“There's a whole bear in there somewhere,” he said.
“Don't eat it,” Josh warned. “That box of crackers has been in Peter's closet for months, and you should see his closet!”
“You want some popcorn?” Wally offered, holding up a couple of microwave bags. That sounded more appealing, so the seven of them sat around the kitchen table listening for the popping to stop.
“Now!” said Jake.
“No … see, there's another pop,” said Wally.
“Okay, now!” said Caroline.
“Nope. Two … three more pops,” said Beth.
Finally the bag was removed and another inserted, and five minutes later two metal bowls of popcorn were making the rounds of the kitchen table.
“Okay, here's the deal,” said Eddie. Her real name was Edith Ann, but she said she'd fight anyone who called her that. “If we're going to do the race, it's got to be fair. There are all kinds of ways we could cheat and the others wouldn't know about it, so it's got to be cheat-proof.”
“How are you going to do that?” asked Wally.
“Like you said, we have to get seven bottles all the same size, with tight caps, and we have to put them in the river at the same place at the same time,” said Eddie.
Caroline looked at the faces around her as Eddie explained the rules. There was a cheating smile on Jake Hatford's face if she'd ever seen one.
“And to make sure that nobody puts the same kind of a bottle with his name and address in it a day or so early,” she continued, which made Jake suddenly snap to attention, “the girls get to put something secret in each of the boys' bottles, and the boys get to do the same with the girls' bottles. This way, if someone calls us to say that they found one of our bottles, we'll ask what was in it, and it had better have the secret something or we'll know it's an extra bottle somebody put in the river, and that won't count.”
The boys looked at each other.
“Okay,” said Jake finally. “Fair enough.”
“I could find something secret to put in our bottles!” Peter offered helpfully.
“Peter, anything you find in your closet will be either moldy or decayed,” said Josh. “No thanks.”
“Are we agreed on the time limit?” Eddie went on.
“Four weeks,” said Jake. “The deadline will be the last day of April. Whoever's bottle goes farthest by then gets to make the others do what he says.”
“Or she says,” put in Beth.
“Yeah,” said Jake.
“But wait!” said Wally. “What if someone finds one of the bottles but doesn't call?”
“There's nothing we can do about that. It's just the chance we have to take,” said Eddie. “And if they call after April thirtieth, too bad.” She put up her hand. “Deal?”
“Deal,” said Jake, slapping her palm.
The girls walked all around the table giving high fives to the boys, the butter from the popcorn traveling hand to hand. Then they went to the front door to put on their boots and raincoats.
“Hey, look! Sun!” said Beth.
It wasn't sun exactly, but the sky was brighter and the rain had stopped. For the first time in days there was a little gold in the sky along with the gray.
“Maybe they'll hold tryouts tomorrow,” Eddie mused.
“Goodbye, Eddie! Goodbye, Beth and Caroline!” called Peter, holding one of the popcorn bowls in his arms and scooping up the last kernels.
“Goodbye,” said Caroline. “Get ready to be my humble, obedient slaves if my bottle goes the farthest.”
“Ha!” shot back Jake. “Be ready to work like dogs if my bottle goes the farthest.”
The girls crossed the road and went down the path to the swinging bridge, stopping to peer over the cable handrail at the water.
“Do you suppose it's over our heads now?” Caroline asked.
“In places, I suppose. The guys said there are only certain parts of it deep enough for swimming,” said Beth.
“Still, I'll bet a bottle would travel pretty fast in this,” mused Eddie aloud.
“I wonder what it's like to be in a flood,” said Caroline. “Just think if water was slowly creeping up your stairs, and you had to crawl out a window onto the roof and wave a pillowcase at passersby, pleading for help, and a helicopter came along and a handsome man dropped a rope ladder and he crawled down and picked you up in his arms and climbed back up the ladder and—”
“Okay, Caroline, we get the picture,” said Eddie. “Everything to you is just a movie. If you were in a real tragedy, it wouldn't seem so romantic.”
“I can do tragic!” said Caroline. “What if a woman crawled out on the roof with her little baby in her arms, but the water kept rising and rushing, and swept the baby away and—”
“Stop it!” said Beth. “Caroline, can't you just talk normal for a change?”
The girls went on across the bridge and up the soggy hill to their house.
“I don't want to leave here,” said Caroline. “We've had more fun in Buckman than we ever had back in Ohio.”
“Well, I don't think we're going to have any say in it, whatever Dad decides,” Eddie told her.
In the kitchen they took off their wet clothes.
“Sun's trying to come out,” called their mother. “The forecast says it's supposed to clear up for a while.”
That was good news—for Eddie, anyway.
“Mom,” said Caroline, going to the door of the dining room. “Has Dad said anything more about going back to Ohio? Do you think we will?”
“My dear, you know as much about it as I do,” Mrs. Malloy said. “He's waiting to hear from someone who's waiting to hear from someone else who's waiting to hear … It's like dominoes. I wouldn't be surprised if we don't find out till the very last minute. With your father, anything could happen!”
Four
Tryouts
Mrs. Hatford brought home the seven bottles as requested, but on Tuesday the rain had stopped, so the Big Bottle Race was put on hold till the team had been chosen. After school Jake Hatford and Eddie Malloy were both out on the school baseball diamond with the other hopefuls. They had all been practicing for an hour under the watchful eye of their coach, and finally he called everyone over. They were all boys except for Eddie.
“With only nine players on a team,” Mr. Bailey said, “I have to make a choice and choose the nine of you for the A team that I think will play best. The rest of you will be the B team, and you'll each be a substitute for an A player. Things happen in a game, you know. If a player gets sick or hurt, a substitute has to be ready to take over, so you'll come to every practice too. Some of you may even prove to be better players than my A team, and I'll keep watching you during practice. If I need to change you around, I will, so everyone needs to play his very best.”
All the boys, of course, were looking sideways at Eddie. So were all of Jake's brothers and Eddie's two sisters, who sat on the wooden bleachers behind home plate.
The coach went down the line and chose the nine players for the A team. Both Eddie and Jake made the list, to the cheers of those in the bleachers. Then Mr. Bailey asked each of the nine what position he would most like to play.
“Pitcher,” said Jake.
“Pitcher,” said Eddie.
Some of the boys smiled and elbowed each other. Baseball was big in Buckman, and half the kids in the school—the boys, anyway—wanted to be one of the Buckman Badgers when they reached sixth grade. Four on the A team wanted to be the pitcher, and Mr. Bailey tried them out one by one till only Jake and Eddie were left.
“Who wants to go first?” asked Mr. Bailey.
Jake and Eddie both said, “I will,” at the same time. “Okay,” the coach said. “Jake, you pick up a bat there, and Edith Ann, you—”
“Eddie,” she corrected firmly. “Okay, Eddie. You go out to the mound.” The coach tossed her a ball, and Eddie took her place.
The Hatford brothers and the Malloy sisters were all rooting for both Jake and Edd
ie for a change, because they wouldn't be competing against each other; they'd be playing teams from other schools.
“Okay, let's see what you can do,” the coach said.
Eddie juggled the ball around in her hands a couple of times. The other boys, whom Mr. Bailey had sent out in the field to catch, laughed softly among themselves.
Jake chose a bat, and after a few practice swings went to home plate. Mr. Bailey served as catcher.
“Ready?” the coach called out.
Eddie drew back her arm, her body turning a little to one side. She slowly lifted one foot off the ground, and then, pow! The ball came so fast that Jake wasn't ready. He blinked as the boys in the outfield fell silent. Mr. Bailey caught the ball and sent it back to Eddie.
“Good throw!” he said. “Let's see another one.” This time Jake was ready. With his knees slightly bent, weight on the balls of his feet, he gripped the bat, his eyes on Eddie. He saw her arm move back, saw her body turn, saw her foot come off the ground, and then the pitch. Crack!
The ball went sailing out over left field and was caught by one of Jake's friends.
“Good! Good pitch! Good swing, Jake! Now, you two trade places.”
There were murmurs in the outfield again, and the boys automatically moved in a little closer to catch any ball Eddie might hit.
Jake did his windup with a flourish and let the ball fly.
Crack!
The ball sailed out over Jake's head, far out into center field, and rolled along the ground several yards before a fielder could rush back to scoop it up.
“Again!” the coach said.
Wally could tell from the way Jake was winding up this time that he was trying to scare Eddie. Whish came the ball, but Eddie was faster. She didn't even blink.
Crack!
The ball sailed out over right field. “Get it! Get it!” the boys were yelling, but Eddie could have made a home run in the time it took them to get the ball back to Mr. Bailey.
“Okay, Eddie, you're in,” said the coach. “So are you, Jake. I'm going to have you two trade off as pitchers.”
Over on the bleachers the Hatford and Malloy cheering sections hooted and hollered.
When both the A and B teams finished practice an hour later, the Hatfords and the Malloys walked home together. It seemed to Wally that Beth and Caroline just wouldn't shut up about how well Eddie had performed. They didn't say anything about Jake.
“You did it! You did it! You made the team!” Caroline cried, slapping her sister on the back.
“Boy, you showed them!” said Beth. “Mr. Bailey's
teeth almost fell out when he saw you hit that first ball. You're in, Eddie! You're in! You'll wow 'em!”
“I told them I could do it!” Eddie crowed. “I wish the games began this month. I wish we didn't have to wait till May.”
“Everybody needs practice,” Jake mumbled. “Even you.”
When they had parted at last at the swinging bridge and the Malloy girls had gone home, Jake said to the others, “She'll be impossible, you know.”
“She already is,” said Wally. “Who?” asked Peter. “The Whomper, of course!” said Jake. That was the nickname they'd given Eddie. “It'll go to her head! You can tell already. Did you hear how many times she kept saying, ‘I told everyone I could pitch! I told everyone I could bat!' So okay, already! Do we have to go on hearing that the rest of the season?”
Wally didn't say so, but Jake sounded a little jealous. “Just be glad she's on your team and not playing for some other school,” Josh said.
“Yeah,” said Jake, but he didn't look very happy about it.
At dinner that evening, when Jake announced he'd made the A team, Mrs. Hatford said, “That's great, Jake! Didn't you try out, Josh?” People often thought that Josh and Jake, being twins, liked the same things. Even their parents made that mistake sometimes.
“No,” said Josh, who was a sort of resident artist for the school. He could draw better than anyone in Buckman Elementary, including the teachers. “I'll just watch from the bleachers.”
“The parents are going to take turns driving you kids to the Saturday games next month,” Mr. Hatford said. “Your mother and I will each take a Saturday off if we need to, and I'm sure the Malloys will do their share of driving.”
“Of course!” said Jake. “They wouldn't want to miss seeing their precious Edith Ann pulverize the other team, would they?” He jabbed at his potato and stuffed a bite into his mouth.
Mrs. Hatford studied him. “Do you mind having Eddie on your team?” she asked.
“Heck, no,” Jake insisted. “As long as she doesn't throw her weight around when she's with us, I'm okay with it.” And he jabbed his potato again.
But next to throwing a baseball, throwing her weight around seemed to be what Eddie did best. When they all walked to school together the next day, she made a point of telling them that she was wearing her backpack on her left shoulder only because it was important not to put any stress on her pitching arm.
When they stood on the playground waiting for the bell, she did finger exercises because, she said, it was important to keep her fingers flexible.
When she had to write an essay on the topic of her choice for sixth-grade English, Eddie chose “The History of Baseball,” Jake told Wally at recess. “She needs to be taken down a peg,” he said.
Uh-oh, thought Wally. Whenever Jake talked like that, it meant trouble.
As all seven of them walked home together that afternoon, talking baseball, Wally said, to change the subject, “We'd better do that bottle race today. The water's already going down.”
It was true that although they still couldn't see the rocks that lay in clumps in the riverbed, the river wasn't as high as it had been only a few days before.
“All right,” said Eddie. “We'll go home and find something secret to go in your bottles. Then we'll be over.”
“Why don't we follow the river back as far as we can before we throw the bottles in?” Jake suggested. “Then we can watch them pass by our house, go down around the bend, and float back up the other side of Island Avenue.”
“Unless they get stuck upriver somewhere,” said Wally. “The river twists and turns a lot before it gets to our house.”
“We decided to paint the caps on our bottles red,” said Josh. “That way we can tell them from yours, Eddie, and see which ones are ahead. Just for fun.”
Wally saw Eddie's eyes narrow. “Are you sure that's the only reason?” she asked.
“Of course!” said Jake. “What other reason could there be?”
“Ha!” said Beth.
“Double ha!” said Caroline.
Five
Into the Drink
“You just know they're up to something!” said Eddie, once the girls were home.
Caroline and Beth had to agree.
“They didn't paint those bottle caps red for nothing!” said Beth. “I'll bet they're going to sneak around to the other side of Island Avenue where we can't see them and try to fish out our bottles as they go by.”
“Maybe they won't be able to reach them,” said Caroline.
“And maybe they will !” said Eddie. “You know what? We'll just have to fish theirs out first! And they've made it easy for us to tell which ones are theirs.”
“They've ruined it all!” said Beth, disappointed. “I don't want to win by cheating.”
“We're just saving our own skins, beating the boys at their own game,” Eddie told her. Her eyes began to gleam. “Do you know what's up in the loft of our garage?”
Caroline thought. “Window screens,” she said. That was all she could remember.
“What else?” said Eddie, her eyes becoming little slits. They looked almost like cat's eyes.
“Boxes? Dry leaves? Pigeon poop?”
“What else?” said Eddie, and when neither Caroline nor Beth could guess, she said, “A butterfly net.”
Caroline remembered. There was indeed an old pole with a net
at the end.
“Perfect!” said Beth, finally enthusiastic about their plan. “Absolutely perfect! Are we in charge or what ?”
When the girls got to the Hatfords', they found seven white bottles on the kitchen table, four with caps painted red and three with white caps. Each person was to put a slip of paper in a bottle, giving his or her name and phone number. Wally helped Peter with his.
“You know,” Caroline said, looking up, “maybe we ought to write a little more on our slips of paper, saying how important it is that people call us before the end of April. Otherwise, maybe nobody will bother.”
That seemed like a good idea, so there was more writing and erasing.
When all the girls' messages had been written, rolled, and thrust down into the bottles with the white caps and the boys' messages had been thrust down into the bottles with the red caps, they exchanged bottles. They turned their backs on each other, and Eddie reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out four buttons off an old Girl Scout uniform. She dropped one button in each of the boys' bottles and put the caps back on.
Jake reached into the pocket of his faded denim jacket and pulled out three matchbook covers from a Mexican restaurant in Parkersburg. He bent each matchbook cover until it would go through the neck of each of the girls' bottles. Then he put the white caps back on the bottles.
When everyone had his or her own bottle back, each screwed on the cap as tightly as possible and sealed it with candle wax.
“Ready?” said Josh.
“Ready,” said the girls.
They put on their jackets again and started up the road outside the Hatfords' house, going in the opposite direction from school. College Avenue began downtown by the college and ran out past the Hatfords' house, on and on, following the Buckman River, until finally, about a mile away, it began to veer off from the water and ended at last at the highway.
The kids decided they would follow the avenue down to where it left the river, and there they would throw the bottles in, then walk back home to the swinging bridge and watch the bottles float by.