Chapter Nine
I stood there open-mouthed for a minute. Here I’d been thinking I might still have to search half of Texas and maybe even then not find the man, and come to find out I’d been sleeping in his bed all night long and eating his food and didn’t even know it. I had to have time to switch a few gears in my mind, let me tell you.
As soon as I could wrap my head around the idea that I’d actually found him, I was carried away by a flood of curiosity.
If this was Justin’s house, then where was he at? Why was he selling it? Who was the old lady in the picture? Who was that girl with the long brown hair? Why was the phone disconnected? I had a thousand questions in my mind and no quick answers for any of them.
I satisfied my itch to understand by rooting through his desk drawers and his closet and anywhere else I could think of that might tell me something about him. I found a lot of interesting stuff.
I came across a couple of dried smelling oranges in his sock drawer, which reminded me of Mama. She always went out in the pasture and picked a couple of them to put in my sock drawer at home every fall. To make the clothes smell nice, she said. These were still fresh, not all dried out like they always got after a few weeks. I picked one up and smelled of it. It had that same sweet orangey smell I remembered, and for a second I was more homesick than I’d ever been since I left Tennessee. After a minute I put it back amongst the socks and moved on.
Justin didn’t seem to wear much of anything except jeans and t-shirts, so that really didn’t tell me much. He kept everything folded up neatly, and most of the shirts were nothing special. There was one that had Garth Brooks on it and another one with a picture of a lion roaring and holding some keys in its paw, and a caption that said “The Lion of the Tribe of Judah has Triumphed!”
I had better luck in his desk drawers. In the top drawer I found an old pay stub from an oil company in Atlanta, Texas, a place which I had never heard of before. I also found an old rent receipt for an apartment in Texarkana, Texas.
There was an AT&T cell phone bill addressed to Justin Wilder at this address. I opened it up and saw tons and tons of calls to Magnolia, Arkansas, but nothing else that really jumped out at me. I wondered who it was he called so much in that town.
In the other drawers I found a half empty box of orange Tic Tacs, a lot of miscellaneous papers and junk, some more photos of people I didn’t recognize, a checkbook from Century Bank, and an expired Texas driver’s license for Justin.
I picked up the driver’s license and studied it for a while. Mama always used to complain that driver’s license pictures look like mug shots, and I guess maybe they do. This one sure did. Justin looked about like he did in the picture I already had of him, except he was a little older and he wasn’t smiling and looked like he was stoned. That made me feel better about recognizing him when we met.
I tried turning on his computer, but it was password protected and so I couldn’t find out anything. There were limits to how snoopy I was willing to be, and trying to hack Justin’s computer was way beyond the pale.
I found a .22 hunting rifle and some shells in the closet, and that pleased me. I can shoot pretty good when I want to. Daddy kept telling me I could have a real gun when I turned thirteen, but in the meantime I went shooting with Jonathan and his dad lots of times. There’s an old rock quarry way back in the woods behind our house where we used to go set coke cans on top of boulders and either knock them off with the .22 or else blow them to kingdom come with the shotgun. I hardly ever missed.
You want to know something really weird, though? There was a whole separate box of .22 shells in that closet where the nose of the bullet was made of silver. I recognized it because the tip of the bullet was black instead of gray or coppery like it should have been, and when I rubbed the tarnish off then it got all shiny and bright.
I couldn’t imagine where Justin had got such a thing, cause you can’t exactly walk into a gun shop and ask for silver bullets. Not unless you want them to laugh at you. He must have special ordered them from somewhere. That made me very curious indeed about why he thought he needed something like that. The only thing silver bullets were good for that I knew of was to poison a loup-garou or make one very sick.
While I was rummaging through the closet, I noticed an access panel in the ceiling for getting into the attic. I thought about it a minute, then dragged the bedside table up to the closet door and climbed up there. It was none too sturdy, but the panel slid back easy enough and I was just tall enough to poke my head through into the attic.
It was dark and musty up there, and there wasn’t much to see. Just a bunch of wires and insulation and stuff like that. No floor, and not even enough room to stand up straight if you climbed up there and stood on the rafters. It wasn’t much more than a crawl space.
I was disappointed and about to go back down when I spotted an old Prince Albert cigar box half buried under some of the insulation. It was close enough to the access panel for me to grab it without getting up into the attic, so I pulled it out. I had to strain a little to reach that far, and just as I got hold of it the darned table fell over.
I hit the floor, of course, and smacked my shin on the door jamb so hard I felt sick at my stomach, but at least I didn’t break anything. It just felt like I did.
I dropped the box when I fell, and it came open in midair and spilled out a bunch of change and dollar bills all over me and the floor.
As soon as my leg stopped hurting enough for me to think about anything else, I picked up the money and counted it on the bed. There was four hundred and sixty-three dollars and fifty-two cents. It was more money than I’d ever seen in my entire life. I guess Justin kept a slush fund at home in case the bank was closed or something like that.
I put the change back in the box and set it down on the desk in front of the computer. There was four hundred and fifty dollars in paper money, so I laid down on the bed and folded it up and turned it over and over in my hands for a little while. I knew I couldn’t spend it because it wasn’t mine, and I wasn’t thinking about stealing it. I just liked the feel of holding that much cash in my hands. What can I say?
It made me wonder again where Justin had got off to. I could understand moving somewhere else and selling the house, but if that’s where he was then I couldn’t figure out why all his stuff was still here and the lights were still on. He couldn’t be gone for good just yet. He’d have to come back here at some point to get his stuff, wouldn’t he? And surely he wouldn’t leave all that money in the attic and the food in the kitchen. I wouldn’t have, if it was me.
The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that he’d come waltzing in sooner or later if I just waited long enough, and therefore the best thing I could possibly do right then was to stay exactly where I was for a while. If I stayed at the house then I’d have plenty of food and a warm place to sleep at night and everything else I needed, plus I’d be sure I wouldn’t miss him if he showed up. If he came in and found me asleep in his bed or something then it might be sorta awkward trying to explain who I was and why I was there, but that was a problem I’d just have to deal with whenever it came. I hoped he wouldn’t be too mad at me. But in the meantime there was no place else I could think of to go except back to Sulphur Springs, and that wasn’t very practical at all.
So that’s what I did. I spent my time doing various things. I laid on the overstuffed couch and ate popcorn and watched horror movies on the bigscreen, which were two things I was never allowed to do at home. Mama said she didn’t like it when popcorn got in the carpet, and since Lola couldn’t watch scary movies that meant I wasn’t allowed to watch them either.
Justin had a big collection of movies to pick from; everything from Nightmare on Elm Street to Scary Movie, and when I got tired of horror flicks there was Indiana Jones and The Day After Tomorrow and even The Lion King.
There was also an Xbox and I thought at first that would be fun, but it didn’t take long for me to find
out he didn’t have many games for it, and no cool ones at all. Just tennis and golf and boring junk like that, so I think I only played it maybe once or twice. It was mostly all movies when I was downstairs.
When I got tired of watching those I read some of his books. He had a lot of really old science fiction stuff and that was okay, but you get burnt out on anything after a long enough time. I’m a fast reader, and I sliced through King Solomon’s Mines and Perelandra and Journey to the Center of the Earth in just three days. That’s speedy even for me, but when you don’t have much else to do then you can go pretty fast.
After about three or four days of sitting around the house I started to get a horrible case of cabin fever. It didn’t even really help to go outside in the back yard, because there was nothing to do out there either. There was a bicycle and a four-wheeler outside, but both of them were locked up.
I thought about The Beast when I saw that bicycle and wished I had it with me. Ugly as it was, and no longer than I had it, I really liked that bike. I wondered if it was still under the trash at the burnt house and if Justin would maybe take me to Sulphur Springs to get it. I could polish it up, make it look a little nicer one of these days. If I’d had The Beast with me then at least I could have run around Wolfe City a little bit and got out of the house now and then.
But on the other hand, maybe it was better I couldn’t. I didn’t want anybody to see me coming and going from the house, and I had to be there when Justin got back.
I did find a fishing pole and a tackle box in the garage, and a little exploring led me to a pond out in the woods behind the house. It wasn’t a real big one as ponds go, but it looked like it might have some sweet bluegills in there. It had a thicket of bamboo growing on the far side which somebody had to have planted there. It was too tall and thick to be the wild kind. There were a few sweet gum trees on the bank, and the water was dark as iced tea from the leaves on the bottom.
That was on Friday afternoon when I discovered the pond, and since I had nothing particularly better to do I took the pole and the tackle box from the garage and sat down under a big magnolia tree that grew on the bank and fished for a while.
It was one of those warm days you get in December now and then, with lots of sunshine and just a little breeze, when it feels more like spring than winter, except you know it won’t last. I was more or less recovered from my trip and back to my old self again. I’d been at the house since Tuesday night.
I wished Justin would hurry up and get home, but then again I didn’t. I still didn’t know what he’d say or if he’d even let me stay with him. I hadn’t even nibbled on the question of what I’d do if he said no. But on the other hand, I really thought he was a person I could get along with, and I liked his place.
I guess I had this notion that he’d understand everything perfectly and not say a word about it, and he’d give me the extra bedroom for my own and we’d just live happily ever after. It was a nice thought, wasn’t it?
One of my worst habits is that my imagination is too good. I build up all these wonderful daydreams about what I want and the best way things should go, and then it never ends up happening like that.
I started wondering what it would be like to go to school in Wolfe City and if they had a good baseball team. I wondered if Justin would take me to the lake during the summer and if I could have a horse someday like I’d always wanted, and if I’d make friends with any other kids.
I was so lost in daydreaming and painting myself this beautiful picture in my head that I didn’t even notice when a man came walking up behind me through the woods. The path was clear of dead leaves, and he didn’t make much noise in his tennis shoes.
He must have stood there and watched me for a while without me knowing, but finally he cleared his throat. I was so startled I dropped the fishing pole and whipped around to stare at him with bug eyes.
There was my Uncle Justin, no doubt about it, and he was looking at me with a frown on his face. Not quite a scowl, but he sure didn’t look pleased to see me.
“Young feller, I don’t mind you fishing in my pond, but I do expect you to ask me first. Specially when you borrow my pole and my tackle box too,” he said. He had a thick Texas drawl, just like Mama does.
This was not the way I had hoped to run into Justin for the first time, with him thinking I was a sticky-fingered trespasser who took things without asking. It wasn’t the best way to get things off on a good foot, not by any stretch of the imagination.
I took a deep breath and looked him right in the eye, like Daddy always told me I should do when talking to a grown man.
“Uh, you probably don’t recognize me, but my name is Zach, and I think you’re my Uncle Justin. I’ve been waiting to see you for a long time,” I told him. I decided it was best to get right to the point.
His eyes narrowed a little bit and he stared at me long and hard. He looked like he didn’t quite believe me.
“And what would make you think that, young feller?” he finally asked.
“Cause I know you have a sister named Jenna in Tennessee, and I’m her son. She gave me this,” I said.
I fumbled in my pocket for that old picture of Justin I took from Mama’s photo album, and offered it to him. He took it without thinking, and I could tell he recognized it. He looked back at me again, and this time his face was impossible to read. He still didn’t look pleased, but I couldn’t have told you what he was thinking to save my life.
“Where’s Jenna then? Why are y’all here?” he demanded. He was starting to scowl for real now, and I knew I better say something quick.
“Mama is still back home. She’s not with me. Nobody is with me. I came here alone cause I ran away before they could turn me into a monster cause I don’t want to be one and you’re the only person I knew who might help me,” I blurted out all in one breath.
Justin looked thunderstruck when he heard that, but gradually I watched his expression soften up a little bit after he had a chance to take it all in.
“That’s an awful long way, kid,” he told me.
I thought about how long it had really been, and how lonely and hard and how I like to have never made it at all. Justin had no idea what an awful long way it had been.
I just nodded without saying anything.
Justin took his cap off and scratched his head and took a deep breath. I’m sure he was baffled and that me showing up was the last thing on earth he ever expected, but he handled it better than a lot of guys would have.
“Nobody knows you’re here?” he asked me.
“No sir, nobody,” I told him. He shook his head like he still couldn’t quite believe it.
“I guess you better come up to the house and we best have a long, serious talk, boy,” he finally said.
I wasn’t sure if that sounded good or bad, but I was in no position to argue with him about it. All I could do was hope and pray he’d listen and see things my way. I did owe him an explanation, because I knew I was asking him for an awful big favor when he didn’t even know me.
Justin turned around and walked up the path toward the house without looking back to see if I was following him. Maybe he hoped I wasn’t, for all I knew. Most people are not too happy when you drop a big fat problem in their laps with no warning, and he was probably no exception.
He walked fast, and I had to trot to keep up with him. I left the fishing pole and the tackle box down by the pond cause I didn’t want to remind him of me borrowing them without asking. Things were likely to be difficult enough already.
We came up into the back yard and I saw Justin’s truck parked in front of the garage. He drove a black Dodge Ram 4x4, which was exactly the kind of truck I always wanted myself someday. He won a few extra points for that.
We came to the front door and he fished out his keys and unlocked it. He threw them carelessly in a basket just inside the foyer and then sat down at the kitchen table. He leaned back in his chair and waved me over to sit down myself, and when I
did he just stared at me again until I thought he’d burn holes in me with his eyeballs.
“So talk,” he finally told me.