“That’s Jack.”
“What happened to him?”
“Only he really knows.” She moved into the kitchen, calling, “Don’t have much in the way of boy food here, but if you want soup, I’m having some. My blood sugar’s down and I’m cold to the bone.”
I was still up to the gills with Lucky Charms, but I wanted to buy some more time with the cats. They were so soft. And Cleo was purring, a hum low and smooth, hypnotizing me. So I told her, “I’ll have a little.”
“Hmm,” she said, studying me.
“Ma’am?”
“Not the answer I was expecting.”
Then she turned away and got busy with a can of soup.
The Admiral ate her soup by hunchin’ over it with her face practically inside the bowl. She didn’t look up once as she shoveled, and that was fine by me. If she had, she’d have caught me sneaking little soupy chicken chunks to the cats.
When she’d drained the last drops into her mouth, I told her I needed to get going and asked if she wanted me to take a load of trash with me on my way out.
She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and frowned. “I don’t have much.”
I couldn’t help giving her counter a look. It was covered with trash. Empty cans, empty paper-towel tubes, plastic bread bags…
“Don’t touch it,” she said in a kind of growl.
“But…”
“They come in handy,” she said. “Or could.”
“If…?”
“You never know.” She frowned at me and stood up. “You just never know.”
I stood up, too, and took the bowls over to the sink, which was crazy full of dishes. And since Ma’s made me a pro at dishes, I got busy without even asking.
“Hmm,” she said with a frown, but instead of stopping me, she left the kitchen.
I didn’t see any dish soap around the sink, so I looked in the cabinet underneath, which was damp and musty and crammed full of junk. There were a lot of old scrub brushes and ugly toothbrushes. Plus miles of crusty cleaning stuff with labels so old you couldn’t even read them. But I did find a bottle of yellow dish soap, and when I stood up, One-Eyed Jack was watching me from up on the counter.
I sneaked a peek around the kitchen wall. The Admiral was sitting in a sunny chair looking out the window, so I leaned in closer to Jack and studied his permanent wink. “How’d you lose it, huh?” I whispered.
He just sat on the counter, his tail doing a lazy little twitch from side to side.
“Keepin’ it a secret?” I whispered, then got after the dishes. And soon my mind was changing Jack’s story. He wasn’t a war soldier—he was a pirate cat. Argh!
“Were you in with pirates?” I asked. “Did they smack you around?”
He seemed to give me a little smile. It was only on one side, but I swear his mouth stretched up a bit.
“Or maybe one of the ship’s rats fought back?”
Then I had an even better idea!
“Did an evil seagull swoop down from the crow’s nest and peck it out?”
The half smile was long gone, and Jack was now just doin’ the lazy twitch, giving me a bored one-eyed stare.
So I dived into the dishes and got lost in picturing Jack on board a pirate ship on the pitching sea, battling rats and birds and sea monsters. I ran through five fierce eye-gouging battles, the most thrilling one involving a sea serpent with scales sharp as knives.
In all the battles, Jack lost the same eye. I just kept resetting it and starting over until the sea serpent showed up in my mind. I could just see it, scales all green and blue and shiny, slitherin’ through the waves, rearin’ its head, flashing its deadly black eyes….
Jack was lucky he hadn’t lost his life!
When I was done with the dishes, Jack was still just sitting on the counter, watching me. Winking at me. Which made me think that maybe he did have telepathy. Maybe he could see everything that was going on in my head! Why else would he sit still for so long?
“We need to get you an eye patch,” I told him as I hung up the raggy towel I’d used for drying. “You’d look sharp in a patch.”
“Mrow!” he said, and nudged right up to me.
As much as I liked hanging out with One-Eyed Jack, I knew I’d best get home before Ma did. The Admiral was snoring in her chair, so I was planning to just sneak out, but as I was tiptoeing to the door, she sputtered to life, then saw me tiptoein’ and screamed.
It was a short scream, though, choked off by something in her throat. Spit? Cat hair? Beats me, but it started her up coughing and wheezing and gasping like she was bound to die.
I fetched her a cup of water quick. And after she’d got things mostly under control, she wheezed, “You’re still here.”
She seemed mad about it, so I said, “Yes, ma’am. I did your dishes.”
“Right, right,” she said, still catching her breath. Then she nodded and warbled, “You can’t go. The door needs repair.”
“Ma’am?”
“You broke it.”
I stared at her and finally said, “You told me to.”
Her top lip lifted a quarter inch. It was the most sarcastic look I think I’ve ever seen. But I asked, “You want me to put it back together?” even though it was tough to keep being polite with that lip curled back like it was.
“Some toothpicks should probably do the trick.”
Toothpicks?
“And a bit of glue wouldn’t hurt.”
Glue?
I wanted to holler, “Ma! Help!” ’cause she deals with crazy all day long. But then the Admiral creaked to her feet and said, “I do appreciate you breaking it down, Lincoln. Really, I do. But I can no longer turn a screwdriver with any force, so if you wouldn’t mind helping fix it?”
I almost slapped myself silly. It was the front door she was talking about, not the bathroom door!
I followed her back to the kitchen. She said nothing about the shiny-clean sink, but she seemed very pleased when she found a smashed box of toothpicks buried in the back of a drawer. “This way,” she said, like she was riding a winning streak, and led me to a little room that might’ve once been for a washer/dryer but was now serving as the cat yard.
My nose tried closing down as my eyes stretched wide at seeing and smelling the four litter boxes. I looked around, but no cats were standing by to take credit for their sand-swept sculptures.
Ma would have been going, “Oh my Lord,” but Mrs. Graves acted like she was reaching over roses instead of turds as she fetched a bottle of glue from a cupboard. “Eureka!” she said, holding it out to me.
I took it and said, “Uh, ma’am?” ’cause she was turning to go like there was nothing wrong.
She looked at me lookin’ down at the sculptures, then bent a little lower to see what I was staring at. “Oh,” she said. She stooped even lower. “Oh, yes. That does need attention.”
It needed a whole lot more than attention.
It needed a bulldozer!
She spread open the top of a big black garbage sack that was on the floor near a food-and-water tower. The sack already had something in the bottom, but I didn’t get what it was until she said, “You mind dumping them in?” And since I was just standing like a cow-eyed rock, she nudged me with, “Just pick up the boxes one at a time and empty them in here. Then we’ll fill them up fresh.”
So I put down the glue, held my breath, and made like a bulldozer. And when I was done, there was a whole acre of stinky desert stuffed in the sack.
“You want me to take it down to the trash?” I asked after I’d filled the boxes with clean kitty litter, ’cause who wants a big sack of cat turds hanging around?
She shook her head. “There’s still plenty of room in it.”
“But, ma’am, it’s already mighty heavy.”
“Leave it,” she commanded, then nodded at the glue and said, “Let’s get that door fixed.”
When I’d kicked down the door, I’d busted out some screws, and the wood
where they’d been was now too spread out for the screws to bite into. But Mrs. Graves showed me that shoving toothpicks into the holes and breaking them off so they were about level and then squirting in a little glue to help things hold together would close in the holes so the screws had something to grip.
After I’d repaired the first hole, the Admiral quit barking orders while I worked and started getting nosy instead. She asked me about school and where I was from, and then she asked about Ma.
“Where is your mother today? I trust she knows you’re here?”
“She’s at work,” I said, doing a little answer dodge as I put some muscle into flushing down a screw.
“Oh? And where’s that?”
“She works at”—I caught myself from saying Crazy Town—“an old-folks’ home.”
The Admiral was quiet for a long time. So quiet that I found myself looking to see if she was still there. Which she was.
“What are you going to tell her?” she asked, and she didn’t seem like the Admiral anymore. She seemed like a cornered mouse.
“Ma’am?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” she said, finding her voice. “You tell her I manage just fine.”
She left while I was cranking in the last screw, and when she came back, she had a little fold of money. “Thank you for your help, Lincoln,” she said, putting it in my hand. “And I trust you won’t make trouble for me.”
“Trouble?” I tried to give the money back ’cause I knew Ma would not be happy about me taking it. Plus, it felt like hush money. “You don’t have to—”
But the next thing I knew, I was shoved outside, standing face to face with her flaky front door, the hush money still in my hand.
The hush money turned out to be three dollars. Three measly dollars. How much hush was she expectin’ to buy with three measly dollars? It was worth a pause. Maybe an extra breath. Nobody would actually hush for three bucks.
I should’ve crammed the money under the Admiral’s door, but I wasn’t thinking straight. What I was thinking was Snickers.
The trouble with hush money is, it comes with voices. Whisperin’ voices that started whooshin’ through my head.
Go! No one will know!
Yeah! You’ll be back in a flash!
You deserve a Snickers!
Think of all the work you did!
Yeah! Breakin’ down doors!
Takin’ down doors!
Fixin’ up doors!
Yeah! And think of all those dishes!
And those nasty cat boxes!
The voices went quiet for a bit, giving me time to think, like they’d told me to. I also started thinking how, according to what had happened each and every Sunday before, I still had thirty minutes before Ma walked through the door. And that the market was right downstairs! Only two minutes away!
The voices were back.
You really think she’s gonna let you keep it?
You need to spend it!
Yeah! ’Cause if you don’t spend it, where you gonna hide it?
And if you do hide it, what happens if she finds it?
I had to admit, those were some mighty good points.
Time’s tickin’.
What’re you waiting for?
Go!
I hit the stairs running and didn’t stop ’til I got to the gate. Then I double-pie-eyed the street. To the left, to the right, across it, and to the left again.
No muggers in sight.
No Ma, either!
So I slipped through the gate and hurried past Levi and his ANYTHING HELPS sign like he wasn’t even there.
Inside the market it was dark. Like the belly of a big bear. One that had been roaming campsites, raiding food bins, having a snack party.
It was also quiet. Like a big-bellied hibernating bear. Which made me feel like I should be stealthy. Smooth. Tiptoe, even.
It’s dangerous to wake a hibernating bear!
I ninja’d past the liquor wall and made a quiet beeline for the candy rack. Mr. Noe was at a computer behind the counter, looking through glasses that were straddlin’ the end of his nose. He rolled an eye up and over my way, then went back to looking at his computer while I studied the candy rack.
According to the prices, I could get two large Snickers. Or a Snickers and a Kit Kat. Or a Snickers and a pack of Sour Patch! Or a Snickers and Red Vines!
I love Red Vines.
It’s funny how you can set out knowing exactly what you’re gonna do and end up confused. And I guess I was taking forever deciding, ’cause Mr. Noe was now aiming double-barreled eyeballs at me. “How much you got?” he asked.
I showed him my money, then glanced over my shoulder.
He looked toward the door, too. “Why are you so nervous?”
“N-nervous?”
He frowned. “You steal, I prosecute.”
I tried to say, “I just showed you my money!” but my mouth was all dry and my words just shriveled up. And the longer Mr. Noe’s aim was on me, the more I shriveled up.
What was I doing? I’d come in for Snickers. I should get Snickers! So I plopped two king-sized on the counter, shoved my bills over, and walked away with two big candy bars and some change.
Change that was now jingling in my pocket like a little tattletale alarm.
If I’d’ve had more time, I’d’ve spent the change. Or, if it’d been found money, I wouldn’t have worried. But it was hush money. What was left of it, anyway. It held a story that I wasn’t allowed to tell, but it jingled and jangled like nah-ner-nah-ner in my pocket, giving away that I had something to hide.
I tried walking smoother, but I could still hear it, deep in my pocket, metal on metal, laughing.
How do you hush up hush money?
How do you stop it from tattling on you?
Outside the belly of the bear, sharp daylight blinded me. And I was so busy squinting and thinking about hush-money change and looking over my shoulder for Ma instead of looking where I was going that I nearly tripped over Levi.
“Oh, sorry!” I said, scampering clear of his setup.
He didn’t say a word, but from his half-cocked grin and the way he was eyeballing the Snickers bars in my hand, I pieced together quick that he’d been watching me.
Watching me watch for Ma.
I stood still as a statue, calculating the situation at light speed. Then I reached in my pocket for the tattler coins and locked eyes with him as I slid them into his box, giving him a silent message: Here’s some hush money. You know what I’m sayin’?
He gave me back a caterpillar eyebrow and a twitch of a grin, speaking without saying a thing. You call that hush money?
His eyes swept back down to the chocolate-colored wrappers in my hand and tossed up a twinkle when they looked at me again. I heard what he was saying without him saying a thing. A Snickers—now that’s hush money.
I gave him a candy bar and skedaddled.
A side from voices, the other trouble with hush money is, it comes with a price.
A big price.
I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew that Ma would be home any minute, and the only place I could think to hide a king-sized Snickers was my stomach. Maybe because it was the place I wanted to hide it. But I was short on time, so I sat in my corner, chewing and stuffing like a skittery squirrel.
I’d been wanting a Snickers forever. And the parts were all there—the chocolate and caramel and crunchy peanuts—but it didn’t taste the same. It didn’t even taste good.
It tasted like gulping down fear.
When it was gone, I felt sick. Sick, and jumpier than ever. Like I was back to hiding from Cliff.
Then I started worrying about the wrapper. First I stuffed it in my pocket. But then I started thinking…what if it worked its way up? What if I forgot and pulled it out? What if Ma checked my pockets while I was sleeping?
So I took it out of my jeans and buried it at the bottom of the kitchen trash.
But there wasn’t much in the t
rash bin, and I could just see the wrapper flashing to life somehow. Unfurling like a flag, surrendering to Ma as she threw something else away!
So I dug it out quick, found some scissors, and made for the bathroom like a cat escaping a hose. Two heartbeats later, “Lincoln!” came cryin’ through the door. “Lincoln, where are you?”
Lightning hit my scissors and cut up that candy wrapper. “Here, Ma! Be right out!” I hollered.
“Oh, thank the Lord,” Ma cried.
I pressed the toilet lever, calling, “What’s wrong?” ’cause I could tell something was and I was praying it had nothing to do with me.
“It’s the Man.”
“Levi?” The cyclone of water was sweepin’ candy wrapper evidence round and round and down the drain as dread went washing over me. “What happened to him?” I stashed the scissors quick and found Ma rag-dollin’ in a kitchen chair.
She sat up some, and her hands covered her mouth as she shook her head. “They tased him.”
“Tased him? Who did? And why?”
“The police.” She looked square at me. “He was shouting and cussing and…and wouldn’t do what the police told him to.”
“What were they telling him to do?”
“To calm down and put his hands up.”
“But…why? What did he do?”
“I have no idea. Maybe it was being surrounded by uniforms that set him off. I tried to get him to calm down, but he didn’t even seem to know who I was. And the things he was saying…it’s like he was someone else. Someplace else.”
“Things like what, Ma?”
“I don’t remember! None of it made sense! He was acting crazy! He lunged at one of the cops and they tased him.” She sat panting, her eyes brimming like she was going down in choppy waters. “They tased him and hauled him off.”
I wanted to say, “But he was fine! I saw him! He was twinklin’ and negotiating hush-money candy! There was nothing crazy about him!”
But I didn’t.
I just stood there, watching Ma drown in the things she’d seen.
“It’s okay, Lincoln,” she said, tossing me a life preserver. “We don’t know what’s going on in that man’s mind. What voices he hears. What battles he’s still fighting.”