Squashed Read online

  Spider heard Ralphie’s truck and started shrieking. Ralphie threw him a hunk of beef jerky, which quieted him right down. Justin stood silently before Max like he was at a shrine.

  “You did this,” whispered Justin, dwarfed by Max’s shadow.

  “It was nothing,” I offered humbly.

  Ralphie got some good shots of me and Max, including some action sequences where I chased away a crow, which, Justin said, gave the feeling of the constant battle of the patch. Justin said it was one of the most interesting interviews he’d ever done and that he was going home to write it up tonight, he was so excited. Even Ralphie seemed impressed with Max and gave Spider another piece of beef jerky and scratched his neck in friendship.

  “One more thing, Ellie,” said Justin, “for the record. Do you think you’re going to win?”

  Now, this was a trick question. If I said yes and lost, I’d look like a jerk and be on the record, and if I said no I’d lose my competitive edge, not to mention my newly found fame, which I was getting real used to. So I said what Mr. Soboleski always said before a big game he wasn’t sure his team could pull off. “We’re going to go out there and do what we have to do,” I said, and looked off into the sunset. Justin nodded solemnly, Ralphie gunned his motor and screeched away in a cloud of dust.

  The latest from Spears was that Dennis hotly denied he was the pumpkin thief, despite being caught red-handed. Dennis’s cousin swore this was the first time they’d tried to steal a vegetable and they didn’t want to get blamed for all the others the sheriff was trying to pin on them, going back to World War II, when, Dennis insisted, he wasn’t even alive yet, and even if he was, he couldn’t drive. Spears told Mrs. Lemming that the sheriff slapped ten other indictments on the boys and was whistling around the station doing little jigs with his bad back. Now he could go into town with his head high and not get the Bronx cheer blasted at him from Mannie Plummer’s sister, who sat on the porch of Kay’s Koffee Kup, his favorite snack shop, when she wasn’t picketing the station. Mannie Plummer said she recognized Dennis’s truck as the truck that pulled away from her house under fire on that tragic, fateful morning. Ed Meegan said he’d seen Dennis’s cousin in Circleville trying to sell a huge squash to a funeral director. Mr. Soboleski wondered if Dennis could be paroled by spring in time for the opening game.

  Wes met me outside Miss Moritz’s class. He was carrying his clarinet case and bad news. Worse even than the news I was about to give Miss Moritz regarding my midsemester paper, “What I Would Do Differently If I Were General Patton,” due today, which I had not started. Given General Patton’s personality, this could take all year.

  Grace McKenna, a pacifist, could not relate to war and had written only two paragraphs. She said Patton did pretty well under the circumstances with all that shooting and Field Marshal Montgomery getting all that press. She said we should all try to get along and then there would be no more wars. The one thing she would have changed was Patton’s famous weather prayer. Grace didn’t feel battle should be easy and that demanding a prayer be written by the chaplain for good weather was unsportsmanlike conduct. God, Grace said, sends the weather He wants, and it is our responsibility to accept it.

  Wes put his hand on my shoulder glumly and delivered his news. “Freezing rain,” he announced, “turning to hail. Expected this weekend.”

  “I’m finished,” I said.

  “Not necessarily,” Wes answered. “We can cover him with a hundred blankets and—”

  “Cyril’s squash will freeze,” I said, which he knew already, “which will preserve it till the Weigh-In. Max will stop growing. I’m dead.”

  Wes looked at me hard: “You have to keep trying, Ellie.”

  “I’m too tired.”

  I slumped against the wall. The bell had rung and I hadn’t noticed. Miss Moritz asked Wes if he would like to join the class or go to his scheduled period, which made most of the class snicker and me turn red and Wes run off to Spanish with Señor “Ted” Morales. I crawled into my seat as Miss Moritz walked from desk to desk collecting midsemester Patton papers.

  “Well?” she said, poised before me.

  “It’s almost done,” I lied.

  She regarded me coldly. “Almost doesn’t count.”

  Tell me about it. You could kill yourself for an entire season, grow the greatest pumpkin of your whole life, and get blasted out of the box by hail, freezing rain, and a brain-dead sludge. If I were General Patton I would have had a million weather prayers commissioned by as many chaplains as I could find just in case God was feeling patriotic.

  Richard and his mother, my aunt Peg, were staying overnight because their water heater broke and flooded their basement. Richard had cleaned most of it up but Wallace, the repairman, couldn’t make it until Saturday afternoon, and the prospect of a damp house with no hot water did not thrill Aunt Peg. She was getting around pretty well with her crutches now, most of the pain was gone from her face, and she was laughing and carrying on just like she used to before the accident.

  Aunt Peg was a beautiful woman with dark brown hair and aqua eyes, the kind of woman that men always looked at and wanted to be around. Aunt Peg was not good at picking men and had given them up on several occasions, having had a rotten marriage to Richard’s father (my mother’s brother, Ken), who was a handsome gambler and a world-class chump. She had a three-week engagement to Spears, who, she said, was a fine assistant deputy and who should probably just concentrate on that. Aunt Peg believed in being kind and that the words we speak on earth will follow us wherever we go. Everyone knew that Spears was still in love with Aunt Peg. Nana said men named Ken were always trouble.

  I made pot roast with tomato ginger gravy, mashed potatoes, tossed salad with mustard vinaigrette, and brown sugar apple cake. Nana came for dinner, too, and said it was the best pot roast she had ever tasted. Richard had thirds and Aunt Peg said I’d make a wonderful wife someday but to watch all men carefully because they could turn on a dime. It was a fine evening surrounded by my family. Everyone clucked over Max except Dad. It was just what Max and I needed, because tomorrow the hail was coming.

  A few cowardly growers like Gloria Shack were cutting their pumpkins off the vine tonight, even though it was still reasonably warm, and bringing them inside for safety before the hail hit. Wes had dropped off nine blankets for Max and was coming over tomorrow with more. Nana, Richard, and I played Scrabble against Dad and Aunt Peg as Max braced himself for the worst. It was Friday night, and nobody wanted to go to sleep. We played until well past midnight and ate the entire brown sugar apple cake and two bags of barbecued potato chips.

  I was about to get a triple word score for “freezing” with a triple letter on the “z,” which would cinch my team’s win and destroy Dad’s earlier score with “quagmire” when Spider shrieked. Spider shrieking was nothing new, but this was a shriek followed by nothing, which didn’t figure, because Spider always shrieked in triplicate. I got up, and Richard pushed me down. Richard had finally found a place for “macho” on a double word with a double letter on the “c” and wasn’t feeling patient. “Freezing” was possibly one of the great Scrabble moves of all time, and I shoved it in Dad’s face as Aunt Peg groaned in bitter defeat.

  Then I heard the sound. I dismissed it at first because Spider didn’t respond, but it was a low-pitched hum, like the chugging of an engine. I heard it again and went to the back window. Spider lay on the ground licking something, probably a smelly old slipper. Max sat sturdily in his patch. The noise had stopped. Strange. Richard was playing “macho” with great fanfare when I saw it. It was big and reddish and pushed by three hooded figures. It didn’t register at first what was really happening, but then everything came into focus as I watched the truck back into my patch and inch toward my squash!

  Pumpkin thieves!

  I screamed for Dad and Richard, grabbed a rolling pin, and pushed out the door. A ski-masked figure stood over Max with a huge knife, ready to cut his vine. I lunged toward him,
screeching. He turned, shocked, and dropped his knife, but that wasn’t good enough. Max’s automatic sprinkling system controls were at my feet. I cranked the dial to high and let the lashing water nail him good. He covered his face as the hard water hit and I raced toward him shaking my rolling pin, screaming like a soldier gunning down the enemy.

  The rotten thieves were shouting to each other to get moving, get out of here, when the cavalry came on the scene. Dad tore past me, running after two of them. The driver went for the truck but was stopped short by a perfectly thrown baseball hitting him square on the shoulder. He fell to the ground as his buddies ran for the street, but they were no match for Dad. His long legs made up speed as the villains tripped over my compost mixture bags trying to escape. Dad grabbed one by the hood and hit another with a bag of pearlite and threw them on the ground. I shoved a hose at the drenched robber and caught him in the face.

  “If you move,” I shouted, holding the rolling pin over him as Richard ran up beside me with his bat. I couldn’t think of anything more scary to say, so I glared at him with hate. Streams of water crashed around us, but I stayed tough. Spider was barking furiously now, finally getting the point.

  “Bad man, Spider!” I shouted, pointing at Max’s enemy. Nana turned off the sprinkler and charged through the patch, shaking my best sauté pan over her head, shouting the law was coming and if anybody moved, she’d bang him good. Dad stood over his prisoners and didn’t have to say anything because he was 6’6”. Aunt Peg hobbled on the porch with her crutches and said Spears was on the way like it was the worst news of her life.

  “Are you all right, Ellie?” Dad shouted.

  “I’m okay, Dad.”

  Richard told our prisoner that in Rock River they burned pumpkin thieves at the stake in the middle of town in broad daylight. I wiped the water from my face as my enemy shook with terror.

  “You,” I spat, “are a rotten, moldy creep!” The thief sighed. I glared at Spider. “This,” I asked, “is the pumpkin thieves’ worst nightmare?”

  Spider licked the thief’s hand. “I think you tamed him, Ellie,” Richard said. “See. You are a dog person.”

  A siren ricocheted from the north up Bud DeWitt Memorial Drive, growing louder as Spider shrieked his warning. “Thank you, Spider,” I spat. “But I think they’re on our side.” Spears and the sheriff marched across the yard, guns ready. Spears grinned and waved at Aunt Peg, who hobbled quickly away.

  “Take your ski mask off, son,” the sheriff directed my robber, but he didn’t move. “Off!” ordered the sheriff.

  Slowly the robber stood on his feet. His hands pulled the mask to his nose. Then he threw it off and stared at the ground.

  Nana said, “Oh, my.”

  Richard said he couldn’t believe it and dropped his bat.

  Spears gasped.

  The sheriff shook his head sadly and pulled out his handcuffs.

  Aunt Peg said she might take a nice walk around the neighborhood.

  I looked at my enemy cold in the face and I guess I should have figured.

  There in the mud and the slop stood Mrs. Lemming’s rotten grandson Ralphie! Ralphie, who had heard all my secrets, checked out my property, befriended my dog, taken pictures of my good side! Ralphie turned to his uncle Spears and said, “Look, it’s not what you think.” Spider, noble guard dog, wagged his tail and pulled a bag of beef jerky from Ralphie’s wet pocket unashamed. Aunt Peg hobbled upstairs and locked herself in the guest room. Max seemed to shiver as a cold, wet wind blew in from the east.

  It was up for grabs as to which band had stolen more pumpkins, Dennis’s or Ralphie’s. No one was making any predictions, and Spears was staying quiet. Arresting a nephew wasn’t an experience every lawman gets to have, and Spears was taking it real hard, but not as hard as Mrs. Lemming, who had drawn her chintz curtains in disgrace and refused to come out of her house. Mannie Plummer said it was a dark day for the Lemming family and left a cranberry strudel on Mrs. Lemming’s screened-in porch so she’d know no one blamed her and so the sneaky raccoon that drove Mrs. Lemming crazy couldn’t get at it either.

  Penny Penstrom, the sheriff’s secretary/dispatcher, called Nana to say that for the first time in history the jail was full. Spears, she said, couldn’t take Ralphie’s mournful wails, and the sheriff felt that eight robbers in two cells was pushing Fate. Ralphie’s father showed up at 3:00 A.M., paid his bail, and dragged Ralphie home by his nose hairs. Ralphie’s mother would have come, but she collapsed in the driveway from shame and was helped to the couch by her only good son, Butchie. Three other robbers, all age eighteen, were moved to Circleville. Dennis’s father told the sheriff to keep him. Penny said this was a story that would make Rock River proud and that my incredible cool under pressure should be recognized. Dennis, she reported, was blaming all squash stealing on Ralphie, who was blaming all squash stealing on Dennis. The sheriff was treating himself to a two-hour breakfast at Kay’s Koffee Kup and thinking about running for mayor.

  I had been up all night guarding Max, except for two hours when Richard wrapped himself in a blanket and sat in the patch with his bat. Richard was sleeping on the living-room couch, and I was fixing cornbread and Canadian bacon when Gordon Mott, publisher of the Rock River Clarion, an extremely important, big-deal newspaper, stuck his head in my kitchen and said, “You’re hot news, kid. Did you know that?”

  I was about as shocked as a person could be but I pulled myself together, said, “Of course I know that,” flipped a piece of Canadian bacon, and missed the griddle.

  Dad came down, and he and Gordon Mott sat on the back porch. Soon, Gordon Mott said, the whole state would know about me and Max and Ralphie’s despicable trick because mine was the kind of news story that people ate up. Gordon Mott knew these things because he used to be the managing editor of the Chicago Tribune before he had a beard and before he took early retirement at forty-six “due to five peptic ulcers and cringing, riveting anxiety.” He bought the Rock River Clarion two years ago and promised to keep his eyes on world events but to print only news that was non-ulcer-producing.

  “Your story’s got everything, kid,” he told me, shoving his photographer in Max’s direction. “Action, courage, love, death—”

  “No one’s died, sir—”

  “Death comes in many forms, kid. Trust me on this.”

  Gordon Mott was rich and carefree, having done very well indeed in the stock market during what he called his “Chicago period,” when people called him “Gordo.” He now lived on the scenic banks of the Rock River in a fifteen-room house with his third wife, Laura, who was someday going to bake the world’s largest pumpkin pie and cinch the title in the Guinness Book of World Records. His only daughter, Marsha, collected puréed pumpkin for her mother, got straight A’s, and really missed Chicago.

  “Okay, kid,” said Gordon Mott, positioning me behind Max and walking back and forth like a great guru seeking the meaning of life. “Tell me what happened last night.”

  “We were playing Scrabble—”

  Gordon Mott scrunched up his face and shook his head. “From the heart, kid. From the heart.” I told him from the heart. The agony, the terror, the desperation, the sprinkler.

  “Nice touch with the sprinkler,” Gordon Mott offered. “Makes a great close.” He was glowing in the sunshine, a tough man who’d found a tender story. The photographer motioned me against the backdrop of the gathering storm clouds and told me to look into the wind.

  “It gets me right here,” Gordon Mott said, indicating his stomach. I nodded. Dad nodded. It got us there, too. He circled Max, his face lost in headlines. “It’s a story of America at its best,” he cried. “Tough and unrelenting—triumphant against the odds—a family pulling together.” He slapped his stomach: “That’s what sells papers. Those poor slobs in Chicago think all people want is bad news. I spent seventeen years behind a news desk. What’d I get? Inner peace? World vision? I got wars, famine, and heartbreak. I got ulcers enough to count. Bad news
gives you ulcers. Trust me on this, kid.”

  Mr. Mott said he was going to write a story such as the world had never seen and that when he got through, Rock River would be on the map and I would have put it there. “No pressure, kid, but what’re your chances of snagging this Weigh-In?” I told him about Cyril and Big Daddy. “If you’ve got any miracles to work on the vegetable,” he said, “I’d start now. Everybody loves a winner. America doesn’t do second place unless it’s absolutely unavoidable.” Then Gordon Mott climbed into his silver BMW and sped off in a cloud of dust.

  I sat with Max in the field, considering our newfound fame. “We’re a hit, Max,” I said. “You think Cyril and Big Daddy could win the heart of the entire state? Not a chance, Max. They haven’t got it”—I patted my stomach—“here, where it counts. Trust me on this.”

  Dad brought a plate of Canadian bacon and cornbread out to the patch on a tray like it was room service. “Well.” He beamed, smiling at Max.

  He’d never smiled at Max before, and this was a grin so big it made me nervous. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Old Abe patted Max’s vine and said, “That’s a fine vegetable you have there, Ellie.”

  I said, “Huh?” as Old Abe, cool and pressed, now sat in the dirt like a regular guy. “You’re sitting in the dirt, Dad.”

  “Yes, dear, I know.”

  “You hate dirt.”

  Dad smiled, ate a circle of bacon, and handed me one. “I think,” said Dad, “I’ve been very wrong about things.” I was quiet because Dad was never wrong, according to him. “It occurred to me,” Dad said, “that what you’ve done with Max here is most astonishing and everyone seems to know it except me.”

  I checked Dad’s pupils. They were normal. He ran his fingers through the dirt like he was touching it for the first time. Spider chased a woodchuck behind the shed and gave up when he found an old slipper.