Here Lies Linc Page 4

  It had taken me years to collect them. But now I had pictures of all Seven Summits—representing the highest mountains in the world, one from each continent. Mount Everest towered over my head at night. Kilimanjaro and Mount McKinley reared up in the distance on either side of my window. The Carstensz Pyramid on the continent of Australia bordered my closet door. Dad used to marvel over the Seven Summits. My father had climbed a few impressive mountains during his time. But Mount Rainier was an anthill, he would tell me, compared to a killer peak like the Aconcagua in South America. I hung my first poster not too long after Dad died, promising myself to live out his dream and conquer a mountain like the ice-capped Elbrus in Russia someday. But who was I fooling? Here I was stuck on the plains of Iowa, hiding in my room like a scared rabbit in its hole. How did I think I could ever scale one of the Seven Summits when I couldn’t even keep up with my junior high cross-country team?

  C.B. must have sensed I was feeling bad. He rested his chin on my stomach and watched me through his eyebrows. “This is all your fault, you old mutt,” I whispered. Then I lay there awhile longer, scratching his favorite spot on his neck, until the hands on my alarm clock scraped their way to two-thirty.

  My class had to be on its way back to Plainview by now. But just to make sure, I swung my feet to the floor and crept over to the window to sneak a look down. Sure enough, the graveyard was completely quiet, all except for my noisy neighbors—Winslow, Dobbins, York & McNutt.

  Okay, so they weren’t real neighbors, but it sure felt like it sometimes. Whenever I glanced out my bedroom window, there they were—those names etched in big, bold letters in stone. Most likely the folks buried in the short row underneath my window never had a thing in common besides the fact that their tombstones were placed in an odd direction, facing south instead of west like most of the other graves in Oakland. But somehow, along the way, I had started to think of them as a club, a foursome of cranky old men who had been fishing buddies once or played poker together on Saturday nights or maybe worked as partners in a law office downtown.

  I couldn’t help imagining they were watching me all the time, commenting to one another about my latest slew of troubles.

  Look at that sorry excuse for a garden, I’d hear Winslow say whenever I watered my yellow vegetable plants that summer.

  Pitiful! McNutt would agree. That boy couldn’t grow mold on a piece of year-old bread!

  The four of them must have had a field day watching me humiliate myself in front of my entire class.

  Winslow: Look at Mr. Tomato Head! Too bad the ones in his garden never managed to turn that nice red color. Hey, where does he think he’s going?

  Dobbins: Awww, he’s running home to hide. At least he’s taking that yappy pile of fur with him. Maybe now we can get some rest around here.

  York: Isn’t his teacher going to stop him and make him go back to school like he’s supposed to? Times have changed, fellas. Can you imagine teachers in our day letting us get away with those kinds of shenanigans?

  McNutt: Not a chance. But wait till that wise guy Mellecker and his friends get ahold of him tomorrow—

  I jerked the cord by the window, and the metal blinds came rattling down. C.B. scrambled off my bed. At first I thought he was just startled by the noisy blinds, but then he sat in front of my closed bedroom door with his tail thumping the floorboards, and in the next instant I heard Lottie’s soft knock.

  I sank down into my desk chair, feeling grateful for the shadowy light in the room as Lottie carefully entered. Once she had given C.B. a wan smile and he had gone click-clicking downstairs, she took a few steps closer and peered at me as if she were a scientist discovering something new under her microscope.

  “What in the world happened out there?” she asked. “Why’d you run off like that?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “It was stupid.”

  Lottie went over to sit on my rumpled bed. “That’s not much of an explanation.”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head, not wanting to remember. “It was embarrassing, that’s all. All of it. That laughing fit of yours and walking past our backyard and C.B. getting loose and jumping all over me, and the way you kept …” My voice dwindled away.

  Lottie blinked. “The way I kept what?”

  “Well, you were acting kind of wacky, Lottie. Kind of … wound up.”

  “What do you mean, wound up? You mean I’m not supposed to show that I’m excited about what I do?”

  “That’s not it,” I told her with a sigh.

  “Then what, Linc? What? First you want me to pretend I’m not your mother because you’re embarrassed about what I do, and I actually agree to play along even though I haven’t seen you for a whole week. Then, from what I could tell, things are going fine until for some unknown reason you start shouting at the other kids in your class. And the next thing I know, you disappear.”

  “Things were not going fine, Mom,” I blurted out. “Mellecker was making fun of you! They all were!”

  Even in the dim light I could see her flinch. “What do you mean making fun of me?” she asked in disbelief. “And who’s this Mellecker person? Is he the one who had never even heard of Cerberus before?” She gave a dismissive snort.

  Typical, I thought. Obviously Lottie didn’t have the faintest recollection of Blair Mellecker, even though I must have talked about him a lot back when I was eight.

  “Listen, Lottie,” I said, scrubbing my hand across my face in exasperation. “It’s just that sometimes I wish you could act a little more like a regular mom.”

  Lottie hugged her arms over her chest and lifted her chin. “And what does a regular mom act like, pray tell?” she snipped.

  “Well, for one thing, a regular mom doesn’t forget to brush her hair in the morning,” I fired back. “Especially when she has to lead a bunch of kids on a field trip.”

  I faltered for a second as Lottie reached up to touch her disheveled hair. I never talked this way to my mother. But suddenly I couldn’t help it. I had to let it out, every stupid little thing that had been building up since school started. “Look, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Lottie,” I flung out, “but you need to know. Other moms, they do stuff like … like they make real dinners once in a while, you know? Like pot roast and mashed potatoes. And they make friends with other ladies and go out for coffee sometimes or the movies. Don’t you ever want to do that sort of stuff, Lottie? Go out for coffee instead of working on your cemetery research eighteen hours a day?”

  I didn’t give Lottie a chance to answer. I didn’t even look at her as I stood up and stalked back and forth in the narrow alleyway of space between the bed and my desk, between the jagged peaks rising up along my walls.

  “Sometimes I hear kids talking at school, and I feel like—like we’re back in the Dark Ages or something, with the way we’ve been living in our own little bubble, just the two of us for so long. I mean, nobody can believe it when I tell them we don’t have a TV. Sure, I understand how you thought it might be a bad influence on me when I was little. But I’m almost in high school now, and I’m still having to ask for permission to use your computer!”

  I flailed my hands up at Mount Everest on my ceiling. “It’s not that I want a bunch of stuff. Heck, I’d be happy if we had a vacuum cleaner that works.” I coughed out a bitter laugh. “I mean, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about, Lottie. We’ve been sweeping our rugs with a broom for a whole year, ever since the vacuum broke down. Don’t you ever want to get it fixed so we can really clean this place up once in a while?” My voice rose higher. “Don’t you?”

  I whipped around and stood over my mother like a prosecutor in a courtroom, breathing hard, ready to hear some answers at last. But Lottie didn’t say a word. She just kept staring down at her palms, open in her lap. She looked like a rag doll, perched there on the edge of my bed with her shoulders slumped and her sock feet barely touching the floor.

  I lowered myself into the chair at my desk again, feel
ing weak and sick to my stomach. The afternoon had been horrible enough already, and now I had gone and made things a hundred times worse. There was another heavy stretch of quiet before Lottie finally raised her head. She lifted her arms a little and let them flop back to her sides. “This is just who I am,” she whispered. But then I realized: Lottie wasn’t looking at me. She was gazing at the picture on my nightstand. And her eyes were round and moist, as if she were trying to explain something to Dad, who grinned back at her from the photo, holding that drippy chocolate ice cream cone.

  I opened my mouth to apologize. But before I could think of what to say, anything to make her feel better, Lottie was rising to her feet and heading toward the door. She turned in the hallway, her face carved by the slivers of light seeping through the blinds. “I need to go in to work for a while and catch up on a few things,” she said quietly.

  I nodded as she disappeared down the stairs. By now I had learned to recognize that frozen tone in her voice and the way she stiffened her shoulders before getting on with things.

  I rushed to the doorway. “What time will you be home?” I called.

  But Lottie was already down in the kitchen, grabbing her keys, letting the screen door slam behind her. I stood still for a while longer, listening to the chug of the Dodge Dart’s tired engine as she pulled out of our driveway. Then my bedroom went silent.

  I shouldn’t have glanced toward the window. Suddenly the old geezers down in the graveyard were at it again, all grumbling and scolding me at once, trying to get their digs in edgewise.

  Shame on you, boy. How could you treat your own mother that way?

  Have you got any idea how tough it is being a single parent these days?

  You know she’s never gotten over losing your dad.

  And here you go rubbing salt in the wounds. And where does that get you?

  They were right, of course. I wished I could take it all back. Without Lottie, all there was … was me.

  The ADOPT-a-GRAVE Project

  At the conclusion of our tour in Oakland Cemetery, please choose one of the headstones in the old section for further study. Choose your site wisely, people! Select a stone with markings that are clearly visible. The more clues on the stone, the better. Throughout October, our class will be visiting the State Historical Society of Iowa and the school library to learn as much as we can about the individuals buried at our sites.

  Be ready to present a ten-minute oral report on your findings by November 17.

  DUE IN CLASS TOMORROW: A sketch of your gravestone selection in the space below, including the name, dates of birth and death, and any other important clues.

  The assignment sheet, along with my muddy notebook, was propped against the pile of mail in the middle of the kitchen table. I had almost forgotten. Mr. Oliver had warned us that he’d be giving out details of a new project during the field trip. He must have asked Lottie to deliver my copy of the instructions. I spotted the words “DUE IN CLASS TOMORROW” and felt my shoulders sag. The last thing I wanted to do that afternoon was go back into the cemetery.

  C.B. cocked his head and let out one of his grumbly moans, waiting for me to unglue my feet from the kitchen floor and take him on his afternoon outing. My neighbor Mr. Krasny would be waiting too. He had hired me to exercise his Boston terrier every afternoon. He paid only ten dollars a week, averaging me a measly $1.42 per day. But I hadn’t been able to say no that summer when he stopped me on one of my walks with C.B. to ask if I’d mind taking Spunky along. Mr. Krasny told me he was ninety-three and his joints weren’t cooperating like they used to. Obviously. I had seen him hobbling past our house to visit his wife’s grave in Oakland. There was no way he could handle a leash-yanker like Spunky.

  Lately, though, I had started to appreciate my job a little more—ever since I’d decided to kill two birds with one stone and use my sessions with Spunky as a way to get better at running. When I jogged, Spunky never had a chance to yank on his leash, and maybe if I kept it up, I’d be ready to join the cross-country team by the time eighth grade rolled around. I was glad I had eleven more months to prepare. So far I could hardly run five blocks without getting winded.

  I sighed and bent down to tighten up my shoelaces. Of course my year-old sneakers and baggy sweatpants weren’t doing much to improve my stamina. But I had promised myself I wouldn’t ask Lottie for new running shoes or any other gear until I could jog for at least twenty minutes without stopping.

  C.B. gnawed impatiently at an itch between his long toenails. I folded up Mr. Oliver’s project assignment sheet and tucked it into the front pocket of my sweatshirt, along with a stubby pencil. “Come on, buddy,” I said, grabbing C.B.’s leash from the hook by the back door. “Time for another field trip.”

  Just as I expected, Mr. Krasny was on his front porch waiting for me. Even though it was only October, with barely a chill in the air, he looked like he was ready for a snowstorm in his wool overcoat, rubber boots, and plaid hat with dangling earflaps. Spunky darted back and forth around his toothpick legs while Mr. Krasny fumbled with the leash, trying to keep his feet from being tangled in the snare.

  “Excellent, Linc,” he said when I came hurrying up his walkway with C.B. “You’re here. Spunky’s getting restless.” Mr. Krasny always talked like that—in urgent little bursts as if he were calling out answers on a game show with only two seconds left before the buzzer went off.

  “We might be gone a little longer today,” I said, reaching for Spunky’s leash. “I’d like to take the dogs a different way than usual, if it’s okay with you.”

  “Certainly!” he said. “My land, he needs a good romp. Been standing at the window all afternoon. Waiting for his fine friend C.B.”

  That’s another thing Mr. Krasny always did, talked about our pets as if they were old buddies who couldn’t wait to share each other’s company every day. The truth was that C.B. couldn’t stand Spunky. Spunky was one of those pesky kinds of dogs, constantly trotting over to bump noses with C.B. or sniff whatever he sniffed or pee wherever he peed. Even when C.B. showed his teeth or let out a little growl, Spunky didn’t get the hint. He just wagged his backside with its nub of a tail and shoved his smushed-up nose in for another good whiff.

  We said goodbye to Mr. Krasny and backtracked along Claiborne Street toward the side gate of Oakland, just past my house. I was planning on starting out at a slow jog. But Spunky was so excited to be heading in a new direction, opposite of our normal route to the neighborhood park around the corner, that he dragged C.B. and me at a dead run into the cemetery—straight past the ALL PETS MUST BE CONFINED IN VEHICLE sign. Luckily, Jeeter and his boss, old Mr. Nicknish, the cemetery superintendent, had never seemed to mind people walking their dogs through the grounds, especially if they were regulars from the neighborhood. Plus, visitors to Oakland were scarce on weekday afternoons. Most people waited for Sundays and holidays to pay their respects. So after scanning the distance to make sure we were alone, I unclipped the dogs’ leashes and stuffed them into the pocket of my sweatshirt.

  With C.B. and Spunky darting in and out of the rows of graves nearby, I jogged along the driveway for a while. Whenever I came to a hill and felt like stopping, I just thought of the wicked smile on Mellecker’s face as he added another flourish to his Lottie cartoon, and a new burst of angry energy carried me to the top of the next rise. As I circled back to the old part of the cemetery, I was surprised at how much better I felt. Although I was heaving for breath, with drips of sweat sliding down my temples, even the Adopt-a-Grave Project didn’t seem quite so terrible anymore.

  Soon I was wandering among the tall oaks and leaning headstones, waiting for a grave to grab my attention, to send me some sort of message—Pick me. Pick me. But like Mr. Oliver had warned, lots of the epitaphs were too hard to read, with the letters covered in moss or worn smooth through the years. Hundreds of other stones had clear markings, but they were too plain to be special—nothing besides names and dates carved in gray granite. I was stan
ding there, wishing I could find an epitaph nearly half as interesting as some of the ones I had collected in my journal, when I heard a rustle of leaves behind me.

  I swung around to find Jeeter grinning at me with his arms crossed over his chest. “Well, well, well, Lincoln Log. I was beginning to take this personally. You been avoidin’ me?”

  “Hey there, Jeeter!” I cried. I almost hugged him. I had forgotten how much I missed Jeeter. “Wow, I like your beard. Or whatever that is.”

  He rubbed his hand across the short scruff of reddish whiskers on his chin. “This here’s a goatee, Lincoln Log!” He shook his head, chuckling at himself. “I thought it might make me look sophisticated. Help with the ladies.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t imagine any lady thinking Jeeter was sophisticated. When I was little, Lottie had taken me to a special showing of The Wizard of Oz over at the university, and as soon as the Scarecrow came on, I had shouted, “It’s Jeeter!” The way the Scarecrow listened to Dorothy’s troubles and wrinkled his brow when he thought hard and loped along that Yellow Brick Road—that was Jeeter to a T.

  “Well, you still haven’t answered my question yet,” Jeeter said. “Where you been? I haven’t seen hide nor hair of you since the beginning of the summer. You got yourself a girlfriend or something?”

  I rolled my eyes. Huh. Fat chance. “No, it’s nothing like that,” I said. “I haven’t had much free time lately. I go to Plainview now. You know, the junior high?”

  Jeeter’s eyebrows flew up. “Junior high, huh? That must be pretty different from your old school. What was that one kid’s name who you used to pal around with? The one who used to wear knee pads whenever he rode his bike?”