You Can't Move

Crap, Crap, I thought as I stomped through the convenient mart to meet up with Skip. We meet outside, but my mom wanted a can of Campbell’s© cream of mushroom soup for tonight’s tuna casserole. Yuck, I hate tuna casserole, but it’s Friday and last Friday she made my favorite, fish sticks, but no way would she have my fave two Fridays in a row. Tonight, was my little sister’s pick and she wanted casserole. I grabbed the stupid soup can and headed for the checkout.

“What’s up?” Skip said as soon as I stepped outside the store.

“We’re moving and we’re having stupid tuna casserole for dinner,” I said raising my voice.

“What? You’re like my best friend in the whole damn world. You can’t move.”

I didn’t mind his acne face like the other kids who were repulsed by it. ‘It’s not catching,’ I had told him the day I sat at his table in the school lunchroom three years ago.

“Well, THEY can’t stand me.” He had waved his arm indicating a majority of the other tables filled with noisy kids.

I looked closer at him. Maybe it was the coke bottle glasses in the red plastic frames that bugged the others. “You like red?” I asked him.

“Yeah, it’s my favorite color.”

“That makes sense.” I told him to make friends and it worked even better than I expected. We had become inseparable.

“What are you talking about?” he yelled at me now as we stepped off the curb in front of the convenience mart.

“My dad got a promotion to Columbus.”

“That’s a president, man.”

“It’s also someplace in Ohio.” I stopped just as we reached the curb across the street to look at him. “I don’t want to go.” I was looking forward to a summer filled with swimming, shooting baskets, fishing, and hunting squirrels with our BB guns, all with my best friend, Skip. “But they’re meetin’ with a realtor tonight to put our house on the market. And get this.” I punched him in the arm just because.

“Owe.”

“They expect me to go with them this weekend to O,hi,o to look for a new house. They say I can have my own room.” That was tempting to get my little sister out of my affairs.

“You can’t go this weekend. We play the Raiders this Saturday.” He was right. Our baseball team played our biggest rivals this coming weekend.

I had carried on for at least a half hour telling my folks that our team needed me even though I do warm the bench more than any other kid on our side except Sammy who has had his broken arm in a cast all season. “My folks wouldn’t listen to reason,” I gave him the shortened version of what happened when my they told my sister and me, we were moving because I didn’t want to tell him I had acted like a whinny baby while my brat sister acted happy.

“We’ve got to do somethin’ to keep you here.” He started moving toward the park. “We’ve got to think of someway you get to stay here.”

“Don’t you think I’ve been working on that, like all night I couldn’t sleep. I was trying to think of somethin’.” I didn’t tell him; I had even said a gazillion prayers to God to keep me here.

“You kill off your little sister. Then the cops won’t let you leave,” he said as we sauntered down the sidewalk.

“But they’d take me off to jail and that would be just like leaving.”

“Oh yeah.” Skip sat on this huge boulder at the edge of the park. He looked thoughtful for a few moments.

I kicked at a bunch of weeds or grasses or something growing nearby turning the toe of my tennis shoe green.

 After a couple minutes, he shouted. “Okay, I got it. What’s your dad’s most precious possession? You know like something he can’t live without, and you hide it, and he won’t leave here without it?”

“I dunno.” I gave him my most ‘that’s stupid’ look.

“Maybe hide your sister?”

“Forget my sister, man.”

“Yea, okay then something else he loves.” He hesitated. “Or something your mom loves.”

The toe of my sneaker was looking green enough, so I kicked and loosened some small stones around the rock. “Well, she loves, no that won’t work.”

“What man?”

“Well, she loves that mink coat my dad bought her last Christmas. You should have heard the way she screamed when she opened the box. She even told my dad, he shouldn’t have, but she was puttin’ it on right away anyway. She wore that furry thing every day last winter, to church, to the lady’s bunco nights and even to the grocery store.”

“That’s it. We hide her mink coat, and she won’t leave without it, and you get to stay.”

I stopped kicking stuff. “M,m,m that might work, but how do I get it and where do I hide it?”

“First, where does your mom keep it?”

“I think it’s in her closet.”

“We wait until she leaves the house, and you go get it.”

“And do what with it? I can’t hang it in my closet. She’d see it.” I just about said when she hangs up my clothes, but I didn’t want to admit that to Skip. “She’d see it, for sure.” I repeated.

“You bury it in the back yard and when she’s frantically looking for it, you tell her, she can have it back until she promises to stay here in Elm Park.” Skip punched me back. He’s pretty smart, but not the forefathers of this town. They named it after all the Elm trees and then  all those trees died of Dutch Elm disease, my dad told me.

I didn’t even mind the punch too much because I was thinking about his plan. “That’s pretty good.”

The next few days I tried to think of all kinds of ways to get my folks and kid sister, Tammy, all out of the house without me. Everything I tried failed. All four of us had to drive to Columbus for the weekend and look at a million houses with this lady that wouldn’t stop talking trying to sell us every one of those houses.  We drove home with printed speck sheets, so my folks could make a decision. I hated all of them and told them so. My dad told me to shut up.

Two days later when I should have been doing my schoolwork done, but I couldn’t. I kept thinking about how to get everyone out of the house. Then I overheard my mom call her sister all excited that they put a bid on one of those houses in Ohio. Damn it! When mom got off the phone, I heard her tell Dad that Marla invited all of us over to her house for dinner for the next Friday to celebrate our new house in Columbus. My Aunt Marla lives about twenty-five minutes across town. Perfect, they were getting out of the house.

On Friday right after school, I got the hot water bottle and a cup of hot chicken soup in a mug and carefully carried it back to my bed. I got in and pulled the covers up to my neck. I had the hot water bottle on my chest. I started to sip the hot soup, but I burnt my tongue and spilled a little soup, it was so hot. Then I wiped it up with the back of my hand and hid the soup behind my alarm clock and started moaning. I had to get pretty loud before Mom heard me and came up to see what was going on. She seemed kind of peeved, but I told her I was sick. When she went to get the thermometer, I quick drank some more soup, even though I burnt myself again. It was worth it. After pulling the thermometer out of my mouth, she reluctantly deemed me too sick to go to Marla’s, but just before the family left, she checked on me again. Thankfully I got the hot water bottle that had been laying on my forehead under the covers just in time. Of, course, she felt my forehead and announced, “I’ve asked Mrs. Pendergrass to look in on you.”

“Oh shit.” that nosey old neighbor.

“Young man if you weren’t so sick, I’d wash your mouth out with soap,” she said as she looked down at me.

“I’ll be fine, Mom,” I used my sickest voice possible.

“We’ll get back as quickly as we can.” And she shut the bedroom door.

As soon as I heard my dad close the garage door, I jumped out of bed and went to my parents’ room. I rummaged around in their closet. But couldn’t find her coat. I pulled the chain and turned on the light so I could see better. Then there in the back of her clothes was this dark plastic garment bag. I yanked the plastic up enough to see the dark fur. I pulled the hanger off the closet rod. It was heavier than normal clothes. I carried it downstairs and phoned Skip. I yelled into the phone as soon as he answered, “I got the coat. Meet me in the back yard.”

He must have run the entire block and a half over.

“We can’t dig up our yard; my folks would notice.”

“Then where?”

“The wilderness,” I shouted.

We ran down the alley as fast as we could go. Skip dragging my dad’s shovel we borrowed from our garage and me carrying the bag of mink coat.

A half mile or so we reached the city forest preserve, thirty acres of maple, oak, and mulberry trees with the Bull Frog Creek running right through the middle of it. That place was the best heaven on earth for Skip and me. It was home away from home. The park was bordered on two sides by highways and houses backed up on the other two sides of it. Skip and I usually stayed clear of it on holiday weekends when it got really crowded with family picnics and boy scout camp outs and people from Chicago fleeing their urban dwellings. All the other times it was our forbidding frontier filled with imaginary bloodthirsty Indians in its deepest wooded depths. We disappeared down one of the many trails that crisscrossed the wilderness without fear of being ambushed by the tomahawk-wielding Red Skins on this spring evening.

I picked a spot behind some Mulberry bushes. “There.” I pointed.

Skip started to dig, but he was taking such little amounts of dirt, that I told him to go wider, rather than deep. It’ll be easier,” I encouraged him.

“Then you dig.”

We both noticed a deep guttural rumbling of thunder followed by a far-off flash of lightening. The bag and coat were getting heavy. The woods were growing darker.

“Okay.” I handed him the bag and took the shovel. The ground was hard as a rock, but then it started to sprinkle.

“I’m not supposed to be out in the rain. My mother says you can catch your death of a cold,” said Skip.

“Don’t be such a baby. The rain will help make the ground softer.” I tried pounding into the rock-hard ground with the blade of the shovel.

The rain came down a little harder. It seemed to take a long time, but finally I felt the hole was deep enough, besides my arms hurt, so Skip threw the black bag into the swallow grave and I began covering it up with shovelfuls of dirt.

“What are you punks doing?”

We both looked up to see old Mrs. Pendergrass standing there in the dark with her skinny bird-legs and rain running off the black umbrella she held over her head. “I’ve heard you threatening to kill your little sister and now you’ve gone and done it.”

“W, we’re not killers.” Skip’s voice cracked under the pressure. The rain had plastered his curly hair into ringlets across his forehead. His red-rimmed glasses dripped rain.

“Not you Skipper. Roger did this.” Her eyes glared at me. “I saw you carry her out the back door in a body bag. You dig up your sister right now or I’m going to scream rape.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but I kind of think it had something to do with sex, but it didn’t sound good the way she said it.

With the wet slippery shovel, I managed to dig the mud back out of the hole.

 “Open that bag quick. Hurry up. Let her breath,” the old hag ordered.

I pulled the mud covered bag from the hole and pulled the plastic up to show her.

“What is that? What did you hoodlums do? Is that roadkill? We’re going back to your house to call your parents right now.” She pointed the umbrella at us like she was going to shoot us with it.

Skip dragged the shovel, while I carried the slippery mud-covered bag and coat back to my house.

Soon we were in the kitchen with my parents and sister who had come directly home after the nosy neighbor phoned them. Mom freaked out about her precious fur and the mud splotched kitchen floor.

Skip and I were both talking at once trying to explain how we didn’t want me to move. My mom called Skip’s mom and his dad drove over to pick him up.

“To pay for the dry cleaning bill on your mother’s coat, you, young man, are babysitting your little sister every Saturday and Sunday until we move,” my father shouted.  “While your mother and I pack.”

I didn’t say it out loud, but I was thinking, “Thank you, God. Thanks, an awful lot.”