Harry Sue Read online

  “Ah, but the technology exists for you to be Matisse.”

  She hopped out of bed. “My name is Anna Sorenson. I have a degree in art education, am licensed in therapeutic massage, and am currently finishing up my course work at the Borne-Benson School of Chiropractic.

  “But right now,” she said, smiling happily, “I need to check you for bedsores.”

  For the second time she slid her fingers under the bedcover.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked from my place against the wall.

  Anna covered her mouth with her hands and backed away from the bed, her eyes wide in surprise, mocking me.

  “Well, hello there,” she said after a minute. “You must be the other fugitive from this game we call life. The one. The only. Harry Sue Clotkin.” She stuck out her hand, real friendly.

  I looked at the ground. I wasn’t about to shake hands with her.

  “When will Beau be back?” I asked.

  “Not today. Of that we can be certain.”

  And as if that settled everything, Anna continued to probe Homer’s body, her hands moving beneath the cover like some kind of alien. Both Homer and I stared at them with disgust.

  I mean, think about it. Sure, he couldn’t feel a thing, but wouldn’t you be disgusted if some crazy lady you never met started running her hands south of your belly button?

  Anna didn’t seem to notice us at all. She looked like she was playing an instrument, her face had such a look of fierce concentration.

  After a minute, she said, “What do we got to work with here, Homer, my boy?”

  Homer didn’t answer. His look said: Let me do my own time.

  “Is he always this uncooperative?” Anna asked me.

  I straightened and made two fists, though I kept my arms at my sides.

  “I think you better go, Anna Sorenson,” I said, taking a step forward. “Homer doesn’t want you here.”

  “I think you better help,” Anna said, tossing me what looked like a tube of toothpaste from the pocket of her dress. “Your friend here has skin like tissue paper. It has to be protected.

  “Now, Homer, I’m not going anywhere until you answer my question. What still works?”

  Homer looked right back at Anna Sorenson. He drilled her with his eyes. Then he delivered the classic quadriplegic gesture of disrespect.

  He stuck out his tongue.

  What happened next is a little hard to describe. Anna Sorenson proceeded to use the metal rail on the bed like a step stool. Before we knew it, she had leapt from the top of the rail to hang from the crossbeam in the ceiling. She stuck out her tongue and wagged it back and forth. She whipped her legs around like an eggbeater. We could see right up her dress to her underwear. It was loose and white with little frilly stuff around the leg holes, like old ladies wear. Stuff was flying from her pockets: roles of adhesive, tweezers, a stethoscope, a little Sesame Street watch.

  I was frozen in panic, sure she would fall right on top of Homer. But she didn’t. She dropped to the floor and stood there, staring at us and panting. After she caught her breath, she stood up straight, put her hand on her heart, and said, just like a TV announcer:

  “A tongue is a terrible thing to waste.”

  I knew I had to help Homer. But the bed was between us. She would see my move coming from a long way off.

  “And now, Homer, for something completely different …” She pulled off the bedcover with a snap. “I’m gonna teach your girlfriend about flexion.”

  I tensed. She wasn’t going to teach me anything.

  “C’mon, Harold,” she said, patting the bed. “Over here.”

  “Give me one good reason,” I said.

  Anna looked up at me and sighed. I was giving her my “somewhere, somehow, when you least expect it, I will exact my punishment” look, only instead of taking her breath away, like it did Violet’s, she yawned.

  “You two are a piece of work, you know that? Okay, how about this?”

  She began talking very slowly, just the way I did when I wanted the crumb snatchers to pick something up.

  “Your friend here has to stimulate his skin. Normally, at his age, he might be trying to grab a girl’s behind, pinch a pack of gum, change the trucks on his skateboard, but as you can see”—she held out her big paddle hands, gesturing toward Homer’s still body—“it ain’t likely.

  “So if we don’t help along his circulation with flexing and pointing …”

  She picked up one of Homer’s arms and fell to concentrating again. There was something about the way she moved his arm, bending and stretching, bending then stretching, gentle and fluid, never exactly stopping, that made me take notice. Something was telling me that Anna Sorenson was good at what she did.

  Very good.

  “Without stimulation, his skin will start tearing like a bunch of your granny’s old silk panty hose. Maybe it’s me, but I figured that while the two of you are hiding out from the world up here, you could at least do your part to keep our Homer from tearing at the seams.”

  Her speech was over, but I didn’t move. I wasn’t at all sure what to do. I knew Homer had to be moved around so he didn’t get bedsores. Think about it. He couldn’t move on his own. Ever. At all. So he had to be turned like a piece of meat in a marinade or a potted plant that needs all sides to face the sun. I knew his skin had to have air.

  She put me in a bad place, you know? Homer was my road dog. I couldn’t let anything bad happen to him.

  “When Beau came, he turned him to his side,” I told her, mumbling my words to show I wasn’t giving her respect.

  Anna Sorenson cupped her hand behind her ear and listened to me. She looked again at Homer’s body and bent real close, her nose almost touching his thigh.

  “Sorry to say this, but your friend Beau is a hack.”

  Homer threw me a quick look. What was that supposed to mean? Hacks were guards as far as we knew. Enemies. Beau had taught us the ropes, the joint jive, the convict’s code. Beau was not the enemy.

  “Harry Sue, I’m willing to bet you’re the kind of woman for whom seeing is believing,” she went on. “So come and take a gander.”

  I looked at Homer and he nodded. I walked over to her side of the bed.

  “Sure, he needs exposure to air. Skin needs that. But look at this color here.”

  I forced myself to look at Homer’s thin legs. Atrophy. That’s what it’s called. When you don’t use the muscles, they just fade away. His legs looked like a couple of plastic plumbing pipes lying there. Anna was pointing to a spot on his thigh that looked like a big bruise.

  “That’s mottling,” she said. “That means there’s not enough oxygen on either side, for the skin or the blood. When that happens, the skin gets stale and it dies.”

  Anna Sorenson replaced the cover gently and looked me up and down.

  “You’re strong enough, that’s for certain. Otherwise you couldn’t haul your skinny rear up that rope. If you weren’t so crooked, you might aspire to the fine career of a home health aide yourself. But even the Hunchback of Notre Dame could push Homer here around in a wheelchair, don’t you think? He can’t weigh much more than a scarecrow.”

  Anna sat down on the bed, swinging her legs back and forth.

  “I’m coming back, you know,” she said. “Day after tomorrow.”

  She scooped her belongings together and stuffed them back into her bulging front pockets.

  “And we will practice flexion.”

  With one foot, Anna Sorenson kicked open the hatch. She sat on the edge, her legs dangling in space.

  “In the meantime, Homer,” she said, “I got a crazy idea.”

  Right before she dropped to the rope, she smiled that crooked smile again and put it out there:

  “Live.”

  Chapter 15

  After the hatch smacked shut, Homer and I stared at each other in silence. There was that grinding noise again and I peeked out to see a beat-up orange Volvo spinning out on the gravel driveway, s
pitting up dirt and dust and rocks on Mrs. Dinkins’s little strip of flower garden.

  “I thought she got here on a broom,” I said quietly, resting my hands on the metal rail. “You okay?”

  To my surprise, Homer smiled. “There’s only one name for her,” he said, his eyes wide.

  I nodded in agreement. In the joint, she’d be classified a category J: crazy as a loon.

  “J-Cat,” we said together. I took his hand and stroked it.

  “Sorry about letting her disrespect you,” I said. “I didn’t know how to start something up here. Maybe I can get your mom to call the agency and fire her.”

  “Don’t say anything yet.”

  “Why? She’s a buster, Homes.”

  Homer pressed his head against the pillow and rubbed at an itch.

  “She’s so crazy, Harry Sue, she just might be able to find my rock.”

  When he mentioned the rock, my heart sank like those two things had been tied together. The idea had snagged him and if it took hold, if he swallowed it the way a fish does a steel hook, he would be caught fast.

  You can’t hold out hope, dangle it in front of his nose like that, and then yank it away without serious consequences. I know this from the past.

  “Don’t look like that,” he said. “I know I can’t take back … what happened. I’m just curious is all. About what happens when things collide and how energy can flow …” Homer broke off there and pressed his lips together, willing himself not to cry.

  It was the picture he had of himself at the bottom of Lake Michigan, Fish—that we both had—of the energy seeping out of him forever that made him so sad.

  Should I believe what he said? Just curiosity? My instincts told me no. I still remember the days at the hospital after they stabilized him. And the tests they put him through.

  “Concentrate, Christopher. Give it your best shot.”

  There was an army of them in pastel pantsuits and khakis. Everybody had a different way to unlock his motivation. They acted like he could will himself to move again.

  There was the pretty one with the soft southern accent. “I think you can try a little harder, Mr. Dinkins. Just try? For me?”

  And the bodybuilder who barked out commands to the sound track of Fame.

  And the retired schoolteacher who made up a different acronym for Homer, depending on how he performed.

  “I think we’ll call you IAN today, which, of course, stands for ‘inactivity achieves nothing,’ Mr. Dinkins.”

  Homer was all over the map. He believed them. He cursed them. He wanted me to take ‘em down. In the end, he just couldn’t let them in anymore. He had to put up a big old wall around his broken self.

  And finally, finally they went away.

  Beau just let Homer do his time. He didn’t try to make him do any special exercises. Just living through the day had got to be the biggest challenge Homer was up to facing.

  That’s why I wanted this J-Cat far away from him. If I could, I would shoot her out of a cannon, send her back where she came from, melt her in a puddle of big ugly sundress.

  “Harry Sue,” Homer said quietly, drawing me back into the room with him. He was smiling. He looked up and to the right, asking me with his eyes to move a curl that had fallen over one of them, making him blink. I pinched it with two fingers and moved it back, then I let my whole hand smooth that shiny hair—just to make sure it stayed in place.

  “Harry Sue, get out your notepad. I know how we’re going to find your mom.”

  My hand left Homer’s head to cover my mouth.

  “For real?” I managed to whisper.

  The whole time I was trying to find my mom, I believed with all my heart that my mom was trying to find me. I don’t know why. How does Dorothy know that Aunt Em and Uncle Henry want her back again? How does she know they didn’t find some other orphan to haul out to their new house on the prairie to handle the chores while she was gone?

  I had evidence in my notepad. I put down every little thing, just hoping that all together it could make the case that Granny was doing her best to keep my Mary Bell from me.

  Didn’t Granny blame everything on Mary Bell? She blamed her for stealing Garnett. She blamed her for having the baby that made him drop out of community college. That’s right, the same baby that got him locked up. She even blamed Mary Bell’s genes for being so strong that, upon seeing me, most folks couldn’t figure out what Garnett had to do with it. I looked that much like my mother. But most of all, she blamed Mary Bell for what happened to Garnett on the inside.

  I believe that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Granny Clotkin was nut up. What happened to Garnett was my fault, Fish. His dying the way he did happened because of me, not my Mary Bell.

  Walking back from Homer’s house that day, I was full, not just of J-Cat, but of Homer’s news, too. Another idea had caught in his head, one that would make me as happy as it would make him to walk again. And just because he knew nothing short of a miracle could make his dream come true didn’t stop Homer Price from helping me realize mine.

  And that, Fish, is the true meaning of a road dog.

  Part 3

  Lost

  It was much harder to find their way back through the big fields of buttercups and yellow daisies than it was being carried. They knew, of course, they must go straight east, toward the rising sun; and they started off in the right way. But at noon, when the sun was over their heads, they did not know which was east and which was west, and that was the reason they were lost in the great fields.

  —The Wizard of Oz

  Chapter 16

  It was a sentence Beau had tossed off in passing that had snagged Homer’s imagination, just like when I’d read that bit about trees absorbing energy. Something about the telephone answering system for the Wisconsin State Lottery.

  What difference did it make to the price of tea in China, I wondered, that Wisconsin had an 800 number for buying lotto tickets? This was Michigan, not Wisconsin, and you could buy Quick Picks or the Daily Double at every gas station and drugstore in town.

  But Homer was way ahead of me, seeing as the whole time I was rescuing Spooner from the pond and messing with the new teacher’s art supplies and almost sending Violet Chump to her eternal reward, he was putting things together in his mind.

  “First I had to make sure what Beau told me was right before I said anything. Then I had to call myself. Well, I had the maternal unit call. Wisconsin is very progressive, Harry Sue. Even lumps like me, with a valid credit card, can participate in legalized gambling.”

  “Yeah, but why?” I wanted to know. “Your mom could just snag you a Daily Double at the gas station.”

  Homer smiled. He loved the dramatic pause.

  “Well, not every lump has people to do his bidding. If your granny were laid up here, you think there’d be someone to wait on her? Maybe it’s for people outside the state to call in their choices. I don’t know, Harry Sue. Let’s return to what matters here. What matters isn’t that there is a telephone ordering system. There is. What matters is that every telephone operator in the Wisconsin State Lottery is a conette.”

  Homer stopped one more time before he put it together for me. “There’s a wealth of information to be gleaned here.”

  “You’re playing me, Homes.”

  “No, this is for real, Harry Sue.”

  “They let those conettes have credit card numbers?”

  “There are safeguards in place. Besides, you think they could have porch furniture from Land’s End delivered to their cell block? What’s a conette going to buy?”

  “How about presents for her kids?”

  “Well, the point is, they thought of all that,” Homer said grumpily because, once again, we weren’t going in the direction he wanted to. “They can’t make any calls out.”

  I was about to argue they could memorize the numbers and pass them on to relatives. Let’s face it. It’s in my blood to know these things. But I didn’t want to make Homer c
ross, so I let him go on with his story.

  Well, almost. As he sat there, chewing his lip and waiting for me to jump on board, I thought of something else that troubled me.

  “Why would you think she’s in Wisconsin? She wasn’t distributing across state lines, so it’s not a federal crime. She’s somewhere in Michigan, Homer, I just know it.”

  “You don’t think conettes have friends? You don’t think their hacks know hacks in Michigan? I bet they even go to the same conferences.”

  “But what are you driving at?”

  Homer rolled his eyes. “My mom left it behind the Kleenex box. It’s a good thing she tucked it away or that J-Cat might have stomped on it.”

  I fit my hand behind the Kleenex box and pulled out the Dinkins family cell phone.

  “You want me to …”

  “It’s got to be you, Harry Sue. Number’s taped to the back.”

  I turned the phone over. There it was, in Mrs. Dinkins’s crabbed handwriting on a torn scrap of blue-lined notepaper. The 800 number for the Wisconsin State Lottery.

  Of course it had to be me. I mean, Homer couldn’t even pick up the phone to dial.

  But what exactly was I doing?

  I looked at Homer’s excited face and realized that if I didn’t get excited with him, I was gonna burn the spot. And I realized this was as much about Homer as it was about me. He was trying to have my back the only way left to him, by bringing me my Mary Bell. When I looked at it that way, I thought what was so wrong with asking for a little information?

  I pressed the numbers in and waited. First thing I heard was music. Happy orchestra music. Soaring trombones. Big drums. It was music for winners, I realized. Music to get you in the mood.

  “Welcome to the Wisconsin State Lottery,” a nice voice said. “Please pay attention, as the following menu selections have changed. For English, press one. Para español, dos.”

  Homer’s eyebrows were raised. He wanted the play-by-play.

  “I chose English.”

  The nice voice came back on. “To order the Daily Dole, press one. To order the Instant Millionaire, press two. To check the winning numbers for a previous date, press three….” I listened to the whole menu, but it wasn’t until after “To repeat the selection process, press eight” that I heard the one I wanted.