That night, out on the back porch with Gus and Bertha, I saw the first star, twinkling over the treetops. I closed my eyes and wished like crazy.
“Making a wish?” Gus asked.
I felt myself blush. “No.”
Bertha nudged Gus. “Tell her about the time you wished your uncle Dean would disappear and then he did,” she said.
Gus flapped his hand at her. “Aw, now, Bertie. She don’t want to hear that boring ole story.” He rocked his chair, making the porch floor creak and groan.
While Bertha talked a blue streak and hardly ever sat still, Gus was quiet and easygoing, with a calm, slow way about him. He wore a baseball cap all day and half the night, his scraggly brown hair poking out from under it every which way. The bill of his cap was dark brown with dirt and greasy fingerprints.
“That there is Pegasus,” he said, pointing to a cluster of stars hovering way up over the top of the mountains in the distance.
“Gus should’ve been a scientist,” Bertha said. “He can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about stars and air and plants and water and weather and all that stuff.”
Gus let out a little pfft.
“He thinks I married him for his looks.” Bertha winked at me. “But I married him for his brains,” she said.
Gus laughed.
And then the most amazing thing happened. They both reached out at the exact same time and held hands. It was like somebody had said, “Okay, on the count of three, hold hands.” I’d never in my whole life seen Scrappy and Mama hold hands. Shoot, most of the time, they didn’t even look at each other.
I watched Gus and Bertha sitting there gazing at the night sky, the corners of their mouths turned up into contented smiles. Every now and then, Bertha looked dreamily over at Gus like he was a movie star and not some scraggly haired man who worked in a mattress factory over in Cooperville.
We stayed out there till it started to sprinkle again, a soft, cold rain that sent the cats at our feet darting inside.
I went to bed that night with my head swirling. I thought about Scrappy snoring away in the county jail and Mama staring up at the ceiling of her dark bedroom. I thought about Jackie, whispering gossip and painting her toenails with Carol Lee. I thought about Howard Odom with his up-down walk and his good-hearted family. And I thought about Gus and Bertha holding hands under the glow of Pegasus. And then I thought about my own pitiful self, laying there wondering if my wish would ever come true.
* * *
The next day, I wore Jackie’s old white majorette boots to school. I knew I’d made a mistake the minute I got on the bus. As I made my way down the aisle, some of those girls pointed at my boots, giggling and whispering. I felt my face burn and I glared at them. Howard motioned for me to sit next to him, but I flopped down in the seat behind him.
I spent the morning drawing on my arm with a blue marker and pretending to read. At recess, Howard tried and tried to get me to let him show me around the school.
“I’m your Backpack Buddy, remember?” he said.
I shook my head. “Forget it,” I said. “I’m not really interested. Besides, I’m not going to be here much longer.”
“Why not?”
I rolled my eyes. “I told you. I’m going back to Raleigh.”
“But what if your mama don’t get her feet on the ground?” he said.
Well, what the heck kind of question was that? I stomped away from him and plopped down under the cafeteria windows and glared at the kids playing soccer on the playground. Once or twice I glanced over at Howard. He was drawing circles in the dirt with his foot and looking all mopey.
When the bell rang, everybody scrambled to line up. A bunch of wild boys pushed and shoved their way in front of Howard and he didn’t even say anything. As I headed toward the line, a girl from my class named Audrey Mitchell waltzed right up to me and said, “Nice boots.” She smirked while her friends giggled behind her.
I felt Scrappy’s temper working its way from the tip of my toes to the top of my head. Hot as fire. Then I said, “Thanks. They’re good for kicking,” and I kicked her skinny shin. Hard.
The next few minutes were a blur of crying and hollering and tattling and then I found myself sitting in front of Mr. Mason, the principal. While he lectured about my inappropriate behavior, I studied the inky little stars and hearts I had drawn on my arm that morning.
Mr. Mason asked me if I knew that what I did was wrong and would I like it if somebody did that to me and a bunch of other questions I didn’t even care about.
I said “Yessir” and “No, sir” but I kept my eyes on my inky arm and clunked the heels of those majorette boots against the legs of my chair.
I shrugged when he said he was going to have to call Bertha and tell her what I’d done. Then I went back to my class and said I was sorry to Audrey Mitchell even though I wasn’t really, and that was how my second day of school in Colby went.
That afternoon on the bus, Howard ignored my laser thoughts again and made a beeline right for me. He dropped into the seat next to me.
“You should save me a seat, ’cause I think Backpack Buddies are supposed to sit together,” he said.
“That’s against the rules,” I said.
“I’m pretty sure you can save a seat for a Backpack Buddy.”
I rolled my eyes and looked out the window.
“Why’d you kick Audrey Mitchell?” Howard asked.
I told him how she had said “nice boots” with that smirk on her face. He shook his head and said, “Dang, Charlie, why you gotta get so mad about that? That ain’t nothing.”
I shot him a glare. Maybe it was nothing to him, but it was something to me. I almost told him about my fiery temper that I got from Scrappy but I didn’t. Instead, I told him how I got sent home from kindergarten the very first day for poking some boy with a pencil.
“Eraser end or pointy end?” Howard asked.
“Pointy.”
“Dang, Charlie.”
I shrugged. “I know. But I was mad.”
“About what?”
“He stuck his thumb right through my sandwich,” I said.
Howard shook his head again, making his red hair flop down over his glasses. “Here’s what you do from now on,” he said. “Every time you feel yourself starting to get mad, say ‘Pineapple.’”
“Pineapple?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“That’ll be like a code word to remind yourself to simmer down. Mama taught my little brother Cotton to say ‘rutabaga’ every time he gets the urge to draw on the wall.”
“Does it work?”
“Sometimes.”
That sounded like the dumbest thing I’d ever heard but I didn’t say so. We sat in silence as the bus made its way up the narrow mountain road. Every once in a while, the view out the window changed from woods, thick with pine trees and ferns and moss-covered rocks, to a wide-open view of the mountains stretching on forever in the distance. A smoky haze hovered over them, soft gray against the deep blue of the mountains.
“That’s why they’re called the Blue Ridge Mountains,” Gus had told me the first day I got to Colby. “’ Cause they’re blue.” Then he had gone on to explain how the color was because of something the pine trees released into the air. I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about, but I had nodded like I did.
When the bus got to Howard’s house, he grabbed his backpack and said, “Remember. Pineapple.”
I watched him and his brother go up the rickety steps of their front porch and disappear inside the house, letting the screen door slam with a bang behind them. Next to the front door was a ratty-looking couch covered with a bedspread. Wilted yellowing plants and dried-up flowers planted in coffee cans lined the edges of the porch. Maybe the Odoms’ hearts were so good that they didn’t care that they lived in such a sad-looking house.
The bus chugged and groaned up the winding road. I was thinking about what I was going to say to Bertha about my kicking incident when a commotion outside the window caught my eye.
Two dogs were fighting in a dirt driveway beside a cluster of trailers. One was small and black. The other one was brown and black and skinny as all get-out. A little girl was screaming and carrying on while an old man turned on a garden hose and aimed a hard spray of water at the skinny dog.
“Get outta here!” he hollered.
A woman ran out of one of the trailers and tried to grab the black dog while the skinny dog snapped and growled and then suddenly just took off running. He ran along the edge of the road beside the bus for a minute or two, his long ears flapping in the breeze. I pressed my face against the window and watched him lope along the side of the road and then turn and disappear into the woods.
When I got off at Gus and Bertha’s a few minutes later, I looked down at those majorette boots. Jackie had always looked so pretty in them but I looked dumb. Those girls were right to laugh at me.
That familiar mad feeling was settling over me like a blanket. But this time I was feeling mad at myself for being a loser that nobody wanted. I stomped my foot and then I kicked at gravel, sending it tumbling into the rhododendron bushes along the side of the driveway.
Then I whispered “Pineapple” before heading on up to Gus and Bertha’s.
I figured Bertha was gonna be mad at me for kicking that girl, but she surprised me by putting her arm around me and saying, “Tomorrow’s a new day.” Then she gave me a little squeeze and added, “Personally, I love those boots.”
She didn’t say one word about my inappropriate behavior. Mama would’ve hollered at me and reminded me for the umpteenth time that I was a troublemaker like Scrappy.
After supper that day, we had blueberry pie for dessert and I got to make my wish. If you cut off the pointed end of a slice of pie and save it for last, you can make a wish when you eat it. I had learned that from my cousin Melvin, who swore it had worked for him when his brother ran off and got married and left him with the bedroom all to himself.
I knew Gus and Bertha were watching me cut off that pointed piece and push it to the edge of my plate, but they didn’t say anything. Even Bertha had been kind of quiet during supper. Maybe she really was mad at me for kicking Audrey. Maybe she was thinking, The apple don’t fall far from the tree. Maybe that night in bed, she and Gus would whisper to each other how much I am like Scrappy and what in the world had they gotten themselves into when they agreed to let me stay with them.
After I ate that little pointed piece of pie and made my wish, I went out front to watch Gus do some weeding in the vegetable garden. A fluffy black cat rubbed against my legs, purring up a storm. I wrote my name in the dirt with a stick and then scribbled it out. There wasn’t one blade of grass in that yard, just dirt and rocks, with sprinkles of color here and there. Patches of wildflowers nestled around the clothesline posts. The pink blooms of a dogwood tree over by the driveway. A neat row of daffodils lined up like soldiers along the edge of the chicken-wire fence that surrounded the garden.
Gus whistled while he hoed around the tiny tomato plants, stepping carefully between the pole beans and zucchini that were just beginning to poke through the warm spring dirt. On my very first day in Colby, Bertha had said to Gus, “Let’s take Charlie on a tour of the garden!” So I had followed along behind them while they pointed out each little plant, telling me how the pole beans were gonna climb up the twine and the zucchini would have giant yellow flowers. I had nodded and said, “Oh,”’cause what else can you say about vegetables in a garden? But Gus? You would’ve thought that was the Garden of Eden out there the way he took care of it, examining each new leaf on the okra plants or moving a squash vine off of the walking path.
So while I scribbled in the red dirt, Gus whistled and hoed. Every now and then, he tugged on the bill of his cap or swatted at mosquitoes. I could hear Bertha in the kitchen talking to some of the cats while she fed them, scolding one of them for killing a bird. Telling another he was getting too fat.
I was about to go on back inside when something caught my eye. There was movement behind the tangle of shrubs that separated the yard from the woods. The black cat darted off, disappearing behind the shed over by the garden. I stood real still and squinted into the darkness of the woods. All of a sudden, a dog poked its head out from behind the bushes. A skinny brown-and-black dog with long, floppy ears. The same dog I’d seen fighting that afternoon!
He looked at me and cocked his head. I took one slow, tiptoeing step toward him. He ducked his head back a little, watching me. I took another step, and quick as lightning, he ran off into the woods.
“Dang it,” I said.
“You say something?” Gus called from the garden.
“There was a dog over there.” I pointed to the bushes.
“Brown and black? Floppy ears?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Did you see him?”
“No, but I’ve seen him plenty of times before.”
“Who does he belong to?”
Gus propped the hoe against the fence and sat in a lawn chair in the yard. “Just an ole wild stray,” he said. “Been hanging around here for months. Bertha keeps putting table scraps out for him. He don’t mind eating her meat loaf, but he don’t want nothing else to do with her.”
I looked toward the woods. “I bet I can catch him,” I said.
Gus took off his baseball cap and scratched his head. “That ole mutt is mighty skittish.”
“If I can catch him, can I keep him?”
“I think that dog would rather be a stray,” he said.
But I knew better. I knew what it felt like to be a stray, not having a home where somebody wanted you. And he was a fighter. Like me. That dog and I had a lot in common. I was suddenly overwhelmed with love for that skinny dog.
I made a solemn vow and promise to myself right then and there. That dog was going to be mine.
I thought I was glad when the weekend came ’cause I didn’t have to go to school, but then Bertha told me we were going to church on Sunday.
I hadn’t been to church since I was little. Scrappy never wanted any part of it, calling those people do-gooders and Bible-thumpers, but Mama took me and Jackie for a while. I didn’t remember much about it except Jackie whining and complaining on the way there until Mama slapped her legs and told her to hush up. But then Mama got too nervous to drive and wouldn’t take off her bathrobe or even comb her hair, so we stopped going.
When I walked into Bertha’s kitchen on Sunday morning, she looked me up and down and said, “Oh, dear.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “Do you have a dress?”
I looked down at my jeans that were too short and my T-shirt that used to be Jackie’s and shook my head.
Bertha flapped her hand at me. “Well, that’s okay. We’ll go shopping this week.”
Then Gus came in the kitchen and I didn’t hardly even recognize him. He had on a coat and tie! Instead of his usual muddy boots, he wore lace-up black shoes buffed and shiny. He could’ve passed for one of those fancy rich bankers over in Raleigh except for the garden dirt under his fingernails and his hair squashed flat from his baseball cap.
He sat at the kitchen table and Bertha kissed his cheek. “Well, look at you,” she said, making him blush and swat her hand off of his shoulder. He kept pulling at his collar and wiping sweat off the back of his neck.
After breakfast, we headed down the mountain to Rocky Creek Baptist Church. When I got inside, I knew right away why Bertha had said “Oh, dear” when she saw me that morning. The other girls in church wore dresses. I couldn’t look anybody in the eye, knowing my face was beet red and my jeans were all wrong.
I sat on the hard wooden pew, sandwiched between Gus and Bertha. While the organist played church music, more and more people filed in, smiling and nodding at one another. Then Bertha poked me and whispered, “There’s the Odoms.”
I glanced up to see Howard and his family carrying their Bibles and making their way to the pew across the aisle. Five boys with slicked-down hair, poking each other and clomping too loud in their Sunday shoes. Their mama chatted with folks, asking about their sick grandmas and making on over their babies while their redheaded daddy mopped his face with a handkerchief.
After a prayer and a hymn, the kids had to go to their Sunday school classes. Imagine my surprise when I got to my class and there was Audrey Mitchell. She looked at me all wide-eyed, like I was a Martian right off of a spaceship. I sat as far away from her as I could, and then Howard came in with his up-down walk and sat next to me.
Our Sunday school teacher was a gray-haired, wrinkly-faced woman named Mrs. Mackey. She didn’t waste one minute telling everybody that my name was Charlie Reese and please welcome me to their church family. Then she taught us a song called “Good Old Noah.” Howard sang louder than anybody and, personally, I thought it was a little embarrassing, but nobody else seemed to pay him any mind.
After that, Mrs. Mackey told us we were going to play a game called Bible Detective. She would read questions from her Bible Detective cards and whenever you answered one right, you got a Bible buck. When you got enough Bible bucks, you could cash them in for a prize.
While she read the questions, the boys fidgeted and the girls whispered and giggled in their dresses, while I kept quiet in my ugly jeans.
How many braids were in Samson’s hair?
Name the man who went down into a pit on a snowy day to kill a lion.
In what book, chapter, and verse can we read about a winner of a beauty contest becoming a queen?
Howard’s hand shot up every time, but I knew for sure I was never going to win any Bible bucks.
After Sunday school, all the grownups and kids gathered in the fellowship hall. Bertha paraded me around like I was a beauty queen, introducing me to everybody and making on over me and saying how lucky she and Gus were to have me staying with them. People nodded and said, “Ain’t that nice?” and stuff like that, but I bet they were wondering why my own mama and daddy couldn’t take care of me and didn’t I know girls don’t wear jeans to church?
When Bertha introduced me to Howard’s mama, she hugged me and said Howard had told her about me. Then she craned her neck, looking around the room. “Mr. Odom must be outside. And I’ll never catch those wild boys of mine long enough to introduce you.”
Some of the Odom boys chased each other around the room, their ties loose and their shirttails flapping. They grabbed brownies off of paper plates while Howard showed everybody his Bible bucks.
“But you come on by the house anytime, okay?” Mrs. Odom said.
Bertha grinned at me. “Now wouldn’t that be nice, Charlie?”
I nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am,”’cause I knew that’s what I was supposed to say.
When we finally climbed into the car and headed back up the mountain toward home, I scanned the woods and yards along the way, hoping I’d see that stray dog again, but I didn’t. What I did see, though, was a truck full of hay. Jackie’s friend Casey told me if you count to thirteen when you see a truck full of hay, you can make a wish. So, of course, that’s exactly what I did.
* * *
Things at school seemed to get worse every day.
My homework papers came back all marked up by Mrs. Willibey in red pencil, with notes like “See me” and “Try again.”
Sometimes I didn’t even do my homework. It seemed like a waste of time since I wasn’t going to be there much longer. Once in a while Bertha asked me if I had homework, and I was pretty good at just shrugging and changing the subject.
Besides, I was used to getting marked-up papers like that ’cause back in Raleigh, I wasn’t exactly Student of the Year. Jackie was the only one who ever fussed at me for not going to school or not doing my homework, but I reminded her that she was not my mother so she should leave me alone. When my teacher called the house to tell Mama how bad I’d done on my math test or ask why I hadn’t turned in my book report, Mama would holler and carry on for about five minutes and then she’d throw up her skinny arms and heave a big sigh before she said, “What’s the use?” Then she’d shuffle out of the room in her bedroom slippers, muttering about how she didn’t deserve that aggravation.
At least in Raleigh, I had friends at school, but here, when I sat at a table in the cafeteria, girls made faces like they smelled something bad and slid their trays away from me. Most days, I pretended like I had a stomachache and spent the afternoon in the nurse’s office drawing more stars and hearts on my arm with a marker.
At recess, Howard followed me around, reminding me he was my Backpack Buddy and asking questions a mile a minute.
“Did you ever visit your daddy in jail?”
“Why ain’t your sister here, too?”
“You want some of my Bible bucks?”
Sometimes I answered him and sometimes I didn’t.
The thing about Howard was, everything just rolled right off him. It seemed like nothing bothered him one little bit. It was clear that nobody at school wanted much to do with him, but he didn’t seem to mind. His brother Dwight was always surrounded by cussing, punching, ball-tossing, fist-bumping boys, but Howard never joined them. A couple of times when I rode into town with Gus and Bertha, I’d see his older brothers, Burl and Lenny, tossing a football or shooting hoops with their friends, but Howard would be sitting on the steps scribbling in a notebook or over by the garage fiddling with his bicycle.
Bertha had commented about him one day when we drove by. “That poor boy is too much of a loner,” she said.
“Nothing wrong with that,” Gus said.
Bertha shook her head. “Not for a child. Children need friends.” Bertha sighed. “I don’t get it. He’s just as sweet as he can be.”
“I bet it’s ’cause of his up-down walk,” I said.
“Well, that’s mean,” she said. She turned around to face me. “You’re going to make so many new friends here in Colby, Charlie. I just know it.”
I stared out the window and pretended like I wasn’t even listening to her go on about all the things I could do. Like Girl Scouts and 4-H. She told me about her friend Jonelle who lived in Fairview and had a daughter my age. We could visit them some Saturday if I wanted to or maybe we could go to the mall down in Asheville. On and on she went, talking as if my life in Colby was going to be like living in Disney World.
“You’re gonna talk that girl’s head plum off, Bertie,” Gus said.
Bertha laughed and slapped him playfully on the arm.
“Where do you think that dog is?” I asked Gus.
“Could be anywhere,” he said. “That mutt gets around.”
I’d been looking everywhere for that stray dog. I’d seen him twice since that day he’d come to Gus and Bertha’s, but both times he darted off into the woods when he saw me.
“He sure loves my meat loaf, I can tell you that,” Bertha said. “He licks that pan clean and then hightails it outta there so fast I hardly get so much as a glimpse of him.”
I leaned back against the seat and sighed. I bet I was never gonna catch that dog. And what if I did? Could I really keep him? Mama would probably have a hissy fit. But I bet Scrappy would call from jail and tell her to stop her yammering and let me have a dog if I wanted one.
Then, as we were turning onto the main road into town, I saw a black horse out in a field, eating grass and swishing its tail at flies. I shook my fist at it three times and made my wish. That was the rule for black-horse wishing. If you see a white horse, just make a wish. But for a black horse you have to shake your fist at it three times. I’d learned that one from Scrappy, which made me a little skeptical, but I did it anyway.
Shook my fist and made my wish.