Strings and Rods

Duncan lay motionless with his legs on the bed and his arms stretched out over the nightstand. The late afternoon sun pierced through the vinyl mini-blinds warming his back. Lynette gasped when she saw him and ran to his side. Nicole was on Lynette's heels anxiously awaiting the moment she could take pleasure in Lynette's distress. Lynette untangled Duncan's strings and rods with the care one would afford any small living creature and not merely a marionette puppet.

“Oh, are you going to cry over your stupid little creepy doll?” Nicole mocked and cackled, feeling proud of herself.

“Don't touch Duncan,” Lynette's voice unintentionally broke into a crackling whine. Nicole laughed and snarkily taunted, “You can't make me. Are you gonna cry? Poor baby. Pobrecita. Pobrecita is gonna cry.”

“I hate you!” Lynette yelled, this time with enough power in her voice to bring their mother charging into their room stomping her feet like a disgruntled rhino, a tactic she mistakenly assumed would be intimidating but which only served to make both girls think she was ridiculous.

Looking straight at Lynette, Maria screeched, “That's enough! I've had it with you!” using the same crackling whine that only moments earlier had caused Nicole to lose respect for Lynette, and yielding the same unfortunate results for Maria.

“Your father's going to hear about this!” It was the same threat she used everyday. Their father would oblige his wife by being angry with their children's behavior but never inquire as to what that behavior entailed.

Lynette's lip began to tremble as she held back tears. She always cried when she was angry. Nicole relished in this moment of triumph, delighting in the confirmation of her dominance and the joy of having skirted accountability. Nicole ran from the room into the living room to use the phone.

In those days, people had house phones, and Nicole wasn't going to waste any time in letting her best friend Vanessa know that Lynette was a giant baby. They would conspire to tell the entire 5th grade the following day. Maria hastily retreated to her own bedroom, locked the door, and lay in bed, commencing in self-pity for her hard life with her bad children.

Lynette took the pillowcase off of her pillow and placed Duncan inside. She looked under the bed for Buck, a small plastic red pony, and added him to the pillowcase. She stealthily took her concealed compadres, walked past Nicole, and out the front door, overhearing Nicole say to Vanessa, “Can you believe she still plays with dolls?... I know!”

Lynette wasn't allowed to leave on her own or without permission. She was terrified of the consequences and unsure of her motives. She was either going to be severely punished or scare them into missing her. Maybe they would think twice about being mean to her? It was a pipe dream.

Los Búhos was a small town stretching one mile wide by one mile deep, with one library, two schools, three bars, and six churches. She only knew how to walk to the library and there wasn't anywhere else she could have gone even if she knew how to get there, but she didn't know how to get anywhere at all because she had never gone anywhere other than school and church.

As she traversed the first hill, she felt brave and terrified but she didn't feel alone as she clung to Duncan and Buck. She whispered to them, “Don't worry, guys, I'll get you out of there in a minute.”

The four blocks to the library was a marathon of courage but she felt safe and exhilarated for a fleeting ten seconds once she passed through the glass library doors. Walking past the librarian at the front desk was another test of courage that had not occurred to her and thus she had not mentally prepared for this obstacle.

Would the librarian immediately and intuitively know that Lynette was an absconding refugee? Surely a librarian would know this for librarians know everything. That's the job. They locked eyes as Lynette strutted by feigning the confidence of a person who was allowed to be there. It worked. She reached the staircase and descended into the basement that housed the children's library.

Hiding between two 20-foot long bookshelves, she sat on the floor and opened the pillowcase. “We made it.” Then, closed it back up again, stood up, and began to browse through the aisles, only pretending to look for a book, to act as naturally as possible as part of her cover. She came across a book that piqued her interest by title alone, The Red Pony by John Steinbeck.

She pulled the book off of the shelf, sat on the floor, and began to read the back cover. Jody was ten-years-old and was given a pony by his rancher father. She was envious and excited. She wished she had a father who was a rancher who would give her a pony. She felt an urgent need to know this story and was certain it was the story of a boy with a perfect life and a perfect family. The only thing Lynette knew about life outside of Los Búhos was that the grass was certainly going to be greener almost anywhere else.

She sat cross-legged on the floor between the bookshelves. She called this, “Indian style.” She safeguarded her accomplices by resting the pillowcase against her calves and began to read the first of the four stories in the book. As it turned out, it wasn't all sunshine and hay bales for Jody, having a pony isn't as easy as it sounds, and not all ranchers make great dads.

Lynette read for what felt to be about 20 minutes, but was in fact, two hours. She was startled by what sounded like her own father's voice, “So you haven't seen her? She hasn't been here?”

“No, she hasn't been here. I'm sorry.”

She could not have been hearing this correctly because he was at work and had never missed a day of work in his life. Lynette peered around the corner of the bookshelves. Oh dang, she thought as adrenaline surged through her body and her heartbeat quickened. Her own father was standing at the check-out desk. I'm busted. She scurried to the far end of the bookshelves and sat huddled on the floor, clutching The Red Pony, too frightened to stand up to put it back on the shelf, waiting for the coast to be clear.

Cal Smith walked past his daughter without having glanced in her direction and headed towards the stairs to the upper level of the library that housed the entrance in which she had originally entered through. He would not stop to ask the librarian in the upstairs adult section if she had seen Lynette.

He didn't seem angry, Lynette thought to herself, but he's definitely angry because he's always angry. She sat frozen and indecisive until she felt an overwhelming need to run. She knew she had to run somewhere but there wasn't anywhere she could think of to go.

Lynette left the book on the floor and sprinted past the check-out desk to the astonishment of the children's librarian who had just minutes earlier sworn Lynette had never been there. “Wait!” she called out after Lynette. Oh, hell no, Lynette beelined out the library basement exit door.

She ran as fast as she could run while clinging on to her pillowcase, deciding not to run in the direction of her house because someone might be looking for her on that route. She ran down Main St. and then zigzagged past the pharmacy and into the town park. She reached the baseball field and hid in the dugout.

“Now what?” she asked herself aloud, and also rhetorically to Duncan and Buck. She wasn't going home. She knew that much.

She sat in the dugout feeling the stinging pain of not belonging anywhere. She wanted to run somewhere. She wanted a destination. There weren't any destinations in Los Búhos for a 10-year-old without any money on a school night. She had to accept defeat and go home, even though it was just a house that didn't feel like home at any time. She dreaded the thought of walking through the front door. She dreaded the sound of Maria's screeching and the sound of Nicole's cackling laugh.

She began to walk home. With Lynette's newfound confidence as a world explorer, she crossed each street without hesitation and whispered to Duncan and Buck, “We will ride a train one day and get out of this town and they'll never see us again.”

Upon reaching the house, she stood on the lawn, hesitating to go inside. Instead, she walked to the side of the house and hid the pillowcase with her friends in between two bushes where Nicole wouldn't find it. “You'll be safe here.”

In a trancelike state, Lynette casually walked through the front door in the hopes that no one would notice or say anything. They were good at ignoring her and maybe that would be a good thing just this one time.

They noticed.

“Where have you been?” Maria asked with what was a rare demonstration of concern.

“I walked around the block.” Lynette lied.

The concern ended and the screeching started. “Oh!” Maria recoiled. “You know what you are?!”

“No.”

“You're selfish and you don't give a damn about anyone but yourself!”

Maria turned to Cal. “Did you hear her?!”

“I heard her.” Cal spoke in a soft monotone.

“Around the block, my ass!” Maria turned and stomped her signature rhino stomp back to her bedroom and once again locked her bedroom door.

“Around the block, eh?” Cal asked his daughter.

“Yep.”

“That's your story and you're sticking with it?”

“Yep.”

“You're not the only one who gets sick of everyone's shit around here.”

“I know.” This was a lie. She had no idea that he had felt the same way she had felt.

Nonchalantly, “Okay, I'm going back to work.”

As he walked to the front door, he turned to her and asked, “Just one question. The Red Pony? Was it any good?”

“Pretty good, yeah.”

“Sarah from the library called.”

“I don't know why.”

He laughed.

“Give your mom a break, would ya?”

“Probably not, but I'll try.”

“Just try.”

“Okay.”

He turned and left.

Lynette went to the side of the house and retrieved her friends and took them to her bedroom. “Guys, we did it,” she whispered. What they had actually done she couldn't articulate but she knew it was something.

Nicole listlessly walked into the bedroom and spoke in a soft disarming voice. Lynette had already learned to recognize this voice as the voice Nicole used when she wanted to gain Lynette's trust before turning on her.

“Where'd you go?”

“Around the block.”

“Where'd you really go?”

“I'm not talking to you.”

Nicole scoffed, pivoted, and left the room without a hint of the concern she had presented only a second earlier.

Lynette collapsed on her bed in wild disbelief that her father wasn't angry and with an equal amount of disappointment that she returned home to the same mother and sister whom she had left.

She took Duncan and Buck out of the pillowcase and put them in the windowsill leaving Duncan's legs to swing freely side to side with Buck at his side.