I was sitting at the kitchen table finishing a bowl of Rice Krispies and reading the funny papers when Eddie pushed open the swinging door from the dining room.
“Somebody you know is out there,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the front door.
I took a piece of buttered toast with me and went to look out the window. Dodie was sitting on the top step of the porch. She started going down the stairs on her bottom. I had done the same thing myself lots of times, but I pulled open the front door and said, “What are you doing?”
“Waiting for you.” She kept on scooting and plopping without even looking at me. “This is a good muscle builder,” she said, checking the tops of her arms to see if her biceps were growing.
“What do you want muscles for?”
“You never know when you’ll need to be strong.” She got up and brushed off the seat of her shorts. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Where?”
“Up Sycamore Creek,” Dodie said. “I know a good place.”
I told Mama where we were going, and we started off.
“Hurry up,” Dodie told me, “or those other two will be butting in.”
“You mean Reba Lu and Geraldine?”
She nodded. “I don’t want them tagging along.”
I felt a little guilty for not including them, but I told myself they wouldn’t want to go up the creek with Dodie anyway. I couldn’t help feeling a little pleased that Dodie had chosen me to see her “good place.” It struck me that this was the first time Dodie had invited any of us to go anywhere with her instead of the other way around.
I followed her down the front steps and we started up Palm Avenue. Was anybody watching us? I wondered what they would say if they were. I could imagine Miss Barnable saying, “There goes Angelina Wallace and that Crumper girl.”
If people saw me hanging around with Reba Lu or Geraldine, they wouldn’t pay the least attention. They would never call Reba Lu “that Adams girl” or Geraldine “that Murlock girl.” But with Dodie it was different. She wasn’t exactly what most folks would call respectable. I wondered if they saw me with Dodie a lot, would they start calling me “that Wallace girl”?
Then I asked myself why I cared. It shouldn’t matter what people thought so long as I knew I wasn’t doing anything wrong.
When we came to her house, she slowed down and grabbed my arm. “Come in for a minute,” she said. As soon as I stepped inside, Dodie pointed at the fishbowl. Hanging from a string that was tied to a stick laid over the top of the bowl was her golden ring. Her free ride. To my surprise, the water was clean.
As we watched, a little goldfish nudged the ring and sent it swaying, then swam right through the middle and out the other side.
“That’s the way!” Dodie shouted. “I knew you could do it.”
It was a few seconds before I realized she was talking to the fish, not me.
“That’s great,” I said. But I was always uncomfortable in Dodie’s house, not knowing what condition her mother might be in. I grabbed Dodie by the arm.
“Come on. It’s getting hotter outside by the minute.”
She reached over to the fishbowl and picked up the stick with the ring dangling from it. Quickly she untied the string and slipped the shiny loop into the pocket of her shorts.
“For good luck,” she said, grinning.
We walked on up the street, and when we came to Dr. Thomas’s house, we both looked up at the window where Miss Emma usually sat. Nobody looked back at us, but we could hear Henry squawking, “Help! Help! Somebody save me.”
“We could stop and say hello,” I said. Miss Emma had seemed so happy at the beach, and she had talked like a normal person when I visited her. I wondered if the sea air had cured her of her ills, like Dr. Thomas said it would.
“I’d rather eat worms,” Dodie replied. She grabbed my arm and started to hurry me past the house.
But the front door opened and Mrs. Dawson came out. She turned the spigot, picked up the hose, and began watering the red geraniums that grew in clay pots by the front door.
“Morning,” I called. “How’s Miss Emma today?”
Mrs. Dawson turned off the water. “Miss Emma isn’t well,” she said. Then she fumbled in her apron pocket, brought out a wadded-up handkerchief and blew her nose on it. Afterwards she wiped her eyes. I wished she’d done it in a different order.
“I wonder what’s the matter with Miss Emma,” I said, after Mrs. Dawson had gone back into the house.
Dodie gave a little twitch of her head that told me to look across the street. “There’s the trouble right there. Didn’t you see him?”
Someone moved quickly behind one of the tall cypress trees that grew in front of Miss Barnable’s house.
“Mr. Clement stands over there where she can see him from her window. As soon as she starts carrying on, he gets out of sight so people think nobody’s there. I expect he’ll be happy if they put Miss Emma away in the sanitarium.”
“The sanitarium? You mean where crazy people go?”
She looked at me a few seconds, then began shaking her head. “You live on a cloud, don’t you, Angie?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. I was getting tired of hearing this. Geraldine was always telling me I didn’t know much about the world. “Why would he be happy?”
“Because if they put her away in the crazy house, she can’t point a finger at him and tell people what he did to her.”
“How do you know so much?” I was thinking of what Miss Emma had told me. Dodie didn’t have any way of knowing about that. But she acted like she knew something.
She paused and scrunched up her face, then looked away from me, down at the geraniums. She picked one and began pulling off the petals.
“Dodie?” I said. But she didn’t look up. She kept dropping those petals in the dirt, one by one. Something had changed. She used to go on and on about how nice Mr. Clement was to her. Now she sounded like she didn’t like him anymore.
I really wanted to know more, but I wasn’t taking a chance on looking dumb. Instead I put some authority in my voice and changed the subject. “Dr. Thomas would never put her away. Never!”
Dodie didn’t answer me, and I felt uncomfortable, wrapped in her silence. Wrapped in the memory of a dark figure looking into a tent. I glanced over at Miss Barnable’s house, at the tall cypress trees. Nothing moved. I supposed that Jefferson Clement had slipped away through the alley next to the house. He was gone. But he had invaded our day just the same.
Dodie nudged me. “We need to move along or we’ll be too late.”
I knew better than to ask Too late for what? I was learning that Dodie was the kind of person who wouldn’t tell anything until she was good and ready.
I looked down at my feet and started side-stepping cracks. “Don’t step on a crack,” I told Dodie. “You’ll break your mother’s back.”
She grinned and put one foot on a crack wide enough to have a dandelion plant coming out of it. “Ha!” she said. “Let’s see how she likes that!”
I was shocked that she would talk that way about her mother. I guess I looked it because she said, “Just kidding.”
We both zigzagged up the street. It was hard not to step on cracks on our sidewalk. Tree roots had grown into the concrete and split it wide enough for red ants to dig their nests and leave pyramids of dirt behind them.
I glanced up at the clock on the front of the Bank of America. Nine a.m. and already hot. “I wish I’d brought a thermos of ice water,” I said.
“Too much trouble,” Dodie answered, twisting one foot sideways so it would fit onto a smooth piece of sidewalk. “Plenty of cold water up the creek.”
“Just how far is up?” I asked.
“As far as you want to make it.” She gave me a sideways look. “I got a place I like. It’s secret, but I decided to let you see it.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I kept quiet. We reached the American Legion Park and walked through the eucalyptus trees, past the place where Dodie had built her little fort. I looked under the trees for it. All that was left was a dried mud wall and a scattering of acorns.
“Your fort is almost gone,” I said.
“It wasn’t built to last.”
I thought back to that day when Dodie had told Geraldine she built it without a door so nobody else could get in. But something was different about Dodie today. She was taking me to her special place. She had opened a door, and I felt like she was letting me in.
We walked out of the park, into the shade of the orange groves, and all the way to the high cliff above the creek. It was irrigation day, and water rushed down the stone ditches, through openings in the sluice gates, and into the furrows among the trees.
“Remember that time we went to the picture show?” Dodie asked. She picked up a stick and squatted down, dragging it through one of the furrows, back and forth, muddying the water.
I squatted down beside her. “I remember,” I said, waiting for her to go on.
“When we saw the Fox Movietone News, it showed a picture of that man who wants to do away with all those people. What’s the word for that, Angie? The word for doing away with someone.”
I pictured the trainloads of Jews that Hitler shipped off to work camps. I had heard Daddy say they would be lucky to come out alive. And I remembered the voice on the newsreel. “Eliminate,” I told Dodie. “Hitler wants to eliminate all the Jewish people in Germany.”
“That’s it,” she said. “That’s exactly the word I was trying to remember. Hitler’s pretty bad, isn’t he?”
“He’s worse than bad. He’s terrible. Eddie says he’s the reason there’s a war in Europe. He says America might have to fight, too. But when he was in the grocery store, he overheard Mr. Flannery telling Reverend Adams that it’s not our battle.”
“What did Reverend Adams say to that?”
“He said evil is everybody’s battle and that man Hitler needs to be stopped.”
Dodie was quiet for a moment, then she said, “I think Reba Lu’s daddy is right. I think we should fight Hitler. And other countries should, too. I don’t get it, Angie. How can people turn their heads and let that man get away with doing terrible things to people?”
I didn’t have an answer. To tell the truth, I hadn’t thought much about it. I always felt safe at home in Messina. Europe was far away. Then I remembered how Hitler had invaded other countries. If he did come to America, he would bring a lot of trouble with him.
I thought about how Jefferson Clement had come to town, bringing trouble to Messina. Why did good folks put up with that? Was that the way people were putting up with Hitler, just ignoring him and hoping he’d go away?
I felt like I was getting a headache. If America couldn’t figure out what to do about the war in Europe, how were we supposed to know what do to about the bad thing that was happening in our little town?
Dodie kept dragging her stick through the muddy water. “Do you suppose I’m bad like that Hitler person because I want to eliminate somebody?”
“What are you talking about? Who in the world would you want to eliminate?”
She mumbled something I couldn’t hear. I nudged her with my elbow. “Come on, Dodie.”
She raised her head and looked right at me. Her lower lip trembled, but when she said the words, her voice was clear. “I wish I could eliminate Mr. Jefferson Clement.”
“You mean kill him?”
“I didn’t say that. I just want him to go away and not come back.”
She shivered and hugged herself, even though it was such a hot day.
“I thought you liked Mr. Clement because he pays you for ironing his shirts.”
“I changed my mind.” She was quiet for a few seconds. “He’s a real bad man. I got mad at my mama for chasing him off, but she was right, after all. He does things he shouldn’t ought to. I think that’s why Miss Emma’s afraid of him.”
“What kind of things?” I asked, even though I thought I knew.
“He watches until he sees me hanging out the clothes. Then he figures Mama’s asleep. He comes over and pretends to help me, but all he wants to do is put his hands on me.”
She stopped and looked at me. When I didn’t say anything, she yanked up her shirtsleeve and showed me an ugly purple bruise on her arm. “See what he did yesterday when I told him I was going to tell?”
“Oh, Dodie! That must have hurt. Do you suppose that’s what he did to Miss Emma?”
She stared at me. “Angie, you don’t get it. A bruise on my arm is a little thing compared to what he wants to do. He wants to touch … he wants to touch me where he hadn’t ought to.” Her voice cracked and she jabbed her stick furiously into the furrow, splashing mud on us both.
When she finally looked at me, I saw how red her face was, and her eyes were all watery. She rubbed the back of her arm across them and gave a loud sniff.
“Dodie, you have to tell your mother! If you don’t, I’ll tell my dad. He’ll do something about it!”
But that didn’t seem to be what Dodie wanted to hear. She got up and turned around without answering, then started walking along the edge of the grove.
“Dodie?” I called. I wanted to tell her I was sorry about her arm and what Mr. Clement had tried to do to her, but she walked fast and didn’t give me a chance. I followed her until we reached the clearing that led to the cliff above the creek bed.
We stood there a minute, together. I started to say something more about telling my dad and what he would do, but when I looked at her and saw her raising her face to the sun, her eyes closed and her head thrown back, I stopped. She seemed to be trying to put Jefferson Clement out of her mind, and I didn’t want to bring him back into our conversation.
“I like it when things are warm and bright,” she said. “Remember how I told you that sometimes I’m afraid of the dark?”
“Sometimes I am, too,” I admitted, thinking about that night when I camped out with Reba Lu and Geraldine.
I peered over the edge. “It’s a long way down there,” I said, glad to have something else to talk about.
“There’s a path,” Dodie said. “Follow me, and you’ll be all right.”
It wasn’t much of a path: more like a downhill skid through dirt and rocks. Dodie went first, bending low and inching her way, so she could hold on to the large rocks in the cliff wall. She reached the bottom and pumped both arms above her head. “Your turn!” she shouted.
I hated high places. They made me feel helpless. I imagined something was crooking a finger, beckoning, pulling me forward. I stepped over the edge, feeling for a foothold. A rock jutted out from the cliff, and I put my weight on it. It held me for a few seconds, then gave way and crashed down the incline. I slipped several feet, before I could grab hold of a dead limb poking out of the side of the cliff. My leg was stinging where I had scraped some of the skin off.
“Come on, Angie!” Dodie sounded like the captain of our fifth grade baseball team. “Just skid on down!”
I dug my heels into loose dirt and let go of the limb. Stones scattered as I took a few steps. I slipped and slithered down the steep slope, groping for footholds I never found. When I finally landed, I was sitting down.
“Yay, Angie!” Dodie yelled. Then she held out her hand to help me up. I thought for a second about the day she had put that same hand in my popcorn. Please, God, let it be clean, I prayed as I reached out and felt her skin against mine. I pulled myself up slowly, surprised that all my parts were still there.
“Nothing to it!” I lied.
We grinned at each other like we had just climbed down a mountain. I thought of that day at the beach when I’d shown Dodie how to jump the waves and ride a painted horse and dig for sand crabs. Now it was Dodie’s turn to share something new with me.
“Come on,” she said. “I have lots to show you.” She led the way, and I followed her.