Chasing AllieCat Read online

  Aunt Janie looked at me and said to Aunt Susan, “And I’m sure both Sadie and Timmy can help you in your big garden, too.”

  “Good idea,” Aunt Susan said, giving me the first smile of the day. “You can both help Stevie and Megan and me in the garden.”

  I tried not to glare at Aunt Janie.

  My little brother Timmy, who couldn’t think of anything more exciting than spending the summer with his cousin Stevie, said, “I can work in the garden!”

  And so, my fate was sealed.

  LeHillier was going to cut me off from my entire world. I’d just turned sixteen on May 23, so Mom wouldn’t let me get my license until she got back from Egypt and could let me do more practice driving. That’s what she said, but the real reason was so she wouldn’t have to worry about me driving while she was gone. So for starters, my only transportation would be my bike. My best friends in Minnetonka, Erica and Sara, were gone for the summer, too, out of cell phone reach. Erica and her parents were spending the summer in England, and Sara and her oboe were off at Interlochen music camp in Michigan where there were strict rules about cell phones. So Mom had cancelled our cell phone contract for the whole summer. No pleading mattered. Her response was, “You earn enough money to buy your own phone and policy this summer, you go right ahead.”

  After pie, I took off on my mountain bike without offering to help with dishes. I rode the bluffs beyond Scout’s place.

  Scout’s house sits near the edge of a rocky cliff overlooking the Blue Earth River. The back of his house is connected, by a huge shop and garage and then a passageway, to the back room of Scout’s Last Chance, the bar and grill he owns. The building is as wide as Scout’s backyard, so even though the front of the bar and grill opens onto a parking lot, you can’t even see the parking lot from Scout’s house. The trees come up thick to the sides of the bar and grill, a border around Scout’s yard. The woods stretch out from there, and steep trails slope down to the water.

  I swooped down a sand hill and tooled around the jumps and logs by the water. It should have been a stunning spot, with the river and hills and woods and all, but it was a junk pit. Wildflowers bloomed purple, yellow, and white, and the trees were a bright early summer green, but garbage littered the beauty, more colorful than the wildflowers. Not just cans and bottles and candy wrappers. A water heater. Broken chairs. A table with two legs. A shoe. A rope. A ripped sweater. A pile of tires. Beer cans. People must have just driven in, dumped their crap, and taken off. I dodged a water softener beside the trail.

  After about an hour, a voice drifted down the hill and I stopped, one foot down, to listen. “Sadie! Sadie!” I turned my bike uphill, toward Uncle Scout’s voice. “Sadie?” I stood on my pedals and cranked up the steep sandy slope.

  “Coming!” I yelled.

  “Get your wiry butt up here if you want to watch the show!”

  “Here she is,” Uncle Thomas bellowed. “Time for the unveiling!”

  The whole family—cousins, Grandma, and all—crowded around Uncle Thomas’s trailer, which was hooked behind his pickup. I wheeled over to them.

  “What are you boys up to this time?” Grandma asked.

  “No worries, Mum.”

  Grandma patted her hair waves and crossed her arms.

  Uncle Scout set a case of MGD on the pickup tailgate and he and Thomas each cracked a can. Two in the afternoon, and it was their second case of the day. Mom’s brothers are both huge men—they could have auditioned for the part of Hagrid in Harry Potter—and they were a little tipsy.

  “I’m sorry,” Aunt Janie said to my mom and to Aunt Susan.

  “Sorry?” Aunt Susan said. “What for?”

  Aunt Janie tried to smile, but it didn’t work. “It’s something Thomas has always wanted,” she said, “so when I found one on eBay, I got it for him. He’s like a little kid with it.”

  The trailer door slid open and Uncle Scout fairly screamed, “Holy shit!”

  “Jack Landan Hoelschmeier!” Aunt Susan yelled. “There are eight children present and you watch your mouth.”

  “He said holy shit!” the kids too young to know better (which meant all the kids except me) whispered, giggling.

  “And she called him Jack,” I said. “Watch out.”

  Scout and Thomas came down the ramp, pulling and steadying a full-sized, genuine Civil War cannon.

  I don’t know what I was expecting to be in the trailer, but certainly not a real live cannon. Well, not live, but real.

  “You’re not going to—” Susan started to say.

  “What exactly,” Scout said, chucking her on the chin in his most tender teasing manner, “is a cannon for, my dear, if not to fire?”

  “You sure that’s a good idea?” Mom, the liberal of the crowd, looked a little panicky. She hates guns, period. And nobody knows her brothers better than Mom does.

  “Settle down, pipsqueak,” Scout said.

  She glowered at him and he laughed. Scout is the only one in the world who can get away with calling my mother pipsqueak. Not even Thomas, the youngest of the three, would dare.

  I leaned my mountain bike against the porch and stood beside Mom to watch.

  Both Scout and Thomas are Civil War freaks. They dress up like Union soldiers, do reenactments of the war, and shoot authentic black-powder rifles. Thomas is a colonel in the Civil War enactment regiment, for whatever that’s worth. Sounds like glorified Boy Scouts to me. Right now they were wearing half of their Civil War uniforms. They hadn’t bothered with the official pants, but they had the shirts on, hanging open over their T-shirts and jeans, the jackets on top, and the blue Union hats jammed cockeyed on their heads.

  Scout and Thomas pulled the cannon out to the bluff. They faced it out over the Blue Earth River toward the field beyond, which was bright green with baby corn plants, fresh out of the ground after spring planting.

  Scout and Thomas were tipsy enough not to be in perfect control of their senses, and they were finding themselves very funny. Scout lit himself a cigar, offered one to Thomas, who waved it away. They put four cannonballs in a little pile, chuckling to themselves. “Just to look authentic,” Uncle Thomas said.

  They poured in some gun powder, tamped it down the cannon barrel with a plunger, and loaded one cannon ball from the small stack.

  Thomas dabbed at his face with his hanky. All this exertion was making him sweat.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” Aunt Janie asked. “That thing did not come with instructions.”

  “Easy, woman. Do you know anyone who knows his way around firearms as well as we do?” Thomas said.

  “That’s what scares me.” Her sigh filled about as much space as Thomas’s body. She forced all of us, the kids and Aunt Susan and Mom and Grandma included, to back up about thirty feet behind the cannon as the guys got ready to shoot.

  Scout and Thomas were hopping around like giant little boys with firecrackers on the Fourth of July. “We’re finally ready!” bellowed Thomas. He squatted by one cannon wheel, well out of the line of fire.

  Scout took a big drag on his cigar so the end glowed bright red. He held it high for a ceremonial moment, then brought it down to the cannon’s touch-hole. It sparked, he dropped to a crouch, and there was a flash from the touch-hole just like in the movies, and then POP! And the cannon ball popped out of the cannon and blooped into the grass fifteen feet in front of the men. It hadn’t even made it into the river.

  We all erupted in howls of laughter, Thomas and Scout, too.

  “HAhaHa!” Thomas said, standing, holding the shaking mass of flesh between his Union uniform jacket and his rib cage. Then he pulled out his bandana and mopped his face again. “That was obviously not enough powder!”

  “Wait,” Susan begged. “We all survived this once. Don’t you think you should quit while you’re ahead?�
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  Uncle Scout’s eyes twinkled. “Ahead? That’s not ahead. That was barely going forward. That doesn’t even count as firing the thing.”

  Aunt Susan shrugged.

  Uncle Scout actually trotted to the house to get more gunpowder from his gun cabinet. It was like an earthquake of flesh. I swear, the ground shook. I had never seen Uncle Scout trot before.

  Peapod, Scout’s yellow lab, didn’t like the cannon. He whined and scratched at the door and dashed inside the second Scout opened it.

  Scout came back lugging a three-gallon powder keg like a pirate’s treasure.

  “Let’s see,” Scout said. “If that much powder just gave a tiny bloop, then we need at least five times that for a hefty shot, don’t ya think?”

  “At least,” Thomas said, turning the keg up to pour some more—a lot more—of its contents into the cannon chamber.

  Janie gave herself the sign of the cross. Mom saw that and laughed, but together, they backed us up even farther this time.

  The men tamped the powder and loaded another cannonball. Susan and Janie put their hands over their ears. “Cover your ears,” Janie said, but none of us kids did.

  Finally, Scout held his now-stubbier cigar to the touch-hole again. It sparkled just like before, jumped to a full-fledged flash, and I saw flames shooting out the cannon barrel a split second before the air around me cracked in two with a boom that seemed to break my sternum and rupture my eardrums and suck the oxygen right out of the air.

  Now I knew why they use the word “deafening.” When the boom went away, no other sound came back. Everything was dead, deafened silence in our damaged eardrums as we watched that cannonball hurl skyward, sailing up, up, over the river and over the horizon, arcing out of sight in a southerly direction.

  I could see Uncle Scout’s mouth moving, but I couldn’t hear a word he said. I could see the giant grin on Thomas’s face and I could see them start to shake with laughter, but there were no sounds getting through my imploded eardrums. Adam, Thomas and Janie’s four-year-old, turned toward me and I could see his face screwed up in an all-out wail, but I couldn’t hear it. I picked him up, but he reached for his mom and Janie took him.

  I could see the men’s laughter subsiding as they looked in the direction the cannonball went and then at each other. I could read Uncle Scout’s lips. “Holy shit.”

  Thomas said something back, and then they turned sheepishly in the direction of their wives.

  Susan’s face was scarlet. I’d never seen her that color in all the years I’ve known her, since I was four and the flower girl at their wedding. Janie’s face was white. She was still holding one ear, with Adam in her other arm, and staring in the direction where the cannonball had disappeared. Mom stood with her mouth hanging open and shaking with laughter.

  An answering BOOM resounded out of the south.

  “Holy shit!” I heard Uncle Scout say, and I realized my eardrums were moving again.

  We wheeled to look, and over the edge of the world, we could see a plume of gray smoke and debris shooting upward. We stood, open-mouthed, until there was another BOOM and flames shot toward the sky, then black smoke, thick as tar, billowed into a column against the deep blue.

  “Oh my stars,” Grandma said, holding her chest.

  “You’d better get yourselves down there and see what the heck you just blew up,” Aunt Susan said.

  Janie’s face had gone from white to ghostly. Adam on her hip, she grabbed six-year-old Alicia’s hand, whirled on her heel, and dragged both kids into the house, slamming the door.

  The rest of us stood there gaping. Mom put one hand on my shoulder. “That was loud enough to wake the dead,” she said.

  “The dead soldiers?” Timmy asked.

  “What?” Mom said.

  “All the dead soldiers? For Memorial Day?”

  “You dork,” I said.

  “Was s’posed to be a joke,” Timmy said.

  “It was almost funny.” I gave him a soft little punch in the shoulder. He stuck out his tongue at me and ran over to Stevie.

  Thomas swiped his face with his hanky and Scout shook his head, as if the big boys were trying to shake off the beer and sober up on the spot. They walked wordlessly to Scout’s pickup, hoisted their heavy carcasses up and into it (which lowered the pickup on its springs a good four inches), and took off down the road in the direction of the cannonball landing. The last thing I saw was Thomas pulling out his everlasting blue hanky and dabbing at his ever-sweating face one more time.

  Aunt Susan, my mom, and Grandma herded the little kids into the house. I ran for my bike. “Sadie, you be careful,” my mom yelled at me as she pulled the screen door shut.

  I’d gone about a quarter mile down the blacktop when two police cars blasted past me, sirens wailing, and then a fire truck. Then another.

  By the time I got to the corner, the road was filling up with cars and pickups—people coming to see what the explosion was. Rubberneckers, my dad always calls them.

  At the corner, I turned toward Norton Roberts’ place, nearly a mile from Scout’s. Behind his house, a thick pillar of black smoke was billowing up to the sky. I felt a whoosh by my shoulder. A pickup truck’s mirror had missed my shoulder by about two inches because the driver was so busy gawking at the fire. I took the ditch.

  Another bang sent up a spray of flame and sparks, higher than all the trees on the place. I got to the Roberts’ driveway just as the garage sort of burst like fireworks, shooting flames, smoke, and sparks in all directions. That set off a whole series of little explosions. Giant firecrackers for Memorial Day.

  A cop guarding the driveway hustled over to me. “You’d better turn around right here, young lady.”

  “But I’m Scout and Thomas Hoelschmeier’s niece. I think they’re in trouble.”

  The cop was bald, and the skin around the edges of his cap looked almost crispy from the heat of the fire. “You bet they’re in trouble, little lady. So much trouble, you’d better git yourself home and wait for ’em.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, little lady.” He lifted his cap and swiped at his face. Beads of sweat stood on his shiny head. The fire was that hot all the way to the road.

  I’m not a lady, I wanted to yell at him. Quit calling me that. But he looked so crabby that I didn’t say anything.

  “You git on home.”

  I just stared at him.

  “Git!”

  So I got.

  Two

  Junk Woods

  May 28, continued

  I rode as slowly as I could, not toward Scout’s. I took the ditches and stayed on the part of the road where I could watch the fire and the black column of smoke over my shoulder. The thick tarry smell hung in the air for almost a mile. Past it, the sky was deep blue, and I rode and rode. When I figured I’d better turn around, I wheeled back and found a path by the river, through the woods, that I thought should lead to Uncle Scout’s.

  Leaves flanked the trail with bright spring green. I could see the pillar of dark smoke from here but couldn’t smell it, so I lifted my nose to breathe it all in like a dog: the sky, the leaves, the wildflowers, the scent of damp earth and new things growing. I cranked around a corner. The trees grew thicker, and I was back in the junk woods. Antifreeze jugs, hubcaps, tires, pieces of a snowmobile, a broken motorcycle helmet, a refrigerator door. At least I was on the right path to Scout’s. “Welcome to the junk woods,” I said out loud. I rode even slower, watching for glass and nails.

  I climbed the hill out of the river bottom and the trees dissolved into a clearing: the edge of a trailer court. This was in town, because LeHillier was inside the Mankato city limits as far as I knew, but the trailers squatted on squares between dirt roads. Dust hung in the air and diluted the blue sky into an orangish-brown haz
e. Garbage was piled near every—every—trailer. Junked cars and four-wheeler ATVs sat in yards.

  A woman in a saggy, dingy white T-shirt sat on her steps, her bony knees sticking out from cut-offs, a cigarette between her lips and a can of Pabst in her yellowed, bony fingers. A German Shepherd beside her jumped up and barked. She said something to him, cigarette dangling and bobbing on her lips, and he sat instantly in the dirt beside her steps and they both watched me wheel past.

  Farther down the dirt road, a pitbull-looking dog lunged to the end of his chain and growled at me. I pedaled faster.

  Past the trailer court, I came to Mankato’s Waste Management Center: a huge recyclables drop-off facility and sleeping quarters for the local fleet of garbage trucks. In back, a Dumpster cemetery sprawled, a Red Sea of rusty decrepit Dumpsters rolling off their broken wheels in the meadow, daisies springing up among them. Creepy. I’d never thought about where Dumpsters go when they’re too busted to be useful. Birds sang, and I could only imagine the rats and mice that figured they’d hit the jackpot for spacious condo living. I pedaled even faster.

  But the world got even stranger. First, a semi-truck loomed between the Red Sea and the woods. This parked, deserted semi looked to be in perfect condition, all intact, with bright shiny red paint—except for the fact that vines had grown all over it, covering its sides, swallowing up the hood, the cab, the doors, as if the vines were ravenous, consuming it. As if somebody had driven it all day, parked it, and overnight the vines took over. A Stephen King truck.

  Beyond the vine truck, I rode into the trailer home cemetery. Junked trailer homes, one after another, lay like a bunch of dead dinosaurs sprawled through an acre of woods. Except somehow, these homes didn’t seem quite dead.

  I stopped, my feet on the ground, and surveyed a trailer that had been rolled on its side. It didn’t have a floor. Bottoms of the bathtub and sink, rusty pipes like giant curling snakes, coils of the stove, and undersides of drawers and cupboards were still intact. I felt as if I was looking up some giant fat lady’s skirt. I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could, but I couldn’t stop staring. It was like peering at some intimate disaster where I had no business looking. Or like watching a horror movie when you want to turn it off, but can’t peel your eyes off the screen.