say anything, Jebby, don’t you? You live to be controversial, I swear.”

  “I mean, the child is the father to the man. Isn’t that right, Clair? The way a child is raised is the way he ends up turning out.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Sure it is,” Jebby said, warming to the subject now that he had his hook in the water. “A plane shapes the wood just as a parent shapes a child. You don’t blame the wood if it doesn’t come out right, do you? No, of course not. You blame the plane.”